Jerrold J. Katz

The structure of a semantic theory

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The philosophy of linguistics

This collection, the first of its king on the philosophy of linguistics, explores questions of the nature and existence of linguistic objects, such as sentences and meanings, and truth in linguistics.

Mentalism in linguistics

Linguists who conceive of their science as a discipline which collects utterances and classifies their parts often pride themselves on their freedom from mentalism. But freedom from mentalism is an inherent feature of the taxonomic conception of linguistics, for, according to this conception, a linguist starts his investigation with observable physical events and at no stage imports anything else.

Chomsky on Meaning

This paper critically examines Chomskys position on meaning, considering its development over the years, its significance for other areas of grammatical theory and for related areas outside linguistics, and its methodological, empirical, and philosophical bases. Focus is on the points of disagreement between Chomskys position and the authors, and it is argued that a close examination of the bases for Chomskys position shows that it should be rejected.*

A HYPOTHESIS ABOUT THE UNIQUENESS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE

principles are tested against the facts in comparative linguistics. (Ref. 9, Sections 5 , 6, & 7.) Above, we described the controversy between rationalism and empiricism over the uniqueness of human beings and human natural language. We described the limitations of a syntactic account of uniqueness and proposed a hypothesis that concerns semantic as well as syntactic structure. The effability hypothesis sharply focuses the rationalistempiricist controversy on the concrete questions of the relation of language t o thought and the character of language acquisition. Quine and other linguistic relativists, such as Whorf and Sapir, make the empiricist assumption that the objects manipulated in thought are or correspond directly to the particular sentences learned in acquiring a language. Quine is particularly clear: Thus who would undertake to translate ‘Neutrinos lack mass’ into the jungle language? If anyone does, we may expect him to coin words or distort the usage of old ones. We may expect him to plead in extenuation that the natives lack the requisite concepts; also that they know too little physics. And he is right except for the hint of there being some freefloating, linguistically neutral meaning which we capture, in ‘Neutrinos lack mass’, and the native cannot.’) To make it perfectly clear, Quine adds that it is an illusion to think that less theoretical, so more readily translatable sentences . . . are diverse verbal embodiments of some intercultural of some intercultural proposition or meaning, when they are better seen as the merest variants of one and the same intercultural verbalism. The discontinuity of radical translation tries our meanings: really sets them over against their verbal embodiments, or, more typically, finds nothing there.” This is the very opposite of a rationalist view. For rationalists, cases of failure to translate theoretical sentences represent only a temporary inability of speakers, based on their lack of knowledge of the relevant sciences,to make the proper combination of primitive semantic concepts to form the appropriate proposition. That is, the failure represents a temporary vocabulary gap (rather than a deficiency of the language) which makes it necessary to resort to paraphrase, creation of technical Katz: Uniqueness of Natura l Language 41 vocabulary, metaphorical extension, and so on, in order to make translations possible in practice, as well as in principle. The empiricist assumption that our concepts come from experience is responsible for the empiricist’s view that natural languages are not intertranslatable; similarly, the rationalist assumption that our concepts come from our genes is responsible for the rationalist’s view that natural languages are intertranslatable. The well-known doctrine of linguistic relativity, which states that cultural differences produce incommensurate conceptual frameworks, derives neither from the discovery of exceptional facts about exotic languages by linguists like Whorf nor from important breakthroughs in the study of methodology by philosophers like Quine. Rather, the doctrine derives from the empiricism common to these linguists and philosophers.(

What’s wrong with the philosophy of language?

The unsuitability of the positivist’s view of natural language has led many philosophers to reject this approach and to turn instead to a careful study of the details of a natural language. But the approach known as ordinary-language philosophy has been rightly criticised by the positivists as lacking in systematicity and theoretical orientation. One must agree with the positivist’s charge against the ordinary-language philosopher that any account of a natural language which fails to provide a specification of its formal structure is ipso facto unsatisfactory. For it is upon this structure that the generative principles which determine the syntactic and semantic characteristics of a natural language depend. These principles determine how each and every sentence of the language is structured and how sentences and expressions are understood. It is his failure to appreciate the significance of the systematic character of the compositional features of languages which accounts for the ordinary- language philosopher’s disregard of the study of sentences and sentential structure.

The availability of what we say

In two recent articles, ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’ and ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’2 (to which we shall refer as M and A, respectively), Professor Stanley Cavell has set forth his position on the relation between the claims Oxford philosophers make about ordinary-language and the methods and results of empirical investigations of ordinary language. These articles are important because they represent a viewpoint that is widely held by current philosophers—widely held but rarely made explicit. Cavell is surely right when he says that the conflict about the nature of our knowledge of ordinary language ‘is not a side issue in the general conflict between Wittgenstein (together with, at this point “ordinary language philosophy”) and traditional philosophy; it is itself an instance, an expression of that conflict’ (A, p. 184 above). The position Cavell advocates in M and A seems to us, however, to be mistaken in every significant respect and to be pernicious both for an adequate understanding of ordinary-language philosophy and for an adequate understanding of ordinary language. In the present paper, we seek to establish that this is in fact the case.

Semantics and Conceptual Change

The discussion of conceptual change that has taken place over the last two decades is peculiar in an important respect: meaning and change of meaning loom large in these discussions, yet no consideration seems to have been given to what linguistics says on these topics. It is almost perverse that in discussions of science carried out by philosophers of science, in which highly controversial claims concerning science turn on assumptions about meaning, there is no attempt to use ideas from the science that studies meaning.1 In ignoring linguistics, these discussions restrict themselves to an overly narrow range of positions on conceptual change in science. In the present paper, I will show that linguistics has a significant contribution to make in extending this range of positions. I will show that there are ideas in linguistics that lead to a new position on con-

Where things now stand with the analytic-synthetic distinction

The philosophy of language can be viewed as a branch of the theory of knowledge. It concerns itself with a special case in epistemology, linguistic knowledge, and the questions about such knowledge that it tries to answer have the form of classical epistemological questions, namely, what do we know about a natural language and how do we come to know it. It is no surprise, then, to find that theories about linguistic knowledge, like theories about knowledge in general, are either rationalist or empiricist. Rationalist theories like Chomskys claim that acquisition of the complex competence of a fluent speaker must be explained as a process in which innate schemata expressing the general form of a grammar become differentiated and realized as hypotheses about the character of the particular grammar underlying a sample of speech. On a rationalist theory, the primary role of a linguistic environment is to stimulate such differentiation and to confirm or disconfirm the hypotheses resulting from these schemata. Rationalism also claims that the principles expressing these innate schemata are synthetic a priori because they constitute the framework within which environmental stimulation can be interpreted as evidence bearing on the learners hypotheses about the grammar. 1 Empiricist theories like Quines claim that an explanation of language acquisition needs nothing more complex or sophisticated in the way of an assumtion about innate capacities than a system of inductive procedures for forming generalizations from the limited regularities in the learners linguistic experience. On an empiricist theory, experience plays the central role that innate schemata play on a rationalist theory. Experience teaches the language learner both the form and content of grammatical rules. Accordingly, for the empiricist, even the principles that express the invariant form and content of grammars, the linguistic universals, are synthetic a posteriori. They could have been otherwise and would have

The Dilemma Between Orthodoxy and Identity

The orthodoxy referred to in the title is Quine’s doctrine of logical form on which logical form has to do exclusively with how “truth functions, quantifiers, and variables stack up”.1 In previous publications,2 I have argued that this doctrine is both arbitrary and mistaken because the so- called “non-logical (or extra-logical) vocabulary” contributes just as much to implication relations among sentences as the so-called “logical vocabulary”. My strategy then was to try to undermine Quine’s criticism of the analytic-synthetic distinction and to formulate an acceptable explanation of analyticitywithin the framework of linquistic theory. Now I wishto try another strategy. Rather than arguing as I formely did that Quine’s arguments give us no reason to exclude the “non-logical vocabulary” from logic proper, Iwant to argue here that Quinean orthodoxy gives us reason to exclude items of the “logical vocabulary” from logic proper. I want to change the focus of the debate and argue the other way around that if the orhodox theory with its distinction between these two vocabularies is not given up, then some items heretofor treated as logical must henceforth be treated as extra-logical. If this argument is sound, it will have considered force. Its force will be proportional to the disinclination of logicians to relinquish bread-and-butter logical apparatus simply to save a philosophical orthodoxy.