Introduction (continued)
From a skeptical point of view
So, what explains the diffused
character of these chapters? I think the answer lies in the way in which my own
intellectual interests unfolded. Having made a decision to shift, early in my
career, from the beautiful abstractions of mathematical physics to the more
existential concerns of philosophy, I settled down to a range of exciting new
developments in analytic philosophy in the post-Wittgensteinian era. The work
of fine philosophers like John Austin, Peter Strawson, Willard Quine, Hilary
Putnam, Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, and other stalwarts of late 20th
century analytic philosophy, promised a healthy mix of rigorous, often formal,
inquiry with what Hilary Putnam called ‘the
whole hurly-burly of human actions’ (cited in Nussbaum 2016). Philosophers such
as Peter Strawson (1992) and others have often suggested that philosophy attempts
to produce a systematic account of the general conceptual apparatus of which
our daily practices display a tacit and unconscious mastery.
But the subtle, abstract, and yet
unifying framework of physics lingered in the mind. This led to a variety of
dissatisfaction with analytic philosophy, especially in the study of language.
We need to step back a little to see why. In the first half of the 20th
century, great philosophers like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Alfred Ayer and others took what Richard Rorty
(1967) called the linguistic turn.
Tracing it to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Alberto Coffa (1991) called this
mode of doing philosophy the semantic
tradition. Within this broad tradition, each of the authors cited in the
preceding paragraph—Austin, Quine, etc.—belonged primarily to the broad discipline
of philosophy of language. The study of language thus formed a central part of
the analytic effort. As with most students of analytic philosophy in
those days, I was attracted to the study of language both for the intricate
formal character of human language, and its ubiquitous role in human life.
Linguistic
philosophy promised a rigorous, scientific approach of its own on classical
philosophical topics such as realism, knowledge,
belief, even consciousness. For example, Willard Quine (1953) argued that for
something to exist it has to be the value of a bound variable in a true theory;
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) suggested that to understand consciousness is to
understand the meaning of the first-person sentence I am in pain; Bertrand Russell (1919) held that beliefs such as <Ramanuj is wise> are propositional
attitudes. I will have much more to say on these things in the chapters that
follow.
Since linguistic philosophy proposed
to examine classical issues by viewing them as ‘semantic’ problems—that is, in
terms of the structure and function of language—it is reasonable to expect that
this philosophy will also furnish a formally satisfying account of language
itself from which the solution to philosophical problems maybe rigorously
derived. However, linguistic philosophy lacked a genuinely theoretical
understanding of the immense richness of human language. This is what a mind
initially trained in physics sorely missed. This philosophy did make formal
proposals occasionally, such as Russell’s famous theory of descriptions
(Russell 1905), to address philosophical problems. But the formal tools were
borrowed from the discipline of symbolic logic which is not only a poor
substitute for human language; its character is parasitic on human language.
In
any case, even with the tools of formal logic, human language resisted any grand
formal theory for addressing philosophical problems, as Peter Strawson (1950)
pointed out in his stringent criticism of Russell’s theory of descriptions:
ordinary language, Strawson declared, has no logic. ‘Ordinary language’
philosophers thus focused on detailed, taxonomic properties of language in the
style of a botanist, as John Austin (1962) suggested, rather than that of a
physicist. The study of language fostered what Strawson (1971) called a Homeric struggle between
‘formal-semantic’ and ‘communication-intention’ theorists of language. My
impression is that the scene in analytic philosophy hasn’t improved since even
if no one openly makes claims for either ‘ideal language’ or ‘ordinary
language.’ At that stage, it was too early for me to admire the value of this
uncertainty in philosophical inquiry.
While
analytic philosophy was going through this apparent absence of direction,
interesting developments took place elsewhere. I expressed my disenchantment
with the state of linguistic philosophy in my doctoral thesis, and turned to
linguistics and cognitive science to see if there was a ‘physics’ of human
language and mind. Two related developments promised what I was looking for:
exciting proposals in theoretical linguistics by Noam Chomsky, and the
formulation of a computational theory of mind by Alan Turing. Both strands of
research, and much else besides, had become established academic pursuits by
the time I completed my doctoral thesis. As I continued with my exploration of
the new science of the mind, certain interesting ideas and results did appear
on the table in due course which I put together in some papers and monographs
culminating in the Primacy of Grammar
(2010). That form of work continues elsewhere.
However,
throughout my engagement with the new science of the mind, I was beginning to
realize that the ideas that interested me there covered very restricted and
abstract domains of human cognition such that the intellectual salience of much
of the rest of the new science could be questioned. For example, the formal
resources of linguistic theory no doubt explained some intriguing facts about
how sound is connected to what may be called the internal significance of a structure, called Logical Form (LF) in the technical literature. However, it is also
clear that the theory does not have either the resources or the desire to
explain what may ordinarily be viewed as the meaning of a sentence.
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