Abstract
In this paper, I address a series of arguments recently put forward by Cappelen Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8(4): 743–762 (2017) to the effect that philosophers should not do formal semantics or be concerned with the “minutiae of natural language semantics”. He offers two paths for accessing his ideas. I argue that his arguments fail in favour of the first and cast some doubt on the second in so doing. I then proffer an alternative conception of why exactly philosophers should continue to do formal linguistics which includes both semantics and syntax.
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Notes
Throughout, I will use “formal semantics” and “natural language semantics” interchangeably, although there is a sense in which the latter can be used to refer to a number of semantic frameworks including distributional approaches. This latter meaning, however, is not the sense in which Cappelen (2017) uses the term.
Williamson’s “arguments” include historical reflection, case study, sociological claims as to what philosophers take to be their subject matter, and the alleged failure of the language-centric model in characterising the latter parts of twentieth century analytic philosophy.
David Albert is a case of an academic who publishes in both physics and philosophy journals on related work.
See his Causation, Prediction and Search (2001) for detailed prediction algorithms designed for feasible implementation among other things.
One might of course argue that using data from psychology or linguistics is not the same thing as doing psychology or linguistics. True enough but there are cases where this distinction collapses, especially in linguistics. For example, the analysis of counterfactuals are notoriously sensitive to both distributional (linguistic) and philosophical analysis.
Unfortunately, the consensus ends here and alternative accounts abound. See Szabó (2012) for an account of this principle in terms of inference to the best explanation.
Here again, the philosophy of language dovetails with the research agenda in linguistics where generative grammars were initially designed to find answers to the syntactic side of this puzzle (see Chomsky 2000).
“The Linguistic Turn provided the only good reasons for thinking that philosophy of language was a significant part of philosophy” (Cappelen, 2017: 748).
A more careful characterisation of Williamson’s position would perhaps describe it as the claim that although attention to language and thought might be required for the analysis of philosophical problems, it is ultimately facts about the world, not language, which resolves them. At other points (see chapter 2 of Williamson (2007)) he argues that taking problems at “face-value” is incompatible with taking the linguistic turn.
Cappelen (2017: 748) has an interesting analogy in support of his division of labour argument. He suggests that the case for semantics is analogous to admitting papers on phonology or the “syntax of Romanian” into philosophy journals. If philosophers are reluctant to do the latter then surely papers on the semantics of definites and indefinites in English are equally unwelcome. Two points are worth mentioning. Firstly, definites and indefinites are canonical cases of linguistic expressions with ontological import. Secondly, and more to the point, there are examples of interesting papers on the syntax of specific languages which had significant philosophical impact. Shieber (1985) (published in Linguistics and Philosophy) derived a proof from the structure of Swiss-German to the conclusion that natural language cannot be context-free (or captured by a context-free grammar). Everett (2005) used the syntax of a little known Amazonian language called Pirahã to dispute the claim that recursion is a universal property of natural language (a view held by most linguists of the generative persuasion). One reason these papers on the syntax of particular languages are important to philosophy might have to do with Universal Grammar or the idea that individual languages shed light on our common cognitive endowment (see Chomsky 2000). Thus, these topics certainly seem philosophically significant and in my view it would constitute an omission to banish them from philosophy journals.
Of course, one could make similar arguments in favour of including formal pragmatics within philosophical methodology. Although this task is beyond the current remit, I think it is an acceptable consequence of the arguments in the present paper. In fact, semantics itself can be more broadly construed to include pragmatic analysis (for a lively debate concerning related claims, see Racanati (2003) and Cappelen and Lepore (2005). I thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this connection and consequence to me.
There might be another reason for including syntax in philosophy related to compositionality or the proper relationship between syntax and semantics.
Here the claim is not that philosophy uses results from these theories but actually applies the tools to its analysis such as conditional probabilities to the analysis of credence levels in epistemology.
Here I make a distinction between direct and indirect piecemeal significance. The former can affect the outcome/conclusion of an argument as to the nature of time, or the compositionality of thought etc. while the latter only figures in highly abstract meta-discussions of the practice. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this clarification.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Bob M. Martin, Bernhard Weiss, Jack Richter, Paul Egré and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments of various drafts of this work.
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Nefdt, R.M. Why Philosophers should do Semantics (and a bit of syntax too): a Reply to Cappelen. Rev.Phil.Psych. 10, 243–256 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0396-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0396-1