Strawson, Peter - The Matter of Meaning

11/05/2010

Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties: The Woodbridge Lectures 1983, Ch 4 Columbia University Press, 1985

This chapter or paper is about the conflict between nominalism and realism. The battle is over the reality of abstract objects.

Part 1 of this chapter talks about the perfectly natural way in which people talk about concepts, propositions and thoughts as though they were real things. Yet such things aren't part of the natural world of space and time; the philosopher is accustomed to calling them 'abstract objects'. Yet there are those who are suspicious of such entities, the 'rejectionist', who believes that only things in the world of space-time are existent. Such a rejectionist is responsible for providing an account of what people are doing when they speak, seemingly meaningfully, about someone grasping a 'meaning' of a word, or someone disputing what a concept entails or doesn't. Author calls for the rejectionist to give an account of: (1) what sentences are and how they do what they do, (2) why and how people assent or dissent to sentences and other proposition-like elements of language, and (3) the seeming realness of 'feelings, images, sensations'.

Author recounts one rejectionist argument offered by the later Wittgenstein. The story goes as follows: a person learns the use of a word by learning how it applies to a certain object, or action, or real-world phenomenon, etc. She then comes to use the term 'naturally', and has 'natural' associations with it. But this is just to say she uses it intuitively, not that it has some special status as an abstract object. (pg76) But what does the term 'mean'? Perhaps we should understand meaning not only as how a particular person uses it, but whether she correctly uses it-- but this simply implicates a community of language users who approve or disapprove of the term's usage. It doesn't need to implicate some reference to an abstract object. Author now asks: does this account satisfy? (pg79)

In section 3, author investigates the two aspects of the Wittgensteinian claim-- that there becomes a natural way to use a word, and that its proper use is located in the community of language users. Author opens with a discussion of seeing x as an x. That is, taking a red, globular sense perception and classifying it as an (e.g.) apple. This seems to be a case of recognizing a particular as participating in a universal, yet the rejectionist can just as easily say it is just a case of understanding that a particular can be treated the same way as previous particulars to which the label 'apple' is applied. (pg81-84)

Author believes he'll get more traction for universals in the second part of the rejectionist's claim, that of correct use within a linguistic community. This is because the language-users must all recognize a word-type and sentence-type and situation-type when judging similarity or difference in (therefore correct or incorrect) usage. Here the rejectionist, if she is to justify her position, must resort to assuming the reality of types, hence possibly universals. (pg84) Author also believes the reductionist reply will be faulty. The rejectionist might reply that if these universals are only located as abstract, objects of thought, then you must be able to find them in the mind. Yet investigations into the mind find only more "natural items, events, or processes". (pg85) Author replies that this misses the point: we are talking about the objects of thought, not the process of thought.

Section 4 tries to change the focus of the debate from abducting universals from the natural world to finding them in the abstract, analytical or logical world. Author starts with an intuition pump about analytic truths, or truths of reason or truths proved by the nature of logic, mathematics, or language. The rejectionist might reply that the underwriting for these truths is not abstract entities but the general agreement or assent by the language users, and, specifically, what those language users do to establish its correctness. If they look at the world, then it may be different from whether they just talk and debate the issue at hand.

There is another reply, one offered by Quine instead of Wittgenstein: that there is no special distinction-- that any statement can be revised or changed in face of empirical discovery, or that any statement can be taken as 'analytic' if the rest of the system is changed to fit it. As long as the system stays consistent, 'analytic' and 'synthetic' are mutable and therefore disposable as distinctions. (pg88-9). Author replies that Quine still needs the principle of 'consistency' or non-contradiction, so this, at least, is one logical truth independent of naturalism. The comeback from the rejectionist is more in the Wittgensteinian vein: it is that the community of language users exhibit a thorough rejection of concepts that negate each other-- this is one of the natural facts of language users. For a reply to this, author suggests that it is an external perspective. From the internal perspective, we can see and find contradictions, elements of tension, and so on, in the concepts employed by others. This is an internal ability, which may become expressed or may not, but it is part of the abilities of rationality. (pg90-1) Author then claims the rejectionist will probably use the same line as before: that thoughts are natural occurrences and that, however it may feel we are manipulating abstract entities, what we are actually doing is a natural process of thinking, and that has a distinctive character.

The conclusion is left open: there are the positions of realism and nominalism; though realism has a long philosophical tradition, the nominalist is more and more popular today.