overcoming “overcoming metaphysics through logical analysis of language” through logical...

Overcoming “Overcoming Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” Through Logical Analysis of Language

Jaakko HINTIKKA~

Summary Carnap tried to overcome metaphysics through a distinction between empirical and con-

ceptual truths. The distinction has since been challenged, but not on the basis of a systematic logical analysis of language. It is suggested here that the logical theory of identifiability based on the author’s interrogative model will provide the tools for such a systematic analysis. As an example of what the model can do, a criticism is offered of Quine’s and Chomsky’s implicit assumption that language learning is based on atomistic (quantifier-free) “answers” (input).

Resume Carnap a essaye de depasser la metaphysique par une distinction entre des vkrites empiriques

et des veritts conceptuelles. Cette distinction a ensuite CtC contestee, mais non sur la base d’une analyse systematique du langage. On suggtre ici que la theorie logique de I’identifiabilite bake sur le modkle interrogatif de I’auteur fournira les outils d’une telle analyse systematique. Comme exemple de ce que peut faire ce modtle, on presente une critique de la supposition implicite de Quine et de Chomsky selon laquelle I’apprentissage du langage repose sur des ccrkponses)) (input) atomiques (sans quantificateurs).

Zusammenfassung Carnap versuchte Metaphysik durch eine Unterscheidung zwischen empirischen und konzep-

tuellen Wahrheiten zu iiberwinden. Seither wurde die Unterscheidung immer wieder angegriffen, jedoch nicht auf der Basis einer systematischen logischen Analyse der Sprache. In vorliegendem Artikel wird vorgeschlagen, dass eine logische Theorie der Identifizierbarkeit, welche auf dem Frage-Antwort-Modell des Autors grundet, die Instrumente fiir eine solche logische Analyse bereitstellt. Als Beispiel dafiir, was das Modell leisten kann, dient eine Kritik an Quines und Chomskys impliziter Voraussetzung, dass das Erlernen von Sprache auf atomaren (quantoren- freien) <(Antworten)) aufbaut (Input).

The theme of this meeting is “metaphysics and science”. I suppose that what is meant could equally well have been expressed by “the relation of metaphysics to science”. But before we can discuss what that relation is, we have to ascertain that there is such a thing as metaphysics that could bear some conceivable relation to science or to anything else.

* Boston University

Dialectica Vol. 45, No 2-3 (1991)

204 Jaakko Hintikka

Historically, metaphysics comes in all sizes and shapes. The definition of metaphysics is itself a metaphysical problem. In contrast, the problem of the possibility of metaphysics is relatively well defined, on one natural interpretation, at least. It is: Can human thought alone, unaided by empirical evidence, produce interesting knowledge? Aristotle’s answer was an unqualified yes. His reasons for the answer are highly interesting though insufficiently appre- ciated by scholars. For Aristotle, to think of X is for one’s soul to take on the form of XI. (This Aristotelian idea still lingers on in the etymology of our language, where being cognizant of X is expressed as having information about it. This of course ought to mean “to be in the form of X”.) Aristotle intends his idea is to be taken literally; an instantiation of a form in one’s soul is on a par with its realizations elsewhere2. From this it follows that any necessary connection between forms can be perceived by realizing them in one’s mind. If the form of Y necessarily accompanies the form of X, then it is necessarily realized in my mind as soon as I managed to think of X, i.e., as soon as the form of X is realized in my soul. It is thus seen that, even though Aristotle was in a sense an empiricist, his reliance on experience was of a very special kind. In Aristotelian methodology empirical input is needed only to enable me as it were to assemble the right forms in mind from bits and pieces given to me by sense-perception. Empirical evidence is not needed to ascertain natural laws, that is, necessary connections between forms.

This way of thinking colors Aristotle’s entire philosophy. It differs so radically from our wanted ways of thought that scholars have not dared ack- nowledge its full consequences in Aristotle. It is among other places reflected in Aristotle’s idea that induction or properly speaking, epagoge, is essentially a matter of concept formation, not of generalization from particulars to uni- versals 3 .

Aristotle’s way of thinking is relevant to the theme of this meeting because it shows in which sense the possibility of metaphysics was unproblematic and in what sense it was problematic for him. The problem for Aristotle was not whether unaided human thought can recognize general truths. Even the

Aristotle, De Anima 111 6 , 431al-2: “Actual knowledge is identical with its object.” Cf. also ibid 8,431b24-432a3.

This is seen most clearly from Metaphysics 27, where Aristotle argued for his thesis that “everything comes out of that which actually is” of the same form. This is trivial in the case of animals but what about the production artifacts and other products of art? When a doctor heals a patient, that is, produces an instance of the form of health in a patient, where is the earlier actual exemplification of that form? In the mind of the physician, Aristotle answers, for having this form is what the medical art consists in. See also Met. Z9, 1034a21-23 and Met. 4, 1070b33-34.

See here my paper “Aristotelian Induction”, Revue Infer~iafionale de Philosophie vol. 34 (1980), pp. 422-39. Cf. also “The Concept of Induction in the Light of the Interrogative Approach to Inquiry”, forthcoming.

205 Overcoming “Overcoming Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” Through Logical Analysis of Language

departmental sciences do that all the time according to him. The problem was whether there is any subject matter left to metaphysics over and above the subject matter of the different particular sciences. Aristotle argued for an affirmative answer by arguing that a completely general science, a science of “being qua being”, is possible4.

This Aristotelian foundation of metaphysics has been given up fairly universally. Few people seriously think that by just putting my mind to it I can obtain knowledge of the objective reality. My historical working hypothesis at this moment is that the demolition job on Aristotelian methodology was started by the medieval nominalists 5 .

Of course, the rejection of the Aristotelian theory did not put an end to other forms of the belief that somehow we could reach substantial truths by means of pure thinking alone. Other suitable metaphysical (or empirical) assumptions concerning the world might serve the same purpose as Aristotle’s psychology of thought here. By the nineteenth century, there was even a name available for one such internal source of truths: intuition. (This, by the way, is not what the word meant earlier6.) But by 1990 most philosophers no longer have the courage of their intuitions. They no longer believe that our intuitions can yield objective knowledge of any independent reality. Consequently, the function of intuition-based theorizing has now become conceived as one of merely systematizing our intuitions as such, without assigning them any role whatsoever as giving information about anything beyond themselves ’. The correspondence theory of intuition has been replaced by a coherence theory, so to speak. This marks the effective end of intuitionistic metaphysics.

Does this mean that metaphysics has been found impossible? No, metaphysics is alive if not particularly well in Konigsberg or wherever the spirit of Immanuel Kant is currently moving. For one can still argue, as Kant in effect did, that pure (i.e., nonempirical) thought can reveal the way in which our knowledge is grounded in our own thinking, in our own activities, and in the conceptual tools they are usingE. This kind of knowledge can certainly be

See Metaphysics 1-2 and cf. G. E. L. Owen, “Logic and Metaphysics in some Earlier Works of Aristotle”, in G. E. L. Owen, Logic, Science and Dialectic: Collected Papers on Greek Philosophy, Duckworth, London, 1986, pp. 180-99.

For a preliminary discussion, see my paper, “Conceptions of Scientific Method from Aris- totle to Newton”, in Monika Asztalos et al., eds. Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philo- sophy, vol. 1, Philosophical Society of Finland, Helsinki 1990, pp. 72-84.

In the early modern period, “intuitive knowledge” meant merely immediate knowledge, with no assumption of any special source of knowledge. For a glimpse of this kind of meaning, see my paper, “On Kant’s Notion of Intuition”, in The First Critique, ed. by T. Penelhum and J. J. McIntosh, Wadsworth, Belmont, CA, 1969, pp. 38-53.

This idea is an extension of Chomsky’s earlier approach to syntactical theorizing, where the rock bottom of the enterprise were competent speakers’ intuitions about grammaticality.

This is perhaps seen most clearly from Kant’s preface to the second edition of the Critique ofpure Reason, especially pp. XII-XVIII.

206 Jaakko Hintikka

substantial and informative. One particularly interesting twentieth-century variant of this kind of critical metaphysics is R. G . Collingwood’s idea that metaphysics is “the attempt to find out what absolute presuppositions have been made by this or that person or group of persons, on this or that occasion or groups of occasion^"^. Whether or not it is always called “metaphysics”, such an examination of the basic conceptual assumptions of particular sciences, or even of our thought at large, seems to be big business even in the twentieth century. And even when the label “metaphysics” is not applied, it might as well have been. For instance, the speculations of twentieth-century physicists about the foundations of their own science are full of claims that are much more blatantly metaphysical than any contemporary analytic philosopher (assuming that that species is not extinct) would dare to make.

However, even the possibility of critical metaphysics has been denied in our century. The classic document in this respect is Rudolf Carnap’s 1931 paper “Die Uberwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analysis der Sprache”, misleadingly translated as “Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” lo. In it, Carnap relied in effect on two theses. They are, first, a sharp separation of empirical and conceptual truths (including truths about the meanings of our words and phrases) and, second, an interpretation of conceptual (analytical) truths as being vacuous (tautological) l . The former thesis relegates metaphysics to the study of merely our conceptual system, and the latter deprives metaphysics of any substantial subject matter. For statements about what our words and phrases mean are on this view empty or “tautological”. To deny one is merely to talk nonsense, and to assert one therefore is not to make a meaningful statement. Finis metaphysics - according to Carnap.

It is interesting to note in the passing that there is relatively little else in Carnap’s philosophy which would have ruled out some sort of critical metaphysics. For instance, Aristotle’s problem of whether there can be a general study of being as being was no difficulty for a defender of the unity of science and of the physicalistic language as the universal language of science 1 2 .

See R. G . Collingwood, Essay on Metaphysics, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1940, chapters 4-7, especially p. 47.

lo Erkenntnis. vol. 2 (1932), pp. 432-65, English translation in A. 3. Ayer, editor, Logical Positivism, The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1959, pp. 60-81.

This thesis was in different variants held by most members of the Vienna Circle and their allies. See, e.g., A. J . Ayer, Language Truth andlogic, Victor Gollancz, London, 1936, chapter 4.

For the difficulties involved with this idea, cf. my paper “ G . H. von Wright on Logical Truth and Distributive Normal Forms”: in The Philosophy of G. H . von Wright (Library of Living Phi- losophers), Open Court, LaSalle, Illinois, 19909, pp. 517-37.

Cf. also Burton Dreben and Juliet Floyd, “Tautology: How Not to Use a Word”, Synthese,

l 2 Both ideas are strikingly in evidence in Carnap’s paper, op. cit., note 10 above. VOI. 89 (1990), pp. 23-49.


It is this Carnapian of denial of the possibility of metaphysics that I want to discuss in this paper. Prima facie, my enterprise might seem to be seriously out of date, for the theses on which Carnap’s attempted “Uberwindung der Metaphysik” rests have been rejected by a number of prominent philosophers, present company not excepted. First, Quine and others began to challenge Car- nap’s sharp dichotomy of questions of fact and questions of meaning13. Quine’s rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction was an early form of the challenge. Later, several philosophers have in different ways defended the theory-ladenness and fact-ladenness of meaningI4. On such a view, no sharp distinction can be made between questions of fact and questions of meaning. Consequently, it looks possible in principle that a conceptual analysis might uncover factual presuppositions of our language and our discourse, or of the discourse of some other group of people. This seems to open the doors to metaphysics at least in the “critical” Collingwoodian spirit.

In a sense, many philosophers already have entered through these doors. Indeed, probably the best known scholar professing to have been influenced by Quine, Thomas Kuhn, can be viewed as having done just that Is. The fact that he is talking about paradigms instead of ultimate presuppositions makes no difference. And Kuhn’s relegation of problem-solving and question- answering to normal science, instead of their Collingwoodian pride of place, merely reflects, I believe, a deeply ingrained restrictive presupposition of Kuhn’s own 1 6 .

But who is right, Carnap or his latter-day critics? Is there a sharp distinction between fact and meaning? Are meanings really theory-laden and fact- laden? At first sight, it might be completely hopeless to try to answer these questions in one paper. In order to do so, I would apparently have to survey and to evaluate nearly forty years of intensive and intricate discussion. This task I obviously cannot take on here.

l 3 Cf. here W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, in From a Logical Point of View, Harvard U.P., Cambridge, MA, 1953, pp. 20-46.

I 4 These terms are not usually used in the literature. Instead, terms like “antirealism” are typically employed. This terminology is not accidental. It seems to me to reflect a genuine confusion as to what is really involved.

Is Cf. T. S . Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second ed., University of Chi- cago Press, Chicago, 1970. A brief survey of the problems Kuhn is dealing with, see Ian Hacking, editor, Scientific Revolutions, Oxford U.P., Oxford, 1981.

In spite of the voluminous literature Kuhn’s book has prompted, there still exists neither a satisfactory analysis of his main concepts nor a close analysis of his argumentation.

l6 This presupposition is expressed most naturally by reference to my interrogative model of inquiry. It amounts to assuring that the “answers” nature can give to a scientist are all particular (i.e., quantifier-free) truths. Kuhn’s strong emphasis that theories are not derived from, or otherwise determined by, evidence does not have plausibility without this assumption. For a discussion of what happens when this assumption is given up, see my paper, “What Is the Logic of Experimental Inquiry?’’, Synthese vol. 74 (1988), pp. 173-90.

208 Jaakko Hintikka

Instead, I will challenge the methodology of this entire discussion. Sup- pose, for the sake of argument, that meanings are theory-laden. Since meanings determine reference, the references of a language user’s words and phrases likewise depend on the theory he or she has adopted or, more likely, on the proto-theory his or her linguistic community has tacitly developed. Now how is such a matter to be studied? The first answer that comes to your mind is the best one. This obvious answer is: by logical means. Or, if we want to be more precise, by means of logical semantics. For what kinds of questions are we supposed to be studying here? There is a great deal of fuzziness in the literature, but a representative kind of question surely could be something like this: Given a theory T[P] containing a term, say a one-place predicate P, what does it tell us about the applicability of P to already different cases? Here T[P] gives us a certain amount of information about some cases to which P applies or does not apply, but at most it tells us something about the relationships between P and the other concepts employed in T[P]. Here it might even seem that the entire problem reduces to good old-fashioned logic. For is not the question whether P applies to a given individual b simply the question whether T[P] logically implies Tb? No, it is not, because in answering such a question we typically have an additional source of information at our disposal. It is our knowledge of how the other concepts occurring in T[P] apply to the indi- viduals in our domain. Later in this paper, I shall show such prima facie ill- defined knowledge can be brought to the purview of explicit logico-semantical theory.

Of course we cannot hope to have a formal theory that could be applied directly to actual natural languages, including our own “limpid vernacular”, to use Quine’s sometime phrase. However, we can try to develop structural analyses which show what the conceptual situation is and thereby what we have to be on a lookout for in real-life situations.

Notice that this way of construing representative problems in the theory of empirical meaning (reference) determination is not subject to Quine’s criticisms of Carnap”. Carnap’s mistake, according to Quine, is to label certain rules as being “analytic” or “meaning rules”, without sketching in the behavioral or societal facts that characterize such a special status. In my sample problem, all assumptions can be expressed by straightforward factual propositions.

In view of this prima facie logico-semantical character of the kinds of questions Quine and others have raised, it blows my mind that in practically the entire discussion he provoked these questions have been dealt with by

1960, especially ch. 1. Cf. W. V. Quine, op. cit., p. 36; also Word and Object, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,

Overcoming “Overcoming Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” Through Logical Analysis of Language 209

means of armchair psychology, cute artificial examples (you have heard of gavagai and of the twin earth, haven’t you?), a couple of natural language illustrations, and so on, in short, by everything but honest logical means. We hear in these days a great deal about naturalistic epistemology. This term nevertheless hides a serious confusion. What naturalizes an approach to epistemology, we are told, is the rejection of all normative considerations. But most practitioners of naturalized epistemology and naturalized semantics have nevertheless thrown out the methodological baby with the normative bathwater. Not only have they rejected normative considerations; they have foresworn the use of all explicit formal methods. This is a mistake; non- normative semantics need not be informal, without recourse to logical and other formal methods. Surely non-normative even fully scientific and naturalistic approaches can employ mathematical and logical models. Indeed, in some cases, logico-semantical conceptualizations have turned out to be much more closely related to actual neuroscience than the bulk of literature on “naturalized epistemology”.

We can thus express concisely what the trouble is with post-Carnapian philosophy of language. It tries to overcome “Overcoming Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”, but not through logical analysis of language. Instead, we are treated to armchair psychology and armchair sociology of language. In my opinion, this constitutes a major paradox in the history of twentieth century philosophy, for several of the main figures involved in those developments are or have been practicing logicians.

The historical roots of this massive failure of famous logicians to use the tools of their own trade when they are doing semantics are highly interesting. I have touched upon them elsewhere, and I will soon return to them.

At this point I can announce my main new result. I cannot explain it fully, and it has not yet been published, but I can briefly explain it here. In the broad- est possible terms, I can tell you that a powerful logico-semantical theory of empirical meaning (reference) determination is possible, because it is actual.

What is this theory? The answer is simple: it is the theory of identifiability that can be developed on the basis of my interrogative model of inquiry 1 8 . As I said, this theory has not yet been published, but an outline will soon be available. Here, only a quick sketch is possible.

First, a few words about the interrogative modelIg. In it, two players, called the Inquirer and Nature play a game on some given model M of the

See here my paper, “Toward a General Theory of Identifiability”, in J . Fetzer, D. Shatz and G. Schlesinger. editors, Definitions and Definabilify, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 1991, pp. 161-183.

l9 See op. cit., note 16 above, and the literature referred to there.

210 Jaakko Hintikka

underlying first-order language. The bookkeeping method employed is the Beth tableau method*O. The game begins like a Beth tableau, with an initial premise T in the left column and the ultimate conclusion C in the right one. There are two kinds of moves, both initiated by the Inquirer, logical moves and interrogative moves. A logical move is simply a tableau-building move (with the rules slightly modified from Beth’s)21. In an interrogative move, the Inquirer addresses a question to Nature, and if an answer is forthcoming, it is added to the subtableau that is being constructed. A full definition of such an interrogative game includes a specification of which answers Nature will yield and which ones she will not give. An interrogative move is allowed only when the presupposition of the question has already been established, i.e., is present in the left column of the subtableau in question. In the games studied here, Nature’s answers are assumed to be all true about M.

We can thus define a relation

(1) M: T k C

which expresses the fact that the Inquirer has a winning strategy in the interrogative game, i.e., can close the tableau no matter what (true) answers Nature gives (subject to certain unspecified restrictions).

This relation (1) is precisely as “logical” as the relation of deductive derivability

(2)T I- C

It is in fact interesting to compare (1) and (2). At first sight, there does not seem to be much hope of developing a general theory for ( l ) , for whether or not (1) holds in a given case depends crucially on a further parameter, viz. on the class of available answers, which can be chosen in a bewildering variety of ways. The real prime time news here is that one can develop a theory for ( I ) which is independent of this parameter. One can even develop it in partial analogy to (or extension of) the metatheory of the usual relation (2) of deductive provability. This is the rock-solid basis of saying that interrogative derivability is just as “logical” a concept as deductive derivability.

2o E. W. Beth, “Semantic Entailment and Formal Derivability”, Mededelingen vun de Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, A f d . Letterkunde N. R. vol. 13 (1953),

This method is of course but a mirror image of a Gentzen-type sequent technique, the only essential difference being the direction in which the applications of the technique proceed.

21 Essentially, no traffic between the two columns (sides) of a tableau is allowed.

pp. 309-42.

21 1 Overcoming “Overcoming Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” Through Logical Analysis of Language

An example of a result from proof theory which can be extended to the theory of interrogative games is William Craig’s famous interpolation theorem22. It holds here in the following form23.

Extended Interpolation Theorem

Assume (i) M: T I- C (ii) Not T I- C (iii) Not M: T I- (S & - S )

(a) M: T t- I (b) I I- C (c) Each predicate, dummy name and free variable of I occurs in

both T and C . (d) Each proper name (individual constant) of I either occurs in

both T and C or was introduced in the proof of (i) for the first time by an answer to a wh-question or was imported in the same proof from the right column into left column by universal instantiation on the left.

(e) All the answers to questions in the derivation of (a) are used already in the derivation (i).

This extension of the interpolation theorem is much more than a mere illustration here. Once we have the interpolation theorem, we can use it to prove an interrogative generalization of Beth’s theorem concerning definabil-

in the same way as the original theorem is proved in the usual metatheory of first-order logic25. The availability of (an extension of) Beth’s theorem means in turn that we can develop a big brother of the usual logical theory of definability, viz. a theory of “interrogative definability”. If you think for a moment what this concept amounts to, you will have a dkju vu experience. You will realize that such “empirical definability” has a well- established name in the methodology of several actual sciences, viz. identi- fiability26. What I have just said can be summed up by saying that the inter-

Then there is a formula I (the interpolation formula) such that

22 See William Craig, “Three Uses of the Herbrand-Gentzen Theorem in Relation Model Theory and Proof Theory”, fournulof SymbolicLogic vol. 22 (1957) pp. 269-85.

23 Cf. here op. cit., note 18. I am here looking away from certain nontrivial assumptions on which the Extended Interpolation Theorem rests. Cf. note 29 below.

z4 See E. W. Beth, “On Padua’s Method in the Theory of Definition”, (IndugutionesMuthe- maticaevol. 15 (1953), pp. 330-9.

25 Beth’s theorem is virtually a corollary to the interpolation theorem. The same relation holds between the generalizations of these two theorems to identifiability and interrogative interpolation, respectively.

26 For this concept, see e.g., Cheng Hsiao, “Identification”, in Z. Griliches and M. D. Intri- ligator, editors, Handbook of Econometrics, vol. 1 , North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1983, ch. 4; Franklin Fisher, The Identijkution Problem in Econometrics, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1966.

212 Jaakko Hintikka

rogative counterpart of the usual theory of definability is nothing less than a general logical theory of identifiability.

But what does the theory of identifiability have to do with the theory of theory-ladenness and fact-ladenness of meaning? I suspect that by this time my clever audience has already seen what is coming and will answer, correctly: everything. The logical theory of identifiability is (or perhaps I should say, can be viewed as) a general logical theory of empirical reference determination. It is obviously the right conceptual tool in trying to answer systematically questions of the kind indicated above.

In this way, we can among other things eliminate all vagueness from the typical questions in the theory of theory-ladenness and fact-ladenness of meaning sketched above. This vagueness was due to the lack of specification of what the relevant empirical evidence is and of how precisely it enters into the determination of the extension or reference of P. The theoretical determination of reference comes from the initial theory T[P] and the factual determination comes from the answers to the identifying inquirer’s questions. The apparent vagueness of such factual determination does not matter, for it only affects the restrictions that have to be imposed on Nature’s answers, while the theory itself is independent of such restrictions. The role of tacit background knowledge requires some additional discussion, but it would not affect what is said in t I ris paper.

Here is the main message of this paper. There is a logical medium for the purpose of discussing meaning determination by theories and facts. This logical theory enables us in principle to discuss in precise logical terms most of the issues thnt have been discussed in the tradition which Quine started and which emphasizes the theory-ladenness and fact-ladenness of meanings. This entire discussion thus has to be re-evaluated.

I cannot undertake such a global re-evaluation here. I will restrict myself to a few general points.

First, the question you have been wanting to raise all the time is: Who is right, Carnap or Quine? Do we really have to countenance a massive determination of meanings by theories and facts? The resounding, albeit qualified, answer that I am giving to you is: Quine is right in the sense that we can make perfect sense of empirical meaning determination to the extent of being able to spell out the logical structure of this determination. The Carnapian idea that the meanings (and a fortiori references) of our words and expressions are predetermined by a set of meaning rules (whatever they are or may be) is unrealistic. What Quine has completely correctly tried to get at is a much more realistic picture of how the semantics of our actual language really works.


Second, large segments of recent discussions in the philosophy of language are immediately thrown into a sharper relief. For instance, from the vantage point we have reached we can understand part of the argumentation of the likes of Putnam. He argues to the effect that the meaning of words like “water” are determined by the actual chemical structure of water, not by its observable behavior or by the practicable method of its identification. There is little in such arguments that cannot be captured by saying that the meaning of “water” is partly determined by the scientific (chemical) theory in which it occurs. This conclusion I can certainly agree with. But what happens in philosophers like Putnam is that the theory-ladenness of meanings is not recog- nized as such, and is embellished with alleged consequences which make sense only if we have a sense of “meaning”, “necessity”, “essence”, or some related term which is not relative to a theory. For instance, if the crux of the matter is the theory-ladenness of the meaning of “water”, it is at best a misleading illustration and a worst bad metaphysics to go on to say that the meaning of “water” is determined by what water is (Putnam) or to say that the chemical properties of water (its atomic structural) necessary, not contingent (Kripke). Such theses make sense only on a theory-independent concept of meaning or of necessity, respectively.

In general, many of the questions that have been asked in recent discussions can be accommodated within my framework. For instance, it is often asked (as, e.g., in Putnam’s notorious “twin earth” example) “what we would say” in certain circumstances. Those circumstances can be specified by spe- cifying the model M and the theory T relied on. In this way, we can eliminate much of the arbitrariness inherent in the all-too-common appeals to our “semantical intuitions” which are in reality just as theory-laden as the concepts which philosophers have tried to explicate by their means.

But what is the moral of my story so far, as for Carnap’s criticisms of metaphysics are concerned? It seems to me that we have indeed overcome them through logical analysis of language, at least insofar as critical metaphysics is concerned. There is no longer in principle any theoretical obstacle of taking a piece of discourse and through a logico-semantical analysis reveal its theoretical and factual presuppositions. And Collingwood was even right in claiming that in that enterprise “the logic of questions and answers” plays a crucial role2’.

Indeed, I happen to believe that Collingwood was right also about the history of thought to a greater extent than he himself managed to demonstrate

*’ R. G . Collingwood, op. cit., note 9 above. Cf. also, R. G . Collingwood, The Idea of History, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1946, Part V, sec. 3.

214 Jaakko Hintikka

by example. Collingwood’s notion of ultimate presupposition is too simplistic to be realistic. However, I do believe that it is in fact possible to locate important large-scale presuppositions that have been made by different philosophers, different philosophical traditions, and philosophers of different pe- riods. I am on the record as offering specific examples of such (usually tacit) presuppositions 28. And at least heuristically the discovery of such presuppositions is greatly facilitated by a conceptual analysis of ideas in question. The basic assumption of Aristotle’s metaphysics which was sketched briefly above provides a modest case in point.

We have thus literally overcome “Overcoming Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” through logical analysis of language. A couple of things nevertheless remain to be done in order to spell out a little bit more fully what I have done and in order to put it in a perspective.

First, let me try to remove a feeling of intellectual discomfort which many of you have undoubtedly felt. My story is too good to be true or, rather, is too simple to be true, you are likely to have felt. If the logical treatment of the theory-ladenness and fact-ladenness of meaning is really as simple as that, it is unlikely that first-rate logician-philosophers like Quine or Putnam should have missed it, you may think.

Part of the answer is that the theory of identification (of which the theory of theory-ladenness is a part) is a much more difficult subject intrinsically than my outline exposition might suggest. Results like my extension of the interpolation theorem are perhaps not very hard to prove, but they are in a theoretical perspective not trivial, either. In particular, the dependence of the theorem on the rules of the interrogative games is a subtle matter indeed29.

There is a deeper assumption at work here, however. My formulation of the interrogative model was in a certain sense in terms of language use. I postulated certain games played by two players. This seems to put us back on the slippery slope which eventually leads all the way to psychologism and sociologism. For who are the players, realistically speaking? Some of my friends have been greatly worried by my apparent personification of Nature in

Cases in point are the ancient Greek treatment of time, the contrast between the two over- all views that I have called the universality of language and language as calculus, belief in the Frege-Russell claim that natural language words like “is” are ambiguous. What might be called the statistical interpretation of modalities, and what I have dubbed the recursive paradigm in language theory. In all these cases, uncovering the tacit presupposition has been helped by a logical and conceptual analysis of the situation.

29 The crucial parameter here turns out to be which tautological disjunctions (S v - S) are admitted to the left column. They have on intuitive meaning: the inquirer’s range of attention comprises the question whether S or not-S iff he or she is prepared to add the tautology (S v - S) to the list of (known or assumed) truths. Cf. here my paper, “Knowledge Representation and the lnterrogative Model of Inquiry”, in Marjorie Clay and Keith Lehrer, editors, Knowledge and Skepticism, Westview Press, Boulder, 1989, pp. 155-183.


the interrogative model. More importantly, speaking of language-using agents seems to relativize everything to the psychological characteristics, background knowledge, early childhood training, idiosyncracies and prejudices of these agents. Or, to generalize the issue, the study of the use of language apparently belongs to pragmatics, not semantics, and pragmatics is (didn’t Morris tell us that?) is a part of the psychology and sociology of language 3*.

This line of thought is nevertheless an unmitigated fallacy. If you stop and think for a minute of what is going on, you will see that (1) is just as an objective relation as (2), as completely independent of the idiosyncracies and indeed of the actual identify of the players postulated. My heuristic term “Nature” does not involve any more any personification of nature than an applied game theorist’s talk about “games against nature”. An analogy should make my point clear. If it is relevant in the theory of interrogative games to ask: But who are the players? then by the same token it must be relevant to ask in logical syntax: Who is supposed to write or to have written these syntactical symbols? If the theory of interrogative games is part of psychology, then formal syntax is part of graphology.

We are dealing here with one of the most harmful prejudices of recent philosophy of language. 1 hope 1 can exorcise it for good 31.

Of course 1 am claiming that the structures exemplified by the interrogative model are not only instantiated in some Platonic or Godelian heaven inhabited by abstract structures as such, but are also instantiated (albeit in bits and pieces) in actual human “language games”. But the question whether they do so is completely independent of the question as to how the structures in question were defined in the first place.

More constructively, we can ask: What is the impact of the logical theory of identification on the entire tradition in the philosophy of language that was largely started by Quine? Needless to say (or, rather, to repeat), a full analysis is impossible within the confines of one paper. Let me nevertheless indicate one important perspective that opens here.

3o One serious fallacy here is a confusion as to what is involved in the use of language. I t is often thought that all use of language depends on the peculiarities of language users, and that all pragmatics is therefore a part of the psychology and sociology. This is a fallacy, for it is possible to study the abstract rules of language use on a purely logical and semantical level. Cf. here my paper “Game-Theoretical Semantics as a Synthesis of Verificationist and Truth-Conditional Meaning Theories”, in Ernest LePore, editor, New Directions in Semantics, Academic Press, London, 1987, pp. 235-58.

3 1 The same bias has made the understanding of Wittgenstein’s language-games unneces- sarily difficult. (It is of course compounded by the later Wittgenstein’s own antisystematic atti- tude.) Cf. here Merrill B. Hintikka and Jaakko Hintikka, Investigating Wiltgenstein, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986.

216 Jaakko Hintikka

First, we nevertheless need a preliminary observation. Let us go back to the general ideas of the interrogative model. Another way of looking at the logical theory of identifiability is to view it as a general logical model of language learning. The Inquirer then becomes a language learner, and the answers to the Inquirer’s questions become the input of the linguistic community into the learning process. The initial premise T corresponds to the learner’s innate linguistic ability.

It may seem that this is far too schematic a model to enable us to establish interesting specific results concerning language learning of the theory-ladenness and fact-ladenness of meaning, Maybe so. But certain important observations can nevertheless be made here. My interrogative model is not fully defined before it is specified what the answers are that the Inquirer (the learner) can receive, i.e., what the possible inputs into the learning process are. And as soon as this question is raised, we become aware of a highly important fact. Almost everybody has assumed, both in the philosophical discussion and in linguistic theorizing, that (in the jargon of my interrogative model) the answers the Inquirer can receive are particular (i.e., quantifier- free) propositions. In other words, the input into the process of language acquisition are particular truths about the language. I have called this assumption (strictly speaking, a closely related and nearly equivalent one) the Ato- mistic Pos t~la te3~.

The Atomistic Postulate has been assumed virtually universally by philosophers and linguists alike. It is in effect adopted by Quine when he chooses as his starting point “sensory stimuli” or “surface irritations” which he says “exhaust our clues to an external world”33. It is in effect assumed by Chomsky when he takes the startingpoint of linguistic theorizing competent speakers’ intuitions about the grammaticality or ungrammaticality of particular strings of symbols34. And it is explicitly assumed in most formal models of language learning 35.

This general acceptance of the Atomistic Postulate in the philosophy of language and methodology of linguistics has its counterpart in the philosophy and methodology of science. As I have shown elsewhere36, some of the most important approaches to the philosophy of science have been motivated (not:

32 The atomistic postulate is the assumption mentioned in note 16 above. 33 Cf. Wordandobject, op. cit., secs. 5-6. 34 Cf. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, Mouton, The Hague, 1957, and Chomsky’s

papers in Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J . Katz, editors, The Structure of Language, Prentice-Hall, Engelwood Cliffs, NJ, 1964.

35 Cf., e.g. Kenneth Wexler and Peter W. Culicover, Formal Principles of Language Acquisition, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980.

36 Op. cit., note 16 above. Cf. also “The Concept of Induction in the Light of the Interroga- tive Approach to Inquiry,” in J . Fetzer, D. Shatz and G. Schlesinger, editors, Defnifions and Definabi/ily, Kluwer Academie, Dordrecht, 1991.


determined) by the assumption of the Atomistic Postulate. This is most con- spicuous in the case of the hypothetico-deductive model and the inductuistic model of science, but in subtler ways the same postulate has colored also Thomas Kuhn’s theorizing. I have also argued and, I dare say, shown that the real logic of experimental science cannot be understood on the basis of the Atomistic Postulate. Instead, we have to assume that a class of answers is available to an experimental scientist which are general (not quantifier-free). More fully expressed, they have at least the AE complexity (existential quantifier governed by a universal one). These answers express the functional dependencies which a controlled experiment can reveal to a scientific inquirer.

This results necessitates a re-evaluation of much of the current philosophy of science, a re-evaluation which largely remains to be carried out. The point I am making here is that the situation is analogous in the philosophy of language. The Atomistic Postulate is an unrealistic assumption also in language theory. There is no valid reason to assume that a language learner cannot use in his or her acquisition process general linguistic regularities without deriving them inductively from a number of special cases. A suitable collection of what are usually considered as particular cases can instead be viewed as collectively revealing a functional dependence of the same kind as a controlled experiment can yield 37.

What is less clear on the side of philosophy of language than on the side of the philosophy of science is precisely what it is that has to be rejected. Further patient work is undoubtedly needed here. Let me nevertheless put forward one specific problem. One place where the Atomistic Postulate has tacitly influenced linguists’ reasoning is in Chomsky’s arguments for his universal grammar. The basic logic of his argument is naturally formulated by reference to the interrogative model. Chomsky argues in effect that inductive learning from particular cases is far too slow a process to account for the facts of language acquisition in children. This corresponds to a case where the Atomistic Postulate is applicable. No general laws follow from such particular answers alone, and consequently Chomsky envisages the model to have been enriched by suitable inductive rules. Chomsky argues, undoubtedly correctly, that they, too, are insufficient to account for the facts, especially for the speed of actual learning by children. Hence the only way out is to postulate a strong

37 Interim generalizations are known to play an important role in language learning. They are usually thought of as inductive generalizations from particular examples. It is in many ways more natural logically speaking to consider them as answers to the language learner’s tacit questions, however, just like nature’s answers to experimental questions.

218 Jaakko Hintikka

initial premise T. What that is in Chomsky’s scheme is precisely the universal grammar 3*.

Chomsky is right in thinking that the poverty of available answers can be compensated for by a rich initial premise T. But, by the same token, there is no need to assume a strong initial premise T if enough logically stronger answers are available to the Inquirer (learner). Thus Chomsky’s argument depends crucially on the assumptions a linguist can make about the availability of different kinds of “answers” to the language learner. If the Atomistic Postulate must be given up, as I have suggested, then Chomsky’s argumentation loses most of its prima facie plausibility.

Perhaps this line of thought can serve as an example of the way in which the critical examination of an important theory can enable a philosopher (or should I say, a metaphysician?) to uncover substantial hidden presuppositions of an interesting theory.

38 For Chomsky’s notion of universal grammar, see the symposium with Chomsky, Putnam and Goodman in Synthese vol. 17 (1967), pp. 2-28 (with further references).

Dialectica Vol. 45, No 2-3 (1991)

overcoming “overcoming metaphysics through logical analysis of language” through logical...

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