Saussure’s most characteristic ideas have British or American sources, including the most distinctively Saussurean idea of all:
"In a language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, the language contains neither ideas nor sounds that pre-exist the linguistic system, but only conceptual differences and phonic differences issuing from this system." (From the posthumous Course in General Linguistics, 1916.)
The terms “signifier” and “signified” were not introduced until one of his last general linguistics lectures in 1911. But the idea of a psychological sound pattern corresponding to a spoken word, functioning purely through its difference from every other such signifier, is found in his notes as far back as 1881, when he was in Paris working towards a French doctorate that he never completed. “Language”, he wrote at that time, in a manuscript now in Harvard’s Houghton Library and published in 1995, “is composed of a system of acoustic oppositions.” Acoustic only: no indication as yet that the conceptual side, the signified, is similarly oppositional in its nature – that it too has no positive content, just a value generated by its difference from other signifieds, as claimed in the quote from the Course.
This remains vividly controversial, as I was reminded some months back when I was drawn into an e-conversation with a philosopher of language who is convinced that the meanings of words must have some primordial reality that is not simply differential, and blames Saussure for introducing a fundamental error. Yet, in philosophy itself, and in sciences other than linguistics (because linguists just did not think about such things), it was a commonplace view in the second half of the nineteenth century that all thought and all consciousness was purely differential and negative in nature. It was a defining feature of British psychology, as opposed to Continental (particularly German) psychology, which, before the British approach made inroads into it, took thought to be made up of ideas, maybe innate, maybe acquired, but with real, substantive content.
For the late nineteenth century the locus classicus of differentiality was John Stuart Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), a scathing attack that brought far more attention to Hamilton’s writings than their author had managed during his lifetime. Hamilton’s “relativity of human knowledge” was one of the few things Mill agreed with, summarizing it as follows:
"We only know anything by knowing it as distinguished from something else; all consciousness is of difference; two objects are the smallest number required to constitute consciousness; a thing is only seen to be what it is by contrast with what it is not." “With this doctrine”, wrote Mill, “I have no quarrel.” Since Hamilton nowhere states it so succinctly or clearly, one can hardly begrudge Mill his co-ownership of it.
Saussure had come into contact with the English and Scottish philosophical traditions in his teens, reading Pictet’s survey of them in his book on aesthetics, Du Beau. That background left him receptive to the Hamilton–Mill doctrine.
In The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1882) by John Bernhard Stallo, Sassure read:
"Thought, in its most comprehensive sense, is the establishment or recognition of relations between phenomena. Foremost among these relations – the foundation, in fact, of all others, such as those of exclusion and inclusion, coexistence and sequence, cause and effect, means and end – are the relations of identity and difference. The difference between phenomena is a primary datum of sensation. The very act of sensation is based upon it. It is one of the many acute observations of Hobbes that 'it is all one to be always sensible of the same thing and not to be sensible of anything.'"
Stallo next quotes the sentence from Mill cited above, not mentioning that Mill is summarizing Hamilton. But the invocation of Hobbes anchors the doctrine still more firmly in the tradition of British thought. What is original to Saussure, then, does not include the view that linguistic meaning or any other form of conceptual knowledge is generated purely by the difference of one element from another within a system of values. Nor, of course, does it include the idea that the link between a linguistic meaning and the sounds which signify it is arbitrary – that is an ancient heritage. His novel contribution was to imagine the sound side of language on the one hand, and the conceptual side on the other, as perfectly alike in their nature and mental operation. This is the “double essence”: two orders of difference, held together by a force that is essentially social, which he called the immutability of linguistic signs. It makes it impossible for an individual to introduce a change into the sign system, and it means that any communal change creates a wholly new system of values, which is to say a new language.
For if all consciousness is of difference, we can only speak of “a language” where all differences have been conventionalized, and are shared. Saussure repeatedly testifies that on this point he was influenced by the work of the American linguist William Dwight Whitney, with whom he had a chance meeting while studying in Germany in 1879. While he did not fully accept Whitney's characterization of a language as an “institution”, it set him on the track toward his own modified view of its essentially social nature.
How the psychological link is made between the two orders of difference is not addressed by Saussure. But he became centrally involved when the question was taken up in 1892 by his psychologist colleague Theodore Flournoy, the most regular European correspondent, confidant and intellectual soulmate of William James. "So it does not seem to be the vowel as such – as it exists for the ear, that is – that calls forth a certain corresponding visual sensation. On the other hand, neither is it seeing a certain letter or group of letters that calls forth this sensation. Rather it is the vowel as it is contained in this written expression, it is the imaginary being formed by this first association of ideas which, through another association, appears to me as endowed with a certain consistency and a certain colour, sometimes also a certain shape and a certain smell."
Terms such as association and sensation which Saussure uses here figure prominently in the “associationism” established by Mill’s Scottish ally Alexander Bain. In the second half of the nineteenth century it came to define “modern” psychology in Britain, then in America and Continental Europe, where opposing traditions were more firmly rooted. Flournoy’s analytical commentary states the principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign that will generally be credited to Saussure’s later lectures, though again its antiquity is well known:
"The word is arbitrary, conventional, and gets attached to the idea only through the direct but purely superficial and (if I may use the term) cortical link that repetition ends up creating between the corresponding centres or plexuses; the connection of the sign and the thing signified is artificial and results from habitual association. On the other hand the relationship of photism to the auditory phenomenon is natural, being essentially founded on . . . the identical psychological effects that they have in the depths of the organism."
The overlap with the Jamesian Flournoy is unmistakable.
adapted from a longer article in the New York Times by
John E. Joseph, Professor of Applied Linguistics in the University of Edinburgh.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment
/the_tls/article2869724.ece
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Conversation with Lois Shawver
You also said, " Do you think his talking of language 'games' undermines the seriousness of certain types of discourse, such as talk about religion, or beauty for example? It does seem to me that saying discourse about religion or ethics is somehow unmappable onto other forms of discourse, is to say that they cannot be criticised from outside their own terms of reference.And that way lies relativism!! "
I think that is a very apt question. However, the answer is not a simple "yes" or "no". There are many kinds of relativism, going back to Protagoras in ancient Greece, at least. Wittgenstein's version (if you want to call it that) is unprecedented and, in my opinion, does not challenge any religious belief. But it does challenge the idea that any way of phrasing religious beliefs is perfect in an objective sense.
How can that be? Think of translation. When one translates there can be times that there is no exact word for an idea. And many words we use to say things because we recognize our audience would not understand our preferred vocabulary, and they may do the same with us.
At any rate, in religious, ethical, aesthetic, and even social language there are many words that communicate clear ideas indirectly through metaphor. This means that the power and inspiration of the text is suggested by the use of a word that one learned in a different context. Take the word "clear" in the first sentence of this paragraph. Imagine a child learning original language in English and learning the word "clear" for the first time by someone explaining that a window pane was made of "clear glass". Somehow most humans (not all) have the ability to use that understanding to understand immediately when one hears the word in a more abstract context such as "That was a clear explanation". One doesn't need to look up the word. The right understanding simply pops in one's head -- although it could be the wrong understanding, too. Take the phrase "look up there". That phrase means one thing in a the "language game" of showing someone something overhead and something very differently in the context "I will look up the word tomorrow".
Take this little paragraph as an introduction to Wittgensteinian thinking about metaphors and language games.
Mark Heyne 24.2.07
Hi Lois, and thanks for your time...
I teach English for academic purposes in the foundation program at Qatar national university. I am following the Pathways program in Philosophy of language out of my own interest...I studied English Literature at Wadham Oxford, but seem to have become interested in language per se recently. As my tutor at Oxford was the Irish Catholic Marxist Terry Eagleton, I had to suspend my disbelief every time he opened his mouth, so yes, I am quite familiar with that concept. Coleridge is undervalued in England as he is virtually the only writer of his generation to pick up on German philosophy, which is rubbished as "Continental" in the UK, rather like we say "Those people 'over there'! How could they possibly eat snails and horses!"
I came at philosophy via writers like Nietzsche and some popular philosophy books like Bryan Magee's 'Great Philosophers'.
While studying Literature I did get to read some philosophical background for each period, so got acquainted with Locke and Hume.
I also read Boethius in Chaucer's translation, and did some Plato in a Greek Lit course. I was infatuated with Schopenhauer for a long while.
In English language teaching, there is a lot of underlying theory assumed that doesn't get discussed much, like Speech Acts, Functional approaches and Chomsky's innatism. I tend more towards a behavioural attitude, and frankly have to ask you if basically Wittgenstein isn't some sort of behaviorist too?
Anyway, I am now trying to get some grounding in Philosophy of Language, and have been thrown in the deep end with Wittgenstein.
I find this the most interesting and demanding subject around.
I appreciate you taking the time to chat, and I value your suggestions. Thanks.
Lois writes:
Wittgenstein addresses the question of whether he is a behaviorist in the PI. Remember as I say in my website, The first comment in an aphorism is an imagined critic, or at least someone he is imagining and wants to respond to. So it is in this aphorism, too:
About Wittgenstein and behaviorism. Many people think he sounds like a behaviorist to them, so Wittgenstein addresses the question of whether he is a behaviorist in the PI, aphorism #307.
307 "Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise?
Aren't you at bottom really saying that everything
except human behaviour is a fiction?"-If I do speak
of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction.
Remember as I say in my website at:
http://users.rcn.com/rathbone/lwtocc.htm
that the first remark in an aphorism, which is often in quotes, is Wittgenstein's imagined audience. He addresses this imagined concern after the little "-".
So, the question is, what is a "grammatical fiction". Here is a brief article of mine online that addresses that question:
http://users.california.com/~rathbone/pm0601.htm
Page down. On the right hand side there is an article called "The Self as a Grammatical Fiction". See if that makes any sense to you and get back to me.
Hi Lois...I don't want to seem to denigrate behaviorism...I don't think behaviorists deny the actuality of inner mental processes, they only say that they are not communicable or 'translatable'. If I can give an example from my own field, we talk of measuring 'competencies' in language, but in effect what we do is measure performance. There is no way we can directly measure the learning of vocabulary or structures, we can only see how the student performs in a given situation. So we infer from their performance whether they have 'learned' the structures. I think it is comparable to talk of inner states while only actually observing behavior.
Lois Replies:
That's an excellent point, Mark. Neither John Watson, nor B.F. Skinner, for example, rejected the reality of mental processes. They were just trying to confine the field of experimental psychology to areas of animal and human functioning that psychologists could conceivably measure. However, the term "behaviorism", as you probably recognize, has often been used by critics to mean that humans are robots, with no mental life, just behaviors. And, as you can see from #307, that is the way in which LW understood what his critics were saying about him. I urge you to stick with that meaning in studying Wittgenstein in order to make the most sense of him.
Was Wittgenstein a behaviorist in the more accurate sense of the term? I would say "not" because he was not concerned with measuring behavior, and he was concerned with what you would call "mental processes". He was concerned with making sense of this dualism.
http://users.california.com/~rathbone/pm040101.htm
I think that is a very apt question. However, the answer is not a simple "yes" or "no". There are many kinds of relativism, going back to Protagoras in ancient Greece, at least. Wittgenstein's version (if you want to call it that) is unprecedented and, in my opinion, does not challenge any religious belief. But it does challenge the idea that any way of phrasing religious beliefs is perfect in an objective sense.
How can that be? Think of translation. When one translates there can be times that there is no exact word for an idea. And many words we use to say things because we recognize our audience would not understand our preferred vocabulary, and they may do the same with us.
At any rate, in religious, ethical, aesthetic, and even social language there are many words that communicate clear ideas indirectly through metaphor. This means that the power and inspiration of the text is suggested by the use of a word that one learned in a different context. Take the word "clear" in the first sentence of this paragraph. Imagine a child learning original language in English and learning the word "clear" for the first time by someone explaining that a window pane was made of "clear glass". Somehow most humans (not all) have the ability to use that understanding to understand immediately when one hears the word in a more abstract context such as "That was a clear explanation". One doesn't need to look up the word. The right understanding simply pops in one's head -- although it could be the wrong understanding, too. Take the phrase "look up there". That phrase means one thing in a the "language game" of showing someone something overhead and something very differently in the context "I will look up the word tomorrow".
Take this little paragraph as an introduction to Wittgensteinian thinking about metaphors and language games.
Mark Heyne 24.2.07
Hi Lois, and thanks for your time...
I teach English for academic purposes in the foundation program at Qatar national university. I am following the Pathways program in Philosophy of language out of my own interest...I studied English Literature at Wadham Oxford, but seem to have become interested in language per se recently. As my tutor at Oxford was the Irish Catholic Marxist Terry Eagleton, I had to suspend my disbelief every time he opened his mouth, so yes, I am quite familiar with that concept. Coleridge is undervalued in England as he is virtually the only writer of his generation to pick up on German philosophy, which is rubbished as "Continental" in the UK, rather like we say "Those people 'over there'! How could they possibly eat snails and horses!"
I came at philosophy via writers like Nietzsche and some popular philosophy books like Bryan Magee's 'Great Philosophers'.
While studying Literature I did get to read some philosophical background for each period, so got acquainted with Locke and Hume.
I also read Boethius in Chaucer's translation, and did some Plato in a Greek Lit course. I was infatuated with Schopenhauer for a long while.
In English language teaching, there is a lot of underlying theory assumed that doesn't get discussed much, like Speech Acts, Functional approaches and Chomsky's innatism. I tend more towards a behavioural attitude, and frankly have to ask you if basically Wittgenstein isn't some sort of behaviorist too?
Anyway, I am now trying to get some grounding in Philosophy of Language, and have been thrown in the deep end with Wittgenstein.
I find this the most interesting and demanding subject around.
I appreciate you taking the time to chat, and I value your suggestions. Thanks.
Lois writes:
Wittgenstein addresses the question of whether he is a behaviorist in the PI. Remember as I say in my website, The first comment in an aphorism is an imagined critic, or at least someone he is imagining and wants to respond to. So it is in this aphorism, too:
About Wittgenstein and behaviorism. Many people think he sounds like a behaviorist to them, so Wittgenstein addresses the question of whether he is a behaviorist in the PI, aphorism #307.
307 "Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise?
Aren't you at bottom really saying that everything
except human behaviour is a fiction?"-If I do speak
of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction.
Remember as I say in my website at:
http://users.rcn.com/rathbone/lwtocc.htm
that the first remark in an aphorism, which is often in quotes, is Wittgenstein's imagined audience. He addresses this imagined concern after the little "-".
So, the question is, what is a "grammatical fiction". Here is a brief article of mine online that addresses that question:
http://users.california.com/~rathbone/pm0601.htm
Page down. On the right hand side there is an article called "The Self as a Grammatical Fiction". See if that makes any sense to you and get back to me.
Hi Lois...I don't want to seem to denigrate behaviorism...I don't think behaviorists deny the actuality of inner mental processes, they only say that they are not communicable or 'translatable'. If I can give an example from my own field, we talk of measuring 'competencies' in language, but in effect what we do is measure performance. There is no way we can directly measure the learning of vocabulary or structures, we can only see how the student performs in a given situation. So we infer from their performance whether they have 'learned' the structures. I think it is comparable to talk of inner states while only actually observing behavior.
Lois Replies:
That's an excellent point, Mark. Neither John Watson, nor B.F. Skinner, for example, rejected the reality of mental processes. They were just trying to confine the field of experimental psychology to areas of animal and human functioning that psychologists could conceivably measure. However, the term "behaviorism", as you probably recognize, has often been used by critics to mean that humans are robots, with no mental life, just behaviors. And, as you can see from #307, that is the way in which LW understood what his critics were saying about him. I urge you to stick with that meaning in studying Wittgenstein in order to make the most sense of him.
Was Wittgenstein a behaviorist in the more accurate sense of the term? I would say "not" because he was not concerned with measuring behavior, and he was concerned with what you would call "mental processes". He was concerned with making sense of this dualism.
http://users.california.com/~rathbone/pm040101.htm
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Dr. Shawver to me
Lois Shawver
Shall we call each other Lois and Mark in these notes? If you like that, just address me as "Lois".
You asked, "Do you think Witt is right in saying that our ordinary language is adequate as it stands, given that he often talks about natural language as ambiguous and misleading? "
Here is how I understand this matter:
In the Philosophical Investigations (PI), which is the book for which you are reading my commentary and which Wittgenstein wrote late in life, Wittgenstein did feel that our language has the potential to grow and in that sense can be improved. (review, for example, aphorisms #18 and 19). In fact, to him, the ability of the language to grow was something that needed to be protected that might be lost if we tried to defined our words too precisely. In the PI, Wittgenstein was specifically arguing against trying to make language less ambiguous. That is the reason he made the the statement you quoted.
But please keep in mind that LW became famous initially for his FIRST book, not the PI. In his first book, The Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Wittgenstein tried to make language less ambiguous and misleading. He often talks about his earlier book and is critical of this aspect of his earlier project. In his latter work, such as the PI, he rejected his earlier project, feeling language could not be made less ambiguous without losing its poetic ability to improve itself. Some people who study Wittgenstein and consider themselves a Wittgensteinian, especially in the United States, are students of the earlier work of Wittgenstein. I am a student, primarily, of the later work. So, whenever one is student of this author, one needs to say whether one is a student of his early work or his later work.
"It can also be put like this: we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were moving towards a particular state, a
state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation.
92. This finds expression in questions as to the essence of language, of propositions, of thought."
He warns against searching for a perfect or an essential language, but it does seem that his previous criticisms of natural language as misleading still seem valid.
Wittgenstein believed his previous criticisms of natural language were important in some areas of language, even in the PI. He simply felt that what was lost in universalizing the call for precision was often more important than he initially imagined, and that the lack of precision was not always a negative thing. He began to think that language has different functions, Some language, such as scientific language, needs to be very precise. But other language can function just fine in an imprecise way. For example, if you measure the quantity of flour to put in a cake is it better if you measure it with all the precision of a scientific scale? Or is it more than adequate if you use an ordinary measuring cup? Moreover, if you try to measure everything with scientific accuracy, there are certain areas of language, so the later Wittgenstein felt, where the language will not support that even a much rougher level of "accuracy" because there is no conventional way of measuring things, and no purpose for measuring them precisely.. It would be like measuring the quantity of air in the room with the window open, or measuring the hour on the moon precisely when there was no convention for calculating the time on the moon because there are presently no time zones. Or, think of measuring the "beauty" of a smile precisely, or the humor of a joke.
It was precisely this dawning belief that stimulated that there was something important to learn about the imprecise areas of language, that gave birth to Wittgenstein's later concept of "language games" - and with that concept, gave birth to the whole of his later philosophy. So, Wittgenstein's later a philosophy makes room for both scientific precision (in certain areas of language) and a more romantic or ethical and/or aesthetic way of using language more poetically. And Wittgenstein thought ordinary language, the first language all of us learn, was highly poetic. He does not just make space for the more poetic, religious, romantic, elements of language, but he theorizes about them in a very distinctive way. It is a very distinct contribution, I believe, and important in part because he can think so precisely in areas where language needs this precision.
Shall we call each other Lois and Mark in these notes? If you like that, just address me as "Lois".
You asked, "Do you think Witt is right in saying that our ordinary language is adequate as it stands, given that he often talks about natural language as ambiguous and misleading? "
Here is how I understand this matter:
In the Philosophical Investigations (PI), which is the book for which you are reading my commentary and which Wittgenstein wrote late in life, Wittgenstein did feel that our language has the potential to grow and in that sense can be improved. (review, for example, aphorisms #18 and 19). In fact, to him, the ability of the language to grow was something that needed to be protected that might be lost if we tried to defined our words too precisely. In the PI, Wittgenstein was specifically arguing against trying to make language less ambiguous. That is the reason he made the the statement you quoted.
But please keep in mind that LW became famous initially for his FIRST book, not the PI. In his first book, The Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Wittgenstein tried to make language less ambiguous and misleading. He often talks about his earlier book and is critical of this aspect of his earlier project. In his latter work, such as the PI, he rejected his earlier project, feeling language could not be made less ambiguous without losing its poetic ability to improve itself. Some people who study Wittgenstein and consider themselves a Wittgensteinian, especially in the United States, are students of the earlier work of Wittgenstein. I am a student, primarily, of the later work. So, whenever one is student of this author, one needs to say whether one is a student of his early work or his later work.
"It can also be put like this: we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were moving towards a particular state, a
state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation.
92. This finds expression in questions as to the essence of language, of propositions, of thought."
He warns against searching for a perfect or an essential language, but it does seem that his previous criticisms of natural language as misleading still seem valid.
Wittgenstein believed his previous criticisms of natural language were important in some areas of language, even in the PI. He simply felt that what was lost in universalizing the call for precision was often more important than he initially imagined, and that the lack of precision was not always a negative thing. He began to think that language has different functions, Some language, such as scientific language, needs to be very precise. But other language can function just fine in an imprecise way. For example, if you measure the quantity of flour to put in a cake is it better if you measure it with all the precision of a scientific scale? Or is it more than adequate if you use an ordinary measuring cup? Moreover, if you try to measure everything with scientific accuracy, there are certain areas of language, so the later Wittgenstein felt, where the language will not support that even a much rougher level of "accuracy" because there is no conventional way of measuring things, and no purpose for measuring them precisely.. It would be like measuring the quantity of air in the room with the window open, or measuring the hour on the moon precisely when there was no convention for calculating the time on the moon because there are presently no time zones. Or, think of measuring the "beauty" of a smile precisely, or the humor of a joke.
It was precisely this dawning belief that stimulated that there was something important to learn about the imprecise areas of language, that gave birth to Wittgenstein's later concept of "language games" - and with that concept, gave birth to the whole of his later philosophy. So, Wittgenstein's later a philosophy makes room for both scientific precision (in certain areas of language) and a more romantic or ethical and/or aesthetic way of using language more poetically. And Wittgenstein thought ordinary language, the first language all of us learn, was highly poetic. He does not just make space for the more poetic, religious, romantic, elements of language, but he theorizes about them in a very distinctive way. It is a very distinct contribution, I believe, and important in part because he can think so precisely in areas where language needs this precision.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
From Dr. K.
Dear Mark,
Thank you for your email of 28 December with your, 'Internet Blogging on Language and Linguistics', your email of 29 December with the first version of your first essay, 'Words and Worlds' and your email of 30 December with the extended version.
A couple of things before I start:
It was A.N. Whitehead (Russell's collaborator on 'Principia Mathematica') who in his magnum opus 'Process and Reality' said 'The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato' (Process and Reality Part II, ch. 1, sec. 1).
The later rather than the early Wittgenstein said that it was his task to 'shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle' ('Philosophical Investigations' para 309).
Your essay starts with the question of the logical analysis of vague statements. It is not clear from what you say whether you think that such analysis is either necessary, possible or impossible.
'Defining the concept clearly', admitting the relative nature of the attribute', or (or, 'and so') 'allowing a sliding scale' are all proposed general solutions which do not in fact work.
The utility of vague terms lies precisely in the fact that they do not have precise definitions. Most of the terms in our language are in fact vague, or have a dimension of vagueness.
The relativity of attributes is a different phenomenon from vagueness as such, as is the phenomenon of attributive adjectives. This is shown by the fact that we can produce any number of versions of the Sorites paradox which do not depend on such relativity.
Again, a sliding scale is just another useful way of sorting objects which is itself infected with vagueness. An object is either grey or not grey, warm or cool (it is of course irrelevant to the question of vagueness as such that observations such as these are observer dependent).
Vagueness is a difficult challenge, whichever way you take it: either as a challenge to provide an adequate analysis - to my knowledge this has not yet been done - or as a challenge to provide an alternative model for what is actually achieved in acts of linguistic communication.
As I remarked in an earlier email, Wittgenstein did not accept Russell's characterization of his project in the Tractatus, as 'seeking an ideal language'. This brings his early philosophy closer to his later philosophy, because he always held that our language, as it is, is fully adequate to do what we do with it. The difference - which is profound - is that in the Tractatus he claimed that what we do with language is picture 'facts', or assert 'propositions', while in his later philosophy he described the radically different theory of language games, which you talk about in the second part of your essay.
While both the early and late Wittgenstein 'had great confidence in the ability of everyday language to convey significance', the early Wittgenstein was led to the project of symbolic construction, not as an improvement on ordinary language, but rather in order to reveal the logical structure that actually exists underneath the skin of ordinary language.
The statement you quote from Wittgenstein, 'Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of language', is intended as a deflationary claim. There is no metaphysics. There is only grammar, which we mistake for metaphysics. He is not making a claim about the mystical harmony of thought and reality. Wittgenstein's 'mysticism' is reserved for questions of aesthetics and value, our sense of the meaning of life - all questions which escape language, as he defines it.
The claim that 'meaning is socially constructed', therefore the witch persecutors of Salem or the Sharia courts are necessarily in the right cannot be derived from 'meaning is use' without the use of additional, and very questionable premisses. Our ordinary language 'is all right as it is'. We have the resources to seek justification and question belief, even in cases where acceptance of a given word seems to imply acceptance of the belief which it embodies. As Oscar Wilde said in his trial, '"obscenity" is not one of my words' (see my glasshouse notebook 2, page 65). You can refuse to use a word, or deliberately use it with a different meaning (like 'nigger', said by a rapper). But much more is being 'done' than appears on the surface.
However, I would not go so far as to assume that we can say anything, or that there are no limits. There has been discussion recently of the question whether the human mind is incapable of discovering the solution to the mind-body problem, as claimed by Colin McGinn. Might there be limits, which we cannot see? This is the frustrating thing about limits, that you don't see them.
I am not arguing that 'therefore' there are limits, or that any of the limits that have been claimed are limits, but simply that we don't know. We don't know what it would take to create a 'language' that successfully limited thought (as attempted in Orwell's 1984). Maybe it is ultimately an empirical question, like the fact that some people are just smarter than others. Maybe there is a limit to just how 'smart' we can be - or there again maybe not.
All the best, Geoffrey
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Mark,
'Snow is white if and only if snow is white' is of no interest whatsoever.
However, consider: 'Snow is white' is X if and only if snow is white.
Think of all the various things one might substitute for 'X'. There is only one substitution which makes ALL statements of this form come out true, namely, X=true.
It is worth stopping for a moment to be amazed that ANY predicate successfully fulfils this role.
By means of the predicate 'true', we acquire a very powerful means for generalising over all possible statements/ propositions:
- For any P, 'P' is true if and only if P.
- For any P, to understand the meaning of P is to know the conditions under which 'P' is true.
This raises some deep questions:
What is it that all true P's have in common? is there anything at all that we can say about this?
Exactly what do we intend when we assert a proposition? what is it to 'aim at truth'?
Traditionally, these questions have been addressed by theories of truth - correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, redundancy. Dummett's contribution to the debate has been to shift the focus from theories of truth to theories of meaning. For Dummett, the issue is whether truth is, in fact, the central concept in the theory of meaning, as the 'meaning is truth conditions' claim implies.
- I won't go on, because much of the Philosophy of Language program is about this.
All the best,
Geoffrey Klempner
Thank you for your email of 28 December with your, 'Internet Blogging on Language and Linguistics', your email of 29 December with the first version of your first essay, 'Words and Worlds' and your email of 30 December with the extended version.
A couple of things before I start:
It was A.N. Whitehead (Russell's collaborator on 'Principia Mathematica') who in his magnum opus 'Process and Reality' said 'The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato' (Process and Reality Part II, ch. 1, sec. 1).
The later rather than the early Wittgenstein said that it was his task to 'shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle' ('Philosophical Investigations' para 309).
Your essay starts with the question of the logical analysis of vague statements. It is not clear from what you say whether you think that such analysis is either necessary, possible or impossible.
'Defining the concept clearly', admitting the relative nature of the attribute', or (or, 'and so') 'allowing a sliding scale' are all proposed general solutions which do not in fact work.
The utility of vague terms lies precisely in the fact that they do not have precise definitions. Most of the terms in our language are in fact vague, or have a dimension of vagueness.
The relativity of attributes is a different phenomenon from vagueness as such, as is the phenomenon of attributive adjectives. This is shown by the fact that we can produce any number of versions of the Sorites paradox which do not depend on such relativity.
Again, a sliding scale is just another useful way of sorting objects which is itself infected with vagueness. An object is either grey or not grey, warm or cool (it is of course irrelevant to the question of vagueness as such that observations such as these are observer dependent).
Vagueness is a difficult challenge, whichever way you take it: either as a challenge to provide an adequate analysis - to my knowledge this has not yet been done - or as a challenge to provide an alternative model for what is actually achieved in acts of linguistic communication.
As I remarked in an earlier email, Wittgenstein did not accept Russell's characterization of his project in the Tractatus, as 'seeking an ideal language'. This brings his early philosophy closer to his later philosophy, because he always held that our language, as it is, is fully adequate to do what we do with it. The difference - which is profound - is that in the Tractatus he claimed that what we do with language is picture 'facts', or assert 'propositions', while in his later philosophy he described the radically different theory of language games, which you talk about in the second part of your essay.
While both the early and late Wittgenstein 'had great confidence in the ability of everyday language to convey significance', the early Wittgenstein was led to the project of symbolic construction, not as an improvement on ordinary language, but rather in order to reveal the logical structure that actually exists underneath the skin of ordinary language.
The statement you quote from Wittgenstein, 'Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of language', is intended as a deflationary claim. There is no metaphysics. There is only grammar, which we mistake for metaphysics. He is not making a claim about the mystical harmony of thought and reality. Wittgenstein's 'mysticism' is reserved for questions of aesthetics and value, our sense of the meaning of life - all questions which escape language, as he defines it.
The claim that 'meaning is socially constructed', therefore the witch persecutors of Salem or the Sharia courts are necessarily in the right cannot be derived from 'meaning is use' without the use of additional, and very questionable premisses. Our ordinary language 'is all right as it is'. We have the resources to seek justification and question belief, even in cases where acceptance of a given word seems to imply acceptance of the belief which it embodies. As Oscar Wilde said in his trial, '"obscenity" is not one of my words' (see my glasshouse notebook 2, page 65). You can refuse to use a word, or deliberately use it with a different meaning (like 'nigger', said by a rapper). But much more is being 'done' than appears on the surface.
However, I would not go so far as to assume that we can say anything, or that there are no limits. There has been discussion recently of the question whether the human mind is incapable of discovering the solution to the mind-body problem, as claimed by Colin McGinn. Might there be limits, which we cannot see? This is the frustrating thing about limits, that you don't see them.
I am not arguing that 'therefore' there are limits, or that any of the limits that have been claimed are limits, but simply that we don't know. We don't know what it would take to create a 'language' that successfully limited thought (as attempted in Orwell's 1984). Maybe it is ultimately an empirical question, like the fact that some people are just smarter than others. Maybe there is a limit to just how 'smart' we can be - or there again maybe not.
All the best, Geoffrey
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Mark,
'Snow is white if and only if snow is white' is of no interest whatsoever.
However, consider: 'Snow is white' is X if and only if snow is white.
Think of all the various things one might substitute for 'X'. There is only one substitution which makes ALL statements of this form come out true, namely, X=true.
It is worth stopping for a moment to be amazed that ANY predicate successfully fulfils this role.
By means of the predicate 'true', we acquire a very powerful means for generalising over all possible statements/ propositions:
- For any P, 'P' is true if and only if P.
- For any P, to understand the meaning of P is to know the conditions under which 'P' is true.
This raises some deep questions:
What is it that all true P's have in common? is there anything at all that we can say about this?
Exactly what do we intend when we assert a proposition? what is it to 'aim at truth'?
Traditionally, these questions have been addressed by theories of truth - correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, redundancy. Dummett's contribution to the debate has been to shift the focus from theories of truth to theories of meaning. For Dummett, the issue is whether truth is, in fact, the central concept in the theory of meaning, as the 'meaning is truth conditions' claim implies.
- I won't go on, because much of the Philosophy of Language program is about this.
All the best,
Geoffrey Klempner
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Ideas and Sentences
John Locke said: "God, having designed man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination, and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him also with language, which was to be the great instrument and common tie of society. Man, therefore, had by nature his organs so fashioned, as to be fit to frame articulate sounds, which we call words. But this was not enough to produce language. It was farther necessary that he should be able to use these sounds as signs of internal conceptions, and to make them stand as marks for the ideas within his own mind, whereby they might be made known to others."
Ian Hacking comments: "The fundamental 17th century node occupied by 'ideas' is nowadays taken over by 'the sentence'.
Wilard Quine says: " The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences."
Frege is often quoted as saying that "it is only in the context of a sentence that a word has meaning." Michael Dummett precises that it is only by means of a sentence that we may perform a linguistic act, and the general notion of the sense posessed by a sentence must be capable of being explained without reference to the notion of the senses of constituent words or expressions. To grasp the sense of a sentence is to know the conditions under which that sentence is true, and the conditions under which it is false." [p5 Dummett on Frege]
Paul Grice: The distinction between meaning and use has found many applications in philosophy, linguistics and artificial intelligence. Both the analytic/synthetic distinction, which relies on a conception of truth by virtue of meaning, and the idea of a conversational implicature require for their full philosophical development a theory of meaning. Grice provided the beginning of a theory of meaning starting with his 1957 paper “Meaning” and elaborated in later papers (Grice 1968, 1969, 1982). The basic idea was to explain the timeless conventional meaning of a sentence type in terms of the occasion meanings of tokens of those sentences, i.e., what those sentence tokens meant when they were produced. In turn, sentence token meaning was to be understood in terms of what speakers intended when producing those sentence tokens. Thus ultimately the abstract notion of sentence meaning was to be understood in terms of specific intentions of speakers on specific occasions. [SEP]
Ian Hacking comments: "The fundamental 17th century node occupied by 'ideas' is nowadays taken over by 'the sentence'.
Wilard Quine says: " The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences."
Frege is often quoted as saying that "it is only in the context of a sentence that a word has meaning." Michael Dummett precises that it is only by means of a sentence that we may perform a linguistic act, and the general notion of the sense posessed by a sentence must be capable of being explained without reference to the notion of the senses of constituent words or expressions. To grasp the sense of a sentence is to know the conditions under which that sentence is true, and the conditions under which it is false." [p5 Dummett on Frege]
Paul Grice: The distinction between meaning and use has found many applications in philosophy, linguistics and artificial intelligence. Both the analytic/synthetic distinction, which relies on a conception of truth by virtue of meaning, and the idea of a conversational implicature require for their full philosophical development a theory of meaning. Grice provided the beginning of a theory of meaning starting with his 1957 paper “Meaning” and elaborated in later papers (Grice 1968, 1969, 1982). The basic idea was to explain the timeless conventional meaning of a sentence type in terms of the occasion meanings of tokens of those sentences, i.e., what those sentence tokens meant when they were produced. In turn, sentence token meaning was to be understood in terms of what speakers intended when producing those sentence tokens. Thus ultimately the abstract notion of sentence meaning was to be understood in terms of specific intentions of speakers on specific occasions. [SEP]
Sense and Reference
In philosophy and linguistics, the sense of a linguistic expression, sometimes understood in contrast to its referent. For example, the expressions “the morning star” and “the evening star” have different meanings, though their referent (Venus) is the same. Some expressions have meanings but no referents (“the present king of France”) or referents but no meanings (“that”). The literal or conventional meaning of an expression may differ from what a speaker of that expression means by uttering it on a particular occasion; this is the case with similes, statements uttered ironically, and statements that convey various “conversational implicatures,” as in the following examples: “She entered the house and shot him” implicates that she shot him in the house after she entered it, though this is not part of the sentence's literal meaning; “John has three sons” implicates that John has no more than three sons, though again the sentence does not literally say this. Other non-literal aspects of meaning include the potential for carrying out various “speech acts” (see speech act theory); e.g., uttered in the appropriate circumstances, the sentence “I christen thee the Joseph Stalin,” constitutes the act of naming a ship, and the sentence “I am cold” constitutes a request to close the window.
[Encyclopedia Brittanica]
Frege's distinction [between Sense and reference] rejects a view put forward by John Stuart Mill, according to which a proper name has no meaning above and beyond the object to which it refers (its referent or reference). That is, the word "Aristotle" just means Aristotle, that person, and no more. It does not mean "The writer of De Caelo." Hence, the sentence Aristotle was Greek says only that that person was Greek. It does not say that the writer of De Caelo was Greek. That is, it permits that Aristotle might not have written De Caelo. More generally, for any given proposition about Aristotle, one can use the name without believing that proposition to be true of Aristotle.
Frege's central objection to the view that a name's meaning is no more than its referent is that, if a and b are names of the same object, then the identity statement a = b must mean the same as a = a. Yet clearly the first can convey information in a way that the second cannot; that Samuel Clemens is Samuel Clemens is just trivial, but Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain is interesting. Why? Or, why is Cicero is Tully more significant than Cicero is Cicero? And, by the same token, Samuel Clemens wrote novels and Mark Twain wrote novels would have to mean the same thing but, again, the two sentences seem to convey different information.
A related problem concerns attributions of belief. It might well seem that, since Deep Throat and Mark Felt mean the same thing, the two sentences Everyone knows that Deep Throat is Deep Throat and Everyone knows that Deep Throat is Mark Felt must also mean the same thing. (Whether that is so is a matter of some controversy, however.) But that is intuitively wrong.
Frege's distinction is meant to make sense of these phenomena. He postulates that, in addition to a reference (Bedeutung), a proper name possesses what he calls a sense (Sinn), some aspect of the way its reference is thought of that can differ, even between two names that refer to the same object. The important difference between Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, for example, is a "difference in the mode of presentation of that which is designated". The sense of an expression is "that wherein the mode of presentation is contained". Thus, one can know both the names Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens without realizing that they are about the same object, because they present that object in different ways, that is, they have different senses.
Summarizing:
* The reference is the object that the expression refers to. For instance, the name Mark Twain refers to Mark Twain, i.e. Samuel Clemens, the man who lived in the U.S. and wrote satires. The name Samuel Clemens also refers to that man. Hence the two have the same reference.
* The sense is the "cognitive significance" or "mode of presentation" of the referent.
* Names with the same reference may have different senses.
Frege uses the following example to illustrate this view. Let a, b, and c be three lines each of which joins one vertex of a triangle to the median of the opposite side. Then it is a theorem that
[t]he point of intersection of a and b is then the same as the point of intersection of b and c. So we have different designations for the same point, and these names ('point of intersection of a and b', 'point of intersection of b and c') likewise indicate the mode of presentation; and hence the statement contains actual knowledge. Gottlob Frege, Über Sinn und Bedeutung
At one time, it was common to identify the sense of a name with an identifying description, which would put Frege's view close to Russell's description theory of names. For example, the name "Mark Twain" might just mean: The man who wrote Tom Sawyer, and Samuel Clemens might mean: The eldest son of John and Jane Clemens. Thus the reference would be determined as whatever fit the description. This interpretation is now almost unanimously rejected by scholars. Unfortunately, however, a detailed replacement has not been forthcoming. But what is clear is that Frege certainly did not mean that the sense of a name is merely a collection of ideas a particular user of a name happens to associate with it: Because they figure into the meanings of terms in a public language and can be communicated, senses must be objective.
[From Wikipedia]
[Encyclopedia Brittanica]
Frege's distinction [between Sense and reference] rejects a view put forward by John Stuart Mill, according to which a proper name has no meaning above and beyond the object to which it refers (its referent or reference). That is, the word "Aristotle" just means Aristotle, that person, and no more. It does not mean "The writer of De Caelo." Hence, the sentence Aristotle was Greek says only that that person was Greek. It does not say that the writer of De Caelo was Greek. That is, it permits that Aristotle might not have written De Caelo. More generally, for any given proposition about Aristotle, one can use the name without believing that proposition to be true of Aristotle.
Frege's central objection to the view that a name's meaning is no more than its referent is that, if a and b are names of the same object, then the identity statement a = b must mean the same as a = a. Yet clearly the first can convey information in a way that the second cannot; that Samuel Clemens is Samuel Clemens is just trivial, but Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain is interesting. Why? Or, why is Cicero is Tully more significant than Cicero is Cicero? And, by the same token, Samuel Clemens wrote novels and Mark Twain wrote novels would have to mean the same thing but, again, the two sentences seem to convey different information.
A related problem concerns attributions of belief. It might well seem that, since Deep Throat and Mark Felt mean the same thing, the two sentences Everyone knows that Deep Throat is Deep Throat and Everyone knows that Deep Throat is Mark Felt must also mean the same thing. (Whether that is so is a matter of some controversy, however.) But that is intuitively wrong.
Frege's distinction is meant to make sense of these phenomena. He postulates that, in addition to a reference (Bedeutung), a proper name possesses what he calls a sense (Sinn), some aspect of the way its reference is thought of that can differ, even between two names that refer to the same object. The important difference between Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, for example, is a "difference in the mode of presentation of that which is designated". The sense of an expression is "that wherein the mode of presentation is contained". Thus, one can know both the names Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens without realizing that they are about the same object, because they present that object in different ways, that is, they have different senses.
Summarizing:
* The reference is the object that the expression refers to. For instance, the name Mark Twain refers to Mark Twain, i.e. Samuel Clemens, the man who lived in the U.S. and wrote satires. The name Samuel Clemens also refers to that man. Hence the two have the same reference.
* The sense is the "cognitive significance" or "mode of presentation" of the referent.
* Names with the same reference may have different senses.
Frege uses the following example to illustrate this view. Let a, b, and c be three lines each of which joins one vertex of a triangle to the median of the opposite side. Then it is a theorem that
[t]he point of intersection of a and b is then the same as the point of intersection of b and c. So we have different designations for the same point, and these names ('point of intersection of a and b', 'point of intersection of b and c') likewise indicate the mode of presentation; and hence the statement contains actual knowledge. Gottlob Frege, Über Sinn und Bedeutung
At one time, it was common to identify the sense of a name with an identifying description, which would put Frege's view close to Russell's description theory of names. For example, the name "Mark Twain" might just mean: The man who wrote Tom Sawyer, and Samuel Clemens might mean: The eldest son of John and Jane Clemens. Thus the reference would be determined as whatever fit the description. This interpretation is now almost unanimously rejected by scholars. Unfortunately, however, a detailed replacement has not been forthcoming. But what is clear is that Frege certainly did not mean that the sense of a name is merely a collection of ideas a particular user of a name happens to associate with it: Because they figure into the meanings of terms in a public language and can be communicated, senses must be objective.
[From Wikipedia]
Linguistics vocab
CALQUE: the midwestern construction in Can I go with? might have arisen as a calque -- a literal translation -- of German Kann ich mitgehen?" "Can I go with?"
MONDEGREEN: (also sometimes spelled "mondagreen") is the mishearing (usually accidental) of a phrase in such a way that it acquires a new meaning.
"Scuse me while I kiss this guy," Jimi Hendrix did not sing in "Purple Haze," but a lot of people heard it that way anyway: somehow in his listeners' ears the break between "the" and "sky" got moved one phoneme to the right. That kind of mistake is known as a "mondegreen".
APORIA:
1. A figure of speech in which the speaker expresses or purports to be in doubt about a question.
2. An insoluble contradiction or paradox in a text's meanings.
[Greek, difficulty of passing, from aporos, impassable
: a-, without; see poros, passage.]
ANAPHORIC
1. The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs; for example, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills” (Winston S. Churchill).
2. Linguistics. The use of a linguistic unit, such as a pronoun, to refer back to another unit, as the use of her to refer to Anne in the sentence Anne asked Edward to pass her the salt.
MONDEGREEN: (also sometimes spelled "mondagreen") is the mishearing (usually accidental) of a phrase in such a way that it acquires a new meaning.
"Scuse me while I kiss this guy," Jimi Hendrix did not sing in "Purple Haze," but a lot of people heard it that way anyway: somehow in his listeners' ears the break between "the" and "sky" got moved one phoneme to the right. That kind of mistake is known as a "mondegreen".
APORIA:
1. A figure of speech in which the speaker expresses or purports to be in doubt about a question.
2. An insoluble contradiction or paradox in a text's meanings.
[Greek, difficulty of passing, from aporos, impassable
: a-, without; see poros, passage.]
ANAPHORIC
1. The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs; for example, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills” (Winston S. Churchill).
2. Linguistics. The use of a linguistic unit, such as a pronoun, to refer back to another unit, as the use of her to refer to Anne in the sentence Anne asked Edward to pass her the salt.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Vital Reading on Language
How to Do with Things with Words : John Austin
Cartesian Linguistics: Noam Chomsky
Frege. Philosophy of Language: Michael Dummett
Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy: Ian Hacking
Intro to Philosophy of Language : Bernard Harrison
Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff
Philosophy in the Flesh: George Lakoff
Language Instinct: Steven Pinker
Speech Acts: John Searle
Expression and Meaning : John Searle
[I am limiting this list to books I have actually read!]
I particularly recommend the books by Ian Hacking and Bernard Harrison for anyone just starting out in this subject.
Cartesian Linguistics: Noam Chomsky
Frege. Philosophy of Language: Michael Dummett
Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy: Ian Hacking
Intro to Philosophy of Language : Bernard Harrison
Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff
Philosophy in the Flesh: George Lakoff
Language Instinct: Steven Pinker
Speech Acts: John Searle
Expression and Meaning : John Searle
[I am limiting this list to books I have actually read!]
I particularly recommend the books by Ian Hacking and Bernard Harrison for anyone just starting out in this subject.
Monday, February 5, 2007
Chi se ne Frege?
Or, Who is this Frege?
Gottlob Frege shows that language is not to be trusted. We are always struggling against the constraints of language...
The moment when the ability of language to refer and to mean becomes problematic or interesting, is the moment when the philosophy of language comes alive.
Why is it that when we refer to an object such as a dog or wardrobe, we initially see it as an indeterminate member of a class, rather than an individual. "There is a dog in my yard", or "I need a wardrobe for my suits" refer to the central objects in such a way as to give no clear mental picture of either. It takes a lot of description and qualification to get anywhere near a picture of a specific dog or wardrobe, and we might well feel that in fact we never do.
IEP says :
Propositions are abstract entities; they do not exist in space and time. They are sometimes said to be "timeless", "eternal", or "omnitemporal" entities. Terminology aside, the essential point is that propositions are not concrete (or material) objects. Nor, for that matter, are they mental entities; they are not "thoughts" as Frege had suggested in the nineteenth century. The theory that propositions are the bearers of truth-values also has been criticized. Nominalists object to the abstract character of propositions. Another complaint is that it's not sufficiently clear when we have a case of the same propositions as opposed to similar propositions. This is much like the complaint that we can't determine when two sentences have exactly the same meaning. The relationship between sentences and propositions is a serious philosophical problem.
Gottlob Frege shows that language is not to be trusted. We are always struggling against the constraints of language...
The moment when the ability of language to refer and to mean becomes problematic or interesting, is the moment when the philosophy of language comes alive.
Why is it that when we refer to an object such as a dog or wardrobe, we initially see it as an indeterminate member of a class, rather than an individual. "There is a dog in my yard", or "I need a wardrobe for my suits" refer to the central objects in such a way as to give no clear mental picture of either. It takes a lot of description and qualification to get anywhere near a picture of a specific dog or wardrobe, and we might well feel that in fact we never do.
IEP says :
Propositions are abstract entities; they do not exist in space and time. They are sometimes said to be "timeless", "eternal", or "omnitemporal" entities. Terminology aside, the essential point is that propositions are not concrete (or material) objects. Nor, for that matter, are they mental entities; they are not "thoughts" as Frege had suggested in the nineteenth century. The theory that propositions are the bearers of truth-values also has been criticized. Nominalists object to the abstract character of propositions. Another complaint is that it's not sufficiently clear when we have a case of the same propositions as opposed to similar propositions. This is much like the complaint that we can't determine when two sentences have exactly the same meaning. The relationship between sentences and propositions is a serious philosophical problem.
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