Philosophy of Language and Linguistics: The Legacy of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein 9783110342758, 9783110342581

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Piotr Stalmaszczyk (Ed.) Philosophy of Language and Linguistics

Philosophische Analyse / Philosophical Analysis

Herausgegeben von / Edited by Herbert Hochberg, Rafael Hüntelmann, Christian Kanzian, Richard Schantz, Erwin Tegtmeier

Volume / Band 53

Philosophy of Language and Linguistics The Legacy of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein

Edited by Piotr Stalmaszczyk

ISBN 978-3-11-034258-1 e-ISBN 978-3-11-034275-8 ISSN 2198-2066 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Druck und Bindung: CPI buch bücher.de GmbH, Birkach ∞ Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Philosophy of Language and Linguistics: The Legacy of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Preface Piotr Stalmaszczyk ............................................................................... 1 Mapping the Ancient City: Historical Linguistics and Conceptual Clarification Joachim Adler .................................................................................... 11 Russell and Wittgenstein on Proposition, Judgement, and Truth María Cerezo ...................................................................................... 29 How to Talk (Precisely) about Visual Perception? The Case of the Duck/Rabbit Paweł Grabarczyk .............................................................................. 53 Priority of Thought or Priority of Language Arkadiusz Gut ..................................................................................... 71 On the Ambiguity in Definite Descriptions Thomas J. Hughes .............................................................................. 99 Proceduralism and Ontologico-Historical Understanding in the Philosophy of Language Carl Humphries ............................................................................... 115 Quine’s Criticisms of Semantics Gary Kemp ....................................................................................... 139 Who Wants to Be a Russellian about Names? Siu-Fan Lee ...................................................................................... 161 Bradley, Russell, and the Structure of Thought Gabriele M. Mras ............................................................................ 181 Logic and the Pursuit of Meaning Jaroslav Peregrin ............................................................................ 193 Objects, Concepts, Unity Ulrich Reichard ............................................................................... 213

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Contents

The Legacy of Frege and the Linguistic Theory of Predication Piotr Stalmaszczyk ........................................................................... 225 Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Notion of False Propositions Piotr K. Szałek ................................................................................. 255 Categorial Grammar and the Foundations of the Philosophy of Language Mieszko Tałasiewicz ........................................................................ 269 Index ................................................................................................... 295

Piotr Stalmaszczyk University of Łód [email protected]

Philosophy of Language and Linguistics: The Legacy of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Preface It is a task of philosophy to break the power of words over the human mind. Gottlob Frege, Begriffsschrift All philosophy is a ‘critique of language’. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Before we can understand language, we must strip it of its mystical and awe-inspiring attributes. Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth

0. Introduction The present volume investigates selected aspects of the legacy of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein in contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics. These three philosophers are considered to be the most important founders of analytic philosophy; at a later stage they shaped and inspired various philosophical approaches to the study of language.1 It would be difficult to imagine research on, for example, truth, sense and reference, proper names, meaning and use, presupposition, without the achievements of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. They have influenced technical discussions on such topics as context, propositions and predication, definite descriptions, and philo-

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For a concise overview, see Baldwin (2006) and García-Carpintero (2012).

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sophical and linguistic inquiries into the limits of language and sense, and the relations between language, mind, and the world. Michael Potter has recently observed that the principal contribution of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein to the philosophy of language was not so much connected with the fact that “they applied philosophical methods to the study of language”, but rather that “they applied linguistic methods to the study of certain problems in philosophy” (Potter 2013: 852). At the same time, however, Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein (both in the Tractatus and in the Philosophical Inquiries) expressed highly critical remarks about the nature of language, and considered spoken language to be an instrument inadequate for the science of logic. Within this context, Frege pointed to the need for creating a language made up of signs, precise and clear of any double meaning (such as his Begriffsschrift), and Russell postulated a hierarchy of languages. Wittgenstein, in his Preface to the Tractatus, claimed that the problems of philosophy are posed because “the logic of our language is misunderstood” (Wittgenstein [1922]: 3). Later he observed that “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein [1953], §109), and that philosophers “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (Wittgenstein [1953], §116). However, the trouble is that “this battle can be refought only by language” (Arendt 1975: 115); hence the need for ‘reforming’ language for the purposes of philosophical and logical inquiries, either through devising necessary formalism, or through elucidations of meaning and focus on language use.2 The influence of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein resulted in the development of at least three traditions: that of formal logic, of ordinary language philosophy, and of contemporary linguistics, even though the three philosophers were not interested in linguistics and considered language only from the perspective of logical and philosophical inquiries. Nevertheless, within contemporary linguistics, formal and formalized approaches to language analysis, inspired by the work of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein (and also by the next generation of scholars, such as Carnap, Tarski, Ajdukiewicz, Quine) are par2

For an introductory discussion on different turns in philosophy of language, see respective prefaces in Stalmaszczyk, ed. (2010a, 2010b, 2011).

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ticularly characteristic of categorial grammars, Montague grammar, and generative grammar. Studies gathered in this volume aim to show that the results of the research programs advocated and developed by Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein are still of utmost importance, and that the three philosophers have significantly contributed to the linguistic turn in philosophy and the philosophical turn in the study of language, contributing at the same time to another movement in modern philosophy, a movement which began: […] when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis exchanged the structure of the mind for the structure of concepts, and that now proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of the several symbol systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse. This movement is from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making. (Goodman 1978: x)

1. Contents of the volume The collection brings together contributions by philosophers, logicians and linguists, offering an interdisciplinary approach to crucial problems in philosophy of language and contemporary linguistics, concentrating on different aspects of influence of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. Also the mutual connections and further implications are discussed. Joachim Adler observes that one of the most important claims of 20th century philosophy of language was that the meaning of any linguistic expression is its use. Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophers inferred from this that philosophical entanglements can only be dissolved by clarifying the misleading concepts. Of course, such conceptual clarifications invariably refer to the present use of a word and not to any historical account of language. Except for a few remarks in Austin’s Plea for Excuses, etymology has never been considered as relevant for ordinary language philosophy. Adler’s aim is to establish historical linguistics as a useful instrument for conceptual clarification. María Cerezo presents the evolution of Russell’s theory of judgement from 1903 to 1913, and discusses the problems that his theory encoun-

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tered under its three versions in The Principles of Mathematics (1903), On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood (1910) and Theory of Knowledge (1913). Cerezo shows the stimulating effect that these problems had on the development of some Tractarian ideas which can be interpreted as something of a return to early Russell in certain aspects, together with other crucial innovations. The chapter focuses on Wittgenstein’s revision of the notion of logical form and its symbolic capacity, and on his truthconditional theory of sense. Paweł Grabarczyk is concerned with visual perception and the celebrated case of the duck/rabbit. In Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology Wittgenstein used ambiguous illusions to investigate the problematic relation of perception and interpretation. Grabarczyk uses this problem as a starting point for developing a conceptual framework capable of expressing problems associated with visual perception in a precise manner. Throughout the chapter he explicates some of the common notions associated with perception such as “to look at”, “to have an impression of…”, “to react as if one had an impression of…”, “to convince oneself that what one sees is…”. His principal aim is to create a precise and unequivocal conceptual framework capable of expressing problems and solutions connected with the phenomenon of visual perception. Arkadiusz Gut observes that Frege’s view concerning the thoughtlanguage relationship contains inner tensions. They arise from the fact that in Frege’s writings two inconsistent statements can be found, namely that the structure of sentence serves as the structure of thought, and that two structurally different sentences can express one and the same thought. Gut starts with Dummett’s three partial claims leading to the conclusion that Frege supports the hypothesis of the priority of language over thought. Next, he shows that the three statements lead to a general rule which, according to Dummett, says that for Frege and all the later analytic philosophers the characteristics of a thought may be obtained through a philosophical characteristics of a sentence (or more broadly – of language). Gut also provides a set of arguments showing that the view suggested by Dummett encountered many lines of criticism, and demonstrates that Frege’s project advocates rather the thesis that two sentences with different predicative structure can express one and the same thought.

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Thomas J. Hughes defends the thesis that definite descriptions should receive an attributive semantics only in those instances where they fall under the scope of certain semantic operators. The ambiguity defended is not the one noted by Donnellan and Kripke, as it will not recognize an ambiguity in one and the same proposition. In the approach advocated by Hughes, each and every proposition receives a single semantics for every occasion of use, and this semantics will be informed by the grammatical configuration of the expressions. Hughes combines semantic investigation with exploration of contemporary generative grammar. Carl Humphries devotes his chapter to proceduralism and ontologico-historical understanding in the philosophy of language. Since Frege, analytical philosophers have mostly construed language proceduralistically, treating reference and assertion as largely uniform procedures for re-identifying entities and proposing states of affairs as true. Their conviction that these procedures make sense as such typically presupposes a broadly Kantian intuition that they reflect some larger selfvalidating normative sphere. This, according to Humphries, faces two objections: that it misconstrues the role of ahistorical, ontologically significant commitments/contexts, and that it ignores cases involving radically historical understanding. Each objection captures something, but it seems that one cannot embrace both on pain of inconsistency, as they entail conflicting readings of the existential quantifier. A third position, explored by Heidegger and the ‘third’ Wittgenstein, rejects the disjunction between ahistorical-ontological and historical-contingent forms of commitment and context, thus avoiding having to choose between these two readings. This, however, involves a quietistic stance regarding the distinguishability of ahistorical-ontological and historical-contingent forms of commitment and context, which is sometimes counterintuitive. Humphries sketches a possible alternative, involving the notion of ontologico-historical understanding. Gary Kemp focuses on Quine’s criticisms of semantics. Kemp demonstrates that Quine’s interest in semantics was subservient to his epistemological agenda, and his overarching aim was to identify the real presuppositions, and to sketch the main lines of a naturalistic and scientific account of the whole of human knowledge. Quine had a number of general criticisms of the discipline or science known as semantics. Kemp

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tries to separate them into the interlinguistic and intralinguistic, suggesting that semantics can survive the interlinguistic criticisms, but that some of the more piecemeal intralinguistic criticisms remain. Siu-Fan Lee discusses Russell’s theories of names. Russell had two such theories and one theory of description. Logically proper names are Millian names, which have only denotation but no connotation. Ordinary names are not genuine names but disguised definite descriptions subject to quantificational analyses. Only by asserting that ordinary names are definite descriptions could Russell motivate his theory of description to solve three problems for Millian names, namely, Frege’s puzzle, empty reference and negative existentials. Whereas critics usually discuss Russell’s theories of names and his theory of description separately, Lee’s paper takes a new perspective and presents a dilemma for the overall project, arguing that it is hard to be a Russellian about names coherently. The central issue is whether contextualisation is semantic or pragmatic in nature, an issue very much alive in contemporary debates. Gabriele M. Mras observes that Russell’s multiple theory of judgement is commonly regarded as a failure. This is so because any attempt to appeal to some entity as that in virtue of which an ascription of properties is true, inevitably invokes a regress. But Russell could have known this all along. He was familiar with this objection from Bradley’s work and he used a “regress argument” himself while he still was philosophizing in the tradition of British idealism. Mras shows that the reason why Russell, despite his own insistence that no ‘third thing’ could unite the items of a sentence, ends up with a view that makes the appeal to such a thing necessary has to do with what is commonly held against him: Russell’s particular way to rely on the notion of structure led him astray as a critique of Bradley. Jaroslav Peregrin shows how the ‘linguistic turn’ of philosophy of the twentieth century led to the overestimation of the role of logic in the process understanding of meaning and in the consequent ‘dissolution’ of traditional philosophical problems. He stresses that the role logic can sensibly play is the Wittgensteinian role of helping us build simplified models of natural language (with all possibilities and limitations models have), not the Carnapian role of reducing meanings, without a remainder, to logicomathematical constructs. Peregrin tries to shed some new light on this sit-

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uation in terms of distinguishing two perspectives: the expression-as-object perspective (looking at the relation between an expression and its meaning as a contingent, a posteriori matter) and the expression-as-medium perspective (looking at this relation as something necessary or a priori). Ulrich Reichard discusses some aspects of Fregean ontology, in which the most fundamental distinction is that between concepts and objects. The famous ‘paradox of the concept horse’ has often been taken to be devastating for Frege’s ontological distinction between objects and concepts. Reichard argues that if we consider how the concept-object distinction is supposed to account for the unity of linguistic meaning, it transpires that the paradox is in fact not paradoxical. Piotr Stalmaszczyk focuses on possible approaches to linguistic predication inspired by the philosophy of language, and distinguishes ‘Aristotelian’ (or concatentaive) predication, and ‘Fregean’ (or functional) predication. His chapter investigates the relevance of Fregean semantics for contemporary linguistics, in particular generative grammar. Though Fregean semantics is not concerned with natural language categories, Frege’s line of reasoning may be fruitfully applied to analyzing predication understood as a strictly grammatical relation. Finally, the paper offers a preliminary classification of predication types into thematic, structural and propositional. Piotr Szałek deals with one of the major puzzles for the Wittgensteinian picture theory of language: if sense of propositions is determined by picturing the possible state of affairs, how then can false propositions have sense if their corresponding state of affairs does not exist? In order to answer the question, Szałek reconstructs the main structure of the argument for the theory in the context of its relation to Bertrand Russell’s view on judgments. The paper argues that the Wittgensteinian solution to the problem of the false propositions relies on the notion of the intrinsic symbolic (syntactic) structure of the proposition in virtue of the analogy to the pictorial representation and possible configuration of its components. Mieszko Tałasiewicz addresses the issue of categorial grammar and the foundations of the philosophy of language. He presents a new approach to explaining productivity of language, a feature that is crucial for

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constructing a credible logic of natural language and elucidating many key issues in the philosophy of language. The starting point of the proposed approach is a combination of Fregean idea of functoriality and the idea of bi-modal intentionality. These two ideas are dealt with in a way inspired by Strawson, notably by his idea that categories are roles rather than kinds of expressions, and that the logical syntax of language is to be founded in some transcendental features of our thinking about the world. As a result, the new approach reveals philosophical foundations of Categorial Grammar (far deeper than Ajdukiewicz ever explicitly acknowledged) and shows, among other things, that Categorial Grammar should not be considered as more or less accurate description of acceptability judgments, which constitute the empirical base of linguistics, but rather as a calculus of intentional structure of human cognition. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Mr Ryszard Rasi ski for comprehensive editorial assistance, and to Dr Piotr Duchnowicz who prepared the final manuscript. I wish to thank Dr Rafael Hüntelmann for professional advice and encouragement for the project, and especially warmly to Ms Olena Gainulina for the final formatting assistance.

References Arendt, Hannah 1978. Thinking. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Baldwin, Thomas 2006. Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth Century. In: E. Lepore and B. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 60-99. Frege, Gottlob [1879] 1997. Begriffsschrift (translated by M. Beaney). In: M. Beaney (ed.), The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 47-78. García-Carpintero, Manuel 2012. Editorial Introduction: History of the Philosophy of Language. In: M. García-Carpintero and M. Kölbel (eds.), The Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Language. London and New York: Continuum, 1-25. Goodman, Nelson 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

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Potter, Michael 2013. Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. In: G. Russell and D. Graff Fara (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language. New York and London: Routledge, 852-859. Russell, Bertrand 1940. An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. London: George Allen & Unwin. Stalmaszczyk, Piotr (ed.) 2010a. Philosophy of Language and Linguistics. Volume 1: The Formal Turn. Frankfurt am Main: Ontos Verlag. Stalmaszczyk, Piotr (ed.) 2010b. Philosophy of Language and Linguistics. Volume 2: The Philosophical Turn. Frankfurt am Main: Ontos Verlag. Stalmaszczyk, Piotr (ed.) 2011. Turning Points in the Philosophy of Language and Linguistics (Łód Studies in Language 21). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Wittgenstein, Ludwig [1922] 1995. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness). London and New York: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig [1953] 2001. Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. (translated by G. E. M. Anscombe). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Joachim Adler University of Zurich [email protected]

Mapping the Ancient City: Historical Linguistics and Conceptual Clarification Abstract: It was one of the most important claims of 20th century philosophy of language that the meaning of any linguistic expression is its use. Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophers inferred from this that philosophical entanglements can only be dissolved by clarifying the misleading concepts. In order to do this, one has to re-collect the ordinary use of the concepts in question. Of course, such conceptual clarifications invariably refer to the present use of a word and not to any historical account of language. Except for a few remarks in Austin’s Plea for Excuses, etymology has never been considered as relevant for ordinary language philosophy. My aim in this paper is to establish historical linguistics as a useful instrument for conceptual clarification. After having outlined my notion of the method of conceptual clarification, I shall first examine why historical linguistics has been constantly neglected in this very method of analytical philosophy. I will then put forward two reasons why integrating a diachronic perspective on language can advance the pursuit for linguistic and philosophical clarity. Finally, my conclusion will show that diachronically enriched conceptual clarification does not lead philosophy into mere empirical sciences. Keywords: Wittgenstein, conceptual clarification, conceptual analysis, diachronic historical linguistics, semantics, ordinary language philosophy Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §18

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0. Introduction Due to the famous linguistic turn, philosophy finally took notice of language. More than ever before, so-called linguistic philosophers now emphasised the importance of language. They strived to make progress in their philosophical pursuits by concentrating on the linguistic form in which it is couched. In the first half of the 20th century, linguistic philosophy split into ideal language philosophy on the one side and ordinary language philosophy1 on the other. And although Ludwig Wittgenstein (together with his followers at Cambridge) is not to be counted as a proponent of either of the two, he was certainly much closer to the latter. They shared important points, most notably in methodology. Contrary to the ideal language movement, philosophy should not try to substitute ordinary language by some sort of logical calculus, but rather elaborate the subtleties in our everyday parlance by examining and clarifying the involved concepts (in the next section of this essay, I will sketch the method in more detail). The heydays of ordinary language philosophy (as well as those of ideal language philosophy) may well be over. What has lasted to this very day though is its method of conceptual clarification.2 In the last few years, one could even speak of a renaissance, as hotly debated topics (especially in the philosophy of mind) have seen promising attempts to progress by clarifying the concepts in this manner. Apart from such good news, this comeback has also reawakened former doubts about this method. Since its early dawning, linguistic philosophy has repeatedly 1

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I use the label ordinary language philosophy for the philosophical tradition which goes back to Oxford in the 1960s and was championed by scholars like John Austin, Gilbert Ryle and Peter Strawson. The important differences between their and Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy notwithstanding, I will neglect the differences in the following. For further reading, see Hacker (1996: 162-182) and Glock (2008a: 34ff). The term conceptual analysis seems to be slightly more common. Despite this, I shall refer to the method as conceptual clarification. While both terms are metaphors and hence carry the risk of confusion, I find the latter less captious. As Ryle pointed out, philosophical problems cannot be analysed like chemicals. It is better to compare the task of the philosopher with that of a cartographer than that of a chemist or detective (Ryle 1957: 385).

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been attacked in various ways. Most of all, the objections focussed on the allegedly intuitive basis of conceptual clarification and its speculations in a lay quasi-linguistic fashion (see, for instance, Mates 1958 and Gellner 1959 for two early criticisms). Quite a few commentators doubted whether the grand questions of philosophy could really be answered by observing the ordinary man’s speech. But even if ordinary language could actually furnish the solution for philosophical entanglements, what qualifies a philosopher to state how ordinary language is used? On what basis does he pick out the concepts which are to be examined? And how does he know whether his grasp of a certain concept is common and ordinary? Unfortunately, these reservations were apparently vindicated by two of the most famous proponents of ordinary language philosophy. Ryle and Austin independently from each other examined the use of voluntarily. But alas, their respective notions of the concept diverged essentially. The mocking thus was foreseeable: If agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged? (Mates 1958: 165)

Following this line, Daniel Dennett (2007: 82f) recently called the procedure of conceptual clarification “naïve auto-anthropology”. Observing linguistic actions of a social group, he claims, would pass as anthropology. But to take only into account one’s own linguistic actions without even assessing them critically, is, in his view, just naïve. Others (e.g. New 1966: 380f) have claimed that fundamental features of language such as changes of meaning are constantly neglected and that, in this sense, the system of language is too dynamic to deduce any philosophical conclusions from it. At least, if one refers to past philosophers, one has to be aware of the possibility that many a concept was used differently at that time. This danger of conceptual anachronism leaves us with two alternatives: either one discards the history of philosophy in total, or one has to discriminate all the different uses of a singular expression, albeit being formally identical (examples will follow below).

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Thus, it seems that conceptual clarification would eventually turn into a Sisyphean challenge.3 To be sure, both charges have a point. Since philosophy is often conceived as a discipline which is only concerned with the a priori, methodological autism is spotted here and there. In matters of linguistic philosophy, however, such a restriction would be blatantly unproductive. If language is seriously to be taken into account, one must not ignore the discipline of which language is the object of study. Among the different concerns about the method of conceptual clarification, I will answer only two of them by introducing historical linguistics as a tool for conceptual clarifications. The integration of a diachronic perspective on language will prove to be an appropriate way to enrich this method with linguistically coherent devices, so that the objection of lay linguistic methods can be repudiated. Moreover, this tool enables us to deal with language change adequately, which will, as will be shown, eventually turn out as grist to the mill for ordinary language philosophy. This also helps us also refer to past philosophers considering their use of the concepts in question. Before answering these objections however, I will also examine why it seems fairly reasonable that proponents of the method of conceptual clarification have hardly ever considered a diachronic perspective on language. I will then put forward two reasons why integrating a diachronic perspective on language can nevertheless advance the pursuit for linguistic and philosophical clarity. At that point, I will have to forestall two misunderstandings which are quite common in matters of language change in philosophy of language. Finally, my conclusion will show that diachronically enriched conceptual clarification does not reduce philosophy to empirical linguistics. Apparently, there are two crucial labels in this essay: historical linguistics and conceptual clarification. What I mean by the latter shall be discussed in the paragraph below. Historical or diachronic linguistics seems to be a rather diffuse etiquette even for linguists,4 let alone philosophers. The term diachronic linguistics was coined by Ferdinand de 3

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For further discussion of the relevance of the history of philosophy, see Glock (2008b). Even though diachronic might seem more precise and less biased than historical, the linguistic discipline I refer to is usually labelled as historical linguistics. Speaking of this specific discipline, I shall thus follow this convention.

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Saussure, and the locus classicus for its definition is to be found in the Course of General Linguistics: What diachronic linguistics studies is not relations between coexisting terms of a language-state but relations between successive terms that are substituted for each other in time. (Saussure 1959: 140)

Diachronic linguistics is concerned with the phenomenon of language change. Every part of language changes: phonetically, as sounds change; grammatically, as inflexional paradigms evolve or even collapse; syntactically, as word orders vary; and, of course, semantically, as meanings change. And since this is perhaps the most striking feature of language change and easily observable also for laypersons within one lifespan, historical linguistics is often reduced to historical semantics. Indeed, semantic change is the main aspect I intend to focus on in the following. For it is the meaning of philosophically contentious expressions that conceptual clarification seeks to elucidate. However, if language change is to be considered in the pursuit of dissolving philosophical problems, one has to incorporate all other aspects of language as well. In fact, semantic change cannot be isolated from phonetic changes. For the history of a word and its meaning can only be traced back if one is able to reconstruct its phonetic shape through the different stages of a language. 1. Conceptual clarification as a method At the beginning of the 20th century, language took centre stage in philosophy. Although there have been and still are various disagreements on what role exactly language should play, it has never lost its importance since then. Arguably the most sustained and uncompromising turn towards language – namely, as the focus of every philosophical venture – was taken by Wittgenstein and, similarly, by ordinary language philosophy. They agreed in the basic idea that philosophical problems arise from linguistic delusions. And these arise when we become puzzled by words used in an unordinary way so that we do not understand what they mean in a certain context. In order to dissolve such conceptual entan-

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glements, one has to clarify the misleading concepts by taking them back to their ordinary use. In Peter Hacker’s criticism of the neuroscientific terminology (see Bennett and Hacker 2003), we find several examples for this method. For instance, if we become puzzled by questions like “Can consciousness be located in the brain?”, “Is consciousness essentially private?” or “Does the phenomenon of consciousness resist naturalization?”, we first have to work out what those question actually mean – and, relatedly, what kind of answer there is to be given. After all, consciousness is not just a technical term that has been invented and concisely defined, nor is it only used in uncontentious situations without any philosophical relevance. Conversely, while it is a word of ordinary language, it is also the hot potato in the dispute between neuroscientists and philosophers. So which context should be the reliable one in our search of the legitimate use of consciousness? Since we do not seem to stumble over its definition in our everyday parlance, it is the ordinary context we should first look to. We say He’s conscious when somebody has passed out and is now opening her eyes again, or I’m perfectly conscious of the risks I’m taking which means that I am well aware of the risks, that I am taking the risks into account. We can hardly find any kind of substance which these two sentences refer to, nor a certain area in our brain. Eventually, we shall find that certain neurophilosophical claims do not use the term as it is supposed to, and this is what often results even in plain nonsense. We do not use consciousness as a name for some Cartesian inner theatre. Thus, there seems to be something awry in the quest for consciousness.5 To sum up, the method discussed here is as follows. One collects the problematic expressions in a given context, examines their use in ordinary language, compares this use with the given context and delineates the bounds of sense in respect of that very language game.6 Conceptual clarification strives for an overview, for clarity (Übersichtlichkeit, as the original reads, see Philosophical Investigations §122). Certainly, in our 5

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I cannot put forward a sustained argument here, but see Bennett and Hacker (2003: 237ff) and also Kenny (2009: 250-263). Wittgenstein’s term “language game” (PI §23) is, for reasons of simplicity, to be understood here as a certain context, or, in Austin’s diction, as an “area (of discourse)”. See Urmson (1967: 233).

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everyday speech, competent speakers hardly become confused by language, just as we are not lost in a city we have known since childhood, although we might not be able to draw a map of that city. As expressed by Wittgenstein in the quotation at the beginning, natural languages – opposed to, say, Esperanto or the interpreted logical calculi envisaged by ‘ideal language philosophers’ – are not built only of rectangular streets and uniform houses. In the alleys of language lurk many traps which we are able to avoid simply because we have trained it more than anything else in our life. Still, in our quest for philosophical insights we easily fall into such traps or run into dead ends. In a remark from 1931, Wittgenstein’s metaphor runs as follows: Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings. And so we watch one man after another walking down the same paths and we know in advance where he will branch off, where walk straight on without noticing the side turning etc. etc. What I have to do then is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings so as to help people past the danger points. (Wittgenstein 1980: 18e)

In the following, I do not wish to dwell on a defence for this method, as much as it would deserve one. Rather, I shall explicate in which way it can be enriched by historical linguistics. Armed with the vigour of linguistic data, one may find the conclusions of conceptual clarification even more compelling. 2. Why the past might not matter At first sight, to combine the idea of conceptual clarification with a historical perspective on language seems highly problematic.7 For when Wittgenstein famously claimed that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (PI §43), one clearly has to understand use here as present use. The use of a word changes constantly; most words are not used the 7

This impression may partly derive from a common prejudice against analytic philosophy as being a- or even anti-historical. See Glock (2008b) for a detailed discussion of the mismatch between analytic philosophy and history.

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way they were several hundred years ago. Even middle-aged people know of some expressions that are used differently nowadays than in their youth. But clearly, one cannot arrive at the actual meaning by exploring etymology. For instance, the fact that etymology derives from Greek étymos ‘true’ does not imply that etymology is about elucidating the true meaning of a word. Today, etymology is the discipline which describes the origins of a word, without any normative power. Despite its name, etymology has shed the idea of a true meaning. Still, academia apart, etymology is consistently exploited for language policies, in some quarters language change is still conceived as some sort of decay. But how – and why – should one want to turn the clock back in matters of meaning, anyway? Consider someone prompting, “Meet me at noon”. Another might know that noon derives from Latin nona (hora), originally ‘the ninth hour from sunrise’ (see ODEE 614), but that would, of course, hardly justify his showing up only at 3 p.m. Regardless of its meaning until the 14th century, noon is used nowadays only to refer to 12 o’clock in the day; one cannot use it for any other hour without being misunderstood. Admittedly, meanings do not always change as unambiguously as in the case of noon. Former uses very often loom into the present through secondary use or by tinging the primary. These cases, of course, are the interesting ones for the method discussed here. Saussure and Wittgenstein compared linguistic acts with moves in chess.8 Both activities are guided by rules which have a constitutive power. Chess rules are constitutive in two ways. On the one hand, they constitute the game that is played as chess. You only play chess if you move your pieces according to the rules of chess. And indeed, these rules have evolved through the centuries just as linguistic ones, but there is only one set of rules that you have to stick to if you play chess these days. If one would bring dice into the game, one could not be said to play chess anymore, although it was played with dice in the beginning. On the other hand, chess rules also constitute the individual pieces. It is not the shape that defines them, but rather the rules that confine their 8

Saussure (1959: 22); PI § 31. Further interesting parallels between Saussure and Wittgenstein can be found in Harris (1988).

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movements: the piece that is allowed to move only horizontally or vertically through any number of unoccupied squares is called the rook. These rules build a synchronic, ahistorical system, which has to be accepted as a whole when one wants to engage in a chess-game. Similarly, in order to take part in a language community, one has to follow the rules that build the synchronic, ahistorical system of every language.9 So, of course, if one wants to understand the meaning of a word, one simply has to look at its present use. Thus it seems that, however perplexing a philosophical problem may be, the former meanings of the expressions involved simply do not play any role both for the reasons and the solution of our problem. Why then should we bother about historical linguistics at all? I want to present two reasons why we should. 3. First reason: clarifying the starting point The first reason leads us back to the initial phase of the clarification process and also to a weighty objection against this method. In this section, I will answer the demurs about the lay linguistic attitude which has been rightly detected in several works of ordinary language philosophers. When we are to describe the relations and dependencies between concepts in a certain area of discourse we have to struggle mostly with the synchronic disorder in our everyday language. The sheer number of near-synonyms, derivations and loanwords makes it very difficult to collect all the relevant expressions, let alone to examine their subtle differences and nuances. Taking the diachronic perspective into account, we can understand the reasons behind those oddities much more easily and have the area of discourse arranged more appropriately. Consider, for example, knowledge. The conceptual entanglements are well known. Philosophers have wrestled with the problem of an adequate definition for ages; dozens of books and presumably hundreds of articles have been published about it. Several linguistic philosophers (Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin) dealt with it too. The heterogeneity of 9

For reasons of space, I will not discuss the well-known qualms whether or not language is a rule-governed activity. As a defence for the position that is taken here, see Glock (2008c).

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the expressions involved is mentioned quite regularly – which actually means, grasping all the relevant concepts, confining the area of discourse, turns out to be at least one of the fundamental parts of the problem. For, as many a failed definition shows, knowledge is related to concepts like consciousness, conscience, wise or witty, which are likely to be overlooked but may yet reveal insights into the language game in which knowledge is embedded (see, for example, Bennett and Hacker 2003: 148ff, and Hanfling 1985). Not least, because of these ties, the concept of knowledge has turned out to be too ramified for any concise definition. Rather, the different uses of knowledge are a decent example of a Wittgensteinian family resemblance: “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (PI §66).10 But how to cope with all these strands? Synchronically, the formal variety of the aforementioned expressions entails the danger of limiting the investigation to knowledge and to know. However, the diachronic perspective readily uncovers the relations to conscience and consciousness, as they trace back to Latin scire ‘to know’ and con-scire ‘to share knowledge with somebody’ or ‘to be privy with another or oneself’ (see ODEE 205f, 508f). A few etymological insights further, one has to recognise that any clarification of knowledge must not neglect consciousness, and vice versa. While dealing with consciousness, Bennett and Hacker state: Transitive consciousness lies at the confluence of the concepts of knowledge, realization (i.e. one specific form that acquisition may take), receptivity (as opposed to achievement) of knowledge, and attention caught and held, or given. (Bennett and Hacker 2003: 253)

And as complex or even desperate as this statement may sound, the interrelated histories of these expressions not only prove it to be correct, but explain also how this came about. Behind every confusing arrangement of expressions lies a bundle of word histories that are well capable of being explained clearly. Of course, there are still plenty of etymologies that linguists have been unable to discover. But due to the ongoing progress of linguistic research, 10

Ernst (2002) does not share this view in his monograph about knowledge. Referring to Hanfling (1985), he basically distinguishes two major uses.

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more and more expressions can be traced back to their roots. Moreover, the still obscure prehistoric stages with no written accounts are of low interest for the issue discussed here. For since western philosophy emerged centuries after the invention of writing, these stages could not have had an immediate impact on philosophical concepts. And as for any indirect traces, there is just no way of telling. By contrast, the more relevant stages, covering the last few centuries, provide us with a vast number of written records, at least in the case of the major European languages. What is more, etymological pathways cross language borders incessantly. Tracing back word histories across different languages does not just affect conceptual clarification in one language, but in many. Despite their different developments, genetically related languages like English and German still share a considerable amount of cognate words. Certainly, many of them are so-called false friends, which means that, in spite of their similar form, the two related words have reached different meanings in the respective languages. Still, how a word is used in German, for instance, is often highly informative for the clarification of its cognate in English. For instance, some former meaning may have survived in one language while it has been abandoned in the other, but it may still be relevant for the understanding of the specific development of use. Apart from cognates and loanwords, languages with similar cultural backgrounds can also simply serve as objects of comparison (Wittgenstein occasionally mentioned the use of a Vergleichsobjekt, see, for instance, PI §131). For what is formally muddled in one language can be much clearer in another, whereas the conceptual framework beneath is always the same. The aforementioned relation between knowledge and consciousness may well serve as an example here. Since the German words Gewissen ‘conscience’ and Bewusstsein ‘consciousness’ were not, as it is the case for English, borrowed from Latin, the close connection to wissen ‘to know’ is even formally evident. And this, of course, reinforces the supposed relevance of the relation between these two concepts. Language-crossing kinship thus often reveals interesting insights too, and is the object of so-called external reconstruction, which is a standard procedure of historical linguistics in order to reconstruct poorly documented language stages or to track nebulous etymologies.

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4. Second reason: understanding language change The second point shows another advantage of a diachronically enriched clarification, but also rules out a misconception of language change which I shall mention first. Critics have occasionally argued that the method of conceptual clarification must fail due to semantic change. The attack runs as follows. The ordinary language philosophers’ pretence of distinguishing uses of expressions that make sense from those that do not turns out to be mere linguistic conservatism. Meanings change constantly and therefore it is principally impossible to fix the rules for the use of an expression. This strand of objection was taken up by Dennett (2007) in his reply to Bennett and Hacker (2003), even though they had already discussed it in this very book. Dennett claims that linguists would hesitate in stating any grammatical rules as these would virtually change the moment they are written down. And since continuous change is conceived as an essential feature of any living language, linguistic conservatism would either be in vain or even restrict the required development of a certain vocabulary. Dennett may be right in his statement that at least some ordinary language philosophers have undeniably been inattentive towards language change (but Hacker is certainly not to be included).11 However, he is wrong in his view both of language change as some sort of chaotic destructive force and of linguistics throwing in the towel in the face of linguistic change. Dennett claims that, as an example, linguists would refrain from calling The cat climbed down the tree an abuse of the verb to climb (Dennett 2007: 84). Given that it originally expressed an ascending motion, should the combination with down count as a mistake or as a semantic change? Pace Dennett, linguists do not have any difficulties in describing the phenomenon (e.g., see Wierzbicka 1990: 363ff). The term to climb down is not be taken as a contradictio in adjecto making linguists shudder; it is simply a nice example of a semantic extension. To climb is a cognate of German (er)klimmen, which is indeed 11

It has to be noted that in his famous and programmatic Plea for Excuses, Austin explicitly took etymology into account as part of the method he envisaged (see Austin 1956). In spite of that, only a few of his disciples followed his example.

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only used to express an ascent. And without the adverb down, the English verb is restricted to the very same use. The cat climbed the tree means that the cat is now up in the tree, not that it just descended it. In combination with down, the meaning of climb has been generalised from ‘move horizontally upwards (by hands and feet)’ to ‘move horizontally (by hands and feet)’. What is more, contrary to Dennett’s contention, this is not an example of recent semantic change; the expression to climb down is documented since the early 14th century, and the evidence is readily accessible in the OED. To be sure, much more dramatic meaning changes are legion. Consider, as a single example, English nice, deriving from Latin nescius ‘ignorant’; one seemingly has to conclude that semantic change is a completely arbitrary process. But what would that mean for ordinary language philosophy? Irritating expressions like My brain is conscious – notably the bone of contention between Hacker and Dennett – could simply be justified by referring to spontaneous meaning change. And this would make it possible to ascribe the term conscious not only to persons, but also to brains, computers and anything you like. Before giving in, however, the “arbitrariness” of this process is worth looking at more closely. For if one does not just settle for shuffling the starting and ending points, but rather aims at a reconstruction of the history step by step, the emerging picture is that of a much more comprehensible process. The Latin nescius evolved into Catalan neci ‘ignorant’ which was incorporated into Middle English as nyce ‘foolish’. By the 15th century, the meaning had become ‘coy, shy’ and via ‘fastidious, dainty’; the present meaning of ‘agreeable, delightful’ was eventually reached in the 18th century (see ODEE 609). It is the instruments of historical linguistics that provide an insight into the black box of language change. Seemingly arbitrary developments like the aforementioned result from the alignment of well-known processes such as specialisation of meaning, generalisation, amelioration, and so on. Impressions of arbitrariness and unpredictability often result from the scope of the diachronic perspective: over the centuries, meanings may indeed take impressive and surprising leaps. But if we dwell on the details of a continuous process, there is no mysterious lottery anymore, no etymological miracle. At the very most, there are unexplainable meaning shifts be-

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cause of word histories that have not yet been uncovered. But semantic change itself is not a quodlibet. With the exception of explicit stipulations, meanings do not leap, they move slowly. For semantic change is always constricted by synchronic comprehensibility: if the majority is unable to make sense of a new use, it cannot be established. At this point, I shall try to forestall two misunderstandings. First, language change is for the most part an unpredictable process – the achievements of post festum diachronic linguistics concerning the explanation of changes in the past notwithstanding. However, while we cannot tell how the meaning of a certain word may evolve, it is quite reasonable to predict what shift in meaning an expression will not undergo, considering its development and present use. Secondly, I am not suggesting that language change is or should be subject to any normative claims. Linguistics is not a normative discipline. Intentionally transferring a word to an unfamiliar context is by no means to be condemned; it is evidence of a living language. Even more to this point, metaphors, as much as loanwords, are the language’s fountain of youth. If scholars manipulate ordinary language though, we have to be cautious. Whatever happens to language within laboratories and philosophy departments may be jolly good, whether their jargon contains technical terms, everyday expressions or codes. Still, even though scientists claim to understand each other’s terminology, many an example shows that, due to conceptual entanglements, they seem to draw the wrong conclusions from their data. For scientific language, as elaborated as it may be, is impregnated with ordinary language, and so are the questions about, say, consciousness. The conceptual confusions vitiate the speaking and thinking of experts. However, it is even more harmful if this idiosyncratic lingo should convey scientific findings to laypeople. For whenever scholars want to make their results and findings available to the public, they have to bridge a gap of knowledge, and this is not to be done by introducing linguistic innovations without explaining them. Consciousness may be a shibboleth for whatever neuroscientific theory, but if neuroscientists talk in the same way in popular scientific articles and books, it should be made

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clear that this cannot possibly mean the same as it does in ordinary language.12 Considering the historical depth of language must not lead us to any sort of linguistic inertia. But, as so often, history provides us with a critical reminder of recent trends. And so we might then reject certain metonymies like “thinking brains”, because they do not fill a gap in our everyday language, nor do they explain anything. Rather, they cause confusion. 5. Conclusion: philosophy as an appendix of empirical linguistics? In the previous two sections, I tried to rebut two objections against conceptual clarification by showing the advantages of a diachronic perspective. I argued that intuitive reasoning can and should be replaced by proper linguistic assessments, including an adequate historical perspective on the concepts which are to be clarified. The second objection concerning language change turned out to be a strong argument for the integration of historical linguistics, provided that we understand the principles of meaning change. Of course, in order to profit from these linguistic tools, substantial empirical data is indispensable. Ever since Russell’s early criticism, ordinary language philosophy has been suspected of dissolving philosophy into empirical linguistics. Furthermore, others have claimed that if philosophy has to bite the bullet of turning empirical it should at least abstain from armchair reasoning and engage in proper empirical linguistics. In this vein, hotly debated experimental philosophy has tried to prove or disprove – if not to improve – the former results of ordinary language philosophy (e.g., see Knobe and Nichols 2008).13 12

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It is well noteworthy that the communication between science and the public has increasingly attracted attention. The journal Public Understanding of Science is just one outcome of this movement, several publications and conferences have been devoted to this hotly debated topic. Sandis (2008) has set out vividly the differences between ordinary language philosophy and experimental philosophy and why conceptual clarification cannot be replaced by polls.

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The fears are baseless. Etymological investigations can no more replace philosophy than sociolinguistic surveys can. Empirical data typically cause frowns in philosophy conceived as referring only to the a priori. But just as in epistemology or philosophy of biology, philosophy of language also must not ignore the empirical basis. Of course, data cannot replace any kind of conceptual clarification or philosophical argument. But it is probable that they help us set the agenda for a certain philosophical pursuit. With regard to conceptual clarification, linguistic data may circumscribe the scope of the area which is to be examined. Different linguistic tools, of which I consider the historical ones only as some among others, provide us with data or premises for philosophical deliberation. When Austin habitually read through the whole dictionary (see Urmson 1967: 234), he collected data for his premises. Thus, what we find in ordinary language, be it that of today or of yesterday, be it by armchair reasoning or by philology, “is not the last word”, as Austin famously declared, but “it is the first word” (1970: 133).14 References Austin, John L. 1956. A Plea for Excuses. Reprinted in 1970 Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Clarendon, 123-152. Bennett, Maxwell and Peter M. S. Hacker 2003. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden: Blackwell. Bennett, Maxwell, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker and John Searle (eds.) 2007. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Dennett, Daniel C. 2007. Philosophy as Naïve Anthropology. In: M. Bennett et al. (eds.), 73-95. Ernst, Gerhard 2002. Das Problem des Wissens. Paderborn: Mentis. Gellner, Ernest 1959/2005. Words and Things. London: Routledge. Glock, Hans-Johann 2008a. What Is Analytic Philosophy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Glock, Hans-Johann 2008b. Analytic Philosophy and History: a Mismatch? Mind. A Quarterly Review of Philosophy 117, 867-897.

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I wish to thank Hanjo Glock, Stefan Riegelnik and Peter Hacker for comments and discussions on several topics that appear in this essay.

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Glock, Hans-Johann 2008c. Meaning; Rules and Conventions. In: D. Levy and E. Zamuner (eds.), 156-178. Glock , Hans-Johann and John Hyman (eds.) 2009. Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy. Essays for P. M. S. Hacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hacker, Peter M. S. 1996. Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Hanfling, Oswald 1985. A Situational Account of Knowledge. The Monist 68, 4056. Harris, Roy 1988. Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein. London and New York: Routledge. Kenny, Anthony 2009. Cognitive Scientism. In H.-J. Glock and J. Hyman (eds.), 250-262. Knobe, Joshua and Shaun Nichols (eds.) 2008. Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levy, David and Edoardo Zamuner (eds.) 2008. Wittgenstein’s Enduring Arguments. London: Routledge. Mates, Benson 1958. On the Verification of Statements about Ordinary Language. Inquiry 1: 1, 161-171. New, Christopher 1966. A Plea for Linguistics. Mind, New Series, 75 (299), 368384. Onions, Charles T. (ed.) 1966. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [ODEE] Rorty, Richard (ed.) 1967. The Philosophical Turn. Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Ryle, Gilbert 1957. The Theory of Meaning. Reprinted in 2009, Collected Papers, Vol. 2. London and New York: Routledge, 363-385. Sandis, Constantine 2010. The Experimental Turn and Ordinary Language. Essays in Philosophy 11, 181-196. de Saussure, Ferdinand 1959. General Course in Linguistics. Translated from the French by Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library. Tsohatzidis, Savas (ed.) 1990. Meanings and Prototypes: Studies in Linguistic Categorization. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Urmson, James O. 1967. J. L. Austin. In: R. Rorty (ed.), 232-238. Wierzbicka, Anna 1990. ‘Prototypes Save’: On the Uses and Abuses of the Notion of ‘Prototypes’ in Linguistics and Related Fields. In S. Tsohatzidis (ed.), 347367. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1980. Culture and Value. Translated by Peter Winch. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Revised 4th edition by P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte. Malden: Blackwell.

María Cerezo University of Murcia [email protected]

Russell and Wittgenstein on Proposition, Judgement, and Truth* Abstract: In this paper I present the evolution of Bertrand Russell’s theory of judgement from 1903 to 1913 and discuss the problems that his theory encountered under its three versions in The Principles of Mathematics (1903), On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood (1910) and Theory of Knowledge (1913). I intend to show the stimulating effect that these problems had on the development of some Tractarian ideas which can be interpreted as something of a return to early Russell in certain aspects, together with other crucial innovations. In particular, I will focus on Wittgenstein’s revision of the notion of logical form and how it symbolizes and on his truth-conditional theory of sense. Keywords: Russell, Wittgenstein, judgement, truth, falsehood, sense, logical form, propositional unity, bipolarity, assertion

0. Introduction Recent work on the objection that Wittgenstein raised to Russell’s theory of judgement in the unfinished version of Theory of Knowledge (1913, henceforth TK) has revived discussion on the particular problems that his theory had. The received view was that the problem derived from its conflict with the Principia’s theory of types (Griffin 1985, 1985-1986), but subsequent work by Hochberg (1996), Stevens (2004, 2006), Hanks (2007), Carey (2007), Landini (2007), Pincock (2008) and Connelly (2011-2012) has brought new hypotheses into the picture. Hanks looks *

Special thanks are due to the late Angel d’Ors, with whom I discussed some of the issues of the paper during many years. I also want to thank for the funds received from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Ministry of Economy and Competivity [FFI2009-13687-C02-01/FISO].

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for a difficulty internal to the Russellian theory of judgement itself, rather than one that derives from its conflict with other Russellian theories. He claims that Wittgenstein’s objection was a version of the classic problem of the unity of a proposition. Stevens also thinks that Russell’s problem was related to this unity and the need to account for the right constituents that can be combined to form a proposition. This point is also stressed by Hochberg when he offers his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s criticism, but Hochberg also insists on the need to account for the connection between a representing and a represented complex. Carey’s detailed analysis of the writing and contents of TK attempts to show that Russell abandoned it because he was not able to account for the bipolarity of a proposition within the framework of his theory of judgement. This line is also followed by Pincock, who focuses on what he calls “the correspondence problem”, that is the question about what must be the case for a belief to be true and what must be the case for it to be false. Landini thinks that Wittgenstein’s difficulty had to do with the presence and role of logical forms in the analysis of judgement. Finally, Connelly defends a reading of the objection in line with Griffin’s reading, but with a different interpretation of the conflict internal to Russell’s proposal, a conflict deriving from the requirement of a significance constraint on judgements together with some facts about logical inference. Most of these discussions approach the relation between Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s ideas from the perspective of the paralyzing effect that Wittgenstein’s criticism had on Russell. In adopting this point of view, the discussion centres on determining which difficulty caused the paralysis. In this paper, my perspective is different. I will not focus on the paralyzing effect of Wittgenstein’s criticism on Russell, but rather on the stimulating effect that Russell’s difficulties had on Wittgenstein’s own development. On the one hand, a similar perspective has perhaps been attempted recently in Stevens approach (2006). Even though he centres his attention on Russell’s theory, he also seeks to account for the way in which the picture theory tried to solve the problems encountered in the Russellian theories. However, Stevens concentrates mainly on the features of the general picture theory (TLP 2.1-2.225), and does not pay sufficient attention to the particular way in which that theory is applied to propositions in the Tractatus. Hochberg’s reading (1996) has a similar

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limitation: he thinks that Wittgenstein did not provide a complete solution to the problem of correlation of representing with represented complexes, since the correlation of the constituents was not sufficient to account for it. However, once one takes into account not only the general picture theory, but its application to truth-functional propositions, new light can be shed on the issue. On the other hand, due to their stress on bipolarity, which is a crucial feature of the Tractarian doctrine, I do share much of Carey’s and Pincock’s flavour, but I also pay attention to the contribution that the Tractarian truth-functions theory makes in tackling Russell’s problems. In Section 1, I focus on the evolution of Russell’s theory of judgement and its problems. Section 2 presents and briefly comments on the texts in which Wittgenstein explicitly mentions and criticizes Russell’s theory. Wittgenstein’s moves to solve these problems are displayed in Section 3 and the last section summarises the problems and moves and provides some final textual evidence for my approach.1 1. The evolution of Russell’s theory and its problems Russell’s clearest difficulty in developing his theory was the necessity to account for how the sense of a proposition is independent of its truth. This required accounting for the truth and falsehood of a proposition and for its meaning in different ways. In general, his proposals were developed along two lines:2 Line 1: To consider truth and falsehood as properties of propositions which are conceived as some sort of independent complex entities whose unity should be ontologically guaranteed. This is the view in The Principles of Mathematics (1903, henceforth PoM), and I will refer to it as the PoM-Theory. 1

2

Table 1 at the end of the paper is provided to help the reader follow the presentation of Russell’s problems and Wittgenstein’s moves. For a useful account of the evolution of Russell’s views about judgement, see Candlish (1996). Stevens (2006), Hanks (2007) and Johnston (2007) also offer clear reports of that evolution.

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Line 2: To consider truth and falsehood as properties of judgements, so that the judging mind was in charge of unifying the objects of belief. The unity of true and false judgements was then accounted for similarly, since it was grounded in the act of judging. The existence/ non-existence of complex entities corresponding to beliefs was then a means of accounting for truth/falsehood. This idea is realized in different ways in both versions of Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgement in On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood (1910, henceforth OTF), which is in general terms the same in Principia Mathematica (1910) and The Problems of Philosophy (1912), and in the unpublished TK (1913). I will refer to these two views as the OTFTheory and TK-Theory, respectively. It is crucial that in Line 1, propositions are primitive with respect to psychological relations. Russell offers a theory of objective true and false propositions, and explains judgement as a psychological relation of the mind to propositions. The problems to which this theory gives rise make Russell invert the account in Line 2: psychological acts are primitive. As we shall see, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus can be viewed as a return to Line 1, with a more complete theory of propositions, and a revision of the analysis of psychological relations. PoM-Theory (1903) There are three important features of Russell’s conception at this early stage of development: the ontological nature of propositions and the relation of language to them in terms of indication; the nature of truth and falsehood, and finally the issue of the unity of a proposition. Russell conceived the relation between language and world as one of indication, that is, a direct relation between linguistic items and world entities. Words indicate terms and sentences indicate propositions. There are two kinds of terms: things and concepts, which are indicated by nouns and by verbs and adjectives, respectively. Propositions are complex entities, whose constituents are terms. Thus, for example, the sentence (1) indicates the proposition (2) below (I will represent entities by placing them in square brackets):

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(1) Obama is younger than Bush (2) [Obama is younger than Bush] where (2) is composed of the following constituents: the things [Obama] and [Bush] and the concept [being younger than]. But these constituents can be combined in different ways to give rise to different propositions, like the different propositions that are indicated by (1) above and (3) below: (3) Bush is younger than Obama This is the way of combination of constituents problem (Problem 1), which has two sides: the way in which the constituents combine (Problem 1.1) and their being actually combined (Problem 1.2). Russell thinks that there is only one kind of relation of language and world, indication. There is no difference in the relation between a word and a term and the relation between a sentence and a proposition, except for the fact that the latter is a complex entity. This fact generates the need to account for truth and falsehood in a different way with respect to reference and lack of reference. If the relation between names and terms, and sentences and propositions is the same, then it seems that if a sentence has meaning (if it indicates a particular complex entity in the world), then there is no way to differentiate between the sense of a sentence and its truth, and thus to account for falsehood (Problem 2: falsehood problem). Of course, one can account for truth and falsehood in other ways, and that is what Russell does: there are objective true propositions and objective false propositions. The difference stems from an important extra primitive quality that true propositions have, namely, assertion. Russell distinguishes between psychological assertion and logical assertion. According to Russell, psychologically, propositions can be merely considered or thought of, or they can be actually asserted. True and false propositions can be equally asserted in this psychological sense, but only true propositions are logically asserted:

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María Cerezo True and false propositions alike are in some sense entities, and are in some sense capable of being logical subjects; but when a proposition happens to be true, it has a further quality, over and above that which it shares with false propositions, and it is this further quality which is what I mean by assertion in a logical as opposed to a psychological sense. (Russell, PoM: §52)

Both true and false propositions, as entities, have being, but in the case of the former their being is being true (that is, being asserted). The proposition indicated by (1) is true, its constituents are actually related by the relation [being younger than], and this is what assertion consists in. Assertion, discussed below, will play further roles in Russell’s proposal, giving rise to new tensions. Therefore, there are two different complex entities (propositions) indicated by (1) and (3) above. Both have the same constituents ([Obama], [Bush], [being younger than]), but the former is asserted and the latter unasserted. The relation of each of these propositions to their truth or falsehood is internal. Russellian propositions are monopolar: they are either true or they are false, but it is not so that they can be true and they can be false. Logical assertion is also responsible for the unity of propositions with that quality and it thus solves Problems 1.1 and 1.2, but only in the case of true propositions. Due to (2) having the quality of being asserted, it is the relation [being younger than] that actually relates the constituents. Russell insists on the idea that logical assertion, even if it is a quality of propositions, is not one of its constituents. If assertion were a further constituent in charge of relating the two terms and the relation in (2), there would arise a risk of a possible infinite regress, since a new relation would be necessary to relate such constituent (assertion) to the rest of the constituents. The peculiar character of assertion, which is not a further element, can join together the constituents, without running such a risk. Conversely, the analysis of (2) into its constituents, insofar as a proposition dissolves into its parts and stops being an asserted proposition, makes the relating relation into a non-relating relation, [being younger than]. The monopolarity of propositions raises two further problems. The first one is explicitly recognized by Russell. Since both true and false

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propositions are entities, the difference between a proposition being actually true from what it would be as an entity if it were not true lies in its being asserted when actually true. And then we have Problem 3: assertion-truth problem: […] if assertion in any way changed a proposition, no proposition which can possibly in any context be unasserted could be true, since when asserted it would become a different proposition. (Russell, PoM: §38)

In order to grasp the problem at which Russell is pointing here, we need to pay attention to his further development of the notion of logical assertion. Assertion is the quality belonging to propositions in verbal form, like [Caesar died] as opposed to propositions in verbal-noun form, like [the death of Caesar] or [that Caesar died].3 The latter can appear in contexts like “p implies q”, as for example in (4): (4) [That Caesar died implies that a new emperor was needed] Therefore, the proposition indicated by “Caesar died” when it is not embedded in another and the proposition indicated by “Caesar died” in (4), where it is unasserted, are two different propositions. Similar reflections apply to “Obama is younger than Bush” embedded in the context “John judges that …” in (5) below. (5) John judges that Obama is younger than Bush The fact that logical assertion accounts for the unity of propositions and also for the truth of true ones makes the problem of false propositions stronger (Problem 2). The proposition indicated by (3) is false. It is thus unasserted, and hence its constituents are not unified as they are in (2). The second problem that arises as a consequence of the monopolarity of a proposition is related to negation. In denying a sentence, like “aRb”, 3

This is why Russell is sometimes read as if one of the constituents (the verb) were responsible for the unity of the proposition. The verb as a verb (in verbal form) is precisely logical assertion, but the verb is also present, as constituent (a concept) in verbal-noun form expressions, which are not asserted.

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which indicates a true or false proposition, its truth-value changes, but we do not have any clue to help us figure out how the world is according to the negating sentence “~aRb”. In other words, Russell can account for the way in which negation affects the truth-value of the sentence, but not for the way in which it affects its meaning (the indicated complex entity). In particular, if “aRb” is true, Russell cannot account for the meaning of “~aRb”, because due to the asserted character of “aRb” its constituents happen to be related in such a way that there is no complex entity indicated by “~aRb”(or at least we do not know how to determine it). And, if “aRb” is false, it is not asserted, and therefore its constituents are not related, but there is no way of determining the complex entity indicated by “~aRb”. This is the yes-no direction problem (Problem 4), which is closely related to Problems 1-3. At this stage judgement, as a psychological relation, is a dyadic relation for Russell: a relation between a subject and an unasserted proposition or propositional concept. Russell’s view about judgement at this time might be symbolized as follows: (6) J (S, aRb) where “S” stands for the subject, “J” for the judgement relation and “aRb” for the judged (unasserted) proposition. Once all these elements are taken into account, it is possible to see that, in the case of false propositions, Problem 1 and 2 have not really been solved, that Problem 3 appears in judgement, as in (5) above, and that Problem 4 has been left untouched. The root of the problems is that being asserted has come to be identified with being true, and therefore it is not possible to account for sense with independence from truth. OTF-Theory (1910) The series of problems just described led Russell to try to account for truth and falsehood in a different direction, namely, as properties not of propositions, but of judgements or beliefs, and to make the subject responsible for their unity, if either true or false. Truth then was correspondence with a further complex entity.

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In his 1910 version of the multiple relation theory of judgement, Russell denied the existence of a proposition as an entity independent of the judging act, and stated that the judgement relation itself established the unity of the belief. Russell’s view might be symbolized as follows: (7) J (S, a, R, b) where “S” and “J” stand for the subject and judgement relation, and where “a”, “R” and “b” stand for the objects of judgement, which are entities of the world. Beliefs are entities whose unity is psychological, and therefore the unity of true and false judgements is accounted for in the same way. Truth is then conceived as the fact that there is a complex corresponding to the judgement. In this way, Russell thinks he has solved the problem of false propositions (now false judgements), in the specific forms in which it appears in Problems 1, 2 and 3.4 Notice however that there are no elements in the OTF-Theory to solve Problem 4. In addition, a new problem arises. Given that [Obama], [being younger than] and [Bush] are actual terms, world entities, with which the mind is acquainted, and it is the mind that unites them into a belief or judgement, then relations are assimilated to things, since they are not in charge of actually relating the relata in judgement. [Obama], [Bush] and [being younger than] are all on equal terms in their relation to the unity action of the subject. This generates a new problem: the right-constituents problem (Problem 5). [Obama], [Bush] and [Clinton] are on the same terms in their relation to the unifying action of the mind as [Obama], [Bush] and [is younger than] are.

4

Candlish (1996) thinks that in the OTF-theory Russell did not solve Problem 2. I will not discuss this issue here. It is sufficient for my purposes that the OTF-theory did not solve all the problems, and this is even truer if Candlish is right. Furthermore, the new version of the multiple theory of judgement to be developed in 1913 shows that Russell was not satisfied, and Wittgenstein’s criticisms of both versions confirm that the solution was inadequate. More on this later.

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In 1913, Russell has recourse to logical forms to solve the problems inherited from his previous theories (in particular, Problems 1, 2 and 5): Suppose now that someone tells us that Socrates precedes Plato. How do we know what he means? It is plain that his statement does not give us acquaintance with the complex “Socrates precedes Plato”. What we understand is that Socrates and Plato and “precedes” are united in a complex of the form “xRy”5, where Socrates has the x-place and Plato has the y-place. It is difficult to see how we could possibly understand how Socrates and Plato and “precedes” are to be combined unless we had acquaintance with the form of the complex. (Russell, TK: 99)

We can now formulate Russell’s difficulty more clearly: the sense of the belief is not established by the determination of the meaning of its parts. Russell thinks that logical forms can play the role of combining the constituents into something that can correspond to an actual combination in the world when the belief is true, and logical forms can also relate constituents which are not so related in the world (Problem 2). Logical form is what remains when all constituents have been removed from a complex. In (2), for example, if [Obama], [Bush] and [being younger than] are removed, a logical form remains, which in this case is the form of a “dual complex”, represented as “xRy”. Russell insists that logical forms are not further constituents of the complex to avoid the risk of infinite regress. His view about judgement can now be symbolized as follows: (8) J (S, a, R, b, xRy) The constituents designated by “a”, “R” and “b” are real objects, constituents of actual complexes with which the subject is acquainted; the 5

In this Section I use the italic “R” in “xRy” to express the fact that here “R” is a variable that stands for any particular relation [R]. Russell did not use the italics, only “R” to express this, and he used particular examples of relations, like “similarity”, “precedes” to express particular relations between particular objects like [Socrates] and [Plato] or [a] and [b].

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logical form represented by “xRy” is that common to all dual complexes with which the subject is also acquainted. The recourse to logical forms allows us to solve Problem 2, but only partially, since old related problems reappear and new ones arise. The difficulty to account for the way in which constituents combine (Problem 1.1) reappears because it is necessary to specify the position of “a” and “b” in “xRy” in order to determine what is being judged. Russell offers a technical account of how this could work, whilst being fully aware of the limits of his explanation (Hanks 2007, Carey 2007). Furthermore, Problem 5 remains: judgement has an undesirable freedom which allows it to combine different objects with logical forms, and there is nothing in the theory that prevents the combination of any two things with any relation, unless further requirements are specified. The status of logical forms, on the other hand, remains unexplained and problematic, and Wittgenstein reacts to it, by insisting that if it is not a further constituent, it can be neither named nor expressed. For if named, it would be a constituent; if expressed, it would be a proposition, and the problem of accounting for its logical form would arise again (N 20.11.14). (Problem 6: status of logical forms problem) In addition, Problem 4 remains as it was: the recourse to logical forms does nothing to explain why a proposition can be true and can be false, or in Wittgenstein’s words in the Notes on Logic (1913, henceforth NL), we must not only know that p implies “ “p” is true”, but also that ~p implies “ “p” is false” (Wittgenstein, NL: 94). Russell’s struggle with positive and negative facts in Appendix B.I, “Props” of TK verifies that this was one of his concerns.6 2. Wittgenstein on Russell’s Theory of Judgement There are three series of texts in which Wittgenstein explicitly reacts to Russell’s theory of judgement. The first of these is the letter written by Wittgenstein to Russell in June 1913, after visiting him, which is said to have paralyzed Russell. 6

For further details of the content of TK, see Carey (2007).

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María Cerezo Text 1: I believe it is obvious that, from the prop[osition] ‘A judges that (say) a is in the Rel[ation] R to b’, if correctly analysed, the prop[osition] ‘aRb v ~aRb’ must follow directly without the use of any other premiss. This condition is not fulfilled by your theory. (Wittgenstein, 1913)

An immediate reaction is to notice that since “aRb v ~aRb” is a tautology, from the perspective of the theory of inference, it does follow from any proposition, and therefore it should also follow from ‘A judges that a is in the Rel[ation] R to b’. But this is too obvious a fact for Wittgenstein to have overlooked it. Fortunately, in NL, Wittgenstein offers a clue to help understand what he meant. Text 1.2: I understand the proposition “aRb” when I know that either the fact that aRb or the fact that not aRb corresponds to it; but this is not to be confused with the false opinion that I understood “aRb” when I know that “aRb or not aRb” is the case. (Wittgenstein, NL: 104)

Wittgenstein is pointing out Problem 4 which is precisely the problem that not only remains unsolved but is not properly addressed in the three Russellian theories presented above. Problems 1 and 5 seem to be the target in the explicit criticism of Russell’s theory in the Tractatus: Text 2: The correct explanation of the form of the proposition, ‘A makes the judgement p’, must show that it is impossible for a judgement to be a piece of nonsense. (Russell’s theory does not satisfy this requirement.) (Wittgenstein, TLP 5.5422)

Again NL helps us here, since Wittgenstein claims that Russell’s theory cannot explain what makes it impossible for us “to judge that this table penholders the book” (NL: 103). Wittgenstein claims that some conditions are required on the structure of “p”, so that for example, “Obama Bush”, “is younger than multiplying” or “Obama multiplies Bush” are excluded. A further explicit mention of Russell’s theory of judgement in NL is the following:

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Text 3: There is no thing which is the form of a proposition, and no name which is the name of a form. Accordingly we can also not say that a relation which in certain cases holds between things holds sometimes between forms and things. This goes against Russell’s theory of judgement. (Wittgenstein, NL: 105) (See also N 20.11.14.)

Here Wittgenstein points to Problem 6, and thus challenges Russell’s solution in TK, which required unification in thought to consist in the joining of forms and constituents. Bearing in mind the Tractarian theory of a proposition, helps to understand Wittgenstein’s criticism better. The following text, also from NL, is an example of an attempt to address Problems 2, 3 and 4 and amend Russell’s theory along the lines pointed out in texts 1 and 1.2: Text 4: In “a judges p” p cannot be replaced by a proper name. This appears if we substitute “a judges that p is true and not p is false”. The proposition “a judges p” consists of the proper name a, the proposition p with its two poles, and a being related to both of these poles in a certain way. This is obviously not a relation in the ordinary sense. (Wittgenstein, NL: 95)

Wittgenstein develops this idea in a longer text in NL. He even draws a diagram of the relation of the subject to the two poles of a proposition.7 Text 4.1: When we say “A believes p”, this sounds, it is true, as if here we could substitute a proper name for “p”; but we can see that here a sense, not a meaning, is concerned, if we say “A believes that ‘p’ is true”; and in order to make the direction of p even more explicit, we might say “A believes that ‘p’ is true and that ‘not-p’ is false”. Here the bi-polarity of p is expressed, and it seems that we shall only be able to express the proposition “A believes p” correctly by the ab-notation; say by making “A” have a relation to the poles “a” and “b” of a-p-b. The epistemological questions concerning

7

The similarity of this diagram with the diagrams in the manuscript “Props”, Appendix B.1 of TK has been stressed by Hanks (2007) and Carey (2007), who offer it as evidence that Wittgenstein’s difficulty to TK was related to the bipolarity of the proposition.

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In any case, in NL Wittgenstein often insists that in order to understand a proposition we must know, not only how the world is when it is true, but also how it is when it is false, and he refers to this feature as the sense of the proposition. Therefore, Russell’s difficulties provided the required stimulus to develop the truth-conditional notion of sense proper to the Tractatus. 3. Wittgenstein’s moves under the stimulus of Russell’s problems Russell had explained the relation of judgement as a relation between a subject (a mind, a simple object) and further objects (a proposition in PoM-Theory, constituents of propositions in OTF-Theory, and constituents of propositions and logical forms in TK-Theory). Wittgenstein’s crucial idea to overcome the series of problems to which Russell’s theories had given rise is to understand the relation of judgement as the relation of saying, that is, the relation between a proposition and what a propositions says, and to give an account of propositions and of what they say in terms of depiction. As he pointed out to Russell in his letter of 22nd July 1913, the objection he had raised to Russell’s theory of judgement could “only be removed by a correct theory of propositions”. The (Russellian) relation of indication between language and world is replaced by two more complex relations: that of naming, between names and objects, and the relation of depiction, between propositions and what they say. The Tractarian truth-functions theory offers the required conceptual framework to account for sense in terms of truth-conditions. By means of being a picture and a truth-function, a proposition can account for all the desiderata that Russell’s difficulties involve. Let us now revise Wittgenstein’s moves in more detail. In Text 4, a pre-Tractarian text, Wittgenstein also conceives the relation of judgement as a relation between an object, a, and a further entity, p, and he focuses his attention on a particular characteristic that the latter, p, must have so that the theory of judgement can avoid Problem 4. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein takes a further step, making a crucial move

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in overcoming Russell’s difficulties. Instead of relating an object (the subject or the mind) with further objects, depiction is a relation between facts (propositional signs) and depicted facts (what is declared to be the case), which are the sense of propositions.8 Wittgenstein’s move is then summarized as follows: It is clear, however, that ‘A believes that p’, ‘A has the thought that p’, and ‘A says p’ are of the form ‘ “p” says p’: and this does not involve a correlation of a fact with an object, but rather the correlation of facts by means of the correlation of their objects. (Wittgenstein, TLP 5.542)

Text 2 is precisely one of the reasons why the judgement relation must be accounted for as depiction: if the judgement relation is explained as depiction, it shows why it is impossible for us “to judge that this table penholders the book” or any other piece of nonsense.9 But the move made by Wittgenstein, namely, to conceive of judgement as a relation between facts, is a complex one, a move that is composed of further novelties and adjustments. The first novelty is a recourse to the pair possibility/factualness to account for the determination of sense with independence of truth. Instead of having the same constituents in judgement and in judged fact with two different ways of combining them in thought and reality (like in OTF-Theory and TK-Theory), leaving sense undetermined, Wittgenstein distinguishes between constituents of the depicting and the depicted fact and requires them to share their logical form, that is, their possibility of combination into states of 8

9

A further contrast between Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s theories concerns the belief statement. In Russell’s accounts, the judgement relation (“J” in (6), (7) and (8) above) is an external relation whose holding can be meaningfully reported in a statement of the form “A believes that p”. However, the depiction relation is an internal relation: in the Tractatus the relation between a depicting and depicted fact is not a further fact of the world, and thus cannot be depicted. Belief statements are therefore pseudo-propositions, since they attempt to say what cannot be said (depicted). For further details on this issue and a revision of the literature on this matter, see d’Ors and Cerezo (1995). As we shall see below, this is solved by the Tractarian idea of isomorphism, i.e. the idea that representation takes place by means of reproduction of structure. See also Hochberg (1996).

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affairs (TLP 2.014-2.0141). Depicting facts and depicted facts are correlated because they are in a particular internal relation: even if they are composed of different objects, they have the same form. The Tractarian isomorphism thesis establishes that there are two networks of objects that share their form, their possible combinations to other objects (TLP 2.16-2.161). This relation of identity of form between language and world grounds the connection between the constituents of language and those of the world. A combination of names (a proposition) can thus present a possible combination of objects, since the connection of the propositional components is a possible connection for the represented things (N 5.11.14; see also N 30.9.14; 29.10.14). Language constituents, names, contain all its possibilities (all possible combinations of names into propositions) and, given isomorphism, any combination represents a possible way in which the corresponding objects could be combined in the world, even if they are not so combined. This allows us to account for the sense of false propositions, and to solve Problem 2; but it also solves Problem 5, because now logical form is internal to language, and any permissible expression represents a possible state of affairs (TLP 5.473-5.4733). Isomorphism is thus the conceptual tool in solving the problems which Wittgenstein pointed out in Text 2. Since as a consequence of isomorphism any possible combination of names represents a possible combination of objects, it is impossible for us “to judge that this table penholders the book” or any other piece of nonsense. “A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is a thought. What is thinkable is possible too” (TLP 3.02). Furthermore, being internal to language, logical form is neither named nor represented in a proposition; it is rather shown (mirrored, displayed) in language (TLP 4.12-4.121). As a consequence, Problem 6 is avoided, and the Tractarian theory can escape the difficulty indicated in Text 3. However, the elements of the picture theory so far introduced cannot solve Problem 1, and in particular Problem 1.2. Given isomorphism, any proposition or possible combination of names represents how things can be combined in the world, and not how they are combined. In order to account for judgement, it is necessary to account for its aim at truth, for its assertive character. After having descended into simples and possibilities to ground logical form, Wittgenstein needs to ascend back to fac-

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tualness. Propositions are the possibilities of language, but they are actualized when a propositional sign is used and projected onto the world. Propositions do not contain their sense, but only the possibility of expressing it by means of a propositional sign, which is not a possibility, but a fact (TLP 3.1-3.144). Since propositional signs are facts, their constituents (the words) stand in determinate relations to one another (TLP 3.14). Propositional signs are not sets of words, but they are articulate (TLP 3.141-3.142). And it is the fact that their constituents are related in a determinate manner that says that the corresponding objects are also thus related (TLP 3.1432). Problems 1.1 and 1.2 are solved because the propositional signs “aRb” and “bRa” are two different facts (Problem 1.1) and because they are facts (Problem 1.2): in “aRb” and “bRa” the constituents a, R and b stand in (Problem 1.2) determinate (Problem 1.1) relations to one another.10 Notice also that Problem 3 does not arise in the Tractatus since assertion is not a property exclusive to true propositions. Any propositional sign that declares that something is the case is asserted and it can be true and false. Russellian monopolar propositions are replaced in Wittgenstein’s theory by bipolar ones. There are two components of sense, which I refer to as sense-1 and sense-2. By isomorphism a proposition (a picture) represents a possible state of affairs by reproducing its structure; it shows that other objects can be combined in the same way as the elements of the picture are combined (sense-1). The second component of sense accounts for the assertive character of depiction. Pictures depict facts: they do not only represent possibilities; they also say (sense-2) that the world is as it is represented (sense-1) in the picture. This duality is captured in TLP 4.031-4.0311 by means of the difference between representing (darstellen) and presenting (vorstellen) a state of affairs, and it is explicitly declared in T 4.022: A proposition shows its sense. A proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand. (Wittgenstein, TLP 4.022) 10

This is the part of Wittgenstein’s move on which Hanks (2007) focuses in his analysis.

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Pictures present how things can be combined (sense-1), but propositions can say how the world is and how the world is not (sense-2). In the Notebooks (henceforth N), Wittgenstein is aware that a picture, on its own, is not able to account for the yes-no direction proper to propositions: Can one negate a picture? No. And in this lies the difference between picture and proposition. The picture can serve as a proposition. But in that case something gets added to it which brings it about that now it says something. In short: I can only deny that the picture is right, but the picture I cannot deny. (Wittgenstein, N 26.11.14)

Wittgenstein conceives affirmation and negation as the two ways of symbolizing (Bezeichnungsweise) that must be attached to the picture for it to determine sense-2. This is a first step in order to solve Problem 4: the state of affairs that is represented by “aRb” and “~aRb” is the same, even if what they say (sense-2) is different. If a picture presents what-is-not-the-case in the aforementioned way [negative way], this only happens through its presenting that which is not the case. For the picture says, as it were: “This is how it is not”, and to the question “How is it not?” just the positive proposition is the answer. (Wittgenstein, N 3.11.14; see also TLP 4.023)

But how is sense-2 determined? In the Tractatus Wittgenstein describes the determination of sense-2 as a demarcation of a place in logical space (TLP 3.4-3.42), and the truth-functions theory offers him the tool to account for it. The idea that a proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions allows us to combinatorially define all the possible truthfunctions of a given set of bases, as in the standard truth-table method (TLP 4.2-4.45). In order to account for determination of sense in a way that takes into account the possible yes/no direction of a proposition, Wittgenstein combines the picture theory and the truth-functions theory. By this combination, Wittgenstein identifies the linguistic logical space (the set of possible combinations of names into propositions) and the logical space (the left part of the truth-table that includes all elementary propositions). Elementary propositions represent the possible states of affairs into which objects can be combined as a result of their logical form (TLP

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4.21, 4.3). The distribution of truth-values on the left part of the truthtable represents the different ways the world could be depending on the existence or non-existence of states of affairs. Each row of the left part of the truth-table represents a possible world. The set of columns on the right, the set of all truth-functions, represent all that can be said about the world. The sense of a proposition is its agreement and disagreement with possibilities of existence and non-existence of states of affairs (TLP 4.2). The sense of a proposition p is then determined by means of a division of logical space into two sets of worlds, those in which p is true and those in which it is false. The proposition p says that the world is one of the worlds in which p is true; and ~p says that the world is one of the worlds in which p is false (TLP 3.4, 4.022-4.023, 4.4). 4. Conclusion Wittgenstein’s dialogue with Russell during the years 1911-1914 was crucial for the development of the Tractarian doctrines and offers an extraordinary framework in which to portray Wittgenstein’s moves as attempts to overcome the difficulties that the evolving Russellian theories encountered. (See Table 1 below for a summary of the moves.) If my interpretation is correct, the problem indicated by Text 1 and Text 1.2 stimulated Wittgenstein to develop the bipolar character of propositions and to explain determination of sense as division of logical space. Is there any textual evidence that Wittgenstein was stimulated by Russell’s difficulties in the direction I have exposed above? His NL offers immediate textual evidence that this was actually the case.11 For 11

The text in NL is very important as evidence of the fact that Wittgenstein was motivated by Russell’s problems. Wittgenstein’s more important conversations with Russell on his 1913 account of judgement took place in May 1913 and the letter where he briefly objects to Russell’s theory was sent in June 1913 (Text 1). Wittgenstein spent the summer in Hochreith and Bergen (September) where he worked on Logic and reported to Russell that his work was going exceptionally well. Finally, he went to Cambridge at the beginning of October and he dictated the manuscript of NL to Russell. It is clear that it contains the work he had done during that summer, work that was developed immediately after intense discus-

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immediately after the paragraph that includes Text 1.2, Wittgenstein explains how the form of a proposition symbolizes: But the form of a proposition symbolises in the following way: Let us consider symbols of the form “xRy”; to these correspond primarily pairs of objects, of which one has the name “x”, the other the name “y”. The x’s and y’s stand in various relations to each other, among others the relation R holds between some, but not between others. I now determine the sense of “xRy” by laying down: when the facts behave in regard to “xRy” so that the meaning of “x” stands in the relation R to the meaning of “y”, then I say that the [the facts] are “of like sense” with the proposition “xRy”; otherwise, “of opposite sense”; I correlate the facts to the symbol “xRy” by thus dividing them into those of like sense and those of opposite sense. To this correlation corresponds the correlation of name and meaning. Both are psychological. Thus I understand the form “xRy” when I know that it discriminates the behaviour of x and y according as these stand in the relation R or not. In this way I extract form all possible relations the relation, as, by a name, I extract its meaning from among all possible things. (Wittgenstein, NL: 104)

It is clear that this text does not give a complete account of the way in which the Tractarian doctrines are combined to account for sense with independence of truth. As we have seen, the picture theory and the truthfunctions theory are necessary for the project, since they provide some important conceptual tools such as isomorphism, the depiction relation and the idea of the sense of a proposition as its agreement and disagreement with possibilities of existence and non-existence of states of affairs. But three ideas are important in this text. First, the idea that the way of symbolizing a proposition can be accounted for differently than the way of symbolizing a name. Secondly, Wittgenstein shows the direction to take in resolving what Russell was attempting but unable to do, namely, to explain how the determination of the meaning of constituents can by itself determine the sense of a proposition.12 And, finally, by rela-

12

sions with Russell on his theory of judgement. See McGuinness (2005), Chapters 5 and 6, for further details. See also McGuinness (1974).

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ting bipolarity with sense (sense-2), he takes the first step, and a crucial one, in the direction that he develops in the Tractatus.13

PROBLEMS 1. Way of combination of constituents 1.1. the way in which constituents combine 1.2. there being actually combined 2. Falsehood 3. Assertion-truth

4. Yes-no direction

5. Right-constituents 6. Status of logical forms

MOVES / SOLUTIONS / NOVELTIES

* Structure of proposition * Factual character of propositional sign * Recourse to form as (combinatorial) possibility * Factual character of propositional sign * Bipolarity * Sense-2 * Bipolarity * Sense-2 * Truth-functions theory * Isomorphism * Sense-1 * Isomorphism * Showing/saying distinction

Table 1. Summary of Russellian problems and Tractarian moves/novelties

References Angelelli, Ignacio and María Cerezo (eds.), 2006. Studies on the History of Logic. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Candlish, Stewart 1996. The Unity of the Proposition and Russell’s Theories of Judgment. In: Monk and Palmer (eds.), 103-135. Carey, Rosalind 2007. Russell and Wittgenstein on the Nature of Judgement. London Continuum. Cerezo, María 2005. The Possibility of Language. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 13

I am aware that some of the Tractarian ideas presented here are simply sketched. My only intention is to show how they arise as a consequence of Wittgenstein’s struggle with Russell’s problems. For a more detailed interpretation of the Tractatus that is behind some of the ideas of Section 3, see Cerezo (2005).

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Connelly, James 2011-2012. On ‘Props’, Wittgenstein’s June 1931 Letter and Russell’s ‘Paralysis’. Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 31, 141-166. Griffin, Nicholas 1985. Russell’s Multiple-Relation Theory of Judgment. Philosophical Studies 47, 213-247. Griffin, Nicholas 1985-1986. Wittgenstein’s Criticism of Russell’s Theory of Judgment. Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 5, 132-145. Griffin, Nicholas (ed.) 1992. The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press. Hanks, Peter W. 2007. How Wittgenstein defeated Russell’s Multiple Relation Theory of Judgment. Synthese 154, 121-146. Hochberg, Herbert 1996. The Role of Subsistent Propositions and Logical Forms in Russell’s 1913 Philosophical Logic and in the Russell-Wittgenstein Dispute. In: I. Angelelli and M. Cerezo (eds.), 317-341. Johnston, Colin 2007. The Unity of a Tractarian Fact. Synthese 156, 231-251. Landini, Gregory 2007. Wittgenstein’s Apprenticeship with Russell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGuinness, Brian 1974. The Grundgedanke of the Tractatus. In: G. Vesey (ed.), 49-61. McGuinness, Brian 2005. Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein’s Life, 1889-1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGuinness, Brian (ed.) 2008. Wittgenstein in Cambridge. Letters and Documents 1911-1951. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Monk, Ray and Anthony Palmer (eds.), 1996. Bertrand Russell and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. d’Ors, Angel and María Cerezo 1995. Tractatus 5.54-5.5423: Sobre los llamados ‘enunciados de creencia’ en el Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus de Ludwig Wittgenstein [Tractatus 5.54-5.5423: On the so-called ‘belief statements’ in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein]. Anuario Filosófico 28, 269-310. Pincock, Chris 2008. Russell’s Last (and Best) Multiple-Relation Theory of Judgment. Mind 117, 107-139. Russell, Bertrand 1910. On the Nature of Truth and Falsehood. In: Philosophical Essays. London: Longman, 147-159. Russell, Bertrand 1937. The Principles of Mathematics, 2nd ed. London: Allen & Unwin (1st ed.: 1903). Russell, Bertrand 1984. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 7, Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript. London: Allen & Unwin. Stevens, Graham 2004. From Russell’s Paradox to the Theory of Judgment: Wittgenstein and Russell on the Unity of the Proposition. Theoria 70, 28-60. Stevens, Graham 2006. Russell’s Repsychologising of the Proposition. Synthese 151, 99-124.

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Vesey, Godfrey (ed.) 1974. Understanding Wittgenstein. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North and Russell, Bertrand 1927. Principia Mathematica, 2nd ed. (1st ed.: 1910). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1913. Letter to B. Russell, June 1913. In: B. McGuiness (ed.), p. 40. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1979a. Notes on Logic. In: L. Wittgenstein 1979b, 93-107. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1979b. Notebooks 1914-1916, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

Paweł Grabarczyk University of Łód [email protected]

How to Talk (Precisely) about Visual Perception? The Case of the Duck / Rabbit Abstract: In Remarks on the philosophy of psychology Wittgenstein uses ambiguous illusions to investigate the problematic relation of perception and interpretation. I use this problem as a starting point for developing a conceptual framework capable of expressing problems associated with visual perception in a precise manner. I do this by discerning between subjective and objective meaning of the term “to see” and by specifying the beliefs which are to be ascribed to the observer when we assert that she sees a given object. The framework (detailed in section 2) is then used to analyze the case of the duck/rabbit illusion. It shows that ambiguous illusions present us with a specific skeptical challenge but that the challenge can be overcome by empirical sciences. Along the way I explicate some of the common notions associated with perception (“to look at”, “to have an impression of…”, “to react as if one had an impression of…”, “to convince oneself that what one sees is…”). Keywords: Wittgenstein, duck/rabbit, ambiguous illusions, optical illusions, perception, impressions, belief ascription

1. Trouble with perception It seems to be a paradox of sorts (or perhaps it’s just irony) that talking about perception leads to so much confusion and so many misunderstandings. After all, shouldn’t that which is given in perception be evident? Isn’t perception our model case of what “being evident” is? Nowhere is this tension better expressed than in the works of later Wittgenstein. In Remarks on the philosophy of psychology (1980) he presents the reader with a collection of visual puzzles the most famous being the

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duck/rabbit picture.1 All of these illusions are there to examine the relation between perception and interpretation. What do we see directly and what is interpreted or inferred from what we see? Is there such a thing as pure, direct perception? Questions like this are, of course, closely related to the question of relation between perception and language because interpretation is first and foremost a linguistic activity. As such it is something Wittgenstein had been interested in long before he started to analyze ambiguous pictures. It is evident in one of his most famous quotes from Tractatus – “What can be shown cannot be said” (1990: 79). One way of interpreting the quote is to take it as stipulating that visual perception contains a non-linguistic surplus. What illusions (ambiguous illusions amongst them) show is that even if there are things you can only show, things which escape successful description, it doesn’t mean that these aspects of perception are pure. It may very well be the case that our conceptual capacities always play an important role in perception. What ambiguous pictures have in common is that they seem to show us the backstage of our perception because we can clearly see that there is some kind of decision-like process that underlies the seeing process. Wittgenstein calls this process a “change of aspect” (1980: 8) but he is clearly having difficulties with finding its exact nature. How is this process different from normal illusions and normal, veridical perception? Does it raise any new and important philosophical questions? What exactly happens when we switch from the duck to the rabbit? My aim in this article is not historical. I do not want to provide an accurate interpretation of Wittgenstein but rather to pursue the above problem and formulate it in a precise manner. I also want to stress that although the problem itself lies between philosophy of perception and philosophy of language, my paper leans heavily towards the latter. Let me relieve the tension – I will not solve the duck/rabbit problem. I will not solve it because, if I am right, it cannot be answered by philosophy of language. But in order for the question to be answered by anyone it has to be asked in a precise manner and this is something, I believe, I can do. My aim is thus strictly conceptual – I want to create a framework

1

Originally introduced in Jastrow (1900).

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which will enable us to talk precisely about perception and restate the duck/rabbit problem in a solvable manner. Let me start by identifying two important reasons why talking about perception often leads us astray. The first can be most easily introduced by a simple dialog: A: Yesterday I saw a red cup in the kitchen. B: You couldn’t have seen a red cup. I don’t have one. A: I think I know better what I saw! It’s futile to ask who’s right here. A and B clearly use the word “to see” with different meaning. Let’s call A’s meaning “the subjective meaning” and B’s meaning “the objective meaning”. As we will see it is important not to conflate these two meanings because they express two aspects of perception which are irreducible to each other.2 The second problem can be introduced via the following reasoning: 1. A dog sees a postman. 2. The postman is the best chess player in the city 3. Thus, the dog sees the best chess player in the city. The argument is formally valid, but I doubt you accepted (3) without hesitation. Why is that? It seems that (3) presupposes or at least suggests that the dog knows that the postman is the best chess player in the city which is rather absurd. Dogs just can’t have such sophisticated beliefs. But the moment you realize this you also realize that accepting (1) is just as risky as accepting (3) because having beliefs about postmen is probably no less cognitively advanced as having beliefs about chess players. Does it mean that the dog didn’t see the postman after all? It may seem that the natural way out of this puzzle is to say that the dog didn’t see the postman as a postman. But what does it actually mean? Is it equivalent to having beliefs about postmen or maybe having a concept of a postman? In fact – do we ever see postmen? Maybe the only thing you can really see is a collection of color patches and shapes. It is easy to get lost 2

Valberg (1992) calls this split “the puzzle of experience”.

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in these questions, so the second thing we have to be extremely careful about is letting beliefs and concepts enter the picture unnoticed. As I said, I believe that a solution of these problems will most likely come to us from cognitive psychology, but it won’t happen if we don’t formulate the questions in understandable and unequivocal manner. To do that we have to create a conceptual framework powerful enough to express the different possibilities that are taken into account in philosophy of perception. As is evident from above considerations the framework has to enable us to clearly distinguish between subjective and objective meanings of “seeing” and clearly state which beliefs are to be attributed to the observer. I construe such a framework in section 2. Section 3 is devoted to some of its possible applications – the duck/rabbit case amongst them. 2. A conceptual framework Let’s start with the difference between subjective and objective meaning. We shall focus on a simple model situation, where an observer O sees a particular object A at a particular time:3 (S) O sees A at t1 What do we mean when we interpret the word “sees” in the objective sense? I propose two conditions which have to be met if it is to be the case: W1: There exists an object x O looks at (at t1) W2: x = A There are a few things we have to clarify here. First of all, we have to explain the term “looks at”. After all, substituting one common term for another doesn’t help much. The term should be understood as follows:

3

“A” is to be understood as a constant.

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An observer O looks at an object x iff the object x reflects light which affects the receptors of O in a proper way. I guess that the expression “in a proper way” may raise some eyebrows, so let me clarify – it is intentionally unexplained, because the question of what really is “proper” is not one a philosopher can answer. It is an empirical question which, as far as I know, has already been quite exhaustively addressed. Let me elaborate on why these conditions look this way. First of all, we couldn’t settle for a rather intuitive condition of vicinity (O sees A in an objective sense if A is in a vicinity of O). It is quite obvious that the object which is to be seen has to interact with the observer and not just “be there”.4 But the interaction itself also has to be rather specific. To start with, it has to be related to a given sense – if we want to differentiate between seeing and hearing, we probably won’t be able to avoid talking about the eyes, and not the ears. So maybe we could settle with something like: O sees A in the objective sense if A interacts with eyes of O? But it is easy to notice that even this isn’t enough. I could easily establish that a given object is cold by touching it with my eyes closed, but it is far from the interaction we were thinking of.5 By talking of the proper way the receptors register the light not only do we give credit where it’s due (that is to empirical science) but we also leave the possibility of talking about observers with photo receptors quite different than eyes (for example robots or people using technologies like Brainport – see Bach-y-Rita et al. 2003). Note that even with these clarifications a conjunction of W1 and W2 does not give a definition of “seeing objectively”. It is meant only to be a necessary condition but it is enough to differentiate it from “seeing in a subjective sense” which we are now going to discuss. Let’s get back to our situation S. What is meant by saying that O sees A at t1 in a subjective sense? I propose to explicate it with the following conditions:

4 5

See Grice (1961: 141) for some rather convincing examples A similar argument can be found in Pitcher (1971).

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58 W3: W4: W5: W6:

O is in an unconscious visual state S (at t1) S is a typical unconscious state for O and A O is in a conscious visual state V (at t1) V is a typical conscious state for O and S

First of all, note that I avoided the most natural way of expressing the subjective meaning of “seeing” which is “having an impression of A”. The reason I don’t want to talk about impressions is that they create intensional context and that their identity conditions are rather mysterious. Consider “an impression of a postman”. Is it the same impression as “the impression of a man dressed as a postman”? Maybe, technically speaking, there is no such thing as an “impression of a postman” and we should talk only of simple impressions like color or shape impressions? But then, consider “an impression of white” and “an impression of the color of my shirt”. Granted that my shirt is white, do you have an impression of the color of my shirt when you look at the margin of this page? Could you have it without ever seeing my shirt? I don’t have a good solution to these puzzles, and that is why I prefer to use W3-W6 instead of the notion of “impression”. Let me elaborate on these conditions so we can learn that they may be treated as an extensional explication of the problematic notion of “impression”. First of all, we have to discern between unconscious and conscious stages of perception. After all, it is pretty well established that the three dimensional picture we experience starts as a two-dimensional pattern. The contours of objects I discern in a given scene have to be detected by the edge detection cells, there is a blind spot in my vision which is filled by my brain and so on. You may be curious about the specifics of this stage – is it something that happens in the retina or does it perhaps span to some parts of the visual cortex? We don’t have to go into these details. The only point is not to conflate conscious with unconscious stages. Note that neither W3 nor W5 says anything specific about the respective states. The only thing said is that the observer is in some internal visual states. We learn more about these states in W4 and W5. The point of these conditions is that they inform us that O has a disposition to be in

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a given state. The key expression “being a typical (un)conscious state for…” can be defined as follows: A visual state X is a typical unconscious state for an observer Y and an object Z iff there exists a moment tn when Y looked at Z and every time Y looks at Z she is in an unconscious visual state X.6 A visual state X is a typical conscious state for an observer Y and an unconscious visual state Z iff there exists a moment tn when Y was in Z and every time Y is in Z she is in a conscious visual state X. Note that what W3-W6 boil down to is much more intuitive than it may seem at first glance. What these conditions try to express is that when we describe someone as seeing an object in a subjective sense, what we really mean is that she is in some (unknown to us) internal state which she normally is in when she sees this object in an objective sense. We do not know the state, because it does not manifest itself to us in any way in normal acts of communication.7 The states are thus relativized to the observer – the state which is typical for observer O when she looks at A may be quite different from the state you are in when you look at A. It is, to use the famous Wittgesteinian expression, a beetle in a box (1958: 100). Similarly to conditions W1 and W2, conditions W3-W6 should be understood as necessary conditions. This way we can precisely differentiate between objective and subjective meaning of “seeing”. Subjective seeing means that conditions

6

7

The reason this definition looks like that is that we have to block a well known counterintuitive consequence of defining a dispositional notion via a material implication. If we decided to use just the second conjunct, then considering that there are things the observer has never seen and will never see – a dragon for example – every state would have been “typical” for a dragon. The same mutatis mutandis can be said about the second definition. Also, the term “looks at” is to be understood in the technical sense defined earlier. They can be registered in various nonstandard ways – for example we can use PET scans to try to correlate them with different stimuli.

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W5-W6 (but not necessarily W1-W4) hold. Objective seeing means that conditions W1-W4 (but not necessarily W5-W6) hold.8 Once we have conditions W1-W6, what is left is to add beliefs to the mix. In order to do that we have to differentiate between two senses of “having a belief” – verbal and non-verbal (indicated by an asterisk). O has a belief that p iff O has the disposition to assert a sentence “p”. O has a belief* that p iff O’s behavior can be best explained by attribution of a belief, that p. The sense of having a belief* is very similar to Dennett’s “intentional stance” (1989: 17). Although we can ascribe having a certain belief to anything, only sometimes does this ascription really help us with our predictions. This definition explicates the common expression: – “it behaves as if it believed that p”. The good news is that introducing extra “belief conditions” will now be extremely easy, because we will be using a simple sentence form “O believes that Wn” or “O believes* that Wn”.9 The bad news is that this triples the number of conditions. Fortunately, there is no point in talking of certain combinations. For example, there is nothing like believing* that W3 – the whole nature of unconscious states boils down to the fact that we do not register them (without advanced equipment) and hence we never act as if we believed that we were in those unconscious states. Similarly, although we could speak about “believing that W3”, it is, in fact, completely irrelevant to perception.10 The belief conditions we will be using in the next section are:11

8

9

10 11

It may seem that the objective sense also demands W5-W6, but the blind seeing phenomenon (mentioned in section 3) and the case described in Gazzaniga et al. (1962) show that they are not necessary. To shorten the number of conditions I sometimes use a conjunction: O believes that Wm & Wn. It is only possible since we can have third person knowledge of our own states. I do not have the space here to elaborate on the reasons some of the possibilities are missing from the list.

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W7: W8: W9: W10: W11:

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O believes that W1 & W2 O believes* that W1 & W2 O believes that W5 O believes that W6 O believes* that W5 & W6

After everything we said up to this point, it should be easy to understand the conditions W7-W11. W7 means that the observer has the disposition to affirm that she looks at A. W8 means that she behaves as if she looked at A. W9 means that O has a disposition to affirm that she is in some specific visual state, W10 means that she believes that she recognized the state as being typical (in a defined sense). W11 may not be obvious at first but it should be easier to grasp once we realize that it is supposed to capture the common expression “reacts as if she had an impression…” as opposed to “reacts as if she saw…”. It is well suited to express (among other cases) our purely aesthetic or emotional judgments. For example, when I look at a cinema screen and see a fast approaching train, I might react to it because I like steam trains and thus I do react as if I had an impression of a train but it does not mean that I reacted as if I had seen a fast approaching train. 3. Framework applications Let’s list all conditions in one place, because we shall be addressing them quite often. W1:. W2: W3: W4: W5: W6: W7: W8: W9:

There exists an object x O looks at (at t1) x=A O is in an unconscious visual state S (at t1) S is typical for O and A. O is in a visual state V (at t1) V is typical for O and S. O believes that W1 & W2 O believes* that W1 & W2 O believes that W5

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62 W10: W11:

O believes that W6 O believes* that W5 & W6

Various combinations of conditions W1-W11 constitute the framework we were looking for. To understand how it works consider two cases: Case 1: W1-W11 obtain. The observer looks at A, has proper visual states (conscious and unconscious), reacts accordingly (as if she saw A and as if she had the impression of A) and believes that she sees A and has a visual state she typically has when she looks at A. We can classify this case as a model veridical perception. Case 2: Only W1-W4 and W8 obtain. The observer looks at A and reacts as if she saw this object, but there is no conscious experience of seeing nor any belief about seeing the object. This case corresponds to the phenomenon of blindsight. Now, if you treat both cases as boundaries, what you get is a set of possible in-between cases. Using these combinations you can express various philosophical positions or describe new interesting cases – real and imaginary. For example, if you take Case 1 and subtract W1 and W2, you end up with hallucination (let’s call it Case 3).12 If you take Case 2 and add condition W7, you obtain Block’s super-blindsight (let’s call it Case 4):13 the observer does not have the conscious experience but not only does she react as if she saw the object, she also learns to give proper verbal reports of the object. It is a good place to remind us that the framework I present here is purely conceptual. It is a set of linguistic tools to speak about perception, not a theory of perception. The latter should be provided by philosophy of mind or psychology. Because of that we should not worry if the idea Block suggested is empirically possible or not. The only thing we are interested in is that it is coherent and can be expressed via the combination of W1-W11. Generally speaking, 12

13

Hallucination would have been described differently if we wanted to embrace disjunctivism. I use this framework to express different positions in philosophy of mind in Grabarczyk (forthcoming). Discussed in Block (1995).

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there are two ways to approach the framework. You can analyze different philosophical positions and try to express them within it or simply combine the conditions and look for interesting cases. I discuss it in more detail in Grabarczyk (forthcoming). Before we can see how this framework can help us with Wittgenstein’s illusions, we have to see how it works for some of the more typical cases of illusion. Let’s use the following convention: we can transform any condition Wn into an alternative condition Wn’, Wn’’ and so on. We do that by replacing every instance of A with A’ (or A’’) where A’ (A’’) is a name of a different object than A (or A and A’). Subsequently we replace every instance of S and V with S’ and V’ (or S’’ and V’’), where S’ and V’ are names of states different than S and V (or S, S’ and V, V’ accordingly). Having established that, let us try to analyze the phenomenon of optical illusion. As we said earlier, philosophers often describe illusions as if they were erroneous interpretations or inferences.14 If we wanted to take their words for granted we would have to interpret the phenomenon of illusion in a following way: Case 5: W1-W6 obtain but instead of W7-W11, W7’-W11’ obtain. What is meant by this is that the observer O looks at A and has all the proper visual states (unconscious and conscious) but, for some reason has a wrong set of beliefs (both verbal and non-verbal). At first it may seem to fit the descriptions cited above, because it is natural to connect the notions of inference or interpretation with beliefs. Even if we accept that the act of interpretation or even an act of inference can start with something different than a proposition, it seems obvious that it leads to a proposition that is held by the interpreter. But upon further inspection Case 5 seems to be more fitting for a description of delusion than illusion. Fortunately we have at least two different possibilities of describing illusion using conditions W1-W11.

14

A notable example of this is Russell (1948: 167).

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Case 6: W1, W2’, W3, W4, W4’, W5, W6, W6’, W7, W8, W9, W10, W11 obtain. Case 7: W1, W2’, W3’, W4, W4’, W5, W6, W6’, W7, W8, W9, W10, W11 obtain. In Case 6, the observer looks at something different than the object A, but for some reason this different object produces in O the unconscious state S (W3) which is the state O is disposed to be in when she sees A (W4). Because of this O is in a wrong conscious state V (W5). It is wrong for her, because she clearly has appropriate dispositions (W4, W4’, W6,W6’) – O was perfectly capable of having a veridical perception if the error hadn’t happened. We have to assume that she has all of these dispositions because this enables us to differentiate between her having an illusion and her not being able to discern between A and A’. Let’s call this type of illusion Lower level illusion. Let’s now turn to Case 7. The only important difference here is that the object A’ O looks at produces the right unconscious state S’, but for some reason it is transformed to a wrong conscious state V. Let’s call this type of illusion Higher level illusion. It is higher level illusions which invite terms like “inference” or “interpretation” into the visual discourse. And, as Wittgenstein (1980: 3) points out, it is much more problematic than we may initially expect. There is just no way for us to use these terms in their normal meaning. Seeing is immediate and quick, while interpretation or inference is a process which takes much more time. Postulating unconscious inferences or interpretations also appears to be rather counterintuitive, but it seems inevitable if we stick to these terms in this context. Fortunately, as conditions W1-W11 show, we can avoid talking about inferences and interpretations altogether and still differentiate between veridical perception and different types of illusion. You might object that it is a cheap win, because we simply dodged the problem – conditions W1-W11 do not tell us anything about the nature of the transition between unconscious and conscious states (maybe it is an act of interpretation after all). But the point is that it is an empirical question and as such shouldn’t be pre-conceived by the definition of illusion. The framework I propose gives us an opportunity to be neutral in this respect.

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Unfortunately, as Wittgenstein anticipated, the duck/rabbit (and other similar examples) introduce their own problems and lead to a unique form of skepticism. With conditions W1-W11 we are in position to show exactly why it is so. One last time, we shall start with a set of two more familiar cases. Case 8: W1, W2’, W3, W4, W5, W6, W6’, W7’, W8’, W9, W10, W11 obtain. Case 9: W1, W2’, W3’, W4’, W5, W6, W6’, W7’, W8’, W9, W10, W11 obtain. What Cases 8 and 9 represent are two types of conscious illusion (lower and higher level). In Case 8 the observer looks at the object A’ (W1 and W2’) and it produces in her the subconscious state S (W3) which she is normally disposed to be in when she looks at A (W4). Because of this she is in a state V (W5) which she should be in if the object is A. But, contrary to this, she believes that what she looks at is actually A’ (W7’). She acts as if she looked at A’ (W8’) although she believes that she is in a visual state V (W9) and that it is something she normally is in when she looks at A (W10) and cannot help but have associations and aesthetical judgments about A (W11). Case 9 is analogous, the only difference being that the error enters at a later stage (at the stage of W5). Let me show it on a concrete example. Consider a rather typical case of looking at a stick in the water. You see it as if it was bent (W3-W6) and know that you see it as if it was bent (W9,W10). If you have any associations, let’s say that you associate it with a letter of an alphabet, you will associate the stick with the letter “V” rather than “I” (W11). Furthermore, you can differentiate between straight and bent sticks (W6, W6’). But you realize that the stick is straight (W7’) and you act as if it was straight (W8’) – for example, if you were to touch its submerged end, you would probably know where to put the finger. The most striking thing conscious illusions teach us is that not only do we sometimes see things differently from what we believe them to be, but also that we couldn’t see them veridically even if we tried. Exposing the illusion does not break the spell. Consider the Ponzo illusion. Even if

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you use a ruler and see for yourself that the lines have the same length you cannot stop seeing one of them as if it was shorter. It leads to a conclusion that perception is somehow immune to belief. Let’s call it a rule of belief independence. Note that this rule is a very important tool against skepticism. Beliefs are somewhat arbitrary – they probably depend on the language we use, the culture we live in, and some of our idiosyncrasies. If perception was dependent on them, we wouldn’t have been able to position it as epistemically basic or pure as we often wanted to do. This intuition is quite easily recognizable in history of philosophy, from Locke’s simple/complex ideas division to the ideal of observational sentences. It has been attacked and pronounced dead several times, but it still returns in different forms, being very attractive for the non-skeptic. And this is the main reason why the duck/rabbit example is so special. Contrary to other conscious illusions, it seems to debunk the rule of belief independence. The distinctive aspect of the duck/rabbit picture is our ability to voluntarily switch between two ways we can see it – once as a picture of a rabbit, once as a picture of a duck. If this switch is, as we feel, something that we actually do, and not just something that randomly happens to us, then a question arises: how exactly do we do it? Note that there are not that many options we can choose from. As should now be obvious from earlier considerations, we can divide conditions W1W11 into three groups. The objective part (W1-W2), the subjective part (W3-W6) and the belief part (W7-W11). We do not have the ability to directly induce visual states (even the conscious states). I can imagine a horse, but I cannot subjectively see the horse, just because I want to see it. Therefore we are not able to directly manipulate with W3-W6. So, if the switch changes them, it can only happen indirectly, as a result of voluntary change of something else. But then, if we decide that this change is the result of the voluntary change in the belief part (any of the conditions W7-W11), we negate the rule of belief independence. Needless to say, it is everything that the skeptic wanted. If a change of beliefs can lead to a change in our visual states, then perhaps we could do the same trick in other, seemingly veridical cases? Maybe everything is an ambiguous illusion waiting to be discovered?15 15

Something along these lines is suggested in Strawson (1974: 58).

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Fortunately, there are at least two ways to describe the duck/rabbit scenario without giving the skeptic the upper hand. Note that because of the ambiguous nature of the duck/rabbit illusion we have to present the cases as disjunctions. Case 10: W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, W6, W6’, W6’’, W7, W8, W9’, W10’, W11’or W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, W6, W6’, W6’’, W7, W8, W9’’, W10’’, W11’’ Let’s explain the idea behind Case 10. The observer looks at the picture of the duck/rabbit and has visual states which she normally has when she looks at the picture of the duck/rabbit. Apart from the disposition to see the duck/rabbit picture she also has the disposition to see pictures of ducks (W6’) and pictures of rabbits (W6’’). She believes that she looks at the picture of duck/rabbit and acts accordingly (W7, W8). But (and here comes the interesting part) she somehow manages to switch between beliefs that what she experiences is the rabbit visual state (W9’, W10’) and the duck visual state (W9’’, W10’’). This switch does not result in producing the corresponding visual states, but it produces in her a non-verbal belief W11’ (or W11’’ accordingly). It is the difference between these two states that gives the distinct feeling of aspect change. What changes is our attitude to what we see, our associations (of something being similar to ducks or rabbits), and our aesthetic feelings towards it (we may like rabbits but not ducks).16 Case 10 can be understood as an explication of a common expression “she convinced herself that she sees…”. But there is one more way to preserve the rule of belief independence. Remember that our aim, if we want to block the skeptical threat is to avoid suggesting that a change in beliefs results in a change in visual states. We achieved it in Case 10, because we suggested that the change happens only in beliefs (verbal and non-verbal). But you may object that it is not compatible with what we really experience, because we in fact 16

Or, as Schroeder (2010: 365) says, she may feel that the beak is simply too long.

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do experience some change in visual state when we switch from the duck to the rabbit. The solution is now evident. If any of the subjective conditions are to be changed and the rule of belief independence is to be preserved, the only place the switch can happen are the objective conditions W1-W2. Let’s show this case and explain it in some detail. Case 11: W1, W2’, W3’, W4’, W5’, W6, W6’, W6’’, W7, W8, W9’, W10’, W11’or W1, W2’’, W3’’, W4’’, W5’’, W6, W6’, W6’’, W7, W8, W9’’, W10’’, W11’’ What is meant here is that the observer, in fact, changes the object she is looking at. The rest of the conditions are simply the result of that. It is worth to mention that we assume this in order to be able to make the switch the observer has to have the disposition to be in visual states induced by duck/rabbit pictures, duck pictures and rabbit pictures (W6, W6’, W6’’) and that even though the switch is quite convincing, she still believes that what she looks at is a duck/rabbit picture although in fact she is looking at something else. How can it be possible? After all the duck/rabbit picture does not change! One possible explanation is that in order to change the visual state, the observer inadvertently looks at different parts of the picture.17 To see the duck she has to focus on the left part, to see the rabbit she has to focus on the right part. If we assume that the difference in focus is radical, then we could treat the two distinct parts of the picture as different objects the observer looks at. The idea that the switch of the aspect boils down to looking at different parts of the picture has been suggested and tested by psychologists, but the results are unfortunately mixed (see Wimmer and Doherty 2007). There are no fundamental reasons, however, to believe that the hypothesis will not be conclusively tested in the future. The important fact is that we are able to formulate the problem in a perfectly solvable way. 17

Some readers may be alarmed by the fact that parts of objects are now treated as new objects. Are we entitled to change the ontology like that? I analyze the relation between perception and ontology in Grabarczyk (2013).

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4. Summary As we saw, talking about perception often leads to some confusion and creates paradoxes. The main culprits of these confusions are: conflating two different notions of the predicate “to see” (subjective and objective) and the uncertainty as to which beliefs (if any) are ascribed to the observer whenever she decides that she sees a given object. My aim was to create a precise and unequivocal conceptual framework capable of expressing problems and solutions connected to the phenomenon of visual perception. The framework consists of eleven conditions, combinations of which give us different descriptions of acts of perception (veridical and non-veridical). Using the framework we were able to reconstruct the reasons why the duck/rabbit case can be thought of as leading to a specific type of skepticism and show how we could avoid the skeptical conclusions. Along the way, we replaced some of the unclear or problematic common notions connected with perception by their explications: “to look at”, “to have an impression of”, “to behave as if one believed that…”, “to react as if one had an impression of…”, “to convince oneself that what one sees is…”. If the proposed interpretation of the duck/rabbit case is right, then whether it poses a skeptical threat Wittgenstein feared, remains an open question. But it is now a question to which further empirical studies can give a perfectly adequate answer. References Bach-y-Rita, Paul, Mitchell E. Tyler and Kurt A. Kaczmarek 2003. Seeing with the Brain. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 15: 285-296. Block, Ned 1995. On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2), 227-247. Cottingham, John and Peter Hacker (eds.) 2010. Mind, Method and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny. New York: Oxford University Press. Dennett, Daniel 1989. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Gazzaniga, Michael, Joseph Bogen and Roger Wolcott Sperry 1962. Some Functional Effects Of Sectioning The Cerebral Commissures in Man. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 48: 1765-1769. Grabarczyk, Paweł 2013. Do Animals See Objects? In: M. Miłkowski and K. Talmont Kami ski (eds.), 86-102.

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Grabarczyk, Paweł (forthcoming), Kłopoty z widzeniem. O filozoficznie istotnych u yciach wyra enia „widzie [Trouble with seeing. On philosophically relevant uses of the term „to see”]. Grice, Herbert Paul 1961. The Causal Theory of Perception, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XXXV, 121-153. Jastrow, Joseph 1900. Fact and Fable in Psychology. Oxford: Houghton, Mifflin. McNamara, Danielle S. and Gregory, J. Trafton (eds.) 2007. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society, Miłkowski, Marcin and Konrad Talmont Kami ski (eds.) 2013. Regarding Mind, Naturally. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Pitcher, George 1971. A Theory of Perception. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Russell, Bertrand 1948. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. New York: Simon and Schuster. Shroeder, Severin 2010. A Tale of Two Problems: Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception. In: J. Cottingham and P. Hacker (eds.), 352-371. Strawson, Peter 1974. Freedom and Resentment. London: Methuen. Valberg, Jerry 1992. The Puzzle of Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wimmer, Marina C. and Martin J. Doherty 2007. Investigating Children’s EyeMovements: Cause or Effect of Reversing Ambiguous Figures? In: D. S. McNamara and J. G. Trafton (eds.), 1659-1664. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1980. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology Vol. 1. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1990. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London And New York: Routledge.

Arkadiusz Gut Catholic University of Lublin [email protected]

Priority of Thought or Priority of Language Abstract: It has been indicated that Frege’s view concerning the thought-language relationship contains inner tensions. They arise from the fact that in Frege’s writings we find two inconsistent statements, namely that the structure of sentence serves as the structure of thought and that two structurally different sentences can express one and the same thought. In the presented paper I start with Dummett’s three partial claims leading to the conclusion that Frege supports the hypothesis of the priority of language over thought. Next, I show that the three statements lead to a general rule which, according to Dummett, says that for Frege and all the later analytic philosophers the characteristics of a thought may be obtained through a philosophical characteristics of a sentence (or more broadly – of language). Next, I provide a set of arguments showing that that the view suggested by Dummett encountered, generally speaking, many lines of criticism. At same time, I develop a suggestion that Frege’s project advocates rather the thesis that two sentences with different predicative structure can express one and the same thought. Key words: Frege, thought, meaning, language, logical form, analytical philosophy

0. Introduction Starting from the works by Dummett (1981, 1991, 1993), Bell (1987, 1996), Currie (1985), Garavaso (1991), Burge (1990), Weiner (1996, 1997) or Mayer (1990), and ending up with the works by Bermúdez (2003, 2001), Künne (2007), Textor (2009) and Kemmerling (2010), it was pointed out that Frege’s view concerning the thought-language relationship contained inner tensions. They arise from the fact that in Frege’s writings two inconsistent statements are found, namely that the structure of sentence serves as the structure of thought and that two structurally different sentences can express one and the same thought.

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In numerous works by Dummett, the statement that the structure of thought is isomorphic to the structure of sentence appears to be an essential part of the more general view according to which Frege advocated the priority of language over thought. The constituents of that generalized view in the form of the priority of language over thought are the claims that for Frege and all later analytic philosophers, characteristics of a thought may be obtained through philosophical characteristics of a sentence, or that our thinking capacity is equated with our ability to use a language, or that thoughts are nothing more but senses of sentences, or, finally, that Fregean conception of a sense should be assimilated to a modern notion of the conventional linguistic meaning. The present text discusses a set of arguments showing that the suggested view – according to which Frege advocated the priority of language over thought – is open to substantial criticism. A key task is to show that Frege’s project rather advances the thesis that two sentences with different predicative structures can express one and the same thought. Accordingly, it will be put forward that particular expression of a thought in a sentence (i.e. a particular decomposition of some thought) proves to be just one of many possible ways a thought can be split up. This entails additionally, as Bell, Garavaso, and Kemmerling admit, that the assumption according to which any thought has one clearly determined (or unique) inner structure, and that one of the alternative structures of a thought may objectively be considered better than any other, ought to be rejected. Following this argument, however, I still believe that defending the thesis that two structurally different sentences can express the same thought does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that thoughts should be regarded as unstructured entities (the view favored by Bell, Garavaso, and Kemmerling). A key aspect in the discussion opened in this text is to place emphasis on thought itself and on showing the deeper meaning of the statement that one and the same thought can be split up (zerlegbar) in different ways, which means that thought is decomposable by nature. Furthermore, a seldom made distinction between two pairs of sentences will be presented, the first pair saying: “Line a is parallel to line b” and “The direction of line a is identical with the direction of line b” and the second stating: “Brutus killed Ceasar” and “Caesar was killed by Brutus”. The

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first pair will be considered as an accurate exemplification of the statement that one and the same thought is decomposable in different ways, whereas the second will just be treated as a hint and elucidation of understanding that language has an extensive range of expressions which allow people to express one and the same thought in different ways. Moreover, it will be shown that clarifying the view according to which a clear distinction between thoughts and sentence meanings (understood as the conventional linguistic meaning) entails considering the identity of thought in terms of intensionally understood equipollence which refers to the so-called epistemic identity. Such line of arguments will serve to maintain the stance that Frege espoused the view of the priority of thought over language. 1. The legacy of Dummett’s approach: language priority over thought In order to sketch two competing approaches to Frege’s stance on the issue of thought-language relationship, I begin the paper with Dummett’s three partial claims that in a systematic manner organize the interpretation of Frege’s position as someone who defends the stance recognizing priority of language over thought. (1) […] a thought is the sense of a sentence; we can present a thought only as the sense of a certain sentence. Thus presentation of the sense is a form of understanding an expression. (Dummett 1981: 478) (2) The concept of sense has been introduced as something objective and common for all language users. (3) A thought is presented during the presentation of the semantic properties of a sentence; to speak about the structure of a thought is to speak about the semantic relations occurring between parts of a sentence. (Dummett 1993: 7-8)

The three statements lead to a general rule which, according to Dummett, says that for Frege and all the later analytic philosophers the characteristics of a thought may be obtained through a philosophical characteristics of a sentence (or more broadly: of language). In his work What Do I Know when I Know a Language? Dummett precisely reveals the

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essence of the above rule. He emphasizes that philosophers before Frege, interpreting the value of language, saw a certain kind of code in language. Concepts are coded in words, while thoughts, being complexes of concepts, are coded in sentences that, generally speaking, are supposed to reflect the structure of the former ones. According to this view, Dummett says, we need a language, since it so happens that we do not have telepathic abilities and thoughts are not transferred directly to a listener. Communication is then understood as the use of a telephone: the speaker codes his thoughts in a transmittable medium and the listener decodes them. The proposition saying that there exists a possibility to ascribe to people possession of thoughts and concepts that is independent from possession of knowledge concerning language is the premise of this vision of language. According to Dummett, the whole analytic philosophical school is in a way founded on the rejection of the above research perspective. In the new perspective presented by Frege, Dummett thinks, the conception of language as a code for thought is replaced by such an interpretation of language that does not refer to the former understanding of thoughts and concepts. Language is understood then not as a code but as a vehicle. Thoughts are regarded to be embodied in linguistic vehicles hence we grasp thoughts through understanding a language and analysis of thoughts is carried on through language analysis. In consequence, Dummett emphasizes, it is impossible to take off the language clothes from the thought and study it without the clothes, and we find factual reasons why philosophical studies of language are gaining value, becoming the basis for all philosophical studies. In this context, it should be stressed that thought by its nature may not exist without a vehicle and that language is a vehicle whose working is most evident, being in this way most susceptible to a systematic philosophical explanation. According to Dummett, this view is supported by two reasons (cf. Gut 2012). Firstly, ascribing possession of a given thought to a subject in a definite time may only be justified by the presence of a background that can be frequently broad, against which something serving as a tool for the thought occurs. Hence the existence of language and its knowledge by the subject are necessary, if we consider the issue of the possession of thoughts by somebody.

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And secondly, the structure of a sentence is the only tool that reflects the structure of the thought. It is assumed that the structure of thought inherits the structure of the sentence, mainly because language is like a vehicle for thoughts, and thoughts, by their nature, cannot exist without this vehicle. With such an approach the basic understanding of what thought is comes from deliberations about a sentence understood as a linguistic meaning, which leads one directly to the statement that “we grasp thoughts through understanding the sentences that express them” (Bermúdez 2003: 15). Hence, when we pass on to the deliberations about the inner composition of thought, its components, and the ways in which thoughts establish inferential relations, our attention is directed to the logical form of the sentences in which thoughts are expressed. The Fregean approach to thought gives us a clear answer. Thoughts are senses of sentences, and the structure of a thought is given by the logical form of the sentence that expresses it – where the logical form of a sentence is given by the appropriate logical regimentation of the sentence in Frege’s concept-script. This logical form identifies the constituents of the thought, that is, the senses of which it is composed. (Bermúdez 2003: 16)

Analogously, when attempting to explain generativity of thought, the starting principle is to show that thoughts are the senses of sentences and hence generativity of thought may be described as a derivative property in relation to generativity of language. Then it is emphasized that: […] There is a further and more overreaching isomorphism in play, not simply between a thought and the sentence expressing it, but between thought as whole and language as whole. (Bermúdez 2003: 17)

All this serves to show that the model of thought suggested by Frege is the model where thought should be treated as a language-dependent unit that may be exclusively possessed by and ascribed to beings that have language at their disposal. Let us also notice that if thoughts are senses expressed by sentences, and the structure of a thought is given to us by analysis of the structure of the sentence expressing it, then we receive a clear epistemological indication about the way thoughts may be identified and ascribed to other subjects at all. There is no other way out than

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to accept that a formulation of a thought cannot be anything else than an understanding of a sentence, and the undertaken understandings cannot be anything else than a kind of transition between sentences (cf. Bermúdez 2003: 19; Gut 2005). The main motif of accepting such an interpretative profile is convincingly connected, however, in Frege’s claim that sentence structure and the structure of thought are isomorphic. As Noonan (2001: 31) stresses, such an approach “led many to assimilate Frege’s conception of sense to modern notion of conventional linguistic meaning”. Supporters of the view connecting the category of thought with the category of linguistic meaning most often refer to the following: We can regard a sentence as a mapping of the thought: corresponding to the whole-part relation of a thought and its parts we have, by and large, the same relation for the sentence and its parts. (Frege [1919] 1979: 255)

2. Overview of alternative approach: relative priority of thought over language Generally speaking, the view presented here has been subjected to criticism from various perspectives. Firstly, it has been noticed that Dummett’s description does not respect numerous source texts, in which Frege seems to unambiguously suggest his status as that of a theorist of thought. A fragment of Begriffsschrift is often cited on this occasion, with the phrase about the task of philosophy which is to overcome the rule of the word over human spirit and to liberate the thought from the burden that is only the peculiarity of the linguistic expression (cf. Frege [1879] 1997). Additionally, in Frege’s unpublished works statements can be found, where he says that “we can be led by language to see things in the wrong perspective, and what value it must therefore have to philosophy to free ourselves from the domination of language” (Frege [1884] 1979: 67). According to Weiner (1997: 11) “someone whose writings include frequent remarks about the importance of freeing ourselves from the domination of language is not a likely candidate for identification as an originator of the linguistic turn”

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and as someone who defends the position of a theorist of linguistic meaning. Secondly, Dummett is accused of wrongly interpreting the very category of sense (Sinn), treating it in a way analogous to what Church earlier did, namely, as linguistic meaning. If Frege is a theorist of the linguistic meaning, it has to be accepted that for him the sense (Sinn) of an expression is only the linguistic meaning that is known to everybody who has the knowledge of the language (Church 1943). Accordingly, the sense is what we grasp only if we understand the language. The above conclusion has been evaluated negatively by Burge. In his article Frege on Sense and Linguistic Meaning (1990) he remarks that in analyses of the Fregean category of sense one must not miss the general principle: that the category of sense was established, among others, for explaining what thought and proposition are. Burge’s argument, which is opposite to Dummett’s, is based on the observations that: (i) analysis of Frege’s remarks on names, occasional expressions, personal pronouns – from which it is to follow that the sense (Sinn) of such expressions as “Gustav Lauben”, “I”, “today”, “yesterday” cannot coincide with their linguistic meaning; (ii) showing that the so-called history of concepts (their historical nature) is only either the history of our cognition of concepts, or of the meaning of words; in other words, the problem is not that the effort aiming at understanding the meaning of a word should not be mistaken with forming a concept, but it should exclusively be defined as a process in which our understanding or grasping a concept is formed. (See Burge 1990: 38-41, 1979: 398-432.)

Thirdly, it is stressed that in Frege’s texts we find a lot of explanations with proofs that achieving knowledge about thought and its structure is not a component of the knowledge that we achieve by analyzing the ways to express thought and the way to form conventional linguistic meanings. In this context the spirit of comments assumes the following shapes: (a) It is stressed “that no amount of investigation of the actual usage and understanding of one’s language is, according to Frege, sure to reveal the ‘deeper structure’ and the nature of sense and thought. One may have to

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Arkadiusz Gut achieve genuine advances in non-linguistic knowledge before one can fully master the sense and thoughts that one’s language expresses. This point renders Frege’s view and modern methodologies for studying language quite different. (Wettstein 1995: 137) (b) It is also argued that although Frege stresses “That certain sentence get correlated with certain thought contents is, he would surely agree, an artifact of human institutional arrangements. Frege would insist, however, that one’s thinking a certain thought content is no matter of human convention, institutional arrangement, or anything of the like. It is a matter of one’s mind grasping an objectively existing content. More important, then, at least in a sense more important, than the fact that sentences express such ‘thoughts’ is the fact that by uttering sentences we assert them, we give voice to the thought contents that we are thinking […] Frege, we might say, puts forth a thought-driven picture of language. (Wettstein 1995: 138-9)

Fourthly, it is emphasized that the stance that grasps thought as something internally connected with linguistic expression is closer to Wittgenstein’s, and not Frege’s ideas. It has repeatedly been emphasized that when we juxtapose Wittgenstein’s and Frege’s positions we clearly notice that only with the first of them it appears that thought is internally integrated with language, that thought is a linguistically dependent entity, and that creating thought is understood as a process accompanying speaking. Fifthly, it is often stressed that Dummett too rashly reduced the thesis about the priority of language over thought exclusively to the semanticanalytical dimension, underestimating the ontological and the epistemological aspect. In this context, it is emphasized that Frege intuitively respects the above distinction. It is shown in many important fragments stemming from Sources of Knowledge and Logical Generality where we read that although the awareness of a thought is always connected with the awareness of a sentence this connection does not follow from the fact that the thought and sentence are identical. Sixthly, it is emphasized that through accepting the more epistemological interpretation profile we acquire a basis for a different treatment of sense. This allows one to conceive the category of sense as the way the referent is given (Art des Gegebenseins) or as the cognitive value (Erkenntniswert) of the sentence. Supporters of the epistemological interpretation argue that a proper answer to the question where the dif-

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ferent cognitive values of the two sentences: “a = a” and “a = b” come from, should be looked for in the fact that each of the thoughts expressed in these sentences is justified in a different way. Thus the cognitive value of the sentence is determined by the ways of its justification (Carl 1994). 3. In quest of Fregean stance Most researchers realize that the key argument that Frege uses to support his theory of priority of thought is ultimately reduced to showing that in the centre of Frege’s deliberations a thesis may be proposed about the possibility of expressing the same thought by means of sentences with different logical structure. In this context following examples from Frege’s works may be given: Seeing that the same thought can be worded in different ways, we learn better to distinguish the verbal husk from the kernel with which, in any given language, it appears to be organically bound up. (Frege [1897] 1979: 142) Therefore let us never forget that two different sentences can express the same thought, that we are concerned with only that part of a sentence’s content which can be true or false. (Frege [1897] 1979: 143) To be sure, we distinguish the sentence as the expression of a thought from the thought itself. We know we can have various expressions for the same thought. (Frege [1924] 1979: 269)

According to Burge (1999) and Bell (1996), it is implied in the above quotations that two different sentences may – despite the difference between them – express precisely the same thought. Presenting the problem in this way seems to be at odds with the rule according to which there is an isomorphic connection between a thought and a sentence. If Frege, indeed, endorses the idea that one and the same thought can be expressed by two structurally (syntactically) different sentences, then the assertion that a sentence functions as a model for a thought could not be taken as a pivotal (central) claim in Frege’s works. Hence, accepting the rule that two different sentences may express the same thought one undermines the logic of the argument leading to essentially connecting both thinking and the very thought with language practice and with the

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sentence itself. If Frege’s stance is really in opposition to the stance expressed by Dummett and others, what needs to be found in Frege’s writings is a full justification for the following thesis: Two structurally different sentences can express the same thought (henceforth 2S-1T thesis – two sentences-one thought). Constructing the argument purely historically, we could, on the one hand, say that Frege’s view that a thought can be split up in many ways, so crucial for the 2S-1T thesis, appears in his works for many times. In numerous places do we read I do not believe that for any judgable content there is only one way in which it can be decomposed, or that one of those possible ways can always claim objective pre-eminence. In the inequality 3>2 we can regard either 2 or 3 as the subject. In the former case we have the concept , in the later . We can also regard as complex subject. As a predicate we then have the concept of the relation of greater to the smaller. (Frege [1882] 1979: 101) (ii) We must notice, however, that one and the same thought can be split up (zerlegbar) in different ways. The word does not apply to thought in itself but only with respect to a to particular way of splitting it up. (Frege [1906] 1979: 202) (iii) We can decompose the proposition into and or into and , or into and . (Frege [1903] 1967: 197) (iv) But we must never forget that different sentences may express the same thought.[…] This will be surprising only to somebody who fails to see that a thought can be split up in many ways, so that now one thing, now another, appears as subject or predicate. The thought itself does not yet determine what is to be regarded as the subject. (Frege [1892] 1952: 49)

We could also quote a few basic exemplifications that Frege discusses, which are supposed to prove that sentences with a different logical and predicative form express one and the same thought. Here are the most frequently given collections of examples (briefly defined in the paper as [ ] examples):

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Example A (1) Line a is parallel to line b. (2) The direction of line a is identical with the direction of line b. Example B (3) There is at least one square root of 4. (4) The concept square root of 4 is realized. (5) The number 4 has the property that there is something of which it is the square. Example C (6) There are 0 F’s. (7) The number of F’s is 0. (8) The concept F is not instantiated.

However, if we assume that in Frege’s works a full justification can be found for the above proposition that at the same time is supposed to be a good systematic argument for recognizing independence of thought from language, we are eo ipso obliged to show that the 2S-1T thesis is more about thought itself than about the specificity of language. In other words, in the process of defending the 2S-1T thesis the following elements have to be articulated: (a) (b)

(c)

(d)

a thought may be split up in different ways; sentences that are to express one and the same thought may be sentences with a different logical form – that is sentences with a different predicative structure; a new formulation of a thought, that is articulation of the same thought in a new sentence, has informative character – which means that the passage from the first to the second articulation becomes a valuable broadening of our knowledge; new formulations of a thought should be treated as a method of gaining new concepts, hence sentences expressing one and the same thought may express different concepts.

4. Elucidation of core idea: one thought two sentences In order to understand the proper sense and dimension of Frege’s argumentation, to find an essential support for the 2S-1T thesis, one has to first separate real representative examples (described above as [ ] examples) that are to support the thesis from the so called exemplifications that only suggest the general direction of Frege’s position, but

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are not par excellence examples for the claim that two sentences with different logical structures may express one and the same thought. Most scholars, however, who support the thesis that distinct sentences can express the same thought (2S-1T thesis) do not draw an important distinction between [ ] examples and elucidative examples. Such a distinction seems necessary in order to understand that the 2S-1T thesis is essentially based on the idea that one and the same thought is decomposable in different ways, but not only on the idea that language has an extensive range of expressions which allow people to express one and the same thought in different ways. Let us start with an analysis of the following pairs of sentences that frequently appear in Frege’s writings: (a) (a’) (b) (b’)

At Plataea the Greeks defeated the Persians. At Pletaea the Persians were defeated by the Greeks. Brutus killed Ceasar. Caesar was killed by Brutus.

In many cases, when he refers to sentences in active and passive voice, Frege draws the reader’s attention to the difference between the means of expression and the thought expressed by these pairs of sentences. At the same time he stresses that “language has means of presenting now one, now another, part of the thought as subject” [Frege [1892] 1952: 49). Prima facie one could think that analysis of pairs (a and a’) and (b and b’) supplies the foundations on which the 2S-1T thesis is based. However, it seems that such a speculation would undermine the sense of the whole discussion, making its philosophical value trivial. In order to understand it, we have to distinguish the pairs of sentences in the active and passive voice from [ ] examples and show that the motivation for introducing the 2S-1T thesis is much more profound than the one that may be connected with analysis of pairs of sentences in the active and passive voice. Firstly, let us notice that quoting examples in the active and passive voice should be exclusively associated with the willingness to present to the reader the introductory idea of the possibility to express one and the same thought in two sentences and of illustrating this it by examples that can be understood by any natural language user. Secondly, when Frege

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says that sentences in the above pairs express one and the same thought, he at the same time admits that what matters here is the differences in the means of expression. This fact – as he stresses in Begriffsschrift – is connected with the resources we encounter in language. Language, he goes on to say, is free to choose a means of expression. When he refers to pairs of sentences in the active and passive voice, Frege says nothing about the fact that a thought may be split up in different ways, but only that “the sentence can be transformed by changing the verb from active into passive and at the same time making the accusative into the subject” (Frege [1918] 1977: 9). In his work entitled Logic Frege quotes the following pair of sentences: (c) M gave document A to N. (c’) N received document A from M. He emphasizes that sentence (c) is a transformation of sentence (c’). At the same time he remarks that owing to this transformation “we learn not a whit more or less from the second sentence than we do from the first” (Frege [1897] 1979: 141). The stressed lack of “a smallest difference” has to be associated with the fact that both sentences not only express the same thought, but do it in the same way. Hence, the possibility to formulate the sentences in the active and passive voice is connected with grammatical rules that are present in natural language. Frege defines these changes as stylistic and aesthetic ones. And he sees their significance in making better communication possible. The linguistic significance of the position of the subject in the word-order lies in its marking the place where what one particularly wants to draw the attention of the listener to it put. This can have the purpose, for example, of indicating relation judgment and others, thereby facilitating the listener’s grasp of all interconnections. Now all those features of language that result only from interaction of speaker and listener […].(Frege [1879] 1997: 54)

Frege places this type of transformations in the grammar of natural language. They are changes that today we would call purely grammatical ones that are not connected with a new split-up of the thought. In other words, he does not connect this type of transformations with broadening

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our knowledge about thought itself (Frege [1897] 1979: 153). We can safely assume that the change from the active to passive voice may be done purely mechanically, without considering the formulation of the thought expressed by the sentence. This kind of transformations does not have to be reflected in the language created for the needs of science, as it is only connected with the structure of natural language itself. The transformations are rather result of acquiring language competence. In the work On the Foundations of Geometry, a distinction appears between linguistic and logical decomposition of a sentence. With the use of the above distinction we may assume that sentences in the active and passive voice are characterized by different language structure that is determined by grammatical rules (Frege [1879] 1997: 54). From the point of view of logic this situation looks different – the two sentences have the same logical structure. In an analysis of the instances given as exemplifications of the 2S-1T thesis, Frege will repeatedly emphasize that the sentences differ from each other not only (referring to the distinction given above) linguistically, but also logically. This significant difference is connected, as will be discussed later, with the fact that in the case of [ ] examples we deal with thoughts that are split up in different ways. The changes, that is the transitions from one sentence to another, are rather connected with what is going on at the level of thought. As will be shown, they cannot be made with the use of purely grammatical resources of transformations. Let us move on to another group of sentences that also have to be distinguished from [ ] examples, i.e. from the proper exemplifications of the 2S-1T thesis: (d) This dog howled the whole night. (d’) This cur howled the whole night. Frege, by means of sentences (d) and (d’), highlights such functions of language which are connected with mood (Stimmung), atmosphere (Duft), illumination (Beleuchtung), colouring (Färbung).

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What we called mood, atmosphere, illumination in poem, what is portrayed by intonation and rhythm, does not belong to thought. (Frege [1918] 1977: 9) But we must not forget that language does not simply express thought; it also imparts a certain tone or colouring to them. And this can be different even where the thought is the same. (Frege [1906] 1979: 193)

Quoting the deliberations about such questions as mood, smell, colouring or illumination proves that natural language sentences, as Frege indicates, over and above thought and assertion often contain a third component not covered by assertion (Frege [1918] 1977: 9-10). Colouring and illumination are very often used, Frege goes on, when we want to act on feelings and mood of the hearer, or to arouse his imagination, that is to direct him to something that is very often hard to formulate in thought (Frege [1918] 1977: 8-9). In our context, this can be read as a directive for making distinctions of the type: content of a sentence and content of a thought. They have their utmost importance in the debate about the relations between thought and language. Referring to the issue of mood, etc., allows Frege to show that not everything that sentences express should be considered a component of the thought itself. Simply, the functions of language exceed expressing just thoughts. The content of the sentence is broader; it also comprises what can be called colouring or embellishing. Decoding Frege’s intention one may also say that – according to him– the means of expression existing in language, like adding the words “already”, “still” (Frege [1918] 1977: 9) or substituting “dog” with “cur”, have an external character in relation to the very thought (Frege [1897] 1979: 141). And what is more important, introducing these means expresses the speaker’s more subjective approach; these are the means connected rather with the component of attitude than the component of the content of thought. However, Frege writes about the basic purpose of the deliberations on this subject in his work entitled Logic, where we read: We have seen that the series of sounds that compose a sentence is often not sufficient for the complete expression of thought. If we wish to bring the essence of a thought into as sharp a focus as possible, we ought not to over-

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Arkadiusz Gut look the fact that converse case is not uncommon, the case where a sentence does more than express a thought and assert its truth. In many cases a sentence is meant to have an effect on the ideas and feeling of the hearer as well; and the more closely it approximates to the language of poetry, the greater this effect is meant to be. (Frege [1897] 1979: 139)

According to this hint, we have to be sensitive, in Frege’s opinion, to the complexity of language and to the multiplicity of its different functions, which make the content of a sentence to include more than only the thought it expresses. Hence, the ability of referring to the thought itself is at the same time connected with the ability to separate, what Frege calls, trappings of the very thought. Also it is important to stress that changing some words or changing their order, although it does not change anything in the thought itself, can significantly change the presentations and emotions that appear in the hearer of the words. This is connected with the fact that “sounds of language act as a sensory stimulus” and influence associations that occur during the comprehension of language messages. The point is that when two sentences produce two different reflections or representations (Vorstellungen) which comprise emotions, mood or attitude, then it should not be concluded on that basis that the two sentences express two different thoughts. In this sense, if we change the word “horse” into “steed”, we are moving on the level of subjective states, something that should be linked with our ability to imagine something that belongs to the content of the sentence. (Frege [1897] 1979: 142) In order to defend the 2S-1T thesis, it seems necessary to redirect this discussion to the level of conceptual contents. In other words, when we change the word “dog” to “cur”, we refer to our imagination or association net; and when we change the parallelism of lines to identity of directions, it is hard to talk about a recourse to our associations. Eo ipso, the valuable broadening of our knowledge that, in Frege’s opinion, is given by [ ] examples should not be linked with changes in attitude or illocutive power, but with changes in the very contents of thought.

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5. Elaborating the priority of thought approach If we assume that up to this moment we have been able to show what the 2S-1T thesis should not be directly associated with, we now have to show three further problems. We have to analyze pairs of sentences that are considered proper exemplifications of the thesis about the possibility of expressing one and the same thought by different sentences. Then we have to show the way in which Frege justifies the thesis that sentences differing in their logical structure and whose components express different concepts, may ultimately express one and the same thought. And finally, the key problem is to give a criterion of identity of the thought that, let us add, may be expressed in various ways. At each of these stages we cannot escape the question concerning the crystallization of the understanding of the sense by building opposition not only to presentation and coloring (which have been mentioned above), but also to the linguistic meaning. In order to cast more light on the issue we are now dealing with, it is worth quoting two contexts in which Frege uses the rule that the same thought may be expressed by two different sentences. The first context comes from Foundations of Arithmetic: The judgement , or using symbols a || b can be taken as an identity. If we do this, we obtain the concept of direction, and say: […] We carve up the content in a way different from original way, and this yields us a new concept. (Frege [1884] 1953: 75)

The second context is a fragment of the essay On Concept and Object in which Frege seems to suggest that the thought concerning the square root of 4 may be expressed in the following ways: (3) There is at least one square root of 4. (4) The concept square root of 4 is realized. (5) The number 4 has the property that there is something of which it is the square. What we have here is a clear suggestion that sentences expressing the same thought do not have to share the same logical structure. The possi-

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bility to express the same thought by sentences with different predicative structures is supposed to confirm the rule that for the same thought there exist many sentences differing from one another logically (cf. Garavaso 1991: 202; Beaney 1996: 134). If such a possibility is admitted, it may not be said that parts of a thought are permanently ascribed to parts of a sentence, or that expressing a thought in a sentence leads to distinguishing primary or the only components of the thought (Currie 1985). Moreover, we see that differences between sentences that can express the same thought may reach a much deeper level than the differences between sentences listed in the comparisons given above [(a)-(a’), (b)(b’), (c)-(c’), (d)-(d’)]. In order to pass on, in Frege’s strategy, to the essential motif, one has to start with the statement, in which the words are uttered, saying that there are no obstacles for the situation that “now one, now another, part of the thought could be presented as the subject” (Frege [1892] 1952: 49). There is a strong suggestion contained in it that the thought in its “nature” makes it allowable “that one way of analyzing a given thought should make it appear as a singular judgement; another, as a particular judgement; and a third, as a universal judgement” (Frege [1892] 1952: 49-50). Let us notice that the equivalences Frege introduces: (1) Line a is parallel to line b. (2) The direction of line a is identical with the direction of line b. clearly show that at the foundations there is a deep conviction that the sentences in the above pairs express the same thought – they have the same conceptual content. Passing from (1) to (2) Frege clearly emphasizes that he wants to express the same content (thought), but in a different way. Let us also remember that if the above pairs of sentences did not express the same thoughts, that is if they did not give the same set of information, the process of analysis underlying reduction of arithmetic to logic would be utterly destroyed (Beaney 1996: 135-140; Currie 1985). So the idea is that the same conceptual contents or judgeable contents may be grasped in various ways. In this sense various ways of expressing the same thought are de facto consequence of different decompositions of the same thought. It is so, because the rule according to which

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the same thought may be “split up” in various ways, is the assumption underlying these propositions. This will be surprising only to somebody who fails to see that a thought can be split up in many ways, so that now one thing, now another, appears as subject or predicate. (Frege [1892]1952: 49)

However, Frege connects the basic argument with the thought itself, stating that: The thought itself does not yet determine what is to be regarded as the subject. (Frege [1892]1952: 49)

We can see a distinct move towards discussing the thought, the content itself, that is subject to different decompositions, and only on this basis is the proposition formulated that different sentences with different logical structures may express one and the same thought. We remember, that when Frege says that sentences: (1) Line a is parallel to line b. (2) The direction of line a is identical with the direction of line b. express one and the same thought, he automatically adds that the transition from (1) to (2) consisted in splitting up the content (the thought) in a different way, and this new split-up resulted in passing from speaking about parallelism of the lines to speaking about equality of the directions. We know that using this example is subjected to showing a similar relation between the sentences: (9) There are as many F’s as G’s. (10) The number of F’s is the same as the number of G’s. When we compare the new split-up of the content, not only does a new concept appear (respectively: direction and number), but also relations change (respectively: we are not speaking about the relation between concepts, but between objects). Hence splitting the contents goes “deep”,

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and the sentences that are supposed to express the same thought may be distinguished from each other by their components and structures. Before we pass on to the question of identity of thoughts, let us discuss two more things. Firstly, if a thought was connected with a sentence, that is if we could talk about the composition of a thought only in the derivative sense as far as the structure of the sentence was concerned, or if the feature of generativity was inherited from generativity of language means, then not only saying that different sentences express one and the same thought would be excluded, but also the idea that subject and predicate are not pre-determined in the content of a thought would not be the raison d’etre. And secondly, it is already at this stage that we realize that the view according to which the above pairs of sentences, despite significant differences, express one and the same thought is only possible to accept when the thought is not numerically identified with something we call conventional linguistic meaning. Transferring these conclusions to the field of deliberations about the category of sense, one has to say that (Fregean) sense may not be identified with the term of linguistic meaning used at present, that is with something that is created only by speakers of a language (Burge 1990). Attention should be paid to one thing: a new decomposition of the content is a way that leads to obtaining a new concept that appears due to splitting the contents of the thought. This is a kind of such an intellectual activity thanks to which the new concept is in a way brought to light as a result of an analysis of the content of the thought that we express in the first articulation. This is why, when talking about a new concept, Frege keeps persuading the reader that we are dealing with the same conceptual content. His reasoning is more or less such that in a new split-up of the thought we do not extend beyond the contents of the given thought, but remaining in its scope we split it up in such a way that allows a new articulation. To explain it visually in a way, it may be said that what matters here is dividing the same field of, for example, a square, in different ways, once by distinguishing four squares, and then by distinguishing four triangles in the square (cf. Beaney 1996). Although the division of the field of the square is different each time, we do not exceed the limits of the square. This is what Frege means when in paragraph 88 of Foundations of Arithmetic he writes:

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If we represent the concepts (or their extensions) by figures or areas in a plane, then the concept defined by a simple list of characteristics corresponds to the area common to all the areas representing the defining characteristics; it is enclosed by segments of their boundary lines. With a definition like this, therefore, what we do – in terms of our illustration – is to use the lines already given in a new way for the purpose of demarcating an area. Nothing essentially new, however, emerges in the process. But the more fruitful type of definition is a matter of drawing boundary lines that were not previously given at all. What we shall be able to infer from it, cannot be inspected in advance; here, we are not simply taking out of the box again what we have just put into it. (Frege [1884] 1953: 100)

At this stage of our deliberations, when we want to support the interpretation suggesting independence of thought from language, it is worth quoting Frege’s remark from Boole’s logical Calculus and the Conceptscript, where we read that the possibility of decomposing a thought into the argument and the function supposes that the thought (judgable content) is internally complex (in sich gegliedert) (Frege [1880/81] 1979: 912). Not only does this confirm the fact that no actual (unique) logical form or actual composition of the parts is ascribed to a thought, but it also emphasizes that a thought should be treated as something internally complex. It is just a thesis about inner complexity of a thought that is one of the arguments because of which Frege stresses the exceptional value and advantage of the analysis with the use of the argumentfunction pair over the analysis with the use of the subject-predicate pair. The significant advantage of analysis by means of the argument-function pair stems from the fact that in its course not only the argument and the functional expression in the actual case are given, but the possibility of an alternative analysis is offered as well. Frege writes about it in Begriffsschrift, presenting an example with hydrogen and carbon dioxide. From the presented analysis we learn that in the course of splitting the thought “hydrogen is lighter than carbon dioxide” into the argument “hydrogen” and the function “to be lighter than carbon dioxide” we also acquire the knowledge that the same content may be split up in a different way, namely, so that “carbon dioxide” will become the argument, and “being heavier than hydrogen – the function. (cf. Frege, [1879] 1997; Beaney 1996: 238) So when formulating the content by means of

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the argument-function pair in one way, we see that it can be also formulated in a different way. In this respect, an analysis by means of the argument-function pair shows the truth of that a thought may be analyzed in various ways, i.e. for each judgeable content there is no one way in which it can be split up. This fact reveals that thought is an entity which is decomposable by nature. A primary characteristic of thought constitutes its division into parts. Therefore, using a certain analogy referred to by Frege himself, thought – just as the area of a square – has the potential for being split up in different ways (i.e. inside a square four identical squares or four identical triangles may be distinguished). How can one formulate conditions for identity of a thought in such a situation? First, let us notice that Frege seems to realize that identity of reference (Bedeutung) does not entail identity of the thought. “From identity (Gleichheit) of reference (Bedeutung) there does not follow identity of the thought” (Frege [1891] 1952: 30-32). In other words, a definition of identity of the thought cannot be given exclusively on the basis of identity of the meaning (reference) – since identity of the thought is a stronger relationship than identity of the meaning (Bedeutung). If two sentences express one and the same thought, then by definition they share the same logical value. However, if they only share the same reference, we have no grounds for recognizing the two sentences as expressing one and the same thought. Next, it has to be remembered that when we speak about identity of the thought, we speak about identity of something that has to be characterized as cognitive content in the first place, that is, what the subject formulates and then recognizes. Taking into consideration the logical side, the level of reference (Bedeutung), is of utmost importance, albeit it is insufficient. Under such circumstances, a fragment from the work A brief Survey of my logical Doctrines seems to be a crucial one; Frege formulates the following criterion there: Now two sentences A and B can stand in such a relation that anyone who recognizes the content of A as true must thereby also recognize the content of B as true and, conversely , that anyone who accepts the content of B must straightway accept that A. (Equipollence). It is here being assumed that there is no difficulty in grasping the content of A and B. The sentences need not be equivalent in all respects. For instance, one may have what we

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may call a poetic aura, and this may be absent from the other. Such a poetic aura will belong to the content of the sentence, but not to that which we accept as true or reject as false. I assume there is nothing in the content of either of two equipollent sentences A and B [that is, not only logically equipollent with respect to reference (Bedeutung), but equipollent in terms of the content – A.G.] that would have to be immediately accepted as true by anyone who had grasped it properly. The poetic aura then, or whatever else distinguishes the content of A from that of B, does not belong to what is accepted as true; for if this were the case, then it could not be an immediate consequence of anyone’s accepting the content of B that he should accept that of A. For the assumption is that what distinguishes A and B is not contained in B at all, nor is it something that anyone must recognize as true straight off. […] So one has to separate off from the content of a sentence the part that alone can be accepted as true or rejected as false. I call this part the thought expressed by the sentence. It is the same in equipollent sentences of the kind given above. It is only with this part of the content that logic is concerned. I call anything else that goes to make up the content of a sentence the colouring of the thought. (Frege [1906] 1979: 197-198)

Quoting the above fragment is extremely important, as it is impossible to grasp in the proper way the sense of the first sentence in which Frege formulates the criterion according to which two sentences express one and the same thought, without citing the conditions under which the criterion is met. The conditions stated in the fragment above clearly imply that Frege refers to the subject and its cognitive abilities. Then the attention is not focused on the logical value of the content itself but on the way the content is conceived and comprehended by the subject. As a result, two sentences express the same thought only when someone who accepts the content (thought) of sentence A as being true also accepts – directly and with no obstructions – the content (thought) of sentence B as being true. It is not the truthfulness itself – or, in other words, sharing the same reference (Bedeutung) – that matters, but accepting something as true, certainly preceded by grasping the content of the thought. A criterion given in this way assumes that everyone who grasps the thought expressed by sentence A and the thought expressed by sentence B, has to accept the first of these sentences directly and with no obstructions, also accept the second one. Here we see a clear reference to the subject’s cognitive activity. It seems that going in this direction Frege realizes that

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without taking into consideration the subject, every other attempt to give a definition of identity would be too coarse; it would aim at identity of reference (Bedeutung). The question of truth – or in other words, reference – does not disappear. However, it is not examined in abstracto, without taking into consideration the specificity of the very content and the way the content is grasped. When we look at the above characteristics considering identity of thought, we see that it says that everybody who accepts content A as true, has to (immediately) accept content B. Going further, two next things are crucial for this explanation. The first one, that the object referred to by the subject is content (Sinn), and not reference (Bedeutung). And the second one, that the content appears as the object of oblique speech (oratio obliqua). For this reason exchanging A for B cannot happen only on the basis of sharing the same logical value; if it were so, a subject accepting a proposition as true would have to accept also all the other propositions that would be logical consequences of the first proposition. If we want to avoid such a situation, it has to be said rather that A and B express one and the same thought when and only when A and B are exchangeable (salva veritate) in oblique contexts (oratio obliqua). In other words, if two sentences express the same thought, the rule of exchangeability (salva veritate) has to apply to intensional, and not only to extensional contexts. Two sentences A and B have to be intensionally equivalent expressions. Knowing Frege’s explanations about oblique speech and intensional contexts we know that instead of the term “thought” we may use the term “sense”, and say that two sentential expressions A and B express the same sense if they are intensionally equivalent, that is, when they may be exchangeable in oblique contexts. The criterion of identity outlined in this way distinctly proves that thought/sense is a kind of stuff constituting the content of our cognitive attitudes. Hence we may state that when Frege establishes identity of thoughts, he means identity of cognitive content, something that is contained in the subject’s cognitive horizon. Such an expression of the notion of sense/thought that is fine-grained allows to clearly distinguish the content of a thought from the way the thought is expressed (Künne 2007). When the criterion of thought identity is adopted, which refers to intensionally captured equivalence, then, as Beaney (1996: 254255) argues, a thought from the thought as expressed may be distin-

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guished, what finally makes it possible to show a wider dimension of Fregaean stance for the priority of thought over language. References Beaney, Michael 1996. Frege Making Sense. London: Duckworth. Beaney, Michael (ed.) 1997. The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Bell, David 1987. Thoughts. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 28 (1), 36-49. Bell, David and Neil Cooper (eds.) 1990. The Analytic Tradition. London: Blackwell Press. Bell, David 1996. The Formation of Concepts and the Structure of Thoughts. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (3), 583-596. Bermúdez, José Luis 2001. Frege on Thoughts and Their Structure. Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy 4, 87-105. Bermúdez, José Luis 2003. Thinking without Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burge, Tyler 1979. Sinning against Frege. Philosophical Review 88, 398-432. Burge, Tyler. 1990. Frege on Sense and Linguistic Meaning. In: D. Bell and N. Cooper (eds.), 30-60. Carl, Wolfgang 1994. Frege’s Theory of Sense and Reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Church, Alonzo 1943. Carnap’s Introduction to Semantics. Philosophical Review 52 (3), 298-304. Currie, Gregory 1985. The Analysis of Thoughts. Australian Journal of Philosophy 63, 283-298. Dummett, Michael 1981. The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy. London: Duckworth. Dummett, Michael 1991. Frege and Other Philosophers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dummett, Michael 1993. Origins of Analytical Philosophy. London: Duckworth. Dummett, Michael 1993a. What Do I Know when I Know a Language? In: The Seas of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 94-105. Frege, Gottlob [1879] 1997. Begriffsschrift (translated by M. Beaney). In: M. Beaney (ed.), 47-78. Frege, Gottlob [1880] 1979. Boole’s logical Calculus and the Concept-script (translated by P. Long and R. White). In: H. Hermes et al. (eds.), 9-46. Frege, Gottlob [1882] 1980. Letter to Marty 29.08.1882 (translated by H. Kaal). In: G. Gabriel et al. (eds.), 99-102.

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Frege, Gottlob [1884] 1953. Foundations of Arithmetic. A logic-mathematical enquiry into the concept of number (translated by. J.L. Austin). Oxford: Blackwell Press. Frege, Gottlob [1891] 1952. Function and Concept (translated by P.T. Geach). In: P.T. Geach and M. Black (eds.), 21-41. Frege, Gottlob [1892] 1952. On Concept and Object (translated by P.T. Geach). In: P.T. Geach and M. Black (eds.), 42-55. Frege, Gottlob [1897] 1979. Logic (translated by P. Long and R. White). In: H. Hermes et al. (eds.), 126-151. Frege, Gottlob [1906] 1979. Introduction to Logic (translated by P. Long and R. White). In: H. Hermes et al. (eds.), 185-196. Frege, Gottlob [1906] 1979. A Brief Survey of My Logical Doctrines (translated by P. Long and R. White). In: H. Hermes et al. (eds.), 197-202. Frege, Gottlob [1918] 1977.Thoughts (translated by P.T. Geach and R.H. Stoothoff). In: P.T. Geach (ed.), 1-30. Frege, Gottlob [1923] 1979. Logical Generality (translated by P. Long and R. White). In: H. Hermes et al. (eds.), 258-262. Frege, Gottlob [1924] 1979. Sources of Knowledge of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (translated by P. Long and R. White). In: H. Hermes et al. (eds.), 267274. Gabriel, Gottfried, Hans Hermes, Friedrich Kambartel, Christian Thiel and Albert Veraart (eds.) 1980. Gottlob Frege Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Geach, Peter T. and Max Black (eds.), 1952. Translations from Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geach, Peter T. (ed.) 1977. Logical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Press. Gut, Arkadiusz 2005. Gottlob Frege i problemy filozofii współczesnej [Gottlob Frege and the Problems of Contemporary Philosophy]. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL. Gut, Arkadiusz 2012. Gottlob Frege’s Thought in the Light of Inquiries Conducted in Contemporary Philosophy. Studies in Logic and Theory of Knowledge 7, 125-162. Hermes, Hans, Friedrich Kambartel and Friedrich Kaulbach (eds.) 1979. Gottlob Frege. Posthumous Writings. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Kemmerling, Andreas 2010. Thoughts without parts: Frege’s Doctrine. Grazer Philosophische Studien 82, 165-188. Künne, Wolfgang 2007. A Dilemma in Frege’s Philosophy of Thought and Language. Revista di estetica 34, 95-120. Mayer, Verena. 1990. Zerlegung und Struktur von Gedanken. Grazer Philosophische Studien 37, 31-57. Noonan, Harold 2001. Frege. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Tait, William W. (ed.) 1996. Early Analytic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Leonard Linski. Chicago: Open Court. Textor, Mark 2009. A Repair of Frege’s Theory of Thoughts. Synthese 167, 105123. Weiner, Joan 1996. Has Frege a Philosophy of Language? In: W.W. Tait (ed.), 249271. Weiner, Joan 1997. Frege’s Logic and the Theory of Meaning. Acta Analytica 18, 722. Wettstein, Howard 1995. Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake? And Other Essays. Stanford: University Press.

Thomas J. Hughes University of Durham [email protected]

On the Ambiguity in Definite Descriptions Abstract: The following paper will defend the thesis that definite descriptions should receive an attributive semantics only in those instances where they fall under the scope of certain semantic operators. The ambiguity defended will therefore not be the one noted by Donnellan (1966, 1968) and Kripke (1977), as it will not recognise an ambiguity in one and the same proposition. Each and every proposition will receive a single semantics for every occasion of use, and this semantics will be informed by the grammatical configuration of the expressions. If the definite descriptions falls under the scope of a particular semantic operator then it is attributive, if not then it is referential. Keywords: definite descriptions, demonstratives, reference, quantification, phases, Russell

0. Introduction The theory of descriptions advocated by Russell in his landmark paper ‘On Denoting’ (1905) argued that a proposition containing a definite description is to be assigned a quantificational semantics. In addition Russell stated that definite descriptions were not to be assigned a semantics in isolation from a proposition. This theory was directly at odds with Russell’s original position in the Principles of Mathematics (1903) wherein he took definite descriptions to be referential and equated them with constants. The position advocated in the following paper is that certain propositions containing definite descriptions are referential and others quantificational, and that these facts are to be explained grammatically. Additionally it will defend a modification of Russell’s position that definite descriptions cannot be assigned a semantics in isolation from a proposition, the modification will be that definite descriptions

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receive a semantics that is dependent on the larger grammatical structure which is found within. The semantics of a definite description therefore is dependent on a larger grammatical configuration, which will be explained below. Keith Donnellan (1966, 1968) illustrated that in some instances definite descriptions are used referentially and in others, attributively. Critically Donnellan stated that the ambiguity occurs in one and the same proposition and depends on the context of use. The sentence in (1) could receive the paraphrase in (2a) or (2b) depending on the usage: (1) Smith’s murderer is insane. (2) a. Jones is insane. b. Whoever murdered Smith is insane. (2a) is the paraphrase of a referential use, whereas (2b) is a paraphrase of an attributive use. It was suggested by Donnellan that this ambiguity was one that occurred at the level of pragmatics rather than semantics (1966: 297). Kripke supported this and stated that the semantics of (1) should be uniform across uses (1977: 262). The semantics of (1) should therefore be universally equated with the logical form in (3) irrespective of how it is used on a particular occasion: (3) ∃x( (x) & ∀y( (y) → y = x) & (x)) When using a description referentially the proposition retains the semantics of (3), but through pragmatic effects akin to conversational implicatures (e.g. the speaker’s intention) it can be used to make reference to a particular individual. The problem with this treatment of the ambiguity is that by considering it as present in one and the same proposition a semantic difference would be both unappealing and unintuitive. However, a further ambiguity appears to rear its head in (4) and (5): (4) The table is covered with books. (5) The mother of every boy is proud of him.

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In (4) we have a deictic use of the definite description, which if felicitous would be a referential use. Alternatively (5) is only felicitous if used attributively, that is, it is felicitous only in the instance where we state of all mothers that they are proud of their sons. (5) is interchangeable with the paraphrase every boy’s mother is proud of him. The distinction between (4) and (5) is clear in that one is noticeably referential and the other is noticeably attributive. It is the contention of this paper that this ambiguity is the one present in definite descriptions, rather than an ambiguity in one and the same proposition (I will continue to use the term ambiguity even though, strictly speaking, ambiguity is by definition a property of a single proposition). 1. Referential uses One preliminary thing that needs to be assured is that (4) is indeed referential, and that it is referential in its semantics. The first point to flag up is that (4) is deictic and is only felicitous if spoken in a context in which a particular table is present. It is reasonable to suppose therefore that the definite description is acting in a similar fashion to other deictic structures, such as demonstrative descriptions. This position is held in various forms by at least Kaplan (1970), Devitt (1981), and Wettstein (1981, 1983). Kaplan defends the view that there is an identical semantic component, ‘dthat’, acting to create the similarity between (6) and (7): (6) Dthat [“the table”] is covered with books. (7) Dthat [“that table”] is covered with books. The identical element he terms ‘dthat’ acts as an ostensive device for making reference, a device that is akin to pointing but expressed in language. Kaplan states of this similarity “if pointing can be taken as a form of describing, why not take describing as a form of pointing?” (1970: 223) If there is a semantic ambiguity in definite descriptions then there are instances when using a definite description will result in a singular proposition and instances wherein it will result in a general proposition. The

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instances where a definite description contains the ‘dthat’ element are those where the proposition created is singular. For Kaplan the sense of the demonstrative description and the definite description is not present in the proposition itself but is instead used to identify the referent and load that referent into the proposition. In Kaplan’s words “[i]nstead of taking the sense of the description as subject of the proposition, we use the sense only to fix the denotation which we then take directly as subject component of the proposition” (1970: 233). The referent, be it a concrete referent or a discourse referent, is then loaded into the proposition, this is in contrast to the general propositions created in attributive uses where the sense is contained in the proposition rather than the referent. Devitt (1974, 1981, 2007, forthcoming) also defends the view that there is a semantic ambiguity and that the referential use emerges in virtue of its link to demonstratives, amongst other phrases (pronouns, proper names). What Devitt says is that a referential description is such in virtue of the fact that there is a ‘causal-perceptual’ link between the expression the F and an object (1974: 186, 1981: 515, 2007: 22, forthcoming: 2). The explanation of this goes as follows “[t]here is a semantic convention of using ‘the F’ to refer to x which exploits both a causalperceptual link between the speaker and x and the meaning of ‘F’ … such a link accompanies all referential uses. It is then plausible to think that it plays a semantic role, just as it does with a deictic pronoun or demonstrative” (2007: 22). A proposition containing a definite description that makes use of this causal-perceptual link creates a singular proposition, and is therefore semantically referential. Devitt’s position again ties together definite descriptions with demonstratives, and states that they have a common method of picking out their referents. There is a clear intuition in both Kaplan’s and Devitt’s theories that referential descriptions act in a way akin to demonstratives. The intuition exists partially in virtue of the fact that the two can be used interchangeably in certain grammatical contexts without loss or alteration of the proposition’s meaning. This fact is illustrated in (8) and (9) below: (8) a. The table is covered with books. b. That table is covered with books.

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(9) a. Juan is such a bad driver the idiot will get himself killed. b. Juan is such a bad driver that idiot will get himself killed. Further examples can be given but (8), the deictic use, and (9), the epithet use, illustrate the point at hand. However, whilst there are clear similarities between the two types of expressions there are also clear differences. For example, it is impossible to use (10) and (11) interchangeably, and this has something to do with the semantics of demonstratives: (10) That is red. (11) *The is red. The fact is that demonstratives can appear without any noun phrase complement whereas the definite article demands one. Before turning to the reason why this distinction exists let us consider some further differences where it is not possible to use the two types of expression interchangeably, consider the following pairs of sentences: (12) a. b. (13) a. b. (14) a. b.

Barcelona F.C. lost and the fans were furious. Barcelona F.C. lost and those fans were furious. Juan crashed his car and the guy was furious. Juan crashed his car and that guy was furious. I always get the bus. I always get that bus.

The (a) sentences are not interchangeable with the (b) sentences in a way similar to those pairs in (8) and (9). In each of (12-14) the (b) sentences are interpreted deictically, that is relative to a referent that is salient in the context. In (12) the definite description in (a) is felicitous primarily in the context where we are talking about each and every Barcelona fan, whereas in (b) the demonstrative description those fans picks out a subsection of the fans and would be felicitous only with a salient set of selected fans. In (13) the definite description in (a) picks out ‘Juan’, whereas in (b) the demonstrative is naturally interpreted as picking out someone other than ‘Juan’. In (14) we see the same facts arise, (a) contains an attributive description stating only a preferred mode of trans-

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port, whereas in (b) the demonstrative description once again picks out a salient particular bus. The obvious conclusion to draw from the examples in (12-14) is that demonstrative descriptions force a deictic reading in sentences where a definite description does not. Demonstrative descriptions are therefore more deictic than definite descriptions. These facts illustrate a difference between the two that should be noticed when giving an account of the semantics of such expressions, a fact that both Kaplan and Devitt appear to overlook. The forced deictic readings for a demonstrative description is born out of the fact that the demonstrative contains locational information relative to the speaker/addressee that is absent in the definite article. Demonstratives can be seen as the morphological realization of the equivalences in (15): (15) That = [the + there] This = [the + here] The locational information gives us two distinct demonstratives, the distal demonstrative to pick out individuals distant from the speaker and the proximal demonstrative that picks out individuals that are closer to the speaker. The locational information is what causes these expressions to be strongly deictic. Interestingly, when a definite description and a demonstrative counterpart are indeed interchangeable, the locational information of the demonstrative is uninterpreted. In addition, it is always the distal demonstrative rather than the proximal that is capable of being used. This fact becomes more important when we consider that it is reflected cross-linguistically in languages typically taken to lack determiners. Cyr (1993) notes that Montagnais has begun to develop a definite article through the distal demonstrative, and when the distal is used in the definite article manner its locational information is not relevant to its interpretation. Huang (1999) states that the same is true of spoken Mandarin. We can say that the definite article is akin to a distal demonstrative except for the fact that the article has been bleached of its locational information. These facts imply that there is indeed a strong relationship between the definite

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article and the distal demonstrative, yet there remain those differences listed above. 2. The Determiner Phrase The facts expressed above all have to do with the grammar of the determiner phrase. It is within the determiner phrase that we see the similarities and differences captured between the distal demonstrative and the definite article. In addition an argument will be made to the tune that the determiner phrase structures the referential capabilities of those expressions that fall in it, including the referential capabilities of definite descriptions. It will be observed that definite descriptions fulfil the requirement forced by the determiner phrase for being a referential expression, and that if no semantic operator alters the expressions interpretation then they receive a referential semantics. Before turning to how we get the attributive readings of definite descriptions it is important to secure their referential readings. Definite descriptions fall grammatically within what is called the determiner phrase. The determiner phrase contains a phrase head, the determiner position (D), a complement, typically a noun phrase (NP), and a specifier position (specD). The structure can be illustrated in the following tree:

(16)

The diagram in (16) depicts the grammatical structure of the determiner phrase. The D position is that occupied by both the definite article and demonstratives. When the D position is filled with a definite article the noun phrase must also be filled, but when the D position is filled with a demonstrative the noun phrase may remain empty. Two further aspects of the diagram need to be explained, that is the edge and interior dichotomy. Following Sheehan and Hinzen (2012), the

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proposal here is that the edge of the determiner phrase is the locus of reference. That is, the more the interpretation of an expression relies on the interpretation of its edge, the more referential it is. The phrase structure of DPs gives us three logical possibilities for grammatical construction, the first are those instances where only the interior is filled, the second are those instances where both the edge and the interior are filled, and the final instances are those, like proper names, where only the edge is filled. Sheehan and Hinzen neatly correlates these grammatical facts with facts about forms of reference, they state that: [W]here the phrase head D is radically underspecified, only the phrase interior is interpreted and reference is purely configured via the NP description… In definite specific readings, both the phrase edge and the phrase interior appear to enter the interpretive process, and a reading that is intermediate between a referential and a purely quantificational one is derived. Finally, after substitution of the head of the phrase interior into the phrase edge, only the edge can be interpreted, and no restriction enters the way in which reference is configured, giving rigidity. (Sheehan and Hinzen 2012: 12)

The DP therefore creates a spectrum of referential possibilities merely in virtue of possible valuations for the edge and interior. The fact is that definite descriptions fill both the edge and interior of the determiner phrase in order to be grammatical. In virtue of doing so they can swing between referential and attributive readings. Demonstratives do not require a noun phrase complement and as such are biased towards the edge and consequently referential readings; however in instances where the interior is filled they can indeed by attributive (see King 2001 for examples). The determiner phrase creates a spectrum of reference as illustrated below (with * standing for ungrammatical and ¬ for negation): (17) a. b. c. d. e.

Bare Nouns Indefinite Descriptions Definite Descriptions Demonstratives Proper Names

[DP *D [NP]] [DP a *¬[NP]] [DP the *¬[NP]] [DP that ¬*¬[NP]] [DP John [*NP]]

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The spectrum ranges from completely non-referential expressions as in (a) to those that are rigidly referential (e-f). We can see that as expressions become increasingly referential the ungrammatical star moves from the edge to the interior, that is bare nouns are ungrammatical with the edge filled, and proper names/pronouns are ungrammatical with the interior filled. Definite descriptions fall in the middle. The spectrum above illustrates how both the differences in (10-14) and the similarities in (8-9) come about. The similarities exist in virtue of the fact that both types of expression are felicitous with the edge and interior filled, and as such are both capable of referential readings. The condition on being referential is that the edge must be filled, both expressions satisfy that. The differences exist in virtue of the fact that the demonstrative itself contains descriptive information morphologically realised in a single word that allows it to be grammatical without the need for a noun phrase. In this later sense the demonstratives interpretation is dependent solely on the edge, and it consequently forces a referential reading. The determiner phrase illustrates how grammar informs the referential status of the arguments of propositions. Definite descriptions fall between referential and attributive readings, which means that there needs to be external pressures on the construction to establish which reading is present in a particular use of a sentence. The determiner phrase itself is not capable of telling us what reading is present in a particular use, for that we need to look further into the sentence. 3. Referential and attributive readings The proposal advocated here is that definite descriptions contain an ambiguity, but that the ambiguity is present in grammatically contrasting sentences, such as (4) and (5). The determiner phrase illustrates how definite descriptions are capable of being in one instance referential and in another quantificational but it remains to be seen how this valuation comes about and what semantics we should assign.

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Before turning to how definite descriptions are valued it is first necessary to outline two possible semantic valuations for referential and attributive uses. In situations where a description is used deictically to pick out an individual in a clear context then it is reasonable to suppose that it has a semantics similar to that of a demonstrative description. However, the deictic role of a demonstrative is largely determined through the (speaker/addressee) locational information that acts as a restriction on the interpretation. Once this has been bleached and we are left with the definite article there is no need to include this proximity information in the semantics of the expression; however such expressions can still be referential. Following Irene Heim (1982) we might take the semantics of demonstratives and definite descriptions to be open formulae, restricted by descriptive content, in addition to certain proximity information for demonstratives. We can write the semantics in the following way: (18) , which reads ‘value x with the individual that satisfies the descriptive restriction and the proximity restriction ’. Applying this formalism to concrete sentences we can state the semantics as follows: (19) The manager of Barcelona F.C. is Spanish. & S(x) (20) That table is covered with books. & C(x) The above may well be a minimal semantics for such expressions but it gets the important part of the interpretation correct. Rather than being quantified over the variable is valued with an individual that satisfies conditions and . A uniquely identifying description can be given the semantics in (19) and this avoids equating all referential descriptions one for one with demonstrative descriptions. For the attributive uses it will be assumed that definite descriptions receive a Russellian semantics, which is given by the formula in (3). Nothing in this theory depends on the Russellian analysis being correct. So long as there is a contrasting semantics for attributive uses the theory holds.

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Turning to the process via which the semantics is assigned, the theory put forward here is that a definite description is only attributive when it falls under the scope of certain semantic operators. In all other instances the definite description receives a referential semantics. The following two example sentences will be used as motivating this theory, although it is important to note that the examples are not exhaustive: (21) I always get the bus. (22) I want to be the mayor. Both (21) and (22) contain definite descriptions that are attributive rather than referential. There is no particular individual picked out by either definite description. In (21) the definite description is used simply to indicate a preferred mode of transport rather than a particular bus. In (22) the definite description is not referring to a particular person but rather a desired job. The fact that the definite descriptions receive an attributive semantics is because they fall under the scope of a generic and intentional verb respectively. Those verbs force an attributive reading on the object of the sentence. Before we turn to a concrete example, the way in which grammar and semantics interact must be explained. It is standard within the generative grammar literature to take grammatical structure to be built up in computational chunks known as phases (Uriagereka 1999; Boeckx and Grohmann 2007; Chomsky 2008; Gallego 2010). The grammatical structure is built from the bottom up and at certain key points it stops, when computational load reaches its limit. At this point grammatical operations such as case marking, agreement, and movement take place, in addition it is at this point that grammatical structure is transferred to its interfaces. The two main interfaces with grammar, which are taken to be a sensory-motor interface and a conceptual-intentional interface, assign an interpretation to the grammatical structure at the phase level. The conceptual-intentional interface is where expressions receive a semantic interpretation. The phases are typically taken to be the complementizer phrase (C), the transitive verb phrase (v*), and the determiner phrase (D) discussed above. At each phasal stage grammatical structure is sent to receive a semantic interpretation. The phasal interior

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is what is given a semantic interpretation at the point of transfer, and only the edge is observable to the grammatical component for further operations. The idea presented here is that the semantics assigned to the determiner phase is dependent upon the grammatical configuration surrounding it. If the definite description is in the object position then its semantic value is assigned at the level of the transitive verb phase in virtue of being in its interior. If alternatively it is in the subject position then the semantics is assigned at the level of the complementizer phase for the same reason. The sentence in example (21) contains a definite description in object position and is given an attributive semantics, and this is the result of the semantic operator contained in the generic verb. To make this clear the process can be seen in the set of grammatical trees below.

(23)

In (23) we see the building of the determiner phase and when this is complete this triggers the transfer of the interior, the noun phrase complement, which assigns a semantic interpretation to the descriptive content of the definite description. At this point we still do not have a referential or attributive semantics assigned, we merely have the semantics assigned to the descriptive content. In (24) the next part of the grammatical structure is built, at this point the grammatical engine can only work with the phase edge. Once the verb has been merged into the grammatical structure, the interior of the transitive verb phase is transferred to be assigned a semantics, and this time the semantics assigned is either referential or attributive. The semantic type assigned will depend upon the verb merged, with certain verbs containing semantic operators that force an attributive reading, if on the other hand the verb lacks such an operator, a default referential reading is assigned.

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(24)

In (24) we see the full theory in practice. Following the introduction of the generic verb the semantic operator present in it causes the definite description in object position to be interpreted attributively, receiving the quantificational semantics. 4. Conclusion The above theory is a stepping-stone towards understanding how definite descriptions come to contain an ambiguity between referential and attributive readings. To begin with, it was argued, contra Donnellan (1996, 1968) and Kripke (1977), that the ambiguity was one that occurs only in different propositions, not in one and the same proposition. Examples (4) and (5) were given to illustrate the ambiguity. Next it was argued that we can understand the referential uses as having a semantics akin to that of demonstratives and that the differences between the two occur only in respect to the demonstratives containing locational information. Once the distal demonstrative is bleached of this it becomes a definite article, as observed by Cyr (1993) and Huang (1999) cross linguistically. These facts are captured neatly in the grammar of the determiner phase. Finally an account was needed as to how a definite description comes to be valued as referential or attributive, which goes beyond the grammar of the determiner phase in isolation. It was argued that def-

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inite descriptions receive their semantic value in virtue of the phase that they occupy the interior of. An example derivation was given of an attributive interpretation, and it was seen that the attributive interpretation is forced only in particular grammatical contexts; when the description falls under the scope of a semantic operator that forces the reading. Overall this is a programmatic paper and the analysis must be extended to account for expressions like (5); however, it is clear that the grammatical structure of propositions containing a description is key to how its semantic value is assigned. Thus, the theory defends a semantic ambiguity in definite descriptions, whose origin is grammatical. References Boeckx, Cedric and Kleanthes K. Grohmann 2007. Remark: Putting Phases in Perspective. Syntax 10 (2), 204-222. Chomsky, Noam 2008. On Phases. In: M. Kenstowicz (ed.), 1-52. Cyr, Danielle 1993. Cross-Linguistic Quantification: Definite Articles vs Demonstratives. Language Sciences 15 (3), 195-229. Devitt, Michael 1974. Singular Terms. The Journal of Philosophy 71 (7), 183-205. Devitt, Michael 1981. Donnellan’s Distinction. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 6 (1), 511-526. Devitt, Michael 2007. Referential Descriptions and Conversational Implicatures. European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (2), 7-32. Devitt, Michael forthcoming. Referential Descriptions: A Note on Bach. European Journal of Analytic Philosophy. Donnellan, Keith 1966. Reference and Definite Descriptions. The Philosophical Review 75 (3), 281-304. Donnellan, Keith 1968. Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again. The Philosophical Review 77 (2), 203-215. Epstein, Samuel and Norbert Hornstein 1999. Working Minimalism. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Gallego, Ángel J. 2010. Phase Theory. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Heim, Irene. 1982. The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts. Huang, Shuanfan 1999. The Emergence of a Grammatical Category definite article in spoken Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 31, 77-94. Kaplan, David 1970. Dthat. Syntax and Semantics 9, 221-243.

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Kenstowicz, Michael (ed.) 2008. Ken Hale: A life in Language. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. King, Jeffrey C. 2001. Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Kripke, Saul 1977. Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2, 255-276. Russell, Bertrand 1903. The Principles of Mathematics. Cornwall: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Russell, Bertrand 1905. On Denoting. Mind 14 (56), 479-493. Sheehan, Michelle and Wolfram Hinzen 2012. Moving Towards the Edge. Linguistic Analysis 37 (3-4), 405-458. Uriagereka, Juan 1999. Multiple Spell-Out. In S. Epstein and N. Hornstein (eds.), 251-282. Wettstein, Howard K. 1981. Demonstrative Reference and Definite Descriptions. Philosophical Studies 40, 241-257. Wettstein, Howard K. 1983. The Semantic Significance of the ReferentialAttributive Distinction. Philosophical Studies 44, 187-196.

Carl Humphries Ignatianum Academy, Cracow [email protected]; [email protected]

Proceduralism and OntologicoHistorical Understanding in the Philosophy of Language Abstract: Since Frege, analytical philosophers have mostly construed language proceduralistically, treating reference and assertion as largely uniform procedures for reidentifying entities and proposing states of affairs as true. Their conviction that these procedures make sense as such typically presupposes a broadly Kantian intuition that they reflect some larger self-validating normative sphere. This faces two objections: that it misconstrues the role of ahistorical, ontologically significant commitments/contexts, and that it ignores cases involving radically historical understanding. The first shows up inter alia in the Wittgensteinian claim that it fails to leave room for a proper understanding of the contextual grounding of language use. The second appears in the critique of historicistic forms of proceduralism. Each objection captures something, but it seems one cannot embrace both on pain of inconsistency, as they entail conflicting readings of the existential quantifier. A third position, explored by Heidegger and the ‘third’ Wittgenstein, rejects the disjunction between ahistorical-ontological and historical-contingent forms of commitment and context, thus avoiding having to choose between these two readings. This, however, involves a quietistic stance regarding the distinguishability of ahistorical-ontological and historical-contingent forms of commitment and context, which is sometimes counterintuitive. A possible alternative is sketched, involving the notion of ontologico-historical understanding. Keywords: language, reference, assertion, ontological commitment, historical commitment, ontologico-historical understanding, proceduralism

1. Proceduralism and the philosophy of language Proceduralism holds that what we do or think or know is partly validated by how, in some more or less general sense, we go about doing or think-

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ing or knowing it – that is to say, by what procedures we follow. Philosophically, proceduralists typically claim that human thought or understanding exhibits, at least in certain respects, an intrinsically selfvalidating character. They generally believe that there is an intelligible sense in which the validity of such forms of thought or understanding can be said to be a function not just of some particular content we entertain, but also of some overall form that thought or understanding is required to possess. This form is only exhibited when the right procedures are followed, therefore its presence testifies to the fact that those procedures have been adhered to. Taking under consideration even a broad range of positions of this sort, it seems that most (if not all) kinds of proceduralism appeal in some way to a notion of rationality as a basis for determining their preferred conception of what, precisely, should be invested with this self-validating status. Proceduralism in this broadly construed sense (as distinct from the Rawlsian one) has, without doubt, played a significant role in modern analytical philosophy of language. The competing claims about the nature of linguistic reference and assertion put forward there point to an ongoing dispute about which areas or aspects of human thought and understanding are to be construed proceduralistically, as possessing an intrinsically self-validating (and so potentially context-independent and formalizable) character, and which not. The most salient example of this is the tension between the essentially formal or propositional paradigm of language that dominated early analytical philosophy (Frege, Russell, the Tractatus), and the emphatically antiformalistic variant of contextualism about meaning-related issues introduced by the later Wittgenstein. Indeed, much of what has followed since in analytical philosophy of language has aimed at achieving a satisfactory theoretical reconciliation between these two overall approaches. Within contemporary philosophy of language, proceduralism about meaning and reference might be thought of as capturing, in a vague but nevertheless fundamental sort of way, the underlying philosophical (vs. psychological) significance of various putative anticontextualist commitments. Introducing the concept of procedural validity as a positive term here may serve to draw attention to wider philosophical concerns that potentially lie behind and motivate the various positions in play – con-

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cerns which, given the technical orientation of such philosophy, have tended to be passed over. But in that case why not also pose questions about whether such positions are worthy of assent in these broader terms too? Surely, it makes sense to wonder about the rightness of such positions, not exclusively as they pertain to more or less specific claims about the context-dependence, or lack thereof, of certain philosophically interesting features of language, but also as positions implicitly adopted at a more general level – the level at which questions arise about the significance of proceduralism. The upshot is that the introduction of the notion of procedural validity into philosophical debates about language constitutes an invitation to think about what is involved more generally, where answers given at this level may then still impact on more specific language-related disputes. In that case, even if our primary concern is with digesting the significance of the language-centred disputes in which figures such as Frege and Wittgenstein have played a prominent role, it will make sense to ask in a more general sort of way whether proceduralism is something we should accept or reject. This article sets out to review the salient issues involved in seeking an answer to this question, keeping in mind its implications for language. 2. The varieties of proceduralism Proceduralism typically holds that there is something about the workings of the human mind, or about human practices or behaviour, that is selflegitimating. The classic example is Kant’s conception of the human mind as self-legislating with respect to the form and status of practicalethical and theoretical kinds of knowledge, in virtue of its possession of reason. Indeed, within the history of Western philosophy, Kant played the leading role in bringing about and helping to complete a shift from a previously dominant conception of thought and knowledge as more or less ontologically or ontologico-theologically grounded to one according to which they are taken to be procedurally grounded in this kind of way. This shift is generally interpreted as reflecting his epistemologically ‘critical’ turn, motivated by the aim of seeking to free human thought

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from dogmatic tendencies within traditional metaphysics while nevertheless establishing, or preserving, the sort of understanding of how thought and knowledge stand relative to the empirical sciences that would allow us to think of human beings as freely rational agents – agents, that is, who may then bear moral responsibility for their choices and actions, and so on. In this respect, Kant is considered to have been motivated by the broadly humanistic goal of harmonising theoretical knowledge (the natural sciences) with practical-ethical knowledge, which he sought to do by means of a unifying move that is tantamount to insisting on the possibility of adopting a higher-level standpoint – one that purports to take in both, but from a perspective that remains recognizably human in its sense of the irreducible significance of both morality and rationality. Of course, one of the great issues in philosophy of the last century or so has been the question of how far this shift ought to be thought of as calling for qualification or reversal. Is there, as many philosophers have argued, a requirement for a viable post-critical philosophy, and if so, does this lead back, at all, to certain pre-critical philosophical insights (e.g. those of Aristotle)? How far would we then be justified in rejecting, or at least distancing ourselves from, Kant’s humanism? The complexity of these issues exceeds what can be addressed in one article, but the fact remains that they are relevant to the standard problems dealt with by philosophers working with language: our conceptions of language do often reflect broader commitments, assumptions or intuitions about proceduralism. For example, the belief that one can pursue a philosophical investigation of language without reference to such motivating commitments at all is itself only tenable against the background of certain assumptions about the self-standing character of language or linguistic communication – assumptions that are often tantamount to a proceduralistic understanding. Historically, the Kantian shift mentioned above first manifests itself as having implications for the philosophy of language with the ensuing rise to prominence of the idea that the basic units of human thought, knowledge and understanding are not the concepts denoted by individual terms within propositions (i.e. those filling the places reserved for subject and predicate in such propositions), together with the structural possibilities opened up by these denotables via the formal relations of tradi-

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tional term logic and their applications in syllogistic reasoning, but are instead the judgements or thoughts expressed by propositions themselves. This idea acquired its paradigmatic modern formulation, of course, in Frege’s context principle and, along with ideas about the analysability of linguistic sentences along lines derived from the logical analysis of mathematical propositions, may be said to have initiated modern analytical philosophy, at least in its early phase. The logicism of early analytical philosophy amounts, then, to a version of proceduralism centred on commitments regarding the nature of propositional assertion: e.g. that everything stateable in natural language can be expressed in mathematical logic (Frege, Russell), or that all stateable facts are subject to strictly logical limits on how language pictures the world (the Tractatus). The commitments involved are, in both cases, proceduralistic, inasmuch as they imply general positions as to the nature of our assertoric practices that would not make sense unless one held the correspondingly general features they are concerned with to be entailed by some overarching character that our assertings are required to share, as a condition of their possessing the distinctive legitimacy they have for us when regarded as acceptable instances of propositional assertion. (In other words, that any such character should be maintained over all conceivable variations in intralinguistic or extralinguistic context consistent with the idea of a string of words counting as a purportedly fact-stating propositional assertion is simply a reflection of – is already implicit in – our prior intuitions or assumptions about the nature of this particular kind of legitimacy.) Indeed, similar commitments of a proceduralistic kind are implicit not only in most subsequent philosophical characterizations of the nature of linguistic meaning and reference, but also in those positions that seek to understand these things against the background of some relatively general conception of the communicative function of everyday language use. Hence the claim of Strawson (1959), that all communication about particulars involves forms of speaker-hearer reidentification presupposing uniquely identifying references to spatio-temporal continuants and their spatio-temporal locations, amounts to a proceduralistic stance about reference qua one of the essential elements of communication (and something similar might be said of the more narrowly specific form of that

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claim put forward by Evans (1982) in respect of demonstrative identification). Likewise, the various claims put forward about how we interpret speaker intention in third-person terms on the basis of certain rationality-presupposing norms amount to variants or elements of a proceduralistic conception of the normative and rational character of linguistic communication.1 In broad terms, the difference made to such theoretical construals of language by their proponents’ adoption of a proceduralistic stance is that an implication comes into play to the effect that we should think of assertion and reference, and in some cases also language-use (or, where such a term is appropriate, linguistic behaviour), as having some overall, internally consistent character. In virtue of this character, some or all of these can be understood as corresponding to, or being regulated by, procedures held to possess intrinsic and general validity where language is concerned, and it is in some way thanks to this that these features can be regarded as fulfilling some purpose – e.g. a practical goal of passing on information – that is itself assumed to be generally in force. Before considering critiques of proceduralism, let us note in passing a couple of additional features that cannot be properly explored here. One concerns the ultimate motivations identifiable in particular versions of proceduralism when construed as an overarching philosophical position, and how far these remain consistent with those of Kant’s version, with 1

Such a conception typically involves some general idea about the role of inferentialistic forms of understanding, or about there being a universal practice in place, either of ascribing, in a supposedly pragmatically rational sort of way, maximally coherent and empirically grounded belief-sets to speakers, or of adhering to conversational maxims pertaining to the interpretation of utterances in the light of reciprocal presumptions about participants’ commitment to rational cooperation, or of interpreting such utterances inferentialistically for the sake of holding speakers to account rationally for their discursive commitments. Such norms are often seen as analogous to what is involved in scientific theory construction, and where this is so it is worth pointing out that philosophical conceptions of the role played by such norms in that area normally amount to statements of a methodological commitment to coherentism as a regulative epistemic ideal. Such statements are proceduralistic, in that they reflect general epistemological positions concerning the status of the methodological precepts of the sciences as these relate to human knowledge generally.

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its underlying humanism. The other concerns the extent to which proceduralism should, or should not, be understood as a commitment about matters that are essentially ahistorical, and so incompatible with any form of historicism. Regarding the first, Kant’s humanism involves the idea that by affirming a priori commitments of a minimally necessary kind, some positive constraints can be imposed, within epistemology, on the scope of both potentially dogmatic forms of rationalism and potentially ultra-sceptical forms of empiricism. Such constraints, as we noted, imply an overview of relations between contrasting forms of human knowledge and understanding, and with this a basis for reconciling them into a unified totality. For Kant the relations at issue are those holding between ethicopractical and theoretical-scientific forms of knowledge, an overall characterization that might also take in Hegel and Marx. For neo-Kantian humanists like Cassirer, they are between the ‘symbolic forms’ manifested in human culture and those manifested in the empirical and formal sciences.2 For Frege and Husserl, they are between logical constraints on thought and its experiential correlates (in the sense of phenomenologically disclosed ‘intending’) on the one hand, and psychological factors on the other. Turning to the second issue, we should note that most forms of proceduralism in Western philosophy are ahistorical in that they represent a theoretical take on supposedly invariant aspects of the human condition, construed at one and the same time in epistemological and ethicopractical, or in some cases cultural-symbolic, terms. This also holds for more specifically political and/or ethical manifestations of proceduralism that invoke a formal-procedural ideal of how human beings should conduct their dealings with one another (e.g. contractualism). But sometimes proceduralism is historical. This is so where the idea of an ultimate appeal to procedural validity derives its justification specifically from its perceived capacity to furnish a response to certain problems that emerge in the light of a prior commitment to historicism. Such forms of proceduralism are historicistically historical: they presuppose historicism. That is the case for the dialectics of Hegelianism and Marxism, 2

See Cassirer (1955/1957).

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with their respective proceduralistic commitments to determinate negation. It is also true of a wide swathe of twentieth-century post-Marxist, post-Nietzschean critical theorising about culture and society, whose central point of reference seems to be the thought that there are singularities of personal and/or collective experience whose overriding importance in the contemporary socio-political context requires a special form of reflective acknowledgement – one that can only be achieved theoretically, utilising interpretative procedures specifically oriented towards resisting the incorporation and perpetuation of ideologically implicated claims. The distinction between ahistorical and historical versions of proceduralism matters because these invite quite different forms of critique, whose relationship to each other then raises further problems. These, as we shall see, also bear on linguistic reference and assertion, but have largely been ignored.3 3. Critiques of proceduralism Critiques of proceduralism can be grouped according to what sort of proceduralism they criticize. Firstly, there are critiques that claim that ahistorical proceduralism cannot capture the real nature of the commitments that frame our empirically oriented understanding and knowledge of how things are.4 As such framing commitments are typically associated with notions of ‘ontological’ commitment (under one or other of the various meanings that the term ‘ontological’ has assumed in modern philosophy), it seems reasonable to say, loosely, that these critiques are ‘ontologically motivated’, and that together they furnish options for what 3

4

Proceduralism sometimes presents itself as both ahistorical and historicistically historical, as when the same form of validity is viewed both as a historical attainment and as a priori transcendental ideal. Both critiques are then potentially relevant. Even if this were not so, the points brought to light by each critique would need to be squared with those of the other one. Our use of the word ‘frame’ here is meant to reflect its etymological connection with notions of ‘making possible’, ‘projecting from’, and ‘helping forward’ – as reflected in the common Indo-European root of the English terms ‘frame’ and ‘from’.

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we shall hereon refer to as the ontological critique of proceduralism. Secondly, there is the critique that claims that historicistically historical proceduralism cannot capture the real nature of our commitments about things that are historical in the sense that they are understood by us to be historically contingent, and which then furnishes a historical critique of proceduralism. Thirdly, and finally, there are critiques that argue that both kinds of proceduralism are wrong, because both of them presuppose the drawing of a fundamentally disjunctive distinction between ahistorical and ontological concerns, commitments, and forms of understanding on the one hand, and historically contingent ones on the other, where the drawing of such a distinction at a fundamental level is itself targeted for critique. This yields one or more critiques of a position we shall call ‘ontologico-historical disjunctivism’. These may be motivated by quietism about the very possibility of making a basic-level distinction between ontologically framing and historically contingent forms of concern, commitment and understanding. We shall call this position ‘ontologico-historical quietism’. 3.1. The ontological critique of ahistorical proceduralism The basic charge levelled against ahistorical proceduralism pertains to our framing commitments – commitments we take ourselves to have because of their role as preconditions for the possibility of certain kinds of practical or theoretical knowledge and understanding that we more or less take for granted, so that they are presupposed by the latter. Proceduralism – it is claimed – fails to differentiate sufficiently between elements or aspects of language or thought as these specifically pertain to such framing commitments on the one hand, and as they specifically pertain to what is framed by those framing commitments on the other. More specifically, it fails to differentiate between these in respect of what it says or implies about linguistic meaning, reference, assertion, etc. The critique comes in three versions, which may be respectively characterized as neo-Aristotelian, early-Heideggerian (Being and Time), and later-

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Wittgensteinian (Philosophical Investigations I).5 We shall focus here on just those versions of these critiques that carry the most direct implications for language. The neo-Aristotelian critique may itself be arrived at from several directions, all of which involve some rehabilitation of metaphysical essentialism. It may begin from a realism about phenomenologically disclosed essences, where this, in turn, may, as in some forms of neo-scholastic philosophy, be theologically inspired, or may correspond to a strictly phenomenological stance – the sort of stance that, historically, as with Ingarden, sought to distance itself from Husserl’s embrace of transcendental idealism as a basis for phenomenology. Alternatively, it may be arrived at (as has been more typically the case in the context of recent analytical philosophy) on the basis of what is thought to be implied by some more or less universal conceptual presuppositions of ordinary language (and the everyday understanding of the world that these reflect): here a neo-Aristotelian form of metaphysical analysis makes an appearance, and is used to explicate everyday conceptions of thinghood (artefacts, living things, etc.), causal powers, dependency relations, dispositional capacities, etc.6 Taken to its logical conclusion, this may suggest advantages for term logic over Fregean mathematical logic when it comes to respecting the validity of inferences between general kind terms – inferences of the sought that, according to realist forms of essentialism, are needed to express our understanding of essences themselves. Fregean mathematical logic emerges as implicitly anti-essentialist and so by no means neutral with respect to ontological matters. In its place, a return to an ontologically grounded conception of logic may be advocated – the latter disclosed via phenomenologico-categorial intuitions pertaining to essences, universal kinds, etc. This would vindicate the longstanding claim of neo-scholastics (e.g. Veatch 1969) that the recursivity of Fregean mathematical logic misrepresents the nature of essentialist commitments in language (and the inferences based on them) by implying a generalized possibility of logical ascent as regards contexts

5 6

See Heidegger (1922/1962) and Wittgenstein (1953). See Wiggins (1980), Lowe (1998), and for a recent overview, Tahko (2012).

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of predication.7 It also lends force to the idea that has come to prominence in some recent analytic philosophy, according to which essentialism and logical modality are held to be divergent in respect of what they imply for basic modal categories like necessity and possibility.8 The early-Heideggerian critique takes a different line, first arguing that acts of assertion only make sense when their apophantic (showing) character has a point, and then claiming (in a phenomenologically motivated way) that this depends on when it makes sense for things to be shown by us to one another, inasmuch as they have not already shown themselves. What then follows is that assertibility must be relativized to some more basic context than any mere context of formal assertibility. For the early Heidegger, that more basic one is furnished by a hermeneutically ontological phenomenology of practical enworldment and practical-existential temporality (Being and Time). The later-Wittgensteinian critique offers a parallel approach, inasmuch as what Heidegger does in relativizing assertibility to practical-existential context, Wittgenstein does (in the Investigations) in relativizing conceptual reference-determining meaning to practice-constituted contexts. According to the latter, the intelligibility of the ‘grammaticality’ of human concept-use depends on how linguistic act-types function within ‘language games’, while language games, in turn, derive their point from their role in helping to sustain practices. The upshot is that universally applicable logical constraints on propositional sense (viz. the Tractatus) are to be replaced by ‘grammatical’ ones internal to practices, where these latter reflect extra-linguistic variations between practice-constituted forms of life. A final step in the analysis is the recognition that such forms of life express human values, concerns and purposes, construed by Wittgenstein in a pluralistically piecemeal way whose implications for a range of issues of philosophical concern (e.g. relativism) remain controversial.

7

8

This runs parallel to the Wittgensteinian idea that our intuitions about ethical value simply leave no room for logical ascent to second-order metaethical characterizations of ethicality itself. See Fine (1994) and Vetter (2011).

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Summing up, we may note that each of these three critiques proposes that we should replace a relatively far-reaching but abstract form of proceduralism about thought and language, manifested in presumptions about the overall analysability of language as a formally logical system, with something else. For the neo-Aristotelian it must make way for the possibility of entertaining essentialist modal commitments, construed as constitutive of the essences of certain kinds of thing, and not as reflecting any corresponding feature of language, thought or the human mind per se. For early Heidegger a formal paradigm of intelligibility is to be replaced by the practical intelligibility internal to the basic ‘situation’ of Dasein’s existing temporally in its world. For the later Wittgenstein it is to be replaced by the ‘grammatical’ contrast between making and lacking sense, as this specifically pertains to our participation in practices that reflect human purposes and concerns that may themselves vary from one situating context to another. In each case the replacement is a context of intelligibility that purports to be less abstract, or less far-reaching (as regards inclusiveness), but still self-validating. Such critiques, rather than entailing a total rejection of what is involved in ahistorical proceduralism, suggest scope-restrictions on its applicability to human affairs.9 3.2. The historical critique of historicistically historical proceduralism Historicistically historical proceduralism, as was noted earlier, presupposes historicism, since it proposes a form of understanding – in this case that of an overarching historical dialectic – that claims to validate itself proceduralistically on the basis of the general premise that realityas-a-whole should be construed in constitutively historical terms – that is to say, in terms that might be said to be radically historical (i.e. historical ‘through and through’). This means we are dealing with something whose intelligibility is held to be entirely independent of ahistorical 9

The deeper issue here, of what proceduralistic and non-proceduralistic conceptions of self-validatingness might be said to have in common, is something I will have to explore on another occasion. It concerns the ultimate form of alignment of order and value in reality – a theme that goes back to Plato’s Symposium.

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framing commitments of a substantive (i.e. ontological) rather than merely procedural (formal-logical) kind. The most straightforward critique of such a position, construed as an instance of proceduralism, argues that it is internally problematic, because either the historicism in question is not, after all, radically historical in the sense just outlined (in that an ontological commitment to a historical telos’s being in play is required for it to make sense), or it is so, but presupposes a commitment to a fatalistic determinism about the future that is held to be intuitively implausible. This stems from the idea that historical intelligibility, properly construed, is always constituted ex post factum. If that is so, then historicism (as a general thesis) presupposes anticipatory knowledge of the end of everything, and such knowledge can only be grounded in either the grasp of an ontologically (and ahistorically) intelligible historical telos or in a commitment to fatalism.10 The idea that historical intelligibility is always constituted ex post factum certainly makes sense if we think that what is historically intelligible consists in a series of occurrences that bring us to a point where they themselves stand revealed as having terminated in an outcome. That outcome then retrospectively confers an ex post factum significance upon them, in virtue of which they constitute a ‘self-standing’ historical episode – as with, for example, the events leading up to some unforeseen but overridingly significant development. Such an episode will be made up of changes in a diachronically unfolding modal scenario whose endstate is the unavoidability of the outcome that has occurred.11 As such, 10

11

A further significant critical point is that such thinking prevents us from seeing that historical understanding can also be ‘radically historical’ in the absence of historicism, inasmuch as it figures as such as part of our ordinary common-sense historical understanding. (taking the latter to be distinct from the essentially interpretative discipline of ‘history’ construed as a form of scholarly research into areas of the past with which one is not directly acquainted by virtue of having witnessed them oneself). For formal analysis of this, see von Wright (1984a). The central idea is that something is understood historically when we understand how it came to be unavoidable through a process of successive eliminations of alternative possibilities brought about by antecedent events. The intuition is that what matters about a

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they can only be grasped after they have happened and a final point of ‘historical closure’ has been reached. In the absence of divinatory premonitions about how the future will look from an ultimate final vantage point, it is hard to see how this could ever be possible with respect to ‘reality-as-a-whole’. 3.3. The critique of ontologico-historical disjunctivism as a proceduralistic premise The historical critique of historicistic proceduralism opens up a perspective on historical intelligibility that is significant for other reasons too. These are connected with the thought that even in the absence of historicism, human understanding may be radically historical: that is, it may be so if or when it concerns something whose only or ultimate significance is historical, in that its significance is necessarily revealed– if it is so at all – ex post factum, without reference to any substantive framing commitments. (This, as we shall see later, when combined with elements of the ontological critique of ahistorical proceduralism, opens up a further perspective on general and language-related issues related to proceduralism.) If one attaches importance to such instances of non-historicistic yet radically historical intelligibility, then the historical critique (of historicistically historical proceduralism) will also have critical implications for ahistorical proceduralism. To grasp this, we must first understand why instances of this sort of historical intelligibility might matter to us. Such cases may be construed in two ways, each with potentially different implications. They can be construed either in essentially firstperson-recollection-based terms, or in essentially third-person-based terms. In the former case, radical ex post factum historical intelligibility will be constituted from the recollective standpoint of individual or colhistorical understanding is that it charts, and by doing so already divulges a significance in, the particular form taken by this process of ‘progressive enfatement’. Our curiosity about counterfactual scenarios then makes sense as an inclination to try to discern the provenance of once contingent events and states of affairs.

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lective subjects engaged in the first instance in reflective contemplation of their past – of the sort most obviously typified in Western cultures by religious and/or poetic forms of introspection. In the latter, it will reflect third-person-based construals of the intrinsic significance of completed historical episodes – episodes pertaining in the first instance to the lives of others, or to one’s own just insofar as it is conceivable as standing on a par with these. Central to the idea of first-person-based radically historical intelligibility is the notion that acts of recollection (and rituals of remembrance) play a constitutive role in relation to reflection on the meaning of a recollected past: a ‘subject’ contemplates the ex post factum significance that past events have when viewed from the perspective of the present, where this implies, in turn, that the relevant episodes of historical development themselves really only count as such in virtue of the ex post factum significance they have when viewed from the standpoint of recollection in the present. However, Wittgensteinian considerations pertaining to the public-private distinction make any attempt to spell out the wider implications of this philosophically problematic: there is no agreement about how we might separate out structural features of public language-use (and any structures of understanding these express) from private introspection. Perhaps, then, we should look to third-person-based radically historical intelligibility to furnish any implications relevant to a further critique of proceduralism. To get a sense of why the latter might be considered important, we must first invoke some sources of a kind that tend not to figure even in the remote theoretical background as this normally pertains to proceduralism. There is, within contemporary philosophising about ethical matters, a strand that might best be described as committed to a form of nonontological personalism, whose distinctive claim is that our fundamental conception of a person is constituted not in terms of a mere continuous form of self-identity, or even some richer notion (such as Aristotle’s) of how a human being comes to be thought of as subsisting through changes. Instead, it is held to be constituted as a reflection of what is implied in respect of it by our ethical responses to some series of developments whose significance, given our response (e.g. compassion, admiration, etc.), is such as to require that we then predicate of it that it corresponds

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to the life-history, and thus also the existence presupposed by this, of a being construed as the bearer of ethical personhood. This is certainly not an easy idea to grasp, but it might be taken to be the essence of the thought expressed in Wittgenstein’s oft-quoted remark: “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul” (Philosophical Investigations II. iv).12 What we respond to in such cases, and what is then invested with significance because of our having responded to it, is what we would then typically go on to think of as having already transpired in the way of things’ being historically significant in such a life, where this commits us to conceiving of such a life as historically constituted.13 If, moreover, the life defined in terms of our responses happens to already be over, then the form of personhood entailed by our responses will be exhaustive of personhood as it pertains to that life (qua life-history). Viewing such a life as the life of this or that person will just mean viewing it with reference to something itself understood in strictly non-ontological, radically historical terms – as historical ‘through and through’.14 The interesting implications of this emerge when we consider what follows for language from this form of antiproceduralism, alongside what is entailed by the ahistorical critiques mentioned earlier. To begin with, let us note that prior to any scope-restrictions stemming from the ahistorical (ontological) critiques mentioned earlier, ahistorical proceduralism in the philosophy of language (Frege, Russell, Tractatus) assumes that we can unify all kinds of commitment about the ‘existence’ or ‘reality’ of logical objects (i.e. occurring events, existing 12

13

14

See Wittgenstein (1953: 178). For a groundbreaking attempt at an exposition of this line of thinking, that takes as its point of departure Wittgenstein’s remark, see Cockburn (1990). The most obvious and pronounced instances of this mode of receptiveness are to be seen in how we respond to the lives of others when we encounter those lives as historically terminated episodes – something that provides the motivation for biography as a genre. One could construct an analogous response-based conception of historically terminated communities – one applicable, for instance, to the way of life of Central European Jews prior to the Holocaust, or, indeed, to any community whose traditional form of life can be said to have been destroyed by the advent of modernity.

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things, etc.) under a single minimally thick notion of so-called ‘existential commitment’, typically expressed by using the ‘existential quantifier’ that is symbolized as ∃x and standardly paraphrased by means of informal phrases like ‘there is’. This form of commitment, it must be noted, signals no more than the availability of something within some domain of discourse to serve as an argument satisfying some propositional function. Each of the ahistorical (ontological) critiques surveyed before implies that this will be problematic in some way or other. For neo-Aristotelianism, it wrongly encourages us to think of all inferences as running between propositions resting on existential commitments of this minimally thick sort (to the exclusion of syllogistic inferences involving kind terms, grounded in an essentialist construal of the referents of these). For Heideggerians, it fails to differentiate between what it means for mere entities to ‘be’ or ‘exist’, and what it means for reflective beings to do so, where these are construed as instantiating temporalized Being (together with its distinctive phenomenology of practical engagements, where this then also contextualizes our grasp of entities themselves). For the later Wittgenstein (of the Investigations), it fosters a false conception of ‘existence’ as involving some sort of underlying context-invariable mode of commitment – one that will be wrongly thought of as invariant across different practice-constituted forms of life, language games, etc. The most straightforward way of capturing what these three positions have in common is to note that in all of them the restrictions imposed on procedurality engender a requirement to differentiate expressively not only between commitments pertaining to actualities on the one hand and to hypothetical possibilities on the other (as in the generalized modal ontological discourse of actualism and possible worlds theory), but also commitments pertaining to constitutive possibilities (‘potentialities’) on the one hand and to merely hypothetical ones on the other. Embracing both of these distinctions entails ontologico-historical disjunctivism. This is because the three ahistorical (ontological) critiques suggest that an existence-commitment with respect to some object of reference will, at least on some occasions, imply a commitment to certain (non-hypothetical) possibilities being taken as constitutive of the framing context that is a precondition of the intelligibility of the exis-

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tence-commitment itself (and of any ‘Russellian’ reference that implies it). Hence, consistency requires that the notion of existential commitment we take as implicit in such cases be thick enough to also capture the particular sort of existential commitments invoked when we seek to express that kind of implication. The significant feature here is that if the common minimum of commitment expressed by the standard use of the existential quantifier (∃x) is itself interpreted as thick enough to leave room for this (in the sense that it allows for the existence of ‘potentialities’ in the sense of unactualized but constitutive possibilities), then it will conflict with what we want to say about radically historical phenomena. This is because a commitment to the radical historicality of some phenomenon just is, as we have seen, a commitment to there being no such implied framing commitments in play as preconditions for the intelligibility of that phenomenon, and hence no context in which the existence of such ‘potentialities’ could intelligibly be posited. The upshot is that embracing both critiques of proceduralism would require us to have in play, at one and the same time, two distinct interpretations of the concept of existential commitment: one that expressly leaves room for such implications, and one that expressly does not. One might then be inclined to think that this places ahistorical and historical dimensions of our structures of understanding and commitment in a disjunctive relationship with one another, at least with respect to how they are manifested through language at the level of our readings of the significance of the existential quantifier. That, in turn, would threaten to preclude any possibility of reaching a unified overview of the relative scope and importance of ahistorical and historical forms of understanding of the world – the sort of unifying standpoint that might furnish a basis for a humanism comparable in its significance to Kant’s. At any rate, it now looks as if the unity of commitment expressed by a proceduralistic understanding, rather than being replaced by an alternative understanding that is more thickly defined, more restrictive, but somehow still capable of expressing the logico-linguistic basis for an overview, has been lost. This suggests that if we really seek such a unity, but also accept the validity of both critiques, we must look beyond the disjunctivistic conflict between ontological and historical forms of commitment that these critiques themselves together imply.

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This is where the third form of critique, which precisely takes as its target the perceived disjunction between ontological and historical forms of understanding apparently brought to light by these differences pertaining to existential commitment, comes properly into view. This critique, at least in its versions to date, invokes a kind of quietism about the very distinction between ontological and historical forms of understanding as a basis for dissolving the disjunction in terms not tantamount to a return to proceduralism. Such a position is to be found in the later Wittgenstein, but also in the later Heidegger, for whom (much as with his earlier critique of proceduralism) the phenomenological conditions bearing on the intelligibility of the apophantic character of assertion call for a more basic context than that of formal linguistic assertibility.15 In this case of Wittgenstein, such a position emerges as a response to the concerns explored in On Certainty.16 In that work, as part of a response to the issue of scepticism raised by Moore, he suggests that his account of the context-dependency of linguistic meaning (as given in the Investigations) can be understood as also, in effect, redefining the Kantian idea of an analytic/synthetic epistemological boundary pertaining to 15

16

For Heidegger, such a context is to be furnished by a poetics of Being as both self-revealing and self-concealing, conceived so that it leaves no room for a foundational distinction to be made between ontologically and historically grounded forms of commitment, since it involves quietism about explanatory grounding per se. He seeks to draw attention to the existence of a longstanding tradition in Western thought of assuming that one must always choose between justifying something either by rationalizing it in the sense of showing how it is required as part of a general structure of possibility (cf. Kant’s a priori knowledge), or by treating it as explainable in terms of either historical factors or other causally explanatory conceptions that are tantamount to regarding it as fundamentally contingent. His point is that this implicitly presupposes the more basic idea that there is some sort of general requirement for grounding of any sort in play – an idea that, quoting the mystical poet German-Silesian poet Angelus Silesius, he rejects. In life, Heidegger argues, when confronted with simple phenomena such as a living thing (a rose), we do not invariably ask why it is there at all, so the question of what sort of answer this ‘why’ would then demand (i.e. an ontological or a historical one) need not necessarily arise. See Heidegger (1991: 41-49). See the whole of Wittgenstein (1969).

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judgements or commitments, so that it now demarcates logico-grammatical commitments presupposed by our practices as quasi-analytically necessarily true from empirically accountable commitments that are contingently true or false, but whose conceptual constituents presuppose these same practices as making those conceptual items intelligible. The consequence he draws is that for any given assertoric context of referential concept-use, there will be a practice-constituted form of life which requires that certain statements count as expressing bedrock presuppositional commitments, while others count as expressing empirically determinable truth claims, while the demarcatory boundary responsible for determining which statements fall into each category will shift from one practice-constituted form of life to another. What sets the boundary, according to Wittgenstein, is just the sheer (ungrounded) fact of our being committed to this or that practice by our form of life – and thus the sheer (ungrounded) fact of our being involved in that form of life. As he says in Investigations, II.xi: “What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life”.17 Of course, if this involvement is unproblematically ungrounded, there can be no meaningful question to answer about whether the grounding involved is properly ontological or historical. This move by Heidegger and Wittgenstein would seem to resolve the issue of how to accommodate ahistorical and historical critiques of proceduralism without relinquishing the unifying goal that motivated proceduralism itself. But it is not without problems. We may wonder whether quietism of this sort really is the only way to achieve such an outcome. Could there not be other ways that might be valid, say, at least for some instances or areas of human concern and commitment – and, by extension, for related context-sensitive aspects of language use? 4. Ontologico-historical understanding and truth Although there is insufficient space to properly address the matter here, I shall briefly point the reader in the direction of a potentially fruitful positive alternative to quietism, which I shall call ontologico-historical un17

See Wittgenstein (1953: 226).

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derstanding. The basic thought here is that there could be structures of intelligibility and significance at work in human affairs that involve a clear distinction between ahistorically grounded (ontological) elements on the one hand, and historical grounded (contingent) elements on the other, where these are nevertheless mutually dependent and conjoined, and mutually irreducible. The example that springs to mind here is that of intergenerational family relationships. If we reflect on what is involved in these, then it does seem to make intuitive sense to say both that the historically construed life-history of a human being qua progenitor (parent, etc.) is rendered ontologically significant by its grounding implications for their descendants’ (children’s) life-possibilities (as a kind of family legacy), and that the ontologically construed life-possibilities of a human being qua descendent (child, etc.) are rendered historically significant by their provenance as this pertains to their progenitor’s (parents’) life-history (as a kind of family inheritance). If that is right, then what we observe in such a case is a complex relationship-structure involving referential dependency relations running in both directions between that which is construed ahistorically (ontologically) on the one hand, and that which is construed historically (as contingent) on the other. As a ‘legacy’ (of one person to another) the referential dependency-relation runs ‘forwards’ from the historical to the ontological, while as an ‘inheritance’ (of one person from another), it runs ‘backwards’ from the ahistorical (ontological) to the historical (as contingent). Such an analysis might, moreover, be widened to take in some other kinds of relationship involving similar role-constituting legacy-inheritance structures, such as non-family-based intergenerational relationships between individuals or between communities. This may shed new light on why certain referring expressions figure in linguistic usage in the way that they do. These are ones that we take as serving to identify integral unities of placehood or objecthood of a sort that would lack any such unified character were it not for the contexts furnished by structures of ontologico-historical understanding of the sort just mentioned. Consider, for instance, the understanding invoked when the term ‘home’ is construed as referring to the spatio-temporal and objectual correlate of a familial or communal legacy-inheritance structure:

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in such cases, the term invokes both an entity comprehensible as defined in strictly historical terms (as the family home, the home of one’s childhood, one’s hometown, etc.), and one comprehensible as defined strictly with reference to its constitutive practical potential as an artefact (i.e. something built and/or chosen for the sake of its capacity to provide shelter, and so on). From the point of view of the philosophy of language, such cases are inherently complicated: they require us to admit assertoric hybrids, in the sense of claims or statements exhibiting features of two quite different modes of assertion at one and the same time. On the one hand, they resemble those whose constituent references imply existential commitments involving a more than minimally thick notion of existence, reflecting ontological concerns. But, on the other, they also resemble those whose constituent references imply existential commitments involving no more than a minimally thick notion of existence, reflecting an absolute bare minimum of ahistorical concern that can only then be construed in proceduralistically formal terms (cf. Adorno 2001: 174-179). Similarly, if there are facts whose obtaining is specifically tied to just those domains of human concern that require such conjoined forms of assertion to be in operation when we make claims about them, then the statements made true by these facts’ obtaining could be said to be ‘ontologicohistorically true’, and thus to instantiate something perhaps deserving of investigation in its own right: ‘ontologico-historical truth’. References Adorno, Theodor W. 2001. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by R. Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity. Cassirer, Ernst 1955/1957. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol.1-3. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cockburn, David 1990. Other Human Beings. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Evans, Gareth 1982. The Varieties of Reference. Edited by John McDowell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fine, Kit 1994. Essence and Modality. Philosophical Perspectives 8, 1-16. Heidegger, Martin 1922/1962. Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. London: SCM.

Proceduralism and Ontologico-Historical Understanding in the Philosophy… 137 Heidegger, Martin 1991. The Principle of Reason. Translated by R. Nelly. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lowe, Jonathan 1998. The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity and Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strawson, Peter Frederick 1959. Individuals. London: Methuen. Tahko, Tuomas (ed.) 2012. Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Veatch, Henry 1969. Two Logics. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Vetter, Barbara 2011. Recent Work: Modality without Possible Worlds. Analysis 71 (4), 742-754. Wiggins, David 1980. Sameness and Substance. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1969. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. von Wright, Georg Henrik 1984a. Diachronic and Synchronic Modality. In: von Wright (1984b), 96-103. von Wright, Georg Henrik 1984b. Truth, Knowledge, and Modality. Oxford: Blackwell.

Gary Kemp University of Glasgow [email protected]

Quine’s Criticisms of Semantics Abstract: Quine had a number of criticisms of the idea of natural language semantics. Without going into them all, I try to separate them into the interlinguistic and intralinguistic, suggesting that semantics can survive the interlinguistic criticisms, but that some of the more piecemeal intralinguistic criticisms remain. Keywords: Semantics, Quine, reference, indeterminacy, underdetermination of theory, Chomsky, Davidson, linguistic disposition, inconsistency.

0. Introduction Let us then recognize that the semantical study of language is worth pursuing with all the scruples of the natural scientist. We must study language as a system of dispositions to verbal behaviour, and not just surface listlessly to the Sargasso Sea of mentalism. (Quine [1975b]: 252)

After Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein, came Carnap, who attempted to analyse meaning in terms of the concepts of intension, extension, and lexical structure (in Carnap 1942, 1956). Other famous figures contributing to this growing development in the 1950’s through the early 1970’s include Church, Montague, Kaplan, and David Lewis. Quine’s was a dissenting voice. Until the 1960 publication of Word and Object, Quine was intimately involved with and critical of the work of Carnap (and a few others). Afterwards, although he seldom criticised philosophers directly, and according to his autobiography, was very selective in what philosophers he read, many of his implicit criticisms of philosophers were well known and indeed are still discussed – in particular, the central dogma discussed in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ of 1951 of an unjustified appeal to analyticity and meaning in epistemology; and the attempt in Word and Object to show that the notion of the meaning of a

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sentence, a proposition, is indeterminate in its empirical application. The earlier paper accused the philosopher of being insupportably dogmatic; the later book made the positive case for the negation of that dogma. Quine’s interest in semantics was in the end subservient to his epistemological agenda. His overarching aim was to identify the real presuppositions, and to sketch the main lines, of a naturalistic and scientific account of the whole of human knowledge. Most of Word and Object, and the subsequent monographs The Roots of Reference, Pursuit of Truth, and From Stimulus to Science, were devoted to that constructive topic (see Hylton 2007). Indeed Quine’s doctrine concerning truth and reference implies that semantics cannot be fundamental, as a so to speak keystone, as it was for Hume, Carnap, Ayer, and Dummett in their different ways. It is an illusion, for Quine, to think that philosophy could first decide a criterion for sense, and then proceed to particular problems such as the external world or induction (Kemp 2010: 289-290, 2012: 57-61). Quine’s message – naturalism as he understands it – is the Neurathean one that there is no such stable starting point; one has to accept science more or less as we have it (which is not to say that scientists are above reproach). But that is, or would be, accepted by many practicing semanticists. It seems to leave open the question of whether we can regard semantics as a science, no higher but no lower than other special sciences. Perhaps semantics is just not at present a hard science, unlike say Chemistry; maybe it is just a young science. And since 1960 attention has shifted from the explication of meaning in ideal languages as in Carnap to the detailed analysis of meaning in natural language. The discipline of natural language semantics has arisen, with branches in philosophy, psychology and of course linguistics, comprehending a bewildering variety of approaches and paradigms: teleosemantics, conceptual role semantics, game-theoretic semantics, dynamic semantics, intention-based semantics, expressivist semantics, inferentialism, and more. It would be presumptuous to pretend to have boiled down a Quinean challenge that directly threatens all of it. Nevertheless, I’m not at all confident that Quinean worries about semantics have quite been answered. Thus, in this paper, after introducing what I think are the primary Quinean objections to the reliance on meaning in philosophy, I shall try

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to articulate some of Quine’s criticisms to semantics in this less ambitious sense.1 Quine’s actual attitude towards semantics has at times seemed more positive than his most famous negative doctrines suggest. In particular, in the 1970’s Quine explicitly supported Davidson’s programme of conceiving the semantics of natural language in terms of Tarski’s truthapparatus (as in Quine 1974: 65). But that was in the initial heyday of Davidson, when it seemed that his approach was a technically souped-up version of Quine’s idea of radical translation, one that like Quine’s did not require for the interpretation of a speaker that one has to assume the concepts of meaning or analyticity (see Quine [1999]: 159-165). Gradually, certain irrevocable differences came to light – over truth and reference (see Kemp 2012 for the whole story).2 Yet, as will become evident, I will make use of a key move in Davidson’s approach, one that is consistent with Quine’s views. 1. External objections Quine was suspicious about the use of the concept of meaning in serious science from very early – not of meaningfulness (roughly, the concept which counts out ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’) but the meanings of sentences, which in turn implies the objectivity of synonymy. In 1946 he wrote an unpublished piece called ‘On the Notion of an Analytic Statement’, in 1949 ‘Animadversions on the Concept of Meaning’, and of course in 1951 the famous ‘Two Dogmas’ article (first delivered in 1950). The two main conclusions of the latter are (1) that no attempt to explain or reduce the notion of analyticity can fail to presuppose other meaning-theoretic notions; and (2) that no such notion is needed to give an account of knowledge – confirmational or epistemic holism can do 1

2

Space prevents me from considering the Quine’s objections to a science of intention, of propositional attitudes de re. Lepore and Ludwig (2005) have argued strenuously that not only was the concept of meaning assumed by Davidson as an intensional concept, his programme seems hopeless without it; I don’t agree with the first bit; see Kemp (2012: 8386).

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the job. The suspect notion of analyticity is a full-blooded one: it covers all the inferences or truths which empiricists ascribed to the meanings of words, not just a few trivial ones such as No bachelor is married. Much later, in the Roots of Reference and elsewhere, Quine recognised certain truths that can plausibly be thought to be accepted in the learning of certain words. This accounts for the bachelor example’s being trivial (but somewhat rare). He thus can recognise such examples without granting that analyticity is capable of anything like the role that Carnap and Ayer envisaged, as the cement needed to hold our entire conceptual scheme together. But Quine’s overriding interest in ‘Two Dogmas’ concerns the fundamentals of epistemology, not semantics per se. One could accept epistemic holism combined with semantic atomism, and that the notion of analytic truth is seldom exemplified, but still hang on to the idea of sentential meaning – it is just that as a matter of fact, synonymies and analytic truths are thin on the ground. Nothing Quine says in that article completely undermines the idea of sentential meaning or proposition, and in particular there is nothing in the article to disqualify those notions from being empirically well-founded. Chapter Two of Word and Object constitutes a direct frontal assault on the notion of sentential meaning. There is an occasional tendency to dismiss it as the ravings of an old-fashioned behaviourist in the style of Skinner. But Quine restricts his behaviourism to semantics – and it is not that the meaning of a sentence or term can be identified with the corresponding behaviour, and nor is it that semantic expressions themselves reduce to behaviour. It is that the only facts relevant to meaning are behavioural facts – where these comprise not just actual behaviour but behavioural dispositions. It is roughly a supervenience thesis (but only roughly, since it is not the case that semantic facts are determined by behavioural facts, as we shall see in a moment). This is harder to deny; it is why Quine says such things as ‘one may or may not be a behaviourist, but in linguistics one has no choice’ (Quine [1987]: 341). True, a Quinean must hold that the basis for the decision is ultimately pragmatic. Still, if two creatures have the same linguistic behavioural dispositions – in every circumstance they would say the same thing – then for Quine it is pointless to suppose there might be a semantic difference between them.

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Ascriptions of meaning, whatever else they are, are in principle verifiable; meaning, if anything, is what is communicated, is what can be held in common by different speakers and handed down from teacher to pupil (see Quine 1969: 81). Doubts about this take two forms: First, one might think that for example colour-inverts are possible but not behaviourally detectable. To which the reply is just the wooden one that any such differences simply would not show up in the meanings of such words as ‘red’ (Quine 1975b: 245). Second, one might point to those ineliminable uses of firstperson pronouns as show up in de se statements of propositional attitude. And again, the correct reply is the wooden one that the facts communicated by such uses of first-person pronouns, and indeed those communicated by the uses of indexicals generally, may in some sense be otherwise incommunicable, but rules for the use of indexicals are necessarily public, can be taught, and so on.3 The very first sentence of Word and Object is that “Language is a social art” (Quine 1960: ix). Brute dispositions are not only mysterious but would violate Quine’s extensionalism. He thinks of linguistic dispositions as ultimately neural, and the relation of disposition to fact as exemplified by the solubility of salt to its underlying chemical basis (Quine 1960: §46). The expression of the disposition of salt to dissolve in certain circumstances is the non-extensional idea that if a sample were placed in water in those circumstances, it would dissolve. According to Quine, the counterfactual conditional can in turn be replaced in a regimented science by certain extensional, universally quantified conditionals, dealing with molecular structure, explaining the counterfactual. We don’t know the neural correlates for linguistic dispositions, but so long as we remain confident that they’re there, we can go on speaking of the dispositions. Thus to Word and Object. The thesis that translation is indeterminate is really two claims: 3

A third response is to cite the idea of someone who always lies. In that case, one should posit a tacit negation in front of everything he or she says. A different case is the person who lies as often as not, where there is no empirical means of telling which is which; I think Quine would simply bite the bullet, contending that such behaviour is not meaningful. See Quine (1975b: 252).

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(1) Holophrastic Indeterminacy, which at this stage was that a native sentence could be correctly translatable in terms of one empirically adequate scheme as P, but according to another empirically adequate scheme, as not-P (thus one must relativise ascriptions of truth to the translation scheme chosen). Especially in cases where the native opinion doesn’t choose between the sentence and its negation, and where our own opinion doesn’t choose between the respective translations, the idea is that there is nothing to choose between them; there is no factual difference. What’s significant is the mere conceivability of it, where what is meant is that the possibility is not incoherent, not inconsistent; in that sense one could translate a speaker in various ways, even if no one would (see Quine [1999]: 159). Why would one believe it? For Quine, sentences can be sorted into the observational and the non-observational or ‘theoretical’. Observation sentences, holophrastically considered, admit of unique translation – in the sense that observation circumstances of the source language sentence can be equated with those of a sentence of the target language (I’ll skip the distinction between observation sentences and non-observational occasion sentences). Holophrastic indeterminacy sets in with the nonobservational part of language, whose translation depends on slicing up sentences into sub-sentential expressions. In Word and Object, Quine merely thought it more or less obvious, once one pays close attention to the plight of a radical translator, one who has nothing to go on but native speech-behaviour. Subsequently one main argument emerged, one that proceeds from the alleged fact of the general underdetermination of theory. The thesis is accepted by many philosophers of science: it is that if our theory – our entire theory, or system of beliefs minus its observational component– is A, there is in principle another theory B which is incompatible with A but is empirically equivalent to it.4 Empirical equivalence is just sameness of entailed observation statements (the question of whether this 4

In fact it is difficult to see how empirically equivalent theories can be incompatible that doesn’t collapse it into practical incompatibility. If logical, just rewrite one theory to eliminate logical incompatibility between A and B. See Quine (1975a: 239-241), but also see Quine [1992: §§41-42].

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equates to justificatory sameness, sameness of warrant, is a thorny issue – surely not, if theoretical virtues such as simplicity count for warrant; I’ll just assume for simplicity’s sake that A and B are also equivalent with respect to these other virtues).5 Thus, if the situation actually arose within science, the choice would be real: we would have a factual decision as to what to count as our ‘ultimate parameter’, our theory of nature, for one must always presuppose in the background, if vaguely, some theory of nature. The relation of indeterminacy to underdetermination is that the former is ‘parallel but additional’ (Quine 1969: 303; also see 1969: 302-304, [1970b]: 209-210). For a radical translator – who accepts A as his theory of nature – the decision whether to translate the native as holding A or as holding B would not make a difference with respect to the native’s behaviour, so would not correspond to any fact, so is indeterminate. The moral is not that no translation is correct, but that either choice is correct.6 Admittedly, the idea of underdetermination, even in principle, depends on broad and manifestly speculative considerations.7 Nevertheless, if one accepts it, then it is difficult to see how the argument can be resisted. The argument does depend on the contrast between ‘inside’ a theory or language, and ‘outside’ one, as in the case of the radical translator. In his earlier reply to Chomsky, Quine says that the very notion of ‘matter of fact’ is an internal notion, a notion which only makes sense within or inside a theory. Does this mean, absurdly, that English-physics differs from Polish-physics? Strictly speaking yes, but in a looser sense such a distinction is matter of degree, not all or nothing. English and 5

6

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Actually theories don’t imply observation sentences directly, but observation categoricals, like ‘If smoke, fire’; see Quine (1980: 27). It is sometimes supposed – not by Quine – that epistemic holism, together with Quine’s behaviourism, entails holophrastic indeterminacy. The trouble is that holism is insufficient for underdetermination, which seems necessary for indeterminacy. For holism, rightly considered, is lacking the necessary broadness of scope; it is ‘unrealistic to extend a Duhemian holism to the whole of science, taking all science to be the unit that is responsible to observation’ (Quine [1975a]: 229-230). Indeed in Word and Object, the indeterminacy of translation was taken to how the underdetermination of theory, not the other way round.

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Polish have the advantage of longstanding proximity, communication, and practices of inter-translation; one seldom if ever calls into doubt the adequacy of the Polish translation of such a sentence as ‘All bodies have mass’. All such matters as the truth-value of the Polish sentence or the English sentence can for all practical purposes be assumed to be questions arising within a theory; no harm will arise. Only the case of radical translation reveals the true situation. (2) The second type of semantic indeterminacy is the Inscrutability of Reference – the indeterminacy of reference of terms, what famously Quine called for a while ‘ontological relativity’. It’s that certain differences in the reference schemes for individual terms do not affect the truth-values of sentences, thus make no behavioural difference, hence there is nothing factual to choose between them. This was what the famous ‘Gavagai’ example was about, with ‘rabbit’, ‘rabbit-stage’ and ‘undetached rabbit-part’. But a few years after the publication of Word and Object Quine saw the complexities of the ‘Gavagai’ example were strictly irrelevant to his claim, and came to favour a simple argument for inscrutability by permutation (see Quine 1969: 55-58, and 1981: 19-20). Suppose we had a complete truth-theoretic interpretation of a language. By a proxy-function Quine means a 1-1 function defined over the entire domain that is not the identity function. Applying such a function in the metalanguage to the envisaged interpretation, along with corresponding re-interpretation of the predicates – so that for example a sentence of the form ‘Fa’ becomes ‘The proxy of a is the proxy of an F’– will not affect the truth-value of any sentence. So we could translate the natives as talking about the proxies of rabbits – say cosmic complements of rabbits (the whole universe minus the rabbit), unit sets of rabbits, or even numbers – rather than rabbits, and the new scheme will predict their speechbehaviour as well as the original scheme did. So reference is inscrutable; again, meaning that there is no such thing as the right choice amongst indefinitely many equivalent schemes. The common complaint that the idea is psychologically implausible fails to reckon with Quine’s behaviourism. Quine does not think of referential claims as saying anything about the psychologies of language users (see Quine 1995: 75). Similarly to Frege, claims about reference

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are justified entirely by their effects on the truth-values of statements, which for Quine are the most that show up in linguistic behaviour or dispositions. Whatever goes in one’s brain may be as ‘rabbity as ever’ without constituting an ‘empirical bar to the re-interpretation’ as Quine puts it [1992: 34]; indeed one cannot suppose that it does without buying into a private language, a gratuitous, free-spinning wheel (imagine one’s interpreting ordinary utterances proxy-fashion, then saying ‘rabbit’ when one means privately rabbit-proxy – such would be an inner ceremony that amounts to nothing). Any clash with intuition can be explained in terms of the use of language: to learn the word ‘rabbit’ and the rest is to learn a manner of speaking. Saying ‘cosmic complement of a rabbit’, and correspondingly for the rest, would come to exactly the same thing so far as reference is concerned, but no one would understand you, at least not at first. Understanding words is partly a matter of familiarity with them. These arguments – against the determinate application of meaning and reference – concern entire languages, the whole of their semantics, from the outside. If these arguments cannot be refuted, then I would propose two things in mitigation The first appertains to the claim of holophrastic indeterminacy. The way to cope is to hold that the notion of the meaning of sentence should not be expunged from serious science, but that it must be understood within the context of semantics for particular languages. By this I don’t just mean that it needs to be relativised, that, since an expression may occur in different languages with different meanings, the expression ‘x means y’ requires at least another argument place for the specification of a language. I refer to the idea that the meaning of a sentence cannot be explained in general, and perhaps even that it makes no definite sense in general – but the semanticist’s activity of formulating an account of the semantics of a particular language may be allowed to proceed, so long as he proceeds ‘immanently’, and does not explicitly use the general notion of meaning. In other words, we go with Davidson, whose theories of meaning don’t actually employ the notion of meaning (whether they do so implicitly is a harder question).8 The situation is analogous with re8

But for dissent, see Lepore and Ludwig (2005).

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spect to Tarski’s definitions of truth. Truth, on his scheme, is explicitly and eliminatively defined for particular (artificial) languages, but no explicit and general recipe is provided for definition of truth for other languages, artificial or natural.9 At most, his definitions provide a model for emulation. And in both cases – Tarskian truth and Davidsonian meaning – the key semantical concept is satisfaction (others may use ‘x denotes y’ or ‘x is the semantic value of y’), an extensional concept that is used only within the semantics of a particular language, not as a general concept. Semantics is thus strictly speaking relative to a particular scheme, a particular interpretation or T-theory of the language in question, but one is free to speak breezily in terms of the general notions, so long as they are understood as partial. The second appertains to the second indeterminacy claim, the inscrutability of reference. What it shows is not that the notion of reference should be expunged by serious science. When musing on ontology, the conclusion that Quine draws from inscrutability is that reference is concerned, strictly speaking, not with word-thing relations, but with structure. To get reference right, it is sufficient to get structure right. But so long as semantics is conceived as a special science – not as a fundamental science – nothing prevents the semanticist from choosing one of the infinitely many adequate schemes of reference. The point may be simply forgotten about; he may blithely get on with ‘Fido’ referring to Fido. 2. Internal objections I now shift to less sweeping, less famous Quinean points that appertain directly to immanent semantics, semantics as a special science. Quine’s naturalism has as a key tenet a ‘doctrine of gradualism’. By this he means that although it is possible to ‘limn the structure of reality’ in a stark language containing only mathematical and logical vocabulary, and physical predicates – where physical objects are just regions of space-time – he does not think of the softer sciences, the humanistic sciences, as being reducible to physics. In that sense he agrees with Da9

Except in languages of infinite order, in which case the truth-predicate can be at most axiomatized rather than defined.

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vidson: he accepts anomalous monism. But only in its negative aspect: he differs from Davidson in that he takes the fact that desire-belief psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and so on, as not being free of human interests, and in point of fact resistant to assimilation to physics, as reason to rank them lower on the scale of objectivity, to call them Grade B. These sciences are comparatively vague, loose-jointed, and sometimes ill-defined in their exact purpose; the supervenience relation mentioned earlier that he envisages is at most a loose one. But – and this is a point that is frequently missed – to call them Grade B is not to dismiss them: the ways of dividing up reality which they embody are enormously complex – having human beings at their centre – and, especially for purposes of prediction, they are the best we can do, at least for the foreseeable future. So Quine is not committed to the idea that because they resist tidy assimilation to physics, semantics – to take the central case – is therefore nonsense, consigned to the rubbish, along with homeopathy and astrology. This is an example of the doctrine of gradualism: gradualism on the score of objectivity. It’s just that semantics cannot be a fully objective and exact science. It stands to reason, then, Quine doesn’t have some sweeping objection to semantics-even-as-admittedly-grade-B. Consider now Quine’s response to Chomsky in ‘Methodological Reflections on Current Linguistic Theory’ (Quine [1970a]: 215-227).10 The subject is not meaning as such but grammar, in the deep sense that Chomsky was pushing. Quine points out that Chomsky gets him wrong in supposing that Quinean verbal dispositions are measured by the probability of an unprompted, out-of-the-blue utterance of a sentence (Chomsky [1969]: 57-58); no, they are measured by the disposition to assent to a queried sentence in a given state of sensory stimulation (where assent, despite persistent readings to the contrary, is a narrowly behavioural matter – unlike Davidson’s holding-true, which imports intentional matter into the situation of the interpreter or translator; see Quine [1975b: 252]. The meat of the essay voices a constant theme of Quine’s philosophy, namely that the postulation of mental structures is not only empirically 10

Thanks to John Collins for guidance is this section.

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unjustified, it carries an illusion of explanation, an appeal to dormative virtues or a just-so story. Linguistic competence cannot be explained by one’s being explicitly guided by an articulate and exhaustive set of rules. The most that can be said is that one’s speech can be described as fitting such rules. Of course Chomsky denies this dilemma; he speaks of ‘tacit knowledge’, or ones ‘cognizing’ such a set of rules, yet for Quine it remains entirely obscure how one can be implicitly guided by, covertly or tacitly guided by a theory (which one is unable to formulate or recognise). But Quine does posit innate structure, as Chomsky recognises [1969: 54-55, 63-64]. Unlike the Lockean tabula rasa, Quine’s infant begins up to its ears in innate dispositions – without them, learning would be impossible, as Quine cheerfully recognises (especially in 1974: 12-32; but also in 1960: 83-85). And I shall assume that Quine’s objections to Chomsky’s programme are insufficient to derail it. I shall think of such a theory as describing, in an abstract way, functions realized by the brain. The mind does have its innate shape, and as many have pointed out, to theorise about it, about the character or nature of ‘tacit knowledge’, can just be regarded by way of an analogy of principles of human hearing, of the human visual system, or even of say digestion. Let us ignore the imprecision of the analogy. The argument remains that without Chomsky’s model or something like it of generative grammar or of grammatical invariances, certain facts – the astonishing rapidity of language-learning of children in view of the poverty of the stimulus, the seeming fact that the generation of well-formed syntax requires operations on underlying trees, not just sentences or strings themselves, and others – are simply inexplicable. Such are the sort of fine-grained dispositions that Chomskian grammar aims to explain.11 Now the details of Chomskian grammar are, thank goodness, not my concern. My concern is semantics. We’ve seen that even if Quine’s abstract arguments against meaning are accepted, then there is still room for an immanent, language-specific semantics. We’ve also seen that for Quine, an account of reference is ultimately an account of structure, the structure of an individual’s linguistic dispositions. What I propose, then, 11

For a recent round-up of these considerations, see Berwick et al. (2011).

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is that a (short-armed) functional theory of language should be regarded as a substantive model of Quinean linguistic dispositions. Such a theory is the closest one may come to a language-transcendent linguistic theory, but such a theory delivers virtually all that is needed. Let me expand on this. First, the linguistic interplay between human creatures, and between them and their environment, is so complex that it is almost inevitable that we think of certain phenomena as ones of ‘meaning’ or ‘reference’, as a matter of word-thing relationships; but nevertheless the habit is just a matter of convenience, if not a measure of our laziness or ignorance, a place-holder for future work. Consider Quine’s response to Davidson’s attempt to get him to give up his theory of stimulus meaning – a theory of linguistic dispositions where the inputs are stimulations of the nerves and the outputs are the disposition to assent or dissent from sentences queried – in favour of Davidson’s own theory which takes as basic the referents ‘out there’.12 The difficulty that besets Quine’s view, but not Davidson’s, is that one cannot assume sameness of structure in our individual neurologies such as the precise layout of photoreceptor cells in our respective retinas; you have your neural patterns of stimulation, I have mine. Quine’s reply is first to describe a puzzle: How can it be that we manage to have more or less the same dispositions with respect to the environment, when what is going in each of us may be quite different? The explanation he gives for what he calls the ‘pre-established intersubjective harmony’ of standards of perceptual similarity appeals to natural selection: the standards of perceptual similarity are defined only for the individual, but the more our ancestors’ standards correlated with the environment, the more they tended to procreate successfully. Since we do inhabit similar environments, we all come to it neurologically equipped to solve the same sorts of problems, despite our anatomical differences. Thus, to a comparatively unreflective translator, it will seem that a basic, unchangeable fact is that the natives refer to rabbits and so on; but all

12

These passages (Quine 1995: 20-21, 1996: 473-476, 1999: 160-61, 2000: 408-410) have often been taken as Quine’s giving in to Davidson; I don’t think so. See Kemp (2012: 124-143).

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that’s going on is certain neural events which make it possible to speak in that unreflective way. This leads to the second point. The envisaged functional theory is an internalist theory of human language, and, by extension, of human cognition in general. Some dispositions – innate or acquired – might even fit into the slots required for concepts. The presence of such innate dispositions or concepts might for all we know be extensive, as people from Meno to Chomsky and Fodor have argued. But the subject matter as Quine sees it would still be neurological; maybe not Fodor’s doorknobs (Fodor 1998), but the neural correlates that make it possible to have a word for doorknobs. That is the most that can be made of concepts, for Quine. If I may assume a functional theory of concepts for the moment, the concept of a doorknob, in its purely recognitional office, has as its inputs the exquisitely diverse range of glimpses and feels, conceived strictly neurologically, of what are in fact doorknobs, together with a few illusory cases. There is no reason to call the concept that of doorknob, except that it is by far the most convenient. Which leads to the third point. If the ultimate subject matter of a theory of language is the mechanism underlying linguistic dispositions, then the story will be unaffected by differences in the creature’s distal environment that make no proximate difference, that don’t leave a mark in its hardware. Putnam’s Oscar on Earth in 1750 will have the same dispositions as his twin-earth doppelganger. If our intuition is that Oscar now means H2O and not XYZ, then that of course shows up in a disposition; if we say the claim is about Oscar in 1750, with a perfect doppelganger on Twin Earth, then the claim is deniable. Something similar can be said to a worry about indexicality generally; when Oscar and twin-Oscar say ‘My mother is lovely’, surely they refer to different women. And of course: linguistic dispositions do not settle reference and truthconditions; for that, we need context. But once we know the story of a creature’s linguistic dispositions, we can plug him in to a context and get truth-conditions; it isn’t a case of something else magically being generated. Fourth, our theory is a theory of human language, so it will have limits. Creatures from alien worlds might be translatable, without the theory of human language being applicable to them. Perhaps they cannot be de-

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scribed as having ‘concepts’ in common with us. But although translation in that case might well be slow work, there is no reason to rule it out as impossible. Once we see our way around the idea that translation requires sameness of meanings, the same propositions, the position with respect to the aliens will not be one of missing the essential thing they have in mind, a meaning. The idea that if one communicates with an alien, then the same theory of language must apply to both can be dismissed as an illusion. And this leads to the fifth point. Whereas we say ordinarily that meaning is what we understand, that we understand by virtue of our grasp of meaning, or some such thing, Quine proposes that understanding can be viewed directly in behavioural terms. He thinks of a self-conscious lexicographer as a sort of coach, or a lion-tamer: Understanding, behaviourally viewed, is thus a statistical effect: it resides in multiplicities. The nucleus is the word, and mass is made up the countless sentences in which the word occurs… Lexicography has no need of synonymy […] and it has no need of a sharp distinction between understanding and misunderstanding either. The lexicographer’s job is to improve his reader’s understanding of expressions, but he gets on with that without drawing a boundary. He does what he can, within a limited compass, to adjust the reader’s verbal behaviour to that of the community as a whole, or of some preferred quarter of it. The adjustment is a matter of degree, and a vague one: a matter of fluency and effectiveness of dialogue. (Quine [1979]: 300)

By ‘lexicographer’ Quine means someone compiling dictionaries. The lexicographer’s art is to coach the user in the use of further words. Sometimes he gives an explicit definition, but other times gives only sufficient or necessary conditions, or gives examples of proper usage in characteristic sentences, or describes the things the word denotes; his overriding aim is to instil fluency in the use of lexemes by hook or crook. The lexicographer does not overstep his bounds if he finds it necessary to speak of extralinguistic fact – dictionaries are not sharply distinguished from encyclopaedias, as Quine puts it. One thinks of Wittgenstein’s point of the entanglement of language in forms of life.

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3. Residual Quinean doubts To repeat: The anti-analyticity points do not spell the end of meaning. The indeterminacy of translation – the radical, holophrastic version– makes trouble for a general or interlinguistic theory of meaning, but does not rule out the construction of specific or immanent ones, in the way that, for example, Davidson described. The inscrutability of reference shows that, in principle, an account of reference is just an account of the structure of a constellation of linguistic dispositions, dealing in the final analysis with matters of neurology. It can in turn be theorised about at a more general and abstract level by means of a functional theory. The result is perhaps an emaciated semantic theory, but it is all the same recognisably semantics. It is not just syntax. Indeed the theorist can keep to saying ‘rabbit’ refers to rabbits and the like; there is pragmatically nothing wrong there. But Quine has further doubts about the science of semantics, having to do with the lack of ordinary determinacy. In a little known piece called ‘Cognitive Meaning’ [1979: 287-302] Quine, assuming an intralinguistic standpoint, argues that synonymy requires an objective distinction between a variant of de dicto occurrences which he calls de voce such as ‘Tom does not know that Hesperus is the Evening Star’, and normal de dicto occurrences such as ‘The Sumerians did not know that Hesperus is the Morning Star’. Intuitively, Tom is semantically ignorant, the Sumerians factually so. But ‘[w]hen we try to find a criterion for that cut-off point, we sense the quality of myth that invests it’ [1979: 297]. Objectively there is at most a partial ordering of terms by degree of synonymy: one term is more cognitively synonymous to another than it is to a third if the set of occurrences where it can supplant the third salva veritate is a proper subset of cases in which it can supplant the other (the idea made its first appearance in ‘The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics’ Quine [1951b]: 47-64). Perhaps at most this will only lay bare one’s antecedent commitment to the reality of semantics. But I think there is a more powerful strain in Quine that runs against semantics: that actual linguistic performance is slipshod in comparison with any semantic models (see Quine [1970a]: 219f, [1975b]: 244f); that the models idealize too much – unlike say me-

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teorology, where the actual phenomena are more complex than our models, semantic models tend to fill in areas that are ontologically grey. Two related points. First, not all the vagueness of ordinary language can be captured by the dominant theories of vagueness (Quine 1961: 1ff). Degrees of satisfaction, fuzzy sets, supervaluation, context-sensitive theories, all assume there is a fact of the matter concerning the precise fuzziness etc., or that in a particular communicative situation there is some exact thing to be modelled. And that is at any rate powerless for what has been called conceptual vagueness. In fact, much ordinary language is vague in this respect to some degree; circumstances occur in which the law of excluded middle breaks down, where the problem is not like the way the principle breaks down in cases like ‘is bald’ – it’s not a case that might be circumvented, for example, by replacing a vague monadic predicate with relational predicate. Wittgenstein dramatized it at PI §80: I say: “There is a chair”. What if I go up to it, meaning to fetch it, and it suddenly disappears from sight? – So it wasn't a chair, but some kind of illusion”. – But in a few moments we see it again and are able to touch it and so on. – So the chair was there after all and its disappearance was some kind of illusion” – But suppose that after a time it disappears again – or seems to disappear. What are we to say now? Have you rules ready for such cases – rules saying whether one may use the word “chair” to include this kind of thing? But do you miss them when we use the word “chair”; and are we to say that we do not really attach any meaning to this word, because we are not equipped with rules for every possible application of it? (Wittgenstein 1953: §80)

The notion of a chair is as solid as an ordinary notion can be, but in describable circumstances one finds the concept slipping through one’s fingers. Not that this is something that ever happens; the point is that concepts need only be as sharp as the world demands in practice (one can say ‘stand roughly there’). ‘It is idle to brook definitions against implausible contingencies’, wrote Quine [1992: 21]. And in other cases – art, the self, indigenous – this sort of thing is not rare. Normal usage of such terms is variable, vacillating, and sometimes uncertain or confused if pressed. It seems inevitable that any semantic model will idealise, running well beyond the behavioural data, filling in and rounding off.

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Second is an issue that is roughly the converse of the foregoing. As pointed out earlier, Quine recognised that certain sentences can plausibly be thought to be accepted or rejected in the learning of certain words. This accounts for the felt analyticity of examples such as the bachelor (Quine 1991: 395-397), as well as the idea that elementary logic, and systems of words such as those describing kinship, are analytic. Thus if we accept that certain statements are, as we say, constitutive of the concepts they involve, then there is a clear sense in which ordinary language is contradictory. Charles Chihara once described a certain league of clubs which subscribe to a rule that no secretary of a club in the league is eligible to join the same club (Chihara 1979). The secretaries of such clubs decide to form their own club – SecLib, thus declaring a rule: Df: For every x, x is eligible to join SecLib iff there is a club of which x is a secretary and which x is not eligible to join. Ms. Fineline is hired as the club’s secretary; she happens not to belong to any other club: Ms. Fineline is secretary of SecLib. Ms. Fineline is not secretary of any other club. Is Ms. Fineline eligible to join SecLib? Contradiction either way. The moral: (1) is pragmatically consistent – it lands one in no trouble– so long as situations such as that represented by the conjunction of (2) and (3) don’t occur. This is ‘more’ paradoxical than Russell’s Barber. The statement ‘There is a barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves’ is plainly false; whereas (1) seems a good definition – and in a loose and popular sense is a definition except for awkward cases like Ms. Fineline. General rules may be perfectly all right yet have exceptions. No word is defined in this case, but Chihara, and I believe Quine, think that this is what is going on with the Liar Paradox, which arguably does trade on unrestricted T-sentences taken as constitutive of the word ‘true’: it’s a good rule that with the introduction of the word via the

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T-schema, an arbitrary statement is equivalent to its own truth-predication, even though in weird reflexive cases the rule runs into trouble (see Quine 1961: 5-9). Similarly with certain other reflexive paradoxes, and sorities paradoxes (‘If n is small, so is n+1’): what one learns in acquiring the words is susceptible to paradox. Quine’s position is not that further analysis will always reveal that there is no antimony, or that we should abandon such habits with words. Rather, if such problems do arise, then, provided we do require an exact and consistent description of the relevant part of reality, we should abandon ordinary language and certain beliefs for regimented theory – as for example replacing the unrestricted T-schema with a Tarskian-style definition of truth, intuitive notions of set with axiomatic set theories, or sorites-culprits such as ‘big’ with the corresponding relative terms (Quine 1960: 53). Such is the way of scientific progress. What then of semantics? Something like the above indicates that a consistent account of ordinary reference is not in the end possible– that a register of all a creature’s linguistic dispositions is all that can strictly be required. One can reply that the solution is the adoption of paraconsistent logic or some variant, but Quine would agree with Strawson on at least this point, that “ordinary language has no exact logic” (Strawson 1950: 344). References Berwick, Robert C., Paul Pietroski, Beracah Yankama and Noam Chomsky 2011. Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited. Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal 35, 1207-1242. Carnap, Rudolf 1942. Introduction to Semantics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Carnap, Rudolf 1947/1957. Meaning and Necessity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chihara, Charles 1979. The Semantic Paradoxes: A Diagnostic Investigation. The Philosophical Review LXXXVIII (4), 590-618. Chomsky, Noam 1969. Quine’s Empirical Assumptions. In: D. Davidson and J. Hintikka (eds.), 53-68. Davidson, Donald and Jaako Hintikka (eds.) 1969. Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine. Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing.

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Fodor, Jerry 1998. Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hylton, Peter 2007. Quine. Oxford: Routledge Press. Kemp, Gary 2010. Quine: The Challenge of Naturalism (On Quine, by Peter Hylton). The European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2), 283-95. Kemp, Gary 2012. Quine Versus Davidson: Truth, Reference and Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lepore, Ernie and Kirk Ludwig 2005. Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orenstein, Alex and Petr Kotatko (eds.) 2000. Knowledge, Language and Logic: Questions for Quine. Vol. 210 of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Dordecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Quine, Willard V. O. [1946]. On the Notion of an Analytic Statement. In: Quine 2008a, 24-35. Quine, Willard V. O. [1949]. Animadversions on the Notion of Meaning. In: Quine 2008a: 152-156. Quine, Willard V. O. [1951a]. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In: Quine 1961, 20-46. Quine, Willard V. O. [1951b]. The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics. In: Quine 1961, 47-64. Quine, Willard V. O. [1954]. The Scope and Language of Science. In: Quine 1976, 228-245. Quine, Willard V. O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Quine, Willard V. O. 1961. From a Logical Point of View, second edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Quine, Willard V. O. [1963]. Necessary Truth. In: Quine 1976, 68-76. Quine, Willard V. O. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Quine, Willard V. O. [1969]. Reply to Chomsky. In. D. Davidson and J. Hintikka (eds.), 302-311. Quine, Willard V. O. [1970a]. Methodological Reflections of Current Linguistic Theory. In: Quine 2008a: 215-227. Quine, Willard V. O. [1970b]. On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation. In: Quine 2008a, 209-214. Quine, Willard V. O. 1974. The Roots of Reference. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court. Quine, Willard V. O. [1975a]. On Empirically Equivalence Theories of the World. In: Quine 2008a: 228-243. Quine, Willard V. O. [1975b]. Mind and Verbal Dispositions. In: Quine 2008a, 244256. Quine, Willard V. O. 1976. Ways of Paradox, revised edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Quine, Willard V. O. [1977]. Facts of the Matter. In: Quine 2008a: 271-286. Quine, Willard V. O. [1979]. Cognitive Meaning. In: Quine 2008a: 287-302.

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Quine, Willard V. O. 1981. Theories and Things. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Quine, Willard V. O. [1987]. Indeterminacy of Translation Again. In: Quine 2008a, 341-346. Quine, Willard V. O. 1992. Pursuit of Truth, second edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Quine, Willard V. O. [1992]. Structure and Nature. In: Quine 2008a, 401-406. Quine, Willard V. O.1995. From Stimulus to Science. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Quine, Willard V. O. [1996]. Progress on Two Fronts. In: Quine 2008a, 473-477. Quine, Willard V. O. [1999]. Where Do We Disagree? In: Quine 2008b, 159-165. Quine, Willard V. O. 2000. Response to George. In: A. Orenstein and P. Kotatko (eds.), 408-410. Quine, Willard V. O. [2001]. Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist. In: Quine 2008a: 498-506. Quine, Willard V. O. 2008a. Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays (edited by Dagfin Føllesdal and Douglas Boynton Quine). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Quine, Willard V. O. 2008b. Quine in Dialogue (edited by Dagfin Føllesdal and Douglas Boynton Quine). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Strawson, Peter 1950. On Referring. Mind 59/235, 320-344. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1953. Philosophical Investigations (translated by G. E. M. Anscombe). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Siu-Fan Lee Hong Kong Baptist University [email protected]

Who Wants to Be a Russellian about Names? Abstract: Russell had two theories of names and one theory of description. Logically proper names are Millian names, which have only denotation but no connotation. Ordinary names are not genuine names but disguised definite descriptions subject to quantificational analyses. Only by asserting that ordinary names are definite descriptions could Russell motivate his theory of description to solve three problems for Millian names, namely, Frege’s puzzle, empty reference and negative existentials. Critics usually discuss Russell’s theories of names and his theory of description separately. This paper takes a new perspective and presents a dilemma for the overall project, arguing that it is hard to be a Russellian about names coherently. The central issue is whether contextualisation is semantic or pragmatic in nature, an issue very much alive in contemporary debates. This paper traces Russell’s ambiguity on this matter back to his conception of the roles of knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description in naming. Keywords: Russell, Kripke, Donnellan, Sainsbury, theory of description, theory of names, semantic-pragmatic distinction

1. Two theories of names and a theory of description Russell has two theories of names. One applies to what he calls ‘logically proper’ names, and is based on the realist theory of meaning and the principle of acquaintance. The other applies to what he calls ‘ordinary proper’ names, for example, ‘Aristotle’, ‘Troy’, ‘Margaret Thatcher’, and is the theory that these are ‘truncated or telescoped’ descriptions (1918: 243; cf. 1912: 29). (Sainsbury 1979: 57)

Like Mill (1872), Russell regarded a name as having no other function but to name. Thus, a name is a simple symbol not composed of any independently meaningful parts. Since a symbol stands for the thing it de-

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notes, a simple symbol can have no other meaning apart from its denotation. ‘Scott’ taken as a name has a meaning all by itself. It stands for a certain person, and there it is. (Russell 1918: 253)

Names and objects are associated through knowledge by acquaintance. It is so because under the influence of Cartesian epistemology, acquaintance guarantees a direct linkage between object and the mind (Russell 1912: 25). Knowledge by acquaintance becomes the foundation of knowledge (1912: 26). It also provides the foundation for naming: to name a thing is for the agent to stand in a naming relation with the object by acquaintance. Since the agent is in direct contact with the object acquainted, no intermediary is required and the function of a name lies solely in its contribution of the object as a constituent of the proposition. A name like this is object-dependent and its utterance guarantees the existence of the object referred. This is what a genuine name is in its logical proper sense. Only indexicals and demonstratives, such as ‘this’, ‘that’ and ‘I’, represent knowledge by acquaintance and hence only they are Russellian genuine logically proper names. Ordinary names, like ‘Aristotle’, ‘Margaret Thatcher’, are not Russellian names because it is possible for a person to utter an ordinary name without knowing the object by acquaintance, thus failing to fulfil what Evans (1982: 43) called ‘Russell’s criterion’, stated as follows: Whenever the grammatical subject of a proposition can be supposed not to exist without rendering the proposition meaningless, it is plain that the grammatical subject is not a proper name, i.e. not a name directly representing some object. (Whitehead and Russell 1927: 66)

Russell claimed that ordinary names are truncated descriptions and the attribution is made only on the level of individuals’ thought: Common words, even proper names, are usually really descriptions. That is to say, the thought in the mind of a person using a proper name correctly can generally only be expressed explicitly if we replace the proper name by a description. Moreover, the description required to express the thought will vary for different people, or for the same person at different times. The only

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thing constant (so long as the name is rightly used) is the object to which the name applies. (Russell 1912: 29-30, emphasis added)

The quotation, together with others such as Russell (1918: 201) and (1959: 168-169), shows explicitly that Russell took idiolect meaning as primary. Thus an ordinary name is only synonymous with a definite description in an individual speaker’s idiolect. It does not entail, however, that a name is synonymous with a definite description in a public language. Such synonymy is necessary for solving the puzzles about names because they are general puzzles about the public meaning or the semantic function of names. Sainsbury argued for a way to defend public synonymy and this will be explained in section 2.1 How would a definite description be analysed then? Russell (1905) provided a theory of description independently of his name theories which claims that descriptions are subject to quantificational analyses. Descriptions do not provide constituents to propositions but produce truth or falsity by ranging over a domain, namely, the set of things that serve as possible values for its variable in a logical system. A definite description is analysed as follows: If ‘C’ is a denoting phrase, say ‘the term having the property F’, then ‘C has the property φ’ means ‘one and only one term has the property F, and that one has the property φ’. (Russell 1905: 490)

For example, ‘The present King of France is bald’ is true if and only if (i) There is at least one x which is a present King of France. (ii) There is at most one x which is a present King of France. (iii) Whoever is a present King of France is bald. Let us call the first claim an existential claim, the second a uniqueness claim, and the third an attributive claim. 1

Russell himself never used the word ‘synonymous’, but simply that common words ‘are’ usually descriptions. There are of course multiple possible meanings of the verb to be. However in the context, it seems clear that ‘are’ means ‘have the same meaning’ or ‘play the same semantic function as’ in Russell’s claim. This is the reading adopted in this paper.

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Russell justified his theory of description by utility. The theory solves the puzzle about identity statements, the law of excluded middle concerning empty expressions, and the existence of non-entities or negative existential statements. Since ordinary names are definite descriptions according to Russell, he could (and did) transfer the solutions to corresponding puzzles regarding names in avoidance of positing any extra semantic notions such as Frege’s sense (1892). This is an admirable project. But how well does it work? So far critics usually discuss Russell’s theory of ordinary names and his theory of description separately. This paper attempts a new perspective to give an overview of the two sides. I argue that Russell can reply to problems of either side but only at the expense of sacrificing the cogency of the other. The upshot is that either way Russell cannot make a coherent account of both ordinary names and definite descriptions. I present the argument in the form of a dilemma as follows. 1. According to Russell, an ordinary name is synonymous with a definite description. 2. According to Russell, a sentence composed of a definite description is analysed semantically to entail an existential claim, a uniqueness claim, and an attributive claim. 3. To solve the puzzles about names, Russell must hold that an ordinary name is synonymous with a definite description in a public language. 4. An ordinary name is synonymous with a definite description in a public language after contextualisation. 5. Contextualisation is either semantic or not semantic. 6. If the contextualisation process in question is semantic, then an ordinary name is synonymous with a definite description in a public language. This avoids Kripke’s challenge to Russell’s theory of names (to be explained in section 2 below). However, because synonymy is a symmetrical relation, a definite description is synonymous with an ordinary name. Given that an ordinary name does not have to satisfy an attributive claim in order to refer, a definite description thus does not have to satisfy an attributive claim. Therefore, (2) is false.

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7. If the contextualisation process in question is not semantic, then even if a person associates a definite description with a name in her thought, such a definite description is not synonymous with the ordinary name in a public language. So a definite description does not have referential uses apart from attributive ones. This avoids Donnellan’s challenge to Russell’s theory of description (to be explained in section 3). However, it also entails that (3) is false. 8. By (5)-(7), either (2) is false or (3) is false. 9. Russell’s project requires that both (2) and (3) are true. 10. Therefore, Russell’s project is inconsistent. Let us examine various premises in details below, in particular the two horns of the dilemma as specified at (6) and (7). 2. The first horn of the dilemma: a reply to Kripke’s modal argument Kripke (1980) argues that an ordinary name cannot be synonymous with a definite description because they have different modal profiles: If ‘Aristotle’ meant the man who taught Alexander the Great, then saying ‘Aristotle was a teacher of Alexander the Great’ would be a mere tautology. But surely it isn’t; it expresses the fact that Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, something we could discover to be false. So, being the teacher of Alexander the Great cannot be part of [the sense of] the name. (Kripke 1980: 30)

According to Kripke, names are rigid designators which pick up the same reference in all possible worlds in which that referent exists. However, descriptions are not rigid designators because they denote different objects in different contexts of evaluation. Hence, names cannot be synonymous with definite descriptions and descriptions cannot give the meaning of a name. The argument seems strong and is accepted by many philosophers (cf. Soames 1998). Sainsbury (1993, reprinted in 2002) defended Russell. He believed that Russell had relativised names as definite descriptions on the level of

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individual’s thought and it was possible to make ordinary names and descriptions synonymous in a public language by reference to such context. …Russell’s theory of the meaning (in more or less Kripke’s sense) of ordinary proper names is about the same as Kripke’s: they are rigid designators whose meaning is their bearer. (Sainsbury 2002: 87)

How can this be the case? We have already noted above that Russell (1912, 1918) identifies an ordinary name with a definite description on the level of an individual speaker’s idiolect. Sainsbury characterised this process as follows: For every name in the relevant category, every speaker, and every occasion of the name’s use, there is a description such that in order to make explicit the thought in the mind of the speaker on that occasion, one must use a sentence in which the name is replaced by the description. (Sainsbury 2002: 86)

Sainsbury argued that the meaning in an individual speaker’s idiolect can turn into a public meaning via a process akin to a Gricean theory of meaning.2 First, a speaker S formulates a communicative practice with S’s audience that by uttering a name N, S intends to convey information about X, which uniquely satisfied a description the F with which N is associated in S’s thought. Sainsbury calls this the descriptive theory of communication, abbreviated as DTC (2002: 91). The next step makes the object specified above the public reference of a name. X becomes “the public reference of a name N in a group G if and only if whenever a member of G uses N, then he and any audience meet the conditions set by DTC and X satisfies the quantification [speci2

Sainsbury did not claim an inspiration after Grice. I see however that his formulation resembles the Gricean approach of meaning as expounded in ‘Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning’ (reprinted in Grice 1989). Sainsbury emphasised the role of communication because Russell focused on that as well. Sainsbury claimed: “Although Russell takes idiolect meaning as primary, he thinks that one can make derivative sense of the successful use of a name in communication. It is not a matter of thought-sharing, but of referencesharing” (2002: 90).

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fied in DTC]; that is X is the F” (Sainsbury 2002: 92). This is the descriptive theory of public reference of names, abbreviated as DTR. The final procedure is to specify a descriptive theory of truth-conditions of utterances containing names from this public reference. This theory provides formulas of the following form: an utterance of a sentence ‘…N…’, where X is the public referent of N, is true if and only if X satisfies ‘…ζ…’ (Sainsbury 2002: 93). Note that in the process, unlike a descriptive phrase, the variable X is bound to the assignment obtained in the utterance occasion in the idiolect stage and is kept fixed by such assignment ever since. In other words, N is ‘assigned an object before the truth condition is evaluated’ (Sainsbury 2003: 93, my emphasis). Since the assignments of reference in all subsequent steps are bound by this assignment as well, ‘…N…’ is expressing the same truth condition of a singular proposition as if N is a rigid designator.3 Idiosyncrasy is therefore not a problem for Russell. If Sainsbury was right, then an ordinary name is synonymous in a public language with a definite description once a contextualisation process described above takes place in the initiation stage of a name-use, ensuring that an ordinary name is a rigid designator. This is a semantic process because the value produced in the contextualisation process contributes to and is kept fixed all through the definition of the public reference of a name among users of that name in a community. Note also that a name so formed under contextualisation is de jure rigid, the type of rigidity Kripke required of names. A de jure rigid designator designates the same object in every possible world in which it exists by stipulation. A de facto rigid designator is rigid because indeed one and only one object in every possible world where the object exists fulfils the description.4 A contextualised definite description is de jure rigid. It is thus reasonable to believe that even Kripke would not reject this kind of rigidity. 3 4

More details are found in Sainsbury (2002: 90-95), especially its footnote 10. Kripke distinguished de jure and de facto rigidity. De jure rigidity obtains ‘where the reference of a designator is stipulated to be a single object’. In contrast, de facto rigidity appears “where a description “the x such that Fx” happens to use a predicate “F” that in each possible worlds is true of one and the same unique object (e.g., “the smallest prime” rigidly designates the number two)” (Kripke 1980: 21n). Sainsbury proposed to interpret the meaning of ‘the F’ as bound to a

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The solution sounds perfect, but nothing comes for free really. I argue that while Sainsbury’s account could successfully defend Russell from Kripke’s attack on names, it also renders Russell’s theory of description untenable. The argument is as follows. Synonymy is a symmetrical and reflexive relation. If a name is synonymous with a definite description, then conversely, a definite description is also synonymous with a name. Therefore, it is possible that a definite description would have at least one possible reading that is always associated with a particular object prior to any analysis, quantificational or otherwise. Suppose a speaker S has mistakenly thought that an object named by N satisfies the property of the F thus linking the name N and the definite description ‘the F’ together, and all members of the linguistic community G follow S or defer their judgement to people who follow S, then the mistake of associating the F with N could go all the way into defining the public reference of N. 5 The result is that ‘the F’ would have a referential use which denotes something that does not satisfy the property F. This undermines Russell’s theory of description, especially the attributive claim. No wonder Sainsbury (2004) himself disagreed with Russell’s theory of description but supported a referential theory which analyses ‘the F’ as ‘that F’. 3. The second horn of the dilemma: a reply to Donnellan’s argument Strawson (1950) and Donnellan (1966) criticised Russell’s theory of description. Strawson argued against the existential and uniqueness claims

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speaker’s thought. This procedure is governed by convention. Hence, I claim that Russell’s contextualised description is de jure rigid. Knobe (2007: 83) reported that in a survey by Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich, the majority of East Asian non-philosophy subjects who were given Kripke’s classic stories of Gödel and Schmidt (1980: 83-84) offered the response that the word ‘Gödel’ referred to the person who really discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic. I think this response can be explained by Sainsbury’s contextualisation. If a name is associated with a definite description from the start, it is psychologically possible that such association would strike the speakers as an essential feature of the name. Thus even when the object does not satisfy the description indeed, people might still retain the impression that the name is supposed to designate something that does.

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while Donnellan argued against the attributive claim. The common idea is that definite descriptions can sometimes be used as referring expressions. Donnellan argued, for example, that ‘Smith’s murderer is insane’ can be interpreted attributively as anyone who murdered Smith is insane when it is uttered in the crime scene against the violated body of Smith. It can also be interpreted referentially to denote a particular person whom was believed to be Smith’s murderer in a court by the audience when they saw that person behaving weirdly even though he may not have been the actual murderer of Smith. Other examples were raised and discussed in the literature subsequently. Kripke (1977) argued that Donnellan confused the semantic and pragmatic uses of an expression, or the semantic reference and the speaker’s (pragmatic) reference in these cases. Donnellan’s criticisms are misguided because similar problems could occur to other expression types such as proper names. For example, suppose two persons saw Smith raking leaves in the distance and mistook him as Jones. Their conversation ‘What is Jones doing there?’ ‘Raking leaves’ is indeed true of Smith, not of Jones. This does not imply however that Smith thereby changed his name or that the name ‘Jones’ has two semantic functions denoting Smith and Jones respectively. Kripke argued that if the ambiguity was semantic, then it could be disambiguated by stipulation. For example, the word ‘bank’ is ambiguous in English and it would be disambiguated if there is a convention that accepts only one use but reject the other, or restricts the word for one meaning but creates another word to signal the other. Donnellan’s ambiguity is not of this kind however. People miscall an object because they have different beliefs about the object concerned. This misuse of language will persist even if a convention is set to limit an expression type to one use but not the other. I reckon that Donnellan’s ambiguity is more complex, so Donnellan and Kripke might have just talked past each other.6 However, I shall not 6

I developed this argument in my dissertation (unpublished) using Kamp’s (1981) and Heim’s (1982) discussion of anaphoric expressions, represented as dynamic changes of references in Kamp’s Discourse Representation Structure (DRS), of which an introduction is found in Kadmon (2001). I believe that not all quantifiers are used in English as anaphors but it is part of the English grammar that

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develop this line of argument in this paper because I want to address another issue. Let us suppose for the moment that Kripke was right; does it imply that a Russellian approach to names would welcome Kripke’s rescue? I think not. A Russellian about names would hesitate to embrace Kripke’s argument because it would make it difficult, if not impossible, to defend the thesis that ordinary names are definite descriptions. Let me explain. As discussed above, a plausible line to synonymise an ordinary name and a definite description starts at the level of an individual’s thought. Russell pursued this line and Sainsbury developed it into a possible programme generating public meanings. Kripke (1977) would deny such possibility because according to Kripke, for example, whether the court believes that Jones is Smith’s murderer at a certain point of time does not have any bearing on the semantic reference of the phrase; ‘Smith’s murderer’ always refers, and only refers, to the real murderer regardless of the utterer’s intention, knowledge and beliefs. ‘Smith’s murderer’ is but one example of a definite description. So the claim must be that in general anything people mistake as the denotation of a definite description in a context of utterance is irrelevant to the semantic function of it. However, if this is so, for the sake of consistency, we must also accept that whatever people take (rather than mistake) as the denotation of a definite description in a context of utterance is irrelevant to the semantic function because the same procedure applies. A person simply may not know whether or not his belief is true indeed at the time he holds it. Hence, if we were to deny the role of knowledge in determining the denotation of a definite description in order to avoid determination based on mistaken beliefs, we must also deny the same procedure when true beliefs are at stake. The upshot is that Russell would not be able to synonymise an ordinary name with a definite description in any case bedefinite descriptions are used like pronouns. Since anaphoric expressions are typically referring expressions, it is also part of the English grammar that definite descriptions are capable of being used referentially. If this is correct, Donnellan’s ambiguity is not simply a matter about a speaker’s contingent belief of things, but a matter about the mechanism for communicators to encode and decode a name with its reference, which brings us back to the interface between semantics and pragmatics and question whether contextualisation can be semantic.

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cause an ordinary name can only pick up the pragmatic speaker’s reference of a definite description but never its semantic reference. Sainsbury’s programme of public meaning would not be able to kick start. Indeed, it would seem impossible to have any programme trying to link people’s thought (Russell 1912, 1918, 1959 as quoted in section 1) with the semantic meaning of their utterance. No wonder Kripke (1980: 9697) himself would prefer a causal theory of names which replaces the socalled Frege-Russell descriptive theory and consider any fulfilment of descriptive beliefs in naming as trivial (Kripke 1980: 88n). In sum, although it is convenient to sweep any unwanted semantic assignment swiftly under the carpet of pragmatic alterations, once we adopt the strategy, consistency would demand that we sweep away any assignment possibly desirable for Russell’s purposes. This is not a result that a Russellian would want in order to keep Russell’s theories coherent. 4. Contextualisation: Semantic or pragmatic? The central issue behind this dilemma is the role of contextualisation in meaning. Sainsbury endorsed contextualisation as a part of the meaninggiving process, thus it is possible to establish a synonymous relation between two expressions which are only linked together contingently in some people’s minds as long as other members of the linguistic community use the association in the same way. Kripke (1977) implies a different picture according to which the semantic function of a linguistic expression consists purely in some logical mechanisms operating independently of people’s use. If names and descriptions have different mechanisms to pick up things, then even if they happen to yield the same reference, it is a coincidence that they do and so they still do not have the same meaning. Contextualisation, under this view, can only be pragmatic but not semantic.

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There is no dispute over whether contextualisation can be pragmatic; the issue is whether contextualisation can be semantic, which is still a much debated issue.7 How would Russell look at this matter? Russell might not be aware of the contextualisation problem and he surely was not worried about the synonymous relation. He claimed that as long as the object referred is constant, communication will succeed because the proposition expressed is the same:8 But so long as this remains constant, the particular description involved usually makes no difference to the truth or falsehood of the proposition in which the name appears. (Russell 1912: 30)

However, the fact that we can get two readings from Russell supporting either his theory of ordinary names or his theory of description shows there must be some ambiguity and it is a significant matter. I argue that the root of this ambiguity lies in the types of knowledge Russell considered as relevant to and required for a semantic process, namely knowledge by acquaintance or knowledge by description. Given that knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description are quite different in nature, Russell’s free use of these two types of knowledge turns out to be the cause of subsequent confusion. Russell illustrated three ways to use a name as follows: Assuming that there is such a thing as direct acquaintance with oneself, Bismarck himself might have used his name directly to designate the particular person with whom he was acquainted… But if a person who knew Bismarck made a judgment about him, the case is different. What this person was acquainted with were certain sense-data which is connected (rightly, we will suppose) with Bismarck’s body. His body, as a physical object 7

8

For example, there is the debate between contextualism and invariantism. Contextualists (Recanati 2004; Travis 2006) argue that meanings, at least of particular types, vary with context. Invariantists (Cappelen and Lepore 2005) argue that sentences have shared type-contents and we can find a ‘minimal’ invariant meaning (overlapping content) to each word, thus disallowing contextual adjustments except in the cases of demonstratives and indexicals. Borg (2004) is a minimalist. Between the two extremes lie many possible intermediate positions, including Stanley, Bach, Szabo and others. See also Sainsbury (2002: 85-101).

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and still more his mind, were only known as the body and the mind connected with these sense-data. That is, they were known by description… When we, who did not know Bismarck, make a judgement about him, the description in our minds will probably be some more or less vague mass of historical knowledge… Thus it would seem that, in some way or other, a description known to be applicable to a particular must involve some reference to a particular with which we are acquainted… (Russell 1912: 30)

There is no doubt that Russell required a name to be initiated by some knowledge by acquaintance. Since the initiation of a name is obviously a semantic process, if not the whole of it,9 knowledge by acquaintance must have some semantic role in a name use. Acquaintance is a causal event. So Russell must hold a certain causal theory of names. However, exactly what kind of a causal theory would Russell hold? Would it be a pure causal theory such that knowledge by acquaintance is necessary and sufficient for determining the reference of a name? Or, would he rather hold one in which descriptive beliefs also play some semantic, viz. reference-determining, role? In other words, would knowledge by description play some semantic role in the use of a name? This is a significant question for Russell particularly because he also claimed that a name is a definite description. Contextualisation typically involves restricting a domain or reference according to speaker’s beliefs at a particular temporal-spatial location. So we can assume that if knowledge by description plays some semantic role, contextualisation is possibly semantic. Let us examine the possible answers in turn. There are two possible interpretations to the claim that names are initiated by knowledge by acquaintance. A strong interpretation requires that a name is initiated solely through knowledge by acquaintance; a moderate interpretation re9

Indeed a Millian theorist of names would hold that initiation is the only semantic process relevant to a name. Kripke defined the Millian theory of names as holding that: “The linguistic function of a proper name is completely exhausted by the fact that it names its bearer” (Kripke 1979: 383). A name can be linked to its bearer by ostensive definition in perceptual contact. Hence, a Millian could hold that the only semantically relevant process of a name is the tagging of a name onto an object. All other processes may be regarded as pragmatics or matters of deference among members of a linguistic community.

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quires that initiation involves both types of knowledge. The strong interpretation can be further divided into two strands: S(i) states that changes in transmission play no semantic role, so a semantic analysis of names only involves knowledge by acquaintance; S(ii) holds that transmission is part of the semantic processes of a name use and knowledge by description may play some regulatory role in this stage. What implication does each of these three readings have on the nature of contextualisation and which interpretation would Russell embrace? S(i) recognises contextualisation as only a pragmatic process because knowledge by description plays no semantic role in the whole process, from initiation to transmission. Descriptive beliefs about an object in a speaker’s mind would not affect the reference determination of the name no matter how dominant the beliefs have become or whether the beliefs are indeed true. This reading entails a pure causal theory of naming, which fits squarely with the Millian view of names.10 However, this view also forms the first horn of Russell’s dilemma as stated above. Names and definite descriptions are not possibly synonymous because the meaning of a name is solely determined by knowledge by acquaintance. All three puzzles about Millian names would return and Russell would not be able to solve them. Empty names can hardly be initiated under this view because naturally no knowledge by acquaintance is possible when there is no object to be acquainted. Negative existential statements would be meaningless as the subject terms are empty. Frege’s puzzle would also reappear because an object can be acquainted in many ways, generating knowledge by acquaintance not recognisable as belonging to the same object. Furthermore, since subsequent users of a name would not have knowledge by acquaintance of the designated object, the transmission of a name-use would depend only on deference. It might be hard for an agent to use a name without being able to identify what it refers. There-

10

By a ‘pure’ causal theory, I mean a doctrine that does not recognise any semantic role played by descriptive beliefs. Kroon (1987) distinguished three types of causal theories of names: causalism, causal neutralism and causal descriptivism. A pure causal theory is roughly the same as Kroon’s causalism.

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fore, a name-use practice of this type would be short, limited in scope of circulation, and easily be mistaken.11 To avoid these problems, Russell is likely to take the remaining readings which both acknowledge some semantic role of knowledge by description. The moderate interpretation states that the reference of the name is determined both by knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Suppose I name a particular table I saw in a particular library at a particular time yesterday P. ‘P’ names the table I saw (or, the sense-data I acquainted, according to Russell); it also names the table I believed I saw at that particular time and space (i.e. a description linking the sensedata with the object). All subsequent users of the name have to follow my practice if they are to use the same name. ‘P was antique’ and ‘the table I saw yesterday in the library was antique’ would say the same thing because the two expressions pick out the very same object back in the naming situation. Contextualisation so described is semantic, not merely pragmatic. This interpretation fits well with Russell’s description of the case when someone who knows Bismarck makes a judgement about him. 11

If only deference were in use and speakers definitely have no knowledge by description, then people would be using the name without any idea of what it refers. Yet people use language to express their thoughts, so there must be knowledge shared and to be communicated among speakers when they use a name. A certain body of knowledge must be associated with the use of a name and motivate people to use it in certain ways, typically to refer to the object that satisfies the associated knowledge. I thus doubt that people would have the interest to keep using it if absolutely no knowledge by description is involved. Besides, even if they keep the practice, it is easy to make mistakes just like when people are playing Chinese whispers. Yet in reality, ‘Aristotle’ designates the unique person even after more than 2000 years and no one alive has knowledge by acquaintance with the designated person anymore. So it seems that knowledge by description must somehow be involved and be used to regulate the usage of a name. It is thus not a trivial matter to explain the mechanism in detail. Kripke (1980) distinguished reference-fixing from meaning-giving functions. I think however that this distinction is not helpful to understand Russell’s case because Russell did hold the Millian view of names that the meaning of a name is to refer. So Russell was not trying to explain meaning separately and independently from reference-fixing.

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Baptism typically involves someone (other than the person or object being named) using a name on some object he or she acquaints, so baptism can easily be described as belonging to this category. The moderate reading is intuitively plausible, too. Sainsbury (2005: 106-107) argued that baptism involves both object-related intentions and descriptive intentions. Suppose during a ceremony a priest baptised a boy and a girl who are twins, the priest uttered a girl’s name to the boy and a boy’s name to the girl because they looked so alike. Our intuition is that the boy would not thereby get a girl’s name and the girl a boy’s regardless of what causally happened in the ceremony. The fact that we would consider the case an error shows exactly that baptism does involve, and is regulated by, descriptive intentions rather than being determined by acquaintance alone. There is a catch for the moderate interpretation however and this constitutes precisely the other source of Russell’s incoherence. The reading implies that reference as determined by knowledge by acquaintance and by knowledge by description may diverge. If baptism includes knowledge by description, then an initiator of a name could attach a mistaken description to the object from the start and it is not easy to distinguish whether subsequent mistaken judgements using the name are mistakes in language or in judgement. Suppose in a maternity ward a nurse misplaced a baby before it was named, a mother then named the baby in her arms having a mistaken descriptive belief that it was her baby.12 Suppose the mistake was never recognised and corrected, such false description would associate with the baby in all subsequent uses of the name. ‘My baby is beautiful’ uttered by the mother looking at the baby in her arms would be false of her biological child but true of the baby in acquaintance. A similar situation happens for the name, too. Suppose the mother gave the name ‘Jack’ in the scenario above. Is the baby in acquaintance Jack, or is the mother’s biological baby Jack? Neither is a better answer than the other because the moderate interpretation acknowledges know-

12

This example is modified from a similar one in Sainsbury (2005: 119-120). In Sainsbury’s example, the mistake was corrected and he used his example to show that a referent is not forever. My example however is to show another point.

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ledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description as both semantic. Therefore we cannot disregard either as illegitimate or derivative. This brings about a situation akin to Donnellan’s examples. ‘Smith’s murderer is insane’ may mean whoever murdered Smith, just like ‘my baby’ uttered by the mother could mean her biological child. Similarly, ‘my baby’ may refer to the baby the mother is holding just like ‘Smith’s murderer is insane’ may mean in some contexts the person believed to be the murderer by the utterer. If contextualisation is possibly semantic, then Donnellan’s challenge to Russell is likely to stay. S(ii) holds that knowledge by description can be taken into the semantic account of a name in the transmission process even if not in the initiation process. Evans’ (1973) causal theory of names belongs to this category. It takes informational links rather than baptismal ones as the determinant of reference. For example, ‘Madagascar’ was originally the name of a part of the African continent. Marco Polo mistook the natives’ descriptions about that place and thought they were descriptions of the island. This usage became more dominant and now ‘Madagascar’ is the name of the island, not the continent.13 S(ii) allows semantic contextualisation, so Donnellan’s challenge would apply similarly to this reading. That is, reference as determined by knowledge by acquaintance and by knowledge by description may diverge and there is no overriding semantic reason to determine which is the one and only correct reference. Indeed, Evans’s causal theory permits reference change; correctness of reference also depends on contingent factors such as dominance of usage and authority.14 13

14

There are disputes over how the phenomenon is explained. Evans (1973) considered it a case of reference shifting. Sainsbury (2005) considered that Marco Polo had unwittingly initiated a new name. Either admits the role of descriptive beliefs in reference determination and so this matter does not influence my overall argument. Evans admits the role of descriptive beliefs in the transmission; Sainsbury in the initiation. Sainsbury allowed an initiation to be unintentional to the baptiser also because there are obvious cases such as a name originated through a slip of the tongue. So he believed that the existence of a name is defined by users’ subsequent practice, not the baptiser’s initiation. Evans identified dominance as a factor in determining reference. He wrote, “I think we can say that in general a speaker intends to refer to the item that is he

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In sum, I argue that Russell would endorse some form of a causal theory because naming is initiated somehow through knowledge by acquaintance. If knowledge by acquaintance is the only semantically relevant knowledge, then contextualisation would be merely pragmatic. This could happen under a certain understanding of the strong interpretation; but all puzzles of names would return and this move would defeat Russell’s cause. To avoid this, Russell is likely to allow knowledge by description to play some semantic role in the initiation (the moderate interpretation) or the transmission processes (the second version of the strong interpretation). It is thus reasonable to believe that Russell would regard contextualisation as possibly semantic. In any case, any interpretation would lead to the dilemma mentioned in the first half of this essay. So it is still hard for Russell to maintain coherence. 5. Conclusion To conclude, this paper investigates some inherent tensions in Russell’s project about names and definite descriptions. It argues that Russell could save his theory of ordinary names from Kripke (1980) if he endorsed contextualised description as a semantic tool for reference determination of a name. Alternatively, he could save his theory of description from Donnellan (1966) if contextualisation is merely a tool for pragmatic reference. Russell’s project will be compromised either way.

dominant source of his associated body of information” (Evans 1973: 202). In turn, who and what define dominance can be a matter of power and authority. For example, in the Madagascar case should Europe not be the dominant power of trade and military expansions in modern times, or should Marco Polo’s information not be incorporated in the map-making process, it is imaginable that ‘Madagascar’ could revert to be the name of a part of the African continent as used by the natives rather than that of the island when Marco Polo’s error was discovered. That this recovery did not happen shows authority does play a role. In another study, Dickie (2011) compared the Madagascar case with the case of Geoffrey Chaucer, which once also involved a large body of misinformation. Yet in the latter case, the errors are acknowledged and recovered without anyone considered that reference shifting of the name is involved.

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I argue that the root of Russell’s problem lies in his ambivalence over how knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description are related in fulfilling the semantic function of a name. If Russell allowed only knowledge by acquaintance in initiating a name, then synonymy would not be established and the Millian puzzles would not be solved. So it is likely that he would allow knowledge by description to play some semantic roles instead, either in the initiation or the transmission processes. A certain kind of causal descriptivism would thus provide a coherent reading of Russell’s literature about names. However, such a move would also entail departure from Russell’s theory of description. Either way has costs to pay, it thus seems hard to be a Russellian about names coherently. References Borg, Emma 2004. Minimal Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cappelen, Herman and Ernie Lepore 2005. Insensitive Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell. Dickie, Imogen 2011. How Proper Names Refer. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111 (1), 43-78. Donnellan, Keith 1966. Reference and Definite Descriptions. Philosophical Review 77, 203-215. Evans, Gareth 1973. The Causal Theory of Names. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement 47: 187-208. Evans, Gareth 1982. The Varieties of Reference (edited by John McDowell). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Frege, Gottlob 1892. On Sense and Reference. In: A.W. Moore (ed.), 23-42. Groenendijk, Jeroen, Theo Janssen and Martin Stokhof (eds.) 1984. Truth, Interpretation and Information. GRASS 2. Dordrecht: Foris. Grice, Paul 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Heim, Irene 1982. The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Kadmon, Nirit 2001. Formal Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell. Kamp, Hans 1981. A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation. In: J. Groenendijk et al. (eds.), 1-41. Knobe, Joshua 2007. Experimental Philosophy. Philosophy Compass 2/1, 81-92.

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Kripke, Saul 1977. Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2, 255-276. Kripke, Saul 1979. A Puzzle about Belief. In: A. P. Martinich (ed.), 382-410. Kripke, Saul 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kroon, Fred 1987. Causal Descriptivism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 65, 117. Lee, Siu-Fan 2009. Names and Empty Names. Ph.D. dissertation. King’s College London. Marsh, Robert C. (ed.) 1956. Logic and Knowledge. London: George Allen & Unwin. Martinich, A. P. (ed.) 1996. The Philosophy of Language. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mill, John Stuart 1872. A System of Logic. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. VII. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Moore, Adrian W. (ed.) 1993. Meaning and Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Recanati, Francois 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reimer, Marga and Anne Bezuidenhout (ed.) 2004. Descriptions and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, Bertrand 1905. On Denoting. Mind 14, 479-493. Russell, Bertrand 1912. The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russel, Bertrand 1918. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. In: Robert C. Marsh (ed.), 175-281. Sainsbury, R. Mark 1979. Russell. London: Routledge. Sainsbury, R. Mark 1993. Russell on Names and Communication. In: M. Sainsbury 2002, 85-101. Sainsbury, R. Mark 2002. Departing from Frege: Essays in the Philosophy of Language. London: Routledge. Sainsbury, R. Mark 2004. Referring Descriptions. In: M. Reimer and A. Bezuidenhout (ed.), 369-389. Sainsbury, R. Mark 2005. Reference Without Referents. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Soames, Scott 1998. The Modal Argument: Wide Scope and Rigidified Descriptions. Nous 32 (1), 1-22. Strawson, Peter 1950. On Referring. Mind 59, 320-344. Travis, Charles 2006. Insensitive Semantics. Mind and Language 21, 39-49. Whitehead, Alfred North and Bertrand Russell 1927. Principia Mathematica. vol.1, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gabriele M. Mras University of Vienna [email protected]

Bradley, Russell, and the Structure of Thought Abstract: Russell’s multiple theory of judgement is commonly regarded as a failure. This is so because any attempt to appeal to some entity as that in virtue of which an ascription of properties is true, inevitably invokes a regress. But Russell could have known this all along. He was familiar with this objection from Bradley’s work and he used a “regress argument” himself while he still was philosophizing in the tradition of British idealism. The reason why Russell, despite his own insistence that no ‘third thing’ could unite the items of a sentence, ends up with a view that makes the appeal to such a thing necessary has to do with what is commonly held against him: Russell’s particular way to rely on the notion of structure led him astray as a critique of Bradley. Keywords: theory of judgement, Russell, Bradley, Frege, unity of the proposition, structure, relations, first and second order functions

1. Bradley and the unity of a thought “Bradley won” – says Davidson in Truth and Predication; which is a remarkable thing to say. Why did he win? According to Davidson, because Bradley’s former pupil failed by a criterion that Britain’s most famous idealist rightly declared crucial for being able to account for thought. The philosopher in contrast to whom Bradley is assessed here so favourably is one of the founders of analytic philosophy: Bertrand Russell. His theory of judgement is said to miss the conditions of the possibility of thought by failing to comprehend “thought’s peculiar unity” (Davidson 2005: 99ff). I would want to agree with this judgement. The expectations, however, that I will now put forward Davidson’s verdict as a diagnosis, as has

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been done recently (paradigmatically Hanks 2007, 2012), will not be satisfied. What is at issue between Russell, and in a way not only Bradley but also Wittgenstein insisted against him on a non-reductive ‘top down’ approach, is not grasped in its depth by insisting on what is conceptionally necessary for being a part, e.g. what is not sufficient for being what a part is a part of. One should not forget: Russell himself emphasized many times, as here in his “Reply to Mr. Bradley” that “no enumeration” of “the constituents” “will reconstitute” a unity, since “any such enumeration gives us a plurality, not a unity” (Russell 1910: 373). If one acknowledges this point about decomposing and rebuilding, then aiming at a unity while defending ‘strict pluralism’ seems to involve no inconsistency. Being an advocate of both, according to Russell, is in this sense not only possible – it is required. A picture of thought that presents thought as not decomposable would not be the right medium to allow inferential relations to be represented. A Bradleyan account of the conditions of there being a unity of thought seems, indeed, to be deficient in this respect. Bradley wanted to interpret our saying something of the form A stands in relation to B as “pointing” to “a unity”, “a substantial totality beyond relations” (Bradley 1946: 141). His answer to “Can we … have a plurality of independent reals […]?” is consequently “No” in an ontological sense (Bradley 1946: 124). This, however, gives the form of a judgement a telos that runs counter to our ordinary understanding of the conditions met, if a judgement fulfills its purpose. Russell focuses exactly on this mismatch. Attributing it to a confusion concerning the relation of the pairs true or false and necessary or possible, he declares: I am inclined to think that a large part of my disagreement with Mr. Bradley turns on a disagreement as to the notion of ‘necessity’. I do not myself admit necessity and possibility as fundamental notions: it appears to me that fundamentally truths are merely true in fact […]. deducibility is […] a fact, i.e. it has no modal property of necessity not possessed by the facts which it relates. (Russell 1910: 374) Mr. Bradley’s contention that such notions as ‘a man’ contain an element of negation is one which I cannot admit. […] It is of course undeniable that ‘a

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man’ implies the denial of more than one man but it does not follow that this denial is part of its content. Such a view involves the assumption […] that all inference is essentially analytic […]. […] This view appears to me to be erroneous […]. (Russell 1910: 377)

As often as he repeats how opaque it is what is to be understood by the famous claim concerning the un-reality of relations – “it is very difficult to state this doctrine in any … precise meaning” (Russell 1966: 139) –, Bradley’s doctrine for him is clearly connected with the idea of truth being grounded in “a substantial totality” that bears with it the idea that the opposite of what is said by a judgement is unconceivable/unthinkable. A “substantial totality without division” (Bradley 1946: 128) could because of that, for Russell, not possibly be condition for thought. It simply fails to make intelligible that what is claimed to be so might not be as it is claimed. So looking at what Russell says about wholes and parts in its historical context ought to put the problem “that exercised the fathers of analytic philosophy following a distinguishable tradition traceable to Plato’s dialogues” (García-Carpintero 2010: 279; see also Picardi 2008) into a different light. Since it is not the case that any unity will do in order to account for the possibility of thought – not the one suggested by Bradley, at least not for analytic philosophers – it is not the case either that the right relation(ship) between ‘parts’ becomes any clearer, if one is reminded that parts are parts only in respect to a unity of which they are such. For philosophers in the Hegelian tradition it is the copula that serves as hint that the relation of ‘parts’ is not to be understood as mere combination. Given that the judgement’s unity is claimed to be possible in virtue of a third thing x, to which one cannot appeal but by two distinct terms, what the copula shows is, that what a thing is, can be expressed by a judgment only. To Russell this approach seemed to ground truth in something object/ substance-like and to dissolve this object/substance as possible reference of a judgement. What if the object assumed to be appearing as subject and predicate was judged not to be as it seems? Russell takes this question to support his view that the “form” of a judgment has to match the

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conditions of our ordinary understanding of what is, respectively is not so, if a judgement is true, respectively is false, and so further to acknowledge an ‘ontology’ that is not Bradley’s. As it is not the case that emphasizing that ‘parts’ must be determined in respect to the whole (thought) is not what Russell would want to deny, it is also not the case that Russell would have wanted to ignore that the role of the ‘parts’ in question has to do with “the capacity to be true or false” (see Gaskin 2008; King 2007; Hanks 2007). There is no question that Russell would have happily embraced: […] what is judged must be capable of being true or false, and a disunified collection of objects, properties and relations […] lacks that capacity. […] the answer to the question ‘What is judged?’ is the sort of thing that is true or false. (Hanks 2012: 39f; see also Davidson 2005: 99ff)

The whole point of Russell’s understanding of analysis is that what is judged must be capable of being true or false, i.e. “truths are merely true in fact” as he insists against Bradley. It was in the course of rethinking what has to be presupposed for judgements to be true that Russell became convinced that a regress à la Bradley’s does not have the argumentative force assumed. It does not prove that “non-intrinsic external relations” could be no part of a sentence, thought or a fact. Why? Not (only) because “A is left to B”, “A > B”, “A lives north of the Danube Canal” as assertions do not state something that is constitutive of the items talked about. And, not because A is something different from the relation it bears to B. This so far could be taken to point right into the direction of Bradley’s approach; as it did for Russell for a long time (see Griffin 2013 and Hylton 2008). What convinced him that, even if there is no thing that constitutes/makes “> B” to be true, the relation “ > ” functions (as point of correspondence are considerations that have to do with falsehood). For Russell, that something is false requires understanding what it is that is denied to be true. If it does sound plausible to say that what is false could well have been, one could think of some A’s, B’s, and C’s and D’s as connected by the range of possibilities that is true of them. The original idea now is that this denial of what could have been represents a part of the ‘situation’ to which sentences like “A is left to B”, “A

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> B”, “A lives north of the Danube Canal” are thought to correspond. If Russell ends up with an account of the unity of a thought by enumerating the terms used to express it, he does face the difficulty Davidson highlights (Davidson 2005). But not because he would not appreciate what he or other philosophers regard as important. García-Carpintero is therefore right to write: To say “a sentence has the capacity to say something true or false” is helping oneself “without further ado” to that “which is precisely what we wanted to understand in the first place” (García-Carpintero 2010: 285). More has to be said about a part’s contribution to the truth of an assertive sentence, if one wants to take up a side in the discussion about the unity of the proposition. 2. The structure of thought Had Russell stayed with Frege’s notion of a concept expression as incomplete he would have found an answer to the question how the parts of a sentence contribute to its truth and would not have defended a term theory of judgement which is widely believed to fail for a Bradleyan or other kind of regress. But the few passages normally cited by philosophers time and again can hardly support the view that Frege wanted to “solve […] the problem of the unity of sentences and the thoughts they express” (Dummett 2001: 10). Frege nowhere mentions Bradley, his regress, or a unity problem as such. Granted that one does not have to be concerned with a question like “What is it for a thought to be about an object?” in order to be able to solve problems connected with it, there is still reason to doubt that the development of a modern conception of a predicate as expression with (empty) places (Davidson 2005: 132) is a contribution to the topic “What is the structure of a thought?” (Dummett 1993: 128f). Dummett is convinced that the quantifier-variable notation is the answer to “What is the structure of a thought?”: […] Frege’s invention of the quantifier-variable notation yielded him several fundamental insights. […] the concept of concept expressions as incomplete solved the problem of the unity of sentences and the thoughts they express. (No glue is needed to make the part of the sentence adhere to one an-

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other.) The concept-expression or relation-expression is of its nature incapable of standing alone […]. (Dummett 2001: 10)

Indeed, the quantifier-variable notation seems to be the appropriate candidate for “a structure of thought” because it represents the requirement that what is said about one thing includes or entails a comparison. If this were a necessary condition for a thought to be about an object, then all sentences – as expressions of thought – would, in a way, have to exhibit this comparison. I think Frege might have agreed to this as desideratum but not as an answer to “What is the structure of a thought?”. Frege introduced the idea of expressions with empty places in a context (Frege 1879: §9) where even the example used shows that he is interested in preserving truth in an inferential relation. The example in which truth is preserved is: If oxygen is lighter than carbon dioxide, and if Carbon dioxide is lighter than C, then oxygen is lighter than that in relation to which carbon dioxide is lighter. The decomposition of the judgeable content that is for Frege most adequate involves the famous function/argument division: […] an expression is […] is split up into a constant part … and a symbol, imagined as replaceable by others, that stand for the object related by the relations. I call one part the function, the other an argument. (Frege 1879: §9)

To stay with his example “Oxygen is lighter than carbon dioxide”– depending on the way it is split up – “… is lighter than carbon dioxide” or “Oxygen is lighter than …” – leaves different parts as exchangeable. As one part of a sentence is regarded as a function-expression that takes different expressions as argument, depending on what is put in the argument place will change the whole expression. But if it is the case that both, “Oxygen is lighter than carbon dioxide” and “Carbon dioxide is lighter than C” are true, the substitution of “carbon dioxide” through C in the first sentence will give a different expression, yet something that in respect to truth – is the same. As this, for Frege, is of the greatest significance, he regards concept-expressions as leaving ‘room’ for other parts, i.e. as expressions which not until they are completed ‘express’ whose part they really are.

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It is, however, not the case that every whole expression that another expression is part of is an expression of something that is either true or false. The (functional) expression “… is lighter than carbon dioxide”, when completed, yields a sentence. The functional expression “… + 3”, when completed by “5”, does not. It gives an expression that stands for a number, here 8. So a function as expressed by the “+” sign cannot be regarded as having the same function as the expression “is lighter”, which is the result of deleting “carbon dioxide” from “… is lighter than carbon dioxide”. Expressions that take other expressions as (their) parts do not, if they are not sentences, have parts which depend on each other in a way that the parts which are parts of expressions that are sentences do depend. So they could not be regarded as equivalent in structure. This means that there being empty places ‘inside’ an expression does not indicate that what is left is a predicate or a concept expression. As we already saw, if structure means dependency, then it applies to too many thing. Turning on the idea of structure serves therefore rather as demarcation: thought cannot be represented as what is an undividable whole. That Dummett cites Frege’s invention of the quantifier-variable notation as paradigm of “the” form of thought has nonetheless some support in passages from “Funktion und Begriff” where Frege shows us what made it necessary for him to extend the notion of a function. Only if a particular instance of an expression of a relation like “+” is enriched by “=” as in “… + 3 = 8” the result is something that is true or false. So only under this condition a function is a concept that matches arguments onto truth values. The extension of the notion of a function not only tries to do justice to a fact that was presupposed in §9 of the Begriffsschrift. Is also presents more clearly how one should think of an aspect Frege addresses already in the Begriffsschrift in the §§9, 11, 12 which follow the functionargument distinction. It is for finding the form of ‘generality’ that a systematic account of the conditions under which expressions are exchangeable is in Frege’s concern (Frege 1879: §9). The generality that is presupposed in the notion of function that takes more than one argument

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does, however, not mean that a sentence like “Edinburgh is north of London”, “3 >1” is an expression of generality. As in the expression of generality the objects are undetermined “is north of London” as part of “that there is something that is north of London” is not the same as “is north of London” ascribed to an object A. The “left-over” part therefore does not show by its brackets that generality is a presupposition in order to understand that an object falls under a concept. It therefore appears to be futile to try to identify as form “the” relation of dependency in virtue of which expressions are to be combined/completed. In a way, this is exactly what Dummett emphasizes when he speaks of a concept expression as being “of its nature” “incapable of standing alone”. In Frege’s famous words: I think of a concept as having arisen by decomposition from a judgeable content. […] I do not believe that concept formation can precede judgement because that would presuppose the independent existence of concepts […]. (Frege 1882: 101)

That one must not “presuppose the independent existence of concepts” because no conditions could prove the applicability of concepts, goes together, so Frege, with regarding the opposite as a view, which claims to be possible what is not.1 But since a conception of a concept as unsaturated is one that is “of its nature” incapable to get hold of these concepts as concepts, it is not only superfluous to look for conditions that represent the “relation” a concept has to an object. It is, in fact, a mistake. If one honors Frege’s distinction of first and second order function/ concept one cannot claim that the quantifier-variable notation is the form in virtue of which thought is about an object. A judgement of the form “a is F” for Frege is to be seen as fundamental and not reducible to judgements whose form expresses that a concept is satisfied in n objects. A singular predicative sentence is not to be ana1

The relevant passage in Frege’s “Der Gedanke” might appear to use a Bradleyan regress as an argument. But it doesn’t. It is close, however, to what is said at the beginning of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction; see also Glock (2010).

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lyzed as saying anything about a concept. On the contrary, “… is wise” is a ‘part’ of an expression, but not in the sense that the expression ‘∃x’ could be used to express what “Socrates is wise” states. One could put that point by saying that when one talks about the ‘part’ of an expression ‘∃x’ that takes something indeterminate as part, one talks not about the concept that as function maps arguments onto truth values. Claims about how to arrive at constant or invariable expressions by decomposition do therefore not fit well with the assumption of a structure: The brackets ‘inside’ an expression do not indicate that what is left is a concept expression, nor that there is only one possible decomposition or that anyone must be prior to another My point is here not that there are many structures for being able to claim “the” one “common form of thought” (see also Kemp 2011, Waismann 1965: 304ff). In a Fregean framework with its distinction of first and second functions or concepts it makes no sense to appeal to a concept in isolation. To divide the part of the expression of a thought to get hold of a concept would be to focus on mere signs or symbols by themselves as being relevant for questions of truth. Dummett’s claim that what “makes the parts of the sentence adhere to one another” is “the capacity of predicate logic … to analyze the structure of … sentences” (Dummett 2001: 17, italics mine) which could be isolated as structure of thought is not what Frege would or could have wanted to defend. 3. Russell and the quantificational form From what has been discussed so far the so-called ‘unity of the proposition’ seems not to be an original question. It is rather a criterion whose fulfillment, however, does not settle whether an approach can or cannot account for how we are able to think about an object. This, I believe, is the source of the recent reservations about the potential fruitfulness of the whole Bradley–Russell–Wittgenstein ‘debate’ (García-Carpintero 2010; Kemp 2011). This critical attitude towards the rapidly growing number of publications about the “thought’s unity” brings out something very important. How far can philosophy disengage

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itself from the common understanding of a judgement? This appears to be what really lies at the heart of the “unity of the proposition” problem. Russell seemed to have thought that by staying close to ‘grammar’ one could accomplish the task once pursued by a “table of judgement”. He obviously saw himself confronted with the problem of how to ascribe something as a property to an object whose identity lies in nothing but a true ascription. Frege’s idea of functions as concepts struck him as being useful in finding a solution to this challenge. But since Russell regarded it as unnecessary or erroneous to distinguish two levels of speech in the way Frege secured their “intranslatability”, he sought to understand a judgement of the form “A is F” in a way that integrates what is for Frege to say something about a concept being satisfied in n objects. If first order concepts as incomplete expressions are necessarily missed whenever one attempts to refer to them – the part crucial in these expressions would be lost – then this is proof for their having been constructed in a wrong way. Russell finds support for this criticism: Frege wishes to have the empty places where the argument is to be inserted indicated in some way; thus he says that in 2x3 + x the function is 2 ( )3 + ( ). But here his requirement that two empty places be filled by the same letter cannot be indicated; […]. (Russell 1903: 509)

But Russell did not assume that for a relation to be is to be abstracted from particulars. Russell's realism requires one to understand universals – which predicates and relations are according to him – as being actually independent of the descriptions that identify objects: […] the relation ‘north of’ does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask ‘Where and when does this relation exist?’ the answer must be ‘Nowhere and nowhen’. (Russell 1912: 55f)

If the analysis of “a is F” or “aRb” tries to respect this “nowhere”, then, however, two criteria of a judgement appear to be true: firstly, the particular objects; and secondly, the relation that possibly holds between them. It is exactly the quantificational form regarded as that in virtue of which judgement is to be understood that makes it impossible to judge

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something of objects as being true. This form does not settle the question whether what is said hypothetically is so/is true of a. And if there is nothing but this form and “a”, then “a is B” and “a is non B” together with “a” are supposed to answer the question what corresponds to “Edinburgh is north of London”, if true. Not surprisingly, this view of truth conditions makes it possible to raise the question again, how one can understand what is stated by “A is in Relation to B” if what is stated needs one to have understood “A is in Relation to B”. This being so, the moral I would want to draw is, nonetheless, not to adopt the following stance: Where Gaskin appeals to a regress he claims not to be vicious to his account for propositional unity, King appeals to a very small circle he claims to be virtuous. (García-Carpintero 2010: 288)

References Amoretti, María Cristina and Nicla Vassallo (eds.) 2008. Knowledge, Language and Interpretation, Frankfurt: Ontos. Beaney, Michael (ed.) 1997. The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Bradley, Francis Herbert 1897. Appearance and Reality. A Metaphysical Essay. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1946. Cottingham, John and Peter M. S. Hacker (eds.) 2010. Mind, Method, and Morality Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidson, Donald 2005. Truth and Predication. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Dummett, Michael 1993. Origins of Analytic Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dummett, Michael 2001. Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). In: A. P. Martinich and D. Sosa, (eds.), 6-20. Frege, Gottlob [1879] 1960. Begriffsschrift (translated by P. Geach) In: P. Geach and M. Black (eds.), 1-20. Frege, Gottlob [1882] 1980. Letter to Marty. In: Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 99-102. García-Carpintero, Manuel 2010. Gaskin’s Ideal Unity. Dialectica 64 (2), 279-288. Gaskin, Richard 2008. The Unity of the Proposition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Geach, Peter and Martin Black (eds.) 1960. Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (trans. by P. Geach), Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Glock, Hans Johann 2010. Concepts: Between the Subjective and the Objective. In: J. Cottingham and P. M. S. Hacker (eds.), 306-329. Griffin, Nicholas 2013. Russell’s Philosophical Background. In: N. Griffin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Russell. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 84-107. Hanks, Peter 2007. How Wittgenstein defeated Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgement. Synthese 154, 121-146. Hanks, Peter 2012. Early Wittgenstein On Judgement. In: J. L. Zalabardo (ed.), Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 37-63. Hylton, Peter 2008. Selected Essays on Russell’s Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kemp, Gary 2011. The Unity of the Proposition in the Later Wittgenstein. Conceptus. Zeitschrift für Philosophie 97, 7-28. King, Jeffrey C. 2007. The Nature and Structure of Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martinich, A.P. and David Sosa (eds.) 2001. A Companion to Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Picardi, Eva 2008. Frege and Davidson on Predication. In: M. C. Amoretti and N. Vassallo (eds.), 49-79. Russell, Bertrand 1903. The Principles of Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, Bertrand 1910. Some Explanations in Reply to Mr. Bradley. Mind 19 (75), 373-378. Russell, Bertrand 1910/1966. Monistic Theory of Truth. In: Philosophical Essays. London: Allan & Unwin. Russell, Bertrand 1912. The Problems of Philosophy. London: Hutchinson Home University Library. Russell, Bertrand 1986. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays 1914-19. Edited by J. Slater. London: Routledge. Waismann, Friedrich 1965. The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy. London: MacMillan. Zalabardo, José L. (ed.) 2012. Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jaroslav Peregrin Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague & University of Hradec Králové [email protected]

Logic and the Pursuit of Meaning* Abstract: The ‘linguistic turn’ of philosophy of the twentieth century led to the overestimation of the role of logic in the process understanding of meaning and in the consequent ‘dissolution’ of traditional philosophical problems. This is not to say that logic, in this respect, would be useless – on the contrary, it is very important; but we must understand that the role it can sensibly play is the Wittgensteinian role of helping us build simplified models of natural language (with all possibilities and limitations models have), not the Carnapian role of reducing meanings, without a remainder, to logico-mathematical constructs. In this paper, I try to throw some new light on this situation in terms of distinguishing two perspectives that may be assumed to look at an expression: the expression-as-object perspective (looking at the relation between an expression and its meaning as a contingent, a posteriori matter) and the expression-as-medium perspective (looking at this relation as something necessary or a priori). Keywords: logic, meaning, linguistic turn, formal semantics We want to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view; one out of many possible orders; not the order. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §132

*

An original version of this paper was written some fifteen years ago, as a byproduct of my work on the book Doing words with worlds (Peregrin 1995). A Czech version appeared in the collection of my essays Logika a jazyk (Peregrin 2003). The work on the present version was supported by the research grant No. 13-21076S of the Czech Science Foundation.

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0. Introduction The linguistic turn that occurred in the minds of various philosophers during the first half of the twentieth century has led to the conclusion that to resolve the traditional philosophical problems means to dissolve them by means of the logical analysis of the language in which they are formulated. The spread of this insight, which presented something truly novel, is probably the most significant event in the history of twentiethcentury philosophy; at the same time, however, it is the source of profuse misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Some of the proponents and followers of the linguistic turn have come to the conclusion that this turn amounts to the ultimate word on philosophy, meaning the end of philosophy in the traditional sense and the rise of a new kind of scientifico-philosophical thinking shaped by Cartesian rigor. Formal logic, viewed as the means of uncovering of the ‘true structure’ of language and consequently of the ‘true structure’ of the world, has moved to the center stage of philosophy. In this paper, I would like to show that however great the significance of the linguistic turn and of the employment of logical means in philosophical analysis, such expectations were – and are – unwarranted. I would like to show that the import of logic for philosophy is neither that it lets us get hold of meanings in an explicit way, nor that it shows us the ‘real structure’ of the world, a structure otherwise obscured by language; rather, its value is that it provides what can be called perspicuous representations. It offers us vantage points from which we can comprehend the vast variety of language, and consequently of the world that we cope with by means of language, allowing us to better understand their nature. I would like also to indicate in which way awareness of the limitations of logical analysis is what distinguishes philosophers like Frege, Wittgenstein or Quine from Tarski, Carnap and many of the subsequent analytic philosophers and theoreticians of language.

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1. The linguistic turn of philosophy The linguistic turn, as Rorty (1967: 3) puts it, is based on “the view that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use”. The idea behind this is that insofar as all the mysterious entities with which philosophy comes to deal, entities like matter, justice, knowledge, consciousness, evil, etc., are meanings of some words (in particular of the words matter, justice, knowledge, consciousness, evil, etc.), the only thing a philosopher must do is analyze and understand meanings of words. And this brings his business from the strange and shadowy realms where such entities are supposed to be found back to the all too well known public arena in which we play our language games. Replacing a question what is (an) X? by what is the meaning of ‘X’?, the move that Quine (1960: 271) later called the ‘semantic ascent’, we seem to be able to reduce many quite obscure or enigmatic questions to ones that can be answered by straightforward and down-to-earth observations on how we use our language. Russell, Carnap and other exponents of the linguistic turn pointed out that the problem with language is that expressions which appear to stand for an object may well not do so. In his path-breaking paper ‘On Denoting’, Russell (1905) showed, by the freshly discovered art of logical analysis, that, despite appearances, expressions such as someone, everyone or the king of France are not names; and Carnap (1931, 1934) struggled to demonstrate how that kind of logical analysis can be used to elucidate the nature of ‘names’ such as God, being or nothingness and in this way reveal the emptiness of many classical philosophical problems. Such considerations resulted in the conclusion that the surface or apparent structure of natural language is not the structure which is relevant for the semantics of language, that the relevant structure is hidden, and that the task of the philosopher is to bring it to light. This then led to the view that natural language is only an imperfect embodiment of an ideal structure which can be disclosed by an analysis; and logic was promoted as the general tool for this kind of analysis. In this way logic launched its triumphant campaign in the realm of philosophy, conquering or exterminating its parts one after another.

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2. The formalistic turn of logic At approximately the same time at which the linguistic turn was finding expression in the writings of Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap and others, another important event, closely connected with it, took place as well. This was the birth of formal logic in the strict sense. To avoid misunderstanding, let me stress the difference between what I call formal logic and logic that I dub merely symbolic.1 Both formal and symbolic logic are based on the substitution of symbols for natural language statements and expressions; however, whereas within the merely symbolic approach symbols are employed solely for the purpose of regimentation (in Quine’s sense), i.e., of suppressing those aspects of natural language expressions which are considered irrelevant for the analysis of consequence, within the truly formal approach the resulting systems of symbols – logical calculi – are taken to be abstract algebraic structures. Aristotle used letters to represent unspecific terms; hence he could be considered an early symbolic logician. Frege and Russell were symbolic logicians par excellence; but neither of them was a formal logician.2 It was Hilbert who, for the first time, viewed logic as a strictly formal matter; however, a tendency towards such a conception of logic is clearly recognizable already in the writings of the logical school of Boole and Schröder. For Frege, a symbolic formula represents a definite statement, a definite ‘thought’. There are situations in which it may be reasonable to disregard the particular statement a formula represents; but there is no way to detach the latter from the former completely. For Hilbert, on the other hand, a formula is first and foremost an abstract object, an object which we are free to interpret in various alternative ways. The nature of the difference between Fregean symbolic and Hilbertian formal logic becomes clear when we consider the controversy between 1

2

These terms have been applied to logic in very various ways. See Dutilh Novaes (2011) for an overview. For both Frege and Russell, symbols were, as Tichý (1988: ii) puts it, “not the subject matter of their theorizing but a mere shorthand facilitating discussion of extra-linguistic entities”.

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the two logicians about the nature of axioms and implicit definitions3. For Frege, as for the Ancients, an axiom is a statement the refutation of which is beyond the scope of human imagination; therefore there can hardly be a discussion on whether something is or is not an axiom. For Hilbert, on the other hand, an axiom is a statement which differs from other statements only in that we choose it as foundation; we are free to choose axioms according to our liking. It was the formal approach to logical calculi which allowed logicians to develop metalogic and model theory, to prove theorems about logical calculi. The work of Löwenheim, Skolem, Gödel, Tarski and others who entered the vast new world of ‘liberated signs’ elevated logic to a new paradigm. Tarski’s model theory then presented the next step in the takeover of philosophy by logic: after the logical analysis of language as pursued by Frege, Russell and Carnap eliminated the old metaphysics, model theory slowly moved in to fill the gap. A volume of selected papers on model-theoretic semantics of one of the most influential twentieth-century theoreticians of meaning, Montague (1974), simply bears the title Formal Philosophy. 3. Correspondence The linguistic turn requires us to look at an expression as a mere type of sound or string of letters and check whether there is a meaning attached to it. Similarly for the formalistic turn of logic: to be able to consider a system of logical formulas as something self-contained, something that can be interpreted in various alternative ways, we must regard formulas as not having a priori meanings, but rather as mere strings of letters. At first sight, there might seem to be nothing easier than consider an expression of a language as an object deprived of any meaning. After all, meaningful expression is a amalgamation of such meaningless expression with its meaning, a combination that does not hold together by itself, but is held together solely by the powers of the human mind; so it seems that to consider an expression as meaningless is easy, for it merely relieves us of the mental effort of holding it together with its meaning. 3

See also Peregrin (2000).

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However, I am convinced that looking at meaningful expressions in this way is basically misguided, they are not complexes formed by attaching meanings to sounds; they are more adequately seen as meanings embodied in sounds. An expression serves as a mere way of presenting its meaning; normally we do not perceive an expression as such, but rather look ‘through it’ at its meaning. An expressions and its meaning are inseparably connected; they are, as de Saussure (1931) put it, two sides of a single sheet of paper. Thus, the connection between an expression and its meaning can be said to be a priori, not to be found in the world, but rather being constitutive of our grasp of the world. And the linguistic turn requires intentional suppression of this normal perception. Once we realize that the Saussurean two sides of a sheet of paper picture the composition of an expression and its meaning much more adequately than the amalgamation of an expression with a meaning, we can see that it might take a nontrivial effort to disengage an expression from its meaning, while what is effortless is to see it as an embodiment of the meaning – to see it as meaningless need not be any easier than to see, say, a human ear as a mere chunk of meat, rather than an ear.4 In sum, both the linguistic turn of philosophy and the formalistic turn of logic require us to view the relation between an expression and its meaning as a contingent, a posteriori, fact. However, we cannot adopt this view universally without undermining our ability to use language and engage in argumentation. If we held the relation between an expression and its meaning to be always contingent, then no statement could be true necessarily, in every possible world (and hence we would not be able to articulate any universally valid argument) – for even for a statement that means (in the actual world) something which is true in all possible worlds there would be possible worlds in which the statement would be false, namely each possible world in which the statement 4

As Dutilh Novaes (2012), Chapter 6, duly points out, ‘de-semantification’ is a cognitive mechanism which is very non-trivial and which is crucial from the viewpoint of the deployment of the methods of modern formal logic. In particular “by countering our automatic (or default) tendency towards semantic activation, de-semantification allows for the deployment of reasoning strategies other than our default strategies, thus enhancing the ‘mind-altering’ effect of reasoning with formalisms”.

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would mean something false (in that world).5 To say that the relation between a statement and its meaning is contingent is to say that there are possible worlds in which the statement means something false; and for the sake of rational argumentation we need statements which have meanings independent of possible worlds (which are, so to say, ‘about’ possible worlds).6 Hence we need both the perspective which allows us to look at the relation between an expression and its meaning as something contingent (a posteriori, ‘within the world’) and the one which allows us to look at this relation as something necessary (a priori, ‘about the world’). Let us call the former the expression-as-object perspective and the latter the expression-as-medium perspective. The expression-as-object perspective is the perspective of a foreigner trying to figure out how to translate our expressions into those of his own language (or that of a linguist intentionally reflecting upon our usage of language); the expression-asmedium perspective is that of our fellow speakers chatting away without any awareness of their use of language. As philosophers we need both perspectives, and, moreover, we need to go back and forth between them. The need to switch between the two perspectives is quite obvious when we try to state explicitly what a given expression means. Let us consider the statement (1), or its Tarskian variant (2). (1) “Snow is white” means that snow is white (2) “Snow is white” is true if, and only if, snow is white Such articulations of the correspondence between language and the world, which are at the heart of the foundation of the Tarskian corres5

6

Contingency of meaning thus makes for a double-dependence of the link of a statement to its truth value on possible worlds: not only that a proposition can be true in some possible worlds and false in others, but also that a statement can mean different propositions in different possible worlds. (This has come to be explicitly reflected by the so-called ‘two-dimensional semantics’; see Stalnaker 2001.) This is to say that possible worlds cannot be used to explain language, because they themselves make sense only on the background of a language. See Peregrin (1995).

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pondence theory of truth, have initiated a broad and still continuing discussion.7 The central issue in this discussion is the status of sentences articulating correspondence: is (2) a necessary or a contingent truth? If it is necessary, then the correspondence theory manages to state the truth conditions of a contingent statement without telling us anything factual, which seems absurd. If, on the other hand, it is contingent, then how is it possible that we directly see its truth? If we consider the sentence snow is white as a priori equipped with its meaning (i.e., if we use the expression-as-medium perspective), then to say either (1) or (2) is to utter a truism. If, on the other hand, we were to look at snow is white as a string of letters whose meaning (if any) is a matter of empirical investigation (hence adopting the expression-asobject perspective), we would make the intelligibility of (1) and (2) itself an empirical issue. In other words, understanding this sentence presupposes knowledge of its truth. What we need to do is use the expressionas-object perspective for the first occurrence of snow is white in (1) or (2) and the expression-as-medium view for the second; only then are we able to see the statement as a nontrivial piece of information, on a par with “Schnee ist weiß” is true if and only if snow is white. (This switch of perspective is, of course, what the apostrophes are employed to effect.) This example illustrates that it is only through the ability to treat meanings as detachable and to switch between the expression-asmedium and the expression-as-object view (comparable with switching between perceiving a window and looking through it) that we can make sense of correspondence. More generally, it is this ability that underlies both the linguistic turn of philosophy and the formalistic turn of logic. The ability to view logical formulas both as self-contained objects and as mere ways of pointing to their meanings is what makes it meaningful to consider alternative interpretations of formulas. It is this ability which made possible the development of genuine formal logic and model theory. And it is the same ability, applied to expressions of natural language, that makes it possible to understand truth as correspondence and to complete the ‘semantic ascent’. However, the art of playing hide-and-seek 7

See, e.g., Leitgeb (2007) and the literature quoted there.

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with meanings can be deceptive: we may delude ourselves into thinking that we have gained everything when in fact we have lost everything because we have lost firm ground beneath our feet. 4. The two faces of language It may be helpful to use the spatial metaphor and to speak about ‘inside language’ and ‘outside language’. To be inside means to use language as the medium of grasping the world; to be outside means to perceive language as a thing among other things of our world. To be inside is to take an expression as inseparably and unquestionably connected with its meaning, while to be outside is to perceive the connection between an expression and its meaning as an empirical fact. If we are inside a house and perceive the sky through a hole in the house’s roof, then it makes no sense to ask whether we really do perceive the piece of sky we do; whereas if we are outside the house, then the question whether an inside observer can perceive this or that piece of the sky is meaningful and nontrivial. The perspective from inside is the expression-as-medium perspective; whereas that from outside is the expression-as-object perspective. What makes language capable of constituting an ‘inside’, which we can ‘enter’? As I have explained in greater detail elsewhere,8 it is I think the fact that language is, essentially, a complicated system of rules that have come to interlock in a robust, but delicate way to delimit the ‘space of meaningfulness’, in which we can take up meanings. In fact, the kind of ‘Janus-faced’ characteristic of language is merely the most sophisticated version of a property of everything that is norm-driven (and thus rational). Any norms are bound to be outgrowths of human communities and viewed as such they appear as contingent products of factual historic developments; but we, as rational beings, are characterized by the ability to obey norms; in other words, to assume the viewpoint from which they appear to us as necessary. If we are inside English, then we perceive what statements like (1) and (2) say as a priori; if we are outside, we perceive it as a posteriori. 8

See especially Peregrin (2012, 2010).

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Hence we may draw the conclusion that to be inside a language prevents us from seeing the language in the unprejudiced way, and that therefore we should try to stay outside every language. However, this seems to be simply impossible for a human being, and it is surely impossible for a theorizing human being. There is no necessity in adopting a particular language, but it is necessary to adopt some language, and adopting a language means to approve the necessity of its necessary statements. As Wittgenstein (1956: II, §30) puts it, “the must corresponds to a track which I lay down in language”. If we do not speak German, then finding out that the sentence “Schnee ist weiß” means that snow is white is like finding out that, say, Hamburg is a port; if, on the other hand, it is German that is the language we use to cope with the world, then we cannot find out anything of this kind, because the knowledge of it underlies the very possibility of ‘finding out’. Moreover, the replacement of the study of the mind and of the world by the study of language which underlies the linguistic turn is meaningful only due to the fact that language acts as our universal means of coping with the world, that it is a medium. In other words, the linguistic turn makes sense only when related to the language we are inside of.9 To sum up: our language is a Janus-faced being; it may be ‘in the world’ (when we are outside it), or it may be ‘about the world’, i.e., ‘transcendent to the world’ (when we are inside it). We can move in and 9

In fact, the problem of the two faces of language is nothing new; it is only the modern reincarnation of the much more traditional problem of the ambiguity of subjectivity. The subject, the ego, can be considered either as a thing on a par with other things of the world (‘psychological’ subject) or as something that is transcendent to the world, that is, in Wittgenstein's words, not a part of the world, but rather its boundary (‘transcendental’ subject). If we want, as Husserl did, to use an analysis of the subject as a step toward the analysis of the world, we must consider the subject in the latter sense, as a transcendental ego; we do not need subjectivity as Seelenleben, but rather subjectivity as “Geltungsgrund aller objectiven Geltungen und Gründe” (Husserl 1977: 27). The linguistic turn then means only the replacement of the subject by language. The opposition between the psychological and transcendental subject reappears as the opposition between the notion of language-as-object (‘grammatical language’) and the notion of language-as-medium (‘transcendental language’), only the latter being able to underlie ontological considerations.

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out; but we cannot be both in and out in the same time. However, to realize all of this means to question the philosophical significance of the correspondence theory, and of the idea of linguistic turn as resting on this theory. The point is that to make the theory of correspondence nontrivial, we need to be outside the language in question; but to make the theory into a path-breaking piece of philosophy we would have to be inside it. If we are inside, then the theory of correspondence is trivial, whereas if we are outside, then it is one of the numerous hypotheses of natural science to be tested by field scientists. What we can get hold of and thus use to articulate correspondence is the language-as-object; but the notion of correspondence is philosophically significant only when related to language-as-medium. In contrast to Tarski, Wittgenstein was clear about this predicament from the beginning. Like Tarski, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was convinced that correspondence was the key concept, but unlike Tarski he immediately realized its essential deceptiveness. He clearly saw that if we understand language in terms of picturing reality, then we question all necessary statements (tautologies and contradictions), because these are not pictures. Thus he was led to the seemingly counterintuitive conclusion that the statements of philosophy cannot be in fact meaningful – the reason is that although truth may be indeed considered reducible to correspondence, no theory of correspondence that would imply the reduction can be consistently articulated. 5. The two kinds of logic The primary aim of logic is to summarize basic instances of consequence, basic patterns of our reasoning used in arguments and proofs. Thus, logic is inseparably linked to natural language – the medium of expression in which arguments and proofs are originally formulated. The use of symbolic and formal devices within logic arises from recognition of the fact that such patterns are easier to summarize if we do not take natural language at face value but reconstruct it instead as a strictly rule-based grammatical system. This leads us to the concept of a formal calculus, a calculus consisting of a formal grammar determining the class of well-formed

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expressions, plus axioms and rules of inference determining the relation of consequence and hence providing the needed criterion of validity of proofs. Formal logic suspends the relationship between natural language and its formal reconstructions in order to permit the undisturbed analysis of properties of formal calculi. However, once formal calculi began to be studied independently of their relationship to natural language, they slowly came to be seen as languages of their own – not as reconstructions of natural language, but rather as alternatives. Taken in this way they turned out to be substantially incomplete: whereas it is essential for natural language expressions that they be linked to their extralinguistic denotations, expressions of the formal calculi lack such links. This was the point at which Tarski entered the scene: his model theory appeared to provide precisely what was needed, namely extralinguistic entities to which expressions of formal calculi could be linked. Thus the parallelism between natural language and languages of formal logic seemed to be complete; and scholars like Montague began to deny any real difference between the two kinds of languages. Notice that the original aim of logic is compatible with the languageas-medium perspective. We need not speak about language, we only need to replace natural language statements and arguments by their formal regimentations which allow us to ignore all irrelevant idiosyncrasies and so to see the relevant patterns. Thus, it allows us to capture the unity of sense within the multiplicity of surface forms and to account for the infinite class of valid instances of consequence by finite means.10 However, if interpreted formal calculi are seen as alternatives to natural language rather than as its regimentation, logical analysis might be seen not as a schematization of natural language sentences, but rather as a way of making their meanings explicit by furnishing them with modeltheoretical interpretations.11 The problem of explicating meaning has come to be understood as the problem of finding a model theory ade10

11

The intention to use symbolic means precisely to this effect has been clearly formulated in the introduction of Frege’s Begriffsschrift. See Frege (1879: v). This institutes an important ambiguity of the term ‘interpretation’; see Peregrin (1994).

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quate for natural language. Many theoreticians have embraced so-called ‘representational semantics’, claiming that we must first develop adequate set-theoretic representations of what the world is like and what it could be like, and only then study the relations of sentences to these representations.12 However, to develop an explicit semantics means to step outside natural language and hence to demote it to a mere object among other objects of our world. From the vantage point of the basic aim of logic this whole approach is disputable. We can, of course, consider a formal calculus as a selfcontained whole, study various relations between its formulas, and talk about some of these relations as relations of ‘consequence’; but doing so means doing algebra, not logic in the genuine sense of the word. Algebraic theories resulting from the autonomous study of logical calculi are respectable as such, and provide useful tools to the logician; however, they are not as yet logic; similarly as the theory of differential equations, surely indispensable for a physicist, is not as yet physics. Axiomatic systems were introduced to characterize and explicate the pre-theoretical notion of consequence; their basic aim was to characterize the infinite number of instances of consequence by finite means (by reconstructing them as potentially inferable by means of a finite number of inference rules from a finite numbers of axioms), i.e., to deliver a criterion of consequencehood. Model theory is merely another such method of characterization (and it is in fact questionable as a method, in that it does not restrict itself to finite means and hence need not provide a real criterion). Thus the formal completeness of a logical calculus does not prove its axiomatization to be ‘right’ (i.e., to adequately capture the consequence relation as it is ‘directly’ presented model-theoretically), rather, it shows that two alternative formal characterizations of consequence, the axiomatic and the model-theoretic one, coincide (thus corroborating the – essentially formally unprovable – claim that they both adequately capture the pre-theoretical notion of consequence).

12

Thus Etchemendy (1990). In fact, this means a return to metaphysics, although in a set-theoretical disguise. Brilliant samples of systems of such a set-theoretical metaphysics can be found in Cresswell (1973) or in Barwise and Perry (1983).

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We have distinguished between two notions of language, the notion of language as an object among other objects of our world, and the notion of language as a medium of presentation of the whole world. Given the basic dependence of logic on language, we can draw a similar distinction for logic: a logical calculus can either be taken as a mere object within our world, or it can be understood as a regimentation of language in its transcendental capacity. This is tantamount to the distinction between logic as calculus and logic as language introduced by Heijenoort (1967). There is little doubt that our medium of reasoning is not a language ‘within the world’, but rather a language ‘about the world’; i.e., that it is the medium view of language that must form the ultimate basis of logic. Calculi of formal logic, if they are not to be understood simply as algebraic structures on a par with groups, rings or vector spaces, must be seen as ‘regimentations’ of our language in its transcendental capacity. Thus, if a logician proposes that “we simply put the logic which we are studying into one compartment, and the logic we are using to study it in another”,13 then he is stepping on thin ice, because unless the logic we study is the same as the one we use, it is in fact no logic at all in the authentic sense of the word. Neurath’s classic metaphor seems to be particularly apt here: we cannot step out of the boat of our language, we have to rebuild it while staying aboard. We can make logical calculi to capture and to explicate important points of the way we use language, but we cannot throw away our language and put a calculus in its place. 6. The elusiveness of semantics So is there any way at all to make sense of the linguistic turn and use logic for philosophical purposes? Do we not, as soon as we begin to speak about language, eo ipso adopt the language-as-object perspective and hence do ‘mere’ linguistics? And are we not doing ‘mere’ mathematics as soon as we set out to do model theory? An answer to this question is indicated in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: one can create a picture, articulating correspondence in such a way as to 13

Kleene (1967: 2-3).

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feature language-as-object in the role of language-as-medium, and hope that the reader will get it and yet not take the picture literally. This is why Witthenstein says Tractatus offers no learnable truths, but rather a kind of ladder to be thrown away once the reader has used it to climb higher. Hence the difference between linguistics and model theory, on the one hand, and a philosophical account of correspondence, on the other, is not that the former speak about language-as-object and the latter about language-as-medium – whenever we speak about language, we eo ipso speak about language-as-object. Language-as-medium can be used, but not fully spoken about. The difference is that in the framework of linguistic or logical discourse we take speech about language literally, whereas in the framework of philosophical discourse we take it as a metaphor, as a picture. In doing Wittgensteinian philosophy we may make use of language-as-object to the extent that it can serve as a vehicle of metaphor; but we must avoid taking the metaphor literally, mistaking language-as-object for language-as-medium. We should devise a theory which permanently reminds us of its metaphorical character. Let us return to (2). The sentence Snow is white is true if and only if snow is white. We may be tempted to say that it is true due to the fact that ‘out there in the world’ or possibly in a model structure which is considered to offer a faithful representation of the world the entity snow instantiates the property of being white, or that snow is an element of the set of white things, or that there exists a fact of the coincidence of snow and whiteness. However, all of this is rather tricky: we can either consider snow is white as a mere string of letters (from the object perspective, i.e., from outside English), and then it is in itself neither true nor false; or we can take for granted that it has its usual meaning (using the medium perspective, i.e., staying inside English), and then (2) turns out to be self-evident.14 To say that the entity snow has the property of being 14

If I say that the entity denoted by ‘snow’ instantiates the property denoted by ‘is white’, then I speak about English and I hence treat of English from outside. However, that such a statements really requires the perspective from outside means that it says something more than every statement that could be made from inside, especially that it says something over and above the statement that snow is white. This is just the case when I insist that the fact of snow’s instantiation of

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white is not an explanation for the truth of the sentence snow is white; it is only its cumbersome paraphrase.15 It is, in fact, as Rorty (1989: 7) puts it, like explaining why opium makes you sleepy by talking about its dormitive power. If we realize that our language is the ‘universal’ (the illuminating German word unhintergehbar unfortunately has no exact English equivalent) medium, then we must conclude that its semantics is in a certain sense fixed. Moreover, we must conclude that this semantics is essentially elusive – to be able to grasp it we would have to step outside language, and this is essentially impossible. “There is no outside”; as Wittgenstein (1953: §103) puts it, “outside you cannot breathe”. By providing a model-theoretical interpretation for a formal calculus or for a natural language we offer a new perspective which may help us perceive patterns and regularities which would remain hidden to our eyes otherwise; however, it is inadequate to see this act as the act of going from the words to what the words are about. 7. Formal logic as ‘perspicuous representation’ The exclusive acceptance of the logic-as-calculus notion prevalent now, and the mistaking of this notion for the notion of logic-as-language, has led many philosophers to misguided conclusions. However, there is also a more or less continuous tradition exhibiting awareness of the limitations of this notion in philosophical contexts. As was shown especially by Hintikka, the notion of logic-as-language has been central not only for Frege, but also for some of the most outstanding analytic philosophers of this century, especially Wittgenstein and Quine.16

15

16

whiteness is a fact independent of, and casually determining the fact of the truth of snow is white. Some paraphrases of such kind, if carried out systematically, may have a purpose, namely helping us see a relevant structure of language; however, this has little to do with the language-world relationship and with the question of what makes sentences true. See Hintikka (1984: 27-49); Hintikka & Hintikka (1986); Hintikka (1990).

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The employment of formal logic for philosophical purposes is justified only to the extent that it helps capture language in its transcendental capacity. In other words, formal logic, and especially model theory, is not as yet philosophy; it is a device which can be utilized (correctly or incorrectly) by philosophers. Moreover, there is no rule for correct usage. This was clearly recognized by Frege, Wittgenstein and Quine,17 but largely ignored by Tarski, Carnap, Montague and many other philosophers and semanticists. The purpose of formalization is to help us see certain aspects of language and its functioning clearer, to achieve what we might call, after Wittgenstein (1953: §122), an übersichtliche Darstellung (‘perspicuous representation’) It is justified to the extent, and only to the extent that it fulfils this function; and it must be constantly evaluated from this point of view. Stekeler-Weithofer has described the situation as follows: With the development of the functio-logical semantics one constructs a (mathematical) ‘object of comparison’, a logico-mathematical ‘picture’ or ‘model’, and compares certain aspects or regularities of our common language usage, especially of our usual talk about the meanings of linguistic expressions and of normal judgements of correctness (adequacy) and hence truth of statements, with aspects and regularities in the picture. Such a comparison can yield certain keys to understanding how language ‘functions’ and it can help us formulate explicit rules of meaning sensibly, … One should never forget, however, that what is at stake are constructed pictures, perspectives which can be varied, and not descriptions adequate in general, nor generally approvable criteria governing correct speech and argumentation. (Stekeler-Weithofer 1986: 141-142)

Russell, Carnap and other scholars were convinced that the structure of language, although something quite definite, is hidden inside language or behind it, and that we need logical analysis to bring this structure to light. In this view, doing logical analysis can be compared to opening the lid of a complicated machine, thereby revealing the machine’s inner 17

It is instructive to see how Frege understands the role of formal logic in his Begriffsschrift. For him, his concept script is like microscope: it is a tool excellent for some purposes (namely for the purposes of science demanding extraordinary acuity and differentiation), but useless for others.

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workings. This metaphor is misguided, however: there is nothing about language that is hidden and can only be made visible by opening a lid. Language is accessible to us in all its aspects; our problem is to comprehend it – to command, as Wittgenstein (1953: §122ff.) puts it, a clear view of it. If language is to be seen as a machine, then it is a machine with all its wheels and gears in full view. Thus, the use of logical formulas to analyze language is more felicitously compared to drawing up a scheme to facilitate comprehension of the operating principle of an engine that is itself fully accessible to inspection but too complicated to be understood. No logical calculus is the scheme that would guarantee understanding language; it is at most one of many possible schemes that may contribute to it.18 8. Conclusion The linguistic turn is based on the fact that whatever we can speak about is the meaning of an expression of our language and that ontology is thus in a sense reducible to semantics. Model theory, as developed within the framework of modern formal logic offered means for the explicit capturing of semantics; hence it is tempting to promote model-theoretical semantics as ontology. However, this might be really misguiding. If we look at our language ‘from inside’ and if we understand logic ‘as language’, then model theory can be at most one of the formal ways of summarizing ways of using language; and as such it cannot be an explanation over and above being a summarization and making language more comprehensible. On the other hand, if we look at language from outside and if we pursue logic as calculus, then there is no immediate philosophical relevance of model theory; model theory is simply a part of mathematics and model-theoretical semantics is a part of empirical linguistics. Such enterprises can be considered philosophically relevant only as metaphors; metaphors which may (and do) help us see how is our language related to the world, which are nevertheless no direct theories thereof. 18

For a further elaboration on these themes see Peregrin (1995).

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References Barrett, Robert B. and Roger F. Gibson (eds.) 1990. Perspectives on Quine. Oxford: Blackwell. Barwise, Jon and John Perry 1983. Situations and Attitudes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Carnap, Rudolf 1931. Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache. Erkenntnis 2, 219-241. Carnap, Rudolf 1934. Logische Syntax der Sprache. Vienna: Springer. Cresswell, Max John 1973. Logic and Languages. London: Meuthen. Dutilh Novaes, Catarina 2011. The Different Ways in which Logic is (said to be) Formal. History and Philosophy of Logic 32, 303-332. Dutilh Novaes, Catarina 2012. Formal Languages from a Cognitive Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Etchemendy, John 1990. The Concept of Logical Consequence. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Frege, Gottlob 1879. Begriffsschrift. Halle: Nebert. Heijenoort, Jean van 1967. Logic as Calculus and Logic and Language. Synthèse 17, 324-330. Hintikka, Jaakko 1984. A Hundred Years Later: the Rise and Fall of Frege’s Influence in Language Theory. Synthèse 59, 27-49. Hintikka, Jaakko 1990. Quine as a Member of the Tradition of the Universality of Language. In: R.B. Barrett and R.F. Gibson (eds.), 159-175. Hintikka, Merril Bristow and Jaakko Hintikka 1986. Investigating Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell. Husserl, Edmund 1977. Cartesianische Meditationen. Hamburg: Meiner. Kleene, Stephen Cole 1967. Mathematical Logic. New York: John Wiley. Leitgeb, Hannes 2007. What Theories of Truth Should Be Like (but Cannot Be). Philosophy Compass 2, 276-290. Montague, Richard 1974. Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of R.Montague. New Haven: Yale University Press. Peregrin, Jaroslav 1994. Interpreting Formal Logic. Erkenntnis 40, 5–20. Peregrin, Jaroslav 1995. Doing Worlds with Words. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Peregrin, Jaroslav 2000. The ‘Natural’ and the ‘Formal’. Journal of Philosophical Logic 29, 75-101. Peregrin, Jaroslav 2003. Filosofie a jazyk. Triton: Praha. Peregrin, Jaroslav 2010. The Enigma of Rules. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 18, 377-394. Peregrin, Jaroslav 2012. Semantics without Meaning? In: R. Schantz (ed.), 479-502. Quine, Willard Van Orman 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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Rorty, Richard 1967. The Linguistic Turn. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Rorty, Richard 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, Bertrand 1905. On Denoting. Mind 14, 479-493. Saussure, Ferdinand de 1931. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot. English translation Course in General Linguistics, Philosophical Library, New York, 1959. Schantz, Richard (ed.) 2012. Prospects of Meaning. Berlin: de Gruyter. Stalnaker, Robert 2001. On Considering a Possible World as Actual. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplem, 141-156. Stekeler-Weithofer, Pirmin 1986. Grundprobleme der Logik. Berlin: de Gruyter. Tichý, Pavel 1988. The Foundations of Frege’s Logic. Berlin: de Gruyter. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1953. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Oxford: Blackwell. English translation Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1953. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1956. Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik. Oxford: Blackwell. English translation Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Blackwell, Oxford, 1956.

Ulrich Reichard University of Durham [email protected]

Objects, Concepts, Unity1 Abstract: The paradox of the concept horse has often been taken to be devastating for Frege’s ontological distinction between objects and concepts. I argue that if we consider how the concept-object distinction is supposed to account for the unity of linguistic meaning, it transpires that the paradox is in fact not paradoxical. Keywords: Frege, paradox of the concept horse, predication, ontology, structure, relational properties, unity of the proposition

1. The paradox of the concept horse The most fundamental distinction in Frege’s ontology is that between concepts and objects. The difference between them is that concepts are ‘incomplete’ or ‘unsaturated’ entities, whereas objects are ‘complete’ or ‘saturated’; that is, concepts are functions, in the simplest case taking objects as arguments to return objects as values. Yet, Frege’s way of drawing this distinction gives rise to the famous ‘paradox of the concept horse’: “the concept horse is not a concept” (Frege 1892: 42). Whereas this follows straightforwardly from Frege’s theory, it has often been taken to be a serious problem for Frege. Dummett (1973: 212), for example, argues that, if the paradox is not resolvable in some way or other, it constitutes “a reductio ad absurdum of Frege’s logical doctrines”. Furthermore, according to Soames (2010: 21), the paradox shows the ‘selfrefuting’ character of Frege’s philosophy. Also Lowe (2006: 84) argues 1

For very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, I am grateful to David Kirkby, Andrew Woodard, Alex Malt and Wolfram Hinzen. I also thank the participants of PhiLang 2013 in Lodz and the participants of the 2013 MLM workshop in Durham for discussions on the topic of this paper, in particular John Collins, Jonathan Lowe, and Jan Westerhoff.

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that the paradox ‘vitiates’ the concept-object distinction, and Davidson (2005, chapter 6) maintains that it shows that Frege has not solved the problem of the unity of meaning (which Davidson calls ‘the problem of predication’). Davidson’s judgement is particularly problematic for Frege, given that one of Frege’s central motivations for drawing a distinction between concepts and objects in the first place was to ensure the unity of the meanings of sentences, which Frege called ‘thoughts’: Frege (1892: 54) argues that without a distinction analogous to his distinction between concepts and objects, it remains unexplained how “all parts of a thought […] hold together”. In the following, I argue that if we consider how an ontological distinction like the object-concept distinction could provide an answer to questions concerning the unity of meaning, it transpires that the paradox of the concept horse is in fact not paradoxical, as Frege (1892) also argued himself. 2. A relational ontology The problem of the unity of meaning consists in the following puzzle:2 sentences have meaning, but words on their own also have meaning. The meanings of the words of a sentence are systematically related to the meaning of the sentence. But the sentence is not just the sum of the meanings of the words: it exhibits a certain unity that the sum of the meanings of its constituents misses. For example, the meaning of the sentence John sits is a proposition (or ‘thought’ in Frege’s terminology). In contrast to the meaning of a list of two words, such as John, Mary, the unity of the proposition exceeds that of an ordered set. The clearest sign for this unity is that the proposition is evaluable for truth and falsity whereas the meaning of the list is not. Thus, we face the question of how the meanings of the words combine to make up a proposition. It might be tempting to think that the problem can be resolved by referring to the 2

Versions of this problem have recently been discussed from a systematic point of view by Davidson (2005), Gaskin (2008), King (2009; 2013), Soames (2010), and Collins (2011). See also the metaphysical literature on Bradley’s Regress summarized in Maurin (2012).

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ingredients: a sentence requires (at least) a noun and a verb, two nouns like John and Mary are not sufficient to get a sentence. Though, having the right ingredients is only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for unity (cf. Gaskin 2008; Schnieder 2004). Exchange Mary for sits in the list John, Mary – the result John, sits is still a list of words and its meaning not a proposition evaluable for truth and falsity. As we shall see below, the unity of linguistic meaning faces a further complication which originates in the nature of natural language. To separate this complication from the unity issue, let us first consider a simpler case: the unity of a complex spatio-temporal object like an arch. What is it, we may ask, that unites all the stones which the arch is made from, such that together they make up an arch, not a house, a pile of stones or a set of stones scattered around the world? The answer to this question is probably that the stones make up an arch, rather than any other object or no unified object at all, because they are spatially arranged in a particular way. In other words, the stones make up an arch, because they are all part of a particular spatial structure. Needless to say, the structure is not itself a further stone that, if added to the other stones, unites them in the required way. To assume otherwise would, it seems, mean making a category mistake and would also lead straightforwardly into Bradley’s Regress, as Russell (1903, chapter 4) had to note. Nonetheless, the spatial structure does not only unite the stones in the appropriate way, it also determines some relational properties of the stones. Relational properties are properties which an object has only in virtue of standing in a relation to some other object. For example, being a grandfather is a relational property, since in order to be a grandfather, there has to be a child that happens to be the offspring of one of your children. Similarly, the stone in the centre of the arch (the one with the rose) is the keystone – not because of its form or mass or any other intrinsic property, but in virtue of playing a particular role in the arch. If this stone was part of the foundation of the arch, or if it was lying around somewhere else, it would fail to be a keystone. Thus, we could say that it is the keystone which unites the arch, instead of saying that it is the spatial structure which does so; for, given that the keystone is only a keystone when it plays this particular role in a certain structure, these two claims are equivalent: if there is a keystone, there has to be the structure

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of an arch; if there is the structure of an arch, there has to be a keystone (special circumstances aside). Keystones, then, are not only stones: they are keystones only in virtue of being part of a structure – we could say, a keystone is a stone with gaps for other stones. In this respect, keystones are quite similar to Fregean concepts: concepts are also said to contain ‘gaps’ for arguments and are therefore ‘incomplete’ or ‘unsaturated’. The structural nature of Fregean concepts is relatively explicit in the following quote: Instead of putting a judgement together out of an individual thing as subject and an already previously formed concept as predicate, we do the opposite and arrive at a concept by having the judgeable content fall into pieces [zerfallen]. However, for it to be possible to fall into pieces, the expression of the judgeable content has to be structured. […] Yet, it does not follow that the ideas of these properties and relations are formed independently of the objects [to which they apply] […]. For this reason, their expressions never stand on their own in the Begriffsschrift; rather, they always occur in combinations which express judgeable contents. (Frege 1880-1881: 18-19)

Concepts, then, originate in complete thoughts (‘judgeable contents’) by abstracting over some parts of the thought. What remains, the concept, retains the structure of the complete thought; concepts therefore are not independent of the thoughts and ‘never stand on their own’. As Diamond (1979) suggests, Frege’s (1884: x) context principle, “never [to] ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a sentence”, may well be motivated by the insight that the meaning of a word depends on the function it plays in a sentence. Also Frege’s (1891a: 96; 1892-1895) explicit distinction between concepts and their extension (and the more general distinction between functions and their value ranges (Frege 1891b: 32; 1892-1895: 132) seem to be motivated by the structural nature of concepts (functions). Something is only a concept if it plays a certain role in a thought; yet, the extension of a concept, the set of objects falling under it, is not sensitive to the structure of the thought. If concepts are thus structural entities, it is clear how they can be used to account for the unity of thoughts. Without there being a complete thought, there is no concept, in the same way as there is no keystone un-

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less there is an arch. Therefore, concepts guarantee the unity of thoughts and can thus be said to ‘hold’ the parts of the thought together. The structural, or relational, nature of the distinction between concepts and objects has to be separated from the question whether an entity is a concept or object necessarily. In the case of the arch, it is clear that the stone which functions as keystone in a particular arch could have been used in a different function in the same or another arch, or in a house, or a pile of stones. Keystones, thus, are keystones contingently, not necessarily. Frege suggests at some places that the same is true of concepts: when he writes that “it is a mere illusion to suppose that a concept can be made an object without altering it” (Frege 1884: x), he seems to imply that, in principle, concepts can be made objects. Whether something is a concept or object, then, is a contingent matter. Also in a later article, Frege (1892: 46) writes that, before it can be made the referent of a subject, “the concept […] must first be converted into an object”, which again seems to commit Frege to contingent ontological categories. However, at this place, Frege adds that, “speaking more precisely, [the concept has to be] represented by an object”, which relativizes Frege’s commitment to the contingent nature of the concept-object distinction. Nonetheless, whether or not the distinction is a contingent one, what matters in respect to the unity question is that it is relational. If entities possess their ontological categories necessarily, they fail to exist when they do not play the role that constitutes the particular ontological category. The category itself may nonetheless be relational. Frege’s distinction between objects and concepts is closely related to a distinction in (logical) syntax. Frege writes: “The concept (as I understand it) is predicative”; and he adds in a footnote: “It is in fact the referent of a grammatical predicate”, before proceeding: “On the other hand, a name of an object, a proper name, is quite incapable of being used as a grammatical predicate” (Frege 1892: 43). The referents of singular terms are, therefore, always objects and the referents of predicates are always concepts – in this way, syntax decides over the ontological category of the referents of the terms (cf. Ricketts 1986: 66). As Collins (2011: 37) concludes, “for Frege, logic or semantics has priority over any metaphysical conception of objects and properties”.

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Furthermore, Frege’s logical syntax is very close to the grammar of natural language. For example, consider Frege’s definition of functions, that at first sight seems to be unrelated to grammatical distinctions: Suppose that a simple or complex symbol occurs in one or more places in an expression […]. If we imagine this symbol as replaceable by another (the same one each time) at one or more of its occurrences, then the part of the expression that shows itself invariant under such replacement is called the function; and the replaceable part, the argument of the function. (Frege 1879: 13)

This definition allows for grammatical singular terms to act as functions. We could, for example abstract over sits in the sentence John sits and thereby receive a predicate John ( ). Yet, following natural language grammar, Frege never considers this as a possibility. As Gaskin (2008: 180) concludes, “it is a mark of Frege’s mature thought […] that the object-concept dichotomy is not treated by him as a purely logical distinction […], but is assumed to line up neatly with traditional grammatical categories”. Frege’s most fundamental ontological distinction, therefore, is ultimately based on the grammatical distinction between referential and predicative expressions. The grammatical origin of Frege’s object-concept distinction is in line with the structural nature of the respective grammatical categories, since the grammatical distinction between referential and predicative expressions is also determined relationally (cf. Hinzen and Sheehan 2013): Whether radium, for example, acts as a name or as a predicate depends on the context of the sentence. In (1), radium is a mass term and is thus used predicatively, whereas in (2) radium is used to refer to a kind (cf. Longobardi 1994): (1) Radium was found in this lake. (2) Radium was discovered by Madame Curie. Similarly, as Frege (1892: 50; cf. 1882) observes, Vienna can be used to refer to an object as in (3), but it can also be used as a predicate as in (4): (3) Vienna is a beautiful city.

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(4) Trieste is no Vienna. Frege (1892: 50) concludes from this that “language often uses the same word now as a proper name, now as a concept-word” and warns us not to be ‘deceived’ by this fact.3 Given the relational nature of the grammatical distinction between referential and predicative expressions, the unity of linguistic meaning can already be guaranteed on the level of grammar: if something is only a grammatical predicate if it stands in the right grammatical configuration, something is only a grammatical predicate if it is part of a sentence (or rather part of a clause). And sentences, as opposed to mere lists of words, have the unitary meanings we seek to account for. Hence, so far, the analogy between the arch and the linguistic case holds: what the spatial structure is for the arch, the grammatical structure is for the sentence; and what the stones are for the arch, the constituents (that is, words and phrases) are for the sentence. 3. Lexicalization of structural properties The case of linguistic meaning is in at least one way more complex than that of the arch. As noted, the structure of the arch cannot be used as a stone in another building. Also, given the structural understanding of keystone discussed above, when the keystone of the arch is taken out of the arch and made part of a house, it stops being a keystone, as it is not part of the structure anymore that makes it a keystone. However, treating structure as a lexical constituent is something language can do. We can talk about the grammatical structure of a sentence or the predicate of a sentence as in (6) and (7). I will call this process ‘lexicalization of structural categories’. (5) John sits. (6) The grammatical structure of (5) is simple. 3

One could insist that different lexical items underlie the different readings of these expressions. However, even if so, this does not change the relational nature of the distinction (cf. the discussion on necessity above).

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(7) The predicate of (5) is sit. Is the grammatical structure of (5) grammatical structure or a lexical constituent? It seems it is both: it picks out the structure of (5), but features in (6) as a constituent. Given that constituents are not structure, the grammatical structure of (5) is both structure and not structure. Yet, this is not a contradiction, since it is structure and not structure in different respects: Grammatically, it is not structure in respect to (6), but the lexical content renders it structure in respect to (5). The same is true of (7): the lexical content of the predicate of (5) renders it a predicate in respect to (5), but it is grammatically not the predicate (but the subject) of (7). Again, this is not a contradiction, as the predicate of (5) is a predicate and not a predicate in different respects. However, although lexicalized predicates are predicates in a lexical sense, there is one important aspect of predicativity which they lack: they cannot account for the unity of meaning anymore. Whereas we can say that sits in (5) is the predicate of the sentence and thus guarantees the unity of the meaning of (5), the predicate of (5) cannot be taken to play this role. Correspondingly, (8) cannot be a sentence and does not have a proposition as meaning: (8) John, the predicate of (5) Given that one of Frege’s concerns was to account for the unity of meaning, lexical predicates, then, are not really predicates, as they don’t guarantee unity. Therefore, he has reason to only count grammatical predicates as predicates. And in that case, the predicate of (5) in (7) will not count as a predicate. Hence, it is true that that the predicate of (5) is not a predicate, in the relevant sense of predicate. Given Frege’s (implicit) assumption that the structure of thoughts mirrors that of natural language, the case of the concept horse is analogous to the grammatical case (Frege 1892: 46, n. 2). Language can not only pick out (which involves lexicalization of) grammatical structure, but all kinds of structure and treat it, not as structure, but as a constituent. Thus, we can refer to concepts and say something about them, disregarding the thought they are a part of.

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(9) John is a horse. (10) The concept horse is instantiated. In (9), for example, horse is a concept structurally. It therefore guarantees the unity of the thought. However, only the lexical content renders ‘the concept horse’ a concept in (10), not the structure of (10). Structurally it is a constituent like John in (9). Treated in this way, the concept inevitably loses one aspect of its structural nature: it cannot guarantee unity anymore. However, given that for Frege the ability to guarantee unity is central for concepts, lexical concepts are not proper concepts. Hence, the concept horse is not a concept. 4. Conclusion In sum, when considered in light of Frege’s urge to account for the unity of linguistic meaning, concepts have to be understood in a structural way; that is, whether something is a concept or not is determined relationally, by the role it plays within a thought. It is an ‘awkwardness’ (Frege 1892: 46) of natural language that we can refer not only to things but also to structures, thus treating them as things, rather than structures in different thoughts.4 Yet, when treated in this way, they inevitably lose their ability to account for unity. The same is true of concepts: language provides the possibility to refer to a concept. Yet, thereby, the concept loses its structural aspect and thus cannot account for the unity of the thought anymore. If this ability is taken to be essential for concepts, concepts thus referred to are not concepts. This, it seems, is fully consistent. It is, therefore, not ‘a reductio ad absurdum of Frege’s logical doctrines’, a ‘vitiation’ of the concept-object distinction, or evidence of the ‘selfrefuting’ character of Frege’s philosophy. And, most importantly, it is an account – even if perhaps not an explanation – of the unity of linguistic meaning. 4

Perhaps it is needless to add that the ‘awkwardness’ of language which gives rise to the purported paradox of the concept horse in the first place is an aspect of what increases the expressive power of natural language greatly – and is therefore (perhaps pace Frege) not to be legislated away.

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References Collins, John 2011. The Unity of Lingustic Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidson, Donald 2005. Truth and Predication. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University. Diamond, Cora 1979. Frege and Nonsense. In: The Realist Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind, 73-93. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (1991). Dummett, Michael 1973. Frege: Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth. Frege, Gottlob 1879. Begriffsschrift: A Formalized Language of Pure Thought Modelled upon the Language of Arithmetic. In: Peter T. Geach and Max Black (eds.), 1-20. Frege, Gottlob 1880-1881. Booles rechnende Logik und die Begriffsschrift. In: Hans Hermes et al. (eds.), 9-52. Frege, Gottlob 1882. Frege an Marty 29.08.1882. In: Gottfried Gabriel et al. (eds.), 163-65. Frege, Gottlob 1884. The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number. Translated by J. L. Austin. Oxford: Basil Blackwell (1950). Frege, Gottlob 1891a. Frege an Husserl 24.5.1891. In: G. Gabriel et al (eds.), 94-98. Frege, Gottlob 1891b. Function and Concept. In: Peter T. Geach and Max Black (eds.), 21-41. Frege, Gottlob 1892. On Concept and Object. In: Peter T. Geach and Max Black (eds.), 42-55. Frege, Gottlob 1892-1895. Ausführungen über Sinn und Bedeutung. In: Hans Hermes et al. (eds.), 128-36. Gabriel, Gottfried, Hans Hermes, Friedrich Kambartel, Christian Thiel and Albert Veraart (eds.) 1976. Gottlob Frege: Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel. Hamburg: Meiner. Gaskin, Richard 2008. The Unity of the Proposition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geach Peter T. and Max Black (eds.) 1952. Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Haaparanta, Leila and Jaakko Hintikka (eds.) 1986. Frege Synthesized: Essays on the Philosophical and Foundational Work of Gottlob Frege. Dordrecht: Reidel. Hermes, Hans, Friedrich Kambartel and Friedrich Kaulbach (eds.) 1969. Gottlob Frege: Nachgelassene Schriften. Hamburg: Meiner. Hinzen, Wolfram and Michelle Sheehan 2014. The Philosophy of Universal Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming). Hochberg, Herbert and Kevin Mulligan (eds.) 2004. Relations and Predicates. Frankfurt a. M.: Ontos Verlag.

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King, Jeffrey C. 2009. Questions of Unity. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 109, 257-77. King, Jeffrey C. 2013. Propositional Unity: What’s the Problem, Who Has It and Who Solves It? Philosophical Studies (forthcoming). Longobardi, Giuseppe 1994. Reference and Proper Names. A Theory of N-Movement in Syntax and Logical Form. Linguistic Inquiry 25, 609-65. Lowe, E. Jonathan 2006. The Four-Category Ontology. A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science. New York: Clarendon Press. Maurin, Anna-Sofia 2012. Bradley’s Regress. Philosophy Compass 7, 794-807. Ricketts, Thomas G. 1986. Objectivity and Objecthood: Frege’s Metaphysics of Judgement. In: Leila Haaparanta and Jaakko Hintikka (eds.), 65-95. Russell, Bertrand 1903. Principles of Mathematics. London: Routledge (2010). Schnieder, Benjamin 2004. Once More: Bradleyan Regresses. In: Herbert Hochberg and Kevin Mulligan (eds.), 219-56. Soames, Scott 2010. What Is Meaning? Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Piotr Stalmaszczyk University of Łód [email protected]

The Legacy of Frege and the Linguistic Theory of Predication Abstract: This paper discusses possible approaches to linguistic predication inspired by the philosophy of language, distinguishing ‘Aristotelian’ (or concatentaive) predication and ‘Fregean’ (or functional) predication. It also investigates the relevance of Fregean semantics for contemporary linguistics, in particular generative grammar. Though Fregean semantics is not concerned with natural language categories, Frege’s line of reasoning may be applied to analyzing predication understood as a strictly grammatical relation. The paper also offers a preliminary classification of predication types into thematic, structural and propositional. Keywords: Frege, predication, generative grammar, predicate, function, copula

0. Introduction The present paper discusses the legacy of Gottlob Frege in contemporary linguistics, focusing on the influence of Fregean semantics upon natural language analyses, especially within the generative paradigm.1 The major claim is that some of the ‘Fregean tools’ (in the sense of Pietroski 2004, see below) may prove useful in analyzing such traditional linguistic notions as predication. For the purpose of this study predication is considered as a strictly grammatical operation: both a semantic relation and an appropriate structural configuration enabling this relation to occur (i.e. a method of constructing sentences). Section 1 briefly discusses the legacy of Frege, concentrating on his critique of natural language, the ideas behind conceptual notation (the 1

This paper is a substantially revised and extended version of Stalmaszczyk (2006, 2010).

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Begriffsschrift), and his ideas on functions and arguments; section 2 introduces the notion of predication; section 3 provides a preliminary classification of predication types into ‘Aristotelian’, or concatenative predication, and ‘Fregean’, or functional predication; section 4 focuses on predication in generative grammar; and finally section 5 proposes a tentative semantics for structural predication. 1. The legacy of Gottlob Frege Paul Pietroski has recently remarked that Frege “bequeathed to us some tools – originally designed for the study of logic and arithmetic – that can be used in constructing theories of meaning for natural languages” (Pietroski 2004: 29-30). The ‘Fregean tools’ still prove useful in analyzing not only the fundamental issues of sense and reference, the semantics of proper names, but also, as will be shown below, such traditional linguistic notions as predication. Frege’s “philosophy of language […] remains intensely vital today. Not since medieval times has the connection between logic and language been so close” (Mendelsohn 2005: xviii), and his “contributions to philosophy of language are so numerous and so fundamental that it is difficult to imagine the field without them” (Heck and May 2006: 3). Scott Soames adds that Fregean systems “were the starting points for the stunning development of mathematical logic in the twentieth century, and for the use of logical ideas and techniques in the study of natural languages” (Soames 2010: 7), and finally, Michael Potter points that: One of the most important contributions made by Frege was to place language at the center of philosophical, and in particular metaphysical, inquiry by recognizing its importance as a route to the structure of our thinking about the world. […] This approach seeks to discuss metaphysical questions about the structure of the world by means of a discussion of the structure of the language in which we represent the world. (Potter 2013: 853)

Michael Dummett (1993) points to Frege’s early work as seminal for the development of the linguistic turn in philosophy. The relevant fragment, which introduces the context principle, is to be found in the Introduction

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to Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, where Frege formulates his three fundamental principles, claiming in the second one “never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation but only in the context of a proposition” (Frege [1884]: xxii); further on in §62 of Grundlagen he stresses that “it is only in the context of a proposition that words have any meaning” (Frege [1884]: 73).2 Dummett (1993: 3) observes that the context principle is “formulated as one governing an enquiry into language rather than into modes of thought”, and the thesis is “that it is only in the context of a sentence that a word has meaning”, with sentences and words being linguistic units. Though Carl (1994) claims that the context principle does “not belong to a particular semantic theory but to an epistemological theory that draws a fundamental distinction between thinking and having representation” (Carl 1994: 43-44), it is clear that any epistemological enquiry is to be grounded in appropriate linguistic investigation, which is the very essence of the linguistic turn in philosophy, initiated by Frege. Before discussing Fregean inspirations and implications for the theory of predication, it is necessary to introduce briefly his achievements important for philosophy of language and linguistics, especially his work on conceptual notation, and functions and arguments. 1.1. Conceptual notation Frege was one of the first modern logicians to notice the need for a formalized conceptual notation, and devoted to this problem one of his first major works, Begriffsschrift, eine der aritmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens (‘Conceptual Notation. A Formula Language of Pure Thought, Modeled on Arithmetic’, 1879, henceforth CN).3 In the Preface he claimed that: 2

3

In a recent translation, Dale Jacquette renders these fragments as “The meaning of a word must be inquired after in propositional context, not in isolation”, and “Only in the context of a proposition do words refer to something” (Frege [1884]/2007: 17; 66). Unless otherwise noted, all page references following the abbreviated (or full) titles are to the English translations of Frege’s texts collected in Beaney, ed.

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If it is a task of philosophy to break the power of words over the human mind, by uncovering illusions that through the use of language often almost unavoidably arise concerning the relations of concepts, by freeing thought from the taint of ordinary linguistic means of expression, then my Begriffsschrift, further developed for these purposes, can become a useful tool for philosophers. (CN, 50-51)

It is clear from the above quotation that Frege did not consider spoken language as a sufficiently precise instrument for logic. He pointed to the need for creating a language made up of signs, the concept-script (or ‘ideography’), clear of any double meaning; he also claimed that “[t]he main task of the logician is to free himself from language and to simplify it” (Letters to Husserl, 1906, 303). Frege’s words were later echoed by his student, Rudolf Carnap, who in the forward to The Logical Syntax of Language (1937) argued that “the aim of logical syntax is to provide a system of concepts, a language, by the help of which the results of logical analysis will be exactly formulable” (Carnap 1937: xiii). 4 Michael Losonsky claims that as result of concentrating on language viewed (or even constructed) as a formal system, Frege “filtered out what might be thought as the human dimension of language, namely its psychological properties” (Losonsky 2006: 148). This is a natural (and obvious) consequence of his anti-psychologism, as introduced already in the Grundlagen, in the first fundamental principle: “always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective” (Frege [1884]: xxii), and repeated in several other places, for instance in Logic: In logic we must reject all distinctions that are made from a purely psychological point of view. What is referred to as a deepening of logic by psychology in nothing but a falsification of it by psychology. (Logic, 243)

4

(1997) and listed in the References. The German term Begriffsschrift has been translated also as ‘concept script’ or ‘ideography’. Further on Carnap remarks that “Philosophy is to be replaced by the logic of science – that is to say, by the logical analysis of the concepts and sentences of science, for the logic of science is nothing other than the logical syntax of the logic of science” (Carnap 1937: xiii, italics in the original).

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Additionally, as observed by Collins (2011: 37), “for Frege, logic or semantics has priority over any metaphysical conception of objects and properties”. In this study I do not investigate that issue any further, concentrating on the ‘Fregean tools’ as applied to analysing grammatical structures. In a somewhat different methodological context, Jan Łukasiewicz elucidated the idea of formalism and observed that every “scientific truth, in order to be perceived and verified, must be put into an external form intelligible to everybody”, and this aim “can be reached only by means of a precise language built up of stable, visually perceptible signs. Such a language is indispensable for any science” (Łukasiewicz 1957: 15). Whereas Frege stresses that “Logic should be the judge of languages” (Letters to Husserl, 1906, 303), Łukasiewicz observes that “Modern formal logic gives the utmost attention to precision of language. What is called formalism is the consequence of this tendency” (Łukasiewicz 1957: 15-16). Elsewhere Frege states that “[i]nstead of following grammar blindly, the logician ought rather to see his task as that of freeing us from the fetters of language” (Logic, 244).5 As observed by Carl (1994: 54), this “struggle against language and grammar” directs the logician’s concern to the issue of the thought expressed by a sentence, and aims at discovering the “logical kernel”. Consequently, Frege distinguishes between “judgement” (Urteil) and “judgeable content” (beurteilbarer Inhalt – the possible content of judgement, the thought expressed by a sentence, or the ‘complex of ideas’). In the conceptual notation, the former is represented by “|—A”, whereas the latter by “—A”. Frege explains the convention in the following way: A judgement will always be expressed by means of the symbol |— which stands to the left of the symbol or complex of symbols which gives the content of the judgement. (CN §2, 52) The horizontal stroke, from which the symbol |— is formed, binds the symbols that follow it into a whole, and assertion, which is expressed by means of the vertical stroke at the left end of the horizontal, relates to this whole. 5

For a critical discussion of Frege’s views on the ‘defects of language’, see Hanfling (2000: 153-163).

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The horizontal stroke may be called the content stroke, the vertical the judgement stroke. The content stroke serves generally to relate any symbol to the whole formed by the symbols that follow the stroke. What follows the content stroke must always have a judgeable content. (CN §2, 53)

In other words, the content stroke serves to distinguish the formation of a judgeable content from the act of judging. This sign indicates assertion, it acknowledges the truth of a thought: We […] need another special sign to be able to assert something as true. For this purpose I place before the name of the truth-value the sign ‘|—’, so that, for example, in ‘|— 22 = 4’ it is asserted that the square of 2 is 4. I distinguish judgement from thought in such a way that by judgement I understand the acknowledgement of the truth of a thought. (GGA, 215)

Frege’s notation has met with criticism from other logicians and philosophers; already Wittgenstein commented that: “Frege’s ‘judgement stroke’ ‘|—’ is logically quite meaningless” (TLP 4.442).6 On the other hand, it is possible to consider this sign as a metalogical symbol. Frege is concerned in CN with splitting up the content of a judgment, which he accomplishes by introducing the distinction between argument and function. In CN §9, a constant component which represents the totality of the relations is called a function, and the symbol which is regarded as replaceable by others and which denotes the object which stands in these relations is the function’s argument. Furthermore, Frege observes that the distinction between function and argument “has nothing to do with the conceptual content, but only with our way of grasping it” (CN §9, 66) and “for us, the different ways in which the same conceptual content can be taken as a function of this or that argument has no importance so long as function and argument are fully determinate” (CN §9, 68). In other words: “the way we distinguish between argument and function is not fixed by the conceptual content of a sentence” (Carl 1994: 62). I return to the consequences of this claim below; here it needs to be added that in Frege’s system the grammatical categories of subject 6

See Dudman (1970) for a critical overview of the issue. For more recent reevaluation of Frege’s judgment stroke, see Smith (2000) and Green (2002). See also the chapter on assertion in Dummett (1981).

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and predicate have no significance: “I believe that the replacement of the concepts subject and predicate by argument and function will prove itself in the long run” (CN, Preface, 51), and “[a] distinction between subject and predicate finds no place in my representation of judgment” (CN, §3, 53). This is a major issue which recurs throughout Frege’s writings, e.g. in one of the letters to Husserl he stresses that “[w]e should either tidy up logic by throwing out subject and predicate or else restrict these concepts to the relation of one object’s falling under a concept (subsumption)” (Letters to Husserl, 1906, 303), and in Logic he concludes that “from all this we can see that the grammatical categories of subject and predicate can have no significance for logic” (Logic, 242). Very interestingly, superficially similar calls for abandoning the traditional notion of predication can be found in Otto Jespersen’s Analytic Syntax (1937), one of the first modern (linguistic) attempts at formalizing the grammar of natural language. Jespersen’s motivation, however, is very different from Frege’s; in a sense, it reverses the logician’s argumentation: It would probably be best in linguistics to avoid the word predication altogether on account of its traditional connexion with logical theories. In grammar, we should not of course forget our logic, but steer clear of everything that may hamper our comprehension of language as it is actually used; this is why I have coined the new term nexus with its exclusive application to grammar. (Jespersen 1937: 120)

Jespersen’s bipartite and relational approach to predication shows affinities with traditional grammar and classical semantics; however, it is also to a certain degree an interesting antecedent of the more recent generative inquiries. 1.2. Functions and arguments The notion of a function was further investigated and developed in Funktion und Begriff (‘Function and Concept’, 1891, henceforth FC), and Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Volume I, (1893, henceforth GGA), where Frege introduced a strict differentiation between functions and

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functional expressions. These studies show the fundamental shift in Fregean semantics: from the unary semantics of conceptual content (as developed in Begriffsschrift) to the two-tiered semantics, where the notion of conceptual content splits into sense and reference.7 This article focuses on one issue only – the treatment of grammatical predicates – an issue of rather marginal importance for the main line of Frege’s inquiry, but of considerable interest for linguistic research. In Fregean semantics, indicative sentences are analyzed similarly to analytic expressions and mathematical formulae, hence a grammatical predicate (i.e. a subject-predicate expression) is treated as a type of function expression denoting a function, and as such has certain properties common to all functions. The function splits into two parts: the sign of the argument and the expression of the function. The latter contains an empty place, it is incomplete or unsaturated: “the argument does not belong with a function, but goes together with the function to make up a complete whole; for a function by itself must be called incomplete, in need of supplementation, or unsaturated” (FC, 133). Elsewhere, Frege explains that “The expression of a function is in need of completion, unsaturated” (GGA, 211). Saturation is achieved through insertion of an argument into the empty place. The argument “only serves to complete the function that in itself is unsaturated” (GGA, 212). Importantly, the same requirements hold for grammatical predicates, consider the following examples: (1) Caesar conquered Gaul. (2) Berlin is a capital city. In (1) the predicate conquered Gaul is incomplete and takes a name (argument) – Caesar – to saturate it, similarly in (2) the predicate is a capital city requires a completing argument – Berlin. The argument (objectname) is complete in itself. The expression …conquered Gaul is a functional expression, which designates a concept, i.e. conqueror of Gaul. 7

More precisely, conceptual content splits into three different notions: sense, reference and extension; this tripartite distinction, however, applies only to predicates, whereas in names and sentences Frege identifies reference with extension, cf. the discussion in Penco (2003).

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Only after saturating the functional expression with a “proper name, or an expression that replaces a proper name, does a complete sense appear” (FC, 139). In Fregean logic, “concepts are functions”,8 and therefore they take arguments and have truth-values, where the value of a function for an argument is “the result of completing the function with the argument” (FC, 134). The following examples illustrate this issue: (3) a. Caesar conquered Gaul. (conqueror of Gaul = Caesar) b. Frege conquered Gaul. (conqueror of Gaul = Frege) c. 2 conquered Gaul. (conqueror of Gaul = 2) As observed by Thiel (1968: 46), all examples in (3) are senseful since Frege’s expansion of the concept of function allows any object to serve as argument, but only for (3a) is the truth-function true. A grammatical predicate may be polyadic and take more than one argument, as in (4):9 (4) Berlin is the capital of the German Empire. Here, the expression is the capital of is a two-place predicate, or relation (i.e. a function of two arguments), requiring two arguments (names) for saturation. According to Frege, functions with two arguments “are doubly in need of completion in that a function with one argument is effected. Only by a further completion do we reach an object, and this is then called the value of the function for the two arguments” (GGA, 214). Frege was primarily concerned with deriving arithmetic from logic; however, the idea of function saturation applies also to grammatical

8

9

Cf. the following definition: “a concept is a function whose value is always a truth-value” (FC, 139). A concept, just like a function, is unsaturated “in that it requires something to fall under it; hence it cannot exist on its own” (Letter to Marty, 1882, 81). On the analogy between concepts and functions, and concepts and relations, see Dummett (1981: 255-257). The same is true for sentence (1), with conquer being a dyadic predicate.

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predicates. Adopting the convention used by Higginbotham (1990), the open places in the predicate are marked with numerals:10 (5) Berlin [is the capital of (1,2)] the German Empire. In the following examples, from Higginbotham (1990), the expressions headed by one of the major syntactic categories of N(oun), V(erb), A(djective), and P(reposition) are understood as n-place predicates. The open places associated with the predicates are marked with numerals, their appropriate arguments are indexed, and the underlined constituents belong to the categories noted: (6) a. Mary considers them1 [N fools (1)] b. Mary1 [V persuaded (1,2,3)] me2 of something3 c. John1 left the room [AP proud of Mary (1)] d. John1 is [P in (1,2)] the garden2 e. The1 [N’ conviction that the earth is in danger (1)] is widespread. A sentence can contain no open positions, since no true or false statement can be made with an open sentence. As noted by Higginbotham (1990), the open positions in the various words and phrases that make up a sentence must be eliminated, or discharged, as defined by the rules of compositional semantics. 2. Predication Research in philosophy of language, logic, and linguistics makes ample, both explicit and implicit, use of the concept of predication.11 In tradi10

11

This convention of representing argument places with numerals was already used by Quine and Davidson, see also Higginbotham (1985). In this paper I focus on predication as a grammatical operation. I do not consider an approach to predication advocated by, for example, V. H. Dudman, who claimed that “a theory of predication for a language is meant to explain what can be said in it, and how” (Dudman 1985: 43). For some recent (critical) discussion on the relation between predication and purported mental processes, see Peregrin (2011).

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tional grammar, predication is the relation between the subject and the predicate. In logic, predication is the attributing of characteristics to a subject to produce a meaningful statement combining verbal and nominal elements. This understanding stems from Aristotelian logic, where the term (though not explicitly used by the philosopher) might be defined as “saying something about something that there is”.12 In more recent logical inquiries, this classical definition is echoed by the ‘thing-property relation’ (e.g. in Reichenbach 1947). Quine (1960) treats predication as the basic combination in which general and singular terms find their contrasting roles; he also considers it to be one of the mechanisms which joins occasion sentences. This idea is close to Lorenzen’s (1968) ‘basic statements’ (Grundaussagen), the simplest structures of a language that are composed of a subject and a predicate. Strawson (1971) stresses that predication is an assessment for truthvalue of the predicate with respect to the topic, and according to Link (1998) it is the basic tool for making judgments about the world. Similarly Krifka (1998) claims that predication establishes a relation of a specified type between a number of parameters, or semantic arguments. For example, sentences with intransitive verbs establish a relation that holds of the subject for some event, and sentences with transitive verbs establish a relation between the subject, the object, and some event. In Davidson’s approach to verb semantics predication can be specified as a relation between a verb and one of its semantic entailments (Davidson 1967), or as a combinatory relation which makes it possible to join a property and an argument of the appropriate semantic type to form a formula whose truth or falsity is established according to whether the property holds of the entity denoted by the argument or not. Elsewhere Davidson related predication to the problem of ‘the unity of proposition’ and claimed that “[…] if we do not understand predication, we do not understand how any sentence works, nor can we account for the struc-

12

This definition may be inferred from Aristotle’s concept of a proposition, understood as a “statement, with meaning as to the presence of something in a subject, or its absence, in the present, past, or future, according to the division of time” (On Interpretation, 17a23).

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ture of the simplest thought that is expressible in language” (Davidson 2005: 77).13 Early generative grammar, in the Chomskyan tradition, paid very limited attention to the notion; later studies, e.g. Williams (1980) and Rothstein (1985, 1992), viewed predication as a primitive syntactic relation. Whereas Williams argued for an indexing approach and almost equaled predication with semantic role assignment, Rothstein claimed that the semantic and syntactic concepts of predication are distinct, and the relation which holds between predicates and subjects at S-structure can be defined in purely syntactic terms. Higginbotham (1987) understands predication as a formal binary relation on points of phrase markers, and Bowers (1993) postulates the existence of a functional category responsible for implementing the relation.14 3. Types of predication Frege has been commonly credited with proposing a bipartite analysis of expressions into a functor and its argument(s). His approach to predication, understood here as a primitive logical relation, may be thus termed functional: a function has to be saturated by an argument.15 Fregean approach contrasts with the concatenative approach to predication, rooted

13

14

15

For a recent critical discussion of this claim, see Peregrin (2011). This paper does not discuss the issue of the unity of the proposition, for some recent studies investigating, from different angles, predication and the unity of the proposition, see Gaskin (2008), Collins (2011), and Peregrin (2011). For a background discussion on the notion of predication, and its importance for linguistics and philosophy of language, see Rothstein (1985), Lenci (1998), and Stalmaszczyk (1999). Fregean predication should be analyzed in connection with his theory of truth and semantic relations. However, this paper focuses only on aspects relevant for a linguistic theory of predication. The mutual relations between the notions of truth, existence, identity and predication are discussed in Klement (2002) and Mendelsohn (2005). For a different discussion of Fregean predication, in the context of the unity of the proposition, see Gaskin (2008) and Collins (2011); see also Oliver (2010) on Frege’s account of predicates.

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in the Aristotelian tradition. Importantly, both these approaches find application in modern theories of grammar.16 3.1. Aristotelian predication In Aristotelian semantics, predication is the relation constituted by two elements, the subject with the predicate, with tense specification being a third, concatenating, element, cf. (7):17 (7) Aristotelian predication: Proposition Subject∩Tense∩Predicate Whereas predication in grammatical theory is concerned with linguistic items, Aristotle was concerned with relations between entities in the ontology, it is therefore necessary to distinguish between reference to linguistic items, i.e. linguistic predication, and reference to items in the ontology, i.e. ontological predication:18 (8) Linguistic predication: A predicate (a linguistic item) is linguistically predicated of its subject (a grammatical item). (9) Ontological predication: A predicable (a metaphysical item) is ontologically predicated of its subject (an item in the ontology). 16

17

18

For a re-analysis of the Fregean approach in contemporary generative grammar, see Rothstein (1985), Eide and Åfarli (1999). A formal approach to Fregean semantics is presented by Chierchia (1985) and Bowers (1993). Some implications of Fregean semantics for categorial grammar are discussed by Wiggins (1984). For a discussion of functionality and predication, see Klement (2002: 28-32). Cf. the Aristotelian definition of simple proposition quoted in note 12, above. This is not to claim, however, that Aristotelian predication is limited to structural configurations, on the contrary, it has deep ontological grounding. As observed by Moravcsik (1967: 82), Aristotle “takes predication to be showing the ontological dependence of the entity denoted by the predicate on the entity denoted by the subject”. Lewis (1991: 4) refers to the latter as metaphysical predication.

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Two relations which are variants of metaphysical/ontological predication are introduced by Aristotle in the Categories:19 (10) X is SAID OF Y i. Socrates is a man ii. If ‘Socrates is a man’ is true, then man is SAID OF Socrates. (11) X is IN Y i. Socrates is pale ii. If ‘Socrates is pale’ is true, then pallor is IN Socrates. (10) and (11) exemplify the relations holding between items in the ontology: between a metaphysical subject, Socrates, and a predicable, man or pallor. ‘SAID OF a subject’ is a relation of ontological classification, ‘IN a subject’ is a relation of ontological dependence. Furthermore, (10i) tells us something fundamental about what kind of thing Socrates is, it is therefore an example of essential predication. On the other hand, (11i) tells us something that happens to be the case, it is an example of accidental predication. In (10ii) and (11ii) the linguistic predication is related to ontological predication, however, Aristotle is concerned primarily with giving the metaphysical configurations that underlie sentences (10i) and (11i), and, as pointed out by Lewis (1991:55), the philosopher is silent on how the two kinds of predication are related. As observed by Lewis (1991: 4, n.4), the relation between linguistic predication and metaphysical predication is not bi-directional: the subject of a linguistic predication can be either a linguistic item or an entity in the ontology, however the subject of a metaphysical predication will always be an ontological item, and not a linguistic one. A similar point is made by Mesquita (2012), who has recently stressed the necessity to distinguish two levels in Aristotelian thought: “the ontological level, where we speak of predicates as something that pertains to things; and the logical level, where we speak of predicates as something that is said of things” (Mesquita 2012: 20). In the former case the predicate is an entity ‘utterly extra-logical and extra-linguistic’, in the latter the predicate is a term, a part of a sentence, hence a linguistic item. 19

Cf. the full discussion in Lewis (1991: 53-63).

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3.2. Fregean predication In Fregean semantics the application of a function to an argument is not a mere juxtaposition of the two elements. The function combines with the argument into a self-contained whole due to the fact that it contains a logical gap (the place-holder, or argument-place) which needs filling. As concluded by Frege in Über Begriff und Gegenstand (‘On Concept and Object’, 1892, henceforth CO): “not all the parts of a thought can be complete; at least one must be unsaturated or predicative; otherwise they would not hold together” (CO, 193). Tichý (1988: 27) comments that “the function latches on its argument, sticking to it as if through a suction effect”. Thus, in Fregean semantics, predication is a relation in which an argument saturates an open position in the function, cf. the simplified formula (12): (12) Fregean predication: Proposition [Function (1, …, n)]∩Argument(1, …, n) It needs to be stressed at this point that Fregean semantics is not concerned with natural language predicates. His line of reasoning, however, may be applied to analyzing predication as a grammatical relation. Formula (12) aims at capturing Tichý’s observation that “the function latches on its argument”, furthermore, the “suction effect” is attributed to the presence of the open position(s) – ‘(1, …, n)’. I use the term “Proposition” in (12) as a generalized term for Frege’s “act of judgement” and “assertion”.20 As observed by Stevens: Rather than analyzing the proposition into a series of elements (subject, predicate, copula), Frege construes the predicative part of the proposition as a function which is essentially incomplete or ‘unsaturated’. (Stevens 2003: 224)

20

Cf. the distinction introduced by Frege in Thought (329): (1) The grasp of a thought – thinking, (2) The acknowledgement of the truth of a thought – the act of judgment, (3) The manifestation of this judgment – assertion.

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In other words, there is a need for a predicative constituent in a proposition to bind the propositional content into a ‘fully-fledged unit’, cf. Stevens (2003: 230-231). In On Concept and Object Frege invokes the concept of unsaturatedness, or incompleteness, in order to elucidate the distinction between singular terms and general terms. In Fregean semantics, a singular term is a name of an object or a definite description. It is a saturated expression that can be used in the subject position of a subject-predicate sentence. A general term is a name of a concept. It is an unsaturated expression, realized by a common noun, adjective or verb, which may be used in the predicate place of a subject-predicate sentence, e.g.: (13) a. Socrates is a man. b. Socrates is wise. c. The Greek philosopher sleeps. The distinction between singular and general terms has interesting consequences for the status of the copula. In sentences (13a) and (13b) the singular term is linked to the general term by the copula is. Frege very carefully distinguishes here between two different uses of the word is.21 Consider the following sentences, based on Frege’s examples: (14) a. He is Alexander the Great. b. It is the number four. c. It is the planet Venus. d. It is green. e. It is a mammal. In the first three instances, is is the “is of identity”, used “like the ‘equals’ sign in arithmetic, to express an equation” (CO, 183). In the last two examples, it serves as a copula, “a mere verbal sign of predication” 21

Obviously, this distinction has an ancient tradition, cf. Aristotelian essential vs. accidental predication; for a detailed discussion, see Lewis (1991). Frege’s originality, however, lies in showing the different underlying patterns of names and predicates. See Wiggins (1984) and Collins (2011) for a recent discussion of this issue.

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(CO, 182). In other words, “something falls under a concept, and the grammatical predicate stands for this concept” (CO, 183). One more example helps to clarify the distinction: (15) a. The Morning Star is Venus. b. The Morning Star is a planet. In (15a) we have two proper names, “the Morning Star” and “Venus”, for the same object. In this sentence, the word is forms an essential part of the predicate, it carries full predicative force. The predicate is formed by is together with the name. This is the relation of equation, which involves two arguments. In (15b), on the other hand, we have one proper name “the Morning Star”, and one predicate, the concept-word “planet”. Here the word is is just the copula, the “verbal sign of predication”. In this instance, we have the relation of an object’s falling under a concept (i.e. subsumption). Note that Frege distinguishes here between two different relations: that of one object falling under a concept (subsumption), and that of one concept being subordinated to another (subordination). Only in the first case, can we talk about the subject-predicate relation. In contrast to equation, the relation of subsumption is irreversible. We may add labeled brackets to (15), in order to explicitly illustrate the distinction made by Frege: (16) a. [Name The Morning Star] [Predicate [is] [Name Venus]] b. [Name The Morning Star] [Copula is] [Predicate a planet] In yet another formulation, it may be claimed that the sense of the copula “is essentially a schematic truth rule that links names and predicates in terms of their respective contribution to the determination of the truth conditions of the host structure” (Collins 2011: 78). Following insights from Frege, and under direct influence of Wiggins, Collins (2011: 78) specifies this ‘schematic truth rule’ in the following way:22

22

Wiggins (1984: 318) stresses the fact that the copula does not stand for a relation, it “does not need to do so, in order to contribute to the sense of the sentence”.

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Where n is a name and P is a Predicate, True [n + copula + P] iff the reference of n falls under the reference of P. Collins also comments on the relation between the copula and judgement: “The copula, as the basis of unity, is not a component of judgement but signifies the unity of the judgement as constituted by the transcendental unity of the judger” (Collins 2011: 14, n. 6).23 The distinction between singular terms and general terms features explicitly in yet another definition of predication. According to Quine (1960), predication is the basic combination in which general and singular terms find their contrasting roles: “Predication joins a general term and a singular term to form a sentence that is true or false according as the general term is true or false of the object, if any, to which the singular term refers” (Quine 1960: 96). Since in Quine’s approach to predication the focus is on proposition formation, this instance of the relation may be termed propositional predication. The logical approach to functions might be insightful for the grammatical analysis of predicates. In this paper, I am predominantly concerned with the nature of the relation holding between two types of “linguistic devices”: those which have an identifying function (Frege’s arguments), and those which have a predicating function (Frege’s functions). I firmly believe that the same line of argumentation applies to the structural organization of syntactic arguments and predicates. Sentence (4), repeated below, was analyzed as involving a two-place predicate (17b): (17) a. Berlin is the capital of the German Empire. b. Berlin [is the capital of (1,2)] the German Empire.

(= (4)) (= (5))

At the same time, however, in this sentence the entire expression is the capital of the German Empire is a one-place predicate saturated by the sentential subject: 23

It needs to be added that Collins makes this remark in the context of his investigation of the problem of the unity of linguistic meaning, and in this particular remark he also comments on Kant’s theory of judgment.

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(18) Berlin [is the capital of the German Empire (1)] Frege himself introduces this two-step approach, cf. the following comment from his Notes for Ludwig Darmstaedter: The sentence ‘The capital of Sweden is situated at the mouth of Lake Mälar’ can be split up into a part in need of completion and the saturated part ‘the capital of Sweden’. This can further be split up into the part ‘the capital of’, which stands in need of completion, and the saturated part ‘Sweden’ (Notes for Ludwig Darmstaedter, 364).

Comparison of (17b) with (18) points to the necessity of distinguishing between two types of predication: polyadic (i.e. ‘grammatical’ in Frege’s terminology) and monadic (i.e. structural, to be discussed below) e.g.: (19) a. Berlinα [is the capital of] the German Empireβ (polyadic predication) b. Berlinα [is the capital of the German Empire] (monadic predication) I will assume here that polyadic predication is a relation which occurs between a predicate and its argument(s), and is a consequence of the predicate’s semantic properties. 4. Predication in generative grammar In generative grammar (e.g. Chomsky 1981, 1982), polyadic predication is associated with semantic interpretation, and as such falls under the scope of Theta Theory, one of the modules in the Government and Binding model of generative grammar. For this reason, it may be referred to as thematic predication. The appropriate context, together with a brief description, is provided below: (20) Thematic predication: i. Argument1 [Predicate (1,2,…)] Argument2 …

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ii. Thematic predication deals with semantic interpretation of arguments and thematic role assignment. Monadic predication, on the other hand, involves a one-place predicate and a referring term functioning as its unique argument (e.g. structural subject), and can be thus termed structural predication:24 (21) Structural predication: i. Argument [Predicate (1)] ii. Structural predication deals with configurational relations between nodes described/defined on phrase markers. In the Government and Binding model of generative grammar, the obligatory presence of the closing argument (subject) in a subject-predicate structure follows from the second clause of the Extended Projection Principle (EPP). The Projection Principle formed in Chomsky (1981: 29) states that the subcategorization properties of each lexical item must be represented categorially at each syntactic level, the EPP adds a second requirement: that clauses have subjects, cf. Chomsky (1982: 10).25 Later, Chomsky (1986) suggested that this part of the EPP might be derived from the theory of predication, as developed in Williams (1980) and Rothstein (1985), and observed that the EPP “is a particular way of expressing the general principle that all functions must be saturated” (Chomsky 1986: 116). Chomsky explicitly referred to Frege, and observed that a maximal projection (e.g. VP or AP) may be regarded as a syntactic function that is “unsaturated if not provided with a subject of which it is predicated” (Chomsky 1986: 116). There is one more crucial property of structural predication not captured by the above descriptions. As observed already by Aristotle, predication is constituted by three elements: the subject, the predicate, and the tense element, cf. (7) above. Also Frege, though working in a completely 24

25

I understand monadic predication similarly to Rothstein (1992: 153), who defines it as the relation holding between the subject of a sentence and the “remainder”. More recently, Åfarli and Eide (2000) proposed that the EPP is the effect of a proposition-forming operation of natural language, induced by a predication operator, and Åfarli (2005) shows the effects of semantic saturation.

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different tradition, referred to the copula as the “verbal sign of predication” (see below), possibly implying that predication is a relation involving three, rather than two, elements. It is also possible to regard the ‘content stroke’, introduced by Frege in CN §2, as a third element involved in predication.26 In accordance with the above observations, it is assumed here that structural predication involves two terms – the subject argument and the predicate function – and additionally an operator of predication, which means that the schema and definition in (21) are inadequate, and require the following reformulation:27 (22) Structural predication: i. Argument [Operator [Predicate (1)]] ii. Structural predication deals with configurational relations between nodes described/defined on phrase markers triggered by the operator of predication. In other words, I make here two basic claims about structural predication:28 (23) I. Structural predication is monadic, in the sense that the predicate takes only one argument (predication subject); II. Structural predication is tripartite, in the sense that an appropriate operator is required to trigger predication. The following table summarizes the correspondences that relate the appropriate notional elements in the definitions of structural predication introduced in this study: (i) shows the general non-theoretic pattern, (ii) 26

27

28

A similar observation has been made by Åfarli and Eide (2000: 47, n. 5). See also Smith (2000) on the meaning and function of the judgment stroke in Frege’s logic. In the semantics developed by Chierchia (1985) and Bowers (1993), the predication operator is a function that takes the property element to form a propositional function, which in turn takes an entity to form a proposition; for further details, see Eide and Åfarli (1999) and Åfarli (2005). For a discussion of these claims, see Stalmaszczyk (1999).

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its Fregean functional equivalents, (iii) gives the relational definitions of grammatical functions in Standard Theory, (iv) provides the X-bar theoretic category neutral elements, and (v) the elements from predication theory grounded in more recent generative grammar (where Pr is a separate functional category with its own projections Pr’, PrP): (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v)

Subject Argument Subject-of: [NP, S] [Spec, XP] [Spec, PrP]

Operator sign of predication

X Pr

Predicate Function Predicate-of: [PredP, S] [X’, XP] [Pr’, PrP]

Table 1. Elements of structural predication

A further layer of corresponding notions will be added after presenting the semantics of predication; first, however, I discuss the predicational domain and the issue of syntactic evidence for structural predication. 5. The semantics for structural predication This section provides some informal semantic interpretation for structural predication and the elements involved in its constructing. The indispensability of this move follows directly from Bouchard’s (1995: 22) Principle of Full Interpretation: (24) Principle of Full Interpretation: Every (morpho-)syntactic formative of a sentence must have a corresponding element in the semantic representation. Every formative of a semantic representation must be identified by a (morpho-)syntactic element in the sentence, which is associated with that representation. I understand the “syntactic elements” mentioned in the Principle very broadly, including all the abstract elements used in defining structural predication. Below I propose a restricted version of semantics for struc-

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tural predication.29 I assume that there are three primitives: proposition (P), entity (e), and property (R). Additionally, I regard the predicate as a function from an entity to a proposition (a propositional function), and the predication operator as a function from a property to a predicate.30 The basic correspondences are illustrated below: (25)

PrPP NPe

Pr’ Pr

VPR

As far as the property (i.e. VP in syntactic terms) is concerned, it is assumed here that it is of compositional nature: it is composed of a function from an entity (or property) to a property predicate: (26)

VPR NPe

V’ V

NPe/XPR

In other words, the verb is defined as a function from an entity (or property) to a property predicate, and consequently V’ is interpreted as a property predicate, i.e. a function from an entity to a property. Table 2 shows correspondences between the syntactic and semantic elements, with (i) the syntactic symbols, (ii) the semantic elements (also with less formal terminology), and (iii) the semantic symbols:31

29

30

31

For a general background to this type of semantics, stemming from the work of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, see Bowers (1993), Chierchia (1985), Eide and Åfarli (1997), Tałasiewicz (2010). Note that these notions are introduced operationally, rather than ontologically. For the methodological background behind this distinction, see Lorenzen (1968). This table complements Table 1, which provided the elements of structural predication within different approaches.

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248 (i) syntax V

(ii) semantics function from an entity to a property predicate function from an entity to a property property function from a property to a predicate (predication operator) function from an entity to a proposition (predicate) proposition entity

V’ VP Pr

Pr’

PrP NP

(iii) semantic symbol e

R R

P e

Table 2. Semantic elements in structural predication

Table 3 shows once again the relevant patterns of correspondences, this time explicitly specifying the properties of appropriate functions, i.e. their arguments and values:

Predicate

syntactic symbol Pr

semantic symbol

Proposition Property

Pr’ V



Function

Argument

Value

Operator of predication Predicate Verb

Property Entity Entity

Table 3. Functions, arguments and values

The full semantic derivation, along the lines suggested above, of a simple transitive sentence (27) proceeds in the following way, with indexing added for explanatory purposes only (and disregarding the issues involved in appropriate tense derivation): (27) Caesar conquered Gaul. (28) 1. V = e = {e, conquered e} 2. V’ = = {Gauli, conquered ei} 3. VP = R = {conquered Gaul}

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4. Pr = R = {(conquered Gaul)i, e P} 5. Pr’ = = {Caesari, ei conquered Gaul} 6. PrP = P = {Caesar conquered Gaul} The above derivation resembles and reflects to some extent the process of Numeration (in the sense of Chomsky 1995: 225), and therefore it might be referred to as ‘Semantic Numeration’. Together, the two processes provide grammatical and predicational domains of the derived structure. Within the grammatical domain the grammatical functions are determined and grammatical properties like modality, tense and aspect are realized. The predicational domain provides the input to semantic interpretation. At the same time the Principle of Full Interpretation (24) is fulfilled, since there is full correspondence between the (morpho-) syntactic formatives of a sentence and the elements in the semantic representation. This integrated approach to predication clearly demonstrates that the different aspects of predication are related. 6. Conclusion The aim of this paper was to demonstrate that Frege’s approach to functions has consequences for the treatment of predicates and predication in the theory of grammar. I have tentatively postulated the existence of thematic, structural and propositional predication, every instance of the relation being linked to Frege’s logical and philosophical inquiries. References Åfarli, Tor 2005. Predication in Syntax. Research in Language 3, 67-89. Åfarli, Tor and Kristin Eide 2000. Subject Requirement and Predication. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 23, 27-48. Aristotle [1941]. De Interpretatione (On Interpretation). Translated by E. M. Edghill. In: The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by R. McKeon. New York: Random House, 38-61. Beaney, Michael (ed.) 1997. The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Beaney, Michael 1997. Introduction. In: M. Beaney (ed.), 1-47.

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Bouchard, Denis 1995. The Semantics of Syntax. A Minimalist Approach to Grammar. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Bowers, John 1993. The Syntax of Predication. Linguistic Inquiry 24, 591-656. Carl, Wolfgang 1994. Frege’s Theory of Sense and Reference. Its Origins and Scope. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carnap, Rudolf 1937. The Logical Syntax of Language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Chierchia, Gennaro 1985. Formal Semantics and the Grammar of Predication. Linguistic Inquiry 16, 417-443. Chomsky, Noam 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris. Chomsky, Noam 1982. Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chomsky, Noam 1986. Knowledge of Language. Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New York: Praeger. Chomsky, Noam 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Collins, John 2011. The Unity of Linguistic Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidson, Donald 1967. The Logical Form of Action Sentences. [Reprinted in Donald Davidson, 1980. Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 105-122.] Davidson, Donald 2005. Truth and Predication. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Dudman, Victor Howard 1970. Frege’s Judgment-stroke. The Philosophical Quarterly 20 (79), 150-161. Dudman, Victor Howard 1985. Towards a Theory of Predication for English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 5, 143-196. Dummett, Michael 1981. Frege: Philosophy of Language (Second edition). London: Duckworth. Dummett, Michael 1993. Origins of Analytical Philosophy. London: Duckworth. Eide, Kristin and Tor Åfarli, 1999. The Syntactic Disguises of the Predication Operator. Studia Linguistica 53, 155-181. Frege, Gottlob [1879] 1997. Begriffsschrift (translated by M. Beaney). In: M. Beaney (ed.), 47-78. Frege, Gottlob [1882] 1997. Letter to Marty, 29.8.1882 (translated by H. Kaal). In: M. Beaney (ed.), 79-83. Frege, Gottlob [1884] 1960. The Foundations of Arithmetic (translated by J. L. Austin). Second revised edition. New York: Harper & Brothers. Frege, Gottlob [1884] 2007. The Foundations of Arithmetic (translated by D. Jacquette). New York: Pearson Education Inc. Frege, Gottlob [1891] 1997. Function and Concept (translated by P. Geach). In: M. Beaney (ed.), 130-148.

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Frege, Gottlob [1892] 1997. On Concept and Object (translated by P. Geach). In: M. Beaney (ed.), 181-193. Frege, Gottlob [1893] 1997. Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Vol. I (translated by M. Beaney). In: M. Beaney (ed.), 194-223. Frege, Gottlob [1897] 1997. Logic (translated by P. Long and R. White). In: M. Beaney (ed.), 227-250. Frege, Gottlob [1906] 1997. Letters to Husserl, 1906 (translated by H. Kaal). In: M. Beaney (ed.), 301-307. Frege, Gottlob [1918] 1997. Thought (translated by P. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff). In: M. Beaney (ed.), 325-345. Frege, Gottlob [1919] 1997. Notes for Ludwig Darmstaedter (translated by P. Long and R. White). In: M. Beaney (ed.), 362-367. Gaskin, Richard 2008. The Unity of the Proposition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Green, Mitchell S. 2002. The Inferential Significance of Frege’s Assertion Sign. Facta Philosophica 4, 201-229. Hanfilng, Oswald 2000. Philosophy and Ordinary Language. The Bent and Genius of our Tongue. London and New York: Routledge. Heck, Richard and Robert May 2006. Frege’s Contribution to Philosophy of Language. In: E. Lepore and B. Smith (eds.), 3-39. Higginbotham, James 1985. On Semantics. Linguistic Inquiry 16, 547-593. Higginbotham, James 1987. Indefiniteness and Predication. In: Eric R. and A. ter Meulen (eds.), 43-70. Higginbotham, James 1990. Frege and Grammar. Unpublished MS, Oxford: Oxford University. Jespersen, Otto 1937. Analytic Syntax. Helsingor. Reprinted New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. Klement, Kevin C. 2002. Frege and the Logic of Sense and Reference. London and New York: Routledge. Krifka, Manfred 1998. The Origins of Telicity. In: S. Rothstein (ed.), 197-235. Lenci, Alessandro 1998. The Structure of Predication. Synthese 114, 233-276. Lepore, Ernest and Barry C. Smith (eds.), 2006. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Frank A. 1991. Substance and Predication in Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Link, Godehard 1998. Algebraic Semantics in Language and Philosophy. CSLI Lecture Notes No. 74, Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information. Lorenzen, Paul 1968. Methodisches Denken. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Losonsky, Michael 2006. Linguistic Turns in Modern Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Łukasiewicz, Jan 1957. Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic (second enlarged edition). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mendelsohn, Richard 2005. The Philosophy of Gottlob Frege. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mesquita, António Pedro 2012. Types of Predication in Aristotle (Posterior Analytics I 22). Journal of Ancient Philosophy 6 (2), 1-27. Retrieved from http://revistas.usp.br/filosofiaantiga/article/view/46736. Moravcsik, Julius M. E. 1967. Aristotle on Predication. Philosophical Review 76, 80-96. Oliver, Alex 2010. What is a Predicate? In: M. Potter and T. Ricketts (eds.), 118148. Penco, Carlo 2003. Two Theses, Two Senses. History and Philosophy of Logic 24, 87-109. Peregrin, Jaroslav 2011. There is no such Thing as Predication. Conceptus 97, 2951. Pietroski, Paul M. 2004. Events and Semantic Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Potter, Michael 2013. Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. In: G. Russell and D. Graff Fara (eds.), 852-859. Potter, Michael and Tom Ricketts (eds.) 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Frege. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quine, William V. O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Reichenbach, Hans 1947. Elements of Symbolic Logic. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reprinted 1966, New York: The Free Press. Reuland, Eric and Alice ter Meulen, (eds.) 1987. The Representation of (In)definitness. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Rothstein, Susan D. 1985. The Syntactic Forms of Predication. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club. Rothstein, Susan D. 1992. Predication and the Structure of Clauses. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 7, 153-169. Rothstein, Susan D. (ed.) 1998. Events and Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Russell, Gillian and Delia Graff Fara (eds.) 2013. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language. New York and London: Routledge. Smith, Nicholas 2000. Frege’s Judgement Stroke. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 78, 153-178. Soames, Scott 2010. Philosophy of Language. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Stalmaszczyk, Piotr 1999. Structural Predication in Generative Grammar. Łód : Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego.

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Stalmaszczyk, Piotr 2006. Fregean Predication: Between Logic and Linguistics. Research in Language 4, 77-90. Stalmaszczyk, Piotr 2010. Gottlob Frege, Philosophy of Language and Predication. In: P. Stalmaszczyk (ed.), 295-314. Stalmaszczyk, Piotr (ed.) 2010. Philosophy of Language and Linguistics. Volume 1: The Formal Turn. Frankfurt am Main: Ontos Verlag. Stevens, Graham 2003. The Truth and Nothing but the Truth, yet Never the Whole Truth: Frege, Russell and the Analysis of Unities. History and Philosophy of Logic 24, 221-240. Strawson, Peter F. 1971. Logico-Linguistic Papers. London: Methuen. Sullivan, Peter 2010. Dummett’s Frege. In: In: M. Potter and T. Ricketts (eds.), 86117. Tałasiewicz, Mieszko 2010. Philosophy of Syntax. Foundational Topics. Dordrecht: Springer. Thiel, Christian 1968. Sense and Reference in Frege’s Logic. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Tichý, Pavel 1988. The Foundations of Frege’s Logic. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Wiggins, David 1984. The Sense and Reference of Predicates: A Running Repair to Frege’s Doctrine and a Plea for the Copula. The Philosophical Quarterly 34, 311-328. Williams, Edwin 1980. Predication. Linguistic Inquiry 11, 203-238. Wittgenstein, Ludwig [1922] 1995. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness). London and New York: Routledge.

Piotr K. Szałek Catholic University of Lublin [email protected]

Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Notion of False Propositions Abstract: The paper deals with one of the major puzzles for the Wittgensteinian picture theory of language: if sense of propositions is determined by picturing the possible state of affairs, how then can false propositions have sense if their corresponding state of affairs does not exist? In order to answer the question, the paper reconstructs the main structure of the argument for the theory in the context of its relation to Bertrand Russell’s view on judgments. The paper argues that the Wittgensteinian solution to the problem of the false propositions relies on the notion of the intrinsic symbolic (syntactic) structure of the proposition in virtue of the analogy to the pictorial representation and possible configuration of its components. Keywords: Wittgenstein, Russell, Frege, semantics, picture theory of language, propositions, falsehood

0. Introduction Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus aimed to explicate the nature of language and its relation to the world. In more technical terms, this work could be regarded as an attempt to clarify the nature of the proposition of logic and of the logical constants, by means of reference to the notion of a representation in general. This task culminated in the so-called picture theory of language, which in terms of syntactical symbolism, described propositions as picture mirroring reality. In this paper, I consider the major difficulty that directs this theory and its possible solution, namely, the problem of the meaning of the false propositions: if the sense of propositions is determined by picturing the possible state of affairs, how then can false propositions have sense if their corresponding state of affairs does not exist?

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In order to accomplish this task, I reconstruct the main structure of the argument offered by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus (1922/1974), Notebooks 1914-1916 (1961), and Notes on Logic (1961). The paper is ordered in the following way. In the first part, I introduce and explain the idea of picturing of the representation in general. In the second, I demonstrate the adaptation of this idea to the theory of propositions. In the third, I clarify the problem of falsehood in the context of the theory of propositions. Finally, in fourth part, I answer the original question on the basis of my prior analysis. I argue that the Wittgensteinian solution to the problem of false propositions relies on the notion of intrinsic symbolic (syntactic) structure of the proposition in virtue of the analogy to pictorial representation and possible configuration of its components. 1. The idea of picturing In Tractatus Wittgenstein offered clarification of the nature of the proposition by an analogy to the pictures. He tried to adapt the framework of a general theory of representation to the explanation of the structure and functions of the proposition in language (see Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 619). Following Kenny, we can state that in the case of any representation there are two things one should consider: (i) what it is a representation of, and (ii) whether it represents what it represents accurately or inaccurately. The distinction between these two features of representation corresponds to the distinction, concerning proposition, between what the proposition means and whether what it means is true or false – between sense and truth value. (Kenny 1973/1975: 54)

Both these elements are present in Wittgenstein’s considerations of propositions. According to Wittgenstein, the nature of propositional representation is an application of the general account of any kind of representation. Any picture, model, or representation represents something in virtue of isomorphic relation between it and the reality depicted. A picture must be composite, that is must be composed of a multiplicity of elements that

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are by ‘proxy’ or stand for the elements of the situation, which it depicts. To obtain this, a picture possesses both structure and form. The structure is conventionally determined by the manner of the depiction. In other words, the structure of a picture represents the relationship between the constituent elements of the picture. This relation is in itself a certain situation or fact, hence Wittgenstein wants to interpret a picture as a fact (Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 14-15). The possibility of the actual structure of pictures is the pictorial form (Form der Abbildung) (Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 16-17) – for instance, the three-dimensionality of a diorama, the two-dimensionality of a painting, or the linear order of a musical score. Additionally, the different representations of the same state of affairs must share the same logical form, that is, the same (logico-mathematical) multiplicity of separate elements and (conventionally determined) possibilities of combinations of these objects (Wittgenstein 1922/ 1974: 14-15, 42-43). The bare minimum of a pictorial (respectively representational) form is therefore the logical form: whatever has a pictorial form also possesses logical form. “Any representation shares with what it represents its logico-pictorial form” (Hacker 1972/1986: 59). In other words, the elements of the picture are correlated with the elements of the situation or state of affairs that it depicts in virtue of this pictorial relationship. In order to be representational, the structure of a picture (an arrangement of its elements) must represent a corresponding situation, namely, a corresponding possible arrangement of the objects depicted. Thus pictorial relationship is isomorphic. What it actually represents in a picture “is not the complex of objects of which it consists, but the fact that they are arranged as they are” (Hacker 1972/1986: 59). As Wittgenstein puts it, only a fact can represent a situation, that is, another fact.1 To summarize the most important features of the idea of picturing, we can emphasise the following: Firstly, every picture must have a logical 1

See in this respect Hacker’s remark: “A model is true if things are in reality as it represents them as being. To know whether it is true or false, however, it must be compared with reality, i.e. verified in experience. One cannot, merely by looking at a model, discern whether things are actually thus or not. The model only determines that things either are so or are not so, and in that sense, only a logical space, not a place” (Hacker 1972/1986: 59).

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form in common with the pictured reality – the logical form is a part of every pictorial form of any picture. Secondly, every picture represents a possible state of affairs that determines its sense: the picture is true if its sense agrees with reality, and is false if it disagrees (see Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 16-19). 2. The propositional representation Wittgenstein applied the above general theory of a picture to the account of the proposition. That is, a propositional representation is explicated in its terms. A proposition then is described as “a picture of reality” that corresponds to reality by depicting it (Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 38-41). A proposition as a picture shares the essential features of a picture in general. Namely, (i) a proposition must be the composite (of a function and arguments in that case); (ii) the elements of a proposition stand for the elements of the depicted situation or state of affairs; (iii) a proposition has a form, that is, combinatorial possibilities of its elements ordered by the rules of logical syntax; (iv) a proposition has structure, i.e. a determined connection between its elements (Hacker 1972/1986: 60; Glock 1996: 301). Moreover, in analogy to the structure of a picture, the structure of a proposition has to be isomorphically related to the logical structure of what it portrays. Therefore, there must be a strict correlation between configurations of the represented objects and configurations of the simple signs in a propositional sign. As noted by Hacker, [w]hat represents in the propositional-sign is the fact that its constituent expressions are arranged as they are, given the conventional rules of syntax and given an ‘interpretation’ of the constituent names. (Hacker 1972/1986: 60)

The crucial point for our purpose is that a proposition is described as bipolar: it could be true or false. The truth of a proposition is characterized as agreement between a proposition and a fact. In order to recognize if a proposition is true or false, it has to be compared with the world. In some sense then, it must be verified.

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The above account of a proposition consists in the basic facet of the picture theory, and could be most directly adapted only to the so-called elementary propositions. Ordinary propositions are not like this. The natural language contains de facto, amongst the others, complex concept-words (or concept-terms), names of complex, and vagueness. Nevertheless, according to Wittgenstein, this ordinary language is intrinsically in a proper order. In principle, thanks to the logical analysis, it is possible to reveal the proper order, or, in other words, to discriminate the elementary propositions that satisfy this order. What is then the order revealed by elementary propositions? The elementary propositions: (i) contain no logical constants, i.e. such words as “not”, or “and”, or “all” (they do not have reference in reality, as they are not names); (ii) are logically independent of each other; (iii) consist of names; (iv) these names represent simple objects in the world; assert (truly or falsely) the existence of a state of affairs. (Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 10-11, 22-23, 58-59, 76-77; Keyt 1966: 378). The elementary propositions are constituents of our natural language. This language is made of them in virtue of a truth-functional combination. 3. The problem of falsehood The theory of proposition as a picture directs us to the problem of false propositions. How is it possible that a false proposition has sense if its corresponding state of affairs does not exist? This problem is an instantiation of the more general, old problem of the intentional reference of falsehood or false proposition, i.e., of the intentional reference of elements of a language to non-existent objects of the world asserted by this language. A proposition is true if and only if it depicts how things are in the world, that is, by corresponding to a relevant fact. However, when a

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proposition is false, it still remains meaningful, although no fact corresponds to it. In order to understand the Wittgensteinian solution to the problem, it is helpful to recall some connected considerations of Russell and Frege. Wittgenstein formulated his theory of propositions as pictures in reaction to the failure of the Russellian theories of judgement, and in the discussion with the Fregean theory of sense and reference (see Pears 1987: 115-152; Glock 1996: 298-299; Ricketts 1996: 64-80). Russell’s early theory (until 1907), the so-called Single Object Theory of Judgement (or Dual-Relation Theory of Judgement) met and fell foul of the problem of falsehood. Namely, in the case of the, S’ propositional attitude, where it is S’ belief that there is some relation between a and b, say aRb. This relationship cannot be described, as suggested by Russell’s theory, as a dual relation between subject S (i.e. his/her state of mind) and its object (i.e. a proposition that expresses this state). In other words, if for a belief to be true, it is to be related to a fact, then for a belief to be false it is to relate to an objective falsehood (see Russell 1912/1991: 70-73). This consequence engaged theory in the ontological commitment to the assertion of the objective falsehood a la Alexius Meinong, i.e., assertion of the different degree of existence, including existence of non-existent objects (see Meinong 1904/1960: 76-117), what was the object of criticism of Russell himself (see Russell 1905 and 1907). To overcome this difficulty, Russell proposed his new MultipleRelation Theory of Judgement (sustained and developed by him in 19101913, and partly rejected later because of the criticism of Wittgenstein). According to this proposal, S is “acquainted with” or related to the separate propositional constituents: a, R, and b, not to the proposition as a whole however. In other words, every judgement is a relation of S’ mind to multiple objects, including a relation to this relation. Schematically, with J for judgement, it could be presented as follows J(a, R, b, S). However, Wittgenstein noted that this theory would allow S to judge nonsense: it would be no longer granted that these constituents are joined in a meaningful way (see Wittgenstein 1961: 95). In reaction to this observation, Russell modified his Multiple-Relation theory by adding the condition that S is acquainted not only with constituents of the

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proposition, but also with its universal logical form, say x y, which stands for a general fact. Wittgenstein insisted, however, that this modification is still not enough to save the theory as the satisfying description of a proposition. He charged the Russellian theory with inconsistency. According to him, there are two contradictory points in the theory: on one side, judgement is described as a fact (general complex), and at the same time, on the other, it is supposed to be a simple object of acquaintance (Wittgenstein 1961: 100-101). The first alternative creates a third-man regress: it explains why a, R and b can combine to form certain facts (aRb, bRa) but not others (RRb, abR) by reference to a further fact. The second simply adds a further constituent to the proposition, without ensuring that its constituents to the proposition, including the additional one, are combined in a licit way. (Glock 1996: 299)

The dissatisfaction with Russell’s theories leads Wittgenstein to his own proposal of explication of a proposition that rests on the analogy to a picture. Formulating his own solution to the problem of falsehood, Wittgenstein also critically used the consideration of Frege. For Frege, names and propositions had both sense and meaning (see Frege 1892/2000: 151-180). Wittgenstein, as indicated in his 1913 Notes on Logic written before the Tractatus, seemed to accept the idea that a proposition has reference. Unlike Frege, instead of describing the truth-value of a proposition as its reference, he proposed to treat the fact that corresponds to a proposition as its reference (Wittgenstein 1961: 94). In particular, the reference of a proposition ‘p’, if ‘p’ is true, is the fact that p; and respectively, if ‘p’ is false it is a negative fact that ~p. This explanation of the reference of a proposition implies essential contrast between (i) the correlation of names and their referents, and (ii) the correlation of propositions and their referents. In order to comprehend a name, it is necessary to know its referent, although “we understand propositions without knowing whether they are true or false” (Wittgenstein 1961: 91), that is, without the condition of knowledge of their referents. Additionally, Wittgenstein in his Notebooks, while discriminating propositions from names, explicitly argued that false propositions do not

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have any reference at all (Wittgenstein 1961: 24), even though he used to speak about “the reality corresponding to” false propositions. This contention is comprehensible in some sense, because as he put it in the Tractatus, “[t]he propositions ‘p’ and ‘~p” have an opposite sense, but there corresponds to them one and the same reality” (Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 44-45). What we comprehend in the case of the propositions is their sense, not their reference (Wittgenstein 1961: 94). A name can have only one relationship to reality: it either names something or it is not a significant symbol at all. But a proposition has a two-way relation: it does not cease to have a meaning when it ceases to be true. (Kenny 1973/1975: 61)

As Wittgenstein wrote, using spatial metaphor, “names are points, propositions arrows” (Wittgenstein 1961: 97; 1922/1974: 22-23). However, the problem of falsehood arises also on the ground of the aforementioned difference between names and propositions. If there is no object that names refer to, names are just meaningless; they are not names at all, because they do not name (Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 22-23). But propositions, in the case when there are no facts to which they refer, are not meaningless but simply false. Thus what a name signifies must exist, but what a proposition signifies need not. (Keyt 1966: 379)

In other words, the problem is how propositions can be false without losing sense. 4. The combinatorial arrangement of possibilities Keeping in mind the above consideration about pictorial description of propositions by Wittgenstein and the problem of false propositions, we can ask at this stage, how a proposition depicts something even if what it

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depicts does not obtain. What is Wittgenstein’s solution to the problem of falsehood on the ground of his theory of propositions?2 According to Wittgenstein, what a proposition depicts is the possibility of a certain arrangement of its constituents. As he puts it: One name is the representative of one thing, another of another thing and they themselves are connected; in this way the whole images the situation– like a tableau vivant […] ‘The connection must be possible’ means: The proposition and the components of the situation must stand in a particular relation […] in order for a proposition to present a state of affairs it is only necessary for its components to represent these of the situation and for the former to stand in a connection which is possible for the latter. (Wittgenstein 1961: 26)

Rejecting the Russellian solution, Wittgenstein insists that we do not need to introduce the additional logical form or the relation between propositional constituents. It is enough to emphasise that components of a proposition might be combined in a certain manner. The crucial point to his proposal is that the possibility of this combination is explained by virtue of the intrinsic combinatorial possibility of arrangement of the components that represent the things in reality for which they stand. For a proposition (or rather propositional sign) to picture, there is no need of a state of affairs to correspond to it as a whole. Nevertheless, something must correspond to its components, i.e. must be the one-to-one correlation between components of a propositional sign and components of the situation it depicts. Moreover, it must be determined by the order of correlation between propositional sign’s elements that depict and depicted reality. 2

However, it should be noted here that the order of this exposition is reverse to an order of development of Wittgensteinian ideas. Firstly, he faced some problems with falsehood, and later proposed the theory of proposition as picture, amongst others, to solve the Russelian problem of false judgements. In my opinion, however, in order to comprehend Wittgenstein’s ideas it is better to follow the proposed ordo dicendi (or exponendi), to explicate reverse Wittgensteinian ordo cognoscendi (or maybe more precisely, ordo creandi). In other words, I am rather interested in the context of justification of Wittgenstein’s solution than the heuristic context of discovery.

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[T]he fact that the elements of the picture are related to each other in a determinate way represents that the corresponding things are related to each other in the same way, whether or not they actually are. (Glock 1996: 309)

For a proposition to picture falsely is to picture a non-existing combination of existing elements (Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 42-43; 1961: 31). In other words, what a false proposition signifies is a non-existent (possible) arrangement of the (actual) existent objects (Wittgenstein 1958: 3). However, it seems to be still justified to ask the question of how even this potential arrangement is possible if there is no state of affairs that refers to the content of the false proposition. According to Wittgenstein, assuming the method of projection, the names of the propositional sign are arranged themselves as the object would be arranged if the proposition in question were true (Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 42-43; 1961: 26). In fact, the arrangement itself is possible, because it stands for the arrangement of names, but not for what the names stand. Therefore, unlike Russell, Wittgenstein focuses on a theory of symbolism of propositions (or syntax of the propositions) rather than on the theory of judgement that expresses a certain propositional attitude. He considers “the linguistic representations we use to express thoughts” (Ricketts 1996: 69). Propositions then possess sense independently of whether the situation depicted is actual or not (Wittgenstein 1961: 15). However, they must share with the situation the possibility, which is actualized when the proposition is true, and it is not actualized when the proposition is false. This possibility shared by a proposition and a situation (in bipolar spectrum) could be regarded as a form.3 A proposition must imply this possi3

Wittgenstein offered an account of the sense of a picture as the possibilities for the existence or non-existence of states of affaires. The term ‘possibility’ gives rise to some interpretative problems. Eric Stenius (1960/1996: 29-36), for instance, claims that the whole (logical) space of possible states of affairs should be regarded as positive possibilia. On the contrary, Max Black (1964: 38-46) sustains that the only state of affairs are actual ones, and the meaningfulness of false propositions is granted by the doctrine of bipolarity of propositions, not by positive possibilia. That is, the sense of propositions is the same state of affairs that makes their negation true and makes them false. The interpretation of this paper

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bility literally, not only metaphorically (Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 16-17, 18-19; Black 1964: 78-79). The form is then (in analogy to a picture) the possibility (as a disposition) of a certain configuration of things that could be depicted. It makes also comprehensible the logical isomorphism between the combination of elements in the propositional sign and the possible combination of objects in the relevant, depicted situation. As Glock notices, [r]epresentation is possible through a logical isomorphism, an agreement in form between what represents – whether it be diorama, painting, musical score, proposition or thought – and what is represented (this recalls Aristotle’s idea that in thought the mind and its object, although made of different matter, take on the same form. (Glock 1996: 300)

5. Conclusion To conclude, I would like to emphasise the following essential points of Wittgenstein’s position on the sense of a false proposition. Wittgensteinian theory of propositions rests on the idea of picturing in general. According to him, the sense of a proposition is ‘what it represents’, i.e. a possible state of affairs – an arrangement of objects or elements that may or may not obtain according to whether the proposition in question is true or false. Proposition, then, is essentially bipolar: it is capable of being true or false. Using the modern truth-conditional semantics we can express this in the following way: the sense of a truth-function of a proposition ‘p’ is a function of the sense of ‘p’, whereas negation just reverses the sense of a proposition in question. Propositions ‘p’ and ‘~p’ have opposite sense, although one and the same reality corresponds to them. The proposition demonstrates (or, in the Wittgensteinian technical term, “shows”) its sense, that is, “how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand” (Wittgenstein 1922/1974: 40-41). The sense is a possibility – a potential combination of objects or names in a propoprovides arguments in favour of Black’s exegetical position (see also Anscombe 1959/1971: 30, 51-63; Thomson 1966: 217-231).

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sitional sign, which need not be obtained or realized. In other words, a proposition can be false, and yet, have sense (without mirroring the actual, non-existing state of affairs) only because, even if no state of affairs corresponds to it as a whole, it still consists of elements that are correlated with elements of reality (at least by means of possible syntactical arrangement of names). Propositions ‘p’ and ‘~p’ refer to the same reality, that is to the same elements of the reality in virtue of the meaning of names as their components and, more technically, arguments. Truth and falsehood of the propositions are functions of these arguments, that is, possible arrangements of these components. In that sense, we can then say that ‘~p’ assumes ‘p’, and the reality that corresponds to ‘p’. Negation indicates to us whether the state of affairs obtains or not, but if it does not obtain, the proposition in question is still meaningful because it shows the possible arrangement of the reverse state of affairs than that asserted. References Anscombe, G.E.M. 1959/1971. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press. Beaney, Michel (ed.) 2000. The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Black, Max 1964. A Companion to Wittgeinstein’s Tractatus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chisholm, Roderick (ed.) 1960. Realism and the Background of Phenomenology. Glencoe: The Free Press. Copi Irving M. and Robert W. Beard (eds.) 1966. Essays on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Frege, Gottlob 1892/2000. On Sinn and Bedeutung. Transl. from German by M. Black. In: M. Beaney (ed.), 151-171. Glock, Hans-Johann 1996. A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell. Hacker, Peter M. S. 1972/1986. Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kenny, Anthony 1973/1975. Wittgenstein. Harmondsworth, Middleesex: The Penguin Press. Keyt, David 1966. Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory of Language. In: I. M. Copi and R. W. Beard (eds.), 377-392. Meinong, Alexius 1904/1960. The Theory of Objects. In: R. Chisholm (ed.), 76117.

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Pears, David 1987. The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ricketts, Thomas 1996. Pictures, Logic, and the Limits of Sense in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In: H. Sluga and D. G. Stern (eds.), 59-99. Russell, Bertrand 1905. On Denoting. Mind 14, 479-493. Russell, Bertrand 1907. Review of A. Meinong’s Über die Stellung der Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie. Mind 16, 436-439. Russell, Bertrand 1912/1991. The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Sluga Hans and David G. Stern (eds.) 1996. The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stenius, Erik 1960/1996. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Thomson, Judith J. 1966. Professor Stenius on the ‘Tractatus’. In: I. M. Copi and R. W. Beard (eds.). Essays on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 217-229. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1922/1974. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. from German by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1958. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1961. Notebooks 1914-1916 (with Notes on Logic). Ed. by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mieszko Tałasiewicz University of Warsaw [email protected]

Categorial Grammar and the Foundations of the Philosophy of Language Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present a new approach to explaining productivity of language, a feature that is crucial for constructing a credible logic of natural language and elucidating many key issues in the philosophy of language. The starting point of the proposed approach is a combination of Fregean idea of functoriality and the idea of bi-modal intentionality (taking some hints and observations from early Husserl, but not restricted to his views). These two ideas are dealt with in a way inspired by Strawson, notably by his idea that categories are roles rather than kinds of expressions, and that the logical syntax of language is to be founded in some transcendental features of our thinking about the world. As a result, our approach reveals philosophical foundations of Categorial Grammar (far deeper than Ajdukiewicz ever explicitly acknowledged) and shows, among other things, that Categorial Grammar should not be considered as more or less accurate description of acceptability judgments that constitute the empirical base of linguistics, but rather as a calculus of intentional structure of human cognition. Keywords: Strawson, Frege, Husserl, Ajdukiewicz, Categorial Grammar, subject, predicate, intentionality, functoriality, unsaturatedness

0. Introduction The core problem of syntax is to explain the unified meaning of compound expressions: what it is and how it can be obtained (productivity of language). There are three distinct aspects of the question, three tasks:

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• How to distinguish well-formed expressions from ill-formed ones • How to obtain compound meanings from atomic meanings (compositionality) • How to distinguish a unified proposition from a mere list of terms Note, that discriminating well-formed and ill-formed expressions is one thing, and understanding compound expressions is another. Accordingly, calculating some compound meaning is one thing, and having this meaning unified and distinct from a mere concatenation, is another. “A problem of syntax” is deliberately ambiguous here: syntax is either a part of language, or a theory of this part of language. Accordingly there are two ways of understanding what the problem of syntax is: we may speak of “a problem” for language: to develop – in the process of evolution – appropriate mechanisms enabling the users to deal with the abovementioned tasks; and we may speak of a problem for theoretician: to explain how these tasks are accomplished. Both kinds of understanding are relevant here. Actually, identifying a mechanism working in a language is a way of explaining linguistic phenomena. Admittedly, mere identification of mechanisms is not a very deep explanation: a deeper explanation of phenomena would require some elaboration – not mere identification – of the mechanisms themselves: their evolutionary origin, their cognitive background etc. Yet it is an explanation – as long as it classifies and unifies phenomena and allows one to answer many questions about details – just as phenomenal laws of physics (like Boyle’s Law) were genuine explanations of facts long before they themselves became explained by general theories (like Quantum Mechanics). The aim of the paper is to propose a new approach to the Core Problem of Syntax or – as it would be more appropriate to say – to adapt a bunch of old ideas and present them as a unified and promising framework. Before we start, I must acknowledge the inspiration I draw for my approach from the syntactic work of Peter F. Strawson, which is now far less popular than it deserves. In the numerous books and papers published in the period of a quarter of a century, Strawson attempted to solve the problem in all three aspects (under the heading of subjectpredicate distinction). I believe that ultimately he has failed (I must postpone the detailed justification of this claim for another occasion) and

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I will not follow his path. But he cleared the field in an unprecedented way and made two very helpful observations, which I will heavily rely upon in my attempt. The first observation is that subject and predicate are not kinds of expressions but rather syntactic roles (Strawson 1950/1971: 15; 1974: 3). At first Strawson distinguished in the function of language two main tasks: that of forestalling the question ‘What are you talking about?’ and that of forestalling the question ‘What are you saying about it?’ The first task is to refer, identify or mention. The second is the task of attribution, description, classification, ascription (1950: 13). Accordingly, we have two main roles or, as Strawson would call them, uses: the uniquely referring use and the ascriptive use (1950: 14). In later writings Strawson would eventually come to maintaining that there are three primary roles. The third one is the role of establishing a propositional unity within a sentence (1974: 17). The second observation is that explanation for the distinction of subject and predicate (and the distinctions between syntactic roles in general) must be in a sense transcendental: We assume that the subject-predicate duality […] reflects some fundamental features of our thought about the world. Strawson (1974: 11) We are dealing here with something that conditions our whole way of talking and thinking, and it is for this reason that we feel it to be non-contingent. Strawson (1959: 29)

I use the word ‘transcendental’ in the sense defined by the cited phrases; it is loosely connected with Kantian meaning (Strawson was the author of The Bounds of Sense); but I am not committing myself to all nuances historians of philosophy may wish to associate with the term. What I am going to do is to establish the three main syntactic roles on a transcendental foundations and derive the rest of the syntactic system of the language from these grounds. The methodology is similar to Strawson’s: we are looking for some fundamental features of our thinking about the world. Different are the starting intuitions: in the place of the ontological distinctions from Individuals I shall take and raise to the rank of our transcendental foundations the two ideas presented in the following section.

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1. Two foundational ideas 1.1. Functoriality The first idea is the well-known Fregean Principle of Functoriality. The principle states an intuitive condition under which any compound expression can be a meaningful whole rather than just a heterogeneous sum of its parts (‘list of terms’). To achieve this, the compound must consist of an ‘unsaturated’ part and of another part which can serve as an argument of the first one and in so doing ‘saturate’ it:1 For not all the parts of a thought can be complete; at least one must be ‘unsaturated’, or predicative; otherwise they would not hold together (Frege 1892a: 54).

1

The idea of functoriality works at the semantic level as well: the ‘unsaturated’ part denotes a function – an unsaturated entity itself – while the part which ‘saturates’ it denotes some object which the function takes as its argument. A uniform denotation of the whole compound expression is the value of the function. Thanks to this we are able to understand why the denotation of a compound expression, say ‘Socrates’ father’, is not a sum (or product) of denotations of the constituent expressions (‘father’ and ‘Socrates’) but a completely different object (here Sophroniscus). This semantic aspect of functoriality is sometimes referred to as ‘compositionality’: the denotation of a compound is a function, denoted by the functor, of the denotations of the arguments of the functor. For reasons fully explained in Tałasiewicz (2010), ‘functoriality’ should be preferred to ‘compositionality’ in the present context. Compositionality nowadays has some air of an epistemological thesis, saying that when we analyze meanings we must first have access to atomic constituents and only then we can obtain the compound expression as their function. Functoriality, on the other hand, is a purely formal notion: any compound expression is a function of its atomic constituents, and by the same token any atomic constituent is a (reversed) function of the compound and other constituents. Which is first given for analysis, is not decided formally, it is a matter of fact. Sometimes it may be the case that it is the meaning of some compound expression what is given first, and the meaning of some of its constituents is only derived. Thus, functoriality is fully consistent with both compositionality and contextuality (and it is not accidental that Frege endorsed simultaneously the two principles). For analogous use of ‘functoriality’ see e.g. Simons (1981: 88).

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Statements in general […] can be imagined to be split up into two parts; one complete in itself, and the other in need of supplementation, or ‘unsaturated’ (Frege 1891: 31).

Strawson recognized this idea but found it, rightly, insufficient. ‘Unsaturatedness’ by itself is hardly intelligible: as Strawson stressed (after Ramsey) both subject and predicate are incomplete or unsaturated as parts of a sentence, on the level of syntax. The semantic level of the notion of ‘unsaturatedness’ works no better, either. According to Frege, unsaturated expressions denote unsaturated objects, that is functions. But since everything can be predicated of, functions notwithstanding, expressions referring to unsaturated objects may be subjects as well as predicates. Our criterion cannot be built up with these bricks. It turns out however that the subject-predicate problem can be solved by supplementing Frege’s idea with another one, namely that of language being founded in two kinds of intentional acts. I take this idea as stemming from Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, particularly Investigation V (Husserl 2001), but the whole conception I set out here is not fully Husserlian. 1.2. Bi-modal intentionality I assume after Husserl that expressions have meanings because they are founded in intentional acts, whereby they appear as being directed at something: The concrete phenomenon of the sense-informed expression breaks up, on the one hand, into the physical phenomenon forming the physical side of the expression, and, on the other hand, into the acts which give it meaning […] In virtue of such acts, the expression is more than merely sounded word. It means something, and in so far as it means something, it relates to what is objective. (Husserl 2001, Vol. 1: 191-192)

There are two kinds of intentional acts: nominal acts and propositional acts. In language, they correspond to names and sentences. It is not enough to say that our thinking or its verbal expression is intentional or

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directed at something, for our thinking and its verbal expression can be directed at it in two different ways: Nominal acts and complete judgements never can have the same intentional essence, and […] every switch from one function to the other, though preserving communities, necessarily works changes in this essence. (Husserl 2001, Vol. 2: 152) Naming and asserting do not merely differ grammatically, but ‘in essence’, which means that the acts which confer or fulfil meaning for each, differ in intentional essence, and therefore in act-species. (Husserl 2001, Vol. 2: 158)

According to Husserl this is a primary, independent differentiation of intentionality, not based on any other differentiation; we can say that our intentional attitude is simply the way it is: when we reflect on our thinking and speaking, it presents itself to us as being directed at something in either one way or the other, as mentioning something or stating something about it. The dichotomy of names and sentences as two fundamental, different and non-interchangeable basic roles of expressions, that of expressing a nominal act and that of expressing a propositional act, is thus fully justified as grounded in this primary foundational distinction. The status of the distinction between nominal and propositional acts is comparable to the intended status of Strawson’s distinction between particular and concept and thus it may be called transcendental in the abovementioned loose sense: we might regard it as a further inexplicable – perhaps metaphysically contingent but epistemologically necessary– fact about the way in which people think about the world. The question of what is the profound nature of intentional acts, and how, exactly, meaning is constituted in such acts, needs not concern us here as long as we keep observing some basic principles of intentional account of meaning.2 What deserves our attention in the first place is the fact that names-sentences distinction, being based upon distinct kinds of intentional acts, has nothing to do with content (meaning) or denotation (semantic correlates) of these expressions. We can speak about the very 2

Although surely it is a very interesting question. A rough sketch how to deal with this matter – in a quite naturalistic way, far from Husserlian origins – is given in Tałasiewicz (2012).

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same objects using names and using sentences (concrete examples depend on many further assumptions; let us consider for the sake of relatively uncontroversial illustration a following one: ‘The cat is on the mat’, which is a sentence, is correlated with exactly the same part of reality as ‘The fact that the cat is on the mat’, which is a name). It is the mode of intentionality, not the object intended, that counts. Being a name depends on the role in which the expression is used (the role of expressing a nominal intentional act) rather than on the kind of expression or the kind of its designate. Names include proper names, nominal phrases with or without articles, definite/indefinite descriptions, pronouns, demonstratives, nominalized sentences (in fact, nominalized everything), and so on.3 In particular, names need not have designates at all. An intentional act, therefore an expression, can be directed at empty space. Expressions appear as directed at something, but not necessarily are so directed. Husserl lays great emphasis on this: Relation to an actually given objective correlate, which fulfils the meaningintention, is not essential to an expression. (Husserl 2001, Vol. 1: 199) Intentional experiences have the peculiarity of directing themselves in varying fashion to presented objects, but they do so in an intentional sense. An object is ‘referred to’ or ‘aimed at’ in them […]. This means no more than that certain experiences are present, intentional in character […]. There are (to ignore certain exceptions) not two things present in experience, we do not experience the object and beside it the intentional experience directed upon it. […] only one thing is present, the intentional experience, whose essential descriptive character is the intention in question […] If this experience is present, then, eo ipso and through its own essence […], the intentional ‘relation’ to an object is achieved, and an object is ‘intentionally present’ […]. And of course such an experience may be present in consciousness together with its intention, although its object does not exist at all, and is perhaps incapable of existence. The object is ‘meant’, i.e. to ‘mean’ it is an experience, but it is then merely entertained in thought, and is nothing in reality.

3

This view is consistent with Geach’s approach whereby, for example, general terms can be used as predicates and names, and that these are different uses (Geach 1980a, section 34).

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If I have an idea of the god Jupiter, […] this means that I have a certain presentative experience, the presentation-of-the-god-Jupiter is realized in my consciousness. This intentional experience may be dismembered as one chooses in descriptive analysis, but the god Jupiter naturally will not be found in it. The ‘immanent’, ‘mental object’ is not therefore part of the descriptive or real make-up of experience, it is in truth not really immanent or mental. But it also does not exist extramentally, it does not exist at all. This does not prevent our-idea-of-the-god-Jupiter from being actual, a particular sort of experience or particular mode of mindedness (Zumutesein), such that he who experiences it may rightly say that the mythical king of the gods is present to him, concerning whom there are such and such stories. If, however, the intended object exists, nothing becomes phenomenologically different. It makes no essential difference to an abject presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or is fictitious, or is perhaps completely absurd. I think of Jupiter as I think of Bismarck, of the tower of Babel as I think of Cologne Cathedral, of a regular thousand-sided polygon as of regular thousand-faced solid. (Husserl 2001, Vol. 2: 98-99)

1.3. Frege and Husserl: cooperation not competition The idea of bi-modal intentionality has a high explanatory potential by itself. It is only after we have distinguished two kinds of intentional acts that we can explain the concept of a sentence. The problem which arises here attracts surprisingly little attention: Strawson posed the question about what the subject and the predicate are in a sentence, treating the sentence itself as something quite obvious. He shares such a lighthearted attitude towards the notion of sentence with many of his critics, notably Bob Hale, who in (1979: 283) says: “The notion of sentence may reasonably be taken for granted…”. Yet in fact there is nothing obvious about it, especially if we reject Frege’s original conception that a sentence is an expression denoting one of the two truth-values (while Strawson, for example, and every exponent of the truth-value-gap theory rejects the necessary link between a sentence and its truth value). The notion of assertion, which perhaps may be thought of as sufficiently strong to replace truth-values in the role of an indicator of sentencehood, is no good, either. Sentences may be correlated with both positing and non-positing acts: assertions as well as mere suppositions. It is clear

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that we can utter a grammatical sentence without a hint of an assertion (and make it so that it does not have any truth-value).4 How can we distinguish a sentence from a non-sentence then? The popular claim that a sentence is an expression that may have a truth-value hardly explains anything. Instantly it begs the question: what makes some expressions enabled to have a truth-value and others not? Bi-modal intentionality provides a good and simple answer to this question: a sentence is an expression that expresses a propositional intentional act. Furthermore bi-modal intentionality explains the otherwise rather obscure notion of ‘unsaturatedness’. Interestingly, Husserl adopted some kind of saturatedness-unsaturatedness distinction himself. In particular, he distinguished independent from non-independent expressions, as well as complete from incomplete ones. Complete expression is a kind of expression which is syntactically coherent, with a unitary meaning, for example, ‘a cat’, ‘The cat sits on the mat’, or ‘quite good’. Incomplete expression is an expression that lacks this internal syntactic coherence: ‘the on cat quite’. This, so far, has nothing to do with Frege’s saturated/ unsaturated expressions (despite the fact that Frege himself sometimes called saturatedness-unsaturatedness ‘completeness-incompleteness’). However, Fregean saturatedness-unsaturatedness in turn has quite a lot in common with Husserl’s differentiation between independent and nonindependent expressions. Independent expressions are e.g. ‘a horse’, ‘I’ve seen a ghost’, ‘a green cow’, while non-independent expressions such as ‘is green’ or ‘quite good’, are functors which have unitary but unsaturated meanings and therefore require objects: Several non-independent meanings […] can be […] associated in relatively closed units, which yet manifest, as wholes, a character of non-independence. This fact of complex non-independent meanings is grammatically registered in the relatively closed unity of complex syncategorematic expressions. Each of these is a single expression, because expressive of a single meaning, and it is a complex expression, because expressive part by part of a complex meaning. It is in relation to this meaning that it is a complete expression. If nonetheless we call it incomplete, this depends on the fact that its meaning, despite its unity, is in need of completion. Since it can on4

For a forceful arguments against assertion as a sentence-hood indicator, see Geach (1972).

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ly exist in a wider semantic context, its linguistic expression likewise points to a wider linguistic context, to a completion in speech that shall be independent and closed. (Husserl 2001, Vol.2: 57)

Thus the explanation of unsaturatedness, available to Husserl but not to Frege, is the following: An expression is saturated when it expresses a complete intentional act: propositional or nominal (thus we have two kinds of saturated expressions: names and sentences). Other expressions are unsaturated.5 It is a very simple explanation, which very easily side-steps Ramsey’s charge: indeed both subject and predicate fall short of being complete sentences, but a name in the subject position expresses complete intentional act (nominal), whereas predicate does not express any complete intentional act, neither nominal nor propositional.6 This explanation accounts in turn for Frege’s ‘horse concept paradox’. Frege, who took pains to distinguish the object (as a correlate of a saturated name) from the concept (as a correlate of an unsaturated predicate), ran into considerable difficulties trying to express his conception. Dummett (1993: 55) calls these difficulties a paradox, which sounds like a rather serious description, but even Frege himself felt the situation was somewhat awkward: It must indeed be recognized that here we are confronted by an awkwardness of language, which I admit cannot be avoided, if we say that the concept horse is not a concept whereas e.g. the city of Berlin is a city and the volcano Vesuvius is a volcano […]. In logical discussions one quite often 5

6

Unsaturated expressions do not express incomplete intentional acts but are correlated, in some intermediate way, to certain structures of complete acts from which their meanings have been abstracted, cf. Tałasiewicz (2010). Compare: “A name has a complete sense, and can stand by itself in a simple act of naming […]. [A] predicate never has a complete sense, since it does not show what the predication is about; it is what is left of a proposition when the subject is removed, and thus essentially contains an empty place […]” (Geach 1980a: 57).

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needs to assert something about a concept […]. Consequently, one would expect that the reference of the grammatical subject would be the concept; but the concept as such cannot play this part, in view of its predicative nature; it must first be converted into an object, or, speaking more precisely, represented by an object (Frege 1892a: 46). I admit that there is a quite peculiar obstacle in the way of an understanding with my reader. By a kind of necessity of language, my expressions, taken literally, sometimes miss my thoughts; I mention an object, when what I intend is a concept (Frege 1892a: 54).

In terms of Husserl’s distinction, matters are clear. The saturation or unsaturation of an expression does not depend on whether the denotation of the expression is saturated or not (whether it is, ontologically, a particular or a concept or a function) but on whether it expresses a full intentional act or not. A name is saturated, even if it is only a name of an ontologically unsaturated object, such as a concept or a function. When we speak about a concept then, we do not convert it in any way. We simply name it, instead of predicating it of something. This is the difference of the logical role, not of the denotation. Nevertheless, there is something about unsaturatedness that Frege has got and Husserl has not. Husserl has got unsaturatedness explained, whereas Frege has got it applied. Unsaturatedness in Frege’s conception is employed in the important task of explaining compoundability of expressions, which is crucial for our purpose of establishing the general principles of logical grammar. Saturatedness-unsaturatedness distinction is namely a part of the more general notion of functoriality, whereby (1) any process of compounding must involve the process of saturating some non-independent (unsaturated) parts (functors) in order to obtain independent (saturated) wholes; (2) the compounding process has the form of supplying arguments to a function indicated by the unsaturated expression. In Husserl’s account the notion of unsaturatedness appears surprisingly idle. Husserl’s method of compounding meanings is much weaker than Frege’s and does not rely on the saturatedness-unsaturatedness distinc-

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tion. Where Frege provides one cardinal rule for compoundability, Husserl does not have any single method for making compounds. He has saturatedness-unsaturatedness at his disposal but he doesn’t employ this distinction to characterize compoundability. In his words: In a purely logical form-theory of meanings […] we must fix the primitive forms of independent meanings, of complete propositions with their internal articulations, and the structures contained in such articulations. We must fix, too, the primitive forms of compounding and modification permitted by the essence of different categories of possible elements. […] After this, we must systematically survey a boundless multitude of further forms […]. [For instance] Any two propositions yield, when combined in the form M and N, another proposition, any two adjectives another adjective […].To any two propositions, M, N, there belong, likewise, the primitive connective forms If M then N, M or N, so that the result again is a proposition. To any nominal meaning S, and any adjectival meaning p, there belongs the primitive form Sp (e.g red house), the result being a new meaning fixed by law in the category of nominal meaning. We could in this manner give many other examples of primitive connective forms. (Husserl 2001, Vol. 2: 69)

This is a piecemeal approach, according to which we must turn to the grammars of particular languages for information on what forms a compound expression may take. This cannot play the role of foundational principle of logical grammar (for it would be question-begging) and it is obviously inferior to Fregean functoriality, which is a single fundamental principle for compounding meanings and may be taken as a transcendental, a priori principle in the Strawsonian sense.7 Thus, the full picture emerges only when we bring together Fregean functoriality, which explains compoundability in terms of saturatednessunsaturatedness distinction, and Husserlian bi-modal intentionality, which explains saturatedness-unsaturatedness distinction. Husserl and Frege do not compete over which of them has managed to express the idea of meaning better, contrarily to what has been suggested in Dum7

To a large extent, Husserl’s approach resembles Richard Montague’s grammar which builds on a large set of grammatical principles given ad hoc, whereas combined Fregean-Husserlian approach yields a classical Categorial Grammar, or so we shall argue further.

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mett (1993: 56).8 They complement one another, each drawing out a different aspect, and only together do their insights generate a powerful framework in which we can understand logical grammar of the language, a framework identifying saturated names and sentences and unsaturated functors as three fundamental syntactic roles (compare Strawson!). 2. A unified approach. Subject and predicate revisited Now we have the resources to explain how the logical structure of a sentence is to be built. The basic syntactical rule for all kinds of sentences, or even all and any compound saturated expressions, follows: Basic Syntactic Rule (BSR) Every saturated compound expression (i.e. a name or a sentence) parses into exactly one n-place unsaturated functor and n of its saturated arguments (if any argument happens to be a compound expression itself, the rule applies accordingly). In atomic sentences the functor is an n-place predicate, while its arguments are n names (n ≥ 1). (BSR) is a more fundamental insight into the logical structure of linguistic expressions than mere subject-predicate distinction. The latter we can get from the former: A predicate is a(ny) sentence-forming functor taking nominal arguments. A subject is relativized to a sentence. In a sentence in which the functor is one-place predicate, the subject is the name that is the sole argument of this functor. With respect to sentences in which the predicate takes more than one name, the notion of the subject needs some more elaboration.

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For similar observation that Fregean conception of language achieves its full ripeness only in combination with the insights of Husserl, see Smith (1994).

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Let us start the labour with a short summary of what we know about sentences, names, and functors. What we need to repeat and highlight is that these are structural roles that different expressions may play in reflecting our intentional acts. We may call sentences, names and functors ‘categories’ for short, but only if we keep in mind that they are not kinds of expressions – they are roles. Perhaps expressions of one kind are better suited to play certain roles than expressions of another kind, but that is a different story. The very same expression, say ‘yellow’, can play the role of a name, as in ‘yellow is a bright colour’, or the role of a functor, as in ‘a yellow car hit the wall’. The most important consequence of this is that the structure of a sentence reflects the structure of an intentional act. This should be contrasted with a common view that the structure of a sentence reflects the structure of a corresponding part of the world (a situation). I am not saying that the structure of a sentence has completely nothing in common with the structure of a situation; but I do say that it might be so only in an intermediate way. Immediately the structure of a sentence depends solely on intentional structure of a thought. It is a reasonable assumption though that the structure of a thought might be induced somehow by the structure of a situation we are thinking about – but, again, that is a different story (the way in which situations induce structures in thoughts is not exactly a straightforward one, I’m afraid). The structure of intentional acts rests on two pillars: the choice of names and the arrangement of names. The choice of names reflects how we frame our presentations; it shows how we parse reality in order to refer to it. The arrangement of names reflects the cognitive structure in which we place the presentations. Compare: (1) Mary | loves | John (2) John | loves | Mary (3) Mary | loves John Our cognitive structure expressed in (1) is such that we present to ourselves two objects and declare them to be in some binary relation. The cognitive structure in (2) is such that we present to ourselves the same objects as in (1) and declare them to be in the same binary relation, but

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in reversed order. The cognitive structure reflected in (3) is such that we present to ourselves just one object – ‘John’ is not a name at this level! – and ascribe to it some property (unary relation). In further refinements of the structure we may notice that this property is nothing else than the relation mentioned in (1) with the second place saturated with the second object mentioned in (1). In such case the second name will reappear, but at another level of analysis: (3’) Mary | loves John loves | John It is worth noting that eventually the sentence ‘Mary loves John’ is structurally ambiguous as it may reflect two different cognitive structures (1) and (3). Therefore in the logical grammar we not only need categories of sentences, names and functors, but also syntactic positions of parts of the sentences: the position of the first argument of the functor, the position of the second argument of the functor, the position of the third argument of the functor, and so on. ‘Mary’ has in (1) different position than in (2) although it belongs to the same category – in both cases it is a name. Moreover, if any part is still a compound expression, we need another level of analysis. Because all levels of analysis are governed by the same (BSR), each level contains exactly one functor. There might be in fact many functors in the whole expression, at different levels and in different positions. In (3’) the functor ‘loves’ has different position than in (1) or (2) although it belongs to the same category – in all cases it is a twoplace predicate. To keep trace of this, it is convenient to introduce a specific term of ‘operator position’ or ‘operator’ for short: the operator position in an expression is the syntactic position that is occupied by the constituent of the expression that is actually the functor precisely in this expression (not in any part of it). Thus ‘loves’ is in the operator position (or, for short, just is the operator) in (1) and (2) but not in (3).9 9

Precisely to this end of discriminating between categories and syntactic positions Geach has introduced the distinction of predicate and predicable (Geach 1980a: 50). His predicable is our predicate in general; his predicate is our ‘predicate in the expression’, or the operator. However, we will retain our terminology (bor-

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Now we may turn back to the question of the subject. We’ve said that in a sentence with one-place predicate the subject is the name (there is just one name in such a sentence). In sentences with many names we may attach the notion of the subject to some highlighted syntactic position that may be taken by a name, precisely as in Strawson’s ‘The whale struck the ship’, where both ‘the whale’ and ‘the ship’ are names but only ‘the whale’ is the subject. The subject may be highlighted logically – usually it is the first argument of the predicate – but occasionally it may be highlighted in some different way, e.g., pragmatically.10 Perhaps for a better understanding of the relation between types of expressions, logical roles and syntactical positions some visualization would be helpful. Consider the task of cleaning the lawn of dead leaves. It consists in executing the following roles: raking the leaves, gathering raked leaves in a container, transporting the container with the leaves to the compost-hole, emptying the container, transporting the container back to the lawn, further raking the leaves, gathering leaves etc. until the whole lawn is neat. These roles can be played by objects of various kinds, some of which are better suited to play a given role than others. For instance, raking the leaves is best performed with a rake. But house broom would do as well, if necessary. Or one’s own hands. Thus ‘a rake’

10

rowed from Ajdukiewicz 1978), as the concept of operator is more general: it works not only for predicates, but for all functors. This complication with the notion of subject justifies to some extent one of Geach’s charges against Strawson. Namely, Geach deplores Strawson’s use of the term ‘name’ on a par with ‘subject’, by saying: ‘name’ ought to mean a logical category, ‘logical subject’ ought to mean a term’s role in a given proposition’ (Geach 1980b: 175). We see, that in a sense, Geach is right here: ‘subject’ does not stand for a category of name, but stands for a specific syntactic position available to names. However, we can see also that this is not a fundamental charge: names (as well as all logical categories) are roles, and in sentences with one-place predicate the subject is the (only) name. It’s just that roles have some arrangement in a sentence that needs to be accounted for, and in sentences with many names the notion of subject is better suited to indicate rather the arrangement than just the nominal role. Subsequently, it is no longer so fundamental; we may choose relatively freely which name we want to honor with this term (subject’s being the first argument of the predicate is a common and useful convention, but there is nothing logically compelling about it).

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may stand for a kind of object designed to rake, but also it might stand for a role in the process (which can be performed by virtually anything that is physically capable of moving a leaf). And now, even if we are talking about roles, not objects, we must properly arrange the execution of these roles in order to accomplish the task, no matter what objects actually play these roles. If we first rake, then gather leaves in a container, then empty the container, then transport the container to the composthole, then transport the container back to the lawn and so on, the lawn will never be neat. The distinction between roles and their arrangement in performing a complex task should not blur the distinction between roles and objects that can play them. 3. Towards Categorial Grammar We have arrived at a point where we are in possession of a very simple yet powerful framework capable of accounting for many facets of logical grammar of language and describing the logical structure of highly complicated expressions. We have seen that Frege’s Functoriality Principle, just as it is, by mere cooperation with Husserl’s bi-modal intentionality, generates a wide range of available structures. With bi-modal intentionality at hand we can distinguish name-forming and sentence-forming functors and cross this distinction with name-taking functors and sentence-taking functors. We get sentential connectives (sentence-formingsentence-taking), predicates (sentence-forming-name-taking), reificators or nominalizers (name-forming-sentence-taking) and logical adjectives (name-forming-name-taking). We can still enrich this framework if we take seriously Husserl’s insight that unsaturated expressions may be compound themselves (so far we were considering cases in which saturated parts of some compound expression could be compound themselves). Guided by this insight we may generalize the notion of functoriality: Any compound unsaturated expression parses either according to (BSR) or into one ‘more’ unsaturated expression and some ‘less’ unsaturated expressions in such a way that the less unsaturated expres-

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sions are the arguments of the more unsaturated expression and the whole compound (unsaturated) expression is the value of such function. In this way we get many other kinds of functors, such as functor-forming functors, among which logical adverbs occupy a prominent place, and eventually in case of some more complex sentences we need to handle a fairly complicated arrangement of categories and positions at once. At this point we may feel a need for some formal calculus. Let us have the types (n) and (s) for names and sentences respectively and let us have a fractional type (x/y1…yk) for an x-type-forming functor taking k y-type-arguments (for the sake of simplicity we ignore functors that have heterogeneous arguments; the complication would be only notational, though). For instance, a two-place predicate may be noted as (s/nn), a logical adverb over two-place predicate as ((s/nn)/(s/nn)), an adjective as (n/n), a two-place connective as (s/ss) and so on. Syntactic positions may be encoded to some extent in the graphical form of analysis. (4) Polluted water | (n) | (n/n)* | (n)

affects heavily public health | (s/nn)* | (n) | ||(s/nn)|((s/nn)/(s/nn))* || (n/n)* | (n) |

Formula (4), where (*) indicates the operator, reads that the sentence ‘Polluted water affects heavily public health’ parses into unsaturated two-place predicate ‘affects heavily’ and two names: ‘polluted water’ as the first argument of the predicate and ‘public health’ as the second argument; furthermore, the name ‘polluted water’ parses into unsaturated one-place adjective ‘polluted’ and a name ‘water’ as its first and only argument; the predicate ‘affects heavily’ parses into unsaturated functor ‘heavily’ and unsaturated predicate ‘affects’ as its argument; the name ‘public health’ parses into unsaturated one-place adjective ‘public’ and a name ‘health’ as its first and only argument. There are of course different notational conventions, better suited for complicated cases but less intuitive for not-accustomed readers, so we will stick to the above. Perhaps we may introduce only a more formal way of encoding syntactic positions (as the graphical form sometimes may seem am-

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biguous). Let us namely write the syntactic position of an expression in form of a sequence of numerals such that to the whole analyzandum we assign the sequence (1), to the operator on the first level of analysis (1,0), to the first argument of the operator (1,1), to the second one (1,2), to the third one (1,3) and so on. If anything of it is still a compound expression and has assigned the sequence (n,m), we assign (n,m,0) to the operator in it, (n,m,1) to the first argument of the operator, (n,m,2) to the second argument and so forth. In the above example it will yield (1,0) for ‘affects heavily’, (1,1) for ‘polluted water’, (1,2) for ‘public health’, (1,0,0) for ‘heavily’, (1,0,1) for ‘affects’, (1,1,0) for ‘polluted’, (1,1,1) for ‘water’, (1,2,0) for ‘public’ and (1,2,1) for ‘health’.11 The functoriality principle may be now rephrased in the form of the so called ‘multiplying out’ rule of functional application: (MP)

(x/y) y → x

This rule, if applied backwards, gives us some constraints for parsing sentences and other compound expressions, although it usually does not determine any particular parsing, since – as we have seen – sentences usually are structurally ambiguous (because the same surface sentence may express different structures of intentional acts). When applied forwards, the rule allows for unambiguous restoring of original expression from its parsed elements. ‘Heavily’ ((s/nn)/(s/nn)) takes ‘affects’ (s/nn) and yields ‘affects heavily’ (s/nn). ‘Polluted’ (n/n) takes ‘water’ (n) and yields ‘polluted water’ (n). ‘Public’ (n/n) takes ‘health’ (n) and yields ‘public health’ (n). ‘Affects heavily’ (s/nn) takes ‘polluted water’ (n) and 11

For details, e.g. formal recursive definition, see Ajdukiewicz (1978). Still another way of encoding syntactic positions is the so called Polish notation: the functor goes first, followed by its arguments, from the first of them to the last one. Within compound constituents the same rule applies accordingly (cf. Ajdukiewicz 1935/1967). An example in Polish notation would look like this: ‘heavily affects polluted water public health’. Apart from its being quite hard to visualize, Polish notation is ambiguous if (Composition), see below, is adopted. A string (s/s) (s/n) n can be parsed either as ((s/s) (s/n)) n or as (s/s) ((s/n) n). There are still more options. Steedman (2000: 34) prefers for instance graphical encoding with left/ right arrows to encode the direction of functional application.

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‘public health’ (n) and yields ‘Polluted water affects heavily public health’. We may perhaps inquire whether there are some further plausible and insightful generalizations of functoriality principle. Let us recall that the first generalization allowed for functions to be arguments of other functions. At the level of expressions this amounted to the possibility of having compound functors. Now we may entertain the idea of the so called functional composition: instead of applying two functions to some argument one after another, we might first merge these functions into one and only then apply the resultant function to the argument. (Composition)

(x/y) (y/z) → (x/z)

It allows for, e.g. a composition of sentential negation with a predicate: (s/s) (s/n) → (s/n) which would be syntactically incoherent under (MP) alone (note that (s/n) is not an argument of (s/s)). Such a possibility is much welcome, because in terms of it we can account for what was so forcefully advanced by Geach (1950): the asymmetry of subject and predicate with respect to negation. Under (Composition) it is nearly self-evident: sentential negation with a predicate gives another predicate, whereas with a name – (s/s) n – it gives incoherent string. Names sometimes can be negated, but only through name negation (n/n), which is categorially different from sentence negation. This is pretty much all we need for logical grammar of language, except for a still better formal elaboration. Luckily enough, such a calculus has already been elaborated in the finest detail and is called Categorial Grammar (CG). It was initiated in 193512 by Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (cf. 12

Actually 1935 was the year of the first publication of a full-blown grammatical calculus. Ajdukiewicz was presenting the core ideas as early as in 1925, at the meetings of the Polish Philosophical Society. Abstracts were published in the proceedings as (Ajdukiewicz 1925a, 1925b). It is worth noting that in these lectures Ajdukiewicz acknowledged very clearly the distinction between nominal and propositional intentional acts and stressed the need to keep this distinction

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Ajdukiewicz 1935/1967), who explicitly acknowledged Husserl’s contribution to the idea (Frege’s contribution was perhaps too obvious to be mentioned).13 Ajdukiewicz developed the calculus up to the (MP) principle. In 1970 Geach introduced philosophically important (Composition) principle (cf. Geach 1970). Further modifications of the calculus introduced over the years, eventually resulted in a bunch of sophisticated formal theories which now constitute one of the leading frameworks in the logical syntax of today.14 However, when we speak about Categorial Grammar in the context of the present purpose – i.e. the purpose of establishing in a philosophically compelling way the right criterion for the basic distinctions of logical grammar – a qualification is needed. Ajdukiewicz conceived his calculus as a grammar, plausible but rather tool-like device for parsing sentences. He never insisted explicitly on any particular philosophical importance of the ideas he took from Frege and Husserl, although it may be argued that implicitly he treated his grammar as philosophically important. Consequently, the developments of the calculus did not always heeded the philosophical underpinnings of this calculus. Now, the point of the present paper is that the joint insights of Frege and Husserl do reveal the actual (and necessary, in a transcendental sense) conditions of our thinking about the world, and thus CG is the logical grammar of natural language – as long as it is faithful to the foundations.15 CG, as opposed to other syntactic theories, in particular generative grammar or Montague grammar, is not a generalization or idealization of a traditional grammar of a particular language like Engseparate from the distinction of assertions and mere suppositions. This topic was never so overtly discussed in his further articles. 13 Ajdukiewicz was concerned only with Logical Investigations. Later works of Husserl, perhaps decisive for phenomenology, were beyond the scope of his interests, as they are beyond the scope of ours here. For arguments that Husserl’s early theory from Logical Investigations is a different theory, and a better one, than his theory developed later, especially in Ideas, see Smith (1994: 177). 14 See e.g. Carpenter (1997); Steedman (2000). 15 From this point of view, the present status of CG as a formal theory does not seem quite satisfactory. The reasons why it is so and some criticisms of unjustified developments in CG are presented in Tałasiewicz (2009, 2010).

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lish, Polish or Latin. It is not a reservoir of distilled linguistic competence of native speakers of some language, either. It is a cognitive frame that shapes the whole way in which we might approach the syntax of any human language whatsoever – a frame that, admittedly, in many cases may be hidden deep beneath actual surface realization. Actual grammar of a given language is a product of interference of many factors, logical as well as semantic and pragmatic. CG reveals only logical aspect of it; empirically not-detachable from other aspects. We might say that Categorial Grammar is a calculus of intentionality, which in turn makes the latter term less obscure than it is normally taken to be, even if it does not explain it to the bone. 4. A comparison with Simons’ account We have been arriving at the formulation of CG step by step from the initial insights to the full-blown calculus in an annoyingly slow pace in order to make this transcendental character of CG absolutely clear. Keeping this character in mind is particularly important for assessing Peter Simons’ approach to unsaturatedness (cf. Simons 1981). Simons’ enterprise has arguably narrower scope than ours. He tries to explain just unsaturatedness, without making use of it in the project of elucidating the subject-predicate distinction.16 Yet unsaturatedness is a big part of the project and his approach is superficially very similar to ours. Simons, namely, explicitly addresses the notion of unsaturatedness as a place in Fregean conception where one ‘shall look to Husserl for a fuller theory, which can illuminate some of the obscurity surrounding Frege’s account’ (Simons 1981:75). Moreover, he acknowledges the Ramseyan type of charge against it (‘all subsentential expressions fall short of being complete sentences’, cf. Simons 1981: 85) and, finally, entertains a type of solution to the problem of unsaturatedness that we have adopted, namely based upon Husserl’s distinction of complete and incomplete intentional acts. Eventually, however, he rejects this solution with a claim that 16

Although he makes use of it in some partial elucidating of the notion of the predicate in the context of the dispute between Dummett (1973) and Geach (1975).

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Husserl’s [distinction][…] may be question-begging, since it seems unlikely that we can classify mental phenomena into the requisite broad classes without bringing in, by the back door, the grammatical classification of the expressions apt to put such experiences into words: is not judgment, for example, simply analogous to the silent internal assertion of a declarative sentence? (Simons 1981: 85)17

Simons provides solution that he thinks is a different one: he decides to take ‘grammatical classification of expressions’ as the ultimate explanans and introduces Categorial Grammar as ‘an intrinsically linguistic account’ of it (1981: 85). With this in mind, he derives saturatednessunsaturatedness distinction from the distinction of basic and functor categories in the technical sense of CG (which is quite obvious at this point), and claims, that wherever CG “might fail to be adequate to the linguistic data […] there […] we should also have little idea whether to describe the expression as complete or incomplete” (1981: 86). Now, in the light of what we have said above, and in particular in the light of Strawsonian analysis of language, this manoeuvre seems entirely futile. Categorial Grammar, if treated as a summary of common grammatical intuitions, looses much of its explanatory force and becomes itself in need of explanation (just as other superficial grammatical features considered by Strawson). Besides, CG is far too distant from the empirical corpus to be such a summary (arguably it is counterintuitive in some

17

Notably, Simons acknowledges also Husserl’s and Frege’s importance for CG: “Both Frege and Husserl are in a sense intellectual grandfathers of categorial grammar: Frege by example, Husserl by precept. Frege’s concept-script is effectively built on categorial principles […]. Husserl, on the other hand, first suggested and outlined the general idea of a categorial grammar […]. It is therefore no accident that the Polish thinkers who first developed categorial grammar were influenced by both Frege and Husserl” (1981: 86). A comment is due. Indeed Frege and Husserl are both ancestors of CG, but in a different sense than Simons depicts it: they are rather like grandfather and grandmother (leaving aside the question who is who): their intellectual gametes had to copulate in the womb of Ajdukiewicz’s mind before he in turn could conceive CG. Neither of Frege nor Husserl alone was doing exactly Categorial Grammar, explicitly or implicitly. As we have seen, Fregean functoriality by itself yields hardly any grammar at all; Husserl devised a sort of Montague grammar rather than CG.

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derivations).18 The explanatory power of CG is derived, or so we have argued, from the fact that CG is founded in some fundamental, basic insight about language: it is a formal and detailed elaboration of this insight. And it is precisely this insight we have tried to reconstruct in the present paper: the confluence of Husserlian bi-modal intentionality and Fregean functoriality. References Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz 1925a. Nazwy i zdania (autoreferat). Ruch Filozoficzny 9, nr 1-2, 23b-24b. Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz 1925b. Składniki zda (autoreferat), Ruch Filozoficzny 9, nr 9-10, 164a-164b. Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz 1935/1967. Syntactic Connexion. In: Storrs McCall (ed.) 1967. Polish Logic 1920-1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 207-231 [first published in 1935 in Studia Philosophica 1, in German as Die Syntaktische Konnexität]. Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz 1978. Syntactical Connections between Constituents of Declarative Sentences. In: J. Giedymin (ed.), 269-281. Black, Max and Peter T. Geach (eds.) 1960. Translations from Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Carpenter, Bob 1997. Type-Logical Semantics. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Dummett, Michael 1973. Frege: Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth. Dummett, Michael 1993. Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Frege, Gottlob 1891. Function and Concept. In: M. Black and P.T. Geach (eds.), 2141. Frege, Gottlob 1892a. On Concept and Object. In: M. Black and P.T. Geach (eds.), 42-55. Frege, Gottlob 1892b. Sense and Reference. In: M. Black and P.T. Geach (eds.), 5678. Geach, Peter Thomas 1950. Subject and Predicate. Mind 59, 461-482. Geach, Peter Thomas 1970. The Program of Syntax. Synthese 22, 3-17. Geach, Peter Thomas 1972. Czemu zdanie nie jest nazw [Why a sentence is not a name] Studia Semiotyczne 3, 13-21 [published in Polish]. Geach, Peter Thomas 1975. Names and Identity. In: S.D. Guttenplan (ed.), 139-158.

18

For a discussion of CG as a linguistic theory, see Tałasiewicz ( 2010).

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Geach, Peter Thomas 1980a. Reference and Generality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Geach, Peter Thomas 1980b. Strawson on Subject and Predicate. In: Z. van Straaten (ed.), 174-188. Giedymin, Jerzy (ed.). 1978. The Scientific World-Perspective and Other Essays, 1931-1963. Synthese Library Vol. 108. Dordrecht/Boston: D. Reidel. Guttenplan, Samuel D. (ed.) 1975. Mind and Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Haaparanta, Leila (ed.) 1994. Mind, Meaning and Mathematics. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Hale, Bob 1979. Strawson, Geach and Dummett on Singular Terms and Predicates. Synthese 42, 275-295. Simons, Peter 1981. Unsaturatedness. Grazer Philosophische Studien 14, 73-95. Smith, Barry 1994. Husserl’s Theory of Meaning and Reference. In: L. Haaparanta (ed.), 163-183. Stalmaszczyk, Piotr (ed.) 2012. Philosophical and Formal Approaches to Linguistic Analysis. Frankfurt a. M.: Ontos Verlag. Steedman, Mark 2000. Syntactic Process. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Stirton, William R. 2000. Singular Term, Subject and Predicate. The Philosophical Quarterly 50, 191-207. van Straaten, Zak (ed.) 1980. Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P. F. Strawson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strawson, Peter F. 1950. On Referring. Mind 59, 320-344 [cited from Strawson (1971), 1-20]. Strawson, Peter F. 1959. Individuals. London: Routlege. Strawson, Peter F. 1966. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. London: Methuen. Strawson, Peter F. 1971. Logico-Linguistic Papers. Aldershot: Ashgate. Strawson, Peter F. 1974. Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar. Aldershot: Ashgate. Tałasiewicz, Mieszko 2009. Geach’s Program and the Foundations of Categorial Grammar. Acta Semiotica Fennica XXXIV, 1731-1742. Tałasiewicz, Mieszko 2010. Philosophy of Syntax. Foundational Topics. Dordrecht: Springer. Tałasiewicz, Mieszko 2012. A New Perspective for the Theory of Intentionality. In: P. Stalmaszczyk (ed.), 513-525.

Index Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz 247, 269, 284, 287, 288, 289, 291 ambiguous illusions 53, 54 analytical philosophy 11, 71, 116, 119, 124 assertion 29, 33, 34, 35, 45, 79, 85, 115, 116, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 133, 136, 229, 230, 239, 260, 276, 277, 291 Austin, John L. 11, 12, 13, 16, 19, 22, 26 belief ascription 53 bipolarity 29, 30, 31, 41, 49, 264 Bradley, Francis Herbert 6, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 189, 214 Carnap, Rudolf 2, 139, 140, 142, 194, 195, 196, 197, 209, 228 Categorial Grammar (CG) 8, 269, 280, 285, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292 Chomsky, Noam 109, 139, 145, 149, 150, 152, 243, 244, 249 conceptual analysis 11, 12 conceptual clarification 3, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 21, 22, 25, 26 copula 183, 225, 239, 240, 241, 242, 245 Davidson, Donald 139, 141, 147, 149, 151, 154, 181, 184, 185, 214, 234, 235, 236 definite descriptions 1, 5, 6, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 161, 164, 165, 169, 170, 174, 178

demonstratives 99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 111, 162, 172, 275 diachronic historical linguistics 11, 14, 15 Donnellan, Keith 5, 99, 100, 111, 161, 165, 168, 169, 170, 177, 178 duck/rabbit 4, 53, 54, 56, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69 Dummett, Michael 4, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 140, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 213, 226, 227, 230, 233, 278, 281, 290 falsehood 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 172, 184, 255, 256, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 266 first and second order functions 181 formal semantics 193 Frege, Gottlob 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 130, 139, 146, 164, 171, 181, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 194, 196, 197, 204, 208, 209, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 236, 239, 240, 241, 243, 244, 245, 249, 255, 260, 261, 269, 272, 273, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 289, 291

296

function 42, 46, 91, 116, 119, 125, 131, 146, 161, 162, 163, 170, 171, 173, 179, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 209, 216, 217, 218, 225, 230, 231, 232, 233, 236, 239, 242, 244, 245, 247, 248, 258, 265, 271, 272, 274, 279, 286, 288 functor 236, 272, 281, 282, 283, 286, 287, 291 functoriality 8, 269, 272, 279, 280, 285, 287, 288, 291, 292 Geach, Peter Thomas 275, 277, 278, 283, 284, 288, 289, 290 generative grammar 3, 5, 7, 109, 150, 225, 226, 236, 237, 243, 244, 246, 289 Heidegger, Martin 5, 115, 124, 125, 126, 133, 134 historical commitment 115 Husserl, Edmund 121, 124, 202, 228, 229, 231, 269, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 289, 290, 291 impressions 53, 58 inconsistency 5, 115, 139, 182, 261 indeterminacy 139, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154 intentionality 8, 269, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 280, 285, 290, 292 judgement 29, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 47, 87, 88, 168, 173, 175, 176, 181, 182, 183, 188, 190, 214, 216, 229, 230, 239, 242, 260, 261, 264 Kant, Immanuel 3, 117, 118, 120, 121, 132, 133, 188

Index

Kripke, Saul 5, 99, 100, 111, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 175, 178 linguistic disposition 139 linguistic turn 3, 6, 12, 76, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 202, 203, 206, 210, 226, 227 logic 2, 6, 8, 79, 84, 88, 93, 119, 124, 156, 157, 189, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 217, 226, 228, 229, 231, 233, 234, 255, 269 logical form 4, 29, 38, 39, 43, 44, 46, 71, 75, 81, 91, 100, 257, 258, 261, 263, 280 Mill, John Stuart 161 ontological commitment 115, 127, 260 ontologico-historical understanding 5, 115, 135 ontology 7, 68, 148, 184, 210, 213, 214, 237, 238 optical illusions 53 ordinary language philosophy 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 23, 25 paradox of the concept horse 7, 213, 214, 221 perception 3, 4, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 69, 198 phases 99, 109 picture theory of language 255 pragmatics 100, 170, 173 predicate 69, 80, 89, 90, 91, 118, 129, 148, 155, 167, 183, 185, 187, 189, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 225, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 244, 245, 247, 248, 269,

Index

270, 271, 273, 276, 278, 281, 283, 284, 286, 288, 290 predication 1, 7, 125, 157, 213, 214, 225, 226, 227, 231, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 278 proceduralism 5, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134 proposition 5, 7, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 63, 74, 77, 80, 81, 89, 94, 99, 100, 101, 102, 111, 140, 142, 162, 167, 172, 181, 189, 190, 199, 213, 214, 220, 227, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245, 247, 248, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 269, 278, 280, 284 propositional unity 29, 191, 271 quantification 99, 166 Quine, Willard Van Orman 2, 5, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 194, 195, 208, 209, 234, 235, 242 reference 1, 5, 6, 33, 92, 93, 99, 100, 101, 106, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 128, 130, 131, 136, 139, 140, 141, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 154, 157, 161, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 183, 226,

297 232, 237, 242, 255, 259, 260, 261, 262, 279 relational properties 213, 215 relations 2, 15, 19, 20, 32, 37, 38, 42, 45, 48, 73, 75, 85, 89, 118, 121, 124, 135, 148, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 190, 205, 216, 228, 230, 233, 236, 237, 238, 241, 244, 245 Russell, Bertrand 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 63, 99, 116, 119, 130, 139, 156, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 189, 190, 195, 196, 197, 209, 215, 255, 260, 264 Sainsbury, R. M. 161, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 176, 177 Saussure, Ferdinand de 15, 18, 198 semantic-pragmatic distinction 161 semantics 5, 7, 11, 15, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 139, 140, 141, 142, 147, 148, 149, 150, 154, 157, 170, 195, 197, 199, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 217, 225, 226, 229, 231, 232, 234, 235, 237, 239, 240, 245, 246, 247, 248, 255, 265 Strawson, Peter F. 8, 12, 66, 119, 157, 168, 235, 269, 270, 271, 273, 274, 276, 281, 284, 291

298

structure 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 40, 43, 45, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81, 84, 87, 90, 100, 105, 106, 109, 110, 112, 133, 135, 139, 143, 148, 150, 151, 154, 181, 185, 186, 187, 189, 194, 195, 207, 208, 209, 213, 215, 216, 219, 220, 221, 226, 236, 241, 244, 249, 255,256, 257, 258, 269, 281, 282, 285 syntax 8, 150, 154, 217, 218, 228, 248, 258, 264, 269, 270, 273, 289, 290 theory of description 6, 161, 163, 164, 165, 168, 172, 178, 179 theory of judgement 3, 6, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 39, 40, 42, 48, 181, 185 theory of names 161, 164, 171, 173, 177 thought 4, 33, 41, 43, 44, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 116, 117, 118, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 135, 142, 144, 156, 162, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 177, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 196, 214, 216, 218,

Index

220, 221, 227, 228, 229, 230, 236, 238, 239, 265, 271, 272, 275, 276, 282 truth 1, 3, 4, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 86, 92, 94, 134, 136, 140, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147, 148, 152, 157, 163, 167, 172, 183, 185, 186, 187, 189, 191, 199, 200, 203, 208, 209, 214, 229, 230, 233, 235, 236, 239, 241, 256, 258, 259, 261, 265, 276 underdetermination of theory 139, 144, 145 unity of the proposition 185, 214, 236 unsaturatedness 240, 269, 273, 277, 278, 279, 280, 290, 291 Wittgenstein, Lugwig 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 54, 63, 64, 65, 69, 78, 115, 116, 117, 124, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133, 134, 139, 153, 155, 182, 189, 194, 196, 202, 203, 206, 208, 209, 210, 230, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265