First draft of introduction and first chapter of a book on philosophical semantics to be published in 2016.
Draft D, 2015/2
PHILOSOPHICAL
SEMANTICS
------------------
SUMMARY
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Against the Metaphysics of Reference: Aims
and Assumptions
Appendix to chapter 1: How do Proper Names Really Work?
(Cutting the Gordian Knot)
Chapter 2: Wittgensteinian Semantics
Appendix to chapter 2: Trope Theory and the Unbeareable Lightness
of Being
Chapter 3: An Extravagant Reading of the Fregean
Semantics
Appendix to chapter 3: Identities without Necessity
Chapter 4: Verificationism Redeemed
Appendix to chapter 4: Frege, Russell, and the Puzzles
of Reference
Chapter 5: Sketch of a Unified Theory of Truth
Appendix to chapter 5: The Discovery of Wine
Philosophers
constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted
to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real
source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
We have first
raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.
George Berkeley
Once one absurdity is accepted, the rest
follows.
Aristotle
Making empty is the result of making
small.
Malcolm Bull
The name of poet was almost forgotten;
that of orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers,
of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was
soon followed by the corruption of taste.
Edward Gibbon
This world is
dying in order to give birth to a new and more beautiful one.
Alexandro Jodorowsky
PREFACE
Indem die Besinnung auf das Destruktive des
Fortschrits seinen Feinden überlassen bleibt, verlieht das blindlings
pragmatizierter Denken seinen aufhebenden Charakter, und darum auch die
Beziehung auf Wahrheit.
[By leaving
consideration of the destructive side of progress to its enemies, thought in
its headlong rush into pragmatism is forfeiting its sublating character, and
therefore its relation to truth.]
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
Science (mainly applied science) goes up while
culture (artistic, philosophical) goes down. Whereas culture was once a source of values,
today science and technology seem to have made cultural values superfluous.
The critical theory of society had some explanations for this. Drawing on
Max Weber’s basic concept of ‘disenchantment of the world,’ it shows that in our modern capitalist society instrumental reason
prevails over valuating reason, promoting mass culture and furthering science
and technology at the expense of the old mystical-humanistic culture.
In this framework, it is not surprising that a kind of philosophy
prevails that in some ways may serve the interests of particular sciences in a
technological world. Philosophy is no longer, as traditionally, an independent
undertaking making balanced use of new scientific information. More often it is
an ideologically motivated endeavor appropriating new knowledge from particular
sciences – formal and empirical. The results of this endeavor are what Daniel
Dennett correctly labeled expansionist
scientism: an effort to assimilate the procedures and proper domains of
philosophy into the domains of some established science, thereby expanding some
particular (formal or empirical) scientific field to replace some old domain of
philosophy by using a reductionist strategy. To make this possible, resilient
and distinctive philosophical difficulties that cannot be accommodated within
the new particularizing model must be quietly swept under the carpet.
The chief inconsistency in scientism comes from the fact that philosophy
is in its own right ‘holistic’: As Wittgenstein once claimed, the fundamental
problems of philosophy are so interconnected that it is impossible to solve any
philosophical problem without having solved all the others; and this is what
makes philosophy so complex and multifaceted. This is also what the great
systems of classical philosophy – such as those of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel –
attempted to do, even if paying for it what we are now more able to see as a
high price in terms of aporetic speculation and artificiality. Nonetheless, it
may be too easy to conclude that true
comprehensiveness isn’t a fundamental feature of philosophy anymore
(Wittgenstein was well aware of this when he called for more ‘Übersichtlichkeit’).
The main reason for the lack of comprehensiveness of much of our present
linguistic-analytic philosophy is the following: Anglo-American philosophy,
from W. V-O. Quine to Saul Kripke and Timothy Williamson, has challenged all
kinds of commonsensical parti-pris, and challenged them in undeniably smart
and imaginative ways, although in my view with ultimately unsustainable
results. Because of this, much of our theoretical philosophy has lost touch
with its intuitive commonsensical grounds in the way things prima facie seem to be and in fact really are. Take, for example, the
concept of meaning: the word ‘meaning’ was challenged by Quine as having too
vague a noise to be reasonably investigated. But it is too vague only from a
reductionist-scientistic perspective that denies or ignores commonsense
certainties, like the undeniable fact that meanings exist.
However, using this strategy of skeptically questioning all kinds of
deep, profound truisms, scientistic philosophers have sawed off the branch they
were sitting on, because the result of the adopted strategy couldn’t be other
than the replacement of true comprehensiveness (which depends on true deepness)
by a positivist and superficializing fragmentation of the philosophical field
in the so-called ‘age of specialization’ (Scott Soames). This fragmentation may
be not only one of dividing to conquer, but also of dividing to subjugate; and
the philosophical intellect is what is here to be subjugated. Without the
branch of deep commonsensical truisms, the only path left to originality, after
a rigorous training in techniques of argumentation, used to be the invention of
metaphysical formalist pyrotechnics. Now, this all blocks the way of inquiry,
preventing an adequate philosophical analysis, what increasis the risc of transforming
the philosophical enterprise into a kind of implausible, if not vacuous
intellectual glass bead game.
It is true that the practitioners of fragmented philosophy sense the
problem, but they have found good excuses for this. Some have suggested that
any attempt to do comprehensive philosophy would not suffice for the present
standards of scholarly adequacy. But in saying this they forget that philosophy
cannot be treated like science. Philosophy is a cultural enterprise: it always contains irreducible metaphorical
elements, and the aim of comprehensiveness is intrinsic to it. Philosophy is a
broad cultural enterprise with the right to controlled speculation,
experimentation and even transgression, as much as a place for an uncommitted
search of truth.
Others have written that it is impossible to achieve an ambitious,
comprehensive philosophy today: this kind of philosophy cannot succeed because
of the overpowering amount of necessary information required, putting the task
far beyond the cognitive capacity of our individual minds. We are (to use Colin
McGinn’s metaphor) cognitively closed to
the achievement of decisive solutions for the great problems of philosophy: in
our efforts to do ambitious comprehensive philosophy, we are like chimps
attempting to develop the theory of relativity; we will never succeed! So, if
we wish to remain reasonable, we should concentrate our efforts on easier
tasks. This, of course, looks suspiciously like escapism. As Wittgenstein also
noted, if we are able to pose a question it is because we are also be able to
find its answer; chimps would never develop relativity theory, but they would
also never ask themselves what would occur if they could move at the speed of
light. Even if the amount of information is daunting, it could be that the
amount of crucial information remains limited enough. And the science usually needed
to comprehensive philosophy concerns only its general results. The main
difficulty may reside in the circumstances, strategies and real aims behind
these attempts – in limits imposed on the context of discovery – more than in
its sheer impossibility. Comprehensiveness has nearly disappeared in the
philosophy of linguistic analysis in recent years. The main reason is a
different one: we are losing the cultural
soil in which comprehensive philosophy could grow.
In this book I will argue that a more fruitful soil can be produced if
we begin with a better reasoned and more affirmative acceptance of our
commonsense truisms combined with a more pluralistic approach that does not
reject science. For it seems that it is precisely against the threatening
return to something in some way closer to an ordinary language and pluralist
approach that the mainstream of our present philosophy of language struggles,
so that it is often obscured by a dense scientistic, nearly scholastic
atmosphere, so thick that its practitioners barely perceive that they are
surrounded by it. The intellectual climate sometimes recalls the Middle Ages,
when one was not allowed to argue against religious dogmas, and to such a
degree that I suspect that today advancing a plausible comprehensive philosophy
against the institutional power of expansionist scientism runs a risk of being
ideologically discouraged as a project and silenced as a fact.
Ernst Tugendhat, who (together with Jürgen Habermas) attempted with
relative success to develop comprehensive philosophy in the seventies, recently
seemed to give up declaring that the best days of philosophy were past. The
problem is in my view simply that we are living in a time of widespread
cultural indifference, where the development of applied science, though
impressive, has in itself an alienating dimension that strives against more
comprehensive attempts to apprehend reality.
In the current volume, I insist on swimming against the current. To
argue against a reductionist-scientistic approach, which is my task here, is to
help restore to the philosophy of language its deserved integrity, without
contradicting either commonsense or science. It is an attempt to give a
balanced, systematic and plausible overview of the mechanisms of reference,
using bridges laboriously constructed between some summits of philosophical
thought, trying in this way to achieve the old philosophical ambition of a
comprehensive synthesis, insofar as it still sounds like a reasonable
enterprise.
INTRODUCTION
In such
theories, it seems to me, there is a failure of that feeling for reality which
ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies. Logic, I should
maintain, must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can; for logic is concerned
with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and
general features.
Bertrand Russell
Would the old orthodoxy of the
philosophy of language that prevailed in the first half of the Twentieth
Century, with its eroded principle of verifiability, with its sharp distinction
between analytic and empirical, with its crude descriptivist-internalist
theories of proper names and general terms, with its naive monolithic dichotomy
between the necessary a priori and
the contingent a posteriori, be
nearer to the truth than the now dominant causal-externalist orthodoxy?
I wrote this book in the conviction that the question above should be
answered in the affirmative. In my view, the philosophy of language of the
first half of the Twentieth Century was indeed much profounder and nearer to
the truth, and its insights were often more powerful than those of the current
orthodoxy. This does not mean, for example, that I reject the interest of
anti-verificationist arguments like those of W. V-O. Quine; nor do I reject the
philosophical relevance of the new causal-externalist orthodoxy founded by Saul
Kripke and Keith Donnellan in the early seventies and later expanded by Hilary
Putnam, David Kaplan and others. They are indeed relevant and in a sense even
indispensable to what I intend to do. However, the relevance of these views is
predominantly negative, since I think that they are simply not true. Their
relevance consists mostly in being dialectically useful challenges, typical of
philosophy, which if adequately answered would bring us to an enriching
reformulation of the old descriptivist-internalist views. The result could be
so much more complex that the previous forms of these traditional views would
become almost unrecognizable.[1]
The aim of the present volume is to
contribute in the proposed direction, though in an indirect way. My approach to
the issue here consists in gradually developing – aided by a critical
examination of some central views of traditional analytic philosophy,
particularly those of Wittgenstein and Frege – the defense of a purely
internalist, cognitivist and neo-descriptivist view of our expressions’ meaning
and mechanisms of reference. This will be complemented by a renewed reading of
the concept of existence as a higher-order property, by a re-evaluation of the
verificationist view of the meaning in which the main objections to it are
answered and, finally, by a thoroughgoing reassessment of the correspondence
theory of truth, seen as complementary to the proposed verificationism.
The obvious assumption that makes my project plausible is the idea that
language is a system of rules, some of them directly accountable for meanings.
The most central meaning-rules are those responsible for what Aristotle called apophantic discourse – representational
discourse, whose meaning-rules could be generally called semantic-cognitive rules. Indeed, it is prima facie highly plausible to think
that the cognitive meaning (i.e., informative content
and not mere linguistic meaning) of our representational language cannot be
given by anything other than semantic-cognitive
rules or combinations of such rules, even if our knowledge of them is
usually tacit, implicit, non-reflexive, that is, even if we are usually unable
to reveal them by verbal means.
My ultimate aim should be to investigate the structure of
semantic-cognitive rules by means of a careful examination of basic referential
expressions like singular terms (proper names, definite descriptions,
indexicals), general terms and even declarative sentences, in order to furnish
an appropriate explanation of their reference mechanisms. This will be done in
the present volume only very partially, in the appendices, often summarizing
ideas already presented in my previous work.[2] These are ideas that should
be elaborated in a more systematic work on the semantics of terms. In the body
of the present volume, however, my central tenet is to clarify my own
assumptions on the philosophy of meaning.
When writing this book I realized, in retrospect, that what I wanted to
do could in its core be understood as reviving a program speculatively
developed by Ernst Tugendhat in his major work Lectures Introducing Linguistic-Analytical Philosophy.[3] This book, published in
1976, can be seen as the swansong of the old orthodoxy, defending an
internalist program that was practically abandoned some years later under the
ever-growing influence of the new causal-externalist orthodoxy. This program
could in its core be conceived of as a semantic analysis of the singular
predicative statement.[4] Thus, giving a statement of
the form Fa, we can say that:
1) the meaning of the singular term a would be given by its identification
rule (Identifikationsregel),
2) the meaning of its general term F would be given by its application
rule (Verwendungsregel), and
3) the meaning of the complete singular
predicative assertoric sentence Fa would
be given by its verifiability rule (Verifikationsregel).[5]
This last rule is obtained by jointly applying the first two rules in
such a way that application of the identifying rule must be assumed in order to
make possible the employment of the general term’s application rule. Thus, for
example, Yuri Gagarin, the first person to orbit the earth from outside its
atmosphere, gazed out of the small window of his space capsule and claimed:
‘The earth is blue’. In order to make this into a true statement, he should
first have identified the earth by applying the identification rule of the
proper name ‘Earth’, and then, based on its application, used the application
(also called characterizing or conceptual) rule of the predicative expression
‘…is blue’. In combination, these rules work as a kind of verification rule for
the statement ‘The earth is blue’. If this rule can be effectively applied,
then the statement is true.
Tugendhat came to this conclusion as a result of purely speculative
considerations, without analyzing these rules and without answering external
criticism of the program, like the many objections that have already been made
against verificationism. But what is extraordinary is that he was arguably
right. Or at least I believe I can make his view compelling, on the one hand,
by refuting the main arguments that could be stated against verificationism,
and, on the other hand, by analyzing in some detail the nature of these
semantic-cognitive rules, explaining the structure of their subdivisions and
relationships, and, finally, explaining some important attributes related to
them, particularly existence and truth, in a more satisfactory way.
My methodological approach, as will be seen, is also different from that
used in the more formally oriented views opposed in this book, inherited from
the philosophy of ideal language in its positivist manifestation. It is
primarily oriented by the communicational and social roles of language, which
are seen as our real units of analysis, being inherited much more from the so
called ordinary language tradition than from the ideal language tradition.[6]
Since I consider the real understanding of language to be unavoidably
involved in our overall societal life, I will always begin with commonsense and
ordinary language, often seeking support in a more careful examination of
concrete examples of how our linguistic expressions are really used.
Finally, my approach is systematic. The chapters are so interconnected
that the plausibility of each is better supported when regarded in its relation
to arguments developed in the preceding chapters and their appendices. The
appendices are complementary; but they were placed as a counterpoint to the
chapters, aiming to justify and reinforce the expressed views.
[1] I believe I have given a glimpse of it in the
neo-descriptivist theory of proper names developed in chapter 2 of my book Lines of Thought: Rethinking Philosophical
Assumptions (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).
[2] Claudio Costa: Lines
of Thought: Rethinking Philosophical Assumptions (Newcastle Upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), chapters 2, 3 and 4.
[3] Ernst Tugendhat: Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die
Sprachanalytische Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976).
[4] In this book I will use the word ‘statement’ in most
cases as referring to the speech act of making an assertion.
[5] E. Tugendhat: Logisch-Semantische Propädeutik
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983), pp. 235-6, Vorlesungen
zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1976), pp. 259, 484, 487-8. For similar
distinctions, see Michael Dummett, Frege:
Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1981), p. 229.
[6] The ideal language tradition (inspired by the logical
analysis of language) was founded by Frege, Russell and the earlier
Wittgenstein, and was strongly associated with the philosophers of logical
positivism, mainly Rudolf Carnap. With the rise of Nazism, many philosophers
associated with logical positivism fled to the USA, deeply influencing American
philosophy of language. The philosophies of W. V-O. Quine, Donald Davidson, and
later Kripke and Hilary Putnam, along with the present mainstream philosophy of
language with its metaphysics of reference, are in this way a later product of
ideal language philosophy. Ordinary language philosophy (inspired by analysis
of the whole speech act in the total speech situation) was represented by the
Oxford School, with philosophers like J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle and P. F.
Strawson, although it had antecedents in the later philosophy of Wittgenstein
and still earlier in G. E. Moore’s commonsensical approach. Ordinary language
philosophy also affected American philosophy through relatively isolated
figures like Paul Grice and John Searle, whose academic influence was
foreseeably less. For history, see J. O. Urmson, Philosophical Analysis: Its Development Between the Two Wars (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1956).
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