Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics
Seeing as how the man himself is to honour us, it may be time I came to grips with this issue. It also came up in Reply to invicta's recent thread, not to mention the distorted use to which the rules for constructing Aussie nicknames were put in the Shoutbox.
If i were to ask Chomsky a question, it would be "Are there analytic statements?"
But rather than just pose that question in the appropriate place, I'm looking for some discussion on the topic first. Lack of confidence on my part.
Those interested in the background and import of this issue might enjoy Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics, a supplementary entry in SEP to The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction.
I'll hopefully fill in a bit more as I work through the related material, but given the centrality of Analyticity to philosophical work, this seems worthy of a thread.
What do you think?
The question for Professor Chomsky is at https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/804011
If i were to ask Chomsky a question, it would be "Are there analytic statements?"
But rather than just pose that question in the appropriate place, I'm looking for some discussion on the topic first. Lack of confidence on my part.
Those interested in the background and import of this issue might enjoy Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics, a supplementary entry in SEP to The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction.
I'll hopefully fill in a bit more as I work through the related material, but given the centrality of Analyticity to philosophical work, this seems worthy of a thread.
What do you think?
The question for Professor Chomsky is at https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/804011
Comments (238)
In a performative act, I define X as x, y and z.
I tell at least one other person.
There is now a social community sharing the same language that knows that X means x,y and z.
The statement "X is z" is now an analytic statement and it is true that "X is z".
Provided that within a social community sharing the same language, at least one person has made a definition in a performative act, and told at least one other person, yes, analytic statements exist.
1. A triangle is a 3-sided shape
2. "Triangle" means "3-sided shape"
Obviously there's a use-mention distinction, but is that distinction relevant here?
1) would be considered an analytic sentence but wouldn't 2) be considered a synthetic sentence? And I think a case could be made that 1) and 2) mean mostly the same thing. Would it then follow that 1) is synthetic and that 2) is analytic? Or perhaps that the analytic/synthetic distinction isn't a significant one?
Or if 2) is in fact an analytic sentence, is it not also a posteriori? Something Kant considered a contradiction?
In as far as I can see it apart from the use of quotation marks and the change of is to means, which is insignificant, the meaning does not change, the statement is essentially the same, and analytic.
The problem is temporal.
Before the performative act, the combination of letters "the triangle" has no meaning.
As "the triangle" doesn't refer to anything, it has no use.
As "the triangle " doesn't exist in the common language, there cannot be any mention of it.
As "the triangle" doesn't exist in the common language, it cannot play a role in any analytic or synthetic statement.
During the performative act, the combination of letters "the triangle" is christened as a word, or as Kripke said, baptised, to have the meaning of a shape with three sides.
After the performative act, within the social community sharing a common language, the word "the triangle" means "a shape with three sides", and the statement "the triangle has three sides" is true.
As "the triangle" does now refer to something, ie, a shape with three sides, it has a use.
As the word "triangle" is now part of the common language, it can be mentioned as being a word within the common language.
As the word "the triangle" does now exist in the common language, it can play a role in analytic and synthetic statements. The statement "triangles have three sides " is analytic, as this is part of the definition of triangles. The statement "the triangle is orange" is synthetic, as this is not part of the definition of triangles.
There is no a priori knowledge of "the triangle" until it has been baptised in a performative act. There is only a posteriori knowledge of the word "the triangle" after it has been baptised in a performative act.
I think Chomsky (or at least some nativists) might argue that the very ability of the performative act is some sort of innate language acquisition capability.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(linguistics)
Also here:
Quoting Minimalist Program
I agree. Whilst on the one hand there cannot be a priori knowledge of "the triangle" until it has been baptised in a performative act, on the other hand, there must be some innate, a priori knowledge of the importance of the concept of triangle, otherwise the language speaker wouldn't have considered it worthwhile naming.
As with "snow is white" is true IFF snow is white, the expression in inverted commas exists in language whilst the expression not in inverted commas exists in the world, there is a difference between "the triangle" which exists in language and the triangle which exists in the world.
It can be argued exactly where this world exists, in the mind or external to any mind. Wittgenstein in Tractatus avoided the question altogether.
Life has been evolving for about 3.7 billion years on Earth, and must be responsible for the physical structure of the human brain as it is today, ie, the hardware. What the brain is capable of doing, ie it software, can only be a function of its hardware, ie, the physical structure of the brain. It is clear that a kettle can only boil water, it cannot play music, ie, what a physical structure is able to do must be determined by its physical structure, What the brain is able to achieve, its thoughts, concepts and language cannot be outwith the physical structure that enables such thoughts, concepts and language.
The linguist Noam Chomsky and the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed the theory that language evolved as a result of other evolutionary processes, essentially making it a by-product of evolution and not a specific adaptation. The idea that language was a spandrel, a term coined by Gould, flew in the face of natural selection. In fact, Gould and Chomsky pose the theory that many human behaviours are spandrels. These various spandrels came about because of a process Darwin called "pre-adaptation," which is now known as exaptation. This is the idea that a species uses an adaptation for a purpose other than what it was initially meant for. One example is the theory that bird feathers were an adaptation for keeping the bird warm, and were only later used for flying. Chomsky and Gould hypothesize that language may have evolved simply because the physical structure of the brain evolved, or because cognitive structures that were used for things like tool making or rule learning were also good for complex communication. This falls in line with the theory that as our brains became larger, our cognitive functions increased.
As regards the immediate topic "Are there analytic statements?", as "the triangle" has been baptised in a performative act as meaning "a shape having three sides", the statement "the triangle has three sides" can only be analytic. Therefore, there are analytic statements.
I find the part about the evolution of language fascinating, especially the speculation surrounding it. The FoxP2 gene, mirror neuron system, plasticity and memory, pre-frontal cortex, and subcortical connections can help us understand how language evolved. It is likely that language initially evolved through exaptation and was later co-opted for further adaptation in parts of the brain.
Regarding Chomsky's position, there are three main camps in the language acquisition debate. The fully nativist camp (Chomsky, Fodor) believes that language acquisition is almost entirely innate, with syntax and semantics generated without the need for social or cultural conventions. The fully conventional camp (Wittgenstein et al) believes that language acquisition is almost entirely conventional and arises from how it is used in a community of language users. The mix of both camp (Tomasello et al) believes that language acquisition has some innate aspects that need to be in place but heavily relies on social cues, particularly aspects like shared attention.
In terms of the synthetic and analytic distinction, my interpretation of Chomsky's view is that the innate language acquisition device of the brain can automatically compute analytic statements, which are true by definition. However, synthetic statements require environmental learning to produce, so while they may use the language rules generated by the LAD, it is not the LAD itself that produces them. I am not sure if this is completely accurate or if this view has changed over time. For example, I know that certain LAD components have been admitted to be no longer necessary for language generation. Now I believe, "merge" is the only function viewed as necessary. How this relates to evolving view of analytic and synthetic, I am not sure though.
References that are useful:
Tomasello's theory of social cooperative origins based much more on evolutionary and developmental psychology experiments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46IrwGZpDQ4
Chomsky's theory, based much more on "optimal interface" and internal mental thought than on cooperative origins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0DiRj5Bud8&t=349s
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-learning/
https://amp.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2015/nov/05/roots-language-what-makes-us-different-animals
https://languagedebates.wordpress.com/2017/12/19/chomsky-or-tomasello-katie-oregan-tries-to-avoid-sitting-on-the-fence-in-the-language-learning-debate/
The issue is if a statement can be true in virtue of the meaning of the words alone. But we do not have a consensus on what the meaning of the words means. Given that Georges Rey thought it necessary to add an entire supplement on Chomsky's view to the SEP article and that the editors accepted this, it seems it is quite involved. More than just an unconscious calculation. Rey quotes Chomsky as suggesting that it is an issue for empirical analysis. Rey is noncommittal, suggesting that Chomsky vacillates, but perhaps Chomsky is undecided because of the absence of empirical data.
What is your interpretation as to what "empirical analysis" entails here for understanding analyticity?
4 out of 5 men believe unmarried males are bachelors. The rest are just the cheaters :rofl:.
**Did I just do a polysemous? :chin:. To be a bachelor or to act like a bachelor. So I guess not. One is the thing, one is only like the thing. A bank on the river would be more like a polysemous.
Isn't this generally tautological? All unmarried men are bachelors is saying unmarried men are unmarried men.
Im not fully up to speed with Chomsky, but I take it he is claiming that our language is meaningful because we know how words work individually (as labels perhaps) and they function together by some human process that we just need to decipher systematically. We imagine we do this all the time when we try follow where someone is going with a new (unexpected) thought. Ive seen it on this board a lot; people see words they know and take them at first glance, imagining their first impression of them together is something they can easily understand.
The picture is perfect (perhaps too so) if we wanted to be certain about what would be meant by what we said, or, say, if we wanted to know what we should do (what would be the right thing to do) before we did it.
But if we extend a concept (or speak across it) the projection is not made inteligible by our understanding the individual words and some internal structure they have (or external structure the world has). We wont figure it out ahead of time by being clever, we carry a concept forward in continuing to talk amongst ourselves as we forge a new path ahead. We put ourselves out in front of our words (responsive to them) in moving past our ordinary practices. There is no certainty that you will, or even can, take up my words (support my acts); thats why we have questions, denials, imagination, impasse, and madness.
In the statement "bachelors are unmarried men", "bachelors" should be thought of as a definition rather than a description.
As a description "bachelors are unmarried men" is tautological, where "unmarried men" is a synonym for "bachelors".
But rather, "bachelor" should be thought of as a definition, where "bachelor" is the definition of "unmarried men".
For example, rather than say "I see a large building, typically of the medieval period, fortified against attack with thick walls, battlements, towers, and in many cases a moat", it is far more convenient just to say "I see a castle", where "castle" is the definition of a large building, typically of the medieval period, fortified against attack with thick walls, battlements, towers, and in many cases a moat.
Similarly, rather than say "I see an unmarried man", it is more convenient just to say "I see a bachelor".
If language only consisted of words that referred to simpler concepts: red, loud, circle, line, sweet, thick, etc, the number of words required to express complex concepts would be inconveniently excessive. Therefore, for convenience, definitions are used to group sets of words together. Without definitions, language would be unwieldy.
As "castle" is a definition, the statement "The castle has thick walls" is analytic. As "bachelor" is a definition, the statement "The bachelor is a man" is analytic.
If "bachelor" means "unmarried man" then all bachelors are unmarried men.
"Bachelor" can mean "unmarried man", but it can also mean "man who has never been married" or "person with a first degree from a university" or "a young knight serving under another's banner".
The sentence "bachelors are unmarried men" doesn't specify which meaning of "bachelor" is being used, hence the need for the antecedent in the first sentence above.
Fair.
Quoting RussellA
Yep. Thanks.
Its just the fact that the definitions must be learned from convention in the first place. If a society has no marriage, it may have no concept of bachelor and thus has no word for bachelor. @RussellA appropriately referenced this idea at the beginning of this thread when he discussed the performative christening (Kripkes idea), though I think Kripkes set of words were limited to proper names and kinds, the distinction being words that are true in all possible worlds (proper names and scientific kinds) and ones that are not (most other words / ones where meaning is from convention and use).
Im not sure thats what Chomsky had in mind for empirical evidence though.
Quine wanted to give a non-circular account of the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences.
Circular in that the notion of analyticity is being used as an explanation for necessity and a prioricity, yet necessity and a prioiricity is being used as an explanation of analyticity.
It is often said that analytic truths are true by definition, but Quine pointed out that an analytic truth can only be turned into a logical truth by replacing synonym with synonym, which again leads into the problem of circularity. Synonymity between two expressions leads to analyticity, but synonymity between two expressions requires analyticity.
As Quine wrote:
There are those who find it soothing to say that the analytic statements of the second class reduce to those of the first class, the logical truths, by definition: bachelor, for example, is defined as unmarried man. . . . Who defined it thus, and when? Are we to appeal to the nearest dictionary ...? Clearly, this would be to put the cart before the horse. The lexicographer is an empirical scientist, whose business is the recording to antecedent facts; and if he glosses bachelor as unmarried man it is because of his belief that there is a relation of synonymy between those forms . . . prior to his own work.
Quine asks "who defined it thus", and the answer is, in a Performative Act, carried out either by a public Institution, by the general users of a language or a combination of the two.
J. L. Austin in the 1950's gave the name performative utterances to situations where saying something was doing something, rather than simply reporting on or describing reality. The paradigmatic case here is speaking the words "I do".
Kripke in Naming and Necessity provided a rough outline of his causal theory of reference for names, promoting it as having more potential that Russell's Descriptive Theory of Names, whereby names are in fact disguised definite descriptions. Kripke argues that your use of a name is caused by the naming of a thing, for example, the parents of a newborn baby name it, pointing to the child and saying "we'll call her 'Jane'." Henceforth everyone calls her 'Jane'. This is referred to as Jane's dubbing, naming, or initial baptism.
From the SEP - The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction:
Analytic sentences, such as Paediatricians are doctors, have historically been characterized as ones that are true by virtue of the meanings of their words alone and/or can be known to be so solely by knowing those meanings.
We can consider two stages in linguistic meaning:
Stage one: words are given their meaning in performative acts
Stage two: once words have their meanings, some statements are known to be true just by knowing the meaning of their words, ie, as the SEP notes, analytic statements.
The Performative Act breaks Quine's problem of circularity.
For plane figures, if the sum of the internal angles of a polygon is 180º, then the polygon has three sides.
This is true in virtue of the meanings of the terms involved. It appears to by analytic.
Nothing in this argument has a form like "I name this a such-and-such"
That is, this analytic statement does not seem to be the result of a performative act.
I conclude that not all analytic statements are the result of performative acts of naming.
My suspicion is that your account is based on considering only one type of analytic statement.
I suspect that Chomsky may well have had something not unlike the thought experiments used by Quine in Word and object. So the question arrises as to how Chomsky could avoid the inscrutability of reference and hence the indeterminacy of translation.
Interesting. Where do "Gavagai", the inscrutability of reference and the indeterminacy of translation fit in this account?
I think one criticism of his general tendency is to change the goal posts as to what the innate structures are and how innate they are. For example, I think the generative grammar project (universal grammar) became less specific overtime. Where you had various functions you now have one, merge (or recursion). This may play into the hedging..
So with that in mind, I do know that Chomsky had two kinds of "devices" at play in his theories. There was the syntactic (how words combine) and the semantic (how words mean). He can preserve the syntactic as being a device that is more fixed (the merge concept) whilst still declaring the semantic as more plastic (learn from language use in the environment). Thus, he might get on board with Kripkean-esque idea that words are "annointed" and then changed-over-time in a community. Thus I still stick with RussellA on how this might look as for how words get their definitions.
My own spin here is that non-proper names and non-scientific kinds aren't so much "annointed" in the same way scientists and parents dub names in a very specific instance, but rather there is some start somewhere and then moves forward.. Thus a tribe sees the practice of marriage and adapts it. They had a word for "wild and free" called "boople" and someone in the tribe said, "the ones who are not married are kind of boople" eh? And then the next use of it is, "look at that boople over there not attached to anyone." And then it becomes something like "All booples are unmarried males".
I am not sure if this counts as 'hedging' in regard to what is innate or not but the following (written in the late 70's) suggests Chomsky is not putting the 'logic' of syntax as making or breaking the argument for a 'preexisting' structure in the way he opposed behaviorism, for example.
Good quote. I'd have to read what he says before and after this to get full picture probably. However, it seems that he thinks that there are beliefs about the world that are necessary for concepts to form. I'm not sure what that means one way or another except that it looks that he doesn't think there is something akin to a "concept module" in the brain. However, I think he is still in favor of syntactic recursion being a specific module that is innate and necessary for language.
These debates seem odd to me because I don't see what the opposition is. It sounds like these things are debates to the extent at what is learned and what is automatically generated (or rather, automatically being computed in some sort of cognitive apparatus). I just think that is weird because even learning has a cognitive apparatus (long term potentiation and things such as this), so is it the kind of apparatus (complete and specialized versus generalized brain apparatus)? This is too vague for me to really take seriously. It would have to be mapped one-to-one to cognitive neuroscience results, or at the least provide some psychological experiments on concept formation in infants, children, and adults for it to have teeth. And of course, even with this, there are so many scientific papers that what is really THE theory and what is relevant gets lost in the noise.. What counts as significant answers to these questions even in scientific conclusions? Hundreds and thousands of papers each year, and what counts as getting a close consensus seems to be harder to decipher. It's not the same as a new element discovered, or understanding of particle interaction.
Your example may be reworded as: "a triangle is a plane figure, a polygon, where the sum of the internal angles is 180 deg", thereby defining "a triangle".
This is a complex concept, so can be carried out in a straightforward Performative Act of Naming, where one word is defined as a set of other words. This is a purely linguistic process, not requiring any link from word to world, and not requiring any link from linguistic to extralinguistic.
Quoting Banno
The gavagai problem may be solved by taking into account the fact that there are simple and complex concepts, and these must be treated differently. In language, first there is the naming of simple concepts, and only then can complex concepts be named, such as the complex concept "gavagai".
Simple concepts include things such as the colour red, a bitter taste, a straight line, etc, and complex concepts include things such as mountains, despair, houses, governments, etc.
For complex concepts, the "gavagai" may be named in a Performative Act of Naming, such that "a gavagai is a gregarious burrowing plant-eating mammal, with long ears, long hind legs, and a short tail". One word is linked to other words, the linguistic is linked with the linguistic, not the world. Misunderstanding and doubt are minimised in a relatively simple process. As "a gavagai" is defined as having long ears, the statement "a gavagai has long ears" is analytic.
For simple concepts, the process is more complicated. The problem is that of linking a word to something in the world, linking the linguistic with the extra-linguistic. For example the colour "orange" is something that is orange, where one word is linked with one thing in the world
In order to explain the naming of simple concepts, I return to my diagram illustrating naming using Hume's constant conjunction of events, whereby learning a name is more an iterative process that is unlikely to be achieved at the first attempt. One needs to note that from the viewpoint of the observer, both the words and pictures are objects, things existing in the world, where the word is no less an object than the picture.
The words "nyekundu", "kijani" and "samawati" have been determined during Performative Acts of Naming either by an Institution or users of the language or a combination of both.
You asked before why the observer should necessarily link two objects that happen to be alongside each other. As the tortoise said to Achilles when playing chess, where is the rule that I have to follow the rules. Why should the observer take note of a constant conjunction of events? Because, as life has been evolving for about 3.7 billion years on Earth, taking note of a constant conjunction of events has been built into the structure of the brain as a mechanism necessary for survival, something innate and a priori.
Chomsky proposed that a person's ability to use language is innate. Taken from the https://englopedia.com article Innateness theory of language:
Linguistic nativism is a theory that people are born with the knowledge of a language: they acquire language not only through learning. Human language is complex and considered one of the most difficult areas of human cognition. However, despite the complexity of the language, children can accurately learn the language in a short period of time. Moreover, research has shown that language acquisition by children (including the blind and deaf) occurs at ordered developmental stages. This highlights the possibility that humans have an innate ability to acquire language. According to Noam Chomsky, the speed and accuracy of vocabulary acquisition do not leave any real alternative to the conclusion that the child somehow possesses the concepts available before the language experience, and basically memorizes the labels for the concepts that are already part of him or her. conceptual apparatus
In summary, first, complex concepts may be learnt as a set of simpler concepts in a Performative act of Naming, linking the linguistic to the linguistic. Second, simple concepts may be learnt by linking two objects in the world using Hume's constant conjunction of events, an innate ability having evolved over 3.7 billion years. The first object a name established during a Performative Act and the second object a picture, thereby linking the linguistic with the extralinguistic.
Chomsky doesnt seem to know if there is a conceptual apparatus so apparently that aspect isnt part of his LAD?
Thank you. I fully understand why you want to see the remarks in the context of his views as they changed over time.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I look at it through the lens of developmental psychology. The dynamic between the 'innate' and the environment points to neither aspect being the only process or ground of personal experience.
When Chomsky says: "Still, this approach seems reasonable to me; to give it some real content, it would be necessary to discover something comparable to a generative grammar in the domain of factual knowledge, which is no small task", that is asking for a science that goes beyond merely noting the dependence upon a repeatable experience of the world for the 'meaning' of propositions.
But it also goes beyond presuming a mechanism such as behaviorism does where different outcomes can be reduced to particular inputs.
I think its simply unclear whats being described. As I said learning is a vague notion and has its own cognitive and brain mechanisms. So it becomes learning vs a linguistic mechanism. But what learning is versus a linguistic mechanism isnt spelled out there. Is it a specific mechanism specialized for concepts or some other process is what hes getting at I guess. He doesnt seem phased either way which indicates generative grammar and concept formation are separate domains and his theory only accounts for generative grammar.
Being able to see the colour red and being able to see a link based on constant conjunction,
as inherent functions of the structure of the brain, and products of genetic coding, are possible without the need of conscious a priori concepts of red or constant conjunction. Concepts are subsequent to the event.
Yeah that makes sense, but I guess the argument is whether he thinks there is a definite specified structure for things as you describe (constant conjunction) in the brain, or some sort of general "learning". And that is where I am confused as to what he is saying or if that is indeed even the argument he is discussing in some of these passages about concepts.
One thing I am pretty sure he is saying is that concept formation is a separate issue than his generative grammar, and his LAD does not apply necessarily to a concept formation mechanism (e.g. something like a constant conjunction function).
A natural reaction might also be to question why he so easily separates these two. Being that concepts are important to language, perhaps the two things are intertwined inextricably and thus, a generative grammar mechanism by itself cannot exist, or needs to at least account for concept formation in the account of the generation of syntax and combinations of words into strings of coherency.
That's not just a rewording. it's saying something completely different. The relevant equivalence is not between "triangle" and "three-sided shape", since we might have given some other name to three-sided shapes. The relevant equivalence is between polygons with three sides and polygons, the internal angles of which sum to 180º. This could not have been otherwise. It is not a result of a performative.
A more complete consideration of "gavagai" will I think show that the performative utterances on which your account relies are not up to the task of fixing the referent of a name without ambiguity.
One example used is that from "John was killed" we can conclude solely on the basis of the meaning of the words, that John is dead. It's not obvious that the only explanation for such an inference is an inherent capacity for a universal grammar. The relation between something's being killed and it's being dead is the sort of thing that Quine's holism explains.
My thinking at present is that the discomfiture between analyticity, necessity, a priority and certainty introduced by analytic philosophy over the last fifty years of last century considerably complicate attempts to provide a consistent and coherent account along the lines of generative grammar.
This should not be surprising. Language grows as much by breaking the rules as by following them.
Understanding that concept is just being able to do that stuff. Including talking.
Quoting Banno
Language surely must be closely linked to cognition. But the devil is in the details. The range of theories between what the brain does and what social interactions do suggest they are only 'the same thing' when some conditions are presumed to be the case.
That prompts me to ask about how you see the scientific method in relation to 'analyticity', as you coin the phrase. Chomsky located linguistics as one of the enterprises of cognitive psychology. Do you conceive of the 'analytic' as prior to such theoretical endeavors?
Noted.
I'm not much into the detailed technical debates on philosophy of language, nevertheless:
There's an excellent and quite long series of classes given by Chomsky that go through a lot of material, including Quine. But 1) it is very, very long (almost 20 hours) and 2) the audio quality is quite bad, it's very low. Nevertheless, if anyone want to go through that hurdle, which I did once, was quite interesting, here is a link to the first part of the lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3gFaNYluBQ&list=PLJ8I0IGeFhIpD2_2w71jghsDGCfbtSVF4
And it goes on from that one, from what I can recall, I seem to remember he discusses Quine maybe in lecture 2-4, one of those, but, can't be sure.
I dont want to disagree that there are very complicated (brain/syntactic) processes happening when we use language, or even that there is perhaps some benefit to learning about them. But (as I see it; as Wittgenstein sees it) we are lured into thinking we will learn how our communications (our sentences) are meaningful if we understand the brain or how language operates logistically (internally as it were). But there is no answer to this desire.
Quoting RussellA
The reason we want it to be true (meaning to be systematic) is that we want to supplant the vagaries and failures of our ordinary back-and-forth, with certainty, such that it can be studied and deciphered (ahead of time).
But, as @Banno may agree, the criteria for judgment of a concept (say, apologizing or intending or threatening or knowing) show that these practices are meaningful to us, reflect what matters to people for that concept to happen or be what it is, not the understanding of a process. And we learn those criteria, judgments, etc. (by osmosis for the most part) through training and watching and making mistakes and being corrected, i.e., living (language is not normative, life isconventions are not agreed to or defined). But, again, maybe I have Chomsky wrong here, however, it is suspect that an analytic statement is one that is true without external reference or without us screwing it up (as we do) and as we want, desperately, to find some way not to (with necessity); most classically, by taking us out of the equation.
We want to create an intellectual (logical, scientific) problem that we might be able to solve, rather than see that actually being able to communicate with people is much more of an ordinarily problematic part of the human condition than wed like it to be. As Wittgenstein said, We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough. PI, p. 212 (emphasis added). The certain things that we find are the ones that we can maybe solve (e.g., the optical process of the brain) because we do not want to accept the fallibility of people (say, their inability to accept things that are pointed out to them).
The question then is not what is analytic (or innate or generative language processes), but: why do they matter? what importance would figuring these out have? where do they get us?
Quoting Banno
Why indeed.
1) In Euclidian space, there is equivalence between (a polygon with three sides)
and (polygons, the internal angles of which sum to 180 deg), and this could not be otherwise.
2) In Riemannian space, there is no necessary equivalence between (a polygon with three sides) and (polygons, the internal angles of which sum to 180 deg), and this could not be otherwise.
3) In RussellianA space, there is equivalence between (a polygon with three sides)
and (polygons, the internal angles of which sum to 75 deg), and this could not be otherwise.
Each space is the result of a Performative Act, first by Euclid, then by Riemann and then by RussellA.
Quoting Banno
True, there is never an absolute consensus as to what words mean, and words change their meaning with time. But if there was no consensus at all as to the meaning of words, this thread would not be possible, as no one would be able to understand what anyone else was saying.
Words may change, but Kripke's Causal Theory of Reference illustrates the importance of the Performative Act Of Naming in Language in ensuring the stability of language, whereby the reference of a linguistic expression, what it designates in the world, is fixed by an act of initial baptism.
Drawing on Gottlob Freges distinction between word meaning and word reference, Kripke and Putnam developed a causal theory of reference to explain how words can change while still designating the same thing in reality.
The act of baptism designates a very real physical object associated with something observable. But words may evolve with time, and what establishes the reality of an expression is the existence of a continuous causal chain, linked back to the initial baptism.
Language thus maintains a stable relationship with the external environment, ensuring that even though words may change, the expression as a whole remains truthful.
The initial baptism establishes the analytic nature of an expression.
Am I mistaken or was Kripke only accounting for meaning in regards to proper names and scientific kinds (like water is H20) which unlike other terms, the meaning and term is always linked in all possible worlds?
Chomsky refers to concepts, thoughts and language in Noam Chomsky on the Big Questions (Part 4) Closer To Truth Chats
He says that the relation between thought and language is one of identity
2min - "Language and thought are intimately related . Language has historically be called audible thought , its the mechanism for constructing thoughts over an infinite range which we can then access and use in our various activities"
He says that concepts cannot exist without language
7min - "Even the simplest concepts tree desk person dog, what ever you want , even these are extremely complex in their internal structure . If such concepts had developed in proto human history when there was no language they would have been useless. They would have been an accident if developed and quickly lost as you cannot do anything with them. So the chances are very strong that the concepts developed within human history at a point where we had computational systems which satisfy the basic property"
He says that communication is a secondary use of language, the primary use of language is thought
16min - "Sometimes language is used for communication, but that is a very peripheral use . Almost all our use of language goes on all our waking hours , most of our language is just thinking, we can't just stop , it almost impossible to stop . it takes an incredible act of will to stop thinking"
IE, Chomsky is saying that concepts wouldn't exist without language, and the main function of language is to have thoughts.
Quoting schopenhauer1
True, I agree that Kripke limited his causal theory of reference to proper names. Putnam extended the theory to other sorts of terms, such as water, whereas in general the theory may be used for many referring terms.
From Wikipedia Causal Theory of Reference:
[i]A causal theory of reference or historical chain theory of reference is a theory of how terms acquire specific referents based on evidence. Such theories have been used to describe many referring terms, particularly logical terms, proper names, and natural kind terms.
In lectures later published as Naming and Necessity, Kripke provided a rough outline of his causal theory of reference for names.......... Although he refused to explicitly endorse such a theory.
The same motivations apply to causal theories in regard to other sorts of terms. Putnam, for instance, attempted to establish that 'water' refers rigidly to the stuff that we do in fact call 'water', to the exclusion of any possible identical water-like substance for which we have no causal connection.[/i]
I'm thinking something along the lines of the formal approach, of a sub-natural-language process which generates natural languages seems like it'd have analytic properties.
However, I tend to believe that the distinction is pragmatic rather than some feature of thought. Even if I grant some kind of mentalese or sub-natural-language generative process I would tend to favor the natural language expressions over this I-language, however it's parsed. (neat distinction though between E/I-language I hadn't encountered before)
Quoting RussellA
I think this is the most interesting theory he holds, and at least prima facie, seem true. Much of language is basically self-talk. It is our thoughts to ourselves: our own reasons, moods, ideas, strategies, everything that is "discursive" in nature.
Tomasello and others might disagree and say that language development is too social to be mainly for just thinking or internal mentation, but rather is meant to be communication first. I think it could be a little bit of both perhaps? But Chomsky would be at odds even with this smorgasbord approach of communication and mentation. I think he has an underlying theory of language development that it was an exaptation, I believe discussed earlier in this thread, whereby the very software of the brain was re-organized in such a way that language and concepts were created by necessity of this one-time "gestalt" brain re-organization.
Biologists generally do not agree with Chomsky, as far as I have read. Most take the anthropological approach that it was a slow development, and mainly based on communication needs.
I can see the strengths and weaknesses of both sides. I can't imagine human beings with anything other than a device that produces thought in linguistic-type forms, inextricably tied with concepts and self-talk.
Quoting RussellA
Right but that article still seemed to not mention other terms (not proper names or natural kinds) as being an outcome of that theory. It seems to always be mentioned in conjunction with proper names et al. I am not sure if it has been explicitly broadened to all terms.
Chomsky also makes the proviso that both the visual system and language need to be stimulated from things in the external world in order to operate successfully.
See Noam Chomsky on Linguistic Theories and the Evolution of Language (Part 3) | Closer To Truth Chats.
8 min "Stimulation is necessary.............if you don't present pattern stimulation in the early days of life the visual system won't function , it has to be set off by different kinds of stimulation and if you modify the kinds of stimulation say horizontal lines instead of vertical lines it will affect the way the visual system develops. That's pretty much like language"
Quoting schopenhauer1
The article, linked here, discusses the causal theory of names as regards abstract objects.
"For example, the numeral 17 is a name of the number 17. But how can there be a causal relation between a number and subsequent uses of a numeral? In short, how can abstract objects stand in causal relations? It would seem that it is always something concrete that is a cause. In this kind of case, it makes more sense to trace the causal chain back to the dubbing, rather than to the object. For although 17 is an abstract object, the act of dubbing it (first performed by some mathematician, no doubt) was a concrete event that can stand in causal relations to subsequent events."
Whether the process is a Performative Act or baptism, the question remains, what authority has determined that "a triangle is a plane figure with three straight sides and three angles", and why do we accept this.
Again, the desire to have all of language work like the very limited process of naming objectsto imagine all words referring to an object, even meaning or something realis because we want logical necessity and predictability. If nothing else, Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations started with that picture of language and goes on to show that not only does most of language work entirely differently (each concept having its on criteria) but that language was taken out of individual case-by-case contexts by philosophy to ensure certainty, and that it is not the structure of language that is essential but our lives; that what we ordinarily say in a given context is simply a means of seeing what matters to us about our lives; and is the tool to take us out of our fixation (bewitchment) of an abstract solution to our failures and limitations.
Indeed. Which is why he refers to Descartes and Cudworth in the tradition, Chomsky is very much an "innatist dospositionalist", experience serves as a trigger for the idea, but the experience is quite fragmentary, and poor compared to what arises in the brain.
He'd say that it would not be possible to explain how experience could possibility lead to such rich concepts.
Apologies if that goes off topic from the OP.
We're a fair way off it anyway. Think we might have to let it roll.
Some thoughts on I and E language. I-language is indeed not a private language in Wittgenstein's sense, since it is not about sensations unavailable to others, but about the things around us. It is however perilously close, close enough that some of the arguments agains a private language may well apply to it.
It is also very close to Fodor's mentalese; I hadn't appreciated the link between Fodor and Chomsky previously.
It is also close to Evans' notion of "speakers'a denotation" as opposed to "name denotation"; The article on which the notes cites is at http://www.jstor.org/stable/410691. I'm not sure why we need Evans.
We might more profitably add Davidson, who in A Nice Derangement..., first posits and then rejects something similar, his "first meaning"
As so eloquently points out, all of these appear to be founded on a misdirected view of language. sets the problem out clearly, in agreeing with Chomsky that most of language is self-talk. Shop's, and perhaps Chomsky's, supposition seems to be that since most of our language use is the little voice in your head, then the source and prime example of language use must be that little voice. But isn't it entirely possible that the little voice is a sort of back-construction, the internalisation, as it were, of our external language?
And there's this.
Similarly mentalese is dependent on algorithmic approaches to language. Hence Fodor's idea that mentalese has the form of first-order logic. I see Davidson's argument in A Nice Derangement... as a sort of diagonal argument agains this; and against the lawful behaviour of language in general. When one sets up some nice set of rules to explain language and language use, someone comes along with a nice derangement of epitaphs to display their negation. Perhaps frustratingly for those who require order, language always transcends whatever bounds one might try to place on it.
I'm going to work from the presumption that language is primarily a social activity, and secondarily "private".
That's no fun.
My ramblings yesterday were unclear. Perhaps I can tidy up a little bit.
Folk tend to talk of names and statements on the one hand and of concepts on the other, as if they were seperate things. So one uses words to give expression to the concept, that concept being a something lurking in one's mind, names by the words one uses. I don't think concepts are like this; or at least, they are not as seperate form words as folk seem to think.
So folk suppose something like that learning the number seven consists in "forming a concept" of seven in the mind of a child. It isn't. The process of learning seven takes place by interacting with things around them, by sharing seven lollies, by working out you will be ten in three more years, by seeing two bikes and five scooters as a group, and by learning all the other numbers as well. That is, it's not the development of a concept but the interaction with the world that counts.
And notice that one checks for understanding of seven by checking these sort of interactions.
"Seven" is not a thing inside a mind, but a capacity to perform certain actions.
And so more generally for pother concepts. They are better thought of not as things but of acts.
And I take it hat this is what underpins "Don't look to meaning, but to use". Hence, Quoting Banno
Quick comment, that's an interesting question. I think Chomsky's idea is that if you introspect into what happening in your head right now, you don't get coherent sentences, sometimes you do, rarely. Usually they are fragments, pieces of words as it were, etc.
This suggests that when we vocalize, we put together these fragments into a coherent whole that another native speaker will understand what we are saying. I suspect that the initial babbling of infants offers a clue of the language faculty growing to maturity.
But your point is worth contemplating.
I'll be sure to look at the articles later, thanks for sharing.
Quoting Moliere
I'm not seeing it. Indeed, i find it hard to understand what an analytic statement would be like in an I-language... as Quoting Manuel
...then how could you get an analytic sentence...?
I don't see how an I-language works.
Sure. But the point remains the not all analytic statements are acts of naming.
But further, when do you, or I, participate in such a formal act of naming? Apart from baptisms and boat launchings, it's not something we commonly do.
Frankly I don't think you've quite got the depth and breadth of Quine's criticism of analyticity. But I do think what you have written here is very good material. Indeed, it is very similar to a short thesis I wrote long ago, mistakenly trying to protect Searle from Kripke.
I agree that a concept (in Wittgensteins sense) is better imagined as an accomplishment (an act of its kind) and not an idea (mental, owned process), and so thinking, knowing, intending, are more like pointing, apologizing, and countingwe judge them based on the criteria that matters to us about them, that count as Banno says.
I would make clear that the end to grab onto is not thus that we then are actors (as a universal or even general rule). We are not now to simply shift to the picture that we control or do these acts or practices. This is not the same game just with a different explanationthe jig is up. We do not use words as a different explanation than that we mean them (not even in moving from picturing that we express a meaning we have inside us). This casual or individuated explanation still relies on a process (internal or external) that remains the mystery that we imagine we simply need to understand to be certain about communication. (Wittgenstein is merely saying that if you want to know what I know means here, look at which of the finite number of versions, or sensesa better word he employs than the easily misunderstood useof that word is happening in this context. For example: of the different possibilities of use, his, in the PI, is the version of use as in which sense, which version in the conceptual category. Whew.)
So the picture is not that we are, somehow: intending, thinking, talking, etc. The point is that judging whether these have occurred is not a matter of knowing a brain process or language structure, but: differentiating what is deemed a thought from merely quoting, or speaking in platitudes; and intention is what we ask you about when you do something weird; and talking is different than shouting or singing. ALL the rest of it [okay, most of all the rest] is based on the desire to create a problem to fix so we can be sure about us squirrelly humansForms, quaila, analytic, factual, real, innate, etc. (or we want to bar ourselves from the possibility of fixing anything).
Quoting Manuel
We rarely put together most of what comes to us unless we are on a first date or creating a speech, much less can use that as a universal description. (The desire though is that we could control what we mean by what we say, even more than we always put it together.) The hoped-for picture here is that there is something (thought, meaning, intention, etc.) that we convey or at least that goes into language (or in this instance is in language systematically). However, for example, when Wittgenstein talks about expression, it is to point to the moment at which we are responsible for what we have saidspeaking externally to this extent only; not to infer it is from something internal. We can also say we speak in expressions; that our words are judged (have importance, are meaningful) by the criteria for threatening, entreating, explaining, describing, etc. But it is not some we that do these or cause them to happen. As I have said in my last post, you are individually responsible for what you say, but it is not otherwise special in your having said it.
Quoting Banno
More than that maybe even. Is talking to yourself necessary? Dont we sometimes want to not listen to ourselves? Despite our internal ramblings, or, more likely, in giving them too much attention, dont we nevertheless speak thoughtlessly?
Sure, if you want to be more precise, you can say that we put together what comes to us when we externalize to others what we say, or when we are attempting to get the other person to see what we are trying to say, as I am doing know, replying to what you said.
The rest of it, is pretty much fragmentary and not put together, that's my experience of it anyway.
As for the Wittgenstein comments, I'd phrase it differently. We are responsible for what we say... ok, fine and fair enough. In a sense, we don't take ourselves to be inferring something internal in ordinary conversation.
But I think that the fact of the matter, is that I attempt to tell you what I have in mind, to the extent that when I am saying something, hopefully you will get to see what I say, from my point of view.
That's an ideal of course, we don't reach it, but that's how I understand communication through language.
I don't quite follow what you are trying to say: "But it is not some "we" that do these..."
Yes, I agree, I am responsible for what I say, but what about it is not special?
Quoting Antony Nickles
yeah, and that's not quite right, since there isn't always a "what goes in" prior to putting the words together. Tolkien said the story grew in the telling, Banno says the sentence grows in the saying. It's not always there beforehand.
Which is what is wrong with the picture of language as externalising something that is already there on the inside... It sometimes isn't there until it is said.
Yes, and what we want to be there is in order for us to avoid our having to stand there ourselves (afterwards); to be responsible for the implications of what we said, to answer for being intelligible further, to be held against our own words. Cavell does a reading of Emersons essay Fate as a discussion of freewill, and I think its there where he has one picture the occurrence of starting a sentence and then realizing that, there, then (in that situation), there is only one way to finish it, of it being out of our control even when we are conscious and careful and choosing our words. Im a twin, and people ask if we finish each others sentences, but what is happening is that I am starting a sentence that doesnt need to be finished, by anyone. You know what the other person is thinking a lot of the time, its just rude to interrupt.
This is a more precise description of the same picture Im saying is only an occurrence (that we decide what to say), not a universal generalization that can explain or figure out language use; Im saying there is no answer. Most of the time nothing definite comes to us; we, as with your examples, just want to apologize, or you want to convince me, or I have to say something polite, or we are responding, in situations where we cant know how it will turn outso we turn it into something we can control; but we dont have in mind what we say; theres nothing that specific or unique about us. Communication is much more slipshod and vague and prone to failure than imagining something definite in you, or that happens in some definite way, instead of as many ways as there are things to do with words. Im saying that the desire for that certainty, that systematizing, that general explanation, is a wish to avoid cleaning up our own mess, or wanting to ensure what we mean beforehand, but that desire creates the goose-chase after a solution.
Both aspects are necessary in language.
On the one hand, we need predictability, otherwise, if you said to me "the grass is greener on the other side of the hill", and I take "grass" to mean "a large, long-necked ungulate mammal of arid country", our conversation will quickly break down. In order to establish a minimum level of agreement, reference to a dictionary will be necessary. We can then both agree that "grass" is "vegetation consisting of typically short plants with long, narrow leaves, growing wild or cultivated on lawns and pasture, and as a fodder crop"
On the other hand, no two people's understanding of "grass" will be the same, as no two people will have had the same life experiences. For example, the concept of grass to a South African taxi driver will be very different to that of an Icelandic doctor.
Communication using language, in order to work, must be founded on basic and agreed definitions of concepts, but consideration must also be taken into account that no two people's concepts of the same word will be exactly the same.
:100: Definately a worthwhile and invaluable thread.
Quoting Banno
As the question in the OP was "If I were to ask Chomsky a question, it would be "Are there analytic statements?", does this mean that on our side we agree that there are.
Quoting Banno
True, I have never launched a boat or baptised a child, as these are things done by others having more authority than me.
But the question remains, who has determined that "triangles have three sides", and why should we accept what they say.
Presumably, it can only be because an Institution or group of people have determined that this is the case, and it would be foolhardy for me as an individual to go against forces over which I have little power.
I may never have baptised the meaning of a word, but it is only sensible to accept the meaning of a word as baptised by those more powerful than me who have come before.
After reading the article, I am uncertain about its implications. Although it is possible that some individuals have a lower frequency of inner speech, further research is needed to investigate whether non-linguistic thoughts are indirectly connected to a language system, even if they are not explicitly experienced by those rare individuals who do not have any inner speech.
However, it seems that many researchers believe that Chomsky's ideas about inner speech (and language in general) are unfounded and lack evidence. Chomsky's theory suggests that language evolved through an accidental exaptation that led to increased mental efficiency, rather than for communication purposes.
Interestingly, I found this paper: https://ijds.lemoyne.edu/journal/8_1/pdf/ijds.8.1.01.wiley.pdf
Norbert Wiley discounts Chomsky's notion thus:
It even appears that Chomsky is directly challenging Wittgenstein's concept of a private language.
Wiley attempts to refute Chomsky's perspective that language was meant for internal speech first, by presenting evidence that inner speech is often a simplified form of language consisting of basic concepts, words, and imagery. This seems to contradict Chomsky's emphasis on fully syntactical language and the generative grammar module.
Here is one of his examples of abbreviated (non-syntactic) inner talk:
So he is trying to make an argument that if the internal structure of generative grammar was mainly for self-talk and mental efficiency, then this should be seen in fully syntactical sentences in inner talk before it is used as communication.
I am sure there are arguments that can be made against this, that you don't need fully syntactic usage for generative grammar to create the mental efficiency. I'd have to see if an argument like that has been made. Too many Ph.D students for there not to be. Certainly, computers have compression abilities.
The embeddedness of language concepts can work as such. As Wiley notes from Vygotsky,
He mentions Saussure:
This theory indicates that on top of syntax is concept formation and their embeddedness in a network. This Saussure idea of language possessing both a syntax and conceptual axis also could be the missing link I wasn't seeing when Chomsky was discussing a "conceptual" system that was learned and outside the scope of his generative grammar. That being said, that is just evidence against Chomskys theory of generative grammar origins in self talk but possibly points to the non-Chomskyan domain of concept formation evolving for self talk.
Now there's an interesting link. I've always been confused about why people think language and thought are tied together as much as they seem to think. I do have verbal thoughts, but only if I'm explicitly forumulating, and when I do, there's always some sort of non-verbal stream of thought in the background that checks whether what I'm saying internally is what I'm actually thinking, or if I need to start anew. For me, anything verbal that's interior is *clearly* at least partly derived from social language. I often have verbal blank-outs: I know intuitively what I want to say, but there aren't any words. I need to find a way to approximate this with language. It's different from the tip-of-the-tongue experience, where I know there's a word I seem to have misplaced. It's an intuition that I don't know how to formulate.
Interestingly, the article also links not having an "interior monologue" to aphantasia, which I think I have, too (at least I'm more on a page with accounts from people with aphantasia than I am with people who puzzle over them).
I'm not an expert on Chomsky, so my immediate question would be whether Chomsky sees the judgement of a statement as analytic or synthetic as a task for the i-language. Chomsky's difficult, since he revised his theory a lot. From what I remember, if you think a line like "Snow is white," that line isn't what i-language is about; it's already internalised e-language maybe? I don't know. I'd have to read up.
I'm fairly sure the i-language, though, is supposed to be some human universal, so that "Snow is White," (Enlish), "Schnee ist weiß," (German) and "Yuki wa shiroi" (Japanese, if I didn't mess up) are the same i-language sentence that generates a different surface structure for each language. A common deep structure that results in different surface structure via different generative rules. (At least that was generative grammar; I'm not sure how much of this still applies to his minimalist program.)
Chomsky's core interest, if I'm not mistaken, was always how sentences were formed rather than what they mean or if they're ture. (I think. As I said, I'm no expert on Chomsky.)
Yet, this might point more to Chomsykean ideas of a "mentalese" (I-language), not that there is no language at all. It complicates things that Chomsky seems agnostic about concepts and very in favor of a generative grammar. As far as concepts, do animals that don't have language have concepts? What is a non-linguistic concept? A dog associating a leash with a walk, is that a concept? It's association sure. Concepts seem to be something beyond just association. Concepts seem to join with a mechanism whereby they are "used" and that can be something akin to a grammar. I can see I-languages being a mentalese that accounts for our shorthand internal language maybe.
Quoting Dawnstorm
The minimalist program is just "merge" now I think.
Would you count seeing something as something as a kind of conceptualization? The ball stands out for the dog; it's a gestalt. This is cognition and re-cognition. Then the dog sees the ball as a to-be-chased; would you say this as a conceptualization?
My own experience of inner dialogue is that much of it goes on in terms of images, not words. But then perhaps the earliest forms of communication of ideas were in images and gestures delineating forms, rather than in words. Problem is we cannot be there to observe.
This is to suppose that there is a thing, which is someone's understanding of grass; as if to understand "grass" were to have a certain box in one's mind; so that your box can be different to my box.
That's the image that is to be rejected. Understanding grass is not having a thing in one's head, but being able to roll on it, pick it, plant it, mow it, set out it's parts in a botanical essay...
You give an oddly subservient view of the way we might use words. A triangular view, inflexible, fixed. Boxes in one's mind.
Well, Chomsky's mainly concerned with syntax, not semantics. (I'm aware that the distinction is not unproblematic.) That I sometimes don't know how to say things because I lack words, doesn't mean that I have problems with the grammar; I just have no words to arrange and modify according to those "transformation rules". So, if deep-structure thought (I-language thought?) can proceed without words, what stands in for words in such a situation? What's the relationship between wordless thought and the constructed word-sequence? I mean, sure, if there's an I-language that's different from an e-language, such wordless thought-stream controlling the e-language output could easily be described as an i-language. That would be some sort of retro-engineering, no? I'm not sure I ever really understood Chomsky.
Quoting schopenhauer1
How do you explain association without concepts? A dog associates what with what? A leash and a walk need to be something associatable; I'm fine with using the word "concept" for that. I don't think it's all that different from a person demonstrating knowledge about role of chairs in waiting rooms by sitting down on one. (You don't need to think the word "chair" to do that.) Whether or not the association itself is also a concept, I don't know. Maybe the dog sees it as some sort of ritual? Likely not, but how would you rule this out?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I somehow get it and somehow don't. If I were to put it in terms that are more intuitive for me, I'd say that Chomsky posits a grammar of thought, and a grammar of language, and a connection between the two. So we have this grammar module in our head that's pretty much the same for everyone, but doesn't determine what language emerges as output (since that's partly social). And Chomsky seems to want to talk about it all in terms of language.
I mean, I'll just point out here that Chomsky thought "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously," is a grammatically well-formed sentence, even though it makes no sense. Grammar is about how we form thoughts, not whether they make any sense, much less about wither they're true. That's where some his pupil parted ways with him (google generative semantics, a shortlived movement, but it did lead to other theories, like cognitive linguistics [via Lakoff, I think?]). I may be wrong about that, too; it's been a while.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Heh. Well, there's certainly more to the methodology, like, say, X-bar theory. I always thought Generative Grammar gave us quite an interesting set of methodology to work with, but I never quite bought into the language faculty stuff.
At any rate, I don't know how analiticity relates to all that. I'd probably expand the question to:
Do analytical sentences exist, and if so are they a feature of the I-language, or are they judgements we port over from non-linguistic cognition to fully formed e-language sentences? (I might need to read more Chomsky to phrase this properly.)
I'll take some small issue with this. Wittgenstein's private language is used to refer to supposedly private sensations, to that feeling you have when your blood pressure is high, to that pain. That's different to what is being described in your quote.
The last speaker of a natural language, and Robinson Crusoe, do not provide examples of such a private language.
Could a Boltzmann Brain develop a language? Perhaps, if it divided itself against itself.
Concepts can be merged to construct new concepts.
Hence the dog might understand that it's master will take it for a walk, but not that its master will take it for a walk next Tuesday.
Draft form. Suggestions welcome.
I believe that i) grass doesn't supervene on its properties, a typically short plant, etc. and ii) "grass" doesn't supervene on its properties, "a typically short plant, etc."
To start, there is a diference between what exists in language and what exist in the world. In language, "grass" is defined by the properties "a typically short plant with long, narrow leaves, growing wild or cultivated on lawns and pasture, and used as a fodder crop". In the world, grass includes the properties a typically short plant with long, narrow leaves, growing wild or cultivated on lawns and pasture, and used as a fodder crop.
I see something in the world that has the properties typically short plant with long, narrow leaves, growing wild or cultivated on lawns and pasture, and used as a fodder crop. It would be unwieldy in conversation to say "yesterday I mowed a typically short plant with long, narrow leaves, growing wild or cultivated on lawns and pasture, and used as a fodder crop". It is far easier to define "grass" as "a typically short plant with long, narrow leaves, growing wild or cultivated on lawns and pasture, and used as a fodder crop" in order then to more simply say "I mowed the grass"
Once "grass" has been defined as the set of properties "a typically short plant with long, narrow leaves, growing wild or cultivated on lawns and pasture, and used as a fodder crop". the statement "grass has narrow leaves" is true by definition and is therefore an analytic statement.
Grass in the world may have numerous properties, only some of which are included in the definition of "grass". In part for the reason that some properties may only be discovered in the future, and in part that some properties may not be useful in daily conversation. It is also true that the definition may change with time.
Definitions aren't perfect, but they are better than the alternative of not having definitions. Without definitions communication would break down. Especially if you said "I mowed the grass yesterday", and my concept of "grass" was "a thickset, usually extremely large, nearly hairless, herbivorous mammal of the family Elephantidae having a snout elongated into a muscular trunk and two incisors in the upper jaw"
As regards boxes in my mind, I agree that my concept of grass is private and inaccessible to anyone else, but my concept of "grass" is accessible to others as it is has been publicly defined.
Communication using language would break down without definitions. One consequence of definitions are analytic statements.
Analyticity is the acknowledgment that the whole doesn't supervene on its parts.
Thoughts and concepts stand in for words
From SEP - Analayticity and Comskyan Linguistics
He sharpens this distinction in his (1986, pp. 202) by distinguishing what he regards as essentially the ordinary, folk notion of external, what he calls E-languages, such as English, Mandarin, Swahili, ASL and other languages that are commonly taken to be spoken or signed by various social groups, vs. what he regards as the theoretically more interesting notion of an internal I-language. This is not a language that is spoken at all, but is an internal, largely innate computational system in the brain (or a stable final-state of that system) that is responsible for a speakers linguistic competence
As I see it, in the mind there are two aspects. There are conscious thoughts about concepts, in that I can have the conscious thought that the tree is to the left of the river, and there is an underlying subconscious structure that enables me to have these conscious thoughts about concepts.
I can have conscious thoughts about concepts without the need of words. When driving through a busy city street, if I had to put a word to every thought or concept, I would have crashed in the first five minutes.
Once I can have conscious thoughts about concepts, an E-language can be developed. My conscious thought that the tree is to the left of the river may be expressed as "the tree is to the left of the river".
In a sense, our conscious thoughts about concepts is a language, but this is secondary to the underlying subconscious structure that enables thoughts about concepts. It is this underlying structure that is common to different peoples.
In an E-language, if "grass" is defined as "a typically short plant with long, narrow leaves", the statement "grass has narrow leaves" is analytic.
In the mind, if I have the thought that there is something that is typically a short plant with long, narrow leaves, then I know that this something that is typically a short plant with long, narrow leaves has narrow leaves, and again, this is analytic.
IE, in the mind, we can have conscious thoughts about concepts, but underlying this is a deeper subconscious structure that is common to different peoples that enables us to have these thoughts about concepts in the first place.
Chomsky says that concepts cannot exist without language. See Noam Chomsky on the Big Questions (Part 4).
7min "Even the simplest concepts tree desk person dog, what ever you want , even these are extremely complex in their internal structure . If such concepts had developed in proto human history when there was no language they would have been useless. They would have been an accident if developed and quickly lost as you cannot do anything with them. So the chances are very strong that the concepts developed within human history at a point where we had computational systems which satisfy the basic property"
Perhaps Chomsky would say that as concepts cannot exist without language, if there is analyticity in language then there must also be analyticity in concepts.
Good question, which is why it's interesting to me that Chomsky doesn't seem as interested in concept formation (the content or representation of what is being generated). Because the assumption seems to be that if concepts are in place, and if inner talk is the primary target of language, the internal grammar should be consistently used for that purpose. This article and others seem to indicate that internal talk is varied and oftentimes truncated and only formalized when externalizing it in external language. So yeah, I'm just trying to throw some ideas out defending inner talk as the target whilst not seeming to have generative grammar internally. I can only think as a defense, that grammar is there in internal thoughts but it's hidden and working in the background. It's running in the background, but the person doesn't realize its efficacy in mental efficiency until it is fully actualized in external language perhaps? Again, this would be much easier if Chomsky's focus was conceptual networking and association, but it is generative grammar which is rule-based. So that makes it harder to defend I would think. However, I still think there is actually a case for conceptual representation and networking being something much more efficient in human brain structures that is innate and targeting inner mental activity and not simply a hodgepodge of other mechanisms or targeting communication. But that is pure conjecture on my part.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yeah, concepts are tricky. I think in fact, much of analytic philosophy's general confusion (starting with people like Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein and going from there) goes back to this problem of concepts and being baffled by what exactly concepts are. The ancient Greeks of course had their notions- Plato had pre-existing Forms, and Aristotle had essences. But I would gather to say that something that ties these "concepts" together is a sort of abstraction; it isn't just recognizing a pattern (i.e. associative learning), but having a level of remove from the association whereby it becomes "tokenized" like a mental "object" that one's memory can refer back to. And it is precisely the nature of this "tokenization" that creates the question of whether some sort of linguistic ability has to be there for conceptual thought to take place. In other words, it begs the question of whether concepts entail language. It might not be equivalent, but perhaps where you see smoke (concepts) you see fire (language).
Quoting Dawnstorm
I think he doesn't have much to say on it, as that's not what he's interested in. Rather, I think people like Kripke wrote some influential theories in the philosophy of language community, specifically regarding the idea of "causal link theory" whereby someone "baptizes" a word and there is a link of that name to that object that obtains in all possible worlds. Mind you, I believe this theory was meant for proper names and expanded to scientific kinds and some other instances. Perhaps it only applies to objects that are actual instances and not universals. So, BrownMug is what I dub this mug next to me. It is thus causally linked as long as it is continually being used in the community. BrownMug is always linked now to that particular mug. However, I don't think this is the same for the universal "mug", as "mug" could have been something else in all possible worlds.
This relates tangentially to @Banno OP.
So I think it's half-and-half. In terms of grammar generation, Chomsky seems to believe language can be wholly internal (I-language not E-language) and therefore, some sense private (if we mean innate by this) and does not need a language community to generate the rules. For E-languages, sure, the conventions have to be there. As to the conceptual/semantic aspect, that doesn't seem to be the focus for Chomsky either way, so not sure about that one.
So it seems for public E-language, the community is needed for convention, but I-language could suffice without a community. What this means for inner talk, I'm not sure though. It still seems to use E-language, just internally, so would probably not count as a private language. I'm not sure though to what extent I-language can be considered a private language prior to its usage in generating E-language.
This very much aligns with what I was discussing here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
An odd word, now becoming surprisingly common. What could it mean to have properties supervene onto individuals... green supervene on grass... that the green "occurs as an interruption" to the grass? Hu?
And what does it relate to what I have said?
Quoting RussellA
Why? A child knows its mother, despite not being able to provide a definition. And so on for the vast majority of words. I think you are here just wrong.
The following argument is stolen from Austin:
Quoting Banno
Is this your opinion, or your view of Chomsky, or both?
Analyticity without language? What could that be? I can make sense of two lexical elements standing for the same concept, but of two concepts standing for the same concept? How could that work?
A neural network need not, and usually does not, work things out using symbols to represent the things on which it is working.
Yes this has been a classic debate of connectionism versus computationalism which this article provides a good overview of: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/#ArgForCon.
It seems that Chomsky thinks grammar more computationalist, and conceptualization can be either. According to Chomsky, grammar is too hierarchical for it to be distributed.
Rather, it is a call to action in a matter of life and death. One means 'evacuate immediately, bring an extinguisher, call the fire brigade, wake up and stop watching the play, Sauve qui peut.
In the trenches, it means something else again.
In another thread, https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14286/a-potential-solution-to-the-hard-problem, the beginnings of consciousness are posited as being in evaluating sensations. I propose that not naming, but evaluation is the beginning of language; the first word was something like a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
I would ground meaning and language in the same giving-a-fuck-icity. The Boy who cried 'Wolf!' is not a tale of someone describing the fauna, but of someone calling falsely for help, and how that falsehood undermined himself as a communicating member of society.
And when we hear that "the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold" we should understand that the word 'wolf' is being used in the same sense, with the same urgency of meaning, and not merely "... the largest extant member of the family Canidae, and is further distinguished from other Canis species by its less pointed ears and muzzle, as well as a shorter torso and a longer tail. Wiki.
Analiticity surely comes much later, when wolves are not much problem any more, and we can start measuring the length of their tails. Certainly one does not begin with Euclid's Elements.
The sound of the dinner gong does not indicate a concept, it is a call to arms.
The idea becomes muddled as analyticity is often associated with a prioricity. The idea being that logic is both analytic and a priori (needs no investigation of instances of the world to be true). For example, if something is fully X then it is not not X.
Where X, with deep irony, stands for anything at all. And what is this "not"? It must be an unsaying, like the all clear after an air-raid warning. Panic over!
It could be the case that all analytic statements were simply one-time synthetic statements that were conventionalized.
True, the same word may be defined in many different ways. The Merriam Webster dictionary for "fire" lists almost 42 different uses.
Though the same principle applies, in that is is more convenient and quicker to say "fire" than "I am making a call to action in a matter of life and death."
I can well imagine an audience of philosophers looking up the word in Merriam Webster and discussing back and forth which of the 42 definitions applies in the particular case while the auditorium burns around them. Not.
First language, then definitions. Let us talk about language before definition, before dictionaries, for a moment. The language of a child. For example: my daughter would hear us saying things like "Can you do that on your own?" And being independent minded, she soon started to demand, "Let me do it on my rown!." Now you will not find "rown" in Merriam Webster, but we knew what she meant, as does everyone reading this.
Chomsky likes Locke.
From IEP - Locke:Epistemology
Locke defines knowledge as the perception of an agreement (or disagreement) between ideas (4.1.2). This definition of knowledge fits naturally, if not exclusively, within an account of a priori knowledge. Such knowledge relies solely on a reflection of our ideas; we can know it is true just by thinking about it. Some a priori knowledge is (what Kant would later call) analytic.
Would it be possible to get Chomsky to talk about the analytic in reference to Locke, someone he likes.
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Quoting Banno
In my mind is a box that includes both the knowledge of my private experience of grass, something not available to anyone else, and the knowledge of the word "grass", which is publicly available to everyone else, as described by Wittgenstein in PI para 293.
As some philosophers, including Searle, believe in supervenience, the concept should be taken into account.
If there is no superveninece, then the word "grass" is simply the set of words "a typically short plant with long, narrow leaves, growing wild or cultivated on lawns and pasture, and used as a fodder crop".
As the SEP - The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction notes
Analytic sentences, such as Paediatricians are doctors, have historically been characterized as ones that are true by virtue of the meanings of their words alone and/or can be known to be so solely by knowing those meanings.
In this case the meaning of "grass" is fully known by knowing the meaning of the words "a typically short plant, etc". In this event, as the SEP notes, analytic.
However, if there is supervenience, then the word "grass" is more than the set of words " a typically short plant, etc". In this event, the meaning of grass cannot fully be known just by knowing the meaning of the words "a typically short plant, etc". IE, the expression cannot be analytic.
IE, whether an expression is analytic or not partly depends on one's attitude to supervenience.
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Quoting Banno
We are communicating using written language. I have no other clues to your meaning other than the words on my screen, such as tone of voice, facial expression or bodily movements.
You have written the word "mother". You may not believe me, but I don't know what this word means. Within the context of the paragraph it could mean, "a child knows its neighbourhood", "a child knows its school", "a child knows its pet", etc.
In order for me to fully understand what you are saying, what does "mother" mean ?
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Quoting Banno
There are two types of concepts, simple and complex (there may be better terminology).
As I wrote before
[i]The gavagai problem may be solved by taking into account the fact that there are simple and complex concepts, and these must be treated differently. In language, first there is the naming of simple concepts, and only then can complex concepts be named, such as the complex concept "gavagai".
Simple concepts include things such as the colour red, a bitter taste, a straight line, etc, and complex concepts include things such as mountains, despair, houses, governments, etc.[/i]
Dictionaries allow us to learn complex concepts, where a complex concept is a set of simple concepts. But we cannot learn simple concepts from the dictionary
In Bertrand Russell's terms, the dictionary allows us knowledge by description but not knowledge by acquaintance.
For simple concepts, we need knowledge by acquaintance, achievable using Hume's constant conjunction of events.
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Quoting Banno
True, I should have made it clearer when I wrote " As I see it".
@Dawnstorm asked "So, if deep-structure thought (I-language thought?) can proceed without words, what stands in for words in such a situation?"
It seems inconceivable that we use words such as "road", "traffic light", "pedestrian", "blue sky" in an I-language.
As I wrote:
When driving through a busy city street, if I had to put a word to every thought or concept, I would have crashed in the first five minutes.
I see no alternative to the idea that in an I-language thoughts and concepts stand in for words.
===============================================================================
Quoting Banno
Starting with E-language, if "grass" has been defined as "vegetation consisting of typically short plants with long, narrow leaves, growing wild or cultivated on lawns and pasture, and as a fodder crop", then the statement "grass has long narrow leaves" is analytic.
There is a direct analogy between analyticity in E-language and analyticity in I-language.
Within the I-language, there are no words such as "vegetation, consisting, etc", but rather thoughts about concepts.
It follows that within the I-language, if I know that grass is vegetation consisting of typically short plants with long, narrow leaves, growing wild or cultivated on lawns and pasture, and as a fodder crop, then I must also know that grass has long narrow leaves, which is also analytic knowledge.
Would you know what a child meant if they said something more complicated, such as
"habari za asubuhi, habari gani" without having to look in a dictionary.
Was there a time when it wasnt common knowledge that all bachelors were unmarried men? You know, before it was discovered?
Maybe all bachelors are unmarried men seems synthetic when it informs someone who doesnt know what a bachelor is. So it could be reworded to show that the statement in this case is about the word rather than about bachelors: bachelor means unmarried man. This is synthetic (as Im supposing all definitions are) and it follows from it that all bachelors are unmarried men is analytically true.
Yes! Exactly what I am suggesting. And I know others have posited something like this, like Quine. It seems to have been a holdover from 17th and 18th century statements about truths to make the distinction so clean cut. Kripke was getting to its nature by emphasizing necessity above all else. That is to say, a triangle necessitates it being three sides and 2 +2 =4 is true in all possible worlds. However, the discovery of this truth is in some way synthetic when first discovered. The passing on of this discovery as a convention that we learn very early on, makes it "analytic", but this is only the way we discover the information. Logic truths might be entailed by necessity, but these are still things for which have to be discovered. That is the main point. Someone worked that out through observation and computation and inference and comparison and all that.
Yes I was actually going to point that out regarding the difference between "A triangle is 180 degree, three sided polygon" and "Bachelors are unmarried males". Kant may have said that the triangle is in some sense "a priori" whereas the bachelor is always a posteriori true. However, I think this distinction is muddled as there doesn't seem to be any clear distinction.
Triangles are abstractions.
Bachelors are abstractions.
Triangles are abstractions of observations, found in both nature and human-made instances.
Bachelorhood is only found in human-made instances (or conventions if you like) but are nevertheless abstractions.
Both are derived from some initial observation and passed on as definitions.
Further, Kripke might say something like:
I guess you can say that if there are a world without bachelors, then bachelors wouldn't exist and therefore a posteriori and contingently true. However in all possible worlds, X is NOT not X, and therefore is necessarily true or something of this nature.
But Ill leave it there for now. I have enough mental plates to juggle. :smile:
You can't do that! Leaving me hanging! :smile:
In the beginning, someone discovered something that had three sides and it had no name. They didn't discover a "triangle", they discovered something that had three sides. The statement "triangles have three sides" would have been meaningless, as the word "triangle" didn't exist.
They named this something with three sides "a triangle", though they could equally well have named it "a circle".
Once named, as the statement "triangles have three sides" is true by virtue of the meanings of the words alone, it is therefore an analytic statement.
IE, when the statement "triangles have three sides" first occurred, it was already an analytic statement.
Quoting RussellA
Right, but the key idea here is they discovered something about the concept first. I guess it's two different questions:
1. The name is attached to the concept thus given a label to that concept.
2. The way that the concept is derived is still synthetic, as it is observed (This is synthetic by way of observation). How would you know that some things have three-sided shapes without observing the world first in some empirical way?
Once the labels are in place it becomes analytic, sure. But that still relies on the initial understanding of the concept which is synthetic. Also, even the dubbing of the name "triangle" is [s]synthetic (if by this we mean some event in the world needed to happen first).[/s] (nevermind, this is a posteriori)
Many parts are observed in the world
But from any set of parts, numerous mereological wholes can be discovered
For example, from the 15 parts shown - thousands of possible wholes may be discovered - for example -
ACHN - BFGM - AB - ABG - etc
It is true, the observer discovers a triangle, CKO
But why discover one particular shape, rather than any of the other thousand possibilities.
Presumably, because the observer knows a priori that the triangle is a shape important in their interaction with the world.
1) Therefore, a priori, the observer knows that the triangle is a shape important in their interaction with the world.
2) It is a necessary truth that the triangle is a shape important in their interaction with the world.
3) The statement "triangles are important in their interaction with the world" is analytic, because it is known a priori that triangles are important in their interaction with the world.
I would suppose Kant would say something like triangles are discovered yet true by our faculties that observe this so a priori synthetic perhaps?
The sky is blue is synthetic a posteriori because it is discovered but true only by way of the content we pick out and not by way of how our faculties must operate.
An X is NOT not X is analytic a priori as not only is it true by our faculties but the very terms dont need to be discovered but are true immediately based on how logic operates a priori.
Hey man good to see you writing about these kinds of things for a change! :smile:
So did Robert of Gloucester know a priori that a Bachelor is but "Syre ?ong bacheler..þow art strong & corageus"? Was he mistaken, not knowing the real meaning of the word was to do with matrimony? Or is there more to the relation between a word and its meaning than is given in a cluster of synonyms?
And why did we drop the letters yogh and thorn?
The point was a simple one:
Quoting supervenience
Quoting RussellA
Indeed, I do not. I think you understand that a child knows its mother, without the child being able to provide a definition. Especially since you went on to talk of a further instance of understanding a concept without being able to provide a definition, this time from Russell.
Again, it seems to me you have not grasped the gist of Quine's argument. Hence your odd insistence that you have solved "the gavagai problem", the inscrutability of reference, with a solution that doesn't appear to so much as address it.
Keep reading. It'll come.
What counts as prime depends on the task in hand.
If you are referring to the bachelor- a world without marriage has no use for the term bachelor. Strictly speaking, bachelorhood might not obtain in all possible worlds because it is very much dependent on the contingent historical facts and convention of this world. It is very much context dependent.
Where I think Kripke's "innovation" was, was to point out that objects and individuals can obtain in all possible worlds, in relation to their name and in scientific kinds, their identities.
The name "mug" as identifier for "cup with handle" is context-dependent and contingent. This mug next to me, I will dub it, "BrownMug" somehow can make it through though as that name is some sort of essential identifier that is not context dependent on that particular mug.
I get that. It is a traditional notion. But, maybe not Kripke, but I can see there being a difference between X is NOT ~x and bachelors are unmarried males. That is to say, bachelors is possible but not necessary in all possible worlds. Bachelors seems to pick out something in this world that makes it true. It is not quite "the sky is blue" synthetic but it is not quite the law of non-contradiction level analyticity.
I might even say it is superficially analytic, using modal logic as its determination.
Quine's point is that all analytic statements are superficially so.
Yes, I agree with that. Hume might say the same. The law of non-contradiction was a kind of bone I was throwing out. It seems like something whereby the very definition is entailed in itself. This is NOT not this seems more foundational and necessary because it is our very way of seeing the world...
However, this is more getting to a priori than analyticity. I get that analyticity is about definitions, but if we agree that definitions start out synthetic first, then that is why Bachelors is synthetic and context dependent whereas law of non-contradiction very much shows its entailment in how we operate more than it is derived. Again, this is more akin to a priori.
Using the convention of "snow is white" is true IFF snow is white, perhaps one could say:
"the sky is blue" is synthetic, the sky is blue is a posteriori, "an X is NOT not X" is analytic and an X is NOT not X is a priori.
"The sky is blue" being synthetic brings in the debate between Indirect and Direct Realism
As you wrote:
Direct realism seems to me, to posit that we "objectively" see the thing "as it is in itself". What is something "in itself" though? A tree is the tree you see as a perceiver when there is no perceiver? Mind you, I'm not saying the tree doesn't exist without a perceiver. If you answer, "Well, no the tree isn't what an average human 'sees' when observing a tree", you have your answer- and it doesn't indicate direct realism. Sense data, goes through other layers of the brain, and creates something we have called a tree. Even if you (oddly) posited just "sense data" and no other layers involved (whatever that might mean), then there is still something there as a barrier to what is the tree in itself. It is its own "indirect".
For the Direct Realist, the sky is objectively blue, in which case the statement "the sky is blue" is synthetic and refers to a world that is external to the mind.
However, for the Indirect Realist, as the sky is not objectively blue, but only subjectively blue, the statement "the sky is blue" is still synthetic but refers to a world that exists in the mind and not external to the mind.
I'll keep reading.
Quoting Banno
True, language is use. Wittgenstein PI para 23 "Here the term "language-game" is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life."
Elaborating, I look at parts in the world, and these parts can combine into numerous mereological wholes.
In a sense, each mereological whole exists in the world, and each may be discovered in the world, although it would take an inordinate amount of time
It is therefore true that in the world there is something with three sides which can be named "triangle", but it is also true that every possible mereological whole could also be named, again taking an inordinate amount of time
As Wittgenstein said, language is part of an activity, a form of life
As it would take too much time to discover each possible shape in the world and then decide which I had a use for, in practice, I start with a task, and then discover in the world that shape that would be suitable for the task in hand.
My judgement that a particular shape is suitable to my task at hand is based on a predetermined requirement as to the suitability of any shape, and is therefore an a priori judgement
My judgement that there is something in the world that has three sides is synthetic, as I can only know that there is something with three sides by discovery.
IE, my judgement that there exists something in the world that has three sides and has the name "triangle" has been synthetic a priori.
Yes agreed. I guess bringing these two concepts together, the sky being blue is contingent on observation which accounts for its synthetic nature in both being directly perceived or indirectly represented. Indirect realism does have the notion that it is the faculties of mind that make "sky" and "blue" possible, but it is not about the faculties themselves (cause and effect, space, time, law of non-contradiction, etc.), but about the content that is passing through those faculties from observation and therefore still a posteriori for either one. That we see color or that we can pick out properties at all to me seems synthetic a priori.
What?
Actually it does have much relation and bearing to Chomsky. A prioricity and organization of the world is very much akin to I-language and the whole nativist camp in cog sci.
You want to talk about vague and muddled notions, both:
a) Chomsky's view on analyticity as described in your OP article is just that.
b) The article itself is kind of meandering and muddled touching a little of here and there
So that being said, I am actually surprised how fruitful this thread was from that start.
Well, yes. Hence the direct question to Chomsky.
:meh:
The Wikipedia article Objectivity (philosophy) notes:
In philosophy, objectivity is the concept of truth independent from individual subjectivity (bias caused by one's perception, emotions, or imagination). A proposition is considered to have objective truth when its truth conditions are met without bias caused by the mind of a sentient being.
The SEP article Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics notes
He sharpens this distinction in his (1986, pp. 202) by distinguishing what he regards as essentially the ordinary, folk notion of external, what he calls E-languages, such as English, Mandarin, Swahili, ASL and other languages that are commonly taken to be spoken or signed by various social groups, vs. what he regards as the theoretically more interesting notion of an internal I-language. This is not a language that is spoken at all, but is an internal, largely innate computational system in the brain (or a stable final-state of that system) that is responsible for a speakers linguistic competence
How can one know that within an I-language the thought that the sky is blue has an objective truth ( its truth conditions are met without bias caused by the mind of a sentient being) or a subjective truth (caused by one's perception, emotions, or imagination) without introducing the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity.
Chomsky sensibly believes that a basic range of concepts are innately represented in the human mind, because, after all, life has been evolving on Earth for about 3.7 billion years.
I would agree about some primitive concepts are innate, such as the colour red.
(1) The first one is to say that most of our concepts are definitions which are defined in terms of primitive concepts. The primitive concepts are either defined as sensory primitives such as RED, SQUARE etc., or as abstract concepts such as CAUSATION, AGENCY, and EVENT etc.
But Chomsky goes too far in arguing that some complex concepts are also innate, such as carburettor
(1) It is of course possible that Chomsky is correct that children are born with innate concepts such as: CARBURETTOR, TREE, BUREAUCRAT, RIVER, etc.; however an incredible amount of evidence is needed to support such an incredible claim.
I will take the opportunity to argue again that the statement "bachelors are unmarried men " is analytic.
Philosophers often use definitions to explain analyticity
(2) Quine suggests that one might, as is often done, appeal to definitions to explain the notion of synonymy. For instance, we might say that bachelor is the definition of an unmarried man, and thus, synonymy turns on definitions.
Quine in Two Dogmas of Empiricism attacks the analytic/synthetic distinction in large part because of the problem of substituting synonyms for synonyms
(2) However, Quine attests, in order to define bachelor as unmarried, the definer must possess some notion of synonymy to begin with. In fact, Quine writes, the only kind of definition that does not presuppose the notion of synonymy, is the act of ascribing an abbreviation purely conventionally. For instance, lets say that I create a new word, Archon. I can arbitrarily say that its abbreviation is Ba2. In the course of doing so, I did not have to presuppose that these two notions are synonymous; I merely abbreviated Archon by convention, by stipulation. However, when I normally attempt to define a notion, for example, bachelor, I must think to myself something like, Well, what does it mean to be a bachelor, particularly, what words have the same meaning as the word bachelor? that is, what meanings are synonymous with the meaning of the word bachelor? And thus, Quine complains: would that all species of synonymy were as intelligible [as those created purely by convention]. For the rest, definition rests on synonymy rather than explaining it (Quine, 1980: 26).
Quine fails to understand the function of a definition.
It is not the case that in attempting to define the notion of "bachelor", I must think to myself what does it mean to be a bachelor, and conclude that bachelor means a man that is unmarried. Rather, a definition is a set of other words, and the meaning of the words in the set plays no part in the definition. The function of the dictionary is not to explain the meaning of each word, its function is to group sets of words together and then name this set, as illustrated by @Banno here.
For example, within a language are a set words "dirisha", "mlango" and "chumba", none of which I know the meaning of, but for convenience the set may be named "nyumba". As "nyumba" names the set of words "dirisha, mlango, chumba", regardless of knowing the meaning of each word, it is necessarily known that "nyumba = chumba", ie, which is analytic.
The meaning of each word may only be discovered out with of the dictionary, external to the dictionary, for example using Hume's principle of constant conjunction of events, as illustrated here, or Wittgenstein's picture theory in the Tractatus.
As a definition is the name of a set of words, regardless of the meaning of those words, all definitions are analytic, including the definition of a "bachelor" as an "unmarried man".
1) = CHOMSKY AND QUINE ON ANALYTICITY PART 1
2) = IEP - Willard Van Orman Quine: The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction
Nice article that lays out the ideas well!
Quoting RussellA
Or if Fodor is correct, we utilize some sort of epistemic a priori mechanism that isn't fully formed definitional concepts. Chomsky tacitly seems to agree with the more extreme view that each concept is innately definitional in various ways (which the article seems to disprove pretty easily) by way of intuition of concepts or by way of syntactic construction.
As a side note, I always thought Hume's constant conjunction was itself a psychological mechanism that he simply wrongly did not recognize as such. As even learning the habit of inferencing (even if not "actually" inferencing as some innate mechanism) is a psychological mechanism, is it not? Yes it may not be necessary in what is observed but it is necessary on our reasoning (pace Kant). Clearly it could be the case these habits are false, but then why can we discuss and use them at all? There does seem to be a non-cultural element to it. That itself needs to be verified or falsified.
I think actually this simply goes back to what I was saying here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
There is the E-language, whereby there are statements such as "A triangle has 80 degrees, and is a three sided polygon". The set "180 degrees, three sided and polygon" has been named "a triangle", such that the statement "a triangle is three sided" is analytic.
There is the I-language, whereby there are concepts such as a triangle has 180 degrees, is three sided and is a polygon.
I can have the concept of a triangle without knowing the word "triangle", and I can know the word "triangle" without knowing what it means, without having the concept triangle.
Though interacting with the world, my private concept of triangle is linked with the public word "triangle". By interacting with the world, my private I-language is linked with the public E-language
The Nominalist view is that abstracts don't exist in the world, only in the mind, meaning that as triangles and bachelors are concepts they only exist in the mind as abstractions.
In the sense that concepts exist in the mind as an I-language and definitions exist in the world as an E-language, I agree with Fodor that concepts cannot be definitions
I also agree with Fodor that concepts don't have an internal structure, and are, in Kant's terms, unities of apperceptions
Both the words "triangle" and "bachelor" exist in the E-language which exists in the world, whereas triangles and bachelors exist as concepts in the I-language which exists in the mind.
The next question is, how are concepts in the I-language linked with words in the E-language.
Even then, I think I'm taking back some of what I thought before. If the language is public then it is subject to revision and then analytic statements will only be known in a post hoc manner (I am usually skeptical of a priori knowledge). We can classify statements such as the case of bachelors and unmarried men and dub them analytic. And we can also say "War is war" and know that the meaning is not analytic -- it's the "is" of predicating rather than the "is" of identity (which really only goes against attempting to define analyticity according to formal characteristics*)
*Defining it formally with E-languages at least. But I'd include logic as within the E-language category.
This element is what confuses me trying to sort out what is 'innate' versus an imposed condition. Are all environmental factors to be dubbed 'structural' factors in contradistinction to what happens in an individual?
I don't get the either/or here. Cognitive psychology has plenty of theoretical claims that differ from the 'taxonomy' Chomsky has objected to throughout his career.
Nice, really nice synthesis here! So what about Hume or Quine's extreme empiricism (the denial of innate mechanisms at all)? Where does that fit in, and what is your analysis? As I said earlier:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting RussellA
The sort of studies done by Tomasello and such, no? But he strongly disagrees with Chomsky. He is very much of the social cognition camp. It is a cooperative learning phenomenon. No cooperative learning, no language. But, I am not sure how much he does actually agree that there is some sort of mechanism in the brain devoted to grammar. I'd have to look up more of his debates and articles. Based on what I have seen, I don't think he does really.
For me, the mechanism linking concepts in the mind and language in the world can be explained by Hume's principle of the constant conjunction of events, illustrated here, in Kant's terms, a posteriori. But the mind's ability to perceive patterns in the world, to perceive the constant conjunction of events is innate, a product of 3.7 billion years of life' e evolution within the world, in Kant's terms, a priori.
I'm not sure that Hume would have denied the innate. He writes in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
By the term impression, then, I mean all our more lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will. And impressions are distinguished from ideas, which are the less lively perceptions, of which we are conscious, when we reflect on any of those sensations or movements above mentioned.
It is an operation of the soul, when we are so situated, as unavoidable as to feel the passion of love, when we receive benefits; or hatred, when we meet with injuries. All these operations are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able either to produce or to prevent.
I would assume Hume takes certain abilities as innate natural instincts, such as hearing, seeing, feeling, loving, hating, desiring and willing. It would follow that rather than learning the instinct of loving and hating from the world, we project our instincts of loving and hating onto the world.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It comes down to the debate between Chomsky, who argued that language is founded on innate concepts biologically pre-set and the Behaviourists, such as Skinner, who argued that that all language is learnt during one's interaction with the environment.
There seems to be a link between Tomasello and Hume in that humans have an ability to recognize patterns.
Tomasello argued:
The essence of language is its symbolic dimension which rests on the uniquely human ability to comprehend intention. Grammar emerges as the speakers of a language create linguistic constructions out of recurring sequences of symbols. Children pick up these patterns in the buzz of words they hear around them.
Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding wrote:
When we say, therefore, that one object is connected with another, we mean only, that they have acquired a connexion in our thought, and give rise to this inference, by which they become proofs of each other's existence: A conclusion, which is somewhat extraordinary; but which seems founded on sufficient evidence.
If I touch a hot stove and see my hand blisters, in my I-language, I am conscious of pain and quickly remove my hand. But if my I-language was formed by my social environment rather than my innate instinct, in a different social environment on touching a hot stove and seeing my hand blister I could well be conscious of pleasure and leave my hand where it was.
But this is not something that is empirically discovered. In all societies, if someone touches a hot stove, they don't leave their hand there but quickly remove it. This suggests that their I- languages are the same, meaning that I-languages are not determined by the social environment but have been determined by innate instinct.
As Chomsky proposed, the I-language is not a language that is spoken at all, but is an internal, largely innate computational system in the brain that is responsible for a speakers linguistic competence.
Quoting Moliere
True, "war is war" is analytic if "is" refers to identity, and "war is war" is synthetic if "is" refers to predicating.
But also, using "is" as identity, if the set of words "A","B","C" and "D" is named "war", then the statement "war is B" is analytic, regardless of the meaning of "A", "B", "C" and "D".
Similarly, if the set of words "A" and "B" is named "bachelor", then the statement "a bachelor is B" is analytic, regardless of the meanings of "A" and "B".
It's because the I-language is not spoken that I doubt concepts are at work. We talk about concepts fairly frequently, and successfully. Freedom, Love, Democracy -- conceptually rendered it's nothing like a neural net, for instance.
Starting to think that the speculation of multiplicity is off topic, though. The reason I thought I-languages might be interpreted analytically is because neural nets are, at base, a bundle of computations. Suggesting something like analyticity in a mathematical sense, at least -- in the sense of there being a sequence or an order of some kind which eventually sets up some kind of relationship to full-blown symbolic meaning.
What it seems we'd agree upon is that I-languages are not spoken like normal languages (which actually speaks to why I tend to deny mentalese -- it's like a homuncular fallacy for meaning). I think I'd just include concepts, as well as logic, within E-language. Or, at least, while I-language remains unclear it follows that E-languages are a clearer category for including things we can make sense of.
Quoting RussellA
This sets out how to use analyticity. It's a convention -- if we interpreted "is" in a certain way, and we interpret the terms in a certain way, then it follows that A is D, analytically.
It reads more like a stipulation than a feature of knowledge.
There is the I-language in the mind, and the E-language in the world.
There is the word "love" in the E-language which refers to the concept of love. The concept being referred to doesn't exist in the either the E-language or the world independent of any mind.
Where else can the concept of love exist if not in the I-language of the mind.
Quoting Moliere
Following on from the OP, the analytic and synthetic are aspects of language. The necessary and contingent are aspects of logic, and the a priori and a posteriori are aspects of knowledge.
Yes, analytic statements are not necessarily statements of knowledge.
The relationship between the learner and the environment can mean very different things. In the Skinner model, stimulus is always on one side and response the other side of events. For Vygotsky, for example, there is a dynamic where the stimulus becomes modified by changes in the learner:
This approach does not cancel the domain of the 'innate' but neither does it make it a realm where 'e-language' can be clearly separated from 'I-language'.
Cool.
So all Brambles are Unbrimbled Tembres.
Unbrimbled when one removes a brimb from one who has been brimbled, and Tembre's being the Brimbled Brambles.
Quoting RussellA
Heh, the whole reason I liked "I-language" was because I thought it side-stepped the whole mind thing :D.
Where do concepts exist? I'm not sure. Or if it's even quite right to say they exist, or if this is a reification.
The example is meant to demonstrate how nonsense terms can come to make sense from the English grammar, rather than because of an I-language.
Yep. The argument seems to be that we need a place for concepts, hence the I-language.
So it's based on a misguided spacial notion of "concepts".
Ah, Hume is more Kantian at second glance here.
Hume's argument was that concepts like causation are not inherent in the world but rather are products of our thought patterns or "habits of thought." However, if Hume's philosophy relies so heavily on a priori reasoning, why did Kant feel the need to refute him? Kant disagreed with Hume's claim that all knowledge comes solely from sensory experience and the constant connection between these experiences. However, it should be noted that Hume's theory essentially describes the process of inference, which relies on a mechanism within the brain. This indicates that some sort of innate mechanism is necessary for his theory, though it may be less modular than the theories of Kant and Chomsky. Nonetheless, the exact nature of this mechanism remains unclear.
I agree, sentient life must evolve through interaction with the world in which it exists, which is why it has taken 3.7 billion years for life to have evolved to its current form.
From the Wikipedia article Enactivism
Sriramen argues that Enactivism provides "a rich and powerful explanatory theory for learning and being."[66] and that it is closely related to both the ideas of cognitive development of Piaget, and also the social constructivism of Vygotsky.[66]
The I-language cannot be separated from the E-language, in the same way that the subject of a painting cannot be separated from the colours and shapes of the paint used in the painting, yet both fulfil different functions.
This answers the OP, "Are there analytic statements?"
Quoting Moliere
Yes, the E-language can be grammatical without making sense.
One advantage of the I-language is that every thought about a concept makes sense, in that meaning within an I-language is self-referential. IE, it is not possible to have a thought about a concept without that thought making sense, having meaning. If I think about the concept triangle, the thought is its own meaning. Unlike the E-language, it isn't necessary to go outside the I-language to find meaning.
The meaning of my concept of pain is the pain itself. As Searle wrote:
The relation of perception to the experience is one of identity. It is like the pain and the experience of pain. The experience of pain does not have pain as an object because the experience of pain is identical with the pain. Similarly, if the experience of perceiving is an object of perceiving, then it becomes identical with the perceiving. Just as the pain is identical with the experience of pain, so the visual experience is identical with the experience of seeing.
The SEP article Concepts wrote that "Concepts are the building blocks of thoughts". The Wikipedia article Concepts wrote "Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks underlying principles, thoughts and beliefs". As the dictionary explains thoughts as occurring in the mind, concepts must also also occur in the mind.
As with many words in language, such as evolution by natural selection, F = ma, the wave theory of light, DNA is the code of life, the genome is the book of life, gravity, dendritic branches, Maxwell's Demon, Schrödingers cat, Einsteins twins, greenhouse gas, the battle against cancer, faith in a hypothesis, the miracle of consciousness, the gift of understanding, the laws of physics, the language of mathematics, deserving an effective mathematics, etc, the word "concept" should also be thought of as a ,metaphor, not something that has a literal physical existence.
In an E-language, meaning is extralinguistic, whereas in an I-language, meaning is the I-language itself.
Hume is a realist about causation, in that although he believes that causation is real in the world it is unknowable. He rejects the idea that we directly know that events in the world are necessarily conjoined, as this would require a priori knowledge, but he does accept that we indirectly know about causation from the observation of constant conjunction of certain impressions across many instances.
Kant on the other hand, is also a Realist, but argued that a genuine necessary connection between events is required for their objective succession in time, and using his revolutionary conception of synthetic a priori judgments, rescues the a priori origin of the pure concepts of the understanding.
So yes, Hume rejected an a priori explanation for causation whilst Kant didn't.
But this raises the question, when patterns are observed in the world, how is the mind able to see these patterns. Is the mind's ability to see patterns innate a priori or learnt from the patterns themselves. Who is right, Chomsky's Innatism or Skinner's Empiricism.
Empiricism is a problem of circularity. If I have no innate rules, and I can only learn the rules from what I observe, then, as the Tortoise could have said to Achilles, where is the rule that tells me when I have discovered a rule. Empiricism proposes that there is something in the rule that I observe that tells me this is the rule that has to be followed, but where is the rule that tells me I have to follow it.
Kant expressed the problem of being able to gain all knowledge from observation in B5 of Critique of Pure Reason
Even without requiring such examples for the proof of the reality of pure a priori principles in our cognition, one could establish their indispensability for the possibility of experience itself, thus establish it a priori. For where would experience itself get its certainty if all rules in accordance with which it proceeds were themselves in turn always empirical, thus contingent?; a hence one could hardly allow these to count as first principles.
It is true that Hume argues we can only indirectly observe causation, and as such is not a priori, but it is also true that he does write about instinct, which is innate and a priori, as being more powerful than thought and understanding. It is perhaps this innate and a priori instinct that allows the mind to observe causation in the first place.
Hume in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding wrote:
What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? A simple one; though, it must be confessed, pretty remote from the common theories of philosophy. All belief of matter of fact or real existence is derived merely from some object, present to the memory or senses, and a customary conjunction between that and some other object. Or in other words; having found, in many instances, that any two kinds of objectsflame and heat, snow and coldhave always been conjoined together; if flame or snow be presented anew to the senses, the mind is carried by custom to expect heat or cold, and to believe that such a quality does exist, and will discover itself upon a nearer approach. This belief is the necessary result of placing the mind in such circumstances. It is an operation of the soul, when we are so situated, as unavoidable as to feel the passion of love, when we receive benefits; or hatred, when we meet with injuries. All these operations are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able either to produce or to prevent.
On the one hand, Hume argues that we only know causation from observation and not, as Kant argues, a priori, but on the other hand Hume many times refers to instinct, which is innate and a priori, and it is perhaps this innate a priori instinct that allows us to see patterns in our observations in the first place.
I think I answered in the affirmative in my opening post, while relying on a theory of analytic statements that reduces them to convention.
Some statements are analytic, but only by convention? Wouldn't we thereby lose any advantage to their being analytic, since someone who disagrees with the convention need not be bound by it?
Yes -- analytic statements lose all their advantages in my interpretation of them. At least for anyone who wants them to be anything more than a convention. I think my interpretation acknowledges why I can understand others who claim P is an analytic statement, and deflates the reason why it is. (I was tempted to go into 7 + 5 = 12 -- but it just seemed too off topic)
So "all ungrammatical sentences are sentences" is not obviously analytic, despite the similarity in structure to "all unmarried men are all of them men"; and that we can see this seems in some way to be dependent on some sort of play on words; perhaps even on a convention.
Perhaps we ought be more sympathetic to Quine's suggestions, and think that "all unmarried men are all of them men" also relies to some extent on convention.
Which is anathema to supposed I-language.
So the workings of analyticity exposed here appear incompatible with I-language.
Not to be pedantic, but does an unmarried man in a de facto relationship count as a bachelor, or must a bachelor live alone? Then what counts as living alone? What if his partner spends two days and nights a week in his dwelling? Three? Four?
It depends on the definition of "marriage"
According to Merriam Webster, "A bachelor is an unmarried man".
But Merriam Webster goes on to say that the definition of "marriage" is changing:
The definition of the word marriageor, more accurately, the understanding of what the institution of marriage properly consists ofcontinues to be highly controversial. This is not an issue to be resolved by dictionaries. Ultimately, the controversy involves cultural traditions, religious beliefs, legal rulings, and ideas about fairness and basic human rights.
In the past, "unmarried man" was defined as "a man who has not taken part in a contractual relationship with a woman recognised by the law". By this definition, an "unmarried man" includes a man living in a relationship with another person. Therefore, a bachelor may or may not be a man living in a relationship with another person.
Today, "unmarried man" may be defined as "a man who is not living in a relationship with another person". Therefore, a bachelor is a man not living in a relationship with another person.
The definition " a bachelor is an unmarried man" hasn't changed, but whether a bachelor, being a man, is or isn't living in a partnership with another person has changed.
The SEP article The analytic/synthetic distinction writes:
Analytic sentences, such as Paediatricians are doctors, have historically been characterized as ones that are true by virtue of the meanings of their words alone and/or can be known to be so solely by knowing those meanings.
As regards the statement "bachelors are unmarried men", it is not possible to know whether it is analytic or synthetic until first knowing the meanings of the words used, in the same way that it is not possible to know whether the statement "moja ndio si ndoa mwanadamu" is analytic or synthetic until knowing the meanings of the words used.
Therefore, the first task is to know what the words mean.
You are right that naming is by convention. The set of words "man" and "unmarried" has been named "bachelor", though the set could equally well have been named "giraffe", "mountain" or "sawdust".
Therefore, even before trying to determine whether the statement "bachelors are unmarried men" is analytic or synthetic, we know that the set "unmarried" and "men" has been named by convention "bachelor".
So knowing that the set "unmarried" and "men" has been named "bachelor", we know just by virtue of the meaning of the words alone that "bachelors are unmarried men" is an analytic statement.
I just saw this. Yes agree, compositionality (merge). But it brings up an interesting understanding of differences of concepts based not just on syntactic merging of novel complex phrases, but the very ability to abstract. The term "Tuesday" for example is full of abstractions of various types.
Measurement and Counting and Pattern-Recognition: The 7 day week comes from the Babylonians dividing the month up from 28 days of the lunar cycle into 4 parts. The Romans renamed the days after their gods. The Germanic tribes like the Angles and Saxons took the Roman gods overlayed their own gods on top. For example, "Tiu" is their god of war, which corresponded with the Roman "Mars" (Martes still retains this in Spanish and Romance languages for example).
Ordinality: That there is something first, second, third, etc. Tuesday is the third day of the 7 day week.
Pragmatics: It is used to indicate a whole host of things. Not only what is happening on those days in a particular time, space, for particular people, but that it often indicates subtler cultural markers such as being associated with a workday as opposed to a non-work day (in general cases).
Images: The word Tuesday, the memory of an event of Tuesday, a color, person, image of something associated with the day, the embeddedness with other concepts like Monday, week, future, past.
Displacement of Time: That there is a present, future, and a past where this day may fall.
All these things and more are in place in humans and not animals.
I see a main argument here between the empiricists and nativists.
Nativists: There are epistemological tools in the brain that allow for separate modules like "measuring/counting/ordinality".
Empiricists: This is all based on general learning. But what does this mean? This too relies on a brain mechanism (things such as working, episodic, and long term memory, long-term potentiation, etc.). So where is this dividing line?
Is it really a dividing line between computationalism and connectionism in modern day parlance?
Anyways, going back to the dog and Tuesday, it is more than compositionality, these mental abilities (I just called it "abstraction" but that can be a misplacement of a more specific concept) that make it so complex. If I-language only refers to basically syntax (merge/compositionality) and not semantics, then indeed this would not have much to inform analyticity.
@RusselA you may be interested.
Chomsky said concepts wouldn't exist without an I-language, so, the semantic part of an I-language are its concepts.
Primitive innate concepts such as the colour red is one thing, but Chomsky weirdly argued for more complex innate concepts such as carburettors, Knowing that a carburettor is a device for mixing air and fuel means knowing the analytic fact that a carburettor is a device.
Well there is a difference between:
carburetor is a device for mixing air and fuel and
carburettor is a device
No?
Objects have properties seems pretty embedded, no?
Also, is identity ever proposed as an innate mechanism? "This is that" is that learned or is that just a priori a part of human cognition? Mind you, I don't mean the content of the logic, just that kind of identity logic. If that is the case, I-language and analyticity can have a connection. If not, then it is just the way E-languages operate once labels are in place. That is to say, it is all convention, all the way down. But again, my whole theme here is that even "convention" or "habits" or anything that is processed through our brains, is still processed by some mechanism.
Just like your quote of mine from direct/indirect.. Whether something is direct/sensory only or indirect/representation, the brain is doing something.
Hopefully suggesting that sense-making, at least, isn't I-langauge dependent. If we can make sense of nonsense words with "not-adjective noun is un-adjectived noun" then the I-language must do something else other than "make sense of things" -- this is a total nonsense phrase but we can understand the temptation to call it analytic from the grammar of English.
EDIT: Which basically goes to agree withyour point here.
That does take the long view of what 'development' involves. I suppose the development of children has to be seen in the context of that larger one. In regard to language, it prompts me to question the clean separation between the 'innate' and the 'environment' as put forward by Chomsky.
Beyond the specific theory put forward by Vygotsky, I think the issue needs to include his observation, "From this point of view, learning is not development."
I think you'd like Tomasello's view here:
seems to have avoided this conclusion by enlarging the notion of innate concepts to include everything, at least up to carburettors. One is left to ponder what concepts are not innate. If all concepts are innate then why bother making the distinction? would both eat the cake that all sentences are true by convention while keeping the cake that some sentences are true by the meaning of their terms.
Yes, I understand that there are possible nuances, and that's why I brought it up; it shows that the statement "a bachelor is an unmarried man" is not analytic, because it is not definitively and unambiguously true.
So, you say a bachelor is a man not living in a relationship with another person. I take it you mean a sexual relationship, because surely a man could have housemates and still be counted a bachelor? But then what if the man has sex with his housemate? Does he then cease to be a bachelor? Or as I said before what if a man lives with his sexual partner three or four days a week?
Yes these are points I was trying to present between the difference of the statement X is not not X and bachelors are unmarried males.
One is conventional and relies on a ton of contingencies, including definitions of marriage, being a precise thing, and people meeting that criteria. The other is defined by the way logic just operates. One can be prone to change and one, seemingly at least cannot. Someone might say something like unmarried males is simply not a good enough rigid designator, in all possible worlds. However, that begs the question: Would there ever be a designator that would be good enough for a convention-based statement with ambiguous contingencies?
I do think there is a case for rigid designators for specific objects and entities though. There is a causal link of a name and a person that transfers so that that person is designated by that name in all possible worlds. But as to statements about conventions, harder to prove as the very entity itself is unclear and relies on contingencies.
The problem with names for persons and places is that more than one may have the same name, and that is where descriptions may need to come in to determine who is being referred to.
The name 'bachelor' seems to be non-functional without any description (definition), and the name itself is inherently tied to description anyway. The problem there is, as you point out, that the defining descriptions cannot be adequately disambiguated.
Agreed here but
Quoting Janus
Though I agree often a description is needed to differentiate people with same name, that the name is referring to that particular person is still the case. Mind you, even if the name itself changed over time, there is still a causal link.
The Tomasello lecture is excellent. His observations are noted in a larger challenge to Chomsky presented by Brian MacWhinney and Elizabeth Bates.
I agree, but that a person was baptized with a particular name entails that the name refers to that person seems to be a somewhat trivial truth; a truism. I don't see it as telling us anything much.
Yeah. Something about baptizing an object provides a causal link between name and object. You dont need a description, just this link to make the name refer to a given object or referent.
The word works, despite there never having been a baptism.
So on two accounts, the causal chain theory does not seem to apply here.
I think I agree. What does TOW mean? Theory of Worlds?
Haha oh you mean two I think. In that case I agree.
Right, but you need to be present when the name is first applied, or to be informed later that the name has been applied. I could say, for example, that my fridge is called 'Peter', then you would know what I meant when I said, "Peter's been running nicely, so I put the milk in him, and took out some carrots". On the other hand if I just uttered that sentence you might have no idea what I am referring to, and only a supplementary description (or in this case maybe clue-based guessing) would inform you of what "Peter" refers to in this context.
A mistake thats apt for post on meaning and reference.
Indeed, if a name is stated and no one else knows its referent, not sure. Its still is a rigid designator I guess but weakly rigid. Ha
The name is unimportant so long as you get what you want... meaning is use.
Agreed as far as importance. Not sure if intended name has any real meaning if no one uses it. Not sure how causal link theory would respond other than the misheard name is part of the causal link. If no name is heard at all then perhaps a new baptism?
Interesting that these do not appear mutually exclusive... There's no obvious reason that all three could not be true in various circumstances... not reason we have to choose one as preeminent.
I see my brother enter the room and immediately leave the room. There is no doubt in my mind that I have seen my brother enter and leave the room.
There is no doubt in my mind that the person entering and leaving the room are identical.
I would suppose that the brain's ability to know that it is the same object that moves through space and time is an innate mechanism that has developed over 3.7 billion years of evolution, rather than something that needs to be learnt.
After all, when we see a snooker ball roll over a snooker table, we don't think that every second the old snooker ball disappears and a new snooker ball appears. We know without doubt that it is the same snooker ball. We know without doubt the nature of identity.
I agree that it is very difficult to put a clean break between a person and their environment. Enactivism discusses this.
There are two aspects:
First, how an object can interact with its environment is a function of its physical form. For example, a kettle in having the physical form it has cannot play music, the horse having the physical form it has cannot enjoy the subtleties in a Cormac McCarthy novel and the human in having the physical form it has can probably never understand the nature of consciousness.
Second, an object's physical form has been determined by its environment.
There is feedback between the innate and the environment. The Wikipedia article on Feedback notes:
Simple causal reasoning about a feedback system is difficult because the first system influences the second and second system influences the first, leading to a circular argument. This makes reasoning based upon cause and effect tricky, and it is necessary to analyse the system as a whole. As provided by Webster, feedback in business is the transmission of evaluative or corrective information about an action, event, or process to the original or controlling source. Karl Johan Åström and Richard M.Murray, Feedback Systems: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers.
There seems to be three types of statements: "a bachelor is a bachelor", "a bachelor is an unmarried man" and a "bachelor is always rich".
It seems that there is general agreement that "a bachelor is a bachelor" is analytic and "a bachelor is always rich" is synthetic, though there doesn't seem to be agreement as to whether the statement "a bachelor is an unmarried man" is analytic or synthetic.
My argument that "bachelor is an unmarried man" is analytic because:
1) Before it can be decided whether "a bachelor is an unmarried man" is analytic or synthetic, the meaning of the words in the statement must be known.
2) We know that the set of words "unmarried" and "man" have been named "bachelor".
3) So knowing that the set "unmarried" and "men" has been named "bachelor", we know just by virtue of the meaning of the words alone that "bachelors are unmarried men" is an analytic statement.
Is there a flaw in my logic ?
I limit innate concepts to primitive concepts, such as the colour red, pain, simple relationships such as to the left of, simple shapes such as a straight vertical line. Chomsky weirdly seems to extend innate concepts to carburettors.
Though I am pleased you are mixing me up with a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.
Quoting Banno
All names are named by convention. It is by convention that the colour red has been named "red" rather than "sawdust", for example.
By convention, if a sentence is thought to correspond with the world it is named "true", otherwise it is named "false". For example, the sentence "the Eiffel Tower is in Paris" is true and the sentence "all unicorns live in Paris" is false. IE, some sentences are true by convention because the meaning of "true" has been agreed by convention.
Whether the statement "the Eiffel Tower is in Paris" is true or false can only be known by first knowing the meaning of its terms. IE, some sentences are true because the meaning of their terms has been agreed by convention.
Would the thing that we've named the "Eiffel Tower" be located in the place that we've named "Paris" if all of humanity were suddenly wiped out?
Yeah, the inferotemporal (IT) cortex has been demonstrated to be linked to object recognition (though the feature of "what" is being recognized to distinguish objects is still inconclusive).
Surely, this kind of distinguishing plays a role in how objects are given discrete identities that are the "tokenized sets" that might comprise concepts.
My point being that, the very fact of such mechanisms discounts convention-only theories of language acquisition. That is to say, if language relies on concepts, and concepts rely on specific brain regions devoted to things like object identity, then there is a clear path back to innate mechanisms necessary for language. This doesn't mean that behaviors don't take place, but to grab a certain @apokrisis common idea, there is the "downward causation" of the animal behavior acting upon the innate mechanisms of the brain, creating a semiotic feedback loop of sorts whereby both are necessary for this process of language, including the a priori mechanisms that may be needed to recognize meanings in concepts. However, I do understand that identification of objects and the meaning of objects are two different things. "That a ball is a ball" is one thing. That a ball is a round object and all other embedded ideas with it, is another. This needs some a posteriori knowledge, but the fact that things get "embedded" in a network of concepts is itself probably a mechanism. Certainly connectionist models of brain organization can (and do) account for this modelling on small scales. Thus, nativists and empiricists are both right.
Yes.
We observe something in the world and then name it "The Eiffel Tower". This something existed before we named it. As this something existed before being named, its existence doesn't depend on being named.
Similarly, we observe somewhere in the world and then name it "Paris". This somewhere existed before we named it. As this somewhere existed before being named, its existence doesn't depend on being named.
As both the something that has been named "The Eiffel Tower" and the somewhere that has been named "Paris" can exist without a name, they can continue to exist even if there was no one around to name them.
From that SEP article, the reference to Quine " Rather, there is simply no such thing as that to which our words refer."
Is pretty much my own encapsulation of why "Bachelor' is so problematic as a referent. As @Janus pointed out, just exactly "what" is marriage? The convention is imprecise really. Is it the ceremony? Is it the signing of a document? Is it the belief of others that the person is married? Is it what the people who are getting married believe? And on and on.
I think Kripke tries to sidestep this problem with his "all possible worlds" notion. Clever, but as we are seeing, possibly problematic. Certainly it seems so for "bachelor", but even for his more prototypical example of a Proper Name, it could get a bit dicey as to if the name really holds. I guess Kripke would say something like, "Even if John were completely replaced (Ship of Theseus), because there is no substance but rather, it is causally linked to something, it remains a rigid designator to the reference (read that as something akin to an "open set" that is causally linked to something)."
Kripke also runs into the problem that in order for his "modal logic" to work, he needs the concept of causality to be necessary and not contingent (very Kantian actually). But in all possible worlds, does this have to hold true in reality? I guess to Kripke, this point doesn't matter because the necessity of human understanding itself needs causality for all possible worlds (that is my interpretation at least).
I totally agree. I understand certain primitive concepts as innate, such as the colour red, pain , etc. We then use these primitive concepts to build complex concepts based on our observations of the world, such as governments, mountains, etc.
Without the foundation of primitive concepts, the building of complex concepts would fall down.
:up:
Quoting RussellA
Yes, I just think it goes back to what counts as a "concept". Are primitive concepts concepts, or are they just primitive epistemological tools? I know this sounds a bit pedantic but might have implications for language. That is to say, "recognizing red" and the "concept of red" could be two different things (even as a primitive concept), no? For example, red might need to be embedded with other things like "green (or any other color)", or associated with "red object" for the primitive a priori phenomena to be a concept that "red" has "aboutness" in some tokenized, discrete, "mind-object".
Okay.
Would "The Eiffel Tower is located in France" be true if all of humanity were suddenly wiped out?
I think of concepts more as a metaphor than a literal physical thing.
Metaphor? Can you explain? Do you mean simply that it is an ambiguous concept (ironically) :smile:?
Yeah, it is tricky defining concepts. One can argue as you seem to that qualia and forms (like roundness) are indeed concepts. But someone else might argue that these are proto-concepts. They are materials with which the concepts are created. Concepts are one step beyond, whereby there is a recognition of an object. The primitive might be something like, "Our brains perceive roundness". That THIS object is round, seems to be closer to the more "indexed" (or "tokenized") notion of a concept. Or perhaps just the recognition, "All balls are round" too. Abstractions and instantations.
Edit: Just riffing on my own idea.. There is an intermediary now that I think of it.. Ball-round is just an immediate understanding where "this ball" doesn't matter, just the immediate recognition. Thus in a sentence, "This ball is round" it is immediate that this is analytic upon no reflection. It is simply an externalization of the internal.
Is "ya mnara lipo nchi" true if there is no one who knows what it means. If no one knows its meaning, then it isn't a language, it's an object like a pebble, and as a pebble cannot be true or false.
Similarly, "the Eiffel Tower is located in France" would no longer be a language, it would become an object, and just like a pebble, cannot be considered as either true or false.
It could be argued that any understanding we have is metaphorical. Some theorists have suggested that metaphors are not merely stylistic, but that they are cognitively important as well. In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but also in thought and action. Cognitive linguists emphasize that metaphors serve to facilitate the understanding of one's conceptual domain, typically an abstraction such as "life", "theories" or "ideas" through expressions that relate to another, more familiar conceptual domain, typically more concrete, such as "journey", "buildings" or "food".
For example, metaphors are commonly used in science, such as: evolution by natural selection, F = ma, the wave theory of light, DNA is the code of life, the genome is the book of life, gravity, dendritic branches, Maxwell's Demon, Schrödingers cat, Einsteins twins, greenhouse gas, the battle against cancer, faith in a hypothesis, the miracle of consciousness, the gift of understanding, the laws of physics, the language of mathematics, deserving an effective mathematics, etc.
For example, within your own post one could say that the following are more metaphorical than literal: tricky, one can argue, created, one step beyond, primitive, indexed, tokenized, notion, abstractions, instantiations, riffing, idea, intermediary, analytic, reflection, externalization of the internal.
I observe something in the world that is round, but the Nominalist and Conceptualist would argue that roundness doesn't exist in the world, only in the mind. They would say that what I actually observe is one particular instantiation of roundness. In fact, nothing in the world can be exactly round, the most would be an approximation of roundness.
It is still the case, however, that I observe something round, even though no round thing can exist in the world. Therefore, the roundness that I am observing can only exist in the mind as an abstraction, as a concept. Merriam Webster lists abstraction as a synonym for concept.
I can name my concept of roundness as "round" and make the statement "I see a round ball", knowing that what I am referring to doesn't actually exist in the world but only in my mind.
Yes, I am somewhat familiar in passing with Lakoff's idea of metaphor. Something to think about for sure! I'd have to look to see how deep the studies are on it though. However, aren't some of the metaphors pretty complex in and of itself? Are the metaphors supposed to reduce to very primitive ones?
Quoting RussellA
Indeed, I'd agree with this mainly. How could it be that judgements such as "round" exist outside an interpretation of such? The thing just "is". How can properties be said to be instantiated in the object and not the mind? The ball has the potential to be actualized as round I guess. Properties need some sort of interpretant, so it seems that (only theoretically) a ball exists (as an event of some sort in space/time), and that (only in potentiality) it can have properties.
I will throw this out there, Speculative Realist, Graham Harman had an interesting idea of "vicarious properties" and "withdrawness". That is to say, humans really do "see" a small portion of the essence of an object, but that the object is always withdrawn or "hidden" besides the vicarious properties of objects it interacts with. This goes for human-object or object-object interactions. However, the idea of "vicarious properties" (properties that objects can share or relate to other objects with) seems a bit ad hoc. I don't know his theory well enough though. If there are any Speculative Realists in the house, please provide some more details.
We know that the meanings of the terms 'bachelor' and 'unmarried' man were considered to be synonymous, when it was perhaps considered unthinkable that a man would live with a woman out of wedlock. Are they still synonymous?
So, a couple of questions: is the statement: "a dog is a mammal" analytic? Can analytic statements be ambiguous?
:up:
So, would "The Eiffel Tower is located in France" still be be meaningful if all of humanity were suddenly wiped out, but it could not be true or false because no one would know it's meaning, or would it no longer be meaningful at all?
Consider "ya mnara lipo nchi". This object has no meaning until some one gives it a meaning. If there is no one to give it a meaning, it cannot have a meaning. As with a pebble, which is neither true not false, if "ya mnara lipo nchi" has no meaning, it cannot be either true or false. Similarly with "The Eiffel Tower is located in France".
Therefore, both will be true. As there would be no one around, i) it could not be true or false because no one would know it's meaning and ii) it would no longer be meaningful.
The meanings of words can change. For example, a dog can mean a domesticated mammal or it can mean a terrible film.
If a dog means a domesticated mammal, then the statement "a dog is a mammal" is analytic, whereas, if a dog means a terrible film, then the statement "a dog is a mammal" is not analytic.
IE, even though the same word may have different meanings, it is still possible for some statements, such as "a dog is a mammal" to be analytic.
Quoting Janus
The Merriam Webster defines analytic as "being a proposition (such as "no bachelor is married") whose truth is evident from the meaning of the words it contains". The Cambridge dictionary defines analytic as "(of a statement) true only because of the meanings of the words, without referring to facts or experience"
There is some ambiguity between these definitions of analytic
IE, even though the definition of analytic may be ambiguous, given a particular definition, the analytic expression itself cannot be ambiguous.
Perhaps the advantage of a metaphor is that it doesn't need to be reduced to more primitive ones, but allows understanding by relating a complex abstract concept to more familiar concrete ones.
For example, I may be perplexed by the concept of gravity, but I feel I have some understanding by observing one snooker ball rotating around a football on a sheet of rubber stretching under their weight.
Quoting schopenhauer1
As I see it, I observe something having the properties round, green and sweet and name it "apple".
When I observe the object apple, I am observing a set of properties, in that if each property was removed one by one, once all the properties had been removed, there would be nothing left.
It is not the case that the properties round, green and sweet are instantiated in the object apple, rather, the object apple is an instantiation of the properties round, green and sweet
It is not the case that an object has an essence hidden behind the properties of the object , rather, the essence of an object is its set of properties, in that if all the properties were removed, neither an essence nor an object would remain .
Bradley questioning the nature of properties. He started with the example of a lump of sugar. He noted that there appears to be such a thing as a lump of sugar and this thing appears to have qualities such as whiteness, sweetness, and hardness. But, asked Bradley, what is this thing that bears properties? On the one hand, he thinks it is odd to assume that there is something to the lump of sugar beside its several qualities, thus implying that postulating a property-less bearer of properties is incoherent. On the other hand, he notes that the lump cannot merely be its qualities either, since the latter must somehow be united. For Bradley, the unity properties presupposes relations, which is why he went on to question our concept of relations.
The alternative is that the apple supervenes on its properties, in that the apple has an essence which is more than the sum of its properties. But how this is possible needs to be justified.
If the property of roundness was instantiated in the object in the world rather than existed in the mind as a concept, as nothing in the world can be exactly round, how can roundness be instantiated in the world if no instantiation of roundness is possible in the world.
Is there a difference between saying that "bachelor" means "unmarried man" and saying that a bachelor is an unmarried man?
But I'd still prefer to just use English rather than simple concepts -- it seems like English is expressive enough to make sense of simple concepts and complex concepts. Maybe there's some I-language in there somewhere, but does it have anything to do with analyticity? Is "Red is a color" an analytic statement? Why is "color" considered simple, or "line" considered simple, when these are more like rarified bits of experience which require reflection and interpretation? Are necessity and contingency simples? How do we make non-arbitrary choices on basic concepts?
This is neat: Quoting Banno
If we accept that analytic statements are analytic on the basis of convention then we accept that they are, at the same time, not going to have anything philosophically interesting about them. That "A is A" isn't a truth for logicians, but a feature of a particular way of arranging language logic-wise.
Quoting RussellA
We must know the meaning, of course. But do we build a meaning from the individual words? What are the tokens of meaning? Why not sentences? Why not gestures?
To know if P is analytic we must know not just P, not just the meanings of the words (think of bi-lingual dictionaries and how little they tell you) -- but we must know the language those words are in. Language allows us to interpret symbols, which is how we come to know meaning. And no sentence stands outside of context, even the ones we're using here. (It is a philosophical context, but still)
Let's just grant the I-language of simple concepts and what-have-you. Somehow this allows us to use an E-language. The examples of analytic statements aren't in terms of simple concepts, though -- they're in E-language. And it seems you agree there's an element of convention in the E-language.
Isn't analyticity on the side of E-language, rather than I-language?
As the meaning of every word in language derives from convention, in what other way can a statement be analytic if not by convention.
Quoting Moliere
When driving through a busy city, I don't have time to put all my thoughts into words taken from my E-language. Yet, I couldn't successfully navigate the streets and other traffic without being aware of complex concepts existing within my I-language,
Chomsky in New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind seemed to argue that not only are there complex concepts in the I-language but that they are also innate. I can understand primitive concepts being innate and complex concepts learnt but would agree that both are within our I-language.
If analyticity requires complex concepts, and complex concepts exist within the I-language, then analyticity can also exist within the I-language.
So far I've thought convention, as in stipulation, is the only way -- so it's trivial.
Though I'm not sure meaning is entirely conventional, either. At least not in the same way that analytic statements are. Here they are conventional because there's no criteria for deciding if a sentence is analytic other than to say "Here is the set of analytic statements"
Quoting RussellA
How about like this -- if the only way we can express our I-language is through E-language, as we are doing in this thread, then what does "I-language" add?
It seems we're still stuck with E-language in determining analyticity, right?
Another meta-lingual category is rhyming. Time and rhyme rhyme, but that they do so is a convention of what rhyming is.
Rhyming focuses on sound synonymy. Analyticity focuses on meaning synonymy.
That some bits of language come out the same on the left and right hand side in terms of meaning is an accident in the same way rhyming is an accident -- it happens, but it's not philosophically interesting.
If the only way the Empire States Building can remain vertical is because of its foundations, one could also ask, then what do its foundations add ?
Are you so certain of your foundations that you'd put them in analogy to architecture?
Why not riverbed bottoms and hinges at the top?
This, for me at least, is probably why I'd favor the E-language over I-language expression of analyticity. I've been using the E-language for quite some time. The I-language, at least my understanding of it, is built upon my understanding of the E-language and my ability to use it. And, since we're dealing here with one another and not some individual phenomenological situation of problems and equipment and horizon, I'd certainly have to use the E-language in talking about analyticity even if there's some I-language foundationally at work in my use of E-language.
I'm starting to think that the E/I-language is to the side of analyticity, though I started out the other way at the beginning of this thread.
He usually responds to emails within mere hours, but, given that he is going to devote some of his time to TPF, it would be a shame not to ask for clarifications.
Alternatively, you can wait an see how he replies to Banno, and ask something in relation to his reply.
Very lively discussion. :up:
E-language is what is written and spoken in our daily lives, and the I-language is the physical mechanism of the brain. E-language is the externalized language and I-language is the internalized grammar.
I agree that we have been using the E-language for quite some time, but no E-language can exist without the brain that has created it, even though the brain can exist without an E-language.
The E-language didn't evolve independently of any brain. Its form, character and nature can only be a function of the physical mechanism of the brain.
It cannot be the case that first there was an E-language existing in the world independent of any user, rather, first was the brain and subsequently there was the E-language.
Chomsky argued that it has been generally assumed that language is thought to be something existent whilst grammar is considered something abstract. So grammar, unlike language, does not exist in the same way as language.
However, Chomsky proposed instead that it is language that is abstract and grammar that is existent. He argued that language is something externalized from our brain whilst grammar is the physical mechanism of our brain. He named language externalized language (E-language) and grammar internalized language (I-language).
I find it easier to believe that E-language has been founded on the physical mechanisms of the brain, an I-language, than there is an E-language operating in the world independently of any mind controlling it that is capable of making sense of the I-language.
What about maths? We might define the symbols and axioms but the results take time to discover and have practical import.
I find it difficult to think of the brain as operating like a grammatic machine, and expressed as much in saying "Why neurons firing rather than concentrations of proteins of a certain kind or ratios of concentrations of the various chemicals interacting or blood flows ?" -- that what we choose as an I-language, even if we delimit our domain to the brain, will be over-determined by the E-language we already know. We'll only know to focus in on this or that bit of the brain if it happens to have a relationship to the meaning of the language we are investigating, and we'll only focus on the bits of the brain that we happen to be able to discriminate.
But that doesn't mean that I'm saying we aren't using our brains. It's just this the category of I-languages that's being disputed -- one may just want to say that things like logic and grammar are a part of the language we're all familiar with and have been using all along rather than some un-definite imagined possible brain architecture or pattern. In addition, I don't think I'd forgo grammar. Grammar and language are as real as beans and brains, in my view. (it's the theories about grammar and language that end up in the land of abstractions)
Math is always weird. Depends on how we set up analyticity probably?
The first thing to mention is that mathematics will be useful to us regardless of how we interpret it with respect to analyticity. So, on my view of analyticity, mathematics could count but I suppose the question is -- is there a non-trivial way to set up analyticity with respect to math?
It'd depend on how we want to dub a particular mathematical sentence to serve as an analytic example in comparison to our synthetic sentences. So we might want to say "For any constant A: "A = A" is analytic, and any instantiation of said sentence is synthetic, i.e. "1 = 1"" as a means to differentiating between individual mathematical sentences and sentences that are tautologously true within a mathematical system -- setting up a notion of "constant" to fulfill the same role as "Bachelor" and "unmarried man" in the bachelor example of analyticity.
Wouldnt degrees of roundness suffice? Whatever relations that interact with that object will interact with it in relation to the round-like feature of that property. So if it is round like, properties of rolling are in play for example. Round like things will roll on some other objects with certain properties such as grade.
This is one of the more important criticisms of the ideas of the Tractatus, made early on in the Investigations - up to about §60, but see especially §47 - 48. And there is the following, that anticipates Gavagi:
Compare with Quoting RussellA
What does i-langage do that is not captured by "cognition"?
What if, however unlikely it might seem, dogs turned out, on further investigation, not to be mammals? A better example might be the related understandings (which you would presumably say are analytic) "reptiles are cold-blooded" and "dinosaurs are reptiles"; what if dinosaurs were warm-blooded (as some paleontologists theorize)?
Quoting RussellA
Both of those definitions seem to state that a proposition is analytic on account of its truth being given purely in the meanings of the words. So then, what if the meanings of the words are ambiguous? Would that make the truth of such an expression undecidable and hence no longer analytic?
Or else, if we were to stipulate that 'bachelor' means 'unmarried man' whatever 'unmarried man' might be taken to mean, or even if we cannot precisely determine its meaning, would that not be trivial?
:up:
The SEP article The Computational Theory of Mind asks "Could the mind itself be a thinking machine?". This brings in the problem of consciousness, in that it doesn't seem that a thinking machine would need to be conscious in order to calculate. Does the fact that we are conscious mean that we are more than thinking machines, or is it the case that consciousness is a by-product of very complex thinking machines.
Quoting Moliere
According to Chomsky, E-language (language) is something abstract externalized from the actual apparatus of our mind and I-language (grammar) is the physical mechanism of our brain. If the E-language is generated by the I-language, then, the E-language won't be over-determining the I-language, in the same way that naming the colour red as "red" isn't an instance of over-determination.
Quoting Moliere
In a sense, everything is both abstract and concrete. For example, a university is both an abstract idea yet is concretely instantiated in buildings and staff.
Who judges the degree of roundness? There is nothing in a mind-independent world that can make judgements about the degree of roundness. Judgements can only be made in the mind.
Cognition is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. The I-language exists in the physical structure of the brain.
Cognition requires thoughts in the brain, but doesn't distinguish between Chomsky's Innatism, where some thoughts result from structures biologically preset in the human brain, from Skinner's Behaviourism, where all thoughts are products of learning from interactions with the environment.
It isnt judged, it is an event. Object rolls down a hill. The object interacts with the ground in the way round objects act. Its manifest in how the object interacts. Its roundness is manifest in how it rolls. No one needs to label it round to interact as round objects will.
If something that was not a mammal had been named "a dog", then the statement "a dog is not a mammal" would be analytic.
Quoting Janus
The statement "this is cool" is ambiguous, in that cool can mean "low temperature" or "fashionably attractive".
If "low temperature" has been named "cool", then "cool is a temperature" is analytic. If "fashionably attractive" has been named "cool", then "cool is fashionable" is analytic.
Even if the meaning of a word was ambiguous, for each meaning an analytic statement can be found.
You say the object rolled down the hill. Who is to say that it didn't bounce, slide, skid, glide, skip or skim down the hill.
A judgement must have been made as to the manner of the object moving down the hill.
But thats what Im saying, it doesnt matter how it is labeled- an object manifested the property of rolling by its action with other objects. It may not be judged as round but acts that way.
I may be misunderstanding. You say that the object may not be judged as rolling, but it acts as if it were rolling.
How is it known that the object is acting as if it were rolling rather than acting in any other way, such as bouncing?
I have a relevant question from before this thread started, that I have not yet found an answer to. Should I put it on the original thread "Guest Speaker: Noam Chomsky" ?
"Many on the Forum seem to believe that the human is born a blank slate having no innate capabilities. As with Skinner's Behaviourism, they believe that everything is learnt from the environment, including language.
What is the best argument we can use to persuade the Behaviourist of the impossibility that everything we know has been learnt from the environment without any foundation of certain innate abilities already built into the physical structure of the brain?"
Sure.
That's why that thread is there, for precisely such questions.
It is not known. It is manifested in the interaction of ball with ground. It doesnt need to be apprehended. The object does as it does in relation to the other object. In this case the object rolls down a hill. Properties of solidity and gravity are manifested in the relation of the two objects.
I can't resist. How do you know the object "rolls" down the hill, if, as you say "it is not known"?
I think this can be answered in various ways, one of them referring back to Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology.
Quoting Blog on OOO
Let's start a different thread on this though. Now we are venturing into metaphysics.
I suppose that I was thrown as a result of you saying that no one would know it's meaning. I should have asked if you believed that the statement has meaning in that case, because "it" referred to the statement. The time frame in question was void of humans. So, I wondered why and/or how you believed that statements could still be meaningful in such a situation.
I would agree that there are no such things as meaningful language or statements in that situation. If we imagine a time in the future when all humans have perished, the once meaningful and true statement "The Eiffel Tower is in Paris" would be neither true nor meaningful.
That's why saying that "no one would be around to know it's meaning" threw me a bit. Still does, but the thread is more about the analytic synthetic distinction, and Chomsky's take on that. So... I'll leave well enough alone...
Thanks for the answers.
:smile:
It's far more complicated than this snippet, but I found that consequence intriguing.
Chomsky's view also makes perfect sense of baby babble and twin speak, moreso than other traditional views. I do struggle a bit to make sense of the claims that equate grammar, universal grammar, and/or I language to physical structures in the brain.
Yes.
Given the word "mkataba", what does it mean? It has no meaning until someone gives it a meaning. Suppose someone says it means "in a manner that is usually done", but someone else says it means "large hill", who determines what the word should mean. Presumably either an Institution or accepted by common usage . The meaning is decided by convention by the society within which the word will be used. Eventually, once agreed by common convention, it's accepted meaning may be codified in a dictionary.
Similarly with the word "analytic". The fact that we accept that it means "true by virtue of the meaning of the words or concepts used to express it, so that its denial would be a self-contradiction." rather than "vegetation consisting of typically short plants with long, narrow leaves, growing wild or cultivated on lawns and pasture, and as a fodder crop." must be because of convention.
In para 43 of PI, Wittgenstein wrote "For a large class of cases, though not for all, in which we employ the word "meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language".
The problem for philosophy, who use language as their primary tool, is that language is something self-referential, a Wittgensteinian language game or a Quinean web of belief. If Quine is correct and the distinction between the analytic and synthetic disappears, philosophy cannot differentiate itself from the natural sciences, where both discuss pragmatic synthetic generalities rather than logical analytic truths.
As with Tarski's Semantic Theory of Truth, where he showed that truth in a language can only be found in a language which is stronger than the language itself, ie, a metalanguage, if philosophy needs to consider analytic truths rather than synthetic generalities, then it must discover how to make the jump from the synthetic linguistic to the analytic extralinguistic.
Max Verstappen performed well at the 2022 Formula 1 would championships because he was competent driver.
Would anyone say that he only became a competent driver after performing well at the championships.
*nodding along, petting his cat, evil-like* Yes, yeess, yeeessss!!! :D
Although I'd put it like this -- philosophy cannot differentiate itself from the natural sciences with the analytic/synthetic distinction. We can make other distinctions, though. Philosophy is very good at making distinctions -- so good at it that we can get lost in them and forget what it was they were originally posited for. I think analytic/synthetic behaves like that: for Kant the whole distinction was to point out the curious category of a priori synthetic knowledge, but somehow we get to analyticity as truth from meaning alone in the circuitous route from there to now.
I think philosophical axiology is what really differentiates philosophy from the other branches of The Liberal Arts and Sciences in this big-picture view of knowledge -- and in this big-picture view of knowledge, the university only defines a small portion of what is known. Philosophy doesn't need to be bound by problems. It creates its own problems. It's not even necessarily bound by the university. It created the university. And questioning the analytic/synthetic distinction is part of that creative spirit that questions not just the distinctions of others, but also its own distinctions.
:100:
Philosophy deliberates on those questions that the natural sciences don't need to think about, yet are still important questions.
Well, I find that there are examples of both. I mean, "practice makes perfect" holds good fairly often in my experience. I've done fairly well in public speeches, including impromptu, using quick outline notes, and well rehearsed written speeches. So, performance with language use(E language) has multiple ways it can considered.
Oral - on the fly. Oral - after practice. Written - on the fly. Written - after editing. Written - after practice. That's just right off the top of my head...
I'm struggling to comprehend exactly what sort of language or grammar could be innate in such a way as for the user to be competent in it prior to E language acquisition. How is it not a private language? I mean, the very notion of I language seems to require either private meaning or meaningless language... neither seems palpable.
Perhaps its the capacity for quick symbolic reference and syntactic generation, not necessarily content. E language cant be acquired but through a brain that has modules for such easy acquisition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_Instinct
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Symbolic_Species#:~:text=The%20Symbolic%20Species%20is%20a,co%2Devolved%20with%20the%20brain.
I agree that "practice makes perfect".
The more one practices, the more competent one becomes, ie practice generates competency. The more competent one becomes the better one's performance will be, ie, competency generates performance.
As you say, and as Chomsky says, "competency generates performance".
Quoting creativesoul
I hit my hand with a hammer and feel pain. I was born with the innate ability to feel pain, it is not something I needed to learn at school. Although I may express my pain using words in an E-language, I don't need an E-language to feel pain. Pain is a concept in my mind.
Chomsky says concepts wouldn't exist without language, and as concepts exist in the mind, this language exists in the mind as an I-language.
Chomsky has said that the relation between thought and language is that of identity:
"Take a look at the human species, what sharply differentiates it from any organic species we know of are two things, possession of language and possession of thought, I have two identifying features of a species. The first question that comes to mind is what is their relation. The simplest relation would be identity ...............language and thought are intimately related. Language has historically been called audible thought"
Chonmsy has said that concepts wouldn't exist without language:
"Even the simplest concepts, tree, desk, person, dog, whatever you want. Even these are extremely complex in the internal structure . If such concepts had developed in proto-human history when there was no language they would have been useless. It would have been an accident if they had developed and they would quickly have been lost because you cannot do anything with them"
My feeling of pain is a private concept, full of meaning to me and regardless of others.
As my private concepts make up my I-Language, my I-language has private meaning.
Chomsky is not saying that the I-language uses words, such as "pain", "tree", "circle". He is saying that the I-language has the characteristics of language as generally understood. A syntax of innate rules ensuring that the arrangement of thoughts and concepts are structurally well-formed, and semantic meaning of sense, reference, presupposition, implication in the relationship between thoughts and concepts.
If there was only an E-language and no I-language, inside the mind would be an empty void.
Thanks for the explanation. In what little spare time available I've been watching Chomsky. There's an abundance of interviews old and new. It seems you've fairly characterized the main thrust of his view. I particularly noted that he's prone to saying that language and thought are unique to humans, and he has openly suggested that they are two different ways to talk about the same thing. So, it seems he tends to equate language and thought on a basic foundational or fundamental level. Our views differ there, so it's probably best for me to end it here.
I should clarify that I agree with saying that language and thought are the very same thing at their core. It's just that my explanation of that core is starkly different than Chomsky's I language or innate grammar.
:grin: