عصرانه 2

در ترم آینده درسی دارم در تاریخ فلسفه با تمرکز بر روی لایب نیتس و هیوم. سیلابسِ درس کمابیش مشخص است و من با مرورِ آن تصمیم گرفتم روی این موضوع کار کنم: "لایب نیتس و جهان‌های ممکن".

اولین کارم خواندنِ چند مدخلِ مربوط از استنفورد بود تا علاوه بر درکی کلی از شمای بحث، بتوانم پرسشی مشخص را استخراج کنم. از پسِ این خوانش‌های اولیه ساختاری که برای شروع متن‌خوانی انتخاب کرده‌ام کمابیش چنین است:

1-      بیان رویکرد اسپینوزا و رویکرد لایب نیتس نسبت به جهان‌های ممکن؛

2-      بیان استدلال (یا استدلال‌های) هریک از ایشان در حمایت از رویکرد مورد نظر؛

3-      استخراج تعهدات متافیزیکیِ مستتر در دل هر دسته از این استدلال‌ها؛

4-      مروری بر رویکردهای جدید در فلسفه‌ی تحلیلی نسبت به جهان‌های ممکن؛

5-      احتمالاً یافتنِ تناظری بین رویکردهای اسپینوزا و لایب نیتس با رویکردهای جدید؛

6-      احتمالاً یافتنِ تناقض‌های رویکرد لایب نیتس و دفاع از رویکرد اسپینوزا.

نکته‌ی آخر برایم مهم شده است: "موضعی در حمایت از اسپینوزا". رویکرد اسپینوزا به جهان‌های ممکن، در تقابل با رویکردِ لایب نیتس، این است که جهانِ واقع تنها جهانِ ممکن است (یا دقیق‌تر آنکه یک تفسیر معمول از اسپینوزا چنین است). احتمالاً این رویکردی است که در بادی امر بسیار بسیار از شهود طبیعیِ ما دور است؛ ما شهوداً در می‌یابیم که می‌شد جهانِ واقع اینگونه نباشد که در واقع است. بنابراین تلاش در جهتِ حمایت از این دیدگاهِ غیرشهودی همچون نوعی بازی هیجان‌انگیز و جذاب است.

کمی به عقب برمی‌گردم. چندی پیش دوستی، در بحثی، داشت این را می‌گفت که چون نوفرگه‌ای است لذا علی‌رغم حرف‌های عجیبِ اوانز در کتابِ “The Varieties of Reference” و ریویویِ منفیِ پاتنم بر این کتاب (اینجا)، اما او در کنارِ اوانز است.

خب چه چیز باعث می‌شود که منِ فلسفه خوان موضعی خاص را برگزینم؟

مثلاً و در مثالِ بالا نوفرگه‌ای باشم؟ یا در نوشتنِ یک تکلیفِ درسی تلاش کنم تا جانبِ اسپینوزا را بگیرم؟  

چیزی که من بسیار مشاهده کرده‌ام این است که برگرفتن این موضع‌ها، بیشتر نوعی بازیِ هیجان انگیز است و فقط همین. ایکس نظرگاهی دارد، می‌توان ضدِ نظرگاهِ ایکس، نظرگاه ایگرگ را برگزید پس آن را برمی‌گزینم تا بازی را ادامه دهم.

این به غایت من را می‌ترساند. من فکر می‌کنم در برگرفتن هر موضعی بسیار باید محتاط بود و بسیار باید سختگیر بود و همواره و پیش و بیش از هر چیز باید نظر به حقیقت داشت و دائم پرسید که آیا موضعِ مختارِ من نسبتی نزدیک‌تر با حقیقت دارد یا خیر. حتی فکر می‌کنم در نوشتن یک تکلیف درسی، که هدفش احتمالاً بیش و پیش از هرچیز پرورش قوای مقاله‌نویسیِ دانشجو است، باید وسواس حقیقت را به غایت پاس داشت.

نیز فکر می‌کنم اختیارِ یک موضع خاص، صرفاً به عنوانِ بازیِ معمولِ فلسفه‌ی دانشگاهی، ما را در فلسفه متفنن می‌کند و جدیت را می‌ستاند. همچنین گمان دارم که بخشِ بزرگی از فلسفه‌ی تراز اول با وسواس سختگیرانه نسبت به حقیقت تولید شده است و بخشِ بزرگی از فلسفه‌ی تراز دوم، که البته وجودش لازم است، با تن دادن به بازیِ هیجان انگیزِ انتخابِ همین‌طوریِ یک موضع خاص.        

خلاصه‌ای از منطق گزاره‌ها و محمولات

فایل زیر مربوط است به یک تکلیف درسی و در آن از منطق گزاره‌ها و محمولات مرتبه‌ی اول، بر مبنای این کتاب از لطف‌الله نبوی، خلاصه‌ای فشرده تهیه شده است: 

خلاصه منطق
حجم: 203 کیلوبایت

فلسفه‌ی زبان موریس: پنج؛ انواع طبیعی

در این فصل به انواع طبیعی پرداخته می‌شود. یکی از خصوصیاتِ مثبتِ کتابِ موریس این است که بحثِ ترم‌های انواع طبیعی کمابیش به صورتی مفصل مورد بحث قرار گرفته است (مثلاً در مقام مقایسه در کتاب‌های میلر، لایکن و کِمپ این بحث به صورتی موجز و در حد دو یا سه صفحه مورد بحث قرار گرفته است). منابع اصلی مربوط به این فصل اینها هستند:

1-      Naming and Necessity, Kripke, lecture 3;

2-      Meaning and Reference, Putnam.

قسمت اول: مقدمه

Saul Kripke’s arguments against description theories of names inaugurated a revolution in the philosophy of language. One of the first acts of that revolution was an application of similar arguments against a similarly descriptive theory of another sort of expression – so-called natural-kind terms. Kripke himself claimed that natural-kind terms are rigid designators. In this, he was supported by the semi-independent work of Hilary Putnam. Kripke and Putnam together are acknowledged as the creators of a new theory of such terms.

Natural-kind terms differ from proper names in this: whereas proper names pick out individuals, natural-kind terms pick out kinds. Favorite examples are ‘tiger’ and ‘water’.

What makes a kind natural? There are two based conceptions of nature which seem to be at play in the focus on natural-kind terms:

(SRN) A natural kind is a kind about which some natural science is authoritative.

What is natural science? We will have a list – physics, chemistry, biology – and we will have in mind certain contrasts – with art and with human sciences.

The other conception of nature is perhaps more fundamental:

(RKN) A natural kind is a kind whose identity as a kind is fixed by reality, and not by human interests or concerns.

Someone may concern, of course, link the two conceptions. Indeed, it might be held that the distinctive point and value of natural sciences is that they tell us how reality is in itself. This kind of view is often known as naturalism, and sometimes as scientific realism.

One way the issue of natural-kind terms is important is that it connects philosophy of language with metaphysics.

 

قسمت دوم: دیدگاهی لاکی دربابِ ترم‌های انواع طبیعی

Locke: “The nominal Essence of Gold is that complex Idea the word Gold stands for, let it be, for instance, a body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed.”

This remark and others in the surrounding text has suggested that Locke himself held a counterpart – for the case of natural-kind terms – of the description theory of names which Kripke is concerned to undermine in the earlier of Naming and necessity. But we can reasonably describe the view Kripke and Putnam attack as broadly Lockean.

We can state the core of a Lockean theory of natural-kind terms, as follows:

(LK) The meaning of a natural-kind term is determined by what is believed to be definitive of the kind in question.

And we can lay out the commitments of such a theory, as follows:

(LK1) If ‘K’ is a natural-kind term, there is a family of things associated with ‘K’, an appropriate part of which is believed to be true of members of K and only members of K;

(LK2) If ‘K’ is a natural-kind term, then if an appropriate part of what is believed to be true of members of K is, in fact, true of something, then that thing is indeed a member of K;

(LK3) If ‘K’ is a natural-kind term, then it is a priori that an appropriate part of what is believed to be true of members of K is, in fact, true of members of K;

(LK4) If ‘K’ is meaningful natural-kind term, then it is necessary true that an appropriate part of what is believed to be true of members of K is indeed true of members of K.

Locke seems generally to endorse an individualist conception of language: each person is the authority over the use of her own terms; a word in one person’s mouth can signify only that person’s conception of things. It is this individualist theory which is the target of the most direct of Kripke’s and Putnam’s criticism.

Take (LK1) first. Putnam says that he cannot tell the difference between elms and beeches, and indeed claims that there is no difference between his concept of an elm and his concept of a beech. So (LK1) looks false.

(LK2) is similarly doubtful. Suppose that what I think is definitive of tigers is just that they are large carnivorous quadrupeds of cat-like appearance, tawny yellow in color with blackish transverse stripes and white belly. Kripke claims, plausibly, that there could be something of just this appearance which was of a different species, and did not count as a tiger. The crucial thing here is that the conception of members of a natural kind which ordinary speakers possess seems to relate principally to relatively superficial appearances. What Kripke’s point suggests is that, intuitively, we do not regard such superficial appearance as really determining what counts as a genuine member of a natural kind. Instead, the job is done by something which we might hope that a biologist would know, but most of us are ignorant of.

This is one of the points of Putnam’s ‘Twin-Earth’ example. Putnam imagines that there is another planet somewhere else in the universe, which he calls Twin Earth. Twin Earth is qualitatively indistinguishable from earth, at least in relatively superficial appearance: that is to say, if you were instantaneously transport there, you wouldn’t notice the difference. Despite all this superficial similarity, there is a fundamental difference between Earth and Twin Earth: whereas the chemical composition of the stuff in Earth rain, Earth rivers, Earth lakes, which we call ‘water’, is H₂O, the chemical composition of the similar stuff on Twin Earth, which the Twin-Earthians call by similar-sounding name, is something quite different – XYZ, let’s say. Putnam claims that the stuff on Twin Earth, despite being superficially indistinguishable from water is not really water. What Putnam is claiming here is that what counts as water is not determined by what ordinary speakers know. It is the knowledge of the scientist which is decisive, not the concepts which ordinary speakers have.

Take (LK3). Kripke shows how we can raise doubt this by considering two kinds of possibility: the possibility that we might have been subject to some kind of illusion when we encountered those members of the kind on which our conception of the kind is based; and the possibility that the members of the kind we have encounter were in fact abnormal.

Now take (LK4). We might identify water as the liquid which falls in rain, which flows in rivers, and which fills lakes and seas. This might be how we fix the reference of the term ‘water’, but it is surely not necessary that water does this.

Kripke and Putnam themselves seems to be more interested in a Lockean claim which looks almost the converse of (LK4). We might formulate it like this:

(LK5) If ‘K’ is a natural-kind term, then nothing is necessarily true of members of K as members of K other than appropriate part of what is believed to be true of members of K, or what follows logically from that.

This claim derives from a general trend in empiricism. A crucial commitment of empiricism is the view that we cannot have any real knowledge of the world beyond what we can gain from experience. Within this basic philosophical approach, Hume made the following claim: we cannot literally perceive that something is necessary.

If necessary derives from our way of thinking about things, rather than from the things themselves, it seems that what is necessarily true of a natural kind can only derive from the way we think of the kind. Kripke and Putnam are concerned to deny (LK5) and the associated conception of necessity as being derived from our way of thinking of things. Consider the following pair of sentences, for example:

(1)    Gold is the element with atomic number 79;

(2)    Water is H₂O.

They claim that statements like these are necessary – at least if they are true at all. Although they are necessary, (1) & (2) are a posteriori. In insisting that (1) and (2) are necessary, Kripke and Putnam are attacking the empiricist conception of necessity which led people to conflate the epistemic and the metaphysical in first place.

Take (1) for example. It seems that (1) can only be necessary if both of the following are true:

(1a)The predicate ‘x is the element with atomic number 79’ applies to that stuff in all possible worlds;

 (1b)The term ‘gold’ picks out that stuff in all possible worlds.

If (1) is true, then it seems that (1a) must be true. But (1b) is just the claim that ‘gold’ is a rigid designator. What this show is that the claim that (1) and (2) are necessarily true, depends on the claim that ordinary natural-kind terms are rigid designators.

 

قسمت سوم: چگونه ترم‌های انواع طبیعی می‌توانند نشانگرهای صلب باشند؟

According to the Kripke-Putnam view, natural-kind terms like ‘gold’, ‘water’, and ‘tiger’ are rigid designators: they designate the same kinds in all possible worlds. They seem to offer an account of their rigidity which is parallel to Kripke’s picture of how proper names work.

In the case of gold, Kripke imagines a ‘hypothetical’, though ‘admittedly somewhat artificial’ baptism, carried out by means of some such declaration as this: ‘Gold is the substance instantiated by the items over there, or at any rate, by almost all of them’. Putnam imagines that I give what amounts to an ‘ostensive definition’ of water as something like ‘the liquid which has such and such superficial properties in the actual world’. Kripke’s ‘baptism’ and Putnam’s ‘definition’ look just like the different ways in which Kripke imagined the reference of a proper name might be fixed.

This might then be thought to suggest that the later uses of natural-kind terms designate the relevant kinds in virtue of being historically connected to the first, introductory uses. That might suggest that natural-kind terms, like proper names, are directly referential. And it might then seem that this non-descriptive directness is what explains the rigidity of natural-kind terms, just as it seems to in the case of proper names.

 

منابع بیشتر

1-      The meaning of ‘meaning’, H. Putnam;

2-      Natural Kinds, D. H. Mellor,

3-      Putnam’s Theory on the Reference of Substance Terms, E. Zemach;

4-      Natural Kind Terms and Recognitional capacities, J. Brown;

5-      Natural Kind Terms: A Neo-Lockean Theory, A. D. Smith;

6-      Beyond Rigidity, S. Soames.               

 

       

فلسفه‌ی زبان موریس: چهار؛ کریپکی

این فصل اختصاص دارد به نقدِ کریپکی بر نظریات توصیفی نام‌های خاص. منبع اصلیِ این فصل این است:

‘Naming and Necessity’

قسمت اول: مقدمه

Russell and Frege both thought that names and descriptions work in the same way. Indeed, they both seem to have thought that ordinary proper names were equivalent in meaning to definite descriptions. In this they were opposed to an elder and simpler view held by J. S. Mill, that proper names ‘do not indicate or imply any attributes as belonging to those individuals’ which they refer to. Then:

Millian view: There is no more to the meaning of a name than the fact that it refers to the object it does refer to. The most obvious difficulty for the Millian view is provided by the kind of case which led Frege to introduce the notion of Sense.

But the obvious problem with the description theory of names, that acknowledged by Frege, is that the same name will seem to be equivalent to different descriptions for different people. John Searle proposed a simple solution to this difficulty. We do not take a name as it stands in a linguistic community to be equivalent to a single identifying description: we take it to be associated with a (slightly indeterminate) cluster of descriptions.

In one form or another, the description theory of names held sway with little question for about half a century. In 1970 Saul Kripke gave three lectures at Princeton which have established a new orthodoxy on the topics of their title, naming and necessity. The first two lectures are concerned to argue that ordinary proper names work quite differently from definite descriptions. They also go some way towards re-instating something like Mill’s view of names.

 

قسمت دوم: تعهدات نظریات توصیفی از نظر کریپکی

Kripke identifies a range of basic commitments of the description theory as follows:

(DN1) If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for a speaker, S, there is a family of things which S believe to be true of O;

(DN2)If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for S, S must believe that some of the things which she believes to be true of O are true of only one thing;

(DN3)If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for S,then if most of the things which S believes to be true of O are in fact true of just one particular thing, then that particular thing is the referent of the name ‘O’ as S understands it;

(DN4)If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for S, then if there is not exactly one thing to which most of the things which S believes to be true of O in fact apply, then ‘O’, as S understands it, does not refer;

(DN5) If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for S, then S knows a priori that, if O exists, most of what she believes to be true of O is in fact true of O (as S understands ‘O’);

(DN6) If ‘O’ is a name which is meaningful for S, then it is necessarily true that, if O exists, most of what S believes to be true of O is indeed true of O (as S understands ‘O’).

Kripke associates one final commitment, (NC), that he argues that all of the basic commitments, apart from (DN1), are wrong, if we keep this commitment in place.

(NC) The things referred to in (DN1)-(DN6) as being believed by S to be true of O must not themselves involve the notion of reference in an in-eliminable way.

 

قسمت سوم: نقد کریپکی به (DN2), (DN3), (DN4)

Who was Cicero? He was a Roman orator. Who was Godel? He was the man who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic. Most of us know almost nothing about these (and most other) famous people, and yet we seem able to use their names, apparently with understanding.

(DN2) - (DN4) are very quickly vulnerable, if we confine our attention to such descriptions as these. Consider (DN4). Surely there has been more than one Roman orator. So in this case, ‘Cicero’, as most of us understand it, fails to refer,which is absurd.

(DN2) is even worse. Which of us believes that there has been only one Roman orator? None of us: so (DN2), it seems, is simply false.

Kripke objects (DN3) by this way. Consider the case of the name ‘Godel’. Suppose that in fact the incompleteness of arithmetic was proved not by Godel, but by an obscure Austrian named Schmidt. Would that mean that the unheard-of Schmidt was Godel? Of course not.

 

قسمت چهارم: نقد کریپکی به (DN5), (DN6)

There is the distinction between contingent and necessary truths. This distinction is concerned with how things could have been, objectively: Kripke calls it a metaphysical distinction. And there is the distinction between a posteriori and a priori truths. This distinction is concerned with how things can be known: it is an epistemic distinction. These two distinctions were thought to coincide: all a priori truths were thought to be necessary, and vice versa; all a posteriori truths were thought to be contingent, and vice versa. But Kripke points out that since the distinctions are made in quite different ways, it shouldn’t be obvious that they coincide.

Consider (DN5). Do I know a priori that Cicero was a Roman orator? Surely not: I read it in a book.

Kripke’s most famous objection to the description theory of names is his objection to (DN6). Suppose that this is all I know about Godel:

(5) Godel discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic.

According to (DN6), the following is necessarily true:

(6) If Godel existed, Godel discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic.

But that is absurd. Even if you add the fullest range of descriptions which it’s plausible to imagine an ordinary speaker might associate with the name, you will still have only contingent truths.

Kripke complements his argument against the description theory of names with an alternative account of how proper names work. The description theory is at root individualist: it imagines each individual being capable of picking out the object referred to by means of what she herself knows about that object. The meaning of a name in community is nothing but the overlap between such individual conceptions. His account runs the other way. According to him, an object receives a name in some initial baptism, and that is then a device for referring to the object later on. Later uses of the name are intended just to refer to whatever was referred to by the earlier uses of the name. Individual speakers need know nothing significant about the object referred to: all they need to do is to tap into a historical tradition of use of the name.

 

قسمت پنجم: Sense and direct reference

If we reject every form of description theory of names, it seems that we have to think of names as directly referential:

(DR) An expression is directly referential if and only if:

(1)    It refers to a particular object; and

(2)    It does not refer to that particular object in virtue of that object’s satisfying some description.

If proper names are directly referential, does this mean we have to adopt a million view of names? It’s standardly assumed that it does, but in fact the issue is not clear. There is a way of offering a neo-Fregean theory which allows proper names to be directly referential and still have Sense.

Frege himself was inclined to explain Sense of proper names in terms of definite descriptions, and the descriptions he chose were the kind which would appeal to a description theory of reference. But if we start just from the idea that Sense is simply what marks difference of informativeness despite sameness of reference, it’s possible to give a different interpretation of the notion of Sense and mode of presentation.

If we are acquainted with an object, we are bound to be acquainted with it is some way: it may be by reading about it, but it may also be by direct perception. We can understand a mode of presentation as a way of being acquainted with an object. The fact that we’re acquainted with an object under a certain mode of presentation doesn’t mean that we’re only indirectly related to it. If this is accepted, it’s clear enough that if an object is real object, it must be possible to be acquainted with it in more than one way. And this is the basis of an alternative account of difference of Sense. So it seems that proper names can be directly referential and still have Sense. And that means that Kripke’s attack on the description theory of names is not yet a decisive argument for a Millian theory of names.

 

قسمت ششم: منابع بیشتر

1-      Proper Names, J. Searle

2-      Thought and Reference, K. Bach (ch.7 and ch.8)

3-      The Causal Theory of Names, G. Evans

4-      The Game of the Name, G. McCulloch

5-      Beyond Rigidity, S. Soames, (ch.2 and ch.3)

 

فلسفه‌ی زبان موریس: سه؛ راسل

در این فصل به راسل و نظریه‌ی توصیفات معینِ او پرداخته می‌شود. مرجع اصلی این فصل این مقاله از راسل است:

‘On Denoting’

 

قسمت یک: مقدمه

As we saw, Frege’s committed to these two claims:

(F3) Ordinary proper names and definite descriptions are singular terms;

(F4) Ordinary proper names and definite descriptions all have Sense.

And the crucial things about the notion of a ‘singular term’ used in (F3) are these:

(ST1) The business of a singular term is to refer to an object;

(ST2) A sentence containing a singular term has no truth-value if there is no object corresponding to that singular term.

Russell was generally suspicious of the notion of Sense. The dramatic proposal of Russell’s great paper of 1905, ‘On Denoting’, is that definite descriptions do not in fact refer to objects. That is, Russell denies (F3), at least for the case of definite descriptions. And this, he thinks, will enable him to deny (F4), and avoid appealing to the notion of Sense altogether.

 

قسمت دوم: مشکلات

Russell treats Frege’s notion of Sense as a theoretical notion designed to deal with certain problems. His claim is that these problems are dealt with better by his alternative theory, which denies both (F3) and (F4). The problems are these:

(P1) How identity statements can be both true and informative;

(P2) How there can be a difficulty in swapping within epistemic contexts words which have the same ordinary reference;

(P3) How something meaningful can be said using ordinary proper names and definite descriptions which refer to no existing objects.

Russell’s theory is designed to solve all of these problems, and two more besides:

(P4) How the Law of Excluded Middle applies to sentences including such phrases as ‘the present King of France’ (It is now customary to distinguish between the Principle of Bivalence – which says that every meaningful sentence has exactly one of the two truth-values – and the Law of Excluded Middle – according to which every instance of the schema ‘p or not-p’ is true. Russell did not distinguish between the two, and it is arguable that his real concern was closer to what we now as the Principle of Bivalence.);

(P5) How there can be true denials of the (apparent) form ‘N does not exist’.

Problems (P4) and (P5) cannot be solved by introducing the notion of Sense, if (ST2) is still maintained.  And it’s clear that Frege himself accepted (ST2). But could we, in fact, modify (ST2)? What if we distinguish between existent and no-existent objects, and allowed that singular terms might refer to non-existent objects? (This view is associated with Alexius Meinong.) Russell himself was impatient with any suggestion that there might be objects which don’t really exit. In such theories, he says, ‘there is a failure of that feeling for reality which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies.’

 

قسمت سوم: راه حل راسل به صورتی موجز

At the core of Russell’s solution to the problems he sets himself is a revolutionary approach to the structure of language: superficial similarities between types of sentence should not be taken as evidence for thinking the sentences really work in the same way. Traditionally definite descriptions had been assimilated to the class of proper names. Russell begins by assimilating them instead to a quite different class of expressions: what he calls ‘denoting phrases’. The examples are these: ‘a man’, ‘some man’, ‘any man’, ‘every man’, ‘all men’. All these phrases involve quantifiers. A quantifier is an expression which specifies some quantity of a given group. Russell is concerned with this sentence:

(5) The present King of France is bald.

According to him, (5) means this:

(5r)There is exactly one object which is now King of France, and that object is bald.

   Russell sometimes expresses this in slightly more complicated way, as being equivalent to the following combination of sentences:

(5r*) (1) There is at least one object which is now King of France;

          (2) There is at most one object which is now King of France; and

          (3) Whatever is now King of France is bald.

On his analysis, the phrase ‘the present King of France’ is not a name of the present King of France. And the phrase has no meaning on its own, although it’s meaningful in the context of a sentence.

 قسمت چهارم: استراسون و توصیفات معین

Does Russell give a correct account of the meaning of sentences involving definite descriptions? In his famous paper, ‘On Referring’, P. F. Strawson argues that he does not. Strawson claims that certain crucial semantic terms are not properly applied to sentences, words, and phrases (expressions) at all: they are only properly applied to uses of expressions. He uses the distinction between the kinds of thing that can properly be said of linguistic expressions, on the one hand, and the kinds of things that can properly be said of uses of expressions, on the other, to remove some of the motivation for Russell’s theory. In particular, we cannot insist that either a sentence or its negation must be true if it’s meaningful. It is not even obvious that we should insist that if a sentence is meaningful, any use either of it or of its negation must be true.

Strawson’s overall claim can be put like this. There are certain central uses of definite descriptions which are referring uses. If a use of a definite description is a referring use, then the person who uses the description does not assert the unique existence of an object which satisfies the description, as Russell thought. Instead, the unique existence of an object which satisfies the descriptions is presupposed.

 

قسمت پنجم: دیدگاه دانلان

So far we have a fairly simple picture. Frege thought of definite descriptions, in all uses, as singular terms, and hence as referring expressions. Russell claims that they were never referring expressions. Strawson adopts something close to Frege’s view for some uses. In ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, Keith Donnellan complicates this simple picture. He claims that there are both referential and non-referential uses of definite descriptions: in this he disagrees with both Frege and Russell. But he claims that the referential uses do not rest on the presupposition that there is exactly one thing which satisfies the description: in this he disagrees with Frege and Strawson. Moreover, whether a use is referential does not depend on the general form of the sentence in which it occurs, or on what we would ordinarily say if we heard it, but on the intentions of the speaker who uses it.

According to Donnellan there are two uses of definite descriptions: attributive use according to which the definite description is essential to what I want to say, and referential use which is not essential. In the latter case I simply want to say something about that person, and using the description is just one of a number of possible ways of making it clear which person is involved.

We might be tempted to accept Donnellan’s distinction, and give a Russellian account of the attributive uses and a Strawsonian account of the referential uses. But this is exactly what Donnellan does not want to do: he thinks that Russell’ account is wrong for the attributive uses, and Strawson’s is wrong for the referential uses.

 

قسمت ششم: دفاعیات راسل

The Russellian will attempt to meet the criticisms brought by Strawson and Donnellan by making two distinctions:

(1)    Between what is strictly true or false and what is helpful or unhelpful in a conversational context;

(2)    Between what is strictly and literally said in a use of a sentence, and what a speaker means in uttering it.

The difference between the Russellian view and its critics are manifestations of a deeper difference between their approaches to the philosophy of language. On the one hand, we can think of human languages as like very complicated machines: the task of the philosopher is then to understand how they tick. We might call this the mechanical conception of language. If we take this view, we will think that the operation of human language is governed by laws which are similar in status to the laws of physics. Our inclinations will be to look for the uniform explanations of variety of phenomena, with particular variations being due to variations in local circumstances. The Russellian approach to definite descriptions broadly fits this model.

Strawson and Donnellan, however, take a different kind of view. They do not suppose that there is a system which can in any way be compared to a machine whose operation we need to understand. They expect to find nothing deeper than the complications of everyday life: their concern is just to be true to those complications. There is no virtue for them in uniformity of explanation, just as such: they are reluctant to generalize too quickly; they expect there to be exceptions to every rule. For them, in the end, the philosophy of language is not concerned with understanding how language ticks, but with what people are doing when they speak.

 

قسمت هفتم: منابع بیشتر

1-      ‘On Referring’, P. F. Strawson

2-      ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, K. Donnellan

3-      ‘Descriptions’, S. Neale

4-      ‘Russell’, M. Sainsbury

5-      ‘Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy’, ch.16, B. Russell

6-      ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’, B. Russell     

 

 

فلسفه‌ی زبان موریس: دو؛ فرگه

در این فصل به فرگه و دو مفهومِ Sense و  reference پرداخته می‌شود. مرجع اصلیِ این فصل این مقاله از فرگه است:

“On Sense and Reference”

قسمت اول: مقدمه

Frege is widely regarded as the father of analytic philosophy. His work has shaped everything which has been written in the philosophy of language in the analytic tradition. I think there are two principal reasons for this. First, his philosophy of language presents a way of accepting what seems most natural and intuitive about the kind of approach to language found in Locke, while decisively rejecting what seems most questionable about it. And, secondly, his work offers the prospect of thoroughly systematic approach to meaning.

Frege shares with Locke these three crucial assumptions:

(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 thought.

But his clearest disagreement with the Lockean tradition comes in his treatment of these two assumptions:

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

(L5) The components of thoughts are ideas.

Frege accepts some version of (L4) but understands it in a non-Lockean way. Locke had the following conception of how words –or most of them, at least- stand for self-standing Ideas in the mind of the speaker, and these are combined into something sentential by an action of the speaker’s mind. Frege rejects this: sentences are, in some sense, basic, and individual words only make sense in the context of sentences.

The other striking innovation of Frege’s philosophy of language is his use of the materials of formal logic to characterize the meaning of words.

 

قسمت دوم: Psychologism and the Context Principle

Frege:

(F1) It is not true that all words mean or refer to Ideas;

(F2) The meaning of a word is what is known by someone who understands the word.

The Context Principle:

First formulation: Never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a sentence.

Other: It is only in the context of a sentence that words have any meaning.

Last version:

(CP) There is no more to the meaning of a word than its contribution to the meaning of sentences in which it may occur.

Why should we accept (CP)? Frege’s principle reason was that unless we insist on (CP), we’ll be driven to think that words mean Ideas. There’s also another reason for accepting (CP): it gives us at least the beginning of a response to the problem of the unity of the sentence. The response suggested by (CP) is this: we don’t try to explain the unity of a sentence as something generated from independently meaningful parts; instead we take the unity of the sentence as basic.

Frege seems also to have implicitly endorsed a kind of converse principle, which we can call the Principle of Compositionality:

(PC) There is no more to the meaning of a sentence than what is determined by the meaning of words of which it is composed and the way in which they are arranged.

(PC) is the core principle in the study of semantics. Semantics is the systematic explanation of how the meaning of words determines the meaning of sentences composed from them.

Here is the problem. (CP) says that sentences are basic; (PC) says that words are basic. One suggestion (by Davidson) might be this. The sentence is basic in our understanding of the relation between language and what is outside of language. But the word is basic in our understanding of the relation between each sentence and the rest of language.

 

قسمت سوم: فرگه و منطق

Frege’s whole approach to language was shaped by his work on logic. Philosophy of language is shaped by the conception of validity which is implicit in his system:

(V) An argument is valid if and only if it is impossible for all of its premises to be true and its conclusion false.

Frege’s logic is built in two layers. The basic layer of Frege’s logic is sentence logic. This is concerned with arguments which depend on relations between whole sentences. The next layer –known as predicate logic- is concerned with arguments which depend on relations between parts of sentences. At its heart is a view of how sentences divide into parts. At bottom, Frege recognizes two basic kinds of parts of sentences. One kind consists of words or phrases which refer to particular individual objects –these are known as singular terms; Frege called them proper names. The other kind of basic part of sentences is the predicate. A predicate is just the result of removing one or more singular terms from a sentence.

Since Frege’s logical system depends on the simple definition of validity given by (V), we can specify quite simply what matters about the meaning of each of these three kinds of linguistic unit:

For sentences –whether they are true or false;

For singular terms –which objects they refer to;

For predicates –what difference they make to the truth and falsity of sentences, given any particular choice of singular terms in place of variables.

 

قسمت چهارم: reference

Two important words:

Bedeutung: reference

Sinn: sense

The basic of Frege’s mature account of language is his theory of Bedeutung. There are two striking things about this. First, he takes Bedeutung to account for what matters about meaning for the purposes of logic and perhaps for science in general. And, secondly, he understands Bedeutung in a way which the German word makes natural, but would seem odd to us if we took it to be simply equivalent to ‘meaning’. It is natural to translate the word ‘Bedeutung’, as it is used in Frege’s mature philosophy, as reference.

It is natural to say that singular terms refer to objects, and this is what Frege says. The cases of predicates and sentences are harder, though. Frege proposed that predicates should be said to refer to functions of particular kind. These are functions from objects to truth and falsity. Frege called functions of this kind concepts, and predicates concept-words. Frege also claims that sentences have referents too. Clearly what matters about sentences for Frege’s logic is their truth or falsity. Frege, In effect, turned truth and falsity into things and named them the True and the False. The True and the False are the values of the functions referred to by predicates, so they’re known as truth-values. He claims that it is only the truth-values of sentences which remain unchanged if you exchange their component words with other words whose reference is the same, and concludes that sentences refer to their truth-values.

 

قسمت پنجم: sense

Frege’s theory of reference leaves a huge gap between the reference of expressions and what might ordinarily be called their meaning. He used the word ‘Sinn’ to refer to this extra dimension of meaning. The word is translated Sense.

Compare these two:

(1)   (2*2^3)+2=18

(2)   18=18

Equation (1) can give us new knowledge, but equation (2) cannot; (1) is informative, while (2) is not.

In Begriffschrift, his early logical work, Frege had supposed that identity statements were really about the words involved: they said just that the words on the left had the same content as the word on the right. In the famous paper ‘Uber Sinn und Bedeutung’, he now thinks that this won’t do.

Frege proposes that there’s a further aspect of what we would ordinarily call the meaning of words –in addition to their reference. This further aspect he calls Sense. Frege then claims that although ‘(2*2^3) + 2’ and ‘18’ have the same reference, they differ in Sense. Sense contains the mode of presentation of referent.  

Frege thought that all kinds of linguistic expression could have Sense as well as reference. In particular, he thought that sentences as whole had Sense, and he thought that the Sense of sentences were what we ordinarily think of as Thoughts: the Sense expressed by a sentence is the Thought.

 

قسمت ششم: استفاده‌هایی از مفهومِ Sene

As he introduces it, Frege’s notion of Sense is defined in terms of informativeness. A true sentence is informative if you can understand it without thinking that it’s true.

Having introduced the notion of Sense to deal with the problem of informative identity statements, Frege used it in a way that offers solutions to two further problems.

The first is what to do about sentences containing singular terms which don’t refer to any real thing. There are two kinds of case here. The first is that of sentences involving singular terms which are semantically complex (example: ‘the least rapidly converging series’). A different kind of case is that of sentences in fiction:

(5) Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep.

Frege suggests that the name ‘Odysseus’ has sense, but no reference, and the sentence (5) as a whole expresses a Thought, even though it has no truth-value

The other problem Frege uses the notion of Sense to solve is one that arises in offering a semantics for ordinary languages. Such languages contain devices for reporting speech indirectly (‘Galileo said that …’), and for describing the thoughts and feelings of people (‘Amy believe that …’). Let us call all of these forms of word devices for introducing indirect contexts, in which sentences are used to report sayings, thoughts, and feelings indirectly, as opposed to by means of direct quotation.

Consider the case of Carol, a classicist. The following sentence involving an indirect context is true:

(6) Carol thinks that the evening star appears in the evening.

It seems that the sentence ‘the evening star appears in the evening’ is part of the larger sentence, (6). And it seems as if the phrase ‘the evening star’ is part of that contained sentence, and hence also part of the whole sentence (6). Moreover it is also true that the morning star is the same thing as the evening star; so the phrases ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’, which are regarded by Frege as singular terms, refer to same thing. It might seem, then, that the following sentence must be true:

(7) Carol thinks that the morning star appears in the evening.

But surely she thinks no such thing.

Frege’s response to this problem is, in effect, to accept that the contained sentence ‘the evening star appears in the evening’ is part of the whole sentence (6), and to maintain that the reference of the whole sentence (6) depends on the reference its part –but to deny that in this context the parts have their normal reference. In contexts like this, Frege claimed, contained sentences and their parts have as their reference not their normal reference but their normal Sense. This means that you can only swap expressions contained in these contexts if they have the same Sense.

 

قسمت هفتم: پرسش‌هایی درباره‌ی Sense

Frege agrees with Locke on this point:

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

But he disagrees with him over the nature of thought.

The claim that Frege offers a fundamentally different account of communication from Locke’s depends on making it clear that Fregean Thoughts are fundamentally different from Lockean Ideas. There are several respects in which one might doubt whether it is as large as initially seems.

The first respect in which the difference between Lockean Ideas and Fregean Thoughts end up looking less than it might initially seem is that Fregean Thoughts seem more personal than his official account might suggest. The other respect in which it seems harder than it might have been thought to maintain a firm contrast between Fregean Sense and Lockean Ideas concerns the relation between Sense and reference.       

 

قسمت هشتم: Sense and Basic Worry

Frege introduced the notion of Sense in order to deal with what may be described as the basic worry with the view that the meaning of words concerns things in the world, rather than things in the mind. In its most general form, the Basic Worry is this. If what matters about the meaning of words is which things in the world are associated with them, we might expect two words which are associated with the same thing in the world to have the same meaning, and a word which is associated with no thing in the world to have no meaning. But it’s natural to think that this is wrong. The notion of Sense is introduced precisely in order to deal with this Basic Worry. We’ve seen that there are some difficulties with the notion of Sense: might we do without it?

 

قسمت نهم: منابعی بیشتر برای مطالعه

از فرگه:

1)      The Foundations of Arithmetic

2)      Thoughts

3)      Function and Concept

4)      On Concept and Object

درباره‌ی فرگه:

1)      Frege: A Critical introduction, H. Noonan

2)      Frege, A. Kenny

3)       Frege: Philosophy of Language, M. Dummett

4)      The Varieties of Reference, G. Evans