Issues in the Philosophy of Language

Dr. Samina Nadeem

Week-2

Issues in the Philosophy of Language

• Meaning Scepticism

• Vagueness / Fuzzy logic

• Enculturation and shared intentionality

• Reference, names and descriptions

• Idiosyncrasies and conventions

• Translation and interpretation

• Interpellation and censorship

• Tongues untied

Reflection – class activity

• Sentence as a reference: but / and ; dog / cur

{Change in tone not sense}

• Language permits construction of sentences which determinate truth-conditions {essence of language}

• Sentence should contain a description of state of affairs that aim to have the command obeyed

Reflection …… cont.

• Gottlob Frege (1848 – 1925):

-The unit of significance is not the word but the sentence (eg: mean / lean)

- Words are for power of expressing ideas

- Combination of words – complex ideas

- For explanation is needed sense of sentence

- Recognition of sense – words are primary

- Linguistic acts, to know the conditions, is based on sentence.

- It is only in a context of a sentence that there is a meaning

Meaning Skepticism• Disbelief in contemporary philosophic

solutions, rejecting the reality

• Agnosticism – truth values of claims (God, metaphysics) are unknown or unknowable.

“ Contextual determinacy is achieved when theparticipants in communication narrow downthe set of admissible semantic interpretationthrough a process of negotiation in whichdifferent interpretations are tacitly orexplicitly rejected.”

Vagueness / Fuzzy logic• Vagueness: Borderline cases …..inquiry

resistant (eg; tall – a relative term)

• Peirce (1902, 748)

“By intrinsically uncertain we mean notuncertain in consequence of any ignorance ofthe interpreter, but because the speaker’shabits of language were indeterminate.”

• Fuzzy Logic: One proposition may be more true than the other. (Lotfi Zadeh, 1965)

Enculturation and shared intentionality• A process – acquiring culture, internalization (not

an innovative process?)

• Herskovits – process of novel change and inquiry – 2 phases; unconscious stage of early years, the conscious stage of later years (innovation may be included)

• Shared Intentionality (early years): a. gaze following into joint attention, b. social manipulation into cooperative communication, c. group activity into collaboration, d. social learning into instructed learning

Reference, names and descriptions• Donnellan, K. (1931 at UCLA)- Rejected the claim that Proper names hold reference

relationship (Socrates etc) called descriptivism by Bertrand Russell (1910)

- Definite descriptions – reference use & attributive use (closer to Russell’s theory)

- Most influential developments of the Causal-Historical view of Reference

- Eg; Santa Claus does not exist but there is a Santa Claus.

• Kripke S. (1970) published Naming and Necessity – a series of three lectures {every name has a cluster of properties…}

Idiosyncrasies and conventions

• The notion is inextricable from the history of culture production – 20th century obsession with deconstructions of the self, from the fragmented self of modern self to the empty self of existentialism ………. This level does not co-relate with anything common or inter-subjectively shared

Translation and interpretation• Interpretative negotiations: to understand how

reference, sense and truth become entangled / how to navigate their complex relationship. Two philosophical models: a. neo- empiricist account (analytic tradition); b. hermeneutic approach

• Quine (1951): Analytic statements – true or false by virtue of their meaning; synthetic statements –knowledge of language and knowledge of world; methodology of interpretation by examining the practice of translation – different language of the interpreter – stimulus meaning (sensory stimulation associated with words and sentences.

Interpellation and censorship

• Althusser, A. (2001): identity through the address of the other. E.g. “Hey, you there!” the hailed individual will turn around and become a subject.

• Butler (1998): Censorship establishes “ what must remain unspeakable for contemporary regimes of discourse to continue to exercise their power”

Tongues untied

• Gloria Anzaldua:

Communities and cultures always speak in many voices - polyphonic

References

• Dummett, M. 1973 Philosophy of language, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• Oxford Scholarship online