Priest, Graham.
Beyond the limits of thought.
2nd ed.
Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Chapter 13 is titled "Translation, Reference, and Truth." Here is where
Priest engages Quine, Davidson, and others.
The postulation of semantic correlates is deep-sixed by Quine's
behaviorism. Quine trashes any notion of mentalism, any notion of meaning
not implicit in overt behavior. (Cf. Quine's "Ontological
Relativity'.) Down with the 'museum myth' of meaning goes the deteminacy
of sense. Another consequence is Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of
translation. In translating an unknown language, we find that there may be
different analytical hypotheses for the language which conform to all
observed speech dispositions. The reason there is no unique solution is
the same we know there is none for any observed empirical regularities,
after Hume. And what applies to unknown languages also applies to known
languages, such as the English we are using now.
This, however, brings us to a familiar self-referential paradox. How are
we to apply a determinate meaning to Quine's own statements? Are we all
translating Quine's writings into our own idiolects, creating an
indeterminate range of personal meaning-schemas? If this were so, how
could we ever understand, or agree or disagree with Quine's views or with
the arguments of one another about them? Yet it seems that Quine's
utterances do have determinate sense in spite of his assertions.
Priest cites Searle as making a such an argument against Quine, Searle
basing his objections on Quine's behaviorism. Priest, however, claims that
behaviorism is not essential to the indeterminacy argument, as the argument
would work just as well with intensional notions. (199) I made note of
this given my absolute lack of respect for behaviorists.
From inscrutability of sense we derive inscrutability of reference, and
then not just to the utterance of others but to one's own.
But we are once again led into the paradox of expression: the indeterminacy
of reference cannot be expressed, yet here it is expressed perfectly. (201)
Quine is aware of the problem and is forced to conclude that the notion of
reference is meaningless. Quine finds a number of subterfuges to
circumvent the undesirable implications of this situation, such as
reference to a background language, which Priest finds unsatisfactory. How
then does one relate this background language to reality, and deal with
claims about reality? Here at least Priest shows himself to be aware not
just of paradoxes, but of the shortcomings of empiricism (204).
Next comes Davidson, who is neither a behaviorist nor an
extensionalist. Priest outlines Davidson's specs for a theory of
language. He uses Tarskian theory to construct a finitely axiomizable
theory of truth for a language.
This would seem to follow in the footsteps of Frege, who suggested that the
"meaning of a declarative sentence is its truth conditions." I fail to see
why this is so. It seems to me a prima facie senseless supposition.
OK, so suppose we can construct a theory of a natural language in the
language itself. Davidson admits of a problem here. Priest asserts that
the attempt to resolve the contradiction at the limit of cognition results
in a contradiction at the limit of expression (206-7).
Davidson, in "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" finds himself in
another quandary, argues that the claim that the conceptual systems of two
speakers may be different, or the same, is senseless.
Such is the legacy of the progression Frege->Wittgenstein->Quine->Davidson.
Clearly there is something wrong with all this, but what? Presumably,
Priest is interested in the unavoidability of contradiction at the limits
of thought, and thus the universality of his Inclosure Schema. He never
asks the salient question: why equate in the first place language (the
linguistic expression of thought) with formal logic? What is the
relationship of both to each other and to reality? In fact, these
questions are evaded from first to last? Perhaps one might pursue this
hypothesis: the logical conclusion of positivism (and hence
'postpositivism') is mysticism.
ADDENDUM: It would be instructive to compare the relation of logic to
language as philosophers see it as to the way that real linguists see
it. To be sure, logic becomes central to linguistic theory in the wake of
the Chomskyan revolution, but would any linguist interested in the logical
structure of natural language venture the claim that the meaning of a
sentence is its truth conditions? Linguistic theory indeed mandates the
formulation of natural language sentences in a formal apparatus (hence the
interest in Montague grammar, for instance), yet the perspective seems to
be different: to stretch logic to fit the facts of natural language, not to
assume that language is just logic in longhand. There's something very
very wrong about what analytical philosophers have done in their
single-minded reduction of ontological and epistemological questions to
linguistic ones, the latter themselves reduced to formal-logical terms.
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