Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: The Age of Meaning

By Scott Soames

This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures. The first volume takes the story from 1900 to mid-century. The second brings the history up to date.


As Scott Soames tells it, the story of analytic philosophy is one of great but uneven progress, with leading thinkers making important advances toward solving the tradition's core problems. Though no broad philosophical position ever achieved lasting dominance, Soames argues that two methodological developments have, over time, remade the philosophical landscape. These are (1) analytic philosophers' hard-won success in understanding, and distinguishing the notions of logical truth, a priori truth, and necessary truth, and (2) gradual acceptance of the idea that philosophical speculation must be grounded in sound prephilosophical thought. Though Soames views this history in a positive light, he also illustrates the difficulties, false starts, and disappointments endured along the way. As he engages with the work of his predecessors and contemporaries--from Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein to Donald Davidson and Saul Kripke--he seeks to highlight their accomplishments while also pinpointing their shortcomings, especially where their perspectives were limited by an incomplete grasp of matters that have now become clear.


Soames himself has been at the center of some of the tradition's most important debates, and throughout writes with exceptional ease about its often complex ideas. His gift for clear exposition makes the history as accessible to advanced undergraduates as it will be important to scholars. Despite its centrality to philosophy in the English-speaking world, the analytic tradition in philosophy has had very few synthetic histories. This will be the benchmark against which all future accounts will be measured.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Feb 9, 2009
• ISBN: 9781400825806

Scott Soames

Scott Soames is Professor of Philosophy (specializing in philosophy of language and linguistics), Yale University. David M. Perlmutler is Professor of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego.

Book preview

PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS

in the

TWENTIETH CENTURY

VOLUME 2

THE AGE OF MEANING

Scott Soames

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2003 by Princeton University Press

Published by

Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved

eISBN: 978-1-40082-580-6

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Soames, Scott.

Philosophical analysis in the twentieth century/Scott Soames.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: v. 2. The age of meaning.

ISBN: 0-691-11574-5 (v. 2: alk. paper)

1. Analysis (Philosophy) 2. Methodology—History—20th century.

3. Philosophy—History—20th century. I. Title.

B808.5 S63 2003 2002042724

146''.4—dc21

This book has been composed in Galliard

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

www.pupress.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED

TO MY SON

BRIAN

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction to Volume

PART ONE: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN’S PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

CHAPTER 1 Rejection of the Tractarian Conception of Language and Analysis

CHAPTER 2 Rule Following and the Private Language Argument

Suggested Further Reading

PART TWO: CLASSICS OF ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY: TRUTH, GOODNESS, THE MIND, AND ANALYSIS

CHAPTER 3 Ryle’s Dilemmas

CHAPTER 4 Ryle’s Concept of Mind

CHAPTER 5

Strawson’s Performative Theory of Truth

CHAPTER 6 Hare’s Performative Theory of Goodness

Suggested Further Reading

PART THREE: MORE CLASSICS OF ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY: THE RESPONSE TO RADICAL SKEPTICISM

CHAPTER 7 Malcolm’s Paradigm Case Argument

CHAPTER 8 Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia

Suggested Further Reading

PART FOUR: PAUL GRICE AND THE END OF ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER 9 Language Use and the Logic of Conversation

Suggested Further Reading

PART FIVE: THE PHILOSOPHICAL NATURALISM OF WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE

CHAPTER 10

The Indeterminacy of Translation

CHAPTER 11 Quine’s Radical Semantic Eliminativism

Suggested Further Reading

PART SIX: DONALD DAVIDSON ON TRUTH AND MEANING

CHAPTER 12 Theories of Truth as Theories of Meaning

CHAPTER 13 Truth, Interpretation, and the Alleged Unintelligibility of Alternative Conceptual Schemes

Suggested Further Reading

PART SEVEN: SAUL KRIPKE ON NAMING AND NECESSITY

CHAPTER 14 Names, Essence, and Possibility

CHAPTER 15 The Necessary Aposteriori

CHAPTER 16 The Contingent Apriori

CHAPTER 17 Natural Kind Terms and Theoretical Identification Statements

Suggested Further Reading

EPILOGUE The Era of Specialization

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LIKE VOLUME 1, this volume grew out of a lecture course for upper-division undergraduates and beginning graduate students given several times at Princeton University—this one in 1998, 2000, and 2002. As such, it has benefited from those who attended the lectures and participated in discussions connected with them. In addition, I am very grateful to five people for reading and commenting on the manuscript of Volume 2—my Princeton colleagues, Professors Mark Greenberg and Gil Harman, Professor John Hawthorne of Rutgers University, my longtime friend and philosophical confidant Professor Ali Kazmi of the University of Calgary, and my Ph.D. student Jeff Speaks. All five read the manuscript carefully and provided me with detailed and extremely helpful criticisms. In addition, Ali and Jeff spent many hours with me discussing important philosophical issues connected with it. Without the contributions of these five philosophers, this work would have been much poorer. As with Volume 1, the people at Princeton University Press–particularly, Jodi Beder, Ian Malcolm, and Debbie Tegarden–did an outstanding job, and contributed much to the final shape of the work. Finally, I would again like to express my appreciation to Martha, who means so much to me, for all she has added both to my life and to the creation of these volumes.

INTRODUCTION

OVERVIEW AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Overview of the Period

This volume continues the story of the leading developments in twentieth-century analytic philosophy begun in volume 1, which ended with the mid-century views of W. V. Quine. Taking up where that one left off, this volume covers the period starting roughly with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953 but completed several years earlier, and ending about the time of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, originally given as three lectures at Princeton University in 1970. Topics covered will include the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein, the ordinary language school of Gilbert Ryle, John L. Austin, Peter Strawson, Richard M. Hare, and Norman Malcolm, the attack on the ordinary language school led by Paul Grice and the recognition of the need to distinguish meaning from use, Quine’s naturalism and skepticism about meaning, Donald Davidson’s systematic theory of truth and meaning, and Kripke’s reconceptualization of fundamental semantic and philosophical categories.

The period studied in these two volumes has the distinction of being old enough to be not quite contemporary, while recent enough not to have achieved the venerable status of history. This makes for an interesting combination. On the one hand, we have achieved enough distance to be able to look back at the work done in the period and begin to form an overall picture of what was achieved and what was missed. On the other hand, since the philosophers studied in these volumes still cast long shadows over current debates, the critical overview we develop should be relevant to contemporary discussions in philosophy. This will, I think, become more apparent as we move through volume 2, and begin to encounter conceptual advances that not only ushered in a new philosophical future, but also transformed our view of our analytic past.

The period discussed in volume 2 begins with the ascendancy of two leading ideas, both growing out of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The first was that philosophical problems are due solely to the misuse of language. Thus, the job of the philosopher is not to construct elaborate theories to solve philosophical problems, but to expose the linguistic confusions that fooled us into thinking there were genuine problems to be solved in the first place. The second leading idea was that meaning itself—the key to progress in philosophy—was not to be studied from a theoretical or abstract scientific perspective. Rather than constructing general theories of meaning, philosophers were supposed to attend to subtle aspects of language use, and to show how misuse of certain words leads to philosophical perplexity and confusion. So what we have at the outset is a remarkable combination of views: all of philosophy depends on a proper understanding of meaning, but there is no systematic theory of meaning, or method of studying it, other than by informally assembling observations about aspects of the use of particular philosophically significant words in more or less ordinary situations.

As one might have guessed, this combination of views proved to be unstable. There are too many factors in addition to meaning that influence when and how particular words are used in order for us to draw philosophically useful conclusions primarily from piecemeal observations about ordinary use. What is needed is some sort of systematic theory of what meaning is, and how it interacts with these other factors governing the use of language. This insight was something that gradually emerged during the 1950s and early 1960s as ordinary language philosophers wrestled with their dilemma. Two important milestones on the way were the development of the theory of speech acts by John L. Austin, and the work on conversational implicature by Paul Grice, both of which we will say something about in this volume.

The end result was that at a certain point philosophers who were convinced that philosophical problems were simply linguistic problems came to recognize that they needed a systematic theory of meaning. However, it was unclear whether such a theory was possible, or, if it was, what it should look like. At the time, skepticism on the matter was fueled by Quine’s highly influential arguments in Word and Object and Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, which reject our ordinary notions of meaning and reference as scientifically hopeless, while proposing radically deflated substitutes. Meaning, as Quine conceived of it, was not the center of anything, certainly not philosophy. However, his was not the only voice. In the early 1960s an important development took place. Philosophers working in a different tradition, growing out of the development of formal logic, came up with a philosophical conception of meaning that many found irresistible. The conception was formulated by Donald Davidson, who conceived of a theory of meaning as a systematic theory of the truth conditions of the sentences of a language. To many this seemed like precisely the thing that was needed to fulfill the conception of philosophy as the analysis of meaning—no matter that the conception of meaning employed was a descendant of one that the later Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers who followed him had earlier rejected as irrelevant.

However, the story was not over. Shortly after the development of Davidson’s theory of meaning, Saul Kripke came along to explode the idea that the problems of philosophy were all problems of meaning or linguistic analysis. So we have a historical development with considerable irony. We start with the conviction that all problems of philosophy are really linguistic confusions to be resolved by a clear understanding of meaning. However, it is soon realized that in order to pursue this idea we need some theoretical understanding of meaning. This leads eventually to the widespread acceptance of a certain kind of logically and scientifically inspired theory of meaning, which—despite its many shortcomings—represents a significant advance. Then, at about this time, a powerful and persuasive position is developed that leads to the conclusion that however valuable it is to have an informative theory of meaning, it is a mistake to think that our most basic philosophical problems can be resolved by appealing to it. Such is the story that will be developed in volume 2.

Historical Background

We begin the story of the period from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to Kripke’s Naming and Necessity with a review of the historical background, covered in volume 1, that led up to it. Crucial to the development of the analytic approach was G. E. Moore’s conception of the proper starting point in philosophy. According to Moore, there is no defensible starting point in philosophy that is more privileged and beyond reasonable doubt than our most fundamental commonsense convictions—e.g., the conviction that we exist, that we are conscious beings, that we inhabit a world containing other conscious beings as well as material objects of various sorts; the conviction that not only do these things exist now, but many also existed in the past, some at times before we were born; and finally, our conviction that we have some genuine knowledge of the existence and character of many of these things. According to Moore, any attempt to ground these convictions on something more certain than they are is bound to fail; no such grounding is possible. Moreover, any claim that we can’t know these commonsense propositions to be true is something that presupposes a philosophical conception of knowledge that stands more in need of justification than the commonsense propositions themselves. This point of view, forcefully expressed by Moore, recurs again and again in the analytic tradition throughout the twentieth century. Not all analytic philosophers have accepted every aspect of it. But it has remained a powerful and influential force.

Although Moore thought that philosophy couldn’t contest our most basic commonsense convictions, he did believe that philosophy might be able to provide an analysis of their content—an analysis that would make clear how commonsense truths can genuinely be known. But how should such analysis proceed? Since Moore himself wasn’t sure, it was left to Bertrand Russell to provide what became the most widely accepted answer to this question. According to Russell, the task of philosophical analysis was primarily that of uncovering the hidden logical forms of sentences, which he took to be the forms of the thoughts that the sentences were used to express. Failure to identify the logical forms of sentences, and to distinguish them from the sentences’ grammatical forms, was, he believed, the source of many of the most serious errors in philosophy.

Russell illustrated his point with the problem of negative existentials. A negative existential is a sentence that says that a certain thing, or a certain kind of thing, doesn’t exist—e.g., Carnivorous cows don’t exist, or The creature from the black lagoon doesn’t exist. Such sentences are grammatically of subject-predicate form. Standardly, we think that a sentence of this form is true if and only if the subject refers to something that has the property expressed by the predicate. For example, the sentence Pedro Martinez is a baseball player is true iff the referent of the subject expression—the man Pedro Martinez—has the property of being a baseball player. But if we say the same thing in the case of negative existentials, we get a paradox. Suppose some negative existential is true—e.g., the one about carnivorous cows. Then, it would seem that the subject expression—the phrase carnivorous cows—must refer to some things (carnivorous cows), and the predicate don’t exist must express a property (nonexistence) which those things have. But that, Russell thought, is impossible; if carnivorous cows are there to be referred to at all, then they must exist. Thus, it would seem that the sentence cannot be true; and, more generally, no negative existential can be true. But surely, that can’t be right.

According to Russell, the solution to this problem lies in the fact that the grammatical form of negative existentials obscures their true logical form. Roughly put, his view was that the logical form of the grammatically subject-predicate sentence Carnivorous cows don’t exist is given by the logical formula, For all x either x isn’t carnivorous or x isn’t a cow. The important point to notice is that this logical form does not contain a subject expression the job of which is to refer to something that is then said not to exist. Rather, Russell saw the logical form as making a claim about the property—expressed by either x is not carnivorous or x is not a cow—of not being carnivorous or not being a cow. The claim it makes is that this property is possessed by every object. The analysis of the negative existential The creature from the black lagoon doesn’t exist is similar. Roughly put, Russell takes this sentence to say that the property of being identical with an object o if and only if o is a creature from the black lagoon is a property that has no instances. He then generalizes this analysis by arguing that whenever a sentence contains a definite description—an expression of the form the so and so—its logical form will be of this complicated sort, and will not contain any single logical constituent corresponding to the grammatical unit the so and so. The end result is a conception of abstract logical form that is rather distant from surface grammatical form, and that has to be reached by a process of logical analysis. This theory of Russell’s—his theory of descriptions—became for many analytic philosophers in the first half of the century the paradigm of philosophical analysis.

Russell extended the paradigm into the philosophy of mathematics, where he defended the view that all of mathematics could ultimately be reduced to pure logic. The motivation for this view was, in part, his desire to explain the certainty of mathematics and our knowledge of it. He initially thought that if mathematics could all be reduced to logic, then it would have the highest degree of certainty anything can have. The reduction was thought of as coming in two parts. First, higher mathematics was reduced to arithmetic, something that was taken to have been accomplished prior to Russell. Next, arithmetic was to be reduced to logic; this was the project to which Russell contributed. To accomplish the reduction, he formulated a set of what purported to be logical axioms, and he proposed a set of definitions of the central concepts of arithmetic—natural number, zero, and successor—in terms of what he took to be purely logical concepts. He then showed how, using his definitions, the axioms of arithmetic could be derived from his set of logical axioms. In effect, this involved viewing simple arithmetical sentences as being abbreviations of very complex logical formulas. Although this might at first seem counterintuitive, the philosophical advantages of the analysis were thought to overshadow any computational complications. In the end, it is doubtful that anything did more to lay the foundations of the view that philosophy is logical and linguistic analyses than Russell’s theory of descriptions, and his reduction of formal theories of arithmetic to his system of logic.

After Russell came Wittgenstein, who had briefly been a student of Russell’s. He took Russell’s conception of analysis, and his distinction between logical and grammatical form, and made them the foundations of an integrated philosophical system, which he presented in his early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the Tractatus, he presents an aprioristic theory of meaning, intelligibility, and the limits of philosophy. According to the theory, all intelligible thoughts have contents and structures that are revealed by sentences in an ideal logical language, which constitutes the hidden core of our ordinary language. The theory classifies the sentences in this ideal language as falling into one or the other of two classes. The sentences in one class are contingent and capable of being known to be true, or to be false, only by doing observations and gathering evidence about the world. The sentences in the other class are either necessarily true or necessarily false. According to the theory, whenever a sentence of the ideal language is necessarily true (or necessarily false), it is capable of being shown to be such by logic alone.

On this view, there can be no special philosophical sentences that give information about the world. If a sentence gives information about the world, then it is empirical and not decidable by philosophical reasoning. If a sentence is a necessary truth, then it is a tautology, and requires only rigorous logical proof. Hence, there are no meaningful philosophical sentences, no philosophical thoughts, and there is no subject matter for philosophy. According to the Tractatus, philosophical problems arise solely from the misuse and misunderstanding of language. Confronted with a philosophical problem, the proper response is to make clear precisely what the misuse or misunderstanding is. Ideally, this should be done by giving the proper philosophical analysis of the problematic sentences, preferably by showing how to express them in an ideal logical language. So says the Tractatus. Later, after Wittgenstein had rejected the Tractatus, he retained this linguistic conception of philosophy, while giving up the picture of analysis as revealing hidden logical structure.

According to the Tractatus, the foundation of the hidden logical language consists of elementary or atomic sentences (propositions), which, if true, mirror the structure of the world. On this picture, the basis of all meaning is naming. The simplest linguistic expression is a name, the meaning of which is the object named. The simplest type of sentence, an atomic sentence, is a structured collection of names. The way the names are arranged in a sentence represents the way their bearers are portrayed as combining in the world—for example, the fact that the name a immediately precedes the symbol R, which in turn immediately precedes the symbol b, in the sentence a R b, may represent the referent of a as being located to the right of the referent of b. Atomic sentences are said to represent logically possible ways in which objects can be combined. Such combinations are called logically possible facts. A sentence (proposition) that stands for a logically possible fact is said to be true if and only if the fact really obtains, and so is actual rather than merely possible. According to the Tractatus, the truth values of all other sentences (propositions) are completely determined by the truth values of all the atomic sentences (propositions). In fact, all nonatomic sentences are claimed to be constructable from the atomic sentences by repeated applications of a simple operation that gathers together previously constructed sentences into a set, and jointly denies them. This is the picture of meaning that Wittgenstein constructs in the Tractatus, and that he later sets out to refute and replace in the Philosophical Investigations.

Another position that preceded the Investigations was logical positivism. Although the positivists accepted the Tractatus conception of philosophy as linguistic analysis, they didn’t accept the Tractatus conception of meaning. In its place, they offered a replacement that linked meaning with verification. Again, sentences were separated into two classes—contingent and empirical vs. analytically true or analytically false, where an analytically true sentence was said to be true solely in virtue of meaning, independent of any possible state of the world (and similarly for analytically false sentences). An attempt was then made to provide a precise criterion for determining which non-analytic, empirical sentences were meaningful. These attempts fell into two categories. First, the positivists tried to define empirical meaningfulness in terms of strong verifiability or strong falsifiability. A sentence was said to be strongly verifiable if and only if it was logically entailed by some finite consistent set of observation statements; it was said to be strongly falsifiable if and only if its negation was logically entailed by some finite consistent set of observation statements. In effect, strongly verifiable sentences were supposed to be those the truth of which could, in principle, be completely established on the basis of sensory observations alone; strongly falsifiable sentences were those the falsity of which could, in principle, be established in this way. However, the idea that an empirical sentence is meaningful only if it is either strongly verifiable or strongly falsifiable quickly came to grief when it was realized that, by this criterion, great masses of ordinary commonsense claims about the world, as well as most of natural science, would wrongly be characterized as meaningless. This realization led the positivists to try a different approach. This time the idea was to define empirical meaningfulness in terms of weak verifiability, where a sentence was said to be weakly verifiable if and only if it, together with other claims, logically entailed observational predictions not entailed by the other claims alone. However, this too led swiftly to disaster, since, when the idea was made precise, it turned out that all sentences, even patently nonsensical ones, ended up being characterized as meaningful. From these failures an important lesson was drawn: typically, the verification of one sentence depends on taking other sentences for granted. So if meaning is verification, then, in general, individual sentences don’t have meanings, considered on their own. Rather it is systems of sentences—theories or entire conceptual schemes—that are the primary bearers of meaning. Sentences are meaningful only in so far as they contribute to such theories.

As the first half of the twentieth century drew to a close, analytic philosophers fell into two main groups characterized by their response to this lesson. The first group was led by Willard Van Orman Quine, whose doctrine of holistic verificationism maintained that meaning is verification, and hence it is only reasonably extensive theories that have meanings on their own. In its simplest form, this view holds that the meaning of such a theory is the class of sensory observations that would support it, and hence that any two theories which would be supported by the same observations mean the same thing. This view was examined at the end of volume 1, where it was shown to lead to a number of paradoxical results, including some that paralleled problems which plagued earlier versions of verificationism. The second group of philosophers was influenced by the view that meaning is use, advanced by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations. In that work, Wittgenstein rejected views of meaning (including verificationism) that rest on what he took to be a false referential and descriptivist conception of language. In particular, he rejected any conception according to which the meaning of a word is what it stands for, and the meaning of a sentence is the potential fact or state of the world that it represents. By contrast, he thought that much of language isn’t descriptive or referential at all, and even that which is, isn’t entirely descriptive or referential. He held that what gives an expression meaning is never simply that a correlation has been set up between it and something in the world; rather, an expression is meaningful only if there is an agreed-upon pattern of use of the expression to which language users conform that allows it to play a useful and intelligible role in their lives. For the Wittgenstein of the Investigations, sentences and other expressions don’t have to stand in any special justificatory relation to the world or to experience in order to be meaningful; any expression for which there are socially useful agreed-upon conditions of correct application qualifies as meaningful. What philosophers need to do, he insisted, is not to construct models of what they think meaning must be, but to look carefully at particular cases to see what the conventions governing the correct application of our words really are. It is to this conception of meaning that we will turn in chapter 1.

A Word about Notation

In what follows I will use either single quotation or italics when I want to refer to particular words, expressions, or sentences—e.g., ‘good’ or good. Sometimes both will be used in a single example—e.g., ‘Knowledge is good’ is a true sentence of English iff knowledge is good. This italicized sentence refers to itself, a sentence the first constituent of which is the quote name of the English sentence that consists of the word ‘knowledge’ followed by the word ‘is’ followed by the word ‘good’. In addition to using italics for quotation, sometimes I will use them for emphasis, though normally I will use boldface for that purpose. I trust that in each case it will be clear from the context how these special notations are being used.

In addition when formulating generalizations about words, expressions, or sentences, I will often use the notation of boldface italics, which is to be understood as equivalent to the technical device known as corner quotes. For example, when explaining how simple sentences of a language L are combined to form larger sentences, I may use an example like (1a), which has the meaning given in (1b).

1a. For any sentences A and B of the language L, A & B is a sentence of L.

b. For any sentences A and B of the language L, the expression which consists of A followed by ‘&’ followed by B is a sentence of L.

Given (1), we know that if ‘knowledge is good’ and ‘ignorance is bad’ are sentences of L, then ‘knowledge is good & ignorance is bad’ and ‘ignorance is bad & knowledge is good’ are also sentences of L.

Roughly speaking, a generalization of the sort illustrated by (2a) has the meaning given by (2b).

2a. For any (some) expression E, . . . E . . . is so and so.

b. For any (some) expression E, the expression consisting of ‘. . .’, followed by E, followed by ‘. . .’, is so and so.

One slightly tricky example of this is given in (3).

3a. For any name n in L, ‘n’ refers to n expresses a truth.

b. For any name n in L, the expression consisting of the left-hand quote mark, followed by n, followed by the right-hand quote mark, followed by ‘refers to’, followed by n, expresses a truth.

Particular instances of (3a) are given in (4).

4a. ‘Brian Soames’ refers to Brian Soames expresses a truth.

b. ‘Greg Soames’ refers to Greg Soames expresses a truth.

Finally, I frequently employ the expression iff as short for if and only if. Thus, (5a) is short for (5b).

5a. For all x, x is an action an agent ought to perform iff x is an action that produces a greater balance of good over bad consequences than any alternative action open to the agent.

5b. For all x, x is an action an agent ought to perform if and only if x is an action that produces a greater balance of good over bad consequences than any alternative action open to the agent.

PART ONE

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN’S PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS

CHAPTER 1

REJECTION OF THE TRACTARIAN

CONCEPTION OF LANGUAGE

AND ANALYSIS

CHAPTER OUTLINE

1. Critique of the Tractarian Conception of Language

The Augustinian picture vs. the conception of meaning as use

Conceptual prerequisites of ostensive definitions

Reference and analysis

The meaning and reference of names

Language games, family resemblances, and vagueness

2. Wittgenstein’s New Conception of Language and Linguistic Analysis

Ordinary language is not to be understood on the model of logical calculi; sentences have neither hidden logical forms nor unique analyses

Language use is not to be explained by speakers knowing and being guided by linguistic rules, but rather by unthinking, socially-conditioned agreement

3. Wittgenstein’s Deflationary Conception of Philosophy

Roots of this conception in his identification of the philosophical with the necessary and apriori, of these with the analytic

Doctrines of the Investigations as self-undermining because they lead to a conception of philosophy which they do not fit

Overview of The Philosophical Investigations

There are three main topics in the Philosophical Investigations : (i) a critique of what Wittgenstein regards as the dominant referential conception of meaning, and a proposal to replace it with a conception in which to use language meaningfully is to master a certain kind of social practice; (ii) a critique of the previously dominant conception of philosophical analysis, and the substitution of a new conception of analysis to play the central role in philosophy; and (iii) the development of a new philosophical psychology in which what appear on the surface to be sentences that report private sensations and other internal mental events or states are viewed as having meanings which license their assertion on the basis of public criteria having to do with behavior and external circumstances. The book’s center of gravity is the discussion of what it is to follow a (linguistic) rule, and the lessons drawn from it about (i), (ii), and (iii). However, Wittgenstein does not start with this. Instead, he begins with preliminary critiques of his earlier, Tractarian conceptions of language and analysis. He then uses the discussion of rule following to strengthen his critiques, to illuminate his new conceptions of meaning and analysis, and to illustrate their consequences by applying them to psychological sentences. We will follow him in this. In this chapter we will deal with (i) and (ii); in the next chapter we will be concerned with (iii).

The Critique of Tractarian Descriptivism

The Augustinian Picture vs. the Conception of Meaning as Use

We begin with Wittgenstein’s critique of the central tenets of his earlier referentialism about language. The view under attack holds that the meaning of an expression is what it names or stands for, and the meaning of a sentence is a possible fact the actual existence of which would make the sentence true. Natural corollaries of the view stipulate that learning a language, and being a competent user of its expressions, is the result of recognizing correlations between words and the objects they stand for, and that being justified in accepting a contingent, empirical sentence S involves having reason to believe that the language-independent possible state of affairs which constitutes the truth conditions of S actually obtains.

Wittgenstein introduces this picture of language in section 1 of the Investigations with a quote from Augustine:

When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.¹

Wittgenstein’s summary of the view is as follows:

These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names.— In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.

Having presented this picture, Wittgenstein immediately challenges it with his example of the five red apples. He says:

Now think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked five red apples. He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked apples; then he looks up the word red in a table and finds a color sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers—I assume that he knows them by heart—up to the word five and for each number he takes an apple of the same color as the sample out of the drawer.—It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words.—But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?—Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.—But what is the meaning of the word five?— No such thing was in question here, only how the word five is used.²

In explaining what it is to understand the expression five red apples, Wittgenstein here recounts what one would do with it. Mastery of the numeral ‘five’ is not explained by finding some unique object for it to name; rather, mastery is a matter of engaging in certain sorts of routine that govern its application. The shopkeeper recites a series of sounds—one, two, three, four, five—and correlates them one-to-one with a series of acts—each act involving taking an apple out of the drawer. Mastery of the numerals is mastery of routines like this. This is Wittgenstein’s first example of the thesis that meaning is use.

In sections 2 and 6–21, he continues the theme of meaning as use with the example of the primitive language of a builder and his assistant. Here, the sentences—Pillar, Slab, Block, and Beam—are not used as descriptions; rather, they are used to give orders. Wittgenstein goes on to emphasize many different uses of sentences as a way of undermining the tendency to take describing, stating a fact, or asserting something as primary. The value of undermining this picture is that it allows him to concentrate on using language as participating in many kinds of social activity. In the elementary language game he describes, there is no referring to an object and predicating a property of it. There is only the co-ordination of words and actions. The moves in the language game are meaningful in so far as they contribute to the coordination of the actions of the builder and his assistant.

Conceptual Prerequisites of Ostensive Definitions

One case study for the thesis that meaning is use is provided by names. At section 26 Wittgenstein starts talking about proper names, common nouns like cat, red, and round, and ostensive definitions. He has already pointed out that many parts of language are not names. Now he emphasizes that even when we introduce a name with an ostensive definition, the definition requires background assumptions in order to work. For example, suppose I point to one of the buttons on my shirt and say This is red, in an attempt to convey to you the meaning of the word red. In order for you to understand my intention, you need to know what I am pointing at—at myself, at my chest, at my shirt, at the button?—and you also need to know which aspect of the thing I am pointing at is the one I am characterizing—its size, its shape, its color, its price? This is where the needed background assumptions come in; it is only by relying on them that I can get my meaning across.

It is certainly true that these background beliefs are necessary in order for an ostensive definition to work; however, Wittgenstein appears to go beyond this, and suggest something stronger—namely, that ostensive definition (in the sense of the Augustinian picture discussed in section 1) makes sense only if one has already mastered a significant part of language in advance. For example, if you are not sure how to interpret my ostensive definition of red, I might clarify things by saying The color of the buttons on my shirt is red. But that presupposes that you have already understood the words color, buttons, and shirt.

Wittgenstein realizes that there are cases in which I could give my ostensive definition, This is red, and you would get the idea without my having to use any further words, because you would correctly guess that I was pointing to one of my buttons and talking about its color. In light of this, one wonders whether further language is always needed to understand an ostensive definition after all. Wittgenstein addresses this point in section 32.

Someone coming into a strange country will sometimes learn the language of the inhabitants from ostensive definitions that they give him; and he will often have to guess the meaning of these definitions; and will guess sometimes right, sometimes wrong.

And now, I think, we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak. And think would here mean something like talk to itself .

There is something quite striking about this passage. Wittgenstein seems to equate (i) a child’s ability to have thoughts about what the words he has been exposed to stand for with (ii) the child’s already having a language in which to express those thoughts. Since it is presumably absurd to suppose that the child already has such a language, Wittgenstein seems to be casting doubt on the idea that the child can think at all prior to having learned his first language.

To this one is tempted to reply: Of course the child can think before he has learned to speak. Have you ever been around young children? It is obvious that they have thoughts before they can speak. Moreover, they would be in pretty bad shape if they couldn’t have such thoughts. How could they learn anything—let alone language—if they couldn’t do at least some thinking first? However, Wittgenstein would not accept this reply. One of the themes of the Investigations is that terms like think and understand, which appear to refer to private mental events or processes, should really be understood as standing for complex behavioral and social dispositions, standardly including dispositions to use language. Of course, if one takes thinking to be something that essentially involves dispositions to use language in certain ways, then the idea of a child being able to think before he has language will seem to be a non-starter. Now, I am not sure that, in the end, Wittgenstein really wants to go so far as to claim that all thinking requires language use or linguistic dispositions, and hence to deny that non-linguistic creatures can have any thoughts at all.³ However, he does seem to presuppose that they couldn’t have the kinds of thoughts needed to understand ostensive definitions. Why, precisely, we should take this to be so is something that, regrettably, he is not terribly clear about (at least at this stage of the Investigations). Still, the import of his view is clear enough: since the thoughts required to interpret an ostensive definition cannot be had prior to mastering a significant amount of language, ostensive definition cannot be the foundation of all language learning and language use. And if it can’t serve as the foundation of language learning and use, Wittgenstein seems to suggest, it is hard to see how the referentialist conception of language, with its emphasis on the importance of naming, can get off the ground. It is not that he is suggesting that we never succeed in naming anything ostensively, or in describing something once we have named it. Of course, we do. Rather, he is saying that naming and describing cannot constitute the essence of meaning, since in order to be able to name or describe anything, we must have a rich system of meaning already in place. To be sure, he hasn’t established this, or even really argued for it yet. He has just raised the issue, and started to paint an alternative picture.

Reference and Analysis

In sections 37 and 38, he attacks a different part of the descriptivist, or referential, conception of meaning. He indicates that it is not clear what we have in mind when we talk about the naming or reference relation.

What is the relation between name and thing named?—Well, what is it? Look at language-game (2) [the builder and his assistant] or at another one: there you can see the sort of thing this relation consists in. This relation may also consist, among many other things, in the fact that hearing the name calls before our mind the picture of what is named; and it also consists, among other things, in the name’s being written on the thing named or being pronounced when the thing is pointed at.⁴

But what, for example, is the word this the name of in language-game (8) [Here Wittgenstein refers to an expansion of the primitive language game of the builder and his assistant] or the word that in the ostensive definition that is called . . .?—If you do not want to produce confusion you will do best not to call these words names at all.—Yet, strange to say, the word this has been called the only genuine name; so that anything else we call a name was one only in an inexact, approximate sense.

This queer conception springs from a tendency to sublime the logic of our language—as one might put it. The proper answer to it is: we call very different things names; the word name is used to characterize many different kinds of use of a word, related to one another in many different ways:—but the kind of use that this has is not among them.

. . . This is connected with the conception of naming as, so to speak, an occult process. Naming appears as a queer connection of a word with an object.—And you really get such a queer connection when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word this innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object. And we can also say the word this to the object, as it were address the object as this—a queer use of this word, which doubtless only occurs in doing philosophy.⁵

The object of Wittgenstein’s ridicule here is (in part) our inclination to think that there is just one relation which all names bear to their referents. Wittgenstein thinks that this idea is obviously incorrect. We can say, if we like, that the numeral ‘5’ names or refers to the number five, but only if we do not take the naming or reference relation that we appeal to in this case to be the same as the relation between someone’s name and the person named, for example. In section 38, he indicates that he thinks that the philosophical problem of discovering the nature of the naming or reference relation falsely presupposes that there is just one such relation. He dismisses this idea with the general remark about philosophy, "For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday."

It is less clear what relevance his dismissal of the idea that there is a unique reference relation has for his overall attack on the referentialist conception of meaning. Perhaps the idea is this: the referentialist is inclined to think that the relation of reference is basic, that by taking it as our starting point we can give a general account of meaning and understanding, and by employing it in the philosophical analysis of language we can achieve a level of clarity and exactness not obtainable in any other way. By contrast, Wittgenstein thinks that talk about reference is something that stands in as much need of analysis and clarification as anything else. In certain cases we mean one thing when we talk about the reference of a word, and in other cases we mean something else. Since talk about reference is subject to the same sorts of ambiguity and unclarity as the ordinary talk it is supposed to be used to analyze, he seems to suggest, claims about reference can’t provide the basis of, or starting point for, all philosophical analyses of meaning and understanding.

This point, though arresting, is telling only if supplemented with something further. Consider the view that to understand a word is to know what it refers to (which, we may suppose, includes, in the case of a predicate, what it applies to). It is one thing to be told that by reference we mean different things in different cases; it is quite another to be told that what we mean by reference in at least some of these cases is such that understanding a word cannot be explained as knowing what it refers to. Maybe the thought is that for any specific disambiguation of ‘refers’, the general claim that to understand any word is to know what it refers to in that specific sense must be false, since, at a minimum, for different words, different reference relations will be required. However, even if that were to turn out to be so, it would still leave open the possibility that understanding a word is always a matter of what it refers to, in the relevant sense of ‘refers’. To rule even this out, one might argue that in at least some cases—e.g., the terms ‘5’, ‘Uranus’, and ‘neutrino’—we don’t understand these terms because we know that ‘5’ refers to an object iff it is the number 5, that ‘Uranus’ refers to an object iff it is Uranus, and that ‘neutrino’ applies to an object iff it is a neutrino; rather, we know these elementary truths about reference because we understand and accept the sentences that express them, which in turn presupposes that we already understand the expressions ‘5’, ‘Uranus’, and ‘neutrino’ them-selves. If such an argument could successfully be made, it would show that understanding an expression is at least sometimes conceptually prior to knowing what it refers to, in which case the latter cannot be the explanation of the former.⁶ Although Wittgenstein seems to have believed this, he did not explicitly argue in this way, and his argument at this stage of the Investigations is left inexplicit and incomplete.

The Meaning and Reference of Names

In sections 39 and 40, he continues his assault on the referential conception of meaning with an argument that the meaning of a name can’t be its bearer. Here is section 39.

But why does it occur to one to want to make precisely this word [the word this] into a name, when it evidently is not a name?—That is just the reason. For one is tempted to make an objection against what is ordinarily called a name. It can be put like this: a name ought really to signify a simple. And for this one might perhaps give the following reasons: The word Excalibur, say, is a proper name in the ordinary sense. The sword Excalibur consists of parts combined in a particular way. If they are combined differently Excalibur does not exist. But it is clear that the sentence Excalibur has a sharp blade makes sense whether Excalibur is still whole or is broken up. But if Excalibur is the name of an object, this object no longer exists when Excalibur is broken in pieces; and as no object would then correspond to the name it would have no meaning. But then the sentence Excalibur has a sharp blade would contain a word that had no meaning, and hence the sentence would be nonsense. But it does make sense; so there must always be something corresponding to the words of which it consists. So the word Excalibur must disappear when the sense is analyzed and its place be taken by words which name simples. It will be reasonable to call these words the real names.

This is essentially one of Russell’s old arguments that ordinary names are not real, or logically proper, names, since ordinary names can have meanings even when they lack referents, whereas the meaning of a real (logically proper) name is nothing other than its referent. Unlike ordinary names, Russell thought, at least some uses of the demonstrative ‘this’ conformed rather well to this criterion. If one says, pointing at nothing in particular, This is a fine red one, then it is plausible to suppose that since one hasn’t identified any object to which the predicate is supposed to be applied, one’s sentence lacks content, and one hasn’t meaningfully asserted anything. For reasons like this, Russell was inclined to say that the word ‘this’ functions as a genuine name, whereas ordinary proper names do not.

Although Wittgenstein at one time accepted essentially this argument, by the time of the Investigations, he no longer did. Here is section 40:

Let us first discuss this point of the argument: that a word has no meaning if nothing corresponds to it.—It is important to note that the word meaning is being used illicitly if it is used to signify the thing that ‘corresponds’ to the word. That is to confound the meaning of a name with the bearer of the name. When Mr. N. N. dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies. And it would be nonsensical to say that, for if the name ceased to have meaning it would make no sense to say Mr. N. N. is dead.

In this passage, Wittgenstein turns the Russellian argument around and uses it to refute the contention that the referent of a name is its meaning. In addition, we get an anticipation of his rejection of old-style philosophical analysis (which assigned abstract logical forms to sentences). Russell and the early Wittgenstein would have said that the fact that a sentence containing an ordinary name would remain meaningful even if its referent ceased to exist, shows that what looks like a name really doesn’t function logically as a name; hence the whole sentence must be given a complex analysis. For Russell and the early Wittgenstein, genuine names must have referents the existence of which is somehow guaranteed. For Russell this meant that names could refer only to things that one could not be mistaken about, like private sense data, or the abstract objects with which one was directly acquainted. For the early Wittgenstein it meant that names must refer to indestructible metaphysical simples that could not fail to exist. Either way, sentences containing ordinary names had to be analyzed in terms of complicated logical forms, which, if they contained genuine, logically proper names at all, were construed as talking about a certain philosophically revealed subject matter. The Wittgenstein of the Investigations rejects the idea that sentences have analyses of this sort. In the sections following 40, he demolishes his old Tractarian view that there are indestructible, necessarily existing simples in the world that cannot be described but can only be named by the corresponding linguistic simples—i.e., by expressions satisfying Russell’s idealized conception of genuine names. The significance of this demolition is rather limited, however, since the views about metaphysical simples in the Tractatus were always seen to be implausible, and never had much of a following. Undermining them was not a great advance.

A more interesting question is whether Wittgenstein’s argument in these sections really shows that the meaning of an ordinary name can’t be its referent. I am not convinced that it does. Certainly the sentence Socrates is dead continues to be meaningful even though the man Socrates no longer exists, and the name Socrates does not refer to any existing thing. However, is it so clear that Socrates fails to refer to anything at all? If it did fail to refer, then it would be hard to see how the sentence Socrates is dead could be true—since the subject expression wouldn’t refer to anything that had the property expressed by the predicate. So perhaps names can continue to refer to things that once existed but no longer do. If the things they refer to are their meanings, then names may remain meaningful, even when the things that are their meanings cease to exist.

If this seems surprising, consider what the alternative might be. Suppose one thought, with Russell, that the meaning of a name like Socrates was given by a description associated with it by speakers. Suppose, for example, one took the name to be short for the description the philosopher who was convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens, and then applied Russell’s theory of descriptions. The result would be problematic in at least two respects. First, if

1. Socrates is dead

meant the same as

2. There exists an x such that (i) x is identical with an individual iff that individual was a philosopher convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens, and (ii) x is dead,

then (1) would entail

3. There exists an x such that x is identical with an individual iff that individual was a philosopher convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens,

which, according to the analysis, means the same as

4. Socrates exists.

But it is absurd to suppose that Socrates is dead entails Socrates exists. Second, the descriptive counterpart (5) of (1) seems to be true, despite the fact that its most natural Russellian analysis, (2), is false.

5. The philosopher who was convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens is dead.

Thus, the orthodox Russellian analysis is in trouble.

Nor will it do to claim that so and so is dead has the logical form it is not the case that so and so is alive; it is not the case that the largest prime number is alive, but that doesn’t mean that that the largest prime number is dead. There is, however, a different, more complicated analysis of (5) that is more congenial to the Russellian.⁷ In giving the analysis, one begins by paraphrasing (5) as (7).

7. The philosopher who was convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens was once alive but no longer is.

Next, one assigns (7) the logical form (8).

8. In the past it was the case that [there existed an x such that ( (i) x was identical with an individual iff that individual was a philosopher convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens, and (ii) x was alive but it is now the case that x is not alive)].

This sentence is true at the present time tnow iff for some earlier time tthen (i) there was (at tthen) an x such that x was identical with an individual iff that individual was a philosopher convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens, and (ii) x was alive (at tthen), but at tnow x is not alive. If this analysis is legitimate, then the Russellian can, in principle, account for (5). However, in order for the analysis to work, it must now be the case that the formula x is not alive is genuinely both meaningful and true relative to an assignment to the variable ‘x’ of an individual who once existed but no longer does. This is significant since, whatever may be true of other parts of language, the meanings of variables (relative to assignments) are simply the objects they are assigned as referents. Thus, if variables can be meaningful by virtue of referring to no-longer-existent objects, and if formulas containing them can be both true and meaningful when the variables are taken to so refer, then the fact that Socrates no longer exists is no argument (a) that the name Socrates doesn’t refer to him, (b) that the referent of Socrates is not the meaning of Socrates, or (c) that if the meaning of Socrates is its referent, then sentences containing it cannot be meaningful.

In light of this, the best thing to say about Wittgenstein’s example in section 40 seems to be that the name Mr. N. N. refers to someone who once existed, but no longer does. But then, the name does refer, even though its referent no longer exists. If this is right, then the name still has a referent, and Wittgenstein’s remarks do not show that its referent can’t be its meaning. The proponent of the view that Wittgenstein opposes may simply maintain that the name does mean something, even though the thing it means is something that no longer exists.⁸ Of course, the proponent of this view has not conclusively established his position either—for, as Wittgenstein