Not the όλ story

My starting point is the assertion that words in everyday languages have indeterminate meanings, with meaning dependent on the lexical ‘bubble’ in which each individual utterer and hearer lives. I live in a predominantly English ‘bubble’ with smatterings of American, Welsh, French, German, Latin, Greek... and perhaps ending up with little Elvish and less Orc. None of ‘my’ words mean precisely the same as any of ‘your’ words. And that is exactly what you would expect if you were a subscriber to the holistic philosophy implied by the first-order logic expounded by W V Quine and others. But if you do so subscribe, most of what I’ve so far written would be nonsense, or unintelligible at any rate. For Quine’s first-order logic will only allow for the existence of material things – those which we label with nouns. In order to describe the properties of things he should have to allow second-order logic. Then we could accommodate descriptive words such as Welsh and Elvish. But Quine does not admit of second-order logic in his scheme of things. Now, the indeterminacy of meaning and the fact that the meaning of no individual symbol can be identified until the meaning of the system as a whole has been identified may be true of arbitrary ‘natural’ languages within the propositions of a logical system. But that is not the way in which normal language (as a means of communicating) works. As Peter Winch says, ‘...it is speakers of a language who attempt to say what is true, to describe how things are. They do so in the language they speak; and this language attempts no such thing, either successfully or unsuccessfully. [...] [Languages] do not attempt to describe anything at all. If we do want to speak of a ‘relation between language and reality’, this is not a relation between a set of descriptions and what is described...’ (Winch, P., (1987) p.196 Trying to Make Sense, Blackwell, Oxford, UK.) It is just this final point which causes H P Grice’s claim that there is a triangular relationship between reality, language and a speaker to collapse.

A better approach to meaning is to learn the lessons of second-generation cognitive science and to approach meaning on the basis of (1) the embodiment of concepts and of mind in general, (2) the cognitive unconscious, (3) metaphorical thought and (4) the dependence of philosophy on the empirical study of mind and language. In short, the principles espoused by Lakoff and Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh, if you know what I mean!

Image: Indeterminate Landscape © Tom Tomos 2010

Slippery Meaning

What do things mean? Humpty Dumpty said that things meant just whatever he said they did, no more, no less. If I utter a phrase, is my intention relevant to the meaning of the words or do they have independent meaning as they swim around in our common lexical pool? Is there a common pool? Wittgenstein talked of, ‘The familiar face of a word, the feeling that it has assimilated its meaning into itself, that it is a likeness of its meaning’ [Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment xi §294 (1953 / 2009) Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK].

Anyone familiar with the first (Anscombe and Rhees) translations of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations will know that seltsam and merkwürdig are translated as queer, whereas the latest revision to Anscombe's text by Hacker and Schulte give odd, strange, and curious for the former and remarkable, strange, curious or extraordinary for the latter, depending on context. Now I know that Grice talks about intentional meaning within a 'linguistic community', but that notwithstanding, I should have thought that it ought to be possible to translate from one tongue to another without significant loss (or change) of meaning - otherwise where does meaning lie at all?

A case in point is the novel by the Dane, Peter Høeg, which I read (in English) some years ago - and which I found unsatisfactory in many ways. I suspect because it was literature in translation. The original title is Frøken Smillas Fornemmelse for Sne. The UK version was rendered as Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow but in America as Smilla's Sense of Snow. Why should translation be at the cost of nuance?

Eric Baum, building on the ‘mind-as-metaphor’ hypothesis of Lakoff and Johnson in What is Thought? [2004, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] describes how we use spatial orientation in our metaphorical descriptions of the ‘world’. For example, ‘up’ and ‘down’ regarding our moods. ‘I’m sinking into depression’. We use a conduit metaphor, for example, ‘the meaning is in the words’. But even simple prepositions are slippery. Lakoff and Johnson claim that they have near universal meaning when applied to these spatial metaphors, but do they? I have a small (and essential!) book for Welsh learners called Pa Arddodiad? [Which Preposition?] And it is essential because a straight translation of an English prepositional use (according to dictionary definition) does not always (or even often) lead to the correct prepositional use in Welsh. An example; ‘at the door’ is, in Welsh ‘wrth y drws’, but the preposition ‘wrth’ means, variously, ‘by’, ‘with’ or ‘to’, but not ‘at’. So, there is a slightly fuzzy concept of ‘someone being proximate to the door’ which has slightly different nuances from language to language. It leads one to question whether ‘languages’ are even natural kinds at all, or whether they are as slippery as the biological concept of ‘species’.

Image: Wittgenstein © Tom Tomos 2010

Individuals

I have been involved in a debate elsewhere concerning the identity of particulars, specifically in relation to propositions which P F Strawson (pictured) describes as ‘feature placing’ sentences. The contention was that such sentences, e.g., ‘It is warm here’ do not have an object. In his book Individuals Strawson gives other examples, ‘There is water here’, ‘Now it is raining’. Now it was this assertion, which seemed to fly in the face of my grammar-school understanding of subject and predicate, that prompted me to delve a little deeper. Having delved I remain unconvinced by Sir Peter’s argument, but I am, hopefully, better informed.

My reasons, briefly, are these.

Before developing his thesis of subject and predicate in Part II of his book, in Part I Strawson spends time exploring how it is possible to identify (and re-identify) particulars at all. He settles on the fact that we can identify ‘things’ (material objects) because of their ‘location’ in a fixed spatio-temporal frame of reference. We use such a framework, he says, ‘not just occasionally and adventitiously, but always and essentially’ [Strawson, 1959, p.24]. But the frame of reference he describes, where individuals can agree on the location in space and time of a ‘thing’ is the Galilean frame of reference based on Newtonian mechanics. And it is wrong. Einstein has shown that observers in inertial frames of reference (i.e., in relative motion to each another) cannot always agree on spatial locations and dimensions or simultaneity. Now all frames of reference are inertial frames and so to base identification of bodies on their spatio-temporal ‘locations’ fails. It must be allowed that at an everyday level the Galilean / Newtonian worldview serves as a good approximation to the Einsteinean universe, otherwise we would not be able to wander around or catch a bus (without performing Lorentz transformations on the ‘timetable’). Strawson’s claims, developed from his framework definition of particulars, ought to be universally true, not just in the Galilean approximation of an Oxford Senior Common Room. Related arguments can be made from a quantum-mechanical point of view.

But let us allow Strawson to develop his argument based upon good approximations to reality. His thoroughly worked exegesis of subject-predicate relations leads him to conclude (inter alia) in relation to the types of expression we have been discussing (he calls them ‘feature placing’ sentences) that because (he says) they do not satisfy his antithetical criteria of completeness / incompleteness vis-a-vis subject / predicate, then they are objectless. He argues that adverbial quantifiers of time and place do not imbue feature placing sentences or propositions with sufficient completeness to fit his criteria. This may follow logically from his arguments but even he admits that it does not always follow in our grammatical usage. I do not accept that adverbial quantifiers do not have that function. I think that philosophers ought to define subject and predicate relations in terms which accord with normal grammatical usage and that Strawson does not do so. Regarding the completeness / incompleteness criteria of his definition, Strawson borrows a metaphor from Gottlob Frege, that of saturation / unsaturation. It is a good metaphor. As any chemist will attest, there are degrees of saturation and it is perhaps here that Strawson’s problem lies.

Strawson, P F, Individuals, 1959 [2006], Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon.

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-05185-9

Cogito ergo Metuo

Poor old René! The butt of Ryle’s little joke and maligned to this day. But rightly so? Surely, versed in the up-to-date Hobbesean scientific method of his day he was as rational a reductionist as the most respectable modern philosopher of mind. So why did he publish his dualist account of mind and body? To my mind the answer lies in the influence of the Church and the long arm of the Inquisition (cue Dan Brown?).

Descartes’ contemporary critic Antoine Arnauld, writing in the Fourth Set of Objections to the Meditations said,

“It seems that [Descartes’] argument [that mind can exist apart from body] proves too much and takes us back to the Platonic view... that nothing corporeal belongs to our essence, so that man is merely a vehicle to the soul – a view which gives rise to the definition of a human being as anima corpore utens” (‘a soul which makes use of a body’).1

Descartes objected to this criticism by saying that in the Meditations he had proved “that the mind is substantially united with the body”.2 One of Descartes’ ‘disciples’, Regius had represented that Descartes’ view was that a human was an ens per accidens, a contingent entity which just happens to come into existence when a soul is joined to a body. Descartes’ rejoinder was strong, “you could scarcely have said anything more objectionable or provocative”. Continuing,

“The mind is united in real and substantial manner to the body [...] we perceive that sensations such as pain are not pure thoughts of a mind distinct from a body, but confused perceptions of a mind really united to a body. For if an angel were in a human body, it would not have sensations as we do, but would simply perceive the motions which are caused by external objects, and in this way would differ from a genuine human being.” 3

In asserting that a human being is an ens per se, Descartes seems to be drawing a distinction between the notional concept of a ‘pure mind’ (an angel) and the situation which actually obtains in real people.

It is worth speculating on why someone who was as rational a reductionist as Descartes allowed his work to be published in a form which can be described as ambiguous or equivocal. Ryle himself is quite helpful here. He acknowledges that Descartes was writing at a time when there were “widespread anxieties about the implications of seventeenth-century mechanics” when “Stoic-Augustinian theories of the will were embedded in the Calvinist doctrines of sin and grace; Platonic and Aristotelian theories of the intellect shaped the orthodox doctrines of the immortality of the soul.”4 Which is to say that ‘the Church’ took a particular stance on these issues – a stance which had led to Galileo’s trial and imprisonment. Descartes was aware of Galileo’s fall from grace. Writing in November 1633 to Mersenne of Galileo’s World System,

“I was told that [...] all the copies had been burnt at Rome and that Galileo had been convicted and fined. I was so astonished at this that I almost decided to burn all my papers, or at least to let no-one see them.”5
He goes on to say that he would not wish to publish a single word that the Church would disapprove of, preferring to suppress it rather than publish it in a mutilated form.6

It is at least worth inquiring whether his published works were ‘mutilated’ in order to deflect criticism or worse from the Church.


1 Quoted by Cottingham, J. in Monk, R. and Raphael, F. (Eds.) The Great Philosophers, (2001) London, Phoenix Publishing, p.123.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid. p.124
4 Ryle, p.147, quoted in Crawford, S. (2010) Aspects of Mind, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
5 Descartes, quoted in Cottingham, 2001, p.104.
6 Ibid.