A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

This is a highly unpleasant paper to read. I am not an analytical philosopher for good reasons.

I think this is a terrible way to approach the topic of comprehension or communication.

"Here is a highly simplified and idealised proposal about what goes on. An interpreter has, at any moment of a speech transaction, what I persist in calling a theory... To put this differently: the theory we actually use to interpret an utterance is geared to the occasion. We may decide later we could have done better by the occasion, but this does not mean (necessarily) that we now have a better theory for the next occasion." Ibid. pg. 260

It seems to me this entire approach is shattered and eclipsed by cultural psychology. Further, Davidson is here speaking of actions divorced from their historical contexts, as if the premises he is arriving at have some kind of meaning apart from their cultural history.

"The speaker wants to be understood, so he intends to speak in such a way that he will be interpreted in a certain way." Ibid.

Does he now?

I find it exceedingly hard to subject myself to this:

"I have distinguished what I have been calling the prior theory from what I shall henceforth call the passing theory. For the hearer, the prior theory expresses how he is prepared in advance to interpret an utterance of the speaker, while the passing theory is how he does interpret the utterance. For the speaker, the prior theory is what he believes the interpreter’s prior theory to be, while his passing theory is the theory he intends the interpreter to use. I am now in a position to state a problem that arises if we accept the distinction between the prior and the passing theory and also accept the account of linguistic competence given by principles (1)–(2)." Ibid. pg.261

Maybe have a little fun to redeem the time it took to read it:

"The asymptote
of agreement and
understanding
is when passing theories coincide.

But the passing theory
cannot in general
correspond to an interpreter’s
linguistic competence.

Not only does it have its changing list
of proper names and
gerrymandered
vocabulary,
but it includes every successful--
correctly interpreted—
use of any other word or phrase,
no matter how far out of the ordinary."

How to know this?
Perhaps one just creates it?

"Every deviation from ordinary usage, as long as it is agreed on for the moment..."

Agreed on it? Agree on it? What's this, the hidden axiom of the interpreter?

"A passing theory is not a theory of what anyone (except perhaps a philosopher) would call an actual natural language." Ibid. pg.261

No one but a philosopher? Yes, indeed, this tells us a great deal about [analytical] philosophers!

But Mr. Davidson, at least the paper has some kind of value?

"Mastery’ of such a language would be useless, since knowing a passing theory is only knowing how to interpret a particular utterance on a particular occasion." Ibid.

What's this then we are discussing? Strange particulars?

"The answer is that when a word or phrase temporarily or locally takes over the role of some other word or phrase (as treated in a prior theory, perhaps), the entire burden of that role, with all its implications for logical relations to other words, phrases, and sentences, must be carried along by the passing theory." Ibid.

But "A passing theory is not a theory of what anyone (except perhaps a philosopher) would call an actual natural language." Ibid.

"In fact we always have the interpreter in mind; there is no such thing as how we expect, in the abstract, to be interpreted. We inhibit our higher vocabulary, or encourage it, depending on the most general considerations, and we cannot fail to have premonitions as to which of the proper names we know are apt to be correctly understood." Ibid. pg.261

I like this, language is not so logical after all.

"In any case, my point is this: most of the time prior theories will not be shared,and there is no reason why they should be. Certainly it is not a condition of successful communication that prior theories be shared..." Ibid.

"Neither the prior theory nor the passing theory describes what we would call the language a person knows..." Ibid.

Mr. Davidson, I am struggling to see why you even wrote this paper?

"Perhaps it will be said that what is essential to the mastery of a language is not knowledge of any particular vocabulary, or even detailed grammar, much less knowledge of what any speaker is apt to succeed in making his words and sentences mean. What is essential is a basic framework of categories and rules, a sense of the way English (or any) grammars may be constructed, plus a skeleton list of interpreted words for fitting into the basic framework." Ibid.

I can move in this direction. I see mastery as an important topic.

"This characterization of linguistic ability is so nearly circular that it cannot be wrong: it comes to saying that the ability to communicate by speech consists in the ability to make oneself understood, and to understand. It is only when we look at the structure of this ability that we realize how far we have drifted from standard ideas of language mastery. For we have discovered no learnable common core of consistent behaviour, no shared grammar or rules, no portable interpreting machine set to grind out the meaning of an arbitrary utterance. We may say that linguistic ability is the ability to converge on a passing theory from time to time—this is what I have suggested, and I have no better proposal. But if we do say this, then we should realize that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally." Ibid. Pg.264-265

I'm not sure why the assumption of knowing a language should specifically be contained in its rules, like with everything else, it's the psychology that makes the rules.

"I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases..." Ibid.

Am I wrong or is this the conclusion of a loaded premise based on premises (1), (2) and (3)?

"(1) First meaning is systematic. A competent speaker or interpreter is able to interpret utterances, his own or those of others, on the basis of the semantic properties of the parts, or words, in the utterance, and the structure of the utterance. For this to be possible, there must be systematic relations between the meanings of utterances.

"(2) First meanings are shared. For speaker and interpreter to communicate successfully and regularly, they must share a method of interpretation of the sort described in (1).

"(3) First meanings are governed by learned conventions or regularities. The systematic knowledge or competence of the speaker or interpreter is learned in advance of occasions of interpretation and is conventional in character." Ibid. pg.254

There "is no such thing as a language" because we fail to quantify it with the analytical method? This is a bearing on analyticity as opposed to language.

I found it quite an amusing read.

I was reminded of this piece on thinking again about the following anecdote...

Wittgenstein’s friend has had surgery. Wittgenstein asks him how he feels. “Like a dog that’s been hit by a truck”, the friend wearily groans. Wittgenstein replies angrily: “How would you know what a dog feels after being hit by a truck?"

Wittgenstein had all too serious, literal perspective on language, a result of his austere attitude towards life generally. Despite this his admonition to look to use rather than to meaning out put us in a good position to deal with metaphor and malaprop.

Less so for Davidson, who here is reneging on some of his earlier thought.

Davidson posits three principles that might allow for a first meaning. They are that it be systematic, shared and governed by learned conventions. Malapropisms undermine this last principle. By its very nature it breaks those learned conventions.

There's this interesting piece: "A speaker cannot, therefore, intend to mean something by what he says unless he believes his audience will interpret his words as he intends". And hence, "Humpty Dumpty is out of it. He cannot mean what he says he means because he knows that ‘There’s glory for you’ cannot be interpreted by Alice as meaning ‘There’s a nice knockdown argument for you’. " I like that.

More anon.

Quoting JerseyFlight

There "is no such thing as a language" because we fail to quantify it with the analytical method? This is a bearing on analyticity as opposed to language.

:up:

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Davidson talks somewhat briefly about achieving understanding as an interactive process. Would that he had spent a bit more time relating this to the notion of triangulation that he articulated elsewhere - as it stands it is a sort of biangulation between speaker and interpreter. But in every instance, a new use must be re-interpreted without the benefit of precedent; or rather, despite precedent.

Davidson draws our attention to the willingness of a speaker to undermine convention, or even to use it to undermine itself:

There is no word or construction that cannot be converted to a new use by an ingenious or ignorant speaker.

It seems that in a world were "research" consists in watching a ten-minute video by some dilettante on YouTube, it's considered too much to ask folk not just to read, but to contemplate, a considered article.

Given that the topic, and the conclusion, the replies so far have not been without a certain irony. Yes, indeed, Davidson's article is an example of language undermining itself; of course, this is what he intended; That's his glory for you.

Reply to Banno

I'll pitch in after I get a chance to re-read the paper, but it might be a few more days.

Mrs Malaprop perhaps made mistakes in her use of language; Sheridan didn't. He put those words into her mouth with intent.

As for replying to those posts above, we might reapply Dogberry's advice to the watchmen:

If you meet a thief, you may suspect him, by virtue
of your office, to be no true man; and, for such
kind of men, the less you meddle or make with them,
why the more is for your honesty.

Quoting Banno

Davidson's article is an example of language undermining itself

So what? And? We suddenly can't use it because it fails to meet Davidson's analytical criteria? Such a conclusion is impossible given the vast world of knowledge that language has spawned. I consider these kind of considerations to be a waste of time. They are formal in a way that doesn't even matter, for God sake man, look at Davidson's ridiculous conclusion: there is no such thing as a language. These are idealistic problems, they are not real problems, the world is full of real problems caused by idealistic reasoning.

Quoting JerseyFlight

I consider these kind of considerations to be a waste of time.

Then please, spend more time here telling of it...

Quoting Banno

Then please, spend more time here telling of it...

Contrary to the assumption behind your premise, there is a value to it. That value is in recovering quality minds from the irrelevance of this abstraction.

Back to the topic...

It's worth considering Wittgenstein's family resemblance here. No one thread runs through the length of the rope. Yet the rope is considered a whole, an individual.

Davidson goes further in pointing out that in the case of language, if any rule be presented then immediately it may be undermined. There can, then, be no set of conventions or rules that can be relied on to set out what that language is.

Edit: this bit:

First, any general framework, whether conceived as a grammar for English, or a rule for accepting grammars, or a basic grammar plus rules for modifying or extending it—any such general framework, by virtue of the features that make it general, will by itself be insufficient for interpreting particular utterances. The general framework or theory, whatever it is, may be a key ingredient in what is needed for interpretation, but it can’t be all that is needed since it fails to provide the interpretation of particular words and sentences as uttered by a particular speaker. In this respect it is like a prior theory, only worse because it is less complete.

Quoting Banno

Then your time is not entirely wasted, but makes use of your capacity to recognise a quality mind.

We are already getting into analytical semantics, not my cup of tea friend. I never said my time here was a waste, I said 'I consider these kind of considerations a waste.' And you should as well. You have a superb mind, why spend it on stuff like this? Davidson will not carry into the warming future as providing some kind of vital knowledge or clarification to humans. His considerations are just intellectual hedonism void of responsibility. My thought is that we must get beyond this kind of stuff. Thought is an incredible power, but it can waste itself by deliberating on what is futile. Life is the agent that thrusts the spear of relevance, we do not create it, life dictates it. Further, life is already discriminating against abstraction... but I am not against abstraction, who could ever sustain such a thing, I am against its irrelevance.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

but it might be a few more days.

By then there is a good chance the thread will be overrun by piss-ants.

...for if one sets out such a general framework for language, then it will be incomplete.

That strikes me as parallel to the incompleteness theorem. Malapropisms as diagonalisation...

Reply to JerseyFlight

Here's something I posted years ago:

There's a touching passage in Tarski's little Introduction to Logic that I'll quote in full here:

I shall be very happy if this book contributes to the wider diffusion of logical knowledge. The course of historical events has assembled in this country the most eminent representatives of contemporary logic, and has thus created here especially favorable conditions for the development of logical thought. These favorable conditions can, of course, be easily overbalanced by other and more powerful factors. It is obvious that the future of logic, as well as of all theoretical science, depends essentially upon normalizing the political and social relations of mankind, and thus upon a factor which is beyond the control of professional scholars. I have no illusions that the development of logical thought, in particular, will have a very essential effect upon the process of the normalization of human relationships; but I do believe that the wider diffusion of the knowledge of logic may contribute positively to the acceleration of this process. For, on the one hand, by making the meaning of concepts precise and uniform in its own field and by stressing the necessity of such a precision and uniformization in any other domain, logic leads to the possibility of better understanding between those who have the will to do so. And, on the other hand, by perfecting and sharpening the tools of thought, it makes men more critical--and thus makes less likely their being misled by all the pseudo-reasonings to which they are in various parts of the world incessantly exposed today.

That's Tarski writing from Harvard in 1940, having fled Poland before the German invasion.


Now will you please stop cluttering the forum with this drivel about what "true thinkers" should or shouldn't do. It is beyond tiresome. Do some philosophy or shut up.

I have no illusions that the development of logical thought, in particular, will have a very essential effect upon the process of the normalization of human relationships; but I do believe that the wider diffusion of the knowledge of logic may contribute positively to the acceleration of this process. For, on the one hand, by making the meaning of concepts precise and uniform in its own field and by stressing the necessity of such a precision and uniformization in any other domain, logic leads to the possibility of better understanding between those who have the will to do so.

People are already doing this and have been doing it for quite some time, that is, having "better understanding." There are people who work with blind children, deaf children, abused children, they make use of language and they actually get somewhere with it!

What you are doing by citing Tarski is trying to validate your abstract program without actually having to engage your burden of proof. Because you like to play these kind of words games, of course you want to presume they have maximum value, but they don't. Bryan Magee in his book "Confessions of a Philosopher," speaks against exactly the kind of thing you are doing. He explains that he became disgusted with philosophy because of it.

This is a vitally important conversation, one where you do not get a free pass on your presumption of value. However, this is not the thread to hash it out on. I tried to contact you privately, I was not rude, I did not attack you, I merely called out your presumption of value, but you never got back to me.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Now will you please stop cluttering the forum with this drivel about what "true thinkers" should or shouldn't do.

Aside from being a poisoning of the well fallacy, the questions of relevance and intellectual responsibility do not fall into the category of "clutter" or "drivel," I expect something better than name calling or ad hominem from analytical philosophers. No one needs to take my word for it, Peter Unger, who is far more intelligent than you, has already said that analytical philosophy is "nonsense," just a bunch of "empty ideas."

Quoting JerseyFlight

However, this is not the thread to hash it out on

No shit.

No one on this forum wants a lecture from you about how they should be spending their time instead; no one wants you to intrude in their thread to tell them you think it's pointless.

Please stop doing that.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

No one on this forum wants a lecture from you about how they should be spending their time instead; no one wants you to intrude in their thread to tell them you think it's pointless. Please stop doing that.

Pardon me, but Banno posted this thread asking every single member on this Forum what they thought about Davidson's paper. Reading the paper, does in fact, entitle me to comment on it, which I did. It's nonsense: "there is no such thing as a language."

There is a philosophical way to settle disputes and it is not the way you are going about it here. Your reply is authoritarian and emotive, it is not logical. A thread is not a place where all your friends get together and agree with your conclusions.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

Let's get back to the point shall we, unless you want to carry on with your authoritarian emotivism?

Banno said:

Quoting Banno

Davidson's article is an example of language undermining itself

And my reply was, so what? 'We suddenly can't use it because it fails to meet Davidson's analytical criteria? Such a conclusion is impossible given the vast world of knowledge that language has spawned.'

My refutation bypasses the skepticism of Davidson's position because it notes that language is already doing things in the world. My point is that the arguments in this paper don't matter, it's just a bunch of abstract formalism. How do you refute my position? Please note: authoritarianism is not a refutation, and neither is calling me names because you're frustrated that I poked a hole in your program.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner While your intent was to keep the ants away, you may have inadvertently lain down a sugar trail...

Quoting Banno

While your intent was to keep the ants away, you may have inadvertently lain down a sugar trail...

This is not philosophy, but it is a form of derogation. Elitist discrimination? I don't get it, not sure what calling me an ant has to do with Davidson? The Nazis used to call Jews rats and many other derogatory terms. What is it called when people do this kind of thing, I can't quite remember? Why do people do this?

"Name-calling is a cognitive bias and a technique to promote propaganda. Propagandists use the name-calling technique to invoke fear in those exposed to the propaganda, resulting in the formation of a negative opinion about a person, group, or set of beliefs or ideas. The method is intended to provoke conclusions and actions about a matter apart from an impartial examinations of the facts of the matter. When this tactic is used instead of an argument, name-calling is thus a substitute for rational, fact-based arguments against an idea or belief, based upon its own merits, and becomes an abusive argumentum ad hominem."

That's just how analytical philosophers roll though, right?

Quoting JerseyFlight

Reading the paper, does in fact, entitle me to comment on it, which I did. It's nonsense: "there is no such thing as a language."

Try exercising some nuanced thinking. Or would that be too "abstract" and/or "idealist" for you? To say there is no such thing as a language is not the same as to say there is no such thing as language. To make the latter claim would indeed be absurd.

And stop accusing others of invoking authority, when that is virtually all you do. I have yet to see a cogent argument from you anywhere on this forum; all you seem to offer are bare assertions.

Quoting Janus

To say there is no such thing as a language is not the same as to say there is no such thing as language.

I am aware of what Davidson said, but here your distinction doesn't matter: "I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with."

This is a mere formal conclusion in the sense that there is something to be learned. You would indeed teach your child a language. The sense in which there is no language doesn't matter! Like I already said, and my conclusion is accurate: This is a bearing on analyticity as opposed to language.

Quoting Janus

Try exercising some nuanced thinking. Or would that be too "abstract" and/or "idealist" for you? To say there is no such thing as a language is not the same as to say there is no such thing as language. To make the latter claim would indeed be absurd.

And stop accusing others of invoking authority, when that is virtually all you do. I have yet to see a cogent argument from you anywhere on this forum; all you seem to offer are bare assertions.

No, you are offering up a base assertion right here.

Both the former and latter claim are absurd. This is a word game where the word "Language" has been unreasonably too far removed from the common consensus for what it means in all meaningful practical settings. Including a philosophy class and abstract thought. If there is no such thing as a language, then if the replacement system is also not a language then using that word instead of using something more appropriate to what is really meant by this not-a-language-but-still-language thing. It's also not even a long game, it's a short one. Meaning neither I nor anyone else has to agree to the rules of it. We don't agree with a rule that states "language" means something else that hasn't even been clearly defined as an appropriate replacement for it.

Cogent responses are an interesting thing to bring up. @Janus Yours isn't even substantive enough to be wrong or right. Just incomplete. You do seem to be getting emotional about this and you aren't being very charitable at all.

I'm assuming this is because you and others are trying to be smug elsewhere even though you've done practically nothing to be smug about. Just being disrespectful and condescending for no good reason.

the ability to communicate by speech consists in the ability to make oneself understood,

...and so to the nearly circular conclusion.

For we have discovered no learnable com- mon core of consistent behaviour, no shared grammar or rules, no portable interpreting machine set to grind out the meaning of an arbitrary utterance.

...and...

that it is derived by wit, luck, and wisdom from a private vocabulary and grammar, knowledge of the ways people get their point across, and rules of thumb for figuring out what deviations from the dictionary are most likely. There is no more chance of regularizing, or teaching, this process than there is of regularizing or teaching the process of creating new theories to cope with new data in any field—for that is what this process involves.

Wonderful stuff. A language isn't algorithmic; it does not conform; there are no fixed rules. The rules of any language game are subject to change, on the whim of the participants. Linguistics can never be complete - and in a way not too dissimilar to that described by Gödel for Mathematics.

Davidson's reputation was built on an attempt at just such an (semi-)algorithmic method, using t-sentences. So is this a great reversal for Davidson? To some extent, yes, but then Davidson's program was always moderated by interpretation.

Quoting JerseyFlight

This is a bearing on analyticity as opposed to language.

Yes. It also speaks of the blindness of some philosophers to linguistics as a science. Witgenstein should have read Saussure, it would have avoided him much embarrassment. And Davidson should have read Chomsky.

-Quoting Banno

Wonderful stuff. A language isn't algorithmic; it does not conform; there are no fixed rules. The rules of any language game are subject to change, on the whim of the participants. Linguistics can never be complete - and in a way not too dissimilar to that described by Gödel for Mathematics.

Perfect, you've managed to squeeze Davidson down to a paragraph. Language isn't exactly like mathematics and it doesn't try to be, so I don't see why this matters so much? As for "wonderful stuff," that doesn't belong to Davidson, that belongs to all the social workers and developmental psychologists who are using language to try to help wounded humans. You can throw out the algorithm discovery all day long, but what does it do? You will still be using language just like we are still using mathematics after Gödel. And what matters most of all, is not papers like Davidson's, but those who figure how to use words to make the world a better place. Should we get a million people to read this paper by Davidson, or should we get a million people to read, "The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog," by Perry and Szalavitz? There is no contest. What these authors are doing in terms of relevance blows Davidson out of the water. And remember, life is short, so this is a decision we must make over and over again, and this is what I know: analytical philosophy loses.

Hammers and nails...

For fuck's sake. Someone against the paper:Make your case. Someone against analytic philosophy, go elsewhere or again:make your case.

I'll read the paper and decide what I want to do after Reply to Banno . I've a bit of time on my hands, due to quarantine from travel... covid regs and all.

Quoting Banno

The argument seems at first blush to be that malapropisms cannot, by their very nature, be subsumed and accounted for by such conventions of language. Is that the whole of Davidson's argument, and is it cogent?

Hmmm. I had a quick read and a half, and will reread tomorrow.

We have options here.

(A) Is Davidson's argument valid? Is he right that his principles (1)-(3) cannot account for what I guess we'll call successful use of language?

(B) Are principles (1)-(3) actually descriptive of anyone's views? Davidson himself is certainly a candidate, but is anyone else? (Not attempting a survey, but we might want some of an answer for (C), coming up.)

(C) If his argument is valid, and we reject views well-described by his three principles, are there other approaches out there that handle malapropisms better?

(D) If we fail to find an existing theory that handles malapropisms happily, does that tell us anything general about the prospects for a grand theory of language, or only that an important dataset has been overlooked? (It's now been decades since ANDOE, so there is essentially zero chance that this dataset is still being overlooked in academic circles. I shudder to think how many papers this paper is directly responsible for.)

I will try to look carefully at the argument tomorrow. On the one hand, it wouldn't surprise me if Davidson's overall view of language use could be shown to be untenable, because it is a fanatically impoverished approach. On the other hand, Davidson has a way of constructing arguments that I can only describe as "untrustworthy", so I will tend to be a little skeptical of even Davidson's own views being refuted by Davidson.

When I first read this paper many years ago, I had not read Grice yet, so all of the nods to Grice went right by me. Now that I have read and thought about Grice a fair amount, the invocation of Grice here and there is just puzzling. I'll think about that too.

What is really shocking though is that he doesn't even mention David Lewis, who at the conclusion of Convention (published 1969) suggested that, while there are two general approaches to language, an idealized model like Tarski's or a more sociological approach like Wittgenstein or Grice [hide="*"](not that far really from langue and parole or competence and performance)[/hide], and he finds value in both, it is entirely possible that no one ever really speaks a language in the idealized model sense. (And then we get a little bonus mini-theory of what they might be doing.)

So this is a little bizarre right? Convention was not a nothing book. (And certainly by the mid-80s Lewis was well-known.) It carries a preface from Quine about how Lewis took up Quine's challenge [hide="*"](it's Lewis's Ph.D. thesis and Quine was his supervisor)[/hide] to make some sense of the idea of convention and show its relevance to language -- he doesn't quite change his mind, as I recall, but he does admit that Lewis has made one hell of a case.

And then Davidson's argument turns overwhelmingly, he says, not on (1) and (2) -- closer to his own heart -- but on (3), and the very last line has a swipe at convention that could have come from a Quine paper some 30 or 40 years earlier!

So is the whole thing actually a veiled attack on Lewis? (I had a quick browse and for provocation there's at least a paper by Lewis from the mid-70s on "radical interpretation" and a quick scan of that suggests that Lewis was not exactly supportive of the program.)

That's a big pile of chitchat. I'll try to have something substantive to say tomorrow.

Reply to creativesoul :grin:

I am quite enjoying this. Through gritted teeth. Give folk enough rope, and they can't help themselves.

Reply to Banno

I understand one part of it now: he brings up Grice only to dismiss him.

I dip into these matters only to distinguish them from the problem raised by malapropisms and the like. The problems touched on in the last two paragraphs all concern the ability to interpret words and constructions of the kind covered by our conditions (1)–(3); the questions have been what is required for such interpretation, and to what extent various competencies should be considered linguistic.

The first paragraph referred to is about ambiguity, and the order of the clauses in a conjunction. That includes this:

But part of the burden of this paper is that much that they ((i.e., competent interpreters)) can do ought not to count as part of their basic linguistic competence.

The second includes this:

Whether knowledge of these principles ought to be included in the description of linguistic competence may not have to be settled: on the one hand they are things a clever person could often figure out without previous training or exposure and they are things we could get along without.

We're a few pages in. Davidson has given the examples he finds challenging or puzzling, and explained how he's going to use the phrase "first meaning". Why does he bring up Grice? He has to. Grice's whole theory is based on distinguishing sentence meaning from speaker meaning, and Grice defends a view that we can still talk about sentence meaning as literal meaning. That is, in Grice's classic cases, we use words with their usual literal meaning to mean something different from what those words say, and we can be understood when we do this because there are rules that govern conversation.

Davidson is first of all making the point, made near the beginning of ever so many papers, that the case he wants to focus on is not covered by prior art. You might think that's something like, "This is worth talking about because, cool as Grice is, his theory doesn't cover my case." But what Davidson says in dismissing Grice is that the "abilities" (the word he'll use in the next paragraph) Grice describes are not specifically linguistic abilities, and anyway they're common sense, and anyway we don't "really" need them.

So what's going on here? Davidson is going to restrict the usage of "linguistic competence" to cover only the understanding of literal meaning, and not how we use language to communicate, if "communicate" is understood to mean letting others know what we mean (speaker's meaning) given a shared understanding of the literal meaning of our words. Of course he can choose to talk about whatever he likes, but to call this the only part of language use that is properly linguistic is tendentious and he knows it: he is dismissing all of pragmatics as having nothing essential to do with language. It's just common sense -- stuff a clever person could figure out -- and we "could get along without" it.

What does that last little comment mean? It means we -- i.e., Davidson -- can imagine a language that is fully disambiguated, does not rely on indexicals, has a prescribed sentence structure, has a stock of names large enough not to rely on any local speech community's usage, and is only ever used literally. (I probably left some things out, but you get the idea.) That is, while we don't speak an idealized Tarski-like language, we could, and the fact that we could means that whatever pragmatics has to say about language use is only about how we happen (strangely) to use the languages we happen (sadly) to have. In a perfect world, we wouldn't need it.

And there is an argument here about priority, which is why there's all the talk about first meaning and what comes first in order of interpretation. There are the usual two points here:

• (i) If I only understand what you mean by figuring out that you did not mean what you said literally, I must have figured out the literal meaning of your words first -- temporal priority. (ii) If what you mean is to be characterized as something different from the literal meaning of your words, then I rely on the literal meaning of your words to characterize what you said -- logical priority.

I don't see any reason to contest either of these points, but I will point out how un-Gricean it is to start here. People only blurt indicative sentences at each other because they intend to communicate. Grice doesn't have a principle of charity, which is an interpretive strategy, but a principle of cooperation, which binds speaker and audience in a shared enterprise.

This is not to say that there is something wrong with trying to understand the specific mechanism by which we communicate, but Davidson insists on describing how the machine works without acknowledging what the machine is for, and rules out discussion of what people use the machine for as irrelevant.

Malapropisms introduce expressions not covered by prior learning, or familiar expressions which cannot be interpreted by any of the abilities so far discussed. Malapropisms fall into a different category, one that may include such things as our ability to perceive a well-formed sentence when the actual utterance was incomplete or grammatically garbled, our ability to interpret words we have never heard before, to correct slips of the tongue, or to cope with new idiolects.

This is where the paper's argument properly begins, so this is where I will stop for now. On the one hand he's inclined to dismiss pragmatic considerations on principle, but he also thinks the analysis of malapropisms will justify this dismissal. What we may want to look out for is Davidson denying pragmatics the resources to explain malapropisms on the grounds that he has already ruled out pragmatics.

Reply to Banno

Should have said something about how Davidson treats intention in his definition of "first meaning", but we can come back to that.

Quoting Banno

The argument seems at first blush to be that malapropisms cannot, by their very nature, be subsumed and accounted for by such conventions of language. Is that the whole of Davidson's argument, and is it cogent?

I agree with the concept of Wittgenstein's family resemblance, and I agree with Davidson's conclusion "We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases", but I don't agree with Davidson's use of the malapropism to argue his case.

Consider the malapropism "I dance the flamingo", which is linked with "I dance the flamenco"

The quality of malapropism isn't exhibited in a single word or phrase, such as "flamingo"

The quality of malapropism isn't exhibited in a single sentence, as a sentence such as "I dance the flamingo" is just as meaningful as the sentence "I dance the flamenco"

Malapropism is exhibited in the relationship between two sentences, in that a sentence exhibits malapropism if it is different to the sentence the interpreter was expecting.

When Davidson says "malapropisms introduce expressions not covered by prior learning", it is true the relationship between the two sentences hasn't been covered by prior learning, but it isn't true that a malapropism introduces an expression (defined as a word or phrase used to convey an idea) not covered by prior learning

As the quality of a malapropism is in the relationship between two sentences, malapropism is included within Principle (1), as Principle (1) is about relationships. "Principle 1) requires a competent interpreter to be prepared to interpret utterances of sentences he or she has never heard uttered before", and "there is no clear upper limit to the number of sentences utterances of which can be interpreted"

Davidson is therefore incorrect when he says, in discussing Principles 1), 2) and 3), "malapropisms fall into a different category".

In summary, malapropism isn't relevant to the case he is arguing.

Reply to RussellA

I don't have the text in front of me, but insofar as (1) talks about relationships, it's just going to be compositionality: we have a recursive engine for interpreting sentences based on how the semantic elements of the sentence are put together (syntax, logical constants). Sentences get their first meaning without reference to any other sentence.

So you're right that malapropism is built on a comparison between sentences, but the theory Davidson is imagining isn't. Unless I'm wrong.

Which might pretty much be that.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Quoting Srap Tasmaner

When I first read this paper many years ago, I had not read Grice yet, so all of the nods to Grice went right by me. Now that I have read and thought about Grice a fair amount, the invocation of Grice here and there is just puzzling. I'll think about that too.

Well I must admit to having only given a passing nod to Grice. I had decided not to read beyond tertiary sources on the grounds that expounding utterer's meaning in terms of utterer's intent appeared far to difficult a task - intent, after Anscombe, seeming itself to be problematic. After all, the same action can be intentional in one description and yet not intentional in another. The intent of an utterance could therefore change with the description, and hence the relation between intention and meaning seems fraught.

Further, Davidson has yet another view of intent, and ironing all that out before coming to terms with meaning seems to me to be putting the cart before the horse. Davidson appeared, in my early years of reading this stuff, to offer a better opportunity at coming to terms with meaning as understood literally - what is here calls first meaning.

Being better versed in Davidson's T-sentences and radical interpretation, I perhaps in error gave Grice little attention. Hence in reading the present article, I went along with Davidson in dismissing him.

Perhaps naively I understand Grice as having advocated that one understands an utterance by reasoning from the utterance, using on one's understanding of various linguistic conventions, to the intention of the speaker. I understand that there are various nuanced caveats to this, but hope we can agree that this is the gist.

The part in which Grice is mentioned cites him in order to distinguish the first meaning from what Grice apparently called the non-natural meaning; it forms part of Davidson's setting up of first meaning. I take it that you are claiming that malaprop utterances can be accommodated in this non-natural meaning? The only defence here would be that Davidson's own semantic analysis can, at least on the face of it, provide a literal interpretation of an utterance that is not dependent on non-natural meanings. He's not so much dismissing Grice as leaving the issues Grice wants to address to one side while he moves on with his analysis.

Quoting RussellA

Malapropism is exhibited in the relationship between two sentences, in that a sentence exhibits malapropism if it is different to the sentence the interpreter was expecting.

Roughly, yes - an utterance can only be malaprop in contrast to an appropriate utterance. A valid point.

The interpretation, in Davidson's semantic theory, would look somewhat like this:

"I dance the flamingo" is true IFF RussellA dances the flamenco.

...and at issue is what conventions permit the move from flamingo to flamenco.

Grice might have us do so by inferring your intent in making the utterance; but as I explained above, intent is not as clean a tool as Grice seems to suppose.

This might be sufficient to reinstate the relevance of malapropisms.

Well, shit. Finally there is some actual philosophy going down on this thread. Who'd a thunk it.

Quoting RussellA

"We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases"

Can any of the analytical philosophers on this thread provide an example of someone actually making this argument about language? Whose idea is this exactly?

Quoting JerseyFlight

Whose idea is this exactly?

I think we're talking about almost every cognitive scientist since Chomsky.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

I think we're talking about almost every cognitive scientist since Chomsky.

Hard for me to see them advocating this:

"a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire" Davidson

Further, if this is not the actual position, then Davidson is attacking a straw-man which he erects through the analytical edifice.

Quoting Banno

the relation between intention and meaning seems fraught.

Then what did you make of Davidson relying on it finally in his definition of "first meaning"?

Quoting JerseyFlight

"I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with."

This is a mere formal conclusion in the sense that there is something to be learned. You would indeed teach your child a language. The sense in which there is no language doesn't matter!

You're still not getting the distinction. You don't teach a child a language where "a language" is defined as a complete set of rules that rigidly specify what constitutes the language. You do teach a child a language where "a language" is defined as open ended, loosely specified, ever-changing linguistic practices.

This distinction may not matter to you, but from that it certainly does not follow that it doesn't matter, tout court. It obviously does matter to others, and those others are most likely not interested in what matters to you, in any case.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Then what did you make of Davidson relying on it finally in his definition of "first meaning"?

Odd, since I read Davidson as saying that intended meaning drops out, being replaced by

a complex system or theory with the speaker, a system which makes possible the articulation of logical relations between utterances, and explains the ability to interpret novel utterances in an organized way.

That would be in line witht he semantic theory Davidson earlier advocated. hence, the three principles listed make no mention of intent.

I had thought that you were objecting to this rejection of Grice.

Quoting Janus

You don't teach a child a language where "a language" is defined as a complete set of rules that rigidly specify what constitutes the language. You do teach a child a language where "a language" is defined as open ended, loosely specified, ever-changing linguistic practices.

Yep.

What drew me back to this article was comments such as this:

Quoting Olivier5

I posit that translation from one language to another cannot be explained other than by reference to the meaning of words that has to be conveyed as faithfully as possible in another language.

So meanings exist.

I take Oliver to here be advocating, roughly, first meaning.

I pointed Oliver to Davidson, but he was not interested. But on reflection I was struck by how much the present article relies on notions developed in Wittgenstein. Hence my reviving it.

So the YouTube version:

Davidson argued we could best get at meaning by talking about truth.

Grice argued that we could best get at meaning by talking about intentions.

Both thought that getting at (at least some of...) meaning was a reasonably mechanical process.

Then Davidson noticed that for any set of rules that could set out such a process, there were things that apparently had meaning but did not follow the rules - the present article.

Wittgenstein argued that we could get by without resort to meaning if we talk about use. He pointed out that rules may change even as they are being used.

Reply to Banno

I was thinking of the passage that begins with Diogenes: he uses intention to pick out first meaning and then says we lose nothing by ignoring intention and going back to a radical interpretation model.

It's part of the argument that whatever Grice was on about, it might as well be extra-linguistic.

I haven't even gone through the main argument carefully, but don't you harbor any suspicion that he painted himself into the corner he'll end up in?

Reply to Srap Tasmaner
Is Davidson a Gricean?

Having a read of this....


Edit: @creativesoul, the difference between Davidson and Grice suggested here is not at all dissimilar to our previous discussions.

Quoting Banno

So the YouTube version:

Are we done now? Should I bother working on the rest of the article?

By the way -- I haven't intended to be advocating for Grice against Davidson, not exactly. He brings up Grice himself, situates how he intends to argue in relation to Grice, and suggests that the argument will along the way justify his approach. All of which is slightly odd since he already knows he's headed for a dead-end. Anyway, I've just been trying to work through that, not stand in for Grice.

I actually think Davidson's argument about what is and isn't needn't for first meaning is worth going over very carefully. I also think it's worth knowing if the main argument is sound, and if it is I am very curious how the formal semantics community has responded.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Are we done now? Should I bother working on the rest of the article?

Just encouraging others to chime in...

Quoting Banno

I take Oliver to here be advocating, roughly, first meaning.

Not advocating anything in particular, just stating the glaringly obvious. Language conveys meaning. That’s its main function, and why it exists. When someone (other than an analytical philosopher) uses language, it’s often to try and communicate something.

Quoting Olivier5

Language conveys meaning.

Only if 'meaning' is understood as 'that which language conveys', and so the proposition is tautological. Otherwise what determines members of the class {meanings}?

Quoting Isaac

Only if 'meaning' is understood as 'that which language conveys', and so the proposition is tautological. Otherwise what determines members of the class {meanings}?

Is this what you ask your doctor? What about the farmers who grow your food? Unfortunately analytical philosophy is an elitist enterprise. As the world continues to warm and spin into civil chaos this kind of doctrinaire approach to existence will be seen for what it is, abstract irrelevance, nothing but a special interest, a hobby for those who want to escape the world. It greatly upsets me to see this class of thinkers attempting to dominate other people with their hyper abstraction, as if their narrowing somehow qualified as progress or an achievement. It doesn't. This has been proven by Davidson's own words, "there is no such thing as a language." And the only reason I assert myself here is because of the arrogance and elitism of the analytical response (see above). It wants to confound the man of common sense, to make him feel ashamed, to lord over him with abstraction. This is a kind of intellectual bullying, and I hope other people will join me in standing up against it. The question of relevance is the thing that refutes analytical philosophy, no other question is needed.

Quoting Janus

You're still not getting the distinction.

Quite the contrary, it is you that is not comprehending the distinction that trumps the subjectivity you here refer to: 'You will still be using language just like we are still using mathematics after Gödel. And what matters most of all, is not papers like Davidson's, but those who figure how to use words to make the world a better place. Should we get a million people to read this paper by Davidson, or should we get a million people to read, "The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog," by Perry and Szalavitz? There is no contest. What these authors are doing in terms of relevance blows Davidson out of the water. And remember, life is short, so this is a decision we must make over and over again, and this is what I know: analytical philosophy loses.'

My argument is that the thing that matters to Mr. Davidson is not a thing that matters in the context of life, concrete existence, it is simply an abstract, formal consideration. Don't take my word for it: "I dip into these matters only to distinguish them from the problem raised by malapropisms and the like."

Further, philosophy can't explain this, it belongs to the domain of psychology. What a joke. Beware what you call profound friend.

Quoting Banno

So is this a great reversal for Davidson? To some extent, yes, but then Davidson's program was always moderated by interpretation.

A philosopher (or a scientist) is necessarily in the third position, triangulating the language of others. Here is a little clue as to what the function of triangulation is.

So I started reading this and to my pleasant surprise it is not written like ass, which alot of (early?) Davidson is. Might finish it!

Quoting Isaac

what determines members of the class {meanings}?

Mental events and structures: Anything you can think of, perceive, feel, plan and do, remember, or imagine. And any thought about that thought, and endless combinations thereof.

Quoting Olivier5

Mental events and structures: Anything you can think of, perceive, feel, plan and do, remember, or imagine. And any thought about that thought, and endless combinations thereof.

This is not a use of 'meaning' I've ever heard. I think if, on hurting my leg, I said "I have a meaning in my knee" I should not be very well understood. Or reassuring people in a tricky situation that I have a plan by saying "It's OK, I have a meaning".

So I don't think simply being a mental event can be sufficient to identity something as a 'meaning'.

Reply to Isaac You’re confusing a general category (meaning in general) with its individual instances (a specific meaning).

You use words to communicate, right? But the sentence: « Word word word, word word. » is not correct. Same mistake.

So in a specific instance you might say « I have a pain in my knee » and you would mean something specific by that, which is to describe a sensation you’re having.

Quoting Isaac

I don't think simply being a mental event can be sufficient to identity something as a 'meaning'.

Why yes. To qualify as linguistic meaning, an idea has to be formulated in a symbolic language. A meaning is whatever thoughts are conveyed by a text. It’s always the meaning of some words (or other symbols).

Quoting Olivier5

You’re confusing a general category (meaning in general) with its individual instances (a specific meaning).

I asked what the membership criteria was for the category {meaning}. You answered that it was any mental structure or event. Generic names can indeed generally be substituted for a specific member in most cases. "I'm enjoying a cup of {some type of drink}" makes just as much sense as "I'm enjoying a cup of tea", even "I'm enjoying a cup of {word with three letters beginning with T}" makes some kind of sense.

"I have {a type of meaning} in my knee" makes no sense at all, so I can't see how the class {meaings} can possibly be circumscribed by 'mental events' like pains.

Quoting Olivier5

A meaning is whatever thoughts are conveyed by a text.

Which is the tautology we started with. "All language conveys meaning" is tautological if 'meaning' is just 'that which is conveyed by language.

Reply to Isaac « Cup » and « tea » are part of the class of words. Therefore, you want a {word} of {word}? That would be the right way to substitute an instance by a set it belongs to. Words are not meaning. They are just signs, tokens for meaning.

Reply to Isaac The idea of ‘thoughts’ has been added.

Ah, what a wonderful paper. I like all these little read-along threads you do @Banno. They make me go through essays I've been meaning to read but never quite got around to. Well - I've gotten around to this and I've found it perfectly agreeable. Some immediate thoughts:

(1) It's striking to me that Davidson begins from a very similar place to Chomsky (novel grammatical or semantic constructions, to state it broadly) and ends up drawing - to Davidson's infinite credit - an almost diametrically opposite conclusion to Chomsky's waste-of-space linguistics: that language can't possibly be considered in terms of some kind of "general framework of categories and rules", and can only be taken seriously when considered in connection to "wit, luck, and wisdom from a private vocabulary and grammar, knowledge of the ways people get their point across, and rules of thumb for figuring out what deviations from the dictionary are most likely". It's nice too, to finally understand the context for that famous line about how "there is no such thing as language", which I've read a thousand times without going to the source.

(2) The paper immediately brought to mind the work of Stanley Cavell, my favourite philosopher of language (and the only post-Wittgensteinian I trust), who, in probably his most famous lines, concluded thus about language:

"We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation—all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life.” Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying" (Cavell, "The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy")

The resonances with Davidson here should be obvious (notably, Cavell published this almsot 20 years before Davidson's essay!). And one of the nice things that Cavell provides - which Davidson here only opens as a question - is precisely an account of these features of language in terms of what he calls 'projection'. For Cavell, words (or phrases, in the case of malapropisms) can be "projected" into different contexts, and whether those projections take hold or not (are "acceptable", in the case of malapropisms, or "unacceptable" in those cases where we adduce that someone is just talking nonsense) depends only on our 'forms of life' - the 'whirl of organism'. Some more Cavell, for comparison:

"While it is true that we must use the same word in, project a word into, various contexts (must be willing to call some contexts the same), it is equally true that what will count as a legitimate projection is deeply controlled. You can "feed peanuts to a monkey" and "feed pennies to a meter", but you cannot feed a monkey by stuffing pennies in its mouth, and if you mash peanuts into a coin slot you won't be feeding the meter. Would you be feeding a lion if you put a bushel of carrots in his cage? That he in fact does not eat them would not be enough to show that you weren't; he may not eat his meat. But in the latter case "may not eat" means "isn't hungry then" or "refuses to eat it". And not every case of "not eating" is "refusing food".

... I might say: An object or activity or event onto or into which a concept is projected, must invite or allow that projection; in the way in which, for an object to be (called) an art object, it must allow or invite the experience and behavior which are appropriate or necessary to our concepts of the appreciation or contemplation or absorption... of an art object. What kind of object will allow or invite or be fit for that contemplation, etc., is no more accidental or arbitrary than what kind of object will be fit to serve as (what we call) a "shoe". ... You cannot use words to do what we do with them until you are initiate of the forms of life which give those words the point and shape they have in our lives." (Cavell, The Claim of Reason).

More to say, but just wanted to plonk at least these two thoughts out there for now.

p. 259:Take proper names. In small, isolated groups everyone may know the names everyone else knows, and so have ready in advance of a speech encounter a theory that will, without correction, cope with the names to be employed. But even this semantic paradise will be destroyed by each new nickname, visitor, or birth.

The semantic paradise -- what I described elsewhere as all of us speaking an idealized Tarski-model language -- is destroyed, destroyed I tell you, by having to add a name to your stock of names.

What about two people sharing the same name? When Davidson proposed his three conditions, he mentioned ambiguity:

pp. 254-255:Probably no one doubts that there are difficulties with these conditions. Ambiguity is an example: often the ‘same’ word has more than one semantic role, and so the interpretation of utterances in which it occurs is not uniquely fixed by the features of the interpreter’s competence so far mentioned. Yet, though the verbal and other features of the context of utterance often determine a correct interpretation, it is not easy or perhaps even possible to specify clear rules for disambiguation.

Wait, what? Davidson admits up front that simple ambiguity is enough to block the assignment to an utterance of a unique and correct interpretation by the interpreter without taking into account the context of the utterance, and so on, but in that same paragraph says that he hopes his argument will show that the ability, for instance, to disambiguate utterances "ought not to count as part of their basic linguistic competence" (p. 255). What kind of competence is it, if not linguistic? It's a competence that allows you to assign the unique and correct interpretation to an utterance. What kind of argument could possibly show that this is not a sort of linguistic competence?

I know, off the top of my head, at least two people named "Bob". [hide="*"](We can, like Davidson, say they have the 'same' name only with scare quotes, and allow that these may be two different linguistic tokens that happen to look and sound exactly alike. Doesn't matter.)[/hide] When I'm at work and someone says to me, "Bob put in a work-order for the ceiling," I do not think I am being told my ex-father-in-law, who is retired and lives 600 miles from here, put in a work-order for the ceiling; I know that the person being referred to is the person I work with named "Bob" who does things like put in work-orders. Davidson is claiming that whatever competence allows me to do this, and while it is a competence we expect interpreters to have, it is not a specifically linguistic competence.

Why not? Because in interpreting the meaning of the utterance I have relied on many extra-linguistic facts, among which might be that the speaker doesn't know my ex-father-in-law's name, or that I have one, that he doesn't work here and couldn't possibly be putting in a work-order for us, etc. While I as a member of this speech community can figure out what my work colleague means by what they say, and this is expected of interpreters, it is not the case that my theory of English is what allowed me to do this. My semantic engine cannot, on its own, assign the proper interpretation to what they said.

I think this is what Davidson has in mind by specifically linguistic competence. My theory of the language we share does not match the theory of anyone I work with -- my theory has a "Bob" in it theirs does not. At work, we might say, I rely on a subset of my theory that leaves out the other "Bob", and my workmates similarly rely only on subsets of their theories. Is it conceivable that we all constrain our semantic engines to a point that we completely share a theory? It is conceivable, yes, but there are two issues: first, the process of constraining the interpretive engine is not itself linguistic; second, Davidson despairs of finding general rules for carrying out such a process of constraint. Note that the second point does not matter here: even if there were rules, Davidson wants to rule them out as not being linguistic rules.

Constraining your theory to a shared subset doesn't explain how an utterance of "Bob" can be taken to refer to the Bob at work, but relies on the fact that it can be: it's only because you have a semantic engine that can produce this interpretation, the correct one, as well as others, that we can talk about constraining it suitably so that it is shared. That the engine can produce this interpretation, and others, Davidson considers a linguistic competence; that you know to use only the part of the engine that produces this interpretation is something else -- related to what the engine does, clearly, but taking as given that it can do do what it does.

I think that's the argument, and there is certainly something to it. If first meaning is taken as given in a typical Gricean case analysis, for example, then by giving that analysis you aren't explaining first meaning at all but relying on it. (Again, only bringing up Grice because he does.)

I'm still not getting out of the start of the paper -- but I'm trying to clarify to myself of what's going on elsewhere. We have also this:

p. 253:A better way to distinguish first meaning is through the intentions of the speaker. The intentions with which an act is performed are usually unambiguously ordered by the relation of means to ends (where this relation may or may not be causal).

And he'll go on to list intentions and say that you can spot first meaning because it's the first in the chain of intentions to require recognition, on the part of the audience, of one of the speaker's intentions:

pp. 253-254:Of course these are not the only intentions involved; there will also be the Gricean intentions to achieve certain of these ends through Alexander’s recognition of some of the intentions involved. Diogenes’ intention to be interpreted in a certain way requires such a self-referring intention, as does his intention to ask Alexander to move. In general, the first intention in the sequence to require this feature specifies the first meaning.

Note that Davidson describes the key intention as the intention to be interpreted in a certain way, that is, for Alexander to rely on that part of his theory of Greek that he shares with Diogenes. Whatever other thoughts Diogenes may wish Alexander to entertain, if any, depend upon Alexander understanding that Diogenes is asking him to move.

For jollies, here's a sort of Gricean take: Alexander, world-conquering hero, asks Diogenes, philosopher lounging in the sun, what boon he would like; Diogenes, like some ancient Philip Marlowe, replies, "Well, for starters, you could move a little to one side -- you're blocking my light." That's a way of saying I want nothing from you qua world-conquering hero, something only you the great Alexander could give me. And yes, for Alexander to get the point that Diogenes wants nothing only he can give, he has to understand that Diogenes is saying he wants him to take a couple steps to his right.

** Far from done, but I'm off to work. **

Quoting StreetlightX

Ah, what a wonderful paper.

I thought so, too.

As well as ambiguity the paper talks, indirectly, about mis-comprehension.

In the discussion above, between @Oliver5 and @Isaac, Oliver offers a definition of meaning, and Isaac immediately presents a counter-instance that shows the definition insufficient. Or so it appears to me.

In the terms used in the article, we start with a prior theory, and search for agreement in a passing theory;

For the speaker, the prior theory is what he believes the interpreter’s prior theory to be, while his passing theory is the theory he intends the interpreter to use.

The prior theory is what is supposedly shared; the conventions. The passing theory is what is finally communicated.

Now I saw what Isaac did in presenting counter-instances. It seems that Oliver saw something not dissimilar, but insufficient for him to reappraise his contention. Instead of seeing the counter instance, he saw a misuse.

Arguably Oliver did not apply the Principle of Charity with sufficient rigour, hence misunderstanding Isaac. But if I have understood your comments on Cavell, this is only one description of the conversation among the many, one way to project the words used.

Is there then a way to decide the issue? Is Isaac misusing language, or did he demonstrate an error in Oliver's position? IF what we have is the 'whirl of organism', is there anything more here than simply my preference for Isaac's words over Oliver's?

Edit: Just wanted to make it explicit that in the discussion between Oliver and Isaac, it is clear to me that @Isaac has the better argument.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

"Bob put in a work-order for the ceiling,"

Hmmm. I'm not sure that you have entirely demolished the T-schema. We would derive:

"Bob put in a work-order for the ceiling" is true IFF Bob put in a work-order for the ceiling

Now this would be true, if we substitute Pat's ex-father-in-law for Bob:

"Pat's ex-father-in-law put in a work-order for the ceiling" is true IFF Pat's ex-father-in-law put in a work-order for the ceiling

...since both the consequent and antecedent are false, the equivalence will be true.

And it will be true for your workmate, Bob:

"Pat's workmate put in a work-order for the ceiling" is true IFF Pat's workmate put in a work-order for the ceiling

But not:

"Pat's ex-father-in-law put in a work-order for the ceiling" is true IFF Pat's workmate put in a work-order for the ceiling

unless you work with your ex-father-in-law.

This to say, perhaps T-sentences are more resilient than you first supposed.

Reply to Banno

But the T-sentence doesn't give you the interpretation; it is the interpretation; or it is one way of expressing the interpretation. The question is how do I know what to put on the RHS, isn't it?

Reply to Banno

Never mind, you're working through the truth values to determine that.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Sure. So I just deleted a two-hundred word reply.

The T-sentence in this case gives two valid interpretations; we have to use our knowledge of the context to understand which is the better. Your excellent point stands, but is already a part of Davidson's program.

Reply to Banno

Agreed. (Doing philosophy while at work is tricky.)

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Yeah - you need your own office. And even then, the bloody interruptions can ruin your train of thought.

Quoting JerseyFlight

My argument is that the thing that matters to Mr. Davidson is not a thing that matters in the context of life, concrete existence, it is simply an abstract, formal consideration. Don't take my word for it: "I dip into these matters only to distinguish them from the problem raised by malapropisms and the like."

What makes you think that Davidson cares about whether his distinction matters "in the context of life. concrete existence". Does music matter in that context, does poetry or the arts generally? Any pursuit, which is not a purely practical pursuit only matters insofar as it gives pleasure, exercises and strengthens the emotions, the intellect and/or the body in some way (preferably all three).

Pursuit of disciplines that one is genuinely interested in is better than mindless passive entertainment, because insofar as they develop the emotions, intellect and the body, people's lives are improved by such pursuits, and the improvement of individuals benefits society. In fact without the improvement of individuals there is not any benefit to society; no improvement of society at all. Society has never been improved by ideologues, or any other form of dogmatist.

It seems to me it's your notion of 'only that matters which benefits society' in its narrow ideological conception that is an abstraction and is elitist and idealist to boot. You are a walking performative contradiction; imputing to others, and attacking them for, all the negatives you exemplify.

Further, philosophy can't explain this, it belongs to the domain of psychology.

Please tell us just what it is, in the context of these kinds of questions of distinction, that philosophy can't explain but that psychology can, and how?

Quoting Banno

Is Isaac misusing language

He is misusing logic, rather.

Quoting Janus

What makes you think that Davidson cares about whether his distinction matters "in the context of life. concrete existence". Does music matter in that context, does poetry or the arts generally?

I never claimed that one cannot ascend, rather, descend to an aesthetic pursuit of analytical philosophy. In that case we must stop pretending like it carries some kind higher relevance, or counts as some kind of higher social discourse. It doesn't, the real objective work is being done in other areas, analytical philosophy is an exercise in abstract games. I would even argue that this particular social form detracts from what can actually be achieved with language, it literally has a negative social value. This is not hard to prove:

Here I merely need to repeat my practical argument: 'You will still be using language just like we are still using mathematics after Gödel. And what matters most of all, is not papers like Davidson's, but those who figure how to use words to make the world a better place. Should we get a million people to read this paper by Davidson, or should we get a million people to read, "The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog," by Perry and Szalavitz? There is no contest. What these authors are doing in terms of relevance blows Davidson out of the water. And remember, life is short, so this is a decision we must make over and over again, and this is what I know: analytical philosophy loses.'

Language is psychological as well as developmental, you will not explain it by multiplying analytical philosophy's abstractions. If you miss vital stages of development you will be cognitively impaired, most especially in your language capacity. This is not an abstract consideration... analytical philosophy doesn't tell us anything here! What people are doing on this thread cannot even be justified in terms of real-world-relevance. As your response betrays, it's just an aesthetic game that analyzes abstract ideals. One is entitled to it, but one is not entitle to call it responsible philosophy.

"Another reason this [Analytical Philosophy] is fruitless is that the analyses we devise would not be particularly useful, even if one of them were widely accepted. The analyses that epistemologists now debate are so complicated and confusing that you would never try to actually explain the concept of knowledge to anyone by using them. So what is the point?..." Michael Huemer

Quoting JerseyFlight

So what is the point?..."

The "point" is merely to sharpen one's mind in this particular game, just to explore the possibilities of a certain kind of analysis. If you enjoy it, then there's a point to it; if not then not.

Who are you to simply pronounce that this pursuit "has a negative social value"? If it is "not hard to prove", then why have you not done so? In what way do you think it has a negative social value, and what's your argument for thinking so?

Instead of derailing this thread, why not start another entitled "Analytic Philosophy Has a Negative Social Value", and make your case there?

Quoting Janus

Who are you to simply pronounce that this pursuit "has a negative social value"?

I did not merely pronounce it, I provided a practical argument. Further the quote by Huemer, who has written 60 plus books (I don't like this game but will do it anyway only because of how analytical philosophers think, which is in terms of elitism) -- how many books have you written?

Quoting Janus

In what way do you think it has a negative social value, and what's your argument for thinking so?

Quite simple: people are communicating all over the place. Not all communication is the same, neither is it equivalent in terms of social value. Just take a look at this thread for instance, there are vast problems in the world and here we have a bunch of people talking about the abstract ideals of language, as refugees shuffle from island to island, as America collapses into authoritarianism, as the globe continues warming, as children lack essential nutrients and come from broken homes that shatter their cognitive quality and potential, and you stand here, bold faced, defending the doctrinaire, academic eccentricities of one Donald Davidson?

Let me tell you what the men who wrote the book I referenced have done with their communication. They have probed deeply into the damage that trauma inflicts on young lives, and they have sough to find a way to heal these poor, young, abused members of our species. There is no contest. The very fact that analytical philosophy has conditioned you to come at me the way you are is only further proof of its elitism, irrelevance and special pleading for its prolix form and idealist cause. Tell me, what are you really doing with your time when you spend it probing this kind of stuff? There is a vast world of productive and relevant communication beyond it! Communication that actually achieves real world value. And if you are not giving your time to this, then you are blinded, you are playing at mere abstraction, as Peter Unger said, a bunch of "empty ideas" that lead nowhere.

I've started a new thread and copied this debate there, so as to refrain from derailing the thread further.

Quoting Banno

Is there then a way to decide the issue? Is Isaac misusing language, or did he demonstrate an error in Oliver's position? IF what we have is the 'whirl of organism', is there anything more here than simply my preference for Isaac's words over Oliver's?

One of the reasons I chose the Cavell quote I did (the second one) was because it tries to make quite explicit that 'preference' is not at all what is at stake. To cite again: "What kind of object will allow or invite or be fit for that contemplation, etc., is no more accidental or arbitrary than what kind of object will be fit to serve as (what we call) a "shoe"... You cannot use words to do what we do with them until you are initiate of the forms of life which give those words the point and shape they have in our lives" (my bolding). One way to read this is that what staves off arbitariness here are necessities imposed upon use by our engagements with and of the world: the flip-side of this is what I take to be Davidson's point: what 'controls' the acceptability or not of malapropism (instead of just nonsense) cannot be adduced from some self-contained thing called 'language'. Which, to put it in fun terms that I like, is to say simply that all language is extra-linguistic.

Cavell even employs - in the next section - a nice Wittgensteinian distinction between saying and showing, which I believe you're quite fond of:

When I give you directions, I can adduce only exterior facts about directions, e.g., I can say, "Not that road, the other, the one passing the clapboard houses; and be sure to bear left at the railroad crossing". But I cannot say what directions are in order to get you to go the way I am pointing, nor say what my direction is, if that means saying something which is not a further specification of my direction, but as it were, cuts below the actual pointing to something which makes my pointing finger point. When I cite or teach you a rule, I can adduce only exterior facts about rules, e.g., say that it applies only when such-and-such is the case, or that it is inoperative when another rule applies, etc. But I cannot say what following rules is uberhaupt, nor say how to obey a rule in a way which doesn't presuppose that you already know what it is to follow them.

This 'what cannot be said' is precisely the 'non-linguistic' element inherent in all use of language, and as such, co-constitutive of it. Hence Davidson's conclusion: "we should realize that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally".

Reply to StreetlightX Oh, alright, Damn you. I just loaded Must we mean what we say? on Kindle. Which paper should I read first?

Reply to Banno The first 3 essays in that collection are indispensable. I want to start a thread on the first essay at some point. Especially on the bit about rules and games. Also, the last quote I cited- about saying and showing - is from The Claim of Reason, I should mention. The essay on Endgame is a hilarious takedown of a great deal of analytic philosophy which I love too. The later essays are a bit... meandering.

Quoting StreetlightX

I want to start a thread on the first essay at some point.

Good plan.

Quoting Olivier5

« Cup » and « tea » are part of the class of words. Therefore, you want a {word} of {word}? That would be the right way to substitute an instance by a set it belongs to. Words are not meaning. They are just signs, tokens for meaning.

Only when quoted. A cup is a type of drinking vessel and Tea is a drink made from dried leaves. 'Cup' is a word and 'tea' is a word. They were not thus quoted in the sentence I used, the grammar tells us whether I'm referring to the word 'cup' or the thing - a cup. So if I was to substitute the genus {words} for each specific case 'cup' and 'tea', it would make perfect sense in sentence referring to those cases as words (ie quoted or otherwise signified), rather than as objects.

It remains the case that for specific cases which are members of a class we can substitute the genera for the specifics and retain the comprehensibility of the sentence.

"'Tea' is an English word derived from the Mandarin" = "Some specific {word} is an English word derived from the Mandarin"

"I would like a cup of tea" = "I would like some specific {drink}"

"I have a pain in my knee" <> "I have some specific {meaning} in my knee"

As such pain cannot be a type of meaning.

Quoting Olivier5

The idea of ‘thoughts’ has been added.

So... "A meaning is whatever thoughts are conveyed by a text.".

You want to claim (contra Davidson, Wittgenstein etc..) that "Language conveys meaning". That when we talk, the purpose (and so the preserved value in translation) is some property of the utterance - it's 'meaning' - which is conveyed from one speaker to another.

I asked you what kind of category a 'meaning' was -what types of thing belong to it. 'Mental structures and events' doesn't seem right because we cannot substitute specific cases of such things for there general class and still be understood.

Now you're suggesting it is the thought which is conveyed, that 'meaning' is a type of thought (those which are conveyed by text). I'm not sure I can quite see that either, without some mental gymnastics. If yell "Get out of the way!", it's not my thought I'm trying to convey (someone is in the way, I'd better get them to move) - that would be useless, it would just lead to the target of my utterance also thinking that someone was in the way and they'd better move them. We could say that the general thought of being in the way is what I'm trying to communicate, but I'm not. I'm not even trying to communicate any thought at all. I want him to get out of the way, even if that's by shock alone, I don't care if he has an appropriate thought associated with it or merely a Pavlovian response.

To riff a bit more on thoughts inspired by the paper: I think the distinction between 'passing theory' and 'prior theory' is really interesting, and they are even more so when thought together with some other super interesting issues regarding langauge. Two, related issues, in particular: that of the status of examples, as well as the issue of learning. In both cases of language-use (which are usually brought up in tandem, i.e. we use examples in order to teach) what's at stake is a kind of spontaneous generation of a "passing theory". A passing theory, moreover, that can be generalized to become a 'prior theory' (i.e. when you're teaching someone, you say 'you do it like *this*', and the student is expected to figure out how to do the same for other cases of *this* - c.f. Witty's comments on 'learning how to go on', PI§151).

In some sense, the 'prior theory' is misnamed: 'prior' theories are not 'prior'; they are, instead, after the fact. They are ratiocinations of what are instead generated in situ and then projected backward in time: effects mistaken for causes. So-called 'prior' theories function, at best then, as sets of heuristics, resources to look to in some cases of trying to figure out novelty, but not at all as distributing the grammatical shape of words or phrases.

Anyway, examples are so interesting because they effect a kind of convergence between 'passing' and 'prior' theories: they enact a passing theory whose status is to be taken for a 'prior' theory ("this is how things ought to be done"). Or to put it otherwise, they effect a kind of short-circuit between saying and showing: examples show how one is to do something as much as what one is to do. Examples show what they say. (to quote Girogio Agamben: "Neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity. Hence the pregnancy of the Greek term, for example: para-deigma, that which is shown alongside". (The Coming Community)).

And this in turn sheds light on the notion of 'use', and helps to show why 'use' does not in any way mean 'use among a community'. There's a great remark in Davidson: "Someone who grasps the fact that Mrs Malaprop means ‘epithet’ when she says ‘epitaph’ must give ‘epithet’ all the powers ‘epitaph’ has for many other people... These remarks do not depend on supposing Mrs Malaprop will always make this ‘mistake’; once is enough to summon up a passing theory assigning a new role to ‘epitaph’" - a single instance is all that is needed generate a use: it might even be a 'one-off. Malapropisms function very similarly: they are 'one-offs' that generate their own passing theory that can be recognized as such. And I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure that there are malapropisms that have become, through common use, accepted as terms of their own.

Quoting Isaac

"I have a pain in my knee" <> "I have some specific {meaning} in my knee"

You are replacing a word by the class of meanings. Of course it's different. That's like replacing an apple by the class of oranges... Duh.

Words are tokens that code for meaning, but they are not meaning themselves. That's the classic distinction between 'signifier' aka 'sign' (word) and 'signified' (meaning or concept). The word is different from the concept meant by the word.

Quoting Isaac

You want to claim (contra Davidson, Wittgenstein etc..) that "Language conveys meaning". That when we talk, the purpose (and so the preserved value in translation) is some property of the utterance - it's 'meaning' - which is conveyed from one speaker to another.

Exactly. Let me know if you actually disagree with that claim.

Quoting Olivier5

That's like replacing an apple by the class of oranges...

No, that's like replacing 'apple' by 'fruit'...

Reply to Banno
You guys are very confused. Not sure I can do anything more at this point... Maybe the idea that words have meaning will sink in after some time. You never know...

“Nothing can be imagined which is too strange or incredible to have been said by some philosopher.”
-- Descartes

“There is nothing so absurd which some philosophers have not maintained.”
-- Thomas Reid

“There is… no banality so banal that no philosopher will deny it.”
-- Louise Antony

Source: The Consciousness Deniers, by Galen Strawson
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/
(an excellent text, somewhat related)

Quoting Olivier5

You are replacing a word by the class of meanings.

As I wrote previously, if I was referring to the word 'pain' I would have quoted it or otherwise indicated by context. I wasn't replacing the word 'pain' qua word, I was replacing pain, the object of the sentence. Thus, as @Banno just said...

Reply to Isaac What you did, technically and factually, is take out the word 'pain', and replace it by another, the word (or symbol) '{meaning}'. That's what you did, period. And I don't actually understand why you did that.

Quoting Olivier5

You guys are very confused.

I've no idea of your background or what you have read in the past; but I do know that the folk with whom you have been chatting here are not neophytes, having been on this forum and others for more than a few years, and having qualifications in this and related topics.

Might it be, just possibly, that they are trying to show you something important that you may have missed or perhaps misunderstood?

Quoting Banno

Might it be, just possibly, that they are trying to show you something important that you may have missed or perhaps misunderstood?

Or vice versa.

Reply to Olivier5 Indeed. Although, given that you seem to me to have missed a point of fairly elementary logic in your discussion with Isaac...

Reply to Banno As you might guess, my inkling is that you missed his obvious mistake: that of confusing a word with its meaning.

Let me try the tedious analytical route, see if that works... You don't say: "I have a meaning of pain in my knee", do you? So you cannot replace the word 'pain' in that sentence by the words 'meaning of pain'. Why then would you think that you can replace the word 'pain' by another symbol meaning the class of all possible meanings?

If one could legitimately say: "I have a meaning of pain in my knee", then one could transpose that meaningfully into "I have a {meaning} in my knee". But since one cannot legitimately say: "I have a meaning of pain in my knee", then one cannot assume that its transposition into "I have a {meaning} in my knee" ought to yield anything other than nonsense.

I hope this dots all the i's and crosses all the t's.

Quoting Olivier5

Why then would you think that you can replace the word 'pain' by another symbol meaning the class of all possible meanings?

Since you said...

Quoting Olivier5

Anything you can think of, perceive, feel, plan and do, remember, or imagine.

... were examples of 'meanings' and since in all other cases we can succesfully replace specific examples with general cases in any sentence.

Reply to Isaac
You can indeed replace specific instances of meaning by the class of all meanings. But a word is not a meaning, so you cannot replace a word in a sentence by its meaning, and then generalize to the class of all meanings, and hope to make any sense.

You don't say: "I have a meaning of pain in my knee", do you?

Reply to Olivier5 Seems you missed the reductio. No, it is not legitimate to say "I have a pain in my knee". That was rather Isaac's point.

Without commenting directly on this debate - which is largely trite - it does seem to me to issue forth from an interesting oscillation: is meaning a verb, or is it a substantive? A substantive that verbs? A verb treated as a substantive?

The grammar of meaning: we say "I mean" or "To mean"; but also "the meaning" or "a meaning". This debate seems to be a confusion of surface grammar with depth grammar.

Reply to Banno

So, I've read the paper and the discussion thus far. Interesting. Particularly the parts about passing and prior theories as a means to account for the ability to understand malapropisms(and novel use as well, I gather). I do want to read it all again, at least another time, prior to joining in here.

I am curious though. Would you remind me of which discussion we've had where the differences between Grice and Davidson are similar and/or reminiscent? That way I can look for those similarities upon rereading again tomorrow.

:smile:

Reply to creativesoul

Section 5, for a few paragraphs from

One major difference between Grice and Davidson is that for Davidson a sentence or word only has meaning in the context of a compositional theory of meaning. When Davidson refers to first meaning, he does not mean that the meaning can exist before a speaker has an idiolect, although this is certainly what Grice seems to hold.

Davidson would not abide meaning without language; but that is Grice's abode.

Sound familiar?

Quoting Banno

it is not legitimate to say "I have a pain in my knee". That was rather Isaac's point.

Whatever the merit of this assertion (EFL here), I don't think it was Isaac's point.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Because in interpreting the meaning of the utterance I have relied on many extra-linguistic facts

Quoting StreetlightX

This 'what cannot be said' is precisely the 'non-linguistic' element inherent in all use of language, and as such, co-extensive of it. Hence Davidson's conclusion: "we should realize that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally"

Quoting Banno

This might be sufficient to reinstate the relevance of malapropisms

It may be that malapropisms are part of the problem, but they could also be part of the solution.

Davidson concludes his article by saying that "we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions" (p. 265)

However - we should perhaps consider two types of conventions - those internal to the utterance and those external to the utterance

When we hear an expression - "A nice derangement of epitaphs" - it is true that there are initially many possible interpretations - it could be a malapropism, it could be ironic, a pun, a hyperbole, a lie, a reference or an attribution or simply explained by a standard dictionary definition. It is true there are no conventions internal to the expression that gives us any information as to which of these it is.

However - we need to consider conventions external to the expression in order to discover a reasonable interpretation. For example, our prior knowledge of the speaker, the speaker's tone of voice, the speaker's state of mind, the location of the utterance, whether in a bus station or comedy club, etc.

Yes, as Davidson said "but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally" (p 265)

One part of A nice derangement that we have not directly addressed so far is that about Donnellan: the referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions. I enjoyed the droll interplay, and the link to modal logic; and the observation that one can say something that is true, using a sentence that is false.

Reply to RussellA Isn't that the same as the distinction between prior and passing theory?

Reply to Banno

Ah, yes!

For what it's worth...

I agree with Davidson when it comes to first meaning(involving sentences and words) requiring an idiolect(their use). However, if Davidson holds that there is no such thing as non and/or pre linguistic meaning, then you know I cannot agree. This paper however does not seem to be concerned with pre and/or non linguistic meaning. Luckily.

:wink:

I am compelled by the inability for theories of language(meaning?) to account for malapropisms and novelty. They've definitely went wrong somewhere along the line. I suspect that the underlying issue is the theory of meaning underwriting the rest.

Tomorrow.

Quoting StreetlightX

Without commenting directly on this debate - which is largely trite

Yeah. To be fair I was expecting an initial response like "Fair enough, what I meant to say was..." followed by a more coherent definition, such that I could return to just reading the thread. I wasn't expecting such an heterodox defence. I don't think there's anything more useful to be said on the matter.

Reply to Isaac So you didn't like my definition of 'meaning'. You couldn't play with it the way you wanted. Now that's too bad. Allow me to apologize for not meeting your high standards.

Do you mind telling what's your definition of it? :-)

Quoting Banno

Davidson would not abide meaning without language; but that is Grice's abode.

Very broadly, I would say Grice and Lewis both approach the issue vaguely as an ethologist might; we are, after all, not the only creatures that communicate, nor the only creatures with social organization. It's a matter of seeing both the continuities and the differences. Lewis explicitly tries to build up language from a concept of signaling to see how much that will cover, what it would take to get from signaling to language, and part of that story is going to be convention. Grice starts with what he calls "natural meaning" -- "clouds mean it's going to rain" -- and part of the story of language will be convention enabling "non-natural meaning".

I haven't the competence to comment on the scientific literature -- I barely have the competence to talk about Lewis and Grice! -- but if you look, say, at Wikipedia articles about criteria for language that have been proposed over the years, models scientists will tinker with, you can see how this works: much, but not all, of the signaling we see in other animals is involuntary, so we put "voluntary" on our list; much, but not all, of the signaling we see in other animals relates to their immediate environment, so we put "displacement" on our list; and so on. I think what Grice and Lewis are up to is largely consonant with that.

By comparison, coming at things, as Davidson does, from the Tarski end looks more like a transcendental analysis. From that end, you get a solid description of what an ideal language would be and then have to account for how your model is modified in actuality and why -- just as you might introduce friction or wind resistance to account for divergence from what unadorned Newtonian mechanics might predict as the behavior of a massive body.

We all, I think, tend to expect the two approaches to meet in the middle and they kind of do. What muddies the water for the Tarski approach is that it's not just a model, but is thought in some ways to be an active participant, a substantive component of the behavior being modeled: you are thought to have a copy of just such an ideal language model instantiated in your brain, and you use it to produce and to respond to the imperfect behavior you and others engage in.

This is roughly Chomsky's story. Generative grammar and transformational grammar -- with which I had at one time some familiarity -- have their complexities but it's clear enough that syntax can be systematized, and that people don't always follow the rules, and that some of those divergences are stochastic but some are systematic and can be explained by further rules. (Before syntax, linguistics already had considerable success with systematizing phonetics, and there too the way people modify the pronunciation of a word or a syllable is sometimes random but sometimes depends systematically on the surrounding phonetic context.) What was so exciting about Chomsky's approach was precisely that you could imagine a finite machine, something that actually could be physically instantiated, that could recursively generate unlimited output, so that explaining how language in the abstract works could be a substantive step toward explaining the behavior we observe -- since the model itself is in there, generating the behavior we're modeling.

The question ever since has been how to do that for semantics, and then later whether pragmatics is just another layer on top to explain deviance from a semantic ideal. The tension arises because the core ideas of pragmatics originally come from the ethological end of things, from seeing how people actually use language. The middle where the two approaches should meet up turns out to be semantics, and the two exploratory parties turn out to have difficulty communicating.

Russell A - "However, we should perhaps consider two types of conventions, those internal to the utterance and those external to the utterance"

Quoting Banno

Isn't that the same as the distinction between prior and passing theory?

The main difference as I see it is that both conventions internal and external to an utterance have the potential to be studied and codified, whereas prior and passing theories haven't. As Davidson says "Neither the prior theory nor the passing theory describes what we would call the language a person knows" (262)

Internal conventions is the study of rules , principles, and processes, ie, a knowledge of syntax and sematic possibilities.
Whereas for the prior theory, as Davidson says "An interpreter must be expected to have quite different prior theories for different speakers" (p. 262)

External conventions are about physicalities in the world external to language that can be objectively observed and studied across a wide range of speakers, in that the speaker's tone of voice, for example, has a measurable objective existence.
Whereas for the passing theory, as Davidson says "For there are no rules for arriving at passing theories" (p. 265)

Reply to Srap Tasmaner The beginnings of a family tree for linguistic philosophy! That might be a fun exercise.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

...you are thought to have a copy of just such an ideal language model instantiated in your brain...

Not sure about this, although I'm happy to be corrected. My understanding of his anomalous monism is that no such simple order might be found in the mind. From Stanford: " Psychology... cannot in principle yield exceptionless laws for predicting or explaining human thoughts and actions.." But I may have misunderstood....

In any case it is clear that Davidson's program - the semantic theory of meaning - did not lead to the sort of radical reinterpretation (see what I did there?) of language that it at first promised. I studied it in some detail as an undergrad, and for a long while thought it may have been useful. What is most interesting for me about the present article is the implied rejection of the semantic theory.

I'm thinking that Davidson moved over time from an approach most influenced by Quine to one most influenced by Wittgenstein. There's Davidson's Wittgenstein, which seems to suport this indirectly by explicating the similarities between Davidson's and Wittgenstein's later philosophies.

We might agree that Davidson repeatedly tries, and fails, to formalise natural language, ending up looking to use.

Reply to RussellA

You may be right. The present article seeks to show that theories based on convention are doomed to be incomplete, because they will necessarily be unable to deal with novel and eccentric uses. I take it that you think convention can be saved, but it's not clear to me how this might be done.

Are internal and external conventions immune to malapropisms? Why?

Quoting Banno

One part of A nice derangement that we have not directly addressed so far is that about Donnellan: the referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions. I enjoyed the droll interplay, and the link to modal logic; and the observation that one can say something that is true, using a sentence that is false.

Interesting that you should mention this, because that particular section has definitely captured my attention. Due to the overwhelming compelling interest that I have in the general subject matter, I'm very carefully studying this part at the moment. I'm reminded of a recurring issue that rears it's head elsewhere. It relates to meaning and/or reference, and seems quite relevant to the Donnellan distinction between two uses of definite descriptions and the MacKay objection to that distinction as discussed by Davidson.

I suspect that the conclusion that one can say something true by using a sentence that is false is based upon conflating the very nuanced but quite remarkable differences in both, the meaning and the truth conditions of what are otherwise identical looking statements. Neglecting that distinction is the recurring issue I'm seeing here and elsewhere(Gettier in particular). I'll try to explain concisely showing the relevance to the paper.

Identical looking statements can and do mean very different things, particularly when examined in a more general sense, such as when completely isolated from the individual speaker(what words mean according to Davidson) as compared/contrasted to what the exact same words mean when they are examined as a belief statement(what a speaker means according to Davidson). The same sentence can and does have very different meaning/reference, and thus very different truth conditions depending upon whether or not we're examining what the words mean(in general) or what the words mean when used by a specific individual speaker.

For example, and in at least partial agreement with Donnellan, I too find that "Smith's murderer is insane" is true when and if "Smith's murderer" refers to an insane individual, regardless of whether or not that individual murdered Smith. I disagree that that is a false sentence when we examine it as an individual belief statement, for the referent of "Smith's murderer" does not need to have murdered Smith. Rather, the referent need only to be insane. That holds good because "Smith's murderer" is doing the work of a rigid designator(pace Kripke in Naming and Necessity). It picks an individual out of this world, to the exclusion of all others. If the individual picked out is insane, then "Smith's murderer is insane" is true because the individual picked out is insane.

It is only when we examine the statement as a general one(divorced from the individual, and such not as a belief statement) that problems arise. That becomes a problem, because "Smith's murderer" no longer refers to the same individual that Jones picked out. Rather, when divorced from Jones and taken in general; the referent, the meaning, and the truth conditions all change accordingly. In such a general case, "Smith's murderer" only picks out the individual that murdered Smith, to the exclusion of all others. In this example, the person that murdered Smith is not insane. There is no problem however, because Jone's most certainly referred to someone else, and that person was insane, despite the fact that a misnomer was used. What we have here are two identical looking statements with very different referents, meaning, and thus truth conditions. The only problem I see is neglecting the differences between them.

That same neglect is also true of Gettier, and it is the very foundation that gives rise to 'Gettier problems'. For example, "The man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job" refers to completely different people depending upon whether we examine it in general(any man with ten coins will do here) or as a particular belief statement of Smith about himself(only Smith himself will do here). Gettier conflates the two. Smith was, of course, talking about himself. He did not believe that anyone else would get the job. Hence, the recurring problem mentioned earlier. That's worth mention, but I digress...

Contrary to Donnellan, and perhaps in some agreement with Davidson(based upon his mention of the disconnect between MacKay's objection and Donnellan's answer)I also do not think MacKay's Humpty Dumpty objection is valid as a result of all this. Rather, I think Donnellan granted far too much, because it is not at all uncommon to use language like that. Perhaps the underlying importance of intentions for Donnellan represents the bulk of the actual problem(s). It could also be the result of the distinction drawn between what words mean and what a speaker means, for that distinction does not successfully do the job needed, as shown above. Davidson also denies that the truth conditions of the statement change according to the meaning, which is very odd to me. He said the following...

Jones’ belief about who murdered Smith cannot change the truth of the sentence he uses (and for the same reason cannot change the reference of the words in the sentence).

That is a point of contention. I would strongly disagree, in part based upon what's above. In addition, I would also charge Davidson with having this the wrong way around. The truth conditions of a statement are determined by the referent and what's being said about the referent, not the other way around. It's not so much that Jones' belief about who murdered Smith changes the truth of the sentence. To quite the contrary, the referent of "Smith's murderer" and Jones' belief about the referent wholly determines it's truth conditions, in the exact same way that Smith's belief determines those things in Gettier's Case I.


Tangentially:The distinction I've set out above may pose insurmountable problems for the T sentence, because the T sentence is incapable of drawing the aforementioned remarkable distinction between the meaning and truth conditions of identical statements(in general as compared/contrasted with individual belief statements). I see no way for the T sentence to disambiguate these remarkably different truth conditions and/or meanings of identical looking statements. Perhaps, Davidson knows this and as a result denies the distinction I've set out here as a means to salvage his project(save the T sentence).

Here's a summation of the article, and a defence against it's conclusion:

2.SPE: Idiolects 3 Against Treating Languages as Conventions

But my brain hurts, so maybe later.

Reply to Banno

We can leave that bit above to the side if you like. I understand that it is tangential to the thrust of the paper. I'd not planned on focusing so intently upon that portion. I'm good with moving on, and am currently continuing past that part.

:nerd:

Reply to Banno

Take some advil.

:wink:

I'm going back to reading...

Reply to creativesoul No, I want to address it. I was looking to find the original context, Donnellan's article, when I came across the above SEP piece. It's Donnellan's Putting Humpty together again, which seems everywhere to be behind paywalls. It's apparent that there is a quite extensive literature on this topic.

Reply to Banno

Oh I'd assume you're right about Davidson -- I was thinking of formal semantics in general, especially as it models itself on the relative success of Chomsky's program and Chomsky's well-known claims that there's something like a language organ in the brain. (I don't know what the last iteration of that is -- he was shifting again, as I lost track, to some more general capacity, I think, and talking a lot about how there had to be a single evolutionary jump.)

Quoting Banno

The present article seeks to show that theories based on convention are doomed to be incomplete, because they will necessarily be unable to deal with novel and eccentric uses. I take it that you think convention can be saved, but it's not clear to me how this might be done.

Perhaps one way is to rethink the notion of convention. Here's a question: can a singular, novel use, establish a convention? Can a singular, novel use, be called conventional? Can we, without bending grammar out of shape say something like: "that was a one-time convention"?

Here's MacKay: Mr Donnellan And Humpty Dumpty On Referring.

What's odd is that he disagrees with Donnellan, only to finish almost agreeing with him that it's just about making known what it is you are talking about, all the while maintaining the this is done by definite descriptions...

I now have Donnellan's article, so it's next.

Reply to Banno

This discussion was skirted around here. Successful reference was a notion that pervaded my contributions throughout that thread. The similarities here are remarkable.

Reply to Isaac

Holy shit Isaac! Just read through a bit of the Naming and Necessity thread and after going through just one of our exchanges, I'm left with a very poor impression of myself...

My apologies!

:yikes:

It's not that I think I was wrong, mind you. But I was certainly being a dick... Jeez.

RussellA - The main difference as I see it is that both conventions internal and external to an utterance have the potential to be studied and codified, whereas prior and passing theories haven't.

Quoting Banno

The present article seeks to show that theories based on convention are doomed to be incomplete, because they will necessarily be unable to deal with novel and eccentric uses

It is true that theories based on convention are doomed to be incomplete, but, pragmatically, no-one needs conventions to be 100% complete. I probably only understand less than 10% of the conventions around me, but that is more than enough for me to have managed to have got through life. Most of what people experience in the world is novel to them, the trick is to keep those conventions that allow one to cope with novel situations and discard those conventions that cannot. In life, conventions are always being undermined to be replaced by new ones, but as long as one group of people follow the same convention at the same time, then conventions serve their purpose. Conventions are more guidelines than algorithms.

Quoting Banno

I take it that you think convention can be saved

As regards internal conventions, syntax and semantics, they are saved in books and articles on linguistics. As regards external conventions, that Goodman Ace was a humourist, people smile whan making a joke, they are saved in society - in personal memories, books, magazines, television shows, films, stories, etc

Quoting Banno

Are internal and external conventions immune to malapropisms?

It is not so much that internal conventions are immune to malapropisms, as internal conventions include within its framework the possibility of an expression being a malapropism. Internal conventions of syntax and semantics establishes a framework within which an expression, such as "cross my eyes and hope to die" (p. 251) has a set of possible meanings - malapropism, irony, pun, hyperbole, lie, etc. To know which particular meaning, one then has to consider the external conventions.

It is not so much that external conventions are immune to malapropisms, as external conventions include the knowledge within its framework that humourists use malapropisms. External conventions within society establishes a framework within which we know that humourists such as Goodman Ace use a wide variety of linguistic tools, including malapropisms, irony, etc. Using our Shelockian proficiency of observation, deduction, forensic science, and logical reasoning, we investigate the physical context around Goodman Ace's utterance, such as prior sentences, speed of pronunciation, tone of voice, pitch of voice, audience reaction, etc and determine from our knowledge of the conventions of the world that he has most likely used a malapropism rather than a pun, for example.

Quoting RussellA

The main difference as I see it is that both conventions internal and external to an utterance have the potential to be studied and codified, whereas prior and passing theories haven't.

Well, I don't agree with this. It seems to me implicit that prior and passing theories are to be understood as able to be codified; and that the point of introducing malapropisms is to show that any such codification would be inadequate.

Further, that inadequacy seems to me to apply ot what you have called internal and external conventions - after all, if they are conventions, they can be made explicit - that is, they can be codified.

And once codified, a suitably erudite speaker will be able to produce a counter-instance.

Davidson wrote:

Because a speaker necessarily intends ?rst meaning to be grasped by his audience, and it is grasped if communication succeeds, we lose nothing in the investigation of ?rst meaning if we concentrate on the knowledge or ability a hearer must have if he is to interpret a speaker. What the speaker knows must correspond to something the interpreter knows if the speaker is to be understood, since if the speaker is understood he has been interpreted as he intended to be interpreted. The abilities of the speaker that go beyond what is required of an interpreter—invention and motor control—do not concern me here. Nothing said so far limits ?rst meaning to language; what has been characterised is (roughly) Grice’s non-natural meaning, which applies to any sign or signal with an intended interpretation. What should be added if we want to restrict ?rst meaning to linguistic meaning? The usual answer would, I think, be that in the case of language the hearer shares a complex system or theory with the speaker, a system which makes possible the articulation of logical relations between utterances, and explains the ability to interpret novel utterances in an organized way.

This answer has been suggested, in one form or another, by many philosophers and linguists, and I assume it must in some sense be right. The dif?culty lies in getting clear about what this sense is. The particular dif?culty with which I am concerned in this paper (for there are plenty of others) can be brought out by stating three plausible principles concerning ?rst meaning in language: we may label them by saying they require that ?rst meaning be systematic, shared, and prepared.

(1) First meaning is systematic. A competent speaker or interpreter is able to interpret utterances, his own or those of others, on the basis of the semantic properties of the parts, or words, in the utterance, and the structure of the utterance. For this to be possible, there must be systematic relations between the meanings of utterances.

(2) First meanings are shared. For speaker and interpreter to communicate successfully and regularly, they must share a method of interpretation of the sort described in (1).

(3) First meanings are governed by learned conventions or regularities. The systematic knowledge or competence of the speaker or interpreter is learned in advance of occasions of interpretation and is conventional in character.

Enter malapropisms and novel use and the issues that arise with the inability to take them into account by virtue of using the above principles...

Davidson ended with this:

The problem we have been grappling with depends on the assumption that communication by speech requires that speaker and interpreter have learned or somehow acquired a common method or theory of interpretation—as being able to operate on the basis of shared conventions, rules, or regularities. The problem arose when we realized that no method or theory ?lls this bill. The solution to the problem is clear. In linguistic communication nothing corresponds to a linguistic competence as often described: that is, as summarized by principles (1)–(3). The solution is to give up the principles. Principles (1) and (2) survive when understood in rather unusual ways, but principle (3) cannot stand, and it is unclear what can take its place. I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly de?ned shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.

I would think that if we acquired knowledge of how language use first begins(what that requires), then all these issues would be resolved.

It seems that Davidson begins with interpretation(or the account he's reporting on does). That which is being interpreted is already meaningful. I agree with Davidson's conclusions here that there is no such thing as language, if the account being critiqued is what counts as such. Basically that conventional account is found lacking. I'm not sure that it's entirely wrong though. I further think that it's lacking as a result of not being basic enough.

The attribution of meaning and all that that requires happens prior to interpretation and language. Though, even here, I would argue against Grice's notions of natural meaning as well. I personally do not think any of them have gotten basic meaning right, and without doing that we cannot expect for them to get language use and/or successful communication right either... not entirely anyway.

Reply to creativesoul

I think the way to proceed is to be clear about what a T-sentence can do, and the role of other aspects of Davidson's semantic theory.

"Smith's murderer is insane" is true IFF P

What we put in the place of P has to be, on Davidson's account, determined by an anthropological examination of the circumstances. This process is the development of theory of the meaning of "Smith's murderer is insane". Hence, it can be interpreted as referring to Fred, Smith's murderer, who is insane:

"Smith's murderer is insane" is true IFF Fred is insane (true)

Or it might be taken as referring to Frank, Smith's murderer, who is not insane:

"Smith's murderer is insane" is true IFF Frank is insane (false)

Or it might be taken to be about Francis, who is insane but did not murder Smith, but to whom it is apparent that Jones is referring:

"Smith's murderer is insane" is true IFF Francis is insane (true)

Or it might be taken to be about Forbes, who is not insane and did not kill Jones, but to whom it i is apparent Jones is referring:

"Smith's murderer is insane" is true IFF Forbes is insane (false)

The interpreter is free to choose from any of these, and will do so on the basis of what is known about Jones, and what they think Jones believes.

That is, the T-sentence can be applied to the description "Smith's murderer" to choose the best referent available based on the evidence of Jone's behaviour and the context of the utterance.

I'm not suggesting that you disagree with any of this, but rather making it explicit so that w have a shared understanding - a passing theory - of how T-sentences function.

Quoting StreetlightX

Can a singular, novel use, be called conventional?

I'll go along with Witti and say "No"
Quoting StreetlightX

...can a singular, novel use, establish a convention?

Again, it could only do so were it a first use that came to be repeated in a community.
Quoting StreetlightX

Can we, without bending grammar out of shape say something like: "that was a one-time convention"?

No.

So I suppose I am committed to not bending "convention".

Reply to Banno

Ah.. you went back to the earlier part, and I moved on. We can do that. I just do not want to be an impediment to progress. So far as that answer goes...

Good. I have been thinking something along those lines since that longer post. In doing so, I had already arrived at believing that the T sentence may not be in as much peril as I had thought at the time I wrote that. "Good" because I am quite fond of it, and happy to know that it's use is consistent and/or amenable with my own position.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Cheers. Seems we agree that brains are not so hard-wired as some have suggested.

Quoting Banno

can a singular, novel use, establish a convention?
— StreetlightX
Again, it could only do so were it a first use that came to be repeated in a community.

I think that this is key in actually understanding the issues that malapropism raise for the three principles in question. They cannot account for this, can they?

Quoting Banno

So I suppose I am committed to not bending "convention".

It would be inconvenient if conventions could not be convened. But of course it remains the case that one cannot be the only one to attend a convention. We come together, nudge nudge wink wink. Say no more.

Quoting creativesoul

That which is being interpreted is already meaningful.

Oh, yes. It's a process of interpretation, not of getting at the move from non-meaning to meaning. Explaining the origin of meaning remains outside his remit.

Reply to Banno

I'm suggesting that that failure to understand the very basics of meaning may constitute the entirety of the problem(s). Perhaps?

...the assumption that communication by speech requires that speaker and interpreter have learned or somehow acquired a common method or theory of interpretation—as being able to operate on the basis of shared conventions, rules, or regularities.

As Davidson notes, this assumption is wrong. There is no theory or method that "fills the bill" according to Davidson. But, what if the problem is not so much that no method or theory of interpretation fills the bill, but rather that we expect it to?

Communication by speech requires shared meaning. I do not think that shared meaning requires any separate and distinct method/theory of interpretation. Successful interpretation is equivalent to shared meaning, isn't it?

Could this just be a case of unnecessarily multiplying entities?

If two people draw correlations between the same things, say "Smith's murderer" and a particular individual, then they have a common method between them which does both, attributes meaning and succeeds in communication(results in shared meaning).

Reply to creativesoul

(1) First meaning is systematic. A competent speaker or interpreter is able to interpret utterances, his own or those of others, on the basis of the semantic properties of the parts, or words, in the utterance, and the structure of the utterance. For this to be possible, there must be systematic relations between the meanings of utterances.

(2) First meanings are shared. For speaker and interpreter to communicate successfully and regularly, they must share a method of interpretation of the sort described in (1).

(3) First meanings are governed by learned conventions or regularities. The systematic knowledge or competence of the speaker or interpreter is learned in advance of occasions of interpretation and is conventional in character.

The comments regarding Donnellan seem pointed at the first; the process of interpreting "Smith's murderer" is not systematic, since it relies on the context of Jones' utterance. Davidson does not see this as overly problematic:

If, in the referential use, Jones refers to someone who did not murder Smith by using the description ‘Smith’s murderer’, the reference is none the less achieved by way of the normal meanings of the words. The words therefore must have their usual reference. All that is needed, if we are to accept this way of describing the situation, is a firm sense of the difference between what words mean or refer to and what speakers mean or refer to. Jones may have referred to someone else by using words that referred to Smith’s murderer; this is something he may have done in ignorance or delib- erately.

But it is the third that malapropism shows wanting.

Reply to Banno

Yes. Again, you've somehow chosen something out of the paper that I've already been carefully considered/studying. It's like you're reading my mind.

Contrary to the impression I may have left earlier, it seems that Davidson is largely in agreement with what I wrote earlier as it pertains to the referential aspects of "Smith's murderer". I think that that post set out that "firm sense" of the difference between what words mean and what a speaker means, but there still remains important differences between he and I, for it did so in a way that does not seem entirely agreeable to Davidson.

At least some(perhaps the bulk) of the disagreement involved the conclusion about saying something true by using a false statement. I found that that statement was not false, for all the reasons set out heretofore, and it seems that you've since shown that the T sentence is amenable to that account as well.

And yes...

The third principle is what Davidson is finding to be wanting when it comes to malapropisms. I would agree, mainly because of the "learned in advance" part. Those interpretations, that shared meaning, happens at the time.

Quoting creativesoul

I think that this is key in actually understanding the issues that malapropism raise

My simple question is, how much time should I spend on this? How important is it? Are there other things that warrant a better use of my time?

Quoting creativesoul

Communication by speech requires shared meaning.

A casual phrase, into which I might be reading too much, but I think this puts the cart before the horse, and os perhaps at the core of the difference between our approaches.

There's a bunch of posters - @Harry Hindu, @TheMadFool, @Olivier5 for starters - who take the view, contra Wittgenstein and most of philosophy of language since - that meaning is made inside one's head and then transported to another head by putting it into words. That meaning precedes communication.

This leads to the reification of meaning, and all sorts of odd attitudes.

Isn't it rather that we do things with words - things that are embedded in our everyday comings and goings?

The notion of meaning is added, post hoc, as a lie-to-children that wrongly explains what we did - "Oh, I meant the other plate", and so on.

Communication by speech does not require shared meaning. Communicating by speech is just doing things with words. Meaning only enters into it when be become self-conscious of what it is we are doing.

That's not well expressed, but it'll do while I get some more coffee.

Quoting JerseyFlight

how much time should I spend on this? How important is it? Are the other things that warrant a better use of my time?

Well, the answer depends on what you want.

Quoting Banno

Well, the answer depends on what you want.

Not so. That's pure subjectivity, you might as well be a hedonist. It depends on what's important!

I could go on about this, but I won't do it in this thread because it would derail your idealistic chess game. I just wanted to make a swift point that was being blinded out of the analysis. There are questions that are more important than the ones you are asking here.

Reply to JerseyFlight

That all depends upon you. You are the only one that can decide that much. Not me.

Personally, given my meticulous nature and fondness for complex systems and methodology(I'm an artist, inventor, engineer, manufacturer, etc.) I find that it does me a whole lot of good, on a personal level, and on a public level.

On a pragmatic level, understanding this paper's underlying subject matter(meaning), is crucial to understanding some of the everyday events that I find myself in. Since I've been doing philosophy(and I'm fond of the analytical approach, but not at all devoted so to speak I do not place logic itself upon a pedestal) I've been able to effectively communicate with(and actually understand) a much wider variety of people than before. Common ground seems to be much easier to find when we understand thought, belief, meaning, and truth and how they work and/or operate in our lives.

Quoting JerseyFlight

Well, the answer depends on what you want.
— Banno

Not so. That's pure subjectivity, you might as well be a hedonists. It depends on what's important!

There's a whole lot packed into that reply, which if I unpack for you will leave you calling me a pedant. And yet if you want a proper answer, the unpacking must occur.

So, for starters, the "No" should have been a "Yes", and your answer, that you want what is important. The stuff about hedonism - well, isn't hedonism getting what you want? And yes, asking what you should do is asking a subjective question, hence, it's somewhat superfluous to point that out.

All of which will be apparent to one who has studied philosophical analysis - from Socrates onward.

So if what you want is doing stuff that is important, shouldn't you spend a bit of time working out what is important?

SO, in oder to answer your question, you should first tell us what you think is important.

Quoting Banno

Communication by speech requires shared meaning.
— creativesoul

A casual phrase, into which I might be reading too much, but I think this puts the cart before the horse, and is perhaps at the core of the difference between our approaches.

It very well may be. Our approaches and positions seem to me at least to be very much alike. Given I've adopted a number of your approaches to certain subject matters, I'm probably more like you than you are like me.

:wink:


Quoting Banno

There's a bunch of posters - Harry Hindu, @TheMadFool, @Olivier5 for starters - who take the view, contra Wittgenstein and most of philosophy of language since - that meaning is made inside one's head and then transported to another head by putting it into words. That meaning precedes communication.

This leads to the reification of meaning, and all sorts of odd attitudes.

Isn't it rather that we do things with words - things that are embedded in our everyday comings and goings?

The notion of meaning is added, post hoc, as a lie-to-children that wrongly explains what we did - "Oh, I meant the other plate", and so on.

We're in complete agreement here aside from one notable exception. I agree that meaning can precede communication. Not always though. And perhaps most importantly, not for any of the reasons many folk hereabout offer. Meaning is not made inside one's head, not by any stretch.

A simple example...

The meaning of "tree" includes a tree. Trees are not inside of our head, nor are words.



Quoting Banno

Communication by speech does not require shared meaning. Communicating by speech is just doing things with words. Meaning only enters into it when we become self-conscious of what it is we are doing.

That's not well expressed, but it'll do while I get some more coffee.

The first and last statement are points of contention. The second one isn't a problem.

Quoting Banno

A casual phrase, into which I might be reading too much, but I think this puts the cart before the horse, and os perhaps at the core of the difference between our approaches.

There's a bunch of posters - Harry Hindu, @TheMadFool, @Olivier5 for starters - who take the view, contra Wittgenstein and most of philosophy of language since - that meaning is made inside one's head and then transported to another head by putting it into words. That meaning precedes communication.

This leads to the reification of meaning, and all sorts of odd attitudes.

Isn't it rather that we do things with words - things that are embedded in our everyday comings and goings?

The notion of meaning is added, post hoc, as a lie-to-children that wrongly explains what we did - "Oh, I meant the other plate", and so on.

Communication by speech does not require shared meaning. Communicating by speech is just doing things with words. Meaning only enters into it when be become self-conscious of what it is we are doing.

That's not well expressed, but it'll do while I get some more coffee

It appears that Wittgenstein thought that it isn't necessary to know the meaning of a word in order to use it correctly hence, meaning is use for him. But when he says "...use it correctly..." referring to a word being used, he must, as of necessity, know the "correct meaning" of that word. How is it possible to know whether we're using the word correctly without knowing what the correct meaning is? Wittgenstein is contradicting himself by first denying the existence of a correct meaning and then employing the concept of correct meaning in order to show that we correctly use words.

Reply to Banno

Are you making the french press or what?

:wink:

Not sure if you wanted to continue the recent bit, or revise those two contentious claims. I'd like to try to keep this relevant to the topic as well, so I appreciate your efforts towards that thus far. My turn to get coffee...

:point:

Quoting TheMadFool

How is it possible to know whether we're using the word correctly without knowing what the correct meaning is?

That is a very good question.

Pick a word, any word, and present its correct meaning. Let's see where that leads.

Quoting TheMadFool

It appears that Wittgenstein thought that it isn't necessary to know the meaning of a word in order to use it correctly hence, meaning is use for him.

Or perhaps that using it correctly shows that one knows what it means.

When someone goes to a store and asks for five red apples, receives five red apples, and goes on their way, it seems that that person knows how to use the words. Ask such a person what the meaning of "five red apples" is, and they may or may not know how to answer.

Quoting creativesoul

Are you making the french press or what?

Turkish. I did spend some time wondering why "That's not well expressed, but it'll do while I get some more coffee" was a point of contention... :brow:

Quoting creativesoul

I'd like to try to keep this relevant to the topic as well, so I appreciate your efforts towards that.

I poked the ants nest again. Couldn't help myself. I've read myself into a state of amorphous misunderstanding, and need some time to digest. That will involve a number of conjectures, probably ill-begotten.

I want to go back to the two books this led me to - by you and by @StreetlightX. Also, @Janus took some considerable flack but did not voice an opinion on the actual article; @tim wood dropped a quick line or two and ran; and the logicians have stayed away.

And I want to further examine the relation between this and Godel's incompleteness.

Quoting Banno

Communication by speech does not require shared meaning. Communicating by speech is just doing things with words. Meaning only enters into it when we become self-conscious of what it is we are doing.

Quoting Banno

I did spend some time wondering why "That's not well expressed, but it'll do while I get some more coffee" was a point of contention...

That was not well expressed by me. I meant in the paragraph at the top of this post.

Quoting Banno

And I want to further examine the relation between this and Godel's incompleteness.

I found that an apt analogy. The continual need for ad hoc corrections based upon new information not yet covered by strict conventional sets of rules. That's the problem in a nutshell I think...

To expect something as fluid as natural/common language to be limited to such a fixed set of conventional rules is to neglect to consider the fluidity itself. It is to mistake our account of how language works with how language works. As always, communication and language use existed in it's entirety prior to our account of it. As such, we can get it wrong. This paper shows that we have in some important respects...

Quoting creativesoul

That was not well expressed by me. I meant in the paragraph at the top of this post.

Ah. Improved the passing theory, we did. Like what Davidson said. We dun good.

Reply to Banno

Sure. We're now both drawing correlations between the same things, after a little effort on my part to clarify which two statements I was referring to with my word use.

:wink:

Quoting Banno

"I dance the flamingo" is true IFF RussellA dances the flamenco.

...and at issue is what conventions permit the move from flamingo to flamenco.

Grice might have us do so by inferring your intent in making the utterance; but as I explained above, intent is not as clean a tool as Grice seems to suppose.

How do you get the truth condition without reference to a convention? I agree with the drive of RussellA's argument, but there's something I think is not exact:

Quoting RussellA

Malapropism is exhibited in the relationship between two sentences, in that a sentence exhibits malapropism if it is different to the sentence the interpreter was expecting.

I agree that the malapropism is exhibited in the relationship between two sentences, but I disagree that it's about what the interpreter expects, because that might be wrong, too.

"Flamingo" isn't a malapropism because the hearer expects to hear it. It's just an incompatibility in two ideolects at that stage, and that incompatibility could be resolved either way. The speaker could convince the hearer that the dance is, in fact, called the "flamingo".

Without convention, you have no malapropism, you have simply an unresolved conflict between ideolects that could - in theory - be resolved either way.

I think it follows that the term "malapropism" and the ralted concept is an utterance-external convention to keep the utterance-internal convention locked in. But a convention isn't absolute: it's dependent on lasting consensus. It may be more efficient to codify a recurring passing theory into a new prior theory than to try to convince a great number of people that they're wrong.

There are a lot of language wars around; "I couldn't care less," vs. "I could care less," for example.

When I hear "I dance the flamenco," what goes on in my head might be analysed thus:

"I dance the..." sets up the expectation that what follows is a dance. At this point, I may or may not pay enough attention to the actual utterance to hear that the other person is actually saying "I dance the flamingo," instead "I dance the flamenco." I could, on account of phonetic similarity, mishear the utterance. That is: I arrive at the correct interpretation by mistake.

If I do hear "flamingo" instead of "flamenco", my prior theory fails, but I can't yet assume why. Maybe there's a dance, the "flamingo", that I don't know? Maybe what I thought was called the flamenco is really called the "flamingo"? Maybe "flamingo" is a cutesy nickname for flamenco I'm not aware of? Maybe the speaker misspoke? Maybe the speaker has an "incorrect" prior theory?

This isn't just one "passing theory"; these are many? So why do I select the malapropism one? Common sense? A desire to be right? In any case, because word meanings are conventional there are "tie breakers" so to speak. Dictionaries, dance experts, and so on. All of that involves social conventions that have to do with language.

And I can have prior theories and passing theories, for example, about the reliability of any one dictionary, though they would not be - strictly speaking - linguistic prior theories.

Basically, with Gricean non-natural meanings, you need conventions to fix truth values, or else you have just unstructured conflict. The rest is just a question what you mean by "linguistic", and that was a question that was definitely in the air in the mid-eighties (with the creation of Langacker's "Cognitive Grammar", or Fillmore's "Construction Grammar", as opposed to hugely popular "Univeral Grammar" by Chomsky).

I'm enjoying this thread, but am a bit shy to respond because I'm not very familiar with the philosophy of language.

Quoting Dawnstorm

I'm enjoying this thread,

Cheers. That's an excellent post. It brings up a nagging doubt that has been sitting gat the back of my mind - in order for a malaprop to undermine a convention, mustn't there already be a convention?

So it's not that there are no conventions in language, surely...

Is it more that one cannot rely solely on convention?

Quoting Banno

Is it more that one cannot rely solely on convention?

I'd say so.

Quoting Dawnstorm

I'm enjoying this thread, but am a bit shy to respond because I'm not very familiar with the philosophy of language.

Seem to be doing just fine to me. I am certainly one who is not familiar with it, at least not a conventional understanding...

:wink:

So, you'll always be adjusting the passing theory with me.

Quoting Banno

That is a very good question.

Pick a word, any word, and present its correct meaning. Let's see where that leads.

Triangle = A three-sided geometric figure

Quoting creativesoul

Or perhaps that using it correctly shows that one knows what it means.

When someone goes to a store and asks for five red apples, receives five red apples, and goes on their way, it seems that that person knows how to use the words. Ask such a person what the meaning of "five red apples" is, and they may or may not know how to answer.

The failure to define is not concrete proof of the absence of a definition. Wittgenstein believed so according to Wikipedia.

I'm of the opinion that all semantics is just a superstructure built on top of ostensive definitions. Wittgenstein denies ostensive definitions are possible using the example "paper". Pointing to a piece of paper and saying "paper" is, as per Wittgenstein, open to multiple interpretations. Does it mean the shape, the color, the texture, the anything except paper? However, this is incorrect. I can ensure that when I say "paper" I'm not referring to the color by using differently colored paper and I can prevent someone from thinking "paper" refers to shape by using paper with all kinds of shapes. The same technique can be used to eliminate other attributes that we're not interested in until we get to the meaning we wish to convey with the word "paper".

Quoting Banno

Are you making the french press or what?
— creativesoul

Turkish.

You made a Turkish press?

Updating the passing theory.

Reply to TheMadFool

You totally missed the point. Using "five red apples" to acquire five red apples shows that the user knows the correct use/meaning of "five red apples".

Quoting creativesoul

You totally missed the point. Using "five red apples" to acquire five red apples shows that the user knows the correct use/meaning of "five red apples".

:ok:

Quoting TheMadFool

Triangle = A three-sided geometric figure

Remember what we are after:
Quoting TheMadFool

How is it possible to know whether we're using the word correctly without knowing what the correct meaning is?

How do we know we are using "A", "Three", "Side", "Geometric" and "Figure" correctly in that definition? So that is incomplete. If you are going to give a complete meaning, you need also to give the meaning of "A", "Three", "Side", "Geometric" and "Figure".

Quoting TheMadFool

Triangle = A three-sided geometric figure

At the risk of getting into another "trite" side-track...where are the sides in a love-triangle?

Quoting Isaac

At the risk of getting into another "trite" side-track...where are the sides in a love-triangle?

Each person represents a point. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You have your love triangle.

Quoting TheMadFool

Each person represents a point. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You have your triangle.

They could do. What necessitates that I imagine this when I use the term to communicate?

Quoting Isaac

They could do. What necessitates that I imagine this when I use the term to communicate?

I don't understand you. You asked where's the triangle and I obliged.

Quoting TheMadFool

I don't understand you. You asked where's the triangle and I obliged.

You answered where the sides could be, I asked where they were.

Quoting Isaac

You answered where the sides could be, I asked where they were.

I only have to answer where they could be, right?

Quoting TheMadFool

I only have to answer where they could be, right?

If I say to someone "She's involved in a love-triangle" and do not bring to mind your 'each person represents a point. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line' mental image, but rather just imagine the three people co-involved, then I've used the word 'triangle' to communicate perfectly effectively absent of any 'sides' or 'geometric figures'. The fact that I could draw imaginary sides between the actors is irrelevant. If I do not choose to do so and yet still communicate effectively, then the triangle I'm referring to has no sides. Likewise my interlocutor might not imagine any sides either and yet perfectly well understand what I'm saying. How is this possible if the meaning of 'triangle' involves sides? I just used the word, was perfectly well understood, and yet no sides ever entered into the process. Did we communicate effectively by accident?

Reply to Isaac See for yourself

Reply to TheMadFool

I'm not sure what you're trying to show here. I'm in no doubt that it is possible to draw three imaginary line between the actors. I'm asking about the necessity of doing so. If two people communicate effectively using the term 'love-triangle' simply on the grounds that there are three people involved, then how is it they've communicated. Are you suggesting that the 'meaning' of a word is some reified thing divorced from that which might be understood during it's use?

Quoting Banno

How do we know we are using "A", "Three", "Side", "Geometric" and "Figure" correctly in that definition? So that is incomplete. If you are going to give a complete meaning, you need also to give the meaning of "A", "Three", "Side", "Geometric" and "Figure".

The entire process will trace back to ostensive definitions.

Quoting Isaac

I'm not sure what you're trying to show here. I'm in no doubt that it is possible to draw three imaginary line between the actors. I'm asking about the necessity of doing so. If two people communicate effectively using the term 'love-triangle' simply on the grounds that there are three people involved, then how is it they've communicated. Are you suggesting that the 'meaning' of a word is some reified thing divorced from that which might be understood during it's use?

I'm only showing you what a love-triangle is. Since a triangle is a geometric concept, it's best to do it with pictures and that I've done.

Quoting TheMadFool

I'm only showing you what a love-triangle is. Since a triangle is a geometric concept, it's best to do it with pictures and that I've done.

I didn't ask what it is, I asked where the sides are in my use of the term. I imagine three people, co-involved, one of whom is the subject of my expression "She's involved in a love-triangle". My interlocutor, on hearing this also imagines three people, co-involved one of whom is the subject of the expression he just heard. He may now proceed to ask relevant questions about the nature of this co-involvement, treat each actor (should he meet them) in a manner consistent with them being co-involved, etc... In other words, I've successfully achieved what I wanted to achieve by using the word 'love triangle' without any sides or geometric shapes being involved in the process at all.

Have I misused the word? Has my success been mere accident? If the 'meaning' of the word is 'a geometric shape with three sides', then what's just happened in my successful use of it absent of any of those features?

Quoting TheMadFool

The entire process will trace back to ostensive definitions.

But - how? In each case you replace one set of word with another, not with an ostension.

Again, remember what we are after:
Quoting TheMadFool

How is it possible to know whether we're using the word correctly without knowing what the correct meaning is?

And again, how is it possible to know that someone has understood the act of ostension correctly, without first knowing the correct meaning?

Quoting Isaac

I didn't ask what it is, I asked where the sides are in my use of the term. I imagine three people, co-involved, on of whom is the subject of my expression "She's involved in a love-triangle". My interlocutor, on hearing this also imagines three people, co-involved one of whom is the subject of the expression he just heard. He may no proceed to ask relevant questions about the nature of this co-involvement, treat each actor (should he meet them) in a manner consistent with them being co-involved, etc... In other words, I've successfully achieved what I wanted to achieve by using the word 'love triangle' without any sides or geometric shapes being involved in the process at all.

Have I misused the word? Has my success been mere accident? If the 'meaning' of the word is 'a geometric shape with three sides', then what's just happened in my successful use of it absent of any of those features?

Well, "three people" are three points and the only shape possible with three points is a triangle.

Quoting TheMadFool

Well, "three people" are three points and the only shape possible with three points is a triangle.

First, a straight line is possible. Second, why must I even imagine a shape at all? The expression seems to get its job done without my needing to.

Quoting Banno

codification would be inadequate

Whilst conventions internal and external to an utterance have the potential to be studied and codified, I agree that any codification of such conventions would be inadequate to result in single and fixed interpretations, but, however, would be adequate to result in reasonable interpretations.

Therefore, I still disagree with Davidson's conclusion that "we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions" (p. 265), as even conventions
that may only enable reasonable interpretations are better than no conventions at all.

Quoting Dawnstorm

Basically, with Gricean non-natural meanings, you need conventions to fix truth values, or else you have just unstructured conflict.

Yes, when I hear someone say something like "I dance the flamingo", in order to understand what they mean I need some knowledge of social context, some knowledge of the social conventions that have to do with language. Accepting also that in practice social conventions aren't absolute but dependent on lasting consensus and without conventions to fix truth values you have just unstructured conflict.

Following on from this, I don't agree with Davidson's conclusion that "we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions" (p. 265), as although he may illustrate why conventions cannot give absolute interpretations, he doesn't show that conventions are not able to illuminate communication.

Of course, all of this discussion took place years ago, and in the intervening time those bright young things at Google simply ignored all this and smashed the problem of translation using the ball pin hammer of an enormous statistical base, with some neurla refinement...

Independent Article...

I wonder what it makes of malapropism...

Reply to Banno

Typing "ball pin hammer" into google translates correctly...

Quoting creativesoul

Typing "ball pin hammer" into google translates correctly...

AH, but how do you know?? :lol:

Reply to Banno

Convention.

Quoting Banno

So I suppose I am committed to not bending "convention".

That's unfortunate. I still think that this line is among the most consequential in the paper:

"These remarks do not depend on supposing Mrs Malaprop will always make this ‘mistake’; once is enough to summon up a passing theory assigning a new role to ‘epitaph’."

A single use is enough to 'summon up a passing theory' - I think this speaks a great deal to how convention can be single-use.

Reply to StreetlightX

I think that perhaps the more important take away is the single(novel) use aspect.

Reply to creativesoul What do you mean?

What counts as "convention" could be altered ad hoc, I suppose, and doing so may save the standard description of linguistic competence under consideration(by definitional fiat). But as it pertains to what successful communication(interpretation) requires, the success of [s]the single novel use shows us that rigid strict rules are necessary but need not be followed. In the case of[/s] malapropisms, convention is necessary as a base for what Davidson calls a prior theory only to be modified at the time of utterance.

Edited to strike out something that I've realized isn't quite right. I realize that it results in difficulty of translating the rest, but hopefully you understand. I meant just malapropisms, and not single novel use, per se. Those, I think are a much different animal then malapropisms.

Reply to StreetlightX

I think it(the single novel use) speaks to how convention gets started. The three principles in question seem inadequate for that task as well as malapropisms.

Quoting StreetlightX

A single use is enough to 'summon up a passing theory' - I think this speaks a great deal to how convention can be single-use.

Worth considering. But it looks a lot like bending "convention" until it breaks. How could a once-used convention serve as a justification?

I'm sure there is a bit about this in the Holy Word of Wittgenstein. Might have a look for it. Something about following a rule once being the same as not following a rule...

Quoting Banno

How could a once-used convention serve as a justification?

Justification? For what? (I think I missed a convo somewhere).

Quoting Banno

Might have a look for it. Something about following a rule once being the same as not following a rule...

Ah, but in Witty, it's quite the opposite: we can find a rule for any use we want to... Quss and all. What is necessary is 'agreement in judgements'...

I've just noticed something about Davidson's notion of first meaning.

The concept applies to words and sentences as uttered by a particular speaker on a particular occasion. But if the occasion, the speaker, and the audience are ‘normal’ or ‘standard’ (in a sense not to be further explained here), then the ?rst meaning of an utterance will be what should be found by consulting a dictionary based on actual usage (such as Webster’s Third). Roughly speaking, ?rst meaning comes ?rst in the order of interpretation...

[snip]

...Because a speaker necessarily intends ?rst meaning to be grasped by his audience, and it is grasped if communication succeeds, we lose nothing in the investigation of ?rst meaning if we concentrate on the knowledge or ability a hearer must have if he is to interpret a speaker. What the speaker knows must correspond to something the interpreter knows if the speaker is to be understood, since if the speaker is understood he has been interpreted as he intended to be interpreted...


[snip]


...Nothing said so far limits ?rst meaning to language; what has been characterised is (roughly) Grice’s non-natural meaning, which applies to any sign or signal with an intended interpretation. What should be added if we want to restrict ?rst meaning to linguistic meaning?

The first part of the first sentence in the last paragraph above ends with a semi-colon and amounts to an obvious falsehood. This is more readily understood when we look at the first paragraph above. That paragraph sets out a clear case of language use replete with words, sentences, speaker intentions, audience interpretations, a standard bearer(convention), along with all that dictionaries(the standard bearer) themselves require. Clearly, that entire example describes a situation that cannot happen, be realized, be instantiated, and/or otherwise take place(etc.) unless language use has long since been.

It also sets up the following question...

What should be added if we want to restrict ?rst meaning to linguistic meaning?

This question only makes sense if first meaning has not already been limited to language by Davidson himself. But it has.

While malapropisms may question the conventional understanding of what counts as a language as set out by the three principles, and constitute ground for rejecting the third outright, it seems that novel first time successful communication and the convention that results from repetition is ground for rejecting all three as first meanings, although the notion of prior theory remains undisturbed.

What the speaker knows must correspond to something the interpreter knows if the speaker is to be understood, since if the speaker is understood he has been interpreted as he intended to be interpreted...

When language use is already being practiced, the above is a fine thing to say...

However, with the creation of convention and hence, the very beginnings/origen of language use, as well as all successful communication involving language thereafter...

The speaker and the listener need only draw correlations between the same(or similar enough) things; one of which are the actual expressions of the speaker, and another would be what the speaker aimed to do and/or achieve by virtue of expression.

That honors looking to use to 'find' meaning...

Quoting StreetlightX

How could a once-used convention serve as a justification?
— Banno

Justification? For what? (I think I missed a convo somewhere).

I could be wrong, but I'm thinking that that comment related to Davidson'a suggestion regarding the need for dropping appeals to convention as a means to illuminate how we communicate. If one time use counts, there would be no need to drop such appeals. For we could appeal to convention each and every time if a one-time use counted.

Malapropism would not be problematic for such a definition of "convention". It would be an ad hoc correction though, and basically be contrary to convention at the time...

Wouldn't it?

Quoting Isaac

First, a straight line is possible. Second, why must I even imagine a shape at all? The expression seems to get its job done without my needing to

Sorry, got caught up in some other things. Your view on the issue is that people can use the phrase "love triangle" without accurately knowing what "triangle" means.

Firstly how do you know that people are using the phrase "love triangle" accurately without there being an accurate geometric description of the phrase "love triangle"?

Secondly, I must admit that people needn't necessarily know the geometric concept of a triangle as it appears to be dispensable insofar as the meaning of a romance involving three people is concerned. What I mean is the essence of a love triangle consists of romance and three people and if people habitually refer to such instances as "love triangles" without actually going into the math of triangles then the concept of triangles is no longer necessary to understand what love triangles are.

Where do you want to go with this?

Quoting TheMadFool

...the concept of triangles is no longer necessary to understand what love triangles are.

Only if love triangles can be existentially dependent upon the mathematical notion of triangles and the latter not be necessary for the former. The meaning of "love triangle" is derived from the meaning of "triangle". The latter is necessary for the very existence of the former, which is in turn necessary for any understanding thereof.

A "love triangle" picks out three people involved in sexual relations. While that notion is itself existentially dependent upon the mathematical notion of a triangle, it does not represent a misuse or incorrect use of the term "triangle". There is more than one accepted use/sense of the term "triangle", and each is correct if and when used in the appropriate circumstances.

That ought tell you something here about how the circumstances themselves are pivotal to what determines "correct" use/meaning.

Quoting StreetlightX

A single use is enough to 'summon up a passing theory' - I think this speaks a great deal to how convention can be single-use.

"Summoning up a passing theory" facilitates understanding, not necessarily agreement, not even necessarily provisory acting-as-if. And classifying the usage as a "malapropism" actively prevents consensus: a malapropism not a permissible variant. "Flamingo" can't be both a malapropism of and a synonym for "flamenco" (not in the same mind, at least). In this sense, the concept of "malapropism" hinders passing theories from undermining convention.

What sort of situation would you describe as a single-use convention:

A makes a malapropism; B parses it as such:

a) B corrects A.
b) B lets it slide.
c) B uses the malapropism repeatedly to make fun of A.
d) B decides to play along
e) B doubts his judgment, and passes over the topic.

And so on.

Quoting creativesoul

I've just noticed something about Davidson's notion of first meaning.

I have trouble understanding Davidson notion of first meaning in the first place. This is one of the places where I wonder whether I'd have better understanding if I was more knowledgable about the philosophy of language. But I come from linguistics, and this feels like a mess. What you've been pointing out is part of it, but I don't necessarily think he's being inconsistent. I just don't get that entire part.

Quoting creativesoul

Only if love triangles can be existentially dependent upon the mathematical notion of triangles and the latter not be necessary for the former. The meaning of love triangle is derived from the meaning of triangle. The latter is necessary for the very existence of the former, which is in turn necessary for any understanding thereof.

Read below:

Quoting creativesoul

A "love triangle" picks out three people involved in sexual relations

Where's triangle in your definition of love triangle?

Quoting TheMadFool

Where's triangle in your definition of love triangle?

The same place triangle is in your definition of triangle.

Quoting creativesoul

The same place triangle is in your definition of triangle.

Love triangle = romance between three people.

No triangle.

To tell you the truth, in my discussion with @Isaac I was basically on the same side as you - maintaining that the concept of triangles is essential to understanding what love triangles are but it isn't as your and my definitions clearly indicate.

However, this doesn't seem to imply that people use words without knowing definitions as Isaac belives because "love triangle" is a different kettle of fish. Although it's made up of the words "love" and "triangle" each having its own definition, it's actually describing the situation in which three people are in a romantic relationship. The concept of triangles is of no conequence at all to the meaning of love triangles. When people use the phrase "love triangle" they have to know what it means in the sense it's defined (romance involving 3 people) even though they don't know what triangles mean.

Quoting Dawnstorm

I have trouble understanding Davidson notion of first meaning in the first place. This is one of the places where I wonder whether I'd have better understanding if I was more knowledgable about the philosophy of language. But I come from linguistics, and this feels like a mess. What you've been pointing out is part of it, but I don't necessarily think he's being inconsistent. I just don't get that entire part.

Interesting that you're from a linguistics background. I'm curious to know what you think about the adequacy and/or sufficiency of the three principles proposed for successful communication/interpretation.



I've no letters at all after my name, nor do I have any academic training(officially anyway). I do, however, have a persistent interest in the subject matter, because of my strong interest in thought and belief itself and the role that meaning plays.

I do not necessarily think Davidson's being inconsistent either. I do think that he's mistaken about some basics of all meaning though as is shown by his being wrong about his notion of first meaning not being limited to linguistic meaning.

Quoting TheMadFool

The same place triangle is in your definition of triangle.
— creativesoul

Love triangle = romance between three people.

No triangle.

Look on the left side at the second word. There it is! Hence, my reply.

Quoting creativesoul

Look on the left side at the second word. There it is! Hence, my reply.

Quoting creativesoul

A "love triangle" picks out three people involved in sexual relations

[quote=Wikipedia]A love triangle (also called a romantic love triangle or a romance triangle or an eternal triangle) is usually a romantic relationship involving three or more people[/quote]

No triangle in the definition.

Reply to TheMadFool

You've lost me here. I see it there as well. Again, on the left, "triangle" is the third term in the definition.

What are you looking at?

"Triangle" is in every one of those definitions!

Quoting creativesoul

You've lost me here. I see it there as well. Again, on the left, "triangle" is the third term in the definition.

What are you looking at?

"Triangle" is in every one of those definitions!

Let me be specific, triangle is not in the definiens

Cambridge.Org

Reply to TheMadFool I've nothing further to say about this...

Quoting creativesoul

I've nothing further to say about this...

Sorry to hear that but it actually doesn't prove Wittgenstein right - that people use words without knowing their definitions. "Love Triangle" is a single semantic unit and although it's made up of two words that have some connection to the concept of a three-way love affair, the precise mathematical concept of a triangle isn't an essential part of the juicy tale of love triangles.

There are other phrases like this e.g. "feather weight". The word "feather" here doesn't mean that a feather is involved in the meaning; only the lightness of feathers is incoporated into the meaning of feather weight. The same goes for love triangles - the threeness of triangles is all that's co-opted into the meaning of love triangles.

In any case, the definition of words or phrases must be known before they can be used properly.

Quoting TheMadFool

...the precise mathematical concept of a triangle isn't an essential part of the juicy tale of love triangles...

Never said it was, nor would I. I direct you back to the first reply I offered you. Love triangle is a deviation of the mathematical concept. The latter is necessary for the former. The former is existentially dependent upon the latter.

Think oil and plastic. The relationship(existential dependency) is very similar to triangle and love triangle.


Quoting TheMadFool

...the definition of words or phrases must be known before they can be used properly.

Not true. Use determines definitions(accepted senses).

Reply to creativesoul The problem is that in order to use words, there has to be a commonly understood meaning with two or more people. Communication is what you use words for and It takes two or more individuals to communicate. If the listener or reader doesn't understand then you didnt communicate and you didn't use words. You just made noises or scribbles.

Now, when two people are failing to understand each other who is at fault? Who is the one that is using words properly or not? To find the answer you look in a dictionary.

Quoting creativesoul

Never said it was, nor would I. I direct you back to the first reply I offered you. Love triangle is a deviation of the mathematical concept. The latter is necessary for the former. The former is existentially dependent upon the latter.

Think oil and plastic. The relationship(existential dependency) is very similar to triangle and love triangle.

Well, we would need some real people to decide the matter. Are there/were there people who know/knew what love triangles are before the advent of mathematics and geometry? Before you answer this question don't forget that polygamy was a more common form of sexual relationship than monogamy in the animal and the plant worlds. Mathematics is relatively a very recent development. In other words, the concept of love triangles precedes the concept of triangles - our ancestor hominids probably were neck deep in not one but many love triangles ergo, fully in the know about love triangles before Euclid came up with a formal definition of triangles. What do you make of that?

Quoting TheMadFool

In other words, the concept of love triangles precedes the concept of triangles - our ancestor hominids probably were probably neck deep in not one but many love triangles ergo, fully in the know about love triangles before Euclid came up with a formal definition of triangles. What do you make of that?

Shows that we've very different taxonomies at work.

A love triangle is not a concept, it is three people involved in sexual relations. We named those circumstances "love triangle" as a result of the similarity with the mathematical notion of a triangle.

Quoting creativesoul

A love triangle is not a concept

What is it then?

Read the next line...

Sigh.

Quoting creativesoul

it is three people involved in sexual relations.

This is a concept.

Reply to TheMadFool Is it? I thought sex was physical. You mean to tell me that I've been having conceptual sex with my wife and not physical sex this whole time? Does that mean that my offspring are conceptual outcomes of my conceptual sex as well? I thought that they are physical outcomes of physical processes. Im really confused now.

Quoting Harry Hindu

Is it? I thought sex was physical. You mean to tell me that I've been having conceptual sex with my wife and not physical sex this whole time? Does that mean that my offspring are conceptual outcomes of my conceptual sex as well? I thought that they are physical outcomes of physical processes. Im really confused now.

You have a point but you do know that love triangles are abstractions - it's a pattern in the many kinds of relationships between men and women. The type-token concept seems appropriate. If you have had a love triangle experience it's a token and all such relationships involving 3 people is the type. In fact the last time I read about the type-token relationship it used triangles as an example. Each instance of triangle observed is a token of the type triangle.

Quoting creativesoul

Interesting that you're from a linguistics background. I'm curious to know what you think about the adequacy and/or sufficiency of the three principles proposed for successful communication/interpretation.

I'm not really from a linguistic background; I just come at the issue from a linguistic perspective. I do have a university degree, but it's in sociology, and whatever formal education in linguistics I have I acquired in the context of a sociology degree (it's more complicated than that because of the way university studies were organised, but that's close enough). It's just that after graduating, I never did anything with my degree, and I kept up a sporadic interest in linguistic on my own.

About the three principles: I think they're all trivially true, but what's important is how you use them in a model of language, and I haven't quite yet figured out Davidson's model (and I probably won't just from this one article). He uses "first meaning", and I'm not quite sure what that means, so that's an additional difficulty I have.

When you start out studying any of the humanities, one thing you learn pretty quickly, is none of the terms probably mean what you think they mean, and different people use them differently, so knowing roughly what sort of theoretical background to expect helps you a lot in understanding a text. That's why it matters to me that I'm not very knowledgable about the philosophy of language. I have all the caution but none of the background when it comes to interpreting the text.

I'll have to run through the principles with what I think of as "lexical meaning", instead of Davidson's "first meaning". I think that's not quite it, but it should come close enough for the purpose here. "Lexical meaning" of a word is just the word it has outside of context. One can think of it as a dictionary in the mind.

So, yes, "lexical meaning" is systematic. For example, an apple is a type of fruit, but a fruit is not a type of apple. The hierarchy involved here is an example of the systematicity we're talking about.

And, yes, "lexical meaning" is shared, as is apparent when I ask you for an apple and you give me one.

And, yes, you have to learn a language before you can use it. And what you learn, are conventions. This is actually the most complex topic. In anthropology, colour terms are the go-to example, because it's easy to see that different languages order a spectrum differently. (Early linguistic is quite bound up with anthropology.)

But that's all pretty trivial. It depends on what you do with that in a language model, and the assumptions you make about what a language is can differ wildly. So when Davidson says "Probably noone doubts that there are difficulties with these conditions," I agree, but what difficulties you run into vary by the model you use. Sure language is systematic, but how systematic? Sure a language is shared, but what does sharing a language look like in practise? Sure a language is conventional, but how much do those convention enable/restrict your language use?

An easy example: If you study linguistics, you'll hear early on that the relationship between the sign and meaning is arbitrary, but then you'll immediately be told that onomatopoetic expression might be an exception. Are they? There's clearly still a level of arbitrariness, because, say, animal sounds are usually linguistic imitations of the real thing, but they still differ by culture. I think that's where the difference between a philosophy of language and linguistics come in. Philosophers tend to be interested in the topic, while linguists tend to be interested in those topics when they become problematic for their theories and research.

So when Davidson concludes that there is no langauge because of malapropism, I'll have to first figure out what is he expected. It's entirely counter-intuitive for me: there are language conventions, but unconventional language use doesn't automatically preculude understanding. For example, if a non-native speaker were to say "I hungy," you might still understand that he's hungry, even if he doesn't acutally use the auxiliary verb and forgets an "r". So to claim that a language is largely conventional is not to claim that if you deviate from those conventions, you can't be understood. We're not computers who return a syntax error for a simple typo. (And this is where I might inject that programming languages are more systematic than natural languages. That shouldn't be a surprise, but this is something you should consider when interpreting principle 1 within a theory.)

So, for example, Davidson says this:

Ambiguity is an example: often the ‘same’ word has more than one semantic role, and so the interpretation of utterances in which it occurs is not uniquely fixed by the features of the interpreter’s competence so far mentioned.

Here's where I'd just look at what I have as a model that I try to get as close to the real thing as I can. So when I notice that there's ambiguity, I'd just look at how we typically resolve ambiguities and add that to the model. Semantic Field theory, for example, helps a lot. "I took the money to the bank," includes two nouns, "money" and "bank", and because they're thematically related (part of the same "semantic field") "The pirate buried the money near the bank," feels more ambiguous, even though we still have "money" and "bank" - but "pirate" and "buried" suggests a river bank as a very real possibility. Beyond semantic field theory common sense would tell me that a pirate isn't likely to bury money near a institution that deals with cash. But once I have to consult common sense to resolve an ambiguity, I'm already aware of it. There's been a disfluency in interpretation. I have a model that would likely lead to misunderstandings, but that's no problem because, well, in real life there are misunderstandings. I don't need a model of language that's more systematic than the real thing. I don't need a model that's completely shared. I don't need a model that's totally formed and restricted by convention. Because the real thing isn't like that either.

The interesting line here is "uniquely fixed by the features of the interpreter's competence". At that point, I'm guessing that he thinks there's a unique thing like "linguistic competence", as opposed to a more general competence. So later he says that:

nterpreters certainly can make these distinctions. But part of the burden of this paper is that much that they can do ought not to count as part of their basic linguistic competence.

If I compare that to my intuition, I'd say he's got a much narrower and more specific idea of what a "linguistic competence" is than I have. As a result I have to be careful not to impose what I think on his text. It's a question of phrasing. So by the time he ends with:

In linguistic communication nothing corresponds to a linguistic competence as often described: that is, as summarized by principles (1)–(3). The solution is to give up the principles.

I'm careful. I still don't quite know what he means by this, or what he expected language to be like. But I connect it to the rise of a couple of linguistic theories from around the mid-eighties to the early nineties (cognitive grammar, construction grammar, functional grammar), many of which were designed in opposition to Chomsky's Universal Grammar program (where there's a deep structure that all people share, and transformation rules generate the surface structures). So he may have just given up on some sort of "linguistic competence", a feature of a person's mind (?), that I never believed in to begin with, so what I would have thought of when reading about those three principles would have been pretty different anyway. For example, it doesn't make sense to me that we'd switch off our cognitive faculties that aren't directly involved with language when speaking, and I certainly don't see a need to integrate functions into a "linguistic faculty" that other cognitive tools do pretty well already. There's some sort of specialisation going on (and some of it is typically brain-related, as Brocca's or Wernecke's aphasia shows), and acquiring your first language seems to be easier and more formative than later language acquisition. But it's still not clear to me how much of language-cognition is specialised. If there are two positions that say "much of it" and "little of it", I'm more inclined towards the little-of-it spectrum.

So my intuition is that three principles hold up pretty well, but it's definitely possible to ask too much of them, and I think Davidson might have realised he asked too much of them. The question I have, is that so, and if yes: what did he expect a "linguistic competence" to do all on its own?

I left university in the early 2000s, so I'm almost completely out of the loop and have been for a while. Computational linguistics and neurolinguistics should have had some interesting results since that time, I would suspect, but I know little about any of that. If I did, maybe the post would have turned out even longer.

p. 252:I take for granted, however, that nothing should be allowed to obliterate or even blur the distinction between speaker’s meaning and literal meaning. In order to preserve the distinction we must, I shall argue, modify certain commonly accepted views about what it is to ‘know a language’, or about what a natural language is. In particular, we must pry apart what is literal in language from what is conventional or established.

Presumably this last sentence doesn't mean Davidson is going to deny the arbitrariness of the sign. Then what does it mean?

p. 258:The trouble is that Donnellan’s original distinction had nothing to do with words changing their meaning or reference. If, in the referential use, Jones refers to someone who did not murder Smith by using the description ‘Smith’s murderer’, the reference is none the less achieved by way of the normal meanings of the words. The words therefore must have their usual reference. All that is needed, if we are to accept this way of describing the situation, is a firm sense of the difference between what words mean or refer to and what speakers mean or refer to.

And I think "what words mean" is what Davidson means by a person's specifically linguistic competence, the prior theory. Here I believe Davidson is talking about Donnellan's example of the ambiguity of some definite descriptions, not of Donnellan's Humpty-Dumpty performance. I think he's saying that the former can be dealt with just fine (raising no questions about theories and competence) while the latter cannot. But I'm pretty sure we still don't know why not.

p. 260:The speaker wants to be understood, so he intends to speak in such a way that he will be interpreted in a certain way. In order to judge how he will be interpreted, he forms, or uses, a picture of the interpreter’s readiness to interpret along certain lines. Central to this picture is what the speaker believes is the starting theory of interpretation the interpreter has for him. The speaker does not necessarily speak in such a way as to prompt the interpreter to apply this prior theory; he may deliberately dispose the interpreter to modify his prior theory. But the speaker’s view of the interpreter’s prior theory is not irrelevant to what he says, nor to what he means by his words; it is an important part of what he has to go on if he wants to be understood.

I wish Davidson had been clearer throughout in what he means by phrases like "how the speaker wants to be interpreted". Remember that the lexical/literal/first meaning of the utterance is only relied on as the means to an end: Diogenes wants Alexander to understand that he wants nothing from him; to make this point, he says he wants Alexander to move a little, and Alexander needs to understand the literal meaning before he can get the point of Diogenes saying it. That means "how the speaker wants to be interpreted" is necessarily ambiguous.

Suppose Alexander stepped to the side a little and said, "Terribly sorry. Is that better? Now -- what boon would you wish from me?" Has Diogenes been interpreted as he wanted? That's obviously "yes" for the sentence meaning and obviously "no" for the speaker's meaning. (And Diogenes turns to the camera and says, "What a maroon.")

It's part of Grice's theory that "If you could step to one side a little" still means just that, that saying that in order to say "I want nothing from you" doesn't touch the sentence meaning at all; there's no claim that those words, even temporarily, mean "I want nothing from you". The whole point of the theory is that when a sentence, taken literally, violates the principle of cooperation (by violating a maxim), you are warranted to infer that the speaker means something different from what they are literally saying.

And the whole point, I believe, of Davidson's focus on malapropisms, is that there are cases when you cannot get the literal meaning at all, thus blocking any inference you're prepared to make that the principle of cooperation is apparently being violated.

That's a little odd though, right? I mean, speaking in such a way that the literal meaning is inaccessible, that looks like a prima facie violation of the principle of cooperation. You might as well speak French to someone who doesn't speak French.

p. 261:Every deviation from ordinary usage, as long as it is agreed on for the moment (knowingly deviant, or not, on one, or both, sides), is in the passing theory as a feature of what the words mean on that occasion. Such meanings, transient though they may be, are literal; they are what I have called first meanings.

And then right away we're here. Davidson explicitly endorses Grice's distinction between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning, but, he asks, what about deviant usage of a word? What about using a word with a nonstandard meaning?

(It's just not clear to me how a Tarski-style model was ever supposed to cope with novel or mistaken uses -- I suppose if I went through Davidson's earlier papers we'd find some handwaving to cover it, but maybe this is the first time he addresses it.)

But here we really need to slow down. Why does Davidson claim that deviant usage must be a change in the literal (or lexical or first) meaning of a word? We know there must be such cases, because the meanings of words change over time. But we also know that there are simple slips of the tongue that do not change what the word spoken means; the speaker is just taken to have said a different word from the one she meant to. That could lead to a change in usage, but needn't.

I think, again, he wants to say that a Gricean approach here doesn't save us. But what exactly is the argument? What does it have to do with convention?

Suppose you're helping someone working on a car engine, handing her tools as she asks for them, and she asks for a socket when she meant to ask for a wrench. The case Davidson is concerned with is where she "gets away with it" and you understand she must have meant "wrench" when she said "socket". What would it take for you to figure that out? Not to admit uncertainty and ask, "You mean the wrench?" and then agree on a fix for the defect in her sentence, but just to know for certain that's what she meant. There are, of course, slips of the tongue we correct without even recognizing we have done so, but let's suppose you heard this clearly and recognize "socket" was the wrong word and the word intended was "wrench". How could you possibly know that?

There are cases. Maybe (strangely) you don't have any sockets to hand and you know she knows that. That looks like an easy case. If there are sockets in the shed and she meant for you to go and get them, she would've said so, right? You can assume she's asking for one of the tools she knows to be ready to hand. But how do you know she hasn't forgotten you didn't bring the sockets out? We stipulated that this is not the case, that she does want a wrench, but how can you the interpreter be sure? If there just are no sockets she might have thought to be available to her (and that includes her bringing over her own set when she came to fix your car) then you're covered. Short of that, what?

Instead of staring at your phone between requests for tools, you could be looking over her shoulder and watching what she's doing. If she needs a wrench to get into a narrow spot where a socket won't go, you'll see that, and know she means "wrench" when she says "socket" -- if you know anything at all about tools and understand something of what she's doing. There's a related case where you correct not what she says but what she's doing: you watch her try to wedge a socket into position and suggest a wrench the same size instead. That might be a simple "Here" and a nudge and offering her the right size wrench. The point is that if you understand what she's doing and how she's doing it, you know for certain what the appropriate thing for her to say is, which tool she should ask for, regardless of what she says. She might, before trying, think she can get a socket in there, but you might see that it'll take a wrench and hand her the wrench instead, even when she knowingly but mistakenly asked for a socket. I think all of these cases are clearly related, and they all depend on you knowing what you're about as a team, what you would say if you were the one doing the work, and so on. If you're following her work very closely, and she knows it, she might not say anything, but just put down the tool she's using and hold out her hand for you to plunk the next tool needed in!

Where in this sort of story do we find the speaker's and interpreter's theories, changes to literal meaning, and where do we find Gricean inferences from violations of the principle of cooperation? Obviously the two share a prior theory that assigns unique meanings to "wrench" and "socket". Are we at any point tempted to say the literal meaning of "socket" has been enlarged to include the literal meaning of "wrench"? If not, are you the helper to take what the speaker under the hood said as a violation of the principle of cooperation? It's easy to see in the abstract that this could be how we correct slips of the tongue, but is that what happens here?

In the first variation, asking for something I can't give you seems to lead to an impasse: how can I be sure you don't think I can give you what you're asking for?

In the second version, I know what you should be asking for, so I know what your speaker's meaning should be; there are then subcases where your speaker's meaning is a mistake, and where your speaker's meaning is correct but your sentence meaning is a mistake. So how do we line up my knowledge of what your speaker's meaning should be with what it is and with your sentence meaning?

Perhaps more to the point -- what here will Davidson consider specifically linguistic competence and is he right to limit the range of that term? We certainly can understand what people mean without knowing what they should mean -- without there even being something like what they should mean. That's probably the normal case for conversation. (Coming back to this.) Davidson's question is not how we can possibly figure out what they mean, as speakers, given only what their words mean -- Grice's territory -- but how we can figure out what they mean, as speakers, when their words do not mean what they think they mean, or when they did not say what they think they said. But what kind of problem is that? Is it a matter of locating the source of uncertainty?

Can we deal with the case where there is no such thing as what you should mean by falling back on the principle of cooperation? That looks like not just yes, but an emphatic yes. The idea is that there is always some restriction on what you say next, always a some general constraint on the sort of thing you should mean: it should be appropriate to the point you're at in the conversation, should be truthful and relevant, on and on. So whatever you say is expected to fall within some limited range, and when it doesn't we presume you're engaging in conversational implicature and carry on.

But is that general constraint robust enough to carry us over slips of the tongue and malapropisms? All the evidence is that it is, right? Because we manage just fine, most of the time. The only question is still whether Davidson is right to say that whatever this is, it is not specifically linguistic competence. In my story, we can even leave out speech altogether! That suggests Davidson is right, doesn't it?

So what does this have to do with convention? In Davidson's hands, convention seems to mean the prior theory, and he takes himself to have shown that prior theory is not guaranteed to be enough on its own to get you sentence meaning, let alone speaker's meaning. If you have speaker's meaning in hand, or a sense of what the speaker's meaning should be, at least in general, you can reverse engineer, so to speak, the sentence meaning, but is Davidson's claim that this is non-linguistic or that it is linguistic but non-conventional?

Reply to TheMadFool A love triangle has three sides, hence the name.

Double post...

Quoting Dawnstorm

He uses "first meaning", and I'm not quite sure what that means, so that's an additional difficulty I have.

Yes. The same is true from my vantage point.


Quoting Dawnstorm

When you start out studying any of the humanities, one thing you learn pretty quickly, is none of the terms probably mean what you think they mean, and different people use them differently, so knowing roughly what sort of theoretical background to expect helps you a lot in understanding a text. That's why it matters to me that I'm not very knowledgable about the philosophy of language. I have all the caution but none of the background when it comes to interpreting the text.

Thanks for the detailed reply from which I pulled the above. I'm glad you emphasized the need to roughly know the theoretical background underwriting the writing. It's a good reminder for me personally. I'm probably still guilty at times of not quite understanding what I'm critiquing. The resident professionals hereabouts have been patient and helpful with me regarding that over the past decade. I've certainly been shown that that was the case in past.

Generally speaking, that's quite a common occurrence actually, here on this forum. Banno has a clever quip or two regarding that. I would say, and suspect you'd agree that understanding X is required in order to properly critique X; where 'X' is a position(theory) based upon a particular taxonomy/set of strict definitions.

You've certainly exercised more caution here than I, and I would most likely be well served to adopt the practice, because after having read through that paper along with the participants' comments numerous times in the last few days, I'm not so sure that I understand exactly what Davidson is getting at with "first meaning" either, although I am having a harder and harder time granting coherency to that notion.

We want a deeper notion of what words, when spoken in context, mean; and like the shallow notion of correct usage, we want the deep concept to distinguish between what a speaker, on a given occasion, means, and what his words mean. The widespread existence of malapropisms and their kin threatens the distinction, since here the intended meaning seems to take over from the standard meaning.

I take for granted, however, that nothing should be allowed to obliterate or even blur the distinction between speaker’s meaning and literal meaning. In order to preserve the distinction we must, I shall argue, modify certain commonly accepted views about what it is to ‘know a language’, or about what a natural language is. In particular, we must pry apart what is literal in language from what is conventional or established.

Here is a preliminary stab at characterizing what I have been calling literal meaning. The term is too incrusted with philosophical and other extras to do much work, so let me call what I am interested in ?rst meaning.

Here again...

If Davidson wishes to preserve a purported distinction between what a speaker means and what their words mean then literal meaning cannot ever be what a speaker means(but it quite often is).

Because it is the case that what a speaker(or speakers) mean(s) determines convention, and conventional use establishes literal meaning, or what the words mean, then it only follows that what a speaker means also determines(or at least can determine) the literal meaning, and/or what the words mean... and there is no prying apart what is literal in language from what is conventional or established. Literal meaning is conventional use. Sometimes there is no difference whatsoever between what a speaker means and what the words mean. They are one in the same thing in such cases. Hence, the distinction is obliterated in such cases and the obliteration is due to the way language actually works.

So...

I'm not sure I can even continue here. I'm compelled more and more to reject the entire project.

Reply to Janus Reply to Srap Tasmaner Reply to Dawnstorm Reply to StreetlightX Reply to Banno Reply to RussellA Reply to Isaac

Have I misunderstood something here? Do any of you find something wrong with the paragraph above beginning with "Because..."? Am I misunderstanding what I'm critiquing? I cannot see how. If it is so, then I need to be shown...



Reply to Srap Tasmaner

I agree with much of that last post. You also reminded me of Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" with the bits about mechanic tools. That's one of my favorite books of all time. Seems you've used a few yourself or at least have some knowledge of some of the tight spots that a wrench can successfully enter and do the job whereas a ratchet handle and socket cannot. Nice post.

Quoting Dawnstorm

And, yes, you have to learn a language before you can use it.

Is that right?

I rather suspect we use it, regardless, and become more adept over time.

That is, learning a language and using it are the very same thing. After all, have you stoped learning English?

But further, and deeper, if you could learn a language before you used it, that would imply that there was a difference between knowing a language and using it. I can't see what that could be like - how could you show that you know a language without using it?

Wittgenstein and all that.

Quoting Banno

And, yes, you have to learn a language before you can use it.
— Dawnstorm

Is that right?

I rather suspect we use it, regardless, and become more adept over time.

That is, learning a language and using it are the very same thing. After all, have you stoped learning English?

I would agree with Banno here. It seems that that is one of the problems within the conventional understanding Davidson is examining. Although, I'm not sure whether or not Davidson had issue with that claim. Need to go back and check on that.

Edited to add:

Yes, that's the problem with the third principle and it's inability to account for malapropisms.

Reply to creativesoul

Except when you mistakenly ask for a socket and I know you meant to ask for a wrench (or should have meant to ask for a wrench), I know what object you actually need because my understanding is aligned with reality, despite what you said. If I were to describe my understanding, my semantic engine will produce "wrench", because it is aligned with -- my understanding? reality?

Oddly, I think sometimes people hear silent corrections: there is a not quite conscious memory, a trace, of the words they spoke, so that if I hand you a wrench without saying anything, you might very well say, "Thanks. I asked for a socket, didn't I? Geez."

Bonus:
That is, the words you actually said create an expectation of their own, one that competes with the expectation of getting a wrench, producing a double-take (sometimes) because you get what you (think you) asked for, but you have a feeling it's not what you expected.

I think we need to get a bit deeper into the actual logic of the argument, but that's going to be fraught.
Edited:
Deleted muddle, overly formal approach.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Except when you mistakenly ask for a socket and I know you meant to ask for a wrench (or should have meant to ask for a wrench), I know what object you actually need because my understanding is aligned with reality, despite what you said. If I were to describe my understanding, my semantic engine will produce "wrench", because it is aligned with -- my understanding? reality?

Convention.

If I ask for a socket when I mean to ask for a wrench, there is indeed a difference between what the words mean and what I mean and/or want to acquire by asking. That's misspeaking. We both know what I meant to say as a result of already having a conventional understanding. The same holds good of malapropisms, prior convention makes it clear.

While I agree with Davidson that the notion of language(successful communication) being discussed is found wanting, I do not find that it is as a result of claiming that successful communication with malapropism requires convention. Rather, I find it wanting as a result of the idea that conventional/literal/prior meaning is somehow completely divorced from actual use and/or what speakers intend/mean.

I agree with him that there is no such thing as language that we first learn, and then use later. Rather, we learn by(while) using.

Quoting Dawnstorm

"first meaning"

I don't find Davidson's sentences the clearest.

Basic linguistic competence
It seems that principles 1, 2 and 3 set out the "basic linguistic competence", meaning a basic knowledge of linguistic conventions. (p. 254)

What does Davidson mean by "first meaning" ?
Consider the malapropism "we're all cremated equal". Initially, Davidson's "first meaning" could mean either - i) what the speaker intended to say "we're all created equal" or - ii) what the words literally mean - "we're all cremated equal". However, Davidson's principle 1 says that a competent interpreter will be able to interpret words independent of the speaker's meaning, meaning that "first meaning" reduces down to what the words literally mean, their normal or standard dictionary definition, ie, cremated means cremated.

Ambiguities and principles 1, 2 and 3
Consider the ambiguity "I saw the chair", where chair could refer to a piece of furniture or a person heading a committee. Davidson says that ambiguities can be resolved within principles 1, 2 and 3 within a "basic linguistic competence". IE, we can consider the full linguistic context using linguistic conventions, "I saw the chair, and he spoke to me"and conclude that here "chair" means a person heading a committee.

Malapropisms and principles 1, 2 and 3
Davidson says that malapropisms such as "we're all cremated equal" cannot be resolved within the conventions of "basic linguistic competence", in that there are no sets of words, that can determine whether "cremated" in "we're all cremated equal" means cremated or created. May or may not be true, however, to resolve the meaning of "we're all cremated equal" we need to look outside of linguistic conventions. Outside of linguistic conventions are social conventions, in that if the speaker of the sentence "we're all cremated equal" is wearing a black suit and black top hat then we can reasonably determine that cremated means cremated and resolve the malapropism.

Conclusion
Davidson does not seem to be distinguishing between linguistic conventions that are internal to the utterance and social conventions that are external to the utterance. As Davidson seems to be equating "convention" with linguistic convention, his conclusion on page 265 may be read as saying - "as we cannot understand language using linguistic convention alone, we should ignore linguistic convention" - which I don't think is a reasonable approach.

Quoting creativesoul

If Davidson wishes to preserve a purported distinction between what a speaker means and what their words mean then literal meaning cannot ever be what a speaker means(but it quite often is).

I think that's wrong. Preserving the distinction merely means to preserve the analytical category. If you do that, you can say that what the speaker means is what the words mean. If you don't preserve the categories, you can't say that in terms of this particular theory, because you lack the tools. He's just describing the analytical framework, here. (The sentence Srap Tasmaner pointed out and I missed about making a distinction between what is "literal" and what is "conventional"... that is really odd, though. I'm not sure what to make of this.)

Quoting Banno

Is that right?

I rather suspect we use it, regardless, and become more adept over time.

We can make similar inquiries about all the principles. There's a point at which we don't know enough about a language to use it, and then there may come a point that we do. In this thread you're using English; could you say the same, in say, Hindi? Basque? Ancient Egyptian?

Still, I think that's an important point you make.Quoting Banno

That is, learning a language and using it are the very same thing. After all, have you stoped learning English?

I don't think it's useful to conflate usage and learning, although learning usually involves usage. One of the things to bear in mind for example is that if a great number of people fail to "learn" a certain feature, we might be looking at language change. (Examples from the past: a nadder --> an adder; a napron --> an apron.)

Also, learning details about a language you're already speaking tends to work a little differently from acquiring a language you don't speak yet. It's especially interesting to look at first language acquisition. We tend not to remember what it was like to not speak any language at all, but there was such a time. What's it like to learn that there is language? (Do we? Some people thing it's innate.)

Quoting Banno

But further, and deeper, if you could learn a language before you used it, that would imply that there was a difference between knowing a language and using it. I can't see what that could be like - how could you show that you know a language without using it?

This is where I start to be out of my depth. I can see that my ad-hoc phrasing above isn't useful for that sort of questioning, but I can't rephrase it really, because I'm not sure what I'd want to achieve by doing it. I could maybe talk about types of usage? Like approaching an unknown language via a text book for second language learners?

Reply to RussellA

That sounds like a plausible reading.

Quoting Dawnstorm

If Davidson wishes to preserve a purported distinction between what a speaker means and what their words mean then literal meaning cannot ever be what a speaker means(but it quite often is).
— creativesoul

I think that's wrong. Preserving the distinction merely means to preserve the analytical category. If you do that, you can say that what the speaker means is what the words mean. If you don't preserve the categories, you can't say that in terms of this particular theory, because you lack the tools. He's just describing the analytical framework, here. (The sentence Srap Tasmaner pointed out and I missed about making a distinction between what is "literal" and what is "conventional"... that is really odd, though. I'm not sure what to make of this.)

Yeah, I think you're right. Srap pointed to it as well, but I missed it. Even if it is often the case that what a speaker means is the same as the literal meaning, there are still cases where it is not. Hence, the distinction is preserved.

However, Davidson did say something about not blurring it. When what the person means is the same as the literal meaning, the distinction is blurred. Probably inconsequential.

Quoting Dawnstorm

...The sentence Srap Tasmaner pointed out and I missed about making a distinction between what is "literal" and what is "conventional"... that is really odd, though. I'm not sure what to make of this.

Yeah, that is very odd to me as well. They certainly ought be the same, unless there are more than one accepted use of the same term, only one of which would be "literal", and the speaker was using another conventional, but more 'figurative' or metaphorical use?

Quoting Banno

But further, and deeper, if you could learn a language before you used it, that would imply that there was a difference between knowing a language and using it. I can't see what that could be like - how could you show that you know a language without using it?

Then an infant that learned its first word, "Mamma", now knows English even though it can't write the word nor even understands what words or language or English is?

The infant is not even pointing to its mother with the sound from its mouth, rather emulating its mothers movements with their mouth to make the sound. Does that qualify as knowing a language?

When does a sound become a word? Seems to me that you have to learn that distinction before using words.

Quoting Banno

how could you show that you know a language without using it?

Language and use
If I had lived amongst the Neanderthals, I could looked around me and named every object I saw - rock, water, gazelle, etc. This would be my language, albeit simple. I could remain an observer of the objects and never use my knowledge of their names, in which case I could have had a language without ever using it. It may be that after a while that I realized that having given names to objects around me would be of practical use, in that I may want someone to bring me water. IE, I had learnt a language before I had any use for it

Language, meaning and use
Wittgenstein said in sect. 43 of Philosophical Investigations that “For a large class of cases – though not for all – in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”
Wittgenstein also denied there was such a thing as identity - i) to say two things are identical is nonsense - ii) to say one thing is identical with itself is to say nothing.
I have a language consisting of the words rock, water, gazelle, etc. As Wittgenstein says, the word "water" has no meaning in itself, it only has meaning for me if I have a use for it, in that water means the abeyance of thirst, the presence of fish, etc. IE - i) I can have a language without it meaning anything - ii) a language only has meaning if it is useful.

Language and meaning
A Neanderthal may not have had a brain with the level of complexity required for modern speech, even though the Neanderthal had had the the physical apparatus for speech. But even without any words to describe their feelings, the sight of a woolly mammoth bearing down on them would certainly have meant something. IE, there can be meaning without language.

Quoting RussellA

If I had lived amongst the Neanderthals, I could looked around me and named every object I saw - rock, water, gazelle, etc. This would be my language, albeit simple.

But why would you do such a thing? What purpose would naming objects only for yourself, that you already know, be? Do you have to name a rock to know about rocks?

To be useful, the names would have to be known by others. Are you using words when you say them and no one is around to hear you say them?

Games have a finite number of rules. Once you know all the rules you know how to play the game. Change the rules and then you change the game you're playing.

Does knowing a language entail making scribbles and noises myself, or simply understanding what others mean when they make particular scribbles and noises? Say there's a person without the ability to speak or write, but has the ability to see, hear and think. Given time to observe others using sounds and scribbles, would they know the language that is being used?

Quoting Dawnstorm

(The sentence Srap Tasmaner pointed out and I missed about making a distinction between what is "literal" and what is "conventional"... that is really odd, though. I'm not sure what to make of this.)

Once you know where the paper's going, it makes sense.

He's going to argue that we communicate by modifying the literal meanings of words as we go and agreeing, if only tacitly, on this usage, temporarily and for as little as a single exchange. If by "convention" you mean something that can be learned in advance, such "passing theories" are not conventional.

If there are two broadly different approaches to language -- langue and parole, formal and sociological, transcendental and ethological -- I believe Davidson is arguing that you cannot get to langue from parole. The only formal specification you'll ever be able to come up with is a one-off.

The "passing theory" theory is a reductio of the idea of deriving langue from parole because the only langue you can possibly come up with is not a language at all.

But note crucially that this all depends on claiming that what we do is determine lexical meaning as we go -- so we're not in Grice's territory at all. Where are we?

If you tell people that the lexical meaning of a word -- and for the sake of argument we, and that means Davidson, are assuming, unlike, I believe, @Banno, that there is such a thing -- is entirely determined by the utterances of the members of a speech community that include that word, whether you take yourself to be (i) a garden-variety lexicographer or (ii) a proponent of some version of Wittgenstein or even (iii) compiling a Tarski-style model with a whole bunch of sentences and the community-standard truth values assigned, the first and most predictable response is:

• Then there's no such thing as misusing a word.

Somehow, for some reason, this seems to be the vineyard Davidson is working in.

((We could enrich the idea of convention; we could take a different approach to the formal model; we have a lot of options for trying to make progress, but I'm still just trying to nail down exactly what Davidson's own argument is.))

Quoting Harry Hindu

Do you have to name a rock to know about rocks?

Naming
I was thinking of "naming" more of an act of defining something rather than describing something - more "I name this ship Queen Elizabeth" than the name of this object is a rock.

Parts and the whole
A table is the relationship between a table top and four legs. Mereologically speaking, an object composed of a table top and the Eiffel Tower is as ontologically real as an object composed of a table top and four legs.

Objects
I observe the world. I observe the parts within the world, and observe that there is an almost infinite number of relationships between these parts. Each possible relationship will create a unique ontological object.

Names
Through observation, I discover a particular object. If the object is useful to me, I invent a name to give to the object in order to label that the object is useful. I don't need to name the object to know the object, as I know the object in discovering the relationship between its parts. IE, names in my language signify that the object they are attached to are useful to me in some way.

First meaning.

Isn't that is it so hard to clearly define exactly the point?

If language were governed by convention, if there were a set of rules that allowed us to determine to the exclusion of other possibilities something called the meaning of a sentence, then there would be a first meaning that somehow dropped out of those conventions. "Roughly speaking, first meaning comes first in the order of interpretation."

The argument proceeds by showing that it is not possible to give a coherent account of first meaning.

So it's not criticism of the article to point that out.

Reply to Banno

Tell me again what the argument is.

Is it, for instance, that because a word might be used to say something different from what it is usually used to say, deliberately or inadvertently, therefore nothing can be learned in advance about how words are generally used? You either get exhaustive, exception-free and eternal rules governing usage, or you get nothing at all.

Is that the argument?

Quoting RussellA

Wittgenstein said in sect. 43 of Philosophical Investigations that “For a large class of cases – though not for all – in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”

Sure. Here he is perhaps being gentle. He everywhere undermines the notion of the meaning of a word, of a sentence, of a concept. Everywhere we are tempted to talk about meaning, we might better talk about what it is we are doing.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Well, what the argument is, is contented.

It seems to me to be aimed at a mooted argument that there is such a thing as the meaning that can be derived in a fairly direct way from a set of words, exclusively by making use of a catalogue of conventions.

But there are instances in which the convention is explicitly undermined.

And hence, the premise cannot stand.

So it's not that nothing can be learned form conventions, but that they cannot be the whole of the story.

I'd like to hear what others think - is this your reading of the argument?

Quoting Banno

It seems to me to be aimed at a mooted argument that there is such a thing as the meaning that can be derived in a fairly direct way from a set of words, exclusively by making use of a catalogue of conventions.

I told a typical story about the ambiguity of the word "Bob" as it appears in what I know about English: my theory has two entries and I rely on context to know which of the two conventional meanings I know to use.

I told a typical story about mis-speaking, saying "socket" when you mean "wrench": that might lead to a genuine impasse, if "socket" is exactly as reasonable a thing to say as "wrench", or you might be able use your knowledge of the context of the utterance to know that "socket" was simply the wrong word. I also suggested that an audience might see saying the wrong the thing as similar to thinking the wrong thing, for the remedies are similar.

(None of the speakers of British or Commonwealth English here complained about my use of "wrench", though if I were helping one of you lot you might have meant to ask me for a spanner, and you might have meant to ask me for a spanner by using the word "wrench" since you know I'm an American.)

In neither case do I see any challenge to the idea that the words being used are generally used in particular ways, that they play certain roles or serve certain functions we can think of as agreed upon, though without any explicit agreement, and that these ways of using words can be learned, that they are in these senses conventional.

It is plain that you can know everything there is to know about the conventions at play and still come up short if you know too little about the occasion of use, but where is the argument that there are no such conventions or that knowledge of such conventions, should they exist, would be useless? Everyone would grant that knowledge of conventions may be insufficient, but where is the argument that it is not necessary?

p. 252:This talk of error or mistake is not mysterious nor open to philosophical suspicions. I was wrong about what a good dictionary would say, or what would be found by polling a pod of experts whose taste or training I trust. But error or mistake of this kind, with its associated notion of correct usage, is not philosophically interesting. We want a deeper notion of what words, when spoken in context, mean; and like the shallow notion of correct usage, we want the deep concept to distinguish between what a speaker, on a given occasion, means, and what his words mean. The widespread existence of malapropisms and their kin threatens the distinction, since here the intended meaning seems to take over from the standard meaning.

Does Davidson show that the "seems to" can be substantiated as a "does"? Does he show that the distinction "threatened" is actually demolished? Does he show that the distinction between what a speaker means and what their words mean is demolished by showing that there is nothing on the right-hand side, nothing that the words mean?

Quoting Banno

He (Wittgenstein) everywhere undermines the notion of the meaning of a word, of a sentence

There are perhaps two aspects to meaning: the semantic abstraction and the psychological instantiation. Frege and Husserl insisted on a clear distinction between the semantic and the psychological, but semantic entities can only exist within instantiated mental acts.

Sentient life has existed on Earth for about 500 millions years, whereas language only developed about 200,000 years ago, meaning that sentient life has depended on psychological meaning for more than 99% of its existence, and has only used semantic meaning for less than 1% of its existence.

One pertinent question is whether semantic meaning grew out of psychological meaning, or is semantic meaning of a different kind to psychological meaning.

Because Wittgenstein has the position that meaning cannot be found in a semantic analysis of propositions independent of any user, but rather can only be discovered in how the user makes use of the propositions as part of an activity, this infers that for Wittgenstein, semantic meaning is no more than an expression of psychological meaning.

It follows that the semantic meaning of a word such as "house" is just an expression of the user's psychological meaning of the concept "house". IE, for the user, a semantic "house" is a psychological "house", where "is " is being used as equality rather than a copula

As sentient life has successful survived and evolved for more than 99% of its time on Earth
where meaning is psychological, and following Wittgenstein that semantic meaning is no more than an expression of psychological meaning, we might agree with Wittgenstein that meaning can be understood purely in psychological terms.

Reply to RussellA

Mental correlations drawn between different things.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

A spanner is a type of wrench. :wink:

Quoting Banno

The argument proceeds by showing that it is not possible to give a coherent account of first meaning.

Which is odd, right?

I mean, it's his notion. He invoked it. He began with a more conventional notion, then set it aside in lieu of what he called first meaning...

Suppose the weak spot in the paper is not principle (3) but (2):

p. 254:First meanings are shared. For speaker and interpreter to communicate successfully and regularly, they must share a method of interpretation of the sort described in (1).

The concept of "sharing" a method of interpretation, or a theory, operative in the paper amounts to "each has a copy, their own copy". That's it. Language use is not an ongoing communal enterprise but an encounter between two people who may or may not each have a copy of the same theory:

p. 259:In small, isolated groups everyone may know the names everyone else knows, and so have ready in advance of a speech encounter a theory that will, without correction, cope with the names to be employed.

What a stroke of luck, if people in small, isolated groups turn out to know each other's names.

Quoting RussellA

semantic entities can only exist within instantiated mental acts.

What's an "instantiated mental act"?

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Very interesting.

This raises the question of what it is that is shared. So what is a "shared method of interpretation" if not a set of conventions?

SO why not (1) as well? What are "systematic relations between the meanings of utterances" if not conventions?

Quoting Banno

This raises the question of what it is that is shared.

I'm not offering to build a complete alternative theory.

These are the options I see:

(i) We have a linguistic competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, and this competence is adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3).

(ii) We have a linguistic competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, and this competence is not adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3). (Some principle must be added, or one of these principles must be modified.)

(iii) We have some other competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, not linguistic and thus not adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3), which describes a linguistic competence, whether or not it describes all possible linguistic competence.

I'm still not sure whether (i) is false, but it's what Davidson believes he has shown.

A version of (iii) might be:

p. 265:But if we do say this, then we should realize that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally. For there are no rules for arriving at passing theories, no rules in any strict sense, as opposed to rough maxims and methodological generalities

(I think this is the bucket he consigns Grice to -- general principles and maxims.)

It's tempting to go along with this, but what was this boundary supposed to be? Driving a car is a specific skill that can be described abstractly to some degree, but even this abstract description will be incomplete if it leaves out all the other abilities and social conditions in which driving a car is embedded, and upon which it is dependent. We feel there must be something we can pick out as specific to car-driving -- and honestly that part's easy, being behind the wheel and operating the controls -- but what you pick out as specific to car driving only is not remotely all there is to driving a car.

So I wonder about the boundary. Language use is obviously social and dependent on a whole lot of other social abilities, as well as physical, and many of them are in turn dependent on language use among a community's members. So where was Davidson drawing the boundary in the first place and should I be pleased to erase it or not?

He seems to prefer (ii) because he still thinks something like (1) - (3) "must be true" and he decides the problem is (3): there have to be these theories, methods of interpretation, but they cannot possibly be learned in advance, therefore (3) is dead.

But we could note that the source of the friction is all related to the sense in which theories are shared or not. The bulk of the actual argument of the paper is laboring over the nature of prior theories, their insufficiency for speech with a specific audience, the generation of passing theories to make up for that, and so on.

But there is no "shared theory" here at all; there are only the theories of isolated individuals, their methods of interpretation. They may each have an identical copy of some theory, but there is nothing here that they could call theirs together, nothing that is actually shared, and certainly nothing that they share with an entire community.

I can easily imagine what such a thing would be: a Lewisian convention. It is something your behavior should be governed by, but also something you participate in shaping, not an external rule imposed by some authority.

It is possible that if you start with a richer sense of what is shared, you do not face the problem of radical interpretation at all. (And I believe Lewis said as much in the paper I mentioned way back at the beginning, but I only skimmed it to see if it might've gotten under Davidson's skin.)

Quoting RussellA

One pertinent question is whether semantic meaning grew out of psychological meaning, or is semantic meaning of a different kind to psychological meaning.

Just catching up on reading through this thread (haven't time to actually analyse the paper itself, much as I'd like to, so just a bystander here), but I can't make any sense of this notion you've introduced of psychological meaning which seems in opposition to semantic meaning, can you elaborate briefly?

Quoting Isaac

psychological meaning which seems in opposition to semantic meaning

Perhaps my distinction is along the lines of Frege's attack on Locke. For Locke, ideas exist independently of words, where words just serve as vehicles to ideas, whilst for Frege, meaning is in the structure of a sentence rather than any psychological state of the speaker or hearer.

For most of its existence, as sentient life has not had language, meaning cannot have come from semantics, but from the psychological state of mind.

Quoting RussellA

For most of its existence, as sentient life has not had language, meaning cannot have come from semantics, but from the psychological state of mind.

It's this that I'm not getting. Without words, what is it that you're referring to the meaning of?

Quoting Isaac

Without words, what is it that you're referring to the meaning of

Even with the first human interaction with fire, perhaps 1.5 million years ago, fire would have had a meaning. Fire would have meant light and fire at night, protection against predatory animals and the smoke would have meant relief from insects. Even without words, the object fire would have had a meaning to these early humans.

Quoting Banno

What's an "instantiated mental act"

As I see it :

Definition
An instantiated mental act is the act of mentally making an instance of, or representing, something perceived.

Instantiated mental acts precede intentionality
In our consciousness, we are conscious about something, we think about something. This is called intentionality. Intentionality has to be directed at something. Intentionality has to do with the directedness, aboutness, or the reference of mental states. Intentionality allows us to represent the world using mental representations. But, something has had to been instantiated before being able to have intentionality about it, in that instantiation and intentionality are linked concepts.

Instantiated mental acts are concepts
A concept, whether abstract or concrete, is an internal cognitive symbol that can represent an external reality, things that have never been experienced, or things that don't exist. Within my mind, my cognition is not directed to the world but to the concept I have in my mind.

Concepts are relevant whether a Direct Realist, an Indirect Realist or an Idealist.
It may be that the Direct Realist is correct and my concepts are accurate copies of the world. It may be that the Indirect Realist is correct in that my concepts are only representations of the world. It may be that the Idealist is correct in that my concepts don't originate other than in my mind.

Instantiated mental acts and universals
Aristotle said that universals only exist when they are instantiated in a particular thing, where chairness is instantiated by a chair, in that there is not a Platonic Form of chairness. Knowledge of universals does not derive from a supernatural source but is obtained by means of the intellect.

Instantiated mental acts are complete
When observing the world through my senses and creating a model of the world, my sense perceptions necessarily only give me part of the full information about the world. Although my knowledge of the world is necessarily incomplete, my model is necessarily complete. My mental instantiation has made something complete out of something incomplete.

Instantiated mental acts and causation
In the problem of the causation of physical effects by mental causes, the mental event of my desire to eat cake plays a causal role in a physical event of raising my arm. A mental desire has been instantiated by a physical action.

Instantiated mental acts and semantics
I observe in the world the object "house" and I observe in the world the attached label "this is a house". I perceive both the "house" and its label as objects. Both these objects are instantiated in my mind as concepts, the concept "house" and the associated concept "this is a house". IE, whether referring to the concrete or abstract, linguistic semantic entities are not of a different kind to non-linguistic physical entities, they are expressions of the same thing.

(I know I will be nearing a profound truth when you ask a 500 word question and I am able to give a 5 word answer.)

Another way to see Davidson's agreement in a passing theory is as a sort of parody of convention, as a parody of agreement, in fact, because one side "gets away with it"; the speaker gets the audience to adjust their theory of the language to match the speaker's. You could say that the speaker wins the speech encounter.

If speaker and audience come to a speech encounter -- and honestly they do not -- with the options of (a) following convention and honoring the social contract, or (b) not, you could do just the sort of game theoretical analysis that Lewis does, starting with a simple four-quadrant payoff table.

Davidson doesn't do this. He starts his analysis with the speaker having already violated the principle of cooperation, and violated the social contract. It's a fait accompli. The audience then has to choose whether to let the speaker get away with it. Davidson has cases where the audience does this, so it's almost as if he's committing to flouting convention being a dominant strategy. (If you can get away with it, then you should.) At the theoretical level, that shows up as doubting or denying the role of convention.

This is all cockeyed though because language use is a cooperative game, not a competitive one.

Reply to RussellA

That all makes sense now, thanks for clearing that up.

Reply to Isaac
There's a meaning there...

Actually, a question for you. I've had trouble working through the notion of a mental model of the world. What evidence is there that we model the world? Or better, what sort of thing is that model taken to be? It's apparent that there are philosophers of sorts that think all we have access to is our model of the world. That's not what psychology thinks, is it?

Can you commend any decent tertiary texts on this?

Reply to RussellA
So you are saying that intentional states are not directed at things in the world, but at Aristotelian universals that are mental objects?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

(i) We have a linguistic competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, and this competence is adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3).

Yes, in which case the article does not hold its argument. The article sets out to shoe that (3) is false.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner

(ii) We have a linguistic competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, and this competence is not adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3). (Some principle must be added, or one of these principles must be modified.)

Yep. This is perhaps the first reading of the article; work out what principle we need to add.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner

(iii) We have some other competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, not linguistic and thus not adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3), which describes a linguistic competence, whether or not it describes all possible linguistic competence.

Is this that Davidson's principles are inadequate? If so, yes, and this seems to me to be were we should be heading, and were Davidson ends up. Your quote reminds me of the end of On the very idea of a conceptual scheme,

In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the tfamiliarobjects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.

Hence my questions to @Isaac and to @RussellA.

Davidson would have us treat language as in direct touch with the world. I have considerable sympathy for this approach.

Reply to Banno

The stuff of mine you responded to, that was supposed to be uncontroversial summary.

In the rest of that post, and in the one before, and in the one that follows, I criticize Davidson's treatment of principle (2) as laughably inadequate.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

The stuff of mine you responded to, that was supposed to be uncontroversial summary.

Sure, which is why I took the time to point out that Davidson's conclusion seems to me to be not too dissimilar to your own conclusion (iii): that the principles listed in the article are inadequate to explaining language.

Reply to Banno

Not clear. They're not where I would've started, I guess, but as long as you take seriously what it means for a method of interpretation to be shared by an entire community, maybe you'd be fine.

But even if we do reach a conclusion you could count as "the same" in some schematic sense, we obviously have different ideas about what the trouble is. Davidson thinks he has cast doubt on the role of convention in understanding language use; I think he doesn't have the faintest idea what convention is.

He hasn't given up anything really. He still sees communication by means of language as radical interpretation or radical translation: either you have a useless prior theory or no theory at all.

I wouldn't say we agree.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

but as long as you take seriously...

Not sure how to read this - do you mean " as long as Banno takes seriously..." or "as long as one take seriously..."?

Reply to Banno

One.

SO drop the notion of a share meaning. I don't see that as overly problematic. That is what Wittgenstein was saying, and where Davidson is heading.

I invite folk to have another look at the concluding paragraph:

The problem we have been grappling with depends on the assumption that communication by speech requires that speaker and interpreter have learned or somehow acquired a common method or theory of interpretation—as being able to operate on the basis of shared conventions, rules, or regularities. The problem arose when we realized that no method or theory fills this bill. The solution to the problem is clear. In linguistic communication nothing corresponds to a linguistic competence as often described: that is, as summarized by principles (1)–(3). The solution is to give up the principles. Principles (1) and (2) survive when understood in rather unusual ways, but principle (3) cannot stand, and it is unclear what can take its place. I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.

The conclusion is to either re-think convention as an explanation, or reject it altogether.

(Avoid the quick trivialisation of decontextualising "there is no such thing as a language")

Quoting Banno

SO drop the notion of a share meaning.

No thanks.

Is this your reading of the paper?

1. Davidson's principles (1) - (3) are a good description of lexical meaning.
2. Davidson's argument shows that (1) - (3) cannot account for linguistic behavior.
Therefore
3. We lose nothing by giving up the idea of lexical meaning.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

3. We lose nothing by giving up the idea of lexical meaning.

I don't think that's the conclusion. The question as to the extent that Davidson repudiated his previous approach remains open at the end of this article. I'd rephrase it as that lexical meaning - convention - is insufficient; that language is more than following conventions.

Rule-based conventions are part of language, but not fundamental to it.

That's something I would agree with.

(So when he says that there is no such thing as language in the way many philosophers and linguists have supposed, he is pointing out that language is more than following rules...)

Reply to Banno

I don't have the paper in front of me (at work); you wanna do a search and tell me what Davidson says there about rules?

Reply to Srap Tasmaner I'm reading convention as rule... almost.

Reply to Banno

A lot of the milk into town and it was pretty crestfallen when you want or go on the road.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner ...and yet that was understood; hence, so. A case in point.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

A lot of the milk into town and it was pretty crestfallen when you want or go on the road.

Quoting Banno

and yet that was understood; hence, so. A case in point.

Really? What do you think it means?

Reply to Janus Nothing. That's why it is the perfect reply. And in so doing, reinforces the point that language does not rely on rules.

Quoting Banno

What evidence is there that we model the world? Or better, what sort of thing is that model taken to be? It's apparent that there are philosophers of sorts that think all we have access to is our model of the world. That's not what psychology thinks, is it?

Can you commend any decent tertiary texts on this?

At the risk of sounding pedantic, the answer to your first question really does depend on what you mean by 'we' and what you mean by 'the world'. I think the varied use of these terms is what causes a lot of confusion around these issues. Though perhaps not exhaustive I think the main options are - there's 'we' as in our entire being - when I say, "I'm on the train", I mean arms and legs too, and then there's 'we' as in that which experiences thoughts. There's 'the world' as in that which we talk about, predict, integrate - and then there's 'the world' as in that which causes those things (not that I'm saying they're necessarily different at this stage, only that it is possible for them to be).

The topic is obviously huge an I had written quite some length here before realising it was completely off topic and so deleted it. Instead I'll give the short answer presuming by 'we' you mean our experiencing selves, and by 'the world' you mean that which is causally responsible for the states our experiencing selves find ourselves in.

What evidence is there that we model the world? - Tons. I'd even go as far as to say that now it would be very difficult even to theorise a physiological mechanism in the brain by which we could actually directly interact with the world without mediation by modelling in cortices not involved in the thoughts constituting a sense of 'we'. I know of not a single psychologist who doesn't work on this assumption.

What sort of thing is that model taken to be? - A tendency for particular cortical responses to be induced by particular cortical inputs despite it being physiologicaly possible for there to be other responses from those same inputs.

Can you commend any decent tertiary texts on this? - I'd recommend Karl Friston on mental models his publications are mostly online https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/. This one is quite a light introduction.

If you want any more info feel free to PM me.

Reply to Isaac Thanks, Isaac - I'll have a look.

Ok. I think I've finally wrapped my head around this paper(Davidson's train of thought)...

The issue:Malapropisms break the rules of conventional language use, but they are readily understood/interpreted by the listener nevertheless, and that particular sort of success causes unresolvable issues for any strict adherence to the following three principles...



(1) A competent speaker or interpreter is able to interpret utterances, his own or those of others, on the basis of the semantic properties of the parts, or words, in the utterance, and the structure of the utterance. For this to be possible, there must be systematic relations between the meanings of utterances.

(2) For speaker and interpreter to communicate successfully and regularly, they must share a method of interpretation of the sort described in (1).

(3) The systematic knowledge or competence of the speaker or interpreter is learned in advance of occasions of interpretation and is conventional in character.



Davidson offers plenty of examples of malapropisms in the very beginning, and subsequently claims(generally speaking) that philosophers have not given malapropisms due attention. Rather, philosophers categorize such uses as erroneous, in error, or otherwise count(classify) them as being cases of 'incorrect' usage, because of the divergence from convention(correct usage). While he does not outright reject this accounting practice, he finds it "shallow". He does not think that the conventional notion of error and it's counterpart incorrect usage are up to the task of explaining how incorrect usage results in correct interpretation(malapropisms), especially if our linguistic competency(translation method) is based upon and/or otherwise satisfied by the aforementioned three principles.

So, we're faced with a problem...

The philosophically interesting aspect of malapropisms is that they succeed, and the problem at hand is explaining how a listener correctly interprets the speaker despite the speaker's 'incorrect usage' if the aforementioned three principles are sufficient for describing all cases of successful communication/translation. They seem inadequate.

When Davidson wrote all this, academia drew and maintained a distinction between what the speaker says, and what the speaker means(or rather what words mean, and what a speaker means). Davidson honors that distinction by insisting upon not even blurring it, only to blur it later. He is also denying the ability of correct/incorrect usage to take account of malapropisms, calling that notion "shallow". Aside from the blurring of the distinction(which happens later), the rest of what's said in this paragraph becomes evident by what he said below.

We want a deeper notion of what words, when spoken in context, mean; and like the shallow notion of correct usage, we want the deep concept to distinguish between what a speaker, on a given occasion, means, and what his words mean. The widespread existence of malapropisms and their kin threatens the distinction, since here the intended meaning seems to take over from the standard meaning...

I suspect now upon reading this that Davidson himself did not pay quite enough attention to malapropisms. Specifically speaking, he did not take into consideration the remarkable differences between correct usage and incorrect usage as they pertain to someone that is deliberately using the wrong words, and someone mistakenly doing so. Taking both situations(both kinds of malapropisms) into proper account is absolutely crucial for understanding the role that intention has in a speaker's meaning. Davidson gets that quite wrong as well. To expand upon all this I'll invoke the following malapropisms...

...It’s high noon someone beat him at his own game, but I have never done it; cross my eyes and hope to die, he always wins thumbs down...

There is a remarkable difference between someone saying the above intentionally, such as a means to joke, and someone saying the above in error. Earlier Davidson dismissed such nuance as unimportant, as shown below.

It seems unimportant, so far as understanding is concerned, who makes a mistake, or whether there is one...

He was very wrong in one way, while being quite right in another. While the success of the malapropism - as it happens in the wild - does not at all depend upon who makes a mistake or whether there is one(he was right about that much), our understanding of exactly how they are successfully interpreted in both cases most certainly does depend upon whether or not a mistake was made(he was quite wrong about that). Let me explain...

When someone intentionally/deliberately says "it's high noon someone beat him at his own game" as a means to be silly or make a joke, they know that they've used the words incorrectly, but they expect to be understood anyway. They did not make a mistake. They said exactly what they intended to say, and meant exactly what they intended to mean. The two are not equivalent. His notion of first meaning does not - cannot - take this into account. In addition, it also blurs the distinction between conventional/standard meaning and intended meaning. I've copied the relevant excerpts below...

The concept(first meaning) applies to words and sentences as uttered by a particular speaker on a particular occasion. But if the occasion, the speaker, and the audience are ‘normal’ or ‘standard’ (in a sense not to be further explained here), then the ?rst meaning of an utterance will be what should be found by consulting a dictionary based on actual usage (such as Webster’s Third)

Aside from intended meaning and standard meaning being equivalent(no distinction), this part is of no further consequence, for it describes normal situations, not malapropisms. I would completely agree regarding such occasions. I also have no issue at all with a speaker's meaning and the meaning of the words being equivalent at times(It's a feature, not a flaw). That said, he then goes on to invoke the speaker's intention as part of first meaning. That's where the more serious problems begin...

A better way to distinguish ?rst meaning is through the intentions of the speaker...

...Because a speaker necessarily intends ?rst meaning to be grasped by his audience, and it is grasped if communication succeeds...

If first meaning is equal to conventional use and/or standard meaning, applies to the actual words used, and a speaker always intends first meaning to grasped by their audience, then the result is in an inherent inability to explain any cases of malapropism.

What's most curious about malapropisms, and what seems very problematic for Davidson here, is that the literal and/or conventional meaning of the word(s) being used is(are) [u]not what the speaker intends, regardless of whether or not they are mistaken.

To quite the contrary, in cases of intentional/deliberate incorrect use, such as malapropism being employed as manner of joking, the joker intends to use language incorrectly, but expects the audience to understand regardless. There are also problems in cases of misspeaking that result in malapropism. In these cases, the speaker intends to use language correctly, but does not. Thus, the first meaning of their words does not correspond to their intentions here either.

So, in neither kind of malapropism do the speaker's intentions match the words they actually use. If first meaning is about the words actually used, as Davidson claims, then we've arrive at a serious problem of inadequacy. Malapropisms are understood regardless of this. Here's my take regarding how(which amounts to my answer to the problem at hand)...

When malapropism is the result of deliberate incorrect language use, such as in the case of joking, the speaker intends for the listener to attribute unconventional/incorrect meaning(not literal/conventional) to the words actually spoken. That is to say that in order for such cases to succeed, the audience must misattribute meaning to the words being used.

When the malapropism results from a speaker accidentally misspeaking, the speaker does not intend for the listener to attribute unconventional/incorrect meaning to their words, but here again the audience must do so in order to successfully interpret the malapropism. That is once again, to say that in order for such cases to succeed, the audience must misattribute meaning to the words actually used.

So while Davidson realizes that the success of malapropisms places convention into question, I strongly suspect that he does not quite recognize how. In addition, and completely contrary to what Davidson claims, malapropisms do not - at all - threaten the distinction between what words mean, and what a speaker means. To quite the contrary, they require and/or necessarily presuppose it. They are themselves existentially dependent upon that very distinction. There could be no such thing as a malapropism if there were no difference between what words mean and what a speaker means.

Here's my assessment of the three principles in question...

An interpretation method and/or linguistic competence strictly based upon(or consisting solely of) learning, knowing, and/or otherwise following the rules of convention would result in translating all unconventional usage, such as malapropisms, as though they too followed convention, and hence:The speaker would not be understood if that's how our language competence and/or translation method worked. To quite the contrary, when translating malapropisms, if our translation method and/or linguistic competence relied solely upon knowing and subsequently applying the rules of convention, then our translation method would fail. We would be correctly attributing meaning to the words, but misattributing meaning to the speaker, because the conventional/literal/correct meaning of the key words within a malapropism are not equivalent to what the speaker means. Hence, if our linguistic competence consisted solely of learning and/or using convention, then malapropisms could not result in successful communication/translation. They require correctly translating an otherwise incorrect usage, by virtue of misattributing meaning to the words actually used. If our linguistic competence and/or ability were limited to those three aforementioned principles, we could not ever know what the speaker meant, as compared/contrasted to what they said... but we do.

Did I miss anything important with regard to the odd success of malapropisms?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

This is all cockeyed though because language use is a cooperative game, not a competitive one.

Unless you're Trump. Then it's certainly a competition to get people to believe what he believes and/or wants others to believe.

:razz:

Quoting RussellA

(I know I will be nearing a profound truth when you ask a 500 word question and I am able to give a 5 word answer.)

Correlations drawn between different things<---------------that's what all attribution of meaning has in common; the irreducible core. Don't ask me to fill it all in though... that is to expect and/or demand omniscience.

Thanks for the succinct and precise overview. It helps clarify.

Quoting creativesoul

If our linguistic competence and/or ability were limited to those three aforementioned principles, we could not ever know what the speaker meant, as compared/contrasted to what they said [in malapropisms]... but we do.

Did I miss anything important with regard to the odd success of malapropisms?

Why yes: what changes in those rules would or could account for our capacity to understand malapropisms? What does this discussion tells us about how to make progress, and update/improve upon Davidson's hypotheses?

Reply to Olivier5

Tomorrow. I've spent enough time on this for one day. The question isn't about what I've missed regarding the odd success of malapropisms. It's about how to correct and/or modify the three principles. It's about what Davidson missed. I'm hesitantly in agreement with some of what others have suggested as necessary modifications. Street earlier suggested that modifying our notion of convention would resolve the issue with the third principle. I suspect that an account of how convention becomes convention would work rather nicely for doing that. Davidson steers clear of such an endeavor.

I'm still thinking that the underlying issue at hand is(are) the conventional (mis)conception(s) of meaning. How meaning first emerges, as compared/contrasted to how we learn to use that which is already meaningful. This would modify our understanding of how convention emerges.

Quoting creativesoul

It's about what Davidson missed.

He tested three hypotheses that couldn't explain a particular fact. Picking up the reasoning where he dropped it, another set of hypotheses is required to explain malapropisms.

Reply to Olivier5

I've already explained where and how he failed. It happened long before he concluded that the third principle failed. Note that the explanation I offered for the odd success of malapropisms eliminated Davidson's notions of prior theory and passing theory. Ockham's razor applies.

Quoting creativesoul

Note that the explanation I offered for the odd success of malapropisms eliminated Davidson's notions of prior theory and passing theory.

I take "passing theory" to mean a non-canonical, no literal interpretation of a sentence or text, a creative, sui generis interpretation that may be required to understand each instance of malapropism. When a sentence does not compute within correct language conventions, one searches for an alternative explanation, a 'theory' of what happened in this particular malapropism. And as you described there's two or three candidates: a speech impairment, an error in one's choice of words, or the pretense of an error, i.e. a joke of some kind. Or a freudian lapse, which is an interesting case in which someone betrays his thoughts by some malapropism.

Personally, I see not how this 'theory' is by necessity 'passing'. It may be that the malapropism is so funny or so easy to make by mistake that the language retains it and legitimizes it after a while. So sometimes these alternative ways of saying things, at first deemed incorrect, become embedded in correct language and 'conventional'. In any case, some malapropisms endure either as jokes or as frequent errors, and therefore their 'theory' is not necessarily 'passing'.

I have two colleagues who say 'axe' instead of 'ask'. It's their way to say 'ask'. I may not like it but I understand them, when they do, and unfortunately it doesn't seem to be passing...

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

1. Davidson's principles (1) - (3) are a good description of lexical meaning.
2. Davidson's argument shows that (1) - (3) cannot account for linguistic behavior.
Therefore
3. We lose nothing by giving up the idea of lexical meaning.

This looks like a pretty good summary to me. Here's a key question:

What's the relationship between "first/literal meaning" and "lexical meaning"?

Davidson doesn't really address this directly, but I think there's a difference, here. First meaning is defined by the interplay of prior and passing theories, and - I think - "lexical meaning" would be part of the prior theory, but it wouldn't be it's entirety, because "lexical meaning" remains some sort of super-situational ideal, an abstraction.

Take this section where he looks at whether a prior theory could be what we think of a natural language.

An interpreter’s prior theory has a better chance of describing what we might think of as a natural language, particularly a prior theory brought to a first conversation. The less we know about the speaker, assuming we know he belongs to our language community, the more nearly our prior theory will simply be the theory we expect someone who hears our unguarded speech to use. (262)

I think there's an idea implied here, that the more we interact with specific people, the more we modify the prior theories we bring to conversations with them, but they don't impact "the theory we expect someone who hears our unguarded speech to use". It feels like a natural language is something a prior theory will diverge from the more we interact with a particular person. Or in short, that we expect Mrs. Malaprop to make malapropisms is part of the prior theory we bring to a conversation with Mrs. Malaprop, but it doesn't modify what we think of as a "natural language".

But he doesn't really talk about what it is he thinks of as "natural language". He keeps saying things like "in rather unusual ways" with the assumption being that there's a "usual" way we all think of language that's obvious.

And this is where I'll again have to emphasise that I come at this article from a linguistic perspective and not a philosophical one; maybe in philosophical traditions there actually is such a thing, and I just don't understand it. So I have this megpie mind; I snatch what's useful from philosophy and discard the rest. Linguistics basically started in earnest as a discipline with Saussure, and it turned into a systematic description of language, where signs interact with each other to make for a whole structure. Since early linguistics was tied up with anthropology, one way to look at it is to find a formal way to describe human artefacts. In other ways, lingistists aren't really doing anything that avarage language users aren't; they're just more systematic and ask questions that arise from being more systematic.

That's never been quite enough to account for all data, though, so linguists would look towards the philosophy of language, say Wittgenstein's language games, Austin/Searle's speech acts, and Grice's co-operative principle, and also towards linguists such as Jakobson and his functions of language, and would establish a discipline called pragmatics, so that we now have:

[Syntax, morphologly, phonetics, phonology, semantics] describe language, and pragmatics describes how people use language.

That was the mainstream standard organisation when I went to university in the 90ies, but pragmatics wasn't actually fully established, I think, until the early 70ies.

Then there's another distniction: linguistic analysis can be twofold: synchorony and diachrony. How language is used at any one time, and how language changes. Usually a synchronic approach would describe a fairly rigid set of rules, and a diachronic approach would then show how rules are broken, subverted, played with, so that langauge changes. (An example would be the migration of the "n" from the noun proper to the indefinite article "a": a nadder -> an adder; a napron --> an apron). Those approaches are seen as complementary, so a described, more or less rigid set of rules isn't taken to determine actual language behaviour.

So one problem I have is that my intuition seems to clash with Davidson's. I might agree with a lot of things he's saying, but I might never have held his view of what a natural language actually is. For example, I think one difference between my instinctive approach and Davidson's might be the following:

We both see language as an overly rigid structure. But where he expects language rules to determine behaviour (something he doesn't find in real life), I expect that rigid structure to be some sort of ideal type of a structuring principle; something people use to both create utterances and compare other people's utterances to, and something that will on occasion fail: people make mistakes, people don't find the words to express what they want to say and approximate with the best words they can find (and on failure to communicate try alternate ways of expressing themselves)... and so on.

It's not a surprise to me that you can also play with language. And we can learn by playing. For example, there's this little tale, "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", which was written to demonstrate the importance of intonation to interpreting words (it's a rewritten version "Little Red Riding Hood"; sadly the audio link seems to be broken - the story's meant to be both read and heard. Here's a youtube link.) It's the perfect case for a passing theory, too. And it's also clear why the theory will remain a passing theory (but maybe turn into a prior theory for whenever you engage with the same text again). None of these new words we'd expect to spill over into dialect, though they might spread as in-jokes for an in-group.

I actually meant to be briefer and more concise this time round.

Basically, I think Davidson is saying that prior and passing theories establish first meaning, which in turn can have consequent meanings due to the compositionality of language (to understand the Shakespear sonnet, we must first understand "foison" and "tire"). What "first meaning" has in common with "lexical meaning" is that it's not necessirily identical with the intended meaning; where it differs is that, unlike "lexical meaning", "first meaning" is always situational. And the way Davidson analysis first meaning sheds doubt on "lexical meaning", though it's possible to import "lexical meaning" into a speaker's prior theory.

So when he finishes with these words:

And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, weshould give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions. (265)

I think, the first clause is his conclusion, and the second clause his bias.

I think he's largely right, but I'm not sure I understand what he thinks a natural language is supposed to be, and I think we (Davidson and I) start in completely different places on that topic, which is why I have trouble reading him in detail.

Reply to Banno

pp. 261 - 262:Why should a passing theory be called a theory at all? For the sort of theory we have in mind is, in its formal structure, suited to be the theory for an entire language, even though its expected field of application is vanishingly small. The answer is that when a word or phrase temporarily or locally takes over the role of some other word or phrase (as treated in a prior theory, perhaps), the entire burden of that role, with all its implications for logical relations to other words, phrases, and sentences, must be carried along by the passing theory. Someone who grasps the fact that Mrs Malaprop means ‘epithet’ when she says ‘epitaph’ must give ‘epithet’ all the powers ‘epitaph’ has for many other people. Only a full recursive theory can do justice to these powers. These remarks do not depend on supposing Mrs Malaprop will always make this ‘mistake’; once is enough to summon up a passing theory assigning a new role to ‘epitaph’.

The role that "epithet" plays in the language: that's its lexical meaning. (See PI §43.) Not only is Davidson not rejecting lexical meaning, his whole argument depends upon it.

Is his argument a reductio of the idea that there are such roles? I think, rather, he claims that we cannot, with certainty, know in advance what word may, even temporarily, be called upon to play a given role, because someone might utter not the standard word but a different one. That doesn't change the fact that we will describe the role taken on by the uttered word anaphorically: 'epitaph' here means what 'epithet' means. Not only do I see no alternative to that being offered, I don't know what such an alternative could possibly be.

This passage is actually the fulcrum of the entire argument. When Davidson said

p. 252:The widespread existence of malapropisms and their kin threatens the distinction, since here the intended meaning seems to take over from the standard meaning.

this is where he was headed: the intended meaning (what 'epithet' means) takes over from the standard meaning (what 'epitaph' means). This is the point at which he substantiates "seems to" as "does", by his lights.

I'm not addressing here whether this is a reasonable account of malapropisms and their kin; my point is only that Davidson is nowhere giving up the idea of lexical meaning, only prying it apart from "what is conventional or established" (252).

But does he? How do we know what 'epithet' means and what 'epitaph' means?

*

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

A lot of the milk into town and it was pretty crestfallen when you want or go on the road.

According to you, this means nothing, and

Quoting Banno

reinforces the point that language does not rely on rules.

You want to explain that?

From the pen of Joss Whedon:

Quoting Dawnstorm

What's the relationship between "first/literal meaning" and "lexical meaning"?

I've been pretty loose about this too.

Quoting Dawnstorm

I expect that rigid structure to be some sort of ideal type of a structuring principle; something people use to both create utterances and compare other people's utterances to, and something that will on occasion fail: people make mistakes, people don't find the words to express what they want to say and approximate with the best words they can find (and on failure to communicate try alternate ways of expressing themselves)... and so on.

I think this is absolutely right, and it's a curious thing. The abstract model has three functions:

1. It is a scientific model a linguist might use to predict behavior.
2. It is physically instantiated within an agent and actually produces the behavior we observe.
3. It is an ideal that language users are aware of and use to guide their (perhaps few) conscious choices about linguistic behavior.

(Logic, decision theory, and game theory all have a similarly peculiar status.)

That the model is an ideal that a language user refers to, sometimes, in choosing what linguistic act to undertake, I find particularly interesting: to choose your words carefully is sometimes to imagine a sort of ideal speaker of your language, who would choose the correct words, and to choose the words they would choose. ("Imbue.")

It seems pretty clear though that (3) there, the ideal we're aware of, is not the same thing as (2), and where (1) fits in is unclear. The structure of (2) we are largely unaware of, so it's more likely that (3) is something else that (2) generates alongside linguistic behavior. And (3) can readily grow from simple correctness to the art of rhetoric.

But maybe it goes in the other direction! Maybe (2) is the habituation of practices first achieved through the conscious building up of (3) -- the usual System 2 to System 1 pipeline. It's just that there's probably, if the sorts of things Chomsky and Pinker say are right, some structure in (2) waiting to find out how it should arrange itself. That still leaves a lot of options for (3): vestiges of the early training, rationalized into a system; a system rationalized out of the behavior we currently engage in we know not why; a rationalized and simplified systematization of some of what (2) is up to passed along to consciousness because it seems to want it.

Quoting Olivier5

I take "passing theory" to mean a non-canonical, no literal interpretation of a sentence or text, a creative, sui generis interpretation that may be required to understand each instance of malapropism. When a sentence does not compute within correct language conventions, one searches for an alternative explanation, a 'theory' of what happened in this particular malapropism

Seems an extremely overcomplicated way to explain the need to misattribute meaning to words as the only means to successfully interpret meaningful but otherwise unconventional language use.

Of course the term 'passing theory' is a bit pompous. You can translate it by "one's understanding of what happened".

Can we not reduce all this to the simple necessity that language is prior to any language theory?
Just as music is prior to music theory. In the beginning was the expletive, and the expletive was understood to be 'Oh fuck!', or 'ug!' for short.

Quoting Banno

So you are saying that intentional states are not directed at things in the world, but at Aristotelian universals that are mental objects?

First part - yes
As an Indirect Realist, I don't believe that I perceive the external world as it really is, what I perceive are mental objects. I have intentionality about my mental objects, things which exist in my mind rather than the world.

Second part - partly
My view is that a mental objects have three properties: particular perception, universal concept and linguistic naming. All mental objects include particular perception, of these, some but not all of these include universal concept, and of these, some but not all include linguistic naming.

Particular perception relates to Frege's "referent" and Wittgenstein's "picture theory". The referent of a mental object is simply a particular entity that has been perceived in an assumed world. A mental object is a picture of a set of particular sensations through our five senses. However, particular perception by itself is insufficient for sentience, as a picture by itself cannot resolve the mereological problem of establishing the importance of relationships between the pictured parts.

Universal concept relates to Frege's "sense" and Aristotle's "Theory of Universals". The sense is the thought that it expresses, whether or not it has a referent, in that Odysseus has a sense but no reference. In Aristotle's view, universals only exist when they are instantiated in the mind, where such universals are concepts. Sentience needs both particular perceptions and universal concepts.

Linguistic naming relates to Kant's Theory of Judgement, where naming is a complex cognitive judgement about the usefulness of a concept. Whilst the mental objects of sentient life for the first 99% of its time of its existence on Earth has included particular perception and universal concepts, it is only in the recent 1% that the mental objects of sentient life have also included linguistic naming. IE, only some of our concepts have words attached, in that I have a word for the concept "chair", I have a word for the concept "Eiffel Tower", but I don't have a word for the concept of an object part chair and part Eiffel Tower.

IE, my understanding is that intentional states are not directed at things in the world, but at mental objects, which have the three properties of particular perception, universal concept and linguistic naming.

Quoting creativesoul

Malapropisms break the rules of conventional language use

It seems that, in his article "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs"

1) Davidson doesn't define what he means by "conventions", but infers a particular definition of "conventions".
2) He concludes by inferring that because his particular definition of "conventions" is not illuminative - then no definition of "conventions" will be illuminative.

Quoting unenlightened

Can we not reduce all this to the simple necessity that language is prior to any language theory?

Well Un, putting that common sense understanding to good use may shed some much needed light upon the subject matter, but doing so requires a methodological approach that analytic and post moderns alike seem averse to, albeit for entirely different reasons. I'll say this much...

Because language existed in its entirety prior to any language theory, so too must all of the basic elemental constituents that such language consists of. This sort of approach is akin to Hume's Guillotine in the sense of driving a wedge between what counts as a product of language(such as theories) and what counts as a basic elemental constituent thereof. The aforementioned approach grounds my own position regarding meaning, truth, thought, and belief... all of which are required for language. However, despite the fact that I strongly believe that there are much deeper issues at hand than the apparent inability of convention to explain the success of malapropisms, I've deliberately avoided getting into all of that, because I do not want to be 'the guy' that derails the entire thread.

:wink:

Oddly enough, the approach is actually the topic of a new thread I'm still working on.

Quoting Olivier5

Of course the term 'passing theory' is a bit pompous. You can translate it by "one's understanding of what happened".

Simply put, it seems clear to me that the notions of 'prior' and 'passing' theory are the result of not quite having a good enough grasp upon what language is, and how it works.

Quoting RussellA

Malapropisms break the rules of conventional language use
— creativesoul

It seems that, in his article "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs"

1) Davidson doesn't define what he means by "conventions", but infers a particular definition of "conventions".
2) He concludes by inferring that because his particular definition of "conventions" is not illuminative - then no definition of "conventions" will be illuminative.

I think that's fair. The deeper issue, by my lights anyway, is that whatever his notion of convention includes, it most certainly does not take it's evolutionary progression into proper account.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

It seems pretty clear though that (3) there, the ideal we're aware of, is not the same thing as (2),

Yes. Look at peeving culture. People often put forward pet-peeves unaware that they're guilty of the same "sins". I remember an anecdote of linguist David Crystal, I failed to find online and thus is of dubious authenticity: He said that a particular violated rule wasn't really a rule people actually use, and to make his point he pointed out some instances in her very own usage. Rather than abandoning the rule she broke out in tears. (I wonder if I misremember the anecdote, the linguist involved, whether it's not online, or whether I just don't know how to find it.)

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

...and where (1) fits in is unclear.

That's a tough one. What complicates the matter is that there's also "traditional grammar", the scholarly approach to correct language that preceded linguistics and is still the main strain in schools, where we all learn how to use language "correctly", after we've already acquired not only our particular language, but language itself. (We don't just learn to speak English, we learn to speak.)

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

The structure of (2) we are largely unaware of, so it's more likely that (3) is something else that (2) generates alongside linguistic behavior. And (3) can readily grow from simple correctness to the art of rhetoric.

But maybe it goes in the other direction!

After the initial language acquistion as a toddler, it probably goes both ways, with judgments being made when what's already internalised is problematic in a stiuation (including being corrected by others). A lot of it is down to how we teach language in school, and also that language change means that old and new usage exist side by side and it's never quite clear what will survive. Some admonishments like "not ending a sentence with a preposition" and "not splitting infinitives" have been around for quite a while, so it's very likely that both the usage and its criticism is going to stick around for a while longer.

There's this idea of a language war between descriptivists and prescriptivists, but that would give you two insane positions: either "there are no mistakes," or "usage doesn't matter". Basically, you just navigate a linguistic landscape, accept some rules (and maybe internalise them, or maybe just pay lipservice), and discard others (maybe as a deliberate choice, or because your word habits are too strong and you just forget). Rules can be internalised from (3) into (2), and (1) can make hypotheses about when that happens (but I'm not sure how good (1) is at that currently).

Davidson's article appeared in a time when (1) generally became more interested in usage on various fronts. The rise of pragmatics, and of usage based grammar theories (such as cognitive grammar, construction grammar, or functional grammar). I sort of see it as a child of its time, and it's really older than me.

Quoting creativesoul

Simply put, it seems clear to me that the notions of 'prior' and 'passing' theory are the result of not quite having a good enough grasp upon what language is, and how it works.

The way I see it, it's a work in progress, annotations and remarks and caveats and entirely new entries get added from time to time, when we note a particular way of speaking ("Alfred keeps saying "obviously" all the time, that could mean something... but what?"), or when we understand a malapropism ("that lady is mixing up complicated words"), or catch a speech impairment ("he can't say "ask", that's why he's always "axing"), or when we learn a new word. It's a long list of "notes to self about language".

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

(C) If his argument is valid, and we reject views well-described by his three principles, are there other approaches out there that handle malapropisms better?

While I'll not claim to have a complete theory of language here, I do wonder what you think about how I handled malapropisms at the bottom of page nine?

Quoting Olivier5

Simply put, it seems clear to me that the notions of 'prior' and 'passing' theory are the result of not quite having a good enough grasp upon what language is, and how it works.
— creativesoul
The way I see it, it's a work in progress...

I would agree. But I meant "what language is, and how it works" in the sense of what all language consists of such that it can and does work; that it's able to evolve as it does.

Quoting creativesoul

that it's able to evolve as it does.

At the core of every system capable of evolving, one can usually find the three darwinian faculties to 1) err, though rarely; 2) weed out most errors when they appear; and 3) select some errors and turn them into useful novelty.

All systems must control errors, but the best systems use errors to evolve. Successful mutants, like malapropisms and neologisms, can become niche sub-species.

Quoting Olivier5

At the core of every system capable of evolving, one can usually...

That's not good enough for what I'm getting at. I'll keep this brief...

Rudimentary language use consists - in part at least - of simple, basic, and/or otherwise rudimentary level thought and belief. A true account of the origen of language must succeed in setting these things out, and must do so in a manner that is amenable to evolutionary terms; in a manner that facilitates and/or enables us to understand how thought, belief, and the language that they give rise to, emerges in their simplest constitution possible, and subsequently grow in complexity. The ability for thought, belief, and language to evolve requires that the basic elemental constituents thereof be capable of doing so.

The stifling problem currently is the inability to account for the transition from non linguistic meaning to linguistic meaning. That problem is one of conventional notions of language and meaning, and as such it is also embedded in this essay.

That's the last I'll say here about this. It's too far off topic... or points to the much too deeply imbedded problem of inadequacy inherent within the conventional notions(misconceptions) of language and/or meaning.

Reply to creativesoul Well done.

Reply to Banno

Thanks.

:smile:

Took me a long time to grasp that much, and I realize that I left all sorts of stuff out. I just wonder if anything I did not discuss needs discussed.

Quoting creativesoul

That's not good enough for what I'm getting at.

Probably not, but it suffices to explain how malapropisms can exist, be decoded, and sometimes get to endure. They are mutations of language.

Quoting Dawnstorm

Wittgenstein's language games, Austin/Searle's speech acts, and Grice's co-operative principle,

We ought add Davidson's own semantic theory. It looks to me to be the best candidate for a prior interpretation.

Is it worth setting it out here?

Quoting Dawnstorm

There's this idea of a language war between descriptivists and prescriptivists, but that would give you two insane positions: either "there are no mistakes," or "usage doesn't matter". Basically, you just navigate a linguistic landscape, accept some rules (and maybe internalise them, or maybe just pay lipservice), and discard others (maybe as a deliberate choice, or because your word habits are too strong and you just forget). Rules can be internalised from (3) into (2), and (1) can make hypotheses about when that happens (but I'm not sure how good (1) is at that currently).

Yeah that's a really curious point: debates about theory have a natural analog in our linguistic behavior, in part because using language seems always to lead to some personal theorizing about it, but also in the practice itself.

(I found myself going the other way too: Davidson starts with examples where people piss on convention from a great height, and then in his theory ...)

Quoting Banno

We ought add Davidson's own semantic theory. It looks to me to be the best candidate for a prior interpretation.

As far as I can tell, Davidson wasn't very influential when it comes to developing pragmatics as a field, even though this article would have fit to some degree, so maybe I just never came across the name. (Wittgenstein was the only one I knew before studying linguistics.)

Quoting Banno

Is it worth setting it out here?

It'd definitely help me understand the article. I've done a little research on truth-conditional semantics, and the most glaring omission is that I can't seem to find out how it deals with word meaning, since truth claims seem to require sentences/clauses. I actually meant to ask, but I forgot.

Reply to Dawnstorm
It doesn't provide a theory of meaning so much as replace it with truth; after all, if you know when a statement is true, what more could you want?

Quoting Banno

Nothing. That's why it is the perfect reply. And in so doing, reinforces the point that language does not rely on rules.

I agree that language does not rely on rules, and there is a fairly simple argument for that. If it was, through and through, merely a matter of following rules, then you would need rules to tell you how to follow the rules, which would introduce an infinite regress. There has to a be a point where we "just get it" and understanding malapropisms exemplifies that.

I'm not seeing how your not understanding Srap's nonsense sentence (even though you said it was understood) supports the contention that language does not rely on rules, though.

Reply to Janus

This getting a little far afield, nevertheless...

You can also describe the regress as needing first to understand the language in which the rules are expressed, and needing before that..., etc.

For all that it's still clear to me that rules play an enormous role in language use, so we need a way around the regress.

The beginning of that is to note that the 1 or 2 year old learning 'apple' (or being taught it) is doing something noticeably different from the 13 or 14 year old learning 'momentum'.

(Recommended: "Some Reflections on Language Games" by Wilfrid Sellars.)

At any rate, Davidson does not make a regress argument against conventions or rules, so perhaps he too feels the regress can be gotten around.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

At any rate, Davidson does not make a regress argument against conventions or rules, so perhaps he too feels the regress can be gotten around.

Yes, well of course I am going to agree that the regress is gotten around; it must be. I also agree that rules (or at least conventions which can be explicated as rules) play an enormous part in language practices. But to me it seems obvious that getting around the regress problem involved with rules cannot simply involve the application of more rules.

Regarding the ability to understand some malapropisms; in such cases we know from experience which word or words usually fit where the malapropism has been substituted, and our general familiarity with the great range of conventional sentences allows us to understand what is being said despite the substitutions. Imagine an alternative situation where a blank is left instead of substituting a misappropriate word .

Quoting Janus

But to me it seems obvious that getting around the regress problem involved with rules cannot simply involve the application of more rules.

No, of course not.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner PI §201

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

(Recommended: "Some Reflections on Language Games" by Wilfrid Sellars.)

Thanks, will take a look at it.

Reply to Banno

I am aware.

When you start out studying any of the humanities, one thing you learn pretty quickly, is none of the terms probably mean what you think they mean...

This is one of the problems with academia in general, I think. Davidson's notion of "first" being a prime example. The historical notion of "necessary" being another. Language use limits what can be said without sacrificing coherency/consistency...

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Just drawing it into the discussion. There is a way of following a rule that is not given by stating the rule but seen in the implementation of the rule...

hats how I would answer @Janus

Interesting response from Ernest Lepore and Matthew Stone:

Quoting Convention before Communication

So, what, then, is our take-home lesson? It is that, as semanticists, we should reject Davidson’s explanations in “Nice Derangement.” There is no reason to believe in Davidson’s passing theories, i.e., in improvised meanings!

Quoting Dawnstorm

truth claims seem to require sentences/clauses

As regards Davidson's semantic theory, Wikipedia's article on "Truth-Conditional Semantics" describes meaning as the same as, or reducible to, its truth condition. But truth is a concept that only exists within language, from which it follows that "a proposition has meaning IFF a proposition is true", agreeing with Scott Soames that this has become circular.

Also, most readers of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, for example, will not know the truth condition of most of the propositions in the book, and many of the propositions will be untrue anyway, and thereby, in Davidson's terms, find the novel meaningless. But this is to define "meaning" in a way totally contrary to conventional use.

Quoting Banno

Just drawing it into the discussion. There is a way of following a rule that is not given by stating the rule but seen in the implementation of the rule...

I'd say this kind of what you call rule following is simply imitation. Humans (and other animals) seem to have a powerful instinct to imitate others of their own kind. Perhaps this ties in with Chomsky's idea that we are "hard-wired" to learn language.

I'm not sure we ever squarely faced Davidson's central claim. Take Lepore and Stone's example:

• That's a nice soup latrine.

I think everyone would agree

1. You said "latrine" when you meant to say "tureen".

Lepore and Stone describe the situation as

2. You mispronounced "tureen" as "latrine".

What's still not perfectly clear is whether

3. By "latrine" you meant "tureen"'.

That is, whether you were, consciously or not, assigning the meaning of the word "tureen" to the word "latrine".

And then, finally, there's the question of whether the interpreter must say

4. In this sentence the word "latrine" means "tureen".

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Strangely my first thought was "soup kitchen". It's all a matter of associations I guess.

"Tureen" associates the idea of two kinds of vessel or container and it rhymes. "Kitchen" associates the ideas of production and disposal, eating and defecating.

How would we know which is right? This goes back to the alternative scenario I mentioned earlier, where instead of using a different word a blank is left.

Quoting Janus

I'd say this kind of what you call rule following is simply imitation

That doesn't harmonise with the context in PI.

There's a way of sidestepping the regress that is not dissimilar to a certain Nike slogan.

Reply to Banno The "just doing it" is not in question, obviously; it's the explanation for that ability which is in question.

Quoting Janus

...the explanation for that ability...

What could that mean?

Reply to Banno Well, the explanation for our ability to understand malapropisms that Davidson seems to be rejecting is that it could be merely a matter of following rules.

So this is taken to mean that learning language cannot be a matter of learning a comprehensive set of semantic rules. Instead then, I suggest learning language is a matter of imitation, for which we have a powerful natural bent.

It's by imitation that conventions become established, not by people consciously seeing them as sets of rules to be followed, but by people's natural tendency to imitate. This means language is an open-ended, often improvisational, practice, not a hidebound practice involving adherence to sets of rules.

Reply to Janus ...and how would imitation account for our capacity to understand malapropisms? What is it we could be imitating, given that the situation is novel?

Reply to Banno As I already suggested, I think we understand malapropisms through association. Association is basically a form of imitation; where one idea resembles or mimics another in some way or other.

We also see people accidentally, and sometimes on purpose, using a wrong word, which is usually associated, in some more or less obscure way, with the word we would expect to be used in the context of the utterance. An example of is the so-called "Freudian Slip".

Probably that "slippage" starts as an accidental malpractice, which can then be deliberately imitated, or even seen as a kind of game.

There is much of play in language I would say.

Quoting Janus

It's by imitation that conventions become established, not by people consciously seeing them as sets of rules to be followed

Imitation alone clearly couldn't establish language. That doesn't even make sense.

Big part of learning it, sure.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Imitation alone clearly couldn't establish language. That doesn't even make sense.

Big part of learning it, sure.

Say someone uses a novel expression; it could become established as convention or not. If others don't imitate, then it won't become established, and if enough do imitate then it will.

I'm not claiming that imitation alone establishes language; obviously there must be something there to begin with; something to imitate.

Reply to Janus I think you've missed the point. Imitation is yet more rules.

Quoting Banno

Imitation is yet more rules.

Imitating is just imitating. If no one is judging whether you've correctly copied or how good the copy is, I'm not sure what you're worried about.

Reply to Banno How is imitation just more rules? Are you claiming that is so in animals too? If you call following instinct following a rule, then your usage of "rule" is so broad as to render the idea of a rule fairly useless, as far as I can see. As the old adage goes " if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail".

Reply to Srap Tasmaner So your imitation does not have to be correct in order to be understood?

Then it could be anything.

Imitation is as much a part of a language game as ostension.

Looks like a backward step - explaining games by more games, rules by more rules.

Quoting Banno

So your imitation does not have to be correct in order to be understood?

I don't know what you were talking about, but I was talking about just plain imitating, like the babbling of pre-linguistic children.

Quoting Banno

Looks like a backward step - explaining games by more games, rules by more rules.

As I said I'm not seeking to explain "rules by more rules" or even "games by more games". Where, if at all, does explanation terminate? What's your alternative?

What I am proposing is that learning language cannot be merely a matter of following rules; it also involves imitation and ostension of course. And it involves simply "getting it" in either case.

So, for example, in the case of ostension, when someone is pointing at something and making a sound I am not familiar with, unless we share a language where it can be explained that she intends to be informing me of the name of the thing she is pointing at, then I must simply "get" that that is what she is doing.

But we do learn that that is what is happening in these kinds of situations, and at least a part of that learning involves imitation, association and repetition.

Quoting Janus

repetition

Good point. Repeatability is crucial.

In general, though, I'd say the mountains of science about how children learn their native language should be the starting point, and all of this is armchair stuff.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

In general, though, I'd say the mountains of science about how children learn their native language should be the starting point, and all of this is armchair stuff.

:up:

Quoting Janus

Where, if at all, does explanation terminate?

In action.

Reply to Banno Ah, inaction!

Quoting Banno

Where, if at all, does explanation terminate?
— Janus

In action.

Out of context, that sounds weirdly fascist.

Eh. Probably just me.

Quoting RussellA

...truth is a concept that only exists within language...

And yet non linguistic creatures have true belief.



Quoting Srap Tasmaner

I'm not sure we ever squarely faced Davidson's central claim.

Did you miss my post on the bottom of page nine? It answers all this.

Take Lepore and Stone's example:

That's a nice soup latrine.

I think everyone would agree

1. You said "latrine" when you meant to say "tureen".

I do not agree. When mistaken, one unintentionally says the wrong word. Not all cases are mistakes or linguistic error. A joker, for example, intentionally means to say "latrine".




Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Lepore and Stone describe the situation as

2. You mispronounced "tureen" as "latrine".

Perhaps in some cases. Not with the joker.

What's still not perfectly clear is whether

3. By "latrine" you meant "tureen"'.

Sometimes if one knows how to use both but misspeaks nonetheless for whatever reason. Not with the joker, or yet other cases where the speaker does not know the meaning of either, and did not quite learn how to correctly use the phrase(learned something sounding close, but unconventional nevertheless).

That is, whether you were, consciously or not, assigning the meaning of the word "tureen" to the word "latrine".

That is to misattribute meaning to "latrine".

That is what the listener must knowingly do in order to correctly interpret the speaker, regardless of whether or not the speaker was mistaken or joking.

And then, finally, there's the question of whether the interpreter must say

4. In this sentence the word "latrine" means "tureen".

They do not have to say that, but they do have to knowingly misattribute meaning to "latrine" by virtue of drawing a correlation between it and the referent of "tureen".

Quoting creativesoul

they do have to knowingly misattribute meaning to "latrine" by virtue of drawing a correlation between it and the referent of "tureen".

If you were compiling a dictionary or a Tarski-style model of the English language, what would you do with the "latrine" sentence? If it's a one-off, the only attestation for "latrine" used as a synonym for "tureen", you could drop it from your sample.

But as Davidson would have it, the interpreter must assign a meaning to this sentence as it stands, and that means saying that in this sentence "latrine" is a synonym for "tureen".

Lepore and Stone say no: we'll take you not to have said "latrine" at all, but to have mispronounced "tureen". We could say, I think plausibly, that what makes the mispronunciation a malapropism is that the sound you make happens already to be a word. If you said "stureen" (perhaps because of the association between "soup" and "stirring") we're not really in dramatically different territory: it's still just an understandable mispronunciation.

But then must the listener treat "stureen" as a nonce synonym for "tureen"? I think Davidson says yes.

The real question, then, is [I] what[/i] do we interpret? Do we assign meaning to the specific tokens you produce? Or is there a little preprocessing first, a little data-scrubbing?

This actually looks like a problem for Davidson, because we know, for a fact, that often mistakes go unnoticed, you read right over typos, and so on. That suggests the sentence interpretation stage comes after some initial classifying of the word tokens -- so by the time meaning gets assigned to the sentence, word-meaning has already, perhaps tentatively, been assigned to the word tokens, and sentence meaning is built out of those, not from the raw tokens.

(We know that the actual noises you make are classified as phonemes somewhat like this, and also somewhat early in the interpretation process.)

That word token processing stage seems to include some error correction, just as it does with phonemes. The dilemma of whether, in this sentence as it stands, we take "latrine" as a synonym for "tureen", may not arise.

But a whole lot of this post should be replaced by actual science...

To continue speculating...

If you know that your dinner guest is looking at your dining table, and seems to be commenting on it, "latrine" is not one of the words you expect them to utter, because you know there is no latrine on the table; you do know there is a tureen on the table, so that word is on the list of words you expect to be uttered.

Whatever lexical lookup occurs, it seems not to range over all possible words, nor over all possible English words (respecting English morphology), nor even over all words we might think the speaker knows, but only over the words we think the speaker knows and expect under the circumstances. As @Isaac would say, we're predicting all the time.

Thus in normal conversation, it's possible to mis-speak and have the mistake corrected unnoticed.

It could be that malapropisms are noticed, when they are, because the substitution suggests an interpretation that could be relevant, as puns do. Thus "latrine" could be an innocent mistake, or a suggestion, conscious or not, that your soup is excremental.

Quoting creativesoul

true belief

Truth within language
A bear hunts for salmon in the coastal waters of Alaska. The bear believes that there are fish in the water and as there are fish in the water the bear has, what we call, a "true belief".

Truth is the accordance between fact A, the bear's belief that there are fish in the water and fact B, there are fish in the water.

As truth is an accordance between two facts, and as neither fact A has any knowledge of being in accordance with fact B nor fact B has any knowledge of being in accordance with fact A, any truth must be external to facts A and B.

IE, truth is not an internal quality of a set of facts. Truth can only be a quality external to a set of facts, such as within language.

Truth outside language
As regards the bear, after successfully catching the fish

C - the bear believed there were fish in the water
D - the bear knows there are fish in the water

For the bear to know a truth, the bear has to know an accordance between C and D

IE, the bear has to know not only i) that it believed there were fish in the water but also
ii) that it knows there are fish in the water.

IE, for the bear to know a truth, the bear has to have thoughts about its thoughts, which becomes a problem of infinite regression.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

The real question, then, is what do we interpret? Do we assign meaning to the specific tokens you produce? Or is there a little preprocessing first, a little data-scrubbing?

That which is interpreted is already meaningful. We interpret meaningful things... correctly or not(and that has some nuance). There is an actual difference between interpretation and attribution. The latter gives rise to the former. Thus, I think the better question is how do we interpret? How do we correctly attribute(successfully interpret) and/or misattribute(misinterpret) meaning? We'll find that we do both, assign meaning to words, and engage in a bit of pre-processing... a kind of situational awareness. We do all this by virtue of drawing correlations between the language use and other things.



Quoting Srap Tasmaner

...a whole lot of this post should be replaced by actual science...

Science of the attribution of meaning? Linguistics?

I'm not following. You earlier mentioned the initial language acquisition of one's native tongue as a starting point, or something similar.

Quoting RussellA

...thoughts about its thoughts, which becomes a problem of infinite regression.

I disagree, but it's irrelevant here. Infinite regress is the result of inadequate accounting practices.


Quoting RussellA

The bear believes that there are fish in the water and as there are fish in the water the bear has, what we call, a "true belief"...

Therefore, either true belief does not require truth, or truth is prior to language. Truth is presupposed within belief and statements thereof. Again, too far off topic here though.

That's a nice soup latrine.

I took the speaker to be disparaging the quality of the soup.

Quoting Banno

I took the speaker to be disparaging the quality of the soup.

In which case, the speaker intended to say "latrine", and the conventional meaning of the term aligns perfectly with the speaker's intent.

Reply to creativesoul Yep.

The last couple of pages haven't added anything to the commentary. Indeed, they detract from it.

Quoting creativesoul

There is an actual difference between interpretation and attribution. The latter gives rise to the former.

[s]Week[/s]Well that's a question, isn't it. What sort of thing is a Davidsonian method of interpretation?

Davidson is very clear that the literal meaning of each word is in play when an interpreter interprets a speaker; the interpreter is not just working out how the meaningful bits have been assembled and what the speaker means to say by having so assembled them.

Quoting creativesoul

Linguistics?

Yes, I just haven't bothered to look in a while, but I suspect what I described is the sort of thing linguists argue about -- how compositionality should be understood. But [s]singe[/s]some of this, like there being stages, could be tested.

Quoting creativesoul

In which case, the speaker intended to say "latrine", and the conventional meaning of the term aligns perfectly with the speaker's intent.

Not sure it's that simple. When I was a boy scout, "latrine" meant a ditch or a hole in the ground; you won't see such a thing on anyone's dining room table. So it's still not just literal; an element of the meaning of "latrine" (container for excrement) is being borrowed on the pretense of the similar sound of the words "tureen" and "latrine". So, a sort of pun.

Reply to Banno

That would be the last time that guy got invited to my dinner party.

:wink:

Quoting Banno

The last couple of pages haven't added anything to the commentary. Indeed, they detract from it.

Are you not entertained?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

What sort of thing is a Davidsonian method of interpretation?

It's an accounting practice of that which existed in it's entirety prior to his account. As is linguistics.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Not for the last page or two.

" That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF P

What are we to put in the place of "P"?

If we assume mispronunciation, put "That's a nice soup tureen". But if not we need interpret a bit more broadly. Taking on board the Principle of Charity, we assume that the speaker has, overwhelmingly, the same beliefs as we do. We might well assume they know the difference between a latrine and a soup tureen. We might assume they know what the usual contents of a latrine are. So we might tentatively construct the following T-sentence...

"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that soup looks like shit

All within a Semantic theory of language using radical interpretation.

That is, there is more to Davidson than has been supposed.

Reply to Dawnstorm, by way of a start on explaining T-sentences.

Reply to Banno

Well done. Gotta love the simplicity of the T sentence.

Quoting Banno

"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that soup looks like shit

I'm really not sure what you think you're demonstrating here.

Maybe it was a genuine malapropism; maybe it was, as I said above, a sort of pun, and some of the conventional meaning of "latrine" is brought along. There's not much to say for one interpretation or another without a little more context.

This is all beside the point though. If it's a malapropism, your T-sentence is

• (T1) "That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that's a nice soup tureen.

And that's pretty clearly a problem. Davidson's whole point is that you could not possibly have learned such a rule in advance. I don't think any of us are contesting that -- of course you couldn't have. The question is whether you come up with this rule, a contextual definition of "latrine", on the fly and use it just the once, rather than dealing with the unexpected utterance of "latrine" in some other way.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

I'm really not sure what you think you're demonstrating here.

Well, for you, pointing out that T-sentences are not just "P" is true IFF P; those case in which the sentence on the right is the very same as the sentence on the left are unusual.

The sentence on the left is in the language being interpreted. The sentence on the right is the interpretation. The structure serves to remove the notion of meaning entirely, replacing it with truth. Moreover it is truth as set out by Tarski, in extensional terms.

The interpretation is not word-for-word; it is holistic.

Reply to Banno

I understand the theory. But we're talking about malapropisms and Davidson's claim that the intended meaning takes over from the literal meaning.

Is my T-sentence not what Davidson tells us would be part of the interpreter's passing theory? Did I misunderstand him?

The core of Davidson's semantics is the search for a way to set out the meaning of often obscure or intensional sentences clearly; a theory of meaning for a language will have been a success if, for each sentence in that language, the theory sets out one sentence that gives the meaning. If 'S' is some sentence in a language, then any decent theory of meaning would generate a statement P such that

'S' means P

Note that S is quoted.

P is some statement that sets out what is said in 'S'. Now we already have a transparent, extensional way of dealing with what is said, in the notion of satisfaction - a satisfies the formula F. So we might set ourselves the task of expressing P in terms of satisfaction; that is, P sets out the conditions under which 'S' is true.

And we have ready to hand a truth-conditional operator that will allow us to link 'S' with P, in equivalence. Hence a truth-conditional theory will have the form:

'S' is true IFF p

Where 'S' is the sentence we want the meaning of, and P the conditions under which the terms in S are satisfied - the truth conditions.

That P sets out the truth conditions for S is an empirical question. For any sentence we would have to construct an interpretation, based on whatever evidence we might collect by observing the language community in question.

So when faced with the utterance

That's a nice soup latrine

we invoke evidence collected about the situation and the community to render P in the T-sentence:
"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF P
There are at least two candidates. One is that the speaker mispronounced tureen as latrine. That would render:
"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that's a nice soup tureen
The other is to understand that the speaker was talking about the soup. that might render something like
"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that soup looks like shit

Reply to Srap Tasmaner
Two very different interpretations, both of which see a word being used wrongly in the sentence 'S' - both of which see a malapropism and dissipate it using the T-sentence structure.

All of this by was of showing that the Semantic Theory is not what is at stake here. I don't see that Davidson is contradicting his earlier work. So no, the T-sentence is not restricted to being part of the passing theory.

For what it is worth, the fault, so far as there is one, seems to me to be way back at the beginning, in the assumption that Quoting Banno

...any decent theory of meaning would generate a statement P such that
'S' means P

That is, the fault is the assumption that there is a thing that can be called the meaning of the sentence. Labouring the point, we are better off considering what is being done with the sentence - admiring a tureen or disparaging a soup.

Quoting Banno

And we have ready to hand a truth-conditional operator that will allow us to link 'S' with P, in equivalence. Hence a truth-conditional theory will have the form:
'S' is true IFF p
Where 'S' is the sentence we want the meaning of, and P the conditions under which the terms in S are satisfied - the truth conditions.

More formal sounding than my earlier understanding of the T sentence, but it seems that your view has evolved a bit. I've never seen you argue for the right side being the truth conditions of the left.



Quoting Banno

That is, the fault is the assumption that there is a thing that can be called the meaning of the sentence.

That is exactly right. The meaning of a sentence consists of more than one thing. The same is true regarding the meaning of a word or anything else that is meaningful.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Davidson's whole point is that you could not possibly have learned such a rule in advance. I don't think any of us are contesting that -- of course you couldn't have.

Or perhaps the ability to correctly translate malapropisms are not a matter of following a rule at all...

Perhaps it's more that our knowing the rules, in advance, allows us to also know when they've been broken. Hence, the interpreter must misattribute meaning to "latrine" is cases of malapropism. That is to say that we gather the meaning of the term by the context, where the context includes situational awareness, and then we employ our inherent innate ability to attribute meaning(a shared method of translation), which is something certainly outside of learning the rules... for it's what allows us to do so.

Quoting creativesoul

The meaning of a sentence consists of more than one thing.

No! IT's not a thing at all, unless you want to call acts "things"!

:joke:

Quoting creativesoul

The meaning of a sentence consists of more than one thing.

Aka polysemia.

Quoting Janus

If others don't imitate, then it won't become established, and if enough do imitate then it will.

Sounds like rules for language use to me.

Quoting Janus

It's by imitation that conventions become established, not by people consciously seeing them as sets of rules to be followed, but by people's natural tendency to imitate. This means language is an open-ended, often improvisational, practice, not a hidebound practice involving adherence to sets of rules.

If language use is open-ended then there can be no wrong way to use a word (no such thing as malapropisms), only a new way to use a word that is either imitated or not - which is another rule.

BTW, how are new words used if everything is imitated?

Quoting Janus

How is imitation just more rules?

Imitation isn't a rule. It is a behavior. Your explanation is a set of rules that describe what language use is or isn't.

Does imitating any noise or scribble made by someone else make that noise or scribble a word?

Quoting Banno

IT's not a thing at all, unless you want to call acts "things"!

Is that a problem?

p. 255:Malapropisms introduce expressions not covered by prior learning, or familiar expressions which cannot be interpreted by any of the abilities so far discussed. Malapropisms fall into a different category, one that may include such things as our ability to perceive a well-formed sentence when the actual utterance was incomplete or grammatically garbled, our ability to interpret words we have never heard before, to correct slips of the tongue, or to cope with new idiolects. These phenomena threaten standard descriptions of linguistic competence (including descriptions for which I am responsible).

The key term in this passage, the target of Davidson's argument, is linguistic competence.

If you have a glance at the cluster of related Wikipedia pages, you'll find that classical malapropisms are a type of speech error and linguists generally classify them as competence errors. Mrs. Malaprop is a sort of walking Dunning Kruger effect, who believes she knows more about some English words than she does. Her speech, on the usual view, is not riddled with simple performance errors such as slips of the tongue, but with perfectly deliberate utterances that betray a lack of understanding of what the words she's saying mean.

What Davidson notices is that she "gets away with it": her interpreters take her as saying what she thinks she's saying rather than as what she's actually saying. That this happens, is a fact. That it happens in real life, is a fact. So how are we to characterize these facts? Shall we say that the interpreters of Mrs. Malaprop, or of anyone who in real life misspeaks in any of a great variety of ways, have a competence as interpreters that can make up for the performance errors, of whatever origin, of speakers?

Let's suppose we do want to describe this as a linguistic competence. Davidson argues that such a competence would necessarily be ad hoc, a theory of meaning for a language with a vanishingly small field of application: what this speaker is saying on this occasion. It can be described formally using whatever sort of semantics you like, so that it looks like a semantics for a natural language, but the argument is supposed to have established that an interpreter will need a new semantics for each speech encounter, and that's not what anyone thinks of as the semantics, or theory of meaning, for a natural language.

Davidson's conclusion is that the idea of linguistic competence must be rejected:

p. 265:The problem we have been grappling with depends on the assumption that communication by speech requires that speaker and interpreter have learned or somehow acquired a common method or theory of interpretation—as being able to operate on the basis of shared conventions, rules, or regularities. The problem arose when we realized that no method or theory fills this bill. The solution to the problem is clear. In linguistic communication nothing corresponds to a linguistic competence as often described: that is, as summarized by principles (1)–(3).

That's the argument up to here, and it's clear enough how it works, and how we might accept or critique it. But the concluding paragraph continues:

ibid:The solution is to give up the principles. Principles (1) and (2) survive when understood in rather unusual ways,

(1) First meaning is systematic; (2) First meaning is shared. (1) and (2) can be taken as describing only passing theories -- this is the "unusual way" -- so is Davidson here endorsing passing theories as a genuine model of successful communication? This is what Lepore and Stone call "improvised meaning".

ibid:but principle (3) cannot stand, and it is unclear what can take its place.

The problem is that passing theories clearly cannot be learned in advance; you cannot be competent in the use of a passing theory before the theory even exists and it doesn't exist until the specific speech encounter in which you, as interpreter, produce it to cope with the specific utterance you are faced with. Thus, "conventions, rules, or regularities" are all out.

ibid:I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with.

And here it's clear that Davidson means to sweep up not just everyone who defends convention as the basis of linguistic competence, but all of generative linguistics. Davidson nowhere mentions Chomsky in the paper, but it's Chomsky's idea of "linguistic competence" (in distinction from "performance") that he is attacking: not just conventions have to go, but rules too and regularities, whether you learn them or are born with them. There is no such thing as linguistic competence of any kind under any description, although Davidson has a particularly dim view of convention, which I for one have been distracted by:

ibid:We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.

Why just "convention" here? What about the rules or regularities we might have been born with?

Another quick tour of Wikipedia makes it clear that Davidson is far from alone in critiquing Chomsky's distinction between competence and performance; but most of the critique from within linguistics has come broadly from pragmatics, from the anthropological approach, from people like Dell Hymes and his "communicative competence" or from functionalists, and those folks are going to tend to insist on the importance of culture and context, to drag in even more conventions to explain how linguistic communication works.

Davidson seems to want to cut off this approach at the knees too. His stand in for all of that, in this paper, is Paul Grice.

Davidson believes he has an argument that shows not just that linguistic competence, along Chomskyan lines, is too narrow a conception of competence, that, whether you're born with it or learn it, your specifically linguistic competence is never enough to explain how you communicate using language but relies on some further cultural competence, describable as mastery of another system of conventions, but that communication by means of language cannot be captured by any sort of convention or rule or regularity, because sometimes people break the rules, whatever rules, break them deliberately or inadvertently or through ignorance, and get away with it.

That is the argument of the paper as I understand it.

Is it a good argument?

When I was in high school I played soccer and the best player on our team, genuinely talented guy, also cheated now and then. I saw him do it. He could take a clear downfield from a defender by carefully, subtly, laying his hand right alongside his thigh to help cushion -- just for a second -- the fall of the ball and it would look, even to a ref standing right there, like he had gently taken the ball on the upper part of his thigh while running -- so of course his hand passes by his leg -- to bring it to the ground under his control. It was perhaps the most artful cheating I have ever seen. He got away with it. We would all laugh about it because Scott was both a fine player and an accomplished cheater.

Does it prove that soccer doesn't have rules?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

(1) First meaning is systematic; (2) First meaning is shared. (1) and (2) can be taken as describing only passing theories -- this is the "unusual way"

I haven't had my coffee yet, but aren't these aspects of the prior theory? That is, they are the supposed attributes that allow language to be learnable and communal...

Quoting Banno

aren't these aspects of the prior theory?

I think this is the form of the prior theory, and thus the form of the passing theory that actually does the work, according to Davidson.

I'm not sure how else to understand this:

Principles (1) and (2) survive when understood in rather unusual ways,

What's your take on the survival of (1) and (2)?

Quoting creativesoul

Is that a problem?

It leads to Harry Hindu -ism.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

What's your take on the survival of (1) and (2)?

pp.263-4, paragraph starting "First..." is about the first principle - grammatical rules; paragraph stating "Second..." is about shared understanding. The subsequent page discusses the consequences. The idea that folk had a prior language falls apart, leaving a sort of shared, sort of systematic language..."no learnable common core of consistent behaviour, no shared grammar or rules, no portable interpreting machine set to grind out the meaning of an arbitrary utterance".

First meaning, using a T-sentence, would look only at the words and grammatical structure. the three Principles might derive only

"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that's a nice soup latrine

...which does not give us the meaning of the object sentence. Other factors must be taken into the account, and hence we can derive

"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that's a nice soup tureen

or

"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that soup looks like shit

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Does it prove that soccer doesn't have rules?

It seems you read Davidson as saying that conventions play no role in understanding what someone says. That's not how I read the article; it's rather that conventions are not the whole of what is involved.

I'm going to have to work for a while, but quickly:

Quoting Banno

It seems you read Davidson as saying that conventions play no role in understanding what someone says.

I haven't figured out how to read him.

Quoting Banno

That's not how I read the article; it's rather that conventions are not the whole of what is involved.

Yes, you've said things like this before.

Quoting Banno

lexical meaning - convention - is insufficient; that language is more than following conventions.

Rule-based conventions are part of language, but not fundamental to it.

And I've asked before if this is saying linguistic conventions are necessary but not sufficient for communication. I don't understand what "not fundamental" means here.

And then shortly after you said:

Quoting Banno

language does not rely on rules.

And that sounds to me like saying linguistic conventions are not only insufficient for successful communication, but unnecessary.

What is Davidson's position?

I told my soccer story not because it's a good analogy for language use or communication -- it's not -- but because it's no longer clear to me what the engine of Davidson's argument is. Does it have anything at all to do with language? Or is the real argument to do with breaking rules and getting away with it, any kind of rules?

I can't fully address your other post, but the passage you mentioned (pp. 263-264) comes after he matter-of-factly observes that prior theories aren't shared anyway (so we're casting about for something more general that might be). If prior theories aren't shared they never even met his criteria (1)-(3). He could have started there. Why is it only halfway through the paper that he mentions that the hypothesized candidate for explaining communication was always a non-starter?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If you have a glance at the cluster of related Wikipedia pages, you'll find that classical malapropisms are a type of speech error and linguists generally classify them as competence errors. Mrs. Malaprop is a sort of walking Dunning Kruger effect, who believes she knows more about some English words than she does. Her speech, on the usual view, is not riddled with simple performance errors such as slips of the tongue, but with perfectly deliberate utterances that betray a lack of understanding of what the words she's saying mean.

What Davidson notices is that she "gets away with it": her interpreters take her as saying what she thinks she's saying rather than as what she's actually saying. That this happens, is a fact. That it happens in real life, is a fact. So how are we to characterize these facts?

That post gets us back to the substance. I appreciate the fact that many others here like yourself have offered background. It helps me tremendously! To answer the question directly above...


From my earlier post at the bottom of page nine...

"Getting way with it" requires correctly translating an otherwise incorrect usage, by virtue of misattributing meaning to the words actually used. If our linguistic competence and/or ability were limited to those three aforementioned principles(all of which are restricted by/to convention), we could not ever know what the speaker meant, as compared/contrasted to what they said... but we do.

What's needed for the successful translation of malapropisms is something extra, some innate ability that is not a matter of convention; a nonlinguistic method, element, and/or aspect of interpretation. That is, some innate means and/or ability to be able to successfully interpret another's meaning, whereas the ability itself is nonlinguistic in nature.

The attribution of meaning(our innate ability to attribute meaning to that which is not already meaningful to us) fits the bill.

Davidson recognizes this need as well. Hence, his notion of passing theory aims to do this. Although, I find it deeply flawed to begin with, and would charge linguistics with the same flaw:A gross misunderstanding of what meaning is and how it emerges onto the world stage.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

my soccer story

I keep being reminded of Elgin's Monday morning quarterback story. (Is it a good case of a passing theory?)

Quoting Banno

Is that a problem?
— creativesoul

It leads to Harry Hindu -ism.

I can assure you that it does not.

Quoting creativesoul

misattributing meaning to the words actually used

That's a funny thing. We can easily conceive of Mrs Malaprop having a conversation with her sister in which neither has any idea that they are using several words in ways the rest of the English-speaking community considers deviant. Their prior theories, we could hypothesize, would match, though it is a theory that differs systematically from the mainstream.

There's no point to this, of course, except humor, because the hypothesized matching of prior theories is just a fairy tale.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

Is it though? I think not actually. What else are idiolects?

Cool Hand Luke:What we've got here is failure to communicate.

Surely there are cases where there is a failure to communicate that we'd be inclined to explain by either a speaker misusing a word, or by an interpreter misunderstanding it.

Davidson doesn't give any such examples, perhaps because he explains them as failure to come to agreement on a passing theory, rather than a lack of competence on the part of speaker or interpreter.

But it sure looks like that sometimes. Anyone got a nice example?

Reply to creativesoul

What would Davidson say?

This thread seems to be going around in circles without anyone apparently being able to say with any surety just what Davidson is arguing for and just what the argument consists in, let alone offering any cogent critique.

I have read the paper and I confess I have no clear idea what Davidson wants to say. If all he wants to claim is that understanding language is not entirely a matter of following rules, then of course I would agree, although it's not saying much.

I've already said that I think it is also a matter of imitation, association and improvisation. @Banno seems to be saying it's nothing else more than rules other than just "action". But what does that tell us, apart from its being trivially true?

We imitate, we associate, we improvise and we guess as well. All of those are "actions", but they are not all the same actions, so I can't see much point in the kind of "nothing-but-ism" that Banno seems to be advocating. It's no help towards understanding what's going on.

Of course, in line with his usual style of engagement, I expect Banno to come back with a clear exposition of his position on this. :wink: :roll:

Reply to Janus

There is a legitimate source of tension here.

Is playing chess just a matter of following the rules? In some sense, yes. Do the rules alone explain what happened in a game of chess? Obviously not.

Even in the improvised games of children, where the rules are modified while playing -- a better analogy for linguistic communication -- there are sometimes changes "proposed" that the other players will balk at. "You can't do that." "No, that's not fair." "If you can do that, then you just win." (I'm not guessing about this; I have six kids.) That sounds a lot like there are rules about what rules you can make. Of course, sometimes someone gets away with it.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

I have six kids

:gasp:

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Is playing chess just a matter of following the rules? In some sense, yes. Do the rules alone explain what happened in a game of chess? Obviously not.

That's true, but there is nothing in chess analogous to malapropistic expressions. I think my response to the earlier "soup tureen" example shows that there are no rules, and that it is mostly a matter of association. I immediately thought "soup kitchen", and there seems to be nothing ruling that out unless a scenario where someone is definitely referring to a soup tureen with the malapropistic "soup latrine" is explicitly specified.

I agree with your point about there being limits to how far the rules can be bent without descending into incoherence.

Reply to Janus

I meant to mention baseball!

Baseball distinguishes between acceptable and unacceptable cheating.

A runner on second is expected to try to steal the catcher's signs and tip off the batter; but a team that puts someone with binoculars and a walkie-talkie in a box above center field is cheating.

Hiding the ball is part of the game, but there are some complications to that since sometimes the ball is live and sometimes it's dead. Deking -- I don't know how to spell that, it's short for "decoying" -- is when you pretend you're taking a throw to make a runner slide, and thus stop at whatever base you're covering when he could have continued running (if, say, the ball got past an outfielder on a bad hop); this is unacceptable because players risk injury by sliding. I've seen players come to blows over it.

And then oh my god there's pitchers and whatever they put on the ball...

One last but of baseball lore, for those who like that sort of thing.

How to spot a rookie or an idealist: a fielder who, after making the last put-out of an inning, especially if it was a 1-2-3 inning, tosses the ball over to the mound or to a player of the opposing team coming onto the diamond to field.

No no no! That was your pitcher's ball. You have no idea what he did to it, especially if you had an up-and-down inning. No, that ball does not go to the opposing pitcher, but to the home plate umpire, who might look it over and keep it in play or start a fresh one.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

I find Davidson's account flawed in the ways I've set out heretofore. What you quoted was part of my position on the matter that Davidson is addressing; the odd success of malapropisms.

I think that you and I are in agreement regarding Davidson's hypothesized account of matching prior theories regarding a plurality of people using several words unconventionally. You've called Davidson's account a "fairy tale", whereas on my view it is an accounting malpractice of actual situations where two or more people have no idea that they are using several words in ways the rest of the English-speaking community considers deviant. Hence, the mention of idiolects.



Reply to Janus

Malapropisms show that academic convention has something seriously wrong somewhere along the line. The underlying issue - by my lights - is one that has been brushed aside, over-looked, and/or glossed over. I've discussed this already, without subsequent due attention. I suspect that what looks like going in circles is as a result.

I'd invite you to read my reply on the bottom of page nine and let me know what you think about how it handles the odd success of malapropisms.

Quoting Janus

there is nothing in chess analogous to malapropistic expressions.

Actually there is! But these would be violations not of the pure syntax of chess, but either of its "school grammar", the received wisdom of how to play properly, or of its "real grammar", how to put moves together in a way that makes sense. For the former, you could look at ideas of "positional chess" as they've been understood through the game's history, the rise of the hypermodern school, that sort of thing, or even at a brilliancy that is "anti-positional" but works because of the specific position on the board.

But there's a fantastic illustration of the latter, a violation of chess's actual grammar. (Citation when I get home and can look it up.) This was a game between Kasparov and some candidate-level player. They were playing the first few moves noncommittally and indirectly, screwing around with move order before settling into a specific opening, the way grandmasters do, but at like move 3 or 4, the other guy made a transposition that actually hangs the exchange! Kasparov could have gotten a rook for a bishop and his opponent would have resigned at like move 5. Unheard of at this level! But Kasparov didn't even notice the mistake, not until after the game I think, because stuff like that just doesn't happen.

Sadly, google will not find it for me.

Talking about rules doesn't help. Rules are conventional. The conventional rules of language use cannot take account of the success of unconventional use. That is, it takes more than just knowing and/or following the rules of convention in order to correctly interpret malapropisms. So, if our linguistic competence is limited to the three principles Davidson set out, then linguistic competence cannot take the success of malapropisms into account. It is found wanting.

Reply to creativesoul

If it were this simple, not only would Davidson's paper have only been one sentence, but it wouldn't have been needed in the first place because there'd be nobody holding the opposing view. It's not.

Davidson attempts to account for how we successfully interpret unconventional language use such as malapropisms by positing his notions of prior and passing theories. For the audience/listener, the prior theory expresses how he is prepared in advance to interpret an utterance of the speaker, while the passing theory is how he does interpret the utterance. For the speaker, the prior theory is what he believes the interpreter’s prior theory to be, while his passing theory is the theory he intends the interpreter to use.

Now, these two notions are incoherent to me(muddled at best). So, perhaps the best thing to do now is for the participant here to find some agreement to build upon.

Do we all agree that the three principles in question are found wanting in their ability to take proper account of how we successfully interpret malapropisms?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If it were this simple...

If what were this simple? The discussion? The problem? The proposed solutions?

You're presupposing that the conventional discourse has 'it' right, and because 'it' is complex, then the problem and/or the solution must be as well.

I do not.

Quoting creativesoul

If what were this simple?

This:

Quoting creativesoul

The conventional rules of language use cannot take account of the success of unconventional use.

Stated as you have here, this sounds like a truism. But I see no reason to believe what you have written here, even discounting the meaninglessness of "take account of".

Quoting creativesoul

You're presupposing that the conventional discourse has 'it' right

That's not saying much, because the views that might plausibly be taken to have been attacked by Davidson include pretty much everybody's, and it's not like they all agree with each other.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

The bottom of page nine...

Quoting creativesoul

The bottom of page nine...

I've looked at the post a couple times, since you keep suggesting you provided all the answers there, and it's not doing much for me. On the one hand, sure it's reasonable to distinguish cases Davidson lumps together -- Lepore and Stone for instance argue that malapropisms, nonsense, and neologisms should all be treated quite differently. But just distinguishing cases he chooses not to is not enough; you also have to provide an analysis more compelling than his, and I don't see that on the bottom of page nine.

An excuse for talking as much as I do about chess and baseball:

Chess, like language use most of the time, is turn-based. Baseball is kind of a hybrid -- there are things that happen simultaneously, but the structure of the game itself is so fundamentally turn-based that it has a turn-based feel to it, unlike, say, basketball or soccer.

A game of chess is a sequence of moves by both sides, and those moves together constitute a game. Even though there are skills you must have to play chess at all, and other skills you must have to play it well, those skills are not enough to have a game; you need an opponent, and the two of you together create a game. Baseball similarly has a myriad of skills that make up ability to play the game, but two teams must take the field and play together for their to be a game.

Both games have a natural back-and-forth, action-and-reaction rhythm. No action stands on its own, but is part of a phrase (as in music): he develops a knight and attacks the center, so I pin his knight with my bishop, so he kicks the bishop with his rook pawn, and then I retreat, having created a weakness I'll try to exploit later; the pitch is inside so the batter turns on it sending a high grounder toward third, which the third baseman has to take deep in the hole and, since he won't be able to make the throw to first in time, he pivots and throws to catch the runner heading for second, who slides wide to try to avoid the tag he knows is coming because the whole play's in front of him.

Both games show this move and countermove, move and response pattern, where each side's actions interlock with the other's side's previous actions, and together they form a meaningful whole. When you look at an action on its own, you can only imagine sequences in which it would make sense, but it doesn't on its own. The pitcher throws to first -- how? why? Was it a put-out? Or is he holding a runner? If holding a runner, should he? Is he screwing with the batter? Is he a nervous rookie? With chess it's even more obvious that a move on its own could mean almost anything, and what it means depends entirely on the course of the game it's part of. The "same move" (say, Re1) may be played multiple times in a game and have a completely different meaning each time.

What I find so uninspiring about Davidson is the choice of starting point: someone has blurted a sentence and I must interpret it. That's not how language is actually used at all. It's a back-and-forth cooperative behavior with participants contributing to a whole, much like chess or baseball. (Yes, chess and baseball are also cooperative, I hope in a perfectly obvious way, though also competitive, as conversation is sometimes too.)

All of this is rule-governed, but the rules don't tell you any of this. Nevertheless, the rules enable the complex behavior we get to enjoy. Of course, the rules of language, broadly construed, change more than almost anything else, including chess and baseball, but that doesn't mean that what rules there are don't function, perhaps temporarily, as the inner structure that supports the elaborate constructions of language use.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

The bottom of page nine...
— creativesoul

I've looked at the post a couple times, since you keep suggesting you provided all the answers there, and it's not doing much for me.

I'm not suggesting that it provides all the answers. I'm strongly suggesting that it adequately explains how we successfully interpret malapropisms.

It finds Davidson's notion of first meaning inadequate, and thus also places his suggested fix to the problem into question as well. However, when regarding the inherent inadequacy of the three principles in question, I agree with Davidson. From that post...

The issue:Malapropisms break the rules of conventional language use, but they are readily understood/interpreted by the listener nevertheless, and that particular sort of success causes unresolvable issues for any strict adherence to the following three principles...

(1) A competent speaker or interpreter is able to interpret utterances, his own or those of others, on the basis of the semantic properties of the parts, or words, in the utterance, and the structure of the utterance. For this to be possible, there must be systematic relations between the meanings of utterances.

(2) For speaker and interpreter to communicate successfully and regularly, they must share a method of interpretation of the sort described in (1).

(3) The systematic knowledge or competence of the speaker or interpreter is learned in advance of occasions of interpretation and is conventional in character.

Do you find my account of the issue contentious?

On the one hand, sure it's reasonable to distinguish cases Davidson lumps together -- Lepore and Stone for instance argue that malapropisms, nonsense, and neologisms should all be treated quite differently. But just distinguishing cases he chooses not to is not enough; you also have to provide an analysis more compelling than his, and I don't see that on the bottom of page nine.

The framework there is perfectly capable of explaining how we successfully interpret all cases of malapropism. Seeing how that is the issue at hand...

It does quite a bit for me.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

In addition, I've already begun laying the groundwork for an exposition, by pointing out that that which is interpreted is already meaningful, and that there is an actual difference between interpretation of that which is already meaningful and attributing meaning to that which is not. You've neglected that along with other relevant posts I've made since.

That distinction is crucial to understanding our ability to interpret and/or invent novel utterances, including but not limited to language acquisition itself.

Reply to creativesoul

The world holds its breath.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

Charming. No point in my continuing this conversation.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

It seems you read Davidson as saying that conventions play no role in understanding what someone says.
— Banno

I haven't figured out how to read him.

Same here. So is Davidson using language in a new way that hasn't been imitated or simply not using language correctly, or is it you and I that are not using language correctly by not figuring out how to read him?

Quoting Banno

It leads to Harry Hindu -ism.

Oh, Banno :heart:

Quoting creativesoul

IT's not a thing at all, unless you want to call acts "things"!
— Banno

Is that a problem?

Malapropism is a noun.

Quoting Janus

That's true, but there is nothing in chess analogous to malapropistic expressions. I think my response to the earlier "soup tureen" example shows that there are no rules, and that it is mostly a matter of association.

I think an excellent example would be using a meat tenderize to hammer a nail, or a hammer to tenderize your meat.

Both tools are similarly shaped, just as words are shaped and sound similarly, but do not have the same use. Observers will understand the use, even though its not the conventional use of a meat tenderizer, because of the similar shape and action in using it.

We only question the proper use of some words when words were used but communication didn't occur.

Quoting Banno

?Dawnstorm, by way of a start on explaining T-sentences.

I do think I get that much, and I also get:

Quoting Banno

The interpretation is not word-for-word; it is holistic.

The problem I have is a different one:

There are many different possible sentences that contain "soup latrine". There may not be a limit to them. Assuming that "soup latrine" is a malapropism for "soup tureen", all the truth conditions would hold the meaning we associate with "soup latrine". Since only the left side of T-sentences is the actual utterance, it shouldn't matter what word is on the other side:

A) "This is a nice soup latrine" is true iff this is a nice soup tureen.
B) "This is a nice soup latrine" is true iff this is a nice soup latrine.

The only difference between A) and B) is whether I use the word "soup latrine", too (in the meaning I have heretofore associated with "soup tureen"), or not. The interpretation, being holistic, remains the same either way. How do T-sentences deal with word meaning? Why aren't A) and B) synonymous? How do I interpret a host of difference sentences (A1...An) in which the systematic difference is that there's "latrine" on the left, and "tureen" on the right?

By virtue of the T-sentences "This is a nice soup latrine" and "This is a nice soup tureen" should be synonymous, so I should be able to write "soup latrine" in my attempt to tansliterate my holistic interpretation, too, right?

Now try explaining why this doesn't work without recouse to convention. Am I making a mistake here? Where?

Quoting Harry Hindu

We only question the proper use of some words when words were used but communication didn't occur.

No, that's clearly not right. I might wonder whether you've misused a word if I understood what you said but am very surprised to hear you say it, especially if a substitution would yield a sentence I think you more likely to say.

Should we say communication has or hasn't occurred here? Evidently, as the audience, I'm not sure.

"Did I hear you right? Are you saying we should tell our customers when Gimbels has an item we don't, or is offering the same item at a lower price?"
"That's exactly what I'm saying!"

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

No, that's clearly not right. I might wonder whether you've misused a word if I understood what you said but am very surprised to hear you say it, especially if a substitution would yield a sentence I think you more likely to say.

Should we say communication has or hasn't occurred here? Evidently, as the audience, I'm not sure.

Until we clear up whether the use was intended or not, no communication has happened. After all, there just might be a new dance called the Flamingo.

Quoting Dawnstorm

By virtue of the T-sentences "This is a nice soup latrine" and "This is a nice soup tureen" should be synonymous, so I should be able to write "soup latrine" in my attempt to tansliterate my holistic interpretation, too, right?

I believe in Tarski's original version, which was intended for formalized not natural languages, the LHS within quotation marks is in the object language while the rest is in the meta-language. (Of most importance to Tarksi is that "true" here is part of the meta-language; the truth predicate for a language cannot be defined within that language at all.)

I think the Davidsonian adaptation here is that the LHS is in the speaker's language and the rest is in the interpreter's. Thus, just because you use "latrine" as a synonym for "tureen" -- if that's what you're doing -- that doesn't mean I have to, and I'll continue saying "tureen" when I mean tureen.

Quoting Dawnstorm

How do T-sentences deal with word meaning?

I think you have to imagine cataloging if not all the sentences then at least all the types of sentences in which a given word could occur, together with their actual or just stipulated truth values, and then working out the "value" of the word like a sudoku puzzle.

If the language is consistent, there will be systematic relations among sentences containing a given word -- that is certain sentences being false will require certain other sentences being true and others still also being false, and so on. Thus the meaning of a word is the "contribution" it makes to the truth or falsity of sentences it could appear in.

Does that make sense yet? It's an approach that was really designed for mathematics, and I think if you get a sort of whiff of David Hilbert's formalism, that's the right impression.

Quoting Harry Hindu

Until we clear up whether or not the use was intended or not, no communication has happened.

That seems fair, and an interesting point, that communication is not just the delivery of a semantic payload but confirmation of that delivery. But absent specific cues, we often just assume we've communicated successfully, don't we?

That is, as the audience, I'm not sure; to a third party, until the audience is sure, there's at most incomplete or partial communication; but the speaker is still entitled their presumption of success.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

That seems fair, and an interesting point, that communication is not just the delivery of a semantic payload but confirmation of that delivery. But absent specific cues, we often just assume we've communicated successfully, don't we?

Assuming that we've communicated successfully comes with an understanding that you know the rules and also knowing that others use the same rules, or else what is the point of knowing the rules?

You wouldn't assume that you successfully communicated with a person in China if you used only your very limited/non-existent knowledge of the rules of Mandarin. You also wouldn't assume that you successfully communicated with a person in China if you used English, rather than Mandarin.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

That is, as the audience, I'm not sure; to a third party, until the audience is sure, there's at most incomplete or partial communication; but the speaker is still entitled their presumption of success.

Sometimes we have to dumb down our language use for others to understand what we intend to communicate. Think about how you would communicate the idea of democracy to an adult vs a child. Presuming you have succeeded in communicating entails not just knowing the rules of the language you are using, but knowing the limits of other's understanding of the rules too. Each person is different and may require different uses to get the same idea across, just as you may have certain phrases, or inside jokes, that only close friends that have experience with how you use words, can understand.

Reply to Harry Hindu

Agreed pretty much all around, except I'd be more inclined to say "following the rules", or if I wanted to be really careful, "acting in accordance with the rules", rather than "knowing the rules". An awful lot of the linguistic machinery we operate is below our level of awareness -- some of it might always be, but at least in use it is: we don't consciously work out what the appropriate rule is and then consciously refer to it as we apply it and check that we've applied it properly. We can do a lot of that sort of thing, and will when there's trouble, but mostly the rules take care of themselves without us paying them any attention. Not once we've learned them, at any rate, and though learning requires a lot of conscious effort, it eventually results in reliable habits that require no awareness.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Thus the meaning of a word is the "contribution" it makes to the truth or falsity of sentences it could appear in.

Does that make sense yet?

Sort of. I still feel it's a little awkward; starting in the middle, so to speak, and then figuring out the meaning of words and texts both on the basis of sentences (if that's what happens). But at the very least I can work with it, I think. Need to let it settle for a while.

Reply to Dawnstorm

I've never tried to work through it in any practical way!

I think I might have an example of how it could work. The approach ends up being inherently comparative and differentiating. (I'd like to say inferential, but I'm really not sure.) I can imagine figuring out that "very" is an intensifier by lining up

"A is tall"
"B is tall"
not "A is very tall"
"B is very tall"

You might also find that "taller than" is never such that both of these can appear

"A is taller than B"
"B is taller than A"

And then further that

"B is taller than A" goes with {"B is tall" and not "A is tall"} or with {not "A is very tall" "B is very tall"}

Anyway, that was kind of what I had in mind as playing semantic sudoku. It's a lot of cross-referencing and looking for consistency among subsets, minimal to maximal, adding and dropping members, etc.

The problem is exactly how we successfully interpret malapropisms despite the fact that they are examples of incorrect, mistaken, unconventional, and thus novel, language use. Davidson is arguing that the odd success of malapropisms places conventional understanding of what counts as having a language, or perhaps what's needed for successful communication, into question.


Davidson suggests that convention has it that, and I quote...

...in the case of language the hearer shares a complex system or theory with the speaker, a system which makes possible the articulation of logical relations between utterances, and explains the ability to interpret novel utterances in an organized way.

This... ...has been suggested, in one form or another, by many philosophers and linguists, and I assume it must in some sense be right. The dif?culty lies in getting clear about what this sense is.

If someone wishes to argue that Davidson does not have the basic conventional understanding right, then the burden is upon them to show how his account above is found lacking or wanting. That is, if there is a germane difference between the two, then it needs set out here. Until then, I'm assuming that his account of convention is close enough.

He further expands upon this conventional understanding by setting out what it would take. In other words, what be the case in order for a speaker and listener to even be able to share a complex system or theory which makes possible the articulation of logical relations between utterances, and explains the ability to interpret novel utterances in an organized way. He's setting out what he believes to be a bare minimum criterion, according to conventional standards, for all cases of successful communication/interpretation, which also explains our ability to interpret novel utterances.

As a result of all the reasons I've given on page nine, I find Davidson's notion of first meaning to be inadequate for taking proper account of any malapropisms. Given that his notions of passing and prior theory are grounded upon his notion of first meaning, and since that is found lacking, so too are his notions of passing and prior theory. Although, the issue may be his use of "intention". If that is conventional, then that may be the issue. The more I read, and understand, the more I believe that that may be the case.

I've left first meaning out of the principles(criterion for linguistic competence), for I take them to be an accurate enough account of the conventional understanding and/or account that he's placing under scrutiny. In other words, these three principles serve as an adequate minimalist criterion for attaining, acquiring, and/or otherwise possessing the linguistic competence necessary for successful communication/interpretation of any kind, and that is what's in question.

(1) A competent speaker or interpreter is able to interpret utterances, his own or those of others, on the basis of the semantic properties of the parts, or words, in the utterance, and the structure of the utterance. For this to be possible, there must be systematic relations between the meanings of utterances.

(2) For speaker and interpreter to communicate successfully and regularly, they must share a method of interpretation of the sort described in (1).

(3) The systematic knowledge or competence of the speaker or interpreter is learned in advance of occasions of interpretation and is conventional in character.

According to Davidson, for all successful communication, what must be shared is the interpreter’s and the speaker’s understanding of the speaker’s words, which the three principles above do not effectively outline. With malapropisms what is common to the cases is that the speaker expects to be, and is, interpreted as the speaker intended although the interpreter did not have a correct theory in advance.

All the things Davidson assumes an interpreter knows or can do depend on his having a mature set of concepts, and being at home with the business of linguistic communication. His problem is to describe what is involved in the idea of ‘having a language’. He finds that none of the proposals satisfy the demand for a description of an ability that speaker and interpreter share and that is adequate to interpretation.

I suppose I'm positing that the ability to attribute meaning to an otherwise meaningless utterance(to the interpreter) satisfies the demand that Davidson claims to be missing.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

That's not how language is actually used at all.

TO be sure, Davidson wrote considerably more, and much of it is specifically about the 'back-and-forth cooperative behaviour with participants contributing to a whole... ' It's a bit like being disappointed in Chess after watching only an electric fence endgame.

According to Davidson, the problem is this: what interpreter and speaker share(the understanding of the speaker's words), to the extent that communication succeeds, is not learned and so is not a language governed by rules or conventions known to speaker and interpreter in advance; but what the speaker and interpreter know in advance is not (necessarily) shared, and so is not a language governed by shared rules or conventions. What is shared is, as before, the passing theory(the understanding of the speaker's words); what is given in advance is the prior theory, or anything on which it may in turn be based.

Quoting Banno

Davidson wrote considerably more

Yeah, that's totally fair. I haven't gone back and re-read the earlier stuff for this discussion (and never read much later stuff) so I'm not in any position to judge his project. Insofar as I have in this thread, that's overstepping on my part.

This paper, by itself, feels pretty thin to me on that front, but I'm open to being shown I'm missing something.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If the language is consistent, there will be systematic relations among sentences containing a given word -- that is certain sentences being false will require certain other sentences being true and others still also being false, and so on. Thus the meaning of a word is the "contribution" it makes to the truth or falsity of sentences it could appear in.

Yep. Radical Interpretation is holistic.

Quoting Dawnstorm

"This is a nice soup latrine" is true iff this is a nice soup latrine.

"Soup latrine", since it is a malapropism, does not occur elsewhere in the object language, or at least does not occur with any where near the of "soup tureen". Empirically it is not a good candidate for the metalanguage interpretation.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Sure. I'm just puzzled by things you have written such as following:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner

All of this is rule-governed, but the rules don't tell you any of this. Nevertheless, the rules enable the complex behavior we get to enjoy. Of course, the rules of language, broadly construed, change more than almost anything else, including chess and baseball, but that doesn't mean that what rules there are don't function, perhaps temporarily, as the inner structure that supports the elaborate constructions of language use.

Now I noted much earlier that the misuse found in malapropisms can only occur, and is of interest because, it breaks the conventions; and hence malapropism presupposes the conventions it breaks. The thought had not occurred to me that Davidson might suppose that there was no role for conventions in understanding what someone says - something you sometimes seem to attribute to him. I'd taken his argument as being against those who suppose that all there is to understanding language is understanding conventions.

I'd seen his argument as rather like Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Gödel showed that in any sufficiently rich formal language it is possible to construct true statements that are not derivable from the axioms of that language. Davidson has shown that in a natural language one can construct sentences that undermine the conventions of that language.

That strikes me as both the purpose of the article and as a significant point.

First, any general framework, whether conceived as a grammar for English, or a rule for accepting grammars, or a basic grammar plus rules for modifying or extending it—any such general framework, by virtue of the features that make it general, will by itself be insuf?cient for interpreting particular utterances. The general framework or theory, whatever it is, may be a key ingredient in what is needed for interpretation, but it can’t be all that is needed since it fails to provide the interpretation of particular words and sentences as uttered by a particular speaker. In this respect it is like a prior theory, only worse because it is less complete.

Second, the framework theory must be expected to be different for different speakers. The more general and abstract it is, the more difference there can be without it mattering to communication. The theoretical possibility of such divergence is obvious; but once one tries to imagine a framework rich enough to serve its purpose, it is clear that such differences must also be actual. It is impossible to give examples, of course, until it is decided what to count in the framework: a suf?ciently explicit framework could be discredited by a single malapropism.

Quoting creativesoul

His problem is to describe what is involved in the idea of ‘having a language’. He finds that none of the proposals satisfy the demand for a description of an ability that speaker and interpreter share and that is adequate to interpretation.

I suppose I'm positing that the ability to attribute meaning to an otherwise meaningless utterance(to the interpreter) satisfies the demand that Davidson claims to be missing, and solves the problem of malapropisms. That ability, if I grant Davidson's notions of prior and passing theory, would be part of both.

Reply to Banno

How would the T sentence method work for translating meaningful sentences that are not truth apt?

For example...

"Don't be scared of the virus." "Don't let the virus dominate your life."

Are these out of reach, so to speak, beyond the 'domain' of application?

Quoting creativesoul

"Don't be scared of the virus."

By taking the utterance as an event. Something like:

creativesoul said "Don't be scared of the virus" 6 minutes ago is true IFF P.

...and we try various substitutions, perhaps "Creativesoul believes that we ought not be scared of the virus and enjoined us to believe the same"... or "Creativesoul would like us to all die of Covid 19 and encouraged us not to take any precautions". The choice would depend on an empirical assessment of the context.

There was for a while an active program taking various difficult cases and treating them in this way.

Quoting creativesoul

His problem is to describe what is involved in the idea of ‘having a language’. He finds that none of the proposals satisfy the demand for a description of an ability that speaker and interpreter share and that is adequate to interpretation.
— creativesoul

I suppose I'm positing that the ability to attribute meaning to an otherwise meaningless utterance(to the interpreter) satisfies the demand that Davidson claims to be missing, and solves the problem of malapropisms. That ability, if I grant Davidson's notions of prior and passing theory, would be part of both.

Reply to Banno does the above make sense?

Quoting Banno

I'd taken his argument as being against those who suppose that all there is to understanding language is understanding conventions.

Two points:

1.) I don't know what you're talking about here. It is consistent to hold of linguistic communication, that absolutely all of it is governed by conventions, rules and regularities, and that these conventions, rules, and regularities do not explain what people communicating using language are doing. I think a similar claim is true of chess, to me obviously true. I would say further that the rules of chess, again in a way I find obvious, don't just allow the feats of creativity we observe but enable them; and I could claim the same for language use.

1.a.) None of this is about other competencies a language user must have, how a linguistic agent is embedded in culture or society, etc., not directly anyway, but about the nature of rule-governed creativity.

1.b.) To hold such a position, I'd need an account of malapropisms as either unsuccessful or successful because of some particular convention, etc.

2.) I just don't see your Gödel reading in the text.

p. 265:The problem we have been grappling with depends on the assumption that communication by speech requires that speaker and interpreter have learned or somehow acquired a common method or theory of interpretation

I read that as saying communication by speech does not require any such thing. He's not about to claim, just a sentence or two hence, that linguistic competence is just not quite enough to explain linguistic communication -- maybe we need just a smidge of something else; no, he's going to claim there just is no such thing as linguistic competence, and though he describes it with his three principles, he really seems to intend them to be broad enough to take in anyone you can think of.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

It is consistent to hold of linguistic communication, that absolutely all of it is governed by conventions, rules and regularities, and that these conventions, rules, and regularities do not explain what people communicating using language are doing.

I don't know what you're talking about here.

I suppose that what you have written might make sense if you divorce "governed by conventions" from "interpreted by conventions"; but Davidson is talking about interpretation, and shows that there are utterances that cannot be interpreted using conventions, because they actually deny those conventions - like Godel's "this proposition is not provable in this language" denies that it is provable and yet is true...

Reply to Banno

Think of a great game of chess: every single move is in accordance with the rules, but if you asked me to explain what happened and why, I wouldn't just hand you a copy of the rulebook. The rules don't explain what happens in a game of chess, even though all of it is rule-governed and could not exist without this system of rules.

Am I still not quite making the idea clear? It's very intuitive to me, so I could be missing the mark.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

he's going to claim there just is no such thing as linguistic competence

That looks like a misunderstanding to me...

These phenomena threaten standard descriptions of linguistic competence

That does not deny linguistic competence. It does not say that there is no such thing as linguistic competence. It just places the conventional notions/accounting practices into question.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner
But a malapropism is more like a game of chess in which one player moves a pawn backwards... despite the rule saying they must move forwards!

Reply to Banno

No they aren't. The substituted word is almost always the same part of speech, even the same number of syllables with the same prosody, and the resulting expression is grammatical.

The analogy in chess would be a move that, while legal, "doesn't make sense" according to some view of chess, but works for some specific reason.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

Davidson wrote..

Malapropisms introduce expressions not covered by prior learning, or familiar expressions which cannot be interpreted by any of the abilities so far discussed. Malapropisms fall into a different category, one that may include such things as our ability to perceive a well-formed sentence when the actual utterance was incomplete or grammatically garbled, our ability to interpret words we have never heard before, to correct slips of the tongue, or to cope with new idiolects.

These phenomena threaten standard descriptions of linguistic competence.

The question is, do the three principles forwarded by Davidson take proper account of the standard descriptions? If they do, then Davidson's argument in the paper seems to show a flaw in the standard description of linguistic competence.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Think of a great game of chess: every single move is in accordance with the rules...

Malapropisms are not in accordance with the rules.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

The problem we have been grappling with depends on the assumption that communication by speech requires that speaker and interpreter have learned or somehow acquired a common method or theory of interpretation
— p. 265

I read that as saying communication by speech does not require any such thing

Whereas, I read that as saying the problem is the assumption that communication by speech requires a common method or theory of interpretation that is in accordance with convention - as being able to operate on the basis of shared conventions, rules, or regularities. Hence, the problem dissolves if we can successfully describe communication by speech in a way that does not make that assumption. All it would take would be to add something else to that method that is not in accordance with convention. It doesn't necessarily require rejecting all conventional understanding on the matter.

That would also change the conventional understanding of linguistic competence, not deny that there is such a thing.

the problem is this: what interpreter and speaker share, to the extent that communication succeeds, is not learned and so is not a language governed by rules or conventions known to speaker and interpreter in advance...

What's shared, to the extent that communication succeeds, that is not learned or governed by rules or conventions, is the very ability(which could be characterized as a method) to attribute meaning.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner I’m nonplussed. No wonder the article appears trivial to you.

More anon.

Reply to Banno

He does try to make his case against conventions, rules, and regularities quite broad -- going beyond malapropisms to include not only all successful speech errors, but also throwing in "Jabberwocky", about which he comments, as I recall, that most of it can be understood on a first reading.

Of course "Jabberwocky" isn't all made-up words, and the made-up words obey English phonology, and it's grammatical.

What's more, just "getting the gist" is maybe a little less than we expect of comprehension.

And still more, it's not like he can point to a large body of speech as odd as "Jabberwocky".

Some natural questions then: (1) Which conventions, rules, and regularities are we keeping? (2) If people can talk this way all the time and get along perfectly fine, why don't they? Why don't we all encounter dozens or hundreds of words each day made up on the spot? (We do, I've read, average perhaps dozens of speech errors per day.)

So my resistance here is not just based on malapropisms, anymore than Davidson takes the case he's made only to apply to them.

For instance, where he says "or born with" referring to the linguistic competence that doesn't exist, that can't be a reference to anyone but Chomsky can it? And Chomsky's original claims for an inborn facility are all to do with syntax. Did Davidson really try to just throw in a denial of our inborn capacity for syntactic speech on the strength of his analysis of semantic speech errors? Yeah I think he did.

Quoting creativesoul

I'd invite you to read my reply on the bottom of page nine and let me know what you think about how it handles the odd success of malapropisms.

You seem to be saying that language is not governed entirely by rules or conventions because otherwise it would be impossible to understand malapropisms, since we would not be able to step outside of literal meanings (what Davidson calls "first meanings").

I agree with that much, but I was not able to see any explanation of how we are able to understand malapropisms there. I don't think the explanation is any big mystery, as I've already explained, but the explanation cannot be precisely set out as some procedure, because procedures involves rule, conventions, protocols, methodologies or whatever you want to call them, and they are the very things being denied as constituting explanation.

So I can say we simply get (when we do!) malapropisms. Or I can say we are able to get them by association, imitation of familiar word plays (rhyming fro example) and so on. Or Banno can say it is just a matter of action (whatever that means). None of these are explanation, though, in the sense that laying out a set of procedures would be.

I don't know what more can be said about it. It's a thread with 400 something posts and nothing much of any cogency has been said so far, and nothing much seems to be in the article the thread is about either.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Actually there is! But these would be violations not of the pure syntax of chess, but either of its "school grammar", the received wisdom of how to play properly, or of its "real grammar", how to put moves together in a way that makes sense.

Now here's something more interesting!

I have been thinking that no move in chess which involves the pieces moving in the conventional ways would be analagous to a malapropism, because the latter break with the convention of using the correct term for the context. "Soup latrine" is obviously not the correct word to use when referring to a soup tureen (or a soup kitchen), and I have been seeing this as analogous to making an illegitimate, as opposed to your example of merely an unconventional, move in chess.

So then, do you want to say that a malapropism is merely "unconventional" and not a trangression against any actual rule?

Reply to Harry Hindu I don't think your mixture of metaphors here is helping. Well, I guess I should only speak for myself: it's not helping me.

Reply to Janus

Hey!

That's too bad that you're losing interest. I'm gaining understanding the more I read here and back to the paper...

Your notion of association, as you know, is commensurate with my own position on how meaning works.

The part of that post that sets out how we understand malapropisms is the bottom half basically. Perhaps a re-read may help you to understand what I'm saying about the attribution of meaning. I've also said much since; that may be of help.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

What's more, just "getting the gist" is maybe a little less than we expect of comprehension.

This is a good point. We don't have any precise understanding of the meaning of Jabberwocky, and there are many poems included in the "Canon" that may elude any literal meaning (not to mention a fair bit of modern philosophy). When we understand "that's a nice soup latrine" as meaning " that's a nice soup tureen" what exactly are we understanding correctly? What would a correct understanding depend upon? Upon the speaker meaning "soup tureen"? What if she meant "soup kitchen"?

So I am imagining a situation in which the speaker and the hearer are in the presence of a soup tureen full of soup (and not standing in a soup kitchen). Given that, what if the speaker had said " That's a nice soup whatyoumaycallit" or "that's a nice soup dog" or "that's a nice soup [blank]"? Would we not, in such a situation, understand just the same what was meant?

Quoting Janus

You seem to be saying that language is not governed entirely by rules or conventions because otherwise it would be impossible to understand malapropisms, since we would not be able to step outside of literal meanings (what Davidson calls "first meanings").

It may not matter, but I'd say that that is not quite what I'm saying. There's a little more nuance than that suggests. Not much, but a little. I'm saying that successful communication with speech is not governed entirely by rules or conventions.

Reply to creativesoul My interest was rekindled so I edited the post. :smile: I did read that long paragraph at the bottom of page nine, and I'm not saying I don't agree with you, I'm just saying that I don't think it constitutes an explanation in the sense that seems to be being sought any more than my "association, imitation, etc." or Banno's "action" does.

So, I have suggested that an explanation set out as a procedural following of rules is impossible, since it is the explanatory (or fully explanatory) capacity of rules that is the very thing being denied.