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

Unless you're Trump. Then it's certainly a competition to get people to believe what he believes and/or wants others to believe.

:razz:

(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.) — RussellA

Correlations drawn between different things<---------------that's what all attribution of meaning has in common; the irreducible core. Don't ask me to fill it all in though... that is to expect and/or demand omniscience.

Thanks for the succinct and precise overview. It helps clarify.

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 [in malapropisms]... but we do.

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

Why yes: what changes in those rules would or could account for our capacity to understand malapropisms? What does this discussion tells us about how to make progress, and update/improve upon Davidson's hypotheses?

Tomorrow. I've spent enough time on this for one day. The question isn't about what I've missed regarding the odd success of malapropisms. It's about how to correct and/or modify the three principles. It's about what Davidson missed. I'm hesitantly in agreement with some of what others have suggested as necessary modifications. Street earlier suggested that modifying our notion of convention would resolve the issue with the third principle. I suspect that an account of how convention becomes convention would work rather nicely for doing that. Davidson steers clear of such an endeavor.

I'm still thinking that the underlying issue at hand is(are) the conventional (mis)conception(s) of meaning. How meaning first emerges, as compared/contrasted to how we learn to use that which is already meaningful. This would modify our understanding of how convention emerges.

It's about what Davidson missed. — creativesoul

He tested three hypotheses that couldn't explain a particular fact. Picking up the reasoning where he dropped it, another set of hypotheses is required to explain malapropisms.

I've already explained where and how he failed. It happened long before he concluded that the third principle failed. Note that the explanation I offered for the odd success of malapropisms eliminated Davidson's notions of prior theory and passing theory. Ockham's razor applies.

Note that the explanation I offered for the odd success of malapropisms eliminated Davidson's notions of prior theory and passing theory. — creativesoul

I take "passing theory" to mean a non-canonical, no literal interpretation of a sentence or text, a creative, sui generis interpretation that may be required to understand each instance of malapropism. When a sentence does not compute within correct language conventions, one searches for an alternative explanation, a 'theory' of what happened in this particular malapropism. And as you described there's two or three candidates: a speech impairment, an error in one's choice of words, or the pretense of an error, i.e. a joke of some kind. Or a freudian lapse, which is an interesting case in which someone betrays his thoughts by some malapropism.

Personally, I see not how this 'theory' is by necessity 'passing'. It may be that the malapropism is so funny or so easy to make by mistake that the language retains it and legitimizes it after a while. So sometimes these alternative ways of saying things, at first deemed incorrect, become embedded in correct language and 'conventional'. In any case, some malapropisms endure either as jokes or as frequent errors, and therefore their 'theory' is not necessarily 'passing'.

I have two colleagues who say 'axe' instead of 'ask'. It's their way to say 'ask'. I may not like it but I understand them, when they do, and unfortunately it doesn't seem to be passing...

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. — Srap Tasmaner

This looks like a pretty good summary to me. Here's a key question:

What's the relationship between "first/literal meaning" and "lexical meaning"?

Davidson doesn't really address this directly, but I think there's a difference, here. First meaning is defined by the interplay of prior and passing theories, and - I think - "lexical meaning" would be part of the prior theory, but it wouldn't be it's entirety, because "lexical meaning" remains some sort of super-situational ideal, an abstraction.

Take this section where he looks at whether a prior theory could be what we think of a natural language.

An interpreter’s prior theory has a better chance of describing what we might think of as a natural language, particularly a prior theory brought to a first conversation. The less we know about the speaker, assuming we know he belongs to our language community, the more nearly our prior theory will simply be the theory we expect someone who hears our unguarded speech to use. (262)

I think there's an idea implied here, that the more we interact with specific people, the more we modify the prior theories we bring to conversations with them, but they don't impact "the theory we expect someone who hears our unguarded speech to use". It feels like a natural language is something a prior theory will diverge from the more we interact with a particular person. Or in short, that we expect Mrs. Malaprop to make malapropisms is part of the prior theory we bring to a conversation with Mrs. Malaprop, but it doesn't modify what we think of as a "natural language".

But he doesn't really talk about what it is he thinks of as "natural language". He keeps saying things like "in rather unusual ways" with the assumption being that there's a "usual" way we all think of language that's obvious.

And this is where I'll again have to emphasise that I come at this article from a linguistic perspective and not a philosophical one; maybe in philosophical traditions there actually is such a thing, and I just don't understand it. So I have this megpie mind; I snatch what's useful from philosophy and discard the rest. Linguistics basically started in earnest as a discipline with Saussure, and it turned into a systematic description of language, where signs interact with each other to make for a whole structure. Since early linguistics was tied up with anthropology, one way to look at it is to find a formal way to describe human artefacts. In other ways, lingistists aren't really doing anything that avarage language users aren't; they're just more systematic and ask questions that arise from being more systematic.

That's never been quite enough to account for all data, though, so linguists would look towards the philosophy of language, say Wittgenstein's language games, Austin/Searle's speech acts, and Grice's co-operative principle, and also towards linguists such as Jakobson and his functions of language, and would establish a discipline called pragmatics, so that we now have:

[Syntax, morphologly, phonetics, phonology, semantics] describe language, and pragmatics describes how people use language.

That was the mainstream standard organisation when I went to university in the 90ies, but pragmatics wasn't actually fully established, I think, until the early 70ies.

Then there's another distniction: linguistic analysis can be twofold: synchorony and diachrony. How language is used at any one time, and how language changes. Usually a synchronic approach would describe a fairly rigid set of rules, and a diachronic approach would then show how rules are broken, subverted, played with, so that langauge changes. (An example would be the migration of the "n" from the noun proper to the indefinite article "a": a nadder -> an adder; a napron --> an apron). Those approaches are seen as complementary, so a described, more or less rigid set of rules isn't taken to determine actual language behaviour.

So one problem I have is that my intuition seems to clash with Davidson's. I might agree with a lot of things he's saying, but I might never have held his view of what a natural language actually is. For example, I think one difference between my instinctive approach and Davidson's might be the following:

We both see language as an overly rigid structure. But where he expects language rules to determine behaviour (something he doesn't find in real life), I expect that rigid structure to be some sort of ideal type of a structuring principle; something people use to both create utterances and compare other people's utterances to, and something that will on occasion fail: people make mistakes, people don't find the words to express what they want to say and approximate with the best words they can find (and on failure to communicate try alternate ways of expressing themselves)... and so on.

It's not a surprise to me that you can also play with language. And we can learn by playing. For example, there's this little tale, "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", which was written to demonstrate the importance of intonation to interpreting words (it's a rewritten version "Little Red Riding Hood"; sadly the audio link seems to be broken - the story's meant to be both read and heard. Here's a youtube link.) It's the perfect case for a passing theory, too. And it's also clear why the theory will remain a passing theory (but maybe turn into a prior theory for whenever you engage with the same text again). None of these new words we'd expect to spill over into dialect, though they might spread as in-jokes for an in-group.

I actually meant to be briefer and more concise this time round.

Basically, I think Davidson is saying that prior and passing theories establish first meaning, which in turn can have consequent meanings due to the compositionality of language (to understand the Shakespear sonnet, we must first understand "foison" and "tire"). What "first meaning" has in common with "lexical meaning" is that it's not necessirily identical with the intended meaning; where it differs is that, unlike "lexical meaning", "first meaning" is always situational. And the way Davidson analysis first meaning sheds doubt on "lexical meaning", though it's possible to import "lexical meaning" into a speaker's prior theory.

So when he finishes with these words:

And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, weshould give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions. (265)

I think, the first clause is his conclusion, and the second clause his bias.

I think he's largely right, but I'm not sure I understand what he thinks a natural language is supposed to be, and I think we (Davidson and I) start in completely different places on that topic, which is why I have trouble reading him in detail.

Why should a passing theory be called a theory at all? For the sort of theory we have in mind is, in its formal structure, suited to be the theory for an entire language, even though its expected field of application is vanishingly small. The answer is that when a word or phrase temporarily or locally takes over the role of some other word or phrase (as treated in a prior theory, perhaps), the entire burden of that role, with all its implications for logical relations to other words, phrases, and sentences, must be carried along by the passing theory. Someone who grasps the fact that Mrs Malaprop means ‘epithet’ when she says ‘epitaph’ must give ‘epithet’ all the powers ‘epitaph’ has for many other people. Only a full recursive theory can do justice to these powers. These remarks do not depend on supposing Mrs Malaprop will always make this ‘mistake’; once is enough to summon up a passing theory assigning a new role to ‘epitaph’. — pp. 261 - 262

The role that "epithet" plays in the language: that's its lexical meaning. (See PI §43.) Not only is Davidson not rejecting lexical meaning, his whole argument depends upon it.

Is his argument a reductio of the idea that there are such roles? I think, rather, he claims that we cannot, with certainty, know in advance what word may, even temporarily, be called upon to play a given role, because someone might utter not the standard word but a different one. That doesn't change the fact that we will describe the role taken on by the uttered word anaphorically: 'epitaph' here means what 'epithet' means. Not only do I see no alternative to that being offered, I don't know what such an alternative could possibly be.

This passage is actually the fulcrum of the entire argument. When Davidson said

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

this is where he was headed: the intended meaning (what 'epithet' means) takes over from the standard meaning (what 'epitaph' means). This is the point at which he substantiates "seems to" as "does", by his lights.

I'm not addressing here whether this is a reasonable account of malapropisms and their kin; my point is only that Davidson is nowhere giving up the idea of lexical meaning, only prying it apart from "what is conventional or established" (252).

But does he? How do we know what 'epithet' means and what 'epitaph' means?

*

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

According to you, this means nothing, and

reinforces the point that language does not rely on rules. — Banno

You want to explain that?

From the pen of Joss Whedon:

What's the relationship between "first/literal meaning" and "lexical meaning"? — Dawnstorm

I've been pretty loose about this too.

I expect that rigid structure to be some sort of ideal type of a structuring principle; something people use to both create utterances and compare other people's utterances to, and something that will on occasion fail: people make mistakes, people don't find the words to express what they want to say and approximate with the best words they can find (and on failure to communicate try alternate ways of expressing themselves)... and so on. — Dawnstorm

I think this is absolutely right, and it's a curious thing. The abstract model has three functions:

1. It is a scientific model a linguist might use to predict behavior.
2. It is physically instantiated within an agent and actually produces the behavior we observe.
3. It is an ideal that language users are aware of and use to guide their (perhaps few) conscious choices about linguistic behavior.

(Logic, decision theory, and game theory all have a similarly peculiar status.)

That the model is an ideal that a language user refers to, sometimes, in choosing what linguistic act to undertake, I find particularly interesting: to choose your words carefully is sometimes to imagine a sort of ideal speaker of your language, who would choose the correct words, and to choose the words they would choose. ("Imbue.")

It seems pretty clear though that (3) there, the ideal we're aware of, is not the same thing as (2), and where (1) fits in is unclear. The structure of (2) we are largely unaware of, so it's more likely that (3) is something else that (2) generates alongside linguistic behavior. And (3) can readily grow from simple correctness to the art of rhetoric.

But maybe it goes in the other direction! Maybe (2) is the habituation of practices first achieved through the conscious building up of (3) -- the usual System 2 to System 1 pipeline. It's just that there's probably, if the sorts of things Chomsky and Pinker say are right, some structure in (2) waiting to find out how it should arrange itself. That still leaves a lot of options for (3): vestiges of the early training, rationalized into a system; a system rationalized out of the behavior we currently engage in we know not why; a rationalized and simplified systematization of some of what (2) is up to passed along to consciousness because it seems to want it.

I take "passing theory" to mean a non-canonical, no literal interpretation of a sentence or text, a creative, sui generis interpretation that may be required to understand each instance of malapropism. When a sentence does not compute within correct language conventions, one searches for an alternative explanation, a 'theory' of what happened in this particular malapropism — Olivier5

Seems an extremely overcomplicated way to explain the need to misattribute meaning to words as the only means to successfully interpret meaningful but otherwise unconventional language use.

Of course the term 'passing theory' is a bit pompous. You can translate it by "one's understanding of what happened".

Can we not reduce all this to the simple necessity that language is prior to any language theory?
Just as music is prior to music theory. In the beginning was the expletive, and the expletive was understood to be 'Oh fuck!', or 'ug!' for short.

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

First part - yes
As an Indirect Realist, I don't believe that I perceive the external world as it really is, what I perceive are mental objects. I have intentionality about my mental objects, things which exist in my mind rather than the world.

Second part - partly
My view is that a mental objects have three properties: particular perception, universal concept and linguistic naming. All mental objects include particular perception, of these, some but not all of these include universal concept, and of these, some but not all include linguistic naming.

Particular perception relates to Frege's "referent" and Wittgenstein's "picture theory". The referent of a mental object is simply a particular entity that has been perceived in an assumed world. A mental object is a picture of a set of particular sensations through our five senses. However, particular perception by itself is insufficient for sentience, as a picture by itself cannot resolve the mereological problem of establishing the importance of relationships between the pictured parts.

Universal concept relates to Frege's "sense" and Aristotle's "Theory of Universals". The sense is the thought that it expresses, whether or not it has a referent, in that Odysseus has a sense but no reference. In Aristotle's view, universals only exist when they are instantiated in the mind, where such universals are concepts. Sentience needs both particular perceptions and universal concepts.

Linguistic naming relates to Kant's Theory of Judgement, where naming is a complex cognitive judgement about the usefulness of a concept. Whilst the mental objects of sentient life for the first 99% of its time of its existence on Earth has included particular perception and universal concepts, it is only in the recent 1% that the mental objects of sentient life have also included linguistic naming. IE, only some of our concepts have words attached, in that I have a word for the concept "chair", I have a word for the concept "Eiffel Tower", but I don't have a word for the concept of an object part chair and part Eiffel Tower.

IE, my understanding is that intentional states are not directed at things in the world, but at mental objects, which have the three properties of particular perception, universal concept and linguistic naming.

Malapropisms break the rules of conventional language use — creativesoul

It seems that, in his article "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs"

1) Davidson doesn't define what he means by "conventions", but infers a particular definition of "conventions".
2) He concludes by inferring that because his particular definition of "conventions" is not illuminative - then no definition of "conventions" will be illuminative.

Can we not reduce all this to the simple necessity that language is prior to any language theory? — unenlightened

Well Un, putting that common sense understanding to good use may shed some much needed light upon the subject matter, but doing so requires a methodological approach that analytic and post moderns alike seem averse to, albeit for entirely different reasons. I'll say this much...

Because language existed in its entirety prior to any language theory, so too must all of the basic elemental constituents that such language consists of. This sort of approach is akin to Hume's Guillotine in the sense of driving a wedge between what counts as a product of language(such as theories) and what counts as a basic elemental constituent thereof. The aforementioned approach grounds my own position regarding meaning, truth, thought, and belief... all of which are required for language. However, despite the fact that I strongly believe that there are much deeper issues at hand than the apparent inability of convention to explain the success of malapropisms, I've deliberately avoided getting into all of that, because I do not want to be 'the guy' that derails the entire thread.

:wink:

Oddly enough, the approach is actually the topic of a new thread I'm still working on.

Of course the term 'passing theory' is a bit pompous. You can translate it by "one's understanding of what happened". — Olivier5

Simply put, it seems clear to me that the notions of 'prior' and 'passing' theory are the result of not quite having a good enough grasp upon what language is, and how it works.

Malapropisms break the rules of conventional language use
— creativesoul

It seems that, in his article "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs"

1) Davidson doesn't define what he means by "conventions", but infers a particular definition of "conventions".
2) He concludes by inferring that because his particular definition of "conventions" is not illuminative - then no definition of "conventions" will be illuminative. — RussellA

I think that's fair. The deeper issue, by my lights anyway, is that whatever his notion of convention includes, it most certainly does not take it's evolutionary progression into proper account.

It seems pretty clear though that (3) there, the ideal we're aware of, is not the same thing as (2), — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. Look at peeving culture. People often put forward pet-peeves unaware that they're guilty of the same "sins". I remember an anecdote of linguist David Crystal, I failed to find online and thus is of dubious authenticity: He said that a particular violated rule wasn't really a rule people actually use, and to make his point he pointed out some instances in her very own usage. Rather than abandoning the rule she broke out in tears. (I wonder if I misremember the anecdote, the linguist involved, whether it's not online, or whether I just don't know how to find it.)

...and where (1) fits in is unclear. — Srap Tasmaner

That's a tough one. What complicates the matter is that there's also "traditional grammar", the scholarly approach to correct language that preceded linguistics and is still the main strain in schools, where we all learn how to use language "correctly", after we've already acquired not only our particular language, but language itself. (We don't just learn to speak English, we learn to speak.)

The structure of (2) we are largely unaware of, so it's more likely that (3) is something else that (2) generates alongside linguistic behavior. And (3) can readily grow from simple correctness to the art of rhetoric.

But maybe it goes in the other direction! — Srap Tasmaner

After the initial language acquistion as a toddler, it probably goes both ways, with judgments being made when what's already internalised is problematic in a stiuation (including being corrected by others). A lot of it is down to how we teach language in school, and also that language change means that old and new usage exist side by side and it's never quite clear what will survive. Some admonishments like "not ending a sentence with a preposition" and "not splitting infinitives" have been around for quite a while, so it's very likely that both the usage and its criticism is going to stick around for a while longer.

There's this idea of a language war between descriptivists and prescriptivists, but that would give you two insane positions: either "there are no mistakes," or "usage doesn't matter". Basically, you just navigate a linguistic landscape, accept some rules (and maybe internalise them, or maybe just pay lipservice), and discard others (maybe as a deliberate choice, or because your word habits are too strong and you just forget). Rules can be internalised from (3) into (2), and (1) can make hypotheses about when that happens (but I'm not sure how good (1) is at that currently).

Davidson's article appeared in a time when (1) generally became more interested in usage on various fronts. The rise of pragmatics, and of usage based grammar theories (such as cognitive grammar, construction grammar, or functional grammar). I sort of see it as a child of its time, and it's really older than me.

Simply put, it seems clear to me that the notions of 'prior' and 'passing' theory are the result of not quite having a good enough grasp upon what language is, and how it works. — creativesoul

The way I see it, it's a work in progress, annotations and remarks and caveats and entirely new entries get added from time to time, when we note a particular way of speaking ("Alfred keeps saying "obviously" all the time, that could mean something... but what?"), or when we understand a malapropism ("that lady is mixing up complicated words"), or catch a speech impairment ("he can't say "ask", that's why he's always "axing"), or when we learn a new word. It's a long list of "notes to self about language".

(C) If his argument is valid, and we reject views well-described by his three principles, are there other approaches out there that handle malapropisms better? — Srap Tasmaner

While I'll not claim to have a complete theory of language here, I do wonder what you think about how I handled malapropisms at the bottom of page nine?

Simply put, it seems clear to me that the notions of 'prior' and 'passing' theory are the result of not quite having a good enough grasp upon what language is, and how it works.
— creativesoul
The way I see it, it's a work in progress... — Olivier5

I would agree. But I meant "what language is, and how it works" in the sense of what all language consists of such that it can and does work; that it's able to evolve as it does.

that it's able to evolve as it does. — creativesoul

At the core of every system capable of evolving, one can usually find the three darwinian faculties to 1) err, though rarely; 2) weed out most errors when they appear; and 3) select some errors and turn them into useful novelty.

All systems must control errors, but the best systems use errors to evolve. Successful mutants, like malapropisms and neologisms, can become niche sub-species.

At the core of every system capable of evolving, one can usually... — Olivier5

That's not good enough for what I'm getting at. I'll keep this brief...

Rudimentary language use consists - in part at least - of simple, basic, and/or otherwise rudimentary level thought and belief. A true account of the origen of language must succeed in setting these things out, and must do so in a manner that is amenable to evolutionary terms; in a manner that facilitates and/or enables us to understand how thought, belief, and the language that they give rise to, emerges in their simplest constitution possible, and subsequently grow in complexity. The ability for thought, belief, and language to evolve requires that the basic elemental constituents thereof be capable of doing so.

The stifling problem currently is the inability to account for the transition from non linguistic meaning to linguistic meaning. That problem is one of conventional notions of language and meaning, and as such it is also embedded in this essay.

That's the last I'll say here about this. It's too far off topic... or points to the much too deeply imbedded problem of inadequacy inherent within the conventional notions(misconceptions) of language and/or meaning.

Well done.

Thanks.

:smile:

Took me a long time to grasp that much, and I realize that I left all sorts of stuff out. I just wonder if anything I did not discuss needs discussed.

That's not good enough for what I'm getting at. — creativesoul

Probably not, but it suffices to explain how malapropisms can exist, be decoded, and sometimes get to endure. They are mutations of language.

Wittgenstein's language games, Austin/Searle's speech acts, and Grice's co-operative principle, — Dawnstorm

We ought add Davidson's own semantic theory. It looks to me to be the best candidate for a prior interpretation.

Is it worth setting it out here?

There's this idea of a language war between descriptivists and prescriptivists, but that would give you two insane positions: either "there are no mistakes," or "usage doesn't matter". Basically, you just navigate a linguistic landscape, accept some rules (and maybe internalise them, or maybe just pay lipservice), and discard others (maybe as a deliberate choice, or because your word habits are too strong and you just forget). Rules can be internalised from (3) into (2), and (1) can make hypotheses about when that happens (but I'm not sure how good (1) is at that currently). — Dawnstorm

Yeah that's a really curious point: debates about theory have a natural analog in our linguistic behavior, in part because using language seems always to lead to some personal theorizing about it, but also in the practice itself.

(I found myself going the other way too: Davidson starts with examples where people piss on convention from a great height, and then in his theory ...)