Meaning and Necessity (Ryle)

7/30/2019 Meaning and Necessity (Ryle)

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Royal Institute of Philosophy

Meaning and NecessityAuthor(s): Gilbert RyleReviewed work(s):Source: Philosophy, Vol. 24, No. 88 (Jan., 1949), pp. 69-76Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3747236 .

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DISCUSSIONMEANING AND NECESSITY'

PROFESSORCARNAPn his new book proffers method foranalysinganddescribing hemeanings fexpressions nd,morebriefly,iscussesthetheoryoflogicalmodalities, heconcepts, hat s, of ogicalnecessity nd possibility.His meaning-analysiss in themain ntended s an improvement poncertaindoctrines nd practicesofFrege. His account of themodal conceptsoflogicis in the main intendedas an improvement pon certain doctrines f C. I.Lewis. Views ofQuine,Russell, Tarski,Church nd others re also discussed.Studentsof Carap's otherwritingswill noticewith interest hat he hasnow swungstill further romthe extremenominalismof his earlieryears.Invertedcommas are no longerhis panacea, and he now makes alarmingrequisitionsupon philosophy's tock of extra-linguisticntities. ndeed, heseemsto need at least as manyas Meinongneeded,and for lmost the samebad reasons.A morereassuring rend s his growingwillingness o presenthis views n quite generous ationsofEnglishprose.He still ikesto constructartificial"languages" (which are not languages but codes), and he stillinterlards isformulaewithunhandybecause,forEnglishspeakers,unsayableGothic letters. But the expository mportanceof these encoded formulaeseemsto be dwindling.ndeed I cannotsatisfymyself hat theyhave morethan a ritual-value.They do not functionas a sieve against vagueness,ambiguity r sheerconfusion,nd theyare not used forthe abbreviationorformalization f proofs.Calculi without calculationsseem to be gratuitousalgebra. Nor, where explicitness s the desideratum, s shorthand a goodsubstitute.The onlycomment hat I shall make upon his account ofmodal conceptsis that he says nothing bout most ofour ordinaryways ofusingwords ike"may," "must," "cannot," "possible" and "necessary." He discusses the"mays," "musts" and "need nots" of logic, but not those of legislation,technology,games, etiquette,ethics,grammaror pedagogy.Above all, hesays nothingabout laws of nature or the concepts of natural necessity,possibility r impossibility.The bulk of the book is concernedwith what Carnap calls "meaning-analysis," i.e. with the elucidationof the concept of "the meaningof anexpression"or of "what the expressionso and so' means." This elucidationdiverges lightlyfrom hat of Frege. Carnap is solicitousnot to seem to beaccusing Frege of error;his views had led to inconveniences, romwhichCarnaphopesthat his alternative ccount s exempt. shall be less solicitousand shall arguethat both Frege's and Carnap's theories re either rroneousor worse.Frege,like Russell, had inherited directly, erhaps,fromMill) the tradi-tional beliefthat to ask What does the expression"E" mean? is to ask, Towhat does "E" stand in the relation n which"Fido" stands to Fido? Thesignificancefany expression s the thing,process,personor entity fwhichthe expressionis the propername. This, to us, grotesque theoryderivespartly,presumably, rom he comfortable act that propernames are visibler Meaningand Necessity:A Study in Semantics nd Modal Logic by RudolfCarnap(U.S.A.: The University f Chicago Press. Great Britain:CambridgeUniversity ress.I947. 210 pp. Price ?I 7s. 6d.).

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PHILOSOPHYor audible things nd are ordinarilyttachedin an indirectbut familiarwayto visible,audible and tangible things ike dogs, rivers,babies, battles andconstellations. his is thenadopted as the model afterwhich to describe thesignificance f expressionswhich are not propernames, and the habit isformed ftreating heverb"to signify" nd thephrase"to have a meaning"as analogous relation-stating xpressions. What that expressionmeans" isthen construedas the description f some extra-linguisticorrelateto theexpression,ike the dog that answers o the name "Fido." (Similarreasoningmightcoax people into believingthat since "he took a stick" asserts arelationbetweenhim and the stick,so "he took a walk," "a nap," "a job,""a liking,""the opportunity" r "time" asserts a relationbetweenhimanda funny ntity.)Now a very little reflection hould satisfyus that the assimilation topropernames of expressionsthat are not propernames breaks down fromthe start. (Indeed the whole point of classing some expressionsas propernamesis to distinguishhem from he others.)No one ever asks What is themeaningof "Robinson Crusoe"? much essWho is themeaningof"RobinsonCrusoe"? No one ever confesses hat he cannot understand r has misunder-stood the name "Charles Dickens" or asks for t to be translated,defined,paraphrasedor elucidated.We do not expect dictionaries o tell us who iscalled by what names. We do not say that theriverMississippi s so and soex vi termini.A man maybe described s "the personcalled 'Robin Hood',"but not as "the meaningof Robin Hood'." It would be absurd to say "themeaningof Robin Hood' met the meaningof Friar Tuck'." Indeed, to putit generally, t is always nonsenseto say of any thing,process or entity"that is a meaning." Indeed, n certain contextswe are inclinednot to callpropernames "words" at all. We do not complainthat the dictionary mitsa lot of English words just because it omits the names of people, rivers,mountains and novels,and if someone boasts of knowing wo dozen wordsof Russian and givesthenames ofthatnumber fRussian towns,newspapers,films nd generals,we thinkthat he is cheating.Does "Nijni Novgorod isin Russia" containthree,fouror fiveEnglishwords?There are indeed some importantparallels between our ways of usingpropernames in sentences nd ourways ofusingsome,but not manysortsof other expressions."Who knocked?" can be answered as well by "Mr.Smith" as by "the landlord"; and in "the noisewas made by Fido," "thenoise was made by the neighbour'sretriever" nd "the noise was made byhim" thepropername,the substantivalphraseand thepronounplay similargrammaticalroles. But this no more shows that substantival phrases andpronounsare crypto-proper ames than they show that propernames arecrypto-pronounsr crypto-substantivalhrases.Two exceptions o the"Fido"-Fido principlewere concededbyitsdevotees.(i) Frege saw that the phrases "the eveningstar" and "the morning tar"do not have thesame sense (Sinn), eveniftheyhappento applyto ordenote(bedeuten) he same planet. An astronomical gnoramusmight understandthe two phraseswhilewonderingwhether heyare mentions f two planetsor of only one. The phrase "the firstAmericanpope" does not apply toanyone,but a personwho says so shows therebythat he understands heexpression.This concession eems to have beenthought o be onlya tiresomethough necessary amendment to the "Fido"-Fido principle. In fact itdemolishest altogether. or it shows that even in the case ofthat relativelysmall class of solable expressions, therthanpropernames,whichare suitedto function s thenominatives fcertain eeded subject-predicateentences,knowing what the expressionsmean does not entail having met any70


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DISCUSSIONappropriateFidos or even knowingthat any such Fidos exist. The things("entities"), if any, to which such expressionsapply are not and are notparts ofwhat the expressionsmean, any morethan a nail is or is part ofhow a hammer s used.

(2) The traditionaldoctrine ftermshad required confusedlynough)theanalysisofproposition-expressingentencesntotwo,orwithheart earchings,threeor more "terms"; and these terms were (erroneously) upposed all tobe correlatedwith entities n the "Fido"-Fido way. But sentences are notjust lists like "Socrates, Plato, Aristotle," r even like "Socrates,mortality."For theytell truthsor falsehoods,whichlists do not do. A sentence mustincludesomeexpressionswhichare not terms, .e. "syncategorematic ords"like "is," "if," "not," "and," "all," "some," "a," and so on. Such wordsarenot meaningless,though they are not names, as all categorematicwordswere (erroneously) upposed to be. They are requiredforthe constructionof sentences. (Sometimes special grammatical constructions nable us todispense with syncategorematicwords.) Syncategorematicwords wereaccordinglyeen to be in a certainway auxiliary, omewhat ike rivetswhichhave no jobs unless there re girders o be riveted. have notfinishedayinganything f I merelyutter the word "if" or "is." They are syntacticallyincompleteunlessproperly ollocated withsuitable expressions fother orts.In contrastwiththem t was erroneouslyssumed that categorematicwordsare non-auxiliaryor are syntacticallycomplete without collocations withother syncategorematic r categorematicexpressions,as though I havefinished aying somethingwhen I say "Fido," "he," "the firstAmericanpope" or "jocular." Russell's doctrineof incomplete symbolswas a half-fledged ttemptto re-allocate certainexpressionsfrom he categorematic othesyncategorematicamily. t was half-fledgedecause it still assumed thattherewereor oughtto be some syntactically ompletecategorematic xpres-sions, some "logically propernames" which would brook being said sansphrase.To call an expression"incomplete"was erroneouslyupposed to besayingthat it did not functionikea name,as if thestandardofcompletenesswereset by names and not by sentences; n fact it is sayingthat it is onlya fragment f a range of possible sentences.So ordinarypropernames are(save perhaps in some of their vocative uses) as incompleteas any othersentence-fragments.Frege had, in consistency, o apply his modified Fido"-Fido principle oexpressionsof all sorts,save thosewhich are patently syncategorematic. ohe had to say, forexample, that a full indicative sentenceboth names anentity and has a sense (Sinn). Its sense is what is sometimes called a"proposition"; its nominee s a queer contraptionwhich he calls a "truth-value." To use Mill's language (fromwhich, perhaps, Frege's Bedeutungand Sinn were adapted), an indicative sentencedenotesa truth-value ndconnotes proposition orGedanke, s Fregecalls it).Carap diverges slightlyfromthe "Fido"-Fido principle-or rather hethinks he divergesfrom t. (But his divergence s not due to recognition fany of the difficultieshat I have adduced above.) Instead of speaking ofexpressions s "names," he gives them the intimidating itle "designators."(He likes to coin words ending in ". . . tor." He speaks of "descriptors"instead of "descriptions," predicators"instead of "predicates," "functors"insteadof"functions," nd toyswiththe projectofpilingon theagonywith"conceptor," abstractor," "individuator," nd so on. But as his two cardinalwords "designator" and "predicator" are employedwith, if possible, evengreater ambiguityand vagueness than has traditionally ttached to thewords "term" and "predicate," I hope that future exercises in logical

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PHILOSOPHYnomenclaturewill be concentrated ess on the terminations han on theoffices four titles.) By a "designator"Carnapmeans "all those expressionsto which a semantical analysis of meaning is applied," i.e. "sentences,predicatorsi.e. predicate expressions,n a wide sense, ncluding lass expres-sions),functorsi.e. expressions orfunctionsnthe narrowerense,excludingpropositionalfunctions), nd individual expressions; other types may beincluded, f desired e.g. connectives, oth extensionaland modal ones). Theterm designator' s not meant to implythat these expressionsare namesofsome entities . . but merely hat theyhave, so to speak, an independentmeaning, t least independent o some degree" (sic) (p. 6). Thus everythinggoes to the laundry in the same washing-basket,from "(declarative)sentences,'which have "a meaningof the highestdegreeof independence,"down to "expressionswith no or little independenceof meaning('syncate-gorematic"in traditionalterminology)" p. 7). It is an inauspiciousstart,particularly ince the notionofindependences not only eftperfectly aguebut is repeatedly pokenof as something fwhichthere re degrees.It is, however,clear fromhis practice, thoughnot from his statement,that "designator" is generally quivalentto the word "term" ofthe (I hadhoped,moribund) radition.Instead of saying,afterFrege, that what a designatormeans is, in thefirstnstance, hat to which t stands as "Fido" stands to Fido, Carnap saysthat what a designatormeans is two thingsat once, namelythe intensionthat it has and the extension that it has. The intensioncorrespondswithFrege's sense (Sinn); the extension s whatthedesignator ctuallyappliesto.Knowing the intension of a designator s understanding t; knowingitsextension s knowing ome facts about both thedesignator nd the furnitureof the world, namely that the designatorapplies to certain bits of thatfurniture.Carnap says a little, though not enough, about fictitious ndnonsensicaldesignators,.e. thosewhichdo not in fact have and thosewhichcould not conceivablyhave extensions. He wrongly ays (on p. 202) what,in effect, e rightly enies (on p. 21 and p. 30), "we must realize that everydesignatorhas both an intension nd an extension."As a senselessdesignator annot and a fictitious esignatordoes not applyto anything, t is clear that the question whether designatordoes applyto anything annot arise until after we knowwhat, if anything,t means.The things t applies to, ifany, cannottherefore,orthis and otherreasons,be ingredientsn what it means. It should be noticedthat we hardlyeverknowand hardly verwantto know howmany things,fany,ourdesignatorsapply to. We do not have inventories f stars, ripplesor jokes; nor do wetryto get them. But we can talk sense and followtalk about stars,ripplesand jokes. So we are not missing nythingwe want to know about the usesofexpressionsf we do not knowtheir xtensions inthissense).But these supposedlytwin notions of "having an intension"and "havingan extension"need furtherxamination.Carnapprofessesn his use ofthemto be merelyclarifying traditionalusage. Yet not only have there beenseveraldiscrepantusages (as Josephand Keynes showedlong ago), but theusage to whichCarap attaches himselfbelongedto the muddled doctrineofterms,which tselfrestedon the "Fido"-Fido principlewhichhe disclaims.I think he actually confuses two nearly disconnectedusages when heassimilates the sense in which truth-functionsre called "extensional"whilemodal functionsare called "intensional," to the sense in which certainnominatives re said to have extensions nd intensions.The use of "exten-sional" and "intensional" to mean "non-modal"and "modal," derivesfromthe debate about the ambiguityof the word "all" as meaningsometimes72


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DISCUSSION"every one of the . ." and sometimes "any .. ." No one, I think, evercouched this debate in the dictionsof "denotation" and "connotation."Onthe other hand the debate about the extensions and intensions(i.e. thedenotationsand connotations)of terms or (some) substantival expressionswas not a debate about the ambiguityof a certainsyncategorematicword,but, supposedly, bout the dual function fall ordinary ategorematicwordsthat are used or usable in the subject-placein subject-predicate entences.The connectionbetween the two debates was, I imagine,this. Some peoplesaid that in "all men are mortal" we are talkingabout or mentioningomemen; others aid that we need not be doingthis,but onlysayingthat therecould not be any immortalmen. The formerweresayingthat the sentencewas a categoricalone, the latter that it was hypothetical.The formerwerecommitted o sayingthat thesubject-termf their ategorical entencemust,qua beinga subject-term, ame or denote somemen. The latter weresayingthat theprotasisofa hypotheticals notassertedfor rue and that thewholehypotheticalcould be true even though it was actually false that thereexisted any men, so no men were named or denoted by any part of theprotasis.The traditional doctrine erroneouslytook the two premises and theconclusionof any syllogismas isomorphous subject-predicatepropositionsand, out ofdeference o Barbara, took such supposedlybi-polarpropositionsas the standard model of all or of all respectablepropositions.All suchpropositions re, it supposed, analysable into a subject-term oupled by acopula to a predicate-term. nd what was predicate-termn one propositioncould, with perhaps a little surreptitious e-wording, eappear as subject-term n another.The subject-termwas the name of what the propositionwas about; thepredicate ermnamed whatwas affirmedrdeniedof thatsubject. Ordinarilythesubject-term as supposedto name a particular ora batch ofparticulars)and the predicate-term as supposed to name the attribute r property hatwas asserted or deniedto belongto it (or them).Now thoughthe predicate-term of a standard subject-predicateproposition could (it was wronglythought)move over unmodified o be thesubject-termfanotherproposition,still in the propositions n which it functions redicativelyt does not do,what the subject-termdoes, namelymentionthe thingor thingsthat theproposition s about. It is, roughly,only in theirsubject-rolesthat termsare used mentioningly. And even this does not hold in, forexample, thepropositions of fiction,where the subject-termsare used only quasi-mentioningly.t does not hold in affirmativer negativeexistence-proposi-tions. It does not hold in all identity-assertions,r in definitions.And itdoes nothold in assertionsof thepattern"any S is P.")Where the subject-termsfsuch sentences re used mentioningly,e theynames, pronouns,demonstratives r substantival phrases,we could say, ifthere were any point in doing so, that the things,persons or processesmentionedwere the "extension" or the "denotations"of thosenominatives;and we could extend this to the things,personsor processmentionedbysuch othermentioningxpressions s mightoccurin, forexample,relationalsentences ike "Caesar was killedby his friend, rutus." But thenit wouldbe quite clearthat otherfragmentsfsentences uch as "is mortal"or "waskilledby" are notmentioningxpressions nd have no extensions r denota-tions n thissense.Nor would entire entenceshave extensions rdenotationsin this sense. It should also be clear that thepersons, hingsor processessomentionedare not themselvesparts of the meaningsof the mentioning-expressions. t would belongto the meaningof "his friend, rutus," that t

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PHILOSOPHYwas beingused to mention ust thisperson, ust as it is the presentfunctionofthis hammer o knock n this nail. But the nail is not part ofthe presentfunction f the hammer, nd Brutus is not part ofthe use of an expressionwhich mentionshim. To understandthe referencewould be to realize thatthis was how it was being used. But Brutus could not be a way in whichan expressionwas used.On this interpretation,nly a minority f expressionswould have exten-sions; none of the standard syncategorematicxpressions nd none of thestandard predicate-expressions ould do so; no sentencesor sub-sentences,and not eventhe nominatives f all subject-predicateentenceswoulddo so;and even thoseexpressionswhich are used mentioningly ould not have thementionedpersonsor things,but onlythe factthattheywerementioned, sparts of theirmeanings. n particular t is an error o suppose that predica-tivelyused expressionsike "is omniscient" r"is thefriend fCaesar" can betransferrednaltered othesubject-place.For,for nething,tis an importantgrammaticalfact that since neither "is omniscient"nor "omniscient" canbe the subject of a verb, a new nominativehas to be constructed uch as"the omniscient eing"or"all omniscient ersons";and this s notequivalentto the predicate ". .. omniscient." And this grammaticalfact reflectsdifferencef employment;for "the omniscientbeing" and "all omniscientbeings" are ordinarily sed in the mentioningway, which was not how thepredicatehad been used. It is a correspondingrror o suppose, as Carnapseemsto do, that a "predicator" s beingmentioninglysed in anotherway,namely as mentioning property, .g. a quality, a state, a relationor anatural kind. The predicatein "Socrates is mortal" does not mention thepropertyof mortality-we use the noun "mortality" for that purpose.Adjectivesand verbsdo not do the same jobs as the abstract nouns that arecommonly ormed ut of them and we have to know how to use adjectives,verbs,etc., fortheir own jobs, beforewe can learn to use the correspondingabstractnouns fortheirquite differentobs. Onlythe sophisticatedmentionor talk about properties. t is not true,therefore,hat predicators ointlymentionproperties nd either the thingsthat have them or (what is quitedifferent)he class of thingsthat have them.The truth s thattheydo notdo either f thesethings;for heyare notmentioningly-usedxpressions.One of Carnap's major concerns s to resolvethe long-standing isputewhetherpredicate-expressionstand for (or denote) propertiesor classes.Believers n universals ssert theformer; elievers n classes assertthe atter.Carnap's eirenicon s to say that they do both at once. They have classesfortheir extensions nd properties ortheir ntensions.But the disputewasa spuriousone. For the predicate-expressionslluded to are not mention-expressionsor,morespecifically, ames,at all. We mentionclasses by suchphrases as "the class of .. .," and we mention properties by such expres-sions as "jocularity." The adjective "jocular" is not used and could notgrammatically e used to deputizefor ither.Nor couldtheydeputizefor t.

Carnap's way of (nominally) dispensingwith the "Fido"-Fido principledoesnot releasehim fromheFrege-Meinongmbarrassments boutsentences.The sentenceswhich he calls "declarative" (which appears to mean whateveryoneelse means by "indicative"), while not described as names ofsubsistenttruths nd falsehoods, re none the less describedas havingsuchentitiesfor their ntensions.For their extensionstheyhave some mysteriescalled "truth-values." For sentences,having been classed as a species of"designator," have to possess their significance n the ways prescribedgenerally ordesignators.And a designator,we are toldin another onnection(p. I07), "is regardedas having a close semanticalrelation not to one but74


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DISCUSSIONto two entities,namelyits extension and its intension,n such a way thata sentencecontaining he designatormay be construed s beingabout boththe one and the otherentity."So though n tactonlya minorityfsentence-fragments, amelymentioningly-usedubstantival expressions, an be saidto have extensions,Carnap has to assimilate the jobs even of sentences tothis special job of a species of sentence-fragments.nd this is preciselyparallel to the Frege-Meinongmistake oftreating entences s names. Thesetheorists ssimilated saying to calling; Carnap assimilates saying to men-tioning.Yet both mentions nd names (whichare a species ofmention)areordinarily sed onlyas fragmentsfsentences.They enable us to say certainsortsofthings,but whenwe have utteredthemby themselveswe have notyetsaid anything.Carnap flounders neasilyover thequestion,How do falsesentencesmeananything?as anybody must who thinks that "meaning something"is arelation-expression.e thinks hat true sentenceshave propositions or heirintensions,whichpropositions re cosily exemplified y facts. (I fail to seehow a factcan be an example of a trueproposition.Could there be severalexamples of the same true propositionand, if not, what does "example"mean?) But a falseproposition s not thuscosilymatched.So Carnaphas tosay that a proposition s a compoundofelements ach of which s severallyexemplified,houghthe compoundof them is not. A sentence s, therefore,after ll, just a list. "Socrates is stupid" is equivalentto "Socrates,attribu-tion, stupidity." Three entities are mentioned n one breath, but no onething s said. Plato knew better than this,but then he paid some attentionto saying.Carnap generously,f somewhatairily, ays that readerswho are discon-tentedwithhis account of the meaningsof entire entencesneed not let itworrythem. The rest of his theoryof meaning does not hinge on thisparticularbit of it. But surely, f his methodofmeaning-analysis oes notapply to what a sentencemeans,this shows that there s somethingwrongwithhis method.And,worse than this,ifthe one section n whichhe triesto discuss saying (as distinctfromnamingand mentioning)s inadequate orwrong, t would be rash to feelconfidentn the meritsof his accountof themeaningsof sentence-fragments.f the plot of the drama is bungled,thescenesand acts can hardlybe well-constructed.Carnap more than once says that he is not guilty of hypostatization,thoughhe has to findnot one but twoentities o be the correlates f everydesignator.The term"entity"we are requestedto take, leavingaside "themetaphysical onnotations ssociated with t," "in the simplesensein whichit is meant here as a commondesignationforproperties, ropositions ndother intensions, n the one hand, and forclasses, individuals and otherextensions, n the other. t seemsto me that there s no other suitable termin Englishwith this verywide range" (p. 22). Shades ofMeinong!Now by"hypostatization"we mean treatingas names or other sorts of mentionsexpressionswhich are not names or other sorts ofmentions.And just thisis the tenor of the whole of Carnap's meaning-analysis. rue, he abjurescertainmythological ictions n which some philosophershave talked abouttheirpostulated entities.True, too, he sometimes uses hard-headed (butnone the less mythological) ictionsofhis own,as whenhe says "the term'property' s to be understoodin an objective, physical sense, not in asubjective,mentalsense; the same holds forterms ike concept,' intension,'etc. The use ofthese and related termsdoes not involvea hypostatization"(p. 16); and "the term 'concept' . . . is not to be understood in a mentalsense, that is, as referringo a process of imagining, hinking, onceiving,

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PHILOSOPHYor the like, but rather to something bjective that is found n natureandthat is expressed nlanguage by a designation fnon-sententialorm" p. 21).Whereabouts n natureare we to look forconcepts?How are the properties"Jocularity" nd "Primeness"to be understoodn a physical ense?My chiefimpressionof this book is that it is an astonishingblend oftechnical ophisticationwithphilosophicalnaivete. Its theoriesbelongto theage that waxed with Mill and began to wane soon after the Principles ofMathematics.The muddled terminology f extension and intension whichbelonged to the muddled and obsolete doctrine of termsis disinterrednorder to help construct two-dimensional elationaltheoryof meaning, ta time when it ought to be notorious that relational theoriesof meaningwill notdo.Carnap's influenceon philosophersand logicians is very strong. Theimportanceof semantic problems n philosophyand logic cannot be over-estimated. It is because I fear that the solutionsof theseproblemsmay beimpededby the dissemination f hismistakes that I have reviewed o scold-inglythe treatise of a thinkerwhose views are beginning o be regarded sauthoritative. GILBERT RYLE.

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Meaning and Necessity (Ryle)