Brian McGuinness

Reply to Davidson

The issue between Donald Davidson and myself is, as he states in his first sentence, whether the idiolect or the common language is primary in the order of philosophical explanation. The issue remains entangled, however, with another which I now think to be irrelevant: whether Davidson was right to deny that there are such things as languages, if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed I admit, of course, that, in some of the remarks I made at Rutgers, I was teasing; not, however, with complete frivolity, since I suspected that there was no place in Davidson’s intellectual landscape for any normal concept of a language. At any rate, I felt certain that the concept of a language had no philosophical importance for him, and with this I strongly disagreed. Let us look at how Davidson delineates that concept of a language that he opposes. “It was this”, he says in his present paper: In learning a language, a person acquires the ability to operate in accord with a precise and specifiable set of syntactic and semantic rules; verbal communication depends on speaker and hearer sharing such an ability, and it requires no more than this. I argued that sharing such a previously mastered ability was neither necessary nor sufficient for successful linguistic communication.

Reply to Prawitz

I am extremely happy that Professor Dag Prawitz took part in this conference. I owe a great deal to his pioneering researches into natural deduction and into the relation between theories of meaning and logical systems so formalised, and regard him as one of the few colleagues with whose ideas I am in nearly perfect sympathy; it would have been distressing to me had he not been present.

Reply to Sundholm

I should be surprised if there were not many vestiges of realism in my writings. A hedgehog, who knows one big thing and sticks to it, can keep himself uncontaminated by alien thoughts; but a fox, who goes snuffling around among the many things about each of which he knows a little, is bound to pick up variegated ideas not consistent with one another. We are all of us brought up to view the world in a realist manner, and it is difficult for us foxes to shake off all the effects of that upbringing. More exactly, I believe that there are several features of our language, and therefore of the way we learn to think, that push us to take the first steps towards realism, and was attempting to explore one of these in one of the papers Sundholm quotes (The Source of the Concept of Truth). These features are, in my view, to be respected, not eliminated as defects; it is a test of any version of anti-realism that it can accommodate them without degenerating into full-blown realism. I therefore view it as misleading that Sundholm should remark (footnote 57) that the notion of truth employed in that paper is a realist one. It was not intended to be a specific or full-grown notion at all: only a newborn infant in which we can discern the future lineaments of a realist conception, but which, given a proper upbringing, still might develop into a viable constructivist one.

Reply to Picardi

Is it a convention that one plays a game to win? More exactly, that one plays a game aiming, or feigning to aim, either to win, or, if that proves unattainable, to avoid losing? Hardly: it follows from the meanings of ‘play a game’, ‘win’ and ‘lose’. It is not a convention that there are seven days in a week, because a period of time would not be a week unless it was just seven days long. It is a convention, however, that we use the week as a salient unit of time, have names for the days of the week and use them to refer to particular days, and so forth. Well, is it a convention that in chess one aims, if possible, to checkmate one’s opponent? Certainly it is, in a sense of ‘convention’ that covers the rules of the game (and not in that which games players contrast rules and conventions). For it is as much one of the rules of chess that one wins only by checkmating one’s opponent as it is that the Rook cannot jump over an intervening piece. In Chinese chess, for example, one can win by putting one’s opponent into stalemate: the rule is different. Now if it follows from the meaning of the word ‘win’ that one plays a game with the real or apparent aim of winning if one can, it must be a rule of chess — one of the conventions constitutive of the game — that one play it with the real or apparent aim of checkmating one’s opponent. Of course, the rules, in their standard formulation, do not state this in that form; rather, they use the word ‘win’ and rely on our understanding of it, which involves our understanding of the general practice of playing games.

Reply to Bilgrami

In controversial cases, namely wherever there has been a serious controversy about whether realism is sustainable, realism almost always threatens to provoke scepticism. Realism about the past, for example, gives sense to a Cartesian doubt about the past, as expressed by Russell’s well-known remark about the world’s having been created five minutes ago, complete with all the signs of its past history. I say ‘almost always’ because it does not seem to have this effect in mathematics, and this is worth bearing in mind. A constructivist, or, for that matter, a formalist, repudiation of mathematical realism may call in doubt whether there is any truth to the matter concerning various mathematical conjectures or hypotheses: but neither has any tendency to make us doubt, or to make it intelligible to doubt, whether we have any mathematical knowledge at all. This bears on Akeel Bilgrami’s second characteristic mark of realism (p. 210). The three characteristic marks are: (a) that statements of the kind in dispute have truth-values; (b) that the states of affairs in question are relatively independent of the basis upon which they are asserted to obtain; and (c) that a knowledge of the conditions rendering statements of the disputed class true can be manifested only holistically.

Reply to Schulte

I am very glad that Joachim Schulte chose to comment on my paper Bringing About the Past, because it concerns a topic that I have thought about a great deal, though written about little.

Reply to Wright

Crispin Wright’s discussion of my paper on Godel’s incompleteness theorem has the great merit of linking the principal topic of that with the more celebrated thesis of Lucas, recently endorsed by Penrose. In my paper I did not refer to Lucas’s work, unsurprisingly since his original paper on the subject was published in the same year as mine; but I came close to endorsing his view, saying: it may be the case that no formal system can ever succeed in embodying all the principles of proof that we should intuitively accept; and this is precisely what is shown to be the case in regard to number theory by Godel’s theorem.1

Truth, Time and Deity

The title may seem a bit unfair to Michael Dummett, since in his collection Truth and Other Enigmas he precisely does not reprint his own paper which argued that only on a theistic basis was realism defensible. How much he has changed his mind about that paper I do not know; nor have I its contents present to my mind. My own starting points were other and threefold, two being rather inexact memories one — of a remark of his to the effect that of the arguments for the existence of God the most satisfactory or the least unsatisfactory seemed to him that which saw God as truth; another is of that one of his William James lectures that I was lucky enough to hear at Harvard, in which he considered (without deciding definitely for it) the possibility of falling back on a theistic motive for a defence of the principle of bivalence in appropriate areas. The third and most publicly accessible of my starting-points is the closing section of The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, which is entitled ‘God’s omniscience’ and may be styled non inelegans specimen demonstrandi in divinis. I will summarise it presently.

Reply to Pears

I hope that David Pears’s acute but eirenic defence of Wittgenstein’s particularism will prompt further debate about this important but insufficiently discussed question. One of his quotations from the Investigations (p. 48) illustrates why I call his paper ‘eirenic’; for convenience I repeat it here.

Reply to Oliveri

Gianluigi Oliveri may perhaps be surprised by the extent to which I agree with him about mathematics; he will not be surprised that I do not accept his conclusion that we should accept a realist interpretation of it.