Searle: Philosophy of Language, lecture 23

okay let's start I have there is a handout sheet that everybody should have I it's in the book that you own anyway but I was afraid you might not bring that book to class since they're probably days in which you don't carry it around with you and consequently it just saves me a lot of writing on the blackboard all right well our problem now is very simple we don't have an awful lot of time left in the semester and I have a lawful lot of material I need to cover so sometimes I'll just skip through things rather rapidly I won't give you the complete account of metaphor because it's in the book but I want to at least situate our discussion within the larger context of current investigations into the philosophy of mind and linguistics traditionally the way that the study of language is divided up is into syntax semantics and pragmatics syntax and I told you this on the first lecture but I'll remind you again syntax has to do with the forms in which linguistic expressions occur so the syntax of john loves Mary is different from the syntax of Mary love John even though the same elements occur and if this were fancy I would say the same morphemes occur but they occur in a different syntactical order so syntax consists of the elements of the sentence together with the order in which they occur some languages mark the functional relations among the order by putting little stickers on the end of the words called affixes so in Latin for example the word order doesn't matter because you can tell what the subject is and what the verb what the object is by the things that are stuck on the end of the words but basically those are syntactical devices for communicating what communicating meaning meaning is semantics so intuitively the idea of syntax is the idea of form the formal elements in which these things occur but the whole purpose of the formal air elements is to carry mean and what is meaning - well meaning relates the syntax relates the words and the sentences to reality and so semantics is how you mediate the relationship between language and reality pragmatics is supposed to be what's left over it has to do with the use of the words in the sentences what you do with them and the way that a lot of people think of this is the thing of well syntax is form semantics this meaning and pragmatics is roughly speaking speech acts and all that kind of stuff now I'm very suspicious of this way of describing the situation I don't think it's entirely false but it's very misleading it's misleading because it suggests that what people actually say is a matter of the semantics and then what they imply or suggest or implicate that's a matter of the pragmatics but I think you can't do it that way that you can't really make sense of the semantics without bringing in a lot of considerations that are typically associated with pragmatics and in particularly what I call the background or the the background and the network are essential to understanding semantics even though on the traditional account they're not part of semantics you know what it said if you know the meanings of the words and how they're organized in the sentence but on the account that I've been presenting you that's not enough to understand the sentence you only you understand the sentence all against the background of presuppositions that are not part of the meaning of the sentence and as and within a network of associated meanings as well as associated beliefs and other intentional states now the best way to illustrate that is with examples and I've just come back from a conference on pragmatics in Madrid and I I got a beautiful example that I want to give you that illustrates the point about the relation of semantics and background incidentally one of the nice things about the modern world as you can literally go anywhere and lecture in English and we lucked out I mean it isn't that I did anything there any of us in this room did anything to deserve this it doesn't matter if I'm in Beijing Shanghai Rio Bangkok or Vladivostok I can lecture in loud American English and everybody will at least pretend to understand so this is a benefit that we have achieved without actually having done anything to deserve it the only thing we did to deserve it was win the second world war and when the Cold War without that we'd all be speaking either German or Russian and know that the time will come when we'll all be speaking Chinese but as they say not during my lifetime the Chinese have a real problem I lectured on this in Beijing and they wanted to know well when is Chinese gonna become a international scholarly language and the answer is get an alphabet first and that may yet happen but they're not anxious to have it for various reasons but no none of us are going to memorize 4,000 Chinese characters I mean it's bad enough learning French or German or Spanish as the case might be but in any case it's just a matter of luck that we're all speaking English in terms of sheer numbers more people feed Chinese or Spanish then speak English but for various historical reasons we dominate the world the English speakers dominate the world culturally and intellectually a domination that won't last forever but the analogy with Latin is pretty obvious it for centuries Latin was the international scholars language and people could go anywhere and well travel wasn't so easy but they could go anywhere in Europe and lecture in Latin and the writing in Latin could be read by educated people anywhere in European civilization and indeed one of the reason they cart revolutionised philosophy it was that he was willing to write in French and that way people could really understand it instead of just pretending not to understand it because the Latin by that time was pretty decadent anyway interesting to see how long English survives as the international scholars language but one of the amenities of the world is you can go anywhere literally the French resent it but they will put up with it and occasionally I lecture in French just to you know pull a sawmill tempo just to annoy people a little bit but I I got a beautiful example and of course I it had to come from us a natives this guy is a native Hungarian speaker in a lecture he was giving in a Spanish university and he gave the following at the background like one guy says to another let's go to the bar and have a drink and the other guy says no I can't my doctor won't allow me and the first guy then says what's the matter with you I that's this and now we have the same conversation only this time the first guy says let's go to the bar and have a drink the second guy says no I can't my mother-in-law won't allow me to and then the guy says what's the matter with you now the point is that the question what's the matter with you means something quite different in the mother-in-law case than it does in a doctor case just to spell it out boringly in the mother-in-law in this doctor case it means what illness do you have that prompts the doctor to forbid you from drinking and in the mother-in-law case it means something like well what sort of a jerk are you that you allow your mother and a lot of boss you around I and even present you from having a prevent you from having a drink okay now that's a typical I think the example is unusual but the phenomenon is typical the phenomena is typical is that in any sentence is interpreted only against background presuppositions contextual features that are not part of the literal meaning of the sentence and then the next step is to argue well in fact they couldn't be part of the literal meaning of the sentence because if you tried to put in all of the contextual stuff all the stuff about mother-in-law's and doctors and illnesses and domination and power relations within families and so on if you try to write all that down what you get is another bunch of sentences which themselves would only be interpretable I against a background of presuppositions and assumptions anyway I think that is the what I just told you I think is a correct view now there's a huge literature about this and most I mean the professional literature and you can look it up the problem with it is it's usually thought to be a question of context and the idea is it's the context that determines how you interpret the sentence but that again is misleading because of the context the actual physical context this actual historical situation in which you find yourself is only relevant insofar as there are features as the features of the context are somehow internalized in your mind or your brain that is the physical context only matters in so far as it is psychologically realized insofar as it's psychologically real so for example if there's a live tiger inside this box well that would be an important fact about the context but it doesn't have anything to do with the interpretation of utterances now because none of us thinks that none of us knows or thinks or even it considers the possibility that there might be a lot of dangerous animals running around so if you're going to look this up I haven't done it look up contextualism and it's sometimes called radical contextualism and my view is said to be radical contextualism because I think that every every sentence is interpreted relative to a background and it's misleading to call out of context let me give you a another example to illustrate this this is a standard example in the literature you hear the sentence Sally gave John the key and he opened the door now was it actually said or only implied that first she gave him the key and second he opened the door was it said or only implied that he opened the door with the key notice those sentences didn't occur and then there's a big debate about how much of the meaning is encoded in the in the actual syntax and how much of it is carried by pragmatic considerations and I want to say that that the question arises because it seems that the meaning of the sentence under determines the literal interpretation but I want to say the sentence radically under determines the interpretation when you hear Sally gave John the key and he opened the door you think of some boring scene where they're standing outside her apartment or something like that but just use your imagination they're both floating in the middle of the Atlantic clinging to this bits of driftwood and Sally coughs up a key that she has digested and John puts it inside the lock well ok you can then do it now do you interpret it the same way no I don't then it has a completely different meaning or it turns out John is kind of a big guy and he has swallowed door and doorframe and Sally gives him the key and he swallows that too and then opens the door through the peristaltic contraction of his gut that's a completely different interpretation or I let having both floating freely in outer space I mean the fact is you understand any sentence with in terms of a very provincial and local set of presuppositions all you have to do is use your imagination to see that you'll get a completely different interpretation so my views that there's a extreme you called radical contextualism that thinks all sentences are interpreted only relative to a context and I'm a sort of radical radical contextual list because I think context isn't the righty or even the right way to describe it it's the relativism is to the background okay now no where does this come out more strongly than in metaphor and it's an interesting fact that some metaphors work in certain societies and even though the societies have a lot in common the same metaphor won't work in another society or won't work in a different language in English if a horrible thing should happen that you don't come to class that is known as cutting the class and you say things like Sally cut class last week what a horrible thought I'm sure you would never do such a thing but in French you don't say that you don't say coupe a last time I spoke French my French student slang is out of date but in those days we said alas sashayed do class she dried out two classes now I can't think that way I mean how on earth do you cut a class by drying it out well anyway that's the way that French think I can't do anything about it I've been trying to correct them for decades but they still persist so why does the metaphor work in one language and not in another I don't know it has to do with background Sensibility but of course that's not a solution to the problem it's just a name of the problem all right now I want to turn to metaphor again and finish talking about metaphor and then we've got to talk about the other subjects that we can that we have some hope of completing during the course of this semester because they're whole lot of other subjects on the syllabus and I don't see how I'm going to get through all of them but now I'm going to turn to some more comments about metaphor before we go to something else okay so questions about what I've said so far everybody's up yeah no it's not too late I'm gonna go through the next step is to go through this chart and show you that there are a series of ways in which semantics and pragmatics interact and what I've done is give you a chart that describes those but go ahead yeah yes yeah yeah no that's a good question please is a modifier on the indirect speech act not the direct speech act yeah let's let's go through it why do you say please well it's more polite it's short for if you please at least etymologically it is I and it's in illocutionary force indicator there it is an indicator and what it indicates is this is a request it means it's a request as opposed to just a question which is also another kind of request but more importantly it means is it's a request as opposed to an order so I in the on the highway sign it doesn't say 65 miles per hour please because if they put that that would imply you have a choice it's on the condition that you please to go 65 miles an hour and we hope you will then go 65 no then it is it is as they say our law a law in this case is a standing directive but it's different from a request because a request always gives you the option of refusal so that's why you have please there to indicate that it's not just a question but all the same the literal meaning is still present and still understood in a way that it's not understood in in the case of a metaphor in the case of the literal meaning can you pass the salt please the can you pass the salt can still be interpreted literally and the proof is you can respond to the literal you can say yes I can here it is or no I can't I've broken my arm or there isn't any salt on the table so and I don't think Grice understood this fully gryce's regarded as this sort of hero of indirect speech acts and correctly so because his Maxim's are very useful but I I don't think he fully got that the literal meaning of the sentence is still meant and still understood unlike metaphor in the case of metaphor the literal meaning if you interpret the sentence literally you've misunderstood it that is if you respond to the literal utterance it's a joke if you say if I say sally's a block of ice that damn Sally and you say well that means she'll melt as soon as we get the room up to above 32 degrees fahrenheit well then you that's either got to be a joke or you misunderstood the sentence yeah does that answer your question no I do not think it negates the literal meaning it makes clear that the full force of the utterance is that of a request yeah so and and it's interesting which of these which of the indirect speech acts well well normally take please and which won't the interrogative very comfortably takes please I can you could you make a little less noise please it's perfectly okay but if you say things like you are going to stop making that noise and you add please well that sounds funny and I can only interpret that please as it's a separate sentence that is you are gonna stop making so damn much noise please meaning I don't really intend it as a request but there's an order and that's why I got this crazy intonation to the utterance of please English is wonderfully subtle with all of these four reasons that I've told you before namely that in English it's a little bit rude to use the imperative mood unless you're obviously not intending the imperative mood unless it is an offer I so for example it's okay to say sit down make yourself at home and those are in the imperative mood but they're not really orders they're offers okay other questions about that what I want to go yes well is there still a background in a formalized language yes I think so now that's much harder to show but I did it with our arithmetic and we could probably do it with I mean I haven't thought it I threw in the case of let's say the predicate calculus but you remember I gave you this example from Vidkun Stein we are trained the three plus four equals seven but it makes perfectly good sense to imagine a culture where they take the set theoretical aspect of arithmetic seriously so they want to know what three what and for what well if a equals three and me equals four then a plus B equals seven but if you imagine it slightly differently if you imagine it this way had it like this how did it go B was forward for ya okay and a was three yeah then so a equals three and B equals four but a plus B equals five and in that case they say well it's obvious that a plus B equals five and we don't do arithmetic that way except in some context we do if I say how many people in the class can speak German and three people raise their hand and how many can speak French and for people who can raise their hand it doesn't follow that seven people can speak French or German because it may be the same people and we don't count them twice in that context okay so now the problem with the example you gave is that the formalized languages are typically not languages they are forms of languages so this is not a sentence there is some X such that FX is not a sentence unless you fill in the value of the free variable there and once you fill that in then the background comes in so if I say there is some X such that X FX that's not a sentence it's got a free variable in it but if I say there's some X that's that X is a horse then you've got a an actual sentence but it's got a content but that's a context well that's a content will be understood relative to a background ok so I think that the thesis is perfectly general the thesis that we understand the assumptions we understand the sentences against the background of presuppositions practices ways of behaving and assumptions now in the case of arithmetic we won't allow you to get out of the third grade unless you do arithmetic the way the rest of us do it but this exam the example from vit consign is designed to suggest that that is its self relative to a set of practices that the semantic content alone is insufficient to fix the understanding because the understanding that you have will always be relative to a set of ways of under a set of ways of doing things that you have been brought up on ok let me go through this chart No and everybody's got a copy of this it's in though it's in your book I mean it's in the assigned reading so it's not a mystery I mean it's not something new but I want to go through it to contrast the case in the case where the syntax and the pragmatics match each other well I don't need to write it it's here in the case of the first one where you have a perfect match then the literal sentence meaning matches perfectly with the intended speaker meaning my guess is that in normal conversation that's probably fairly rare if anybody's short of one of these they're available here right that in normal conversation there's always more suggested or implied than is actually said but we put that there and just for the sake of completeness here you go all right now the interesting case though is where you get a separation and the most famous cases are metaphors now in the case of metaphor I there is just a huge literature on the subject and I have not attempted to go through it but just to cite some of the most famous mistakes the two standard theories of metaphor in the history of the subject have been the comparison theory that goes back to Aristotle that says every metaphor involves a comparison of two objects so if I say sally's a block of ice I'm asking you to compare Sally with a block of ice but that is opposed to the interaction theory that says the metaphorical meaning is a product of the interaction of the two literal meanings it's the interaction between your understanding of Sally as a human female and your understanding of a block of ice as a certain type of physical structure and the interaction of those produces the metaphorical meaning now a third approach is to say there's really no such thing as metaphorical meaning rather you need to distinguish between the literal sentence meaning and the intended speaker meaning and the metaphorical meaning is just a special case of intended speaker meaning that's my view the view that says there's some set of cognitive capacities by which the hearer can understand the intended speaker meaning and metaphor is just a name for a class of intended speaker meanings whereby there's some systematic processes according to which you can get the intended speaker meaning by understanding the a sentence meaning together with the background in the network now there's a fourth view that has recently become very influential and that's Davidson's view that says there's no such thing as metaphorical meaning period there's just a literal sentence meaning and when the speaker produces the metaphorical utterance what we're being asked to do is to see the object of which the predicate is predicated to see that as to see it as if it were like the literal the the extension of the literal meaning and the seeing as location here comes from Vikki enstein as you know the famous duck rabbit which can be seen either as a rabbit looking up that way or a duck looking that way that is one of the lamest duck rabbits that I've ever drawn but anyway you're supposed to be able to see it as a duck a duck looking that way rather less intelligent duck than I would normally draw but Lee has a certain charm so let's leave him as he is or a somewhat frightened rabbit looking up at the sky that way so if you're putting a necktie in the rabbit it would go here and putting it on the duck it would go here everybody got that now it's of some interest philosophically because once you see it as either a duck or a rabbit you can't see it both as once and are hard to see it as what it really is namely just a bunch of lines notice a very important fact which we'll get to when we talk about pictorial representation it doesn't look at all like a real duck or a real rabbit if somebody sold you a rabbit I'm going to sell you a rabbit I'll bring it around the house and it looked like that you'd ask for your money back or if you actually encountered a duck in the zoo that looked like that you'd think you'd had too much to drink so I doesn't actually look like either and the mechanisms by which we're able to interpret it is either a duck or a rabbit those are I think quite remarkable and when we when we when we get to the subject of pictorial representation I over I will go over this the single most powerful a discussion or philosophical analysis of pictorial representation I saw again day before yesterday in the Prado Museum and it's called Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez and I'll try and show you representation of it you know what do we have we used in this room used to have what a nice thing for slide projector oh there it is good thank God ancient technology survives and I'll try to show you that and other such examples but in any case I the the point for the present is that Davidson is trying to tell us that metaphor is like seeing as that when when I say sally's a block of ice don't think that is a statement more like an instruction see Sally as a block of ice and as Davidson is anxious to insist seeing as is not the same as seeing that I see on my view a propositional content is conveyed not on Davidson's view on Davidson's view there is no separate set of truth conditions it beyond the literal and and and that's why I says most metaphors are just false as far as propositional content it's just false that Sally's a block of ice just as most similes are true Sally's like a block of ice well everything's like something in some respect or other eye so I he thinks that it's a mistake to think there are two eye that that there is a metaphorical propositional content that is conveyed now I think there there there are no doubt cases poetic cases where this would be the case I mean maybe we ought to think of Romeo's saying about Juliet Juliet is the Sun we should perhaps think of that a long day Sonia's line see Juliet as if she were the Sun but what seems to me decisive against Davidson is that you can actually have debates about the truth of the metaphorical utterance I say Sally's a block of ice and you say you don't know Sally Sally's a bonfire now I won't go through the details here but it seems to me clear that the two guys we imagine having this argument about that are actually arguing about propositional content and they can spell it out in what respects they think the one metaphorical interpretation is right and the other metaphorical interpretation the other metaphorical understanding is wrong if you look at the literature there's another odd feature about this and that is in general when people write about metaphor they're tended the tendency is to think isn't it wonderful and then they quote passages from the Romantic poets and I got so exasperated this when I was writing an article about metaphor that I decided look the opposite attitude be utterly Philistine it's the right attitude to take so give dumb examples like Sally's a block of ice bill is a pig and so I don't think I got a single quotation from the Romantic poets you know hail to thee Blithe Spirit bird thou never worked well that's true as some metaphors going on there and we could analyze those but I didn't do that in that particular article so what I thought was that we ought to be able to analyze the the way that metaphor actually functions the way that it actually works without appealing to the aesthetic ecstasy's that come over us when we read Byron Shelley and there and Keats however maybe I'm missing something and Davidson thinks well everybody's missing something if they think there's a separate such thing as metaphorical propositional content conveyed and I think there is now what happens in many cases is that the metaphor comes into the language because there's no literal way to say what we wanted to say so we say of the pattern of dots that it is mosaic comparing it with a mosaic pavement we say of the tool you use to push your computer cursor around we say that it's a mouse because we don't have a literal expression for that and now what happens in those cases is that the metaphorical meaning becomes dead metaphor that the metaphorical meaning the word now develops a new literal meaning but that's interesting to us that's not something to be sneered at because of course what that shows is there was a semantic need and the metaphor fill that need to the point that it became dead it became a new literal meaning all right so let's go through the chart the first one shows literal utterance the metaphorical utterance is the case where you go through the literal meaning to get to the intended metaphorical utterance meaning now notice the go through and what I just said that's a metaphor I don't have another way to describe it and we do have these systematic associations between such things as movements or spatial positions and alternative propositional contents that we can convey now what's going on here well it seems to me that metaphor functions on the basis of perceived I want to say similarities but of course the similarities need not be literal similarities so for example you're all familiar with how to do graphs but the graph is itself I mean this is a standard economics graph about where the marginal cost equals the marginal revenue and you have a supply curve the more the higher the price the more will be supplied the higher the price the less will be demanded so you get the supply and demand curves and then the rational entrepreneur sells at this point okay but I want you to notice the processes by which this representation works they are metaphorical there's nothing literally similar between the the height here and the amount I in in dollars that's being asked for the product it's just rather that you understand it naturally that way similarly left to right is a metaphor for time and if you think of graphs that show the passage of time they always work time going on left to right x-axis I so the processes by which certain sorts of pictorial representations work are themselves metaphorical processes and I think you ought to understand graphs as an application of spatial representations for other sorts of phenomena now a fascinating case that I don't fully understand is musical notation it seems to us perfectly natural that that the higher the note is on the score the higher its frequency will be in its actual playing but it's not necessary to think of it that way and I'm told that I in in the evolution of musical notation there were times when the lower down conveyed a higher number frequency that seems very unnatural to me because I'm part of our background culture and I don't know if this is still true but there was a time when we didn't know how to play great ancient Greek music because though we had the notation we had no idea how to interpret it I don't know if that's still true some of you should look it up and track that down and be interesting to know so there's nothing inevitable the musical score that we use the way we have of doing musical notation has now become I culturally universal but it's not inevitable it is a form of metaphor whereby you give spatial representations where you can give a set of notational representations for sounds that people are supposed to actually play and hear okay so there's a huge literature on metaphor going back to Aristotle and there's something deep about it that I want to emphasize all predication works on the perception of similarities if you say something's red you are saying it is similar to other things in respect of a certain color if you say it's tall or heavy you have a similarity relation now the interesting thing is the similarities need not be literal as when I say there's a similarity relation between the the height I of the X of the y-axis and the amount of money involved or similarity between the passage of time and spatial relations the spatial eyes metaphor for time are pervasive in our Western civilization I don't know that they're pretty pervasive in all situations so we think of time as something that passes and we have all these metaphors time whizzed by or crawled by or slowly inched forward as we were waiting for the plane and the airport there's the spatial metaphors for the passage of time are pervasive even though there's no literal similarity okay but now literal predication and metaphorical predication both rests on the assumption of similarity and this is what drives people to say silly things like well all language is metaphorical well that's not literally true but it's not a bad metaphor metaphor is they're being used metaphorically if I say whole language is a metaphorical because what mien is all languages like metaphor in resting on similarity but of course it can't literally be the case that all language is metaphorical because the metaphorical use of language presupposes the literal use of language on which the metaphorical intended speaker meaning is based did everybody get that sentence I doubt if I can repeat it in my current jetlag condition I won't make it past Greenland if I try to do that again but anyway I think you get the the basic idea that we are understanding I that there is something deep in the metaphor that all language is metaphorical and that is that our ability to understand a language rests on our ability to perceive similarities and those types of similarities are the types of similarities that enable us to go beyond the literal meaning to the metaphorical intended speaker's meaning of an utterance so as false that all language is literally metaphorical but it's metaphorically true that all language is metaphorical because all language like metaphor rests on the perception of similarities okay now there's a huge literature on metaphor and Aristotle says it's a mark of real genius to be able to coin new metaphors but indirect speech acts well nobody much cares about them but I think they're interesting for this phenomenon that we were just describing and the indirect speech act differs from the metaphorical utterance in that the indirect speech act is always a case where the literal speaker meaning is meant and understood and you get to the intended speaker meaning by understanding the literal sentence meaning so the guy literally does ask you whether you can pass the salt when he asks you to pass the salt by asking you can you pass the salt so the they want to I guess one reason that in direct speech acts seemed less exciting then metaphor is that they don't have this creative capacity there's another problem for the the David Sounion approach that says well there's no such thing as metaphorical speaker meaning and that is it's hard to see why some metaphors work and others don't now notice work in that sense is a metaphor why is it that some metaphors are readily understood and others not if I oh god I just visited Sam's apartment Sam is a pig well you all understand that but if I say oh I just visited Sam's apartment Sam's a prime number I have no idea how to interpret that you know yeah she's a prime number greater than 17 and lower than 40 than 37 but still a prime number and I'm still stuck you know what do I look for I mean Sam's a pig okay I won't go to his apartment but Sam's a prime number what do I do get out of my pocket calculator I have no idea what to do without it so some metaphors work and others don't I and that's why it seems to me a theory of metaphor has to explain how that's so now as I said earlier not all metaphors work in all languages and if somebody were really going to be serious about this they oughta figure out why I the French student metaphors a French students slang is different from the American student slang and I I mean that's just a factual a theoretical issue that I don't understand okay now we get to these other cases of and in the in the article I wrote I treat them as like metaphor but I'm not sure that's right Synecdoche and metonymy and by the way I think if we actually went back and looked at the at the great Renaissance rhetorical theorists we'd probably find that their accounts are more sophisticated than what we're writing today but if you think of metonymy the standard dictionary deference a definition of metonymy did I spell it right met I think it's right for jetlag spelling it's not bad the standard example are things like well the White House announced that such and said well what the House announced I mean the door opened a lot of noise came out no the White House there is a metonymy and the metonymy is supposed to be for I it's the container for the thing contained so the container is the White House and what's the thing contained god knows but anyway that's how we're supposed to understand metonymy and I treated in the article I wrote metonymy as like synecdoche I sorry as metonymy is like metaphor now sign neck Dickey I never did get it a good sign neck I always want to say signing Doge but I'm sure that's not a sign neck dokie I'm spelling question mark okay if you want to write that in your notes I neck Dicky it's things like well I have 17 head of cattle I on my ranch well if I if you went out there and what you find were 17 dead heads in the field you'd think I misled you because you understand that differently and then of course the most common types of figurative uses are hyperbola and understatement and hyperbole somebody gave an example last time Oh God there were millions of people at the party well they don't mean millions they don't even mean 1 million that's an exaggeration but that's perfectly standard and I think the mechanism by which we understand that are the kinds that you're already familiar with namely you know that the literal utterance can't be true so you get an intended speaker meaning which is not the same as the literal sentence meaning and you think well what the guy is really trying to tell me is there were a lot of people at the party how about irony and sarcasm well they're you wonder the opposite of the literal sentence meaning so you hear the sentence John is very intelligent or Sally's very pretty as ironical as meaning John is really stupid and Sally looks awful and you have cues that the that that the sentence is used ironically now some linguists say well what we do is rely on the special intonation contour of oh he's very intelligent i but you the interesting thing about irony is you don't have to have a special intonation there is such thing as dead Pan irony where the guy says an ordinary I've noticed the metaphor of their deadpan the guy says in perfectly ordinary tones yeah John's very intelligent where it's obvious from the context that he think John is a total idiot and so on with other examples now again as usual the French have wonderful ways of saying things ironically and one of my favorites I don't know if this still survives but when I was more active in French culture that I am now if you want to say that a girl looked awful you said she has pretty eyes that day Bulls you meaning well that's about the only good thing you can say about her and I think that's a case of crisis maximum quantity is that's the most you can say about her is she has pretty eyes so that is taken to imply she doesn't look very good this is by the way a a continuing obsession in French civilization is how good people look Americans are more interested in the sexual aspects directly well I won't go into detail about this there's a funny article in today's New York Times about the evolution of beauty contests in French there they they have a Miss France it's a straight imitation of Miss America they even call it Miss they don't call her men was and it turns out their two rival teams trying to produce miss France and one is representing the great tradition and it's run by a 75 year old former Miss France but then there's the new da nouvelle vogue so to speak of Miss France anyway you can read a very funny articles in today's New York Times I just read it's why I'm reminded of it okay so I'm now gonna leave this what I think is one of the most fascinating subjects is the relation between literal sentence meaning and intended speaker meaning now some people have said well look if you're right about all this then really there's no such thing as literal sentence meaning it's a mistake to think that we have this literal sentence meaning what you got is a set of tools I'll take questions in a second is a set of tools for conveying speaker meaning but that's all it really exists there's no such thing as literal sentence meaning I think that's wrong too and the reason for that is how is it possible to learn a language when you learn a language you have to learn the literal meaning of the words and how to combine those words into sentences so I don't think that the as it were the pervasiveness of pragmatics intended speaker meaning can overcome the fact or somehow a discount the fact that you have to be able to understand the syntactical units and their combination into sentences and the literal semantic content of those sentences enable to learn and understand a language at all now there are enormous implications of what I just said that I haven't spelled out but I want to spell them out before the end of the semester and that the two implications are one social and cultural and secondly moral the first implication is that in fact all of what we consider as institutional reality of money and property and government and marriage in universities cocktail parties football games stock markets national payments all of those are linguistically constituted you cannot have a President of the United States without representing somebody as president United States you can't have a $20 bill without representing somebody as a $20 bill and that has to be done linguistically and I'm gonna explain to you how that works but I want you to see that now secondly there is an implicit axiology and implicit ethic in the use of language because you can't even say such things as there's a man at the door without committing yourself in certain ways you're committed to the truth of what you say but more ominously you're committed to identifying relevantly similar phenomena in exactly the relevantly similar way so if you say there's a man at the door then you're committed to recognize that in an exactly similar situation there would also be a man at the door so I told you earlier language like metaphor is inherently general is inherently rests on similarities but it also has this other feature namely it's inherently general once you recognize the meaning of a term you recognize the meaning of the term read or man or dog or cat or water you recognize that there are similar classes of things which will be identified that way on the basis of resemblance but also you recognize that that notion is itself perfectly general it applies to a potentially infinite number of examples okay now the problem is that in most courses that most books on the philosophy of language people don't pay attention to these facts and I think they are crucial language is used to create human civilization in ways that I've only hinted but haven't yet explained to you language were less arrests on the recognition of similarities which pre-linguistic intentionality does not have C pre-linguistic intentionality doesn't commit you to recognize similar phenomena in similar ways and and third language is inherently general when you get the general terms then they mark an indefinitely large class of entities as falling under the general term okay now I saw various questions about beginning with Kelly you have to talk louder for me yes I've never seen metaphor and I okay the differencing metaphor and irony is this in irony there is a rather simple method of operation namely in the ironic utterance you understand the intended speaker meaning as the opposite of the literal sentence meaning now notice that we have a psychological reality two opposite which is not the same as negation so when I say he's very intelligent meaning that ironically I mean more than it's not the case that he is intelligent I mean he is the opposite of intelligent namely stupid so irony works on an important psychological reality namely that we have a psychological reality to the notion of the opposite and it's it's not the same as the notion of a propositional negation metaphor on the other hand works on a set of principles by which the literal sentence meaning is used to convey an intended speaker meaning and I try to give a list of those principles in the article that's assigned however the difficult cases are the cases in the upper right hand side of your chart here where it's open-ended where I say I or Romeo says Juliet is the Sun and there's a whole lot of things that he might mean by that I Juliet is a source of energy to me my day begins with Julia Julia tis a source of life and inspiration to me and a lot of these are themselves metaphorical so there's nothing lazier than giving a metaphorical interpretation of a metaphorical utterance but there I think that's probably not a perspicuous way of representing this but what I'm trying to get at in the cases that are most sympathetic are the most favorable to the David Sounion account that there's no such thing as metaphorical meaning the problem is not that there's no such thing but there are too many there are too many possible metaphorical meanings and we're not quite sure which one or how many the speaker intended and again pick your favorite poetic metaphors as examples of that yes yeah I'm not sure I think sorry a sarcasm is nastier than irony irony you can kind of go away with it but if the guy's really sarcastic then you can't evade it if he says ironically well the food in this restaurant that you have recommended is perfectly okay he says that ironically well you can kind of you know I saw him not insulted by that and he said oh you recommend this restaurant ah food that's really wonderful yeah well okay then that's sarcasm and there I think it's less subtle however yeah that'd be a good topic for you to work out write me a short note on differencing irony and sarcasm because I haven't worked it out okay I mean some cultures are much more ironical than other cultures and of course you always want to be aware of the fact that different metaphors as they acquire different literal meanings will be as they become dead metaphors I give you a picture of the dead metaphor here where you just no longer go through the letter meaning and I think for me for example I don't hear the leg of the table or the computer mouse as as live metaphors those are dead metaphors from me when I think of the leg of the table I don't think well where's the knee and where's the toe I mean and the true the test is very simple psychological test it's a dead metaphor for you if you don't think of the literal meaning when you hear the metaphor I no longer think of actual rodents when I go to a store to buy a new computer mouse it's a dead metaphor for me but as I said different cultures will encode these differently and you want to be careful a famous example is that in English to knock up means to come and knock on your door so the Englishman says to the visiting American girl I'll come and knock you up this afternoon and I can tell you this produces a lot of cultural misunderstanding I'm talking about actual historical examples here because as some of you probably know it means something different in American English from just knocking on your door okay so how much time well let's take question I'm gonna get out for the subject a metaphor metaphor to speak metaphorically is a [ __ ] but indirect speech acts it's kind of well-defined and you know people take my stuff and they program their computers to understand indirect speech action it works pretty well it never works perfectly but they take the stuff on metaphor to try to get the computer to understand metaphor not so easy it's pretty difficult I saw some more hands up yes well I don't think so now this is a good question and it would lend credence to the to the David Sounion approach if all metaphors were really open-ended but if I say you see a lot of these metaphors have become dead now take cold for emotion a if you if I say she's a very cold person I that is now I think become a dead metaphor and in indeed I last time I looked in the dictionary under cold one of the meanings one of the literal meanings of cold is unemotional but I don't think that's true for things like block of ice or bill was a real wet blanket at the party maybe that's a dead metaphor by now I don't know wet blanket do you still think of wet blankets I kind of think of wet blankets so that's a partly dead metaphor but I don't think block of ice is open-ended like Juliet is the Sun or a bird thou never Wert and and all on these poetic metaphors that you get in romantic poetry they're open-ended in a different way okay any other questions I want to go to another subject we got so many subjects I don't know where to start but one I left myself 15 minutes that we can at least get started all right there are some famous issues in the philosophy of language that you ought to know about even though I am pretty much unsympathetic with the way that they're described or with the whole issue now there is a famous article by Quine in which he attacks the analytic synthetic distinction on the grounds that nobody has given an adequate definition of analyticity and they say an analytic proposition is one which is true in virtue of meanings or one where you can get an identity statement by substituting synonyms so they think bachelors are married is analytic because you can substitute the synonym unmarried man for Bachelor and you have all unmarried men are unmarried men instead of all bachelors are unmarried men I so you get the identity statement and that's supposed to explain analyticity ok now says Quine there's something wrong with that and that is it uses the notion of meaning and Sonata me which are just as mysterious as the notion of analytic and he says the notion of analytic is supposed to be the notion of a sentence which you will hold true no matter what the evidence is no matter what the evidence is you will hold true all bachelors are unmarried or all bachelors are unmarried men but says Quine any sentence might be held true if you're willing to make other adjustments in the system of your beliefs in the system of the sentences that you think are true I don't think this is a very powerful argument but it has become influential in the literature and this is in an article called two dogmas of empiricism I and Hilary Putnam says it's the most important article of the 20th century or he has some hyperbolic account of it I don't think that but certainly it was influential no what's wrong with it well first of all he treats analytic as if it were an epistemic category as if what it means to say there's a statement is analytic is to say you will believe it's true no matter what the evidence is for or against it because it's so to speak immune from a vision but it's not an epistemic category it's a semantic category it has to do with what's true or false in virtue of meaning now Quine rejects the notion of meaning but so much the worse for him I don't think we can get on without the notion of meaning the problem with the notion of analyticity is not that it can't be given a non-circular definition most interesting words can't be given a non-circular definition no philosophers that were given a definition of truth that wasn't circular our definition of causation for reasons that we saw in the case of tarski tarski tried to do it in the case of truth but he did it only by changing this subject I so I don't think his objections can be taken seriously the real difficulty is that the analyticity always rests on a set of background assumptions it always rests on a background on a on the pervasiveness of the background capacities that enable you to interpret any sentence at all and for that reason it's just it isn't that we abandoned the notion of being true by definition no it's still useful but you have to understand it's relative to a background if I say I want you to introduce Sally to a bachelor and bachelors unmarried man and you introduce Sally to the Pope have you introduced him I have you introduced her to a bachelor well I mean I I the Pope I guess satisfies the definition he's unmarried and he's definitely male but is he a bachelor well not the way I use it not my background is different he gets kind of left out in in the in in the bachelor line of business so the problem with analyticity is I not that the definitions are circular they because they rely on notions like synonymy and meaning but that they I they give you the idea that you have a set of truths that are totally a background free or background independent and that seems to me wrong however there's a deeper mistake in this whole discussion and that is somehow or other there's something preferable about the statement all unmarried men are unmarried that's okay but all bachelors are unmarried that's supposed to be puzzling the first is a logical truth because you have the same expression on both sides of the fret is all unmarried men are unmarried and Quine thinks that's okay he has a problem with all bachelors are unmarried but I think they're exactly the same I suppose I said well the reason that all unmarried men are unmarried is okay is really it's a substitution of instance of all bachelors are unmarried which is a paradigm of analyticity what's supposed to be preferable about logical truth for were ordinary analyticity and I think nothing other than a prejudice for the syntactical similarity could lead people to this mistake to suppose that there's something somehow preferable to the logical identity all back all unmarried men are unmarried men to the ordinary English analytic statement all bachelors are unmarried men I want to say they're exactly the same as far as my ability to understand them as stating something that's true by definition so that's the preference for the the syntactical identity but that's got to be wrong because the syntactical identity is not sufficient to guarantee identity of meaning and that should have been obvious to everybody but take again the English and the American in American English SiC means l but in English English SiC means you want to throw up but if he is sick then he is sick is not analytic if I'm using the first sick in the American sense if he's got an illness Danny wants to throw up no that's not analyst analytic so just having the same sound the same morpheme the same syntactical unit isn't sufficient to guarantee logical truth it cause why it depends on the meaning and it depends on how the sentence is uttered both of those occurrences of sick are literal if he's sick then he is sick but one is literal American and the other is literal English okay however this leads to a much more radical and more interesting discussion again do turquine incidentally when he was alive Quine was probably most influential philosopher in the world and he was a marvelous intelligence and always worth arguing with I think he was almost totally mistaken on all the important issues but I think that about most of the great philosophers I mean I that's true of contour Hume or liveness or anybody so don't think I'm putting down Quine when I say he was wrong he's in if he's in bed with Lydon it's not-- the metaphor there in bed with Leibniz cotton and all the other great philosophers but he held the most radical view that he held is really there's no such things as meanings anyhow here's the proof suppose I go as an anthropologist to a native tribe I find this tribe in the Amazon basin and I notice that whenever a rabbit runs past they always say the same thing they shout gah bah guy okay now says coin if I am a good linguist I will interpret that as meaning rabbit or as he says maybe I should say low a rabbit all right but says quiet now wait a second if you think of the evidence that I'm presented with how do I know the correct interpretation isn't stage in the life history of a rabbit for that is all that the native actually saw see here's this rabbit runs past the native shouts gavagai now I'm trying to figure out what does he mean now says Quine well the natural thing for me to say would be he means rabbit because that's what I would say and maybe I could expand it a bit and say low a rabbit but that's I it turns out not necessarily the only translation that fits the data an equally good translation would be stage in their life history of a rabbit because that's all that the natives saw right or how about undetachable parts for that's all that the native saw the natives saw a bunch of undetachable parts ambling past or how about well what the native really meant was instantiation of the platonic universal of rabbit who and why not that fits all the evidence or how about suppose the native thinks of it as an activity I there is something going on here like rain only we should translate it as rabbit death that is the activity of rabbiting is occurring right in front of our eyes quiet incidentally was a master of languages and he could see he seemed to learn any language with rabbit death is what how we're supposed to hear I hear that and he seems to have no problems language I was once with him in a conference in a in a german-speaking community and he was perfectly happy to converse with everybody in German he had a terrible American accent but anyway most of us do I so the point he's making is this seemed to be an indefinite number of translations which are consistent with all of the evidence so says Quine now this is the where he gets to his conclusion there is no fact of the matter about meaning and if there's no fact of the matter then there isn't any fact about meaning why because any amount of alternative and inconsistent translations will be consistent with all possible evidence about what the native actually meant the native said rabbit a native said gavagai and our interpretation is our natural interpretation would be to say well gavagai means rabbit when we're making a dictionary that's what we'll do but Quine says the evidence is just as good that the native mint stage in the life history of a rabbit under task rabbit parts activity of rabbiting instantiation of the Platonic Universal of rabbit hood etc there seems to be no limit of the number of alternative and inconsistent translations that can be made consistent with all possible data and this is a very influential view of whines like all these thing it's got a name it's called the indeterminacy indeterminacy of translation and that means since translation is supposed to preserve meaning it's the indeterminacy of meaning and it's in its most radical form it comes out as follows the notion of meaning is inherently an ill-defined notion it is a notion of no scientific validity because anything which is scientifically valid must be something that is testable we must have some test for the presence of meaning but where meaning is concerned there is no fact of the matter which we establish by evidence because any evidence at all will be consistent with or rather any translation at all will be consistent any translation within a range of translations will be consistent with any and all possible evidence no matter how much evidence you got you will always be able to make your translation consistent with that evidence so if you're inclined to say well it must mean stage I in the life history of a rabbit then if suppose you could present a guy with only this stage in the life history by say one millisecond of a rabbit is that a gamma guy and if the guy says no well as you still don't know that that was the right translation because there are alternative interpretations of what he said as no maybe no meant yes maybe what you thought as know was really yes or maybe it was yes used ironically howdy since you have only a finite amount of evidence the evidence will always can always be made consistent with any number of alternative and and this is the crucial point in consistent translations now years ago I was writing a book on intentionality and I thought there are two great threats to intentionality one is quiet indeterminacy argument so I wrote a long article attacking that and I and it's in Al's book it's in the Martinez book and it's a sign you should read that article call the indeterminacy of translation and another threat was Kripke skepticism about meaning so I wrote an article attacking that I had to get both of these off my back before I could write my book on intentionality anyway that curse of that is you have to read my reputation of Quine and I want you to read that before next Tuesday okay we got time for one question yeah yeah you know I'm still my stomach is still somewhere over Iceland and I don't want to think about the calendar yet what day is this I mean yeah I have to I have to talk with my colleagues because they have to grade these things but if so look on bSpace we'll announce it if we're gonna make a change yeah

Channel: SocioPhilosophy

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

Id: 2jYpBNLYIbo

Length: 76min 49sec (4609 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2011