Philosophy of Language » Lecture 3
But is this qualitative similarity of concepts sufficient for synonymy?
Another aspect of the internalist package is that the ability of language to be about the external world is because concepts apply to things; things fall under concepts.
It seems there is a test for internalist synonymy here:
(Putnam 1973) challenges the coherence of this internalist theory, noting that it is possible for qualitative duplicate concepts to turn out non-synonymous according to the test.
Twin Earth is very much like Earth… One of the peculiarities of Twin Earth is that the liquid called ‘water’ is not H2O but a different liquid whose chemical formula is very long and complicated. I shall abbreviate this chemical formula simply as XYZ. I shall suppose that XYZ is indistinguishable from water at normal temperatures and pressures. Also, I shall suppose that the oceans and lakes and seas of Twin Earth contain XYZ and not water, that it rains XYZ on Twin Earth and not water, etc.
If a space ship from Earth ever visits Twin Earth, then the supposition at first will be that ‘water’ has the same meaning on Earth and on Twin Earth. This supposition will be corrected when it is discovered that ‘water’ on Twin Earth is XYZ, and the Earthian space ship will report somewhat as follows.
On Twin Earth the word ‘water’ means XYZ. (Putnam 1973: 700–701)
If the meaning of water is the concept water, water on Earth and water on Twin Earth are synonyms.
Since different things fall under water on Earth and water on Twin Earth, water on Earth and water on Twin Earth are not synonyms. (Conceptual Non-Synonymy)
So the meaning of water is not the concept water. (1, 2, modus tollens)
So, therefore, the meaning of water isn’t the concept water – nor any other concept – nor is the meaning fixed by a narrow internal mental state, which is duplicated between Earth and Twin Earth.
So the internalist theory is false: the meaning of water determines its extension; we and the Twin Earthers are psychological duplicates; so the difference in extension cannot be explained by any difference in our internal psychological states:
Cut the pie any way you like, ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head! (Putnam 1973: 704)
This preserves the traditional internalist picture – at the cost of making even the stuff ‘inside the head’ partly a matter of what is outside. On such a view, even our concepts
are fixed by environmental factors that are not entirely captured in the explicatory or even discriminatory abilities of the individual. (Burge 1993: 318)
Synonymy occurs when we have many expressions with one meaning. We should also attend to the converse possibility: many meanings for one expression, or ambiguity.
Consider the expressions down and animal as they occur in the following:
Clearly the occurrences of down in (4) and (5) mean different things: so different, in fact, that it seems almost accidental that we use the same expression.
Contrast that with (6) and (7) where the meanings must differ (6 says that humans are animals; 7 presupposes they are not), but where there does seem to be more in common than in the case of down and down.
Suppose we begin with the internalist idea that a word is a mental entity with syntactic, semantic, and phonologio-orthographic components (Elbourne 2011: 23).
If we apply this theory strictly, any difference in meaning should suffice for distinct words.
But few internalists would wish to take that path; usually ‘sameness’ of words is flexible enough to accommodate small differences in pronunciation (e.g., accents), the acceptability of particular grammatical occurrences (e.g., is I got 99 problems grammatical for you – so-called ‘bare got’), and variations in meaning.
This background allows us to distinguish two ways in which an expression can have multiple meanings:
By contrast, the uses of animal are not historically unconnected, and there seems to be a core meaning which appears in both (6) and (7), modified by some additional element that differentiates those meanings.
Thus it is concluded that we have the same word here, which has different senses (distinct from Frege’s notion of a sense (Sinn) to which we return next time, but closely related to the organisation of standard dictionaries).
Another example might include paper:
This is a case of what is known as metonymy, where the stuff on which essays might once have been written comes to be used for the abstract entity written on them. Intuition strongly suggests we have the same word here with two senses, given that, e.g., this can be true: Jess produced a good paper even though she had no paper.
My theory is that there is no such thing as polysemy. The appearance that there is a problem is generated by the assumption that there are definitions; if you take the assumption away, the problem disappears. … definitions don’t solve the problem of polysemy; definitions are the problem of polysemy.
People sometimes say ‘exist’ must be ambiguous because look at the difference between ‘chairs exist’ and ‘numbers exist’. A familiar reply goes: the difference between the existence of chairs and the existence of numbers seems, on reflection, strikingly like the difference between numbers and chairs. Since you have the latter to explain the former, you don’t also need ‘exist’ to be polysemic. (Fodor 1998: 53–54)
A vague word admits of borderline cases, cases in which we don’t know whether to apply the word or not, even though we have all the kinds of information which we would normally regard as sufficient to settle the matter. We may see how tall a man is, or even know his height to a millimetre, yet be unable to decide whether he counts as tall or not. We may see a collection of grains of sand, and even know exactly how many grains of sand the collection contains, yet not know whether it should be called a heap or not. … This ignorance is not a manifestation of any failure to understand our language. (Sainsbury 2009: 41)
If \(a\) and \(b\) are very close in \(F\)-relevant respects, then ‘\(Fa\)’ and ‘\(Fb\)’ are very close in respect of truth. (Smith 2005: 164)
since colours form a continuum … there are shades of colour concerning which we shall be in doubt whether to call them red or not, not because we are ignorant of the meaning of the word ‘red’, but because it is a word the extent of whose application is essentially doubtful. (Russell 1923: 85)
One puzzle posed by vagueness is the traditional sorites, or the paradox of the heap.
A 10,000-grained pile of sand is lots of sand.
If a \(n\)-grained pile of sand is lots, then so is an \(n-1\)-grained pile. (No sharp cutoffs for vague predicates like lots; the so-called Tolerance principle)
A 9,999-grained pile is lots. (From 10, 11, logic)
A 9,998-grained pile is lots. (From 12, 11, logic)
\[\vdots\]
We could run the same format for red, bald, etc.: any vague word linked to an underlying smoothly varying quantity (wavelength, number of hairs, …).
Option | View |
---|---|
Reject premise | Epistemicism (Williamson 1994); Supervaluationism (Fine 1975); Degree theory (Smith 2008) |
Reject reasoning | Degree theory (Edgington 1996) |
Accept conclusion | Eliminativism (Unger 1979) |
Solving the sorites is not our goal; that’s a job for a different class. Our question is: how to account for vague meanings?
One answer we foreclose from the start is ontic vagueness:
Vagueness and precision alike are characteristics which can only belong to a representation, of which language is an example. They have to do with the relation between a representation and that which it represents. Apart from representation … there can be no such thing as vagueness; things are what they are, and there is an end of it. Nothing is more or less what it is, or to a certain extent possessed of the properties which it possesses. (Russell 1923: 85)
So we will need to account for vagueness by assigning meanings to imprecise expressions but which make use of only precise entities.
This incomplete look at referentialist options reveals there are ways of preserving classical semantic values but they are not straightforward.
The internalist, by contrast, has a natural account of linguistic vagueness. A vague word, like bald, expresses a vague concept bald. And this is very well modelled by the prototype theory of concepts:
Entities are associated with the category to the extent that they resemble the good examples. Often, the boundary of a prototype category will be fuzzy – it might not be clear whether some entities belong in the category or not. Moreover, prototype categories have an internal structure, in that some entities count as more central members than others. (Taylor 2015: 286)
Here we have both borderline cases, where the ‘extent of resemblance’ to various prototypes is not sufficient; and we have the sense in which the internal structure ‘shades off’ towards those borderline cases.
So internalists provide concepts as semantic values for vague words that mimic the behaviour of those words.