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Michael Dummett is one of the most important and influential of contemporary philosophers; this book covers his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of language, two branches of philosophy that arc closely intertwined. It contains twenty essays that have not appeared in his previous collections Truth and Other Enigmas and Frege and Other Philosophers; of these essays, three are previously unpublished, one appears here in English for the first time, and others have been difficult of access until now. The two central questions addressed here arc: What is it for a word or a sentence to mean what it does? What is it for a statement to be true? These fundamental questions continue to perplex philosophers. This collection represents a fascinating and indispensable contribution to the project of resolving this perplexity. ‘this is an impressive collection by one of the most influential of living English philosophers... Reading him, one has the impression of being at the hub of the discussion in the philosophy of language and his points in other areas are invariably authoritative and original. It is welcome as an elaborate and useful contribution to contemporary philosophical thinking.’ History and Philosophy of Logic Michael Dummett is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in the University of Oxford. He was Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford 1979-1992, and is an Emeritus Fellow of New College. r I ■' > ■ J < ISBN 90000 Clarendon Press is the academic imprint of OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 9 780198 236214 THE SEAS OF LANGUAGE Michael Dummett CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard specification in order to ensure its continuing availability OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Ina, New York © Michael Dummett 1993 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 0-19-823621-2 To Paul, Virginia, Charlotte, Hannah, and Esther See how high the seas of language run here! (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I. 194) Preface This book contains almost all my articles and essays on metaphysics and the philosophy of language—two branches of philosophy that I regard as closely intertwined—that have been published or are shortly to be published and were not contained in Truth and Other Enigmas (London, 1978) or in Frege and Other Philosophers (Oxford, 1991). It also contains one essay, ‘Could there be Unicorns?’, not previously published in English, and two neither forthcoming nor previously published in any language. Of these, ‘Truth and Meaning' was written for publication; the other is my valedictory lecture ‘Realism and Anti Realism’. Apart from the publication of matter not published previously, the chief purpose of such a collection as this is the convenience of readers, who no longer have to strive to remember in which journal or book a given article or essay was published, nor to go from one to another if they are wishing to read more than one of them at a time. (It is also a great convenience to the author, who no longer has to keep messy and incomplete piles of offprints; but that is obviously an inadequate justification for publishing such a book.) A further purpose is to introduce readers to some articles or essays they had previously missed; the author hopes, moreover, that they will be prompted to reread some that they had not missed but have now largely forgotten. Among the earliest of the items in this collection to be written are ‘Does Quantification Involve Identity?’ and ‘Mood, Force, and Convention’, both composed in 1976 and intended for Festschrifts, the former for one in honour of Peter Geach and the latter for one in honour of Donald Davidson. Those that were published earliest are the two—a lecture and an essay—entitled ‘What is a Theory of Meaning?’, both of which appeared before the compilation of Truth and Other Enigmas. They were excluded from that book because at the time I intended to make them the first two chapters of a short book, with, perhaps, only one other chapter. That project was never carried out, because, by the time that I might have started work on the third chapter, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (II)’ no longer seemed to me satisfactory. Some evidences of this dissatisfaction appear in other essays included here, for instance in ‘What do I Know when I Know a Language?’ It is to the two essays called ‘What is a Theory of Meaning?’ that I shall principally direct my comments in this Preface. From the start, I have felt an awkwardness about the first of the pair, for the following reason. My memory was, and is, that I experienced great illumination from listening to a discussion after a lecture of Donald Davidson’s which I attended when on a visit to the United States. In the course of this discussion, as I remember it, Davidson answered an objector by saying viii Preface that, according to his conception of a theory of meaning, such a theory was not intended to convey the concepts expressible in the object-language, but to convey an understanding of that language to one who already had those concepts. This struck me as a luminous way of expressing his idea of what he was after in his discussions of a theory of meaning, and also as focusing very precisely on the difference between the ways he and I conceived of such a theory. The two of us each contributed to a series of Wolfson Lectures held in Oxford in 1974 (and published as Mind and Language, edited by Samuel Guttenplan, Oxford, 1975); by an odd coincidence, out of the six lecturers, all but the two Americans were Catholics, although you could not have inferred that from their lectures. When I came to compose my lecture, I decided to treat of the conception of a theory of meaning I remembered Davidson to have expressed with such clarity, and borrowed that formulation for my characterization of what I called a ‘modest’ theory of meaning: but I was embarrassed whether or not to acknowledge the source of the formulation. On the one hand, I surely owed it to Davidson to do so; on the other, it is unfair to saddle people in public, and particularly in print, with things they said in discussion, which may well not have expressed their considered view. In the event, I decided, with some uneasiness, not to make any acknowledgement. I was later relieved, but at the same time greatly surprised, when Davidson, in informal conversation, declared that he had never intended a theory of meaning, as he conceived it, to be modest in my sense, and had never asserted it to be. My memory is extremely unreliable; in particular, I have often discovered that people never said what I thought I remembered them as saying. One possibility, therefore, is that Davidson had not said what I remembered as having afforded me so much illumination, and that I misunderstood him at the time or misremembered him later. Another, of course, is that he had forgotten saying something by which he would not wish to stand. Either way, I am glad that I made no acknowledgement to him in the lecture. I nevertheless retain an uneasy feeling that I failed to avow a debt; I take this opportunity to thank him for saying whatever it was he said that prompted me, by one means or another, to frame an idea which I believe to be fruitful. The formulation, as I gave it in the lecture, was faulty; the error was corrected in ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (II)’. It plainly cannot be demanded of a ‘full-blooded’ theory of meaning that it should be so framed as to convey every concept expressed by a word in the language to one who does not possess it; some concepts must be taken as basic, and others cannot by their nature be conveyed by means of a verbal explanation, and hence by any statement that can be incorporated in a theory of meaning. The most that can be generally demanded of such a theory, therefore, is that, in the course of specifying what is required for a speaker to grasp the sense of a given word, it "should explain what it is for him to possess the concept it expresses. I do not Preface ix believe, however, that this means that conceptual analysis has no contribution to make to a theory of meaning. A speaker, to be credited with an understanding of the expressions of a language, must manifest his grasp of connections between them; it is those connections that conceptual analysis aims to make explicit. When the concept expressed by some word of the language can be wholly or partly conveyed by verbal explanation, such an explanation may reasonably be expected to be incorporated into a full- blooded meaning-theory. After giving the lecture, I thought of a way of construing Davidson’s conception of a theory of meaning as not being modest, by giving full weight to the holistic component in his thinking, which I had ignored in the lecture. This is expounded in the Appendix to the lecture, which was written for the published version in Mind and Language. Before this, however, Davidson had, with the greatest mildness, voiced, again in private conversation, a complaint I had not anticipated, that it had been he who introduced the notion of a theory of meaning for a specific language, whereas in the lecture, I had treated it as a notion in common currency, on which he had put a particular interpretation. The phrase “theory of meaning is, of course, quite old, in that use in which it denotes a branch of philosophy, in analogy with “theory of knowledge”; this differs sharply from the conception of a detailed theory relating to a particular language and giving the meanings of all words and sentences of the language. Davidson has operated with hat conception since the earliest of his published papers on the philosophy of language (that is, since 1967). Iff have borrowed it and used it without proper acknowledgement, I hereby express my thanks and my apologies. I find it impossible to be sure whether this is so, or whether there is merely a partia convergence of ideas. Davidson’s earliest relevant essays antedate my first book, Fiege. Philosophy of Language (London, 1973), in the preface to which I acknowledged Davidson’s general influence on me so an examination of it does not settle the matter. Looking through it, I find the S ffeTnt ±«°ofT?ing t reP.eatedly- and with no care to distinguish different senses of it. Sometimes it is used in the old sense; more often as denoting a comprehensive theory describing the workings of‘language’, with all its component expressions, and thereby explaining what constitutes the possession by those expressions of the meanings that they have, but as if there was only a single human language; but sometimes (e.g np 106 397 413-17 432—6, 460-1) as denoting a theory of this kind reiafingm a ita Ji spec fie language. So I certainly had that concept then, without keeping it at all sharply m focus; but that does not show that I did not derive it from Davidson. For any injustice or ungraetousness of which I may have been unintentionally guilty, I hereby sincerely apologize. J 'What is a Theory of Meaning? (!!)■ was meant, when it was written, to be a defimuve statement of my views upon the topic; that, indeed, was what Gareth