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. — Harry Hindu

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.

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. — creativesoul

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.

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. — p. 252

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

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. — p. 258

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.

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. — p. 260

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.

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. — p. 261

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?

A love triangle has three sides, hence the name.

Double post...

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

Yes. The same is true from my vantage point.

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. — Dawnstorm

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 first 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.



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...





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.

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?

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.

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? — Banno

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.

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.

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? — Srap Tasmaner

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.

"first meaning" — Dawnstorm

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.

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.)

Is that right?

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

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.

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

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.)

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? — Banno

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?



That sounds like a plausible reading.

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.) — Dawnstorm

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.

...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. — Dawnstorm

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?

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? — Banno

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.

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

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.

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. — RussellA

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?

(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.) — Dawnstorm

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.))

Do you have to name a rock to know about rocks? — Harry Hindu

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.

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?

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.” — RussellA

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.

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?

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. — Banno

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?

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. — p. 252

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?

He (Wittgenstein) everywhere undermines the notion of the meaning of a word, of a sentence — Banno

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.

Mental correlations drawn between different things.



A spanner is a type of wrench. :wink:

The argument proceeds by showing that it is not possible to give a coherent account of first meaning. — Banno

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):

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). — p. 254

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:

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. — p. 259

What a stroke of luck, if people in small, isolated groups turn out to know each other's names.