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Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? For Jane Frances Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? Ian Hacking CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521099981 © Cambridge University Press 1975 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1975 Reprinted 1976, 1978, 1981, 1982, 1985, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1995, 1997 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congess Catalogue Card Number 75-19432 isbn 978-0-521-20923-6 Hardback isbn 978-0-521-09998-1 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel timetables, and other factual information given in this work is correct at the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter. Contents Preface vii 1 Strategy 1 A. The heyday of ideas 2 Thomas Hobbes' mental discourse 15 3 Port Royal's ideas 26 4 Bishop Berkeley's abstractions 34 5 Nobody's theory of meaning 43 B. The heyday of meanings 6 Noam Chomsky's innatism 57 7 Bertrand Russell's acquaintance 70 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein's articulation 82 9 A. J. Ayer's verification 93 10 Norman Malcolm's dreams 103 C. The heyday of sentences 11 Paul Feyerabend's theories 115 12 Donald Davidson's truth 129 I. Tarski's theory 130 II. Problems and extensions 134 III. The theory of meaning 140 IV. The verification of J-sentences 144 V. Charity and hu- manity 146 VI. The determinacy of translation 150 13 Why does language matter to philosophy? 157 A. The heyday of ideas 163 B. The heyday of meanings 170 C. The heyday of sentences 177 Bibliography 188 Index 197 Preface This book comes from a course of lectures first given in Cambridge in the Easter Term of 1972 and repeated, in a revised and augmented form, in Michaelmas 1973. Quite a lot of people came, ranging from freshmen to graduate students and faculty. Many of them had found themselves dis- satisfied with recent linguistic philosophy, and yet knew that in some way language has deeply mattered to philosophy. I tried to describe, in a few case studies, some remarkable ways in which language has mattered, and then speculated on why this should have been so. The approach was often more his- torical than the audience expected, but to understand why language mattered we had to think not only how it has mattered but also when it has mattered. None of us was con- cerned with boring and ephemeral questions such as whether linguistic analysis is worthy or iniquitous. We were trying to understand the structure of something very striking about philosophical speculation. I hope that students elsewhere with doubts and fascinations similar to ours may find this book helpful. 1. Strategy I shall not begin by saying why language matters to philosophy, but start with some evidence, examining a few familiar problems in metaphysics and epistemology that have been influenced by theories about language. The main body of the book will illustrate how language has, from time to time, mattered to philosophers. It is a collection of case studies, which can usefully introduce newcomers to the subject. Only the final chapter tries to guess about the nature of language and philosophy in an attempt to explain some features of the case studies. Only then do I try to answer the question Why does language matter? The final conjectures, although by no means original, are at present non-standard. The reader is not obliged to accept them. In the case studies I aim at objectivity, providing data on the basis of which you can judge the situation for yourself. This objectivity is slightly spurious because I inevitably select and interpret the data in my own way. I try to refrain from editorializing until the end. Before getting down to work, a variety of remarks are needed, mostly negative. First, many philosophers writing in English seem to have settled down to discuss the pure theory of meaning. They do not appear to study language and meaning in order to understand some philosophical problem- what we could call applied philosophy of language-but write almost exclusively about the nature of meaning itself. A sizeable proportion of potential philosophy graduate students applying to English-speaking universities say they want to do