The sameness of form underpins the idea of the model theory of language. Something like: what can be described in language is the same as what can be the case in the world.
The problem is that the possible combinations of objects in the world seems obviously more restricted in their combination possibilities than language. To respond to this, W will ensure that the combination possibilities of language are pinned to the possibilities of the world. This will lead him to postulate a most restrictive account of possible linguistic combinations. What strikes me is that he seems to be engaging in the very method he proscribed for Russell, wrt theory of types: that one cannot dictate to grammar what it can do. [] Here I take the implication to be that grammar cannot be restricted by other, non-logical or non-descriptive commitments: One cannot, in order to achieve some non-descriptive goal, impose on language a logic of convenience, if you will. I wonder then, how much precisely this kind of trap is where the Tr ends up. What is the tension between a broad strategy begun by Russell: namely, the appeal to a hidden logical form that gets one out of certain complications, and which eventually becomes a generalized strategy (hidden existential quantifier: work of empty reference is done by an (unproblematically unfullfilled) variable, on one hand, AND a broadly descriptivist approach to what could count as good grammar.
Even if reality and the expressive possibilities of language end up being identical in a strong sense, what are we left with if it turns out that we can't really say anything about language? This it seems was an important advantage of the linguistic turn. What remains left of it in W's project, even if he does show argumentatively that there is such an identical underlying form? It may seem the very notion of a contentful remainder - what's left when we put empirical claims to one side and non-sense to the other - is inconsistent with an approach that took much as one of its guiding criteria the denial of the synthetic a priori.
The problem is that the possible combinations of objects in the world seems obviously more restricted in their combination possibilities than language. To respond to this, W will ensure that the combination possibilities of language are pinned to the possibilities of the world. This will lead him to postulate a most restrictive account of possible linguistic combinations. What strikes me is that he seems to be engaging in the very method he proscribed for Russell, wrt theory of types: that one cannot dictate to grammar what it can do. [] Here I take the implication to be that grammar cannot be restricted by other, non-logical or non-descriptive commitments: One cannot, in order to achieve some non-descriptive goal, impose on language a logic of convenience, if you will. I wonder then, how much precisely this kind of trap is where the Tr ends up. What is the tension between a broad strategy begun by Russell: namely, the appeal to a hidden logical form that gets one out of certain complications, and which eventually becomes a generalized strategy (hidden existential quantifier: work of empty reference is done by an (unproblematically unfullfilled) variable, on one hand, AND a broadly descriptivist approach to what could count as good grammar.
Even if reality and the expressive possibilities of language end up being identical in a strong sense, what are we left with if it turns out that we can't really say anything about language? This it seems was an important advantage of the linguistic turn. What remains left of it in W's project, even if he does show argumentatively that there is such an identical underlying form? It may seem the very notion of a contentful remainder - what's left when we put empirical claims to one side and non-sense to the other - is inconsistent with an approach that took much as one of its guiding criteria the denial of the synthetic a priori.
No comments:
Post a Comment