semantic entities can only exist within instantiated mental acts. — RussellA

What's an "instantiated mental act"?

Very interesting.

This raises the question of what it is that is shared. So what is a "shared method of interpretation" if not a set of conventions?

SO why not (1) as well? What are "systematic relations between the meanings of utterances" if not conventions?

This raises the question of what it is that is shared. — Banno

I'm not offering to build a complete alternative theory.

These are the options I see:

(i) We have a linguistic competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, and this competence is adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3).

(ii) We have a linguistic competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, and this competence is not adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3). (Some principle must be added, or one of these principles must be modified.)

(iii) We have some other competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, not linguistic and thus not adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3), which describes a linguistic competence, whether or not it describes all possible linguistic competence.

I'm still not sure whether (i) is false, but it's what Davidson believes he has shown.

A version of (iii) might be:

But if we do say this, then we should realize that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally. For there are no rules for arriving at passing theories, no rules in any strict sense, as opposed to rough maxims and methodological generalities — p. 265

(I think this is the bucket he consigns Grice to -- general principles and maxims.)

It's tempting to go along with this, but what was this boundary supposed to be? Driving a car is a specific skill that can be described abstractly to some degree, but even this abstract description will be incomplete if it leaves out all the other abilities and social conditions in which driving a car is embedded, and upon which it is dependent. We feel there must be something we can pick out as specific to car-driving -- and honestly that part's easy, being behind the wheel and operating the controls -- but what you pick out as specific to car driving only is not remotely all there is to driving a car.

So I wonder about the boundary. Language use is obviously social and dependent on a whole lot of other social abilities, as well as physical, and many of them are in turn dependent on language use among a community's members. So where was Davidson drawing the boundary in the first place and should I be pleased to erase it or not?

He seems to prefer (ii) because he still thinks something like (1) - (3) "must be true" and he decides the problem is (3): there have to be these theories, methods of interpretation, but they cannot possibly be learned in advance, therefore (3) is dead.

But we could note that the source of the friction is all related to the sense in which theories are shared or not. The bulk of the actual argument of the paper is laboring over the nature of prior theories, their insufficiency for speech with a specific audience, the generation of passing theories to make up for that, and so on.

But there is no "shared theory" here at all; there are only the theories of isolated individuals, their methods of interpretation. They may each have an identical copy of some theory, but there is nothing here that they could call theirs together, nothing that is actually shared, and certainly nothing that they share with an entire community.

I can easily imagine what such a thing would be: a Lewisian convention. It is something your behavior should be governed by, but also something you participate in shaping, not an external rule imposed by some authority.

It is possible that if you start with a richer sense of what is shared, you do not face the problem of radical interpretation at all. (And I believe Lewis said as much in the paper I mentioned way back at the beginning, but I only skimmed it to see if it might've gotten under Davidson's skin.)

One pertinent question is whether semantic meaning grew out of psychological meaning, or is semantic meaning of a different kind to psychological meaning. — RussellA

Just catching up on reading through this thread (haven't time to actually analyse the paper itself, much as I'd like to, so just a bystander here), but I can't make any sense of this notion you've introduced of psychological meaning which seems in opposition to semantic meaning, can you elaborate briefly?

psychological meaning which seems in opposition to semantic meaning — Isaac

Perhaps my distinction is along the lines of Frege's attack on Locke. For Locke, ideas exist independently of words, where words just serve as vehicles to ideas, whilst for Frege, meaning is in the structure of a sentence rather than any psychological state of the speaker or hearer.

For most of its existence, as sentient life has not had language, meaning cannot have come from semantics, but from the psychological state of mind.

For most of its existence, as sentient life has not had language, meaning cannot have come from semantics, but from the psychological state of mind. — RussellA

It's this that I'm not getting. Without words, what is it that you're referring to the meaning of?

Without words, what is it that you're referring to the meaning of — Isaac

Even with the first human interaction with fire, perhaps 1.5 million years ago, fire would have had a meaning. Fire would have meant light and fire at night, protection against predatory animals and the smoke would have meant relief from insects. Even without words, the object fire would have had a meaning to these early humans.

What's an "instantiated mental act" — Banno

As I see it :

Definition
An instantiated mental act is the act of mentally making an instance of, or representing, something perceived.

Instantiated mental acts precede intentionality
In our consciousness, we are conscious about something, we think about something. This is called intentionality. Intentionality has to be directed at something. Intentionality has to do with the directedness, aboutness, or the reference of mental states. Intentionality allows us to represent the world using mental representations. But, something has had to been instantiated before being able to have intentionality about it, in that instantiation and intentionality are linked concepts.

Instantiated mental acts are concepts
A concept, whether abstract or concrete, is an internal cognitive symbol that can represent an external reality, things that have never been experienced, or things that don't exist. Within my mind, my cognition is not directed to the world but to the concept I have in my mind.

Concepts are relevant whether a Direct Realist, an Indirect Realist or an Idealist.
It may be that the Direct Realist is correct and my concepts are accurate copies of the world. It may be that the Indirect Realist is correct in that my concepts are only representations of the world. It may be that the Idealist is correct in that my concepts don't originate other than in my mind.

Instantiated mental acts and universals
Aristotle said that universals only exist when they are instantiated in a particular thing, where chairness is instantiated by a chair, in that there is not a Platonic Form of chairness. Knowledge of universals does not derive from a supernatural source but is obtained by means of the intellect.

Instantiated mental acts are complete
When observing the world through my senses and creating a model of the world, my sense perceptions necessarily only give me part of the full information about the world. Although my knowledge of the world is necessarily incomplete, my model is necessarily complete. My mental instantiation has made something complete out of something incomplete.

Instantiated mental acts and causation
In the problem of the causation of physical effects by mental causes, the mental event of my desire to eat cake plays a causal role in a physical event of raising my arm. A mental desire has been instantiated by a physical action.

Instantiated mental acts and semantics
I observe in the world the object "house" and I observe in the world the attached label "this is a house". I perceive both the "house" and its label as objects. Both these objects are instantiated in my mind as concepts, the concept "house" and the associated concept "this is a house". IE, whether referring to the concrete or abstract, linguistic semantic entities are not of a different kind to non-linguistic physical entities, they are expressions of the same thing.

(I know I will be nearing a profound truth when you ask a 500 word question and I am able to give a 5 word answer.)

Another way to see Davidson's agreement in a passing theory is as a sort of parody of convention, as a parody of agreement, in fact, because one side "gets away with it"; the speaker gets the audience to adjust their theory of the language to match the speaker's. You could say that the speaker wins the speech encounter.

If speaker and audience come to a speech encounter -- and honestly they do not -- with the options of (a) following convention and honoring the social contract, or (b) not, you could do just the sort of game theoretical analysis that Lewis does, starting with a simple four-quadrant payoff table.

Davidson doesn't do this. He starts his analysis with the speaker having already violated the principle of cooperation, and violated the social contract. It's a fait accompli. The audience then has to choose whether to let the speaker get away with it. Davidson has cases where the audience does this, so it's almost as if he's committing to flouting convention being a dominant strategy. (If you can get away with it, then you should.) At the theoretical level, that shows up as doubting or denying the role of convention.

This is all cockeyed though because language use is a cooperative game, not a competitive one.

That all makes sense now, thanks for clearing that up.

There's a meaning there...

Actually, a question for you. I've had trouble working through the notion of a mental model of the world. What evidence is there that we model the world? Or better, what sort of thing is that model taken to be? It's apparent that there are philosophers of sorts that think all we have access to is our model of the world. That's not what psychology thinks, is it?

Can you commend any decent tertiary texts on this?

So you are saying that intentional states are not directed at things in the world, but at Aristotelian universals that are mental objects?

(i) We have a linguistic competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, and this competence is adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3). — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, in which case the article does not hold its argument. The article sets out to shoe that (3) is false.

(ii) We have a linguistic competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, and this competence is not adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3). (Some principle must be added, or one of these principles must be modified.) — Srap Tasmaner

Yep. This is perhaps the first reading of the article; work out what principle we need to add.

(iii) We have some other competence that allows us to deal with malapropisms and their kin, not linguistic and thus not adequately described by Davidson's principles (1) - (3), which describes a linguistic competence, whether or not it describes all possible linguistic competence. — Srap Tasmaner

Is this that Davidson's principles are inadequate? If so, yes, and this seems to me to be were we should be heading, and were Davidson ends up. Your quote reminds me of the end of On the very idea of a conceptual scheme,

In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the tfamiliarobjects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.

Hence my questions to @Isaac and to @RussellA.

Davidson would have us treat language as in direct touch with the world. I have considerable sympathy for this approach.

The stuff of mine you responded to, that was supposed to be uncontroversial summary.

In the rest of that post, and in the one before, and in the one that follows, I criticize Davidson's treatment of principle (2) as laughably inadequate.

The stuff of mine you responded to, that was supposed to be uncontroversial summary. — Srap Tasmaner

Sure, which is why I took the time to point out that Davidson's conclusion seems to me to be not too dissimilar to your own conclusion (iii): that the principles listed in the article are inadequate to explaining language.

Not clear. They're not where I would've started, I guess, but as long as you take seriously what it means for a method of interpretation to be shared by an entire community, maybe you'd be fine.

But even if we do reach a conclusion you could count as "the same" in some schematic sense, we obviously have different ideas about what the trouble is. Davidson thinks he has cast doubt on the role of convention in understanding language use; I think he doesn't have the faintest idea what convention is.

He hasn't given up anything really. He still sees communication by means of language as radical interpretation or radical translation: either you have a useless prior theory or no theory at all.

I wouldn't say we agree.

but as long as you take seriously... — Srap Tasmaner

Not sure how to read this - do you mean " as long as Banno takes seriously..." or "as long as one take seriously..."?

One.

SO drop the notion of a share meaning. I don't see that as overly problematic. That is what Wittgenstein was saying, and where Davidson is heading.

I invite folk to have another look at the concluding paragraph:

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

The conclusion is to either re-think convention as an explanation, or reject it altogether.

(Avoid the quick trivialisation of decontextualising "there is no such thing as a language")

SO drop the notion of a share meaning. — Banno

No thanks.

Is this your reading of the paper?

1. Davidson's principles (1) - (3) are a good description of lexical meaning.
2. Davidson's argument shows that (1) - (3) cannot account for linguistic behavior.
Therefore
3. We lose nothing by giving up the idea of lexical meaning.

3. We lose nothing by giving up the idea of lexical meaning. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think that's the conclusion. The question as to the extent that Davidson repudiated his previous approach remains open at the end of this article. I'd rephrase it as that lexical meaning - convention - is insufficient; that language is more than following conventions.

Rule-based conventions are part of language, but not fundamental to it.

That's something I would agree with.

(So when he says that there is no such thing as language in the way many philosophers and linguists have supposed, he is pointing out that language is more than following rules...)

I don't have the paper in front of me (at work); you wanna do a search and tell me what Davidson says there about rules?

I'm reading convention as rule... almost.

A lot of the milk into town and it was pretty crestfallen when you want or go on the road.

...and yet that was understood; hence, so. A case in point.

A lot of the milk into town and it was pretty crestfallen when you want or go on the road. — Srap Tasmaner

and yet that was understood; hence, so. A case in point. — Banno

Really? What do you think it means?

Nothing. That's why it is the perfect reply. And in so doing, reinforces the point that language does not rely on rules.

What evidence is there that we model the world? Or better, what sort of thing is that model taken to be? It's apparent that there are philosophers of sorts that think all we have access to is our model of the world. That's not what psychology thinks, is it?

Can you commend any decent tertiary texts on this? — Banno

At the risk of sounding pedantic, the answer to your first question really does depend on what you mean by 'we' and what you mean by 'the world'. I think the varied use of these terms is what causes a lot of confusion around these issues. Though perhaps not exhaustive I think the main options are - there's 'we' as in our entire being - when I say, "I'm on the train", I mean arms and legs too, and then there's 'we' as in that which experiences thoughts. There's 'the world' as in that which we talk about, predict, integrate - and then there's 'the world' as in that which causes those things (not that I'm saying they're necessarily different at this stage, only that it is possible for them to be).

The topic is obviously huge an I had written quite some length here before realising it was completely off topic and so deleted it. Instead I'll give the short answer presuming by 'we' you mean our experiencing selves, and by 'the world' you mean that which is causally responsible for the states our experiencing selves find ourselves in.

What evidence is there that we model the world? - Tons. I'd even go as far as to say that now it would be very difficult even to theorise a physiological mechanism in the brain by which we could actually directly interact with the world without mediation by modelling in cortices not involved in the thoughts constituting a sense of 'we'. I know of not a single psychologist who doesn't work on this assumption.

What sort of thing is that model taken to be? - A tendency for particular cortical responses to be induced by particular cortical inputs despite it being physiologicaly possible for there to be other responses from those same inputs.

Can you commend any decent tertiary texts on this? - I'd recommend Karl Friston on mental models his publications are mostly online https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/. This one is quite a light introduction.

If you want any more info feel free to PM me.

Thanks, Isaac - I'll have a look.

Ok. I think I've finally wrapped my head around this paper(Davidson's train of thought)...

The issue:Malapropisms break the rules of conventional language use, but they are readily understood/interpreted by the listener nevertheless, and that particular sort of success causes unresolvable issues for any strict adherence to the following three principles...



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

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

(3) The systematic knowledge or competence of the speaker or interpreter is learned in advance of occasions of interpretation and is conventional in character.



Davidson offers plenty of examples of malapropisms in the very beginning, and subsequently claims(generally speaking) that philosophers have not given malapropisms due attention. Rather, philosophers categorize such uses as erroneous, in error, or otherwise count(classify) them as being cases of 'incorrect' usage, because of the divergence from convention(correct usage). While he does not outright reject this accounting practice, he finds it "shallow". He does not think that the conventional notion of error and it's counterpart incorrect usage are up to the task of explaining how incorrect usage results in correct interpretation(malapropisms), especially if our linguistic competency(translation method) is based upon and/or otherwise satisfied by the aforementioned three principles.

So, we're faced with a problem...

The philosophically interesting aspect of malapropisms is that they succeed, and the problem at hand is explaining how a listener correctly interprets the speaker despite the speaker's 'incorrect usage' if the aforementioned three principles are sufficient for describing all cases of successful communication/translation. They seem inadequate.

When Davidson wrote all this, academia drew and maintained a distinction between what the speaker says, and what the speaker means(or rather what words mean, and what a speaker means). Davidson honors that distinction by insisting upon not even blurring it, only to blur it later. He is also denying the ability of correct/incorrect usage to take account of malapropisms, calling that notion "shallow". Aside from the blurring of the distinction(which happens later), the rest of what's said in this paragraph becomes evident by what he said below.

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

I suspect now upon reading this that Davidson himself did not pay quite enough attention to malapropisms. Specifically speaking, he did not take into consideration the remarkable differences between correct usage and incorrect usage as they pertain to someone that is deliberately using the wrong words, and someone mistakenly doing so. Taking both situations(both kinds of malapropisms) into proper account is absolutely crucial for understanding the role that intention has in a speaker's meaning. Davidson gets that quite wrong as well. To expand upon all this I'll invoke the following malapropisms...

...It’s high noon someone beat him at his own game, but I have never done it; cross my eyes and hope to die, he always wins thumbs down...

There is a remarkable difference between someone saying the above intentionally, such as a means to joke, and someone saying the above in error. Earlier Davidson dismissed such nuance as unimportant, as shown below.

It seems unimportant, so far as understanding is concerned, who makes a mistake, or whether there is one...

He was very wrong in one way, while being quite right in another. While the success of the malapropism - as it happens in the wild - does not at all depend upon who makes a mistake or whether there is one(he was right about that much), our understanding of exactly how they are successfully interpreted in both cases most certainly does depend upon whether or not a mistake was made(he was quite wrong about that). Let me explain...

When someone intentionally/deliberately says "it's high noon someone beat him at his own game" as a means to be silly or make a joke, they know that they've used the words incorrectly, but they expect to be understood anyway. They did not make a mistake. They said exactly what they intended to say, and meant exactly what they intended to mean. The two are not equivalent. His notion of first meaning does not - cannot - take this into account. In addition, it also blurs the distinction between conventional/standard meaning and intended meaning. I've copied the relevant excerpts below...

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

Aside from intended meaning and standard meaning being equivalent(no distinction), this part is of no further consequence, for it describes normal situations, not malapropisms. I would completely agree regarding such occasions. I also have no issue at all with a speaker's meaning and the meaning of the words being equivalent at times(It's a feature, not a flaw). That said, he then goes on to invoke the speaker's intention as part of first meaning. That's where the more serious problems begin...

A better way to distinguish first meaning is through the intentions of the speaker...

...Because a speaker necessarily intends first meaning to be grasped by his audience, and it is grasped if communication succeeds...

If first meaning is equal to conventional use and/or standard meaning, applies to the actual words used, and a speaker always intends first meaning to grasped by their audience, then the result is in an inherent inability to explain any cases of malapropism.

What's most curious about malapropisms, and what seems very problematic for Davidson here, is that the literal and/or conventional meaning of the word(s) being used is(are) not what the speaker intends, regardless of whether or not they are mistaken.

To quite the contrary, in cases of intentional/deliberate incorrect use, such as malapropism being employed as manner of joking, the joker intends to use language incorrectly, but expects the audience to understand regardless. There are also problems in cases of misspeaking that result in malapropism. In these cases, the speaker intends to use language correctly, but does not. Thus, the first meaning of their words does not correspond to their intentions here either.

So, in neither kind of malapropism do the speaker's intentions match the words they actually use. If first meaning is about the words actually used, as Davidson claims, then we've arrive at a serious problem of inadequacy. Malapropisms are understood regardless of this. Here's my take regarding how(which amounts to my answer to the problem at hand)...

When malapropism is the result of deliberate incorrect language use, such as in the case of joking, the speaker intends for the listener to attribute unconventional/incorrect meaning(not literal/conventional) to the words actually spoken. That is to say that in order for such cases to succeed, the audience must misattribute meaning to the words being used.

When the malapropism results from a speaker accidentally misspeaking, the speaker does not intend for the listener to attribute unconventional/incorrect meaning to their words, but here again the audience must do so in order to successfully interpret the malapropism. That is once again, to say that in order for such cases to succeed, the audience must misattribute meaning to the words actually used.

So while Davidson realizes that the success of malapropisms places convention into question, I strongly suspect that he does not quite recognize how. In addition, and completely contrary to what Davidson claims, malapropisms do not - at all - threaten the distinction between what words mean, and what a speaker means. To quite the contrary, they require and/or necessarily presuppose it. They are themselves existentially dependent upon that very distinction. There could be no such thing as a malapropism if there were no difference between what words mean and what a speaker means.

Here's my assessment of the three principles in question...

An interpretation method and/or linguistic competence strictly based upon(or consisting solely of) learning, knowing, and/or otherwise following the rules of convention would result in translating all unconventional usage, such as malapropisms, as though they too followed convention, and hence:The speaker would not be understood if that's how our language competence and/or translation method worked. To quite the contrary, when translating malapropisms, if our translation method and/or linguistic competence relied solely upon knowing and subsequently applying the rules of convention, then our translation method would fail. We would be correctly attributing meaning to the words, but misattributing meaning to the speaker, because the conventional/literal/correct meaning of the key words within a malapropism are not equivalent to what the speaker means. Hence, if our linguistic competence consisted solely of learning and/or using convention, then malapropisms could not result in successful communication/translation. They require correctly translating an otherwise incorrect usage, by virtue of misattributing meaning to the words actually used. If our linguistic competence and/or ability were limited to those three aforementioned principles, we could not ever know what the speaker meant, as compared/contrasted to what they said... but we do.

Did I miss anything important with regard to the odd success of malapropisms?