Abstract
The present article is the second part of a trilogy of papers, devoted to analysing the influence of semantic Platonism on contemporary philosophy of language. In Part I (Picazo 2021), the discussion was set out by examining a number of typical traces of Platonism in semantic theory since Frege. In a subsequent paper that shall be published elsewere, additional illustrations of such traces will be provided, taken from a collection of classic texts in the philosophy of language, also from Frege onwards (Baghramian 1998). Then, the present paper is devoted to providing yet additional illustrations of those traces, but this time taken from a collection of recent commissioned essays on the subject: the book Prospects for Meaning, edited by Richard Schantz in 2012. We shall, thus, describe a considerable number of examples in which the influence of semantic Platonism on these essays can be felt. Prominent among these examples are the adhesion to pseudo-Platonism in the form of semantic mentalism; the typical limitations of avoidant and trivializing semantic accounts; the confinement to logico-philosophical analysis as the only methodology for semantic research; the excesses committed by some radical semantic anti-representationalists and some radical semantic biologists; and the adhesion to hardcore semantic Platonism itself.
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Notes
Schantz’s book does not provide a numbering system for the essays it contains. However, a system suggests itself by combining the section of the book in which an essay appears with the number order within that section. In this way, e.g. ‘Essay IV.8’ will correspond to the eighth essay of the fourth section. In the sequel, on every occasion on which one of the essays of Schantz’s collection is mentioned for the first time, I will indicate, between em dashes, the essay number so obtained.
‘[W]e know from our own case that we do mean by “rabbit” something different from “rabbit stage” or “undetached rabbit part” … In all discussions in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, it is absolutely essential at some point to remind oneself of the first-person case’ (Searle 1987, §I: 126); ‘[W]e know in our own case that we mean, e.g., Wilt as opposed to Wilt’s shadow … [I]n my own case, when I understand myself, … I know what I mean’ (Searle 1987, §IV: 141); ‘It is part of the persistent objectivizing tendency of philosophy and science since the seventeenth century that we regard the third-person objective point of view as preferable to, as somehow more “empirical” than, the first-person, “subjective” point of view’ (Searle 1987, §V: 145). It is interesting to compare this last observation with Searle’s critique of philosophy of language on grounds of being ‘insufficiently naturalistic’ (Searle 2012, §I: 554) (cf. §14, below).
‘In his 1987 paper “Indeterminacy, Empiricism and the First Person”, John Searle argued that the first-person perspective provides the basis for securing determinacy in language and in thought, thereby fending off arguments for radical content-indeterminacy like those propounded by philosophers like Quine and Davidson. In this paper we propose a way of elaborating Searle’s suggestive but cryptic remarks’ (Horgan and Graham 2012, Abstract: 321).
‘What suffers in this treatment of demonstratives is not the definition of a truth predicate, but the plausibility of the claim that what has been defined is truth. For this claim is acceptable only if the speaker and circumstances of utterance of each sentence mentioned in the definition is matched by the speaker and circumstances of utterance of the truth definition itself. It could also be fairly pointed out that part of understanding demonstratives is knowing the rules by which they adjust their reference to circumstance; assimilating demonstratives to constant terms obliterates this feature. These complaints can be met, I think, though only by a fairly far-reaching revision in the theory of truth’ (Davidson 1967: 34).
Of course, this does not make Sainsbury a ‘Platonist’. We have already pointed out (cf. §1 above and Picazo 2021, §1) that none of the criticisms put forward here is intended to permit an overall conclusion about any of the authors concerned. The point that I have just made concerns only one particular aspect of one proposal considered at one point by Sainsbury (an aspect in which an influence of semantic Platonism, in the form of ‘avoidant semantics’, can be traced). Besides, I did in fact lean on Sainsbury in Picazo (2021, §5, fn. 4), in my criticism of analytic methodology.
‘It is argued that there are at least three kinds of meaning that have wide currency across many different kinds of language use. The first kind consists of formal definitions of terms in mathematics and science … The second kind consists of dictionary definitions, familiar to all of us. The third kind, that of associative meanings, is not as widely recognized as the first two, but associative meanings are at the center of our cognitive and emotional experience. Baldly stated, the thesis defended is that associations provide the computational method of computing meaning as we speak, listen, read or write about our thoughts and feelings’ (Suppes 2012, Abstract).
In correspondence, Peregrin acknowledges that speaking of ‘finding out meanings by inspecting my mind’ is infelicitous, as he did not mean to allude to introspection. Relatedly, he agrees (and points out that it should be clear from his paper) that the kind of knowledge of the meaning of a word of which he says that ‘once I have learnt it, I no longer need to look at people using it’ is the practical ability attributable to any speaker simply by virtue of her/his linguistic competence, as opposed to the kind of theoretical (explicit) knowledge of meaning that semantic theory is after. This being so, my objections vanish.
E.g.: ‘[T]he literature makes it plausible that…’ (Devitt 2012, §2.3: 70); ‘The view that … is a pillar of folk psychology, accepted one would have thought by everyone bar a few eliminativists’ (Devitt 2012, §3.2: 76); ‘So my conclusion is that there are good reasons for the view that … and no good reason has been presented against this view’ (Devitt 2012, §3.2: 77); ‘Still, we should not rest with an intuition: we need an argument’ (Devitt 2012, §3.5: 80).
E.g.: ‘[C]onventions do not generally require regularities of behaviour, either de facto or de jure. In particular, conventional coordinations, including linguistic coordinations, do not, in general, require regularities of behavior’ (Millikan 2012, §II: 88); ‘Specific language forms continue to be reproduced by speakers within a language community merely because, often enough, they prompt hearer responses that contribute to the fulfillment of speaker purposes in speaking’ (Millikan 2012, §II: 89); ‘[T]here is a reason why one can learn from observation of one or a few examples of the kind much that is likely to be true of most others. Most single terms designating kinds designate real kinds of this sort’ (Millikan 2012, §IV: 100).
‘The distinction between true use and linguistically correct use is best illustrated by simple examples’ (Miller 2012, §3: 352); ‘Clearly, one could go on constructing examples to illustrate the distinction between true use and linguistically correct use. For our present purposes, we can simply define linguistically correct patterns of use as patterns of linguistic use characterised by the absence of linguistic incorrectness, as exemplified in cases C, D, C* and D* above’ (Miller 2012, §3: 353).
‘I raise the question what it is for there to be a shared knowledge of words’ meanings’ (Hornsby 2012, Abstract: 383). The title of the paper is, indeed, ‘Knowledge of Meaning and Epistemic Interdependence’.
‘We distinguish tokens of “tall” in different contexts by subscripting’ (Segal 2012, §1.2.1.1: 295).
‘[T]he Chinese context is the k-th context’ (Segal 2012, §1.2.1.1: 295).
‘[A]ll tokens of “tall” governed by the standards of that context are subscripted with “k”: “tallk”. “Tallk” is a syntactic type’ (Segal 2012, §1.2.1.1: 295).
‘All and only utterances of “tall” in the k-th context are utterances of “tallk” (although the numeral remains unpronounced)’ (Segal 2012, §1.2.1.1: 295).
E.g.: ‘Consider, for example, the extension of “hammer” … in the following scenario. On a distant planet with no carpentry, there naturally occur objects that are intrinsically physically identical to hammers’ (Segal 2012, §1.2.3: 298–299).
‘The aim of this article is to provide a brief summary of some of my views on the relation of meaning to its biological base’ (Searle 2012: 553); ‘So the materials for building language are already present in prelinguistic intentionality. What is lacking? Well, a whole lot of things are lacking’ (Searle 2012, §III: 558); ‘We have to add speaker meaning, conventions and inner syntax to the apparatus of intentionality that exists in many prelinguistic animals, but it is important to emphasize that all this, as I am attempting to describe it, is an extension of, and a natural development from, prelinguistic forms of mental life’ (Searle 2012, §VI: 563).
‘Meaning as a Biological and Social Phenomenon’ (Searle 2012, Title); ‘The author argues for the thesis that meaning is a biological as well as a social phenomenon’ (Searle 2012, Abstract); ‘So far, I have produced a rather simple account of language according to which it is fundamentally a rather natural, indeed, biological phenomenon’ (Searle 2012, §VI: 563).
We could even point, symbolically, to the year 1918 (which was the year of publication of Frege’s ‘Thoughts’ [Frege 1918]) as the climax of semantic Platonism in contemporary philosophy of language; and to the year 1953 (which was the year of publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations [Wittgenstein 1953] and Quine’s first edition of From a Logical Point of View [Quine 1953]) as the beginning of its fall.
In fact, I suspect that a similar problem, with the same or analogous forms of Platonism, applies to most—perhaps all—areas of analytic philosophy. That would be a matter, however, for a much broader investigation than the present one.
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Acknowledgements
In the preparation of this paper, I have received help from Samuel Cuello Muñoz, Daniel García Simón, Peter Kingston, José López Martí, Jaroslav Peregrin, Mark Sainsbury and Proof-Reading-Service.com.
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Picazo, G. The Long Shadow of Semantic Platonism. Philosophia 49, 2211–2242 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00321-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00321-x