Theory of Meaning

V temu prispevku predstavljam skeptični izziv, kot sledi iz Kripkejeve intepretacije Filozofskih raziskav. Vprašanje, ali je ta interpretacija Wittgensteinovega teksta upravičena, me tukaj ne zanima. Raje sem si pogledal skeptikove argumente in preučil možnosti, kako nanje odgovoriti. Čeprav skeptik zavrne mnoge pristope, se moramo opomniti, da tukaj nima zadnje besede. Kasnejši avtorji so se v iskanju zahtevanega dejstva ponovno spustili v proučevanje naše mentalne vsebine, drugi so razvili bolj sofisticirane verzije dispozicionalne rešitve. Pod vprašaj so bile postavljene marsikatere skeptikove predpostavke. Skeptično rešitev so praviloma zavračali – tukaj sem izpostavil nekatere težave te rešitve. Predlagam, da je najprepričljivejša in najbolj zadovoljiva »neposredna« rešitev problema, ki jo predstavi Delancey. Zaključim s tezo, da smo s sklicevanjem na preprostost upravičeni do pripisovanja pomena. Po drugi strani skepticizem pomena ni upravičen.

1. Quote/Unquote Philosophers like other people often have a weakness for quiz-shows. And like the crew in the Hunting of the Snark, they are all of them fond of quotations 1 . So I begin with a quotation and a question. The quotation comes from a famous o indeed a ‘superstar’ o text. But which text? Which famous writer indicted these lines? The purpose of the universal jargon was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of logical empiricism, but to make other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when the universal jargon had been adopted for all and the metaphysically infected terminology forgotten, a metaphysical thought o that is a thought diverging from what logical empiricism regarded as genuinely thinkable o should be literally unthinkable, at least in so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a log...

Is meaning an ideational property? Or would it be a propositional property? These two issues set the difference between two important classical theories of meaning, namely, ideational and propositional. The ideational theory of meaning claims that the meaning of words are special ideas present in the mind. John Locke, in Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) presents some points in favor of such position. The propositional theory of meaning, on the other hand, claims that the meaning is a property of the proposition and not of words alone. In this essay, therefore, it is aimed to evaluate these respective positions and to present some objections to the ideational theory of meaning.

In his paper "Explaining Deductive Inference" Prawitz states what he calls «a fundamental problem of logic and the philosophy of logic»: the problem of explaining «Why do certain inferences have the epistemic power to confer evidence on the conclusion when applied to premisses for which there is evidence already?». In this paper I suggest a way of articulating, and partly modifying, the intuitionistic answer to this problem in such a way as to both answer Prawitz's problem and satisfy a requirement I argue to be crucial for any epistemic theory of the meaning of the logical constants: the requirement that evidence is epistemically transparent.

I am planning a history of the notion of philosophical nonsense and naturally difficult historical and exegetical questions have come up.  Charles Pigden has argued that the notion goes back at least as far as Hobbes and that Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (on some interpretations) and pragmatists such as William James, as well as numerous Twentieth-Century philosophers make use of it.  In this ‘paper’ I put forward for general discussion such questions as whether Hobbes was the first 'nonsensicalist', whether Kant was a 'nonsensicalist' at all, which philosophers if any have considered contradictions to be meaningless and whether Wittgenstein thought that his concept of criterion could legitimately be used verificationistically.  I shall continue to add further questions as they occur to me.

How do philosophical accusations of talking nonsense relate to the layperson’s notions of meaning and meaningfulness?  If one were to explain carefully what philosophical nonsense was supposed to be, would one be greeted with incredulity?  How do people react to being accused to talking nonsense themselves?  Is anything analogous to an illusion of meaning recognised in everyday life?  In dream-reports perhaps?  Or in the utterances of schizophrenics or those under the influence of drugs?  Or in certain jokes and hoaxes?  Are contradictions felt to be meaningless?  I argue that, though it is clear that experimental philosophy could shed some light on these questions, their subject matter creates special difficulties.  First, it is more difficult than usual to formulate questions and produce ‘vignettes’ that do not subtly encourage certain responses at the expense of others.  Second, the fact that philosophical nonsense is a metaphilosophical concept ensures that its investigation is going to be more indirect than would be that of knowledge or intention, for example.

Professeur de philosophie à l'Université Saint-Louis à Bruxelles et à l'Université du Luxembourg, où il enseignait la logique et la philosophie contemporaine de l'esprit et du langage, Robert Brisart est décédé le 25 février 2015.
Réunissant ses collègues et amis autour des thèmes philosophiques qui lui étaient chers et qui ont constitué le coeur de ses recherches, ces journées veulent lui rendre hommage.

Here I bewail the slapdash and confusing way in which philosophers bandy about the word ‘incoherent’ (and ‘incoherence’ and ‘incoherently’).  To some it appears to mean: inconsistent; to others: pragmatically self-defeating; and to yet others: nonsensical, i.e. meaningless.  And often one is left guessing.

Thomas Nagel in ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ suggests that we don’t yet have much idea of how mental entities could be identical with physical ones (though he wisely stops short of accusing physicalists of not meaning ANYTHING WHATSOEVER by their identity-claims).  Colin McGinn goes further by suggesting that we may forever remain in this state of ignorance and incomprehension because of the inherent limitations of the human intellect.  I argue that the mere possibility that McGinn is right shows that it is over-hasty to conclude from philosophy’s failure to solve its problems that there must be something wrong with the problems themselves.  I also try to relate Nagel’s and McGinn’s view to David Stove’s response to philosophy’s apparent failure to make much progress.  He seems pessimistic about whether we will ever fully understand what is wrong with some philosophical claims.

This paper looks at philosophical accusations of talking nonsense from the perspective of argumentation theory.  An accusation of this sort, when seriously meant, amounts to the claim that someone believes there is something she means by her utterance when in fact she means nothing whatsoever by it.  Such accusations may indeed be peculiar to philosophy.  They also involve the claim that there can be ILLUSIONS OF ARGUMENTATION, both inter- and intra-personal.  The problem of how one could possibly diagnose such illusions is raised and I suggest that, if there is a way, it will require a therapeutic rather than a polemical approach.  This suggestion is of course made by Wittgenstein and some of his followers but, in my view, it has remained undeveloped.  It often takes the form of a comparison with psychoanalysis.  I note that the more like psychoanalysis it becomes, the less like traditional argumentation, philosophical or otherwise, it will be.

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) was one of the foremost twentieth-century philosophers of science. Although he attained infamy by embracing cultural relativism and by providing a searing critique of the claims of science, there has been, to date, no comprehensive critical study of the major themes in Feyerabend’s philosophy. This book rectifies that situation.
The book traces the evolution of Feyerabend’s thought, beginning with his attempt to graft insights from Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning onto Popper’s falsificationist philosophy. The component parts of Feyerabend’s ‘model for the acquisition of knowledge’, the normative aspect of his project, and its roots in a Popperian conception of epistemology, are identified and critically evaluated. Feyerabend’s early work emerges as thoroughly post-Popperian, rather than as a contribution to the historical approach to philosophy of science with which he is usually associated.
In his more notorious later work, notably the 1975 book Against Method, Feyerabend claimed that there was, and should be, no such thing as the scientific method. This ‘epistemological anarchism’ and Feyerabend’s attendant relativism are examined here in the light of his recognition that Against Method was a collage constructed out of his earlier thoughts. The roots of epistemological anarchism are exposed, and the weaknesses of Feyerabend’s later thesis of incommensurability are brought out.
Throughout the book, the influence of Feyerabend’s thought on contemporary philosophers is tracked. The author draws attention to Feyerabend’s exciting but divided legacy. On the one hand, contemporary scientistic philosophers have used his earlier views in a vigorous defence of an uncompromising ‘eliminative’ materialist view of the mind. On the other hand, thinkers influenced by Feyerabend’s later work have begun a humanistic critique of science, scientific myth-making, and scientific claims to knowledge.
The book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of philosophy, methodology, and the social sciences.

This book is an introduction in a double sense. It is intended to introduce beginners in philosophy to the idea of philosophical nonsense and the problems it raises. But it is also addressed to professional philosophers, most of whom seem virtually unaware of the issue.

Certain philosophers, here called ‘nonsensicalists’, believe that much philosophy (philosophical questions as well as assertions) is simply nonsense in the strict sense of being meaningless. They proceed as though it were an established fact that there is such a thing as philosophical nonsense and the notion were quite unproblematic. By contrast, many other philosophers proceed as though either they had never heard of it or it were quite obvious that there is no such thing.

There can be little doubt that what the nonsensicalists are saying is of great importance – if they are right. But there are at least eight questions that must be addressed before anyone is in a position to start hunting down philosophical nonsense and they have all been woefully neglected.

The idea of philosophical nonsense goes back to Thomas Hobbes at least and yet its history remains largely unresearched.

In view of the neglect of the problems raised by the notion of philosophical nonsense, even by professional philosophers, it is not unduly optimistic to suggest that it is a topic to which relative newcomers to the subject might make a contribution.

Ludwig Wittgenstein thought that good philosophy unties the knots in our thinking that bad philosophy has put there and must make movements as complicated as the knots it unties. Is the notion of philosophical nonsense an essential aid to this – as Wittgenstein himself thought – or just another knot?

This text was first presented for the "Habilitation à diriger des recherches" in 2011. It deals with the theory on linguistic and textual meaning in Antiquity, mainly through the semantic analysis of the key Greek and Latin words of the theory of sign (logos; rhèma; onoma; lexis; sèmeion; tekmèrion; sumbolon; signum). Is meaning necessarily linked to a language? Is there any possibility of thinking without words? This research proposes in the end a new understanding of the way meaning emerges from a given utterance.

Hermeneutik als eine Wissenschaft vom Verstehen hat maßgeblich den Charakter der Erkenntnistheorie beeinflusst, die sich heute auf einem neuen kategorialen Fundament entwickelt. Statt am Denken orientiert man sich am Sprechen, statt am Urteilen am Begreifen und statt am Begriff an der Bedeutung.

Diese Transformation arbeitet Maja Soboleva anhand von Texten Georg Mischs und Josef Königs heraus. Sie interpretiert den Ansatz Mischs als eine Lebenshermeneutik. Drei Vektoren – Lebensbegriff als eine logische, eine hermeneutische und eine diskursive Kategorie – lassen ein neues hermeneutisches Paradigma rekonstruieren. Die theoretischen Bemühungen Königs werden als eine Seinshermeneutik dargestellt, in der das Sein zunächst in der Logik der „determinierenden“ und „modifizierenden“ Prädikate fundiert, und die später durch die verschiedenen Epistemologien und Ontologien für die Bereiche der „theoretischen“ und „praktischen“ Sätze ergänzt wird.

This collection of essays represents  Professor Harjeet Singh Gill's  preoccupation with the semiotics of conceptual structures in language, literature, art and culture since 1964 when he
joined the Centre National de  Ia  Recherche Scientifique in  Paris. The theoretical reflections begin from the twelfth century philosopher, Pierre Abelard, through the Age of Enlightenment
of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries with Port Royal Logic, Condillac and Destutt de Tracy, to the modem French theoreticians of conceptual constructs. This eight hundred
years long  tradition has  been  reflected upon, interpreted and applied on  specific European and Indian, oral and written texts, by the author, and by his students in a number of doctoral
theses. There have been different perceptions but the reactions and responses of the students and colleagues, both Indian and French, have helped crystallise his theoretical position, without
necessarily altering the basic hypotheses. The search for this epistemological continuity was the main theme of the International  Seminar on Theories of Signification since the Middle Ages that Professor Gill organised in Paris in November 1993 on the invitation of the Maison des  Sciences  de  I 'Homme.  These  reflections  in  a  new  unified  conceptual  structure are presented for another look, regard, another critique.


Paris
January 13, 1995  Danielle Gill

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto." Terêncio em Heautontimorumenos, v. 77 "Em todas as discussões sobre a filosofia da linguagem e sobre a filosofia da mente, é absolutamente essencial nos lembrarmos em algum momento da primeira pessoa. Ninguém, por exemplo, pode nos convencer, por mais engenhoso que seja o argumento, de que a dor não existe se de fato sentimos dor; e considerações semelhantes se aplicam ao exemplo de Quine. Se alguém apresentar a teoria de que não há nenhuma diferença entre eu querer dizer coelho e eu querer dizer parte de coelho, isso já basta para eu saber que sua teoria está equivocada." John R. Searle em Indeterminação, Empirismo e Primeira Pessoa RESUMO: Este artigo procura, primeiramente, apresentar as objeções de Quine à teoria mentalista do significado e a concepção behaviorista que ele pretende fazer prevalecer. Em seguida, tentamos mostrar que a rejeição de Quine não se baseia em boas razões, e que leva a certas incoerências. Por fim, apresentamos algumas alternativas mentalistas sólidas, das quais o próprio Quine parece ter se aproximado em suas últimas obras. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Teoria do Significado; W.V. Quine; Mentalismo; Filosofia da Linguagem.

This paper starts from Tractatus, 6.53, and ask how one could show someone ‘that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions’.  Once one has fully mastered the ‘austere’ conception of nonsense – that nonsense has neither meaning, form, content, nor logic – the difficulties of the enterprise become evident.  It is not clear how one could be in a position to conclude much about an utterance without first finding a meaning in it.  Suggestions made by Guy Robinson, Edward Witherspoon and Hans-Johann Glock are considered but it is concluded that the last, best hope for nonsensicalism lies in a therapeutic approach.  I end with a plea for someone who is sympathetic to this aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to make a serious attempt to work out the details.

I originally entitled this paper ‘Why are there no uncontroversial examples of philosophical nonsense?’, but since this seemed apt to provoke rather superficial responses, I decided to re-title it.  In it I ponder the fact that, not only are there no uncontroversial examples of philosophical nonsense, there are no uncontroversial examples of what one might call ‘analogue philosophical nonsense’.  These would be non-philosophical cases of someone’s believing he means something when in reality he means nothing.  (Someone’s saying, ‘It’s 5 o’clock on the sun’ is sometimes offered as an example.)  I ask what conditions such cases would need to satisfy.  What would count as a compellingly clear case of an illusion of meaning?  Why has no one described one?

.Taking as my starting-point Cora Diamond’s paper ‘What nonsense might be’, I extend her ‘austere’ conception of nonsense to encompass the talking of nonsense.  We need to focus on the utterer as well as the utterance.  This brings out how difficult it is going to be to DIAGNOSE the talking of (philosophical) nonsense, without falling into the ‘sense that is senseless’ trap (PI, I, 500).  It is not clear to what extent Diamond sees the problem here.  I suggest that if there is a way round the difficulty, it will involve adopting a therapeutic approach.

Edward Witherspoon distinguishes Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense from Rudolf Carnap’s.  The latter does not fully take into account the fact that, if something really is nonsense, it has no more meaning than ‘Ab sur ah’ and therefore cannot have any logical properties.  He finds the Carnapian conception even in professed Wittgensteinians such as Peter Hacker and Gordon Baker who think of themselves as rejecting it.  My question is where this leaves the notion of PHILOSOPHICAL nonsense.  Could anything that was utterly devoid of content play the crucial deceptive role that nonsensicalists, including Wittgensteinians, assign it?  Could it ever be detected if it did?

Aristotle's philosophy is considered with respect to one central concept of his philosophy, viz. opposition. Far from being a mere side-effect of syllogistics, my claim is that opposition helps to articulate ontology and logic through what can be or cannot be in a systematic and structural way. The paper is divided into three interrelated parts. In Section 1, the notions of Being and non-Being are scrutinized through Aristotle's theory of categories. In Section 2, the notion of existence is reviewed in its ontological and logical ambiguities. In Section 3, the notion of essence is revisited in order to bring about a holist theory of meaning by individuation through opposite properties. In conclusion, the legacy of Aristotle is depicted as balanced between a powerful reflection around Being and a restrictive ontology of substance.

I suggest that, although the nonsensicalist challenge (obviously) matters, it has, at least in its Wittgensteinian form, been widely ignored.  On the other hand, those who still adhere to nonsensicalism (mainly Wittgensteinians) have been equally remiss in their failure to examine its presuppositions.

Sass, like R. D. Laing before him, wants to make sense of schizophrenic discourse.  In 'Paradoxes of delusion – Wittgenstein, Schreber and the schizophrenic mind' he uses Wittgenstein’s later work, particularly the Blue Book, to this end.  Read criticises Sass for not taking Wittgenstein’s nonsensicalism seriously enough and suggests that some schizophrenic utterances cannot be understood at all.  I argue that Sass’s position is more consistent than Read’s, though it is probably true that Sass is the less thoroughgoing Wittgensteinian.  Read’s way of arguing his case exhibits all the difficulties that those who employ the notion of philosophical nonsense are apt to get themselves into.  The denigratory vocabulary he uses to characterise schizophrenic discourse – ‘confused’, ‘inchoate’, ‘incoherent’, ‘empty’, ‘without content’ – is itself confused and confusing, but, more importantly, his talk of ‘transitional remarks’ and his admission that he is himself ‘trafficking in nonsense’ suggest that he is falling into the very error of which he accuses Sass.

Objectif Les relations entre la pensée et le réel sont étudiées dans bien des domaines de la philosophie et des sciences. Citons l'ontologie et la métaphysique en général, la linguistique, les neurosciences et même les mathématiques. Chacun a ses postulats, son langage, ses méthodes et ses contraintes propres. Il serait néanmoins déraisonnable qu'ils s'ignorent. Dans les pages qui suivent nous tenterons d'identifier des zones de proximité entre les idées émises par les philosophes contemporains du langage et celles émises principalement par l'Ontologie des Connaissances (voir ci-dessous) mais aussi par les mathématiques et les neurosciences. Nous tenterons pour cela de tirer avantage de la clarté et de la parfaite structuration du cours « La philosophie contemporaine du langage » donné par le Pr Denis Vernant (voir ci-dessous). Nous reprendrons ce cours, à la fois pour les idées présentées et comme démarche de référence. L'objectif étant bien entendu de faire émerger, par cette bienveillante confrontation, de nouvelles idées au bénéfice de la connaissance en général. Introduction à la philosophie contemporaine du langage. Le contenu du cours rédigé par le Pr Denis Vernant (Univ. Pierre Mendes-France-Grenoble II) est repris dans le livre en (ref.1). L'objectif est très clairement exposé dans le préambule, aussi contentons-nous ici de le reproduire. « L'objectif de ce cours est d'initier l'étudiant à un aspect fondamental de la pensée contemporaine : la réflexion sur le langage et la signification. La question centrale du sens est successivement étudiée sous ses aspects syntaxiques, sémantiques et pragmatiques en faisant appel à tous les champs contemporains du savoir en la matière : logique, linguistique, sémiologie, philosophie du langage. » Après un bref retour sur les origines grecques de la question, le Pr Vernant nous offre, dans un texte d'une clarté absolue, un panorama complet et structuré des réflexions depuis l'aube du 20 ème siècle.

Philosophers know a great deal about how reasoning can go wrong but very little about what can go wrong with the conclusions that philosophers try to establish by their reasonings.  It is Stove’s great merit that he tackles the latter problem directly, though a certain dogmatism in his approach and a contemptuous attitude towards the ‘great’ philosophers have almost certainly led to a neglect of his work.

This paper inquires into the appropriateness of the label ‘neo-positivist’ that he applies to his own position and considers his view that there are probably, but not certainly, innumerable ways in which a philosophical claim can be wrong, mistaken, untrue, absurd even.  An attempt is made to relate our lack of knowledge here to the Chomsky/McGinn thesis that there may be kinds of problem with which the human intellect is just not equipped to deal.

I am planning a history of the notion of philosophical nonsense and naturally difficult historical and exegetical questions have come up.  Charles Pigden has argued that the notion goes back at least as far as Hobbes and that Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (on some interpretations) and pragmatists such as William James, as well as numerous Twentieth-Century philosophers make use of it.  In this ‘paper’ I put forward for general discussion such questions as whether Hobbes was the first 'nonsensicalist', whether Kant was a 'nonsensicalist' at all, which philosophers if any have considered contradictions to be meaningless and whether Wittgenstein thought that his concept of criterion could legitimately be used verificationistically.  I shall continue to add further questions as they occur to me.

Wittgenstein's notion of passing from 'disguised' to 'patent' nonsense is problematic once one realises that nonsense can have no logical properties.  I ask whether anything has yet been demonstrated to to be disguised nonsense.  No philosophical thesis (something that has been seriously offered as a truth) has, but even invented examples turn out to be controversial.  An example from elementary algebra however does seem to show how someone could unwittingly treat as sense what was in fact nonsense.  But, although the case genuinely deserves to be called one of disguised nonsense, there is still a crucial difference from what a case of philosophical nonsense would have to be.

This paper is a critique of coercive theories of meaning, that is, theories (or criteria) of meaning  designed to do down ones opponents by representing their views as meaningless or unintelligible.  Many philosophers from Hobbes through Berkeley and Hume to the pragmatists, the logical positivists and (above all)  Wittgenstein have devised such theories and criteria in order to discredit their opponents. I argue 1) that such theories and criteria are morally  obnoxious, a) because they smack of the totalitarian linguistic tactics of the Party in Orwell’s 1984 and b) because they dehumanize  the opposition  by portraying them as mere spouters of gibberish;  2) that they are profoundly illiberal since  if true, they would undermine Mill’s arguments for free speech; 3) that such theories are prone to self-contradiction, pragmatic and otherwise; 4) that they often turn against their creators including what they were meant to exclude and excluding what they were meant to include; 5) that such theories are susceptible to a modus tollens pioneered by  Richard Price in his Review Concerning the Principle Questions of Morals(1758); and 6)  that  such theories are prima facie false since they fail to ‘predict’ the data that is it their business to explain (or, in the case of criteria, fail to capture the concept that they allegedly  represent).  The butcher’s bill is quite considerable:  some of Hobbes, a fair bit of Locke, half of Berkeley, large chunks of Hume, Russell's Theory of Types, verificationism in its positivist and Dummettian variants, much of pragmatism and most of Wittgenstein - all these have to be sacrificed if we are to save our souls as philosophic liberals.

This is part II in a series of papers outlining Abstraction Theory, a theory that I propose provides a solution to the characterisation or epistemological problem of induction. Logic is built from first principles severed from language such that there is one universal logic independent of specific logical languages. A theory of (non-linguistic) meaning is developed which provides the basis for the dissolution of the 'grue' problem and problems of the non-uniqueness of probabilities in inductive logics. The problem of counterfactual conditionals is generalised to a problem of truth conditions of hypotheses and this general problem is then solved by the notion of abstractions. The probability calculus is developed with examples given. In future parts of the series the full decision theory is developed and its properties explored.

Three points of view on the problem of the answerability of philosophical questions are developed:
a) the traditional view that the questions are perfectly genuine but just very difficult;
b) what I call the 'nonsensicalist' view, characteristic of logical positivists and Wittgensteinians, that they are largely meaningless pseudo-problems;
c) the 'mysterian' or transcendental naturalist view that they are genuine problems but ones that our intellects are unequipped, or at least very ill-equipped, to handle.

Jose C. Cañizares -¿Cerebros en la cubeta? Por una teoría de la referencia con imaginación ¿Cerebros en la cubeta? Por una teoría de la referencia con imaginación Resumen: Criticamos la teoría realista del significado y de la referencia, y reivindicamos una concepción pragmática y consecuente. A la luz de esta crítica, detectamos la injerencia de los excesos realistas en el argumento central de Putnam en "Cerebros en la cubeta", y discutimos las consecuencias de esta injerencia. Concluimos proponiendo la adopción de una teoría de la referencia libre del rigorismo realista, y capaz de dar cuenta del peso real que los productos de la imaginación tienen en la ciencia y en la vida comunicativa ordinaria de las personas.

Since the demise of logical positivism accusations of talking nonsense in philosophy have mainly been made by Wittgensteinians.  But some of these latter are as free with words like 'nonsense', 'senseless' and 'meaningless' as any logical positivist.  One such is Rupert Read, who is prepared to write off the whole of metaphysics as nonsense.  Condemnations of this sort have in recent years largely been ignored by other philosophers, which is surprising in view of their apparent importance.  It is equally surprising that the evident problems with accusations of talking nonsense have been largely ignored by those who are still prepared to make them.