Knowledge and Language BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Editors ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University JURGEN RENN, Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science KOSTAS GAVROGLU, University of Athens Editorial Advisory Board THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University MARX W. WARTOFSKYt, (Editor 1960-1997) VOLUME 227 KNOWLEDGE AND LANGUAGE Selected Essays of L. Jonathan Cohen by L. JONATHAN COHEN Queen's College, Oxford, and Fellow of the British Academy, United Kingdom edited and with an introduction by JAMES LOGUE Somerville College, Oxford, United Kingdom SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Ubrary of Congress. ISBN 978-90-481-5955-0 ISBN 978-94-017-2020-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2020-5 Printed on acid-free paper AII Rights Reserved © 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002 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. Contents Preface vii Publisher's Note ix Introduction xi James Logue 1 On the Project of A Universal Character 1 2 On A Concept Of Degree Of Grammaticalness 15 3 The semantics of metaphor 27 4 Can The Logic Of Indirect Discourse Be Formalised? 41 5 Some Remarks On Grice's Views About The Logical Particles Of 49 Natural Language 6 Can The Conversationalist Hypothesis Be Defended? 67 7 How Is Conceptual Innovation Possible? 77 8 Natural Language Definitions 95 9 A Problem About Ambiguity In Ttuth-Theoretical Semantics 113 10 The Individuation of Proper Names 119 11 Third World Epistemology 141 12 Guessing 155 v vi KNOWLEDGE AND LANGUAGE 13 Bayesianism versus Baconianism in the Evaluation of Medical Diagnoses 175 14 Are People Programmed to Commit Fallacies? 195 15 Inductive Logic 1945-1977 221 16 Some Historical Remarks On the Baconian Conception of Probability 245 17 Twelve Questions about Keynes's Concept of Weight 261 18 Some Steps towards a General Theory of Relevance 279 19 Should A Jury Say What It Believes Or What It Accepts? 293 20 Are There Ethical Reasons For Being, Or Not Being, A Scientific 313 Realist? Preface I am very grateful to Kluwer Academic Publishers for the opportunity to republish these articles about knowledge and language. The Introduction to the volume has been written by James Logue, and I need to pay a very sincerely intended tribute to the care and professionalism which he has devoted to every feature of its production. My thanks are also due to Matthew MeG rattan for his technical as sistance in scanning the articles onto disk and formatting them. 1. Jonathan Cohen vii Publisher's Note Thanks are due to the following publishers for permission to reproduce the articles in this volume. Paper 1 On the project of a universal character. Oxford University Press. Paper 2 On a concept of a degree of grammaticalness. Logique et Analyse. Paper 3 The semantics of metaphor. Cambridge University Press. Paper 4 Can the logic of indirect discourse be formalised? The Association for Symbolic Logic. Paper 5 Some remarks on Grice's views about the logical particles of natural language. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Paper 6 Can the conversationalist hypothesis be defended? Kluwer Academic Publishers. Paper 7 How is conceptual innovation possible? Kluwer Academic Publishers. Paper 8 Should natural language definitions be insulated from, or interactive with, one another in sentence composition? Kluwer Academic Publish ers. Paper 9 A problem about truth-functional semantics. Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd. Paper 10 The individuation of proper names. Oxford University Press. Paper 11 Some comments on third world epistemology. Oxford University Press. Paper 12 Guessing. The Aristotelian Society. Paper 13 Bayesianism versus Baconianism in the evaluation of medical diagnoses. Oxford University Press. Paper 14 Are people programmed to commit fallacies? Basil Blackwell Publish ers, Ltd. Paper 15 Inductive logic 1945-1977. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Paper 16 Some historical remarks on the Baconian conception of probability. The .Tournai of the History of Ideas. Paper 17 Twelve questions about Keynes's concept of weight. Oxford University Press. Paper 18 Some steps towards a general theory of relevance. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Paper 19 Should a jury say what it believes or what it accepts? The Cardozo Law Review. Paper 20 Are there ethical reasons for being, or not being, a scientific realist? Kluwer Academic Publishers. ix Introduction James Logue It is a privilege and a pleasure to be asked to write an introduction to this collection of papers by my former teacher and colleague L. Jonathan Cohen. Jonathan Cohen's career to date as a professional philosopher has spanned more than fifty years. During this time he has produced a very large body of extremely influential and important work - indeed, a great deal of it seminal and ground breaking - in philosophy of science, the philosophy of induction and probability, epistemology, philosophical logic, the philosophy of language, jurisprudence and political philosophy, among other fields. The papers in philosophy of language and episte mology which make up this volume exhibit all the qualities most charac teristic of Cohen's work: originality and insight, a distinctive analytical perspective, great clarity, rigour and cogency of argument, elegance and wit. Their reproduction here will, I hope, be a stimulus to new work on a wide range of important topics. With the obvious exception of the previous paragraph, I have written this introduction in consultation with Jonathan Cohen: I hope that that has saved me from misrepresenting his views. But, of course, it should not be taken as a statement of his own overview of the papers. As to how it reflects my own views, it would obviously be inappropriate for an introduction of this sort to stray into becoming a critique: so, in summarising the papers, I have resisted the strong temptation to add comments of my own, except in a couple of clearly signalled instances. It would be a mistake to see these twenty papers, written over a period of more than forty years, as part of a single consciously unified project. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of continuity and thematic unity as the papers move through philosophy of language via general epistemology to confirmation, induction and probability. It is, perhaps, easier to see this continuity by tracing a route backwards through the papers (not chrono logically, but as they appear here). The last group of papers is largely Xl XII KNOWLEDGE AND LANGUAGE concerned with how empirical knowledge may be acquired through ev idence in states of uncertainty. The middle group explores how such evidence often requires or results in conceptual innovation and is given to us in language the meaning of which is not always easy to determine. The first group asks how a theory of meaning can be constructed both for natural and for artificial languages. {That is, so to speak, the logical ordering of the thought behind each paper: the present order has been chosen to facilitate thinking one's way into the issues.} This thematic unity is underpinned by Cohen's common commitment to the richness both of language and of enquiry and his pluralist opposition to simplis tic and dogmatic formalizations such as are offered by certain kinds of compositional semantics and by monistic interpretations of probability. In the remainder of this introduction, where I summarise each paper in turn, I shall regularly draw attention to the many connections among them which are generated by these threads which run through much of Cohen's philosophy. The first ten papers focus on issues in the philosophy of language. Paper 1 (On the Project of a Universal Character [1954]) begins by attacking a widely held view that Leibniz was the solitary originator in the seventeenth century of the project of developing a 'universal char acter' - an artificial language, suitable for the new science of the day. Leibniz intended his universal character to fill three main roles. It was to be an auxiliary language facilitating communication between scientists of different nations; it was to act as a simplified notation for science; and it was to be an instrument for discovery and demonstration. But a number of Leibniz's contemporaries and predecessors also articulated and attempted to carry out just such a project. Bacon [1605, 1623] and Descartes [1629] both discussed its possibility and desirability; from Descartes' time onwards the project seems to have become a common place, with numerous writers - the best known being Mersenne, Dal garno and Wilkins - carrying it through in some detail and with a clear commitment to the need for a universal character to fill the three roles Leibniz identifies. What was distinctive about Leibniz's position was solely his conception of a calculus (independently important as a progen itor of modern formal logic) which would operate on the formulae of his character so as to lay bare the implications of what was already known. Cohen argues that the failure of these seventeenth-century projects - which contributed nothing towards either enhancing international com munication or promoting scientific discovery - has implications for how we now ought to view the relationship between science and language. It is a fundamental mistake, he says [po 11] "to think that the same language could serve adequately both as an unspecialised international
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