Abstract
Two different conceptions of language dominate philosophical reflection on the nature of human language and of human linguistic powers. The first is the conception of language as a calculus of meaning, and of understanding as computational interpretation. This conception is rooted in the exigencies of function-theoretic logic. The notions pivotal to this conception are truth, truth-condition, sense and force, naming and describing (representation), and theory of meaning for natural languages. The alternative conception is an anthropological one, which conceives of language above all as a form of human communicative behaviour, constituted by human practices and manifest in human action. The notions pivotal to this conception are practice, language-game, use and rule of use as given by explanations of meaning, understanding and criteria of understanding. The fundamental principles that inform each of these conceptions are explained. The radical flaws of calculus conceptions of language are laid bare.
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Notes
Wittgenstein wrote of himself as using ‘the ethnological approach’ (CV, under 2. 7. 1940; MS 162b, 67v). Later sociologists would no doubt have described it as ‘ethno-methodological’. For elaboration, see Hacker (2010), pp. 15–31. The term ‘anthropological approach’ perhaps has some warrant by reference to Investigations §415 and RFM 399 (‘Mathematics, after all, is an anthropological phenomenon’). Neither term is altogether felicitous.
‘A process of derivation of some kind is involved in the understanding of a sentence’, Dummett (1975), p. 112. ‘… the computations involved may be fairly intricate … But since they rely on principles of universal grammar that are part of the fixed structure of the mind/brain, it is fair to suppose that they take place virtually instantaneously and of course with no conscious awareness and beyond the level of possible introspection’, Chomsky (1988), pp. 90f.
Of course, we must distinguish between a sentence, the meaning of a sentence, the utterance of a sentence on an occasion and the statement made by the utterance of a sentence. Strictly speaking, it is not declarative sentences or their meanings that can be true or false, but rather what is said by their use. For the most part, I shall disregard these nice distinctions for the sake of brevity.
It is noteworthy that neither of the founding fathers of the calculus conception of language actually claimed that the meaning of an elementary (atomic) sentence is given by its truth-conditions. The only mention of truth-conditions in the whole of the Fregean corpus is §32 of The Basic Laws of Arithmetic, vol. I. That is concerned exclusively with the truth conditions of sentences formed from Frege’s eight primitive function-names that take names of truth-values as argument expressions. Here the sense of elementary sentences (which are conceived to be names of truth-values) is taken as given. In so far as Frege has any account of the sense of elementary sentences, it is that their sense is the mode of presentation of a truth-value as the value of a function for an argument. Similarly, the Tractatus claim that the sense of a sentence is given by its truth-conditions is tailored for the molecular sentence, and applies to an elementary sentence only in the Pickwickian sense that every elementary sentence is a truth-function of itself (‘p’ = ‘p·p’).
For the history of attempts to deliver such analyses, see Baker and Hacker (1984), ch. 2.
Wittgenstein (1958) §§19–20.
The point was first made in print in Wittgenstein (1921), 4.02–4.03 (derived from his ‘Notes on Logic’ of October, 1913), followed by Frege’s discussion of ‘thought-building blocks’ in Frege (1923), p. 390; the idea first appears in Frege’s Nachlass in his (1914) ‘Logic in Mathematics’, Posthumous Writings, p. 225, after lengthy conversations with the young Wittgenstein in December 1913.
Of course, there are many different kinds of interpretration. Laws of the land often need an interpretation, which is given by the courts. Legal documents commonly require an interpretation. Historical texts, especially if corrupted, need an interpretation; and so on. These are not in question here.
‘Descartes’s problem’ was held to be the problem of how we put our ‘system of knowledge of a language’ to use in speaking (by contrast with understanding the speech of another, which is to be explained computationally). Chomsky’s answer was that a solution to Descartes’s problem is probably beyond our reach: ‘One possible reason for the lack of success in solving it or even presenting sensible ideas about it is that it is not within the range of human intellectual capacities. … There is some reason to suspect that this may be so …’ Chomsky (1988), p. 151. We are never told what reason there is.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Hanoch Ben-Yami, Hanjo Glock, Edward Kanterian, and Herman Philipse for their comments on a draft of this paper, and to Gerhard Ernst, Erasmus Mayer and the audience at Erlangen University where it was first presented. For a more detailed treatment of the themes in this paper, see my forthcoming book The Intellectual Powers: a Study of Human Nature (Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2013).
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Hacker, P.M.S. Two Conceptions of Language. Erkenn 79 (Suppl 7), 1271–1288 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9558-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9558-9