LANGUAGE, MIND, AND ART SYNTHESE LIBRARY STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Managing Editor: JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University Editors: DIRK VAN DALEN, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands DONALD DAVIDSON, University of California, Berkeley THEO A.F. KUIPERS, University of Groningen, The Netherlands PATRICK SUPPES, Stanford University, California JAN WOLEN-SKI, Jagiellonian University, Krak6w, Poland VOLUME 240 LANGUAGE, MIND, AND ART Essays in Appreciation and Analysis, in Honor of Paul Ziff edited by DALE JAMIESON University of Colorado, Boulder SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Language, mind, and art essays in apprec1ation and analysis 1n honor of Paul Ziff I edited by Dale Jam1eson. p. cm. -- (Synthese library ; v. 240) ISBN 978-90-481-4391-7 ISBN 978-94-015-8313-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8313-8 1. Aesthetics, American. 2. Language and languages--Philosophy. 3. Phi losophy, American--20th century. 1. Ziff, Paul, 1920- II. Jamieson, Dale. III. Ser1es. BH221.U5L36 1994 100--dc20 94-9708 ISBN 978-90-481-4391-7 Printed on acid-free paper AII Rights Reserved © 1994 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1994 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1994 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface vii DALE JAMIESON Paul Ziff, 1958-1960: A Reminiscence PAUL BENACERRAF Understanding Misunderstanding 9 ZENO VENDLER Rules and Regularities Revisited 23 JAY F. ROSENBERG Proper Names: Possibility and Culture 39 THOMAS E. PATTON Numbers as Structures and as Positions in Structures 55 MICHAEL D. RESNIK The Unnaturalness of Grue 69 RITA NOLAN Microscopes and Corpuscles 83 PETER ALEXANDER Why Machines Can Neither Think Nor Feel 101 DOUGLAS C. LONG Ziff on Shooting an Elephant 121 DALE JAMIESON Jazz and the African-American Experience: The Expressiveness 131 of African -American Music BILL E. LAWSON v vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Anything Contemplated 143 DOUGLAS DEMPSTER Aesthetics and Baseball 159 JOSEPH S. ULLIAN Rhyme Without Reason 169 DOUGLAS F. STALKER Afterword: Selections from A Tripartite Trismus 187 PAULZIFF The Publications of Paul Ziff 199 Notes on Contributors 205 Name Index 209 PREFACE This book is a collection of essays in honor of Paul Ziff written by his col leagues, students, and friends. Many of the authors address topics that Ziff has discussed in his writings: understanding, rules and regularities, proper names, the feelings of machines, expression, and aesthetic experience. Paul Ziff began his professional career as an artist, went on to study painting with J.M. Hanson at Cornell, and then studied for the Ph.D. in philosophy, also at Cornell, with Max Black. Over the next three decades he produced a series of remarkable papers in philosophy of art, culminating in 1984 with the publica tion of Antiaesthetics: An Appreciation of the Cow with the Subtile Nose. In 1960 he published Semantic Analysis, his masterwork in philosophy of lan guage. Throughout his career he made important contributions to philosophy of mind in such papers as "The Simplicity of Other Minds" (1965) and "About Behaviourism" (1958). In addition to his work in these areas, his lec tures at Harvard on philosophy of religion are an underground classic; and throughout his career he has continued to make art and to search for the meaning of life in the properties of prime numbers. Although his interests are wide and deep, questions about language, art, and mind have dominated his philosophical work, and it is problems in these areas that provide the topics of most of the essays in this volume. I first met Paul Ziff in 1970 when I arrived in Chapel Hill as a new gradu ate student. As a refugee from San Francisco, the culture shock was enor mous. Moreover, I was more committed to opposing the war in Viet Nam and having fun than to doing philosophy. From Paul I learned that doing philoso phy could be fun, and also had a strong claim to improving the world. Were it not for Paul, I would not have become a philosopher. He would disapprove of my saying this not because he is modest about his effects on people, but because modality is still suspect in his eyes. During my first semester as a graduate student I took Paul's class in phi losophy of language. Paul was intriguing but evasive: he would only talk to me while he was hanging upside down in the gym, doing inversions. He was in fine form during these conversations but I confess that I was often dis tracted. Paul didn't think much of my work in that course: He gave me a B-, the sort of grade that graduate students aren't supposed to get. vii D. Jamieson (ed.), lAnguage, Mind, and Art, vii-xi. Vlll PREFACE He seemed surprised to see me in his seminar the next semester. My work must have improved because he gave me an A for the course and began meeting with me in his office. I think that he must have admired my willing ness to come back for more despite the grade that I had gotten in the first course. He probably thought that I was serious and dedicated to philosophy. Really, however, I was more attracted Paul than to philosophy. What he com municated was energy, enthusiasm, honesty, and passion. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life but I knew that whatever it was I wanted to do it in that way. Integrity was what mattered to me most and Paul was the real thing. I became one of a small number of graduate students who took all of Paul's seminars. It didn't matter what the announced topic was (Thought and Language, Epistemology, Generative Semantics, The Mathematical Structure of Language), they were all courses in Paul. In each seminar we were required to read everything that Paul regarded as relevant to the topic (often the list was eccentric, always it was long), produce a paper each week, and somehow survive the full force of Paul's intellect. It was not possible to sit quietly in a corner and try to avoid the spotlight of his attention. There were rarely more than a half dozen of us and Paul always demanded that we fight back. He hated losing arguments but he didn't much like easy victories either. Many of Paul's most devoted students left philosophy or did not produce as much and as good as might have been hoped. I think in part this is because most of us could not sustain or even survive Paul's intensity. After three or four years of fire, many of us were burned-out. I know that I was a cinder after completing the course work and requirements for the Ph.D.; I went to Jamaica, not knowing if I would return and finish my degree. But late in 1974 I began working on a dissertation on conventions of lan guage with Paul as my supervisor. For two years, almost every week, we would follow this routine. I would arrive at his house at 4 in the afternoon with the pages that I had written. At first I was pleased when I had produced 10 or 15 pages for the week. Soon it became clear that true happiness was when a paragraph or two had emerged unscathed. After ninety minutes of this we would adjourn to the library for drinks and to watch the 5:30 rerun of The Beverly Hillbillies. After dinner and talk of art, music, politics, and tennis I would return home, exhausted from three or four hours with Paul. After two years of this enough paragraphs had survived for me to be granted the Ph.D. Nearly twenty years later I often reflect on my philosophical apprentice ship. Not many of us give to our students what Paul gave to me. I suppose that in the language of the 80s you might say that it was an intellectual PREFACE ix version of "tough love." People are often surprised when I tell them what it was like to be Paul's student because many in the profession think of him as overly aggressive, even nasty and mean-spirited. Many academics are remarkably obsequious to those whom they perceive as above them in the academic pecking order. They can be kind and generous to those who have benefits to distribute, but are unkind and small-minded to those who are dependent on them. But if anything, Paul was just the opposite. To beginners he was supportive and generous, although demanding. At Chapel Hill he was a legendary undergraduate teacher. Paul was selective about his graduate stu dents, but once he took you on he embraced the whole person. He was gener ous with his time, and often made arrangements for housing and sometimes even helped with money. But to his fellow professionals who enjoyed large reputations, Paul could be brutal. He sometimes got as good as he gave, but because he held his peers to such high standards he was not a member of anybody's club. Many professional philosophers found Paul intimidating and a little scary because he would make a scene, not say the polite thing, break a little glass (conceptually speaking). In his view moderation in the pursuit of truth is no virtue. It's not easy to go through life in this way and I don't think that it has always been easy to be Paul. But I hope that knowing what a dif ference he has made to people who have been fortunate enough to learn from him may make things a little easier. The essays in this volume begin with Paul Benacerraf's reminiscence of Paul between 1958 and 1960. For those of us who studied with him later, Benacerraf's portrait of Paul as obsessed with truth but patient with students, encouraging and empowering them, is a familiar one. Zeno Vendler starts from Ziff's paper, "Understanding Understanding." He is concerned to discuss what sorts of things one can be said to understand and also to characterize misunderstanding, a state alternative to both under standing and not understanding. While not providing a complete account, Vendler forwards our understanding of misunderstanding considerably. Jay F. Rosenberg returns to an old public debate he had with Ziff in the early 1970s before the Philological Society at Chapel Hill on the question of whether or not there are rules of language. With the hindsight of twenty years Rosenberg remains satisfied that his affirmative position is correct, but sus pects that he and Ziff are less at odds on this matter than they once both thought. Rosenberg also sagely suggests that Ziff may not agree. Thomas E. Patton is concerned with proper names. Ziff put forward an account of proper names in Semantic Analysis that was later criticized by Kripke, who in tum was Ziff's target in a later paper called "About Proper x PREFACE Names." For the most part Patton defends Kripke but in a Ziffean spirit, praising culture while burying possibility as relevant to the workings of proper names. Michael D. Resnik begins with a quotation from Ziff's Epistemic Analysis. In discussion Paul used to say that to know that 2+2=4 is to know the individ ual numbers 2 and 4 while Resnik would deny this view. Now Resnik thinks that there is more to the issue that meets the eye, and he sketches a subtle account of what numbers are. Rita Nolan addresses the New Riddle of Induction, introduced to the liter ature by Paul's old colleague from the University of Pennsylvania, Nelson Goodman. Nolan proposes a naturalistic explanation of why we tend to reject "grue-type" predicates as proper bases for induction. She argues that such predicates violate requirements on normal predicates of languages that are capable of being learned by humans. Peter Alexander discusses Locke's view of microscopes and corpuscles. Locke believed in the corpuscular hypothesis and appears to suggest that with greatly improved microscopes we should be able to see the corpuscles. That this is Locke's view has been regarded as uncontroversial by some scholars, but Alexander shows that it conflicts with some central views in Locke's Essay. Douglas C. Long returns to Ziff's claim in "The Feelings of Robots" that machines cannot have feelings because they are not alive. Over the years Ziff's claim has been roundly attacked by a wide range of philosophers. Long defends Ziff's claim, arguing that machines cannot think or feel because they are different in kind from living human beings and animals. Dale Jamieson is concerned with Ziff's account of the nature and value of aesthetic appreciation. While broadly sympathetic to Ziff's account, he criti cizes some of the details. Jamieson argues that moral acceptability is an appropriateness condition for acts of aesthetic appreciation to carry intrinsic value. On his view, even if everything that can be viewed can be aesthetically appreciated, not all aesthetic appreciation is of intrinsic value. Bill E. Lawson addresses the claim that jazz expresses the African American experience and finds it wanting. Jazz is important to the lives of black people and is one of America's cultural gifts to the world, but it does not give direct information about the lives of black people. Good jazz can be played by people of diverse backgrounds and it can be enjoyed for its musical qualities alone. Douglas Dempster contrasts Ziff's way of accounting for the perplexities and perversities of twentieth century art with that of Arthur Danto's. Ziff