Benefits of Cancellation

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Benefits of Cancellation

Cancellation does have its upside. During the last ten years (it has been that long) I have had far more time to think, write philosophy, read (by choice), and pursue other interests. None of this would have been possible without ceasing to be a fulltime professor. This blog is one result. Not only that but I am no longer pestered with requests to give lectures, contribute to anthologies, review books, appear on panels, supervise theses, write references, help junior philosophers, travel to distant places, reply to professional emails, meet with people for lunch, and sign petitions: my time and energy are my own. This has enabled me to achieve results that would never have happened without the benefit of cancellation. No longer do I feel frustrated by lack of time to do what really matters to me. I am no longer on the academic treadmill. I don’t have to commute to work or attend faculty meetings or hold office hours. Less obviously, I now know who my true friends are: not those who ran for the hills at the slightest sign of trouble, despite the help I gave them over the years (one of whom I literally saved the life of), but those who were decent and steadfast—and I appreciate them all the more for it. So, for all these things I am thankful. But there is another question: who suffered by my cancellation? Who did it harm? Many people, especially those close me (family, in particular). What about all the students who never got to be taught by me? It didn’t benefit them (let’s assume the students I taught before were benefitted). I think it certainly harmed the department I used to belong to, and in myriad ways. It harmed my ex-colleagues (ex-friends). It also harmed academic philosophy in America for the simple reason that I have been excluded from contributing to the philosophical life of the country in which I still live. I flatter myself that this harm has been considerable. And there are other harms into which I won’t enter having to do with moral climate and academic freedom. So, there have been benefits to me and harms to others; considerable in both cases. I daresay this was not the intention of those who engineered the cancellation, or acquiesced in it, or simply turned a blind eye; but actions often have unexpected consequences.

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Character and Consciousness

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Character and Consciousness

It would be good to have a philosophy of character analogous to the philosophy of action or perception or emotion or thought or imagination or consciousness or the self. But we don’t. The subject hardly exists. I will take some steps to remedy that, focusing on the relationship between character and consciousness. First, let’s pin the subject down a bit, given its rather nebulous status. The OED gives us “the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual” for “character”. This is admirably concise and helpfully conjoins the mental with the moral. When we turn to “personality” we find “the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s character”; so, personality consists of the mental and moral qualities that constitute character—the one defines the other. Neither definition brings in the concept of a trait, but it is common to speak of personality and character traits: thus, character is to be defined as a combination of mental and moral traits, varying from person to person. What traits? A representative list would include: honesty, loyalty, generosity, impatience, integrity, empathy, bravery, fairness, wit, conscientiousness, flexibility, curiosity, and paranoia—along with their opposites. The first thing we feel inclined to say about this psychological terrain is that it is unconscious—or not conscious. But in what way is it not conscious? Not like the Freudian unconscious, which is the result of repression: no one represses their character traits—they are not generally shameful or disturbing to consciousness. They are not the source of neurosis or jokes or dreams or slips of the tongue. Nor are they like unconscious memories, which can be retrieved with mental effort; they were not once conscious and now lie in wait for conscious retrieval. Nor are they comparable to the unconscious mastery of our native language—computational machinery operating behind the scenes. They have their own sui generis form of unconsciousness, apparently. But they are also accessible to consciousness in another way: they can erupt into consciousness. Sartre gives the example of seeing a man walk into a room and feeing a sudden rush of conscious revulsion coupled with a strong desire to shun this man.[1] You thereby know that you hate him. Sartre calls this a “state”: it transcends the conscious convulsion that manifests it. It is not yet a trait of character, but it might be a symptom of such a trait, because you might be constitutionally prone to irrational hatreds and general interpersonal hostility. You might have the trait of irascibility. This Sartre calls a “quality” (note that the dictionary employs the same word). In fact, we don’t have a developed vocabulary for the type of property in which character consists, so we choose whatever locution that comes to hand. This suggests a certain ontological aporia, and is worth bearing in mind. The ontology of character is obscure, even ineffable. Some may reach for that philosophical catchall “disposition”: but that would be to try to reduce character to its manifestations in consciousness and behavior, and anyway would run into familiar problems with contrived dispositions in the absence of underlying character traits. In any case, our question has to do with the relationship between character and consciousness: between character reality and character phenomenology. Do we ever have flashes of conscious insight into our character? Is character necessarily hidden from consciousness? It is far from obvious that this is true; we might well experience such flashes. There might be something it is like to be irascible. An irascible man might be well aware of his tendency to irascible emotions and behavior—what with those upsurges of angry feeling at the slightest provocation or no provocation at all. He might feel perpetually on the brink of a violent outburst. That can happen for limited time periods in the life of many people, so what is to stop it occurring over a whole lifetime? A person could be consciously irascible and know himself to be so (or generous, empathetic, impatient, etc.) For example, it is perfectly obvious to me that I am an impatient individual, because I feel impatience all the time: I don’t infer it from my behavior—it isn’t a theoretical posit designed to explain what I observe. I’m not agnostic about it or self-deluded or plain ignorant. I am fully conscious of my impatient nature (and I try to curb it, with limited success—oh how I suffer!). This puts the lie to a well-known bromide about the epistemology of character, namely that there is no first-person privilege about it. The idea is that I am as ill-placed as another person to know my character, because I have only behavior to go on; it is nothing like knowing I am in pain or thinking. Certainly, one can be fallible about one’s character, but it does seem true that consciousness can reveal character quite plainly, and in a way not available to anyone else. There is something it is like to have a particular personality type—a certain specific noema (in Husserl’s terminology). Character can be an intentional object of a conscious act. It isn’t always but it can be. Why isn’t it always? Who knows—maybe it is just a matter of cognitive economy, not wasting valuable conscious space on what it is not necessary to consciously know. But it does tell us that character occupies a strangely ambiguous position vis-a-vis consciousness: it both is and isn’t conscious (not at the same time, of course). I think that in general people know quite well what kind of person they are. Their character is displayed to their consciousness—in all its gruesome glory. They may flinch from it and try to avoid it, but they know—they know perfectly well. How could you not know if you are a constitutionally envious or ill-intentioned person? You have an envious consciousness, an ill-intentioned inner aura. You know that your character exists and you know its lineaments—this is much clearer to you than the nature of someone else’s character. There is no symmetry between your knowledge of your own character and your knowledge of other people’s character (there is a real other character problem). Your own character never surprises you in the way other people’s character can: it never comes as a revelation, a shock, a bitter disappointment. Your character is hooked up to your conscious cognitive faculties in a way that other people’s character is not (same brain, remember). I don’t sit around speculating about my character (“Maybe I’m an exceptionally loyal generous person, though I strike myself as a bit of a bastard”). Character has close connections with emotions, and I am well aware of those: how could a generous person have these emotions? Thus, people try to conceal their character from others: they know quite well that they are a certain way and they don’t want other people to know—they are not in the dark about it, as others are. They consciously exploit the first-person third-person asymmetry. People probably start to do this in the teenage years when social manipulation sets in and self-reflection gets a grip; then it becomes a way of life. It isn’t that they are blissfully unaware of their character faults, or what are deemed such; their conscious self-knowledge is what guides their social behavior. I myself constantly conceal my impatience—it is not an attractive trait. I adopt a look of benign calm, spiritual ease, while inside I am seething with impatience. Nobody would want to hang out with me if I didn’t do this. It is not news to me to be told that I’m an impatient individual. Anyway, character is manifested in consciousness. It has a phenomenology. It is “intuitable”. It is not a transcendent mental reality, slyly escaping the searchlight of consciousness. It is noteworthy that the character traits often deemed inaccessible to consciousness are the bad ones; it isn’t supposed that people are unconscious of their good qualities. Shades of Freudian repression here: we render unconscious what we are ashamed of being. But wouldn’t it be odd if the only unconscious character traits were a subset of the totality? They should all be equally conscious or unconscious, but then the bad ones should be as conscious as the good ones, which are not unconscious. The truth is that our characters are uniformly accessible to consciousness; not constantly before the mind, to be sure, but capable of being known by conscious awareness. We are not a closed book to ourselves, as the Freudian legacy would have it, but an open secret (open to ourselves, closed to others). Character and consciousness are therefore interwoven. Character traits are not covert states of an unconscious medium but intentional objects of conscious mental acts. We are aware of ourselves as characterful beings.  The first finding of the philosophy of character is: character is conscious.[2]

[1] The Transcendence of the Ego (1957), p. 63.

[2] I haven’t discussed such familiar questions as whether character traits should be regarded as reducible or irreducible, real or fictitious, indispensable or eliminable. Are they primitives in the psychology of personality or explicable in other terms? I tend towards a realist view in which they act as internal causes of behavior and conscious events. They are not dispositional properties defined by their manifestations. Bravery is not like solubility: to call someone brave is not to say what he or she would do in such and such circumstances; it’s more like saying a bridge is sturdy or a tree leafy.

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Aspects of Meaning

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Aspects of Meaning

Many theories of meaning have been propounded, each seeming to have some merit. But only one theory can be true, so some have to be rejected—or so we suppose. I will contest this. Things are more complicated, more nuanced. Among the theories defended we have: truth conditions, verification conditions, linguistic use, speaker meaning, hearer uptake (e.g., power to cause beliefs). Are these theories really competitors or might they all be integrated together? I am going to distinguish between what I shall call primary meaning and secondary meaning: as a first approximation, primary meaning is strict and literal linguistic meaning in the public language, while secondary meaning is anything that belongs to the overall significance of a speech act—anything conveyed by an utterance (apart from primary meaning). If you consult a thesaurus under “means”, you will find such synonyms as the following: signifies, connotes, denotes, designates, indicates, expresses, conveys, suggests, alludes to, adumbrates, hints at, intimates, implies, points to, stands for, symbolizes, touches on, mentions, calls to mind, and gestures towards. This is a very capacious list and does not correspond to what we ordinarily think of as strict and literal meaning. Yet it would be true to say that these verbs signify properties or actions that depend on literal meaning—they are not independent of it. A meaning-independent property of a word or sentence would be its phonetic or graphic features—how it sounds when spoken or looks when written down. These have nothing to do with what the word or sentence means (put aside onomatopoeia). Likewise, where a sentence is uttered, or at what time, is meaning-independent. So, I shall say that some aspects or instances of meaning are primary and some are secondary, according as they are comprised in strict and literal meaning or not. To be concrete, let us agree that truth conditions are constitutive of primary meaning (this is just to fix ideas): then all the other theories of meaning I listed can be said to belong to secondary meaning. For example, verification conditions are primary-meaning-dependent secondary meanings. Intuitively, they are consequences or concomitants of primary meaning, derivative, parasitic. A sentence can allude to (“show”) something it doesn’t strictly mean or say—convey it, put it across, communicate it. It is something the speaker and hearer know in knowing the language, but it isn’t part of what the words strictly mean. The structure of the position can be compared to Frege’s distinction between sense, on the one hand, and force and tone, on the other. Force and tone are not strictly part of sense, though they depend on sense for their signifying properties; they are a type of secondary meaning—just not the core of meaning, its fundamental nature or nerve. Sense does not depend on them; it forms their foundation. Similarly, we grasp verification conditions (criteria of assertion) when we understand a sentence, but this grasp is not (we are stipulating) part of our grasp of the sentence’s strict primary meaning—though it is a consequence of that. It is a secondary meaning placed on top of, or set besides, the truth-conditional primary meaning. And the same is true of the other items I listed: use, speaker meaning, and hearer uptake (as in so-called causal theories of meaning—the meaning of a sentence is given by the beliefs its utterance causes). We know these facts about a sentence whose meaning we grasp (unlike certain other properties of the sentence), and they depend on the truth-conditional meaning we grasp, but they are not part of its primary meaning—its core, essential, foundational meaning. They are to primary meaning what (for Frege) tone and force are to sense—secondary, derivative characteristics (not the heart of the matter). One way in which they differ is that they are, in a certain sense, agent-relative: they depend not only on the primary meaning but also on the characteristics of the speaker and hearer. Thus, verification conditions depend on the epistemic capacities of the agent in question; and what one agent can discover may not be discoverable by another agent (consider a blind man). Truth conditions are not agent-relative, but verification conditions are. The same is true of speaker meaning (trivially), language use, and hearer uptake (also trivially). These are all pragmatic in the sense that they concern relations between words and people not just words in themselves (as with syntax and semantics, as classically defined). So, secondary meaning is agent-relative and primary meaning is not. I can best explain this by making an analogy with primary and secondary qualities (I chose my terminology by analogy with the older use of these terms). The primary qualities of an object are not perceiver-relative, but secondary qualities depend on both primary qualities and properties of the perceiver. They have a foot in both camps: they depend on primary qualities but they also depend on the perceptual reactions of perceivers. Hence, they are secondary—a bit second-class, parasitic. Color is not as ontologically robust as shape; its claim to centrality is not as strong. A philosophical extremist might insist that objects don’t have color, that color isn’t really a qualityof objects: it is extraneous, imposed, allowed in by courtesy not by right. Similarly, someone might claim that what I am calling secondary meaning isn‘t really meaning; it’s just associated with meaning, a kind of moocher and hanger-on (parasites are not usually of the same species as what they parasitize). I don’t think the word matters much; what matters is the intimate relationship between strict and literal meaning and other aspects of sentences that convey information, unlike things like sound and location. The question is what the semantic natural kinds are, the fundamental taxonomy; and the secondary cases, both for perceptual objects and language, are sufficiently close to the primary cases that we can justify using the words in the way I am suggesting. That is, colors are qualities of objects and verification conditions (etc.) are a type of meaning—though secondary types. We thus make room for a more inclusive picture of meaning, as we do for the case of perceived objects. This allows us to favor one theory of meaning as central and basic without having to declare the others outright false. For the others have their merits and attractions, their staunch and sincere defenders—they aren’t just completely wrongheaded. We just need to recognize that what we call “meaning” has a wider extension than philosophers have tended to assume. Meaning isn’t the kind of monolithic uniform structure that tradition suggests. This is a kind of Wittgensteinian point: let’s not suppose that only the indicative sentence as used in science deserves to be called meaningful. Let’s not be so anal about language and meaning. Meaning is a mixed bag, a ragbag even, not a crystalline Platonic form—a kind of sublime and singular geometry of thought. Objects are a mix of primary and secondary qualities, messy as that seems, and sentences are a mix of primary and secondary meanings, untidy as that may appear. We don’t need to fight with each other over which theory of meaning is correct; we can accept that each theory deserves its place in the sun. Perhaps one theory deserves pride of place over the others, but the other theories are not hopeless losers and misfits with nothing to recommend them. We can be principled semantic pluralists.[1]

[1] The tendency of most theories of meaning has been to reduce the semantic content of sentences: meaning is only sense or onlyreference or only use. I am suggesting that we increase it dramatically (but not irresponsibly), so that the standard theories get a shot at being admitted to the party. We don’t need to be so selective or snobbish or sniping, though a single type of theory gets to determine the nature of primary core meaning (it isn’t a congeries). The picture is that of a nucleus fanning out to satellites feeding off the energy of the nucleus. Much the same picture fits the case of objects and their qualities, primary and secondary (also tertiary). There is the solid hardworking hub along with its shiftier cloudlike companions. The atmosphere of the earth can be counted as part of the earth, but it isn’t as strictly part of the earth as its rocks and mountains.

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Analyzing Use

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Analyzing Use

If meaning is use, then a theory of meaning is a description of use not an analysis of sense. This is the message of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, as commonly understood. Instead of analyzing what a sentence means, breaking it into parts, providing necessary and sufficient conditions, we should aim for a perspicuous description of use, a survey of the practical capacities that constitute mastery of a language. Not ideal composite unities (the “proposition” of the Tractatus) but the concrete multifarious phenomena of actual speech, spread out in time, located in a context: performances not propositions, deeds not definitions, actions not analyses. Thus, we abandon the quest for analysis and replace it with something completely different; we change the form of a theory of meaning, and hence the form of a philosophical production. The picture of a unified but composite sense, capable of analysis, is dropped in favor of the idea of a multi-faceted linguistic practice, susceptible only to open-ended description not scientific dissection. No more talk of combinations of objects, hidden forms, final analyses, logical pictures, parts and wholes, simples and complexes. Meaning is not a structured whole, internally articulated, but a pattern of use distributed in time and place, a multiplicity of practical moments. Wittgenstein doesn’t say much of a systematic nature about this pattern of use, but it is possible to reconstruct the outlines of what he had in mind (or what readers have taken away from his text). First, we have the antecedents to a particular occasion of use: what led up to the occasion, particularly the training the speaker received, but also what was going on that caused the speaker to speak as he did (what we might think of as the historical context of the occasion of use). Second, we have the consequences of the use in question—its effect on hearers, the way it changed the state of things (to put it as vaguely as necessary). The use has a future as well as a past. For example, the act of speech might lead to a belief formed or an action carried out or a reply made. Third, we have the criteria of assertion for the sentence involved (if it is an assertoric sentence): what made the speaker think his utterance was warranted, the evidence he had at his disposal. Fourth, we have the purpose of the act—what the speaker was aiming to achieve, the function of his words. He might be trying to induce a belief or getting his interlocuter to act in a certain way (“Please shut the door!”). So, the pattern of use includes historical context, future developments, criteria, and purpose—a motley collection of fragments quite unlike a classical proposition or thought (in Frege’s sense). As an example, I will cite a certain kind of speech act occurring during a tennis match, which puts the use theory in the best light. At a certain point the umpire says “Fifteen all”: what was the pattern of use he exemplified? The past context includes the fact that a tennis match is underway and this match led him to make his utterance—his past and present surroundings form the context of utterance. The future consequences include the players continuing to play until the game is won, the server is reversed, and a new game commences. The criteria involve where the ball landed during the point, and hence who won the point. The purpose of the utterance was to indicate the score, with the further purpose of determining who wins the match. This is all rule-governed behavior, an embedding of speech in a non-linguistic context, a customary practice, a form of life, a sequence of choreographed actions. Describing it is nothing like analyzing the momentary meaning of the sentence “Fifteen all”—its sense, propositional content, what passes before the speaker’s mind (if anything). Use is not an inner something like grasping a sense, a kind of intellectual perception; it is a practical ability, a mode of action. Thus, analysis is banished and perspicuous description takes its place. But is this really true? Has analysis been banished? Haven’t we replaced a complex of objects (Tractatus) with a complex of actions (Investigations)? For the use is itself made up of a series of connected elements: it has a kind of composite unity. Specifically, it is composed of the four elements we have identified: history, results, criteria, and purpose. We have analyzed the total use into four parts, all connected. We haven’t changed the method of philosophy, only its objects. We have introduced a new type of complex whole—a pattern of use—and analyzed it into its constituents. It has parts, components, just as a classical proposition has parts, components. Use therefore has a componential analysis. Indeed, these components can be converted into necessary and sufficient conditions: each aspect of total use is necessary and together they are sufficient. The meaning of “Fifteen all” is given via a description of these components of use, suitably linked together: the sentence would not mean what it does (according to the use theory) without the contribution of each component, and the conjunction of them is sufficient for that meaning. What we have here is a classical analysis of a concept—the concept of meaning. We have a whole with parts, capable of analytic breakdown, a composite kind. And how else could meaning be explicated? Certainly not by some sort of unstructured simple event, an unanalyzable deed: meaning is inherently complex, so any account of it must respect this complexity. It is a sophisticated organized human achievement not an unanalyzable atom of semantic goop. Nor could it be just a chaotic collection of unrelated activities: the components of use must be intelligibly related to each other. A language game is a unified entity made up of separable parts; it can therefore be analyzed (what can’t be analyzed?). It is neither random nor indivisible. Thus, linguistic use is a complex assemblage capable of analysis. If we think of use as a card-carrying behaviorist might, we could say that meaning is a matter of a structured sequence of behaviors (stimulus and response) that can be divided into sub-behaviors, which can also be further divided—that is, the relevant behavior has the usual type of analysis. There is really no alternative to analysis, unless you want to go magical and mystical (use as an emanation of spirit with neither parts nor aspects). Pragmatism is as analytical as logical atomism; it just shifts the locus of analysis (from facts to actions). This means that its methodological burdens are much the same as those of other approaches: it has to give an intelligible account of the constitution of whatever it chooses as the intellectual foundation of its theories. It cannot shirk necessary and sufficient conditions, or take refuge in airy slogans (“In the beginning was the deed”). In the case of Wittgenstein, we need to be told what the use is exactly and how it determines a unique meaning for any arbitrary sentence of the language. We need an analysis of use not merely an inarticulate pointing or positing. The whole idea of a non-analytic style of philosophy is really an abnegation of intellectual responsibility (this is no doubt why it appeals to a certain kind of mind).[1]

[1] For the dedicated conceptual analyst, an adequate use theory of meaning would assume the following form: A sentence S has a (meaning-conferring) use if and only if (a) S has an appropriate history, (b) S has certain kinds of result, (c) there are criteria for the assertion of S, and (d) there is a purpose to uttering S. It would then be necessary to spell out these conditions in more detail to avoid counterexamples and circularities (as well as intolerable vagueness). None of this would be easy, but it is what theory demands. This would be good old-fashioned conceptual analysis. Then we would need to extend the theory from sentences to words—and good luck with that! A use theory will face all the challenges of any philosophical theory.

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Analysis of a Sentence

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Analysis of a Sentence

It is a useful exercise, for those interested in language, to list the various ways in which a sentence can be analyzed, in order to gain a full appreciation of how multi-faceted a sentence is.[1] Strangely, I have never seen this done. As an example, I will choose the sentence “Miami is hot”, but any sentence will do, since the same classification scheme applies to any sentence in any language. These are to be universals of language. (1) Ethnography: what language does the sentence belong to, who speaks it, and where? The same string could occur in more than one language, and a given sentence can contain words from more than one language. (2) Lexical: what words are contained in the sentence and in what order? Are there any ambiguous words or nonsense words or misspelled words or obsolete words? (3) Phonetics: what phonemes does the sentence (or its utterance) contain? Here we look at the acoustic and articulatory properties of the sentence. These can vary from speaker to speaker and dialect to dialect. Volume and location of utterance are not relevant. (4) Syntax: what is the syntactic or grammatical structure of the sentence? Now things become more theoretical and difficult. As a first approximation, we can say that our sample sentence contains a noun, a verb, and an adjective; and it is a simple subject-predicate sentence (no sentence connectives). It is in the indicative mood. These properties do not vary from speaker to speaker; they are intrinsic to the sentence’s syntax. (5) Semantics: what does the sentence mean? How does its meaning depend on the meaning of the words that compose it? It means that Miami is hot, and it is composed of a singular term denoting the city of Miami and a predicate ascribing the property of being hot to that city. In the case of other sentences, we will identify truth-functional connectives, intensional operators, quantifiers, indexicals, and other devices. We might also speak of logical form, truth conditions, functions from objects to truth-values, propositions, possible worlds, predicate modifiers, etc. (6) Pragmatics (or linguistic use): how does the sentence relate to speakers who use the language? In what circumstances is the sentence used? What are the criteria of assertion for the sentence? What are the likely consequences of asserting it? What language game does it belong to? (7) Conceptual analysis: how are the concepts expressed by the sentence to be analyzed? Here we might claim that the name expresses a definite description picking out the city of Miami, and that the predicate ascribes a dispositional property (apt to feel hot to normal people in normal conditions). We are elucidating the concepts that the sentence expresses, spelling out their underlying content. (8) Ontology (or metaphysics): what is the ultimate nature of the entities that form the subject matter of the sentence? Should we be realists or anti-realists about them? Are they mental or physical (idealism versus materialism)? Are they substances or events? Are they Many or One? Is God essential to their existence? (9) Phenomenology: how does the sentence manifest itself in consciousness? What is the nature of the intentional acts that constitute grasping the sentence consciously? What are the relevant noemata? Is the consciousness of death (Heidegger) part of apprehending the meaning of the sentence? (10) Neurological: what are the brain processes that underlie understanding the sentence? How is its structure represented in the brain? In what ways can brain damage impair using and understanding the sentence? (11) Psycholinguistic: what is the cognitive psychology of the sentence (any sentence)? How is it produced by the speaker and processed by the hearer? What is the role of attention in speech comprehension? What causes performance errors? How is the sentence acquired by the child, and when? (12) Psychoanalytic (if any): how does the sentence bear on the neuroses, dreams, and complexes of the speaker or hearer? How does it interact with the unconscious mind, the id, the superego, repression, sexual development? (13) Literary: what are the literary aspects of the sentence (here we might switch to “To be or not to be”)? Does it contain rhymes, assonance, onomatopoeia, poetic depth? Or is it banal, cliched, derivative? (14) Etymology: what is the history of the words composing the sentence? From what language do they derive? Is their current meaning close to their original meaning? (15) Cachinnation: is the sentence funny? Is the word combination amusing? Is it in bad taste? Would you say it in front of your mother? Is it the punchline of a joke? These are all legitimate questions we can ask about a sentence (there may be others). They all involve analyzing the sentence (OED “analyze”: “examine methodically and in detail for the purposes of explanation and interpretation)”. Some are more controversial than others. The philosophically relevant kinds of analysis occur naturally on the list along with the other kinds. Sentence analysis brings in linguists, psychologists, philosophers, physiologists, psychotherapists, literary scholars, historians of language, and humorists. The sentence is a many-sided creature, not the exclusive property of any one field. No single field can claim to comprise the whole of Sentence Studies. For the philosopher, it is salutary to observe that many fields seek to analyze sentences, each for its own purposes; philosophers are just doing more of the same, but with respect to different dimensions of the phenomenon. Sentences are subject to conceptual analysis, ontological analysis, and phenomenological analysis, as much as phonetic, syntactic, and physiological analysis. Perhaps it is true to say that language is susceptible to more types of analysis than any other phenomenon of nature. Or to put it differently, it is the most interesting and complex thing in the world.[2]

[1] I will leave aside the question of what a sentence is. It is certainly not sound waves in the air or marks on paper; such things could arise in any number of ways and have nothing to do with language. Sounds and marks are vehicles of sentences not sentences themselves. Are they something psychological or neurological or computational or abstract? It is hard to say. People tend to assume that sentences are clear and meanings unclear, but really sentences are unclear too. What makes a sentence what it is—a syntactic object capable of bearing meaning? Here is where the idea of a language of thought becomes attractive, because such items would have syntax built into them ab initio. The ontology of sentences is obscure (like that of propositions).

[2] I write this partly because there is currently a fashion for decrying conceptual analysis in philosophy. But really analysis of sentences is customary across many fields, and is not to be dispensed with. See also my “Analysis of Analysis”. It is certainly not to be equated with something pejoratively labeled “ordinary language philosophy”.
Analysis is an essential part of science.

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Philosophy and Thought

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Philosophy and Thought

It is often said that philosophy is, or ought to be, concerned with thought. It is then contended, by some, that it should be concerned with language, since language provides our only access to thought.[1] Hence, the linguistic turn. A contrast is thereby presupposed: between science and philosophy. Science deals with external reality by using its proprietary methods, while philosophy deals with thought by using its proprietary methods (whatever these may be). Science deals with reference, philosophy with sense, to put it Frege’s way. I think this is an unhelpful way to think—in fact, I think it is completely wrong, except perhaps under an implausibly charitable interpretation (which we will come to). In the first place, it makes philosophy into a branch of psychology: the study of a mental phenomenon. Maybe it is philosophical psychology, but it is still psychology. Would we want to say the same about logic and mathematics—that they are about logical and mathematical thought not reality? Wouldn’t that be a brand of psychologism? At the least, we would need to know what aspects of thought qualify as philosophically relevant; then it is about those aspects. Not the empirical facts of thought, presumably: not the psychological laws of thought, or its relation to emotion, say. Is philosophy being identified with cognitive psychology (or a department of it)? Second, do we mean thought singular, as a general category, or thoughts plural? Do we mean the faculty of thought as opposed to other mental faculties (memory, perception, conation, etc.), or do we mean the many different thoughts that we have along with their specific content? Not the first, because that would limit philosophy to very general questions about cognition (we surely would want to investigate ethical thoughts, aesthetic thoughts, epistemic thoughts, logical thoughts, etc.); but not the second, if that means the full range of thoughts, including such thoughts as that I need to go and buy milk. Should we study false thoughts as well as true thoughts? Or silly thoughts as well as sound thoughts? Presumably not. Clearly, we need to know what thoughts to study and why. The answer to that will have to include the following obvious consideration: we need to study the thoughts relevant to the problems of philosophy. But what are they? The proposal so far says nothing about this—it just says we should study thoughts (perhaps via sentences). The main question is thus roundly begged. Clearly, philosophy should study philosophical problems, but the recommendation to study thoughts makes no mention of this and is much too inclusive. Should we then say that philosophy is concerned with thoughts about philosophical problems? No, it should study the problems not thoughts about them (that would be meta-philosophy). Third, why thought and not belief and other propositional attitudes? What is it about thinking in particular that makes it the proper object of philosophical study? Isn’t thought chosen because it is where concepts occur, but concepts occur in other mental environments too. Many philosophers have urged that philosophy is concerned with concepts, but they don’t limit concepts to thoughts. They may say that philosophy is about our conceptual scheme, but not about thinking specifically—we also have concept-endowed beliefs, intentions, desires, etc. We are concerned with the concept of knowledge, say, but not specifically with thoughts about knowledge. Why not say we are concerned with propositions about knowledge (i.e., the contents of thoughts, which can be shared with other propositional attitudes)? And what about the idea that philosophy in general is concerned with human knowledge (its nature, scope, and limits) not human thought? That would overcome the problem of false thoughts (why study them?), and knowledge is correlative with concepts. This suggestion has the drawback of confining philosophy to the epistemological, though that domain can easily open up into ontology. That would return us to Descartes, possibly with the addendum that knowledge is best understood via language about knowledge (the Cartesian linguistic turn). But at least this is a recognizably philosophical concern, unlike a wish to study thoughts in general; and knowledge is plausibly regarded as integral to concept possession—to have the concept of an F you need to know what an F is. The truth, though, is that none of these proposals works very well: they tend to be too restricted and too psychologically oriented; in particular, they don’t bring reality into the picture clearly enough. Here I will repeat what I have argued elsewhere: philosophy is about logical reality[2]. Only in so far as thought, belief, language, concepts, and knowledge provide a way of representing reality are they of methodological interest to philosophy. Philosophical problems, according to this view, are logical problems (in a wide sense), so we seek to understand logical reality. I think conceptual analysis is the best way to access logical reality,[3] but this is not restricted to a particular class of mental capacities—certainly not to thoughts specifically. Philosophy, however, is not about concepts, as opposed to reality (sense not reference); it is about reality, via concepts. In fact, I hold that philosophy is the science of logical reality, so I don’t make the kind of distinction between science and philosophy that motivates the turn to thought and language. Philosophy is no more about concepts (its main source of data) than physics is about meter readings (or perceptions thereof). But that is another story; my point here is that it is quite wrong to equate philosophy with the study of thought specifically and as such. For example, ethics is about the nature of right and wrong not about thoughts of right and wrong (still less the words “right” and “wrong”): thoughts only come into the picture as one possible means of discovering the nature of right and wrong. There is much about thoughts that is completely irrelevant to the philosophical question—their ontogenesis, phylogenesis, causal powers, brain implementation, interactions with desires, conscious manifestation, etc. Only in a very limited respect are they philosophically relevant, namely that they contain concepts that can be analyzed so as to reveal (perhaps only partially) the nature of the reality they denote. Nothing about their being thoughts (the psychological type) is relevant to their philosophical significance. The psychology of thought is of no philosophical relevance, even when the psychology is philosophical (e.g., that thoughts are subject to the will, referentially opaque, possible without language, etc.): for that has no bearing on their ability to shed light on moral value and other subjects of philosophical interest. So, what in some circles is treated as axiomatic is completely mistaken, i.e., the thesis that philosophy is about human thought (whether directly or via language). True, there can be a philosophy of thought, as there can be a philosophy of many things (necessity, causation, time, space, etc.); but philosophy generally is not the study (solely) of thought. Thought is not its subject matter, its focus of interest.[4]

[1] Michael Dummett says this a lot, but many others subscribe to the same view. His book On the Origins of Analytical Philosophy(1993) insists on the idea throughout, using it to promote the linguistic turn.

[2] See my papers, “Philosophy Defined” and “Philosophy as Logical Analysis” on this blog.

[3] See my Truth by Analysis (2012).

[4] Of course, I am using “thought” in its usual psychological sense not in Frege’s non-psychological sense, but even in that latter sense it is hopeless as a definition of philosophy: philosophy is not confined in its interests to a supposed realm of objective mind-independent abstract entities. Nor does Dummett use“thought” in this sense; he means to speak of psychological entities. From my reading, he never seems to spell out precisely why thought is the royal road to solving philosophical problems; he seems to take it as obvious. He is mainly concerned to show that thought has to be understood via language. How any of this would help with the mind-body problem, say, is never explained: is the solution hidden somewhere in the thoughts we have? Why is philosophy so hard if thought contains all the answers? These are obvious questions, left unaddressed.

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