Abstract
Throughout this whole book we have approached logic as the matter of criterial reconstruction of necessary truth; and we proposed to take meaning to be something that gets explicated precisely in course of such reconstruction. Moreover, in the previous chapter we considered the Wittgensteinian and Quinean challenge to the very concept of necessary truth; and we concluded that it is not legitimate to see necessary truth as reflecting, and hence logic and semantics as explicating, some ultimate “form of the world”. Let us now investigate the general picture of the relationship between language and the world, between words and things, to which holding this position leads us.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
For both Frege and Russell, symbols were, as Tichÿ (1988, p.ii) puts it, “not the subject matter of their theorizing but a mere shorthand facilitating discussion of extra-linguistic entities.” Tichÿ himself is probably the most consequential contemporary continuator and the most diehard advocate of the Frege-Russell tradition in logic.
Everyone who uses words or mathematical symbols makes the claim that they mean something, and no one will expect any sense to emerge from empty symbols.“
For Frege it cannot be a question of changing universes. One could not even say that he restricts himself to one universe. His universe is the universe.“ (Heijenoort, 1967, p.325)
The nature of the difference between Fregean symbolic and Hilbertian formal logic is clearly seen when we consider the controversy between the two logicians about the nature of axioms as expounded in Section 3.4.
Using Goodman’s (1984) terms, we can say that it means thinking of words without thinking in the words.
And accepting it as an explanation is, as Rorty (1989, p. 8) puts it, like explaining why opium makes you sleepy by talking about its dormitive power.
See the suggestion of Tichg (1992) and my criticism (Peregrin, 1993c).
Cf. Mates’ (1968) distinction between being true of a possible world and being true in the possible world.
The fact that we can speak about possible worlds means that possible worlds exist - in a sense - within our (actual) world. This may mislead us into seeing necessity as a peculiar kind of contingency. This line of thought leads to what McGee (1992, p.274) calls, inspired by Etchemendy (1990), the contingency problem: to be valid is to be true in all models; but which models exist is the matter of contingent fact. However, to inquire whether necessities are not after all in some sense contingent is essentially erroneous - necessity is what makes every contingency possible in the first place. To examine necessary truths within the framework of which they are constitutive is like asking whether logic is logical, or, to use Wittgenstein’s (1953, §50) well known example, whether the meter-standard is one meter long.
As Kripke (1972, p. 267) it: “’Possible worlds’ are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes.
Goodman (1984, p. 21) speaks about “inexorable dictates of nature”.
Whorf (1956, p.213) claims: “We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.”
This fact is, I think, quite clear to linguists grown within the European tradition (see, e.g. Hagège, 1993); but now it comes to be appreciated also by many American, even formally-minded, linguists (see, e.g., Bach et al., to appear.).
The problems connected with believing in “purely observational knowledge” in the context of scientific discovery were discussed in detail by Hanson (1961). It is interesting to note that the disbelief into the positivistic notion of observation was expressed already by Frege (1884; p.99 footnote): “Das Beobachten schließt selbst schon eine logische Tätigkeit ein.” [“Observation itself already includes within it a logical activity.”]
This has been urged by Whorf (1956, p.221): “The phenomena of language are background phenomena, of which the talkers are unaware, or, at the most, very dimly aware - as they are of the motes of dust in the air of a room, though the linguistic phenomena govern the talkers more as gravitation than as dust would. These automatic, involuntary patterns of language are not the same for all men, but are specific for each language and constitute the formalized side of the language, or its ‘grammar’ - a term that includes much more than the grammar we learned.” Putnam’s (1990, p.28) philosophical analysis leads to a similar conclusion: “Elements of what we call ‘language’ or ‘mind’ penetrate so deeply into what we call ‘reality’ that the very project of representing ourselves as being ‘mappers’ of something ‘language-independent’ is fatally compromised from the start.”
See Wittgenstein’s (1953, §122) concept of übersichtliche Darstellung; and cf. Peregrin (1992).
A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of words. Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity.... Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain.“
This is essentially the view envisaged by Quine (1972, p.451): “I find the phrase ‘logical analysis’ misleading, in its suggestion that we are exposing a logical structure that lay hidden in the sentence all along.... When we move from verbal sentences to logical formulas we are merely retreating to a notation that has certain technical advantages, algorithmic and conceptual.”
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Peregrin, J. (1995). Language and the World. In: Doing Worlds with Words. Synthese Library, vol 253. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8468-5_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8468-5_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4618-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8468-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive