Abstract
Perhaps the clearest and most explicit development of what appears to be a narrowly Humean theory of language acquisition in recent philosophy is that of Quine, in the introductory chapters to his Word and Object.1 If the Humean theory is roughly accurate, then a person’s knowledge of language should be representable as a network of linguistic forms — let us say, to first approximation, sentences — associated with one another and, in part, associated to certain stimulus conditions. This formulation Quine presents as, I take it, a factual assertion. Thus he states that our “theories” — whether “deliberate”, as chemistry, or “second nature”, as “the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized objects” — can each be characterized as “a fabric of sentences variously associated to one another and to non-verbal stimuli by the mechanism of conditioned response” (p. 11). Hence the whole of our knowledge (our total “theory”, in this sense) can be characterized in these terms.
Excerpted from ‘Some Empirical Assumptions in Modern Philosophy of Language’, to appear in Philosophy, Science, and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel (ed. by S. Morgenbesser, P. Suppes, and M. White), St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1969. Printed here by permission of the editors.
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References
W.V. Quine, Word and Object, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1960.
Accepting, that is, the interpretation of his remarks that is discussed above.
Elsewhere, Quine states that “the learning of these wholes (sentences) proceeds largely by an abstracting and assembling of parts” and that “as the child progresses, he tends increasingly to build his new sentences from parts” (p. 13). For consistency of interpretation, we must suppose that this refers to “analogical synthesis”, since the three methods enumerated are intended to be exhaustive. If something else is intended, then the scheme again reduces to vacuity, until the innate basis for the “abstracting” and “assembling” is specified.
It is interesting that Russell, in his Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Allen and Unwin, London, 1940, with his concept of real logical form and of logical words as expressing a mental reality, does appear to presuppose a structure that would avoid at least these very obvious problems. But a discussion of Russell’s quite intricate and interesting approach to these questions, though a useful undertaking, is impossible within the scope of this paper.
The reasons for this choice would take us too far afield, into a much more general consideration of Quine’s thesis, developed later in the book, about the scheme of discourse that one must use in “limning the true and ultimate structure of reality” (p. 221), and in describing “all traits of reality worthy of the name” (p. 228).
Recall, again, that Quine is using the concept of “interlinguistic synonymy” as a device for discussing not only translation, but also learning of language in the first place and interpretation of what is said to him by one who knows a language.
Cf. Philippa Foot, ‘Goodness and Choice’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 35 (1961) 45–60. She comments, correctly I am sure, that we would describe such objects as looking exactly like knives, but being something else. See also the remarks by J. Katz on such words as ‘anesthetic’ in his ‘Semantic Theory and the Meaning of “Good”’, Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964) 739–766.
Consider, for example, the experimental evidence that has been produced purportedly showing differences between apes and humans in ability to carry out cross-modal transfer. The difference is sometimes attributed to the ‘linguistic tags’ available to the human. (Cf. A. Moffet, and G. Ettlinger, ‘Opposite Responding in Two Sense Modalities’, Science, No. 3732 (8 July, 1966) 205–6; and G. Ettlinger, in Brain Mechanisms Underlying Speech and Language, ed. by F. L. Darley, Grune and Stratton, New York and London, 1967.) Another possibility that suggests itself is simply that the ‘concepts’ used in the experimental situation, being defined in terms of conjunction or disjunction of elementary physical properties (as is the general procedure in concept-formation experiments), are entirely artificial and mismatched to the ‘concept space’ of the tested animal. The human subject, however, imposes his own system of concepts (since he understands what the experiment is about, etc.). Under the conditions of the experiment, the distinction between the artificial concepts of the experimenter and the natural concepts of the subject might well be undetectable. Hence it might be that no difference between apes and humans in cross-modal transfer (and nothing about linguistic tags) has yet been shown by such experiments, and that what is shown is merely that an animal (or human) cannot make reasonable use of concepts that are mismatched to the innate structure of his system of concepts.
Of the cited conditions, the one that might be regarded as relevant is “knowledge and belief”. Thus it makes sense to argue that under certain conditions, a change in belief may entail a modification of language. But surely it is senseless to hold that wherever difference of belief leads to a difference of disposition to verbal behavior, there is necessarily a difference of language involved.
In From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Mass., 1953.
The issue is not simply one of observation vs. abstraction, but rather one of significant vs. pointless idealization. A set of dispositions to respond is a construction postulated on the basis of evidence, just as is a generative grammar that attempts to characterize ‘knowledge of a language’. In Quine’s terms, the first is based on “genuine” and the second on “analytical” hypotheses, but only in a sense of “genuine” that is divorced from its ordinary meaning (or else on the basis of a value judgment that seems to me quite unsupportable). It would be more accurate to say that setting up a “complex of dispositions to respond” is merely a pointless step, since such a structure has no interesting properties, so far as is known.
Except, as noted earlier, for the constraints imposed by the structure of the quality space, the system of truth-functional logic, certain primitive forms of induction, and the capacity to form arbitrary associations.
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Chomsky, N. (1969). Quine’s Empirical Assumptions. In: Davidson, D., Hintikka, J. (eds) Words and Objections. Synthese Library, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1709-1_5
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