Biology of language: A Milestone beyond the Quinean turn
Unless we remember, we cannot understand.
E.M. FORSTER
Exordium: the stakes
Quine conceived his naturalized account of epistemology in innocence of the
subject’s historically defining issues. This tacit verdict underlies a recent historical
reappraisal of logical empiricism promoted by Friedman (1999) and Richardson (1997,
1998). Both historians argue against Quine’s attempted assimilation of Carnap’s Aufbau
project to the strict empiricism of Russell’s ‘External World Program’. Both draw our
attention to a neo-Kantian strain in Carnap’s proposals that escaped Quine’s notice.1 The
observation hints of a wider symptomology in Quine’s historical self-understanding. In the
hagiology of his naturalized account, after all, he finds a prominent niche for John Horne
Tooke, none at all for Immanuel Kant.2
If Quine seems to some to have scraped too lightly at the historical Carnap, others of
us may perhaps have raked too feebly at the historian Quine. Beyond the canonical writ of
‘Epistemology Naturalized’ (1969a), there may be more friable soil and more reliable roots.
Quine never aspired to the status of intellectual historian, and to some his vision may seem to
indulge a common conceit: that all previous thought worthy of mention trickles ineluctably if
chaotically into one’s own great laminar flow. But one might prefer to suppose that Quine
was observing an equally common courtesy: a formalist’s acknowledgement of the sources of
his own inspiration, whether or not his prefigurers could have grasped his late discovered
significance of their work. If his reading of them seems to diverge orthogonally from the
1
2
See Friedman 1999 and Richardson 1998.
See Quine’s 1995. Richardson 1997 also notes this odd feature of Quine’s history.
2
readings of the tradition, it may be Quine’s own oblique vision of their subject matter in play,
not a misunderstanding of their intentions.
Now no doubt our own reading of Quine may occasion a similar set of judgments, for
our objects in this paper are threefold, and are in some measure at odds. All require us to
weigh the assets of his adopted predecessors against Quine’s patrimonial claims. Some such
exercise seems necessary simply to understand the distinctiveness, as Quine saw it, of his
proposed reconstruction. Such understanding is our first object. Our second will seem to
some more shocking. It is to demonstrate that Quine’s own view was, in key respects, less
radical than those of the theorists he claims as predecessors and, in precisely those respects,
insufficiently radical to work. Our third object, patrimonially figured, is to argue that from
the fund of ideas bequeathed by Tooke and Bentham, Quine bagged the baubles and left the
plate. We would see title awarded elsewhere. A propaedeutic word or two about this last
object is in order.
It is an empirical banality that language is primarily physical, for that is how it
presents itself to observation. The difficulty lies in drawing from this observation some
philosophically satisfying method for studying that physical phenomenon. We more closely
approach this goal in accepting that language is, more specifically, biological. That too is a
banality. Language is observably a biological feature of an animal species. But it follows that
the language of epistemology too is a part of that biological phenomenon. From these two
remarks we may infer that an initial physical theory of language should be biological in
character, and should explain, inter multa alia, the language of epistemology. One key point
in this contention: it is that such a theory will provide an explanation, not that it will provide
a semantics. The language of meaning will have no place in such a theory unless ‘meaning’
3
is merely appropriated as a suggestive label for some physical (biological) type. The
language of epistemology will be relegated to the status of observational data.
The historical connection is this: a philosopher studying language along biological
lines would find undeniable historical antecedence in the works of Tooke (1736-1812) and
Bentham (1748-1832), not because they consciously construed language explicitly as
biological, but because the methods they advocated, insofar as they are recognizably
physical, are by now recognizably biological in character. In somewhat attenuated retrospect,
the same can be said of Locke, of whose work Tooke saw his own as a natural successor. All
three recognized that language changes, and that an understanding of previous characteristics
is an essential ingredient in an understanding of its present condition. Now no one supposes
that Quine’s work was actually inspired by his readings of Tooke and Bentham, and it cannot
be claimed that any recent biological study of language has been inspired by Tooke or
Bentham or Locke, or for that matter, by Quine, though any such study must agree with
Quine’s approach in the matter of physicality:
I am a physical object sitting in a physical world. Some of the forces of this physical
world impinge on my surface. Light rays strike my retinas; molecules bombard my
eardrums and fingertips. I strike back, emanating concentric air waves. These waves
take the form of a torrent of discourse about tables, people, molecules, light rays,
retinas, air waves, prime numbers, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and evil.
(Quine 2004, 193)
It is a curious thing that such an observation should have suggested physicalism rather than
physics. Certainly the observation that language is biological is not intended to replace
physicalism with biologism, but with biology. It is not a reduction of the linguistic to the
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biological. The linguistic is biological already. But the linguistic has its own biology, as any
evolved type of articulated physical activity has its own biology and as any product of such a
type of activity has its own biology. The account is partly neurological, partly physiological,
and also partly populational since it must be evolutionary on the scale of a particular
language’s development. So it is also diachronic and higher-order. By the second of these we
mean this: that a central question will be: how is the physical significance of current
linguistic interventions engendered by the previous physical significance of previous
linguistic interventions? Therein, as we shall see, lies its philosophical interest. As we hope
to demonstrate, a biological understanding of language, though more radical than Quine’s, is
also more natural, more productive, and has a more compelling claim of inheritance to the
Locke-Tooke-Bentham estate.
Quine’s History of Epistemology: The Progress of Empiricism
As many have noted, Quine’s own naturalist accounts of knowledge and language
seemed to develop without reference to historical context. Quine himself emphasized the
difference between philosophy and its history, aiming his main thrust toward the solution of
contemporary problems, rather than their history. It might be fairer to say that he distrusted
other peoples’ accounts of epistemological history, because they seemed to him to bespeak a
misunderstanding of the problems and the means to their solution. The histories were
histories of a muddle, ætiologies of a persistent and hopeless methodology that wallowed in
the problems rather than tackling them by scientifically certifiable methods. Scientific
histories are histories of successes, not of unacknowledged failures. Accordingly, an
optimistic naturalist looks to the history of his own method’s anticipated triumph, not of
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others’ predictable demise: “I do not limit the role of philosophy in language theory to
Tooke, Bentham, Dewey, and behaviorism,” he insisted, “but I am speaking of philosophical
progress in language theory” (1970, 5). It is evident from the outset that for Quine, the
history of epistemology was the history of empiricism.3 His historical account was perforce
potted, but pointedly, and, he hoped, expertly so. It follows that to see what he has made we
must attend to the flora exotica he featured, and not dwell in astonishment on all the
sentimental favourites he eschewed. To understand it, we must see it, not as a record of what
are now considered the decisive moments, but as a record of what Quine predicted would
eventually be seen to have been the decisive moments when, on the naturalized grounds that
he was preparing, philosophy had made its epistemological pile complete.
Quine’s own contribution was, in his estimation, a later step in the progress of
empiricism. We cannot assume him to have supposed that his work represented the ultimate
stage. But we can certainly assume him to have taken a scientist’s view of the matter: if his
own view was incorrect, it would not be because some previous view was correct, but
because some as yet unformulated view would be inspired by his and prove to be less wrong.
Here at any rate is his account of the matter–the famous five turning points:
…there have been five points where empiricism has taken a turn for the
better. The first is the shift from ideas to words. The second is the shift of
semantic focus from terms to sentences. The third is the shift of semantic
focus from sentences to systems of sentences. The fourth is…methodological
monism: abandonment of the analytic-synthetic dualism.
The fifth is
naturalism: abandonment of the goal of first philosophy prior to natural
3
Quine’s discussions of the history of epistemology are found in his (1970), (1981), (1993) and (1995).
6
science. (1981a, 67)
The first turning point is the rejection of the classic British empiricists’ theoretical use of the
language of ideas in favour of a metalanguage of natural language. Quine attributes this step
to John Horne Tooke, who observed (1786, 36-7) that the main insights of Locke’s Essay
would by no means be lost were his attention to the composition of ideas replaced with
references to linguistic expressions.4 For Quine this might have been the advent of a new
methodological self-consciousness: Tooke seems to have been the first to notice that the
language of idea can have no place in a genuinely empirical enterprise. For Quine, the
adoption of the language of terms had presented the possibility of an externalized
empiricism. “…Language, unlike the idea, is conspicuously external. Language is a social
art, acquired on evidence of social usage” (1970, 3). Only with such a linguistic turn, could
empiricism properly benefit from its methodological reliance upon the observable. Now, in
such an assessment, it is difficult to be as fully self-conscious as one might like. Empiricism
was, after all, traditionally a theory about the origins of ideas and of knowledge. The
adoption of Tooke’s proposal would therefore have committed philosophers not merely to a
change of method, but to a change of subject matter. His imputed historical innocence
notwithstanding, Quine has perceptively documented this change:
Thus it is that the declaration of independence precipitated a revolution, a
Copernican flip. There are, we see, two factors: first, the philosophical shift
of focus from idea to word; second, the linguistic fact that the words in
sharpest focus are mainly words for external objects. For empiricism as thus
reoriented, the focus of understanding is outside us. Our mental life settles
into an inferential status. The internal looks now for its legitimation to
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external evidence.
The ghost, in Ryle’s phrase, is exorcised from the
machine. This is behaviorism. It has not become everyone’s philosophy, not
even every empiricist’s philosophy. The revolution has been, for empiricism,
less a turning point than a splitting point. (Quine 1970, 4)
The rejection of the language of ideas and, by parity of argument, that of knowledge, must
require more than a re-formulation of theoretical goals. It must mark an appropriation of
empiricism as the label for an entirely new theoretical topic. That new subject matter must be
expected to require its own theoretical language and its own explanatory standards. Here,
once again, Quine is explicit as to the meta-philosophical demands of such a study:
My position is that the notions of thought and belief are very worthy objects
of philosophical and scientific clarification and analysis, and that they are in
equal measure very ill-suited for use as instruments of philosophical and
scientific clarification and analysis. If someone accepts these notions outright
for such use, I am at a loss to imagine what he can have deemed more in need
of clarification and analysis than the things he has thus accepted.
For
instruments of philosophical and scientific clarification and analysis I have
looked rather in the foreground, finding sentences…and dispositions to
assent.
Sentences are observable and dispositions to assent are fairly
accessible through observable symptoms…In my thought experiments I am
using the strategy of isolation, or of divide and conquer, that characterizes
theoretical science across the board…It is in this spirit that I begin with
occasion sentences, indeed with observation sentences in my special sense; I
thus filter out the complexities, complex almost to the point of white noise,
8
that come of the subject’s concurrent preoccupations and past experience…It
is not a way to encompass thought or even language, but it is a way in. It is a
plan for isolating a clearly explicable component of a complex phenomenon.
(1981c: 184-6)
Clearly such a redefinition of empiricism creates two classes of terms, those that are, as it
were, allowed on the theoretical furniture (term, response, neural intake) and those that are
not, (idea, knowledge, thought). But that distinction must not be confused with another. In
formulating the language of the explanatory theory one can eschew language that is not
definable in sensory terms. However, that does not amount to a theoretical claim that terms
that are not sensorily definable do not make sense or can be ignored. What Quine does not
acknowledge here, and Bentham explicitly did, is that any such retooled investigator must
eventually recognize that idea and knowledge are themselves terms that demand explanation
within the new theory. When we abandon epistemology in favour of a science of language,
then knowledge, belief, idea and the rest of the terms of traditional epistemology betake
themselves among the explananda. We may not be able to say in sensory terms what ideas
are, but physical tokens of the term idea require no definition. They are just observable data
of daily speech. In any case, neither the language of making sense nor the language of …in
sensory terms can find its way into the theory even on Quine’s terms, since neither can be
defined in sensory terms. For the theorist embarking on such a project as Quine’s, and for the
theory itself, which must somehow mark the distinction between theoretically respectable
language and the rest, this hard fact of the matter is bound to be discomfiting.
Quine himself wondered about terms such as grammatical particles and abstract
9
nouns and verbs, which, though indispensable for communication, seem to resist the
requirement of definability in sensory terms.5 And for Quine’s part there is some relief in the
shift from a preoccupation with terms to an appreciation of the indispensableness of
sentences. Historically, according to Quine, the move from terms to sentences coincided
with the appearance of contextual, or as Bentham called it, paraphrastic6definition.
A word may be said to be expounded by paraphrasis, when not that word alone is
translated into other words, but some whole sentence, of which it forms a part.
Some terms
particularly, but not exclusively functional terms
find their linguistic
significance only as parts of sentences. But most vocabulary admits of variation of significance
from linguistic environment to linguistic environment. Contextual definition makes explicit the
semantic primacy of sentences over terms and lays to rest worries over sensorily accessible
definitions of functional terms, since, in the nature of the case, no definition outside of sentential
environments can be expected. Quine attributes this revolution in semantics to Bentham, and in
its later stages to Frege and Russell. The effects of this semantic shift were widely felt in
twentieth century epistemology, which found logical empiricists attending to questions
concerning the meaningfulness of sentences, and ordinary-language philosophers applying their
analyses to sentences rather than to words. Of course, a genuinely physical understanding of
language should be expected to overthrow the system of theoretical values that takes semantic
primacy seriously. If vocabulary differs in its physical significance from use to use, a physical
theory should provide the general principles that trigger its uses. The language of truth, and so
the language of meaningfulness ought to pass into the category of data to be explained.
4
It was Skinner who gave Quine an edition of Tooke’s The Diversions of Purley. See Gibson 2002, 214
See (Quine 1981, 68).]
6
Bentham ( 1962, Vol 1, note 6, pg 293).
5
10
The third milestone marks a further progression from sentences to systems of sentences.
For support, Quine points to a claim suggested by Duhem, to the effect that, with respect to a
scientific theory, a sentence lacks its own separate fund of empirical meaning, that only within a
larger tissue of interconnected sentences taken as a whole has it the needed observational
significance. Beyond this third milestone lies a modest holism with respect to the sentences of
scientific theory, which denies individual scientific sentences autonomous empirical meaning
(1981a, 71). Once again, however, it must be remarked that the language of meaning ought to
seem an ill fit in a genuinely physical theory of language, unless it is merely appropriated as a
label of convenience for some physical type. One wants to see articulated the general principles
that tell us how the physical significance of an inscribed or uttered sentence is altered by a
continuing succession of other inscriptions or utterances. One wants to uncover the general
principles by which the effects (particularly perhaps the neural effects) of constituent portions of
discourse exploit and are constrained by other constituent portions.
The last two milestones introduce us to Quine’s own contributions to the history of
empiricism. The fourth has introduced us to what Quine calls methodological monism, which he
claims emerges naturally from the holism of the previous stage. Here is diffused the formerly
rigid segregation of sentences having empirical content from sentences having none. This is, of
course, Quine’s famous rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction as it appears in the work of
Carnap. Quine understands holism as a blurring of this distinction, with the structuring role
earlier assigned to analytic sentences now shared by sentences more generally, and the empirical
content that was reserved for synthetic sentences as spread out throughout this ‘web of scientific
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belief’.7 But again, the admission standards that physical theory construction imposes ought to
subject the language of content and structuring role to a strict interrogation as to their
credentials. If they represent neither mathematical nor physical types, are they not rather part of
the data than part of the explanation?
The fifth and final milestone marks a turn to naturalism. On Quine’s formulation of this
doctrine, naturalism involves the rejection of ‘first philosophy’, in fact of any philosophical
perspective that purports separation from that of science. But the upshot is not so much a
rejection of epistemology itself as the appropriation, for its proper conduct, of the resources and
methods of science. The central epistemological goal is now a detailed scientific account of the
acquisition of scientific understanding through the stimulation of our surfaces (or, one might
rather say, how stimulation of our surfaces eventually occasions attributions of understanding).
In this new research program, Quine notes, the naturalized epistemologist will avail himself of
whatever theoretical resources he deems of use. Essential among these will be the findings of
language acquisition research and of investigations into the neurology of perception. In the broad
sunlit uplands beyond this milestone, questions of knowledge and language are the province of
science. Real progress in epistemology is now possible through research that draws upon
resources of the sort that have contributed to progress in science more generally. Here again,
however, we can insist upon higher standards: if progress in understanding of language is like
scientific progress more generally, then we will expect reciprocity among sectors of the
investigation. A physical understanding of language, taken as far as it can be taken with little
detailed neurological data, should then give direction to neurological research; that is, it ought to
7
Friedman (2001, 33) demonstrates that Carnap was also committed to holism, and that Quine is, at least,
misleading with his identification of the denial of holism with the so-called dogma of analyticity.
12
play a significant role in formulating the questions that neurological investigations are called
upon to answer.
The language of milestones and turning-points
These, then, Quine takes to have been the five significant advances of post-Humean
empiricism (1981b, 29). From Quine’s guide we might be led to think that the first four lead
ineluctably to his naturalism, with empiricism finally achieving maturity in its transformative
grasp of the indispensability of science for accomplishing its now transformed aims. All well and
good. And yet there hangs about the narrative an atmosphere of parvenu invention. The unease
lies not in questionable elements of Quine’s chronology of events, which is certainly accurate as
far as it goes, nor with his arrogation of its editing. Histories after all are written by those who
live to write them. The question is only in part whether Quine had yet achieved such
epistemological or linguistic successes as could warrant such an historical sketch of their
provenance. After all, milestones measure distances to destinations, not distances from
wilderness beginnings. Even if we take the history as no more than one of epistemological
method, one might reasonably feel that talk of milestones is premature until the latest method
yields a significant body of new results. Quine it seems would concur: “Whistling in the dark is
not the method of true philosophy” (Quine 1960, 207). Whether Quine had himself got much
beyond the sibilant murk is, of course, the question.
Milestones, schmilestone
Anyone wishing to view these turning points as milestones, would be disappointed in one
other expectation aroused by the language. One might have expected some continuity in the
13
conception of progress from milestone to milestone, some agreement, say, between Bentham and
Quine as to the relative importance of Tooke’s contributions. One might have expected to find in
Quine’s work a realization of goals to which Bentham had been directed by the work of Tooke.
As it is, the research direction in which Bentham thought Tooke’s work to have most importantly
pointed is not the direction in which Quine’s work takes either Bentham’s or Tooke’s. For
Bentham, the significance of Tooke specifically was not his rejection of theories of ideas in
favour of theories of words; it was his discovery that connectives (“conjunctions”, as Tooke
called them) were descendents of grammatically and psychologically more tractable parts of
speech. Tooke was not the first to notice that functionalization is the source of connective
vocabulary, and he did not offer it, as he might have, as an explanation of the semantic
intractability of natural connectives such as or8 and if 9. But he was the first to attempt anything
like a systematic study. He did not mention, for example, the functionalized uses of have, go,
will, and do as auxiliary verbs. He ventured no explanation of the particular instance of the
phenomenon that he observed, but he did have some notion of its generality across languages.
Indeed one of Tooke’s insights might have found some application in a treatise on radical
translation. This was his observation that there is no reason to believe that different languages do
not evolve their connective vocabulary in distinct manners and from semantically distinct lexical
parts of speech. Had Quine given the point due weight, he might have suspected the
implausibility of his assumption (1961, 12) that Latin vel represented 1110 disjunction and aut
0110 xor, a claim that even a superficial empirical study of Latin would have shown to be false.10
8
See Jennings 1994, 2001, 2004.
See Jennings 2004.
10
For a fuller discussion see Jennings 1994.
9
14
One may suppose too that he would not have casually dismissed the notion of syntactic
indeterminism.11
The lasting importance of Tooke’s discovery, by Bentham’s reckoning, lay in its potential
contribution to a science of universal grammar.
The circumstance by which, at the present time in particular, the prospect
of being able in relation to this at present abstruse branch of art and science,
to administer instruction on terms of hitherto unprecedented advantage, is the
discovery made by Horne Tooke:
that discovery by which the relation
which has place between certain till then incomprehensible parts of speech on
the one part and certain of the better understood parts of speech on the other
part, has been brought to view;
by which the import of certain till then
incomprehensible parts of speech was made known, by showing their identity
with other parts of speech, the import of which was not thus abstruse.
The explanation of this discovery of his, having been left in an unfinished
state, may, perhaps, in some measure, have been the cause, why no new
system of universal Grammar, constructed with the lights thrown upon the
subject by that discovery, hath as yet been given to the world. But to the
purpose here in question, to anyone who will be at the pains of availing
himself of them, the light afforded by that discovery will, it is believed, be
found quite sufficient. (Bentham Vol 8, 185)
11
See (Quine 1990, 5).
15
Tooke, for his part, regarded his own work as an extension of work that Locke had already
begun. He quotes Locke
When I first began this discourse of the Understanding and a good while
after, I had not the least thought that any consideration of words was at all
necessary to it. But when, having passed over the original and composition of
our ideas, I began to examine the extent and certainty of our knowledge; I
found it had so near a connexion with words, that unless their force and
manner of signification were first well observed, there could be little said
clearly and pertinently concerning knowledge: which being conversant with
truth, had constantly to do with propositions. And though it terminated in
things, yet it was for the most part so much by the intervention of words, that
they seemed scarce separable from our general knowledge.
and observes “. . .from these and a great many other passages throughout the Essay, you may
perceive that the more he reflected and searched into the human understanding, the more he
became convinced of the necessity of an attention to language; and of the inseparable connexion
between words and knowledge.” (1786, 43)
Now both Tooke and Bentham are, without doubt, worthy of being regarded as
milestones along the highroad to our understanding of language. We hope, by the end of this
essay, to have demonstrated as much. But on even a casual reading of Tooke and Bentham, it is
apparent that for both of them so was John Locke. It will become evident in the sequel that there
is more useful continuity among those three authors than between the later pair and Quine. In
fact so right were their intuitions about the way ahead, that there would be more justice in
regarding Quine’s contributions as a useful lay-by or side excursion, than as the latest milestone
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on the main way; for though Quine might rightly have spoken of their work as turning points,
they were also way-markers, and in this role Quine paid them no heed.
Theoretical terms or observational data?
Now a shift from ideas to words is a shift from unobservables to observables, and
therefore from experimentally unusable somethings-or-other to objects of ordinary common
experience. For an empiricist this might present itself as a gift of seven league boots. But
empiricism is a doctrine about the sources of knowledge; it is not science. Though for science
the shift is certainly some sort of vehicular improvement, for empiricism it must be a kind of
Trojan horse. Once properly taken in it brings home to us that the language of knowledge is as
problematic as the language of idea. The problem with ideas is not so much that they are
inaccessible to our fellow researchers, as that we don’t know, except conversationally, what they
are. Neither do we know, except conversationally, what knowledge is, nor what truth is, nor what
belief is, nor what justification is. What Quine did not seem to realize is that if he is right, then
empiricism was dead. It had died in its dogmatic slumber and left its remains to a science of
language: among those remains is its theoretical vocabulary. But with the decease of its owner,
the vocabulary is merely a sort of puzzling bric-a-brac, not part of any serious solution. If Quine
is right, one might better label his brand of empiricism posthumous than post-Humean. But we
ought not to be at a loss how to carry on.
For a scientist, the shift from ideas to words is not straightforward. To be sure the
vocabulary is communally recognizable in discourse, and therefore available for systematic
study, even for experiment. But to what end? The physically observable features of discourse do
not in themselves constitute raw data except for the study of discourse itself. It is only under the
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auspices of some overarching hypothesis and attendant theoretical assumptions (such as that
language is a communicative instrument, that it represents, that it conveys, that it has content,
and so on) that the observation of discourse can play the role of interpreted evidence. But for any
such enterprise the shift to words holds the threat that it holds for empiricism. The study of its
central theoretical items can and should give way to the study of the corresponding vocabulary.
For the scientist, such a shift to words would not be a shift to accessible instances of
Wittgenstein’s “simple things”; it is a shift to potentially explainable things. No physical theory
can be required to explain the physically inaccessible, and certainly not the postulated entities of
a theory that it seeks to replace. But idea, knowledge, and so on are themselves words, and any
adequate explanatory theory of language ought to be able to explain how a language can acquire
a word such as idea if an idea is not physically accessible. It ought to permit one to say more
about the character of such words as knowledge and idea than that they are too vague for
theoretical use. It ought to tell us about the nature of the vagueness and determine its provenance.
Certainly a theoretician can and ought to resist such terms in formulating a theoretical language,
but he should not permit himself to avoid them as data if the theory is to be a theory about
language. It is a puzzle worthy of attention that we can and do have adequate conversational
command of vocabulary of which, in the nature of the case, we can have no adequate semantic
theory. Moreover, the stricture against the inclusion, in a theoretical language, of vocabulary of
which we have only conversational understanding ought to apply equally to such words as
reference and truth. They are part of the data, and a challenging part at that. But their difficulty
cannot be overcome merely by absorbing them into the theoretical language. Quine speaks of
acquiescing in vagueness:
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“‘Know’ is like ‘big’: useful and unobjectionable in the vernacular where we acquiesce in
vagueness, but unsuited to technical use because of lacking a precise boundary.
Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, blushes for its name” (1984: 295).
But a natural theory of language ought not merely to acquiesce in the very vagueness that it is
bound to explain.
Quine’s understanding of language learning takes sentences and not words as the vehicles
of meaning. A naturalistic account of language and its uses, he hopes, will then reveal sentences
and not words as the unit of empirical significance. With the modulation from sentences to
systems of sentences, naturalism is also at work, since the realization that it is only larger
systems of sentences that imply observational consequences and thereby have empirical
significance emerges from a reflection on the nature of science itself. It is a discovery about
scientific theories revealed through the use of science itself and, once again, it is a by-product of
Quine’s naturalist instincts.
Now from a bio-linguistic point of view, the particular abstraction within which Quine
makes the point seems unnecessarily semantic. A parallel point can be made on the more prosaic
evidence of conversation and the neuro-biology of speech. Particular linguistic interventions are
minor physical contributions to sensory commerce. Every such intervention occurs within a
comparatively vast spatio-temporal environment extremely rich in sensory resources, and
synaptically, an elaborately pre-structured economy. An intervention is more efficient in the
proportion that it can exploit that richness and that elaboration. Moreover, much both of that
richness and of that elaboration is already linguistic in nature. From any sensible point of view,
sentences have their physical significance within such a preparation. From a physical, (as distinct
from a physicalist) standpoint that should be sufficient comment. The question as to
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implicational significance can be bracketed until it is shown to be indispensable or at least
useful. But ultimately, the language of implicational significance must be explainable by the
theory.
Finally we come to Quine’s methodological monism, and his famous deconstruction of
the analytic-synthetic distinction, another dictate of his naturalism.
In his earlier writings,
Quine’s argument against the philosophical intelligibility of this distinction emphasized that by
appealing to analyticity, Carnap was simply too timidly empiricist, “The distinction wavers as
soon as we try to base it on verbal behavior. When you consider how the notion of analyticity
has dominated empiricist philosophy, the shortcoming is ironical; for it is that the notion is just
insufficiently empirical” (1970, 6-7).
Such a reply is of a piece with Quine’s attempted
empirical reconfiguration of semantics more generally: the responsible naturalist takes advantage
of the fact that language is a social art acquired on the overt evidence found in social usage
(1970, 3). The empirical credentials of analyticity then concerns the possibility of its empirical
clarification along such lines, with no clear distinction between the analytic and synthetic
sentences presenting itself. That this is Quine’s standard of intelligibility is evident from this
remark: “…we find it argued that the standard of clarity that I demand for synonymy and
analyticity is unreasonably high; yet I ask no more, after all, than a rough characterization in
terms of dispositions to verbal behavior” (1960, 207).
Perhaps impressed by his own successful naturalist clarification of the distinction (1974),
Quine explains in later writings, that rather than the requirement of explication, it is the
epistemological significance of the distinction that he finds most pressing: “I now perceive that
the philosophically important question about analyticity and the linguistic doctrine of logical
20
truth is not how to explicate them; it is the question rather of their relevance to epistemology”
(Hahn and Schilpp 1986, 207).12
One source of these misgivings about analyticity, may be Quine’s misguided readiness to
cast Carnap in the role of empiricist fellow traveller. For an empiricist the apparent necessity of
mathematical and logical truths presents itself as an embarrassing puzzle. The conferral of
analytic status upon the sentences of logic and mathematics permits the empiricist to own their
necessity without compromising his empiricist virtue. Mathematical and logical claims are true
in virtue of the meanings of their constitutive terms, and thus can have no empirical import at
all.13
Recent philosophical scholarship 14 questions this reading of Carnap’s programme:
Quine’s epistemological questionings, it suggests, betray a misunderstanding of Carnap’s own
philosophical motives and interests. For Carnap, the philosophical commitment to empiricism
can be formulated only from within the context of an analytic linguistic framework. On his
view, epistemological questions, positions, or commitments can be formulated only after
acceptance of a linguistic framework that requires the use of analyticity that Quine questions in
the name of empiricism. For Carnap, empiricism is not a doctrine; it emerges as a practical
commitment to a set of languages that are given a syntactic and semantic clarification by means
of the analytic-synthetic distinction. Carnap does not begin with a philosophical commitment to
empiricism which then must be squared with the formal techniques of mathematics and logic;
rather he looks to the formal techniques themselves to advance our understanding of the
sciences, and of our own philosophical commitments.
12
13
As quoted in Hylton (2002, 16-17).
See Richardson 1997, and 2004 for a more detailed discussion of this issue.
21
Carnap’s general project is one that, like Quine’s, tries to align philosophy more closely
to science. The key difference is his preference for the techniques and methods found in the
mathematical and formal sciences. The distinction between analytic and synthetic statements is
crucial to such a task, for it distinguishes a logical interest in knowledge, described as the logical
analysis of scientific language, from psychological questions concerning belief acquisition. Only
by attending to the distinction for a given language, he supposes, can one satisfactorily separate
the logical issues of philosophy from the empirical issues of psychology.
The distinction is
foundational to his conception of philosophy, and, for him, an indispensable instrument for
understanding the methods of science. We may therefore take Carnap to agree with Quine about
the scientific status of philosophy. They differ over what scientific resources and methods best
promote such a conception. From either a Carnapian or a Quinean perspective, the difference is a
significant one: it is the root of their disagreement over the viability of the analytic-synthetic
distinction.
Now, from the perspective offered here, this difference is of little consequence, since
again, we must stress that from a strictly physical standpoint, any field-theoretic substitute for the
distinction must itself be biological in character. We have already remarked that a linguistic
intervention is dependent for its effects upon a vast sensory and neurological preparation of its
site. This fact creates difficulty for both Quine and Carnap, though Quine’s view, suitably
modified, accords better with biological reality, since much of the preparation is biologically
linguistic in character. The biologer has forced upon him, as the semanticist does not, the
fundamental difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of saying what language is. The problems become
14
For some examples, see Friedman 1999, and Richardson 1997, 1998. Richardson’s 2004 addresses these issues
by emphasizing the importance of the principle of tolerance for Carnap’s larger philosophical motives. For a
Quinean perspective on these issues see Hylton 2002.
22
apparent upon the contemplation of either synchronic or diachronic boundaries of any natural
language, for the set of linguistic interventions is not classical in either dimension. And as
difficult as it is might be to determine whether a given intervention is linguistic, be it sufficiently
archaic or sufficiently eccentric or sufficiently gesture-dependent, it is even more difficult to say,
for such interventions near the fringes, whether the language of semantics is itself a good fit. The
problem is not alleviated by a strict accounting of what constitutes verbal behaviour. Beyond the
playground of simple assertion, none of these distinctions is particularly steady on its pins,
whatever negotiated boundaries separate the set of verbal behaviours from its complement. If my
wave to a young woman is unreturned, and I offer in explanation “She didn’t see me”, my
colleague, probing the chink, might rejoin “Either she didn’t see you or she did.” Can a tautology
wound?
Now it is evident that each of the four historical advances is offered as such because of
Quine’s prior commitment to a method; (indeed the method defines his naturalist commitment.)
Any advocates for refinements of his method may perhaps wish to claim a common ancestry. But
so much has the physical understanding of language progressed since, say, Word and Object, that
anyone now venturing a radical refinement will readily find such a host of living theorists of the
biological phenomenon of language as to beggar Quine’s dusty line of descent. All of these
theorists and the present authors are as one with Quine in supposing that language is physical.
Outside of philosophy it is a banality of language research that language is primarily a biological
phenomenon. And, again, one must say “primarily” because that is how language presents itself
to observation.
23
Indeterminacy and the Biology of Language
Quine’s relocation of philosophy to the general scientific enterprise requires, as he
supposes, not an abandonment of semantics, but merely an empirical reconfiguration of it. From
within his shifted perspective, the study of meaning must adhere to the standards of testability
found in the empirical sciences. This in turn involves an appeal to external evidence, which
provides the future testability of observables.
The study of meaning, then, rests on an
investigation of the external utterances that comprise our verbal behaviour: “…there is no more
to the meaning of an expression than the overt use that we make of the expression…When we
learn the meaning of an expression we learn only what is observable in overt verbal behavior and
its circumstances” (1987: 130). He was in no theoretical frame of mind to give serious
explanatory consequence to folk-semantical items, such as meanings. His thought experiment,
which sets us the task of translating utterances of an unknown language without the aid of
bilinguals or dictionaries sufficiently brings home the fatuity of these devices. But the quoted
positive claim offers the wrong contrast. Just as everyone else does, philosophers acquire
language, including the language of meaning and most of the other folk-semantic vocabulary, in
their childhood; in theorizing about how they do so, the language of evidence may well be as
misplaced as any other folk vocabulary. There is little to suggest that the language they acquire is
exactly that of their parents, and much evidence to suggest that it is not. One may insist that they
grow up with linguistic capacities sufficiently similar, for government or philosophical work, to
those of their immediate linguistic forebears, but languages change, and that is in part how they
do so. What children inherit from their parents is, not their parents’ language, but, with minute
alterations, a restricted capacity for phonemic discrimination, and their parents’ physical capacity
24
for acquiring language.15 In any case, any useful scientific interest in language requires attention
to the details of change. Change rather than constancy is the inescapable theoretical reality of
language science, as motion rather than rest is the inescapable theoretical reality of natural
science. And as language changes slowly if inexorably, the philosopher who wishes to
understand language must acquire a tolerance for detail, and a capacity to notice it.
Now the point of Quine’s thought experiment was that it should force us to “…approach
semantical matters in the empirical spirit of natural science” (1970: 8). The dramatic premiss is
that we are trying to reconstitute meaning from the empirical resources available for translation.
Of course the plot is that of a reductio. It is meant to lay before us the poverty of materials
available for the reconstitution. With regard to what we refer to as meanings we must impose as
much as we discover (Quine 1992: 49). Translations require conjectural admixture the more as
correlative observation is less and less available, with the upshot that the translation manual
more and more closely approximates a mere register of subjective preferences.
As sentences to
be translated are more theoretical, we can rely less and less upon the available evidence, with the
result that two translation manuals could be consistent with the available evidence yet differ on
other theoretical sentences that are less directly related to the evidence. Translation has now
become indeterminate. There is no unique, correct translation of the language in question, and no
additional appeal to relevant evidence can decide the case: our translation has been based on the
only evidence relevant to the task.
This last has become the sticking point for one of the more glutinous ripostes to Quine’s
argument. It is claimed that non-behavioural resources, resources that Quine ignores or
dismisses, are crucial to (and also available for) successful translation. Of course unless these
15
Perhaps we might better say, their parents’ incapacity to avoid learning language.
25
resources are shown to be jointly sufficient for success, they are irrelevant. In any case the notion
of successful translation is nowhere defined, but if it can be satisfactorily defined independently
of semantics, that fact alone would make Quine’s larger case. If it cannot be satisfactorily
defined, that too makes Quine’s larger case. But consider the requirements for success. If the
English word success were a perfect translation of the German word Erfolg, the perfection would
consist partly in the one word’s being as indeterminate as to physical significance in an English
speech production as the other is in the German speech production. The thought experiment itself
is not the focus of interest; the nature of language is.16 Even translations by bilinguals admit of
both varying measures, and by those measures varying degrees of success. Translation is
preservation: there can be no judgement of success or failure of a translation independently of an
account of what was to be preserved. Curiously, the best examples of the preservation of
physical (because neurophysical) effects lie in the translation of poetry. Consider the problem of
translating, say, into French, Dylan Thomas’s “They shall be one with the man in the wind and
the west moon”, which transparently plays a neurological trick on the reader by its
reconfiguration of “man in the moon and the west wind”. Here the question would be: how to
preserve the neural sleight of hand. Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, if it is better than
his predecessors’, is not better because of its better preservation of “semantic content”, however
that notion is to be construed. We can invoke meaning to compare Heaney’s work with, say,
“Leaves of Grass” as a translation of Beowulf. But when the most finely graded comparisons are
required, we invariably have recourse to other, non-semantic measures. The preservation of
meaning could not suffice as the sole determinant of success in translation. The reason is that
although we have conversational command of the language of meaning, that command is no
16
Quine, himself has made the point. See (1970, 178)
26
guarantee of eventual philosophically useful understanding, anymore than steeping in one
another’s bath water carries a guarantee of eventually emerging clean. A figure emerges that is
more explicit than that of Quine’s sibilant murk: Talking in order to find out what we are talking
about is no way to do philosophy.
Our quibbles with Quine apply with greater force against his semanticist critics. A
properly natural metatheory of language will be one compatible with everything we can find out
about the phenomenon of language. What theoretical types the theory admits will no doubt
require adjustment as its metalanguage is refined. Thus, we should not expect at the outset to be
able to say what those types will be. We can hope that the theory will inform us usefully about
the word meaning, but we can have no a priori grounds for supposing that the word meaning will
label any theoretical type represented in the theory.
Conventionality and convention
So, what is to be said about the physical nature of language? We begin at the point at
which, typically, the Empire strikes back. This is the contention, common in philosophical
responses to Quine and Davidson, that our understanding of language is dependent upon an
understanding of linguistic conventions. For such philosophers, no purely physical account is
adequate because no such theory can take the conventional character of language into account.
Witness for example Glock (2003, 259)
It is only through linguistic conventions that we can communicate finegrained thoughts even to total strangers, people who are not in tune either
with the speaker’s thoughts or with the circumstances of utterance.
27
Never mind that for a physical theorist the language of thought will not make it past the first
milestone; never mind the a priori assumption that language exists to communicate them. Never
mind that the stipulation begs the question as to what a convention is. There are of course readymade philosophical accounts of convention available at the local library, from Lewis’s deluxe
model, which comes with higher-order intentions and other physically suspect whistles, to
stripped-down utility models that involve little more than a few thousand volumes of shared
arbitrary rules. But again, for the physical theorist, intentions are pre-Tooke, and, as the
philosopher rightly remarks, rules are just the wrong sort of item for a physical theory.
Purely philosophical rejoinders are readily come by, for from a philosophical point of
view, the object of the observation about conventions is unclear: whether that our linguistic
capacity consists in a capacity to observe its conventions, or that some independent and more
general capacity for conventional behaviour must be invoked to explain our linguisticality, or
some combination of the two. The observation that underlies the claim of conventionality seems
to be that the purely physical characteristics of the elements of speech in themselves bear no
systematic physical relationship to their effects, neither to the responses to which they give rise,
nor to the conditions that prompt them. Inscriptions represent a second level of physical
disconnection. This arbitrariness of linguistic types can be tentatively conceded: any system of
utterable phonemic streams might have worked as well as any other for the general purposes to
which language is put. The great diversity of human languages seems to bear out the concession.
What could control the manipulation of arbitrary tokens other than a set of rules?
The arbitrariness of elements of speech and their inscriptional representations is again
compounded by their unique neural realization in the brain of each language user. Of course the
uniqueness of realization and the arbitrariness of the items realized are to be distinguished. Any
28
single element of speech is uniquely realized in each speaker on every occasion of its utterance,
and to a less troublesome extent in each inscription. The success of linguistic interventions must
therefore depend upon a combination of discriminatory incapacities, and positive capacities for
filtering out apprehended distinctions, at least for some characteristics of their neural intake (to
use Quine’s preferred term), and likewise for some characteristics of the responses that they
prompt. Some differences we simply do not detect; others we ignore for some dimensions of our
response but not for others. One might not hear differences among several spoken requests from
the same person. One might notice the difference between a man and a woman asking the same
question, and though the answer might be the same for each, the manner of one’s response might
differ between the two cases. Somewhere among the manifold neural dimensions of speech
apprehension must be found some complex capable of playing the role that Quine, in earlier
writings, labelled “stimulus meaning”, a term later displaced by the language of neural intake.17
This cannot be an easy task. Merely reflect upon our successive neural intakes of, say, a difficult
metatheorem and its proof, as we work through it again and again, or of a page-long sentence of
Utilitarianism through however many readings it takes to satisfy us that we have understood its
syntax. What constitutes the stimulus meaning in the successive readings? And since we are
recording levels of complexity, we must add that any neural systems figuring in episodic
apprehensions of speech and inscription must also be dynamically changing throughout the
ontogeny of the linguistic agent.
For a physical account of the kind that Quine seems to have envisaged, the prime
theoretical difficulty imposed by these considerations would seem to lie in individuating stimulus
17
For more on the motivations underlying Quine’s use and later rejection of the term ‘stimulus meaning’ see
Sinclair 2002.
29
meanings or neural intakes as physical types independently of the phonemic streams that produce
them. But it is not in doubt that read or spoken language physically occasions neural effects that
in general are accessible to the systems of speech production and other motor responses.
However these physical effects are typed, no one will want to deny that some characteristics of
these effects constitute the neural substrate of what is referred to as the conventionality of
language. For the purposes of devising an explanatory theory, the central question is not how to
type the neural effects, however independently tantalizing that question may be. We can set aside
for the moment questions as to what properties a language would minimally require for defining
a useful notion of neurological meaning. The critical question is just this: what, in physical
terms, constitutes what we call the conventionality of language? Clearly it is not the product of a
convention or deliberation or negotiation; nor does it arise through any previsionings of future
utility. No ANSI or ASCII or IEEE has decreed a set of standard neural effects. Nevertheless the
conventionality of linguistic effects does have one very general feature in common with the
conventionality of industry standards: namely
(a) that the physical significance of every linguistic intervention has itself a physical history,
and
(b) that that physical history has explanatory relevance.
The physical significance of present speech has been engendered by the physical effects
of previous speech. That is to say, we use the vocables that we use with the effects that they
have, because our linguistic ancestors18 used ancestral vocables with the ancestral effects that
they had, and because of the nature of the engendering relation. What a satisfactory physical
18
The language of linguistic ancestry as we use it here should convey no suggestion of great temporal separation. It
includes all causally relevant previous users, possibly including ourselves.
30
theory of language must yield, besides a suitable typing of neural effects, is an understanding of
the engendering relation. Even without a theory of neurological effect types, a theory of the
processes by which earlier linguistic effects engender later linguistic effects would constitute a
substantial contribution to a philosophically satisfying understanding of language. The principal
burden of the remaining sections of this essay is to demonstrate that even a small sampling of
preliminary findings confirm this claim.
Milestones again
Now these observations put us into a position to say in what respect the language of
milestones might mislead. It is that Quine does not see himself as a successor to the labours of
Bentham or of Tooke. His conception of epistemology is generic. It may owe something to his
association with C. I. Lewis, but Lewis’s conception (derived from a marriage of NeoKantianism
and Classical Pragmatism) is itself non-specific. Tooke and Bentham provide him with what he
takes to be clues, but the clues are clues to the method for naturalizing epistemology understood
as Locke initially understood it but later doubted, and as perhaps some twentieth-century
philosophers understood it: not as Bentham did. To switch metaphors, one might say that
although Quine salvages a brick or two from Bentham and Tooke, his building site is elsewhere;
his foundations are not theirs. The twentieth century inherited Locke’s early understanding of the
problem, not Bentham’s. Quine’s idea is to replace the language of knowledge acquisition with
the language of linguistic ontogeny. No doubt some of the understanding he seeks can be gained
only by such a study. But by contrast, both Tooke’s and Bentham’s focus was on linguistic
phylogeny. And Bentham too, within the limitations of his age and its scientific idiom, wanted to
naturalize epistemology. The status of the difficult vocabulary, the locus of the vagueness in
31
which Quine acquiesces, is for Bentham the product of linguistic evolution: the items to which
the vocabulary seems to refer are fictional. To offer a marital metaphor, though each element of
language once was paired with a sturdily sensible referent, the vocabulary has fallen into a kind
of referential viduity, and lingers on in the lonely comfort of its purely formal syntactic
inheritance. Bentham’s envisaged universal grammar was to be based upon a post-mortem
examination of the long-deceased referential better halves.
By fictitious entities are here meant . . . such as quality
property, (in the
sense in which it is nearly synonymous to quality) relation, power, obligation,
duty, right, and so forth. Incorrect as it would be, if the entities were
considered as being, in point of reality, on a footing with real entities, the
supposition of a sort of verbal reality, so to speak, as belonging to these
fictitious entities, is a supposition, without which the matter of language
could never have been formed, nor between man and man any converse
carried on other than such as hath place between brute and brute…As in the
case of all words, which have an immaterial, as well as a material import, the
root of the immaterial will be found in the material import; so, to explain the
nature and origin of the idea attached to the name of a fictitious entity, it will
be necessary to point out the relation, which the import of that word bears to
one or more names of real entities: i.e. to show the genealogy, or (to borrow
an expression from the mathematicians,) the genesis of the fictitious entity.
(Bentham, Vol 8, 126n.)
Bentham’s proposal has a direct and explicit ancestor in a proposal of Locke’s.
32
It may also lead us a little towards the original of all our notions and
knowledge, if we remark, how great a dependence our words have on
common sensible ideas; and how those, which are made use of to stand for
actions and notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence and
from obvious sensible ideas, are transferred to more abstruse significations,
and are made to stand for ideas that come under the cognizance of our senses;
v.g. to imagine, apprehend, comprehend, adhere, conceive, instill, disgust,
disturbance, tranquillity, etc., are all words taken from the operations of
sensible things, and applied to certain modes of thinking....I doubt not, but if
we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all languages, the
names, which stand for things that fall not under our senses, to have had their
first rise from sensible ideas. By which we may give some kind of guess, what
kind of notions they were, and whence derived, which filled their minds, who
were the first beginners of language; and how nature, even in the naming of
things, unawares suggested to men the originals and principles of all their
knowledge. (Locke, 1959, 4-5)
The Language of the Biology of Language
From just what we have said so far it follows that when we have typed the neural effects
of vocables, however we do so and however individual elements of the type are constituted, such
a type will itself constitute a species on the following definition of that term:
33
A species is a union of populations temporally ordered monotonically by an engendering
relation. (That is, earlier populations engender later populations.)19
Our ordinary understanding of any particular species, (tigers, say) typically reflects
the temporal point at which we identify it, so that its naïve defining characteristics are those
of the current population. But every population is minutely different both from its
predecessor and from its successor. So our classification of species is non-trivially
temporally indexed. Sufficiently archaic ancestral populations are not populations of that
indexed species, but rather of an ancestral species. Virtually every such indexed species will
be an evolved species on the following definition of evolved:
A species is evolved iff the characteristic function of the closure of the set of its populations
under its engendered-by relation is non-trivial, and temporally monotonic. (That is, in the
ancestral of its engendering relation we will find populations that are to some non-zero
degree within, and to some non-zero degree outside of the species, and in general, no
properly later population is “less” a subset of the indexed species than any properly earlier
population.)20
That virtually every member of every species of linguistic effect has ancestral effects that
are not of the species at all follows from the fact that humanity is itself an evolved species, and
that therefore, in the closure of our own engendered-by relation, there are populations that are
wholly non-linguistic. Thus, for every linguistic effect there are ancestral effects that are nonlinguistic. But in general, virtually every member of virtually every species of linguistic effect
also has linguistic ancestors that are not members of the species.
19
S is a species iff
& (i,j, Rpi pj
a set of populations indexed by ,
20
is evolved iff
&
is an ordered set of times indexed by , and
0<
Cl
)<1&∀
Cl
≤
where
is
is an engendering relation.)
)≤
Cl
)
≤
34
The definitions will have made it clear that the language of species and evolution is not
being used as a vague metaphor. The introduction of evolutionary vocabulary should not suggest
that this approach to the biological study of language trades upon some analogy with the
phenomena of organic evolution. The implicit claim is only that the linguistic facts of the case
are usefully describable in this language as we have defined it. No inferences are invited that do
not accord with the definition. It does not follow, for example, that it is useful to regard the
evolution of linguistic effects as Darwinian.
Evolution and selection are separable. And selection is separable from other evolutionary
factors such as the fixing of selectively neutral alleles in population bottle-necks. As an
illustration, William Calvin has plausibly argued that even the production of speech involves a
Darwinian competition for neo-cortical workspace. If Calvin is right, it is plausible to suppose
that such struggles also play a role in speech comprehension. The language of selection may also
be required, for it may be that elements of speech both in speech production and in the
phylogeny of the lexicon are selected for efficiency and for other features. But the definition, of
itself, begs no questions of selection or of Darwinism. We remain free to investigate each
evolved phenomenon on its own terms. Except insofar as they satisfy common general
definitions, linguistic and organic evolution require largely distinct methods of study.
Replication and expression also play roles in the evolution of linguistic species, but not
roles that parallel those of the replication of genetic material and the expression of genes in the
evolution of organic species. The subject matter dictates deployments of the language. It is useful
to think of the neural effects of an occurrence of an element of speech as its biological
expression. And the apprehension of speech in one’s own language involves a form of
replication, including, as it appears, a pre-motor rehearsal for the production of a replicant
35
phonemic stream. In speech we promote correct replication of syntax by variations in the three
prosodic dimensions of pitch contour, lengthenings, and stress, so it is useful to view prosody as
providing the weak forces that preserve syntax from speaker to listener. To see the importance of
prosody in the preservation of syntax, the reader can try uttering each of the Chomsky pair, Time
flies like an arrow / Fruit flies like a banana with the prosodic profile natural to the other.
Alternatively consider the effects of prosodic differences in the apprehended syntax of: What is
this thing called love? / What is this thing called, Love?21 In some cases syntax is insufficiently
reinforced by prosody, as in No trees have fallen over here, 22 but the indeterminacy goes
harmlessly undetected. In other cases, though detected the indeterminacy is unimportant: Harper
may not wait for the Gomery inquiry to bring down the government. In other cases the matter is
sorted out by other means: I’ll have breakfast only if there is insufficient food. But in certain
classes of cases where prosodic cueing is absent or insufficient, there is a non-zero replicative
error rate, which has, as we shall see, significant and varied consequences for medium term
linguistic evolution. In some such cases, the outcome is something very like mutation, as that
term is understood in organic evolution. More on this later.
Compositionality and Composition
It is supposed, at any rate recited, by some that some version of compositionality is
required to explain our ability to produce indefinitely many novel constructions and to
understand the novel constructions of others. In whatever formulation it receives, the principle of
compositionality would require reconciliation with a view such as Quine’s that words have their
21
22
From a BBC Radio Three talk.
We owe the example to Mary Shaw.
36
significance only within sentences. If we adopt a theory in which meanings play a role, then we
will probably accept that non-vacuous substitutions in sentences can produce sentences with
distinct meanings. Thus, for example, I am going to understand the point and I am coming to
understand the point have different meanings. But the difference is not the aspectual difference
between coming and going (What goes around comes around); it is the difference between a
functionalized use of going and one of many lexical uses of coming.23 The reconciliation might
take numerous forms. In one formulation words might be replaced by smallest functional unit.
Another might take the dependence between word and sentence to be mutual. A third might
combine the two. Any would require careful circumscription, for if the significance of every
component must be uniquely reformulated for every composition, compositionality offers no
assistance in either the formulation or the understanding of new strings. There must be some
degree of systematicity beyond that imposed by syntactic constraints for a version of a
compositionality thesis to be of use.
Now none of this is news. Someone interested in these questions must decide whether the
exercise is worth the bother. One might suspect that for a theory of language, any version of the
compositionality thesis sufficiently vague or sufficiently circumscribed to be right will be
sufficiently vague or complex to be useless. And the mere adoption of a physicalist crouch would
not seem to help matters, for the problems have worse physicalist counterparts. No doubt the
neural effects of the elements of a sentence play some role in determining the neural effects of
the sentence as a whole. If those component effects are in some respects constant across a wide
family of sentences in which the elements occur, the constancies might or might not be
23
Even within lexical uses, the differences are not always aspectual. Consider: If I go around and talk to her, I’m
sure she’ll come around to our point of view.
37
interesting, depending upon what they are. But the neural effects of a sentence also depend upon
prosodic presentation, gestural accompaniments, epiphrastic modification (“Seriously, . . .”, “I’m
afraid that . . .”), upon its setting, upon biological relationships and other factors. It is no doubt
true that, syntax, as well as all of these other factors being kept constant, the selection of
sentence elements makes a difference. But the overburden of circumscription in formulation, and
of ceteris paribus in practice raises the same troublesome worry about the use of limited lab time.
Is it worth the expenditure?
Philosophers might, of course, wish to debate these issues for their own sake, and
ingenious formulations are available. (See for example Kirby 2000 or Pelletier 1994.) But from a
biological point of view, the need for a formulation of compositionality is less pressing than the
need for an understanding of the constraints upon actual productions of speech. There are two
reasons. First, while it may be that we could produce indefinitely many compositions, we
actually produce relatively few. Second, the compositions that we do produce are the principal
engine of linguistic change. Theorists theorizing about compositionality assume a static
language; or rather theorize about particular states of a language as though language change,
(along with prosodic, epiphrastic and gestural modifiers) should be disregarded, as children are
told to neglect friction in some school physics calculations. For a biologer of language, this is not
an idealization; it is a denial of the biologically fundamental character of the subject matter.
Since every novel composition contributes minutely to change, two fundamental questions
concern controls on linguistic change:
I
In what manner and to what extent are novel compositions constrained by
compositions already made?
38
II
How do the effects of novel compositions exploit the effects of previous
compositions?
From a physical point of view, composition (or rather production, for it is mainly not a
deliberative act) is fundamental. A Bertie Wooster who says “My senses ache and a drowsy
numbness fills my boing” conveys bounceless torpor with less earnest preciosity and more
jocular inventiveness than Keats. But (a) he exploits for his effect the effects of Keats’s earlier
composition and (b) he coins a grammatically new use for an onomatopoeic reference to the
oscillations of a spring. This brings us to the central point about compositionality and
composition. One of the two cited questions about composition (to what extent novel
compositions are constrained by previous compositions) can be rephrased as “How much
inventiveness can we get away with?” The answer must be complicated in its details, and must
depend upon subpopulations of speakers and the functions of the composition. What would have
been a selection error for an earlier generation may become, through successive stages, a later
generation’s idiom or catch-phrase. Contrast the last quoted question with the question, “How
much loot can we get away with?” Compare “How much linguistic inventiveness will our
audience stand for?” with “At what intervals will a mare typically stand for a stallion?” Compare
“We can arrange to travel via Chichester and put up with Cousin Charlotte” with “How long a
visit with Cousin Charlotte do you think you could put up with (or ‘live with’)?” The point is not
that virtually every construction has more than one use; it is that virtually every construction in a
natural language represents a succession of abaptations24 from some earlier use (and, lest we
forget, that applies to all of the problematic vocabulary of traditional epistemology, ethics, and
24
By abaptation, we mean the assignment of a new role in a new linguistic environment. Unlike Gould’s notion of
exaptation, we understand success in an abaptive role as dependent upon the continuing availability of the earlier
use.
39
metaphysics.) The tolerated degree of inventiveness, the average radicality of successful
abaptations, is a fundamental determinant of the rate at which a language changes. It lies
somewhere between that of Jabberwocky and that of echolalia and certainly somewhere closer to
the former.
Linguistic Engendering
Of those properties of linguistic engendering that are revealed in written records over
relatively short periods, millennia, say, we can piece together some concrete information. But it
is well to bear in mind that the engendering relation of recent linguistic developments,
understood as a physical process, is itself evolved from earlier engendering relations, in earlier,
more primitive ancestors of present languages, and ultimately from engendering relations over
non-linguistic populations of neural effects. Of these more distant developments, we can
theorize, but either with less confidence or with less concreteness as the significance of
fragmentary written evidence becomes obscured. Evolution is itself evolving.
In the middle distance one philosophically notable attempt is that of L.W. Palmer (1950),
who attempts, though in the language of semantic space, to explain the conversational
significance of
in classical Greek, by its Indo-European descent. One cannot at once be
convinced that Palmer is correct in his understanding of the data and suppose that
!"# can
be properly understood (or accurately conveyed to students) independently of it. So, vis-à-vis
practical applications of a biological treatment of language to philosophical understanding,
Palmer’s contribution deserves to be seen from the road as much Bentham’s does. One late
milestone would have Palmer’s name inscribed. In the farther distance, the theorizing perforce
40
merges with that of organic evolutionary biology, but is readily recast as attempts to work out the
lineage of linguistic effects in their pre-linguistic forebears. See, for example (Jennings, 2004b).
Within an epoch rich in textual data, we can confidently list properties of the engendering
relation, and extract useful, sometimes sobering, philosophical lessons. In particular, we can
readily find evidence of what engendering does not reliably preserve, and therein evidence of the
kinds of linguistic drift, and the kinds of linguistic indeterminacy that, philosophically, we must
simply try to learn to live with.
At the most fundamental level, the engendering relation does not preserve either vocular
or consonantal repertoire. Thus it does not preserve the internal phonemic matter of words. Nor
does it perfectly preserve the boundaries of words, an once becoming a nonce, an ick name
becoming a nick name, a naperon becoming an apron, a numpire giving way to an umpire and
so on.25 Such changes at the level of word formation have been well studied by linguists.
For more recent examples, we need look no farther than Canadian parliamentary practice
to find an example of some charm. Before an election can be called, a writ must be drawn up by
the chief electoral officer at the behest of the Prime Minister. In Canadian English the verb
phrase draw up in this setting has been transmitted as the verb drop, with the result that pundits
speculating about the timing of an election speak of the Prime Minister’s dropping the writ.
News readers announce that he or she has finally dropped it. The mist that obscures much of
parliamentary language apparently relieves them of any disappointed expectation of knowing
what that act might plausibly amount to. It is an expression of which the occasions of use are
sufficiently well understood that it can be used with no more specific compositional
understanding. One might say that it represents a new, functionalized use of the verb drop.
25
See Jespersen 1934 for a longer list of examples. Jespersen calls this process “meta-analysis”.
41
There are of course many familiar cases of mere extensional change, as say, from some
Jacobean uses of fond to those of Modern English. But some such changes still bear the mark of
an originating mistransmission. The word internecine is a case in point. The only etymologically
justified use of internecine is the use in which it is replaceable with mutually destructive, as
when it is said that the Peloponnesian War was an internecine dispute. But through some
misunderstanding, perhaps of Greek history as it affects that very example, it has acquired a use
in which it is replaceable (roughly) with intrafamilial (perhaps abetted by some hint of niece in
nece. Who knows?) What marks this as the product of a transmission error is that its extension in
this use is restricted to linguistic environments involving mention of conflict. One does not
speak, except with mischievous irony, of internecine picnics.
The fragility of syntax
Quine expressed surprise that his readers should have taken his claims about
indeterminacy to apply to syntax. To be sure, if we construe indeterminacy more broadly than
mere ambiguity, then in the nature of the case it would be difficult to adduce convincing
examples. We can, however, find instances to contradict the supposition that there is never
syntactic indeterminacy however slight, without non-negligible semantic indeterminacy. At the
level of word formation we have already given examples of intergenerational syntactic
mismatch, as when members of one generation hears an ick name and some members of the next
hear a nick name and so on. But even at the level of more significant structure, we could offer, as
we have, No trees have fallen over here (fallen over / over here) or We had tea together later on
that afternoon (later on / on that afternoon) as examples in which syntactic discrepancies
between speaker syntax and hearer syntax might make no significant semantic difference. In fact,
42
for reasons that Tooke noticed, and for other reasons as well, connective vocabulary, the
structural ligaments of speech are semantically more fragile than lexical vocabulary and syntax
is, within certain describable bounds, demonstrably indeterminate.
The vocabulary from which our connective vocabulary descends to us, once it is
identified, is relatively easy to understand and explain. The earliest stages of significant
development in the direction of connectival use depended upon that easy pre-connectival
understanding. But later stages will have depended decreasingly upon conversational familiarity
with those comparatively easy uses and more upon familiarity with more recent less easy uses. It
is this increasing independence of conversational understanding from earlier lexical uses that
permits the morphological reduction, and that reduction in its turn weakens the historical
connection. We will leave this theme for a later stage of our discussion of ethical vocabulary,
save to offer this preliminary observation. Partly, no doubt, because of the morphological
reduction, but also because of the increasing semantic difficulty of the vocabulary, connective
vocabulary is more fragile and more generally susceptible to semantically (that is satisfactionconditionally) major change than lexical vocabulary. Especially is it susceptible to influences
that one can hardly call anything but mutagenic, because their effects so nearly parallel the
effects of organic biological mutagens. As we shall see, some such influences come to bear on
other philosophical vocabulary as well. For the moment we remark that connective vocabulary is
far from being semantically stable. Moreover, because it is susceptible to semantic change, we
should expect, when it is examined with any care, that it will exhibit semantic diversity. Finally,
because our acquisition of conversational competence is not semantically grounded, we should
expect some such vocabulary to be semantically intractable. To the extent that the historical
development of epistemological vocabulary parallels the historical development of connective
43
vocabulary, we should anticipate corresponding difficulties in attempts to give a semantic
account of it. This is, however, not to say that we cannot gain better understanding of it: only that
the understanding we achieve will be of the same kind as our understanding of any other
biological phenomenon. We will understand how it is, and how it comes to be the way it is. It
goes without saying that our capacity to use it in conversation will be, if unimproved, at least
more or less unimpaired.
Unless
The connective unless provides a useful introductory illustration of the sort of mutation to
which connective vocabulary is subject, and the role that such changes have played in the history
of but will illustrate the sort of semantic difficulty that such developments produce.
Unless is a reduced form of the longer construction on [a condition] less than that. Now
if we imagine two conditions, [α] and [β], then the condition [α on a condition less than that β]
is the condition in which [α] obtains and [β] does not, that is, the condition [α ∧ ¬β]. But this
understanding is at odds with the use of unless in Modern English, where, approximately, it is
understood as (that is, largely shares occasions of standard use with) if not or or. How has the
change come about? The transformation seems to have come about through a mistransmission of
syntax. The original construction on less than that seems never to have occurred outside the
scope of some form of negation, so, again approximately: Not α on less than that β. However, in
the transmission of the construction, the occasions of use were learned, but not the scope
arrangements. For reasons that also partly account for the morphological reduction, the scope of
the negation was taken to include only the α clause, and the occasions of use forced an
understanding of the whole construction as Not α if not β. When this reading of the syntax was
44
the reading of a critical mass of speakers the construction could migrate to, and survive
unchecked in, negation-free environments, where the or reading was then forced. The general
rule governing such changes can be crudely summed up as
Same occasions of use + syntactic change
new meaning.
The case of unless is distinguished from the many other such cases by the fact that the original
understanding has disappeared. Other connectives and quasi-connectives have acquired dual uses
through parallel developments.26 Contrast She’ll die without betraying her comrades (D ∧ ¬C)
with She’ll die without immediate coronary rescue (D ← ¬C'
). And the mention of without,
which in earlier uses was, and in certain specialized environments remains, the natural opposite
of within, brings us to the more complicated case of but, which, as a spatial adverb, preserves a
parallel relationship in some northern dialects to the word, bin.
But
But descends from butan (by outan
outside). Butan, because so many of its scattered
descendents are yet with us, gives a pretty example of connective phylogeny, and sets the
biological method the task of exposing phylogenetic structure. Because one of the termini of that
structure is the semantically puzzling conjunctive but, it also serves as a useful illustration of the
type of semantic difficulty that we will claim has come to beset much of the vocabulary of
traditional epistemology. And, finally, because a diagnosis of the difficulty is a requirement of
understanding the vocabulary, the biological diagnosis for but provides a model for a biological
understanding of semantically difficult vocabulary.
26
See Jennings and Schapanski 2000.
45
The story of but provides also a biological perspective on the nature of compositionality.
It is held that compositionality explains our capacity both to produce and to understand novel
constructions. As we have earlier claimed, it is chiefly because of this feature of our use of
language, that language evolves. Each successful novel production is a successful exploitation of
the effects of productions that have already occurred. In effect, each successful new composition
is a minute technological innovation, and each minutely changes the technological base available
for later novel exploitations. But since the morphology of the vocable itself persists, each such
innovation also diminishes the capacity of the vocable, independently of contextual matter, to
have effects of the same degree of specificity as those of its earlier occurrences. To give a simple
example, all earlier uses of the spatial relational modifier but the house might have been in
attributions to things on the grounds of the house, but once the same modifier has also been
successfully used of items that are on the roof of the house, its capacity to have the earlier more
specific effects independently of additional cues is diminished. And again, when the relational
term but has been successfully used of a broader range of enclosures, paddocks, counties,
countries, committees, it loses its capacity to occasion highly specific spatial hearings
independently of the cues provided by its grammatical object and surrounding matter. It is that
gradual loss that permits its earliest successful non-spatial, categorial uses, such as no one but the
committee members, in no wise but by trying, and so on, and those that permit its earliest
successful circumstantial uses such as I did not come to town but that I sickened. [I did not (come
to town and not sicken)]. Here but is still prepositional, though it has a noun clause as object.
Here seems to have occurred the initial scope misapprehension that gave us the disjunctive or ifnot reading of but [(I did not come to town), if I did not sicken.] It was the more general ellipsis
of the proto-subordinator that that gave the language the subordinators if, because, for, but (for
46
as late as the 17th century, all of them could still govern that-clauses) where it had had
grammatically adverbial or prepositional items. And it was likely the consequent replacement of
such conditional constructions as the counterfactual I would have arrived sooner but that I was
detained by I would have arrived sooner but I was detained that rendered such constructions
susceptible to the scope misapprehensions that gave the English language the conjunctive but.
However, we need not assume that such a mutation could be triggered only by environments in
which the but-clause could be correctly inferred: all that is required is that sufficiently many
such inferences go uncorrected, whether because warranted or because not noticeably
unwarranted.
Now that (admittedly conjectural) explanation of the origins of conjunctive but does not
yet provide a semantic account of it. It is semantically difficult, though we have no difficulty in
using it. Grice27 admits that he does not know the falsity-conditions of such constructions, and
elsewhere that it paradigmatically carries implicatures, though he ventures no general account of
their character. It may be tempting to suppose that the use of but is triggered by, and so conveys
some perceived adversative connection between its clauses. However, any theory of the role of
but must take into account its uses between clauses one of which implies the other. Simply
consider He got here late but he got here, in which the first clause implies the second. Then
notice at once the related features (a) that a second clause might imply the first, and (b) that such
constructions are non-commutative. He got here, but he got here late illustrates both features.
Let us admit this much agreement with Grice. What distinguishes but from and is that it
produces effects that cannot be wholly accounted for by the truth-conditions of its component
sentences. Conjunctive but modifies the presentation of the sentences. It is, as we might say,
27
In Grice 1984.
47
epiphrastic:28 that is, it modifies a saying rather than a part of speech or even a whole sentence as
adjectives, adverbs, and adsentences do. It is an adlocutive. It does not present a semantic
relationship between sentences; it presents a relationship between the saying of one sentence and
the saying of another. To be sure, there will be quasi-semantic constraints on its use. Whatever
may be the relationship between sayings that it represents, some uses will be more puzzling, that
is, will require the commitment of more neural resources to sort out, than others. Consider It
smells all right, but it tastes all right.
How are we to account for the role of but in such a way as to accommodate uses such as
the earlier pair and the momentary puzzlement occasioned of such uses as the last? The answer is
given by considering the connective’s immediately ancestral roles, and asking what changes of
role would be forced by the latest mutation.
Now the relational uses of but, once it is freed from spatial exclusion, remains that of
categorial and then circumstantial exclusion, representable by relative complementation. The set
comprising all the members of the set a but those in the set b is the set
a − b,
the relative complement of b in a. If a and b are propositions, that is, sets of states, then that
relative complement represents the set of states in which the sentence α ∧ ¬β is true if α is
assigned to a and β is assigned to b. What then if but is epiphrastic? The answer seems to be that
in those conjunctive uses of but that are the nearest descendents of that latest mutation,
conjunctive but remains subtractive, but now subtractive of effects or significance. If we imagine
such connectives as issuing an instruction set, the instruction set of but for α but β in these uses
would be:
48
From the effects of α, subtract the effects of the negation of or salient alternative to β.
This is the source of the mitigative character of these uses. A late arrival is not so grave a fault as
truancy or not so thoughtless or not such a snub or not so fraudulent. Mere arrival, on the other
hand, is not so virtuous as punctuality, or demonstrates less keenness or reliableness. Though
independently of the setting we cannot say what the scale is, but is pragmatically scalar in these
uses. The difficulty of seeing what the subtraction is stems from the loss of the implicit negation
in the immediately ancestral use.
This then is the contrast between these uses of but and the corresponding uses of and. In
the one case we add to the effects of one clause the effects of a second; in the other case we
subtract from the effects of one clause the effects of the contradictory or some salient contrary
alternative to the second clause. An instructive over-simplification would put the matter this
way: but involves a kind of pragmatic double negation. The closest representation of α but β in
truth-functional language would be the inadequate α ∧ ¬¬β.
This is not to say that all instances of conjunctive but are thus accounted for. All
connective uses inevitably become generalized, and those for which we have no easily
articulated understanding generalize less constrainedly. Uses are triggered by habitual cues that
have only incidental connection with the developments that explain them. If, for example,
particular deployments of negations habitually figure in a use, then anticipated negations can
trigger the use even when otherwise deployed. Except by such general observations, we cannot
28
By analogy with epirrematikos, adverbial. Contrast the adverbial and epiphrastic uses of seriously in She’s
seriously ill and Seriously, she’s ill.
49
understand the use of but in If α then β, but if ¬β then ¬α. Such accidents can mute or mask the
immediate effects of earlier mutations and can themselves bring about new ones.29
In the phylogeny of connectives, two mutually reinforcing changes, morphological
erosion, and loss of specificity are at work to place the vocabulary beyond easy satisfactionconditional modelling. We have offered but as an example, but others come readily to hand once
one knows what to watch for. So it is perhaps useful to set out the stages by which it seems to
occur. The language of stages must be generously understood, since linguistic sub-populations
change relatively smoothly, and are not homogeneously interactive. All stages may therefore
exist at once:
1. Germination (The initial undetected, therefore uncorrected, scope misapprehension)
2. Incubation (The new use is hidden beneath the old as the population of its adherents
increases.)
3. Migration (The vocable now appears in its new use in environments in the absence of
masking negations or modal auxiliary verbs; since the new use now accords with that of a
sufficient proportion of the population, it is sustained uncorrected in a sufficiently large
population.
4. Ambiguity (The connective in its new use is free to return to environments that initiated the
change, where now the new use is directly in conflict with the old.)
29
Among these is if. For a more general account of mutation and its stages, and a broader range of examples, see
Jennings, 2002. See Jennings and Schapanski 2000, for a study of mutated without and other instances in the syntax
of Breton. For another example, consider the use of until in I don’t think the train can arrive until Monday.
Evidently the use of until is triggered by the presence of the n’t. But there is no plausible construction by which that
negation can be brought inside the scope of a universal quantifier over moments between the time of utterance and
the following Monday. Such a composition might eventually engender a use of until in which it would be
replaceable by before: that is, particular uses as universal quantifier over moments of an interval would give rise to
uses as existential quantifier over moments of an interval. Some such development may already be in train. A senior
Canadian politician recently prefaced to a precautionary remark, Until we jump to conclusions. . .. One may
instructively compare the Elizabethan/Jacobean use of while ∼ until.
50
5. Disambiguation (One of the uses is marked, typically by an extremal to distinguish the two
uses (just any, even if, for all, just in case etc.)
Now it must be admitted that connectives and other “syntactic” vocabulary do not offer the scope
for claims of indeterminacy that lexical items do. However, we must bear in mind that if there is
a useful distinction between the lexical and functional items of a language, it is itself an evolved
distinction. What is more, functionalization is itself an evolutionary process as we are using the
term. Linguists have begun to find evidence of these syntactic schisms in languages other than
English.30 It is safe to predict that their wider presence in English will become a commonplace of
language research.
Engendering as preservation
What can we say about engendering. As we understand engendering it is a realized
capacity of one effect type to enable another. Since the biologer of language is centrally
interested in language, he is centrally interested in linguistic engendering, that is, in the capacity
of one linguistic effect type to enable a later, perhaps altered, linguistic effect type. As in
biological engendering, an interest in the slowness of change requires attention to engendering’s
capacity to preserve; an interest in the fact of change, however slow, requires a focus upon the
limitations of engendering’s capacity to preserve. A theorist wishing to do justice to the nature of
language can hardly afford to ignore either aspect of language transmission. Engendering
involves exploitation; so to the required extent it must preserve in some general form features
that it would exploit. Engendering exploits past effect types for novel effect types; so to the
required extent, it must expand the base of effect types available for exploitation. For a medium-
51
scale example, consider the effects of “Now you’re cooking with gas,” which exploits the
effects of an earlier extolling of the efficiency of gas cookery as compared with other methods of
heating food. It preserves what we want to call the “implication” of improvement in efficiency,
but does not preserve what we want to call the “implication of food preparation”. But the
preserved effect, the expectation of an implication of increased efficiency, can be exploited
through being disappointed in such a novel construction as “Now you’re cooking with camel
dung.” The earlier newly created vehicle is made to carry a new cargo. Compare “If I’ve told you
once, I’ve told you twice” or “If Snodpool is elected, I’ll eat my breakfast.” But we can sensibly
conjecture that all of language at every stage of its evolution has exploited effects of earlier
interventions for the efficacy of later interventions. Sufficiently early stages of pre-language
must have coincided with sufficiently early stages of pre-technology, in interventions that
exploited the effects of earlier interventions (or of natural predispositions).
Now as we have suggested, these examples, though they involve fairly large-scale
exploitative innovations, nevertheless are merely magnifications of the ordinary business of
language use, which universally involves the exploitation of conditions produced by earlier
language use for the production of minutely novel effects. But this ordinary business is
transacted against a background of ineluctable change. Roughly speaking these smaller-scale
changes can be classified accordingly as they are speaker-produced or hearer-produced. The
former represent the preservational capacity of engendering but minutely alter the exploitable
base. The latter represent the preservational limits of engendering. Engendering tends to preserve
low rates of change in classes of occasions of use while it occasionally admits higher rates of
change in word-formations, as witness the numpire/umpire and the draw up/drop examples. It
30
See, for example, Han, Lidz and Musolino 2003 and Han, Storoshenko and Sakurai 2004 for examples from
52
promotes smooth transitions in occasions of use while exercising less control over available
generalizations of those occasions, as witness the extensional schism in the uses of internecine. It
generally preserves smooth transitions in occasions of use, though it occasionally admits more
abrupt changes in syntactic construal, as witness the many examples of apparent mutations in
connective and other vocabulary. All of these types of change, both speaker-initiated and hearerinitiated, are mutually reinforcing, so that in general, linguistic engendering preserves classes of
occasions of use better than it preserves evidentiary access to initiating conditions. In the
outcome we know how to speak but we don’t why how we speak is, at the moment, how to
speak. We are not in a position to understand, because we are not in a position to remember. In
some cases, as in changes by mutation, no one was ever in a position to observe.
Ultimately, the preservational incapacities of engendering explain much that is, or ought
to be, philosophically puzzling about folk-theoretic vocabulary. One such puzzle concerns the
nature of intention. Dennett and Haugeland (1987) in their discussion of intentionality explain
that that term, which was coined in the middle ages, derived from the verb intendo, meaning to
point (at) or aim (at) or extend (toward). Near enough for their purposes. But that use was itself
an exploitation of an incidental effect of more directly physical application of the verb to
drawing back, that is, tensioning the string of a bow and the bow itself. Figurative uses of the
verb referred to drawing the bow string in (of) the soul: a preparation for some directed action,
directed because the drawing of a bowstring incidentally involved an approximate initial aiming
of an arrow. Perhaps among contemporaries of Terence (195 − 159? B.C.E.) the provenance of
the effects of intendo animam in the effects of the vocabulary of archery, played a role in
Korean and Japanese.
53
constraining the occasions of use of the phrase. But among contemporaries of Cicero (104 − 43
B.C.E.), there were doubtless some for whom archery-uses, though still available, had lost that
capacity. And the archery-specific uses of the descendent English vocabulary did not persist
much beyond the 16th century, when one could still speak, perhaps pedantically, of ‘intending a
bowstring’. It is fair to say that few philosophers of language to whom the language of intention
seems theoretically indispensable also regard it as figurative language, but it was so in the
earliest instances of its non-ballistic uses, in which exertion, stored potential, and directedness
were disarmed correlatives of a threatening physical action. The residue of the figure remains;
the ballistic uses are lost.
Now the production of speech is an articulated action, and in that respect much like the
aiming of a bow, so it is easy enough to see why some philosophers insist that intentions must be
taken into account in an understanding of language. But if it is discovered that the neurological
springs of linguistic acts are, as William Calvin has conjectured, a succession of very fast
Darwinian, competitions for a limited neocortical workspace, one may wonder whether the
language of intention is itself likely to survive in such a theoretical climate as that would
produce. In conversation it would be largely unaffected: after all, those selective pressures arise
in and reflect a uniquely prepared neural environment, so questions of authorship remain
answerable. But in a biological theory that seeks integration with the best available neuroscience,
the figure of a drawn bowstring might simply be a bad choice.
A broadly parallel account can be given of the philosophical difficulties inherent in the
language of cause. The blank, impenetrable wall that Hume met was linguistic in character and
historically explainable. Causa had simply been the best available Latin match for aition, but
best because it too was sufficiently removed from its own ancestral uses that it already defied
54
semantic accounting. And again, the misplacement of the language of responsibility 31 in
explications of aition, and the connections between the language of responsibility and the
language of blame are all products of an almost universally forgotten, but largely recoverable
history.32 It requires only curiosity and a little careful attention to work this history out, a useful
exercise for introductory philosophy students. The point of the exercise would not be to furnish
them with the kind of understanding that ethicists seek, but to enable them to understand why in
the particular case that sort of understanding is inaccessible.
More generally we can observe that engendering does not reliably preserve metalinguistic
information. We may on many occasions be aware at some level of the effects that we exploit in
novel constructions. But it does not follow that we are aware of the effects that the earlier effects
exploited. As an example, We might use such constructions as My, but that’s a pretty sloop! but
in general we do so in ignorance that the but is a sort of alluvial deposit of a once current syntax
that also left us My, if that isn’t a pretty sloop! The effect doesn’t require us to know that the
“My” is a stub where, at two ancestral removes, an oath would have stood, as, for example:
Damn me (Blind me) but that’s (if that isn’t) a pretty sloop! One might even say that the effect
requires us not to have to know that. Why can we acquire no non-historical understanding of but
in such constructions? Because there is no other understanding to be had!
As near to a universal principle in these matters as we can furnish lies in the answer that
biology gives to the question: How much semantic understanding ought we to hope for? The
31
The mismatch is readily seen when one reflects that responsibility is the Latinate correlative of answerability. The
implication of authorship emerges from wholly incidental features of particular uses. To understand Aristotle’s use
of aition, one does better to shape an exploration after the methods of Palmer 1950 than to satisfy oneself with a
“quick and dirty” translation into a vocabulary of which our understanding is largely illusory.
32
Quite independently of larger theoretical questions that this essay is intended to raise and which in their details
must be debatable, pedagogical issues arise. It does no one credit that philosophy students should be permitted to
persist in obliviousness of the recoverable histories of ethical and epistemic vocabulary. The question as to its
relevance to their understanding cannot be settled in ignorance of the historical data itself, and since the question of
55
answer is that we ought to hope only for the degree of semantic understanding that is required
for the transmission of language from one generation of speakers to the next at its current rate of
change. (That principle applies as well to the language of semantic understanding.) How much
semantic determinacy ought we to expect? The biological answer takes the same form.
We might ask a more difficult question: How much semantic determinacy is compatible
with the transmission of language as it actually occurs? The answer may well be “Not much.”
Insofar as we are adapted to the acquisition of language, we are adapted to the manner of its
transmission. If that transmission does not yield the resources for a sort of linguistic
understanding we crave but have not so far attained, there is no reason to suppose that it could
yield them. So even without knowing what semantic determinacy might be, the biology of
language can give a conditional answer to these questions. We should expect it to be present
(absent) if its presence (absence) is a requirement of language transmission; else we should not.
We should doubt the presence of any underlying natural semantic theory if its transmission
would require neural resources that we have not acquired through the acquisition of the capacity
for language. Biology reigns!
Conclusions
There is a faint echo in Quine’s indeterminacy thesis of this biolinguistic fact of life, but
there is a more striking consonance in Bentham’s theory of fictions. Bentham’s explanation, like
Tooke’s is to be filled out phylogenetically. Bentham presents the puzzle as an ontological one,
though he could recognize that its springs lay in linguistic processes. Tooke seems not to have
relevance then raises larger and deeper methodological issues, it would seem a simple matter of intellectual hygiene
to have the information before them.
56
concerned himself much with the details of semantic intractability, merely the fact of its
existence. We do not have to look to translation, radical or otherwise, to find indeterminacy. To
be sure we can ask whether the question ′Does the mind means in English what l’esprit means in
French?’ could have an answer. But the problem surely begins closer to home.
The
indeterminacy resides within each language, and is the product of bio-linguistically
understandable developments. Now there is an anticipation of this fact in a remark of Quine’s
On deeper reflection, radical translation begins at home. Must we equate our neighbour’s
English words with the same string of phonemes in our own mouths? Certainly not; for
sometimes we do not thus equate them. (1969b, 46)
It will be evident from what we have already said, that, on the evidence, there is a much deeper
and more pervasive indeterminacy in human language than Quine was in a position to
acknowledge. It characterizes much of what we say; and therefore much of what epistemologists
say. What Quine failed to see for all his extraordinary acuity, what his way-markers, with the
best vision their world permitted, saw dimly, is that the indeterminacy is a clue to a more
comprehensive, satisfying, and natural (as distinct from ‘naturalized’) understanding of
language.
It has to be acknowledged that neither the tactical details nor the larger strategic design of
the biological approach to language owes anything to Quine’s proposed naturalization of
epistemology. We claim Quine neither as a way marker to a biological turn, nor as a late
precursor. It must be admitted, however, that our own historical placement of Locke, Tooke and
Bentham is a reaction to Quine’s. And their anticipations too are a late discovery occasioned by
Quine’s references to their work. For both of these we are indebted to Quine. Insofar as we have
offered a programmatic proposal, it is one that follows upon a comparatively large corpus of
57
observational data and previously obtained results. But again, the observations were prompted in
the first instance by features of natural language to which Quine and others failed to attend, and
which his predecessors did not. What remains as a question for critical consideration is the
relevance to philosophic method of the body of observational detail of which this essay has
revealed only a very inadequate sampling. We have ventured some critical judgements, but these
must apply with greater force to some philosophical practices than to others. The question
whether the biology of language will transform philosophy on a scale that Quine envisaged for
his proposed reforms, or merely persist as one more philosophical speciality we must commend
to the judgement of others present and future.
58
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