Description: During the last century, philosophy of language has become a central subdiscipline in philosophy. How we treat problems of knowledge, ethics, logic, being and mind crucially depend on insights from philosophy of langauge. And some of those insights, when applied to some of those problems in other areas, reveal that a great deal of traditional philosophical work has been terribly off the mark or burdened by mistaken assumptions about how words work, what concepts are. For example, the assumption that good was a label or a sign for some entity which needs to be defined sent legions of ethicists off on quests for definitions, for theories of goodness, and for reasons why we ought to be good. The analogous chase for a willow-the-wisp definition of knowledge is still a going business, as though epistemologists were like the astronomers half a century after Copernicus’ death still trying to reconcile the Ptolemaic model to what they saw when they opened their eyes. (This is not a settled matter, not a consensus--from the point of view of those still working within the assumptions that good and knowledge are labels or signs for a substance or an entity in need of conceptual clarification, in both ethics and epistemology there have been startling seeming-successes, which from the opposing camp's view have made it more difficult to achieve real progress.)
There are a couple of remarkable things about philosophy of language of which we have to take account in our investigations. First, even though philosophers cannot agree about what rationality is or whether writing is a good or an evil or better or worse than speaking or whether there is such a thing as mind, there is an amazing near-consensus about what language is, up at least to a certain point. We’ll start by reading some philosophers who cannot agree about anything else but who agree on the basic story about language. Now, one might be tempted to think, that if everybody, or rather every philosopher, says it’s so, then it’s almost certain that it is not so. One would be right. At any rate, that is the first thing, that philosophers agree about something, agree about a great deal regarding language, and that in their agreement they are dead wrong.
The second thing is that there is a revolution going on, a Copernican revolution spreading out from within philosophy of language, which threatens to turn almost all philosophy inside out. It begins with heightened scrutiny of (not answers but) issues or problems and then findings that at least some of them arise out of oversimplifications and begged questions. The revolution, however, is not a done deal. Indeed, most respected journals and authorities seem to have written it off. We’ll read some commentary, both play by play and color.
These two circumstances make doing a balanced investigation into philosophy of language difficult. We will cope by stressing fundamentals and working on some central, classic problems which remain of interest to current scholars. What is language, really? What is the meaning of a word? How do words refer to the world? How do we do things with words? With each of these we will read classic and contemporary sources, including challenges to the standard view. We will then take a look at how linguistic analysis might help (or harm) our philosophical work in other areas of philosophy, such as ethics and epistemology.
Text and Materials: Readings will come from three sources: an anthology of readings, more readings posted on Moodle (the University’s web-based course materials system), and classroom handouts.
1. The anthology is edited by Andrea Nye: Philosophy of Language: The Big Questions. It is in the University Bookstore for a little less than $50.oo. It is not likely you will find local used copies, but it’s been around for half a dozen years and online sites such as Amazon, ABEbooks, and Powell’s Books may have used copies. The first readings will come from Moodle, giving you time to find one used. I’ll refer to this anthology as Nye. (An instance, not of a word referring, but rather a person (me, jwp) referring, to a book, and, oddly, by using another person's name.)
2. Several of the most basic background readings will be on Moodle, as well as some of the most controversial of the contemporary works. Moodle is available from any computer with a Web browser as a link from the HSU website’s “Quick Links” pull-down menu. You will need to log in using your HSU username and password. Anyone who has trouble with access should immediately let me know–e-mail jwp2. I can send all Moodle readings to you via e-mail until access is straightened out.
3. A few of the readings will be handed out in class on clay tablets or paper. If you miss a class, check to see if you have missed handouts.
Grading and Graded Assignments: There will be four graded assignments, all weighted the same except that a poor first grade may be dropped as explained below.
A Preview Example: Consider as an example an insight about language which has implications for philosophy of mind, ethics, metaphysics, as well as many pop philosophy positions. That insight goes as follows. When a word is used in a conversation, it makes the sense it does partly because of what other words could have been used in place of it. Colors make an easy example: saying a car is blue makes the sense it does (note we are leaving the truth of this out for now) partly by virtue of the other words which could have been substituted for blue. Saying a car is blue is, in effect, saying the car is not red or champagne or white or black etc. If cars were limited by law to only blue and black, then saying a car is blue would not make the same sense it does make for us though it would still make the same kind of sense. But now try to imagine the world consisting only of things which are blue, that is, no other colors exist, only, let’s say, lighter and darker shades of blue. The first result is that there would be no reason for anyone ever to say that something was blue, but more subversive than that is the insight that blue would no longer be blue as we know it.
Skipping over the honest work of nailing down the arguments, suppose some truth to these claims and consider implications: One is that we may be slipping into incoherence or nonsense when we say something which attempts to deny or to eliminate the alternatives which make sense of the words we affirm. This calls into question those claims when people say that all people, really, are only (perhaps because of their genes) completely selfish; or, everything is subjective; or, reality or knowledge is all constructed; or everything is relative; or all acquisition of linguistic competence is innate, or Descartes’ evil genius could deceive us about everything, or nothing is certain (you might want to do an inventory to check whether you are tempted by any abstract claims which raise these issues). Philosophers have articulated these points in different ways. Depending on your background, you may have run into talk about totalizing concepts, or about pragmatics as limiting semantics, about logical space or the grammar of concepts, about (usually these put their claims in negative terms blind to their own self-sabotage–see Richard Rorty, Sandra Harding, Foucault) the evils of dualisms, about problems vs. pseudoproblems in philosophy, or about alternation as a structural limit on intelligibility. One rather unseemly place to find some of these ideas at work is the cemetary where philosophers line up pissing on the graves of the logical positivists.
Another implication is that these insights have to be handled with respect if we wish our work even with them to escape their corrosiveness. There are comical and scary instances of Siegfried-and-Roy-type forgetting this danger. For example, some philosophers have tried to conceive of different ways of making sense which would escape the necessity for invoking dichotomies and alternation, a kind of new or nondichotomous consciousness, doomed at the start by the level of abstraction in their work–what’s nondichotomous consciousness mean?? –well, you know, the kind of consciousness which is not dichotomous, oooops.
(I seem to see the shades of philosophers raising their hands to ask that I acknowledge their contributions to these insights, which play roles in several parts of the contemporary philosophical world. An abbreviated list: Chuang Tzu, Nietzsche, de Saussure, Derrida, Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, O.K Bouwsma.)
I mention these matters in the syllabus as an example, and to show that though these matters are not settled, they still serve notice that there are some stakes in these controversies. They raise the possibility that your work in philosophy, if you don’t approach it in fear and trembling with all your critical faculties intact, if you don’t give it your full attention, will wind up on the same rubbish heap with scholastic debaters about whether Jesus could have been the Messiah had He come to earth in the shape of a flea, with verficationists (including some writing even as we speak) slaughtered by their own two-edged swords, with possible-world theorists, and with the believers in logically private languages in which you cannot have my pain and so you can never know really what my pain is like.
Schedule: (This schedule is false. Most of the readings in Nye are not noted here.)
Readings: miscellaneous notes;
Plato, from Cratylus, from Theaetetus.
Aristotle, from Categories, from De Anima
Charles Morris, from Signs, Language, and Behavior; Carnap, from An Introduction to Semantics.
J.F.M. Hunter, “On How We Talk,” from Essays After Wittgenstein
Derrida, from Limited, Inc (and from Of Grammatology, section leading up to “nothing is not text”)
Grice, “The Causal Theory of Perception” “Logic and Conversation”
W., beginning of The Blue Book; Beetle in a box sections from Philosophical Investigations
Quote assignment–poem, song lyrics, regarding words or language
Rorty, from The Linguistic Turn
jwp readings:
Preface
read the whole thing?
“In and Out of Language”
“TVIL”
Contextualism and Its Discontents Keith DeRose, & responses to him.