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Introduction
In so far as Language Sciences has an editorial credo, one of its tenets is thatthe disciplinary boundary between linguistics and philosophy of language is asabsurd as it is persistent. Historically a legacy of the trivium, the apportioning ofacademic language studies between the two is based on the fact that whereas thepreoccupations of modern linguistics are roughly continuous with those of thegrammarian and the rhetorician, the range of linguistic concerns inherited bymodern philosophy has developed out of ancient and medieval logic. In practice,and very crudely speaking, what has emerged from this history is a division oflabour corresponding to a distinction between language as a Ding an sich,including especially the nuts and bolts of the linguistic machinery, and thoseaspects of its external functioning that bear on a range of traditional philosophicalproblems.
So, both philosophers and linguists would agree that children play is an Englishsentence comprising a subject children and a predicate play. Thereafter the twodiscourses diverge. Philosophers are characteristically interested in such questionsas how children manages to refer to a class of beings in the world and how,therefore, the sentence might be used to assert a proposition, the generalconditions under which asserting the proposition would be to say something true,and so forth. Whereas for the linguist children play might exemplify a syntacticpattern, to be compared and contrasted with other syntactic patterns (do childrenplay?, children don't play, etc.) and analysed in terms of the smaller linguistic unitsout of which it is created. And this of course requires from linguists nut-and-boltish factual or would-be factual statements about these units, such as thatchildren, as the plural of child, is morphologically anomalous, or that its initialsegment is a voiceless palatoalveolar a�ricate.
Not that a carve-up along these lines means that the boundary between the twois or has ever been uncrossable. Chomsky is a linguist whose work manifestlybears on traditional philosophical problems. Austin was a philosopher arguablyengaged in a form of linguistics. And of course there are topics, such as semantics,that belong equally to both. But there is a tendency for linguists not to readphilosophers, and vice-versa. For this and other reasons, certain issues apparentlyfundamental to both philosophers and linguists can fall into a no-man's landbetween the two. Whose job is it, for instance, to ponder the ontology of, andother vexed questions pertaining to, the entity alluded to in the previousparagraph by writing a sequence of two English words in italics? This is not a
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traditional philosophical problem, or at any rate not a problem in the philosophyof language as usually conceived, so philosophers leave it to linguists, if toanybody. But the linguist can justi®ably retort that, traditional or not, it isundeniably philosophical.
In the belief that it might foster circumstances favourable to reducing the size ofthis no-man's land, David Brooks, who taught philosophy at the University ofCape Town for many years, was charged with bringing relevant currentphilosophical writing to the attention of the readers of Language Sciences, bycommissioning articles on a range of general topics in philosophy of language. Hehad hardly begun on this task when he died, suddenly and unexpectedly, at theage of 46. It was decided to collect together the fruits of his endeavours up to thatpoint, together with articles specially written for the occasion and other relevantwork, in an issue of Language Sciences dedicated to his memory.
Modern philosophers' attitudes to language, and to the philosophy of language,run the gamut from the later Wittgenstein's belief that all philosophising resultsfrom linguistic confusion to Popper's determination to treat language as anentirely unproblematic device for conveying ideas and, indeed, embodying`objective knowledge'. An attitude common among analytic philosophers,especially those for whom philosophy is the handmaiden of a realist science, isthat language is of philosophical interest to the extent that it presents features thatappear to problematise the status or success of the scienti®c enterprise. DavidBrooks fell into the category of philosophers whose interest in language was thusfocussed; and a number of the essays in this collection are, overtly or implicity,concerned with ways in which the mirror language is allegedly capable of holdingup to nature may be tarnished or distorted.
The relation between language and science is the speci®c topic of HowardSankey's paper, although much of what he says about the problem of `meaningvariance' (if problem it be) applies more generally. Sankey's survey of twentieth-century thinking about language as a problem in the philosophy of science startswith logical positivitism, according to which both the content of our empiricalconcepts and the evidential support for our beliefs must derive from sensoryexperience. One central question addressed by logical positivism was howcognitively signi®cant discourse about the world is possible. The response initiallyfavoured by positivists was veri®cationism Ð `the meaning of a proposition is themethod of its veri®cation'. What was unveri®able in principle was withoutmeaning. Two problems for veri®cationism were (i) Popper's argument that itrendered statements of universal scienti®c laws meaningless, and (ii) the status ofthe veri®ability principle itself, given that it is evidently not an empirical claim.
In the mid-1960s a number of philosophers came to be concerned more withhow scienti®c theories and practice evolve socially and historically than with theinternal logic of science. One of the more controversial ideas to emerge from thisapproach was the claim made by Kuhn and Feyerabend that alternative scienti®ctheories may be incommensurable: the content of one scienti®c theory may not bedirectly comparable with the content of another. Sankey formulates theincommensurability thesis in terms of three features of the semantic relations
Introduction / Language Sciences 22 (2000) 109±115110
between the vocabularies of alternative scienti®c theories: (i) meaning variance, (ii)translation failure, (iii) content incomparability. The basic idea is that the contentof alternative scienti®c theories cannot be compared because of translation failuredue to variation as to the meanings of terms in their technical vocabularies.
The problem is that both the sense and the reference of scienti®c terms is liableto change. For instance, the modern term `atom' seems not to refer to the samekind of entity as did ancient use of its etymon or translation equivalent. The mainresponse of scienti®c realists to this problem was to invoke a `causal theory ofreference', according to which reference is a matter of an `initial baptism' Ð aprimordial naming followed by a causal chain linking later use of the name, via itsuse by other speakers, with the occasion on which the name was ®rst introduced.So although the meaning, i.e. the `sense', of scienti®c terms may well vary in thecourse of theoretical change, it does not follow that reference must also vary as aresult, for reference is not determined by sense, but by causal chains which linkthe present use of terms with initial baptisms at which their reference was ®xed.So reference does not vary with the changes of descriptive content which occurduring theoretical change. Hence reference is held constant across theoreticaltransitions, and theories may be compared by means of reference. Thus, there isno referential discontinuity, no incomparability of content and noincommensurability.
However, there are di�culties. First, the original version of the causal theory ofreference eliminated the possibility of referential change altogether. If reference is®xed at a `baptism', then reference cannot change. But there appear to be cases inthe history of science where the reference of terms has changed. Secondly,ostensive introduction of a term does not su�ce to determine the kind referred to.
Lastly, we now have a modi®ed, taxonomic version of the incommensurabilitythesis, developed by Kuhn in writings published late in his career. According tothis view, scienti®c revolutions are characterised by changes in the taxonomicschemes by means of which theories classify the entities in their domains ofapplication. Such changes include redistribution of members among existingtaxonomic categories, modi®cation of criteria for category membership, andintroduction of new categories. At the semantic level, taxonomic change gives riseto change in the meaning of preserved vocabulary, which in some cases involveschange of reference. In the case of new categories, it may also result in theintroduction of new vocabulary di�ering semantically from previous vocabulary.The result of such taxonomic change is restricted translation failure between localparts of the theoretical vocabulary employed by scienti®c theories, since themeanings of these terms are crucially a�ected by taxonomic variation betweentheories. Where Sankey's own view di�ers most fundamentally from Kuhn's isthat whereas Kuhn derives anti-realist consequences from incommensurability,Sankey sets the issue of conceptual change squarely within the framework ofscienti®c realism. The opposition between realist and anti-realist approaches toconceptual change in science constitutes, in Sankey's view, one of the keyunresolved problems currently exercising philosophers working in this area.
Gordon Lyon canvasses various philosophers' interpretations of metaphor, a
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topic of interest not only for its own sake, but especially because failure to pinmetaphor down within a theory of meaning poses an obvious threat to the ideathat language can provide the uncontentious mapping of reality required by thescientist. In fact the chief issue, according to Lyon, is whether there is such athing as metaphorical meaning at all. Max Black, for instance, holds thatmetaphorical meaning arises from an interaction, within a single sentence, betweenthe metaphorical word and the literal words that make up the rest of the sentence.Black stresses that the shift from literal meaning to metaphorical meaning is ashift in the speaker's and hearer's meaning. Similarly, Searle's approach is tolocate the metaphor at the level of speaker's meaning rather than sentence-meaning Ð that is, in terms of what a speaker means or intends on a givenoccasion rather that what a linguistic expression means in a given language. Searletoo attempts to state the principles that describe how the hearer or reader infersthis metaphorical utterance-meaning from the literal meaning of a givenmetaphorical sentence, and the context of the utterance. Taking pragmatics to bethe theory of speaker's meaning, and of the principles whereby conversationalcontext contributes to communication, Searle's and Black's theories are bothexamples of the `pragmatic' approach to metaphor. The pragmatic approach,based on the view that metaphorical meaning is a kind of speaker's meaning, isprobably the most common among philosophers of language, says Lyon.
In contrast, Davidson argues against the notion that words can have ametaphorical meaning or sense. For Davidson, interpreting a metaphor isessentially a creative, imaginative endeavour. There can be no manuals or rulebooks for understanding metaphor. Metaphor is removed from the theory ofmeaning altogether. What a metaphor accomplishes is di�erent in kind fromliteral meaning, not just another type of meaning.
Roger White too rejects the notion of words having a metaphorical meaning.He observes that the point of talking of the `meaning' of words is to explain thesimilarities and di�erences between di�erent uses of the same word in di�erentsentences. But the metaphorical use of a word in one sentence does not guide usin interpreting the metaphorical use of a word in another: as White points out, wecannot infer the metaphorical meaning of `lion' in `Beethoven was a lion' from itsmetaphorical meaning in `Achilles was a lion'. Ascribing identi®able metaphoricalmeanings to words is therefore unacceptable.
The standard treatment of `dead' metaphors is to say that they have ceased tobe metaphorical at all. However, Lyon discusses the argument, attributed toLako� and Johnson, that the use of metaphor is often systematic, and that entireconceptual structures can be metaphorical in character. According to Lako� andJohnson, we structure thought and experience in one conceptual domain via theexperiential structure of another domain. For example, we organise our thinkingabout argument in terms of how we think about war, in so far as we talk ofattacking, defending, demolishing and winning an argument, and of arguments asinvolving positions and strategies. Within such conceptual structures, individualmetaphorical expressions may be `dead' as metaphors, but nonetheless contributeto the whole.
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Seumas Miller's discussion of speech acts introduces what is potentially adi�erent philosophical tack, in that to treat language as a form of action is on theface of it to emphasise the artefactual nature of linguistic acts, to de-privilege, inparticular, those products of particular acts of stating and describing that we call`science', and to draw attention to what is problematic about the notion that, byperforming such acts, we may have access to the truth about an objectively givenreality. In practice, however, `doing things with words', to borrow Austin'sfamous phrase, has been interpreted as excluding the creation of, and assignmentof meaning to, words themselves; and the radical implications of this perspectivehave been largely ignored. In any case, Miller is exercised by the somewhattangential question of the conventionality of speech acts.
Any act (not only speech acts Ð e.g. raising one's arm to vote) involving aperformative device might be described as involving a conventional means. Shouldwe say, however, that such an act did not merely involve a conventional means,but was essentially conventional Ð i.e. an act not simply conventional in respectof the means by which it is performed? Perhaps we should say this because theperformance (the `device') looks as if it in some sense constitutes the act it byconvention performs. (Conversely, I warn you that . . . is nothing but aconventional means Ð a warning is still a warning without this pre®x). Miller'sconclusion is that
certainly a variety of means of performing speech acts are conventional, andconventional in a variety of ways; however, the evidence suggests that speechacts are not essentially conventional. The evidence consists in the failure ofSearle, Strawson and Dummett to provide convincing conventionalist models ofspeech acts (or of those types of speech act they believe to be essentiallyconventional). At the same time it has to be said that no argument has beenproduced to demonstrate conclusively that no speech act type is essentiallyconventional. What is presumably called for is an analysis of each speech acttype and a demonstration in respect of each that it is not essentiallyconventional.
The next two essays are in di�erent ways critical of analytical philosophy oflanguage. In David Schalkwyk's view, the proper name lies at the heart of theantagonism between analytical philosophers and literary theorists. Names, andhow names can refer, have always been crucial to philosophers who takedescribing the world to be the chief purpose of language. But philosophers'treatment of names Ð in particular the currently fashionable causal theory ofreference (as discussed in this collection by Sankey) Ð is at best simplistic, a pointSchalkwyk makes via detailed discussion of relevant writings of Derrida's.
What makes it simplistic is that the human context in which language is createdand used has been left out of account. In `Sense and secrecy' Tony Holidaymounts a radical assault on the notion, fundamental to dominant trends intwentieth-century philosophy, that leaving out the human context, and exposingto view the semantically puri®ed language concealed behind the `vagueness and
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inaccuracy' of common speech (Russell) is vital if language is to serve thepurposes of science, and if we are to understand how it does so. The generaldoctrine that has arisen from the desire to purge language of everything in it thatobstructs and obscures the expression of semantically unambiguous, truth±value±determinate propositions Holiday dubs `semantic esotericism', and he attacks it asnot just mistaken but morally repugnant. Semantic esotericists insist that we focusnot on the sentences of natural languages but on the formal sentential `structures'that are supposed to inhere in all our cogent utterances. Where they succeed inconveying meanings Ð and meanings are conveyed only when information istransmitted or elicited Ð these structures do so in virtue of their composition,which is a simple relationship between function and argument. Holiday rejects allthis: if the mirror is, as a matter of fact, tarnished or distorted, it is a great dealworse than useless to pretend otherwise.
Richard McDonough's contribution is a review of a book (Roy Harris's TheLanguage Connection ) that can be seen as drawing together and commenting on anumber of themes from the preceding papers. As McDonough points out, Harrisargues that both linguistics and philosophy of language are wedded to a`segregational', decontextualised view of language as something that can beusefully treated as separate from its users. Harris holds that this account isincoherent, since it results in a picture of the relationship between language andthe world which is itself decontextualised. But there is no such thing as context-free language, and no such thing as talk about the world that can be usefullyunderstood apart from the human context in which it takes place. The result ofthe segregational misconception is a wholesale failure to understand languagewhich, as McDonough puts it, is nothing less than a failure of self-knowledge ofthe most massive proportions.
Whatever one might think of this argument, it casts an intriguing light on someof the foregoing discussions. Take the questions (i) what is the correct account ofreference?; (ii) is there such a thing as metaphorical meaning?; (iii) are (certain)speech acts intrinsically conventional? Questions like these have in common thatsatisfying and decisive answers seem hard to come by. Indeed, it is often far fromclear what would in principle count as a decisive answer. That, perhaps, is whatmakes them interesting philosophical questions, as philosophers are wont to pointout. But rather than endlessly re-asking them, it might be even more interesting toanalyse why they are so intractable. Harris's answer, as reported by McDonough,is that they are questions that could only be posed on segregationist assumptionsabout language, for they presuppose that language exists `out there', in theabstract, waiting to yield the answers when probed. `Reference', for instance, istreated as an objectively occurrent phenomenon, brought about by some featureof a linguistic mechanism whose workings are independent of human motives andpurposes; and a theory of reference is an attempt to identify the feature inquestion. The alternative view is that since reference itself takes place to the extentthat human language-users decide that it does, the only valid theory of reference isone that starts by identifying the relevant motives and purposes of language-users, including those of theorists of reference. In short, rejecting linguistic
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segregationism is one possible point of departure for an inquiry into languagethat, by examining assumptions made by linguists and philosophers alike, canbridge the gap between them and lead to a re-uni®cation of their concerns.
Nigel LoveDepartment of Linguistics, University of Cape Town, 7701,
Rondebosch, South AfricaE-mail address: [email protected]
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