I. COMMITMENTS AND CONTENTIONS
COMMON COMMITMENTS:
1. (COR) CORRELATIVE MEANING: a linguistic entity is said to have correlative meaning (if and?) only if they are meaningful due to being correlated or indexed with an extra-linguistic entity.
- The correlation relation possesses (at least) these two features:
(ARB) arbitrary (external) relation
(NTR) non-transformative relation (this will certainly be required if mirror analogies are to hold)
This assumption is supposed to be an intuitive starting place. I take it that there is a further assumption that in the absence of any additional claims of how ling.ent get their meaning, that ALL linguistic meaning is, immediately or derivatively, given to linguistic entities in this way.
[As far as I can tell, this assumption is shared by all relevant parties wrt the Tr. It has been suggested that Davidson's semantics would present a denial and alternative to correlative meaning. This fits with what little I know about his epistemology, something to the extent that nothing extra-linguistic could give meaning to something linguistic, etc. Follow up.]
2. (OBJ) OBJECTIVITY: the extra-linguistic entities with which ling.ents are correlated are objects in the world.
- To be an object in the world is (at least) to be:
(PUB) publicly accessible
(IND) possess existence that is not dependent on being perceived or represented by anyone
[This is a common assumption to all relevant parties, and in fact this commitment seems to me as THE motivating presupposition/conclusion that founds the distinctly analytic movement, as central to understanding its unique problematic as Frege and Russell's logicism.
MOORE: Follow up: Bradley's idealism is to be the most significant statement of what this movement is a turn away from, with OBJ as the pivot. Bradley is taken to have been committed to the following claims
(i) that all relations are internal;
(ii) relatedly, that truth is always a matter of degree, and always incomplete;
(iii) some form of global skepticism, perhaps
Also, he is charged by Moore with a equivocal notion of 'idea'. Moore can disambiguate two usages (The nature of judgment) idea as an occurrent mental event and idea as universal meaning. From this latter he develops the notion of the concept, which is committed to (IND) and also the denial that a concept is a mere 'abstraction' from ideas or things: each of these is itself comes under the concept of concept as anything else (not sure if I get this or what work it's doing).
FREGE: Follow up (The thought) Frege's motives seem to come out of his Logicist project. This needs to be expanded on greatly; he has arguments for rejecting psychologism: charging that ideas as private mental acts fall out of the picture in an account of public meaning (is this anachronistic?); he also finds a conflation between descriptive or 'natural' laws, and prescriptive or normative laws. But the logicist project as such seems to demand a more 'substantial' status to the claims of logic if founding mathematics in logic is supposed to count as an accomplishment, or as a founding at all. Bringing in this dimension, we see also another target of criticism: Kant. In Begriffschrift, Frege declares he is searching for a system that will "bring forth judgments that at first sight appear to be possible only on the basis of some intuition." There is a broad project then that might be called (EMP) the empiricist project: to do away with the notion of the synthetic a priori, to explain how we can have knowledge of logic, metaphysics and mathematics without some kind of intuition. It is probably too broad reaching: I'm not sure Russell could be counted as not wanting to appeal to some kind of intuition, since his acquaintance seems to have, at least at times, applied not only to empirical entities but also things like universals and logical constants. Moreover, I get the impression from what little I've read that Russell is something of a one trick pony: beyond his treatment of definite descriptions, it's clear that his thought is more instructive as an exhibition of error than a font of philosophical methodological and substantive inspiration. Still, historically speaking, his often evolving attempts to solve the problems raised by his own current set of philosophical hypotheses is not simply explanatory of W's framework, but is telling to exhibit - perhaps by virtue of the strained positions he finds himself in - of the inherent difficulty of the problematic of early analytic philosophy and it's commitments to COR, OBJ, and perhaps EMP.
LOCKE: Follow up: Lockean phil of language founds the subjective explanation of linguistic correlative meaning. Locke seemed to believe that words most immediately refer to occurrent ideas in the speaker's mind. This may seem, for reasons analytic and continental, laughably primitive, however I do hope to show that the (early) analytic tradition, in many ways is dealing with problems that were easy enough to solve within a subjectivist or mental meaning framework. Most prominently, the problem of meaningful but non-existent entities or sentences seem simple enough for Locke to explain, however explaining the content of occurrent ideas might prove to force him into the same problematic.
(RFL) LINGUISTIC REFLECTION: structural properties of linguistic entities reflect/reveal structural properties of the world (or of the objective, extra-linguistic entities to which they correspond)
From this follows the crucial claim that to understand the former is to understand the latter, the former not being intrinsically interesting, or, at least, the understanding of the world as the more ultimate philosophical goal.
A crude an incomplete construction of the reasoning is something like:
(1) COR
(2) OBJ
(TF) RFL
I can understand the broad idea of this argument, but it seems that there are some crucial and contentious that allow the move from (1) & (2) to RFL. Some assumptions would be: a language will contain at least all the vocabulary and (more importantly) the grammatical forms to represent and so articulate the real categories of the world. The counter claim however seems imaginable: the language gets its meaning from its real world correlates, however it does not, even at some 'deep' level, possess the kind of fine-tuned sensitivity to capture all real categories. Of course, the weaker claim might just be that an analysis of language can, at best, reveal all the categorical distinctions that we can speak about. The ambition of these two different claims seems to be infinitely different to me, even if the results would amount to the same thing. I need to understand the justification for this move much better. So we can maybe see how eg post-structuralist thinkers reject RFL because they, at least, reject NTR condition of OBJ. If we, somehow, hold a view of language by which reality is transformed, constructed, or constituted by contingent linguistic frameworks, then it is easy to imagine the argument failing for want of a complete set of true premises. However it still seems questionable whether COR and OBJ alone entail RFL, whether the inference is valid. I suspect this question will come up in my prospective reading, and if not there, I doubt there is a shortage on the subject.
OPEN ISSUES:
(VAC) PROBLEM OF VACUITY - General term for problems raised by the move toward OBJ. There are at least two:
(MER) the problem of making sense of sentences which do not have an objective correlate e.g., "Superman is weak to kryptonite" or "The king of France is bald." This will be the first problem raised by the move to meaning grounded in objective correlation: how do we explain the way we understand the meaning of linguistic entities that do not have any such correlate.
MER seems to arise pretty immediately in response to COR & OBJ. It also is related to an old problem, already raised by Plato (in the Theatetus?). Competing strategies (positing another extra-linguistic layer (Frege), (analyzing sentence to expose logical form that makes no such reference, i.e., one that relies on objectively correlative meaning (Russell) will arise in line with broader theoretical commitments (Frege's light of making sense of communication, Russell's in light of epistemic considerations).
(NTI) the problem of making sense of non-trivial identities e.g., "Hesperus is phosphorus" or "2+3=5". Why should these sentence be meaningfully different from the trivial identity claims "Phosphorus is phosphorus" and "5=5", if the entities on both sides of the equation are meaningful in virtue of the same objective correlates.
NTI was raised by Frege as a way of defending his logicist project, needing to clarify a universal sense of identity (follow up: Elucidations).
(UNT) ACCOUNT OF UNITY - Any theory of meaning will have to explain the holistic unity of the sentence. This can be exhibited by considering the difference between a list and a sentence: you can remove and add items from a list and it remains a list, however removing a term from sentence may cause it to cease to be a sentence. Since linguistic terms are as such ARB (there is nothing about linguistic entities as such that ensures unity), there must be some extra-linguistic ground for this unity.
Propositions "cannot consist of names alone; they cannot be classes of names"...For a class of names offers no prospect of supplying the resources to explain the unity of the proposition" NL 111.
Accounting for unity without supposing OBJ seems more easily accomplished: Locke, and Kant?,for instance, held that it was the mental act of judgment that 'holds together' the elements of sentence: unity as a mental, occurrent act. But since OBJ is not supposing linguistic meaning to depend on mental acts, it seems it is committed to the idea that their is an extra-linguistic objective unity in the world that grounds the unity of the sentence. This will also be related to Frege's context principle, I think. Wittgenstein takes it as a given that one cannot 'judge a nonsense', so if judgment constitutes the unity of the sentence, then nothing would rule out judging a nonsense.
If we observe that the (SPR) meaningfulness of a proposition cannot depend on its truth, otherwise we could not make sense of falsehood, then the problem of unity can be seen as the problem of accounting for unity as a tension between the requirement for objectivity (that the extra-linguistic unity must be objective) and that false sentences must equally be possessed of that same unity: so we require an account of unity that is somehow objective but also non-actual. Russell, who is most stringently attached to the actuality (to the point of indubitability) of any objective correlates will struggle most to make sense of this. Frege seems to depend on making sense of the unity of thought. While W will deny that a sentence has an extra-linguistic entity from which it gets its meaning.
F,R and W all see that they must account somehow for the form of the proposition, that it is not the heap of names or terms that can account for the fact that something is asserted, but essentially an orderly combining of them. (a cobb salad is not just all the ingredients of a cobb salad). Early, Russel inspired solution involved casting a proposition as an existential assertion about a complex. Frege used the notion of function but this does not help with understanding a proper analysis of the proposition (scrutiny of a proposition cannot reveal the function whose value for the argument it is.)
Here Wittgenstein must add the notion of form to the picture, which must be something radically different from a name.
(GDV) QUESTION GRAMMATICAL DIVERSITY - This is a question about whether, or how many, logical/grammatical types their are. Possibilities will be horizontal (names, predicates) and vertical (as in a hierarchy of types) and unclear (logical constants).
The main force of the argument for an undifferentiated horizontal grammar is made by Russell. He seems above all committed to the idea that any term must be able to be spoken of as subject and as quality. It is easy to see the complications involved of differentiating or defining the category of predicate without making them objects and thereby referring to something essentially difference than what we want to be talking about. Ordinary language seems to allow a single concept to change its form as needed - a throw, throwing, thrown, etc. Intuitively there should be a single concept that these make reference to, however different grammatical types will make it not only impossible for the surface connection to be made between a throw and throwing, but it will make it impossible to differentiate them at the grammatical level. Frege also considers this problem, where he needs to say something like, "...is a horse" refers to the concept horse.
COMMON COMMITMENTS:
1. (COR) CORRELATIVE MEANING: a linguistic entity is said to have correlative meaning (if and?) only if they are meaningful due to being correlated or indexed with an extra-linguistic entity.
- The correlation relation possesses (at least) these two features:
(ARB) arbitrary (external) relation
(NTR) non-transformative relation (this will certainly be required if mirror analogies are to hold)
This assumption is supposed to be an intuitive starting place. I take it that there is a further assumption that in the absence of any additional claims of how ling.ent get their meaning, that ALL linguistic meaning is, immediately or derivatively, given to linguistic entities in this way.
[As far as I can tell, this assumption is shared by all relevant parties wrt the Tr. It has been suggested that Davidson's semantics would present a denial and alternative to correlative meaning. This fits with what little I know about his epistemology, something to the extent that nothing extra-linguistic could give meaning to something linguistic, etc. Follow up.]
2. (OBJ) OBJECTIVITY: the extra-linguistic entities with which ling.ents are correlated are objects in the world.
- To be an object in the world is (at least) to be:
(PUB) publicly accessible
(IND) possess existence that is not dependent on being perceived or represented by anyone
[This is a common assumption to all relevant parties, and in fact this commitment seems to me as THE motivating presupposition/conclusion that founds the distinctly analytic movement, as central to understanding its unique problematic as Frege and Russell's logicism.
MOORE: Follow up: Bradley's idealism is to be the most significant statement of what this movement is a turn away from, with OBJ as the pivot. Bradley is taken to have been committed to the following claims
(i) that all relations are internal;
(ii) relatedly, that truth is always a matter of degree, and always incomplete;
(iii) some form of global skepticism, perhaps
Also, he is charged by Moore with a equivocal notion of 'idea'. Moore can disambiguate two usages (The nature of judgment) idea as an occurrent mental event and idea as universal meaning. From this latter he develops the notion of the concept, which is committed to (IND) and also the denial that a concept is a mere 'abstraction' from ideas or things: each of these is itself comes under the concept of concept as anything else (not sure if I get this or what work it's doing).
FREGE: Follow up (The thought) Frege's motives seem to come out of his Logicist project. This needs to be expanded on greatly; he has arguments for rejecting psychologism: charging that ideas as private mental acts fall out of the picture in an account of public meaning (is this anachronistic?); he also finds a conflation between descriptive or 'natural' laws, and prescriptive or normative laws. But the logicist project as such seems to demand a more 'substantial' status to the claims of logic if founding mathematics in logic is supposed to count as an accomplishment, or as a founding at all. Bringing in this dimension, we see also another target of criticism: Kant. In Begriffschrift, Frege declares he is searching for a system that will "bring forth judgments that at first sight appear to be possible only on the basis of some intuition." There is a broad project then that might be called (EMP) the empiricist project: to do away with the notion of the synthetic a priori, to explain how we can have knowledge of logic, metaphysics and mathematics without some kind of intuition. It is probably too broad reaching: I'm not sure Russell could be counted as not wanting to appeal to some kind of intuition, since his acquaintance seems to have, at least at times, applied not only to empirical entities but also things like universals and logical constants. Moreover, I get the impression from what little I've read that Russell is something of a one trick pony: beyond his treatment of definite descriptions, it's clear that his thought is more instructive as an exhibition of error than a font of philosophical methodological and substantive inspiration. Still, historically speaking, his often evolving attempts to solve the problems raised by his own current set of philosophical hypotheses is not simply explanatory of W's framework, but is telling to exhibit - perhaps by virtue of the strained positions he finds himself in - of the inherent difficulty of the problematic of early analytic philosophy and it's commitments to COR, OBJ, and perhaps EMP.
LOCKE: Follow up: Lockean phil of language founds the subjective explanation of linguistic correlative meaning. Locke seemed to believe that words most immediately refer to occurrent ideas in the speaker's mind. This may seem, for reasons analytic and continental, laughably primitive, however I do hope to show that the (early) analytic tradition, in many ways is dealing with problems that were easy enough to solve within a subjectivist or mental meaning framework. Most prominently, the problem of meaningful but non-existent entities or sentences seem simple enough for Locke to explain, however explaining the content of occurrent ideas might prove to force him into the same problematic.
(RFL) LINGUISTIC REFLECTION: structural properties of linguistic entities reflect/reveal structural properties of the world (or of the objective, extra-linguistic entities to which they correspond)
From this follows the crucial claim that to understand the former is to understand the latter, the former not being intrinsically interesting, or, at least, the understanding of the world as the more ultimate philosophical goal.
A crude an incomplete construction of the reasoning is something like:
(1) COR
(2) OBJ
(TF) RFL
I can understand the broad idea of this argument, but it seems that there are some crucial and contentious that allow the move from (1) & (2) to RFL. Some assumptions would be: a language will contain at least all the vocabulary and (more importantly) the grammatical forms to represent and so articulate the real categories of the world. The counter claim however seems imaginable: the language gets its meaning from its real world correlates, however it does not, even at some 'deep' level, possess the kind of fine-tuned sensitivity to capture all real categories. Of course, the weaker claim might just be that an analysis of language can, at best, reveal all the categorical distinctions that we can speak about. The ambition of these two different claims seems to be infinitely different to me, even if the results would amount to the same thing. I need to understand the justification for this move much better. So we can maybe see how eg post-structuralist thinkers reject RFL because they, at least, reject NTR condition of OBJ. If we, somehow, hold a view of language by which reality is transformed, constructed, or constituted by contingent linguistic frameworks, then it is easy to imagine the argument failing for want of a complete set of true premises. However it still seems questionable whether COR and OBJ alone entail RFL, whether the inference is valid. I suspect this question will come up in my prospective reading, and if not there, I doubt there is a shortage on the subject.
OPEN ISSUES:
(VAC) PROBLEM OF VACUITY - General term for problems raised by the move toward OBJ. There are at least two:
(MER) the problem of making sense of sentences which do not have an objective correlate e.g., "Superman is weak to kryptonite" or "The king of France is bald." This will be the first problem raised by the move to meaning grounded in objective correlation: how do we explain the way we understand the meaning of linguistic entities that do not have any such correlate.
MER seems to arise pretty immediately in response to COR & OBJ. It also is related to an old problem, already raised by Plato (in the Theatetus?). Competing strategies (positing another extra-linguistic layer (Frege), (analyzing sentence to expose logical form that makes no such reference, i.e., one that relies on objectively correlative meaning (Russell) will arise in line with broader theoretical commitments (Frege's light of making sense of communication, Russell's in light of epistemic considerations).
(NTI) the problem of making sense of non-trivial identities e.g., "Hesperus is phosphorus" or "2+3=5". Why should these sentence be meaningfully different from the trivial identity claims "Phosphorus is phosphorus" and "5=5", if the entities on both sides of the equation are meaningful in virtue of the same objective correlates.
NTI was raised by Frege as a way of defending his logicist project, needing to clarify a universal sense of identity (follow up: Elucidations).
(UNT) ACCOUNT OF UNITY - Any theory of meaning will have to explain the holistic unity of the sentence. This can be exhibited by considering the difference between a list and a sentence: you can remove and add items from a list and it remains a list, however removing a term from sentence may cause it to cease to be a sentence. Since linguistic terms are as such ARB (there is nothing about linguistic entities as such that ensures unity), there must be some extra-linguistic ground for this unity.
Propositions "cannot consist of names alone; they cannot be classes of names"...For a class of names offers no prospect of supplying the resources to explain the unity of the proposition" NL 111.
Accounting for unity without supposing OBJ seems more easily accomplished: Locke, and Kant?,for instance, held that it was the mental act of judgment that 'holds together' the elements of sentence: unity as a mental, occurrent act. But since OBJ is not supposing linguistic meaning to depend on mental acts, it seems it is committed to the idea that their is an extra-linguistic objective unity in the world that grounds the unity of the sentence. This will also be related to Frege's context principle, I think. Wittgenstein takes it as a given that one cannot 'judge a nonsense', so if judgment constitutes the unity of the sentence, then nothing would rule out judging a nonsense.
If we observe that the (SPR) meaningfulness of a proposition cannot depend on its truth, otherwise we could not make sense of falsehood, then the problem of unity can be seen as the problem of accounting for unity as a tension between the requirement for objectivity (that the extra-linguistic unity must be objective) and that false sentences must equally be possessed of that same unity: so we require an account of unity that is somehow objective but also non-actual. Russell, who is most stringently attached to the actuality (to the point of indubitability) of any objective correlates will struggle most to make sense of this. Frege seems to depend on making sense of the unity of thought. While W will deny that a sentence has an extra-linguistic entity from which it gets its meaning.
F,R and W all see that they must account somehow for the form of the proposition, that it is not the heap of names or terms that can account for the fact that something is asserted, but essentially an orderly combining of them. (a cobb salad is not just all the ingredients of a cobb salad). Early, Russel inspired solution involved casting a proposition as an existential assertion about a complex. Frege used the notion of function but this does not help with understanding a proper analysis of the proposition (scrutiny of a proposition cannot reveal the function whose value for the argument it is.)
Here Wittgenstein must add the notion of form to the picture, which must be something radically different from a name.
(GDV) QUESTION GRAMMATICAL DIVERSITY - This is a question about whether, or how many, logical/grammatical types their are. Possibilities will be horizontal (names, predicates) and vertical (as in a hierarchy of types) and unclear (logical constants).
The main force of the argument for an undifferentiated horizontal grammar is made by Russell. He seems above all committed to the idea that any term must be able to be spoken of as subject and as quality. It is easy to see the complications involved of differentiating or defining the category of predicate without making them objects and thereby referring to something essentially difference than what we want to be talking about. Ordinary language seems to allow a single concept to change its form as needed - a throw, throwing, thrown, etc. Intuitively there should be a single concept that these make reference to, however different grammatical types will make it not only impossible for the surface connection to be made between a throw and throwing, but it will make it impossible to differentiate them at the grammatical level. Frege also considers this problem, where he needs to say something like, "...is a horse" refers to the concept horse.
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