Searle: Philosophy of Language, lecture 1

I there's always a choice on exams that I give and I tell my students that when you're writing an exam remember the following one answer the question you'd be surprised how often people don't answer the question they they have some things they'd like to talk about so they talk about that but things that poor examiner he or she thought so hard to try to make a nice question and their feelings are hurt if you don't answer the question it's not good to hurt the examiners feelings okay now the second thing is when you ask the question know your stuff you should be fully in charge of the material in lectures and reading and then third it's helpful if you think for yourself if the exam is intelligently designed you should have some opportunity to exercise your critical abilities and fourth it is immensely helpful if you can write coherent English the all-time record was set by a guy who managed to write a three-hour exam in which there was not a single grammatical English sentence and when I pointed out that this was responsible in part for his low grade he complained bitterly he said he was a chemistry major and nobody ever asked him to write a sentence before and who the hell was I to ask him to write sentence as well anyhow in my old-fashioned way I appreciate English sentences paragraphs I think are too much to ask for but sentences are much appreciated and of course it's also night if you could nicely if you can write legibly I can't write legibly so I'm the wrong guy to insist on that but it does help the person reading the exam okay any other bureaucratic type questions all right yeah okay Monday sections are not meeting this Monday fine I went is Labor Day by the way and this business of starting before Labor Day God invented Labor Day so we knew when to start school but now it's just crazy to have do all this stuff before Labor Day but Monday is not Labor Day a week from Monday so you're gonna have two days off it seems like two money as well but sorry three-day weekends okay all right so Monday sections are gonna be deprived all right okay well let's go to work then any more question anything you guys want to announce we all everything's in order all right this of course in the philosophy of language and the central question of the course to put it very crudely is how exactly this language relate to reality how are the different forms in which language relates to reality now that question may seem different from the question what is meaning but I think in a way they're the same question because of course in some sense we want to say language relates to reality in virtue of meaning so two ways to express the main subject matter the course are what is meaning and how do words relate to reality and I want you to be struck by the astounding character of the fact that we do this I stand here and I have this hole in the bottom half of my face and I open it up and now all this noise comes out and there linguistics textbooks in the old days they used to show you diagrams of the tongue and the larynx and the all that wet slimy stuff in there and I always felt that's not what I'm interested in you know that's just a kind of accident I make these noises through my mouth but the amazing thing is these noises have these remarkable properties I I say things that are true or false or boring or original or exciting or tiresome or tedious or irrelevant how can noses have those properties also a people get excited about the noises you make through your mouth for some reason the university even pays me to make these noises not very much but they do not as much as they should but they do pay us to make these noises through our mouths so there must be something interesting about these noises and how is that possible what's going on now in the 20th and 21st century a language has had a special role to play in philosophy and many philosophers have thought that it was a defining role I think that's maybe an exaggeration but certainly your conception of language will have a powerful influence on your conception of philosophy and I want to begin by describing certain linguistic distinction certain conceptions about language which have had an influence on a corresponding conception of the nature of philosophy the nature of the philosophical Enterprise now before I do that let me say that there are two broad strands in the philosophy of language there is one strand that takes mathematical logic to be the right model for understanding language ordinary language is a kind of practical device but they but the the really the bare bones structure what counts is given by the logical forms and those are best explicate 'add using the resources of modern logic so there is a formal or mathematical or logical strand in the philosophy of mathematics and there's also another strand which emphasizes the use of language in ordinary conversations and discussions and interchanges between speakers and hearers so there's one branch of the philosophy of language that sees language is essentially a formal system or set of formal systems and much like mathematical systems and another branch that and sizes the social active character of language I think the second branch is right but there certainly there's a lot to be said for both and I have to say that the most influential forms of the philosophy of language right now are the formalist or logical approach to problems in the philosophy of language my situation in teaching the philosophy of language is a bit like my situation in teaching the philosophy of mind I think the mainstream philosophy of mind is hopelessly mistaken and has been since Descartes so I start off by attacking these guys and then I tell you at the end what I think is the right way to do it here I'm gonna reverse the order I'm gonna tell you at the begin at the beginning what I think is the right way to do the philosophy of language and then I'm going to go through the history of this subject essentially from Fraga to the present a philosophy of language was invented in the late 19th century by German mathematician and logician and philosopher called Gottlob Fraga and in a sense we're all the heirs of Vega and I think a lot of people would agree with me that after Conte Fraga is the most important german philosopher he revolutionized well at least three subjects logic the foundations of mathematics and philosophy of language in any case the subject was invented by Fraga and it has followed we've been discussing problems that we've inherited from Freya right down to the present time but as I said there are these two strands and the strand that is dominant uses the resources that Freya invented particularly modern mathematical logic there's a distinction though between the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind as far as I'm concerned because it seems to me that the mainstream philosophy of mind which inherits that de cartes categories there years to have a choice you can be either a duelist or a materialist and I think that's a hopeless conception of the subject but there I think the mistakes are fairly easy to point out I mean everything from dualism to the computational theory of the mind to functionalism and behaviorism I can point those out fairly easily but in the philosophy of language it's pretty tough stuff and the guys who do it are pretty smart and I you can't just it's not a simple argument so I'm gonna give you what I think is the right way to do it before I try to tell you what I think is wrong with the way that it's standardly done in the philosophical literature okay so that's placing the issues in some historical context but now let's go through some linguistic distinctions there is a traditional distinction it goes back a long time but this jargon goes comes from cond whereby we make a distinction between synthetic statements and analytic statements and and a synthetic statement is one which is true or false in virtue of some facts in the world an analytic statement is one which is true or false in virtue of the meanings of the words themselves so the famous examples of analytic statements are all bachelors are unmarried two plus two equals four all women are female where the truth is supposed to follow from the definition but synthetic statements if they're true or false it's not just a matter of definition you've got to know something about how the world is so if I say most bachelors in Berkeley own at least one pair of blue jeans well that's a synthetic statement and you can't figure out that truth just by looking at the meanings of the words you'd have to go to an investigation this is a semantic distinction has to do with meaning analytic statements are true or false in virtue of meaning synthetic statements in virtue of something beyond meaning some facts in the world now that's supposed to be related to other famous distinction between propositions which have to be known after investigation after an investigation using experiences and those which can be known prior to any such investigation and they these are classical languages are frequently invoked here the ones that are known prior to investigation like all bachelors are unmarried or two plus two equals four are said to be a priori they are known prior to experience whereas are things like bachelors wear blue jeans or the incidence of alcoholism among Berkeley bachelors has they increased those are a posteriori and this is an epistemic distinction this is a distinction in how these propositions are known and the idea that people had is that analytic propositions can be known a priori but synthetic propositions have to be known a posteriori and Kant for those of you who ever studied and he can't made a big deal out of trying to find propositions that were both synthetic and could be known a priori he thought he had a bunch and then he tried to figure out how they were possible okay now these two are related to another crucial distinction between propositions that are said to be contingent as opposed that are said to be necessary and this is a logical or some people even would say a metaphysical distinction it's a contingent fact that bachelors in berkeley wear blue jeans but it is not a contingent fact that two plus two equals four it's a necessary truth it's a necessary fact it has to be the case that two plus two equals four now in the heyday of analytic philosophy the kind of philosophy invented by God la Vega and the kind that's dominant I throughout the english-speaking world now in the heyday the were supposed to be three different ways of marking the same distinction all analytic propositions can be known to be true a priori and all analytic propositions are necessary because their necessity derives from the meanings of the words used to express the proposition meaning guarantees truth synthetic propositions have to be known a posteriori and they don't state necessary truths they state contingent truths so if you're looking at academic subjects the sciences are over here on this side and logic and mathematics is over here on this side logic and mathematics state propositions which are necessary a priori and an analytic whereas the Natural Sciences including the social sciences state propositions that are contingent a posterior or AI and synthetic okay now everybody's got that I hope I'll take questions in a minute but I want to introduce another distinction which was crucial for the conception that people had of philosophy and that's a distinction between propositions which state matters of fact which are said to be factual or sometimes descriptive and that includes all that stuff up there all of the synthetic analytic and so on but there are lots of other utterances that according to this conception aren't really true or false because they are evaluative or emotive so if you say things like there are lots of grandmother's emotive there are lots of grandmothers who ride buses in Berkeley that is a factual statement you could find out bus ridership but if you made a moral statement you shouldn't push grandma off the bus or you ought not to or it's immoral to push grandma off the bus that's not a factual statement that's in evaluation that tells you what's good or bad but it's not according to these guys literally true or false now incidentally I don't I'm not though I'm trying to make this sound plausible to you all this okay but I don't believe any and what I've told you so far ok I'm just telling you what the subject history the subject is now I want you to have a feel for it because it's not unintelligent ok so there's a distinction between the factual and the descriptive and that includes all that and the evaluative and the emotive now over here is all of ethics and aesthetics ok now then the question is where it is philosophy fit in well philosophy has to tell you the truth philosophers are telling you truth so they can't tell you anything evaluative or emotive they can't tell you that Beethoven is a better a composer then the latest I don't even know their names I don't know the famous composers in in rap music perhaps there are none ok let's let's say Beethoven is a better composer than the average rap musician I they would say that's evaluative you can't know that that's true or fault that just expresses your attitudes or your emotions or your evaluations okay now so the story goes if philosophy is to tell you the truth it can't be giving you any evaluations it can't tell you anything in ethics or aesthetics because those can't be true or false so what the philosopher does is tell you something that's true but what kind of truth is it well it's the philosophers not a scientist he doesn't go in the lab and do a whole lot of experiments but he does he states analytic truths so his activities like that of the logician and the mathematician so when the philosopher when Hume says causes have to come before or simultaneous where there are effects they can't come after the effects the idea is that is supposed to be an analytic truth it's a necessary truth about causation but it's arrived at by the analysis of meanings so if you accept these linguistic distinctions and a lot of people did and many people still do you get a certain very precise and elegant or rather limited conception of philosophy the philosopher doesn't tell you how to live because there's no true propositions that you can make about that I all you can do is express your feelings and attitudes and the philosophers know better than anybody else to have feelings and attitudes so but if the philosopher is gonna tell you the truth he has to tell you a priori analytic truths and those will be truths that articulate the structure of our concepts so the philosopher will tell you that the analysis of cause requires that causes have to become prior to the effects they can't come after the effects the philosopher will give you an analysis of these concepts including the analysis of ethical and aesthetic concepts but the philosopher doesn't try to tell you any substantive synthetic factual or descriptive statements about the contingent real world he gives you factual descriptive statements about the structure of a concepts now this was an elegant conception of philosophy where we're to think of philosophy as coming if you think of languages hovering over the world and describing it and languages part of people's engaging in activity then the philosopher comes in from the side and describes these relations between language and reality it's an elegant conception and it was very influential for a long time now lately it has come under a prodigious number of attacks this I have myself attacked this distinction between evaluative and descriptive in some of its versions there have been a number of attacks on the analytic synthetic distinction and nowadays I think an awful lot of people think that you don't get this correspondence between propositions that are necessary and propositions that are analytic and a priori so for example a lot of philosophers nowadays think that there are propositions that are a posteriori you only can find out by investigation but what you find out is a necessary truth so there are necessary a posteriori propositions they all the favorite example there's always water is h2o you have to do an investigation to find out that water is h2o you can't just look at the meanings of the words but when you find it out what you've discovered is a necessary truth so I want you to see that there are these distinctions and they're going to be important in what we do but I we're gonna buy between now and the end of the semester we're gonna get to the bottom of how it actually works okay now there's some other notions that I want you to have in your repertoire so far I've tried to tell you that there are these families of notions about the nature of language that determine the nature of philosophy and for a long time they were accepted that philosophy was essentially an activity of conceptual analysis whereby the Philosopher's investigates the use of language and comes up with a set of analytic truths that articulate the relationships between the philosophically puzzling notions including notions in ethics and aesthetics but there the philosopher makes no substantive claims about how you ought to live or what you ought to appreciate but just what it means to makes claims about how you ought to live or what you ought to appreciate okay that is by way of setting the background for much of the debates that we're going to be considering now I got to give you some more tools so you will understand the the issues that I will be raising and that you'll and will come up in the literature now the way I like the lecture is I talk for a while and then stop for questions and so if you have questions you have you save them because every few minutes I'm going to shut up and take questions so this is a good time any questions so far I've actually said an awful lot very substantive material and if you didn't understand it yet don't worry too much because we're going to go over it more slowly and go into more detail about the various finer points any questions so far okay well I think what I'll do now is introduce a bunch of distinctions that are essential in the study of language I just so you won't be intimidated by the jargon it's awfully easy to get scared by the jargon and people always try to do that I mean one of the things that's fun about taking advanced course in anything is that you learn a lot of big words and and and then you can use them to snow the amateurs but I don't I mean I discovered this when I just people in artificial intelligence were making a whole lot of idiotic claims about how if you got the right computer program you'd be creating a mind in the same sense that you and I have a mind and I pointed out that was obviously false and they immediately hit me with a whole lot of fancy technical words that I can't even remember him now I'm a bit jet-lagged I got in late last night from Europe so I'm my system mice the system is only working on a few cylinders but in any case it's easy to learn the words and I'm gonna teach you the meanings of some of the crucial words now okay an important distinction in the study of language is the distinction between syntax and semantics and syntax has to do with the formal structure of the sentence is it a subject predicate sentence is it a relational sentence and what are the elements of the sentence the notion of a word or a morpheme is a syntactical notion but so syntax is a matter of form what are the words and sentences that's the those are syntactical notions but of course the whole idea of having words and sentences is to talk with and when you talk with them you're supposed to say something meaningful and that is where semantics comes in so syntax is formal structure semantics is meaning we will be studying a lot of semantics and this the job of the syntax is to carry the semantics the minimal complete unit is the entire sentence and that's the syntactical notion but what the hell is a sentence and why should it be the meaningful the minimal meaningful unit now there's another notion that some authors bring in and that's the notion of pragmatics so they say in addition to the form and the meaning there is the use and people can put the same meanings the same meanings expressed in the same form that says the same semantics and syntax they can put it to different uses well how so well that introduces another distinction and that's the distinction between the meaning of the sentence sentence meaning versus what speakers mean when they utter the sentence so it's as a sentence meaning as this thing from speaker meaning and there are lots of famous examples of the distinction and in fact if you listen carefully to yourself and your friends you will find that all day long you are saying more than what the sentence is that you utter mean that is you will have a speaker meaning that goes beyond sentence meaning you're sitting at the at the table at lunch and you say can you pass the salt and a guy who hears that doesn't think for one say yeah I can't know a actually a piece if he's fully socialized he will pass you the salt I mean and there a lot of comic routines done on this I where the the person takes the utterance completely literally the guy has stopped on the streets of Paris and asked do you know away the Palace Hotel anything she wants a yes then walks on well of course that's missing the point here the point of the of the particular semantics was to convey a speaker meaning and the speaker meaning of can you pass the salt goes beyond the semantic meaning it is it contains also past the salt or even please pass the salt and that involves something that I call an indirect speech act where when you ask the guy can you pass the salt you're asking a question about his abilities but you are doing more than that you have that's what you directly asked but what you did indirectly was convey a request you made an indirect request and I call those indirect speech acts okay so we have the distinction between sex syntax semantics and pragmatics and that's going to be important to us because there's going to be a distinction we need to make between what is actually said in an utterance what is the actual literal meaning of the sentences uttered and what the speaker says in the larger pragmatic sense of what the speaker means as part of his speaker meaning not as part of his sentence meaning and if you're listening closely you'll find an awful lot of what people say contains meanings that go beyond the semantic meaning of the sentence the speaker meaning exceeds the synth they this semantic meaning of the syntactical forms that are uttered now one of the main topics of this course in when we in the in the second part will be how many ways are there that the sentence meaning and the speaker meaning can come apart there's obviously indirect speech act but a famous case is metaphor in the case of metaphors you utter something that has a strict sentence meaning but it's you seem to be conveying something more than or something quite even quite different from the semantic meaning of the sentence other cases are irony and sarcasm you say oh he's very intelligent or you mean he's a total idiot or something to that effect you have something where you say one thing but mean the opposite of what you say and their whole lot of traditional rhetorical devices understatement and hyperbole as as well as all these more fancy versions like metaphor and metonymy and Annika Luthan and all the rest of it and we'll get to those when we discuss the relationships between sentence meaning and speaker meaning and it's and then a we're gonna have the question well which is prior which is the one that matters most which is the basic one and I'm gonna argue later on this is the one that does the work speaker meaning the purpose of the sentence is to enable speakers to talk with it however I that's not to say that sentences are not crucial they're absolutely fundamental and the remarkable thing about human communication systems as opposed to animal communication systems is that we can do things with sentences that go far beyond what any animal known to me can do and that's because our sentences have some other features I'm not going to tell you all of them just yet but I want you I want to mention two of them they have compositionality and generativity compositionality is just a fancy way of saying that you can tell the meaning of the sentence from the meaning of the parts and the way they are composed the way the sentence is composed the meaning of the sentence is a compositional function it's due is determined in a compositional way by the elements of the sentence and how they are arranged so you all hear the difference between john loves Mary and Mary loves John you hear that difference even though the sentence contains exactly the same elements it contains them in a different order the syntactical order of the sentence is different and that order determines a different meaning furthermore that you you hear the sentence John loves Mary and Mary is loved by John even though those sentences are different they mean the same that the transformation to the active to the passive doesn't alter the meaning and this is a remarkable feature of language that you can understand new sentences see my dog Gilbert is pretty smart and he understands a lot of stuff but he cannot use sentences in a compositional fashion he can think there's somebody at the door there's no question he thinks that because I can fool him by doing this I'm not gonna say hi and then Gilbert will come out of his bedroom barking like crazy and oh who is this guy and there's nobody there and he looks surprised and I feel sometimes bashful that I played a trick on him but in any case I he and he can think there's somebody at the door but he can't think I wish there were a thousand people at the door and he can't make the difference between that someone is approaching the door and the door is being approached by someone he can't get the distinction we in the active in the passes because however he thinks he has not got compositional principles that enable him to shuffle meaningful elements at will now there is a stunning human achievement it's in dispute how much other animals have it I I don't deny that they have it to some extent but I don't know of any animal that has it in a way that that human beings have it that is where you can shuffle using your own free will you can shuffle the syntactical elements of the sentence to make completely new and unheard of sentences and if you think about compositionality seriously it is quite stunning I can now without any rehearsal produce sentences you've never heard before and will never hear again I hope and yet in some sense you understand what I mean I might say there were ten thousand freshmen standing on the top of Mount Everest to eating mcdonald hamburgers covered with ketchup and limeade all of the time they were standing on their head and eating with their elbows okay I I never heard that sentence before right that's one sentence oh you know there were some commas in it but it was one sentence and you've never heard it before I hope you'll never hear it again it's not all that good a sentence but the remarkable thing about human language in this a stunning fact is that you can produce meaningful elements meaningful units meaningful sentences that you've never heard before and you understand them it's no big deal to understand these sentences okay now compositionality is related to but not the same as generativity generativity is another remarkable fact about human languages and again Fraga I was the guy who put his finger on all of this stuff this is what I'm telling you now it's a straight Frager and that is that you can generate not just new sentences strictly speaking you can generate an infinite number of new sentences and you can do that because you have rules that apply over and over so called recursive rules where the rule will apply to its own output the favorite of pompous English speakers is the relative clause so you can say I met the man who lives in Sacramento where my aunt worked when she left Santa Barbara where just where my uncle still lives while he is still employed by the utility company which is slowly going broke and you go on or not now again I just made all that crap up on the spot and FFI we're more awake I could probably give you a better example but the marvelous thing about that fact about this capacity is you can generate an indefinite number of new senses it isn't just that you can produce some new senses if you had a language that allowed you to say John loves Mary and Mary loves John you'd have compositionality but she's not much you can do with it you got to have rules that apply over and over I like the rules for forming conjunctions or relative clauses or rules that involve words like because and those are cases where you get generativity you're able to generate new sentences without limit there's no upper limit now you have to be careful when I say there are an infinite number of sentences in English or any other natural languages I'm not saying there are sentences that have infinite length that's a different point this is the point that for any sentence you give me I can always make a longer sentence just as for any number you give me I can always produce a successor of that number so there no there is no upper limit to the number of sentences that can be produced okay so in an account of language we've got to account for compositionality and generativity and the way those are done in languages like English is through manipulations of the syntax it's a syntactical rule that enables you to take a sentence take another sentence and use the second sentence as a relative clause on the first sentence so I went to see my grandmother my grandmother lives in Sacramento you from those two you get I went to see my grandmother who lives in Sacramento now do all languages have this kind of stuff pretty much now there is a debate going on right now because a guy named Dan Everett I went to live with some people in the Amazon basin and they're there they're called a PETA ha it's spelled para ha but it's pronounced PETA ha a tribe in the Amazon basin and Dan says an ISA most honest guy I know he says they have no relative closets they have no recursive rules at all they can't say I went to see my grandmother who lives down the river they have to say I went to see my grandmother my grandmother lives down the road River they cannot make relative clauses now this a big deal this issue because there's another guy Noam Chomsky who's argued that all languages have a common underlying a syntactical structure called universal grammar he modified that a bit but that's the basic idea and oh and he even says that the essence of human language is recursion is having these recursive rules while Dan claims to have a language in the Amazon Basin for which there are no recursive rules I and this is a debate that's going on I won't attempt to resolve the debate right now but I want to call your attention of fact this as a debate between Dan on the one hand and Chomsky and his colleagues there are a lot of them on the other about whether or not the pita ha actually form a counterexample to Chomsky's conception of universal grammar that's a big issue and I'll come back to that when we talk about how the stuff that we're talking about in the course relates to the science of linguistics how it relates to the study of actual human languages okay let's stop for questions again I said an awful lot yeah yes that that recursive rules generate an indefinitely large number of new sentences because the recursive rule is a rule that replies over and over and applies to its own output so the jet they the recursive rule it says you can always add a relative Clause can then be applied to the very relative clause that you added so I went to see the man who lives down the street where we used to live when we lived on Yosemite Road I mean you can keep going with these once you get something once once the recursive rule squirts out a new Clause you can apply it again to the to the clause that just got squirted out I'm sorry but it's unfortunate metaphor but anyhow um part of my brain is still over the Atlantic I thought well what the hell I'll sleep on the plane not a good idea but anyhow ok other questions that's a good question yeah and then I have talked louder for me well there are you can easily invent a machine that will produce an infinite number of new sentences it's not a that's a rather simple rule I and indeed what elementary arithmetic has a recursive device which enables you to generate an infinitely long an infinite number of numerals and it doesn't since by adding one you take any number you've got an add one and that gives you a new number but I may not be understanding the question well chop now this I'm not going to give you a real lecture on Chomsky's linguistics today I mean the worst thing I can do is give you the impression that you understand something that I haven't yet explained to you so let me say this much here is the remarkable fact about human beings and it is a stunning fact the child acquires a remarkably complex structure the structure of English or French or Chinese or Swahili at a very early age at the age of two years or even less and acquires this without any training the kid just picks it up middle-class parents have the illusion that they teach the children a language and to this day I'm convinced that I taught my little brother how to speak English that Billy boy learned it from me but I have to admit that the evidence for that is slim that in fact the child just picks it up the child picks up a remarkably complex formal structures much more complicated than axiomatic set theory but tried teaching axiomatic set theory to a two-year-old you're just not going to get anywhere whereas the kid will pick up English which is much more complicated much more difficult and he just does it more or less automatically it just seems to come and furthermore they do it without formal training and the exposure they get is imperfect because the sentences that are that they hear are typically ungrammatical it contains all kinds of breaks and pauses and starts and stops so the kid acquires this incredible formal structure how is it possible well Chomsky postulated that it's only possible because in a sense the kid knows it already it's already programmed into his brain I in the child's brain at birth is programmed a universal grammar and the universal grammar gives the child a language acquisition device because it's got this universal grammar which enables it to process incoming stimuli in such a way as to produce a sentences as output and they're whole lot of other arguments for this I won't go through them all this morning but acquiring a language doesn't seem to be a function of intelligence smart kids and dumb kids learn the same language a smart kids then have bigger vocabularies but basically it's the same syntax the same language it's done without training and here's another remarkable fact it has to be done at a certain rather precise period in the child's development if the child gets to adolescence without having been exposed to a language it's very hard to teach them language after that there are some horrible cases and I'm too upset already to tell you about them now but I'll tell you about them later in that of course I when our children didn't have a chance to be exposed to language and it was only when they were adolescents and then it's clear that the mechanisms by which they're trying to acquire the language aren't the same they're not using the same apparatus that the that the in that the infant uses when the kid just picks it up when the kid picks it up by in a sense generating the language and one good evidence for that is the mistakes the children make the children will produce words that the kid has never heard before and and yet they make perfectly good sense I'll give you an example when my oldest son was very young he used the word ement as I am a good boy ement hi now that's not something he ever heard anybody safe there's a sense in which he invented it but it's not an arbitrary invention it makes perfectly good sense there ought to be such a word in English along with isn't wasn't aren't etc why not ement well I looked it up and there was such a word it is the original of the word ain't which we are now assured ain't in the dictionary it's very hard for English speakers to the mmm sequence of consonants you know so they shortened it comes out as ain't and it is the original four ain't okay now what's interesting about that is here is the child acquiring a language and producing words that he's never heard and I and the way that he does that is by over generalizing from words that he has heard again the past tense it's a good case of this because the children will regular I so they'll say I walked and I runned I and that makes perfectly good sense it's just not good English they have to learn the exceptions they have to learn the not the exceptional cases on an ad hoc basis one at a time all right so here are cases where it isn't so much a child learning a language in the sense of memorizing a set of words and sentences but the child acquiring exposure to a language where the child's innate mechanism that enables it to produce sentences of the language now in the early days of MIT linguistics this was the prevailing view is that we all had in our heads at Birth a universal grammar and the universal grammar is was common to all human languages the objection of that was always well languages are so different Chinese is really different from English and the MIT answer that was no they're not so different they look different on the surface but in fact underneath in the deep structure all human languages are pretty much dust same they all have sentences the sentences have known phrases and verb phrases the noun always dominates the adjectives and the verbs in the rules for constructing the sentences I and when I worked at MIT that the standard joke was that all languages are really Latin all languages are really Latin except Latin which is really English I and that's because most of the people in building 20 could only speak English and usually a rather unattractive dialect of Brooklyn English but in any case the idea was that the differences among languages were really superficial at at bottom all human languages were pretty much the same now that pretty picture was destroyed by a guy named Ken Hale and Hale was one of these guys who could go anywhere and pick up the language in a couple of weeks and he was phenomenal and he went to Australia he went the Australian outback and learned some Australian languages that just didn't fit the Chomsky model well now what do you do when your theory is refuted well an ingenious person absorbs the refutation as part of the theory and what would they said at this point was well in fact it isn't that there's a list of the rules of universal grammar but rather there's this big machine in your head that has all these principles and when you're exposed to particular languages the language will set the parameters of those particular principles so the universal grammar model was replaced by principles and parameters what we have is not a fixed list of rules but our set of principles for for forming rules and those those rules are I are those principles can then be fixed they're like it's like a big machine with a lot of switches and when the child hers here's French she will set the switches for French and when she hears English she'll set the switches for English but the switches are there and the principles on which the switches operate are there at birth it's just that the parameters are not yet fixed okay I'm not gonna resolve this this morning I just want you to see that the issues we're going to be talking about in the philosophy of language extend beyond philosophical questions to cover questions about the nature of human languages in the actual structure of human languages now emotional auditions don't give a damn about this because in a formal logical languages like the predicate calculus you don't have to worry about relative clauses you lay it all out as a series of sentences and iterated forms of quantifiers and modal operators we'll get to that later on okay so let's think how much we've covered this morning I've said that there's a traditional way of making distinctions between synthetic a posteriori contingent propositions on the one hand and analytic a priori necessary propositions on the other and that in its simplest form that gives you a very elegant conception of philosophy philosophy consists of stating analytic truths about concerns about concepts it's essentially a conceptual inquiry I for a number of reasons that picture has come under attack I haven't told you the most powerful forms of the attack but there are a number of reasons that it has come under attack now in addition to that though we also need the distinction between syntax semantics and pragmatics and that acquires some of its interest because we need a distinction between sentence meaning and speaker meaning we need to get the idea that when people actually communicate with each other they use sentences but the meaning of what they say typically differs from the meaning of the sentence they uttered they may mean more they may mean less they may mean something different as in the case of metaphor they may mean the opposite as in the case of sarcasm and irony but there's a systematic set of relations between the sentence meaning and the speaker meaning you can't say anything and mean anything but you can do an awful lot in speaking by uttering sentences that don't express exactly the message that you're trying to communicate okay now that relates to two other principles that we're going to need and that those are the principles of compositionality that the sentence is a composition the meaning of the sentence is a compositional function of the meanings of the parts and their arrangement in this sentence and then you need also the notion of generativity that in in actual human languages we have the capacity to generate an indefinite number of new sentences okay now there are a couple of things I mean we're getting a sort of manageable picture but there are a couple of things that upset the the the traditional order the traditional elegance of the picture and one I want to call your attention to now because we're going to be spending some time on it and that is Austin noticed that's JL Austin an Oxford philosopher Austin noticed that there are lots of utterances that are perfectly legitimate utterances but don't seem to aim at stating something true or false if I say I promise to come and see you I'm making a promise if I say I order you to leave the room I'm issuing an order and a pick one of Austin's example in a wedding ceremony when the preacher says to the man you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife and he says the woman do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband when he says that and they answer yes I do as Austin says they're not describing a marriage it isn't that they're giving a description they are getting married they're indulging in a marriage it's what's happening and Austin notice that all of these cases have these remarkable verbs you can adjourn the meeting if you're the right Authority simply by saying I adjourn the meeting or the meeting is adjourned you can even declare war by saying war is declared or we hereby declare war and Austin introduce the notion of a performative and he said that if we're looking at language it isn't just we have to look at propositions which are analytic and synthetic or evaluative and descriptive that those categories weren't rich enough to capture the idea of there being uh pterence --is the making of which is the performance of an action your doing the action and your doing the action named by the verb so you can order somebody to leave the room by saying I order you to leave the room now you can also do it without a performative verb by using the imperative mood by saying leave the room or even leave the room and that's an order so he identified what he thought were class of performative utterances and he contrasted those with a philosophers favorites which work on stative utterances which were cases where you had an utterance which set out to be true or false so a con stative utterance would be it's raining I and a performative utterances would be I asked you to close the windows on the performative you perform the act named by the verb what's the difference then between the performative utterance and the con stative uh pterence well the Constanta veterans can be true or false and the performative utterances cannot be true or false at least it doesn't seem it can it but it's more like it's it's okay or not okay it's felicitous or in felicitous he says it can be appropriate horn not appropriate if I stand up in the middle of an Academic Senate meeting and say the meeting is adjourned well that's in felicitous I'm not the authority I can't get away with that if I go in front of the Congress and say war is declared it doesn't work I'm it's in felicitous okay so Khan stadiums are true or false performative are in felicitous furthermore it seems that there are special verbs for these performative utterances special performative verbs and they have this peculiar syntactical property that they take certain modifiers the favorite modifiers of performative verbs are hereby I hereby order you to leave the room the meeting is hereby adjourned whereas with kaan state is you just have ordinary indicative sentences like it's raining or two plus two equals four and then the big difference that seems to underlie these is that the performative czar all cases of actions there are cases of doings and not just cases of saying when you make a performative utterances war is declared you're married I bet you $5 the Giants will have another bad season all of those are cases where you're doing something and not just describing not just saying something okay now that looked pretty good you've got a distinction between the Philosopher's favors that con stadiums over here that can be true or false they come in regular what in America called declarative sentences but in England just say indicative sentences and they're sayings they're utterings as opposed to the performative which are not true or false but felicito that are in felicitous they have special verbs and their actions they're all cases of action now what happens often is what looks like a new kind of case the performative case may have features that swallow the general case and that is if you look closely over here you'll find that you can't make the distinction in this way lots of performative I can be true or false I warn you that it's going to rain today well that's likely to be a false warning because it's whatever else is going to happen in Berkeley today it's not going to rain or so I I don't promise you but that would be my my statement okay and furthermore there can be felicitous and in felicitous con stative if i now say there are exactly 37 people in the next room and you say well how do you know well I just said it I mean it's a free country well there's something wrong with that if I make a firm claim I am required by the rationality of the language by the structure of the speech act to being able to answer this question is how do you know furthermore there are verbs that you can use for constants such as state I hereby state that it's raining is as much a use of a speech Act verb as I hereby promise to come and see you next Wednesday but then if that's right then it looks like all of these cases over here are also doings saying and doing don't mark exclusive categories all sayings are kinds of doings and that led Austin to suggest well maybe we ought to think of all other ensues as speech acts maybe the basic unit of analysis is not the sentence but rather because the sentence is used to talk with what we're interested are the speech acts that people perform when they talk and they make statements give descriptions I make I make questions I give answers to questions make orders requests promises those threats pledges apologies thanks and congratulations just to think of a few that I can think of at this time of the morning so you get a very large number of different kinds of speech acts and maybe that is the right unit to approach an analyzing language think of this as above all a device that talk with and what is talking talking is performing a certain kind of action okay well I covered too much material in this lecture and I'm gonna bring it to a close shortly but what I want you to see is there are a number of crucial distinctions that are going to be that have been important historically and which we're going to have to take seriously in the analysis even if to some extent we challenge them or reject them there are a series of principles that I want you to have in the back of your mind I want you to see the distinction between syntax and semantics and pragmatics and I want you to see above all perhaps the distinction between what the sentence means as an element in the language and what the speaker means when he or she utters the sentence between speaker meaning and sentence meaning I and then I want you to understand that the resources of the language have to give you a compositionality and generativity okay any questions before we break up for this morning yes speaker meaning and sentence meaning can coincide and there's a if you say to me how much is two plus two and I say two plus two equals four the speaker meaning and the sentence meaning can coincide but there are lots of cases where this don't snap your notebooks just yet we're still I'm still talking there are lots of cases where the speaker meaning in this sentence meaning come apart you say to me how did Sally behave at the party and I say two plus two equals four well then I kind of leave it open what the hell is he driving at and then I your imagination has to go so that's a case where we would assume speaker meaning and sentence meaning are coming apart he must what did he mean by that would be the question we would want to ask so in the ideal case speaker meaning and sentence meaning can coincide but I think an ordinary conversation it doesn't coincide much because we're always we always have much more I in mind then is actually expressed in the sentence now there's another principle that I'm going to tell you about next Tuesday and that is all sentences are understood against the background of presuppositions ways of behaving how the world works which are not part of the meaning of the sentence so if you read they went to a restaurant and I she ate halibut and he ate a steak well there's just an enormous amount of information that you will bring to bear that enables you to understand those sentences which is not contained in the meaning of the sentence I mean for example you know that they ate the fish and the steak by putting it in their mouths and chewing on it they didn't stuff it in their ear or absorb it through the skin by some apparent some meta morphosis I they they there are ways in which people eat things and you take that for granted that's not doesn't have to be included in the meaning of the sentence you bring that to bear when you understand the sentence and I want to say you understand you bring that to bear when you understand any sentence any sentence requires and I'm gonna introduce two technical terms it requires a network of other information about about what's happening and in addition to the network it requires a background of skills and abilities and dispositions you have to understand a society if I say they jumped in the car and drove to Sacramento you immediately take an enormous amount for granted you know they first didn't eat the car and then I run with the car inside their stomachs to Sacramento and they didn't dig a tunnel between here and Sacramento in order to get there you immediately get a picture of how the world works and that's the application of the network in the background and I'm gonna make a strong claim all understanding goes on within a network of other meanings and other mental states and against the background of capacities and think of any sense Sally enrolled in Berkeley because she wanted eventually to go to law school and she thought a Berkeley degree would help her get into a good law school in order to unmet understand that sentence you would have to have a prodigious intellectual resources as I said Gilbert is a very intelligent dog but I would never try to explain to him what's in that sentence you know I show him Sally and I show him Berkeley and I shown the law school and here Gilbert have a look it's not gonna work you see he does not have the network and the background I'm sorry to make rude remarks around Gilbert I'll bring him to class some day and you'll see what an intelligent dog he is though alas he can't talk he'd like to talk but he can't talk now Fraga my first I've had four dogs Fraga Russell Ludvik and Gilbert is named after Gilbert Ryle Fraga was the most intelligent dog I've ever met and frege's simply seemed to understand English you know I ton frigate go stand over there and he just go I didn't have to train him and once we you know we used to go to restaurants on Telegraph and just leave him out outside the restaurant once we came out of a restaurant at lunchtime fraga was gone no affray go well I didn't know what to do call a dog pound I rushed back to the office and there was Fraga waiting outside the office door he got sick of waiting around with all those deadbeats on Telegraph he went back to Moses hall and parked himself outside the door anyway I never trust dog owners because they always answer for as their dogs okay we're going to go on with this on Tuesday and between on Tuesday I want you to read the article by Austin called performative utterances I'll see you on Tuesday

Channel: SocioPhilosophy

Views: 68,471

Rating: 4.9357142 out of 5

Keywords: John, Searle, Philosophy, of, Language, University, California, Berkeley

Id: Uk5pIzCNOzU

Length: 67min 7sec (4027 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/nukefudge]

philosophy of language

philosophy of mind

is this out of the analytic/anglophone tradition alone?

[u/ShakaUVM]

Searle rocks. I've read several of his books on philosophy of mind.

I always wanted to sit in on one of his lectures when I was living in the Bay Area, but never worked up the courage to do so.