Behaviorism Re-Refuted

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Behaviorism Re-Refuted

 

 

Behaviorism is a bit like a zombie: just when you think you’ve killed it the thing comes lumbering back into the room. So it may be worth reminding ourselves quite how bad the reasoning was that led to it. The doctrine may be defined thus: mental states are dispositions to observable behavior. There are three concepts at work here: disposition, observation, and behavior. None of these is redundant: each could be satisfied without the others being satisfied. Mental states could be dispositions to produce certain effects without those effects being observable or behavioral, since they could be entirely mental. They could be known by observation without being dispositional or behavioral, since they could be known by observing brain states or possibly by something like telepathy (assuming this to be logically possible). And they could be behavioral without being either dispositional or observable, since the behavior might be invisible—it might only occur at a microscopic level or possibly wear a cloak of invisibility (assuming this logically possible). Presumably no one would advocate behaviorism if the behavior was as unobservable as the mental state within, but this is not to be ruled out on logical grounds. The whole point of introducing behavior is to provide something that will function as observable evidence, so unobservable behavior is not going to cut it: hence the need to specify observable behavior (sometimes “gross behavior”).

The reasoning, then, goes from observation to behavior to disposition (the last introduced in order to allow for mental states on which the organism is not currently acting). We want something observable if psychology is to be a real science; behavior is observable; therefore mind is behavior. There is already a non sequitur here: it needs to be the case that only behavior is observable. That may seem de facto true, but it’s worth noting how contingent it is. What if brain waves detectable by an EEG machine were more accessible and revelatory than they actually are? Then scientists could read the mind off the recordings taken by such a machine without recourse to behavior.[1]Psychology could thus be a science based on electrical observations, not unlike parts of physics. It is merely a contingent fact that this is not the case. Or suppose there were super-scientists equipped with a special sense capable of detecting other people’s mental states directly—again no need to invoke behavior. Or suppose brain chemistry has reached such a point that chemical analysis can reveal what is going on mentally. None of these is practically possible as things stand, but they are not ruled out as a matter of principle. So the behaviorist is in effect saying that as a practical matter the only evidence we have is behavioral, not that no other evidence is logically conceivable. Consider how psychology might be conducted by blind psychologists: no one can see anyone’s behavior. Would the behaviorist approach seem so attractive then? What if EEG recordings delivered by Braille, though crude, actually outperformed attempts to hear or feel or smell other people’s behavior? Then the appeal of behaviorism as an evidence-based approach to psychology would presumably lapse. Behaviorism only seems appealing because we sighted people in fact generally judge other people’s mental condition by looking at what they do, but that is hardly a logical necessity. It amounts to the claim that as a matter of contingent fact we judge other people’s states of mind by visually observing their behavior, while allowing that there is nothing necessary about that.

But this gives the game away: for how could the mind be dispositions to behavior, simply because behavior is the only evidence we actually have, given our senses and the state of our technology, for ascribing mental states to others? Isn’t this a blatant case of trying to derive an ontological conclusion from an epistemological premise? It may be that the only evidence we practically have for knowing about distant stars is the light that reaches us from those stars, but that hardly implies that stars are patterns of light traveling across space. Evidence is one thing, fact another. A star is not a collection of dispositions to send light into our eyes, even though we have no evidence apart from this; and it is perfectly possible that other forms of evidence might emerge as technology develops—for example, we might travel to the stars and have an up-close look. So the reasoning in support of behaviorism commits a glaring non sequitur: it moves from a claim about the evidence actually available to us to a claim about the nature of the thing for which this is evidence. This is an attempt to move from a highly contingent fact about evidence to a constitutive truth about the nature of mind. If we made such a move in the possible scenarios I sketched, we would end up saying that mental states are dispositions to cause EEG recordings or chemical changes in the brain or even telepathic intuitions in a certain class of observers. None of these are what the mind is; they are merely possible sources of evidence regarding the mind. Behaviorism is no different: it is the elevation of one source of evidence, itself quite shaky, to the status of constitutive truth. There is nothing privileged about behavior in providing possible evidence about the mind, so converting it into a constitutive claim is bizarre and unwarranted. The mind cannot be what just happens to provide evidence for it to us now, given our senses and state of technology. Behavior is really just one effect of mental activity to be set beside others (electrical fields around the brain, chemical changes within it, remote stimulations of human senses at some distance from brains). Choosing another type of effect by which to define the mind would strike us as bizarre, but then why is behavior regarded as constitutive?[2] And add to this the point that gross observable behavior is actually a very unreliable and crude guide to what is going on in someone’s mind, being just a displacement of the body caused by an internal state. Your larynx moves thus and so when you vocally express your pain by groaning, but the pain itself may have a complex internal reality that exceeds this relatively coarse mode of expression. Also, behavior can be deceptive and misleading: it is hardly a certain guide to the other’s state of mind. EEG recordings would be much more reliable and attuned to what is really going on inwardly. Behaviorism is appealing to a rather impoverished source of evidence as well as committing a logical fallacy (trying to deduce an ontological conclusion from an epistemological premise). In ordinary life we have nothing better to go on most of the time, but as a basis for solid science behavior is far from ideal—so why try to convert it into a definition of the mental? That’s like taking unaided observations of the stars from planet earth as constituting the very nature of the astronomical world. Looked at like this, it is hard to see how anyone could have taken behaviorism seriously.[3]

 

Colin McGinn

[1] There are now many machines that allow for such brain scanning.

[2] A follower of Wittgenstein might insist that behavior supplies a criterion of the mental not merely a symptom; it is woven into the concept of mind. But why should the same thing not be true of EEG recordings if they formed part of our language game with mental words? What if children were brought up this way and took it for granted?

[3] There is also the familiar (and good) point that it is wrong to reduce a postulated theoretical entity to the evidence for it: but this concedes too much to the behaviorist in allowing that behavior is the unique and necessary form of evidence for mental attributions. What we need to appreciate is its thoroughly contingent status as evidence—whatever necessity it has is purely practical. Presumably if brain scanning were more realistic at the time behaviorism gained a foothold it would not have had the appeal it did have. The introspectionist school in psychology would be opposed by the brain scan school not by the behaviorist school. Maybe in the future behavioral evidence will be completely replaced by brain scan evidence; then someone will no doubt proclaim that the mind is a set of dispositions to produce images on scanning machines.

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Communication and Language

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Communication and Language

 

 

It is commonly supposed that the use of language in communication is its primary use. There is either nothing else that is language or anything else is an internalized version of outer speech. But in fact communication itself presupposes that language exists in another form and is not self-sustaining. First, communication is precisely the conveying of thought from one person to another, but this thought must exist in some symbolic medium, so it is required that sender and receiver share a language-like cognitive structure. Suppose I am thinking about a problem, talking to myself the while, and eventually I decide to communicate my conclusion to you: I say out loud “We had better take a left”. I have a thought and I attempt to transmit it to you, causing you to have the same thought; but this thought is in both cases a representational entity. Communication is the communication ofsomething, and that thing has to have properties that are encoded in communicative speech. It can’t be just unrelated to the speech act that conveys it; it must map onto the speech act, intelligibly so. Often, of course, it simply is an internal act of speech. The case is not like saying “I’m in pain” because that is not a case of communicating pain—I am not causing you to share my pain. But in communication I am causing you to share my thought, so my method must capture what is constitutively true of the thought; it must recapitulate the thought in some way. But what could this recapitulation be except a sharing of form? So a speech act of communication presupposes a prior instantiation of language in the mind of the speaker in the form of a thought. No communication without thought transmission, but also the transmitted thought must be alike in nature to the means of transmission; otherwise it is not communicated. If we regard language as primarily an instrument of thought, this is easy to understand: the internal language is simply translated into external language in acts of communication. But if we insist that outer speech is the only linguistic reality, we have trouble even explaining what communication is. For what precisely is it that gets communicated?

Second, speech acts require speech intentions. If I say, “It’s raining” I do so by forming an intention to say those words, just as if I raise my umbrella I form an intention to act in that way. So I have the intention to say, “It’s raining”. Acts of communication require intentions to make certain utterances.[1] But those intentions embed a reference to language: you intend to say the words “It’s raining”—this is the content of your intention. That implies that language exists in your mind prior to the act of external utterance, so it cannot be the product of your external speech. Speech acts require speech intentions, but speech intentions make reference to language, so the former cannot be the basis of the latter. In order to learn to communicate with language we have to learn to have linguistic intentions, but those intentions are already steeped in language, so communication cannot be prior to linguistic intentions. To put it differently, communication requires linguistic plans, but linguistic plans involve the ability to use language internally, so we can’t hope to base internal language use on external language use, let alone deny the existence of any language use other than overt communicative language use. Even if language were primarily used for communication, that would still require that language exists in another form—in this case as embedded in intentions. And since communication is precisely the communication of thought, the alleged primacy of communication would still require that language exists in the form of thought. Thus we cannot derive from the primacy of communication thesis the claim that language has no other form, or that whatever other forms of language exist they must depend on the outer form. The far more natural thesis is that language is not primarily a means of communication, still less is it identical to outer speech acts, but that it has an existence that is independent of such public expressions of language. That is, there are inner instantiations of language, in both thought and intention, and these get expressed, contingently so, in acts of outer speech. Outer speech is consequential not constitutive.[2]

 

C

[1] If you blanch at the word “intends” here, we can always replace it with something more neutral and sub-personal such as “directs” (cf. Chomsky’s “cognize”): the essential point is that the vocal system will include a preparatory phase of internal processing leading up to the actual utterance of the words determined on inwardly. Also, the usual strictures about implicature apply to using the familiar word “intends”, which I prefer: just because we don’t normally say that someone intends to say what they actually say doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.

[2] The idea that human language is identical to outer speech is well nigh universal in recent philosophy of language, though seldom explicitly stated, no doubt as a result of the prevalence of behaviorism. Yet it seems fairly easily refuted by the points made above. It is amazing what a stranglehold behaviorism has had despite its obvious weaknesses: it qualifies as an ideology and not merely a rational doctrine.

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Is Logic Arbitrary?

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Is Logic Arbitrary?

 

 

Propositional logic is the logic of truth functions: negation takes us from true to false and false to true; conjunction takes us from double true to true and otherwise to false; disjunction takes us from single true or double true to true and otherwise to false. But are these the only truth functions there are? No: what about the truth function that takes us from double true to false, or from single true to true but not from double true? That is, suppose we had a symbol for a truth function that is like conjunction except that it requires both conjuncts to be false for it to be true, or one that gives truth only if one of the disjuncts is true but not both. These might be written “nand” and “nor”, as in “p nand q” and “p nor q”. These truth functions exist and we can define them. We don’t seem to have any natural language words for them, but why should logic care about that? If we are interested in truth-functional logic as a general theory, we should make room for these non-standard truth functions and study their properties—they certainly generate well-defined entailments (for example, “not p” follows from “p nand q”). It would be arbitrary to exclude these truth functions from logical theory. And yet they are not mentioned in standard logic texts.

Predicate calculus introduces two quantifiers: “all” and “some”. It studies the entailments thereof. But in natural language there are many more quantifiers (and no doubt others could be defined): “most”, “many”, “a few”, “several”, “nearly all”, etc. They all serve to indicate quantity, and they all feature in valid inferences. For example, although “Most F are G” does not entail “This F is G”, it does entail “This F is probably G”; and we can infer from “Several F are G” that not just one F is G. Yet quantifier logic, as standardly presented, does not include these non-standard quantifiers, as they are called (though they are perfectly standard outside of standard logic textbooks). Surely a general theory of quantifiers should include the full range of quantifiers; it is arbitrary to exclude them. It leaves quantifier logic incomplete. It is true that such quantifiers are not found in arithmetic, with “all” and “some” ruling the roost, but they are common elsewhere and should be accorded the respect that is their due.[1] Just because predicate calculus historically arose from the desire to formalize arithmetic is no reason to ignore the logic of other quantifiers. There is thus an arbitrariness built into the logic that is customarily taught to students and thought to define the subject. Like propositional calculus, predicate calculus is too confined, too exclusive, too focused on one region of the logical landscape. We need a more inclusive logic open to the historically marginalized. Call this deviant logic if you like, but notice the pejorative connotations of that term.[2]

 

Colin

[1] No one seems interested in Goldbach’s sister’s conjecture that most numbers greater than 2 are the sum of two primes.

[2] We might see this as an essay in logical politics.

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The Certainty Principle

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The Certainty Principle

 

 

The Uncertainty Principle in physics comes as no surprise to a skeptic. We can’t know the position and velocity of a subatomic particle—so what? We can’t know a lot of things, including the position and velocity of an elephant. We think we can know that—or we think it when we are not thinking—but elementary reflection quickly convinces us that no such knowledge is possible for human beings. Newton’s physics is as uncertain as Heisenberg’s once we get critical about knowledge. Knowledge is basically an effect of the world, and the world does not affect us in such a way as to reveal its full nature. That should not surprise anyone according to the skeptic. Everything is subject the Uncertainty Principle—the truism that we can’t be certain of anything.

But wait: is that principle universally true? Can’t I know the intensity and quality of my present sensations? It is not that knowledge of the one automatically rules out knowledge of the other, or that there is some insuperable barrier to knowledge here. Indeed, I can be certain of the properties of my consciousness, so that skepticism gets no purchase: it is laid out before me, fully and transparently. True, the unconscious is subject to an uncertainty principle, like the body, but the conscious mind is subject to a Certainty Principle—the principle, namely, that I know with certainty the present state of my consciousness. I can’t know my brain in this way, but I can know the consciousness that depends on my brain. So consciousness possesses a remarkable epistemic property—it admits of certain knowledge. The physical world is subject to the Uncertainty Principle, both in physics and more generally, but the mental world is subject to a Certainty Principle. Amazing! How could anything in reality produce effects on us that guarantee knowledge of that thing? How does consciousness manage to convey its inner nature so perfectly? That seems contrary to the very nature of knowledge and yet it is apparently true. It even has an air of paradox about it—real yet fully known.

It doesn’t normally strike us that way because we are so familiar with consciousness, but a simple thought experiment makes us see how strange the situation really is. Suppose we were brought up knowing all about quantum theory: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is second nature to us, as familiar as elementary arithmetic. Moreover, our teachers have placed this principle in the context of general skepticism: we are thoroughly versed in skeptical thought and take it for granted in our daily lives. Epistemic limits are bread and butter to us. However, no one has ever said anything to us about consciousness—that subject has been off limits, possibly to discourage undue introspection. But this has not prevented a group of renegade thinkers from investigating the topic: they want to find out the truth about this aspect of nature. They have made some interesting discoveries about consciousness such as that it has intentionality and subjectivity and that it varies in certain ways with facts about the physical world. So far, though, no one has broached the question of the epistemology of consciousness, so ingrained is the acceptance of epistemic modesty. But one intrepid thinker takes the revolutionary step of questioning the general belief in Uncertainty and announces that there is something in the world that admits of complete Certainty. This is shocking, maybe even paradoxical, because the relation between reality and our epistemic faculties is generally believed not to admit of such a thing, and yet upon examination it turns out that consciousness is an exception to the general rule. Naturally the scientific world is in an uproar, but people have to admit that this brave thinker is onto something: the Certainty Principle gradually gains acceptance, despite some initial resistance. We have discovered that nature contains pockets that can be known with certainty—we can even know the intensity and quality of a sensation simultaneously! The Certainty Principle is added to the Uncertainty Principle as a pillar of science—though some people find it hard to accept the new paradigm, stubbornly insisting that it is simply not possible for any knowledge to escape the Uncertainty build into all human knowledge (so called). There must be some error in the reasoning that leads to that conclusion, or experiments are cited that purport to show that contrary to appearances error can creep into self-knowledge. Actually whenever someone takes himself to know both the intensity and quality of a sensation he is always a bit wrong about one of these properties. However, this is a minority position, with most people accepting the newly discovered Certainty Principle. A Nobel Prize eventually ensues.[1]

 

[1] Motto: what counts as a surprising discovery depends on background belief.

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Internal Language and Consciousness

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Internal Language and Consciousness

 

Do the words of inner speech consist of mental images of outer speech? If I say to myself “It’s raining” do I entertain mental images of my saying out loud “It’s raining”? Are inward utterances strings of such images? If so, that would indicate that inner speech is the internalization of outer speech, with the process of internalization consisting in image formation. And that would imply that inner speech is dependent on outer speech for its existence and nature—that it is a derivative phenomenon. On the other hand, if inner speech were not image-like that would imply that it is independent and autonomous, perhaps more basic. It is certainly true that we can form auditory images of the sounds of outer speech, as when you recall how someone pronounces certain words; but are these what inner sentences are made of? I think not: the two things are very different. First, images fade with time, but not so the constituents of inner language—they are not like memory images of words you have heard uttered. Second, they don’t feel the same: using words inwardly is not like hearing yourself speak, or anyone else—it lacks the sensory specificity of such images. Third, it is not to be supposed that a deaf person entertains auditory imagery when engaged in internal dialogue, yet he or she may experience inward speech in much the same way as hearing people. Nor is it that the deaf have mental images of sign language while the hearing have mental images of vocal speech—though these may make an appearance in the minds of the people involved—but rather that their inner dialogue proceeds in a modality-neutral manner. Fourth, such imagery lacks the combinatorial power of words in the formation of phrases and sentences, while inner words combine in natural grammatical ways (how would images distinguish between nouns and verbs?). Finally, people may differ in their powers of mental imagery, some being notably deficient in it, but they don’t thereby differ in their ability to talk to themselves; lacking such imagery altogether is no bar to self-communion. So it would be quite wrong to identify the lexical constituents of inner speech with sensory images of speech events; they are not “faint copies” of heard sounds (or possibly seen gestures). Accordingly, it would be wrong to suppose that internal language use derives from external language use by the process of image formation—by a process of internalization.[1]

What then is the phenomenology of inner speech? What kind of consciousness do we have of it? We are certainly conscious that we have such speech—it is not just a theoretical conjecture—but what is it like to talk inwardly? Here matters grow obscure: the phenomenology of inner speech seems curiously elusive and difficult to pin down. It hardly has a sensory feel at all, except around the edges. To judge from my own case, when I try to introspect its felt quality I come up with nothing definite, except that the harder I try the more I seem to force a sensory interpretation on my experience, as if desperate to find something concrete to cling onto. Most of the time the words slip by noiselessly, neutrally, blandly, a kind of wispy nothingness in the center of my thronging consciousness—a black hole in my sensory awareness. They are speech without the sound of the speech, experience without quality. Why is this? Here is a hypothesis: the internal language is largely unconscious.[2] The lexicon is hidden from us, except for fragmentary connections to heard language, so that we can’t say what word in this language corresponds to the English word “sound” (say). We have no conscious experience of the words of IL (as we may call this internal language). We are conscious that we have such a language, but its actual nature is inaccessible to consciousness—both lexicon and grammar. We are familiar with the idea of unconscious computations conducted in a symbolic medium; well, our inner speech is conducted in a medium whose character is hidden from our consciousness. It is a bit like vision: conscious percepts backed by unconscious symbolic processes. Thus I know what I am saying in my inner code, but I don’t know the nature of the code—I don’t introspect it. The words are nothing like conscious mental images of auditory impressions, but rather inscrutable elements of lived experience, unmistakable yet elusive. The picture, then, is of an unconscious cognitive system that is not derived from external speech and does not share its medium; rather, it is more plausible to suppose that outer speech is the externalization of this system clothed in materials appropriate to the senses. The process of externalization imposes a sensory quality on our awareness of language, or at least one expression of it; hitherto it was largely closed to conscious awareness, possessing zero phenomenology. Language is fundamentally an unconscious phenomenon only recently reaching consciousness in virtue of externalization.[3] It just happens that we are conscious of language in its sensory manifestation—and even here the sensory form is not to be identified with language as such. External perceptible speech is more of a symptom of language than the real thing. Consciousness and language are not natural bedfellows.

If that is true for inner speech, it is true a fortiori for what is called the language of thought. We should distinguish this idea from that of inner speech: LOT is not IL. The LOT theory, as propounded by Fodor, is motivated by considerations about the logical structure of propositional attitudes, particularly related to productivity: and any creature capable of propositional attitudes is credited with a LOT. It is not supposed that in thinking and belief formation we are saying the words of LOT to ourselves as we say the words of our inner language to ourselves. LOT is a theoretical construct not a datum of human conscious life (it is meant to apply to animal thinkers too, whether they engage in internal dialogue or not). LOT belongs at the level of computations in the visual system, i.e. not connected with consciousness at all. Our thoughts are indeed conscious but the symbolic medium in which they are encoded is supposed far removed from conscious awareness, so that we are not even aware that LOT exists. So the language in which we are alleged to think is not the same as the language in which we talk to ourselves: we might even call the latter language English (or Swahili), while that description is presumably false for LOT.[4] The idea of LOT is logically independent of the idea of IL—neither entails the other. The existence of IL is a matter of lived experience, while LOT is a daring hypothesis unconfirmed by direct awareness.[5] Accordingly, we can say that a typical human speaks three languages (individuating languages intuitively): LOT, IL, and EL. We have a language of thought, possibly universal among thinkers, human and other; a language for inner dialogue (or monologue), which is not possessed by all thinkers but which may be possessed by all normal humans; and a particular so-called natural language that is not universal to all human speakers (English or Swahili). These occupy different compartments of the mind, with two of the compartments hidden to consciousness and the other compartment open to conscious perception (at least as so manifested). The study of language therefore has three separate parts, with the third part distinctly marginal to the general phenomenon of language. Of course, it may turn out that these three compartments are at a deep level unified by a common set of linguistic principles, so that there is really only one language at work in all three areas; but prima facie we have three distinct linguistic faculties, operating in different realms and serving different purposes. Putting it chronologically, LOT is as old as thought itself, perhaps going back to the dinosaurs and beyond, while IL is of more recent vintage, date of origin unknown (let’s say two millions years ago), and EL is the new kid on the block, a mere 200,000 years old (and highly dependent on the larynx). Each resulted from suitable mutations driven by natural selection at vastly different times, but they each now sit in the human head guiding behavior: one language used as a vehicle of thought, another used to talk inwardly, and the third used as a means of communication. It would be quite wrong to think that the last adaptation is somehow more fundamental than the other two; they are simply different. It is as if evolution discovered language three times for different reasons and installed it in our nervous systems to serve three sorts of end. LOT is designed to enable thought to exist, IL is designed to improve thinking and solve problems, and EL is designed to get information across from one organism to another. Different functions, different languages—unless by some miracle they all converge on a set of linguistic universals.[6] Consciousness plays a minor role in this grand narrative, being mainly clueless except in peripheral ways. Nor need these languages obtrude themselves on conscious awareness given their job description: basically they are combinatorial systems designed to generate unlimited output, thus enabling a potential infinity of thoughts, internal conversations, and meaningful utterances. These are different sorts of output, and the means by which they are generated is of no immediate concern to the organism benefitting from them (compare vision). We happen to have three linguistic organs or organ-systems installed in our brain, a necessary duplication in the circumstances–as we have two eyes, two hands, etc. It is widely accepted that we have a number of memory systems, also designed with different goals in mind, possibly with different evolutionary origins, and so language is hardly anomalous in its variety (we also have five senses). We pay more attention to our communicative system for various reasons, but that is no indication of theoretical centrality or evolutionary priority. Language extends far beyond this domain and penetrates into every corner of the human mind (as well as the minds of many animals). Its relative unconsciousness is no impediment to this ubiquity. In particular, inner speech is not to be identified with some kind of echo of outer speech, as the image theory would suggest; it is a robust mental faculty in its own right, plausibly underlying the very possibility of outer speech.[7]

 

[1] We can also say, more generally, that the inner speech faculty is not the same as the imaginative faculty: imagination extends beyond language, obviously, but also internal language use is not a special case of imagination—which is not to say that the two don’t interface.

[2] Chomsky writes: “There’s good reason to believe that the inner language that we use all the time is inaccessible to consciousness, and that the fragments that reach consciousness reflect externalization—which, strictly speaking, is not part of language but of an amalgam of internal language and some sensorimotor system; it’s like the relation between a program in a computer and the particular printer that’s used to externalize it (so philosophers of language aren’t really discussing language).” (Personal communication, June 2020)

[3] I mean recent in evolutionary time: prior to the onset of vocal speech about 200,000 years ago language was silent and unperceived, not present to consciousness except obliquely; when it connected to the vocal apparatus it became an object of conscious apprehension (though not in its full nature).

[4] We speak this way because of the obvious connections to the language we grow up to speak not because IL is literally identical to spoken English (or Swahili), but LOT is not connected to our spoken language in that way, operating as it does entirely behind the scenes.

[5] LOT is regarded as constitutive of thought, part of its inner essence, while IL is best seen as an aid to thought, and strictly external to it. Thus one language operates to aid in the deployment of another language—IL helps LOT form the right beliefs. In other words, by speaking to ourselves we regulate what LOT will enter in the belief box. If we call the first language L1 and the second L2, then we can say that L1 helps organize L2 so as to serve the purposes of the belief system. That is, we get better beliefs if we use our inner speech faculty to think.

[6] A possible hypothesis is that IL is the origin of both EL and LOT instead of being quite separate from LOT. That would imply that LOT did not exist before IL came into existence, which would imply either that dinosaurs didn’t think or that they spoke to themselves. I suppose these are possible scenarios, but the more plausible theory is that thought came into existence before inner speech evolved, thus ruling out the hypothesis that IL is the sine qua nonof LOT. Still, we should keep an open mind on the question. Alternatively, it may be supposed that LOT is the basis of both IL and EL: I think this would be wrong for various reasons, but I won’t go into the question now.

[7] This paper is offered as a summation of several controversial lines of thinking not as a complete defense of the positions presupposed, for which the interested reader would have to look elsewhere.

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A Theory of Language

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A Theory of Language

 

In A Theory of Justice Rawls suggests a thought experiment designed to rid us of biases in our thinking about justice, labeled the Original Position. We find ourselves occupying a certain position in society, perhaps an unfairly privileged one, and we need a way to prescind from this contingency, so we imagine ourselves not to have knowledge of the facts of our actual position. In this way we can gain an impartial perspective on what constitutes a just distribution of resources. I want to suggest something similar in the philosophy of language: we are familiar with certain concepts and perspectives on our language that arise from the contingencies of our linguistic history, but these may give us a biased view of the real nature of language, so we need a way to prescind from such contingencies. We need to imagine ourselves not possessing our customary knowledge, stripped down to the basics of linguistic life; then we can start from scratch in producing a theory of language. That theory might be quite revisionary of our ordinary conceptions, as Rawls’s theory is quite revisionary of common assumptions about justice. He was trying to get to the very heart of justice; we are trying to get to the very heart of language—by suspending common assumptions (the method is also similar to Husserl’s epoche). So: what does our commonsense theory of language look like and where might it go wrong?[1]

Our commonsense understanding of language invokes a range of concepts familiar to philosophers of language: meaning, reference, sense, ambiguity, communication, intention, convention, speech act, assertion, command, question, grammar, logical form, use, word, sentence, speaker, hearer, implication and implicature, truth conditions, translation, and others. These make up the tacit theory we bring to bear on language, which are then converted into theoretical terms of an overall theory. They belong to a semantic meta-language. Maybe we acquire this meta-language in the course of our linguistic upbringing, maybe it has an innate component: in either case it comes to us naturally and spontaneously, without any self-consciously explicit theory construction. So let’s imagine that we do not acquire this set of concepts in the way we do but rather reach linguistic maturity without developing any such self-understanding: we speak an object language (say, English) but we don’t speak a meta-language about it—we have no thoughts at all about the nature of the language we speak. We don’t even have the concept of meaning. Perhaps animals that use symbolic systems—whales and dolphins, say—are in this cognitive situation: they speak and listen but they don’t theorize at all. They just act and react. Then the question is what account of language might we develop starting from this position of complete ignorance. Would it resemble the theories we currently espouse? Would it employ the concepts we employ now? We have no folk semantics to rely on, so what would a properly scientific semantics look like? If we could wipe the slate clean, what would we write on it starting from scratch? Would everything from our folk semantics survive, or just some, or none? In particular, are there any biases built into our existing theories, arising from the contingencies of our history?

Certainly there have been philosophers (and linguists and psychologists) who have detected such biases and recommended rejecting them. Quine, say, recommends rejecting most of folk semantics as irredeemably unscientific: meaning, reference, intention, synonymy, etc. He proposes replacing this obsolete theory with a behaviorist theory: the central concepts of scientific semantics are stimulus and response, stimulus meaning, holism, indeterminacy, and radical translation. Wittgenstein attacked the idea, supposedly part of common sense, that every word functions as a name, which he attributed to a natural human failure not to make distinctions; and he proposed replacing concepts like denotation with the concept of use. Others have rejected sense or meaning as anything over and above reference. Still others have expanded folk semantic concepts to include revisionary theories of language, as with Frege’s semantic theory (e.g. sentences denote truth-values construed as objects). The idea of criticizing our habitual thinking about language has not been off the table, but it has not been as radical as the sort of criticism we see in physics or biology (except perhaps in the case of Quine). And it has not been suggested that we are prone to systematic error because of a historical contingency regarding language, making us miss the essence of language. The contingency I have in mind is that we happen to use language for communication, but this is not the primary or original manifestation of language. We might never have used language to communicate, but we have shaped our understanding of language through consideration of this contingent expression of linguistic mastery. To put it directly: the use of language as a tool of thought is the primary manifestation of language, and it is not subsumable under the kinds of concepts we bring to language used as a vehicle of communication. If we had started by considering this kind of internal language, we would have arrived at a very different understanding of the essence of language; as it is we have been biased by the contingent circumstance that we use language to communicate. For various reasons communicative uses of language are salient to us, and certainly they require their own treatment, but they are not the only or the central uses to which language may be put. They are, in fact, derivative and parasitic, reflecting more about the human sensory-motor system than the inner workings of language as such.

I am not going to defend the cognitive view of language here—the idea that language is primarily a tool for thinking.[2] I will merely observe that a huge amount of language use goes on outside of any communicative context, being “in the head”. We talk to ourselves constantly and use language to help us solve problems (as well as being a resource for contemplation). A person can lack the ability to speak and hear and yet still employ language internally. A reasonable hypothesis is that language evolved initially as a cognitive aid and only later become adapted for communicative use (about 200,000 years ago by most estimates). It became integrated with our sensory-motor systems, thus inheriting their architectural features. Prior to that it functioned very much like our imagination—another human faculty that evolved as an aid to thought and which exists primarily as an internal system. We may suppose that language and imagination coexisted in the human mind for a considerable time quite cut off from any direct behavioral expression; they were not initially designed as communicative systems. Today imagination is still in this condition, but language was partially repurposed as a means of communication while preserving its cognitive function. Both imagination and language are essentially combinatorial systems with infinite potential, and this confers great utility on them in solving problems; but whether this structural feature becomes expressed in vocal speech is entirely contingent. We can imagine imagination achieving public expression in somewhat the way language has by coopting a sensory-motor system that reveals imaginative acts as they occur—say, by displaying visible images on the body of the organism—but as things stand this adaptation has not occurred. Likewise language could have remained internal and performed its cognitive function without the evolution of a sensory-motor system that embeds it in acts of communication. It seems to me entirely possible that many animals employ an internal symbolic system in their cognitive lives—a language of thought essentially—without ever transitioning to spoken language.[3] That is just an entirely different biological system with a different function and morphology (sounds, gestures, larynx, ears). The human species has been using internal language for its entire history, reaping the cognitive benefits, and only lately began incorporating it into their communicative repertoire. Presumably a mutation (or combination of them) led to this ability long before any thought of communication entered the picture: language has been aiding thought, solving problems, enabling contemplation, for lo these many years, well before overt speech took off. If speech were to cease tomorrow by some catastrophe, language would carry on performing its vital cognitive function. Of course, internal language use is inaudible and invisible, while external language use is noisy and visible (consider sign language), which may give salience to the latter compared to the former; but in point of biological priority, functional utility, and sheer pervasiveness internal language surely has the edge. We talk to ourselves all day but only occasionally do we open our mouths (and what an effort it is!). Internal language is woven into our entire conscious life (even when sleeping). Without it our minds would be much diminished.

The point of urging this perspective on language is to expose the parochial character of our current theorizing about language—the bias built into it, the skewed perception. Suppose we had never developed the ability to speak externally, confining ourselves to inner speech: what would the theory of language look like then? The entire apparatus of folk semantics for outer language (better, outer expression of language) would be redundant in so far as that apparatus is directed to communication. Two epistemic features of communicative speech may be noted: uncertainty about what the speaker has in mind and uncertainty about his or her truthfulness. We often don’t know who or what the speaker is referring to (has in mind) and we don’t know how reliable she is. Thus we must bring to bear the concept of reference and the concept of truthfulness. There is an epistemic gap between speaker and hearer—the hearer can’t read the speaker’s mind—and that gap must be negotiated in acts of communication. But no such gap obtains between the user of internal language and the recipient of such use. So there need be no concerns about what the speaker has in mind or whether he is being truthful. These reasons for bringing in the concepts of reference and truth do not exist for the internal use of language—so what purpose do they serve in the theory of internal language? The first thing we would light upon in theorizing about this use of language is its combinatorial structure, because that is what powers its central function—creative thought, problem solving. If we did come up with the concepts of reference and truth it would be an afterthought not a central concern, as it is for public language. Problem-solving potential would be the central concept, and this would lead us to focus on the constitutive structure of language—on syntax, basically. Grammar, recursion, infinite scope, embedding, transformations—these would be the properties to engage us. These are what drive the cognitive engine, making language apt for its function.

What about meaning? Would we make a point of assigning meaning to internal language? The word “mean” has two uses: applied to speakers and applied to words. The OED gives this for “mean”: “intend” and “intend to convey or refer to”. The primary meaning of the word is in application to agents who mean things, linguistically as well as otherwise. Words mean things in so far as people mean things by them (this connection is articulated in Grice’s account of meaning).[4] But this use of “mean” does not apply to internal language: a user of an internal sentence does not intend to convey information to anyone, still less to harbor Gricean intentions. We don’t mean things by the words we use when we engage in inner speech (that word itself is dubious—is this any kind of speaking?). But if internal language is not meant, does it mean? Is our inclination to say that it is meaningful a kind of projection from outer communicative speech? Would someone in the original linguistic position, with no spoken language to deal with, reach for the concept of meaning—our concept of meaning—in describing internal language? Maybe some notion of linguistic significance would be invoked, possibly the notion we apply to non-human languages, but would we say that our internal sentences have meaning? Who to and for what purpose? Who cares about what the sentences mean so long as they do their job—aid in problem-solving thought? I need to know what you mean in order to get information from you, but do I need to know what I mean when I am trying to solve a problem? My purpose is not to mean things by my inner sentences but to employ them in a cognitive task. So the concept of meaning seems irrelevant to internal sentences; maybe they have meaning, but who cares? What we are concerned about is their ability to facilitate cognitive functioning, which is a matter of their inner architecture and functional properties: syntax not semantics, roughly.

And so on down the line: speech act, intention, language game, convention, use, communication, assertion, command, and question—none of this is relevant to internal language. It is relevant to only one expression of language in acts of overt speech, which involves a sensory-motor apparatus extrinsic to language itself as a cognitive structure.[5] Just as vocal speech is not integral to communicative language as such (consider sign language), so overt speech in general is not integral to language as such—not part of its core. It is a relatively recent evolutionary step, not prefigured in the origins of the language faculty. Making outer speech the focus of language studies is like making those external signs of the imagination I mentioned earlier into the focus of imagination studies. What is called philosophy of language, as practiced by analytical philosophy heretofore, is really philosophy of one-expression-of-language, and not even the most central expression. It’s like focusing on writing while ignoring speech and calling that linguistics. Internal language has a far stronger claim to be basic and original. The mind consists of various faculties—mathematical, scientific, moral, imaginative, and linguistic (among others)—and the last item is no different from a locational point of view. True, we can manifest these internal faculties in external form by engaging our senses and motor capacities, but none of them is rightly seen as constituted by such exterior manifestations—including language. The theory of language must accordingly recognize that fact and shape its concepts appropriately. That will involve at least a shift of emphasis, possibly large-scale revision, in which some familiar concepts recede and others seize center stage. To put it bluntly, syntax will take over from semantics, at least as semantics is currently conceived. We have been bedazzled and distracted by the noises we make when accessing our internal language faculty and by our feeble attempts at interpersonal communication, when all along language was purring along inside us doing its vital work.[6]

[1] In physics and astronomy the analogue of position in society is position in the universe. We live on the surface of a small planet and our view of the universe is shaped by this contingency (e.g. the sun looks to rise); to do physics and astronomy correctly we need to prescind away from this and form a conception of the universe that excludes such factors. We need to replace the science we naturally assume given our contingent position with a science that gets to the heart of objective facts. We need to do this in physics and astronomy but also in theories of justice and in theories of language.

[2] Chomsky defends it in Why Only Us (2016) and What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2016).

[3] These symbolic systems might be as species-specific as human language is, so that internal discourse varies dramatically from species to species.

[4] Here is an interesting fact: we say “John means ‘unmarried male’ by ‘bachelor’” but not “John means ‘bachelor’ by ‘unmarried male’”, where we could paraphrase “means” by “intends”—despite the synonymy of the two terms. Likewise it is right to say “’bachelor’ means ‘unmarried male’” but it sounds wrong to say “’unmarried male’ means ‘bachelor’”—again despite the synonymy. This shows the affinity between “means” and “intends” and also the close connection between speaker meaning and word meaning.

[5] Ambiguity and the arbitrariness of sound-meaning pairings are properties of external speech, creating genuine problems for speakers and hearers, but they don’t trouble internal language users: we are not in doubt about which meaning we had in mind, and whatever arbitrariness there is in internal symbols poses no problem of inward interpretation. Internal language is peculiarly transparent.

[6] The conception of language I am working with will no doubt sound completely alien to the typical contemporary philosopher of language, but close students of Chomsky’s work will find it comfortably familiar. Time to get some reading done.

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Academic Freedom

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of conductng my first seminar in eight years. We discussed two papers of mine from this blog. We used Zoom. The students were excellent, the discussion scintillating; it was just what a philosophy seminar should be. You ask what institution organized this seminar–is it perhaps indicative of a thaw? Perhaps some small courageous American college dedicated to academic freedom? It was with philosophers at Moscow University at the Center for Consciousness Studies, not an American among them. Does anyone see the moral of this?

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Is Reference Real?

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Is Reference Real?

 

“Sitting next to her, talking with her about the simplest and most insignificant subjects, Prince Andre admired the joyful shining of her eyes and smile, which referred not to what they were saying, but to her inner happiness”: Tolstoy, War and Peace, Volume II, Part Three, chapter XVII.

 

The standard position is that the concept of reference applies to some expressions but not to all. Which expressions refer is controversial: doubt has been cast on predicates, definite descriptions, “I”, quantifiers, connectives, adverbs, numerals, feature-placing sentences, and fictional names. The paradigms of referential expressions are taken to be names of persons or things and demonstrative pronouns: there are entities for these words to refer to and they succeed in referring to them. Reference is taken to be a real relation that can hold between words and things, but it may not hold in some cases. Not just any old expression can stand in this relation; the expression must contain a special power of referring, not conferred on every expression. Perhaps the power is derivative on a speaker’s performing a referential act, so that word reference is not an intrinsic property of the word, but it is still supposed that reference is not granted to any and every meaningful word. It is an elite property, marking a word out for ontological distinction: the word reaches majestically out to reality, sword-like, while non-referential words are semantically limited to language itself, trapped inside it. The referential words provide the hooks linking language to the world. They are lines thrown out to reality.

But this position is not the only one: Frege’s position stands in stark contrast. According to Frege, every expression refers: not just names and demonstratives but predicates, connectives, quantifiers, sentences, and that-clauses. A menagerie of entities is wheeled in to provide the reference for these expressions: first- and second-level concepts, truth functions, truth-values, and indirect senses. If each word refers, there must be something to which it refers; the relation needs relata. Reference thus comes cheap and is thoroughly democratic, making no distinctions. It is not a privilege possessed by names and other singular terms but a property of every meaningful expression. Language has hooks to the world at every point. Many philosophers have felt that this is excessive, that it empties the concept of reference of all significance; they evidently have a sufficient grasp on the notion of reference to feel this in in their bones. Another position, seldom if ever occupied, is that no word refers–not even the supposed paradigms of reference. True, traditional empiricist theories of meaning, which equate meanings with “ideas” or mental images, make no mention of a reference relation to the non-mental world; but even these theories don’t explicitly deny that reference applies to language. The neglected position does just that: it asserts that reference is a pseudo-concept, applicable to nothing. Frege took language to be semantically uniform with respect to reference and so does this third position, but in the opposite direction; only the standard position adopts a mixed perspective—partly referential, partly not. The uniformly non-referential position holds that there is no such relation as reference, not even for names—though it is not denied that every expression has meaning (determinately so). Reference is a myth, a philosopher’s invention, a trick of the imagination. Words don’t refer, period (and neither do speakers).

It must be admitted that the two pure positions enjoy a theoretical advantage: they don’t divide words into two groups characterized by different semantic concepts. The standard position posits an awkward theoretical disunity: on the one hand, the robustly referential expressions (or speech acts); on the other, the etiolated non-referential expressions locked up in themselves. At least Frege’s universal referential realism makes no such division and accordingly affords a generalized conception of meaning—all meanings are designed to generate acts of reference. The mixed position, by contrast, supposes that some meanings have the job of generating reference and some do not—and that seems like an unattractive lack of unity in the concept.[1] Also, there is intractable controversy about which expressions are referentially endowed, which casts doubt on the clarity of the concept of reference, as philosophers are wont to understand it. Some people have no doubt that definite descriptions refer while others stoutly deny it, and intuitions seem hazy on the question. Some people insist that predicates refer to properties while others vehemently deny it, and the issue is difficult to resolve. In certain moods Frege’s system can strike one as theoretically compelling, but then one snaps out of it and reverts complacently to the mixed position. We may find ourselves accepting that reference has its varieties, but we stubbornly maintain that expressions either have it or they don’t—even as we lack clear criteria to make the distinction. A more uniform position would seem desirable, but Frege’s position is too extravagant to contemplate; and the third anti-referential position just seems manifestly untrue, since surely some words refer!

The view I am going to defend is the anti-referential view, but this will require some subtlety and alertness to philosophical illusions. The basic idea is that the philosopher’s concept of reference is a misplaced reification of a common sense notion: it invests more in that notion that it can really bear. I will begin by consulting the dictionary, always a solid starting point. The OED has this for “refer”: “to mention or allude to” and then “(of a word or phrase) describe or denote”, followed by secondary meanings such as “send someone to a medical specialist”. Under “mention” we find “refer to briefly” and “refer to (someone) as being noteworthy”. So we have a speaker’s use of “refer” that includes mentioning and alluding, and then a linguistic use of “refer” that includes describing and denoting. Clearly “mention” is not a synonym of “refer”, so we can’t trade on its familiarity to validate the philosopher’s use of “refer” (we often mention that such and such but we can’t refer that such and such). The closest we get to the philosopher’s use is “describe or denote,” but “describe” doesn’t cut it since not all referring expressions are descriptive—and don’t predicates describe? So we are forced to fall back on “denote”. Here is the entry for “denote”: “be a sign of; indicate” and “stand as a name or symbol for”. The first thing that strikes one here is the generality of the notion as so defined. The notion of being a sign of or indicating is not even restricted to linguistic contexts: it is the analogue for denotation of Grice’s notion of natural meaning. Clouds can denote rain under this definition, since they can be a sign of rain or indicate it. So this cannot be the definition we are seeking if we want to capture the philosopher’s notion. We turn then to the second definition: here the generality is at least confined to language, since it concerns symbols. But isn’t “red” a name or symbol for redness? Isn’t “and” a symbol for conjunction? Isn’t “all” a symbol for universal quantification? Isn’t every word a symbol for something? Then everything in language denotes something, according to this definition. We are in Frege territory, with the notion shorn of all exclusive implications: denoting is just the property of being a symbol for. Isn’t a symbol precisely something that is a symbol for something—that’s what it is to be a symbol. Calling a symbol denotative doesn’t go beyond calling it a symbol. Clearly Frege and other philosophers intend something stronger than that—but what? That is all that the dictionary tells us and it does nothing to vindicate the philosopher’s use of the term. The notion of reference so understood is trivial not substantive: no concept of a special relation possessed only by special words can be gleaned from the dictionary definition.

At this point the philosopher is apt to fall back on something called “the name-bearer relation”: surely this is a case of genuine substantive reference. Here is the name and there is its bearer, clearly distinct things, and the former designates the latter—denotes it, refers to it. But what does this alleged relation come to?  Isn’t it just that the former is a name of the latter? It is the word (symbol) that we use for a certain individual. But nothing in that locution implies some special relation of reference that holds uniquely between name and object. Notice that the alleged relation is not perceptible and has no causal powers: it is not like a bridge or a light ray or a line drawn in space. It is curiously impalpable, strangely elusive. We might imagine it as analogous to a kind of pointing: pointing fingers are perceptible things, and some reference is indeed aided by pointing. So we imagine the name as pointing to its bearer (or the speaker doing so, physically or mentally): that is what reference looks like! But this is so much mythology: there is no such pointing going on. The idea is just an imaginative crutch designed to confer substance on the supposed special relation of reference. Someone might protest: “Surely sentences containing names are about something—isn’t that what reference is?” I would make two points. First, sentences are also “about” other things such as colors and conjunction—this is part of what they mean—but the idea is supposed to be that these expressions don’t refer. Second, the relevant notion of “about” is connected to truth, as follows: a name contributes to truth conditions in virtue of the fact that a certain object is relevant to the truth of sentences containing it and not other objects. The name “Aristotle” is such that sentences containing it are true just if Aristotle is a certain way. The name “Aristotle” is a name for Aristotle in this sense: but on the face of it this truism says nothing about any supposed relation of reference.[2] The mistake is to think that the very thin notion of reference that is captured by the truism is actually a thick substantive relation that it makes sense to investigate like other relations in nature. It is not, for instance, like the relation of perception (with which reference is often compared). It is quite true that we mention things and allude to them and even make reference to them, but these commonsense notions don’t add up to the philosopher’s special notion of reference—that privileged restrictive notion that invites such philosophical perplexity. We have taken an ordinary notion, fine in its place, and run away with it, postulating metaphysical facts that exceed anything common sense can ground. We have, in a word, reified the notion. This is why it sounds so strange to say in this sense that a predicate denotes a property or that “and” denotes conjunction or that sentences denote truth-values. We have stretched and mangled the notion beyond recognition. We have conjured a semantic reality from thin air and based our whole account of language around it. We are guilty of philosophical hyperbole.[3]

Notice that abandoning the notion of reference, as a heavy-duty theoretical tool, does not mean we have to abandon key insights. We can still distinguish names and demonstratives from descriptions, predicates, and quantifiers; and we can still say (if we like) that the meaning of a name is its bearer. What we must not do is invoke a special relation of reference that supposedly links names to their bearers, or demonstratives to objects in the environment, or “I” to a certain self. We might wish to speak this way for convenience, expressing only the thin deflationary notion I specified; but we can’t suppose we are speaking of a primitive relation, analogous to pointing, that links words with things. Seeking a causal theory of reference, say, or a functional theory, is folly, since reference is not the kind thing that could consist in such facts; it’s just a device we use for talking about words, sentences, and truth. Or again, it is a potentially misleading way to express the idea that symbols symbolize—that symbols are symbols for something. When someone learns that “and” is the word for conjunction in English we can express that fact by saying “He now knows that ‘and’ refers to conjunction in English”, but nothing can be read into that way of talking of the kind assumed in standard philosophical parlance. There is no such thing as reference in that sense—it isn’t real. The right thing to say is that in the ordinary dictionary sense every meaningful word refers (shades of Frege, suitably deflated) but in the philosopher’s sense no word refers, not even names. And that seems like a welcome result given that a mixed position is theoretically infelicitous: better to have a nice uniform account of meaning. Wouldn’t it be odd if one part of language—the part occupied by names and demonstratives—had the remarkable property of reference while the rest of language hobbled along without it? Imagine lines drawn vertically below every allegedly referential word and a blank below every non-referential word: that would suggest totally different functioning as between the two kinds of word. Yet syntactically and pragmatically (as well as sense-wise) all expressions are alike–why the anomaly?

How did the notion of reference find its way into the philosophy of language? We all remember Frege’s argument for why we need sense in addition to reference, but the same argument can be construed as a defense of reference (and may subliminally operate in this way). Suppose we start by assuming that “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” have different senses: we then observe that they nevertheless have something in common, i.e. the same planet is relevant to the truth of sentences containing either name. Let’s introduce a name for this common feature: we say that both names refer to the same planet. Then we announce that two names can have the same reference—an interesting discovery about language. We invert Frege’s argument so as to move from diversity of sense to unity of reference, in the process inventing a new concept, viz. reference. And now we are off and running, applying this notion all over the place. But the data that led to this conceptual profusion merely concerned the fact that the same object figures in the truth conditions of sentences with different senses—it has no more content than that. Then too, we are influenced by the pointing gesture and by the relational nature of perception. We thus end up with a thick (yet elusive) concept of reference whose correct application proceeds to perplex us. We need to develop a healthy skepticism regarding the notion of reference that has grown from these dubious roots. There is nothing wrong with saying that names name people and things, but we shouldn’t convert this into the fanciful idea that there is some peculiar relation that links names to their bearers—an invisible string, a mental pointing, a magical arrow.[4] Alternatively, we could view talk of reference and denotation purely mathematically, as in mathematical model theory, and give up the idea of real empirical concrete relations between words and things. There should be no metaphysics (or science) of reference.

The usual way this subject has been pursued is to assume that there are certain paradigm cases of reference (the name-bearer relation, demonstrative reference to sense-data) and then ask whether other cases approximate to the paradigm. Then we debate how far the concept of reference can be extended from the paradigm cases. The more radical position is that there are no paradigm cases, because nothing refers. We can speak of meaning and sense as real properties of language, but it is pointless to debate how extensively the notion of reference applies. It has no serious application, not as a matter of linguistic theory (though a doctor can still refer a patient to a specialist). Articles with titles like “On Denoting” or “On Referring” are about nothing (this one might be called “Against Denoting”). Questions like whether the reference relation is rigid or non-rigid with respect to a particular class of expressions are also misguided, since there is no reference relation to be one or the other (though we can reconstruct the underlying issues without assuming realism about the reference relation). We must either purge the philosophy of language of the myth of reference or show that it can get by without going beyond the minimalist view of “refers”. The standard division between the referential and the non-referential is an untenable dualism.

 

[1] If the sense of names involves a mode of presentation of a reference, what does the sense of other expressions involve if there is no reference to be presented? The mixed position gives us a radically divided theory of what senses are, thus undermining the idea of a general notion of sense.

[2] It is commonly stated that predicates denote their extensions, thus conjuring up a special semantic relation between predicates and sets; but this is no more than a fancy way to talk about the things a predicate is true of. There is no more content to the idea of extension-denotation than the idea of what a predicate is true of. The same should be said of names: talk of their denotation is just a fancy way to talk about their contribution to truth.

[3] I am conscious of echoes from Wittgenstein in these remarks.

[4] Notice that other non-theoretical uses of “refer” and cognates do not suggest any such “queer” facts (Wittgenstein’s term): letters of reference, references as citations, works of reference. Nor does the comical use of “I don’t know to what you are referring” by the socially aspiring lady in the train station tearoom in the film Brief Encounter (she actually knows quite well to what the station master is referring).

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