Abstract
The present article is the first of a trilogy of papers, devoted to analysing the influence of semantic Platonism on contemporary philosophy of language. In the present article, I lay out the discussion by contrasting semantic Platonism with two other views of linguistic meaning: the socio-environmental conception of meaning and semantic anti-representationalism. Then, I identify six points in which the impregnation of semantic theory with Platonism can be particularly felt, resulting in shortcomings and inaccuracies of various kinds. These points are the following: the limitations of regarding logico-philosophical analysis as the only working methodology; the tendency to avoid investigating a number of aspects of linguistic meaning; the recurring confusion between sentences, statements, and propositions; the weakness of transcendent assumptions about meaning; the weakness of meaning assumptions adopted on the basis of pure intuition; and inconsistencies caused by some over-eager attempts to escape semantic Platonism.
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Notes
‘Frege’s conception of thoughts and their constituent senses is mythological … These eternal, changeless entities inhabit a “third realm” … There is no way of explaining how thoughts relate to things in other realms of reality … There is no way of explaining how we grasp them … Above all, there is no way of explaining how we attach senses to words or expressions’ (Dummett 1986: 251–252). ‘Abstract objects cannot present themselves to us in a perceptual encounter. In paradigm cases, in fact, their abstractness just consists, it appears, in a kind of causal impotence; naturally, therefore, they are incapable of impinging on our senses’ (Wright 1983, Ch.1, §1: 1); ‘[A] philosophical description of a concept is prima facie objectionable if it represents what it is to understand that concept in such a way as to be incompatible with, or render mysterious, the possibility of learning the concept by an empirical route’ (Wright 1983, Ch. 1, §1: 5).
‘For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’—though not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (Wittgenstein 1953, §43). (As is customary, italics—and inverted commas, etc.—are as in the original text, unless otherwise stated.) Interestingly, from Wittgenstein’s slogan ‘meaning is use’ and Dummett’s corollary, ‘knowledge of meaning must be manifestable in use’ (Dummett 1975: 224), a synthesis is sometimes derived that, literally taken, does not make sense: ‘meaning should be manifestable in use’ (e.g. Green 2001, Ch. 3: 97). Indeed, if meaning is use, then it cannot be manifestable in use. Only if we take meaning to be something different from use does it make sense to say that it can manifest itself in use. Analogously, it would be absurd to say that a clothing fashion must be ‘manifestable’ in the way we use clothes: a clothing fashion is a way of using clothes, full stop. Green’s conclusion has thus a Platonic resonance, despite the anti-Platonist spirit of the two slogans in which it is inspired. Of course, it could be replied that this is a minor point—one concerning a very small subtlety. But most of this trilogy of papers is indeed devoted to such subtleties (‘many a mickle makes a muckle’, as the Scots say, would be my bottom-line argument).
‘[S]ome writers … are careless about the distinction between sentences and their meanings. In inveighing against propositions in ensuing pages, I shall of course be inveighing against them always in the sense of sentence meanings’ (Quine 1970, Ch. 1: 2); see also the Preface, and Ch. 1, pp. 2, 8, 12, 14.
For a contrary view, from which I have borrowed these last words: ‘There are some grounds for supposing that interpreting sentences is not a matter of following the lines of entailment from word meaning to sentence meaning, but is, perhaps additionally, a matter of guesswork and probabilistic reasoning’ (Sainsbury 1991, Ch. 6, §6: 332).
‘With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for a prior philosophy’ (Quine, W.v.O. 1968, §I: 185). One page later, however, Quine makes another inadvertent concession to Platonism, when he writes: ‘Semantics is vitiated by a pernicious mentalism as long as we regard a man’s semantics as somehow determinate in his mind beyond what might be implicit in his dispositions to overt behavior’ (Quine, W.v.O. 1968, §I: 186, my italics). Indeed, most social phenomena (such as fashion, inflation or war) are defined in terms of ‘behaviour’, not in terms of ‘dispositions to behave’: a war is a fight, not a disposition to fight; inflation is a rise in prices, not a disposition to raise prices; a clothing fashion is an actual trend of wearing certain clothes, not a mere disposition to wear them. By shifting the focus from ‘behaviour’ to ‘disposition to behave’, Quine is once again rendering an unconscious tribute to semantic Platonism, the very same philosophy from which he is trying to escape.
Dummett 1978: 312, 322 also draws a comparison between knowing a language and knowing how to ride a bicycle, but interprets it in a completely different way.
A view that bears resemblance with the one put forward in this section is the following: ‘I assume anti-Cartesianism. It is common to think that linguistic-conceptual competence brings “privileged access” to meanings (or contents) … I think that the onus lies very much on the other side. The supposition that someone who has a thought, or uses an expression, that has a certain meaning thereby has knowledge about that meaning is a strong one requiring much more support than it has ever been given (even if the knowledge is described as only “tacit”) … My aim is for a semantics that does not make these suppositions. My second assumption is already obvious. It is naturalism: that there is only one way of knowing, the empirical way that is the basis of science (whatever that way may be). So I reject “a priori knowledge”’ (Devitt 1996: 2).
‘A preliminary remark. It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence … older philosophers who discuss the problem of ‘the meaning of words’ tend to fall into special errors, avoided by more recent philosophers, who discuss rather the parallel problem of ‘the meaning of sentences’. Nevertheless, if we are on our guard, we perhaps need not fall into these special errors, and I propose to overlook them at present’ (Austin 1940, I: 56).
‘A very simple case indeed [of “calling different sorts of things by the same name”] is one often mentioned by Aristotle: the adjective “healthy”: when I talk of a healthy body and again of a healthy complexion, of healthy exercise: the word is not just being used equivocally. Aristotle would say it is being used “paronymously”. In this case there is what we may call a primary nuclear sense of “healthy”: the sense in which “healthy” is used of a healthy body: I call this nuclear because it is “contained as a part” in the other two senses which may be set out as “productive of healthy bodies” and “resulting from a healthy body”’ (Austin 1940, III: 71).
In (Picazo 2015b) I argue that the degree of language automaticity that is required for fluent conversation fosters semantic conceptions in which meanings are unthinkingly ‘taken for granted’, as it is usually the case with semantic Platonism. As an illustration of this, I pinpoint four places in Quine’s work in which, because of this problem, he is driven to inconsistency. Some of these inconsistencies have been or will be mentioned here.
The expression is inspired by Plato: ‘The second principle is that of division into species according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part as a bad carver might’ (Plato, Phaedrus [Plato 1993], 265e).
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Acknowledgements
In the preparation of this paper, I have received help from José Ardid Vera, Lee Barber, Diego Clares Costa, Mélissa Couchot, Samuel Cuello Muñoz, Ángel García Rodríguez, Daniel García Simón, Peter Kingston, Juan Carlos León Sánchez, José López Martí, Andrés Luna Bermejo, Susana Pickett, María Ruiz Fernández, Alejandro Rodríguez Galván and Proof-Reading-Service.com.
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Picazo, G. The Long Shadow of Semantic Platonism. Philosophia 49, 1427–1453 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00304-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00304-4