Philosophy of Modern Language

The next important step was taken by a number of leading physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers who formed a group in Vienna known as the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle was committed to a repudiation of metaphysics in favor of science, and they saw in the ideas of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein the philosophical foundation for their movement. They embraced a philosophy of "logical positivism." At the heart of this movement was the thesis, known as the principle of verification, that only sentences making empirically confirmable claims are meaningful at all. Unverifiable sentences are nonsense. In the 1930s, many positivists had to flee Austria and Germany. As émigrés, they exercised a profound influence on philosophy in the English-speaking world.

Challenges to the positivist conception of language.

The 1950s and 1960s saw a reaction against the positivist theory of language. The challenge had two sources: the ordinary language movement of Oxford University and a powerful critique of the very idea of meaning by the American philosopher W. V. O. Quine of Harvard.

Ordinary language movement.

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953) and J. L. Austin's writings were the mainsprings of the ordinary language movement. These philosophers retained the positivist suspicion of metaphysics as confused theorizing, but they rejected the celebration of science at the expense of all other forms of understanding and its theory of language. Wittgenstein and Austin, in their different ways, argued that the theories of language represented by Frege, the Tractatus, and the positivist movement are themselves as confused as the metaphysical theories they deride. One of the striking consequences of the verificationist theory of meaning is that ordinary objects, from pigs to chairs to electrons, are logical constructions out of our sensory experiences, a view called "phenomenalism." Phenomenalism is the theory that all empirical sentences are analyzable into sets of sentences about actual and possible observations that would confirm (or disconfirm) the truth of the sentence. Meaning is ultimately rooted in sensory experience. "This is a penny" is thus analyzable into a set of experiential sentences: "this is copper-colored, round, hard and cool; or this is copper-colored, elliptically shaped, hard and cool; or …" The full analysis would consist of a potentially infinite disjunction of experiential sentences, one for each possible experience of a penny.

Critics argued that the positivist theory is belied by the realities of ordinary language. They used nuanced descriptions of our actual uses of language to challenge the claims both that language has an underlying logical form revealed through analysis and that referential theories of meaning, and phenomenalism in particular, are correct. Early referential theories state that the semantic relation between words and the world is fixed by ostensive definitions, that is, by naming an object. But ostensive definition cannot fix meaning since any object has many distinct properties, which the ostensive definition in itself does not distinguish. Defining "horse" by pointing to Silver does not show whether the expression is intended to be a proper name or to pick out Silver's horsiness or his being four-legged or white. So, it is concluded, reference cannot explain meaning, but presupposes it.

Meaning seems better explained in terms of how words are used in connection with our actions and interactions with the world and each other. Meaning is not the denoted object, but the use to which the word is put in practice. This idea of meaning as use brings with it a holistic conception of meaning rather than the atomistic conception of referential theories of meaning. A number of different positions developed within this movement: (1) Some advocate a use theory of meaning, which replaces the idea of language as a single systematic totality with that of an array of overlapping ways of using language. It replaces the search for necessary and sufficient experiential conditions for the applicability of an expression in favor of criterial grounds, where criteria constitute necessarily good evidence for the presence of some object while nonetheless falling short of entailment of the presence of that object. (2) J. L. Austin and others introduced the speech act theory of language, according to which the act of utterance and the context within which it occurs is the starting point for a theory of meaning. This too leads to a holistic conception of meaning and blurs the distinction between what belongs to semantics (the meanings of our words) and what belongs to pragmatics (the background and contextual considerations that inform actual speech). (3) Lastly, there are those who see in the ordinary language critique of the representational picture a rejection of the possibility of theorizing about language at all. There can only be the diagnosis of error in any such attempt.

Quine's philosophy of language.

The second great challenge to the dominant picture of language comes from W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000) with his critique of the distinction between analytic and synthetic truth ("Two Dogmas of Empiricism," 1951) and his more general attack on the very idea of meaning (Word and Object, 1960). Sentences that are analytically true are true solely in virtue of the meanings of the constituent words. The truth of synthetic sentences, on the other hand, is a function both of the meanings of the words and of the nature of the world. It is the difference between "Bachelors are unmarried" and "Sam is a bachelor." Quine argues that the sentences we accept as true hang together holistically in a "web of belief" that can be adjusted at any point. He concludes that there is no point in classifying some sentences as true by meaning and some as empirical.

In Word and Object, Quine introduces what proves to be the greatest challenge to the dominant view. With "the museum myth of meanings" (words as labels for objects) fully discredited, we must look at language in a new way. The way to understand meaning is to ask what translation preserves. Much translation is customary, so we should look at radical translation. The situation of radical translation is one in which the linguist seeks to translate a language that is wholly alien to him. We find that there is no uniquely correct way to specify the translations of the unknown language into the known language ("the indeterminacy of translation") and no way to specify determinately what objects or properties the terms refer to ("the inscrutability of reference"). Further Quine attacks the idea that language has a logical form that is captured by formal logic. He argues that such an ideal is at best the regimentation of a part of our language. Quine's challenge set the agenda for the 1960s and 1970s.