Abstract
The purpose of this article is to compare and contrast the underlying accounts of language and linguistic communication in Waismann’s “Verifiability” [1945] and the “Analytic-Synthetic” series [1949]–[1953]. There is some overlap, and the two reinforce each other, but the “Analytic-Synthetic” series presents a more far-reaching view.
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Notes
- 1.
In the entry “vagueness”, Blackburn (1996) says, “A term that is perfectly precise would generate no borderline cases”. He goes on to tie vagueness to the presence of a sorties paradox.
- 2.
Key historical sources include Hilary Putnam (1970, 1975) and Saul Kripke (1980). Putnam (1970, 189) once wrote:
Even if we could define “natural kind”—say, “a natural kind is a class which is the extension of a term P which plays suchandsuch a methodological role in some well-confirmed theory”—the definition would obviously embody a theory of the world, at least in part ...what really distinguishes the classes we count as natural kinds is itself a matter of (high level and very abstract) scientific investigation and not just meaning analysis.
- 3.
See Lassiter (2008) for an illuminating account of the evolution of natural language, to accommodate the intutions behind the standard accounts of natural kind terms. Lassiter suggests that natural kind terms are associated with speakers’ dispositions to defer to certain members of their linguistic communities, presumably the scientists. Many of his conclusions dovetail with Waismann’s, especially concerning the flexibility and evolution of natural languages.
- 4.
We are using “presupposition” a bit loosely here. We do not claim that it satisfies all of the roles that presuppositions have in contemporary semantics. For example, the common ground is not updated to include them. Thanks to Giorgio Sbardolini for pressing this.
- 5.
In light of the developments concerning Pluto, not to mention asteroids and planets of other stars (which Waismann himself mentions in (1949, 31)), the example is perhaps not the best. Maybe something like “a vixen is a female fox” or “a bachelor is an unmarried male” would be better.
- 6.
The only mention of Quine in the entire series is in the first article (1949), where the main point of “Truth by convention” (Quine 1936) is endorsed.
- 7.
Shapiro (2014, Chapter 5) argues that “has the same meaning as” is context-sensitive. Whether two instances of a given expression have the same meaning depends on what is salient in a given conversational context.
- 8.
- 9.
Waismann also broaches what is now called the “Whorf-Sapir” hypothesis that language somehow influences, or even determines, one’s world view. One need not endorse this in order to appreciate the themes presented here.
- 10.
Thanks to Robert Kraut for pressing this issue.
- 11.
This is not the place to fully articulate these notions, and show how they relate to each other. Contextualization and definedness, once discovered, make expressions more precise, without, perhaps, making them fully precise. We plan on developing these themes in future work.
- 12.
We plan to address this matter in future work.
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Shapiro, S., Roberts, C. (2019). Open Texture and Analyticity. In: Makovec, D., Shapiro, S. (eds) Friedrich Waismann. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25008-9_9
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