Key texts

W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1960), ch. ii; ‘On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation’, Journal of Philosophy, 67 (1970), pp. 178–83.

Introduction

We've seen that Quine's and Davidson's insistence on the centrality of radical translation or interpretation to our understanding of language is an expression of a fundamentally scientific attitude to language. In Quine's case, this formed part of a concerted and longstanding attack on traditional conceptions of meaning. At each end of the central decade of his philosophical career, he produced dramatic claims about meaning which have continued to seem profoundly sceptical – though Quine himself didn't see them in quite that way. In ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (first published in 1951), Quine attacked the use, within empiricism, of the traditional notion of analyticity, which is bound up with the idea of sameness of meaning. In Word and Object (first published in 1960), he advocated what he called the indeterminacy of translation, which again calls into question the extent to which it makes sense to speak of sameness of meaning.

These two challenges to traditional conceptions of meaning have had rather different histories. The first (the attack on analyticity in ‘Two Dogmas’) remains quite widely accepted, particularly in the United States. It has shaped, and continues to shape, the whole conception of their subject held by many philosophers in the English-speaking world.

Key texts

Saul Kripke, ‘A Puzzle about Belief’, in A. Margalit, ed., Meaning and Use (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), pp. 239–83; Donald Davidson, ‘On Saying That’, in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 93–108.

Introduction

Semantics is the attempt to give a systematic explanation of how the meaning of sentences depends upon the meaning of their parts. Modern semantics began with Frege, whose logical system depends on the semantics of the sentences which can be constructed using its grammar. Frege's semantics was extensional: in general, whole sentences may be swapped when they have the same truth-value, singular terms may be swapped when they refer to the same object, and predicates may be swapped when they're true of the same things.

Propositional-attitude constructions – constructions involving a psychological verb (‘believes’, ‘hopes’, ‘wishes’, ‘fears’, etc.) and a ‘that’-clause – have presented a challenge to extensionalism from the beginning. It's clear that more matters about sentences which occur in such ‘that’-clauses than their truth-value, and it seems that more matters about singular terms which occur here than which object they refer to, and about predicates than which things they're true of. How, then, are we to explain what the words are doing in these ‘that’-clauses? How can we provide a semantics for propositional-attitude constructions?

Key text

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book iii, chs. 1 and 2.

Introduction

This book is an introduction to philosophy of language in the analytic tradition. Analytic philosophy begins with Gottlob Frege, who wrote at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. So why begin this book with John Locke, whose principal work was written at the end of the seventeenth century? Briefly: because Locke presents in a clear and simple way the background to analytic philosophy of language.

In the first place, Locke's general theory of language initially strikes many of us as extremely natural. His views about what words are and what language is for are shared with almost the whole analytic tradition. But he is also a clear representative of a line of thinking about language which has been the main target of much of the analytic tradition. Frege's philosophy of language can be said to begin with a rejection of what seem to be central features of Locke's view. And much recent work on proper names and natural-kind terms (the topics of chapters 4 and 5) is defined by its opposition to a broadly Lockean kind of view.

What Locke says

One of the four books of John Locke's vast and seminal work, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, is dedicated to language. The core of his conception of language is laid out in one paragraph; here it is:

Key text

H. P. Grice, ‘Meaning’, The Philosophical Review, 66 (1957), pp. 377–88.

Introduction

In the last few chapters, we've been circling round what may seem to be the most basic question in the philosophy of language: what is it for linguistic expressions to have meaning at all? Quine's and Davidson's insistence on the central importance of radical interpretation does say something relevant to this question. They claim, in effect, that what is meant in one language is always open, in principle, to being captured in another language. And they make it central to meaning that it is something to be understood in the course of a general project of understanding people. Working from another angle, Austin's work places language among the actions that are performed in getting things done. But none of this seems to address the basic question directly.

And the basic question can seem very pressing – almost bewildering, in fact. For suppose we think, as it can seem very natural to think, that words are, at bottom, just types of mark or sound: things which have no meaning in themselves. How could something like that have any meaning at all? This is the question which Paul Grice seems to be addressing in a series of papers, beginning with the ground-breaking ‘Meaning’, which is the focus of this chapter. The precise details of his answer have often been questioned, but many of the questioners (who include Grice himself) have been in broad sympathy with his approach.

Key text

J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words, 2nd edn, J. O. Urmson and M. Sbisà, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), especially lectures i, v, vi, viii, and xi.

Introduction

Truth has some claim to be the central topic of philosophy. It is therefore not entirely surprising to find philosophers of language (as opposed to students of linguistics and grammarians, for example) concentrating particularly on truth in their treatment of language. Analytic philosophy of language may be said to begin with Frege's determination that the fundamental thing about the meaning of a sentence is its truth-value. And we've seen Davidson's related claim, that the meaning of a sentence may be given by giving its truth-conditions, forming the core of his philosophy of language.

This focus on truth has led to a corresponding focus on the kind of sentence which can be used to say something true: the declarative sentence – the kind of sentence which it makes grammatical sense to insert in the gap in the phrase ‘Simon says that …’ It has therefore come to seem natural to regard sentences of this grammatical type as the basic kind of sentence, and to regard their meaningfulness as being closely connected with what is involved in their being true or false.

In a series of lectures, worked on over several years in the 1950s and eventually published as How to Do Things with Words, the British philosopher J. L. Austin set out to challenge this apparently natural view.

Key text

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), part I, §§ 1–32.

Introduction

This last chapter is devoted to a small extract from a work by one of the most puzzling and awkward figures in the analytic tradition of philosophy of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein met and corresponded with Frege, and was taught by Russell. His first work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, adapted and refined many of their ideas on logic and language. It inspired the scientifically minded philosophers who made up the Vienna Circle, and who in turn had a profound influence on analytic philosophy, particularly in America.

Wittgenstein's later work, of which the Philosophical Investigations is the principal text, divides the English-speaking philosophical community. He is often dismissed by those who have a broadly scientific approach to philosophy, though he's read keenly by many of those who don't. This is partly to do with the style of his writing (though, of course, the style embodies something of his philosophy). The Philosophical Investigations is not organized systematically: it has no chapters and no simple sequence of thought; it is even disputed whether it contains arguments. Much of it has the form of a probing conversation of the author with himself: Wittgenstein raises a worry – often on behalf of a more traditional approach to philosophy – responds to it, responds to the response, and so on.

Key text

W. V. O. Quine, ‘Three Grades of Modal Involvement’, reprinted in Quine's The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).

Introduction

In the last two chapters we've looked at the works at the centre of a revolution in our thinking about reference and necessity. So far I've represented the revolution as being against views to be found in Frege, Russell, and Locke. But there was a more recent target than any of these: the great American philosopher and logician, Willard Van Orman Quine. Quine dominated the English-speaking philosophical world in the middle years of the twentieth century, with an enormous influence on both doctrine and style, in the United States in particular.

Quine followed Russell in his treatment of definite descriptions and proper names. Indeed, he went even further, proposing that all singular terms be replaced by, or reconstrued as, definite descriptions. He was also an ardent advocate of what he and his followers called extensionalism. Recall the core of Frege's conception of meaning, the part to which the notion of Sense is added. According to this, what matters about the meaning of various types of expression can be summarized as follows:

1. For sentences – whether they are true or false;

2. For singular terms – which objects they refer to;

3. For predicates – what difference they make to the truth and falsity of sentences, given any particular choice of names in place of the variables.

Key text

W. V. O. Quine, ‘Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes’, Journal of Philosophy, 53 (1956), pp. 177–87.

Introduction

Linguistic constructions count as intensional if they raise problems for the rule of extensionality. Where extensionality reigns we can swap singular terms which refer to the same object, predicates which are true of the same things, and sentences which have the same truth-value (either both true or both false), without affecting the truth-value of the whole sentence in which such expressions occur. In chapter 6 we looked at problems which arise in connection with one kind of intensional construction – modal constructions (to do with possibility and necessity). In this chapter we'll look at some related problems with another kind of intensional construction – propositional-attitude constructions. Intensional constructions in general are of central interest in the analytic tradition, because they are a principal focus of what I've called the Basic Worry about the view, which has been adopted enthusiastically in the analytic tradition, that the meaning of words is concerned with things in the world, rather than things in the mind. The relevant aspect of Basic Worry is that this world-directed view seems to require two words which are associated with the same thing in the world to have the same meaning, but that seems counter-intuitive in some contexts. Intensional constructions are the most obvious contexts in which it seems counter-intuitive.

A propositional attitude is a state of mind whose nature can be characterized using a whole sentence embedded within a ‘that’-clause.

Key texts

W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), ch. 2; Donald Davidson, ‘Radical Interpretation’, in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 125–40.

Introduction

So far we've been concerned with the kind of meaning different kinds of linguistic expression have, and with the way in which the meaning of sentences depends on the meaning of their parts. But there might seem to be more basic issues in the philosophy of language. Don't we need to understand the role of language in people's lives?

This issue will occupy us, in various forms, over the next few chapters. In this chapter we'll be examining the conception of language and meaning proposed by Willard Van Orman Quine and developed by Donald Davidson. They're concerned to show what kind of phenomena languages are, and what it is to make sense of them. Since the meaning of words is what there is to make sense of in them, an account of making sense of language is bound to be illuminating about meaning. Indeed, Davidson uses it to try to supply what we found to be missing from his semantic proposal, considered on its own.

The general picture of language developed by Quine and Davidson has been hugely influential. There are some differences between them on questions of detail, as will be clear shortly; and people have differed from both of them on other points.

What is language? What is it for words to have meaning? What is the meaning of words? These are the basic questions of the philosophy of language. And here's a natural-seeming way of answering them. Language is a system of signs which we use to communicate with each other. Communication is a matter of letting other people know what we think. The signs which make up language get their meaning from our associating them with the thoughts we want to express. The meaning of words of common languages, such as English or French or Japanese, is a matter of a convention among speakers to use them with agreed associations.

Something very much in the spirit of that natural-seeming way of answering these basic questions was proposed by John Locke at the end of the seventeenth century. Recent philosophy of language is most simply understood by considering where it stands in relation to Locke's view. The most decisive shift came with the judgement – associated most obviously with John Stuart Mill and Gottlob Frege – that our words concern things in the world, rather than things in our minds. So complete has this transformation been that it is now accepted as simply obvious that one of the central things which has to be understood in the philosophy of language is how language relates to the world. That major change apart, however, there are significant points of overlap between Locke's view and the standard assumptions of contemporary philosophers of language.

Key text

Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), lectures i and ii.

Introduction

‘Alice Cooper’ is a proper name; ‘the famous shock-rock musician’ is a definite description which tells you something about the person whose name it is. Frege thought that both names and descriptions were singular terms – expressions whose business is to refer to objects. Russell thought that neither ordinary proper names nor definite descriptions were singular terms. But Russell and Frege were agreed in this: they both thought that names and descriptions work in the same way. Indeed, they both seem to have thought that ordinary proper names were equivalent in meaning to definite descriptions.

In this they were opposed to an older and simpler view held by J. S. Mill, that proper names ‘do not indicate or imply any attributes as belonging to those individuals’ which they refer to. A simple amplification of Mill's view – let's call this the Millian view – holds that there is no more to the meaning of a name than the fact that it refers to the object it does refer to. The most obvious difficulty for the Millian view is provided by the kind of case which led Frege to introduce the notion of Sense in the first place. The kind of difficulty involved here is an aspect of what I've called the Basic Worry for the view that the meaning of words is concerned with things in the world, rather than things in the mind.

Key texts

Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), lecture III; and H. Putnam, ‘Meaning and Reference’, Journal of Philosophy, 70 (1973), pp. 699–711.

Introduction

Saul Kripke's arguments against description theories of names inaugurated a revolution in the philosophy of language. One of the first acts of that revolution was an application of similar arguments against a similarly descriptive theory of another sort of expression – so-called natural-kind terms. Kripke himself claimed that natural-kind terms are rigid designators. In this he was supported by the semi-independent work of Hilary Putnam. Kripke and Putnam together are acknowledged as the creators of a new theory of such terms. This chapter focuses on the work by these two philosophers in which they first proposed that new theory.

But what are natural-kind terms? They differ from proper names in this: whereas proper names pick out individuals, natural-kind terms pick out kinds. Favourite examples are ‘tiger’ and ‘water’. But natural-kind terms form a grammatically variegated class. Although they're all terms for kinds in some sense, they may be terms for kinds of object (like ‘tiger’, ‘mammal’, ‘fish’, ‘whale’) or for kinds of stuff (like ‘water’, ‘gold’, ‘aluminium’). It's generally assumed that this difference is not important for the issues which Kripke is concerned with. What does matter is that the kinds in question are natural kinds. So what makes a kind natural? There are two broad conceptions of nature which seem to be at play in the focus on natural-kind terms.

Key text

Gottlob Frege, ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Zeitung für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 100 (1892), pp. 25–50; translated (for example) as ‘On Sense and Meaning’ in G. Frege, Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, ed. B. McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); this paper appears in many anthologies in various translations.

Introduction

The German mathematician and philosopher, Gottlob Frege, is widely regarded as the father of analytic philosophy. His work has shaped everything which has been written in the philosophy of language in the analytic tradition. I think there are two principal reasons for this. First, his philosophy of language presents a way of accepting what seems most natural and intuitive about the kind of approach to language found in Locke, while decisively rejecting what seems most questionable about it. And, secondly, his work offers the prospect of a thoroughly systematic approach to meaning.

Frege shares with Locke these three crucial assumptions which we identified in chapter 1:

1. (L1) The nature of language is defined by its function;

2. (L2) The function of language is to communicate;

3. (L3) What language is meant to communicate is thought.

But his clearest disagreement with the Lockean tradition comes in his treatment of these two assumptions:

1. (L4) Words signify or mean the components of what language is meant to communicate;

2. (L5) The components of thought are Ideas.

Frege accepts some version of (L4), but understands it in a non-Lockean way. Locke had the following conception of how words are components of sentences.

Key text

Bertrand Russell, ‘On Denoting’, Mind, 14 (1905), pp. 479–93.

Introduction

‘Alexandra’, ‘Rasputin’, and ‘Felix Youssoupoff’ are all proper names: they're names of the wife of the last Tsar of Russia, the monk she admired, and the man who shot that monk, respectively. We use these names to refer to those people: that seems to be what the names are for.

But what about those other phrases I've just used: the phrases ‘the wife of the last Tsar’, ‘the monk she admired’, and ‘the man who shot that monk’? Phrases like these are known as definite descriptions. What do they do? How do they work? Do they refer to the people in question? Do they work like names? It might seem just common sense to suppose they do work like names; that's certainly what Frege seems to have thought. This chapter focuses on a famous article by Bertrand Russell which argued that definite descriptions work quite differently, despite initial appearances. Although it's apparently concerned with something very minor – the meaning of the word ‘the’ – Russell's article was part of a revolution in the philosophy of language.

What is Frege's view, precisely? As we saw in chapter 2, he's committed to these two claims:

1. (F3) Ordinary proper names and definite descriptions are singular terms;

2. (F4) Ordinary proper names and definite descriptions all have Sense (as well, perhaps, as reference).

And the crucial things about the notion of a ‘singular term’ used in (F3) are these:

1. (ST1) The business of a singular term is to refer to an object;

2. (ST2) A sentence containing a singular term has no truth-value if there is no object corresponding to that singular term.

Key text

Donald Davidson, ‘Truth and Meaning’, in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 17–36.

Introduction

The meaning of sentences depends upon the meaning of their parts. This basic truth about language must be at the heart of any philosophy of language. In the analytic tradition, it guides the project of semantics, which attempts to provide a systematic theoretical explanation of precisely how the meaning of sentences depends on the meaning of their parts. We've seen this issue shaping all of our discussions so far. What does a definite description contribute to sentences of which it can form part? Is it an object referred to, together with the way in which it is given (as Frege thought), or does it, in context, assert the unique existence of something which satisfies some condition (as Russell proposed)? A parallel question arises for proper names: do they work in sentences in the way that definite descriptions do (whatever that is), or do they do something quite different? Again, should we give a descriptive account of what natural-kind terms contribute to the meaning of sentences involving them, or should they be regarded as directly referential? And the whole discussion of propositional-attitude constructions, from Frege himself onwards, is shaped by the difficulty of explaining what the words in the ‘that’-clauses of such constructions are contributing to the sentences which report propositional attitudes, given that they seem to be subject to peculiarly strict restrictions on substitution.

Key text

Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).

Introduction

We've seen the difficulty of explaining what it is for linguistic expressions to have meaning. But what if it could be shown that there's no fact of that matter at all about what our words mean? This dramatic sceptical claim was presented by Saul Kripke, in his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. This work had an immediate effect, in two ways. First, it presented a striking challenge to everyone who believed that words really mean something, and provoked a minor industry of work designed to avoid the scepticism which it proposed. And, secondly, because Kripke claimed to derive his sceptical arguments from some sections of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, it led to a renewed interest in Wittgenstein's later philosophy.

In fact, it's probably better not to stress the links with Wittgenstein too heavily. Kripke himself is quite modest about the status of his work as an interpretation of Wittgenstein: he claims to be doing no more than present ‘that set of problems and arguments which I personally have gotten out of reading Wittgenstein’. And it's now quite widely agreed that, in certain crucial respects at least, Kripke misrepresents Wittgenstein. Nor is the scepticism presented here one which Kripke himself endorses: what we have is, in Kripke's words, just ‘Wittgenstein's argument as it struck Kripke, as it presented a problem for him’.