Philosophy of Meaning, Knowledge and Value in the 20th Century

Routledge History of Philosophy Volume 10

John V. Canfield, John V. Canfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781136767418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The twentieth century brought enormous change to subjects such as language, metaphysics, ethics and epistemology. This volume covers the major developments in these areas and more.

CHAPTER 1

Philosophy of language

A. P. Martinich

LANGUAGE AND ITS USES

Most philosophers of language¹ in the twentieth century distinguish between three aspects of language or its use: syntax, semantics and pragmatics.²

Syntax is the study of the ways that words and other elements of language can be strung together to form grammatical units, without taking the meaning of the sentence into consideration at all. The sentences, ‘Smith are happy’ and ‘Smith happy is’, are both syntactically incorrect. The sentence ‘Smith is happy’ is syntactically correct as is the sentence ‘Green ideas sleep furiously’. The latter sentence may appear to be defective. If it is, it is because a literal meaning cannot be assigned to it. But meaning is a concept that belongs not to syntax but to semantics, which will be discussed shortly.

Human languages consist of an infinite number of sentences. It is easy to see how a new sentence can be built out of a simpler sentence indefinitely:

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the mouse that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the cat that chased….

Since human beings are limited in intelligence and they learn a language in a finite amount of time, its syntax must be finite. That is, a grammar for a human language must consist of a finite number of words and a finite number of rules from which the sentences are formed. Because most of the important work on syntax has been done by linguists and formal logicians, nothing further will be said here about this topic. (See chapter 2.)

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and sentences. Meaning has generally been thought of as a relationship between words and the world. Reference and truth are the two principal concepts used in semantics. During the 1920s and 1930s, many philosophers thought that it was impossible to have a science of semantics, because semantics tries to use words to do something that words cannot do. Words can be used to talk only about things; but semantics is the attempt to talk about the relationship between words and things. That relationship cannot itself be a thing, because if it were, then one could ask what connects that relationship to those other things. If the answer is that there is some other relationship that connects them, then if that additional relationship itself is a thing, one can ask the very same question over again; and this would lead to an infinite regress. The problem that seems to undermine the possibility of semantics can be put in global terms. Language represents the world, but semantics exceeds the representational ability of language by trying to represent the relationship between language and the world.

In the 1930s, Alfred Tarski showed philosophers a way that semantics could be done without violating the expressive limits of language. Semantics then dominated the philosophy of language until the end of the 1950s. (See pp. pp. 12–18 and 18–21.)

The study of pragmatics began to acquire importance in the early 1950s and flourished until the early 1980s. (See pp. 21–6.) Pragmatics is the study of how language is used. Speakers can use language to make statements, promises and bets; to ask questions; to issue commands; to express condolences; and so on. Pragmatics focuses on the interaction between speakers and hearers. The major idea that guides research in this area is that speaking is intentional behaviour and governed by rules. (For an alternative understanding of pragmatics, see chapter 2.)

Semantical studies were reinvigorated in the early 1970s and continue today. (See pp. 26-31.) But at the same time, some of the assumptions that made possible the distinction among syntax, semantics and pragmatics were challenged by other philosophers, and a very different conception of language has begun to emerge. (See pp. 31 –5.)

THE NAMING THEORY OF MEANING

What originally motivated philosophers in the twentieth century to study the nature of language as intensively as they have is their traditional concern with the nature of truth and reality. An ordinary sentence or statement is true, it seems, when it corresponds with the facts. Truth then would seem to reside in language, and the nature of truth can be fully understood only when the nature of language is. Concerning reality, many philosophers at the beginning of the century were frustrated by the apparent failure of metaphysicians to discover the nature of reality by studying it directly. Thus arose the idea that perhaps reality could be studied indirectly by studying language. Since language reflects reality, discovering the structure of language would reveal the structure of reality. Here then were two reasons for philosophers to study language: to understand the nature of truth and to understand the structure of reality.

One aspect of language, namely referring, received a disproportionate amount of attention, because of its connection with truth. If truth requires correspondence between elements of language and entities in the world, and if language reflects the world, then language must attach to the world at certain points. The way that language attaches to the world is reference. Reference is usually thought of as a feature of proper names or subject expressions that denote individual objects, because individual objects existing in space and time seem to be the basic constituents of the world. Such considerations inspired the simplest and perhaps the most resilient semantic theory, the naming theory of meaning.

According to this theory, the meaning of a word is the object it names or refers to. Ludwig Wittgenstein presented a stark version of the theory in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (first published in German in 1921 and in English translation in 1922). He wrote, ‘A name means [bedeutet] an object. The object is its meaning’ (Proposition 3.203). Although names are the basic building blocks of sentences, names alone do not express a thought. Names are concatenated or strung together to form propositional signs (sentences). Since Wittgenstein defines a fact as an existing configuration of objects (2–2.011), propositional signs are themselves facts. Imagine a very simple language that expresses thoughts by the arrangement of its names. Then, the sentence

Adam Beth Carol

means that Beth is between Adam and Carol.

European languages are one-dimensional in the sense that the only significant aspect of the arrangement of a word in a sentence is its linear order. But nothing prevents two- or three-dimensional languages, in which information would be conveyed by other geometrical relations among the words. Thus, a two-dimensional language might use

Adam

Beth Carol

to express that Adam is above Beth and Beth is next to Carol. A three-dimensional language could use blocks as words and count three-dimensional placement of the blocks as semantically significant. Such possibilities inspire Wittgenstein to say that a sentence is a picture or model of reality (Proposition 4.021) and that hieroglyphic script indicates the ‘essential nature of a proposition’ (4.016). Consequently, what makes a proposition true is analogous to what makes a picture accurate: the meaningful elements of the proposition, that is, the names, must correlate with the objects in the (non-linguistic) fact it purports to describe; and the configuration of the names must be the same as the configuration of the objects in the represented fact. One-dimensional languages, such as English, tend to hide their true form (4.0031). Presumably, most human languages are one-dimensional because as a practical matter such sentences are easier to produce.³

Bertrand Russell developed a variation on Wittgenstein's naming theory. According to Russell, there are two kinds of names: proper names and common names. Proper names directly denote individual objects. For him, these individual objects are virtually always sense data, that is, sensations, in contrast with independently existing concrete objects such as tables, chairs, cats and dogs. Common names directly denote what philosophers have variously referred to as concepts, properties and universals. The difference between individuals and concepts can be explained with examples. In looking at a chalk board, a person sees a particular patch of black. This sensation is an individual. But this particular sensation of black is only one of many that can be seen either by the same person at different times or by many people at different times. These particular sensations of black have something in common; they are all instances of a certain general thing. That general thing is the concept, property or universal.

The distinction between individuals and universals gets reflected in language as the distinction between subjects and predicates. All and only proper names are subjects; all and only common names are predicates.⁴ (The term ‘common name’ may be misleading because for Russell, adjectives and verbs are the paradigmatic cases of common names.) A sentence such as ‘Socrates sits’ is usually understood as having the subject ‘Socrates’ directly denote Socrates and as having ‘sits’ express the concept of sitting. The sentence is true just in case Socrates belongs under the concept of sitting.

Russell drew a sharp distinction between proper names and definite descriptions. Russell defined a definite description as any phrase of the form ‘The Φ’ (where Φ is any noun or noun phrase) such as ‘The tallest person in China’. In doing so, he was directly opposing the great nineteenth-century logician Gottlob Frege, who had grouped proper names and definite descriptions together as ‘singular terms’. Both kinds of expressions, it seemed to Frege, could occur as subject expressions of sentences and had the same function, namely, to refer to the object of which a property was to be predicated. Also, both denote objects through some sort of cognitive or conceptual element, which he called ‘Sinn’ (sense or significance). For example, the phrases ‘the third from the left’ and ‘the second from the right’ have different senses, yet each refers to the same thing if four objects are placed in a row. In short, Frege had a two-tiered semantic system: a realm of senses (Sinne) and a realm of referents (Bedeutungen).

Russell had a one-tiered system. Since the meaning of a word is the object it directly denotes, names do not have any descriptive content (Sinn). The name ‘Socrates’ does not reveal anything about what Socrates is like. Even a seemingly descriptive name such as ‘Sitting Bull’ is not descriptive. Sitting Bull is not a bull and does not need ever to sit, so far as the naming function of ‘Sitting Bull’ is involved. In contrast, Russell thought that a description does not directly denote an object and hence has no meaning. It denotes its object, if at all, through the mediation of the concepts expressed by it. For example, ‘the evening star’ denotes Venus through the concept of being the first celestial body to appear in the evening sky. One consequence of the differences just mentioned is that proper names cannot fail to denote an object while descriptions can.

Another consequence is that descriptions are never subjects. This is initially implausible since ‘the present king of France’ appears to be the subject of the sentence ‘The present king of France is wise.’ On the other hand, there is a problem with holding that the description is the subject of the sentence: there is no king of France. How can the sentence be meaningful, as it is, and yet not be about anything?

There are three basic ways out of this problem. One is to designate an arbitrary object, say, the null set, to serve as the referent of any description that does not naturally denote an object. This was Frege's suggestion, and Russell rejected it as ad hoc and artificial. A second way is to maintain that there are non-existent beings that are actually denoted by such words and phrases as ‘the present king of France’, ‘the golden mountain’ and ‘the largest natural number’. Russell himself had accepted something like this view in Principles of Mathematics (1903), but railed against...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Routledge History of Philosophy
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the paperback edition
• General editors’ preface
• Notes on contributors
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 Philosophy of language
• 2 Formally oriented work in the philosophy of language
• 3 Metaphysics I (1900–45)
• 4 Metaphysics II (1945 to the present)
• 5 Ethics I (1900–45)
• 6 Ethics II (1945 to the present)
• 7 Epistemology
• 8 Wittgenstein's later philosophy
• 9 Political philosophy
• 10 Feminist philosophy
• 11 Philosophy of law
• 12 Applied ethics
• 13 Aesthetics
• 14 Philosophy of religion
• Glossary
• Index