Cambridge Scholars Publishing published the book Philosophical Semantics in 2018. This developed draft is posted here for research purposes.
Table of Contents
Preface............................................................................................................. xi
Acknowledgments...................................................................................... xviii
Chapter I........................................................................................................... 1
Introduction
1. Ernst Tugendhat’s analysis of singular predicative
statements
2. The virtue of comprehensiveness
Appendix
to Chapter I...................................................................................... 8
How Do Proper Names Really Work? (Cutting the
Gordian Knot)
1. A meta-descriptivist rule for proper names
2. Identification rules at work
3. Objection of vagueness
4. Signification
5. Ignorance and error
6. Rigidity
7. Rules changeability
8. Names versus descriptions
9. Autonomous definite descriptions
10. Kripke’s counterexamples
11. Donnellan’s counterexamples
12. Explanatory failure of the causal-historical
view
Chapter II........................................................................................................ 42
The Most Suitable Methodology for Conceptual Analysis
1. Common sense and meaning
2. Ambitious versus modest common sense
3. Resisting changes in worldviews
4. Primacy of established knowledge
5. Philosophizing by examples
6. Tacit knowledge of meaning: traditional explanation
7. A very simple model of semantic-cognitive rule
8. Criteria versus symptoms
9. Challenges to the traditional explanation (i):
John McDowell
10. Challenges to the traditional explanation (ii):
Gareth Evans
11. Unreflected semantic cognitions
12. Conclusion
Appendix
to Chapter II.................................................................................. 79
Modal Illusions: Against Supra-Epistemic Metaphysical
Identities
Addendum:
disposing of externalism
Chapter III.................................................................................................... 117
Wittgensteinian Semantics
1. Semantic-cognitive link
2. Why cannot reference be meaning?
3. Failure of Russell’s atomistic referentialism
4. Meaning as a function of use
5. Meaning as a kind of rule
6. Meaning as associations of rules
7. Meaning and language-games
8. Meaning and form of life
9. Tying the threads together
10. Criteria and symptoms revisited
11. Transgressions of the internal limits of language
12. The form of semantic-cognitive rules
13. What is wrong with the private language argument?
14. Concluding remarks
Appendix
to Chapter III............................................................................... 157
Trope Theory and the Unsustainable Lightness
of Being
1. Introducing tropes
2. Tropes and universals
3. Tropes and concrete particulars
4. Formal tropes
5. Conclusion
Chapter IV.................................................................................................... 182
An Extravagant Reading of Fregean Semantics
1. Reference of a singular term
2. Sense of a singular term
3. Reference of a predicative expression
4. Ontological level
5. Referring to particularized properties (tropes)
6. Difficulties with the concept of unsaturation
7. Unsaturation as ontological dependence
8. Sense of a predicative term
9. The dependence of the predicative sense
10. The concept of horse paradox
11. Existence as a property of concepts
12. Existence as a property of conceptual rules
13. Two naïve objections
14. Attributing existence to objects
15. The existence of objects and its identification
rules
16. Existence of spatiotemporal locations: indexicals
17. Advantages of the higher-order view of existence
18. Ubiquity of existence
19. Answering some final objections
20. Reference again: a metaphysical excurse (Mill)
21. The reference of a sentence as its truth-value
22. Logical structure of facts
23. Ontological nature of facts
24. Church’s slingshot argument
25. Sub-facts and grounding facts
26. Taking seriously the sentence’s reference as
a fact
27. The riddle of identity in difference
28. Contexts of interest: no need for a necessary
a posteriori
29. Sense of sentences: the thought
30. The thought as the truth-bearer
31. Facts as true thoughts?
32. The thought as a verifiability rule
33. Frege’s Platonism
34. Avoiding Frege’s Platonism
35. Further ontological consequences
36. A short digression on contingent futures
37. Conclusion
Appendix
to Chapter IV............................................................................... 288
Frege, Russell, and the Puzzles of Reference
1. Russell’s solutions to the puzzles of reference
2. Fregean solutions to the same puzzles
3. Reviewing Fregean assumptions
4. Reviewing Russell’s assumptions
5. Building a bridge between both views
6. Conclusion
Chapter V..................................................................................................... 313
Verificationism Redeemed
1. Origins of semantic verificationism
2. Wittgensteinian verificationism
3. Verifiability rule as a criterial rule
4. Objection 1: the principle is self-refuting
5. Objection 2: a formalist illusion
6. Objection 3: verificational holism
7. Objection 4: existential-universal asymmetry
8. Objection 5: arbitrary indirectness
9. Objection 6: empirical counterexamples
10. Objection 7: formal counterexamples
11. Objection 8: skepticism about rules
12. Defending analyticity
13. Conclusion
Appendix
to Chapter V................................................................................ 359
The Only Key to Solving the Humean Problem of
Induction
1. Formulating the Humean argument
2. The basic idea
3. Reformulating PF
Chapter VI.................................................................................................... 371
Sketch of a Unified Theory of Truth
1. The deceptive simplicity of correspondence
2. Analysis of correspondence (1): structural isomorphism
3. Analysis of correspondence (2): categorial match
4. Analysis of correspondence (3): intentionality
and causality
5. Exemplifying correspondence
6. Compatibility between verificationism and correspondence
7. Formal definitions of truth
8. Negative truths
9. Self-referentiality
10. Pragmatics of the correspondence relation
11. Retrograde procedures
12. A more complex case
13. General statements
14. Some funny facts
15. Expansion to formal sciences
16. Why can analytic truth be called true?
17. The insufficiency of coherence
18. Coherence as a mediator
19. Roles of empirical coherence
20. Reverend David’s case
21. What about the truth of the truth-maker?
22. Objection of the linguistic-cognitive circle
23. Answering the objection of the linguistic-cognitive
circle
24. The argument of illusion
25. Answering the argument of illusion
26. The argument of science and its answer
27. Question: How do we warrant the perception of
external content?
28. Answer: A definitional criterion of external
reality
29. Proving the existence of the external world
30. Skeptical scenarios
31. Verification and intentionality: Husserl
32. Solving two Husserlian problems
33. Truth and factual existence again
34. The rule’s structural mirroring of the world
35. Conclusion
Appendix
to Chapter VI............................................................................... 463
Discovery of Wine
References.................................................................................................... 465
Un coup de dés
jamais n’abolira le hazard.
[A throw of the dice will never abolish hazard.]
Stéphane Mallarmé
Preface
Niemand weiß noch, wer künftig in jenem Gehäuse wohnen
wird und ob am Ende dieser ungeheuren Entwicklung ganz neue Propheten oder eine
mächtige Wiedergeburt alter Gedanken und Ideale stehen werden, oder aber – wenn
keins von beiden – mechanisierte Versteinerung, mit einer Art von krampfhaftem
sich wichtig nehmen verbrämt. Dann allerdings könnte für die “letzten Menschen”
dieser Kulturentwicklung das Wort zur Wahrheit werden: “Fachmenschen ohne
Geist, Genußmenschen ohne Herz: dies Nichts bildet sich ein, eine nie vorher
erreichte Stufe des Menschentums erstiegen zu haben.”
[No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or
whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will
arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if
neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive
self-importance. For the ‘last man’ of this cultural development, it might well
be truly said: ‘Specialist without spirit, sensualist without heart; this
nullity imagines that it has attained a level of humanity never before
achieved.’]
—Max Weber
The aim of
philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest
possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the
term.
—Wilfrid Sellars
Making empty is the result of making
small.
—Malcolm Bull
Science (mainly applied science)
rises, while culture (artistic, religious, philosophical) falls. Whereas culture
was once a source of values, today science and technology have made cultural values
seem superfluous.
The critical theory of society has offered
some explanations for this, drawing on Max Weber’s basic idea of the disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung der Welt). According to him,
Western society has undergone a long and seemingly irreversible process of rationalization,
in which a scientific-technological society, characterized by increasing bureaucratic
rationality, gradually becomes alienated from the values, traditions, and sentiments of older forms of social thinking
and acting, without having developed suitable resources to fill the void left behind.
As a result, in a scientifically oriented society, instrumental
reason tends to prevail over valuing reason, furthering science and technology at
the expense of an adequate substitute for the traditional aesthetic, mystical and
humanistic cultural practices, which the available science remains unable to
replace. Sociologists have used terms like ‘anomia,’
‘alienation,’ and ‘nihilism’ to designate the negative individual and social effects
of this mismatch between science and humanistic thinking, complaining that our
technological world demands forms of cultural alienation to feed itself. Mass culture
is a poor attempt to fill the gap; another is scientism.
Given the pressure of modern social forms resulting from rapidly spreading
disenchantment, we should not wonder
that a kind of philosophy prevails that all too often materially and institutionally
simulates the methods and aims of particular scientific fields. In fact, it often emulates the sciences in a manner suggesting the way much
of continental philosophy has emulated rhetorical-literary forms, that is,
taking over the place of the most proper forms of philosophical argumentation with
the effect of losing much of its relation to truth. As a fact, a scientistic attempt to ‘disenchant philosophy’ is incoherent
because science in a wide sense must be ‘consensualizable public knowledge’ (John
Ziman), opposed in this way by the inevitably non-consensualizable philosophical
activity, often turning itself into a mix of pseudo-science and bad philosophy.
Hence, a scientistic attempt to disenchant philosophy is, in fact, a thinly veiled attempt of ‘re-enchantment.’
However, it must be a deficient one, insofar as the epistemic place of philosophy
in its central domains is by intrinsic necessity deeply ingrained in older forms of a pluralist conjectural argumentative endeavor aiming at comprehensiveness, which cannot be reduced to the domain of a particular science without being
severely mutilated.
We can feel this tension in praxis: by taking
into account only the discussions of recent years, as science does, one might pretend
that the philosophical community is going through the same linear development as
science, only to find itself some time later lost in a confusing variety of foreseeable
culs-de-sac. But an inevitably segmented
‘minute philosophy’ of the ‘last novelty’ made for ‘immediate consumption’ by and
for small self-protective cliques of specialists and related scientists no longer
seems, as in the tradition, to be an independent conjectural undertaking making
balanced use of whatever new scientific knowledge can serve its purposes. More often,
it appears often as a busy handmaiden of science suffering from loss of identity
and self-esteem; a forcefully particularized pseudo-scientific guesswork, an atomized
conjectural endeavor that does not look beyond its own narrow interests. This
guesswork scarcely touches the central philosophical problems inherited from the
philosophical tradition or touches them in a way that is unrecognizably deformed
by their own reductive-positivist perspective. They seem unprepared to see that
in its most central domains philosophy should absorb science instead of being absorbed by science.
In pointing to this, I am far from embracing
Manichaeism. I am not claiming that for science to exert great influence on philosophy
is inevitably specious and unfruitful. There are many useful limited ways of doing philosophy. Often, particularized philosophy
furthers the development of particular sciences or develops into a new field
that approaches science, as in the very successful case of speech acts theory. Moreover,
there are felicitous cases, like the rapid proliferation of competing theories of
consciousness over the last five decades, which serves as a striking example of
fruitful philosophical work very closely associated with the development of empirical
science that has deepened the field of investigation. And these are only a few cases
among many!
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that
this same intellectual movement can easily become an ideologically motivated agenda
if it tempts the theoretical philosopher to import new knowledge from particular
sciences – formal or empirical – in ways that cause him to lose sight of the vast
and plural scope of the philosophical landscape. A possible consequence of this
is what can be aptly labeled expansionist
scientism: an effort to reduce some wide
domain of philosophy to the scope of investigative strategies and categories derived
from a new more or less established particular science. In order to achieve this
aim, the particular (formal or empirical) scientific field must be expanded in order
to answer questions belonging to some more central domain of philosophy, using a
reductionist strategy that underestimates philosophy’s encompassing and multifaceted character. An earlier example of
expansionist scientism was in my view Pythagoreanism, which unsuccessfully
tried to find answers to the problems of life using the newly developed
science
of numbers. Today’s example would be modal logic, which has also generated a
fair amount of expansionist scientism. The price one must pay for this may be that
persistent, distinctive philosophical difficulties, which cannot be accommodated within the new particularizing model
must be minimized if not quietly swept under the carpet.
A chief inconsistency of scientism arises from
the fact that while sciences are in various ways all particular, philosophy is most
properly ‘holistic’: As Wittgenstein once wrote, the difficulty of philosophy is
that its problems are so interconnected
that it is impossible to solve any one philosophical problem without first having
solved all the others. Insofar as his claim is true, it means that a persistent
difficulty of the central philosophical problems is that we need a proper grasp
of the whole to be able to evaluate and answer them properly. Indeed, this is what
can make philosophical understanding so unbearably complex and multifarious.
And the lack of this kind of
comprehensiveness is what can make fragmented contemporary analytic philosophy
often appear like a headless turkey running around aimlessly. Nonetheless,
taking account of parts as belonging to a whole, trying to see things sub specie totius, is what the great
systems of classical philosophy – such as those of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel –
strove to achieve, even if paying a price that we are now better able to
appreciate as unavoidably high in terms of misleading and aporetic speculation.
Nonetheless, it would be too easy and hasty to conclude that true comprehensiveness is no longer a fundamental
desideratum of philosophy (Wittgenstein was well aware of this when he called for
more ‘Übersichtlichkeit’).
There is also an internal reason for the narrowness
and fragmentation of much of our present linguistic-analytical philosophy that can
be explained as follows. The new Anglo-American philosophy – from W. V-O. Quine
to Donald Davidson, and from Saul Kripke to Hilary Putnam and Timothy Williamson
– has challenged a great variety of inherited commonsense starting points and challenged them in often undeniably
insightful and imaginative ways, although in my view with ultimately unsustainable
results. Because of this, a considerable part of theoretical philosophy has increasingly
lost touch with its intuitive commonsense grounding in the way things prima facie seem to be and
for the most part really are.
Take, for instance, the concept of meaning:
the word ‘meaning’ was challenged by Quine as too vague a noise to be reasonably
investigated. But an approach is inevitably limited if it, moved by contentious
arguments, starts from a kind of positivist-reductionist perspective that denies or ignores commonsense
certainties, like the indisputable fact that meanings exist and demand an appropriate
explanation. Indeed, using the strategy of skeptically questioning all kinds of
deeply ingrained truisms, scientistically oriented philosophers have sawed off the
branches they were sitting on. The reason for this is that the result of the adopted
strategy couldn’t be other than replacing true comprehensiveness with a superficializing
positivistic fragmentation of inevitably misleadingly-grounded philosophical concerns.
This movement ends by plunging philosophy into what Scott Soames confidently called
the ‘age of specialization,’ while Susan Haack with a healthy touch of pessimism would call it ‘a disastrous age of fragmentation.’
Admittedly, this fragmentation can be regarded as dividing to conquer;
but it may also be a matter of dividing to subjugate, and what is here to be subjugated
is more often the philosophical intellect. Indeed, by focusing too much on the trees,
we may lose sight of the philosophical forest and thereby even of where the trees
are and how to compare them. Without the well-reasoned assumption of some deep common
sense truisms, no proper descriptive metaphysics, to use P. F. Strawson’s expression, remains possible. And
without this, the only path left for originality in philosophy of language, after
rigorous training in techniques of argumentation, may turn out to be the use of
new formalistic pyrotechnics of unknown value or the production of intellectual
artificialities of scarce intelligibility and suspicious depth. This would have
the end-effect of blocking paths of inquiry, disarming adequate philosophical analysis
and increasing the risk that the whole enterprise will degenerate into a sort of
scholastic, fragmented, vacuous intellectual Glasperlenspiel.
It may be that practitioners of reductive scientistic
philosophy are aware of the problem, but they have found plausible excuses for neglecting
to deal with it. Some have suggested that any attempt to do philosophy on a comprehensive
level would not suffice to meet the present standards of scholarly adequacy demanded
by the academic community. But in saying this they forget that philosophy does not
need to be pursued too close on the heels of new advances in the sciences, which
are continually producing and handing down new authoritative developments. Philosophy
largely remains an autonomous cultural
enterprise: it is inherently conjectural and dependent on metaphorical elements
indispensable to its pursuit of comprehensiveness (Aristotle, calling his first
philosophy ‘the searched for science’ was well aware of this). Indeed, most of
philosophy remains a relatively free cultural enterprise with a right to controlled
speculation, experimentation, and even transgression, though most properly done
in the pursuit of truth.
Others have concluded that today it is impossible
to develop a truly encompassing theoretical philosophy. For them this kind of philosophy
cannot succeed because of the difficulties imposed by the overwhelming amount of
information required, putting the task far beyond the cognitive capacity of individual
human minds. We might even be – to borrow Colin McGinn’s original metaphor – cognitively closed to finding decisive solutions
for the great traditional problems of philosophy in the sense that we aren’t
adequately wired to solve them. That is, in our efforts to do ambitious comprehensive
philosophy, we are like chimps trying to develop the theory of relativity. Just
as they lack sufficient mental capacity to solve the problems of relativistic mechanics,
we lack sufficient mental capacity to develop comprehensive philosophy and will
therefore never succeed! Hence, if we wish to make progress, we should shift our
efforts to easier tasks...
This last answer seems specious and borders
on defeatism. The very ability to initiate the discussion of broadly-inclusive philosophy
suggests that we might also be able to accomplish our task. As Wittgenstein once
noted, if we are able to pose an appropriate question, it is because we are also
in principle able to find its answer. In contrast to human thinkers, one indication
that chimps could never develop a theory of relativity is that unlike Einstein they
are unable to even pose questions such as what would happen if they could move at
the speed of light. Moreover, even if the total amount of scientific knowledge available
to us has increased immensely, it may well be that the amount of really essential
information needed to answer any given question is sufficiently limited for us to
grasp and apply. Very often the science needed to do philosophy can be limited to
very general findings. Furthermore, not all philosophical approaches need to be
taken into account, since they are often superimposed or displaced. The main difficulty
may reside in the circumstances, strategies and authenticity of attempts, in limits
imposed on the context of discovery, rather than in the sheer impossibility of progress.
In any case, it is a fact that in the so-called philosophy of linguistic analysis
true comprehensiveness has almost disappeared in the recent years. However, my guess
is that the main reason isn’t impossibility in principle, but rather the loss of a suitable cultural soil in which
a more comprehensive philosophy could flourish.
In this book, I begin by arguing that more
fruitful soil can be found if we start with a better reasoned and more affirmative
appreciation of commonsense truisms, combined with a more pluralistic approach,
always prepared to incorporate the relevant – formal and empirical – results of
science. Perhaps it is precisely against the uncomfortable return of a broader pluralistic
approach that much of the mainstream of our present philosophy of language secretly
struggles. Awareness of this
can be obscured by some sort of dense, nearly scholastic scientistic atmosphere,
so thick that seasoned practitioners barely
notice it surrounding them. The intellectual climate
sometimes recalls the Middle Ages, when philosophical investigation was allowed, providing
it left unchallenged established religious dogmas. I even entertain the suspicion
that in some quarters the attempt to advance any plausible comprehensive philosophy
of language against the institutional power of reductive scientism runs the risk
of being ideologically discouraged as a project and silenced as a fact.
Ernst Tugendhat, who (together with Jürgen
Habermas) attempted with considerable success to develop comprehensive philosophy
in the seventies, seems to have hoisted the white flag by admitting that the heyday
of philosophy is past. The problem is in my view aggravated because we live in a
time of widespread indifference concerning high culture, as I pointed out at the beginning – a time heavily influenced by
a steady, almost exponential development
of science and technology that forcefully minimizes the role of valuing reason.
Though quite indispensable from the viewpoint of instrumental reason, our scientifically
biased age tends to impose
a compartmentalized form of alienation on philosophical research that works against
more broadly oriented attempts to understand reality.
In the present book, I insist on swimming against
the tide. My main task here – a risky one – is to establish the foundations of a
more comprehensive philosophy of meaning and reference, while arguing against some
main reductionist-scientistic approaches that are blocking the most promising paths of inquiry. Hence, it is
an attempt to restore its deserved integrity to the analytic philosophy of language,
without offending either common sense or science; an effort to give a balanced,
systematic and sufficiently plausible overview of meaning and the mechanisms of
reference, using bridges laboriously constructed between certain summits of philosophical
thought. In this way, I hope to realize something of the old philosophical ambition
of a comprehensive synthesis, insofar as this still sounds like a reasonable undertaking.
Paris,
2017
Acknowledgments
Before any acknowledgments, I must
emphasize Wittgenstein’s major influence on my philosophical outlook. His exceedingly
suggestive and multifarious approach is more far-reaching than unprepared readers could possibly grasp, and
the originality of his philosophical mind is indebted to his freedom from the burdens of the academic
factory. Frege’s unprecedented work was equally indispensable in structuring the subject under investigation.
I must also emphasize as well the strong influence
on my thinking of two living philosophers:
Ernst Tugendhat and John Searle.
Regarding proper acknowledgments, first I would like to thank Anna-Sofia
Maurin and her talented students from the University of Göteborg in Sweden for critically
discussing with me some main issues of a later draft of this book and asking challenging questions. I am also especially grateful to François Recanati’s
generous invitation to spend time
at the
Institute Jean Nicod in Paris; his teaching of pragmatics was for me very instructive.
I am also indebted to the organizers of the 40th Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel
for the opportunity of presenting some views on philosophy of perception that I tried to better develop in this book.
Earlier partial drafts I discussed years
ago with Wolfgang Spohn at the University of Konstanz in Germany and presented to
João Branquinho and his colleagues at the University of Lisbon. I am grateful to
each of them for their helpful suggestions. I am also grateful to Guido Imaguire,
Dirk Greimann, Ethel Rocha and faculty members at the Department of Philosophy of
the IFCS in Rio de Janeiro for their remarks. Moreover, I would like to express
my gratitude to several persons who in different ways have influenced this work:
Richard Swinburne, Allan Sidelle, Cheryl Misak, David Rosenthal, Susan Haack, Manuel
García-Carpintero, Marco Ruffino, André Leclerc and Nelson Gomes. Cinara Nahra,
as head of my department at the UFRN, has greatly supported and encouraged my work,
and my colleague Daniel Durante has made valuable suggestions on numerous occasions. I warmly thank my former
professors Raul Landin and Guido de Almeida for encouraging my work on this project.
And I would also like to thank Dr. James Stuart Brice for carefully and insightfully
proofreading my text. It goes without saying that I am solely responsible for the
views defended in this book.
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