An Essay on Morals_ A Science of Philoso Philip Wylie
Turba Philosophorum
James P. Hogan Mind, Machines and Evolution
Coles R., The_Secular_Mind
Forester Cecil Scott PowieśÂci Hornblowerowskie 06 (cykl) SzczćÂśÂliwy Powrót
Diana Palmer Najlepsze wcić śź przed nami
1919 Bergson L'energie spirituelle
Foster, Alan Dean Catechist 03 A Triumph of Souls
Courths Mahler Jadwiga Kocham CićÂ, Lonny
Christie Agatha Parker Pyne na tropie
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do not lose their meaning just because the speaker does not understand them. But
this property of sentence content does not seem to apply, or not to the same degree,
to the content of thoughts--you cannot think a proposition you do not grasp. But if
judging were mentally uttering a sentence with a meaning, then there should be no
such restriction on what can be thought: you could succeed in thinking that
sesquipedalianism is an affliction of the erudite just by inwardly uttering that
sentence, despite the fact that these words mean nothing to you. So saying
something with a content can be dependent on being part of a language community
in which words have a public meaning, but you cannot expect your thoughts to have
content just by internally uttering words you correctly believe to have a content but
whose content you do not grasp. The existence of malapropism demonstrates this
difference vividly: malapropism occurs in speech when a person's intended meaning
does not match the word she chooses to express that meaning; but there can be no
such mismatch in thought, since there is nothing with public content to come apart
from private meaning. To make a judgement with a determinate content one needs
actually to have the concepts involved in the judgement; but to say something with a
definite content this is not necessary.
These differences between the two sorts of content do not perhaps decisively refute
the inner saying theory, since they could be disputed or held inessential: but they do
raise real questions about the theory that need convincing rebuttals if the theory is to
deserve credence. It will help put these objections in a clearer light if we turn to the
third sort of objection we mentioned, namely allegations of circularity; for the import of
this sort of objection is that the inner saying theory seems able to capture some of the
central features of thought only because it is circular--that is, it uses the distinctive
features of thought to explain themselves, while taking an idle detour through
language. The charge of circularity is, in a nutshell, this: language can seem to
explain thought only because speech is to be understood as the expression of
thought. Thus suppose you hear the
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speech of a foreigner whose language you do not understand: you assume that he is
giving expression to a thought which gives his words content. Without this
assumption, it seems, his utterance would be mere sound, devoid of significance. But
now what of the underlying thought itself? If we analyse this as an inner speech act,
then it seems that the conjectured internal utterance must in turn express some
thought if it is not to be just a collection of unmeaning characters: but of course this
launches us on an infinite regress. The objector is confronting the inner saying theory
with a dilemma: either we say that the inner sentence expresses a thought, in which
case the theory is circular; or it does not express a thought, in which case it can have
no semantic content. The suggestion is that outer speech has meaning by being
connected with propositional attitudes, so we cannot hope to explain what it is to
have a propositional attitude by claiming that attitudes consist in inner speech. This
objection does not, as stated, deny that when we think we inwardly utter; what it
denies is that such inner utterance could explain what it is to think contentful
thoughts. And if the inner saying theory can no longer be regarded as explanatory,
the motivation lapses for insisting that we recognise the existence of a language of
thought.
It might be suggested, as a way of meeting this objection, that we claim a difference
in the way outer and inner speech acquire significance. Thus we might concede that
outer speech has content because it is expressive of thought, but deny that inner
speech has content in this way; we hold that it has content in a more basic way. The
idea will be that judgement involves a relation to a sentence with meaning, but its
having that meaning does not come from expressing a thought--this is a matter of
prior interpretative facts. These more basic facts may include relations of reference
and determinants of psychological role; when these are combined with a relation of
inward utterance we get a thought--but not before. The picture, then, is that the inner
sentences are the basic objects of interpretation; their content confers content upon
thoughts; and thoughts transmit their content to outer speech. However, this
manoeuvre does not evade the fundamental objection, even if the picture it
recommends is granted. For there now rises up a new dilemma, naturally descended
from the first: either the inner sentences have their content determined by facts which
go beyond their merely formal properties, in which case these facts will be what really
constitute the content of thoughts; or else we shall try to get by,
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theoretically, just with the sentences--but then won't they be just meaningless bits of
syntax? The second horn of this dilemma points out that no system of linguistic signs
can ever be, so to say, selfinterpreting, and so the inner saying theory needs to
introduce resources capable of conferring significance on the internal sentences; the
first horn asserts that such extra resources will render the internal sentences
themselves theoretically superfluous--we could simply drop the sentences and let the
conditions that are brought in to interpret them do all the work. At the least, it will be
these additional resources, whatever they may be, that will be ultimately accounting
for the features of thought that the inner saying theory was designed to capture. The
attraction of the inner saying theory was that it promised to explain judgement in
terms of mere words, but closer inspection has shown this suggestion to be spurious.
We could put the point, very simply, as follows; everyone can agree that judgement is
the exercise of concepts--we think 'in' concepts; the inner saying theory offers an
account of what this exercise of concepts consists in--it consists in the internal
manipulation of words; but words have content only because they express concepts;
so the theory presupposes what it set out to explain. To fulfil its ambition, therefore,
the inner saying theory must tell us what it is for an inner word to express a particular
concept; but then the threat is that this account of concepts, which cannot make
appeal to the meaning of words, will make the imputation of a language of thought
theoretically redundant, since a concept will presumably consist in some kind of non-
linguistic internal representation capable of doing all the jobs inner words were cut
out to do. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
