Phil. 154

 

Philosophy of Language

Philosophy 154

Fall Semester 2001

TR 12:00-1:15

Prof. Dowden

 

 

 

 

 

 

CATALOG DESCRIPTION: Traditional and contemporary theories of meaning. The connection between language, thought and reality. 3 units.

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Our course is about the connection between language and thought, what makes statements meaningful and true, and how theories of language can resolve philosophical problems.

 

TEXTBOOKS: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker, and The Meaning of Language, by Robert M. Martin.

 

GRADING: Homework questions (44% total), an essay (21%), a final exam (30%), and occasional participation in class discussions (5%). There will be no true-false or multiple-choice questions during the semester.

Homework 1 due Thursday, Sept. 13.

Homework 2 due Tuesday, Oct. 2.

Homework 3 due Thursday, Oct. 25.

Homework 4 due Tuesday, Nov. 13.

Essay due Thursday, Dec. 6.

 

ADD-DROP: To add the course, try to do so by telephone using Casper. If the course is full, then see me about signing up on the waiting list. To drop the course during the first two weeks, use the Casper telephone system. No paperwork is required. After the first two weeks, it is harder to drop, and a departmental form is required, the "Petition to Add/Drop After Deadline." As with any university course, make sure you are dropped officially (by Casper or by the instructor or department secretary); don't simply walk away into the ozone or else you will get a "U" grade for the course, which is counted as an "F" in computing your GPA (grade point average).

 

LATE WORK: If you have a proper excuse, I'll use your final exam grade for the grade on one missed assignment. There are no make-ups. Contact me right away if you miss an assignment. Class attendance is not required in this course, but it is highly recommended.

 

PROFESSOR: My office is in Mendocino 3022, phone 278-7384. My weekly office hours will be announced at the first class meeting. Feel free to stop by or call at any of those times. If those hours are inconvenient for you, then we can arrange an appointment for an alternative time. Also, for a quick response, send me e-mail at dowden@csus.edu

 

FIRST READING ASSIGNMENT: Your first reading assignment is the last paragraph on page 2 of Martin's book, then chapters 1 and 2 of Pinker's book, by next week. The overall plan of our course is for us to read the Pinker book swiftly, then the Martin book slowly.

 

GOALS: By the end of the course you will have an overall view of (1) the connection between language and thought, (2) what makes statements meaningful, and true, and (3) how theories of language can resolve philosophical problems. You will have been introduced to many of the major problems in the philosophy of language. You will have some opinions about how to solve those problems and how not to solve them, and so you will have the beginning of a philosophy of language of your own. You also will have developed your philosophical skills for making progress in other areas of philosophy.

 

COURSE TOPICS:

Language is good for some things and poor for others. It's a good way to order cheeseburgers. It's is poor at describing faces. It's the ONLY way to proclaim, "There's NOT a giraffe standing next to me." The great achievements of language are that by using it we can think in deeper abstractions; we can say anything we can think; and only we humans can say NEW things.

The philosophy of language sets out to provide deep insights into certain general features of language such as reference, truth, meaning and necessity. It also intends to make progress on the great problems--the mind-body problem, the problem of free will, the metaphysical problem of distinguishing ultimate reality from mere appearance, the problem of finding the nature and basis of our knowledge, and so forth. 20th and 21st century analytic philosophers believe that the great problems of philosophy should be studied, not only directly, but also via a focus on the language they employ. These philosophers believe that they have new and better approaches to the great problems than did the philosophers of previous centuries. In other words, there has been progress in philosophy, and those persons who are unaware of the philosophy of language are simply not at the frontiers.

Nearly all the philosophy we will read in this course is post-1985 philosophy. As many contemporary philosophers would say, the old philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, and Kant either didn't think about the crucial problems of language, or, when they did, they got it wrong.

In the 1960s, largely as a consequence of results achieved by the American philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, the science of linguistics quit paying so much attention to describing language and shifted its attention to explaining it. Thus the field shifted from describing speech that had occurred to explaining speech that could occur, from actual to potential speech, from performance to competence. This shift focused linguistic attention on the underlying human capacity for language, on the cognitive capacity that must underlie every particular use of any language. The resulting search for a general theory of language, of which each particular language was a special case, convinced Chomsky that theoretical linguistics is also a cognitive science, a science of the mind.

A principal focus of our course is on the notion of meaning and the extent to which the study of language can give us insights into how the human mind works. Chomsky says that investigating the structure of human languages may reveal much about the structure of the human mind. For example, he claims such study may reveal that the mind contains a universal grammar that limits what kind of human languages could ever have appeared on earth throughout its human evolution. Chomsky's student Jerry Fodor claims that we were able to learn the language of our parents because we already knew an innate language--mentalese. This is really our first language, says Fodor, and we never LEARN it. The Chomsky school in the philosophy of language has its critics, as we shall see.

Let's turn now to the other philosophical topics we will explore in our course. Suppose you meet someone from a new civilization. When you go about translating the person's verbal remarks, how would you know when you've successfully figured out the meaning of one of their words? Can you rule out all the alternative possibilities and settle on just one correct one? Philosophers disagree about this.

And just how bizarre can an unknown civilization be yet still have its language translated correctly into English? Could the people be so bizarre that they don't even use our logic? Philosophers disagree on the answer to these questions.

What are meanings? Are they ideas in the mind? Yes, answered many European empiricist philosophers from the 17th to the 20th centuries (Locke, Hume, Mill, Russell). According to this theory of language-meaning, when I say "Madonna is sexy" and mean what I say, my words are connected in a special way to the ideas I have. The idea corresponding to the word "Madonna" is somehow connected to the woman Madonna. Similarly, other words in the sentence are connected to other ideas (for example, "is sexy" is connected to the idea of sexiness), which in turn are somehow connected to things outside of language (sexy persons). Thus, the spoken sentence "Madonna is sexy," means that the Madonna idea of the speaker is connected to one of the sexy persons who are connected to the sexiness idea. This idea theory of meaning was seriously challenged in the 20th century by arguments from Ludwig Wittgenstein and W.V. Quine, as we shall see.

In 1956, Benjamin Whorf claimed that minds using very different languages will construe reality in very different ways. For example, the Inuit Indians of the North are said to have many more words for snow than we have, so when they see what we call "snow" they see something different than English speakers do. Whorfians wonder whether you and I can break free of the grip that English has upon our minds. Steven Pinker argues that the Whorfians are mistaken.

Is language basically a set of rules and conventions? Bertrand Russell said in 1921 "We can hardly suppose [there once was] a parliament of hitherto speechless elders meeting together and agreeing to call a cow a cow and a wolf a wolf." In that sense, language is not conventional; there was no founding convention. Yet some philosophers persist in saying it is conventional that a cow is called a "cow" and not a "zbgg".

Our language does have grammatical rules. You violate the rules if you say "Saturday don't believe me him," and you violate the rules if you say "John threw" and don't follow this with a direct object. As the U.C. Berkeley philosopher John Searle said, "Speaking a language is engaging in a (highly complex) rule-governed form of behavior. To learn and master a language is (among other things) to learn and to have mastered these rules." But, as M.I.T. philosopher Paul Ziff countered, "Rules have virtually nothing to do with speaking or understanding a natural language. ...A picture of language [which makes rules central] can produce...nothing but confusion. An appeal to rules in the course of discussing the regularities to be found in a natural language is as irrelevant as an appeal to the laws of Massachusetts while discussing the laws of motion." Ziff and Searle can't both be correct, can they?

Philosophers of language are interested also in the problem of machine language. The problem isn't whether some future computer might be able to manipulate sentences to the point where it would be difficult to distinguish the machine's verbal behavior from a human speaker's verbal behavior--though that's an interesting problem for computer scientists. Instead, the problem is whether such a machine, if built, would properly be said to mean something by the sentences it puts out. Our course will be consider arguments on both sides of this controversial issue.

Philosophers disagree with each other about whether the sounds made by any (non-human) animals qualify as being a language. Porpoises, chimpanzees, and whales communicate with other members of their species, of course, but do they really have a language? Some experimenters claim to have taught a chimp to use and understand combinations of words the animal has not previously encountered. The experimenters argue that this fact is a nail in the coffin of those who don't believe animals possess real language. Objecting to this line of reasoning, the critics complain that these experimenters have misinterpreted the evidence and that upon closer examination the experimenters have committed the Walt Disney Fallacy, the fallacy of projecting complex mental beliefs, intentions, and attitudes to animals when in fact the animals don't really have them.

Philosophers of language point out that it's helpful to look at traditional philosophical problems in a new way, through an analysis of the language used in stating those problems. For a simple example, Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that the correct answer to the traditional philosophical question "How do I know that I exist?" is that the speaker has misused the verb "know" and let language "go on holiday". A little attention to language will help to dissolve this and many other traditional problems, says Wittgenstein.

In our course we will be considering all the above philosophical topics, plus many others, such as the following:

The private language argument

Speech acts

Definite descriptions

Extensionality

Modal contexts and possible worlds

Sense and reference

Truth

 


PROF. DOWDEN / PHILOSOPHY DEPT.
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND LETTERS / CSUS

The web address of this file is
http://www.csus.edu/indiv/d/dowdenb/154/154syl01.htm

updated: 8/26/01