فلسفه‌ی زبان موریس: یک؛ لاک

در این فصل به لاک پرداخته می‌شود. این فصل بر مبنای قطعاتی از این کار لاک نگاشته شده است:

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book iii, ch.1 and 2.

 

قسمت اول: لاک چه می‌گوید؟

One of the four books of John Lock’s vast and seminal work, An Essay concerning Human understanding, is dedicated to language. Lock:

“Man, though he have great variety of thoughts, and such, from which others, as well as himself, might receive profit and delight; yet they are all within his own breast, invisible, and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made appear. The comfort and advantage of society not being to be had without communication of thoughts, it was necessary, that man should find out some external sensible signs, whereby those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others. For this purpose, nothing was so fit, either for plenty or quickness, as those articulate sounds which with so much ease and variety he found himself able to make. Thus we may conceive how words, which were by nature so well adapted to that purpose, come to be made use of by men, as the signs of their ideas; not by any natural connexion, that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea. The use then of words, is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for, are their proper and immediate signification.”

نکته اما این است که این تلقی عمومی از زبان مختص به لاک نیست. بسیاری از این موارد در کارهای هابز قابل تشخیص است و عناصر این تلقی را می‌توان تا ارسطو به عقب برد. اما بیان فشرده و موجز لاک در بالا باعث می‌شود که مشکلات چنین تلقی‌ای از زبان به سرعت خود را نشان دهد.

موریس در ادامه‌ی این قسمت، از پاراگراف بالا هشت حکم استخراج می‌کند:

(L1) The nature of language is defined by its function.

(L2) The function of language is to communicate.

(L3) What language is meant to communicate is thoughts.

(L4) Words signify or mean the components of what language is meant to communicate.

(L5) The components of thought are ideas.

(L6) One person’s ideas cannot be perceived by another.

(L7) The relation between words and what they signify or mean is arbitrary.

(L8) Words are not intrinsically meaningful. 

نکته‌ی 1: مربوط به حکم چهار:

It is not quite obvious that his notion of signification is the same as we might ordinarily think was involved in the notion of meaning.

نکته‌ی2: مربوطه به حکم پنج:

The word ‘Idea’, as it is used here, is a technical term.

 We probably get closer to Locke if we think of a Lockean Idea as a kind of mental image. 

 

قسمت دوم: meaning and signification

We might say that a word first -directly or immediately- means an idea in the mind of its user, and secondly -indirectly or mediately- means the things which that idea represents.

It seems clear enough that Locke is committed to the view that it is part of the meaning of words that they signify ideas, and that is enough to raise some of the most obvious objections to his theory.         

 

قسمت سوم: مشکلاتی دربابِ communication

The most obvious difficulty with Locke’s conception of language is that … it makes communication impossible.

Genuine communication involves one person understanding another, and this requires that she should know what the other person means. This is just what is impossible, on Lock’s picture.

Some people might tempted to accept this conclusion: perhaps communication really is impossible … but this doesn’t look like a very stable position to hold … it cannot sensibly be accepted by a Lockean, or anyone else who thinks that the nature of language is defined by its function and that the function of language is to communicate … if you think communication is impossible, it seems silly to try to explain the nature of language in terms of the function of communicating in first place.

Meaning is connected with understanding. Meaning is what you know when you understand a word; and understanding a word does not involve knowing the psychological associations which a word might have … Locke’s theory as a whole, which accepts all of the assumptions (L1)-(L8), needs revision.

The slightest revision might be to change (L6). But if we think Ideas as being a kind of mental image, revising (L6) will not be an attractive option.

The next slightest revision would be to change (L5), and suggest this:

(L5*) The components of thought are concepts.

The reason for suggesting this change is that it might seem – on an everyday understanding of the word ‘concept’ – that you could tell from someone’s behavior what concepts she has … One major tradition in recent philosophy of language can be seen as differing from Locke’s theory in accepting something (L5*) instead of (L5): … Frege, can be understood as belonging to this tradition.

You would get a more radical alternative to Locke’s theory if you questioned (L3) … Locke’s conception of communication is fundamentally individualist. Each person is thought of as an autonomous individual, whose basic relationships with the world and with other people are independent of society and social institutions. The individual person has to understand the world and other people for herself, and make sense of them all in her own terms … if each person starts off as an autonomous individual among other autonomous individuals, the fundamental goal of communication is clear: each individual needs to find out what the other individuals are thinking.

We might instead have a fundamentally collaborative view. On such a view, the basic purpose of communication will not be to find out what other people are thinking, but to inform one another of how things are in the world. If we take this collaborative view, then we may propose this as an alternative to (L3):

(L3*): what language is meant to communicate are facts.

Whereas on Locke’s conception of language is concerned first with what is in people’s mind, on this alternative view language is fundamentally concerned with things in the world.

This view is developed like this:

We still accept (L4) and we will propose this instead of (L5):

(L5**) The components of facts are objects and properties.

This world-oriented view of language is also represented in a major tradition in recent philosophy of language: Russell was one of its pioneers.

 

قسمت چهارم: لغت‌ها و جمله‌ها

The idea behind the (L4) was that words are the basic components of language, so the meanings of words must be the basic components of what is meant by language.

It’s tempting to think that the sense (whatever it is) in which words are components of language is the same as the sense (whatever it is) in which words are components of sentences.

Words are thought to be the basic components of sentences as far as meaning is concerned. The meaning of sentences depends systematically on the meaning of the words of which they are composed … the idea here is that words are, so to speak, atomic in an account of meaning … and again the idea is that words are meaningful, but parts of words not.

This assumption could be doubted in one of two obvious ways. First, you might think that there are compound words (like ‘ice-pack’) or words with standard prefixes (like ‘unhappy’) or suffixes (like ‘stupidly’), whose meaning does depend systematically on the meaning of their component parts. One simple solution to this kind of problem might be to change our conception of what counts as a single word: so we might say that ‘ice-pack’ is two words, and prefixes and suffixes are words themselves.

The other way of doubting the assumption that words are atomic as far as meaning concerned is to question whether the letters and sounds from which a word is made really are irrelevant to its meaning.

اکنون بپردازیم به یک مشکل اساسی‌تر:

Sentences are not just lists of words. Compare a sentence with a list:

(1)   Socrates is waspish.

(2)   Socrates, being, waspishness.

The basic difference between the sentences (1) and the list (2) is that (1) is complete in a way that (2) is not … This feature which sentences have and mere lists do not is sometimes called the unity of the propositions: in one of its senses ‘proposition’ means sentence.

Locke seems bound to find it difficult to explain the unity of the sentence, because he seems to react words as names of Ideas … this is what he says:

“The mind, in communicating its thought to others, does not only need signs of ideas it has then before it, but others also, to shew or intimate some particular action of its own, at that time, relating to those ideas. This is does several ways; as, Is, and Is not, are the general marks of the mind, affirming or denying.”            

The suggestion seems to be this. If I say, ‘Socrates is waspish’, then I am affirming waspishness of Socrates; if I say, ‘Socrates is not waspish’, then I am denying waspishness of Socrates. What happens, according to Locke, is that the various Ideas are joined together in an action of the mind. The unity of the sentence, then, is created by the mind.

I think the problem is just transferred. A unity is created by an action of the mind … but the nature of the unity which is created is mysterious.

 

قسمت پنجم: حکم‌های (مفروضاتِ) کمتر مناقشه‌برانگیزِ لاک

The four assumptions – (L1), (L2), (L7) and (L8) – have generally been accepted without question in the analytic tradition.

 

پی‌نوشت:

موریس اینها را به عنوان منابعی برای مطالعه‌ی بیشتر معرفی کرده است:

N. Kretzmann: “The Main Thesis of Lock’s Semantic Theory”

E. J. Ashworth: “Lock on Language”

من کتاب زیر را تورق کرده‌ام و به نظرم مفید رسیده است:

Walter Ott: “Locke’s Philosophy of Language”