Jaroslav Peregrin

Saul Kripke ’s book Naming and Necessity (which first appeared in 1972 as a paper within a volume on natural language semantics1) is felt, by many linguists and philosophers, as a milestone of the semantic analysis of natural language. Prior to it, many semanticists took for granted that the meaning of any expression must be a two-level matter, consisting of something of the kind of what Frege called Sinn and Bedeutung or what Carnap christened as intension and extension. The first of the components is what the speaker knows when she understands the expression (and the knowledge of which is independent of any knowledge of facts external to the language in question), while the second amounts to some kind of chunk of the real world which gets denoted or referred to by the expression. Thus, the intension of the king of France is what you get to know as soon as you come to understand the phrase, and the extension is what (if anything) happens to be picked out by the intension in the actual world in the actual moment. This is to say that an expression gets to into the contact with its extension only via the intension (which we can imagine also as a kind of a criterion for picking up the thing). Intension, then, is what amounts to the meaning of the expression in the intuitive sense of the word2. Now Kripke’s considerations challenged this very two-level structure of meaning: he argued that especially proper names get their semantics via a direct, inmediated contact with the world – that their meaning does not mediate their contact with a thing, but directly is the thing. This may be not so surprising in case of proper names (after all, it is even disputable whether they can be counted to the language – for you cannot find them in dictionaries), but Kripke went on to argue that the same holds also for some other expressions, especially natural kind terms such as “cow” or “water”. Kripke’s argumentation is concise and flattening; and it has been provoking a lot of discussions..

Analytic philosophy is based on the assumption that our world is a world grasped in terms of (this or another) language and that the question of the character of any entity is closely connected with the question of the linguistic grasp of that entity. The father of this philosophical trend was Gottlob Frege: he showed the way to capture the semantic aspect of language in a systematic way without resorting into psychologism; he also showed that logical analysis can be an extremely powerful tool for capturing meaning. Frege's teaching was further developed by Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Willard Van Quine and other philosophers. This philosophy, in connection with which the term linguistic turn is also often mentioned, is characterized by viewing language as a means of picturing the world and truth as the correspondence between statement and reality. Whereas some of the analytic philosophers (Carnap, Alfred Tarski) understood the relation between language and the world as a matter of a better or worse adaptation of the structure of language to the autonomous structure of the world, others (Wittgenstein, Quine, Nelson Goodman) realized that the structure of the world is always a matter of the language we use approaching the world

V knize konfrontuji běžné pojetí jazyka, podle kterého je význam záležitostí vztahu slovo-věc, se strukturalistickým pohledem, podle kterého význam nemůže existovat bez toho, aby byly výrazy určitým způsobem provázány mezi sebou. Ukazuji, že takový strukturalismus není jen věcí Ferdinanda de Saussura, ale že se vyskytuje (pod jménem holismus) i v základech (post)analytické filosofie Quina, Davidsona, Sellarse a Brandoma. Ukazuji také, že není neslučitelný s formálně-logickým přístupem k významu, jaký byl rozpracován Carnapem, Montaguem a dalšími.

The beginning of this century hailed a new paradigm in linguistics, the paradigm brought about by de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Genérále and subsequently elaborated by Jakobson, Hjelmslev and other linguists. It seemed that the linguistics of this century was destined to be structuralistic. However, half of the century later a brand new paradigm was introduced by Chomsky's Syntactic Structures followed by Montague's formalization of semantics. This new turn has brought linguistics surprisingly close to mathematics and logic, and has facilitated a direct practical exploitation of linguistic theory by computer science

After putting forward his celebrated deflationary theory of truth (Horwich, 1998a), Paul Horwich added a compatible theory of meaning (Horwich, 1998b). I am calling also this latter theory deflationism (although it may be a slightly misleading name in that, as Paul himself notes, his theory of meaning is deflationary more in the sense of being forced by the deflationary theory of truth than of being particularly deflationary in itself). In contrast, what I call inferentialism is the theory of meaning which I am going to advocate here – the view, in a nutshell, that meaning is a matter of inferential role. Various versions of this theory have been defended by Wilfried Sellars, Robert Brandom and a couple of other philosophers including myself. And the thesis I wish to present in this paper – to put it as a provocation right off – is that Paul is an inferentialist led astray. Both deflationism and inferentialism can be seen as elaborations of what can be called the use theory of meaning; for both seem to agree that.

What is structuralism? The stock To explain why we should see Quine can translate the natives’ gavagai either as answer is that it is the brainas a structuralist, I would like to revive rabbit or as undetached rabbit’s part, so he child of Ferdinand de his widely discussed thought experican translate his peers’ rabbit either as Saussure, later fostered by Levi-Strauss, ment, featuring a field linguist decipherrabbit or as undetached rabbit’s part. Hence Foucault, Derrida and their allies. But I ing an unknown language spoken by the cultural relativism appears to muthink we have only to confront the ausnatives somewhere in the middle of tate into an “individual relativism”, a terely scientific style of Saussure’s Course nowhere. On hearing the natives exkind of solipsistic skepticism in which de linguistique générale with that of the claiming “Gavagai!” whenever they see a we can be certain neither that we underwritings of the French structuralists to rabbit, the linguist records in his notestand the natives, nor even that we unrecognise an essential discontinuity. The book the tentative translation hypothderstand each other! French philosophers have developed esis gavagai = rabbit. Next, Quine asks us However this is not a conclusion only certain consequences of Saussure’s to imagine another linguist, who, ob- Quine would be willing to draw. He teaching; and, moreover, in a rather nonserving the same behaviour of the same does not say that we cannot understand Saussurean way. natives, proposes the hypothesis gavagai each other (nor even that we cannot un- In my recent book I put forward the = undetached rabbit’s part. Quine then conderstand the natives): that we can is conalternative thesis that the kind of strucsiders ways of deciding which of the tinually testified to by the indubitable turalism advanced by Saussure is in fact two linguists is correct, and concludes, successes of our communication. For present implicitly in the writings of to the astonishment of many readers, Quine, there is no other measure of unpeople not normally associated with the that there is no feasible way to decide; derstanding, save the smoothness and term, namely the (post)analytic phiand hence that both linguists are corfruitfulness of linguistic interaction, the losophers such as Willard Van Orman rect..

Atomists explain properties of wholes as compositions of properties of their parts; in particular properties of complex expressions as composed of properties of their parts. Especially, semantic atomists explain meanings of complex expressions as composed of meanings of their parts. Holists deny themselves this way: they insist that at least in some cases properties of wholes are more basic than, or not reducible to, properties of their parts; in particular, semantic holists claim that meanings of (at least some) wholes are more basic than meanings of parts. Now as atomists have composition as the way of getting themselves from the meanings of parts to the meanings of wholes, holists need something to get them from the meanings of wholes to those of their parts. What is usually invoked in this context is the concept of intersubstitutivity, which is, however, not always wholly clear.

Abstrakt. Co je to myšlenka? Všichni se asi shodneme na tom, že každý z nás lidí si myslí různé věci, že všichni máme všelijaké myšlenky, a že právě toto naše myšlení je tím, co nás lidi odlišuje od ostatních tvorů a věcí, na které můžeme v našem světě narazit. Co to ale taková myšlenka je, jak vypadá a co dělá? A jak vůbec lze na takto položenou otázku odpovídat; je to věc empirického výzkumu, nebo snad něčeho jiného (třeba fenomenologické introspekce)? V tomto článku hájíme tezi, že empirické zkoumání mysli (na rozdíl od zkoumání mozku) podstatným způsobem předpokládá pojmovou analýzu, která je doménou filosofie.

In a memorable paper, Donald Davidson (1986, p. 446) insists that "there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed". I have always taken this as an exaggeration, albeit an apt exaggeration that might be philosophically helpful. Now when it comes to predication, what I would have expected to hear from the same author would be along the lines of "there is no such thing as predication ... ". But instead of this I hear something very different (Davidson, 2005, p. 77): [I]f we do not understand predication, we do not understand how any sentence works, nor can we account for the structure of the simplest thought that is expressible in language. At one time there was much discussion of what was called the "unity of proposition"; it is just this unity that a theory of predication must explain. The philosophy of language lacks its most important chapter without such a theory, the philosophy of mind is missing its crucial first step if it cannot describe the nature of judgment; and it is woeful if metaphysics cannot say how a substance is related to its attributes. I find myself at odds with just about everything written in this paragraph; and what is worse, my disagreement stems from a notion of language which I believe I have acquired also by reading Davidson. Reading this passage, I desperately sought for an indication that it was leading up to some catch, and not meant to be taken at face value. But, alas, I am afraid there is none. To avoid misunderstanding: I see nothing wrong in understanding predication as a clearly delimited linguistic phenomenon. We put together one kind of expression, which we have come to call the subject, with a different kind of expression, called the predicate, possibly..

There have been, I am afraid, almost as many answers to the question what is logic? as there have been logicians. However, if logic is not to be an obscure "science of everything", we must assume that the majority of the various answers share a common core which does offer a reasonable delimitation of the subject matter of logic. To probe this core, let us start from the answer given by Gottlob Frege (1918/9), the person probably most responsible for modern logic: the subject matter of logic is "truth", and especially its "laws"1. How should we understand the concept of "laws of truth"? The underlying point clearly is that the truth/falsity of our statements is partly a contingent and partly a necessary, lawful matter: that "Paris is in France" is true is a contingent matter, whereas that "Paris is in France or it is not in France" is true is a necessary matter (let us, for the time being, leave aside the Quinean scruples regarding the delimitation of necessarily true statements). Logic,then, should focus on the statements that are true as a matter of law (i.e. necessarily), or, more generally, the truth of which "lawfully depends" on some other statements (i.e. which are true as a matter of law provided these other statements are true). This renders Fregean laws of truth as, in general, a matter of "lawful truth-dependence" - i.e. of entailment or inference (again, let us now disregard any possible difference between these two concepts). This yields a conception of logic as a theory of entailment or inference, a conception which looms behind many other specifications of the subject matter of logic and which, I think, is ultimately correct. However, we can also see the logician – and this is the view we will stick to here – as trying to separate true sentences from false ones; or, equivalently, to map sentences onto truth and falsity. Let us first consider the case of a non-empirical language with a single, definite truth valuation – like the language of Peano arithmetic..

Metaphysics is usually understood as the investigation of being qua being and of its ultimate categories. Given this characterization, it may be hard to grasp why anyone might wish to oppose metaphysics, why anyone might claim that metaphysics ”leads the philosopher into complete darkness” (Wittgenstein, 1958, p.18)? What could be so misleading about the investigation of the most abstract vestiges of being? One source of disparagement towards metaphysics, of course, stems from the relativist conviction that there is no absolute being, and hence nor are there any ultimate categories of being. Another ‘reason’ for some philosophers of this century (notably Carnap) to reject metaphysics appeared to consist in their reinterpretation of the word ”metaphysics”, in effect, simply as ”nonsensical philosophy”. However neither of these reasons seems to be the Wittgensteinian one. The way I propose to envisage this reason takes us back to Plato with his distinction between Being and Becoming (echoed, in one or another form, within the conceptions of so many subsequent philosophers). It is the distinction between the ‘higher’ realm of ideas with its crisp, eternal truths, and the ‘lower’ realm of appearances in which anything appears only as a fuzzy and transient reflection of something from the higher realm. The original message harbored in this Platonistic picture is clearly that the vast and hardly graspable flux of appearances shelters something firm and invariable, something potentially fully capturable by human reason which can then use it as a prism to comprehend and understand the everchanging phenomena. However, as I will claim, the picture of a ‘higher’ reality behind phenomena is dangerous in that it can delude a philosopher into feeling that he can solve empirical questions by a quasiempirical investigation of a non-empirical realm: a ‘metaphysical reality’.

Knihu Kritika depolitizovaného rozumu (podtitul Úvahy (nejen) o nové normalizaci, Václav Bělohradský a kol., Grimmus, Všeň 2010) jsem si kupoval s vědomím, že s její- mi autory se asi nebudu ve všem shodovat, nicméně také s přesvědčením, že problém, na který poukazuje její název, je skutečně závažný, a s nadějí, že se o něm třeba dozvím něco z úhlu pohledu, který mi není vlastní, a tak se mi podaří ho nahlédnout plastičtěji. Bohužel jsem zjistil, že název knihy je pouze krycí; že nejde o boj s depolitizací rozumu, ale naopak o zčásti otevřený a zčásti partyzánský boj proti skutečné politizaci, tj. proti demokratické- mu prostředí, ve kterém se otázky zá- kladního směřování společnosti mohly stát předmětem politických diskuzí a politických střetů, ve jménu absolutizace určitých velice konkrétních, pokud ne pří- mo politických, pak ideologických názorů. Jak říkám, jsem přesvědčený, že problém depolitizace rozumu tu skutečně je. Lidé, zdá se mi, skutečně mají čím dál více pocit, že všechna rozhodnutí jsou na nějakých těch odbornících, jimž do toho nejenom není potřeba mluvit, ale ani by se jim do toho mluvit nemělo. Máme stát zadlužovat? To přece musejí říci ekonomové. Mají se zakazovat politické strany? To my nevíme, ale vědět to musejí politologové či sociologové. Je potrat vražda, nebo medicínský zákrok? To by nám měli říci biologové, filozofové nebo bůhvíkdo, ale hlavně někdo, kdo to dokáže vyčíst z příslušných faktů.

Doing Worlds with Words throws light on the problem of meaning as the meeting point of linguistics, logic and philosophy, and critically assesses the possibilities and limitations of elucidating the nature of meaning by means of formal logic, model theory and model-theoretical semantics. The main thrust of the book is to show that it is misguided to understand model theory metaphysically and so to try to base formal semantics on something like formal metaphysics; rather, the book states that model theory and similar tools of the analysis of language should be understood as capturing the semantically relevant, especially inferential, structure of language. From this vantage point, the reader gains a new light on many of the traditional concepts and problems of logic and philosophy of language, such as meaning, reference, truth and the nature of formal logic.