Meaning, Truth-Conditions, Proposition: Frege's Doctrine of Sense Retrieved, Resumed and Redeployed in the Light of Certain Recent Criticisms

Meaning, Truth-Conditions, Proposition: Frege's Doctrine of Sense Retrieved, Resumed and Redeployed in the Light of

Certain Recent Criticisms

David WIGGINS.

Summary This article first recounts the history of the truth-conditional conception of meaning from

Frege to the present day, emphasizing both points that are neglected in receidev accounts of this history and points of permanent philosophical interest. It then concludes with a review of certain current objections to the truth-conditional conception and seeks to answer the difficulties pressed by Stephen Schiffer in Remnants of Meaning, offering certain fresh considerations upon the question what it is for two speech action to representent the saying of the same thing.

1. My office here is to retell an old story, namely that of the Fregean conception of the declarative meaning, simply and briefly enough to make room for its present day sequel or sequels. In fulfilment of this office, I grant myself licence to use hindsight to fill gaps of argument or supply deficiencies in the received history of these matters, to make fresh emphases or pass over that which seems unfortunate or misleading in favour of what hindsight finds in- teresting and important. I take further licence to muster new responses (sig- nalled as such) to new statements of objection. But the chief aim is to save the thread, however invisible it may seem at some points in the historical record, that connects the beginning of the story with the here and now'.

* Birkbeck College, Dept. of Philosophy, Malet Street, London WCIE 7HX GB. 1 The occasion of the address on which this article is based was the opening session, 22nd

August 1988, of the annual meeting of the Institut International de Philosophie, held in 1988 in conjunction with the 18th (Brighton) World Congress of Philosophy. The author is grateful to the respondent, Donald Davidson, for his comments, and to the then president of the Institut, David Pears, for proposing the particular brief that I tried to follow.

The synopsis of the literature on meaning and Fregean sense that has resulted from the attempt to document the claims advanced here is of course utterly partial. It is offered without prejudice against other emphases or points of view.

Dialectica Vol. 46, N o 1 (1992)

62 David Wiggins

1 2. What is it for a declarative sentence to mean something, or have a sense?

In volume I, section 32, of the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Jena 1893), Frege explains that every sentence of his concept-writing or Begriffsschrift, the artificial language whose operations are to shadow and, in certain matters of difficulty, to regulate and supplant the workings of natural language, has both a sense and a reference. The reference of a sentence is its truth value. The sense of the sentence is the thought that the sentence expresses. But how exactly does a thought attach to a sentence? And what is a thought‘? Well, which thought it is that a sentence expresses and how it attaches will depend upon nothing other than this: under what conditions is the sentence to count as true? Or, as Frege puts the matter in his own terms for the case of his artificial language,

<<It is determined through our stipulations [for the language of Be- grif$sschrift] under what conditions [ any sentence of Begriffsschrift] stands for the True. The sense of this name [of a truth-value, i.e. the sense of this sentence], that is the thought, is the sense or thought that these conditions are fulfilled.>>

This statement comes at the end of Frege’s explanations of Begriffsschrift. But its import, like that of the other remarks he makes in the same section about sense (the senses of constituents contributing to the sense of the whole, the senses of parts of a complex expression being parts of the sense of that expression etc.) is potentially perfectly general. Frege’s stipulations of sense for the expressions of his concept-writing simulate what it is for a given expression of a natural language to have a given or actual sense. The institution of Be- griffsschrijtat once extends and (albeit in microcosm) illuminates natural language. It serves purposes akin to the practical and theoretical purposes that the construction of an artificial hand might have for a community of beings whose normal members have natural hands.

3. Consider then the natural language sentence <<the sun is behind cloud,. It has sense if and only if it expresses a thought. For the particular thought that the sun is behind cloud to attach to this English sentence (this symbol or social artefact, produced and held fast in its social setting, Frege need not forbid us to say) is for the sentence to be such (in that setting) that it stands (there) for the True just in case the sun is behind cloud. Or putting the matter in a way that is not Frege’s but will readily consists with his way, he who understands the sentence is party to a practice that makes this the condition under which it counts as true. And once that is said, what mystery is left over about what a thought is?

Meaning, Truth-Conditions, Proposition: Frege’s Doctrine of Sense Retrieved, Resumed and Redeployed in the Light of Certain Recent Criticisms

63

This thesis can be detached from more questionable features of Frege’s semantical doctrine, such as the idea that a sentence is a complex sign (strictly) standing for the True or the False or is a name of a truth-value. And Wittgen- stein does detach it (an act of retrieval for which he is too rarely commended) in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ( 1921)2: 4.022 A sentence in use (Satz) shows how things stand if it is true. And it says

that they do so stand. 4.024 To understand a sentence in use means to know what is the case if it is

true. 4.061 . . . A sentence in use is true if we use it to say that things stand in a cer-

tain way, and they do . . .

4. These are striking formulations, not radically dependent upon the picture theory of meaning. But on one key point they are less explicit than they appear. If we say that the meaning of <<the sun is behind cloud>> is given by saying that the sentence in true just in case the sun is behind cloud, we must at- tend to a question neither Frege nor Wittgenstein addressed explicitly. If the English sentence <<The sun is behind cloud>, is true, then no doubt all sorts of things have (as matters stand) to be the case. It is daytime, it is not dark, more people are awake than asleep, millions of automobiles are emitting smoke into the atmosphere, andthe sun is behind cloud. It is by virtue of knowing already what the English sentence means that we pick on this last thing. To say what a sentence means it seems we must attach to it an intended or (as one might say

2 I translate ‘Satz’ here not as ‘proposition’ but as ‘sentence in use’ in order to mark and preserve the continuity (as well as the discontinuity) with Frege, who always used ‘Satz’ to mean what we now mean by ‘sentence’, For more on this matter, see below 0 21 and Tractatus 3.12.

In detaching Frege’s doctrine from the finer details of Frege’s semantical doctrine, I take it that Wittgenstein effectively answers the complaint that Frege has nothing to say about what it is to understand a sentence or grasp a thought. For this complaint, justifiable enough perhaps when directed against the expositions given in Carnap and Church (see below, notes 9 and 34), see e.g. Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance, Cambridge, Mass., Bradford Books, 1987, p. 123, eFrege does not tell us anything about what grasping a thought consists in,. In fact, it would be much fairer to complain against him - if one thinks this a matter for complaint - that, by introducing the thought simply as what one who is becoming party to a linguistic practice grasps and grasps by virtue of grasping the acceptance/rejection conditions of something linguistic, Frege acquiesces, not in the vacuous supposed platonism of an empirically inaccessible world of noeta, but in a highly controversial quasi-linguistic view of thinking, namely the view of thinking as the soul’s internal dialogue with itself. The view may be wrong, but it is not empty or absurd. And, interestingly enough, this really is Platonic! (<The soul when it thinks is simply conversing with itself, asking itself questions and answering, affirming and denying. . . So I define one’s thinking as one’s speaking - and one’s thought as speech that one has had - not with someone else or aloud but in silence with oneself%, Plato, Theuetetus 189E - 1 9 0 A . On this and cognate matters, see now Michael Dummett, <The philosophy of thought and the philosophy of language, in Mkrites et Iimites des methodes logiques en philosophie (Paris, Vrin et Fondation Singer Polignac, 1986).

64 David Wiggins

by analogy with the use of the term in the theory of propositional logic) a designated condition on which its truth depends.3

One way to try to secure this point is by recasting Frege’s and Wittgen- stein’s thesis as follows:

Sentence s has as its use to say that p just if whether s is true or not depends upon whether or not p.

But this is not really the end of the difficulty just rehearsed. For one of the things that the truth of <<the sun is behind cloud,,, as said at a given time and place, depends upon, in one ordinary, standard sense of <<depend>>, is very likely low atmospheric pressure. That, however, is not one of the things the sentence says or even implies. And for the same reason we cannot improve the formulation just given by ruling that the truth of the sentence has to depend only upon the designated condition. It cannot depend only on that condition, in the ordinary sense of <<depend>>. It must depend, in that ordinary sense, on everything that the satisfaction of the intended condition itself depends upon.

It seems we can make the new formulation come out right either by spec- ifying what kind of dependence we have in mind, or by insisting that the troublesome reading of the formulation is perverse. On a natural reading of what is intended, a defender who takes the second of these lines of defence may say, there is really nothing wrong with the thesis. Such insistence is indeed perfectly natural. Unluckily, though, the real reason why it is so easy to insist that the unwanted reading is perverse is that it is so easy for us to hear the formulation as referring to what is already a semanticaldependence. Perhaps we do that by understanding <<the sentences s’s truth depends upon whether p>> in a way that makes it tantamount to <<It’s the output of the system we have at our disposal for making sense of one another that s is true if and only if p>>. There is nothing wrong with that way of understanding <<depends,. (See below, 39 5,9,12). But it was on the idea of the semantical and of our communicating and making sense of one another that the theorist started out wanting to cast light. So long as that is his aim, it is pointless for him to insist on the ‘natural’ reading of the Frege-Wittgenstein thesis. He must find a way of implementing the first defence and show how to pick out the particular sort of dependence intended.

3 Among earlier formulations of this or cognate points see A.J. Ayer, <<Truth,,, Revue Inter- nationale de Philosophie 25 , 1953; David Wiggins, <(On Sentence-sense, word-sense, and difference of word sense),, in Steinberg & Jacobovits (eds.), Semantics: An interdisciplinary Render, Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 18-9; P.F. Strawson, Truth and Meaning, Inau- gural Lecture, Oxford 1970; John Foster, ((Meaning and Truth Theory,, in Truth andMeaning: Essays in Semantics, edited by J.McDowel1 and G.Evans, Oxford 1976. See also Davidson’s ((Reply to Foster,, ibid.


65

5 . Consider then what Frege could and would have said at that point in the Grundgesetze in reply to the difficulty just mentioned. Suppose that the language of his Begriffsschriftwere expanded to enable one to say <<the sun is behind cloud>> and other similar empirical things. Then each new primitive expression (‘sun’, ‘cloud’, etc.) would have a reference stipulated for it. In each case, the sense of the new primitive expression would consist in the fact that its reference was stipulated in that way4. Thus the sense of any complex expression would be determined from its structure and from the stipulations govern- ing each constituent expression. And nothing else would determine it. But then Frege is entitled to insist that, if we stick scrupulously to what actually flows from the appointed stipulations for Begriflsschrifr, we shall never arrive at the biconditional ‘the sentence <<the sun is behind cloud>> stands for the true if and only if there is low pressure’. The intended or designated condition is precisely the condition that the appointed stipulations suffice to deliver. In concert, the stipulations themselves spell out the particular dependence that had to be at issue in the restatement of the Frege-Wittgenstein thesis. No won- der then that we can hear <<the sun is behind cloud>> is true if and only if the sun is behind cloud’ as more or less equivalent to ‘The truth of <<the sun is behind cloud>> semantically depends upon whether or not the sun is behind cloud’. For we hear ‘<<The sun is behind cloud>, is true if and only if the sun is behind cloud’ as something delivered to us by whatever plays the part for natural language that the Fregean stipulations play for Begriffsschrift.5

This answer has a certain limitation that I shall come to shortly. But in the context of Frege’s own particular purposes in the Grundgeserze, it can be de-

4 Here I borrow an expository idea from Michael Dummett. See his Frege: Philosophy of Language (London, Duckworth, 1973), pp.227-8.

5 Some writers have given the impression that we have for all these purposes to find a stronger connective than ‘if and only if‘ between ‘ccthe sun is behind cloud, is true’ and ‘the sun is behind cloud’. Other writers on these matters have sought to mollify the first set of writers by saying that a system of biconditionals in the form <True s iff p’ will ‘serve as’ a theory of sense, while conceding that it does not itself constitutesuch a theory. If the reply I have formulated on Frege’s behalf is correct, then neither party to this controversy is in the right. ‘If and only if‘ does just what is needed in ‘ b T r u e s if and only if p’ and (subject to the point made in the next note) it hits off just the right kind of dependence, provided that 8 is the right sort of axiom set. (That will be our next problem but one. See 5 8.) And anything that is or entails a system of biconditionals presented in the form ‘+ True s if and ony if p’, one for each J will itself constitute a theory of sense for the language to which the sentences s belong. The claim will become fully and finally plausible when (or if) it is shown how ordinary speakers can be credited with an understanding of something tantamount to c k p . See 5 12 below.

66 David Wiggins

veloped into a complete defence of what Frege wanted to say there about sentence sense6.

6. Before we resume the main thread, let us note that there i s one other point that Frege and Wittgenstein ignored. Wittgenstein’s 4.061 affects to bring real live speakers into the picture. That must be a good thing to do. But once we take their presence seriously, we shall notice another difficulty in the Frege- Wittgenstein thesis. Consider the Latin sentence afea jacta est. Like its standard translation into English, the die is cast, the sentence is true if and only if a die has been thrown. - Which requires (i.a.) that there be a real die and someone who has thrown it. But I think it is safe to say that what speakers normally have used the Latin or the English sentence to state or to intimate - to say in the some full or ordinary sense of ‘say’ - is not that. The normal use of the sentence is to say the sort of thing Caesar said by alea jacta est when he broke the laws of the Roman Republic and, instead of disbanding his troops, led them towards Rome across the boundary marked by the river Rubicon. We who follow Caesar use the English sentence to assert that in doing some act or other we have committed ourselves irrevocably. There is no simple route from a sentence’s use to say something back to its proper meaning.

The proper response to this problem is first to concede something to the objection and adjust the Frege-Wittgenstein thesis to read

sentence s has as its use to say fiterally (in the thinnest possible acceptation of ‘say’) that p just if whether s is true or not depends upon whether or not p,

and then to imbed that new formulation in a larger more comprehensive theory. The larger theory will persist in the Fregean explication of the literal meaning of a sentence as consisting in its truth-condition but explain the fuller kind of saying by building upwards from literal meaning. In attempting such

I say only that it can be developed to do this. The extra step that is required is to rule that a biconditional in the form ’s stands for the True if and only if p’ be derived from the stipulations by a certain canonical proof procedure that exploits the sense-giving stipulation for each constituent of s and then halts, abstaining from needless detours through logical equivalences that the deductive apparatus may no doubt make possible. Otherwise there is a danger that all logical equivalents of a given sentence will appear to have the same sense as it does. (On another ap- proach to this problem, one might explore, with Richard Grandy’s writings on these questions in mind, all possible weakening of the deductive apparatus of a truth-theory that preserve its adequacy to deliver a biconditional for each sentence s, and one might prefer syntactical and se- rnantical characterizations that cohere best with the desideratum of weakeness.)

Meaning, Truth-Conditions, Proposition: Frege’s Doctrine of Sense Retrieved, 67 Resumed and Redeployed in the Light of Certain Recent Criticisms

an account, we may begin by suggesting that by doing the rhetic7 act of saying something which means literally in language L that the die has been thrown (so by saying something which happens here to be false), a speaker can perform a further speech act, an illocutionary act that is tantamount in force to the declaration that he is irrevocably committed. If literal meaning - a technical construct - is to be what determines what was said in the narrowest, thinnest acceptation of ‘say’ (a technical acceptation of ‘say’, no doubt), we can appoint the theory of sense as so far developed to determine the content in L of what Austin called rhetic acts, acts of saying in this narrowest sense, and we can make that the innermost portion of the larger theory.

The immediately adjacent next outer portion of that larger theory may then advance to the other linguistic moods of L and seek to identify linguistic acts as acts of specifically asserting that [the sun is behind cloud, say, or the die is cast], asking whether [the sun is behind cloud] or enjoining, again in the thinnest possible sense [and however vaingloriously in this particular case], that [the sun be behind cloud] 8.

The next outer portion of the grand theory will be a less language-specific, more general theory of illocutionary force, furnishing the materials to determine of a given utterance in a given mood in a given context what its force is over and above its being an act of asserting, asking or enjoining. The assertion that p may in context have the force of an authoritative military command that it should be brought about that p; or, in another context, it may have the force of a plea to bring it about that it should no longer be the case that p. On the other hand, an act of enjoining that p may have the force not of a command, but of advice. And again, (representing a different sort of datum for this part of the theory), saying that p may, in such and such context (e.g. that obtaining with Caesar in Cisalpine Gaul in 49BC), have the force not so much of the

7 For J.L.Austin’s theory of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts see How to Do Things with Words(ed. J.O. Urmson, Oxford 1965). A rhetic act is an act of using vocables with a contextually determinate sense and reference and in such a way that one can be reported as saying that. . .. For the connection between the locutionary and the rhetic, the connection between Austin’s researches and post-Austinian developments, and much else besides that be- longs in the areas I have so roughly blocked in, see Jennifer Hornsby, ‘Things done with words’, in Jonathan Dancy, J.M.E.Moravcsik and C.C.W.Taylor, Human Agency: Language and Duty: Essays for J . 0. Urmson (Stanford University Press 1988).

8 Cp. John McDowell. <<Truth Conditions, Bivalence and Verificationism,, in Truth and Meaning, eds. Evans and McDowell, Oxford 1976, p. 44, who assigns this task to a <theory of force,. (Cp. also Dummett’s variant usage of this expression at his op.cit. p.416.) For the reasons why one might hive this task off from a theory of force in Austin’s more general sense, see Donald Davidson, ‘Moods and Performances’, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford 1984), pp.109-21. See also Hornsby, op.cit., and her ‘A Note on Non-Indicatives’, Mind, January 1986.

On this view, context is considered over and over again (in different ways) at each point in the application of each portion of the larger theory.

68 David Wiggins

declaration that p as of the declaration that q, intimate not so much that there is a die that someone has tossed as that a certain action has committed someone irrevocably to something. (Finally perhaps, some yet outer portion of the grand theory will exceed the province not only of the language-specific but also of the specifically linguistic and treat - so far as that is manageable or the- oretically needful - the various further effects - persuading, deterring, incit- ing or whatever - that J.L. Austin denominated perlocutionary, the effects that we can bring about through saying things.)

7. It will be apparent that, by this excursus undertaken in the cause of its defence, I have tried to place in a single focus the Frege-Wittgenstein conception of sense, in the condition in which it was available by 1921, and the utterly different researches of J.L. Austin, which were undertaken some thirty years after the Tractatus in a framework of theoretical expectations both at odds with the concerns of Grundgesetze and Tractatus and innocent (alas) of active knowlege of most of what these great works had in common. Can I really jus- tify the attempt to arrive at a common focus for all these different inquiries?

My recollection from being a student at Oxford during the 1950s, at the time when Austin was giving the lectures he then called Words and Deeds, is that what we were all being taught then about the meaning of words and sentences was a simple version of a thesis of the middle or later Wittgenstein, namely that meaning was use. There was not a trace of the idea that to know the meaning of a sentence was to know what it would take for it to be true. (Three years later in the Princeton philosophy department the situation was very much the same, if my memory is to be relied upon.) What then had hap- pened to the Fregean thesis?

I surmise that the fate of that Fregean thesis had been this. During the 1920s and 1930s, having survived in Wittgenstein’s reformulation, it became the thesis that the meaning of sis the method of its verification. (For what appears to be a key moment in the transformation, see Wittgenstein, Philosop- hische Bemerkungen IV.43. <<To understand the sense of a Satz means to know how the issue of its truth or falsity is to be decided.,,) And then the dis- credit into which verificationist doctrine so quickly descended effectively buried any general recollection there may have been of preverificationist statements of the Fregean thesis, at least among practising analytical philosophers in England or Americag. At a time when the picture-theory of meaning had

Y It is noteworthy that, in the several decades here under consideration, Wittgenstein’s is the one clear, philosophically salient formulation of the connection that Frege discerned between sense and truth-condition. Frege’s doctrine on this point is conspicuous by its absence from expositions where we might have expected to find it, such as those of Alonzo Church at § 04 of his


few adherents, perhaps the picture-theoretical presentation of the thesis in the Tractatus helped to obscure 4.024. That is speculation. What seems to be a matter of fact is that the thesis remained more or less buried until 1959, when Michael Dummett disinterred it and put it back into circulation (which was at first an extremely limited circulation)lO. But, of course, by 1959 the text we now call How to Do Things with Words was already as complete as it was ever going to be. Austin’s and his associates’ interest in Frege was always confined (so far as I could tell) to the GrundZagen der Arithmetik (which Austin had caused to be made a prescribed text at Oxford and for that reason translated), to <<On Sense and Reference>,, a paper which Carnap, Quine, and Feigl and Sellarsll had made familiar to all professional philosophers but which leaves it dark what the sense of a sentence is to be, and then to Geach’s and Black’s Se- lections (which still leave that dark)12.

So there was no immediate question at the time of Austin’s lectures on how to do things with words of properly or completely integrating his contentions with the Fregean conception of the sense of a sentence - no more that there was any real question of Frege or Wittgenstein’s integrating their contentions with a theory of the speech act. Yet I make no apology for attempting to achieve this unitary focus upon Frege, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Austin. For Austin, as if perceiving the possibility of some general theory of sense and reference, himself delimited the province of the locutionary/rhetic in Fregean terms of sense and reference. It is evident that he supposed that there was much more to be said under this head. In the second place, Austin’s researches and Wittgenstein’s researches (and, at a far greater degree of abstraction, even

introduction to Introduction to Logic (Princeton 1956) and Rudolf Carnap at 5 33 Logischer Aufbau der Welt. (For Carnap’s own insufficiently remarked, final return to a Fregean position, without explicit acknowledgement to Frege, see Introduction to Semantics (Cambridge, Har- vard, 1944), p.22)

I have wondered whether it is something connected with the blind spot I seek to explain in the text that accounts for the strange neglect of Richard L.Cartwright’s definitive improvement of Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment, namely his reformulation of this in terms of rules of truth. See Cartwright’s <Ontology and the Theory of Meaning,, Philosophy ofscience 21, no.4 (October 1954), an article that rehearses and resolves difficulties that were still under active discussion a whole decade later.

10 See his <Truth,, Proceedings ofthe Aristotelian Society 1958. (But cp. also (1) David Schwayder’s article <=B, Mind 1956; ( 2 ) Carnap’s Introduction to Semantics, op. cit., note 9; ( 3 ) the works of P.T. Geach and G.E.M. Anscombe, where, to one who knows it, the Frege- Wittgenstein view will often appear to be presupposed. It will be well to remark that, in the nineteen fifties, Geach and Anscombe were alien to mainstream analytic philosophy, British or American, and were happy to be seen as alien to it.)

11 See on <Sense and Nominatum, in H. Feigl and W. Sellars (eds.), Readings in Philosop- hical Analysis New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts 1949).

12 See P.T. b each and M.Black (eds. and translators), Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Blackwell 1951).

70 David Wiggins

Frege’s researches) are all answerable to the same mass of social and linguistic phenomena. The only way to take any of these philosophers seriously is to assess his work against this shared background, and then think in the light of all the requirements that come to light how its shortcomings and omissions can be made good. Anything correct must go with anything else that is correct.

8. So much then for the question of the intended truth-condition, and so much for what (<the die is cast, says, as two objections to the truth-conditional view of saying. It is a tribute to these basic objections that the first should draw so much attention to the phenomenon of semantic compositionality and the second should force the philosopher of language into a far less restrictive and abstractive interest than heretofore in the social and linguistic phenomena of communication. But an even more radical reorientation lies in store for us when we seek to generalize the doctrine presented in Grundgesetze. In seeking to do this in a manner that will cohere with the defence we offered in § 5 , we shall need to resume the historical thread and shift the main focus from Frege in Jena and Wittgenstein in Cambridge and Vienna, moving first east- ward to the Lwow and Warsaw of Kotarbiriski and Tarski, and then westward, through Cambridge (Massachusetts) and Oxford (England), to California, which is where the theory first received its modern presentation, in the writings of Donald Davidson.

9. We defended the thesis that sentence s has as its use to say literally [in the narrow rhetic acceptation of ‘say’] that p just in case the truth of s depends upon whether p and we did this by undertaking to deploy the semantic stipulations for the (extended) Begriffssschrift in order to recapitulate in detail the nature of this semantic dependence. What than resulted was an articulation of the particular dependence that obtains for the sense of the language of Be- grifJwhrifr. But that leaves over at least one question. How can we arrive in this way at a general account of semantic dependence or a general account of the relation of truth and sense? The most that we could claim to be able so far to put on the pageis some account of what it is for a sentence to say-[this-or- that] -in-the-language-of- Begriffsschrifr, or

s can be used to say-literally-in-Bg that p if and only if it is derivable from the referential-stipulations-for-Bg (specified thus . . .) that s stands-in-Bg-for the True if and only if p,

or, less archaically, redescribing the provisions for reference and truth in Bg as what they are, namely the definition of truth-in-Bg,

s can be used to say-literally-in-Bg that p if and only if the definition of ((sentence-true-in-Bg>> has as a consequence True,,(s) if and only if p.


71

These dicta point at something general about truth and meaning. But how can we saythis general thing? How can we fight free of these hyphenations? I shall mention two ways of dispensing with the essential reference to Bg. The first method of generalization is one we can pick up from Tarski’s transposition to the framework of his <<general methodology of the deductive sciences>> of an idea that I believe he was encouraged to have about truth by reading the section on truth in Kotarbinski’s Elementy Teorji Poznania,13 a section that is itself strongly reminiscent of Tractatus 4.06114. The second method is the later (1973) of two suggestions made by Donald Davidson in conscious redeploy ment of the work of Tarskil5.

10. The first way to lose the essential reference to Begriffsschrift is to say under what conditions a set of axioms 8 counts as a definition of <<sentence true in language L>> for arbitrary language L, ruling that 8 constitutes a ma- terially adequate determination of the extension of ‘true sentence of L‘ if and only if, for each sentence s of L, 8 has as a consequence a sentence in the form

where p on the right hand side holds a place for a translation of s into the metalanguage for LI6. (See below § 11.)

Now this proposal hits off exactly what it was that Frege had shown how to provide in Grundgesetze. What is more, given Tarski’s purposes, it is perfectly satisfactory. If one’s chief concern is with such questions as (say) the coincidence or non-coincidence of the class of true L sentences and the class of L sentences that are provable (by whatever means), then the notion of translation is in principle available. A logician does not beg the question at hand, for instance, if he avails himself of the intuitive idea of translation, as it figures in Tarski’s ruling concerning material adequacy, in order to assure himself that

True s iff p,

13 Lwow 1929, cited by Tarski in ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’ (1933), translated in Logic, Semantics and Metamathematics, Oxford 1956. Kotarbinski’s book has been translated and expanded as Gnoseology (London 1961).

14 For the claim about Tarski and Kotarbinski, see David Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth, 2nd edition (Blackwell, Oxford 1991), pp.333-4. (In addition to making general reference to Kotarbinski’s book, Tarski refers also to lectures in Warsaw by Lesniewski. But the main burden of that acknowledgment seems to relate to the semantic paradoxes.)

15 For the first suggestion see <<Truth and Meaning,, Synthese, vol. 17, 1967, reprinted in Inquiries op.cit. For the second see <Radical Interpretation,, Dialectica 27, 1973 (also reprinted in Inquiries op.cit.), John McDowell, CBivalence and Verificationism,, op.cit., § 1; Gareth Evans and John McDowell, editorial introduction to Truth and Meaning op.cit.; John McDowell, <<On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name,, Mind 85, 1977

16 See Tarski op.cit., p.188 - defining a canonical use of the expressions <theory [or cede- finition,] of truth, to which some modem writers have not adhered (e.g. Martin Davies, Meaning, Quantification and Modality (Routledge, London 1981), ch.1 & 11, and Stephen Schiffer, Remnants of Meaning (MIT 1987), ch.5 and passim), but to which I adhere.

72 David Wiggins

the referential stipulations for a constructed language furnish the intuitively acceptable, non-accidentally correct method of stating the principle that determines the membership of the class of true L sentences17 (which membership can then be contrasted, say, with the membership of the class of provable sentences). He is simply assuring himself that it is truth as intuitively conceived that his characterization gets hold of (and then sterilizes from paradox etc). Matters are quite different, however, if we are chiefly concerned not with the connection of truth and provability, not with mathematical definability or any other metamathematical issue, but with the notion that is correlative with that of truth, namely meaning. Then <<translation)> cannot be a primitive idea and we shall need a different or additional characterization of what it is for a theory 0 to constitute a referential stipulation or a definition of truth for a language L. It will be good to have a characterization covering not only the case where sense is stipulated, as it is for a formal language, but also the case where it is discovered, as it is for a natural language.

So here we reach Donald Davidson’s suggestion. To understand this, it helps to appreciate the immediate background of his speculations, which was not in fact any concern with the theory common to early Wittgenstein and to Frcge (to whose doctrines Davidson evidently regarded Alonzo Church as the complete guide) I*. The background comprised more topical preoccupations, namely Davidson’s considered rejection of the answer to the question of linguistic meaning provided by H.P. Grice’s (1957) reduction of semantic no- tions to psychological ones such as belief and intention 19, and Davidson’s strong preference for the speculative framework furnished by W.V. Quine’s then recent book, Word and Object (1960) - most especially Davidson’s interest in Quine’s question of how from a standing start, so to speak, one person could in principle effect a radical translation (or a radical interpretation, as Davidson preferred to say) of another’s linguistic behaviour. As is well known, Davidson agreed with Quine’s requirement that the answer to this question should be naturalistic, empirical and innocent of all <<museum myths)) of meaning. But Davidson added something quite distinctive to Quine’s requirements when he insisted that the only way to conceive of a radical interpretation’s being achieved is to conceive of the interpreter’s making

17 This is not to say that the notion of translation is available for the particular definition of utrue-in-l)) for some particular L. According to Tarski, it is not. What cctranslates>> and ((translation, are available for is the definition of what will count for arbitrary L as a definition of true in L. See Needy, Vulues, Truth op.cit., pp.336-8, also 143-4.

18 A theory as effectively invisible to philosophers in American philosophy departments, I have claimed (see note 9), as it was to British philosophers - apart, of course, from the picture- theoretic formulation in Tractatus, an object then of mainly antiquarian interest.

1‘’ See H.P.Grice, (<Meaning>>, Philosophicul Review 66, 1957.


general sense of his subjects by seeking to read more and more fine-grained, presumptively rationally explicable, beliefs and purposes into these subjects’ behaviour (as provisionally, then progressively less provisionally characterized), by attributing rationality to them and simultaneously organizing his interpretive efforts around the attempt to find ways to determine the conditions under which the sentences of the subjects’ language are true. Davidson thought that such determinations, taking the form of descriptions of the referential contributions of such individual words and linguistic devices as the interpreter can discern in the flow of speech, must have as their consequences sentences in the form ‘True x iff p’, one for each sentence of the language in question, where ‘x’ holds a place for the mention of a sentence of the subjects’ language and ‘p’ holds a place for a sentence in the interpreter’s language. But if that is right, Davidson claimed, then the said determinations will amount to nothing other than a Tarskian (we see now that he would here said Fregean) definition of truth for a given language L. For the attempt to say what L sentences mean can involve nothing less than an attempt to arrive at the definition of true-in-L for the natural language L spoken by the people whom the interpreter is to make sense of.

At this point we should note another important departure from Quine, viz. Davidson’s insistence that the sentence replacing ‘p’ should be formulated by the interpreter in terms that describe the world, not via the ocular irradiations or neural impacts on subjects that Quine had introduced into the discussion, but in perfectly ordinary terms (or ordinary terms that are not disqualified by local or special considerations20 as inaccessible to the speakers of the language).

11. Epitomizing the two suggestions just mentioned and putting them into the form in which we have already stated their intellectual antecedents, we have

For any sentence s and any language L, s has as its literal use to say in L that p just if EITHER (using Tarski) there is a 0 such that (i), for every sentence x of L, 0 has as its consequence that True x iff. . . where ‘. . .’ translates x into the metalanguage for L, and (ii) True s iff p;

20 For the place of such considerations and the motive they afford to reformulate the principle of charity as a principle of <humanity>>, see Richard Grandy, ((Reference, Meaning and Belief,, Journal of Philosophy 70, 1973.

74 David Wiggins

OR (using Davidson, Lewiszl, McDowell22 et al.) there is a 0 such that (i) 0 implies a biconditional in the form True x i f . . . for every sentence x of L; and (ii) when 0 is applied in tandem with a theory of mood, a theory of illocutionary force and an anthropology of L-speakers to the task of making sense of L-speakers, what results makes good sense (sense not im- proved upon by the application of any rival combination) of the shared life and conduct of L-speaker+; and (iii)

The relation of these two proposals, the EITHER and the OR, is that they are consistent but that, in the case where the concern is with natural language, the second comes to the aid of the first and, in doing so, supersedes it.

True s iff p.

* * *

12. I come now to objections to the doctrine we have arrived at - first old objections (in so far as not answered silently by the choice of mode of exposi- tion) and then new objections.

It may be objected that young and unsophisticated human beings learn the notion of meaning effortlessly and swiftly. (Surely <<means>> is among the first hundred words that children catch onto.) It must be wrong to suppose that meaning is as complicated as this proposal represents it as being.

The objection may (for all I know) be effective against the suggestion that we have here a member of that rare species, a ‘philosophical analysis’. Yet surely there is something else for it to be. If the proposal effects an illuminating conceptual connection between distinct but correlative ideas, then it will be enough for it to be recognized as true and correct after prolonged relection and testing (which not all people will wish to engage in). I would only add that the proposal is less abstruse than it may seem. What we have here is only the idea of a significant language as a system that correlates strings with states of affairs that they can draw attention to or get across (in other words, a system that generates a truth-condition for each sentence), a subsystem of the larger system by which social beings participate in their shared life. There is nothing

21 ((Radical Interpretation,, Synthese 27, 1974. 22 See specially his <(Truth Conditions, Bivalence and Verificationism,, op.cit.; also David

Wiggins, ((What would be a substantial theory of Truth,, in Z.van Straaten (ed.), Philosophical .Subjects (1980). and Essay 1V in Needs, Values, Truth, op.cit.

23 Thus rendering their beliefs and other propositional attitudes intelligible in the light of the reality they are exposed to, and their actions intelligible in the light of their beliefs and other propositional attitudes. See McDowell, op.cit. note 22 above, pp.44-5.

Meaning, Truth-Conditions, Proposition: Frege’s Doctrine of Sense Retrieved, 75 Kesumed and Redeployed in the Light of Certain Recent Criticisms

abstruse in that. It is because we grasp it so readily (I think) that, both in philosophy and before philosophy, we can hear a T-sentence given in the form <<True (s) if and only if p>> as the output of such a system24. When we grasp that, it is tantamount to our intuitively grasping the <<I--p> that plays the part described in the Fregean elucidation of meaning.

13. It might perhaps be objected that the circularity that the second proposal (the OR condition) purports to remove from the first proposal returns immediately with the idea of an interpreter’s ‘making sense’ of subjects. But to this the theorist of truth-conditions would reply that, whatever the impact of circularity on philosophical analysis, simple circularity as such is not inimical to philosophical enlightenment. In fact a genuine elucidation results from this second suggestion (the OR), and extra information relevantly accrues, because the idea of making sense that we find there is a much wider one than the idea of linguistic interpretation. (The absence of this kind of understanding can be demonstrated non-linguistically.) It embraces and interestingly in- volves the ideas of saying and interpretation of saying with coeval, collateral ideas of explanation and understanding - even (as you may say, if you are convinced, as I am, of the indispensability of these further things to the full story) with the idea of participation by interpreter and subjects in a shared form of life, and the idea of explanation as Verstehen.

14. It has been objected that in this conception of meaning there is a commitment to a ‘classical’ account of truth according to which truth and meaning can transcend palpable linguistic use. The objection (prefigured perhaps in Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Bemerkungen, quoted above 8 7 and in Witt- genstein’s reformulation there of Tractatus 4.024) deserves extended consideration. But in this place, where I cannot undertake to expound justly or fairly all the claims made by anti-realists such as Michael Dummett and Cris- pin Wright, just one remark will have to suffice. So far from involving the antecedent commitment to a particular view of truth, the proposal suggests a framework in which the idea of truth can itself be investigated. In the presence of an intuitive idea of what it is for a sentence to say something (and in the presence of any further convictions of the kind that it is evident that this objec- tor already possesses), we can ask what the property of truth must be Zikeif the definition of the property of truth in L is to be such as to deliver contents for saying and believings that will serve in their turn to produce an intelligible ac-

24 See again 3 5, ad fin.

76 David Wiggins

count of the life and conduct of L-speakers25. It is by no means a foregone conclusion that the outcome of this inquiry will confirm the so-called ‘classical’ conception of truth.

15. A final clarification before we advance to new objections. In the formulation I have set down here, it is not a necessary condition of s having it as its literal use to say that p, that there should be only one suitably constrained theory 0 that implies that s is true if and only if p, or that all suitably constrained theories should imply that s is true if and only if p. The question is open. Matters of indeterminacy of interpretation are simply postponed until the time when we have a fuller account of what it is to make sense of the shared life and conduct of L-speakers. But it must be mentioned that, in advance of all that, some will wish on other grounds to augment or modify the Davidsonian account of these matters. They may claim that- the terms of grammatical cum semantic description ought to engage with the terms in which the processes or algorithms of speech processing and production are to be characterized in psychology. The thing they say we need here is an extra empirical input to the truth-conditional theory, an input that will have in the end to be sustained by empirical science and may, puce the thesis of indeterminacy, narrow further the choice of admissible interpretation.

About this I want to make just one point, aiming it equally at radicals and reactionaries. To reactionaries already suspicious of the whole scheme of 8 11, I would say that there is no reason why an upholder of the truth-conditional theory of declarative meaning needs to object if it proves that someone or other knows how to make such a programme operationally specific and he then implements it. Nevertheless the truth conditional theorist should resist all suggestions that the legitimacy of his concerns stun& or fulls with the success of such a programme. His theory does indeed make room for the fact that people effortlessly comprehend sentences that they have never heard before: and it is one point (not the only point) in favour of the compositional, truth- conditional view that it demonstrates how there is room for this to be possible. A theory <<explicitly states something knowledge of which would suffice for interpreting utterances by speakers of the language,, as Davidson once put it”. But <<would suffice>> only. A particular interpretive theory 0 does not have as such to afford any information or depend upon any information or be

25 This is the strategy of my <<What would be. . .)) cited in note 22 and of Essays 111, IV and V of Needs, Values, Truth opcit.. and is viewed favourably by Crispin Wright in the more recent work that he has included in ReaIism, Meaning and Truth (Blackwell 1986). See especially

26 Donald Davidson, <<Reply to Foster),, in Truth and Meaning, opcit., reprinted in In- pp.3Olff.

quiries opcit.


answerable to any information about how it is actually possible for us to do this interpreting. It need not say anything about the nature of the knowledge on the basis of which it is supposed that we get our propositional knowledge of what sentences mean27. It will not be a point against the truth-conditional conception then if someone succeeds in mocking or poking fun at the idea of tacit knowledge of meaning or of rules or whatever.

That is what I say to the conservative. but to the radical let me say that it is a mistake, even in his would-be scientific terms, to make the semantidgram- matical description of language subordinate (or even answerable) to the concerns of scientific psychology. Language is a complex and changeable object whose nature and existence may affect as well as be affected by the evolution- ary processes that determine human neurophysiology and neural anatomy. The first call upon a theory 8 is to combine with a general sort of participatory understanding. What is needed for that purpose is a convincing and illuminating account of this or that language as the social object that speakers know, talk, and talk about - even as they seek to make themselves clear in it to one another, or seek to translate it into other languages, or seek to understand texts from its past, or seek to assess or criticize one another’s efforts in using it for the open-ended set of purposes that they have in mind when they speak or write it. What in the first instance seems to be most important is that 0 should engage with the terms in which we do some or all of these things28.

* * *

16. I come now to doubts and difficulties that have been expressed more recently. From a mass of present day writing on these subjects I have chosen two recent contributions, one as representative of a body of opinion that de- parts significantly from the programme that flows from what appeared as established in 8 12, the other as revolutionary in its intended effect and subvers- ive of all such programmes.

27 I am claiming then that, so long as our concern is to say what meaning is, it is a mistake to seek to go beyond the point marked in these matters by Martin Davies, Meaning, Quantifica- tion and Modality, op.cit., chs. 3 and 4.

28 Since we sometimes have to appeal to something like grammatical theory itself in con- ducting the process of criticism, improvement and assessment of what is said or written by ourselves or others, there is no doubt a circle here. Or, better, there is need for mutual accommodation between theory and practice (accommodation that may itself issue in innovation). But even where terra firma gives out, grammar does not float unconstrained. For, inter alia, it has to serve the purposes of understanding that precede translation into radically different languages. (A test by which some well-tried parts of traditional grammatical theory are strongly vindicated.)

78 David Wiggins

In <<Direct Reference, Propositional Attitudes and Semantic Theory, (Philosophical Topicsvol.XV, no.1, Spring 1987), Scott Soames puts together the requirement that a semantic theory should tell us what sentences say with the idea that it <<is the job of a semantic theory [by which he presumably means a theory like 0, not a doctrine like that of Frege et al. that I am defending] to tell us what the truth conditions of sentences are>>. Thus he arrives at the claim that <<the truth-conditions of a sentence, relative to a context, are the metaphysically possible worlds in which the sentence, as used in the context, is true>>. And then from this Soames deduces all sorts of difficulties, that all necessary truths say the same thing, that the conjunction of a sentence with any necessary consequence of it says the same thing as the sentence itself. And then, since, if Q is a necessary consequence of P, then the set of metaphysically possible worlds in which P & Q is true is the same as the set of worlds in which P is true, the question arises how he who has a belief with a content corre- sponding to a given set of possible worlds can help but believe the conjunction of the consequences of the belief.

Soames proposes two subtle but radical revisions of semantic theory to avoid these and other difficulties; but rather than assess these, let me go back to his starting point, the leap from <<s says that p>> to <<there is a possible world w such that s RW.

One who understands s and knows what it means knows the truth-condition for s (one can say). If knowing a truth-condition had to be knowing an entity and truth-conditions had to be entities, then perhaps truth-conditions would be sets of possible worlds. But let us be as careful as we can with the claim that <<to understand s is to know s’s truth-condition>>. <<Knowing the truth-condition>> sounds deceptively like being acquainted with something - with an object that can then turn out in the theorist’s hands to be a set of possible worlds. But what knowing the truth-condition for s really is is simply knowing (propositionally knowing) under what conditions s is true. It is a matter of being able to answer the question <<under what conditions is the sentence true?, (More artificially, it is a matter of answering a question tantamount to<< s is true iff what?,) Of course, he who knows the meaning of s knows what smeans. But this <<what>> is an interrogative not a relative <<what>,. It is not scire id quod sententia s signijicat - with the relative quod. It is scire quid sententia s significet - with the interrogative quid and the subjunctive significet. Under what conditions a sentence is true is not an object at all. A fortiori it is not a set of possible worlds knowledge of which is a candidate to be the same as knowledge (= savoir= wissen) what a sentence s means. (Let nobody confuse this reply to Soames with a general offensive, which I have no interest in mounting, against the idea of a possible world.)


79

17. Another doubt or difficulty that has been raised recently arises in roughly the same neighbourhood, but is not so readily answered.

Stephen Schiffer in his recent book Remnants of Meaning29 mounts a general attack on all extant theories of meaning, an attack turning on the in- consistency that he alleges between nine propositions that he supposes most of his readers will be as strongly drawn to believe as he is himself.

Schiffer works on a vast canvas. But let me try to reproduce the one detail that bears on the truth-conditional conception. Schiffer argues in his Chapters One (p.7) and Five (p.112) that, if natural languages have compositional truth-theoretic semantics, then all attitude-verbs like ‘believe’ and ‘say’ must be relational verbs, relating a person to a thing believed or said, either a proposition, or a sentence in the language of thought, or (the third possibility) a sentence in some public language. Schiffer undertakes to refute each of these possibilities; and then at the end, having been through all the possibilities, he is moved to offer a <<no theory, theory of meaning predicated upon the denial he is led to make that natural languages have truth-theoretic semantics.

I doubt that the truth-conditional theory could ever be defeated by such an argumentative strategy. But I shall accept provisionally Schiffer’s dialectical framework. Schiffer disposes convincingly of sentences in the language of thought; and then, less convincingly, he disposes of propositions as candi- dates to be things said or believed. I think he underestimates the resources that would be available there to the Fregean theorist. But, since the reasons why I think that depend partly on my faith in Schiffer’s next and last candidate and on my faith in everything a theorist of Fregean thoughts might do to redeploy the success he might score there, I readily admit that everything depends on this third candidate, as considered in the only version Schiffer takes seriously, namely Davidson’s paratactic theory of <<saying that . . .>> contexts.

18. That theory is well known. In response to the problems that had troubled his predecessors in the sentential tradition of analysis of orutio ob- Ziquu, Donald Davidson proposed that we should see <<Galilee said that the earth moved>> paratactically, and as consisting of <<Galilee said that>> adjoined to the potentially free standing sentence <<the earth moves>>, which is itself said but not asserted by whoever is here reporting Galileo, this as if free-standing sentence being thereby displayed in its ordinary use, functioning as it normally functions. Thus <<the earth moves>>, is embedded in the larger context that is made up of this sentence itself preceded by <<Galilee said that,. The ut-

29 Bradford Books, MIT, Cambridge Mass. 1987.

8 0 David Wiggins

terance of ((Galilee said that>> thereby refers to, displays or demonstrates its companion utterance. Thus we have

The earth moves, Galileo said that.

or, as it is normally put, Galileo said that the earth moves3”.

On this paratactic account, the verb <<say>> is primitive but, in a loosely expla- natory fashion that introduces strictly superfluous matter, its office can be ex- plained or conveyed as follows: [Galileo said that the earth moved] just if [Galileo said that: The earth moves] just if [There is an utterance of Galileo’s by which he stands in the required relation to my (the reporter’s) ensuing utterance: the earth moves] just if [There is an utterance of Galileo’s by which he committed himself in the way in which I should commit myself if I were to commit myself by saying now as follows: The earth moves].

19. According to Schiffer <<the really urgent problem, (p.133) for the paratactic theory is that one can know what is said by e.g.

or

without knowing what Sam says, i.e. without knowing that Sam is right in what he says if and only if flounders actually snore. Whereas one cannot know what is said by

without knowing that Sam is right if and only if flounders snore. The objection may seem to depend on wilful ignorance of what the para-

tactic theory says. But Schiffer undertakes to prove the first of these two claims (the second is plainly correct) by inviting us to consider the following dialogue.

Sam says that [Flounders snore]

Flounders snore. Sam says that

Sam says that flounders snore

Pierre: La neige est blanche, Donald: Tarski said that,

where Donald need not know what Pierre’s utterance <<la neige est blanche,, actually says.

The trouble with this objection is that the possibility for Donald not to know what Pierre’s utterance actually says depends on the division of labour

30 The fact that Tadeusz Kotarbinski, a Polish speaker, was moved by other considerations to make a somewhat similar proposal in his ‘imitationist’ doctrine of psychological reports (see ((The Fundamental Principles of Pansomatism,, Mind 1946) suggests that we do well to expound the doctrine in a way that treats as inessential the allegedly demonstrative character of the word ((that)). ( I record that in 1988 this was not a point on which Davidson demurred.) Let us simply say that the ((Galilee said. . .>) context demonstrates what follows it.


81

between Pierre and Donald. Each speaker (we may suppose) knows what he is saying, but they do not need to have complete comprehension of one another. When we go back to the paratactic proposal itself, however, we find that it required that Pierre and Donald be the same person. One and the same person must himself say what he reports Tarski as saying. But then, if each speaker really knows what he is saying, there is no chance of the speaker who is the same as each of them not knowing that Tarski was right in what he said iff snow is white.

The objection and the reply that it provokes encourage the hope that the best answer to Schiffer’s doubts both about the paratactic theory and about the truth-conditional conception will be to get the paratactic theory completely clear.

The same hope is encouraged by the consideration of one of Schiffer’s other objections - though I have to say that this other objection has had the indirect effect of persuading me that the emendation as well as the clarification is needed of Davidson’s theory. The other objection is this: it is hard to see how ({Galilee believed something>> can entail that there is an utterance u such that Galileo stood in the requisite belief relation to u. Galileo’s belief might not have been expressed. None of his beliefs might have been.

As it stands this objection is not an objection to the “saying that. . .>> proposal but only to its extension to <<believing that. . .>>, an extension which is neither trouble-free nor mandatory (especially if we can conceive of a success with aaying that. . .>> creating the possibility of a convincing reconstrual of propositions). But we can invent a variant of the objection. Consider <<there’s something nobody has ever said>>. Ex hypothesi there is no utterance - if utterances are, as Davidson supposes, particulars - to verify this claim. Yet surely the claim is actually true.

Schiffer makes the helpful suggestion that Davidson could reformulate his theory using utterance kinds, which can exist uninstantiated31, but then he spoils that suggestion by presenting it as the clumsy proposal that c<Galileo said the earth moves>> be seen as:

The earth moves Galileo believed that kind of utterance,

complaining also - as if the theory of <<saying that. . .>> were not itself one part of the theory of saying and meaning - that the theory of kinds of utterance will require recourse to an unexplained notion of content.

31 Not resisting the temptation to remark at the same time that if one has utterance kinds ‘then one has properties, propositions and the lot, and no need to worry then abouth achieving an extensionalist semantics’ (p.130). This is just silly. What Schiffer calls an extensionalist semantics may be precisely the way by which things like properties and propositions are to be put onto a sounder basis of theory.

82 David Wiggins

Schiffer continues his critique of Davidson by declaring that the parataxis theorist <<will have to find content-determining features of utterances and construe propositional attitudes as relations to utterance kinds as individ- uated by those features,. Let us therefore conclude by seeing how far we can succeed in something tantamount either to that or to something even better than that - namely an account of things said that meets all the constraints that Schiffer adds to those that Davidson has formulated and complied with.

20. Let us begin by regrouping the forces available to us and propose that, when I say c<Galileo said that the earth moves,, what it is announced by the first three words that 1 shall demonstrate is nota mere utterance, my future ut- tering of the words I shall come out with when I produce a token of the sentence <<the earth moves>>. What my <<Galilee said that. . .>> harks forward to is something that the coming utterance of <<the earth moves, itself exemplifies. (A sort of ‘deferred ostension’.)32 What then does that utterance exemplify?

It may help here to put the neo-Davidsonian proposal, as so far reformed, into concert with a general observation about actions and acts that I owe to Jennifer Hornsby33. Suppose that the tennis instructor says <<do this>,, and then he shows you what you are to do by doing it himself. He closes the racket face (say), takes the racket back and up, and then steps into the next ball that he receives even as he strikes it inches in front of the left knee. (<<And the same on the backhand,, he may say.) Then what the <<this>> in <<do this>> refers to is not his action or his particular doing of what he showed you. That is gone for ever. It refers to what the instructor did and you are to copy him in doing - namely take the racket back and up, step into the ball (etc.), striking it inches in front of the knee. This is an act, a multiply instantiable thing - the cut- stroke that the instructor will have had to get you to recognize before he can ask you to do it or teach you to deploy it appropriately.

32 After the completion of this article, and in execution of the resolve to read through the published writings of my lamented former (and to have been future) London colleague, Ian McFetridge, who died in October 1988, I discovered that I was not the first to find ‘deferring ostension’ here, though McFetridge’s preferred object of deferred ostension was not (as I claim) the speech act but the proposition, understood by him as a class of utterances. See his article (<Propositions and Davidson’s Account of Indirect Discourse,, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1975-6. The difficulty for Davidson that McFetridge sets out with in his article (namely that on Davidson’s account, given in terms of utterances, if A says twice <<The earth moves, then the second time B can reply, absurdly, <<That’s another thing Galileo said,) gives pro- minence to a difficulty somewhat similar to the difficulty Schiffer presses, and it could receive a similar answer if utterances were replaced in the Davidsonian theory (as now advocated) by speech acts.

33 See <Which Physical Events are Mental Events,, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1980, ad init., and op.cit., note 7 above. For ccrhetic acts in the sequel below, see again the work of Hornsby’s cited in note 7 above.


83

Similarly - somewhat similarly, mutatis mutandis - the claim being advanced is that, when I say <<Galilee said that the earth moves, and I produce my token of athe earth moves>>, what I display or exemplify is not my own particular utterance or my particular token of <<the earth moves, but some act of saying, a narrowly drawn specific rhetic act (but not a speech action, for that is a particular), an act that one who can interpret English speech will know issues in truth if and only if the earth moves. It is something that an Eng- lish speaker knows about by virtue of having a grasp of the context in which the sentence <<the earth moves, is used and by virtue of being able to speak and interpret in the language in which the demonstration is offered. (This is not of course to say that all performances of that very act must be in English, or that all performances of it will be discernible as such by those who can discern an English language performance of the act.)

According to this conception, a truth bearer is neither an action nor a sentence nor an utterance. It is an act, something universal that is multiply instantiable in different contexts, but so closely specified for any given context that, on a proper understanding of what it is, it can count there as true or false sim- pliciter. What the conception also leads us to predict - perfectly correctly, it turns out - is (1) that sentences like <<It is true to say the earth moves>> and <<To say that the earth moves is true, will be good English sentences; (2) that what we are saying when we say that Galileo said that the earth moved is something that may be loosely paraphrased as follows: Galileo did the same as we shall do when we perform the following rnetic act (act of saying): The earth moves.

21. In dispensing so far with the proposition or judgment, in the traditional sense, and espousing the idea that the rhetic act can itself be a primary or non- derivative truth bearer, it may seem that we are on the point of losing the con- trast, so rigorously insisted upon by Schiffer34, between things that are contents and things that have content.

If so, we are not the first to seek to do so. Russell, for instance, doubting at this moment in his thinking that there were propositions (either true or false), said that it seemed to him evident <<that the phrase ‘that so and so’ [e.g. ‘that the earth moves’] has no complete meaning by itself which would enable it to denote a definite object as (e.g.) the word ‘Socrates’ does. We feel [he writes]

34 Op.cit., p.118. Cp. A.Church, op.cit.8 04, athe present use of the word proposition is the happy result of a process which, historically, must have been due in part to sheer confusion between the sentence in itself and the meaning of the sentence,.

84 David Wiggins

that the phrase ‘[that the earth moves]’ is essentially incomplete>> 35. The elucidation just proposed is one way of making good what Russell claims it is we feel. And however superficially differently, it is surely the same aim that Witt- genstein was implementing36 when he sought in the Tractatus to make a sentence in its projective relation to the world displace and do duty for the proposition as Russell and Moore had conceived it.

3.12 I call the sign with which we express a thought a Satzzeichen [Pears and McGuinness render this word propositional sign]. - The Satz is a Satzzeichen in its projective relation to the world.

This ruling has great virtues. It points forward to insights that Wittgenstein conveyed later when he asked about what brings the words of a language to life. (Questions that Tractatus 3.1-3.262 already does much to answer.) But the literal-minded will be justified if they ask: what else can a sign in its projective relation to the world be but a sign? Or, if that answer is blocked by the ruling that a Satz is a sign-in-its-projective-relation-to-the-world, then what exactly is the semantic effect of this hyphenation? What other kind of entity does it introduce?

In order to cut short these questions the answer I am suggesting for consideration is that a Satz, in Wittenstein’s special acceptation of Satz, or a Satz- zeichen-in-its-projective-relation-to-the-world, had better be a thing done, some sufficiently specified rhetic act. (I do not of course mean that that is how Wittgenstein conceived it. For that is fundamentally unclear.) This rhetic act is the sort of thing we can catch onto, learn to produce, and learn to identify by the phenomenal appearance of its instances. These are the productions, in the contexts of real life in which they are tantamount to one another, of various actual tokens of various sentence types. But then, having grasped the idea of a rhetic act from the typical case, we need have no difficulty with the idea that, as in the objection Schiffer has motivated us to consider, some rhetic acts have never been done and never will be done. We escape the conclusion that all un- exemplified rhetic acts are the same because we are not constructingsuch acts from their instances. Indeed there is no question of proving that they really exist. We are finding them and learning to exemplify them in their instances.

22. Here, with the idea that a sufficiently specific rhetic act can be a truth- bearer in its own right, we reach a momentary resting point in the defence of

35 See <<The Nature of Truth and Falsehood,, in Philosophical Essays (Longmans, London

36 Cp. Tractatus 5.541-2, a proposal that may itself be downwind from what Meinong in 1910), p.151.

(iher Annahrnen called <<the grammarians’ theory),.


85

the idea of sense as truth-conditions. Pending the appearance of quantification over things said as we speak of them in English, what we now have pro- vides a perfectly workable account of reported speech.

In further defence, we could now try to soften the strangeness of the im- plied consequence that a thing said is a thing done (a rhetic act) by seeking to suggest that the thing Galileo said is somehow the internal object of the verb suy37. Such a proposal might be defended in its own terms. Unluckily, however, it will secure only temporary respite from new difficulties that arise as soon as we take seriously our actual manner of quantification over things said38 and seek to satisfy Schiffer’s requirement that the context <<believes that. . .>> either be brought within the ambit of the paratactic elucidation of <<says that. . .>> or be placed in some clear relation to it.

Schiffer’s requirement is a substantial one. It creates the expectation that the world-involvingness39 of the content sentence that replaces ‘. . .’ in <<says that. . .>> contexts will carry over to the contents reported by <<believes that

37 Of course this internality would have to be sharply distinguished from the internality of <<house>> in <<Jack built a house, and the internality of abattle in <Napoleon and Wellington fought the battle of Waterloo,. In both of these cases the internal object is a particular, a thing or an event.

38 It will be good to be clear about where we have now arrived. We began ( Q 20) by taking seriously the factthat some things will never be said. We are now to take seriously the means or linguistic expressions by which we can say (inter alia) that some things will never be said.

39 For the world-involvingness of saying and the possibility of its accommodation within Fregean semantics, see (generally) Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford 1982 ,

(for certain special predicates) David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Blackwell, Oxford 1980), Preamble and ch.3; also <<The Sense and Reference of Predicates,, Philosophical Quar- terly 1984; (for demonstratives) John McDowell, De Re Senses,, Philosophical Quarterly XXXIV (1984).

ch.1; (for names) John McDowell, <<The Sense and reference of a Proper Name,, Mind 197 s ;

86 David Wiggins

. . .>> contexts40. Nevertheless, it seems a reasonable and correct requirement. And, if it is to be satisfied, then a more natural answer is needed (more natural than can be furnished by the idea of rhetic acts as truth bearers) to the question what exactly it is - what one thing - that long ago Galileo once said, some of his contemporaries disbelieved, and we now all believe.

On the view we have taken so far, the assertion, the disbelief and the belief that the earth moves all stand in a certain relation to a specific rhetic act, the rhetic act of saying that the earth moves, which we can do three times in Da- vidsonian parataxis, thereby showing what it would take for the assertion and the belief to be right (or wrong) and for the disbelief to be wrong (or right). Galileo i s right just if the earth moves; we are right just if the earth moves; Galileo’s contemporaries were wrong just if the earth moves. There is nothing controversial in the claim that by doing thrice this rhetic act in reporting them, we show this common content. But the rhetic act cannot itself be the common content. How then can we escape the difficulties of the traditional account of what that content is?

One view that may attract support among those with no interest in the idea of something sayable (thinkable?) that will never be expressed in the language in question (or among those who are hesitant to think that, in speaking of things said, speakers of English somehow commit the philosophy of language to acquiesce in something that may seem analogous to the kind of supposi- tional leap that we accused Scott Soames of making (0 16)) is a substitutional view of the apparently existential quantification <<there is something Galileo

4 0 For the doubt that Fregean senses that are world-involving can be appropriate bearers of cognitive content and that believing can be world-involving in respect of its content, see the useful conspectus of considerations that have currency compiled by Daniel Dennett in <<Be- yond Belief)), in The Intentional Stance (op.cit., note 2). See specially p.124 and thereabouts. For the reply to several of these considerations, see Philip Pettit and John McDowell, pp.1-15 (especially note 18), in Pettit and McDowell (eds.), Subject, Thought and Context (Oxford 1986) with the further contributions of Pettit, McCulloch and Hornsby. I believe that the most important points that need to be made in countering the denial of the world-involvingness of the content of beliefs are these: first, that, on any sane and defensibleview of the mental, it is not so much a weakness as a strength in the cognitive construal of Fregean sense for it to predict, as it does, that we are fallible judges of what it is we are cognizing, and to predict that, under certain conditions, we can he in doubt what it is exactly that we count as believing (what our belief amounts to): and second, that, even on a physicalistic view of the mind, it is not obvious - cer- tainly not as obvious as some writers who deny the world-involvingness of beliefs have claimed it is - that <there must be some way of describing the operation of the nervous system)) (so there must be some way of describing the operation of anything at all that can play the explana- tory role for which beliefs must be seen as suitable by any one who takes belief seriously as a determinant of action?) &dependently of its embedding in the world)) (Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance, p.147). There had better perhaps be no physical mystery about the workings of the various components of the nervous system. But this is not in itselfto say that, when these components are directed outwards to the world, it will be possible, even <<in principle,, to char- acterize in this independent way their synergetic interaction with what they encounter there.


said that we believe and his contemporaries disbelieved>>. Given a not incon- siderable amount of work on the syntax of the Davidsonian proposal, that might be a very nice further development of Russell’s dictum35. But can we not have an objectual view?

23. A familiar suggestion might be that the common content is to all the instances of the rhetic act what a common direction is to the many parallel lines that all (as we can say) point in it41. But recent discussions have shown how much more needs to be said about the use of that Fregean analogy. Does the set-theoretical construction of directions from lines show the objecthood and objectual quantifiability of directions? Or, by suggesting the reducibility and harmlessness of talk of directions, does it disprove the objecthood and real objectual quantifiability of directions42. That is one area of doubt. But nor must one forget that in the case we are concerned with there are notorious difficulties in realizing such a construction. Countless attempts have foundered on the doubt whether, construing propositions as sets of utterances, we can really discover or define any relation R between sentences-in-contexts (s-in-c has R to s’-in-c’) that will partition these sets in the way required for the construction of propositions, namely after the manner of an equivalence relation.

It would be good to find an escape from the set-theoretical, reductive ap- proach. And surely this is not impossible, once we have rhetic acts in the picture that can be assessed as true or false. Once we accept that what theory has to do here is not so much to create propositions or construct them from something allegedly clearer as to articulate, and then to defend against certain definite doubts or misgivings, the existing practice by which we do already speak of things said, there is surely a third, more properly objectual way. If we are satisfied that there are rhetic acts, acts of saying that . . . (cp. 8 6, 8 20), if we recognize these things as perfectly familiar, there is room to develop an account of propositions as things said on the following lines. A proposition is that which counts, in virtue of the relevant semantical provisions, as said or propounded (put out into the open) by alldoings that are truth-evaluable of a given rhetic act r. (Nobody who does a rhetic act will do only that act. There will be indefinitely many other things he does thereby. But what we are concerned with is that which alldoings of a given rhetic act will propound in common.)

40a See <<The Nature of Truth and Falsehood,, in Philosophical Essays (Longmans, London

41 Cp. Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic, $0 64-8. 42 Cp. Crispin Wright, Fregek Conception of Numbers as Objects (Aberdeen 1983).

1910), p.151.

88 David Wiggins

Let P(r) be the proposition thus associated with the act r. Then P(r) = P(r’) if and only if r = r: And r = r’ if and only if to do r is to do r’. What then does the question turn on whether to do r is to do r?

For the sake of simplicity, the suggestion I want to make about this will be limited here to the rhetic acts done by English speakers in English. Let 0 be the truth theory for English, including indexicals in English etc. Let 0 be the full semantic theory for English, comprehending not only 0, but everything else that has to be there for us to report correctly what someone said (in the narrow sense of say) and report whatever other linguistic acts he did by this (narrow) saying. Then, given a rhetic act r, 0 will enable us to determine that to do r is to say that. . .. But just in case to do ris to say that p, 0 will entail that it is true to do r if and only if p. And to do r will be to do r’ just in case there is a condition q such that the theory 0 rules that it is true to do r if and only if q and rules also that it is true to do r’ if and only if q.

Suppose I say aloud to myself <<My answer to Schiffer is in danger of making this paper too long,; and suppose the referee’s comment is <<The author’s answer to Schiffer is in danger of making the paper too long,,. Intuitively, it seems, not that whatever 1 am saying he is saying - there is far too much going on for that to hold - nor that the proposition that my answer to Schiffer is in danger of making this paper too long and the proposition that the author’s answer to Schiffer is in danger of making this paper too long are the same proposition (that again leads nowhere), but that there is some one thing that we are both saying. We are saying the same thing (and we are propounding the same proposition), according to the proposal under consideration, just if, in the light of all further contextual or other clarification of each utterance, it can be shown that there is some rhetic act that a speech action of the referee and a speech action of mine exemplify and that the rhetic act which these exemplify can itself be identified and specified to a point where, for any given temporal cum speaker perspective and any given language of sufficient expressive power, there can be an agreed, non-ambiguous, truth-evaluable way of execu- ting the act in that language43.

This is not the place in which to refine or develop the suggestion just made. I would simply note these points:

J 3 Does not this occurrence of <<ambiguous,, disable the proposal from operating effectively? No, not in the presence of the regulative assumption (a cousin of the principle of sufficient reason) that, in the absence of reasons to postulate multivocity, there is always a presump- tion of univocity - an assumption that is as harmlessly indispensable to the elucidation of speech acts and their instantiations as it is to the enterprise of constructing a theory of sense and composition for any particular language. (For a defence of this claim, see David Wiggins, pp.30- I . in <<On sentence sense, word-sense and difference of word-sense,, in Semantics: an inlerrliscipiinary reader, op.cit., at note 3 above).


(i) The notion of its being true to do r is that which was introduced in 3 21 (ad fin). (ii) On the view suggested, rhetic acts are not sets of utterances, nor do they need to be reduced to anything else. (iii) Rhetic acts and r’, that are never done are not, in virtue of their non-exemplification the same act. For the semantic provisions for the language will not rule, just because nobody ever does r or r’, that doing the one is true iff q and doing the other is also true iff q. Exemplification is irrelevant to the identity of rhetic acts. (iv) What we say is needed is a non-reductive non-constructional account of the nature and identity of rhetic acts and what they propound. But this is not to say that there is no sense in which propositions are constructions. Rhetic acts are surely the communal creation of communities of speakers and, by virtue of their being our own creation and possession, we do as speakers enjoy a certain makers’ and possessors’ insight into them and authority over them (an authority even analogous to the one that interested Vico in the Nuovu Scienzu). Even as we speak and interpret, and even as we react to any puzzle- ment that we create as speakers by better explaining ourselves and those whom we seek to interpret, we can draw upon our maker’s knowledge to refine and redefine what we are doing in saying what we say. In that way we refine and redefine what, in doing what we take ourselves to be doing, we are saying. In so far as there are doubts that are material or significant about what we have done, it is simply up to us to resolve them. It is this ever present possibility of further and better determination that sustains the hope that a theory of propositions that individuates them in one-one correlation with rhetic acts will be able to answer the challenge of furnishing an account of what it turns on whether r and r’ count as the same or different acts.

24. So much by way of answer to Schiffer and so much for the theory of propositions. The conviction I have voiced is that our current practice of speaking of such things is fully rich enough to sustain the objectual conception of things said. In so far as I have now to confront one who insists on reckoning in terms of a commitment to ‘entities’ the intellectual commitments we have thereby incurred, the main point I should care to insist upon in reply to him is that such propositional contents, such entities, are not entities we have to in- voke in order to describe what it is for someone simply to say that the sun is behind cloud. We can do that much by doing a rhetic act to demonstrate how things must be for that speaker to be right. The real situation is rather this. In the presence of (i) an antecedently established account of what it takes to give a theory of meaning for a language by means of truth-conditions and (ii) a

90 David Wiggins

workable, proposition-free paraphrase of <<Galilee said that the earth moved,, we can readmit the philosophical proposition, not as something that acts of saying and believing have ex initio to dock with in semantical outer space (an idea so absurd that I have reserved my own right to disbelieve that Frege was ever committed to it44), but as the correlate of the rhetic act, as the sort of thing we can commit ourselves to the existence of when we enter the claim - a claim venturing significantly beyond <<Galilee said the earth moved, - that what one person said another disbelieved and a third and fourth believed, or that we commit ourselves to when we enter the consequen- tial claim that there is a way things have to be for the first, third and fourth of these persons to be right and the second wrong. To the extent that this sort of talk takes on a life of its own, as it surely has, we only have to suppose that within some relevant demarcated area we are in a position to make, refine and defend definite judgments of sameness and difference between specific rhetic acts. But if this last is a problem, it is not a special or a new problem. For we are already committed to tasks of developing life-like, contextually competent theories of truth for natural languages and of refining in application Frege's intuitive criterion for sameness and difference of sense45. We do not need (and we must absolutely dispense with) the traditional proposition in developing such interpretive theories or working out the framework in which to develop them. But this is not to say that, even at the end, such theories cannot deliver such a thing.

25. The time has come to conclude, which I can best do by saying that, whatever he intended, Schiffer's contribution in his recent book seems not to have been to undermine the truth-conditional conception of meaning and saying, but to show how important it is to complete that conception in order to accommodate the semantics of <<believes that. . .>> and similar mental verbs. To complete it, it appears we need a further and better account of what can be said or believed. But when we have found our way through that problem and we measure the absolute distance we have come from Frege and from Witt- genstein, we may find that we have made a detour - an indispensable detour, of course, but a detour - back to almost the same place where we began, namely the task of understanding everything that is involved in someone's doing the act of saying something and, in doing this act, saying that. . .

44 See again note 2 above, ad fin. 45 See (e.g.) Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, p. 19, and McDowell ibidem, ap-

pendices to Chapters Nine and Six.

Dialectica Vol. 46, N o 1 (1992)

Documents

Meaning, Truth-Conditions, Proposition: Frege's Doctrine of Sense Retrieved, Resumed and Redeployed in the Light of Certain Recent Criticisms