Mind and Language WOLFSON COLLEGE LECTURES 1974 EDITED BY SAMUEL GUTTENPLAN CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD - 1975 ae) Oxford University Press, Ely House, London W. 1 GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON CAPE TOWN IBADAN NAIROBI DAR ES SALAAM LUSAKA ADDIS ABABA DELHI BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA KUALA LUMPUR SINGAPORE HONG KONG TOKYO 1sBN 0 19 824521 1 © Oxford University Press 1975 All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press Printed in Great Britain byRichard Clay (The Chaucer Press), Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk for SIR ISAIAH BERLIN, O.M. President of Wolfson College 1966-1975 254135 a LL sh, Bi 3 HII, e20pk ADB wheis i AT POW RRS a = LEA . yam Preface in THE essays this collection began life as the Wolfson College Lec- tures for 1974. These lectures, under thetitle ‘Mind and Language’, were delivered at the University of Oxford in Hilary term 1974; they are printed here in the order in which they were given. However, there are many variations between the spoken and printed versions of each the of these essays. Most of authors include material here which they did not have time to develop in their lectures but the contributions of W. V. Quine and Michael Dummett are very much longer than the originals and some comment should be made about this. Of the two essays printed here ‘The Nature of Natural Knowledge” was Quine’s Wolfson lecture but he allowed me to print ‘Mind and Verbal Dis- positions’ and this is an illuminating companion to his lecture. The Appendix to Michael Dummett’s essay developed from a seminar which he with Donald Davidson in the term following that of gave the lecture series and should help to locate more precisely the bases of his disagreement with the Davidsonian programme. I had considerable help in organizing the original lecture series and would like to thank Professor Dana Scott and Mr. Henry Hardy for this. Thanks are due too to Mrs. Beryl Schweder for her secretarial assistance with the lecture series. SAMUEL GUTTENPLAN Oxford Contents INTRODUCTION S. D. Guttenplan, The Open University 1. THOUGHT AND TALK D. Davidson, Rockefeller and Princeton Universities 2. MEANING AND EXPERIENCE 25 D. Follesdal, University of Oslo 3. THE FIRST PERSON 45 G. E. M. Anscombe, University of Cambridge 4. THE NATURE OF NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 67 W. V. Quine, Harvard University MIND AND VERBAL DISPOSITIONS 5. 83 W. V. Quine, Harvard University 6. WHAT IS A THEORY OF MEANING? 97 M. A. E. Dummett, University of Oxford Appendix 123 7. NAMES AND IDENTITY 139 P. T. Geach, University of Leeds HOVE eri] GT win 2 b abil a HAY SpA "i nied wim be A2p Pi a VINA EAN a hil - 4 SP SRE - 3 a Er id nN : , ) Bam. a ] = i. b ry \ ) H x i Sa) 4 ; 3 ES Fr fe LRAT, Introduction S. D. GUTTENPLAN WHETHER as general questions about the relationship between the so-called ‘propositional attitudes’ and linguistic meaning, or as more specific questions about the connections between certain mental and linguistic concepts, issues of mind and language bulk large in current philosophical literature. In fact, of all issues, one would be justified in labelling these as perhaps most characteristic of philosophy in our time. Yet even a superficial survey of philosophical works since at least the late seventeenth century would show that concern with these questions is not merely a phenomenon of this century. This is not because one can find one or two writers here and there before the beginning of our century who tried to detail the relationship between mind and language. It is because one finds developed attempts by many writers to solve the very sorts of problems which we recognize in as so characteristically modern; and, the eighteenth century, these attempts were loosely organized around a particular theme. Ofcourse, current work on mind-language questions owes almost nothing to these early investigations; though, to a surprising degree, the general form of question is shared. None the less, one way of appreciating the common background of the essays in this volume is by understanding why they owe so little to the tradition which posed many of the questions they consider. What follows is a very brief sketch, by way of example, of the eighteenth-century treatment of these questions to- gether with some discussion of how the basic contributions of the last hundred years have made this treatment appear unfruitful. Though there are doubtless more direct ways of introducing the subject matter this of this book, none can show, in quite the way that approach can, the sort of which has been made in dealing with this kind of progress philosophical question; progress which forces us to view much 2S. D. Guttenplan previous work irrelevant or superficial, and which gives contem- as porary philosophy of language and mind that characteristic appear- of self-containment. ance Locke, after devoting many pages of the Essay to detailing the impediments with which language encumbers the attainment of knowledge, felt it necessary to explain why he blamed language and not, more simply, the users of languages: ... [when] I began to examine the extent and certainty of our know- ledge, I found it had so near a connexion with words that, unless their force and manner of signification were first well observed, there could be little said clearly and pertinently concerning knowledge [words] very . . . interpose themselves so much between our understandings and the truth which it would contemplate and apprehend that, like the medium through which visible objects pass, their obscurity and disorder does not seldom cast a mist before our eyes and impose upon our understandings. Though Locke’s description of the ‘imperfections’ of language and his account of the consequences of these imperfections for human understanding do not appear profound, these parts of the Essay were the major source of eighteenth-century interest in the philosophy of that language and mind. The preoccupation—for is what it was—of’ these writers was with the question: what was the origin of human language; and the question, if not some of the answers to it, was prompted by Locke’s Essay. By pointing out the connection between language and knowledge, Locke made the understanding of language a prerequisite for fixing the boundaries of knowledge. The idea that language could be understood by discovering its origins comes partly from the ‘plain, historical method’ tone of the Essay and partly from Locke’s conjecture about such origins at the beginning of Book III. Condillac, Mandeville, Adam Smith, Rousseau, James Harris, Mau- pertuis, Turgot, and Monboddo, among many others, speculated this in about subject and most of them believed that, trying to uncover the origin of language, they were investigating its nature. It seemed to them, and can without reflection seem to us, that language as a human activity must have had ‘origins’ in the way that, say, chess did and that, however cloudy, these beginnings should be traceable. Further, there was the hope that the discovery or reconstruction of these origins would help in deciding the role of language in the exercise of human intellectual capacities. From our vantage-point the many attempts to reconstruct the * An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, Chap. IX, 4 21.