Philosophy 399, Intentionality and Attacks on Semantics in Philosophy of Language

Spring 1998; one credit, Mondays 4-5 or 5:30 in UANX 152; Dr. J. W. Powell; office 110 UANX;

Office hours 10 MW(not F), 10-12 Tues. and by appt. in 110 UANX.

Your odds are good of catching me anytime I'm not teaching. e-mail jwp2@axe; phone x5753

Here's a little fairy tale about philosophy of language:

Once upon a time all philosophers thought, language is basically a means of communicating by employing sounds as external signs of internal ideas or thoughts, and that those ideas, then, are the meanings of the words we use as signs. The kingdom was peaceful and happy, as much as a philosophical kingdom can be, and all the inhabitants had heated discussions on how to understand meanings as thoughts and ideas and propositional contents.

Two magical children, whose names were J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, were riding through the woods one day and happened to hear a gathering of philosophers saying things like this, and they began to laugh and point, and such was the power of their laughing and pointing that the philosophers saw their words fall dead on the ground and their ideas exploded into splinters in the sky.

The philosophers became highly agitated. The discipline went through a dark period that lasted forty years, maybe more. Some of them went home and beat their spouses and jumped off bridges and took up economics. Some of them spent years sullenly insisting that there must have been something right about the story they had all believed and they collected splinters and tried to work with microscopes and tweezers to reassemble them into models of mighty warships. Some of them made up new stories about how sounds were not dead after all but participated in the quantum consciousness of the new age and how there would be a second coming of those live words, and boy would they be pissed. Others told about how human beings were after all just as dead as billiard balls and the death of language was not an event but a recognition. Others constructed spiny hedges of burberry and poison oak and obfuscation around the sites of the deaths and explosions so no one could tell what happened. And others told about other things.

One who constructed a new story was J.L. Austin's little bulldog, whose name was John Searle, with some help from a tubby gnome with two teeth and a long, sharp, warty nose named Paul Grice: their story was that Austin had taught them that language is a way of doing more things than communicating, and that the meanings of the things we say are to be understood by paying attention to what we are trying to do when we say those things. Bingo, intentions. A great many philosophers, when they saw the newspapers and heard the town criers telling this new story, felt a great lightening of the load on their shoulders, and a sense of hope they had forgotten it was possible to feel.

--The question now is, how should the end of this story go?

a. Searle's and Grice's story became the dominant paradigm in linguistics and in philosophy of language and all who heard were amazed and persuaded and all lived happily ever after.

b. Intentions turned out to contain just as much C-4 as Ideas and Thoughts had contained , and their relations to the still-dead sounds by which meanings are allegedly conveyed or achieved turned out to be just as hard to understand as the old story.

c. Language and Philosophy-of-Language finally found happiness by resolutely turning their backs on each other and talking to themselves.

d. The old story of language as external signs of ideas rose from the dead after a fearful Armageddon and ruled on the right hand of Quine.

e. ?

We are going to read some of the bits of this story: what the philosophers were saying; how they got laughed at and got pointed at in the wood; how Speech Act Theory and intention-based semantics rose up out of the Slough of Berkeley, California; how some problems about Intentions have been splinted. Then we are going to try to think through how this new story works or does not work.

This is the second semester working on this problem or set of problems. Last semester was wildly successful at something or other, but not at making progress on this set of problems. We are going to start over.

We will meet once a week, on Monday afternoons. Required readings will be provided either as handouts or on reserve in the library. Each student must provide a half-page, 50-150-word reaction to readings every other week, with a copy for all of us. I will set up a mechanism for doing this by e-mail. At the last of the semester we will each write a summary or otherwise do what has to be done. I am drafting a paper on the topic of underlying presuppositions common to theories of meaning, and will share what I've got at the end. Your first note to the group is due the 2^nd of February.

This is a lot of work for one credit. One reason is that the reward for doing the work has nothing to do with credits--we will get to think about crucial, current problems, and make some philosophical progress. For this to work, we all need to be engaged. Puzzlement is just fine, may be a sign of wisdom, but we need in the face of puzzlement and confusion to worry hard about the readings and the questions.

From earlier semesters:

In Lieu of a Syllabus:

Philosophy of Language Group (Philosophy 399, Fall 96, Spring 97):

Plans and some notes on first package of readings after Locke

Here is the beginning of Book III of Locke's Essay, where he tells us what language is. This is a central document in philosophy of language, perhaps even more central than people have supposed.

I'm interested in the question of whether there are some common presuppositions which underly basic problems in philosophy of language. I'm thinking of those problems as standard old-chestnut problems: What is meaning? What is the meaning of a word? How can language serve as a medium of communication? How can we account for novel utterances? (that is, how is it possible for someone to say something or to understand something which has not been said or understood before? What is knowing a language? What are names? How can a word refer to an indefinitely large number of things? What is it for a person to mean what she says? How are words related to the world? How are utterances used to perform actions (like promising, demanding, assuring, etc.)? What is the relation between a sentence and a proposition?

Now of course some of you know that there is something bogus about my asking this question, what are the presuppositions of these problems, because I'm really out to claim that I think there is something like a nest or set of such presuppositions, questionable presuppositions, and that if we examine those we will radically change how we do philosophy of language. Radically change means we will sweep away all those questions and start over in some dimly imagined way.

The set of presuppositions may be captured in these first readings. Locke (and I could have referred us to Russell and Augustine and Mill, since they all have parts of their story on which they are in agreement) sketches a compelling and seductive story about what language has got to be for us to make any kind of sense of it at all. That set of presuppositions is the thing I'd like to clarify and then question. I'm tempted to claim that Kripke and Searle and Grice and Bar-On and others also have kept this bathwater while struggling mightily to get rid of babies. Locke I like because of the conciseness and eloquence and so those first three chapters of Book III can serve as a touchstone if you like. Ideas give way to meanings, to reference, to thoughts, to messages, to illocutionary act potentials or to tendencies to behave, to possibilities of verification or falsification or truth conditions or propositional content or something--now only dimly perceived--but the stuff that does the conveying by standing for those things, namely words and sentences, names and utterances and statements, remain importantly the same through all these different accounts.

Jeff Johnson and Mike Duffy went over some of the same territory with me during last year and the summer, and they have pointed out that there is something troubling about the basic arguments I've been using. As I understand it, their story goes like this: jwp, you are making a case that if you think of language in a certain way, then you can make many of the problems in philosophy of language into urgent, troubling, and interesting philosophical problems; and then you show that that way of thinking about language has problems, including problems of intelligibility and paradoxical consequences. So that way of thinking about language is probably not the right way to think about language. The trouble is that these are something like psychological arguments when what is needed is philosophical arguments. You, jwp, do not show that these are the only ways to think about language, or that we cannot just start with the problems, or that there are other ways to get the problems aloft. Indeed it is hard to imagine how anyone could make a case that this is the only way to think about language, and even if you did, that does not show the philosophical problems cannot stand on their own.

So, I'm not finished, and my main reason for working on these problems is to get your help in thinking them through. I need to get the basic view out, my arguments against the view, and figure out whether there are replies to the objections raised by Jeff and Mike. Along the way, I hope we can become acquainted with some of the most important classic and current readings in philosophy of language, in particular with readings on naming (fall) and meaning (in the spring).

What I'd like to do here is march through some history of the philosophical concept of meaning (not that there is any other concept of meaning). Ideally we would not do this; rather, we would go sit at the feet of the master and get each story from the horse's mouth. If the group is interested in going back, or any of you are interested in reading and reporting back to us on any of these, that would be terrific.

Plato is often represented as claiming that the existence of names is highly important, and so naming is itself a business to be taken on with care, and only to be done by those who have insight into the essences of the things which they name. The meanings of names (and sometimes it seems as if sentences consist of nothing except names) are the forms or the reality of the things that bear those names if naming is done well. (Though at one point [Epistle VII, Stephanus 341 ff.] he says that names are not stable in the way the things they should name are stable.) Now there are grave problems with this, but they will pull us far afield. In the Cratylus, connections between names and the things they name seem to operate by way of characteristics of the thing named, and good names are ones which direct our attention to crucial characteristics, essences we might say, of the things named.

In Plato is the beginning then of the notion that the meanings of words are to be thought of on the model of names and things named, with some attention drawn to the possibility of intermediaries between those two. Usually these kinds of accounts are called theories of reference, but they are often acknowledged as theories of meaning as well or are called referential theories of meaning. Names refer to the things they name or to some intermediate like for instance characteristics or properties of the things named; words in general might then be thought of as naming their meanings, to which they refer.

What is often called the ideational theory of meaning is found in Locke. The meaning of a word is the idea which it stands for in the minds of speakers or produces in the minds of hearers. For this, Locke's is the very eloquent horse's mouth. On this account, then, philosophy of language is explicitly a subdiscipline of philosophy of mind.

We looked at objections to the ideational theory, but here I'll just wave my arms at a couple of those. Descartes pointed out that if we think of ideas as like mental images we are hard pressed to account for the difference between the meaning of "thousand-faceted-solid" and "eleven-hundred-faceted-solid" since the images of the two will be insignificantly different even if the meaning seems clearly different. Berkeley points out that though the word triangle surely has a meaning, we can conceive of no such general idea as a triangle--what we are capable of having in our mind is always more specific in being obtuse or acute, right or oblique, even though the word has to mean triangle-in-general which is not obtuse or oblique. Wittgenstein (after worrying about images of leaves in the way Berkeley worries about triangles) points out that the existence of ideas need not be present for words to do their work--whether I have a particular idea or no idea at all, if I have conversations my conversations remain the same, and even if we were to discover some invariably-present idea that would not be the determiner of the roles which the words play in conversations in the way philosophers who think those ideas are the meanings require.

Wittgenstein is often wrongly characterized as replacing the ideational theory of meaning with a theory which claims that meaning is use. Though it is not his child it still wears his name and is influential. On this account one determines or, worse, finds the meaning of an expression by looking to see how the word is used in the language. How a word is used in the language, what its role is in linguistic activities--these are the meaning of the word. William Alston, influenced by J.L. Austin, works to amend this story as follows: the idea of use in Wittgenstein is a technical notion; use can be thought of as the way a word contributes to the performance of certain speech acts or actions which require words. Austin calls one of the main families of speech acts by the technical label of illocutionary acts, and Alston then speaks of the possible contribution of a word to one of those illocutionary acts as illocutionary act potential, which is his analysis of meaning. So two words could have the same illocutionary act potential or the same meaning if they could be interchanged in an utterance without changing what was accomplished by that utterance.

The logical positivists, to whom we owe the philosophical respectability of the idea of nonsense mostly because of their awesome facility with logic and their self-righteousness, address the question of what it is for an expression to be meaningful rather than meaningless in a way which winds up having implications for an analysis of the meaning of an expression. On their view, (with exceptions for logical tautologies and logical contradictions) sentences are meaningful only if there is in principle a public way to verify them or falsify them. The meaning then of utterances comes to be identified with the method of verification (or falsification) or the conditions to be satisfied which would provide that verification or falsification. Note that this trades heavily on the notion that the main business of communication is to say truths, and conditions of verification wind up later, in paler and quieter versions (in e.g. Davidson talking about sentences rather than words), popping up out of their graves to plague us as truth conditions.

The ideational theory implied a close relation or an identity between expression meaning and speaker meaning. Paul Grice reexamines this and finds an important distinction between the two which has come to be generally accepted, especially in linguistics. We need to slow down a moment. Grice's question is whether what an expression means can be reduced to what a person means by that expression. His genius is probably in raising the question, rather than in the answer he provides, but here's that answer. He claims that expression meaning is a particular kind of nonnatural meaning "meaning-sub-NN", which, though, is parasitic or grounded in a more natural kind of meaning, that which we see in cases like someone remarking that "those spots mean measles." The other contribution is to relate the notion of meaning to the notion of intention; what a person means to do Grice thinks of as within the realm of natural meaning, and it provides part of the basis for his nonnatural meanings. What a person means to do is roughly what that person intends, and so the meaning of expressions is to be analyzed in terms of the intentions of persons who use the expression. "Sam meant[sub-nn] something by the utterance u," gets treated by Grice as equivalent to "Same intended his utterance u to produce a certain effect in his audience by their recognition of his intention."

Philosophy of Language Group

In Lieu of Syllabus, part two, on requirements

The basic requirement is that each of us write a half page note to the group every other week. The first one is due next week, and the most obvious topic you might write on is Locke's theory of meaning. You may of course write on something else if you have something to say or you are under the delusion that you have something to say.

If you want to move ahead of the schedule, writing on something one week out of phase, that would be terrific. That is, if we were to get some of the half-page notes on one week and then more the next week, perhaps the resulting conversation will continue at a more steady pace. We will read a tiny bit from Searle's Speech Acts--the first two paragraphs, then some longer pieces of his Intentionality and Paul Grice's "Meaning" and "Logic and Implication." Our directions then depend on what we find out or what we need.

The deadline for each half-page note is the beginning of class. You need not send them in e-mail, though that will be a convenience [if you do, put Phil399 as the first part of the subject heading so I will see it in time to run off copies]. You need not even type them if that is inconvenient, though of course a half page of handwriting takes up a full page.

A note about methods in writing. Grice's first words in "Meaning" are meant as allusions to examples, in a way calculated to ground the philosophical work in support/premises which are not themselves shaped by the philosophical ideas we are trying to test. That is, he tries to avoid begging philosophical questions by giving examples we would understand if we were in the example and not doing philosophy.

Because part of our agenda is that we are looking to see to what extent philosophical assumptions shape the questions in philosophy of language [in other words we are looking for begged questions at a very basic level or as part of the first steps that philosophers make in their investigations or in their articulating the questions]--because of this interest, it is crucial that we be able to give examples which illustrate the claims we make, the distinctions we are interested in, the bases of our arguments, the terms in which we articulate the problems. If those examples are one which require buying philosophical views in order to understand them, they are suspect. If they, on the other hand, can stand on their own without our having to explain them by reference to philosophical lines of thought, then we are more likely not to have begged questions.

What this comes to is that we need in providing examples to think like novelists or short-story writers or reporters--not like philosophers, though of course philosophical concerns are going to be behind the selection of examples in which we are interested. But if you want to say, for instance, that a particular sentence means something or a particular speaker meant something by saying something, along the way to saying how meaning works, it will be a help if you can provide examples in which a nonphilosopher in the example says something like "This sentence means . . . ." or in which a nonphilosopher in the example says something like "She meant . . . when she said that."

In your half-page notes to the class, then, it is incumbent on you to back up what you say in part by showing what it comes to in examples which are not nonsense and which do not require our assenting to any of the philosophy at issue for us to make sense of them. I think that this is pretty hard work, and it may take a while to get the hang of it--I still find myself doing illicit and corrupt work by smuggling it into examples.

If you want to comment on this stuff about examples, that too could be one of your half-page reaction notes to the class.

Here's an example to help point up the problem about method, namely how to make sense by thinking about nonphilosophical examples:

A Platonic Dialogue,

Among Dolly Parton, Marty Robbins, and Socrates,

On the burning issue of Being and Nothingness.

Background Music by Johnny Cash.

Marty: I've a serious case of the munchies--Are there any sweets in the house?

Dolly: Look in the freezer--there may be some ice cream left.

[pause while Marty goes to kitchen, comes back looking crestfallen]

D: Did you find any ice cream?

M: I looked, but there's nothing there.

Note: these italics mark, as probably should be required by law, that we have made the transition from an imaginable example into The Philosophy Zone.

Socrates: Really?? Is it still there?

M: Eh?

S: Nothing. Is nothing still in the freezer?

M: Eh?

S: You said you looked in the freezer and nothing was there. Is it still there?

M: Eh?

S: Marty. Look at me. It's a simple question. Is there still nothing in the freezer?

M: What are you talking about?

S: Nothing.

M: That's what it sounded like to me.

S: No, no. I'm trying to figure out what nothing is. You apparently located it.

--The Hell with it. I'll look myself.

[pause while Socrates goes to the fridge, returns looking crestfallen]

M: So, old man, how'd that go?

S: There's ice cubes in there. It's like a little cave. I've been working on this for years, and I'm pretty

sure, despite Robert Frost, that nothing is not ice.

M: Eh?

S: Don't start.

-----

Here's another:

Here's a philosophical example, or maybe more than one

First, an introduction to it in the form of an argument:

The ways things {seem to us/appear to us/are experienced by us/look to us/

are perceived by us}

could be the same whether they are based on reality or on {illusion/hallucination/afterimages/delusion/dreaming/mirages, etc.};

Therefore, we don't know anything.

This is the argument from illusion, maybe the only argument in philosophy. In trying to figure whether it is a good argument, the procedure I'm recommending here would lead you to back up and worry about the terms, and whether they beg philosophical questions. In this case, clearly they do. At issue here is whether the person who gives this argument is already a dualist, since otherwise the first line would not make sense. That is, she thinks that whenever we see something there is a difference between the thing we see and the way that it seems-looks-appears etc. Is that true outside of philosophy?

Consider a pair of contrasting examples (the two are the same up to a line where they branch off from each other):

You are having a garage sale at your house out on the Arcata Bottoms. I'm trying on Saturday morning to find the sale, but I'm being unsuccessful and get lost. I call you up on my cell phone: "I can't find your goddamned garage sale." You: "Well, where are you?" I: "I don't know. There was a sign for some Lanphere-Christensen Dunes, but that was several left turns ago." Y: "Can you see any landmarks?" I: "There's a big, hip-roofed barn across the road, by itself." Y: "What color is it?"

[That's where they branch. So, ]

Example A.

I: "It's red." Y: "Okay. The only painted barn out here is Mr. MacGregor's. You need to do a u-turn, go about a mile to an intersection with a big cluster of mailboxes and a little shelter for kids to wait for the school bus, turn right, . . . .etc."

Example B.

I: "It looks red." Y: [long pause] "John, have you been dropping acid again? [or] Are you wearing those purple John Lennon sunglasses? [or] Oh, yeah, you're in that lowrider pickup with the dark green-tinted windows--roll down the window and look at the barn."

[and then, we hope, Example B rejoins Example A.]

Here come the morals, drawn on the basis of only the slightest of hints: The way it looks to me does not arise or make sense in nonphilosophical examples unless there is some oddity about the case that makes it unlike a great many (maybe most of) the cases in which I see the barn. In order to think that in Example A there has to be a way the barn looks to me, I have to already be a dualist. The support for the argument works only if the conclusion is true, not otherwise. That's the fallacy known as begging the question.

Now, where's the philosophical example? The answer is that the philosophical example is example B but without all the ways to make sense of it that you offer over the phone, and without any other ways to make sense of it either. This is, of course, an overly combative way for me to put it, but it is at least the possibility that makes philosophers add intelligibility to the list of crucial virtues. That is, the philosophical example is the one that does not make sense.