In our post below (Doctor Justice’s Petting Zoo), we offered
an ontological fable, inspired by Quine’s celebrated demonstration, in Word
and Object and later writings, that an investigator faced with the problem
of “radical translation” cannot determine, by behavioristic methods alone,
whether the expression in the exotic language refers to rabbits as unified individual enduring entities, or as (potentially
contingent) conglomerates of undetached rabbit parts, or as ontological
instantons (what you see before your eyes right
now), or individual doses of the mass-term Rabbit Fusion (the way puddles
instantiate water), or as incarnations of the Urkaninchen, or what have you: the reference of the expression is insofar inscrutable. From this potential modus tollens he decides to hang on to the
behaviorism and to ditch various
purported mental entities instead -- a process which, if carried to what some
(Scott Soames, for one) deem its logical conclusion, then “Quine’s position has several
consequences that are so unpalatable as to make it … self-undermining.”
(Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003), II 282). But the spice of the tale is in the
telling, and Quine tells it exceedingly well.
Likewise delightful is his fable of referential ontogenesis, a tale broached in Word
and Object and taken up again
in Roots of Reference. Here
we are given poignant glimpses of Quine’s tortured infancy (“More mama! More water! More red!), and offered careful, psychologically plausible
reconstructions of how we acquire mass terms, collectives, quantifiers, relative
pronouns and so forth, along with their associated ontologies.
In “Reference and its Roots” (in: Hahn & Schilpp, eds., The
Philosophy of W. V. Quine (1986), p. 523), Strawson has a bone to pick with
Quine’s (psycho)logical account of the acquisition of singular versus general
reference:
It must be part of [the learner’s]
mastery of ‘Fido’, that Fido is unique. A plurality of Fidos simutaneously soliciting his
attention must be ruled out by his
understanding of the term -- semantically ruled out. … But if it is ruled out, then what becomes of the
claim that ‘Fido’ is semantically simpler than ‘dog’? The answer at least is simple: we
just reverse the terms. … ‘Fido’ is a more, not a less, sophisticated
acquisition than ‘dog’. ‘Dog’ has
individuation; ‘Fido has
individuation plus.
But here Quine is surely correct, as regards the sequential
ontologenesis. Initially, Mama
(for let us revert to her, for dignity, leaving Fido in his kennel) simply
is what she is, as presented (well, and as supplemented by instinct, but in
this connection the point is a
distraction, though we revert to it later): Die Mutti ohne
Eigenschaften, as it were (nurse, nurse, nurse). There is initially no reason to posit that she, or Fido, are
representatives of any larger Natural
Kind, any more than is Yuri the Unicorn (the family pet, and unique of his
species, as it happens). Later we learn and add layers to this initial
baldly-presented UrMutti: she
turns out to be an example of the class of Women, and moreover a painter, and a
Clinton Democrat, and foreign-born (which accounts, in retrospect, for certain
oddities of her accent, though it sounded fine to us as an infant); so eventually the term Mama does become enriched beyond that of
woman; it just happens that we met her prior to such enrichment,
unlike the case of such other specializations as, say, topologist as against person,
where we don’t meet the former term until our including ontologies are well in
place. -- The situation is quite
general, not especially connected with singular terms. As, there is a certain commonality in
the notion ‘atom’ that has persisted since the days of Democritus, yet the
concept has repeatedly deepened, from the periodic table and the notion of
valence, to the Rutherford model, then the Bohr model, and eventually SU(3).
*
Let us now take leave of Quine’s idealized account of the
logic of language acquistion -- take leave of philosophy altogether, and glance
at actual acquisition, in all its oddity.
There was a time, I am told, by one in a position to know (I
myself have no memory of it), when I uttered “Daddy” in the presence of any
bald man. What did I mean by this?
Did I actually mistake the
gentlemen in question for my own father?
Was the word used as a metonym or simile -- “Lo, a man who reminds me of
my father!” Was it a way of
saying (the word bald not yet being
in my young vocabulary) “Behold, a bald man!” Or is the reality behind the reference truly inscrutable, my infantile mind
not being yet up to the task of distinguishing among these variant
interpretations. (Such, indeed,
was some of the thrust of my “Petting Zoo” parable: Quine’s sophisticated picture of temporal rabbit-slices
competing with Rabbithood and the Rabbit Fusion for primacy, is comically at variance with his scenario of
savages in the bush.)
The first hypothesis (debility in recognizing my own father)
seems unlikely (certainly I blush to imagine it), and yet a somewhat similar
situation occurred involving a friend of mine, who at the time was eight years
old -- not eight months. The lad
was somewhat familiar with a friend of mine named Nick; and one day, spotting a fellow who
sported a sandy moustache like Nick’s, referred to him as “Nick”. I said No, that’s not Nick, they
just look somewhat alike. To
my surprise, the boy insisted that he was not mistaken, and was quite upset
that I continued to contradict him.
Now, such anecdotes have a curious attraction, as offering
rare insights into the no-longer-accessible logic of our own young minds. (For another such, click here: Temps et durée chez une enfant de quatre ans.) But more significant -- and more
disturbing -- are referential inscrutabilities that persist (often undetected)
into our adult life.
The clearest examples are provided by the shifting, mixed
figures of our own dreams.
Very often an individual in your dream is a sort of quantum
superposition of a number of people you have known (and some, perhaps, that you
have not precisely known personally, but are archetypes or something of the
sort). You seldom get “Daddy” in a
pure state. -- In film, such
ambiguities were classically depicted in “Persona”.
By now we are on the boggy ground, not of Frege and Quine,
but of Freud. And the
latter’s analysis of the Psychopathologie
des Alltaglebens is relevant
here as well. We can see this in
standard-issue misspeakings (Versprechen). One my wife spotted just an hour ago,
when, referring to a phone conversation she had had with our son Steven
concerning the Shakespeare course he’s now taking, I said, “Did you mention
that you and Steven used to attend the Ashland Shakespeare festival?” -- but I
should have said, “You and I”. And
this was indeed no mere unmotivated “slip of the tongue”; its psychological
grounding was immediately apparent to analysis (for I live an examined
life). What was surprising
was simply that the mixed quantum state here involved a melding of myself with
my son, whereas the usual melding in my mind (originally pre-conscious, now
familiar) is between my son and my younger brother.
Again, such blends are not restricted to persons. Freud discovers many examples in Die
Traumdeutung, under such designations as Mischbildung, Mischgebild,
and Mittelding. In extreme pathological cases, such
blending can involve the rational and the inanimate, as in The Man who
Mistook his Wife for a Hat.
(The most nightmarish title
in the history of literature.)
*
Back to Quine.
His radical-translation fable was framed as a tale of
linguistic anthropology; of rabbit-hunting, but really he was after bigger
game. As he later stated
(“Ontological Relativity”):
referential inscrutability begins at home.
I was reminded of this earlier today, while perusing Scott
Soames’ account of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity and its aftermath. All sorts of ingenuity has been applied
to the case, to try to tame its oddities and paradox (problems with Peano, Thales, etc.):
actuality operators, neo-descriptivism … And I couldn’t help thinking: quelle besogne ingrate. Here some highly trained minds
are applying techniques appropriate to philosophy and mathematics, largely with
a view to constructing abstract semantic castles in the air, yet in part to
model actual human linguistic behavior, at least in the sense of being inspired
and corrected and tethered to the same -- much as the theoretical physicist,
spinning his gossamer webs of Strings, must occasionally glance at the actual
facts of the cosmos, to justify his departmental affiliation. But human linguistic behavior -- human
any behavior -- is simply too messy and defective to admit of such austere systematic
description. (Kripke’s point was
indeed partly just that, and he left his lecture informal.) Certainly mathematicians, when
asking foundational questions, do not worry about what Joe Sixpack thinks about
Zorn’s lemma.
Epigram: The
enterprise of linguistic philosophy is like that of “Consider a spherical cow”
-- good mathematics, bad biology.
The larger problem that confronts us (and it is a
perspective I have been brought to only reluctantly) is the truth of the following
two factual complexes, either surprising in itself, but jointly infuriating:
(a) the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Human Communication
(b) the Utter Impotence of Human Communication
[More to come, if reader interest warrants]
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