Showing papers in "Synthese in 1984"

The language of ideology

Abstract: Even in a relatively quiet and sober decade, such as the seventies, one can hardly subscribe to Daniel Belt's evidently premature judgment about "the end of ideology". Ideologies may no longer sound so biased, militant and aggressive as in the days of the Cold War, but they still dominate the whole world of politics and culture. Humankind is still divided into ideologically exclusive camps. Many economic, political and ecological problems cannot be solved in optimal ways for ideological reasons. Rather than withering away, ideologies tend to multiply and grow in complexity. In addition to traditional class struggles, new conflicts break out and new social movements have been generated: those of rebellious youth, oppressed races, women, national and religious communities. Each of them tends to create a new ideology: the New Left, feminism, black racism as opposed to white racism, various forms of nationalism, and of (Zionist and Islamic) religious ideology. Philosophy was never able to preserve its purity from various ideological intrusions. On the contrary, it was philosophers who pro vided theoretical foundations for all three of the most important political ideologies of our times: liberalism, Marxism and fascism. And it could be shown that even the most strictly anti-metaphysical, anti-speculative, consequently anti-ideological contemporary trend that of analytical philosophy tacitly assumes some of the basic premises of liberalism. Now when analytical philosophy is opened up for historical study and value judgments, it will even less be able to keep its distance from ideological considerations. And yet philosophy, because of its commitment to unbiased thinking and universal values, is better equipped than any other form of inquiry to provide a critique of ideology and ideological reasoning. The first question we have to discuss is then the following: What is ideology? How can it be distinguished from philosophy, science, and rhetorics? What are the basic logical characteristics of the language of ideology?

Wittgenstein on following a rule

Abstract: We find it natural to think of meaning and understanding in, as it were, contractual terms. 2 Our idea is that to learn the meaning of a word is to acquire an understanding that obliges us subsequently if we have occasion to deploy the concept in question to judge and speak in certain determinate ways, on pain of failure to obey the dictates of the, meaning we have grasped; that we are 'committed to certain patterns of linguistic usage by the meanings we attach to expressions' (W, p. 21). 3 According to Crispin Wright, the burden of Wittgenstein's reflections on following a rule, in his later work, is that these natural ideas lack the substance we are inclined to credit them with: ' there is in our understanding of a concept no rigid, advance determination of what is to count as its correct application' (ibid.). 4 If Wittgenstein's conclusion, as Wright interprets it, is allowed to stand, the most striking casualty is a familiar intuitive notion of objectivity. The idea at risk is the idea of things being thus and so anyway, whether or not we choose to investigate the matter in question, and whatever the outcome of any such investigation. That idea requires the conception of how things could correctly be said to be anyway whatever, if anything, we in fact go on to say about the matter; and this notion of correctness can only be the notion of how the pattern of application that we grasp, when we come to understand the concept in question, extends, independently of the actual outcome of any investigation, to the relevant case. So if the notion of investigationindependent patterns of application is to be discarded, then so is the idea that things are, at least sometimes, thus and so anyway, independently of our ratifying the judgement that that is how they are. It seems fair to describe this extremely radical consequence as a kind of idealism. 5

Communication and convention

Abstract: Convention figures conspicuously in many of our activities, for example in playing tarot, in speaking, and in eating. In playing tarot, convention is essential, in eating it is not. In explaining what it is to play tarot, we could not leave out of account the rules that define the game; in explaining what it is to eat, no mention of rules or conventions needs to be made. What is the case with speech? Are conventions mere conveniences or social flourishes, or are they necessary to the existence of communication by language? The question is delicate because it concerns not the truth of the claim that speech is convention-bound, but the importance and role of convention in speech. The issue may be put counterfactually: could there be communication by language without convention? According to David Lewis, \"I t is a platitude something only a philosopher would dream of denying that there are conventions of language.\" 1 Certainly it would be absurd to deny that many conventions involve speech, such as saying \"Good morning\" no matter what the weather is like; but this is not the sort of convention on which the existence of language depends. No doubt what Lewis has in mind is the idea that the Connection between words and what they mean is conventional. And perhaps only a philosopher would deny this; but if so, the reason may be that only a philosopher would say it in the first place. What is obvious enough to be a platitude is that the use of a particular sound to refer to, or mean, what it does is arbitrary. But while what is conventional is in some sense arbitrary, what is arbitrary is not necessarily conventional. In one respect we describe a language completely when we say what counts as a meaningful utterance and what each actual or potential utterance means. But such descriptions assume we already know what it is for an utterance to have a particular meaning. Light on this question the traditional problem of meaning requires us to connect the notion of meaning with beliefs, desires, intentions and purposes in an illuminating way. It is mainly in making the connection, or connections, between linguistic meaning and human attitudes and acts described in nonlinguistic terms that convention is asked to do its work. And here

Semantics, Wisconsin style

Abstract: There are, of course, two kinds of philosophers. One kind of philosopher takes it as a working hypothesis that belief/desire psychology (or, anyhow, some variety of propositional attitude psychology) is the best theory of the cognitive mind that we can now envision; hence that the appropriate direction for psychological research is the construction of a belief/desire theory that is empirically supported and methodologically sound. The other kind of philosopher takes it that the entire apparatus of propositional attitude psychology is conceptually flawed in irremediable ways; hence that the appropriate direction for psychological research is the construction of alternatives to the framework of belief/desire explanation. This way of collecting philosophers into philosopher-kinds cuts across a number of more traditional, but relatively superficial, typologies. For example, eliminativist behaviorists like Quine and neurophiles like the Churchlands turn up in the same basket as philosophers like Steve Stich, who think that psychological states are computational and functional all right, but not intentional. Dennett is probably in that basket too, along with Putnam and other (how should one put it?) dogmatic relativists. Whereas, among philosophers of the other kind one finds a motley that includes, very much inter alia, reductionist behaviorists like Ryle and (from time to time) Skinner, radical individualists like Searle and Fodor, mildly radical anti-individualists like Burge, and, of course, all cognitive psychologists except Gibsonians.

Intentionality and its place in nature

Abstract: Intentionality is that feature of certain mental states and events that consists in their (in a special sense of these words) being directed at, being about, being of, or representing certain other entities and states of affairs. If, for example, Robert has the belief that Ronald Reagan is President, then his belief is an intentional state because in the appropriate sense his belief is directed at, or about, or of, or represents Ronald Reagan and the state of affairs that Ronald Reagan is President. In such a case Ronald Reagan is the intentional object of Robert’s belief, and the existence of the state of affairs that Ronald Reagan is President is the condition of satisfaction of his belief. If there is not anything that a belief is about, then it does not have an intentional object; and if the state of affairs it represents does not obtain, it is not satisfied.

How to bridge the gap between meaning and reference

Abstract: There is a temptation, during a revolution, to minimize the significant differences among the revolutionary parties. The activists themselves, due to their deep and unanimous opposition to the old regime and their exhilaration at recent successes, often find it difficult to overcome the illusion of general agreement on fundamentals. The past two decades has been a period of revolutionary activity in the philosophy of language. The members of the old regime are, as it were, the pro ponents of the Fregean picture of how words hook up with the world, the idea that singular terms express descriptive concepts and refer to those items that satisfy the concepts. Frege's perspective has been vigorously attacked by those recently called by one anthologist "the new theorists of reference", originally Donnellan, Kaplan, Kripke, and Putnam. Singular terms refer, according to the latter theorists, not by expressing concepts but in some much more immediate and direct way. The definite description, Frege's paradigm, has been replaced by a new paradigm or two, the demonstrative expression and/or the Millian proper name that merely tags but does describe its bearer. I plead guilty, as one of the advocates of the newer approach, to the charge of laboring under the illusion of agreement on fundamentals. I became suspicious, however, when I was accused of advocating the causal theory of reference, a view that seemed foreign to my thinking but was supposedly central to or even definitive of the new approach.1 The question I shall address, the question mentioned in the title, will highlight profound disagreements among the new theorists and will provide an opportunity to further develop the direct reference ap proach. I shall restrict my discussion to indexical reference, specifically to reference by means of pronouns and demonstratives. That there is a gap between meaning and reference in the case of indexical expressions has been a cornerstone of the new approach. Consider the first person pronoun. Each of us can use it to refer to ourselves, yet it is not ambiguous. Its lexical meaning remains constant

The sorites paradox

Abstract: The characteristic feature of a vague predicate is its possession of borderline cases. For us to even consider an item to be a borderline case of V, or equivalently, a borderline case of notV, our intuitions on the correct use of V must to a significant degree find plausible the application of V to it counterbalanced by our finding nearly as plausible the application of n o t V to it; otherwise we would consider it to be a definite case of V or a definite case of no t -V. Borderline cases of a vague predicate V are items for which it is rationally acceptable to classify them as V and rationally acceptable to classify them as notV, that is, items for which the difference in warrant for applying V or applying n o t V is too slight to judge that the one term can be acceptably applied but not the other, too slight to enshrine only one of the predicates V, or n o t V as the only correct one to apply to any one of the given items to whose classification there has as yet been no commitment . The borderline cases of V constitute the overlap of the range of the acceptable application of V with the range of the acceptable application of no t -V. Tha t is the overlap construal of borderline cases: the rational acceptabili ty of opposite classifications. To accurately characterize borderline cases more would have to be said. For one thing, one 's finding acceptable both of opposite classifications of an i tem is not to be attribtued to ignorance of certain relevant facts about the classified item or of linguistic usage. For present purposes no more need be said. Far f rom it being impossible to say of a borderline case whether it is V or notV, we can admit that either classification of a borderline case is a rationally acceptable one, though obviously, either term is applied with less warrant than we customarily require or seek to have for the assertion of a s tatement expressing the classification of a nonborderl ine case. There is no reason to disallow this lowering of the standards of warrantedness for classification judgments on borderline cases; such judgments are less like judgments of matters of fact and more of the nature of decisions settling what one 's usage is to be on the particular occasion where the speaker ' s intention and say-so can be definitive. It is

Logic and Reasoning

Abstract: Should we think of logic as a science like physics and chemistry, but more abstract and with a wider application? Or should we think of logic as having a special role in reasoning, a role that is not simply a consequence of its wider application? This is a difficult issue and I for one am unsure how to resolve it. In this paper I will try to say why certain answers are unsatisfactory.

Content and context of perception

Abstract: What makes a perception \"of\" an object? Ubiquitous Smith, no relation to the author, is strolling a beach in the Caribbean. A few feet ahead of him in the glistening sand lies a sea urchin. His eyes happen upon it. He sees it, he has a perception of it. In what does his seeing it consist, that is, his perception's being of the urchin? We seek an ontological analysis of this relation between a perceptual experience and its object, the relation wherein a person is perceptually acquainted with an object, a relation of intentionality. (For the record, Ubi Smith and the sea urchin are fictional characters created a few words ago, but his perception of the creature is an actual experience that was actually once enjoyed by the present author, who can therefore attest below to its phenomenological structure.) I shall argue that perception has an intrinsic \"demonstrative\" character in that its phenomenological structure or content prescribes an object appropriately before and sensuously affecting the perceiver on the occasion of the perception. A proper analysis of what makes a perception \"of\" its object must capture the interplay between the phenomenological content and the physical context of the perception. The demonstrative character and so the context-dependence of perceptual acquaintance pose serious problems for the classical \"internalist\" or \"content\" approach to intentionality found in Husserl and others. Yet the theory I shall propose vindicates to a large extent the leading intuition of that classical approach. And in this respect it contrasts with recent proposals that do not give content a proper role in perceptual acquaintance and that effectively analyze the intentional relation between a perception and its object as a causal or contextual relation. Intentionality is, of course, just that feature of psychological events or states that consists in their being \"of\" or \"about\" something, a consciousness of or about something. 1 It is commonly observed that an experience may be \"directed\" toward be of or about something even where no such thing exists. Indeed, a theory of the intentionality of

Wittgenstein on meaning, interpretation and rules

Abstract: In section 138 of Wittgenstein 's Philosophical Investigations a problem is raised about an apparent tension between Wittgenstein 's dictum that the meaning of a word is the use we make of the word and the undeniable fact that we understand the meaning of a word when we hear or say it. When I hear a word and understand what it means can the whole use of the word come before my mind? How can what comes before my mind in an instant accord with a use? This is an instance of a more general problem, which concerns the relation between what is present and what is not present, what takes place at a certain t ime and what does not take place at that time, what is present in someone ' s mind at a certain t ime and what, so it seems, is not so present. In the sections that follow §138 Wittgenstein 's concern with various instances of this general problem is predominant ly to do with what is present to someone ' s mind in the sense in which something is present to someone ' s mind when something happens that the person experiences or performs and of which he is aware. How can what is present to someone ' s mind 'contain ' what is not present as it seems to do when the person is truly described at the time in terms which refer to what is not present? Or instead: what is the relation between a person and what is not present when he is correctly described at a t ime when something is present to his mind by the use of a predicate which imports a reference to what is not present? Thus if the occasion when something happens to a person 's mind (i.e., something is present to his mind) is one when he can be said to have grasped in a flash the meaning of a word, to have meant a formula a certain way, to have realised how to continue a series, to have recalled how a tune goes (without hearing it through), to have decided to play chess, what is the relation between what happened in the person 's mind and the predicates 'grasped (in a flash) the

Realizability and Intuitionistic Logic

Abstract: The present paper is an attempt to clarify the relationship between Heyting’s well-known explanation of the intuitionistic logical operators on the one hand, and realizability interpretations on the other hand, in particular in connection with the theory of types as developed by P. Martin-Lof. Part of the discussion may be regarded as a supplement to the discussion by Martin-Lof.

Foundations for Analysis and Proof Theory

Abstract: The title of my paper indicates that I plan to write about foundations for analysis and about proof theory; however, I do not intend to write about the foundations for analysis and thus not about analysis viewed from the vantage point of any “school” in the philosophy of mathematics. Rather, I shall report on some mathematical and proof-theoretic investigations which provide material for (philosophical) reflection. These investigations concern the informal mathematical theory of the continuum, on the one hand, and formal systems in which parts of the informal theory can be developed, on the other. The proof-theoretic results of greatest interest for my purposes are of the following form: for each F in a class of sentences, F is provable in T if and only if F is provable in T* where T is a classical set-theoretic system for analysis and T* a constructive theory. In that case, T is called REDUCIBLE TO T*, as the principles of T* are more elementary and more restricted.

A hundred years later: The rise and fall of Frege's influence in language theory

Abstract: One of the most fashionable current terms in the philosophy and history of science is the word paradigm introduced by Thomas Kuhn in his famous book on the structure of scientific revolutions.1 It is also one of the most misinterpreted and abused terms in recent discussion, to the extent that Tom himself has sworn, only half jokingly, never, never to use the accursed word again. In spite of Kuhn's renunciation of the term, it seems to me to be applicable to Frege's influence on logical semantics and logical study of language in the last hundred years. The hundred-year period is not just an approximation, either, for we recently had the centenary of Frege's first extensive publication in logic, viz., his Begriffschrift.2 The very title of this work betrays Frege's interest not only in pure logic but also in the logical analysis of concepts, i. e., logical semantics. But when I thus say that Frege created a paradigm in logical semantics, I will be almost universally misinterpreted unless I supply further explanations. For when philosophers, logicians, and linguists think in our days of Frege's semantics, they virtually always think of Frege's theory of sense and reference and of the apparently Platonistic ontology that goes together with it.3 This perspective is not so much wrong as radically misleading. If I may exaggerate somewhat in the opposite direction, I would say that in the total picture of Frege's semantics the theory of sense and reference is merely frosting on a much bigger cake. Frege's main achievement in logical semantics was the creation of that paradigm which we may perhaps call first-order logic with its associated semantics, together with the ontology (categorical analysis of the world) that comes with it. This ontology is that of individuals (comprising a universe of discourse) plus their properties and relations. The languages appropriate for reflecting this ontology are our familiar first-order languages with their familiar semantics codified much later in the works of Tarski and Carnap.4 This conception of first-order logic with its associated semantics and

The Knowing Mathematician

Abstract: Mathematics is at the beginning of a new foundational crisis Twenty years ago there was a firm consensus that mathematics is set theory and that set theory is Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZF) That consensus is breaking down It is breaking down for two quite different reasons One of these is a turning away from the excesses of the tendency toward abstraction in post-war mathematics Many mathematicians feel that the power of the method of abstraction and generalization has, for the time being, exhausted itself We have done about as much as can be done now by these means, and it is time to return once more to hard work on particular examples (For this point of view see Mac Lane [16, pp 37–38]) Another reason for this turning back from abstraction is the economic fact that society is less prepared now than it was twenty years ago to support abstract intellectual activity pursued for its own sake Those who support research are asking more searching questions than formerly about the utility of the results that can reasonably be expected from projects proposed Mathematicians, moreover, are increasingly obliged to seek employment not in departments emphasizing pure mathematics, but in departments of computer science or statistics, or even in industry Thus there is a heightened interest in applied and applicable mathematics and an increased tendency to reject as abstract nonsense what our teachers considered an intellectually satisfying level of generality The set-theoretic account of the foundations of mathematics, however, is inextricably linked with just this tendency to abstraction for its own sake Mathematics, on that account, is about abstract structures which, at best, may happen to be isomorphic to structures found in the physical world, but which are themselves most definitely not in the physical world Thus as mathematicians turn away from pure abstraction, they also become increasingly dissatisfied with the doctrine that mathematics is set theory and nothing else

The Primacy of the Intentional

Abstract: According to the thesis of the primacy of the intentional, the reference of language is to be explicated in terms of the intentionality of thought. The word “Pferd,” for example, refers to horses in so far as it is used to express thoughts that are directed upon horses. But most contemporary philosophers of language, until recently at least, have held that the intentionality of thought is to be explicated in terms of the reference of language. But no such explication is at hand.

In defense of type materialism

Abstract: L'A. pense que les arguments couramment employes contre le materialisme "type/type" (les types d'etats mentaux sont des types d'evenements neurophysiologiques) ne sont pas suffisants pour infirmer cette these, et presente des arguments aussi bien empiriques que conceptuels pour la defendre.

Semantics for clausally complemented verbs

Abstract: A wide variety of English verbs accept clausal complements. Some believe, know, promise, cause, mean and prove, for example have aroused great philosophical interest. Others such as persuade, mumble, suggest and ask seem more prosaic. But surely one cannot rest content with a semantics for philosophically exciting verbs that fails to harmonize with an adequate account of their duller cousins. In this paper, therefore, I shall examine a very large group of English verbs and attempt to outline a semantics for them all. My analysis rests on three assumptions which I cannot defend in any detail here. First, I assume that (Chomsky, 1982) is correct that the immense syntactic complexity of clausal complementation is largely irrelevant to semantics. I thus assume the sentences in each of the following sets to coincide in truth-conditions:

Did the Greeks really worship Zeus

Abstract: The week before final exams is a very busy time. Some student or other is always waiting to see me. One day during this hectic period, after an hour of seeing students, I mused, nodding toward the door, "This one probably wants an incomplete" (taking for granted that the individual in question was a graduate student). I was mistaken, however, for there was no student outside my door. Does the expression 'this one' refer in such a case? It is surely plausible to suppose that it does not. Who but a Meinongian would suppose otherwise? Terence Parsons has urged that not even a Meinongian need argue that I did refer.1 Parsons, a defender of nonexistent objects, maintains that since my intention was to speak about a real thing, a flesh-and-blood student, and since there was no such object present, I simply failed to refer. Similarly, the faithful ancient Greek, when he tells his children, "Zeus sits on Mt. Olympus", fails to refer, for he intends to speak of an existing deity. Nonexistent objects, at least on Parson's version of Meinongianism, are not the booby prizes for intended but failed references to real things. Unsuccessful attempts to refer to real things, argues Parsons, should be sharply distinguished from attempts to refer to nonexistent objects. While the ancient Greek's utterance of "Zeus sits on Mt. Olympus" was false or lacking in truth-value, since his 'Zeus' failed to refer, the contemporary historian appears to express a truth when he teaches that "Zeus sat on Mt. Olympus". His use of 'Zeus' thus appears to be quite different from that of the ancient Greek. Parsons explains this difference in terms of the respective speaker's referential intentions and the distinction between unsuccessful attempts to refer and reference to the nonexistent. The historian, as opposed to the ancient Greek, intends to refer to a nonexistent object, the mythological Zeus, and in this he succeeds. His remark is true in the straightforward sense that the object to which he refers possesses the property he predicates of it.2

Wittgenstein on sensation and ‘seeing-as’

Abstract: Although Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind has given rise to a vast body of critical literature, his discussion of sensation has so far received only piecemeal treatjnent. In fact, the focus of commentators has been so much on the private-language argument that it may appear as if Wittgenstein had little else to say relevant to the topic of sensation. Although I shaU of course pay heed to that argument, my main concern is to sketch an overview of Wittgenstein's approach to sensation. One special virtue I should like to claim for it is that it provides some important thematic continuity between the two parts of the Philosophi cal Investigations.2 Another feature is that it avoids imputing to Wittgenstein various traditional philosophical doctrines which some of his critics, as well as some of his followers, claim to find in the later writings. I have just suggested that Wittgenstein's account of sensation is significantly different from what may be found in traditional philoso phical theories. Nevertheless, some writers have viewed Wittgenstein as adopting a behavioristic analysis of mental phenomena; others have credited him with preserving private, inner mental process, and intro ducing 'criteria' to bridge the gap between mind and behavior. If what I have to say in the first part of this essay is correct, it follows that both of these interpretations are fundamentally in error, and that both errors have a common source.

Identity, intensionality, and intentionality

Abstract: Identity, it has been remarked, is a rather elementary concept, and so it may be. I surmise however that we shall never possess a steady comprehension of this notion until it is satisfactorily explained how one may entertain thoughts concerning a certain object without ever engaging these very thoughts about another object, when a modicum of common sense demands that these objects are one and the same. From Dame Jane's Philosophical Notebook

The identification of metaphor

Abstract: A number of philosophers, linguists and psychologists have made the dual claim that metaphor is cognitively significant and that metaphorical utterances have a meaning not reducible to literal paraphrase. Such a position requires support from an account of metaphorical meaning that can render metaphors cognitively meaningful without the reduction to literal statement. It therefore requires a theory of meaning that can integrate metaphor within its sematics, yet specify why it is not reducible to literal paraphrase. I introduce the idea of a “second-order meaning”, of which metaphor is but one instance, that is a function on literal-conventional, i.e., first-order meaning, and outline a linguistic framework designed to provide a representation of linguistic meaning for both. This framework is designed to represent linguistic units ranging from a single word to an entire text since I argue that the by-now familiar position that the sentence is the appropriate unit for metaphor has mislead us into asking the wrong questions about metaphorical meaning. With this apparatus, we can specify the conditions under which an utterance may transcend the constraints on first-order meaning (transgressions not always apparent on the sentential level), without thereby being “meaningless”. Conversely, we can specify the conditions that may render apparently odd utterances first-order meaningful rather than metaphorical. In this way we see how metaphorical language differs both from deviant language and from specialized language such as technical language, fanciful and fantastical language (in fairy tales, science fiction, etc.).