Language, Externalism and Meaning

Posted on July 3, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy |

Tanasije has had this very interesting series on externalism and mathematics over at Brood Comb the past few weeks. His latest post got me thinking about an externalism similar to Putnam or Davidson and what that means to language. Consider someone in the Matrix. What they mean by water, to the externalist, isn’t really water but virtual water. Not knowing the real world they couldn’t even refer to real water. So “water” to the person in the Matrix has a different meaning than “water” to the humans outside of the Matrix. So here’s the question, even acknowledging a difference of meaning do they still speak the same language?

Put an other way to what degree is language qua language about meanings? It seems to me that I’d want to say that both the person in the Matrix and outside of the Matrix speak the same language but simply refer to different things by the language.

I can see some wanting to say that meaning is so wrapped up in language that a significant change of meaning entails a new language.

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10 Responses to “Language, Externalism and Meaning”

Just to note - to avoid some causal theories of meaning such as perhaps Davidson’s Tanasije makes the Matrix not a simulation of the real world (and thus causally related to the real world) but one produced purely by chance.

I should add that where this gets more interesting is with regards to mathematics. Say we encounter an alien species. They know mathematics. Is it the same mathematics we know? That one ends up being trickier because you could always say the math is causally related - at least initially - to features of the universe.

I tend to think that all these sorts of thought experiments lead one to Peirce’s scholastic realism or the idea there are real universals independent of any particular mind. Which needn’t entail Platonism which, as I understand it, is the stronger claim that universals exist immaterially. Peirce separates reality from existence.

“So here’s the question, even acknowledging a difference of meaning do they still speak the same language?”

What does “same” mean, here? How do we individuate “languages”? Do I speak the language which Shakespeare wrote in? Or Chaucer? Or Joyce? (I can read both Chaucer and Joyce with about equal facility (difficulty); could Chaucer have read Joyce? Does this mean that they cannot have both written in English? If they did not, then what languages did they write in?)

I think the answer to your sort of question is the same as Putnam’s (most recent) stance on mind-brain identity: We’ve not yet given any sense to what “being the same” or “not being the same” mean, in these sorts of questions.

Obviously there are many ways to distinguish & enumerate languages — English is not Spanish is not Latin is not Basque is not Pidgin — but I see no reason to think that any particular way is “the” way, such that a general question about whether there are two languages need have an answer. We can say what we like without “losing sight of the facts”.

I don’t see how these sorts of riddle-puzzles are supposed to lead one to think that there “really are” abstract universals (whatever “reality” as apart from “existence” is supposed to mean, here). I don’t see how it’s supposed to offer an answer, nor do I think that whatever answer it may offer is the only one.

(I do not generally have a problem with saying that abstractions exist; I am happy to quantify over them, and this seems to me sufficient to warrant positing their reality. But I do not see that whether we say they exist or they don’t exist makes much of a different in what other things we say and do.)

Daniel, thanks for the comments.

I don’t think we can individuate language. That’s sort of what I’m getting at. I want to say that we’re speaking the same language but clearly there are differences. But, as you suggest, we could typically say that of any two people. (Not just me and Shakespeare but say me and a trapper living off in the wilds of Canada) Many of the meanings of words I have will be different from other English speakers on the planet. Is that enough to constitute a difference? I’m not sure we can really say that. It seems that the path from one language into an other is somewhat continuous. Why do we call Porteugeuse and Spanish different languages while say the Argentine and Mexican forms of Spanish are merely dialects. It’s very blurry at best.

As to the bit about universals. If math is more than just a language then if we want to say that the alien and ourselves are both doing math we have to make sense of that. One obvious way is to say that math is real independent of what any particular person thinks about it. As I said that needn’t lead to Platonism as one could make that claim without arguing for existence.

I didn’t mean to imply this is the only way out of the delemma. I think that there are anti-realist approaches to mathematical foundationalism that would work. I’d mentioned at Brood Comb Intuitionism for instance.

As to whether the existence of universals (i.e. strong Platonism) makes a difference in what we say or do I’d have to think about that. I’m not sure I’ve even thought along those lines much, truth be told. I reject strong Platonism but more for complex reasons regarding time. But if they did exist… I just don’t really have an opinion one way or the other. I tend to reject it mainly because I don’t think there’s a good argument for the existence of universals. So I suppose I’ve always just taken Ockham’s Razor and assumed they aren’t existing. I probably could come up with a stronger argument but it’s just not something I’ve given much time to.

Hi Clark,

I wonder if the decoupling of language and meanings you are discussing may be related to what we mean by ‘meanings’. If by ‘meaning’ we mean something which is pointed to by language (so, not “inside” the language so to say), then I think you are right. For sure things like rabbits, water (and possibly math theorems, change, time, space) are not in the language, though we can use language to talk about them.

If we on other side by ‘meaning’ we mean the relation between the language and those things, then it seems that there can’t be meaning without language, and that meanings are part of the language taken in general as a more or less established practice in the world.

Anyway, the issue of speaking the same language seems as very interesting question, if I understand what you are pointing to - we surely would be inclined to say that Neo knows to speak English when he gets out of the vat, though before we describe him the situation he doesn’t mean what we mean by lot of his words (’water’, ‘rabbits’). But if he doesn’t speak English we couldn’t inform him about what is happening in first place, and it surely seems that we could tell Neo what is happening. So, it seems that we must accept that he know to speak English in the moment he leaves the vat.

I wonder if this has to do with the distinction of knowing how-to from knowing-that and knowing-X (in sense of being acquainted with X).

For water to have a meaning it must have a fixed place in language game, and interlocutor must be aware of its place to get the message. Otherwise, uttering a word without a fixed place in a language game is like suddenly making faces for your interlocutor.

If one adopts a game theoretical stance towards language ala Wittgenstein. Not everyone is quite convinced it’s a game or at least not to the degree Wittgenstein does.

A pragmatist might say that unless a person in the Matrix can perform an experiment to distinguish his conception of water with that of someone on the outside (or vice versa), the concepts (and hence the languages) are identical. Whether the water is or isn’t different is irrelevant, the question is what the speaker _means_ by the term.

No the pragmatist (at least the Peircean kind) would say that the meaning is wrapped up in the verification done in counterfactual fashion. That is the meaning is wrapped up in possible tests that could be conducted. So that would distinguish the Matrix water from the real water.

No, Clark. The question that matter to pragmatists is not whether a word possesses meaning or not, whether it raises real or unreal problems (”What they mean by water, to the externalist, isn’t really water but virtual water”), but whether the resolution of that debate will have an effect in practice, whether it will be useful. For the fundamental thesis of pragmatism is William James’s assertion that if a debate has no “practical” significance, then it has no “philosophical” significance.

-Borrowed from Rorty

James & Dewey all follow the pragmatic maxim that Peirce came out with. But the “practical” significance are the potential ways you’d verify the truth claim. It’s actually not that far removed from the positivist claims. Check out these quotes from Peirce.

It’s actually a matter of debate whether Peirce’s scholastic realism is compatible with his pragmatic maxim. I think it is but there are whole books that argue it isn’t.

Now it is true that how James pushed the pragmatic maxim took “use” in a broader more subjective psychological sense. But use even often for James is more verification as a way of ending debate.

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