Quine’s Behaviorism and Linguistic Meaning: Why Quine’s Behaviorism is not Illicit

Some of Quine’s critics charge that he arrives at a behavioristic account of linguistic meaning by starting from inappropriately behavioristic assumptions (Kripke 1982, 14; Searle 1987, 123). Quine has even written that this account of linguistic meaning is a consequence of his behaviorism (Quine 1992, 37). I take it that the above charges amount to the assertion that Quine assumes the denial of one or more of the following claims: (1) Language-users associate mental ideas with their linguistic expressions. (2) A language-user can have a private theory of linguistic meaning which guides his or her use of language. (3) Language learning relies on innate mechanisms. Call an antecedent denial of one or more of these claims illicit behaviorism. In this paper I show that Quine is prepared to grant, if only for the sake of argument, all three of the above claims. I argue that his claim that “there is nothing in linguistic meaning beyond what is to be gleaned from overt behavior in observable circumstances” is unscathed by these allowances (Quine 1992, 38). And I show that the behaviorism which Quine does assume should be viewed as a largely uncontroversial aspect of his evidential empiricism. I conclude that if one sets out to dismiss Quine’s arguments for internal-meaning skepticism, this dismissal should not be motivated by the charge that his conclusions rely on the illicitly behavioristic assumptions that some have suggested that they do.     

Does the Quine/duhem Thesis Prevent Us from Defining Analyticity?

Quine claims that holism (i.e., the Quine-Duhem thesis) prevents us from defining synonymy and analyticity (section 2). In Word and Object, he dismisses a notion of synonymy which works well even if holism is true. The notion goes back to a proposal from Grice and Strawson and runs thus: R and S are synonymous iff for all sentences T we have that the logical conjunction of R and T is stimulus-synonymous to that of S and T. Whereas Grice and Strawson did not attempt to defend this definition, I try to show that it indeed gives us a satisfactory account of synonymy. Contrary to Quine, the notion is tighter than stimulus-synonymy – particularly when applied to sentences with less than critical semantic mass (section 3). Now according to Quine, analyticity could be defined in terms of synonymy, if synonymy were to make sense: A sentence is analytic iff synonymous to self-conditionals. This leads us to the following notion of analyticity: S is analytic iff, for all sentences T, the logical conjunction of S and T is stimulus-synonymous to T; an analytic sentence does not change the semantic mass of any theory to which it may be conjoined (section 4). This notion is tighter than Quine's stimulus-analyticity; unlike stimulus-analyticity, it does not apply to those sentences from the very center of our theories which can be assented to come what may, even though they are not synthetic in the intuitive sense (section 5).     

The dynamic lexicon in a truth-conditional framework; or how to have Your cake and eat it

A fundamental principle of all truth-conditional approaches to semantics is that the meanings of sentences of natural language can be compositionally specified in terms of truth conditions, where the meanings of the sentences’ parts (words/lexical items) are specified in terms of the contribution they make to such conditions their host sentences possess. Thus, meanings of words fit the meanings of sentences at least to the extent that the stability of what a sentence might mean as specified in a theory is in accord with the stability of what a word might mean as similarly specified. In this paper, I shall be concerned with Ludlow’s (2014) idea that, in fact, there need be no such sympathy between words and sentences. He proposes that we can square what he calls a dynamic lexicon, where word meaning is not stable at all, with a traditional truth-conditional approach of the kind indicated, where sentence meaning is delivered via ‘absolute truth conditions’. I share Ludlow’s aspiration to accommodate dynamic features of word meaning with a truth conditional approach, but not his belief that the marriage is an easy deal. Thus, I shall present a problem for Ludlow’s position and show how resolving this problem leads to an alternative picture of how the meaning of a sentence may be truth-conditionally specified with all relevant dynamic features of the lexicon retained.     

Quine's truth

W. V. Quine has made statements about truth which are not obviously compatible, and his statements have been interpreted in more than one way. For example, Donald Davidson claims that Quine has an epistemic theory of truth, but Quine himself often says that truth is just disquotational. This paper argues that Quine should recognize two different notions of truth. One of these is disquotational, the other is empiricist. There is nothing wrong with recognizing two different notions of truth. Both may be perfectly legitimate, even though, to some extent, they may be applicable in different contexts. Roughly speaking, a sentence is true in the empiricist sense if it belongs to a theory which entails all observation sentences which would be assented to by the speakers of the language in question (and no observation sentences which would be dissented from by these speakers). Various objections to this idea are discussed and rejected.     

Say What? On Grice On What Is Said

Abstract: In this paper I argue that there is a very important, though often neglected, dissimilarity between the two Gricean conceptions of ‘what is said’: the one presented in his William James Lectures and the one sketched in the ‘Retrospective Epilogue’ to his book Studies in the Way of Words. The main problem lies with the idea of speakers' commitment to what they say and how this is to be related to the conventional, or standard, meaning of the sentences uttered in the act of saying. Since the later notion of ‘what is said’, or ‘dictiveness’, is claimed to be logically independent from ‘formality’ (roughly, conventional meaning), Grice seems to maintain that there are cases in which content that is not expressed by a sentence in a context may nevertheless count as what is said. I propose an account of what is said that brings together the two apparently irreconcilable approaches. The price to be paid for a Gricean, however, is to accept a duality of behaviour between (natural language counterparts of) logical constants and logical variables.     

Can First-Order Logical Truth be Defined in Purely Extensional Terms?

W. V. Quine thinks logical truth can be defined in purely extensional terms, as follows: a logical truth is a true sentence that exemplifies a logical form all of whose instances are true. P. F. Strawson objects that one cannot say what it is for a particular use of a sentence to exemplify a logical form without appealing to intensional notions, and hence that Quine's efforts to define logical truth in purely extensional terms cannot succeed. Quine's reply to this criticism is confused in ways that have not yet been noticed in the literature. This may seem to favour Strawson's side of the debate. In fact, however, a proper analysis of the difficulties that Quine's reply faces suggests a new way to clarify and defend the view that logical truth can be defined in purely extensional terms.     

Human understanding

Contemporary thinkers either hold that meanings cannot be mental states, or that they are patterns of brain functions. But patterns of social, or brain, interactions cannot be that which we understand. Wittgenstein had another answer (not the one attributed to him by writers who ignore his work in psychology): understanding, he said, is seeing an item as embodying a type Q, thus constraining what items will be seen as the same. Those who cannot see things under an aspect are meaning-blind.That idea is expanded in this article. Its ontology consists of types only: entities that recur in space, time, and possible worlds. Types (Socrates, Man, Red, On, etc.) overlap; Socrates = Bald at some index and not in another. The logic used is thus that of contingent identity. Now some possible worlds are mentally represented; the entities that occur in them are meanings. But such entities may also recur in the real world. Thus the entities we experience, the phenomena, which serve as our meanings, may be identical in the real world with real things. A correspondence theory of truth is thus developed: a sentence is true iff its meaning constitutes, in a specified way, a real situation.     

Interpreting conjunctions

The interpretation generated from a sentence of the form P and Q can often be different to that generated by Q and P, despite the fact that and has a symmetric truth-conditional meaning. We experimentally investigated to what extent this difference in meaning is due to the connective and and to what extent it is due to order of mention of the events in the sentence. In three experiments, we collected interpretations of sentences in which we varied the presence of the conjunction, the order of mention of the events, and the type of relation holding between the events (temporally vs. causally related events). The results indicated that the effect of using a conjunction was dependent on the discourse relation between the events. Our findings contradict a narrative marker theory of and, but provide partial support for a single-unit theory derived from Carston (2002). The results are discussed in terms of conjunction processing and implicatures of temporal order.     

Constitutive Rules: Games,Language, and Assertion

Many philosophers think that games like chess, languages like English, and speech acts like assertion are constituted by rules. Lots of others disagree. To argue over this productively, it would be first useful to know what it would be for these things to be rule-constituted. Searle famously claimed in Speech Acts that rules constitute things in the sense that they make possible the performance of actions related to those things (Searle 1969). On this view, rules constitute games, languages, and speech acts in the sense that they make possible playing them, speaking them and performing them. This raises the question what it is to perform rule-constituted actions (e. g. play, speak, assert) and the question what makes constitutive rules distinctive such that only they make possible the performance of new actions (e. g. playing). In this paper I will criticize Searle's answers to these questions. However, my main aim is to develop a better view, explain how it works in the case of each of games, language, and assertion and illustrate its appeal by showing how it enables rule-based views of these things to respond to various objections.     

Beyond-personal love – Experiencing love beyond the person

ABSTRACT

Love is seen as interpersonal phenomenon in western society. The love of things that are non-interpersonal or ‘beyond-personal’ is less understood. A sample of 208 adults responded to a questionnaire asking what they loved, and how much they loved 61 common objects, activities, experiences and ideas. An exploratory factor analysis yielded five distinct categories of beyond-personal love including spiritual ideology, physical activity, material objects, hedonic experiences and social experiences. Loving physical activities predicted life satisfaction, happiness, and presence of meaning. Loving social experiences predicted happiness and presence of meaning. Loving hedonic experiences, spiritual ideas or material objects did not predict any of the outcome variables when all factors were considered, but material love was correlated with search for meaning. Results show that beyond-personal love can be considered adaptive, yet the target of beyond-personal love can predict whether one feels life satisfaction, feels subjectively happy or has meaning in one’s life.     

Truth in the Tractatus

My paper takes issue both with the standard view that the Tractatus contains a correspondence theory and with recent suggestions that it features a deflationary or semantic theory. Standard correspondence interpretations are mistaken, because they treat the isomorphism between a sentence and what it depicts as a sufficient condition of truth rather than of sense. The semantic/deflationary interpretation ignores passages that suggest some kind of correspondence theory. The official theory of truth in the Tractatus is an obtainment theory – a sentence is true iff the state of affairs it depicts obtains. This theory differs from deflationary theories in that it involves an ontology of states of affairs/facts; and it can be transformed into a type of correspondence theory: a sentence is true iff it corresponds to, i.e. depicts an obtaining state of affairs (fact). Admittedly, unlike correspondence theories as commonly portrayed, this account does not involve a genuinely truth-making relation. It features a relation of correspondence, yet it is that of depicting, between a meaningful sentence and its sense – a possible state of affairs. What makes for truth is not that relation, but the obtaining of the depicted state of affairs. This does not disqualify the Tractatus from holding a correspondence theory, however, since the correspondence theories of Moore and Russell are committed to a similar position. Alternatively, the obtainment theory can be seen as a synthesis of correspondence, semantic and deflationary approaches. It does justice to the idea that what is true depends solely on what is the case, and it combines a semantic explanation of the relation between a sentence and what it says with a deflationary account of the agreement between what the sentence says and what obtains or is the case if it is true     

Behavioral pragmatism: no place for reality and truth

The current article begins by reviewing L. J. Hayes's claim that pragmatism relies on a correspondence-based truth criterion. To evaluate her claim, the concept of the observation sentence, proposed by the pragmatist philosopher W. V. Quine, is examined. The observation sentence appears to remove the issue of correspondence from Quine's pragmatist philosophy. Nevertheless, the issue of correspondence reemerges, as the problem of homology, when Quine appeals to agreement between or among observation sentences as the basis for truth. Quine also argues, however, that the problem of homology (i.e., correspondence) should be ignored on pragmatic grounds. Because the problem is simply ignored, but not resolved, there appears to be some substance to Hayes's claim that pragmatism relies ultimately on correspondence as a truth criterion. Behavioral pragmatism is then introduced to circumvent both Hayes's claim and Quine's implicit appeal to correspondence. Behavioral pragmatism avoids correspondence by appealing to the personal goals (i.e., the behavior) of the scientist or philosopher as the basis for establishing truth. One consequence of this approach, however, is that science and philosophy are robbed of any final or absolute objectives and thus may not be a satisfactory solution to philosophers. On balance, behavioral pragmatism avoids any appeal to correspondence-based truth, and thus it cannot be criticized for generating the same philosophical problems that have come to be associated with this truth criterion.     

The Three Quines

This paper concerns Quine's stance on the issue of meaning normativity. I argue that three distinct and not obviously compatible positions on meaning normativity can be extracted from his philosophy of language - eliminative ]naturalism (Quine I), deflationary pragmatism (Quine II), and (restricted) strong normativism (Quine III) - which result from Quine's failure to separate adequately four different questions that surround the issue: the reality, source, sense, and scope of the normative dimension. In addition to the incompatibility of the views taken together, I argue on the basis of considerations due to Wittgenstein, Dummett, and Davidson that each view taken separately has self-standing problems. The first two fail to appreciate the ineliminability of the strong normativity of logic and so face a dilemma: they either smuggle it in illicitly, or insofar as they do not, fail to give an account of anything like a language. The third position's mixture of a universalism about logical concepts with a thorough-going relativism about non-logical concepts can be challenged once a distinction is drawn between the universalist and contextualist readings of strong normativity, a distinction inspired by Wittgenstein's distinction between grammatical and empirical judgements.     

The assertion-candidate and the meaning of mood

The meaning of a declarative sentence and that of an interrogative sentence differ in their aspect of mood. A semantics of mood has to account for the differences in meaning between these sentences, and it also has to explain that sentences in different moods may have a common core. The meaning of the declarative mood is to be explained not in terms of actual force (contra Dummett), but in terms of potential force. The meaning of the declarative sentence (including its mood) is called the assertion-candidate, which is explained by what one must know in order to be entitled to utter the declarative with assertive force. Both a cognitive notion (knowledge) and a pragmatic notion (assertive force) are thus part of the explanation of the assertion-candidate. Davidson’s criticism that such a theory is in need of an account of the distinction between standard and non-standard uses of the declarative is answered: without counter-indications an utterance of a declarative sentence is understood as having assertive force. The meaning of an interrogative sentence, the question-candidate, and that of the other sentence types can ultimately be explained in terms of their specific relations to the assertion-candidate. Martin-Löf’s constructive type theory is used to show the philosophical relevance of a semantics of mood. The constructivist notion of proposition needs to be embedded in a theory of the assertion-candidate, which fulfils the offices of being the meaning of the declarative sentence, the content of judgement and assertion and the bearer of epistemic truth.     

Meaning Approached Via Proofs

According to a main idea of Gentzen the meanings of the logical constants are reflected by the introduction rules in his system of natural deduction. This idea is here understood as saying roughly that a closed argument ending with an introduction is valid provided that its immediate subarguments are valid and that other closed arguments are justified to the extent that they can be brought to introduction form. One main part of the paper is devoted to the exact development of this notion. Another main part of the paper is concerned with a modification of this notion as it occurs in Michael Dummett’s book The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. The two notions are compared and there is a discussion of how they fare as a foundation for a theory of meaning. It is noted that Dummett’s notion has a simpler structure, but it is argued that it is less appropriate for the foundation of a theory of meaning, because the possession of a valid argument for a sentence in Dummett’s sense is not enough to be warranted to assert the sentence.     

Early, Mandatory, Pragmatic Processing

The experiment reported in this paper used a delayed same/different sentence matching task with concurrent measurement of eye movements to investigate three questions: whether pragmatic plausibility effects are restricted to certain phrasal environments; how rapidly such effects are shown in on-line sentence processing; and whether they are a product of optional, high-level, inferential processes. The results clearly show that plausibility effects are not restricted to low–level phrasal units and that they appear to arise as a necessary consequence of the process responsible for deriving basic sentence meaning. The rapid and highly localized nature of the effects supports a view of sentence processing involving incremental interpretation of the earliest available syntactic representations. We argue that the apparently mandatory nature of plausibility effects, coupled with their insensitivity to repetition context, presents difficulties for both modular and interactive views of sentence processing.     

Davidson,correspondence truth and the frege-Gödel—church argument

This paper argues for a conditional claim concerning a famous argument—developed by Church in elucidation of some remarks by Frege to the effect that the bedeutung of a sentence is the sentence’s truth-value—the Frege–Gödel–Church argument, or FGC for short. The point we make is this :if, and just to the extent that, Arthur Smullyan’s argument against Quine's use of FGC is sound, then essentially the same rejoinder disposes also of Davidson's use of FGC against ‘correspondence’ theories of truth. We thus dispute a contention by Professor Davidson that it is coherent to accept that Smullyan’s rejoinder takes away the force of Quine’s version of FGC, while still consistently using FGC to establish that if true sentences (or utterances) correspond to anything, they all correspond to the same thing. We show that the differences between the cases discussed by Smullyan and Davidson’s version of FGC on which Davidson relies for his contention are irrelevant to the point under dispute