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