Thinking and Speaking

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Thinking and Speaking

 

Is thinking a type of speaking? There is a tradition that says it is: thinking as “saying in one’s heart”, the language of thought, voices in the head, thoughts as sub-vocal speech. The idea is that just as we produce outward speech by using our speech organs so we produce inward speech when we think: thought is silent soliloquy. Thinking is the occurrence of inner speech acts; it might even be the internalization of outer speech acts. The process of thinking is a process of speaking. Certainly, inner speech exists, so isn’t it natural to suppose that inner speech is what constitutes thought? True, we also hear words in our imagination, but thinking is more active than hearing, so it is preferable to align thinking with speaking rather than hearing. Writing is another process that relates us to language, but it seems implausible to suppose that the mind is writing when it thinks (on what and with what?). Thus people have tended to identify thinking with speaking words not with hearing or writing them. Is this a defensible position?

            Sundry objections spring to mind. First, are the organs of speech employed when a person thinks? Evidently not, since the larynx can remain at rest—and there is no sign of a parallel larynx in the brain. So this must be speech without speech organs. Still, it may be said, the brain must contain some apparatus that governs thought, so there has to be something analogous to speech organs. Hmm. Second, is thought as much of an action as speaking is? Granted, thinking is voluntary (like imagining), but is it really always an intentional act? Don’t thoughts sometimes just occur to us without any initiating intention? Aren’t some thoughts reflexive? Here it may be said that acts of speech can also be unintentional and reflexive. Maybe so, but there does seem to be something to the point that thinking is a lot less intentional than speech. Third, perception is not naturally construed as a type of speech—we don’t contemplate “talking eyes”—so why should thought be aligned with speech? Couldn’t thought be like perception: not voluntary, generally reflexive, and not word-oriented? Couldn’t it be more like reading? In reading we see words and simultaneously have thoughts: the reading is voluntary (though not always, as when a big sign heaves into view), and yet it is perception-like. Is the mind actually reading words when it thinks? The brain writes them and the mind reads them: is that what thinking is? This is no doubt an ingenious idea, but none too intuitively appealing. We therefore return, somewhat morosely, to the speaking model, given the unease occasioned by these misgivings and worries. There is a feeling that we have not yet nailed the problem, though the killing objection hovers elusively in the vicinity. While it is true that language features in our thought processes in the form of inner speech, it seems wrong to identify thinking with speaking. Speaking might accompany thought without being thought. But why is this exactly?

            I think the answer has to do with the contingency of the link between sound and meaning. The most dramatic way to see the point is to note that you can say something by uttering a sentence you don’t understand, but you can’t think something by uttering a sentence you don’t understand. You can utter a sentence of a foreign language and say something meaningful, but you can’t have a thought just by uttering a sentence inwardly that means the content of the thought. Thus you can rehearse a sentence in your mind, possibly in preparation for uttering it, and not thereby think what the sentence expresses; you might just like the sound of the sentence. To think with a sentence you have to grasp its meaning. You think meanings but you say sounds: so thinking can’t beinward utterance. All the sounds of English sentences could pass through your mind in the form of grammatical strings and yet you may understand none of them—in which case you will not be having the corresponding thoughts. Or consider malapropism: you can utter the wrong word and say something you don’t mean, but there are no malapropisms of thought—no cases of thinking a thought you don’t intend to think. In thought you can’t say one thing and mean another, because there is no slack between the word uttered and the proposition meant. There are no slips of the tongue in thought. You can indeed use the wrong word in a sentence that you inwardly utter, but that just shows that thinking is not inner speaking. Speech, inner or outer, can aid thinking, but that is not to say that it is thinking. It is not sufficient to think that p to inwardly utter a sentence that means that p. Nor is it necessary, since surely many animals (and many humans) can think thoughts without inwardly uttering sentences. They need concepts (or something like them) but they don’t need words for concepts—they don’t need to intone words to themselves in order to think. There is such a thing as wordless thought.

            What, then, is the process of thinking? It is not the process of speaking, or of hearing, or of writing, or of reading: it is none of these language-oriented processes. And why should it be—why should thinking mimic these other processes? We don’t report thought by saying that the thinker inwardly said a sentence to himself; we talk as if thinking is another sort of process entirely. Descartes doesn’t say, “I inwardly utter sentences, therefore I am”. This is a theory of thought not a mere synonym of “think”—and it is not a very good theory.  [1] The problem is that it is hard to come up with anything better: we gravitate to this theory because we can’t think of an alternative. We think we know what speaking is, so we propose that thinking is just like that—except that it isn’t. What it is, though, remains obscure.  [2]

 

  [1] Strictly speaking, the considerations advanced here don’t count against the idea of a language of thought—a symbolic system encoding concepts—though they count against the idea that such a language is spoken. Fodor used to say that a sentence of LOT is “tokened”, a neologism that studiously avoids the idea that thinking literally involves speaking. What such tokening is remains unclear (this is not necessarily an objection). Tokening is what any type does when it generates an instance of itself; it is not specific to mental processes, let alone thought processes.

  [2] Notice how unhelpful introspection is here: we can’t just read off from introspection what thinking is. Nor is conceptual analysis particularly helpful. Yet we are thinking all the time; it should be the most familiar of mental processes. But when we ask what exactly thinking consists in we quickly hit a brick wall. It is even hard to say what it is like to think. Thinking is a bit of mystery, is it not? I think, but I don’t know what thinking is.  

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Judas

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I’ve been wondering about Judas Iscariot recently. We are told he betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, a contemptible act. But what surprises me is that it took money to get him to betray Jesus, quite a bit of it. Surely it is more realistic to suppose that he did it for a much less compelling reason, e.g. to be popular with the mob. And isn’t it unrealistic to suppose that only one member of the twelve apostles betrayed Jesus? Judging by contemporary standards, one would expect most of the apostles to have been in on the betrayal. Judas has been represented as far more singular than human nature suggests. 

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A Linguistic Universal

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A Linguistic Universal

 

We are familiar with claims of linguistic universality: the noun-verb form, recursive embedding, quantificational structure, adverbial modification, discrete infinity, and the like. I want to add a different kind of linguistic universal, one that is less syntactic than semantic: I call it “material plurality”. A natural language like English contains resources for covering three large domains: the world of material objects in space, the psychological realm, and ethical concerns. It also contains specialized technical vocabulary such as we find in theoretical physics and linguistic analysis, but these are not the core components of the language. It is evident that other natural languages contain the same basic range of resources. This is not surprising given that we acquire the whole threefold package more or less simultaneously.  [1] There is good reason to believe that all three domains correspond to innate cognitive resources, possibly organized into distinct modules. But there is no logical necessity about this: it could have been otherwise. It is logically conceivable that a child should acquire one or two of these types of linguistic competence but not all three. Animal communication systems don’t encompass such a wide range of subject matters, but human languages always incorporate reference to the three domains in question. They are logically dissociable but not actually ever dissociated. There is a certain kind of holism at work, biologically based. Thus human languages exhibit the universal of material plurality with respect to these three areas. This is not a syntactic universal but a semantic one; it concerns what human languages are about. It is non-trivial and counts as an empirical regularity. We have an innately based universal of linguistic clustering. We could have had merely local clustering, or no systematic clustering at all, but in fact we find that all human languages obey a principle of material plurality—a de facto conjunction of differing linguistic systems. The human language faculty incorporates resources suitable for physics, psychology, and ethics (of the common sense varieties)

            Presumably the linguistic is underlain by the cognitive: we also have an innately based cognitive clustering. Again, there is nothing a priori about this: it could have been otherwise. But in fact the human mind comes prepackaged with three separable components corresponding to the external world, the internal world, and the normative world. There are no (normal) people that function using only one or two of these three modules: everyone is a commonsense physicist, an amateur psychologist, and an opinionated ethicist. This is the way the human brain is contingently organized. For us, the world comes arranged into the physical, the mental, and the ethical—with connections between them. We are cognitively tripartite. Each area has its own ontology, organizing principles, and theoretical assumptions; but we effortlessly master all three together. We are not like schoolchildren learning history before geography or algebra after music. The pre-school developing mind doesn’t first understand the external world, then graduate to the psychological world, and finally ascend to the dizzy heights of ethics: all of it emerges as a whole, despite the variety of subject matter. That is a remarkable fact, and a remarkable achievement: it is an awful lot to take in (or allow to grow internally). But we all do it, quickly, smoothly, and without concentrated study. We might encounter aliens with a grasp of only part of this grand cognitive structure (they are shaky when it comes to ethical thinking—see the Klingons). But we humans universally grasp all three domains and use them as a basis for more specialized study.

            Why do we exhibit this particular pattern of linguistic and cognitive mastery? Why did we evolve so as to install these three types of competence? The answer is not far to seek: we are a social species with sophisticated social cognition (quite a bit above bees and ants). We clearly need to grasp the workings of the material environment, but we also need to understand and predict our fellow humans, because their behavior affects our own welfare—we need a folk psychology. But with that comes the need to police behavior—to censure and criticize, punish and deter. We need ethics in some form. Quite possibly ants and bees have some sort of counterpart to this given their intensely social life, but we humans need it in spades because of our complex social relations. Not to possess one of these competences would severely disadvantage a human being, rendering him or her incapable of productive human interaction. So we would expect a robust innate program for developing the mature competences that we see universally exhibited. Thus we are not just Homo sapiens but also Homophysicists-psychologists-ethicists. It is our human nature to instantiate these three sorts of competence. Possibly other primates have the rudiments of all three competences, but in us they reach a high level of sophistication.  [2]

 

  [1] I say this not because I know of detailed scientific studies that establish it but because of common observation (a neglected source of data). It would be interesting if minute differences of cognitive scheduling could be detected between the three areas.

  [2] This doesn’t mean they are incapable of improvement: we are not omniscient physicists, psychologists, and ethicists. We might be sharply limited in all three areas. But our cognitive patrimony includes a substantial helping of each of them.

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Song and Soul

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Song and Soul

 

It is a truism that song touches the soul. Something about song and something about the soul naturally mesh: that is, song and the emotions are suited to one another. But why is this? What features suit song to the emotions and hence the soul? Song is clearly language set to music, but what is language and what is music? Language is the pairing of sound and meaning, or better the union of the two: sound expresses meaning and meaning suffuses sound. Music is the union of melody and rhythm: pitch variations conjoined with temporal intervals. So song is the union of these two unions: a song is the joining together of the sound-meaning pair (language) and the melody-rhythm pair (music). When you sing you are fusing your ability to conjoin sound and meaning with your ability to conjoin pitch variations and temporal intervals. A song is a synthesis of these four elements: sound, meaning, melody, and rhythm. In a song, language is converted into something temporally structured (bars, note lengths) and pitch variations are imposed on it (the standard musical scales). Language becomes music. So there is a metamorphosis into an aesthetic medium, no longer a mere vehicle of communicative speech. Language is called upon to operate in the realm of art. Meaning itself becomes an aesthetic object by being subjected to musical forms. The speech act of song is a distinctively aesthetic type of speech act. And music itself becomes imbued with the representational power of language: it acquires an extra layer of meaning, a new type of significance. Music becomes semantically complex, doubly expressive. Such are the powers of song to transform both language and music into new versions of themselves.

            But how do these constitutive features of song mirror the emotions? One would like to find parallel structures at work in the emotions. First, sound and meaning: what in the emotions parallels this duality? Surely this: emotions admit a distinction between their felt character and their representational content. It feels a certain way to be angry or in love and these emotions are about certain people and states of affairs—what philosophers call qualia and intentionality. Moreover, these features merge and meld: they are not independent dimensions like size and color. So emotions are structurally similar to language in joining the phenomenological and the referential—a coloration of consciousness and a semantic content. Second, melody and rhythm: how do emotions parallel thisdistinction? Certainly not by sounding like higher and lower notes, or by mimicking the sound of a drum; but at a more abstract level we can find similarities. Pitch intervals consist of variations along a continuum of sound, selections from acoustic space; and rhythm is the spacing of sounds over time. But don’t emotions also vary continuously in an analogous way, and don’t they also occur spread out in time as separate experiences? Your anger can reach a high affective pitch, waxing and waning, then give way to something less intense; and it can also develop over time according to a recognizable pattern. Your love can burn brightly or dim languidly, and it also throbs and pulses in predictable ways (as when you meet or part from the beloved). Emotions evolve in time and they can be more or less intense (sharp, deep, tormenting, exhilarating). They can also be repetitive and maddening (or soothing). They can reach a crescendo or peter out, scale new heights or plumb new depths. Emotions seem to possess a “music” of their own: staccato or smooth, vibrant or torpid. So emotions mirror the musical form of a song, as well as its linguistic form. As the song progresses, its melody and rhythm intersect with the phenomenology of the corresponding emotions, in such a way that a certain note seems to condense a whole world of emotion, capturing the emotion perfectly. The music of the song maps onto the “music” of the emotions, with its variations of pitch and temporal development. Thus a song can condense and encapsulate a familiar human emotional experience, say the breakup of a love affair. There is an underlying commonality of form. The fourfold union of song reflects the fourfold union of emotion: sound-meaning plus melody-rhythm mirrors feeling-meaning plus affective variation combined with temporal development. The song is targeting the emotional structures of the soul.  [1]

            And there is a further similarity, namely the close connection between the inner and the outer that characterizes both song and emotion. Emotion characteristically has a behavioral expression, both vocal and non-vocal, as when a person shouts and stamps his feet; but song too, like most music, is often accompanied by behavioral expression, as in swaying and dancing. Musical experience and emotion both tend to translate into bodily movement. So hearing a song is apt to lead to the same kinds of behavior that the corresponding emotions lead to—swooning, jumping up and down, lachrymation. The emotions have their bodily manifestations, and so does hearing a song. This affinity enables song to connect with emotion, just as if a song were an embodied emotion. Also, the connection between the inner and the outer in the two cases is not an external connection: the behavior is integral to the emotion (in a way notoriously hard to articulate). The inner and the outer are unified. So there is a third union to be added to the previous two: both song and emotion are the union of three unions. Song is thus the ideal vehicle for the expression of emotion: they both have the same abstract architecture. The soul sings.  [2] 

 

Co

  [1] Similar remarks may be made about poetry and emotion: the affinity is undeniable, and it is natural to find in emotion some of the structure of poetry—meter, assonance, dissonance, etc. Song, of course, is a form of poetry, as well as being a form of music. A song is poetry set to music, and this enables it to tap into the emotions via the formal analogies between the two.

  [2] Less poetically, the emotions are analyzable using much the same conceptual apparatus that we can use to analyze the nature of song. The two are isomorphic, formal twins. That is why a song feels like an aural emotion.

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An Objectivist View of the Universe

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An Objectivist View of the Universe

 

I will describe a metaphysical view aptly labeled objectivist. My aim is expository rather than argumentative, though I am inclined to accept the view. Objectivism says that the universe (reality, being) is fundamentally objective not subjective, with the emphasis on “fundamentally”. It isn’t that the universe has no subjective features; it is just that these features always have an objective basis. By “objective” I mean “not mind-involving”—having nothing intrinsically to do with consciousness (or unconsciousness). The view contains two sub-theses: all properties have an objective basis or correlate, and all concepts have an objective counterpart concept. For example, the property of being red, though subjective, has a basis in objective properties of objects and nervous systems; and the concept of being red has a counterpart concept in concepts of such properties. The color is mind involving, but the correlated objective properties of objects and nervous systems are not mind involving; and the concept of the color is graspable only by someone who experiences the color, but concepts of external objects and nervous systems are not so graspable.  That is, subjective facts always have objective facts behind them—but not vice versa. I won’t harp on the property-concept distinction in what follows, since the same point applies to both: I shall simply say that the subjective is always backed by the objective. What “backed” means will vary with the topic: it could mean straightforward identity, or it could mean something like supervenience or grounding or realization. For example, pain always has an objective correlate of some sort, though views may vary about how strong this correlation relation is. Strong objectivism might insist on reductionism via identity; weak objectivism might claim only a supervenience relation. The general idea is that the subjective is always embedded in the objective, while the objective need not be embedded in the subjective (and typically is not). Thus reality is fundamentally objective. We could put this by saying that the subjective is always emergent on the objective, but the objective is never emergent on the subjective. Mind-independence is the basic form of reality.

            Notice that I have not used the word “physical”: the objectivist view is not that everything has a physicalbasis. There are three reasons for this. First, the concept of the physical is not well defined (for reasons I won’t go into here). Second, we want to leave open the possibility that fundamental reality is not what the physical sciences (currently) describe. Third, it may be that physics harbors subjective elements: our concepts of geometry, causality, and motion are arguably anthropocentrically constituted (at least in part). It could be that a genuinely objective physics has to move beyond these human concepts in order to achieve the kind of absoluteness demanded by the “absolute conception”.    [1] So the objective world I am talking about might not coincide with the world as described by physics; at any rate, we are dealing with different doctrines. Objectivism is committed to the idea that everything has non-subjective nature (or correlate)—something that is captured in a “view from nowhere”—not that everything has a physical nature (whatever that may mean). The thought behind it is that minds are just part of reality; they don’t condition the whole nature of reality. And where they do exist they always rely on non-subjective features. Thus objectivism stands opposed to subjectivism—the doctrine that reality is inherently subjective. Idealism is the obvious form of such subjectivism, but other versions of subjectivism are conceivable. The point of objectivism is to insist that reality is not subject to the mind—and even the mind depends on non-mental factors. Even if we cannot achieve a perfectly objective conception of things, reality itself demands such a conception. Maybe a completely objective conception is impossible for any conscious thinking being—in which case reality is necessarily inconceivable as it is in itself—but still its nature is such as to be quite independent of any subjective intrusion. Objectivism regards reality as perspective-neutral, perspective- transcendent. This view goes beyond what is commonly called realism: it isn’t just the doctrine that reality is independent of our thoughts; it expels anything subjective from reality (except for the manifestly subjective). It takes reality in general to be radically removed from anything mental. Even when objects have subjective properties, such as color, they have underlying properties that have nothing to do with the mind. And even if some properties are irreducibly subjective (e.g. color experiences), they must exist against a background of objective being. There is no such thing as the kind of free-floating subjectivity that idealism contemplates. Metaphysical objectivism affirms that reality exists on a bedrock of entirely mind-free facts, whatever exactly those facts may be. The basic reason for this is that reality pre-dates minds and would exist even if minds did not. Objectivism is the abstract position that reality is constituted quite separately from mind: it is not committed to any particular view of what the underlying reality is. In that sense it is ontologically neutral.

            It should not be taken for granted that subjective facts necessarily have objective counterparts or correlates—after all, many philosophers have denied this. It tells us something about the nature of the mental: it needs the non-mental. It can’t exist without it. No matter how irreducibly subjective a mental state may be, it must bring with it something quite different from itself—something objective. The objective, on the other hand, obeys no such requirement: it can happily exist without the company of the subjective. The subjective, however, is dependent on the objective in order to have any being at all, despite the opacity of the connection. Thus some sort of objectivist reduction would appear indicated—yet no such thing seems on the cards. This is really quite puzzling. The subjective is irresistibly drawn towards the objective, entirely parasitic on it, yet quite different from it. It is true that the subjective is enmeshed in the objective, notably via causality, but still the nature of the necessary connection is far from clear (thus allowing dualism to gain a foothold). So the objectivist position is not free of perplexity: it is true without being intelligibly true. The objectivist therefore carries a heavy explanatory burden, which he fails to discharge (I don’t regard this as an objection). The position is certainly interesting and distinct from other more familiar positions. It should be debated on its own terms.

    [1] Objectivity can come in degrees (as can subjectivity): one conception can be more objective than another. Thus physics may be very objective compared to common sense. But there also must be a form of objectivity that is absolute—where the objectivity is complete. For reality itself does not share gradations of objective understanding: facts have absolute objectivity when they have it at all. The world itself is absolutely objective (not counting the mental world). 

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Ignorance, Error, and Mystery

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Ignorance, Error, and Mystery

 

The extent of our ignorance is stupendous. We know next to nothing about vast tracts of reality. If the world is the totality of facts, then our knowledge is confined to a tiny proportion of these facts. Just think of the distant past and remote future: all those individual facts about which we know nothing. We know hardly anything of what happened in the universe during the last five seconds. The universe is huge, populous, and mostly far away—nearly all of what happens is unknown to us. Nearer home we have the microscopic and invisible world: we certainly don’t know what is going on atomically in particular objects at particular times. Nor are we aware of the individual lives of bacteria and the like. We are almost entirely ignorant of what is going on the minds of sentient organisms, even the people we know quite well. We get glimpses, but most of it is quite hidden from us. The spotlight of knowledge falls on a minute section of reality; the rest is ignorance. And this is something we know perfectly well: we are not in the dark about the extent of our ignorance. Of course, we don’t know what we don’t know, but we do know that reality contains dimensions and scales that guarantee human ignorance—the expanses of space and time, in particular. Ignorance is only to be expected, and nothing to feel ashamed about: reality is intrinsically unknown to us in its full extent. Realism implies ignorance: being real does not imply being known.

            The skeptic thinks that ignorance extends even further than this: we are ignorant about what we think we know. We think we know about the local external world, but the skeptic says we are ignorant about it—as ignorant as we are about the remote external world. We think we sometimes know about the minds of others, but the skeptic says we are ignorant about this too: not only do we not know about the minds of bats, we don’t know about the minds of our nearest and dearest. Nor do we know the recent past, or the laws of nature, or what will happen next. All is blind ignorance. We might be making constant errors as well as simply not knowing various things. But even if the skeptic could be rebutted, it would still be true that we are massively ignorant. No one would think that your average animal knows very much of the universe—why should they?—and we are no different. Ignorance is simply a fact of nature, a biological necessity. Nature is sublimely indifferent to how much of it is known, and very little is.

            In the light of this vast ocean of the unknown, it is hardly surprising that some things are mysteries—things that cannot be known. Things have explanations, but not all explanations are known by us, or even could be known to us. It all depends on the available evidence and our powers of intellectual ingenuity. Many crimes remain mysteries: no one knows who committed them (apart from the criminal). Historical events in general may be quite mysterious, even the origins of large-scale wars (see Tolstoy’s War and Peace). Take a typical murder mystery, real or fictional: there may be a range of suspects but no way to decide among them, or there may be no such range—just total mystery. Detectives try to remedy such ignorance, but there is no guarantee that they ever will. Thus we are perfectly familiar with the type of ignorance we call mystery: the type in which we don’t know the correct explanation for a certain event and never will. Here is a mystery that I recently came up against. I have a pond in my garden in which I keep several fish: one day several new fish appeared in it as if from nowhere. The new fish were clearly not of the same species as the old fish—green and yellow with a red tail not red and white. Where did they come from? I didn’t put them there, and they couldn’t have arisen by natural reproduction. Could someone else have put them there? But who would do that, and for what reason? Did they somehow find their way there from some other pond? But fish can’t walk on land. Did they fall with the rain? But how can fully-grown fish fall with the rain? It was a complete mystery, and I never solved it. Several months later the four new fish died of natural causes, remaining mysterious till the end. The mysterian was faced with a real-life mystery! Such things happen. I didn’t suppose that God did it, or that the fish spontaneously arose from nothing, or that I must have put them there in my sleep: I ruled out these possible explanations. But nothing else occurred to me—the mystery fish remain a mystery to this day. I am completely ignorant as to the correct explanation of their appearance. If only I could have asked them!

            I mean these pedestrian remarks to bear on the question of mysteries in philosophy and in science–for example, the mystery of consciousness. Given the prevalence of mystery, it should not be surprising that certain natural phenomena present deep mysteries. Mystery is a form of ignorance (ignorance of explanation) and ignorance is everywhere: we are ignorant of far more things than we are knowledgeable about. Nor should it surprise us if the mystery is terminal: it is surely obvious that we will never completely remove all ignorance—there is just too much in reality for our brains to take in. Our faculties are limited and the world is broad and deep. True, science has made an impressive assault on our natural state of ignorance, but even science will never remove all ignorance. There will always be things that no human knows, often quite boring things. Some of these things may concern phenomena that are quite close to home—including our own consciousness. Does anyone think that a human mind could know the entire state of a person’s brain at a given moment? No, there is just too much going on in those billions of neurons. Human knowledge has its limits, so we shouldn’t dismiss suspicions of mystery out of hand. It would be strange if there were no mysteries given the amount of ignorance there is. I am not trying to prove mystery here, merely to put the claim of mystery in its proper epistemic context. The existence of mystery is the existence of one kind of ignorance, but ignorance is the natural condition of the human cognitive system—as all other cognitive systems. There are very few things that we are not ignorant about in the wide sweep of things. It is easy to focus on what we know, given that by definition it comes within our cognitive reach, but the area of what we don’t know is incomparably vaster, notwithstanding its rather hazy presence to our minds. We do better to think of reality as what we don’t know about rather than what we do. From nature’s point of view, most of it is secret, offering only glimpses to curious minds.  [1]

 

C

  [1] There should really be a branch of epistemology dealing with ignorance in addition to the branch dealing with knowledge.

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On Not Denoting

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On Not Denoting

 

The literature on descriptions tends to operate with a limited class of examples, mainly descriptions of people and places (“the queen of England”, “the capital of France”). This can bias us in favor of certain theories of their semantics. We can think of descriptions as referring to people and places (Frege and Strawson), or we can think of descriptions as quantifying over people and places (Russell). But there are many other types of descriptions that lend themselves far less readily to such theories: “the end of the line”, “the impossible dream”, “the shortest way home”, “the day after tomorrow”, “the big home sale”, “the height of absurdity”, “the reason why”, “the truth about Mary”, “the logic of existence”, “the problem of consciousness”, “the Greek gods”, “the mystery of life”, etc. etc. Here we are not dealing with concrete particulars unabashed reference to which can be assumed unproblematic; some ontological hesitancy might be presumed. Are we really to believe that the use of such descriptions necessarily commits the speaker to a robust ontology of corresponding entities? The speaker might turn around and say that of course she has no belief that such things really exist: if a theory of descriptions commits her to such existence, she might demur from the theory.  [1] When a speaker says, “the golden mountain must be worth a lot of money” are we to assume that she believes that the golden mountain exists to be referred to and quantified over? It is noteworthy that these descriptions don’t have names or demonstratives associated with them, unlike descriptions of people and places: there isn’t an antecedent assumption of existence-committed reference of the kind suggested by names and demonstratives. We are not already referring to such things in other ways; the description is the only way we have to speak of them. So a referential or quantificational treatment of them is not intuitively natural: their meaning is not naturally taken to involve the kind of ontological commitment we associate with other referential devices. Their “logical grammar” is not that of a straightforward assertion (or presupposition) of existence, whether by singular term (name or demonstrative) or by existential quantifier.

            The idea that descriptions are name-like or demonstrative-like has never seemed particularly attractive—they seem semantically sui generis—and this has fueled the ascendancy of Russell’s quantificational theory. But that theory too has some untoward consequences, notably the consequence that a freestanding description is really a whole sentence: if I utter the sentence fragment “the queen of England”, I have really uttered the whole sentence “there exists a unique queen of England”. The film title The French Connection is equivalent to There Exists a Unique Connection that is French or some such. Maybe descriptions imply or presuppose existence and uniqueness (or maybe not: see above), but it is hard to accept that they state existence and uniqueness (this was Strawson’s point). If they did, it would be possible to negate them; but we can’t say “It’s not the case that the queen of England”. So neither of the two standard theories looks very attractive, despite their hegemony: the suspicion grows that they have been accepted mainly because of a lack of any better alternative. The appearances suggest that descriptions are not referring devices like names and demonstratives (which don’t contain the particle “the”) and they are not like quantified expressions either: they are what they are and not some other thing. The meaning of “the” is unique—which is why we have the word. But then, what kind of semantics do they have? Their meaning appears not to be referential (in any clear sense of that elastic term), either in acts of singular reference or in acts of quantification; but if not, what kind of meaning do they have? Are we to say that they have non-referential meaning? That would not be unprecedented, since words like “not”, “and”, and “if” are also used non-referentially; but descriptions are at least nouns, unlike these words, so the idea of reference clings to them more tightly. This is really a problem: descriptions fit none of our referential paradigms, but they also don’t fit non-referential paradigms. They occupy a curious semantic no-man’s land. We might say that they serve to “introduce a topic” or “identify a subject”, but these phrases don’t really help to pin down how they specifically function. Indeed, they seem to challenge the whole referential framework: the concept of reference (or lack of reference) is unable to cope with them. They don’t denote, but they don’t not denote either. Russell could have written a paper called “On Not Denoting” and proceeded to discuss the semantic peculiarities of “the”. He was right that descriptions don’t denote like names and demonstratives, but he was wrong to suppose that they denote in the way quantifiers do, i.e. with variables ranging over existent entities. There is no denoting at all going on with descriptions as such, as opposed to certain instances of them, but what is going on remains obscure.  [2]

            A radical solution may be proposed: the whole framework of referential semantics deriving from Frege and developed by others needs to be abandoned. It is hard to remember that in the old days meaning and reference were not closely associated: meaning was held to consist in ideas of the mind; it was not a matter of word-world relations. Today we would say that meaning is a matter of concepts, which are psychological entities: they have a role in the mind but any supposed relation to things outside the mind is purely incidental. This is non-referential semantics (meaning is completely “in the head”). According to a view like that descriptions have meaning in virtue of internal psychological factors, so that the idea of reference never comes into the picture. In the extreme, this internalist semantics says the same thing about all expressions, including names and demonstratives, but we could restrict it to the case of descriptions: they express concepts but they don’t refer to anything or quantify over anything (i.e. refer by means of variables). The case of descriptions, then, provides support for such a non-referential semantics—though it is certainly a contrarian point of view (compared to orthodoxy). Short of that, we have an unsolved semantic problem on our hands, despite the enormous amount of attention paid to the word “the”: we still don’t know what this word means. We know what “that” means and we know what “there is” means, but “the” leaves us baffled. Russell was right to fret mightily over this little word, and Strawson was right to question his theory, but in fact it remains as puzzling now as it was over a hundred years ago.  [3]

 

  [1] I am not saying that the descriptions listed clearly fail to refer to existent entities; I am saying that a theory that says they definitely do is going out on a limb that no semantics should venture. We don’t want to end up saying that a speaker’s sentences commit him to the existence of things he expressly repudiates: a nominalist, say, should be able to use these descriptions with a clean conscience.

  [2] The semantics of descriptions should not be dependent on their type of subject matter: it should be the same whether we are speaking of entities acknowledged to exist or things to which we are reluctant to ascribe existence. Indeed, it should be neutral with respect to whether anything exists. Building assertions of existence into the very meaning of descriptions burdens them with far too much ontological responsibility. Questions of existence are far too controversial to be presupposed by semantics. 

  [3] Note to experts: I am well aware of the complexities of this subject, and the myriad ways of wriggling out of objections, and the passions aroused by the meaning “the”: but I am trying to cut through all that to expose a basic weakness in our thinking about descriptions since Russell wrote “On Denoting”.

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