jerrold j. katz - the metaphysics of meaning, Książki naukowe (thanx zaupank)
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//-->AcknowledgmentsI want to thank the students in my courses at the CUNY GraduateCenter over the last several years for making examination of the issuesdealt with in this book a stimulating and enjoyable experience.Also , I want to express my gratitude to a number of people withwhom I have had helpful discussion or communication in the courseof the writing . It is a pleasure to thank Rogers Albritton , JawadAzzouni , George Bealer, Alan Berger, Ned Block, Martin Brown ,William Fisk, Paul Horwich , Mark Johnston , Peter Lupu , SidneyMorgenbesser, Yuji Nishiyama , Gary Ostertag , Charles Parsons,David Pitt , Paul Postal, David Rosenthal, Stephen Schiffer, Robert,Tragesser Peter Unger , Virginia Valian , Hao Wang, Stephen Yalo-witz , and Palle Yourgrau .Special thanks go to Leigh Cauman and David Pitt . My debt tothem is great . Leigh did an excellent job of copy editing . She alsocontributed to the clarity of the exposition and made an inherentlytedious and worrisome stage of production pleasant and free of care.David helped me prepare the manuscript for submission , checkedproofs with me, and compiled the index . David not only performedthese duties skillfully , but his suggestions and questions led to manyimprovements in both style and content . The intelligence and goodhumor of both Leigh and David made my production tasks tolerableand , quite often , fun . I hope they know how fortunate I feel to havehad their assistance.Finally , thanks to the people at the MIT Press - Betty Stanton , HelenOsborne , Joanna Poole, Brooke Stevens, and Sandra Minkkinen - fortheir efficiency and cheerfulness throughout .PrefaceIn the following passage Kripke expresses a tension felt by many,:philosophers. . . I find myself tom between two conflicting feelings - a''Chomskyan feeling that deep regularities in natural languagemust be discoverable by an appropriate combination of formal ,'-empirical , and intuitive techniques , and a contrary (late) Witt'' ''gensteinian feeling that many' of the deep structures , logical'''forms , ' underlying semantics and onto logical commitments ,etc., which philosophers have claimed to discover by such techniquesare Luftgebliude1.When we consider what is sacrificed in resolving this conflict eitherway , we can see that Kripke is posing a dilemma of the utmost significancefor contemporary philosophy .Chomsky appeals to our scientific side. As citizens of this century ,we can hardly doubt that natural languages are a fit subject of scientificstudy , and nowadays the Chomsky an approach , in broad outline""2, is virtuallysynonymous with scientific linguistics . Thisapproach holds out the prospect of theories that reveal deep principlesabout the structure of particular natural languages and of languagein general , the precision of formalization that has been of suchimportance to the development of logic and mathematics , the securityof having scientific methodology available to us in the study oflanguage, and , finally , interdisciplinary connections that promisenew insights into logical form and into some of the higher cognitivefunctions of the human mind .The late Wittgenstein appeals to our philosophical side. As philosophersin this century , we can hardly think that empirical science willsolve the philosophical problems with which Frege, Russell, Wittgen -stein , and their descendants have struggled , and the Wittgensteinianapproach seems to provide the only account of why empirical discoveriesin psychology and the brain sciences do not come to grips withviiiPrefacethose problems . Moreover , when Chomsky an linguistics itself islooked at philosophically , as it has been from time to time , it seemsclear that those problems remain despite the considerable scientificprogress that has been made in linguistics proper . It is even quiteplausible to think that the problems become worse for being obscuredformalisms and technicalities . Furthermoreby philosophically unilluminating "" "", linguistic theories , with deep structures , logical forms ,""underlying semantics, and all the other paraphernalia of theChomsky an approach , in major respects seem to be refurbishmentsof Frege's semantics and Wittgenstein 's early philosophy which , despitethe technical sophistication , embody their central metaphysicalassumptions . The Chomsky an approach thus seems to reflect a failureto have learned the lessons of the Wittgensteinian critique of.metaphysics in PhilosophicalInvestigations In contrast , the late Witt -genstein , whether or not he succeeded in dissolving philosophicalproblems or was even on the right track , at least engages them in adeep enough way to make it clear that philosophical progress requiressubsequent philosophers to work through his investigationsof them .Philosophers , faced with the choice between the two sides of theirnature , behave in very different ways . Some find it easy to make thechoice, but they do not , I believe, fully appreciate the sacrifice theyare making , or perhaps they mistakenly think that some rapprochementcan be found between the Chomsky an and the (late) Wittgen -steinian approach es. Many philosophers feel themselves tom , andvacillate . Most choose either the Chomsky an approach or the (late)Wittgensteinian , but feel they have lost something , and continue torecognize advantages in the other approach .In another context , Frank Ramsey once wrote :Evidently , however , none of these arguments are really decisive,and the position is extremely unsatisfactory to anyone with realcuriosity about such a fundamental question . In such cases it isa heuristic maxim that the truth lies not in one of the two disputedviews but in some third possibility which has not yet beenthought of , which we can only discover by rejecting somethingassumed as obvious by both the disputants .3I believe that Ramsey's maxim is sound in the present context , too.In this book , I argue that the truth lies not in either the Chomsky anor the Wittgensteinian view but in a " third possibility " that emerges""only when something assumed as obvious by both the disputantsis rejected. Thus , I argue that the dilemma is a false one: it is unnecessaryto sacrifice either an appropriately scientific approach to nat -Prefaceixural language or an appropriately philosophical approach to theproblems of philosophy . The unsatisfactory alternatives to which thedilemma limits us seem to be the only alternatives we have becauseof an assumption which restricts our options . This assumption ,which seems obvious to Chomskyans and (late) Wittgensteinians , aswell as to most of contemporary Anglo -American philosophy , andwhich , for this reason, goes largely unnoticed , is that the proper approachto natural language is naturalistic .Later, particularly in chapter 7, I shall say more precisely what Ithink naturalism is. Here I need only say that , as I am using the term ,naturalism covers a wide variety of views all of which , in one way oranother , claim that natural history , broadly construed to include ournatural history , contains all the facts there are. In standard philo -sophical terminology , naturalism is a monism which claims thateverything that exists in the world is a natural phenomenon in thesense of having a place in the causal nexus of spatio -temporal objectsand events. Chomsky has frequently expressed this naturalistic outlook"with respect to language; for example, he writes : . . . mentallyrepresented grammar and UG [universal grammar ] are real objects,part of the physical world . . . . Statements about particular grammarsor about UG are true or false statements about steady states attainedor the initial state (assumed fixed for the species), each of which is adefinite real-world object, situated in space-time and entering intocausal relations ." 4 Wittgenstein expresses his naturalistic outlook invarious places, for example, in his claim that what we should say"about mathematical proof is that this is simply what we do. This isuse and custom among us, or a fact of our natural historysQuestioning naturalism opens up the possibility of going betweenthe horns of the dilemma . In the course of this book I shall argue thatwe should give up a naturalistic conception of language . I try to showthat this is not as hard as it might at first seem nowadays , becausethe arguments for a naturalistic conception of language turn out notto hold up , and , independently , there are good reasons against-adopting such a conception . I shall also present a non naturalistic accountof language which provides a way out of the dilemma , enablingus to enjoy both the scientific advantages of the Chomsky an approachand the philosophical relevance of the (late) Wittgensteinianapproach .The issues here go deeper than the study of language . With thelinguistic focus of philosophy in this century , the naturalistic conceptionof language led straightforwardly to a naturalistic conception ofphilosophy itself . The fundamental issue with which the presentwork is concerned is the metaphilosophical question of the adequacyxPrefaceof the naturalistic picture of language and of philosophy whichemerged in the course of the so-called linguistic turn .Wittgenstein , Chomsky , Quine , Goodman , Davidson , Putnam ,and their followers have made naturalism the dominant philosophyof our time . Though one certainly sees here and there , philosophers,who have broken ranks , or perhaps were never in ranks , that is, philosopherswho take a genuinely non -naturalist - i .e., realist- view ofproperties and relations , even those philosophers adopt such a viewof properties and relations in the context of work on particular problemsin the philosophy of language, logic , and mathematics . Therehas not yet been a comprehensive philosophical examination of thereemergence of naturalism in the twentieth century and the specialforms it has taken . What is lacking is a rationale , suitable for the presentphilosophical situation , which can provide the foundations forappeals to non -natural objects in philosophy .The current influence of naturalism is so strong that it is worthwhilereminding ourselves that naturalism was not always as widelyaccepted in this century as it is today . Earlier, the philosophy of logicand mathematics , under Frege's influence , and ethics, under G. E.Moore 's, had a distinctively non -naturalistic cast. The subsequentsuccess of naturalism in these areas depended on particular argumentsabout meaning and language, given primarily by Wittgensteinand Quine . Their arguments led twentieth -century Anglo -Americanphilosophy into naturalism , and , accordingly , only a successful critiqueof those arguments can permit us to find a way out .In this book I have tried to give such a critique . The critique is atwo - part affair . In the first part I concentrate on the architects of contemporarynaturalism , Wittgenstein and Quine , examining their argumentsin a detailed , systematic, and comprehensive manner . Ibelieve I have shown that their arguments are inadequate to supportnaturalism . In the second part of the critique I try to identify the underlyingproblem in the naturalist position . On my account , the problemarises from the paradoxical use of philosophical means toestablish a position on which such means would not exist. However ,I do not claim to have accomplished everything necessary in order toestablish non -naturalism . Indeed , the present book is only a prolegomenonto a future non -naturalism : its aims are limited to vindicationand exploration .I have already said enough about vindication : successhere shouldbe measured by the effectiveness of the critique of the Chomsky an ,late Wittgensteinian , and Quinean approach es, together with the formulationof arguments for an alternative non -naturalist approach thatsacrifices neither the advantages of scientific investigation into lan -
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