I’ve been reading Chris Gauker’s book Words Without Meanings to review it for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. It’s very interesting, in no small part because Gauker has such a different view to everyone else. It’s somewhat revealing that the view he’s arguing against, that “the central function of language is to enable a speaker to reveal his or her thoughts to a hearer”, is so entrenched that it doesn’t even have an -ism associated with it. I’ve been playing with truism, or expressivism, or communism as names for it. The last isn’t too bad, because what’s central to the view Gauker’s criticising is that language is for communicating thoughts. Gauker doesn’t believe that, because he doesn’t believe in what I think of as thoughts.
It also means that I can say truly that the profession is over-run with communists. And no one else is using communism for anything else these days. I can see how this would have been misleading 15 years ago, but that kind of communism is dead and buried. Communism is dead; long live communism. (If I could do subscripts in HTML I’d put the subscripts on those two tokens of communism to disambiguate a little.) And now we can link up with other dubious renamings to ask whether, for example, communism has a distinctive ideology? I don’t think I’ll use this in the review (so any readers from NDPR – don’t panic!) but for here I’ll use communism as a name for what Gauker simply calls The Received view.
One of the problems with communism is that it assumes that there is such a thing as mental representation. Gauker thinks that thinking doesn’t involve manipulating propositions. The key argument against mental representation is a Kripkenstein/Putnam content scepticism argument. For some reason Kripkenstein isn’t cited, nor is Goodman, but the argument should be familiar. There’s too many interpretations of any purported mental representations that fit with any constraint on interpretation for any particular one to count as the content of the mental representation. The constraint Gauker focusses on is that beliefs should be mostly true. (In fact he generously spots the communist the premise that we can identity the true beliefs prior to interpreting them, though I doubt even communists believe anything that strange.) But any similar constraint, that beliefs should be reasonable, or understandable, or consistent or whatever will suffer from a similar weakness.
This should all be familiar, and we Lewisians have a familiar answer to it. Among all the interpretations that satisfy the kind of Quinean/Davidsonian constrains that Gauker considers, only a handful assign natural meanings to each of the words in the language. Most of the deviant interpretations are, to put it mildly, deviant. They assign meanings like “being either blue and identical to o1 or not blue and not identical to o1” to simple words like blue. The correct interpretation of a system of representations is the one that (a) satisfies whatever Quinean/Davidsonian constraints that we settle on, and (b) assigns meanings that are as natural as possible to the lexical simples.
Gauker considers this response, which he quite rightly characterises as a preference for interpretations that “carve nature at the joints”, and has a rather dismissive response to it.
But this cannot be right either since we can certainly think about properties and kinds that do not carve nature at the joints such as dwellings, songs, dictators, and surprises, and our thoughts about these cannot be reduced to thoughts about properties that carve nature at the joints.
If, dear reader, you were hoping for an argument for the striking anti-reductionist claim at the end of that quote, your hopes will be dashed. This is taken to just be common knowledge, and indeed I suppose it is a pretty common opinion around the traps. But what of the more central claim, that the properties these words latch onto do not themselves “carve nature at the joints”? This seems in a way misguided to me.
It’s an important part of the Lewisian theory that, somehow or other, naturalness comes in degrees. This might be because it’s just a primitive fact that some properties are more natural than others, or it might be because various properties stand in relations of greater or lesser proximity to the core natural properties. (I think Lewis preferred the latter reason, I prefer the former, but not much turns on this.) So dwellings, songs, dictators, and surprises may not denote perfectly natural properties, but the properties they denote are more natural than some. Dont all surprises have more in common, objectively speaking, than things that are surprises on Sundays or murders on Mondays or tea-parties on Tuesdays? This is just what we mean when we say that surprise carves nature at a joint. (If I knew more anatomy I’d make a little joke here about it being a not very central joint, more like a metatarsal than a knee, but I don’t even know whether a metatarsal is a joint, so I won’t risk making anatomical jokes.)
Anyway, the whole point of this wasn’t to just complain about Gauker, or to stand up for communists, but to see what people thought about a certain kind of theory. I quite like the Lewisian theory, that we solve problems to do with radical under-determination by appeal to objective similarities in nature, and that these similarities don’t just help us distinguish ELECTRON from SCHMECTRON, but also SURPRISE from SCHMPRISE (where of course schmectrons and schmprises are generally but not always electrons and surprises). This all seems to me very plausible metaphysically and semantically. One particular reason it appeals to me is that it seems to get just the right amount of indeterminacy in semantics, but that’s a story for another post. But here Gauker, who for all his radicalism is not utterly insensitive to mainstream opinion, and certainly is a first-class philosopher, is basically just dismissing it. Is Lewisian semantics really that far from respectable opinion nowadays? I don’t mind too much if it isn’t that respectable. I quite like having radical views, especially when I’m right. But it would be a little disappointing to find out everyone else is so ignorant or misguided.