Vernaculars as object languages

Tarski's distinction between metalanguages and the object languages they "talk about" raises an interesting question about vernacular speech.

Suppose we think of a variety of a natural language--say, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)--as an object language, in the Tarskian sense. The metalanguage we use to state Tarskian truth schemas (following convention T) would presumably be AAVE plus whatever logic we need for those schemas. So far, pretty routine.

But what if we stretch out the time dimension really far? Suppose we allow for time enough to get syntactic change to occur in AAVE? If AAVE as object language has syntactic feature f, while AAVE as metalanguage is alike in every respect except for its logical "richness" and feature f, then the semantic openness Tarski insists is needed to avoid liar paradoxes would be monkey-wrenched, no?

In fact, if syntactic change stood between any object language and its metalanguage, wouldn't those two languages stand with respect to each other just as any two (distinct) languages stood with respect to each other? Suppose, for instance, that AAVE is the object language and standard English is the metalanguage, differing in the syntactic features associated with negation. AAVE possesses such features as are required to license negative concord phenomena, while standard English lacks them. Wouldn't liar antinomies be unresolvable in such a situation?

To withstand this, we need to distinguish logical richness from logical difference in the metalanguage (presumably in the proof theory and model theory of such language).

I realize this is dense. I'll try to unpack it later.

Wittgenstein versus Chomsky

Perhaps it is meant as a teaching device, but I'm always thrown off by the attempt to pit Wittgenstein and Chomsky as competitors in philosophy of language. 

From the Investigations (para. 498) (I guess it's Elizabeth Anscombe's translation): "When I say that the orders 'Bring me sugar' and 'Bring me milk' make sense, but not the combination 'Milk me sugar,' that does not mean that the utterance of this combination of words has no effect. And if its effect is that the other person stares at me and gapes, I don't on that account call it the order to stare and gape, even if that was precisely the effect I wanted to produce."

Nothing Chomsky says preempts that story. More to the point, W is urging a long look at how language is playful, undetermined by its formalizable rule structure. C starts with that rule structure, and attempts robust description of it.

This goes to something that's bothered me for a while (see my earlier post about the state of the philosophy of language). What is philosophy of language about, and what should be its ongoing impact? 

Clearly the W versus C pairing (most recently in the student-friendly collection by Nuccetelli and Seay (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008)) is intended to get rival intuitions about the subject matter going, which is great, pedagogically. But why are we pretending that anyone thinks C is possibly wrong or incomplete? Why not begin with Chomsky, finding the clearest recent statement of the principles and parameters approach he is famous for, and then spend time--as philosophers of language--asking the rich theoretical questions it generates: what counts as syntactic change? what kind of phenomena are syntactic phenomena (licensing, for instance, or movement), and what do they share with other logical objects and their phenomena? is it possible, at least in principle, to achieve an exhaustive logical reduction (so to speak) of the syntax of some L, or would there be some residue? 

I simply don't hear enough discussion by philosophers of language about the enormously interesting (and subtle) theoretical problems in syntax. I think we're too enamored with replaying the battles of old for their own sake. 

(Punchline: let the pragmatists have Wittgenstein...)

On wax

“So what was it in the wax that I understood with such distinctness? Evidently none of the features which I arrived at by means of the senses; for whatever came under taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing has now altered—yet the wax remains.”

The wax is a body that ‘presented itself’ to Descartes ‘in these various forms’ earlier, and is now ‘exhibiting’ other forms. The central problem of Cartesian metaphysics has got to be this: what sort of body could there be that has no sensible properties necessarily/essentially? Aren’t bodies just those things that are extended? How can an extended thing not have any sensible properties, and yet have causal powers to ‘make’ itself present this way or that?

And if the intellect is able to grasp this true ‘formal object’ (my label, for now), aren’t we simply talking about some kind of a mental substance—perhaps a non-thinking thing that is thought, a thinked thing (sorry)?

(It’s remarkable that two centuries of metaphysics are traceable to these few paragraphs that every undergraduate has read. Make that four centuries, depending on your view of Kripke and (David) Lewis.)

What impresses Descartes as most mysterious about the wax, it seems, is that it is capable of an infinite number of different extended states:

“I would not be making a correct judgement about the nature of wax unless I believed it capable of being extended in many more different ways than I will ever encompass in my imagination. I must therefore admit that the nature of this piece of wax is in no way revealed by my imagination, but is perceived by the mind alone.”

Oddly, though his point goes to mental architecture, it has the metaphysical implication that bodies are extended in an infinite number of ways, outrunning our sensory apparatus and imagination, and are only catchable by our intellect. The oddness is that, by making the intellect a transcendental requirement for any sensory experience that may contribute to knowledge, Descartes seems to be making bodies essentially un-extended, or perhaps pre-extended, and throwing into doubt the ability for bodies to play any causal role in nature.

I’m anticipating another look at this in meditation 5.

Res cogitans

Descartes famously doubts those attributes of his soul that are body-dependent (nutrition, movement, and sense-perception). But notice the different kinds of dependence: Nutrition and movement are mere ‘fabrications’ if body does not exist, whereas sense-perception does not occur without a body, and so (presumably), though it need not include body within what it perceives, it must be illusory if the bodily state it would occur in does not in fact obtain.

If that is so, it does not really matter what the object of sense-perception is to the Cartesian skeptic. All that is required to support his (negative) worry is that the bodily state required for the sensory state fail to be realized.

If that is so, then doesn’t the dream argument become superfluous? Descartes even suggests as much, mentioning it as an aside:

“Sense-perception? This surely does not occur without a body, and besides, when asleep I have appeared to perceive through the senses many things which I afterwards realized I did not perceive through the senses at all.”

But more importantly, I think, it makes the argument much more transcendental than I realized. I always think of the Cartesian skeptic as preoccupied with the objects of thought—I think I see a tomato, but that’s not really a tomato, because this sensory information has a faulty object. But Descartes seems to be arguing about the conditions for the possibility of a sensory experience (surprising since Kant usually gets the credit for that), and—very surprising—the conditions for that possibility seem to be this or that bodily state.

That carries through to the res cogitans notion: “I am, I exist—that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking.” Whereas the cogito itself is an objective account (it answers the question, what is the object of thought, and what makes it true) the res cogitans argument is a transcendental account (it answers the question, what are the conditions for the possibility of a thinking experience).

Res extensa

“...by a body I understand whatever has a determinable shape and a definable location and can occupy a space in such a way as to exclude any other body...”

I’m unclear whether extended things are extended in the three spatial dimensions essentially, and extended temporally (duration through time) only accidentally, or if temporal extension is also essential.

From this early definition of extension it appears that only spatial extension defines bodies, but earlier Descartes mentions duration through time as among the ‘primary qualities’ or elements of real objects.

More on the cogito

“So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”

I often ask students why Descartes didn’t just write the famous version of this argument: I think, therefore, I am. It’s actually kind of puzzling. The star of the argument in the version he actually presents here is a proposition, not a self, not a rational being, not a thinking thing, none of usual Cartesian suspects.

The argument is based on a modal property of an abstract object: that some proposition has some modal status such that it is necessarily true on the occasions of its uttering or entertaining in thought. And implicit in the claim is that that abstract object has a peculiar referential property: that it refers to its entertainer/utterer, and that without failure.

In an earlier post I wondered about the tensions between the semantic and the pragmatic in the argument. This other tension I’m noticing is between the content of a proposition, and the object that causes its reference to succeed.

A further wrinkle: the object that causes it to succeed does so categorically (that is, anything/anyone that utters ‘I am, I exist’ must exist, regardless of how the rest of the universe is configured). Referential success is thus a priori. But then how to square that with the contingent character of the cogito: namely, that it is necessarily true on this or that occasion, but not timelessly?

I need to untangle the notion of essence from reference, which I can’t do right now. But this anticipates meditation 5, and Kripke. More later.

More on elements

“For even when painters try to create sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they cannot give them natures which are new in all respects; they simply jumble up the limbs of different animals. Or if perhaps they manage to think up something so new that nothing remotely similar has ever been seen before—something which is therefore completely fictitious and unreal—at least the colours used in the composition must be real. By similar reasoning, although these general kinds of things—eyes, head, hands and so on—could be imaginary, it must at least be admitted that certain other even simpler and more universal things are real. These are as it were the real colours from which we form all the images of things, whether true or false, that occur in our thought.”

This includes, says Descartes, extension, shape, quantity, place, time of duration. Is this a first stab at primary qualities?

Does Descartes mean that one begins, even in imagination, with these elements that are the same throughout the natural world? Is it a prior constraint on our thought about the natural world? Or does he mean that nature itself has these constraints, that objects already have built into them these qualities? The first gloss is the Kantian, of course, the second, Lockean.

Or does such a distinction not make sense to ask of Descartes?

The puzzle gets trickier when, in the second meditation, Descartes supposes that, among other things, “[b]ody, shape, extension, movement and place are chimeras.” Why don’t those ‘chimeras’ resist doubt in the thought experiment, if they are universal, simple, and thus real?

I never realized this before: if Descartes maintains a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, or elements and arrangements of elements, does that undermine his solipsism? Wouldn’t the existence of primary qualities be assured, even if the secondaries were doubtful?

Maybe this is how Locke and Kant read him. I never thought about it in these terms before.