I think a puzzle for Davidson's approach is that we couldn't work out how to speak a language from a truth theory for the language on its own. Since a truth theory for a language only allows us to distinguish true from false sentences of the language, it can only teach us what to assert and what to deny. It is hard to see how context can get in here.
I don't mean just the kind of context that disambiguates indexicals, or gives sense to 'occasion sentences', but also the conversational context, the context that makes a certain utterance 'appropriate'.
Is there an important difference, here, between having a theory of truth for L and having a list of all the true sentences of L? Isn't a theory of truth (as envisioned by Tarski and Davidson) just a way of generating such a list, or determining whether an arbitrary sentence is a member of it?
How would we make a transition from having such a list, or such a test, to being able to speak L? We may not be able to give a full account of meaning in terms of use, but we can't give an account that denies its relevance. If we don't know how to use an expression, we don't know what it means.
We can be confused by the fact that we might learn to speak French from a theory of truth for French written down in English, but we would oly be able to do this if we can, as well, transfer certain principles of appropriate use from the English context onto the French expressions that we have learned.
Even if these principles were, themselves, articulated in both English and in French, they would not be part of the hypothesised theory of truth for French.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Friday, December 23, 2011
A priori tautologies
On second thoughts, logically a priori statements are slightly interesting, because the rules that they ultimately depend on are only intelligible within practices which, themselves, are at least partly 'hinged' upon non-tautological a priori statements.
It is not possible to articulate a logic without a language to articulate the logic in, and the possibility of this language, if it is considered by its speakers, must be the subject of an a priori judgment.
The necessity of logical laws follows from the a priori possibility of the language in which they are entertained.
It is not possible to articulate a logic without a language to articulate the logic in, and the possibility of this language, if it is considered by its speakers, must be the subject of an a priori judgment.
The necessity of logical laws follows from the a priori possibility of the language in which they are entertained.
Distinctive definition of 'A Priori' ... tidying up
An 'a priori' statement is one which, though not a logical theorem, cannot be false in any playable language game. Whether we call logical theora a priori is a matter of taste, but they are certainly not interestingly a priori.
Among necessary falsehoods, we can recognise hypotheses about the impossibility of language in general, claims which are Moorean 'paradoxical' etc.
There is room for us to argue about whether some particular statement is a priori or not - for "Neurath's Boat" type reasons, and because there is an open question bar to a general theory here. Whether some statements are a priori may be a matter of linguistic experiment - of 'doing philosophy', perhaps.
Among necessary falsehoods, we can recognise hypotheses about the impossibility of language in general, claims which are Moorean 'paradoxical' etc.
There is room for us to argue about whether some particular statement is a priori or not - for "Neurath's Boat" type reasons, and because there is an open question bar to a general theory here. Whether some statements are a priori may be a matter of linguistic experiment - of 'doing philosophy', perhaps.
Thursday, December 01, 2011
Composition
Clearly, some 'concepts' are, at least partly, compositional.
We can't conclude from this that:
(a) we can recognise compositionality from particular structural features, or
(b) that the meaning of a composed 'concept' is exhausted by an account of its composition
This is partly because we can't sideline idiomatic uses. 'Brown suit' has a content which cannot be discovered from 'brown' and 'suit', because to wear a brown suit means something different than to wear a grey suit. Or a pink suit.
It is possible that compositionality (ugh) is not even that important - that it sort of helps us along, but more as a kind of mnemonic than because we need it.
'But' the grammarians say 'how do you account for our indefinite capacity to construe meaning from a finite set of components?'.
The answer is in two parts: what is the evidence that we have this indefinite capacity? It doesn't exist, because an indefinite capacity can't be demonstrated. It can only be a potential account - and an unlikely one, given our finite condition.
The second part is that even if we settle on requiring a rule-based account of human 'language' behaviour, this need not be a grammatical account. A finite computational engine can produce speech-like behaviour from non-grammatical components - e.g. a list of sentences linked to a list of appropriate reponses. Even were such an engine to do a little humanish parsing, this need not be its only method.
Dyslexic people sometimes have difficulty discriminating individual words - since they don't have the resource of a reliable capacity to decode or concoct written sentences, they are more dependent on phonetic elements. For instance, they are more likely to think that common complex expressions - 'Just now', 'Good day', 'How are you' - are single words.
Most of us, even if not dyslexic, can remember similar errors from childhood. I remember hearing 'Here we go round the' (... Mulberry bush) as 'Helligo rounda'. The fact that it didn't have any clear meaning didn't especially distinguish it within my limited experience, and even adult literate reflection can't make a lot of relevant sense out of the first line of this nursery rhyme.
(Mulberries don't grow on bushes, for one thing.)
The compositionality argument has two parts:
(1) There are cases where we can deduce the meaning of an expression from grammatical rules and the 'meanings' of its parts (word meanings, in particular).
(2) We need some story about how we can decode expressions we haven't heard before.
But this is pretty ramshackle. As above, (1) is rarely possible in a completely satisfactory way. And (2) ignores lots of other resources we might draw on - particularly context, including any preceding linguistic exchange.
After all, that's how we start 'decoding' in the first place ...
We can't conclude from this that:
(a) we can recognise compositionality from particular structural features, or
(b) that the meaning of a composed 'concept' is exhausted by an account of its composition
This is partly because we can't sideline idiomatic uses. 'Brown suit' has a content which cannot be discovered from 'brown' and 'suit', because to wear a brown suit means something different than to wear a grey suit. Or a pink suit.
It is possible that compositionality (ugh) is not even that important - that it sort of helps us along, but more as a kind of mnemonic than because we need it.
'But' the grammarians say 'how do you account for our indefinite capacity to construe meaning from a finite set of components?'.
The answer is in two parts: what is the evidence that we have this indefinite capacity? It doesn't exist, because an indefinite capacity can't be demonstrated. It can only be a potential account - and an unlikely one, given our finite condition.
The second part is that even if we settle on requiring a rule-based account of human 'language' behaviour, this need not be a grammatical account. A finite computational engine can produce speech-like behaviour from non-grammatical components - e.g. a list of sentences linked to a list of appropriate reponses. Even were such an engine to do a little humanish parsing, this need not be its only method.
Dyslexic people sometimes have difficulty discriminating individual words - since they don't have the resource of a reliable capacity to decode or concoct written sentences, they are more dependent on phonetic elements. For instance, they are more likely to think that common complex expressions - 'Just now', 'Good day', 'How are you' - are single words.
Most of us, even if not dyslexic, can remember similar errors from childhood. I remember hearing 'Here we go round the' (... Mulberry bush) as 'Helligo rounda'. The fact that it didn't have any clear meaning didn't especially distinguish it within my limited experience, and even adult literate reflection can't make a lot of relevant sense out of the first line of this nursery rhyme.
(Mulberries don't grow on bushes, for one thing.)
The compositionality argument has two parts:
(1) There are cases where we can deduce the meaning of an expression from grammatical rules and the 'meanings' of its parts (word meanings, in particular).
(2) We need some story about how we can decode expressions we haven't heard before.
But this is pretty ramshackle. As above, (1) is rarely possible in a completely satisfactory way. And (2) ignores lots of other resources we might draw on - particularly context, including any preceding linguistic exchange.
After all, that's how we start 'decoding' in the first place ...
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