Scepticism and the content of “commonsense”

We think, and we speak our thoughts. Necessarily we speak them, even to ourselves, in some language, either in a so-called natural one – French, English, Hebrew, Greek – or in one of the so-called artificial languages of mathematics or formal logic. Whatever language we choose to speak, or must speak, however, we take ourselves often enough, most often perhaps, to be speaking in it of real things: things “real” in the sense, a sense introduced to philosophy by Descartes, and the source of much enduring intellectual anguish since, of being “outside the mind.”

But are not words themselves creatures of language? Is language itself not a creation of the human mind? If so, what assurance have we that, when we speak, we speak of the furniture of the universe, of Reality itself, rather than merely of the homely, and home-made, furniture of our own minds?

In raising such doubts we envisage the possibility that language, although it may seem the house of the mind, with windows opening on an extramental, extralinguistic world, may in fact be a prison, with none. The image of language as a prison no doubt owes something, historically, to Plato's myth of the Cave. But those immured in the Prison-House of Language, as philosophers since Locke have conceived it, are rather worse off than those chained facing the back wall of Plato's Cave.

This book is the product of a transatlantic cross-fertilisation. The authors found themselves from 1991 onwards members of the same department, at the University of Utah, to which Harrison had moved from a British university (Sussex). At that time, Hanna was nourishing some doubts about various forms of meaning-scepticism, mainly in Quine and Kripke. Harrison had a number of projects on hand, one of which was an absurdly ambitious attempt to rethink the philosophy of language since Frege from the standpoint of an idiosyncratic reinterpretation of Wittgenstein. Some of the component parts of this enterprise, including a series of exegetical studies of middle-period Wittgenstein, had seen or were about to see print, but the project as a whole was, to put it bluntly, stalled, and had been stalled, except on its exegetical front, since the early 1980s. Conversation between us at first revealed some points of contact between our two projects. Then we began to see the possibility of certain large structural moves that would get Harrison's project moving again, in directions that would provide a framework for Hanna's ideas. At first we thought the work might yield a joint paper. Later we realised that it would have to be a series of papers. Finally we resigned ourselves to producing a joint book. By this time so many changes had occurred in each of our minds, stemming from objections or suggestions by the other, that we would have been at a loss to say which of us “owned” which parts of the project.

Sense and truth-conditions

It has been a commonplace of philosophy since Frege that “the sense of a sentence is determined by its truth-conditions.” But that, as it stands, is a dark utterance. We need for a start to distinguish between the sentence and its sense. A sentence is just a string of words. Different sentential strings may have the same sense: “express,” as is often said, “the same proposition.” Both (some) sentences and the propositions they express may be said to be assertoric in form, in the sense that what each expresses is the content of an assertion. It is this that makes “The cat is on the mat” an altogether different sort of logical entity from a mere string of names: “James Peter John.” So one could say that both sentences and propositions aim at truth. What one means by that, roughly speaking, is that only in the case of the kinds of sentence that express the content of a possible assertion does the question of truth arise. As Frege put it, “The only thing that raises the question of truth at all is the sense of sentences.” But to raise the question of truth and falsity is not necessarily to be susceptible of truth or falsity. Even an assertoric sentence, such as “The cat is on the mat,” cannot be said to be in its own right true or false.

Introduction

Philosophy exists to trouble the peace of minds secure in their assumptions. Its shadow has always lain athwart the paths of commonsense thinking. To be fertile in paradox is part of its nature. At the same time the mind can never for long rest content with conclusions which smack of it. Paradox is not a resting-place, rather a spur to further thought. And for that reason, philosophical paradox is a serious matter, to which, when it is the product of a considerable mind, real intellectual importance can attach. It is something to be resolved, transcended if possible; it is not, by contrast, at least at its best and most serious, something to be laughed off.

In this Part, we have to deal with two such flights of paradox. The first, which will occupy us in this chapter, is Quine's celebrated argument for the indeterminacy of translation. The second is an argument of Kripke's which seems to show that our ordinary criteria for ascribing belief on the basis of sincere assent to propositions lead in certain cases to irresoluble contradiction. We shall argue that both are plausible only when their supporting arguments are advanced against the background of a certain, widely pervasive intellectual outlook, namely, the one we have been attacking throughout this book. Dispensing with Referential Realism, along the lines argued in Parts I–III, allows one, as we shall see, to deal rather swiftly with them.

Wittgenstein's Slogan and the later Wittgenstein

In Chapter 3, we outlined a strategy of opposition to Referential Realism. In pursuit of that strategy we committed ourselves in chapter 4 to a defence of what we there called Wittgenstein's Slogan: “Logic must take care of itself.” We took the Slogan to be equivalent to the proposal that all “logical” questions, taking “logical” in a sense broad enough to include all questions of the meaning and reference of terms, must be capable of being settled antecedently to the assignment of truth or falsity to any contingent proposition. And we began our defence by attempting to show, in Chapters 5–7, that the ability to refer by means of a proper name does not depend on a speaker's knowing any contingent truth concerning the entity to which he refers, but only on his knowing-how to participate in some selection of the array of socially instituted practices, maintained with the general object of keeping track of items by means of their names, which we called the Name-Tracking Network.

We have assumed, in short, that what is required to implement Wittgenstein's Slogan, once it is removed from its original context in the phase of Wittgenstein's thought that culminated in the Tractatus, is some way of representing what is known in knowing a language as knowledge-how, not knowledge-that: knowledge of the workings of practices, not knowledge of the truth of propositions.

Nomothetic objects

Russell's Principle in Russell's version is the dictum that “Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.” In Gareth Evans's version, it is the more or less equivalent claim that it is possible for a person to have a thought about something only if he knows which particular individual in the world he is thinking about, with the rider that at some point the phrase “which individual” will have to be spelled out in terms of sensory acquaintance if the demands of the principle are to be met.

It is worth noticing right at the outset, therefore, that there are types of reference and referring expression to which neither version of the Principle appears to have any application whatsoever. Take for instance, the sentence “The King can move one square in any direction.”

“The King” is a referring expression. It picks out an object, the chess-King. It would be possible, for that matter, to envisage a chess nomenclature in which, rather than being indicated by means of definite descriptions, “The White King,” “The White Queen's Bishop,” “The White Queen's Knight's Pawn,” and so on, the objects so indicated would be baptised with proper names: “King George,” “Queen Mary,” “Kaiser Wilhelm,” “Bishop Wilberforce,” and so on.

The identity of the object picked out by the definite description “The White King,” or by an equivalent proper name, however, neither needs to be explained, nor could be explained, “by acquaintance.”

Universals

Does the universe contain, in addition to individuals, kinds and properties? This is the celebrated Problem of Universals. The traditional answers to it comprise Realism, which posits kinds and properties in addition to their individual exemplars and instances, and Nominalism, which allows the existence only of individuals. There is also a third answer, Conceptualism, which, recoiling both from the absurdities of an outright Nominalism and from the over-richly peopled universe of the Realist, assigns to kinds and properties the refuge of a shadowy existence as mental templates, or rules, for shuffling individuals into the sets, or as logicians say, extensions, associated with kind-names.

Realism was born with Plato. Nominalism, despite the efforts of Nelson Goodman or Hartry Field, is widely regarded as having died with Hobbes. The analytic tradition in philosophy has tended until very recently to alternate uneasily between the options of Conceptualism and some kind of platonic or quasi-platonic Realism. The Realism recommended both by Frege and by the early Russell was of this kind.

“Third realms” and their contents sit ill, however, with the Positivism-derived naturalism and empiricism of so much analytic philosophy.

Reference, Meaning, and Intention

The three forms of Referential Realism we have so far distinguished, albeit in a fairly brisk and sketchy way, account for a considerable part of what has taken place in analytic philosophy of language since 1900. They exhibit numerous incompatibilities, and the discussion of their relative merits has achieved considerable heights of complexity and acuity. We shall not, except occasionally and indirectly, enter into those discussions. Our object in this book is not to argue for or against any particular version of Referential Realism but to attack Referential Realism root and branch.

In opposition to the Referential Realist we shall contend that the entities “picked out by,” or “referred to,” or “designated by” all of the content-bearing expressions of a natural language are without exception linguistic constructs: things “constituted by linguistic convention,” in the sense of being things having no existence in nature prior to the constitution of language. At the same time we shall argue that such a claim yields neither of the absurd consequences it is generally supposed to yield.