Philosophy of language - a very biased Cook's tour
Discussion on Friday 13 September 2019. Andrew will do the initial presentation..
Alan Watts has a light-hearted go at academic philosophers in one of his talks, where he describes them as people who spend their days debating and writing about whether certain sentences have a meaning and if so what. He relays a quote from another writer saying that a philosopher would go to work in a white coat if he thought he could get away with it.
It sounds like he’s having a go at philosophy of language in particular. Philosophy of language is a whole field in itself, and contains some of the most abstract philosophy ever written.
Despite being so easy to mock, philosophy of language can be fun, as long as one doesn’t take it too seriously. And some parts of it are even useful – especially those that overlap with study of how humans and other animals learn to communicate by speech and other means.
For me, key landmarks in philosophy of language are:
Bertrand Russell’s theory of definite descriptions
This was Russell’s attempt to make sense of statements that were ambiguous or contained false presuppositions, such as
“The present king of France is bald”
Russell invented the term ‘Definite Description’ to refer to word sequences like “the present king of France”, or ‘the Chancellor of Germany’ (who was at the time Otto von Bismarck) that are intended to pick out a particular object from all the potential objects about which one might speak. The idea is that Definite Descriptions serve the same purpose as Proper Nouns. Under Russell’s Theory, the meaning of the sentence about baldness is:
(1) There is a single individual that is currently the king of France; and
(2) That individual is bald.
Under that interpretation the sentence is false, since part (1) is false (France was a republic and had no king in the late 19th century, when Russell wrote that).
Q1 Is the sentence “The present king of France is bald”, uttered in 1890 or 2019, True, False or Meaningless. Or is this question itself meaningless or in some way not a valid question? Or is it a silly or pointless question? Why or why not?
Ferdinand de Saussure invented the concept of intensionality. To explain this we first need to identify three contrasting concepts about the roles of things relating to a noun in a statement:
- the signifier – the "sound image" or the string of letters on a page that one recognises as the form of a sign
- the signified – the meaning, the concept or idea that a sign expresses or evokes
- the referent – the actual thing or set of things a sign refers to. See Dyadic signs and Reference (semantics).
In the word sequence “The PM of New Zealand”, as part of the sentence “The PM of New Zealand is inspirational”, the signifier is the string of letters, or the sound we make when we read the words aloud. The signified is like a pointer that currently points to Jacinda Ardern, but a couple of years ago pointed to John Key. The referent, if the sentence is uttered today in September 2019, is the actual human being whose name is Jacinda Ardern.
An intensional statement is one in which we can change the meaning of the sentence, and even its truth or falsity, by replacing the signifier by a different signifier that, currently, has the same referent. An example is “Many people would be surprised to learn that Ian Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” [Fleming is famous for having written the James Bond books, which have an adults-only style, while Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is for children]. If we replace “Ian Fleming” by “the author of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” we have not changed the referent, but we have changed the signifier, and thereby created a sentence that is almost certainly false. If we remove the “Many people would be surprised to learn that” from the sentence, it ceases to be intensional. NO matter what switches we make to the signifiers, the sentence remains true as long as the referents do not change.
Gottlob Frege, regarded by many as the founder of modern logic, played in this space too. He is famous for asking what was the meaning of the sentence “Phosphorus is Hesperus”.
Phosphorus is the name given in the Classical period to the brightest non-lunar heavenly object seen just before dawn (the Morning Star), and Hesperus is the name they gave to the brightest no-lunar heavenly object seen in the evening (the Evening Star). Centuries later it was discovered that the two are the same object – what we now call the planet Venus.
Q2. Can we use Saussure’s trio of concepts to explain exactly what the sentence “Phosphorus is Hesperus” is doing and what, of any, meaning it conveys?
Ludwig Wittgenstein – “Meaning is use”
This para should really go last because personally I see Wittgenstein’s theory as the unassailable answer to everything we might wonder about language. But I didn’t think it fair to put it last because that implicitly declares it the winner, and it’s only my opinion.
Wittgenstein was a brilliant, fascinating, mercurial, irascible, often contradictory philosopher who only wrote two short books, the first of them – The Tractatus Philosophicus - setting out his explanation of life, the universe and everything, and the second one – Philosophical Investigations - repudiating most of what he had written in the first book and setting out new theories in a highly creative, somewhat mystical and hard to follow fashion.
By the by – the Tractatus, despite being repudiated by its author, is the only book I know other than ‘1984’, for which both the first and last lines are highly memorable:
First line: “The world is all that is the case.”
Last line: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent”.
The second book presents Wittgenstein’s new explanation of language. He had trained under Russell and earlier had supported Russell’s theories. While he never came to oppose them in the direct way that people like Kripke did, Wittgenstein took a decidedly different approach with his second book. His approach, in a nutshell, was to say that ‘meaning’ is not the point of language, and that discussions of what given uses of language (‘speech acts’ as they’re called in the trade) mean miss the point. W says that people do not speak to convey meaning. They speak in order to achieve something, and the question to ask instead of ‘what did X mean by saying Y to Z’ is ‘what did X aim to achieve by saying Y to Z’.
That’s where the saying ‘meaning is use’, often used to summarise W’s theory, comes from: to understand their role in human thinking and relations, we should focus on what speech acts are used for, not on what they might mean. Like most good sayings attributed to famous people, W never said this. But I think it is still a good summary of his theory.
Another key concept from W’s books is that of the ‘language game’. This goes with the ‘meaning is use’ concept. W says that language is a game we play, that has rules that are mostly mutually understood, like the rules of chess, and we play by the rules in order to achieve our goals. Somebody saying something is a move in the game, and our wondering about the reason for the move is analogous to wondering about the reason for a move in chess. Sometimes the reason is obvious. Sometimes it is obscure. Indeed, sometimes it is even unknown to the person that made the move.
If we adopt W’s approach then the discussion about meaning, referents, descriptors and so on falls away as mostly irrelevant. It is much easier in theory to understand why somebody said something (not in practice, when we may often be surprised by things others say to us, but Russell’s Theory of Descriptions or Kripke’s Causal Theory of Reference won’t help us there either), than to understand what every part of it meant, and often we don’t need to understand the latter.
W’s second book is full of practical examples, some of which are very clear and helpful. Others are mystifying. I really like the first one, about someone going into a greengrocer’s and giving the clerk a slip of paper saying ‘Five red apples’, and what happens next. For me, reading that was one of those rare occasions in life when you encounter something that gives you a startling perspective you had never considered before, and changes your entire mode of thinking from then on. The vignette is presented here and then discussed by somebody that appears to have been as impressed by it as I was.
The following anecdote from wiki gives a good sense of the spirit of Wittgenstein’s theory, and also may identify the epiphany that led to it:
Norman Malcolm credits Piero Sraffa with providing Wittgenstein with the conceptual break that founded the Philosophical Investigations, by means of a rude gesture on Sraffa's part:
"Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity', Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?'"
It is very important to physically make the gesture yourself, which I am sure we have all seen in Hollywood mafia movies, as you read and think about that! See here for a nice gif illustration of the Neapolitan chin flick, with the fingers suitably pixillated because it is so rude.
Q3. Do you think the role of speech acts is to achieve goals, or to convey meaning? Is there a difference between the two? What would be an example of a speech act that conveyed meaning but had no purpose? What about a speech act that had a purpose but conveyed no meaning?
The liar sentence.
The ancient philosophers wondered what to make of the Cretan that said “All Cretans are liars”. There are a number of different possible resolutions to this. Some people don’t accept any of them, and some of those even believe it proves that nothing makes any sense and we might as well just give up (on all mental activity, not just on philosophy of language).
Q4. What do you make of the less racist version of the liar sentence “This sentence is false.” Is it True, False, Meaningless, is this question itself Silly….
Ordinary Language Philosophy
JL Austin, working in Oxford in the forties and fifties, founded the Ordinary Language Philosophy movement. Building on the foundation laid by Wittgenstein, their significant contribution was to point out that many of the traditionally puzzling problems in philosophy were really just instances of unclear use of language, and that they dissolved into non-problems when we dissect the language to see what is behind it.
An example of such a problem is: If I go into a teleport machine that destroys my body completely here and then recreates it atom for atom, including all memories, at a teleport machine in another country (or planet), is the person created there still me?
Corollary question. What if there are two destination teleport stations and they both create a copy of me. Which one is me?
The ordinary language philosophers would say “First work out what you mean by ‘me’. Find the answer to that, and you will find the answer to your question. If you can’t work out what you mean, you will eventually see that your question is meaningless.”.
Q5. Do you think the question about the teleporter and ‘which one is me?’ is meaningful? If so, what does it mean? What would be the difference between a world in which the answer was ‘Yes the new one is me’ and one in which the answer was ‘No, the new one is not me’?
As far as I’m concerned, that response makes a great deal of sense, and solves many age-old problems, and that should have been the end of it. See also the para on E-Prime below, which makes the teleporter question inexpressible, which I reckon it should be.
But understandably, philosophers don’t take kindly to people suggesting that the things they write innumerable journal articles about are illusory, so a counterattack was inevitable, and it came with:
Saul Kripke, who invented his Causal Theory of Reference in the sixties and seventies, publicising it through a series of lectures recorded in the book Naming and Necessity. The theory introduces the concept of a Rigid Designator, which is a name or similar form of words that ‘refers to the same object in all possible worlds’. In my opinion this theory is unnecessarily complex and weighed down by loads of metaphysical baggage, and gives us nothing we didn’t already have from other theories. Yet it is very popular and Kripke is seen as deeply influential.
Despite all the metaphysics, the Causal Theory does have some nice practical aspects, in particular where he discusses how names originate and gradually gain currency through people using them, and that use transmitting from one person to another - ‘going viral’, as one might say these days. Kripke desribes the first ever use of a new proper noun as a ‘baptism’. It is interesting to think in Kripke’s way about how new slang expressions gain currency. A nice example is how the word ‘versus’, as in England vs Australia, became a verb ‘to verse’. Schoolboys say ‘we are versing St Brutus’s I rugby next week’. Such usage was unknown prior to 2000, but it was everywhere in 2010, in Sydney at least. I wonder who performed the baptism. ‘To verse’ is a verb, rather than a Proper Noun, which is what Kripke was concerned with. But I think the principles are similar.
If anybody would like to read about the Causal theory it and discuss it, I’m definitely up for that.
There’s a Partially Examined Life discussion of Kripke’s theory here.
Imaginary objects.
One of the questions that language philosophers loved to discuss was what, if anything, we were referring to when we referred to imaginary objects. The usual example chosen was of course from the classics – Pegasus the flying horse. They wondered what it meant when we said ‘Pegasus is white’, whether that was true, false or meaningless, and what the ‘Pegasus’ was referring to. How could it refer to anything if the thing it is supposed to refer to does not exist?
Is the sentence ‘Pegasus is chestnut’ any less true than ‘Pegasus is white’, given that (so I believe) those of the Greek myths that mention Pegasus’s colour say he was white. If ‘chestnut’ is less true then how do we justify that assessment?
People that didn’t study at Oxbridge would probably choose Harry Potter as an example rather than Pegasus. Is the sentence ‘Harry Potter was tall, blonde, bronzed and muscular’ any less true than ‘Harry was thin, pale, had messy dark hair and had a scar on his forehead’? Why?
Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong took an interesting approach to this, saying that things that do not exist – like Harry or Pegasus – may be said to ‘subsist’. The short wiki article attempts to summarise his ideas. He defines three nested levels of being: absistence, subsistence and existence.
Only actual real things exist. Imaginary things subsist but don’t exist. Logically impossible objects like a triangle with four corners absist but do not subsist or exist.
Q6. Do you like Meinong’s approach to imaginary objects? How would you explain the meaning and the truth or falsity of statements about fictional characters? What do we mean when we say that Miss Trunchbull was a bully? What is the meaning of discussions about who, if anybody, Harry would have ended up marrying if Ginny had been killed in the battle of Hogwarts?
David Bourland invented the notion of a language E-Prime, constructed by removing all instances and synonyms of the verb ‘to be’ from English. Bourland and others saw certain uses of that verb as the source of much of the confusion we face in everyday life. An example of such confusion: during my childhood, If I said ‘I’m hungry’, my father would reply “Pleased to meet you Hungry. I’m Dad”. My children now do the same thing to each other. How can that sort of attitude help us feed the world?
See the wiki article on E-Prime, itself written in E-Prime. Every now and then an instance of the verb ‘to be’ infects it via an edit from an incautious contributor. E-Prime enthusiasts like me occasionally find them and root them out, but we can’t watch continually.
E-Prime advocates suggest that not only does reckless use of ‘to be’ sow confusion, but it also encourages depression, as it encourages people to identify with their bad feelings. Albert Ellis, the founder of CBT, supported E-Prime because he saw it as an avenue towards positive thinking. He often tried to use it, but using it can slow one’s writing, which makes problems when one has much to do. That’s why I only wrote this section of this note in E-Prime. Let me know if I missed any ‘to be’s (Uses, not Mentions).
Q7. Do you think we English would lose anything by dropping the verb ‘to be’ from our vocab, other than a period of adjustment? If so what? DO you see any benefits from dropping it?
Use vs Mention distinction.
If we only got one useful thing out of philosophy of language, it would be this. We Mention a word or phrase when it is in a direct quote of somebody, or a hypothetical example of what somebody might say. Mentions are written inside quotation marks, or sometimes italicised instead. If we don’t do that then we are using the word.
With all the swear words I know except maybe one beginning with C, it is considered OK in civilised company to Mention them but not to Use them. Interestingly, there are other words, being racial insults rather than swear words, that some people believe it is wrong even to Mention.
Some Orthodox Jews apparently believe it is wrong to even mention the name of God, and always write it G-d.
Q8. Do you think there is a difference in the acceptability of Mentioning rather than Using offensive words? Are there any words that you think should not even be mentioned? What are they, and why?
Standardising Spelling.
This is abowt the politiks rather than the filosophy of langwij. It is widely recognised that Inglish has difficoolt spelling, largely becoz it is dessended from so meny different langwijes. Attempts hav been made sporadically to simplify spelling, but hav met with no suxess. We are (I would say) cursed with the prezence of a modern noshun that there is a ‘correct spelling’ of wurds. I say modern becoz it woz not until the 19th sentury that spelling started to becum standardised. There is grate vairiation in spelling in printed 18th Century wurks, and no consept of sum being correct and others rong: dubbling letters randomly, swopping ‘i’ vs ‘y’ or ‘sed’ vs ‘ced’ vs ‘zed’ (‘a highly prised award’).
Sum punkchewayshun is also poyntless. Commuz are grate but not apostrofees. Perhaps we cud deleet all apostrofees. See this ABC artikul proposing that and this (I think hewmerus) artikul objecting.
Meny, inclooding mee until resently, beleeved it woz just impossibul in practiss to change existing practiss so wee had better not try. That, plus, being rather good at spelling, I didn’t want to looz wun of the things at wich I exel – ie intellectual snob valyoo.
Reesently, I lerned that the Jerman guvernment reformed offishul Jerman othografy (wich is spelling plus punkchewayshun) in 1996 to make it more consistent and eezier to lern and yooz. That reform was suxessful and now everybody rites and lerns Jerman spelling that way.
Q9. Shud we reform English othografy? If not wy not? If so, wot chanjes wud we make and how wud we make them?