Hilary
Putnam offers us some philosophers who've defended the notion of context-dependence when it comes not only to meaning; but also to
truth-conditions. Indeed, if we have one, then we must have the
other. The contextuality of meanings determines the fact that
truth-conditions are also contextual in nature:
“…
Wittgenstein and
Austin well before us, would argue that sentences do not normally
have context-independent truth conditions. It’s the meaning of the
sentence or the words plus the context that fixes the truth
conditions.” (232)
Putnam
means that we can't even begin to ‘fix the truth conditions’ of
words or sentences if we haven’t already fixed the meanings of
those words or sentences. And that fixing of meaning will be a
contextual matter. That is, we must move from the
- context-dependent meaning of ‘cat’ or ‘The cat is on the mat’.
- context-dependent truth-conditions of the word ‘cat’ or the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’.
Not
only that: even according to Tarski’s Convention T, all truth-conditions really are the named sentences disquoted, as in
(T)
S is truth iff p.
or
(T)
The sentence ‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.
If
the truth-conditions are the disquotation of the former named
sentence, and that sentence requires a meaning that is
context-dependent, then it follows that the truth-conditions (or the
sentential disquotation) will also be context-dependent: dependent
not only on the context-dependence of the meaning of ‘snow is
white’; but also on the context-dependence of our choosing the
truth-condition snow's being white (which isn't, however,
really a choice we can make with Convention T).
Putnam
believes that one of the main reasons for the denial of
context-dependence (or context-sensitivity, as in Frege, Dummett and
others) is the desire to make philosophy (or at least semantics) more
scientific and logical in nature. Thus more capable of securing
determinacy of sense and the objectivity of language and meaning. As
Putnam puts it:
“…
philosophy stands
almost entirely apart from [linguistics, semantics, and
lexicography], giving much too much significance to ideal language,
mathematical logic and all that.” (232)
In
the first half of the 20th century, most philosophers in the analytic
tradition virtually ignored relevant work in linguistics and
semantics and most definitely in lexicography. Even Strawson - who was
one of the first to reject the ideal of an ideal language (or even
its possibility or use) - wouldn’t have spent much time on (pure)
linguistics and (pure) semantics, let alone on lexicography!
These philosophers were dealing primarily with abstract entities like
senses, meanings and propositions. They did so with the tools of
mathematical logic. Thus it's hardly surprising that such
philosophers had no time for linguistics, semantics and certainly not for lexicography. To think that a linguist (or
semanticist) - let alone a lexicographer - could have told them the
true sense or proposition behind an expression would have seemed
outrageous or ludicrous to them. These are, after all, empirical
disciplines; whereas philosophy, logic and mathematical logic are a
priori disciplines which deal with what must be taken as a
platonic realm; even in the cases when the philosopher isn't
strictly speaking a platonist.
This
antipathy towards the ideal of an ideal language is neatly expressed
by Putnam:
“I
think that we still suffer from the idea that formalising a sentence
tells you what it 'really' says. Perhaps we are now doing something
similar with Chomskian linguistics.” (233)
It's
not just arrogant for a philosopher to tell us ‘what we really
mean’: it's also wrong. It can't be done. What they tell us (if
they tell us anything about our actual meaning) is what we should
have said or meant. And that normativity should - or would - have
depended on the ontological and logical commitments of the
philosopher concerned.
Thus
Bertrand Russell is well known for telling us what we really mean
when we say that ‘The king of France is bald’. What Russell
really meant by that is that we're making philosophical and logical
mistakes in such a formulation. Or, alternatively, that we're
committed to things which we don’t realise we're committed
to. Thus he was telling us what we should say and what we
should be logically/philosophically committed to. Not that we
are logically/philosophically committed to X. And Russell
certainly wasn't telling us what we really said or meant.
In
most cases (though not all), if we had wanted to say or mean
something else by what we said, we would have said something
else.
Would
we say, for example, that when a young child says that ‘4 + 2 = 7’
that he really meant to say ‘4 + 2 = 6’? What if someone says that ‘Tony Blair is
a shit’ and the philosopher says that he really meant ‘Tony Blair
is a bad Prime Minister’? Perhaps that’s what he should
have said. But he didn’t mean that; otherwise he would have said it
and meant it.
The
formalising of a sentence (whether by Russell or Dummett) is thus a
little like psychoanalysis. The psychoanalyst tells us, for example,
what our dreams or our locutions really mean; even though we
don't know what they really mean. Indeed almost by definition the
psychoanalyst (in these cases) believes that we mustn't (or can't)
really know what we mean by what we say (or what our dreams mean).
Thus
does the formalising philosopher also tell people that (almost by
definition) we can't know what we really mean because we
haven’t got the philosophical and logical skills to fully know (or
know at all) what we really mean. Similarly, the psychoanalyst also
has skills (or so he thinks) that we don't have and is thus
automatically entitled to tell us what we really mean by something or
other. Who knows, perhaps their psychoanalyst is being normative in
that he's really telling us not what we really mean; but what we
should mean by what we say and do.
It's
strange, then, that on this interpretation of what the formalising
philosopher does, he's essentially dealing in normativity when it
comes to formalising our sentences. That is, he's telling what we
should mean given the ontological and logical implications of
what we do actually say. Not only that: this also means that we
should be ontologically and logically committed to things that we
aren't at present committed to.
Thus
the normative dimension of formalising philosophy appears to be even
more normative in nature. Instead of discovering the deep truths
about propositions and meanings, the formalisers are really offering deep truths
about themselves or about what it is they're logically and
ontologically committed to.
If
that's the case, perhaps they should have come clean with both others
and themselves and told us that this is what in fact they were/are
doing.
Another
way to put all this is to agree with Wittgenstein and say that there
are no deep truths not only about what we say; but also in philosophy
as a whole. Everything "is on the surface". Any depths there are
belong to the minds of the philosophers who create those depths. If
they are only illusory depths (perhaps “cast by the shadows of our
language”), then we have good reasons to ignore what the
philosophers tell us about what we really mean. If anything is deep,
it's their minds. In that case, perhaps psychoanalysts should cast
their nets into the deep depths of the minds of formalising
philosophers and then they could tell us what they, not us, really
mean.
Putnam
then offers us an interesting and ironic take on these
philosophical formalisers. (Indeed perhaps some of these formalising
types would say that Putnam’s analysis of what they do is
‘psychologistic’ or even one large ad hominem.)
Putnam says:
“I
think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas
look mysterious – you write backward Es!” (233)
Who’s
to say that to some the use of mathematical logic will automatically
take us nearer to the truth about such matters? (The truth about
meaning for a start.) Just because mathematical logic is arcane and
an extra-special specialism - indeed just because it's also
‘mysterious’ (with its ‘backward Es’), does that
automatically mean that it will be of value – of any value – when
it comes to discovering things about the non-formal matters of
philosophy? Mathematical logic may help us in certain ways. (It will
help us formalise our problems for a start.) Though wouldn’t we
reach a point at which it would be of no help whatsoever?
Is
mathematical logic seen by some philosophers as the strange and
arcane symbols of ancient myths and religions were seen by people
like Newton and others – as keys to an otherwise impenetrable - though
deeper - world?
Perhaps we should finish here with a mention of an
appositely entitled book by Bertrand Russell – Mysticism and
Logic!
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