Abstract
A certain direction in cognitive science has been to try to “ground” public language statements in some species of mental representation. A central tenet of this trend is that communication—that is, public language—succeeds (when it does) because the elements of this public language are in some way correlated with mental items of both the speaker and the audience so that the mental state evoked in the audience by the use of that piece of public language is the one that the speaker wanted to evoke. The “meaning”, therefore, of an utterance—and of the parts of an utterance, such as individual sentences and their parts, such as the individual words, etc.—is, in this view, some mental item. Successful communication requires that there be widespread agreement amongst speakers of the same public language as to the mental entities that are correlated with any particular public words.
Another faculty we may take notice of in our minds, is that of discerning and distinguishing between the several ideas it has.... Unless the mind has a distinct perception of different objects and their qualities, it would be capable of very little knowledge... On this faculty of distinguishing one thing from another, depends the evidence and certainty of several, even very general propositions, which have passed for innate truths; because men, overlooking the true cause why those propositions find universal assent, impute it wholly to native uniform impressions: Whereas it in truth depends upon this clear discerning faculty of the mind, whereby it perceives two ideas to be the same, or different.
(Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.xi.1)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Again, we do not pause here to consider the critiques leveled by realists against this view of meaning. My goal here is instead to explain the theory.
The puzzle goes even further. Consider any two positive sentences, S1 and S2, that have been given some meaning by correspondence to a combination of mental items. These two sentences correspond to different mental combinations if and only if the sentence “S1 does not mean the same as S2” is true. Yet this is a negative sentence, and therefore cannot be true by the argument mentioned in the text. So S1 and S2 cannot correspond to different mental items, and so they mean the same thing. But this is true for every positive sentence. So therefore, all meaningful sentences correspond to the same mental item, and they all mean the same thing! Cognitivists really must solve the “problem of predicate negation” if they are to have any logically coherent theory.
At least in finite cases. The formula presupposes that we can always find “those tilings that are different from a.” But the complement of a set, here the complement of the set containing just a, is not always well-defined in a setting of an infinite number of items. But I presume most cognitivist theories would hold that the mental inventory is finite, and so that this is a well-defined notion.
It does not have to manifest any member of the group at all, for the object in question may be, for example, a number. And then the entire applicability group is inapplicable. But if some member of the group applies to the object, then no other member of that same group can apply.
Of course, people do find negations more difficult to deal with (especially in reasoning) than positives, and perhaps this would argue against analysis (3) and in favor of analysis (1) and analysis (2).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pelletier, F.J. (1998). Thinking of ‘Not’. In: Arrazola, X., Korta, K., Pelletier, F.J. (eds) Discourse, Interaction and Communication. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 72. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8994-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8994-9_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4996-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8994-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive