The Very Last Remnants of Meaning
A.J. Hartline
R.E. Jennings
Laboratory for Logic and Experimental Philosophy
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C.
ABSTRACT
In Remnants of Meaning, Stephen Schiffer presents an argument for what he calls a “no-theory theory” of
meaning. Schiffer’s no-theory theory amounts to the thesis that it is impossible to complete satisfactorily
the schema “x refers to y iff … “. We endorse Schiffer’s claim: philosophical bio-linguists also operate
with a no-theory theory of sorts. But Schiffer and we have arrived at our respective non-theories by
fundamentally dissimilar means. Schiffer’s argument treks through an intricate network of “conceptual
dissonances” between philosophically opaque English vocabularies such as those of meaning, propositions,
and beliefs. In contrast, our path to the no-theory theory is primarily empirical rather than “conceptual”: we
ground our argument in the biological character of language and the antagonism of its fundamental
character to the historical philosophical enterprise in general. As a result, the biological understanding of
language affords us a broader, more accurate, and hence more useful view of the slough-like vocabularies
Schiffer despairs of understanding. For our approach neatly explains why one must despair. Since the
resources that would be required to answer philosophical questions are not themselves required for the
transmission of language from one generation of language users to the next, the probability is vanishingly
small that such resources exist. So we must be no-theory theorists concerning virtually everything about
which philosophers have historically theorized.
Introduction
.
In his book Remnants of Meaning, Stephen Schiffer despairs of the availability of
the type of understanding of the vocabulary of meaning that philosophers seek, and he
encapsulates his despair in a “no-theory-theory” of meaning. The gist of the no-theory
theory is that one can never satisfactorily complete the schema “x refers to y iff…”, and
that the questions being asked in the philosophy of language therefore have false
presuppositions insofar as they aim for a completion of this schema. In this essay we
want to show how a basic understanding of the biology of language might induce
someone to be a no-theory theorist of meaning without becoming mired in Schifferian
despair. Mainly, we present the biological features of language that make Schiffer’s
conclusions correct, independently of his arguments. Our method allows us to avoid
despair because it neatly explains why one must despair with respect to the project of
filling schemata like Schiffer’s, and in doing so it points the way towards more
intellectually constructive ways of spending one’s time.
Schiffer’s no-theory theory of meaning
Again, the gist of Schiffer’s no-theory theory is that one can never satisfactorily
complete the schema “x refers to y iff…”, and that the questions being asked in the
philosophy of language therefore have false presuppositions insofar as they aim for a
completion of this schema. The no-theory theory administers a sharp rebuke to both
semantic analysis in its traditional practice, and to the more current practice that Schiffer
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calls “physicalist reductionism”. Both types of philosophers, says Schiffer, accept that on
some level, in some manner or other, there are “semantic facts,” that items such as truth,
meaning and denotation are to be found in what it pleases them to call the world. But the
conceptual analyst, as Schiffer sees him, doesn’t worry about how one might incorporate
these facts into a physical conception of the world: he is not particularly bothered by the
notion of “irreducibly semantic” facts. The conceptual analyst is characterized also by his
“a priori,” introspective methodology. The physicalist reductionist differs in both these
respects. He does fret anxiously over the incorporation of so-called “semantic facts” into
a scientific conception of the world. His “physicalism” consists precisely in a morbid
desire to incorporate these semantic facts into a “scientific” conception of the world by
stating them in a physicalistic, non-semantic idiom. And unlike the conceptual analyst, he
does not expect that these reductions will be discovered by introspective analysis of
concepts. He takes for his models for reduction such exemplars as the theoretical
reduction of heat to mean molecular kinetic energy, and the reduction of valence to
physical properties of atoms, in which empirical research is somehow involved (268).
Schiffer rejects also a third approach to a “theory of meaning”, involving the
completion of a constructive semantic “meaning theory” for particular languages,
knowledge of which would suffice for understanding the semantic content of utterances
in a given language. This kind of theory is supposed to be the only possible way to
account for how it is that speakers can understand an indefinite number of novel
constructions in a particular language. And Schiffer argues that the pursuit of such a
theory is not intellectually useful both (a) because this kind of knowledge is (as he
claims) patently not necessary for the understanding of an indefinite number of
constructions, and (b) because positive considerations count against it, considerations
involving problems in the creation of a positive theory of belief, on which a constructive
meaning theory might depend (268).
No ism-ism: a no-theory theory of all natural language vocabulary
We agree with Schiffer that none of these three approaches will work, and
applaud his conclusions. But we have arrived at them more directly. Schiffer couches his
arguments in language “internal” to philosophy; his method in general involves showing
that certain goals of a particular philosophical method are inconsistent with other
commitments of those who apply them; or else they depend upon demonstrably false
philosophical theses, and so forth. For our part, we would wish to claim that if the
conclusions are correct, they are correct because of the nature of language. Language is a
physical phenomenon available for detailed investigation; there is no need to poke at it
tentatively with a philosophical crutch. No doubt it has some sort of discoverable order.
But considerations external to philosophy establish independently that the kinds of order
sought by Schiffer’s philosophers of language are unlikely to be found.
Furthermore, the “outsider’s” viewpoint afforded us by these non-philosophical
considerations gives us a broader and hence more useful perspective than Schiffer’s. For
ultimately Schiffer’s argument depends on his determining every possible means of
filling out the “x refers to y iff…” schema, and demonstrating for each of those ways that
its details cannot satisfactorily be worked out. In contrast, our path to the no-theory
theory allows us to show why, for any means of filling out the schema, that means cannot
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work. As a result we are able to explain thoroughly the tangle Schiffer finds himself in at
the end of his book.
We turn now to our explanation. It is a common-place that physically, natural
language presents us with a dauntingly complicated web of causal relationships: that the
request:
Frank: George, can you open a window please?
is the controlled phonemic product of oscillations in Frank’s larynx and supralaryngeal
cavities synchronized by movements of his lips, tongue and soft palate creating
fluctuations of air pressure. In favourable conditions, these ripples will produce
oscillations in George’s tympanic membranes which will generate electrical pulses in his
inner ear; these pulses will in turn produce some ultimately understandable sequence of
physical events somewhere in George’s brain. Somehow, other circumstances being
auspicious, all this may terminate in George’s getting up and opening a window. A
sociopathic Frank may congratulate himself on his achievement.
But however it works, language is obviously a physical phenomenon. So it is a
curious matter that so many philosophers and linguists choose to view language
semantically. Not that they are not ready with reasons: typically with the justification that
language is conventional—at first glance the physical significance of a bit of language
seems arbitrary in a way that (to take Grice’s example) that of a photograph or icon is
not. Again, however, not that they can say what conventionality is. From a biolinguistic
point of view, the feature of language that gives rise to its characterization as
conventional is simply this: the causal significance of any particular linguistic item has
itself a causal history. Earlier causal “significances” engender later ones; this is just to
say that a bit of English has the effects it now has precisely because certain other bits of
language had the effects that they had last week, last year, last century, last millennium,
and because of the facts of linguistic transmission. If no one had been affected as people
were affected by the English spoken before we were born, and the language had not been
transmitted to us then we wouldn’t be affected as we are by the English spoken today.
Our aim here is to sketch the basic requirements of a physical theory of language
so as to have something to say about semantics, physicalism and compositional meaning
theories. In doing so we use the word meaning, so it is well to mention at the outset that
in the idiom of our research, the word meaning is used idiosyncratically to denote
physical types. We are appropriating the word meaning for families of causal
“significances”. More accurately, we are applying meaning to families of effects, among
them the neurophysiological effects occasioned by linguistic events, effects which are
themselves involved in the production of future linguistic responses. More particularly a
meaning is the union of a set of populations of linguistic effects of the type just
mentioned, populations temporally ordered by a relation of engendering: earlier effectpopulations engender later ones.
The fact that responses to a linguistic act among people of the same linguistic
group display a certain level of predictable regularity suggests that there will emerge a
functional description of neurophysiological effect-types—however differently the
functional types are realized. The predictability is grounded in the fact that such effects,
generally constrain responses. If “Nice day, isn’t it?” nets “No thanks, I’ll have the ham
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sandwich,” we reckon that the effects have not been produced. An adequate physical
theory of language will be sufficiently fine-grained both to honour without vacuity the
functional similarity between the neurophysiological states of people who “understand”
and to show how these states differ from those obtaining in the brains of people we
characterize as, in one way or another “not understanding”.
We can infer (mostly negative) features of the engendering relation from what we
understand of the manner in which languages change. We discover more positive features
through the study of language acquisition. But however well or badly we understand it, it
is at least obvious that there is one. and even with our paucity of knowledge there are a
number of important and interesting things we can say about it. The most important and
interesting of these things for the present purpose is that the engendering relation does not
require the transmission of anything anyone would wish to characterize as semantic
understanding. There is no semantic audit by which adolescent usage is examined for
duplication of parental usage. The only check is the detection of error in circumstances in
which it can be corrected. If a senior Republican complains of Richard Clarke’s
“ingenuousness” where one would have expected “disingenuousness”, her fellow
panellists do not remark upon the point. If someone asks us to keep her appraised, we bite
our tongues.
Now, in the case of evolved phenomena in general there are “a priori” guarantees
in both a positive and negative sense. Absent specific knowledge of an organism type
save that it is evolved, we can we can nonetheless say that in all probability its members
have whatever features are necessary for its own reproduction at the current rate of
change for the species; and that generally speaking, its members do not universally
display features unnecessary for such reproduction. But absent an argument that a feature
has ever played an essential role, we are entitled to assign its hypothesis a vanishingly
low probability. Meanings as a biolinguistic theory understands them are evolved in a
sufficiently close understanding of the term that we can apply the same principles.
With this in mind, we submit that we must assign a vanishingly low probability to
the hypothesis that there an available “philosophical” understanding of exactly the areas
of natural language that philosophers are interested in. The starting point of philosophical
analysis classically conceived comes in the form of one’s Socratic realization that
although she can use the vocabularies of justice, knowledge, reference, and so forth as
well as any typical speaker of the language, nevertheless she doesn’t really know exactly
what such things are. One’s curiosity is compounded when she goes on to discover that
no other competent user of these vocabularies know exactly what such things are either.
Philosophers classically conceived are undaunted by problems such as this, and boldly
offer “isms” such as nominalism, physicalism, intuitionism, and so forth, where the root
to which –ism is affixed generally represents their best hunch of exactly what people are
talking about when they use some problematic bit of natural language. We are reluctant
to follow philosophers all the way down this particular path. To us, the fact that no
natural language user has a properly “philosophical” understanding of any of the natural
language vocabularies in which philosophers are interested demonstrates that the
acquisition of the kind of understanding philosophers wish they had is not necessary for
perfectly proficient use of these vocabularies. So it is no wonder that no one has ever
completed an uncontroversially successful philosophical analysis of anything worth
analyzing philosophically. For according to a basic physical understanding of language,
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for every instance of philosophically opaque vocabulary there is only an infinitesimal
chance that this kind of understanding is there to be found at all. This is why we are notheory theorists and no-ism-ists of everything about which philosophers have historically
theorized. Natural language is not the kind of thing to which one can successfully apply
philosophical, ism-sitic methods.
The no-ism-ist, no-theory theory of reference
The preceding sketch of no-ism-ism is not meant to claim that biolinguistics can
have nothing to say about the philosophical vocabulary that Schiffer seizes upon. To be
sure it will not provide semantic analyses, a physicalist reduction or a compositional
meaning theory; nor will it absorb the vocabulary into its own theoretical lexicon. If the
terms on the philosophy of language name no physical types, they can find no place in
such a theory. But if they are current in the language, than a physical theory of language
must explain their presence; if they are anomalous, then it must furnish explanation of the
anomalousness. If the schemata that Schiffer adduces cannot be completed, then the
theory should help us understand why not.
Consider an example. Schiffer argues that one can never correctly complete the
schema “x refers to y iff…” on the armchair-based conceptual-analysis model. The
biolinguistic theorist must agree. Presumably attempts to complete this sentence with
some kind of semantic analysis will rely on the fact that we sometimes assert the relation
of reference between a person (or an element of language) and something else; and that
we recognize that we sometimes mistakenly do so. This may suggest at first blush that
there is a relation to be investigated, but at second blush we can see that the first blush
revealed a blemish. The language of reference is just more language. We can infer that
there is such a relation only if the corresponding inference is warranted in general. That is
the claim of semantics, and that is precisely what is in doubt. Our use of the language of
reference provides no basis for any semantically useful general claim. It merely raises the
question in its own right. A physical theory of language must take on the role of revealing
why the temptation to make such inferences is to be resisted, and ultimately remove the
temptation. We might as well begin with understanding the temptation as it arises in the
case of “refer”. “Refers” as it is occurs in natural language is a physical phenomenon the
neural effects of which we suppose will eventually be described as a collection of related
physical types corresponding to its various distinct uses. We can examine its higher-order
natural history, first, to try to see how it has come to have the various networks of neural
effects that it has, and second, to see why none of this will provide the kind of
understanding that is sought, semantic or otherwise.
So, why does refer have the conversational effects it does that have so baffled
philosophers, and caused Schiffer to despair? The most correct answer we can give is
simply that this is so because older words had the effects they did, and because of the
facts of engendering. Beyond this somewhat uninformative generalization, to hypothesize
becomes riskier; in part because we know so little about the neurophysiological realities
of language and its transmission; and in part because in researching the history of
language we are subject to the kind of interpretive difficulties archaeologists face in
explaining strange old artifacts. Nevertheless, in the biology of language, as in
archaeology, we can satisfy our curiosity to a fair extent with a little digging followed by
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some examination of that which we have dug up in the light of what little we already
know.
Let us do so now with our word refer. The word comes from Old French referer,
itself from ferrer, meaning “to carry”; and re-, a Latin prefix that originally had the effect
of “back” or “backwards” (OED, s.v. “re-”). The effect of the complete formation was
therefore something like “carry back to or towards the starting-point”(OED, s.v. “refer”).
And in all likelihood uses of this word originated in the utmost literality, as in (to
caricature) “Refer the hoe to Farmer Clergue’s house over yonder”. But the first
occurrences of refer recorded by the OED in English proper are straying into less
physical uses. In this translation of Boethius, Chaucer speaks of things being referred to
nothing, from which we presume they originated.
Either alle thinges ben referred and browht to nowht [L. ad nihilum referuntur],
and floteryn with owte gouernour,..or elles [etc.]. (Chaucer, 1374)
And later, someone’s thoughts are figuratively carried back to silence by his fancy.
One while his tired fancy does refer His thoughts to silence. (Quarles, 1629)
The hypothesized physical “carrying-back refer” would have occasioned incidentally
what we might characterize as inferences of the referrer’s returning the referand to some
more original state. “Recurrence-to-origin-refer” would have occurred as a natural
consequence of figurative uses of the older, physical refer outside of situations of
physical carryings-back.
This being the case, to speak of referring something undesirable would naturally
occasion responses involving one’s taking it back to its origins. But the responses in this
case would naturally have taken a more specific form: of the referrer’s locating someone
or something to blame for the undesirable object. Here, Chaucer speaks of those who, so
to speak, carry our sins up to heaven and dump them accusingly at God’s feet.
Thanne folweth it that owre vices ben referred to the makere of alle good
(Chaucer, 1374).
Naturally, one lays not just the bad things before God. Here, credit is given where
credit is due.
He ascriueþ to no man eny good þinge, but holy referriþ all þynges to god, of
whom þei proceden originaly. (tr. De Imitatione, c1450)
We can call this use of refer “author-refer” since referring events to a person makes us
think that that person is somehow their author. Here is a use of author-refer that is
perfectly neutral in that it has more to do with abstract responsibility than praise or
blame.
Some referre this Prologue to Athanasius, because it is found in his Synopsis (KJ
Bible, 1611).
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One might reasonably conjecture that the blaming author-refer preceded the praising
author-refer, and make an even more solid conjecture that that only afterwards came the
neutral author-refer. This is so not just because that’s the chronological order in which
the quotations supplied by the OED occur. In general, everyday uses of words proceed
from more physical to less; this is just another manifestation of the evolutionary truism
that evolution takes smaller rather than larger steps; more complicated forms tend to arise
from minute changes made on less complicated forms. And to throw down an undesirable
object at the feet of its maker is seemingly the most literal type of author-reference
appearing among the three; of these three, it would represent the least radical departure
from the previously discussed “return-to-origin-refer”. In any event, the neutral authorreference is seemingly the furthest from “return-to-origin refer” of the three, and we are
safe in assuming it arose from the first two.
Naturally the application of author-refer spread in due time to non-human
“authors”, and became part of a kind of causal vocabulary as the inference to explanatory
origins, present in author-refer, became isolated.
While we referre it unto the Moon, we give some satisfaction for the Ocean, but
no generall salve for Creeks, and Seas which know no floud (Browne, 1646).
It seems impossible to refer all these well-attested stories to imposition (Mitford,
1841).
Explanatory refer appears to have slowly given way to a refer that occasioned residual
responses of vaguer “relatedness”, in which the first item is still in some way “filially”
dependent on the second. As is generally the case in etymologies, responses of filial
dependence is nothing new; it is left over from author and causal-refer, in an isolated and
refined state.
To thys euery man ought to referre al hys actys, thoughtys and dedys (Starkey,
1538).
In the above passage, one’s thoughts and deeds are to be carried out always in accordance
with whatever it is Starkey is talking about—honour the father, in other words. This filial
dependence comes into play in a refer that is closer to the one in which we are interested
than any we have so far observed. In the following refer, one refers a word to an object.
The inference is that the object is somehow paternally related to the word. In referring the
word to the object, we carry it back to its pa.
The Latyn worde whyche that is referred Unto a thynge whych is substancyall,
For a nowne substantyve is wel averred (Hawes, 1509).
When a woorde hath a proper signification of the owne, & beyng referred to an
other thyng, hath an other meanyng, the Grecians call it Metonymia (Wilson,
1553).
Ειδωλον is to be referred also to those things that are not carved Images (More,
1664).
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All the refers thus far discussed have been transitive: that is, A refers B to
C. The refer in which philosophers are interested is intransitive: A just refers to C.
In uses of this philosophers’ refer, either some person refers to some object using
language, or the linguistic item itself refers to an object. (Set aside philosophical
questions of supposed reductions of one to the other for now).
Intransitive refer seems to originate in a word occasioning inferences of returning
to a person or thing. Not carrying back an object: just returning. Note that the uses below
are fairly non-literal instances of returning. Chaucer promises he will return in his
narrative to “Þis matere”, and Lydgates’s wittes (think “mind”) are returning to Phebus.
As touchyng [{th}] is matere, For I it gan, I wil [{th}] er-to refere (Chaucer,
1374).
(As touching this matter, for it I go: I will thereto refer)
To Phebus my wittes gan refere, And on this wise he sayde to me [etc.] (Lydg.,
c1430).
The origins of this refer are a little puzzling. One wonders what would originally have
been made of talk of “carrying-back” to something, sans mention of any object that gets
carried. We might speculate that what originally was the inferred object of carrying-back
was one’s narrative. This would make Chaucer’s use above a primitive instance of this
refer. At any rate, what is important in this refer for later purpose is the inferences of a
return to something’s origins; less specifically, to a causally important “place”; less
specifically, to a place of some important quasi-filial relatedness. As these inferences
become isolated and refined, the way is prepared for the use of modern philosophers’
refer in which a word refers to an object.
To go to the conclusioun/ That refereth to thy confusioun (Chaucer, 1386).
Word-object refer appears in full flower in the following passages. The inference is, as in
the transitive refer discussed above in which one refers a word to an object, that the word
stands in some kind of vaguely filial relationship with whatever object it refers to.
Awake, my glory, soul, if such thou be, And that fair word at all refer to thee
(Crashaw, 1647).
I marked some Terms in Joynery with superiour Letters..intending at the latter
end of these Exercises to have explained the Terms those Letters referr'
d to
(Moxon, 1678).
My measurements refer to the ice at and near the surface (Tyndall, 1860).
The origins of the other kind of referring, the referring that people do to objects,
are slightly different. The object of reference in this case is originally the listener’s
attention; this is seen clearly in the following:
Some suspected passages..are degraded to the bottom of the page; with an
Asterisk referring to the places of their insertion (Pope, 1725).
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The listener’s-attention-specific aspect of this particular inference has been obscured
through frequent use of this refer in cases where the direction of attention is not entirely
salient to conversational purposes, as seen below. We still make the auxiliary inferences
that would have accompanied that inference of the speaker’s ostensibly directing our
attention.
I at length found myself on the peak referred to (Tyndall, 1860).
He refers to passages of his personal history (Jowett’s Plato, 1875).
This concludes our look at refer, which we hope affords us better understanding of why it
has the effects it has. Naturally, this represents no sort of semantic answer to the question
“What is reference?”. Indeed, the point of the story of refer is to relieve us of the notion
that these questions can be given any sort of satisfactory answer. The story is of
philosophically more opaque effects of using a sound evolving out of philosophically less
opaque effects, as a result of what we might think of a succession of “figurative” uses.
There is nothing in this evolutionary chain to equip a more or less proficient English
speaker, however well trained, to give a satisfactory semantic account of this vocabulary,
to fill in Schiffer’s schema “x refers to y iff…”. The word acquires certain new
conversational effects, and one’s being (in the neurophysiological sense) an instantiation
of these effects consists in knowing more or less the appropriate responses when
reference comes up in a conversation. Acquisition of the language of reference does not
require the resources that would enable one successfully to answer the philosopher’s
question. We should not be surprised that the question is unanswerable.
This, incidentally, allows us to reject with Schiffer (though for altogether different
reasons) the possibility of a philosopher of language completing a compositional
semantics for English or any other natural language. In Remnants, Schiffer defines the
offending notion in this way:
A compositional (truth-theoretic) semantics for a language L is a finitely statable
theory that ascribes properties to, and defines recursive conditions on, the finitely
many vocabulary items in L in such a way that for each of the infinitely many
sentences of L that can (in principle) be used to make truth-evaluable utterances,
there is some condition (or set of conditions) such that the theory entails that an
utterance of that sentence is true iff that condition (or a certain member of the
set) obtains (179).
For a compositional semantics to be possible, it would have to be possible to give truthconditions for utterances in English such as “‘Fido’ refers to Fido”. But it isn’t. Such a
possibility just isn’t required by the facts of language transmission, and we have no other
reason to suppose it might be required.
Accordingly, the justification Schiffer says is typically offered as a motivation for
the construction of a compositional semantics must be supposed not to be much good.
And it turns out that it isn’t. The compositionalist’s justification, as offered by Schiffer:
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It would not be possible to account for a human’s ability to understand utterances
of indefinitely many novel sentences of a language without the assumption that
language had a compositional semantics (180).
The assumption here is that “understanding” is a matter of grasping semantic content.
Not only is this assumption groundless in that no semantic analysis of anything has ever
succeeded; its falsity apparent from a physical examination of language. Semantic
content, meaning, reference and so forth are simply inappropriate candidates for a
metalanguage of natural language, because the level of understanding we associate with
the successful application of such notions to language is not required for the transmission
of language from one generation to the next. Moreover, to use these words in the
conversational sense as a part of one’s theory of language assumes they have the very
theoretical rigour that they demonstrably lack.
But what if, with Schiffer and with a lot of philosophers in the analytic tradition
since the 1960s, we wonder whether the schema “x refers to y iff…” might be filled out
on a physicalist reductionist model if semantic analysis is to be abandoned? The example
Schiffer offers is the reduction of heat to mean molecular kinetic energy. Notice how
different this type of reduction is from a semantic analysis. The idea here is not to
analyze what we mean when we say “x is hot”, but instead to define a physical type and
to co-opt a bit of old vocabulary, using it in a new way in order to talk about that type.
This is unproblematic: it is just what we biologers of language do when we use meaning
to talk about species of neurophysiological effects of language. But unfortunately for
reductionism, this does not exhaust what is going on in the project. The reductionist
project smuggles into the framework of the theory the suspect idea that somehow, mean
molecular kinetic energy is “what we talk about when we talk about heat”. Intentions,
reference and truth have after all a place in the reductionist’s metalanguage of natural
language; not innocuously as co-opted names for well-defined physical types but in their
suspect conversational forms. And smuggled in as well is the old idea of semantics and
truth; one is correct in saying the room is hot iff… Schiffer rejects the physicalist
reductionist enterprise as depending on the idea that the schema “x refers to y iff…” can
correctly be filled out. Schiffer doesn’t believe this can be done; and (for different
reasons), neither do we.
A defeatist program of despair?
In a section at the end of Remnants of Meaning that is titled identically to this one,
Schiffer writes,
…what one wants to find for the philosophy of meaning and intentionality, if not
for philosophy generally, is a characterization of the discipline that would
perspicuously define research programs in advance of having the positive
theories that would characterize their fruition. It is this characterization that I am
stuck for. I do not know how to give an interesting answer to the question of
what I do for a living (269).
Having said this, Schiffer sincerely denies being a defeatist with respect to the
philosophical problem of reference. Schiffer characterizes himself as a non-defeatist
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because in his eyes, a defeatist wants to ignore facts that cry out for explanation. And, he
says, someone who accuses him of thusly ignoring “the nature of semantic and
intentional facts” is missing the point. Schiffer sees himself as having shown that anyone
who sets out to explain such facts is proceeding on a mistaken assumption—that such
facts can be explained, that one can satisfactorily fill out the schema “x refers to y iff…”.
Since such questions are simply unanswerable, says Schiffer, we cannot say that any
“semantic and intentional facts” are there to be ignored at his behest (271).
In the same section, Schiffer is more equivocal with respect to the question of
whether his program is one of despair. In looking at the presuppositions of analytic
philosophy of language, Schiffer has come up against a wall; and as far as he can tell, it is
impenetrable. The despair he wants to avoid but finds himself drawn towards comes as a
result of his not having any idea what to do next.
I do not want to think that my career is to show the fly the way out of the flybottle. I wish that I could go on from here to raise new questions that would
enable me to give my hypothetical course. But I have not yet been able to define
those questions. I would like to think that I have not yet succeeded. (271).
A non-defeatist program of non-despair?
The uncertainty of what to do next that Schiffer evinces at the end of his book
appears to stem from his failure to understand fully why his wall is impenetrable. Our
program affords us a general understanding of why all walls like Schiffer’s are
impenetrable; that is, we know precisely why one must despair of gaining a
“philosophical” understanding—semantic, physicalist, compositional or otherwise—of
any philosophically opaque vocabulary of natural language. From our point of view, the
way is open for new questions and new methodologies by which one can answer them;
and so we do not despair.
Schiffer actually anticipates a project like ours in his book, minus a few important
details that include our non-despair. Having rejected under the auspices of the “no-theory
theory of meaning” the possibility of ever filling out the “x refers to y iff…” schema, and
having condemned analytic philosophy of language in general for relying overmuch on
the assumption that this schema can ever be completed, he finishes Remnants of Meaning
with the following thought.
There is one legitimate theory that might be called a “theory of meaning,” though
that is not how I would choose to speak: namely, a theory of language
understanding, a theory that explains one’s ability to go from auditory
perceptions of utterances of sentences to knowledge of what propositional speech
acts were performed in them (269).
With some theoretically serious reservations this is not a bad intuitive account of the kind
of theory we aim to construct. We share Schiffer’s reservations about the label “theory of
meaning”, as we would want to excise the conversational use of meaning altogether from
the metalanguage of natural language. And we would be more conservative than Schiffer
with vocabulary such as language understanding, knowledge, and propositional speech
acts. Like refer they are to be regarded as data, not terms of the theory. These are part of
12
the phenomenon of natural language in that people use them in conversation. But we are
interested in language as a physical phenomenon, and at that level of explanation (as
Schiffer himself maintains) we cannot expect there to be anything that might be got at
with this vocabulary unless it is overtly co-opted. Once again, the level of understanding
their ordinary conversational use would require semantically to pick out useful physical
types and thus to have immediate theoretical utility just isn’t required for the transmission
of language.
Schiffer comments that the “trouble” with a theory such as ours is that it “would
not be a philosophical theory” (269). Certainly it would not be a philosophical theory if
one abandons philosophy in abandoning the traditional, “What is ϕ?” style of philosophy,
where ϕ is knowledge, or belief, or what have you. But given the fundamental problems
our approach has shown to be inherent in this style of philosophy, one might wonder
whether the failure of our project to be properly philosophical really constitutes
“trouble”. Alternatively, we can respond to Schiffer’s worry (truistically) that the
tradition of philosophy assimilates its critics. Our project is on that reckoning very much
within philosophy, and may even be the key to the reintegration of philosophy with
science.
Works Cited
Schiffer, Stephen. Remnants of Meaning. MIT, 1987.
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13
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