Searle: Philosophy of Language, lecture 6

it occurs to me that it might be a good idea to take stock of where we are to start the lecture as I told you there are really two strands in the philosophy of language there is a majority strand that I'm going to tell you about and I'm almost totally out of sympathetic with it out of sympathy with it but then there's a minority strand that I'm sympathetic with and that is the strand that says we have to see language as a form of human behavior if there is a question how do words relate to reality how the answer has to be they relate to reality because human beings intentionally perform speech acts that relate them to reality they intentionally say things that are true or false or irrelevant or stupid or obeyed or disobeyed and those are speech acts of various kinds so if you want to know how language relates to reality it relates in the performance of the speech act now there's another school of thought that isn't so much in disagreement with this it just thinks it's irrelevant it thinks that essentially the problem of language is a problem in mathematical logic or applied mathematical logic and what we're going to do is give formal semantics for different types of expression and I'm going to tell you about that in the second half of the course but right now we're still a expounding speech act theory okay so that's the overall structure the first half of the course I'll tell you how it ought to be done and the second half of the course I tell you how most people do it and what I think is right and what I think is wrong now these are not necessarily inconsistent with each other it's possible to see formal semantics as applied speech act theory but in in fact most people don't see it that way and most people see it as something really quite different okay and now however if we're going to do it we're going to give an intentional istic account of meaning we're gonna have to explain how a speech act is a special kind of an action and then in order to understand you have to understand what an action is in the first place and that's mostly what I might be talking about this morning what is an action anyhow I led into this by going through a historical account whereby we explained Austen's approach to the theory of speech acts and gryce's account of meaning and last time I said I think the way out of the difficulties in gryce's account is to see it not as an analysis of meaning as such but an analysis of communication and indeed it seems to me in the structure of the speech act and then the performance of an act that has that structure we've seen over and over that you need to distinguish the illocutionary type or the force from the propositional content and you can think of the communication from the speaker to the hearer the speaker first creates one of these and then he communicates it to the hearer and if you if you wanted to leave out the notion of meaning because it's famous source of difficulty just say the speaker has to create a representation in one or more of the illocutionary modes an assertive a directive akka missive and then he's got to communicate that representation now Grice it seems to me is right about communication that communication is a matter of producing understanding and what is it that the hearer gets when the hero gets understanding well he recognizes the intentions of the speaker he gets the speaker's meaning by the meaning is communicated when the hearer recognizes the intent that the speaker had in performing the utterance and there it seems to me then the right way to think of those intentions the communication intention is the intention to produce a understanding in the hearer by getting the hearer to recognize precisely that intention in other words there is a self reflexive or self referential feature to the speaker's communication intention because the speaker intends to produce an effect by getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect okay so it seems to me you avoid the objections to grace by simply saying let's distinguish representation from communication we don't care which one you call meaning I'm more inclined to think representation is closer to meaning in the ordinary sense but it doesn't much matter what you have to think of is a speaker creates a certain semantic package and then he communicates that package he gives that package to the hearer but language is unusual among human behavior and that you can achieve what you're trying to achieve by getting your audience to recognize that you're trying to achieve it you can't do that with per location area effects you can't convince people just by getting them to recognize that you try now you're trying to convince them or you can't become president in the United States or marry a Republican or become rich just by getting people to recognize your intention but you can make a statement and communicate it just by getting people to recognize your intention to communicate the statement that you've made now I think that's closer to a common sense account of meaning if I make a bunch of marks on the blackboard they're just a bunch of marks on the blackboard but if I then tell you what they mean I tell you that all of these circles are supposed to represent the offensive team in football and these X's are supposed to represent the defense then they're more than just X's and O's then they have become the diagram as we would say they become a representation of a football player okay so the the quarterback will drop back and take three steps back the wide receiver will go out to the left the the tailback who will go out to the right and the full-back will act as a another blocker okay now this is how we convert a bunch of marks on a blackboard into in this case it's a species of directive it tells the players what they're supposed to do when a certain play is called all right and that seems to make the common sense account of meaning is you take sounds and marks and you impose meaning on them you decide that they're gonna mean something now it turns out of course that there's a huge apparatus necessary in order that you can make that decision and that's the apparatus of intentionality together with the network and the background okay but now if you look at the stuff you've been asked to read there's clearly a big difference between the approach that I adopted when I wrote speech acts and the approach that's in that article what is language and I have to explain the differences when I wrote speech acts I didn't try to ground a now the analysis of language in pre-linguistic intentionality I think in the end you have to do that I and so I try to do that in the article that you've been asked to read called what is language but when I wrote speech acts I thought well we can just take language for granted just assume people have a language and then ask how do they perform speech acts in that language now there are two devices that encouraged me to do that at two theoretical principles that encouraged me to think well for purposes of analyzing speech acts we can assume that the speaker and the hearer have a common language and then proceed for there and the two devices what I call a principle of Express ability and that just says anything you can mean you can say there's no meaning that is absolutely inexpressible now you meant there may be some meanings that are in communicable maybe if you suffer a certain kind of honks it is the ONC's the post-industrial man under late capitalism in a society devoted to unrewarded hedonism and unrequited striving for infinity now maybe that's impossible for you to communicate at all your friends in your sorority house because they usually lose interest after the first clause or two but but all the same you can't express what you mean if that I won't try to repeat it I don't know what the hell I said but anyway it's not like pretty deep pretty deep stuff you know it's kind of thing you ought to say in German but I anything you can mean you can say now that doesn't mean get people to understand it or even pay attention to it but there's no meaning that is so to speak inherently inexpressible so I thought well I can work with language because any meaning that the speaker has the speaker can put in words and if you lack words you can always invent a word a famous problem of translators is some words don't really translate very well from English from German let's say or French to English Oh what translators do is they cheat how they use the original how do you translate the German Zayn's ooked well a standard translation that means some like yearning or desiring but it's kind of a big deal desire but a lot of translators just cheat and say Zayn's ooh why not I mean if you got Zayn's ooh just be happy to have Zayn's ooh it's a free country and it's a special kind of Germanic yearning and maybe for all I know it goes how do you spell Zane's ooh is that right it looks right to me there's got to be an H there so he can make that stretch out a long time anyway okay how do you translate it well if worse comes to worse use the original German and explain it to your audience and after after a while they'll get it okay so that's the first point is the principle of Express ability and then there was another a theoretical device that I used it's gonna be important and that's the notion of the constitutive rule and the corresponding notion of an institutional fact now I want to explain those notions and so I'll take a few minutes to do that you need to make a distinction between institutional facts such as the fact that Barack Obama is President of the United States and what you might call brute facts such as the fact that the earth is 93 million miles from the Sun you need the distinction between the brute and the institutional and the distinction is this the brute fact doesn't require a human institution in order for it to exist brute facts just exist the earth and the Sun don't give a damn about what we think they're that far apart 93 million miles and there are 93 million miles apart no matter what anybody thinks but the fact that Barack Obama is president United States or the fact that 49ers lost the football game yesterday those are institutional facts and they exist only within sitting within human institutions you have to have the human institution of the United States government of the human institution of football in order that it can be a fact that the 49ers lost the football game a fact that Barack Obama is President of the United States now then the next crucial question is well what is an institution and in order to explain that distinction I have to in order to explain what an institution is and what how institutions differ from other human phenomena I have to distinguish between two different kinds of rules rules that regulate an decedent li existing forms of behavior and not surprising I call those regulative rules they regulate behavior that can exist without the rule whereas some rules not only regulate behavior all rules do that but they constitute the very behavior that they regulate in that it isn't even behavior of that kind unless they are following a certain number of the rules so an example of a regulative rule would be drive on the right hand side of the rule road driving exists independently of that rule in some countries they drive on the left hand side once you have driving you can decide to drive on the left or on the right that is a rule that regulates behavior that exists apart from the rule well what about constitutive rules well the philosophers all-time favorite are the rules of chess because the rules of chess don't just regulate the activity of playing chess but acting in accordance with at least a certain subset of the rules constitutes playing chess if you're not following any of those rules you're not playing chess it is not you see in the case of driving people had to make up their mind shall we drive on the right or shall we drive on the left but in the case of chess it was not a case that there were a lot of people pushing bits of wood around on boards and some genius says fellas we got to get some rules because you keep banging into my bishop with your knight let's get some rules no that's not how it work it's an interesting question I don't know how did chess evolve see I can tell you how baseball if all guys hit a ball with a stick it actually came out of cricket I or how American football evolved it came out of rugby and and in primitive villages they took a pig's bladder that's why it's called a pigskin and it's shaped like that and they would fill it for I don't know how we got off under this I don't want to tell you about the history this is too sorted but in any case I yeah it's easy to see how the rules would evolve but I don't know how chess evolve be interesting to look it up I'll try that great scholarly tool Google and see if we can't I tracked down the history okay but I want you to see that rules of chess are different from the rules that say drive on the right-hand side of the road or drive on the left-hand side of the road because the rules are constitutive you have to follow a certain number of those rules I don't know how many exactly you got to follow there's some rules of chess I never did figure out like the rule for taking a pawn all paths all if somebody put a gun said state the rule for taking upon home passed on God knows I'd have to look it up i I know how to castle on the right side in the left I can do that part but that pawn on pass oh I never did figure out anyhow yeah I think there's an intuitive distinction between constitutive rules and regulated rules and the idea of institutional facts is institutional facts presuppose systems of constitutive rules now one last theoretical tool and that's this typically the constitutive rule has the form needn't be syntactically in this form but semantically is in the form X counts as Y actually typically X counts as Y in context see so such-and-such counts as a legal night move such and such a position counts as check such in such a form of check concepts checkmate that's ex counts as Y and see that's the form of the constitutive rule and typically those come in systems such as are the rules of chess or the Constitution of the United States whereas the regulative rule typically has the form do X or do y I Drive on the right dry on the left or if you like do X in context C do Y in context C and those have the form of directives okay now if that's right then we can think of language as performing speech acts according to constitutive rules and such just as such and such move counts as a legal night move or hitting the ball with a bat and running the first base before gets their counts as getting a base hit in baseball so uttering such and such sounds counts as making a statement giving an order making a request so I thought of language as a matter of creating speech acts in a way that creates institutional facts according to systems of constitutive rules and I didn't have to worry about the fact that there are lots of speech acts that are performed outside of language because given the principle of Express ability that says anything you can mean you can say I could always find some linguistic equivalent okay so when I wrote that book speech acts I was taking a lot of apparatus for granted I was taking I the eye system of I was taking existing human languages for granted and I was saying that typically languages our systems of constitutive rules and that those rules have a certain form and that we need to distinguish those from regulative rules and what we're going to analyze are the set of institutional facts that constitute speaking a language now one last distinction I need is the distinction between the constitutive rules of certain types of speech acts and the conventions with which those rules are realized in different languages so in English you say I promise and in French you say Drupal May and those are different canvas realization of the underlying constitutive rule that's saying something counts as making a promise all right let me consider one objection to what I've said then we're gonna stop for questions the objection is this you said that the fact that the earth is I 93 million miles from the Sun is a brute fact and not an institutional fact but you just had to use an institution the institution of measuring in miles in order to state that fact and that's that's right I have to use an institution in order to make a statement the statement that the earth is 93 million miles from the Sun is uses the institution of measuring in miles I could have used kilometers what is it 150 million kilometers I could have said it in kilometers but the facts stated has to be distinguished from the statement of it the actual brute relation between the earth and the Sun that brute relation doesn't give a damn about how we measure it or how we describe it so you need to distinguish the brute fact which is stated from the institutional fact that there was a statement of it the statement of it requires an institution but the facts stated does not thereby require an institution ok now I've said a hell of a lot of stuff in these few minutes so let's take questions about all that I want to make sure everybody is on board because I now want to show how we can go into this more deeply we can get a much deeper account i if we try to show how the system of constitutive rules and conventions is grounded in pre-linguistic intentionality and that's what I try to do in that article what is language which is among the first things you were assigned to read ok questions about what I said so far about brute facts and institutional facts yeah right what I'm considering there is case where people have difficulty communicating their meaning yes but that but the fact that you have a certain meaning can always be given expression there is nothing that is so to speak intrinsically ineffable that is intrinsically inexpressible you often feel well language fails me in this particular case but what you mean is that I the existing language that you've learned you might feel well I have such a deep emotion about this issue that I can't find words to express it well then invent words or borrow words from a different language or create your own words but there's nothing that is so to speak intrinsically inexpressible and we know why that's so now because we know that meaning is a matter of imposing conditions of satisfaction on condition of satisfaction and you can just take any damn sound or symbol you want I and impose the conditions of satisfaction on it impose the meaning on it so there was it when I published this or a lot of attacks on the principle of Express ability but I think is trivially true I think what it says is that if you have an intentional state you can always introduce some linguistic device to express that intentional state there's nothing that is intrinsically inexpressible now I some feelings are hard to communicate one of the of traditional forms of philosophical skepticism like skepticism about the future and skepticism about the external world the one that I think has a grip on ordinary people quite apart from philosophy seminars is the problem of other minds I mean you always feel well there's something about other people even people were close to there's something that we don't fully understand you see this strikingly when people do something that is totally unpredictable a good friend commit suicide for example and you're absolutely flabbergasted and then what we do of course is we cheat we go back and rewrite the narrative in such a way that oh yeah I know understand why she committed suicide or why he committed suicide because you retell the story of their life in a way that makes sense of that but I think that's cheating if you couldn't predict it at the time then there was something you didn't understand at the time I come for a generation of people where that was a quite sizable number of suicides of very sensitive people particularly French friends of mine I don't know if that's still a case I don't think I think suicides gone out of fashion now people have a pharmaceutical methods for overcoming they're honest and that's probably I mean I'm not recommending the pharmaceutical devices that they use but it certainly beats killing yourself okay anyway at the point however is that the principal express ability is trivially true just as any thought you have you can get a introduce a sound introduce a mark a word a sentence to express that thought yes yeah yeah yes there's always a problem about alternate interpretations and then since any a different interpretation can be given of any public expression there are always lots of different interpretations that will be consistent with all the data how do we settle on the right interpretation and there you have to appeal to what I called earlier the background you share a common background so when I said what did you do yesterday I say I cut the grass you know that I didn't rush out and stab it with a knife or or bite it with my teeth you know that I ran over it with a lawn mower now what I said I cut the grass that's consistent with biting it with my teeth or stabbing it with a knife but you have a background you share it with me a common background and that enables you that fixes interpretation however that doesn't mean interpretation is easy there are lots of Matar hard to interpret in general in philosophy if you can't figure it out I mean if the guy wrote it so badly that you really can't figure it out it's probably not worth hassling over it's probably BS the exception is can't I can't I have to say it drives you crazy because it's all it's a lot of it is badly written but it's worth the effort I guess I got so irritated with the damn book I decided to write I decide to rewrite it the way it ought to be written in plain English so I wrote a summary of the critique of pure reason and it's got its help various people to pass their exams on the critique and if you ever want to if you ever want to know what can't really said I have a quick ordinary language summary and more or less playing English I mean yes you have to use some of the content jargon icon is an interesting case cuz he's not a artist to use the technical expression air unlike a lot of other German philosophers and it's worth the struggle but it is a struggle and it is exasperating the real problem with canta is he doesn't give me enough examples I the secret of being clear in philosophy is to give plenty of examples can't example they're kind of vulgar he said that's the goecart of philosophy is if you if you give examples but I think examples is the key to clarity anyway there is a problem about interpretation and it's also brought about translation one of my favorite French poets is Stefan mal how may now matter may to say he's difficult or obscure is an understatement and what's fun is to see how you would translate some of these poems of malhomme into ordinary colloquial American English and I don't think it can be done and one of the malla may Stefan was his first name one of the interesting thing is to read different competent translators translating the same poem it looks quite different in different translations I have different translations of malhomme and you can see the differences in their treatment of the same poem okay other questions I want to make sure everybody's with us you and then you yeah unique expression well there can be an expression which is unambiguous but the problem is expressions change their meaning they evolve over time I mean a good case is the word atom the word atom was introduced to name the smallest unit of matter and people then thought okay we've identified these things as atoms but then they found oops that the atom is itself made of smaller units of matter so now you have to change the definition of atoms even though you use it to identify the same things yes you had a hand up yeah I was going to ask her first and then you I know I pointed you but that's her first and then you yeah yeah no I the point is something like this that from the principle of Express ability does not have the consequence that everything is expressible in every existing language we know that's wrong because we constantly have to keep enriching English to express the thoughts we have even in philosophy we need to introduce technical terms the word illocutionary Act that's a technical term introduced to express an idea that's easy enough to see but you need a word for it so the point is not that every natural language is capable of expressing every thought I think that's obviously false the point is however for any thought that you have you can just arbitrarily invent some expression for it now if you want to communicate that you have to introduce you have to introduce expressions that will enable you to communicate it okay you're next yeah sorry to make you wait can that constitutive rules be what I can't hear you very well well can you express the constitutive rule as a regulative Rule yeah you could but you missed the point you see i instead of saying the person who gets a majority of votes i in the electoral college counts as the president-elect you could say here's what you guys have to do when somebody gets a majority of votes treat him as if he were the president well that's a regulative rule but then you have a mystery there why and the answer of course is because you've defined election to the presidency as getting a majority of votes in the electoral college so you can always you can always cheat but I think the intuitive idea is very simple you need rules to regulate antecedently existing forms of behavior and so you invent I rules that'll do that just to make the behavior more efficient but with a constitutive rule I you create new forms of behavior now once you got those new forms you got to keep messing around with more regulative rules the history of basketball is fascinating because people are always finding ways to cheat or to exploit the existing rules so you got to keep making more rules about one on one and you're in the penalty phase because you got so many fouls I mean I in the early days people were such lousy shooters I that it wasn't in your interest to follow them but now because they would do better from the free-throw line now it's often in your interest to follow them so they have all kinds of ways of overcoming that I mean the history of games somebody's always exploiting the rules so you need new constitutive you need new constitutive rules to add to the system now the interesting thing is to study the law because what people know doing the law is they find ways to cheat within the within the literal interpretation of the rule or what they claim is the literal interpretation and they exploit the background a good example was the income tax law the income early income tax law made a distinction between the corporation tax and the individual tax corporations were taxed at a much lower rate than individuals some lawyer in Los Angeles thought well why don't I just take my moviestar clients and make them into corporations so Carey grant he's got practically no income he gets a few bucks from Cary Grant incorporated and that's the corporation and the corporation makes all his money and pays a rather low rate of income tax much lower than he would pay as an individual now that's a case of exploiting the background I mean I the whole theory of the corporation is it's not supposed to be an individual but as simply you declare the individual a corporation then the corporation pays the individual pittance hardly any money at all but the corporation has an awful lot of money pays a low tax rate and of course the corporation has all these expenses which are not taxable it has to support the individual now that's a people who cheat this way have a technical name they're called lawyers and they they become quite successful at it so there's a constant struggle in the tax law between people finding new ways to exploit the system and in fact in a way there's no way you can avoid it I'm now doing my taxes a bit late I admit but I there's it's it's all supposed to be algorithmic but none of it is it's all one big gray area which of those books that I bought is really for it useful for philosophy and which are for fun well that's no way to settle that so you're constantly in a struggle with the background i an't not to mention your checkbook okay any other questions everybody up with us yeah a couple more hands the woman in the back and then you yeah I'm sorry I can't area I still carry any I said for the principle Express ability I got that far oh yeah you can impose meaning on it right yeah let's suppose I think it's very hard for me to understand what I mean what and when I say I suffer the angst the post-industrial man under late capitalism okay I I saw I decide what the hell I'm gonna use the word glug when I say glug that means I suffer the Ox the post-industrial man under late capitalism you can do that I take any sound you want and let it have to mean anything you want now it's true if you want to communicate you got it as to get richer than that but I want it the principle accessibility has to be trivial it just says any intent intentional state whatever allows of externalization in the form of a sound or a mark that's all that's all that it says now that hard point is communicating and I anybody who's written philosophy I try to write clearly but you'd be surprised at the number of ingenious misunderstandings that reviewers can produce of what you thought were perfectly clear philosophical theories there's one more question yeah this guy right yeah oh it's this a good case in point it's the relation of the earth and the Sun is a matter of brute fact I there were various difficulties in getting acceptance of the fact that the Sun that the earth revolved around the Sun rather than revolving around the earth but the fact remains brutal that some institutional structure I made it difficult or had an alternative way of describing this that's an institutional fact but the actual physical relations between the various celestial objects is strictly a matter of brute fact now there are several obstacles to this one is that our representation of the brute facts is often conditioned by our our ideology and our theory and our vocabulary and our presuppositions and our background and those are not always matters a brute fact those can be institutional facts the fact that the church had a certain Dogma that that was opposed to the Copernican conception those are institutional facts about the the church hierarchy but the actual relations between the the celestial objects between the objects the astronomical objects that's a strictly a matter of brute fact those facts don't give a damn about us the other obstacle is epistemic you can always say well I Galileo had us and Copernicus had a simpler theory than the Ptolemaic theory and so we just accepted that this is what what I was brought up on in introductory science courses in the university but that's false the idea that it's just a matter of simplicity no the whole point about simplicity is we think it gets at the truth but what we're after is get at the actual fact just alternative interpretations are not just constructions but the actual brute facts and it's interesting in the case of the of the institutional facts is that they exist within systems of brute facts so in order for me to talk to you there has to be an institution of the English language and I have to be creating institutional facts by talking yes but all the same my mouth has to open up a noise have to come out and that's all a matter a brute fact okay let's go yeah well one more question I don't want to spend the whole day asking quick asking questions yeah you get one more yeah yeah yeah i this is i think if i understanding credits the view that I'm objecting to I'm objecting to the view that somehow or other the distance between the Earth and the Sun depends on us it does not depend on us it somehow it depends on our paradigm it depends on on our emotive description the earth and the Sun don't give a damn about us and our mode of description it's true epistemically as far as knowledge is concerned we have to have a huge apparatus to discover the brute facts and there are lots of different interpretations of the epistemology of the discovery but at the end of the day hi the earth and the Sun a stay in their movements and that's strictly an entirely a matter of brute fact now there was a guy in our department who did a history of science his name was Tom Kuhn I and Koons work I think was widely misunderstood what he showed is that typically science does not progress by a series of gradual accumulations of more information it progresses according to Koons book the structure of scientific revolutions it progresses by periodic major upheavals major revolution so the Copernican revolution was a revolution that overthrew a certain medieval conception of the solar system that went back to the ancients that was called after the egyptians it was a call it Ptolemaic system that's fine we got a different conception of the brute facts but the brute facts remained the same however Kuhn said a lot of things that made it it made it seem he was if it's a as if we were saying science creates the facts and a revolution creates a whole lot of new facts that didn't exist before and cocoon did say things that lend to that interpretation he said uh Aristotle lived in a different world from the world of Galileo and Copernicus he they lived in a different world well that's false I have been to Italy where those guys lived and I've been to Greece where Aristotle lived it's the same damn world throughout but a whole lot of people particularly in literary studies interpreted Kuhn as saying science is as big a crock as literary criticism because the scientists don't tell us the facts they just give it they rush from one paradigm to another by a series of processes that are just as irrational as anything in religion or politics or anything else and I think I Kuhn did never never succeeded in overthrowing this misunderstanding I think it was very hard for him as it would be hard for anybody when people say to you you're the greatest genius that ever came along and you've totally revolutionize our whole way of thinking and there's never been a book as important as yours for him to then say you've totally misunderstood me from beginning to end I at one conference in Princeton a [ __ ] did say well it turns out I'm not a [ __ ] Ian but for the most part his work was misunderstood as as giving the impression that science does not discover brute facts it is just like literary theory there you go from one paradigm to another and I don't know how Coons book is taught I in other departments today but I know I'm pretty sure that that's not what he intended that he was dismayed by that but he did say things that lended that interpretation he does say that after a scientific revolution scientists live in a different world that's false I've been in now in these parts of the world and it's the same damn world throughout this is very common my colleague Bert Dreyfus wrote a book where he said well the Greek practices revealed the gods on Mount Olympus no they did not I have been on Mount Olympus there are no gods on Mount Olympus the Greeks were mistaken they can have as many practices as they want all the same there are no damned Greek gods no Zuse and no Jupiter no Roman imitations wandering in either and if you like we'll go and check the place out but in any case this is a common form of confusion in contemporary intellectual life is that this thing that somehow other language creates reality in general it doesn't there's a little corner of reality that's very important to us where language does create reality and that's the reality of institutional facts and how language creates the reality of institutional facts is very interesting ok now then the mark that the way you identify basic differences in philosophy is find out what does the philosopher regard as absolutely fundamental there's no going behind that now when I wrote speech acts I treated the existence of language existence of things like French and German as fundamental and for the purpose of that investigation that was ok to do that but that's not philosophically satisfying you got to go behind that what is what's behind language and the version that I'm giving you in this in this course and the version that I given in what is language is that behind the languages like French German English and all the rest of them is human intentionality and language is built on top of human intentionality and we have to see exactly how that is done so what I'm going to do is not throw out this whole account in terms of the the of the institutional facts I think there really are institutional facts and I think they really do exist within systems of constitutive rules but I have to show how that is grounded in the pre linguistic intentionality of the might and the biologically more basic you see I that the assumption behind what I'm doing is that we have to think of the the universe as consisting entirely of roughly speaking physical particles and that these are organized into systems and that are in our little earth some of those systems have evolved some of those carbon-based systems with lots of hydrogen nitrogen and oxygen have evolved into beasts like us and this particular species of beast has language and with languages had all sorts of other institutional facts like money and property and government and marriage but we have to start with the basic facts of biology the fact that we are a biological beast capable of consciousness and intentionality and show how we get to that other stuff so I'm not throwing out the account in speech acts but I am trying to ground it in something much more fundamental now in one respect it does seem to me the account in speech acts is mistaken or at least it's misleading and probably mistaken and that is I took the analogy between games and language very seriously the idea goes back to Vic and Stein it's in a way implicit in Austin is that speaking of language is like making moves in a game I see there are rule governed activities and you learn the language game you learn to make promises or give orders the same way you learn any other game and now it seems to me that's I don't say it's false but it's very definitely misleading because it makes as if look as if language is a game like any other and it's not I language is pries language is the foundation of any form of institutional fact it isn't just that language is one kind of institutional fact along with other kinds all of the other kinds presuppose language language does not presuppose the other kinds you can have a society that has language but does not have football and baseball or chess on money or property or government or marriage but you cannot have a society that has football baseball and chess money property government in marriage but does not have a language language is fundamental so I over drew it was a way it was characteristic of the time I over drew the analogy between language between speaking a language and playing a there is an analogy but it only goes so far because language is prior to games you only understand what a game is if you understand what language is because the mechanisms by which the constitutive rules created institutional facts are essentially linguistic mechanisms okay so what I got to do in the rest of this morning's lecture is give you the basic theory of human action that will enable us to show how speech acts are a special case ok so here goes anybody want to ask a last question before we launch into this I want everybody on board all right here goes and we're gonna a theory of intentionality in a way it's pretty much implicit in what I've already said but let's make it fully explicit the structure of the intentional state is strikingly like the structure of the speech act so if this is the assertion that it is raining and this is the belief that it is raining then each has a propositional content that it is raining presented in a psychological mode in the form of belief or desire or hope or fear I and over here in the form of a speech act in the form of an assertion of prediction characterization or an explanation the crucial difference is that this is an act over here the speech act is a human action or it this is state over here however it's going to turn out that our analysis of the speech act contains most of the features of the analysis that we need to give of intentional States the first is that this distinction works for both speech acts and intentional States if we think of language is on the left and and the mind is on the right but furthermore direction of fit works in the case of language you have the word to world direction of fit in statements and the world to word direction of fit in orders and commands exactly that distinction carries over to the mind you have the downhill or mind to world direction of fit in the case of beliefs and the uphill or world to mind direction of fit in the case of desires and intentions and remember the simplest tests for the presence of that direction of fit is can you literally say that it's true or false beliefs like statements are literally true or false but furthermore and this is the key point both mental states and speech acts have conditions of satisfaction what stands that the beliefs being true is what stance the desires being filled fulfilled I or the the intention being carried out and that's exactly the same as what stands to the statements beings true is what stands to the orders being obeyed is what stands to the promised being carried out you get the same exact same notion of conditions of satisfaction applies across the board to both language and mind so in a way you might say there's a theory of the mind already implicit in the theory of speech acts because in the theory of speech acts you identify these guys which is the act as already contain an expression of these guys which is the mental state and it's not surprising that the speech act has the same structure as the mental state cause that speech act is designed to express the mental state when you make a statement you're expressing a belief when you give an order you're expressing a desire now you're doing more than just expressing a belief or a desire when you give an order you're not not just saying what you would like people to do you're actually trying to get them to do it when you make a statement you're not just saying what you believe but you're actually committing yourself to something's being true but there's a sim clarity and structure which will enable us to explain intention ality the intention of the mind it using the same apparatus that we use to explain the intentionality of language now you have to be careful when I explain the intentionality of the mind by appealing to the analogy z' with meaning in language with the intentionality of language it might look as if I'm saying mind is dependent on language no that's not right it's the the logical dependency is exactly the reverse language is defendant on the mind but for pedagogical for educational for teaching reasons I can appeal to your understanding of sentences in order to explain the intentionality of pre-linguistic mental phenomena because they have the same structure it's a pedagogical device to appeal to this analogy but the relation of logical dependence is these guys over here depend on these guys over here and finally a fourth point of connection is the sincerity condition every performance of one of these is already a performance an expression of one of those okay so we can say in our theory of speech act there was implicitly a theory of the mind I didn't see that for years and years I just did not see that connection but I think I see it clearly now and we can say for many not all but for many intentional states the ones that matter to us most the intentional state is a representation of its conditions of satisfaction beliefs represent their truth conditions intentions represent their carrying out condition desires represent their fulfillment conditions think of the intentionality of the mind as a matter of representing conditions of satisfaction okay now immediately there are a bunch of problems what do you do about mental states that don't have a whole proposition you have something like let's suppose you're in love with Sally then you don't have a whole proposition here or you hate Billy then you don't have a whole proposition you just have an object that the intentional state is directed at how do you analyze that in terms of conditions of satisfaction well remember something that I told you in passing but I need to spell it out more and that is any speech act is understood only within a network of other beliefs and other intentional states that you have and only against the background of presuppositions that you make and if you think if you carry that over here then you'll see you can't love Sally without having a whole lot of beliefs and desires about Sally and you can't hate Billy without having a whole lot of beliefs and desires about Billy so it's true that you don't get conditions of satisfaction in any obvious way for the emotions like love and hate but you do have these networks of intentional state and what emotions like love and hate and fear and disgust and shame and pride what they do is they pick out clusters within the network of intentionality okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna modify this later on when we get when he gets more complicated but what we're going to say is this at this simple level we're now operating at the key to understanding the operation of the mind is to think of the mind as essentially giving us representations of the world with one or more of the different directions of fit you represent how things are with your beliefs and you represent how you're going to change them with your intentions or how you'd like them to be different with your desires now if you carry this over one a step to perception then it's easy to see that perception also has conditions of satisfaction if I when I now look at this piece of chalk part of the condition of satisfaction are there actually has to be a piece of chalk there another part is it's actually going to be causing me to have my visual experience so it looks like it's a pretty powerful conception of the mind to say that the intentionality the mind relates us to the real world by way of representing conditions of satisfaction now I'm gonna make that more complicated in a few minutes but I want you to get that principle that basic idea the intentionality of the mind is a matter of representing conditions of satisfaction and this is a basic animal biology here my dog can do this he doesn't have a language but he can certainly have beliefs and desires I and he can see things how things are and he can in attempt to do things so that's our first message as I said it's going to get more complicated in a few minutes but the basic idea is that key to understanding intentionality is representation representation always goes on within a network of other mental phenomena again and against a background of the animals abilities so far nothing so fancy here is having a language just a basic biological ability to cope with reality by way of perception action intention belief desire and the rest of it all right now we're going to turn to action and action is a key notion in our whole analysis and I said now that remember in order to explain what a speech act is you've got to know what an act is what's any kind of an act because a speech act is a special kind of an act so our theory has got to show how speech acts in some ways are like all other acts because their acts but they're special in some ways they're different from other acts because they are meaningful and communicative in a way that acts in general are not meaningful and communicative so now we're going to take up action and and an intention and our first question is what is an intention when I intend to go to the movies or intend to vote in the next election or intend to get my income tax in in the course of the next week what is an intention and it might seem at first sight well intention is very simple just as beliefs represent states of affairs and desires represent states of affairs so intentions also have conditions of satisfaction the condition of satisfaction is of an intention is an action the relation of intention and action is just that an intention is a representation of the action which will satisfy that intention all right now that looks good but it isn't going to work and if we can see exactly why it doesn't work it'll open up a whole lot of we'll get a whole lot of new insights that's what I'm gonna take up next what is wrong with saying an action just is the condition of satisfaction of an intention okay questions about that I gave you a very fast run through of the bare-bones theory of intentionality where the keys to understanding it are the distinction between the state type and the content directions of fit conditions of satisfaction and seeing the connection with language that any speech act is an expression of a sincerity condition is an expression of intentional state every assertions expression of a belief every desire every order is an expression of a desire every promise is an expression of an intention every apology is an expression of sorrow or regret alright so now we're going to go on to action and intention any questions everybody up with us here goes there are three reasons why it won't do not to say an action just is the condition of satisfaction of an intention first of all it's puzzling that we should have a special word for the condition of satisfaction of an intention we don't have a special word for the conditions of satisfaction of beliefs and desires and indeed there an infinite number of facts in the world that no one has ever believed or desired but they're do not seem to be an infinite number of actions that no one has ever performed and that leads to the second worry this seems to be a special intimate kin action between action and intention and this is shown by the fact that it looks like you don't even have an unintentional action unless you have some kind of an intentional action to take a famous case eat up us got married he married Jocasta he married Jocasta intentionally but it turns out Jocasta being identical with his mother he married his mother unintentionally now that's an interesting case how often did he get married he only got married once he had problems but he was not a bigamist so he married Jocasta intentionally but he I forget his mother's name but he's called him his mother now he married his mother unintentionally one action so one of the same action it seems is both intentional and unintentional and indeed if you look at things like I did it on purpose inadvertently by accident by mistake unintentionally and intentionally what's going on we don't have that kind of vocabulary for the condition of satisfaction of beliefs and desires so there are two puzzles as to why I if you say an action just is the condition of satisfaction of an intention puzzle number one why especial vocabulary puzzle number two it seems like there's a special intimate connection between the intention and the action which you don't get with representations of states of affairs because it looks like you don't even have an unintentional action unless somehow or other there's an intentional action you can't eat up his can't marry his mother unintentionally without marrying somebody intentionally that's and this the kind of stuff that Otto worry us as philosophers okay a third set of worries has to do with this you can have an intention and the intention I can't represent an action and the action can actually occur but all the same you didn't do it intentionally indeed the intention can even cause the action but all the same the intention was not satisfied and I'll give you some famous examples of this now these are famous philosophers examples and they all have something in common they're all murderous or homicidal and I don't know what a psycho psycho analyst would say about philosophers that they love murderous examples some repressed a rage is coming out here but anyway here are three murderous examples of what I'm talking about the first is due to Rod Chisholm and Chisholm says imagine that bill intends to kill his uncle he wants to kill his uncle to inherit his uncle's money and to that and he's driving around the Berkeley Hills and when he comes to a stoplight at the corner of Cedar and Euclid I he's thinking about his intention to kill his uncle and his intention to kill his uncle makes him so nervous that his foot slips off the brake and he runs over a pedestrian and if you've ever had a philosophy course you know that the pedestrian was his uncle right he runs over his uncle now in that case he intended to kill his uncle his intention to kill his uncle caused him to kill his uncle but he did not kill his uncle intentionally what's going on everybody see that he intended to kill his uncle he did kill his uncle his intention to kill his uncle caused him to kill his uncle but all the same he did not kill his uncle intentionally and his intention was not satisfied it wasn't carried out the second case equally homicidal due to Davidson and Davidson says imagine that a climber is holding another climber on a rope these are mountain climbers and says Davidson the first climber holding the Rope wishes to rid himself of weight and danger and to that end he forms the intention to release his hold on the rope but as he's thinking about this the whole thing's makes him so nervous that the Rope slips out of his and now notice he the two different cases one case where he's gripping the rope and he says I'm gonna let this damn thing go 1 2 3 lost and he drops it that's intentional but that's not Davidson's case Davidson cases oh my gosh I'm gonna drop this rope and Bill's gonna fall to his death which is really what I want I guess oh my gosh oops I seem to have dropped the rope that is that's the case where he did not there was no point at which he can answer the question by saying what are you now doing where he can say I am now dropping the rope what he can say is oh my gosh the Rope seems to have slipped away everybody see those two cases in both cases you had an intention the intention caused an event that was the event described as the propositional content of your intention killing the uncle or releasing the hold on the rope but all the same you did not do it intentionally what does that mean you didn't do it intentionally what does it mean to do it intentionally third case I do to Dan Bennett who was a student of Davidson and I also equally murderous but slightly different from the other two cases Jones wishes to murder Smith to that end Jones goes out in the field with his gun and shoots his gun at Smith Jones is a terrible shot and he misses Smith but this is these guys live down by Stanford and this in those hills near Stanford I and the shot stampedes a herd of wild pigs and I don't have to tell you what happens the herd of wild pigs stampedes poor Smith to death okay Jones intended to kill Smith Jones fired the gun with the intention to kill Smith Smith died as a result but all the same something went wrong Jones did not intentionally murder Smith and lawyers tell me that that they could get the guys off on all three of these cases the last case is different from the other two but in all three cases I the intention wasn't carried out even though the intention caused the event that looks like it's the condition of satisfaction what's going on okay so here's now we're in a typical case with a philosophical puzzle we have a puzzle what exactly is an intention and what is the relation of intention to action it won't do quite to say an action just is the condition of satisfaction of the intention because you can have an intention and have an action and yet and the action is described by the same words as state of the intention I intended to kill my uncle I killed my uncle but all the same the intention wasn't carried out even in cases where the intention causes the event that is used to describe the action killing the uncle all right so that's what we're gonna answer that now I'm gonna give you now a theory of action and step one in the theory of action is you need to distinguish between the prior intention the intention you have before the action and the intention you have while you're actually performing the action between the prior intention and the intention in action and you can see that if you look at the conditions of satisfaction now I'm gonna take just to make it easier I'm going to take simple Mickey Mouse actions like scratching your head or raising your arm and later on we'll get to more complicated cases like performing a speech act or writing the Great American Novel or becoming president of the United States but you got to start somewhere so I'm gonna start with these simple cases suppose I have an intention to raise my arm well the conditions of satisfaction we can spell out this is a prior intention and the condition of satisfaction of the prior intention is simply that I raise my arm or so it seems so I have a prior intention and the condition are that I raise my arm but now when I'm actually raising my arm I'm doing it intentionally and there it seems to me I'm having what I'm going to call an intention in action and the intention in action is simply as far as this part goes is that my arm goes up because if I'm trying to raise my arm in an intention in action and what I'm trying to do is get my arm to go up that my arm goes up okay but now both prior intentions and intention in action have a causal component as part of the condition of satisfaction because unless the intention unless the prior intention causes the condition of satisfaction then it's not really satisfied so I say this is causal reflexivity because it's part of the condition of satisfaction of the intention and prior intention itself that it has to cause the raising of the arm it's part of the condition of satisfaction of the intention and action itself that that intention in action has to cause the arm to go up so we have to add a clause to each of these the condition of satisfaction of the prior intention that I raised are not just that I raise my arm but also and this P I causes that I raise my arm there is a causally self-reflexive feature furthermore with the intention in action it isn't just that this intention in action is satisfied if my arm goes up but this intention in action causes that my arm goes up so we've got a causal condition on both the prior intention and the intention in action all right but now then if this is right so far then it looks like we have a rather simple account of the relations between these different elements and here it goes the prior intention causes the action but the action consists of two components it consists of an intention and action which causes the bodily movement so I had a prior intention to raise my arm that caused me to raise my arm when I raise my arm there were two parts of that I had an intention in action and that a trying is the ordinary word for intention in action I had an intention in action and the intention in action caused my arm to go up so the prior intention causes the arrows represent cause here cause the intention in action the intention in action causes the bodily movement to be M and the whole action consists of the intention in action plus the bodily movement it's so beautifully simple that I wonder why it take me so long to see it but anyhow here here it goes but now then we've already solved two of our counter examples in both the Chism case where bill kills his uncle and the Davidson case where the guy drops the rope there never was an intention in action there never was a trying there was in Bennett's case that's different so in bills case you see the intention in action is an answer the question what are you now doing and in bills case where he's trying to where he wants to kill his uncle he intends to kill his uncle there's no point where he can say I am now killing my uncle he can't say that what he says is oops my foot has slipped off the brake I seem to run over my uncle he went from the prior intention to the bodily movement without an intervening intention in action and that means there was no intentional action similarly with Davidson's case the guy had a prior intention to drop the rope the prior intention caused that bodily movement but there never was a right there never was an intention in action the intention and action is answered by the question what is the answer the question what are you now doing and in bills case he can't say I am now killing my uncle what he says is something has happened to me I wasn't trying to do it but my foot slipped off the brake and in Davidson's case the guy can't say I'm now dropping the rope what he now says his whoops the Rope seems to have slipped out of my hands okay so now it looks like we're off and running we haven't yet got a theory of action but we have made some very important distinctions we have a distinction between the intention you have prior to the performance of an action and the intention you have during the performance of an action we know they must be different because the conditions of satisfaction are different the condition of satisfaction of the prior intention is that I perform a whole action and that this power in tension causes it the condition of satisfaction of the intention and action is just that there be a bodily movement and this intention and action causes the bodily movement those look remote from each other but in fact they tie together because the action consists of two components it consists of an intention and action plus a bodily movement where the intention and action causes the bodily movement alright so that's a kind of simple account now it's going to get more complicated because we've just discussed raising your arm and stuff like that we haven't discussed the Bennett account or example all right what I'm going to do then I'm gonna go on with this on Thursday and finish giving you a theory of action and then I'll show how it you get a beautiful theory of speech acts once you have this theory of action we'll go on with that on thirsty

Channel: SocioPhilosophy

Views: 7,299

Rating: 5 out of 5

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

Id: vbwAzu8k76c

Length: 77min 36sec (4656 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2011