What is this thing called Philosophy of Language?

Gary Kemp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351999472
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Philosophy of language explores some of the most abstract yet most fundamental questions in philosophy. The ideas of some of the subject's great founding figures, such as Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, as well as of more recent figures such as Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, are central to a great many philosophical debates to this day.

In this clear and carefully structured introduction to the subject Gary Kemp explains the following key topics:

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• the basic nature of philosophy of language, its concepts, and its historical development

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• Frege's theory of sense and reference; Russell's theory of definite descriptions

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• Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Ayer, and the Logical Positivists

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• recent perspectives including Kripke, Kaplan and Putnam; arguments concerning necessity, indexicals, rigid designation and natural kinds

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• The pragmatics of language, including speech-acts, presupposition and conversational implicature

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• Davidson's theory of language, the 'principle of charity', and the indeterminacy of interpretation

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• puzzles surrounding the propositional attitudes (sentences which ascribe beliefs to people)

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• Quine's naturalism and its consequences for philosophy of language.

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• The challenges presented by the later Wittgenstein

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• Contemporary directions, including contextualism, fictional objects and the phenomenon of slurs

This second edition has been thoroughly revised to include new key topics and updated material. Chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary make this an indispensable introduction to those teaching philosophy of language and will be particularly useful for students coming to the subject for the first time.

1
^•naïve semantics and the language of logic

Language is an enormously complex phenomenon. As with many complex phenomena, it would be pedagogically extremely hard, in one fell swoop, to begin with a complicated theory covering all its many aspects. Compare physics, in which one studies a model of a ball rolling down a plane – ignoring friction, air pressure and resistance, imperfections in the ball and in the surface of the plane, and so on. We can learn a lot from the model, and think profitably about its most important features, without forgetting that the actual phenomenon is more complicated.

We will thus begin by considering a simple theory of language, one grounded in common-sense ideas of how language functions: naïve semantics. Later, one can adjust the theory or start over from a more informed perspective. Indeed, many philosophers hold that naïve semantics is almost completely wrong. But if it’s wrong, it is wrong in something like the way that Newton’s classical physics was wrong: it is a good start and is intuitively satisfying in many respects. Further, in order to see why a different theory is needed, it’s useful to see where it breaks down. This, then, will provide an excellent basis from which to consider the more elaborate Frege–Russell outlook, which is often nowadays called classical semantics or the classical theory of meaning, which are the subjects of Chapters 2 and 3.

I admit that this chapter is a bit dry as well as philosophically comparatively barren, but it will serve to introduce some terminology, to introduce some notions that are pretty sure to remain standing and as a foundation for what comes after. It is not long.

• Naïve Theory: Singular Terms, Predicates and Reference

A sentence is made out of words. Words fall into different grammatical types or classes – syntactical categories. To these categories correspond different semantical categories – categories of meaning. According to the classifications of traditional grammar, these include proper names, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, definite and indefinite articles, adverbs, prepositions, quantifiers and more. Those classifications have been partly superseded in modern linguistics, largely because that discipline has a firmer grasp of what such classifications are for. For our purposes, the purposes of the philosophy of language, many of these distinctions don’t matter; we’ll carve up language in slightly different and in some respects cruder ways – ways, primarily, that in the first instance directly affect the truth-conditions of statements. Also, the individual words are sometimes best treated not as semantically significant parts in themselves but only as parts of parts that do have meaning (as ‘syncategorematic’). What all this means will be much easier to see once we get going.

We first introduce and explain the notion of an atomic sentence, such as ‘Jane smokes’ or ‘The cat is on the mat’ (they have also been called elementary sentences).

Singular terms

Consider:

1. (1) Mars is red.
2. (2) Mars orbits the sun.

Both (1) and (2) contain the name ‘Mars’. ‘Mars’ is a name, a proper name, of Mars. It stands for it, names it, picks it out, denotes it, designates it. According to a decision announced in the Introduction, we say that it refers to it; Mars, the actual planet Mars with all its red dust, is its referent, i.e. the thing it refers to. It is customary to call ‘Mars’ a singular term. We will also formulate naïve principle 2 (naïve principle 1 will be introduced shortly):

(NP2) The meaning of a singular term is its referent.

We are not going to try to give a precise definition of ‘singular term’. It is too hard. But our intuitive classification is sufficiently reliable: we are thinking simply of words whose role, whose function, is to stand for an object, a certain individual – a person, a city, a planet (so all these things are objects, in an extended but philosophically standard sense of ‘object’). ‘Dog’, by contrast, is not singular term because there are many dogs for which it stands.

Thus ‘the sun’, as it occurs in (2), is also a singular term. It refers to the sun. Here are more singular terms:

1. (3) Jupiter
2. (4) Prince Charles’ mother
3. (5) the river that runs through Prague
4. (6) the fastest mammal

(3) is a proper name, but (4) and (5) are not (though (4) and (5) contain proper names or titles as parts). As you can see, singular terms may be simple (containing no expressions as parts), as in the case of (3), or complex, as in the case of (5).

Predicates I: syntax

If we remove the name ‘Mars’ from (1) and (2), we get:

1. (7) ____ is red.
2. (8) ____ orbits the sun.

These, in the logical sense of the word, are predicates. In general: the result of removing a singular term from a sentence is a predicate. This is a point of syntax, for we expressed it without speaking of the semantics of predicates, of their meaning.

In writing down (7) and (8) we used underlining to indicate blanks or gaps – the places vacated by the singular terms we removed. It is convenient to refine this practice, using Greek letters to indicate the gaps:

1. (9) α is red.
2. (10) β orbits the sun.

The Greek letters do not mean anything. They are not variables, either (as we use in logic to express quantification, or in algebra to speak of numbers in general, as in ‘2(x + y) = 2x + 2y)’. They are just there to mark the gaps, the places in predicates where names can be inserted (if this were a hard-core course in logic we would take care to distinguish these from ‘open sentences’, which become closed sentences when the blanks are filled with suitable expressions). We call this procedure predicate extraction.

We can attach any singular term to a predicate such as (9) or (10), and the result is a sentence. In particular we can make a sentence in this way by replacing the Greek letter with a singular term. Thus we can attach (4) to (10), yielding the sentence:

1. (11) Prince Charles’ mother orbits the sun.

It’s not likely that anyone would ever say this, but nevertheless there is nothing grammatically wrong with it as a sentence.

The predicate (10), you may observe, contains a singular term. The sentence (2), from which we derived (10) by deleting a singular term, contains two singular terms, not just one. If we now delete the remaining singular term from (10), inserting another Greek letter in the vacated space, we extract:

1. (12) α orbits β.

This too is a predicate. But unlike (9) and (10), which are one-place predicates, or monadic predicates, (12) is a two-place, or binary predicate.

To construct another sentence from (12), we can replace both Greek letters with singular terms (either different ones or the same one used twice). There are also three-place predicates, such as:

1. (13) α gave β to χ.

There is in principle a predicate of n places for any finite n, no matter how large.

Unlike (10), no further predicates can be extracted from (12) or (13) by removing singular terms. (12) and (13) are what we shall call pure predicates, by which we mean that not only are they without singular terms as parts, they also do not contain sentential connectives such as ‘and’ and ‘or’, or quantifier-words such as ‘something’ or ‘everything’. We shall consider sentential connectives and quantifiers later in the chapter. We will also set aside adverbs such as ‘quickly’ (although the presence of an adverb does not disqualify a predicate from being a pure predicate).

We adopt a rule governing our use of Greek letters: when replacing Greek letters with names (or, later, with variables) to form a sentence, always replace every occurrence of each Greek letter with the same name (or variable). For example, we regard the following as different predicates:

α killed β.

α killed α.

Thus ‘Jones killed Jones’ is correctly obtained from either of these predicates, but ‘Jones killed Smith’ cannot be obtained correctly from the second one. This reflects the fact that the concept of suicide could be defined in terms of the concept of killing (one commits suicide just in case one kills oneself), but that of killing could not be defined in terms of suicide.

Such sentences as (1), (2) and (11) are the simplest sentences: each is constructed from a pure predicate and the requisite number of singular terms, and contains nothing else, no other kind of expression. Indeed, any such sentence contains exactly one (pure) predicate. Sentences of this kind are called atomic sentences.

An atomic sentence is a sentence comprising nothing besides one n-place pure predicate and n singular terms.

What about verbs?

In traditional grammar, it is customary to say that every sentence must contain a verb. But the notion of a verb is really of no use to us. For what, indeed, is a verb? In school grammar we say that ‘is’, as it occurs in (1), for example, is a verb. But what does that mean? What is a verb? The word ‘is’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Naïve semantics and the language of logic
• 2 Fregean semantics
• 3 Russellian semantics
• 4 Russell’s theory of judgement, the early Wittgenstein and logical positivism
• 5 Kripke on naming and necessity
• 6 Context-dependence, indexicality and natural kinds
• 7 Pragmatics
• 8 The propositional attitudes
• 9 Davidson’s philosophy of language
• 10 Quine’s philosophy of language
• 11 The late Wittgenstein
• 12 Modern directions
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index