[An essay I submitted on the philosophy of language at Melbourne University].
“The meaning of an expression is an object for which it stands".
In response to whether language can point unreservedly to objects or facts, I advocate an Heuristic account of Meaning. In this way, I claim that language - and sentential expressions- can be viewed from 'within' or 'without'. That is to say, we can look severally into the syntactic and the semantic patterns of Meaning. In other words, meaningful expressions can be viewed from the intuitive/transcendent grounding of logic or from the vital standpoint of semantic rules. In philosophical terms, I contend that Meaning does not solely stand for an object but rather we communicate and gather our thought by way of rational perspective. Hence our language can flourish out of a continuum of Meaning, combining syntactic reflection with semantic complexity.
THE PROBLEM OF MEANING
In some respects, the question of Meaning has more relevance to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries than to any other century. Frege's Sense and Reference may be said to stand for the Objective theory of Meaning: through his logicist program, Frege aimed to locate objects and their sense within a truth-functional grammar. In the first part of my paper, I will underscore the undeniable logical fluency of Frege's calculus. On the basis of his 'conceptual notation', however, Frege hoped to supply a complete map of the act of reference, and of expression as 'Thought'. (According to his formal notion of Truth, Frege believed that Thought must refer to its 'own' Object, the True or the False). Whereas Frege's realism is persuasive to philosophers such as Carnap, Tarski and Chomsky, I will explain how semiotician Horst Ruthrof tackles the problem of Synonymy from Sense and Reference. Ruthrof's heterosemiotic account of 'referential background' will then collapse into Wittgenstein's Conventional account of Meaning and natural language use in the Philosophical Investigations. Drawing particularly on the example of a chess board, I intend to explore the later Wittgenstein's composite picture of semantic rules and their pertinency to language as a game, or as a 'form of life' (Lebenswelt). Finally, I will elaborate my heuristic account of Meaning through the supporting theses of J L Austin and of Umberto Eco.
FREGE'S SENSE AND REFERENCE
By vocation a mathematician and not formally trained in philosophy, Frege published Sense and Reference as an exposition of his Objective analysis ofMeaning2. Just as an object is indispensably 'linked' to its environment, so Frege maintains that objects of Meaning are invariably tied together in the unitary grouping of the sentence. In correlation with Frege's sentential or 'context principle', formal objects are categorized as either 'singular terms' or 'Proper names' within an expression. Hence, for example, in the phrase 'John is walking his dog' two objects - the Proper name, John and the singular term, dog - cohabit in the one meaningful expression/sentence, 'John is walking his dog'. Furthermore, Frege holds the strong thesis that each part of an expression must 'refer' (Bedeutet) to an object, and each object in turn to the Object of the Sentence. In this way, Frege intends that any language-user will be capable of locating objects within a 'truth functional’ syntax which assimilates objects into a sentential unit of meaning.
This alone, however, does not satisfy Frege as a fully Objective account of Meaning. As evidenced by the eponymous title of his paper, Frege distinguishes further between the 'Sense' (Sinn) of an expression and its 'Reference' (Bedeutung). As such, Frege holds that the 'Reference' of an expression 'stands' for an object. Yet one can only fix the reference to an object, adds Frege, with the aid of Sense. Thus the sense of the Proper name, 'Morning Star' refers to the planet Venus; for it is through sense that one can 'grasp' or understand the reference to the planet sensibly known or understood by that name. In what certain commentators have seen as a quasi-metaphysical tour de force, Frege ultimately attempts to 'link' the sentence (language) to truth3. Hence the object of a sentence, for Frege, is its 'Truth-Value', namely the primitive disjunction of True or False: while the sense of a sentence expresses a 'Thought'. This Thought is evaluative, in that one's judgment is subject to the determination of right or wrong. It is at this point where Frege's program of Sense and Reference runs into difficulty. In a sort of neo-Platonist twist of the screw, Frege claims that Thought occupies an objective Third Realm of Meaning which is transmissible between individual speakers and even generations of language-users. Yet what of the the cultural, as opposed to the grammatical context of meaning-full expressions?
A HETEROSEMIOTIC CRITICISM
The Problematic of Synonymy
Focussing on the problematic of 'synonymous' reference, Horst Ruthrof launches a two-pronged attack on Frege's conflation of formal and natural language use – Ruthrof’s initial objection is Conventional, whereas his subsequent objection is Semantical. (Ruthrof himself adopts certain thought experiments to make these philosophic positions clear). For ease of comprehension, nevertheless, let us first define the problem. In Fregean parlance, synonym ('same meaning') involves the substitution of different sense for a common reference, expressible by the propositions, 'a=a and a=b'. Note that the two sentences refer, identically, to the object 'a'. Returning to our example of Venus, the 'Morning Star' - as Frege does - we may generate two meaningful identity statements therefrom. Uninformatively, one may assert that 'the Morning Star is the Morning Star': in post-Kantian epistemology, this is an 'analytic' judgment. Info rmatively, on the other hand, we can state that 'the Morning Star is the Evening Star' or 'Hesperus is Phosphorus'. These two expressions designate the same planet, Venus, although we grasp their common reference by different senses. By the mere act of substitution, Frege was convinced that the problem of identity/synonymy and the synthetic process of Meaning dissolved into a formal operation5. Ruthrof, however, is not swayed.
Ruthrof's Objections to Sense and Reference
Ruthrof raises two very interesting thought-experiments with regard to Frege's argument. Assume, for instance, the identity statement that ‘John is Mr Smith' . At the same time, Ruthrof lists the utterance, 'Mary believes that John is Mr Smith,6. Although it is formally necessary in Frege's scheme that the Proper names' John' and 'Mr Smith' refer to the same object, it does not follow, Ruthrof holds, in respect to Mary's propositional attitude of Belief. On the contrary, Mary is well acquainted with John but is 'unaware' that John is also called Mr Smith. As a result, Ruthrof states that it is not the case that the truth-value of the Thought, 'John is Mr Smith' equates with Mary's independent knowledge of that sentence. In sum, Ruthrof argues, Frege cannot validate that objects have stable references nor, in consequence, are Thoughts irrecusable. Whereas Frege's scheme is undoubtedly elegant in posing the primary act of assertion, it cannot secure any statement in an atemporal world, free from its specific usage.
Further to his critique, Ruthrof contends that thoughts cannot be unwound from their subjective 'wrappings'. In the light of his rigid grammar, Frege maintained that the peculiar 'colour' or 'tone' (Farbung) attaching to the sense of an expression was unimportant7. Apart from indirect reference, there was no requirement to unwrap (Umhullungen) the semantic perspectives of an object or statement. Throughout his work, Frege refused to entertain the Psychologist stance that our signification of an object is connected to the culture of language as well as to our many 'mere subjective associations', or Ideas. (Roger Scruton, for instance, speaks of such semantical interpretations and 'images' as that Venus is the Goddess of Love, Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus', the Venus of Holst's 'Planets', etc)8. In this vein, Ruthrof discusses Devitt and Sterelny's example of 'Everest = Everest' and 'Gaurisanker = Everest'. He declares that the previous expressions have two 'distinct' and highly individuated references. Whereas the first sentence is clearly 'tautologous', Ruthrof claims that the sense of the Proper name, 'Gaurisanker' may only be understood by the Tibetan community, to which the term refers to the concept 'at home' and only 'obliquely' to the highest mountain in the world. Hence, Ruthrof concludes that 'Unlike formal terms, natural language expressions cannot be cleansed of the semantic traces of their typifiable utterance situations (deixis)9.
WITTGENSTEIN AND HIS 'CHESS GAME'
As an introduction into the enigmatic aporia of the Philosophical Investigations and into the later Wittgenstein's speculations regarding the 'conventionality' of language and Meaning, it is instructive to look at Wittgenstein's example of a chess-game10. Challenging the Augustinian (and, one may infer, Fregean) analysis of Meaning i, Wittgenstein questions our ordinary, common sense view of a chess game. Although he admits that our syntax - or perhaps more appropriately, our 'rules of play' - dictate the division of thirty-two white and thirty-two black squares between two opponents, Wittgenstein nevertheless wonders whether our view of the board is so 'obviously and absolutely composite'. Thus, Wittgenstein asserts that we could rather choose to focus on the colour of the squares and their schema in place of the overall perspective of the game. Moreover, Wittgenstein breaks down the apparent dichotomy between 'particulars' and 'universals' by abstracting the form of the square from its colour-properties. Wittgenstein sums up his criticism of determinate object-reference in the following passage:
Asking - "Is this object composite" outside a particular language-game is like a boy once did, who had to say whether the verbs in certain sentences were in the active or the passive voice, and who racked his brain over the question whether the verb "to sleep" meant something active or passive' 11.
According to A J Ayer, 'Just as Wittgenstein came to reject the Augustinian conception of language which he had so wholeheartedly embraced in the Tractatus, so he ceased to maintain that reality consists of simple objects' 12.
To fill the gap left by the elimination of a formal correspondence between names and objects, Wittgenstein introduces his concept of a 'language-game' 13. Paradoxically, however, there is no one feature, for Wittgenstein, which is the 'essence' of a game. Games need not be competitive, they need not be fun and they need not involve a strict set of rules. Instead, games are a network of features, which criss-cross like threads of various lengths and material to produce 'family resemblances'. Numbers, for example, could follow a mathematical function or rule - much like the grammar of Sense and Reference. Nonetheless, there is also some 'paradigm' or formula in calling a catch or in saying a prayer. In contradistinction to Frege's formal calculus, a primitive language game could entail a builder calling for a set of blocks and commanding his workers to collect them14. As such, there is an indiscretion in the way Frege distinguished with such finality, between what is sense and what is an object or reference. Wittgenstein likens Meaning fortuitously to our perception and signification of 'colour'. On the one hand, we may elect to speak of the Universal, 'Redness' 15. This, on the other hand, can only be within a language-game and its form of life: impugning the criterion of a universal 'hue', Wittgenstein indicates that we could point instead to particular colour samples of red, which would open to negotiation the instantiation of colour in an object-frame. As Ruthrof suggests, in short, language is nuanced and Meaning is flexible or diverse. Although Meaning is not entirely 'arbitrary', there is infinite scope to its 'forms of life’ ii.
AN 'HEURISTIC' APPROACH TO MEANING
The arguments of J L Austin and Umberto Eco
The theories of Austin and Eco are attractive both for their syntactic categorisation of 'speech-acts' and for the semantic fluency of these categories. To begin with, Austin Austin Austin Cambridge Oxford Austin Austin Austin Austin
In Kant and the Platypus: Essays in Language and Cognition, Eco cites the platypus as a prototype of the way in which Meaning is generated18. Indebted to Peirce's semiology, Eco attempts to reconstruct the 'semiosic' route to naming that peculiar object, the platypus. Beginning with the 'Cognitive Type' (CT) of an independent observer, the token of the platypus becomes a recognised unit of 'perceptual meaning in the phenomenological tradition' to that observer, especially after repeated sighting. Subsequently, the CT may translate into a 'Nuclear Content' (NC) such that the 'platypus' can become an object of propositional report. In other words, the independent observer reports the 'platypus' to his colleagues or acquaintances, and they in turn have CT sightings. Finally the object of the 'platypus' becomes closer to a concept as the reference to a platypus is interpreted and re-interpreted: this is the 'Molar Content' (MC). From the crass referentiality of a platypus as an - object with fur and a beak - the platypus eventuates as a 'mammal already present at the Mesozoic' which can regulate its own body heat, firid food with ears closed and 'with renowned spear spurs to compete with other males in the mating season'! Without a sharp distinction between 'sense', 'concept' or 'object', the platypus is part of a continuum - a wondrous 'unity in manifold' 19.
CONCLUSION
By virtue of Austin's and Eco's reasoning, we come full circle to the problem of Meaning, and particularly to the issue of objective sense and reference. Adopting Kantian logic, we might argue that there is no clear boundary separating 'determining' from 'reflective' reasoning. On the one hand, Frege develops a coherent account of the groundwork of assertion and of the affinity between Thought and Truth. On the other hand, Ruthrof demonstrates that the speculative power of Frege's formal language cannot rule out the problem of semantics and contextual reference ('referential background'). Hence I have resorted to the flexibility of an heuristic theory, combining reference with syntax and conceptual content. In so doing, I hope to break down the fractious logic which has divided grammar or 'sense' from the significatory/semantic act of referring. This plan has been inspired by the iconoclasm of the later Wittgenstein, and the fluidity of his Philosophical Investigations. Though mine may not constitute a new theory of Meaning, it could at least 'prepare the way' for a subtler approach to language and language use.
Wittgenstein Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations GEM Anscombe (Tr), Macmillan , New York
i Wittgenstein attributes to St Augustine
It is a feature of the mental that the attribution of mental phenomena must be responsible to the background of reasons, beliefs, and intentions of the individua\... There is no assigning beliefs to a person one by one on the basis of his verbal behaviour, his choices or other local signs no matter how plain ancl'evident, for we make sense of particular beliefs only as they cohere with other beliefs, with preferences, with intentions, hopes,_fears, expectations and the rest.
1 Scruton Roger, Modern Philosophy: an Introduction and Survey, Sinclair-Stevenson Great Britain
2 Frege Gottlob, 'On Sense and Reference' in Translationsfrom the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Ed), Peter Geach and Max Black, Basil Blackwell, Oxford
3 Op cit n 1, see also generally Ayer A J, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Random House, New York
4 RuthrofHorst, Semantics and the Body: Meaningfrom Frege to the Postmodern, Melbourne University Press, Australia New Zealand
5 Op cit n 2.
6 Op cit n 4, pp 65-70. 7 Op citn 2.
8 Op citn 1, p 62.
9 Op cit n 4, pp 63-65, see also chapter 2.3 'Camap's Sleight of Hand', pp 76-106.
10 Wittgenstein Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations GEM Macmillan New York I.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid. See passim, Ayer A J, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Random House, New York
13 Op cit n 10, I, 66.
15 Op cit n 10, 1,47 and 22.
16 See discussion of Austin
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
Eco Umberto, Kant and the Platypus: Essays in Language and Cognition, Seeker and Warburg (Tr), Italy
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ayer, A J, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Random House, New York
Carnap, Rudolf, Meaning and Necessity, University of Chicago Chicago
Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, C V Spivak (Tr), John Hopkins University Baltimore
Devitt Michael and Sterelny, Language and Reality: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Language, Basil Blackwell, Oxford
Dummett, Michael, The Interpretation of Frege 's Philosophy, Harvard University Cambridge , MA
Eco, Umberto, Kant and the Platypus: Essays in Language and Cognition, Seeker and Warburg (Tr), Italy
Frege, Gottlob, 'On Sense and Reference' in Translations from the Philosophical Writings ofGottlob Frege (Ed), Peter Geach and Max Black, Basil Blackwell, Oxford
Hamlyn, D N, A History of Western Philosophy, P_nguin Books, Middlesex, 1987.
Passmore, John, One Hundred Years of Philosophy, Duckworth , Great Britain
Ruthrof, Horst, Semantics and the Body: Meaningfrom Frege to the Postmodern, Melbourne University Press , Australia New Zealand
Scruton, Roger, Modern Philosophy: an Introduction and Survey, Sinclair-Stevenson , Great Britain
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