Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language and reality. For continental philosophers, however, the philosophy of language tends to be dealt with, not as a separate topic, but as a part of logic. (See the section "Language and continental philosophy" below.)

First, philosophers of language inquire into the nature of meaning, and seek to explain what it means to "mean" something. Topics in that vein include the nature of synonymy, the origins of meaning itself, and how any meaning can ever really be known. Another project under this heading of special interest to analytic philosophers of language is the investigation into the manner in which sentences are composed into a meaningful whole out of the meaning of its parts.

Second, they would like to understand what speakers and listeners do with language in communication, and how it is used socially. Specific interests may include the topics of language learning, language creation, and speech acts.

Third, they would like to know how language relates to the minds of both the speaker and the interpreter. Of specific interest is the grounds for successful translation of words into other words.

Finally, they investigate how language and meaning relate to truth and the world. Philosophers tend to be less concerned with which sentences are actually true, and more with what kinds of meanings can be true or false. A truth-oriented philosopher of language might wonder whether or not a meaningless sentence can be true or false, or whether or not sentences can express propositions about things that do not exist, rather than the way sentences are used.

History[link]

Antiquity[link]

Linguistic speculation in India is attested since the Vedic period (roughly 1500 BC) with the deification of vāk, "speech". In the West, inquiry into language stretches back to the 5th century BC with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.^[1] Both in India and in Greece, linguistic speculation predates the emergence of grammatical traditions of systematic description of language, which emerged around the 7th century BC in India (see Yāska), and around the 3rd century BC in Greece (see Rhianus).

In the dialogue Cratylus, Plato considered the question of whether the names of things were determined by convention or by nature. He criticized conventionalism because it led to the bizarre consequence that anything can be conventionally denominated by any name. Hence, it cannot account for the correct or incorrect application of a name. He claimed that there was a natural correctness to names. To do this, he pointed out that compound words and phrases have a range of correctness. He also argued that primitive names had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments. For example, for Plato the letter l and its sound represented the idea of softness. However, by the end of the Cratylus, he had admitted that some social conventions were also involved, and that there were faults in the idea that phonemes had individual meanings.^[2]

Aristotle concerned himself with the issues of logic, categories, and meaning creation. He separated all things into categories of species and genus. He thought that the meaning of a predicate was established through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. This theory later came to be called nominalism.^[3] However, since Aristotle took these similarities to be constituted by a real commonality of form, he is more often considered a proponent of "moderate realism".

The Stoic philosophers made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives (names or epithets), conjunctions and articles. They also developed a sophisticated doctrine of the lektón associated with each sign of a language, but distinct from both the sign itself and the thing to which it refers. This lektón was the meaning (or sense) of every term. The lektón of a sentence is what we would now call its proposition. Only propositions were considered "truth-bearers" or "truth-vehicles" (i.e., they could be called true or false) while sentences were simply their vehicles of expression. Different lektá could also express things besides propositions, such as commands, questions and exclamations.^[4]

Middle Ages[link]

Medieval philosophers were greatly interested in the subtleties of language and its usage. For many scholastics, this interest was provoked by the necessity of translating Greek texts into Latin. There were several noteworthy philosophers of language in the medieval period. According to Peter J. King, (although this has been disputed), Peter Abelard anticipated the modern ideas of sense and reference.^[5] Also, William of Ockham's Summa Logicae brought forward one of the first serious proposals for codifying a mental language.^[6]

The scholastics of the high medieval period, such as Occam and John Duns Scotus, considered logic to be a scientia sermocinalis (science of language). The result of their studies was the elaboration of linguistic-philosophical notions whose complexity and subtlety has only recently come to be appreciated. Many of the most interesting problems of modern philosophy of language were anticipated by medieval thinkers. The phenomena of vagueness and ambiguity were analyzed intensely, and this led to an increasing interest in problems related to the use of syncategorematic words such as and, or, not, if, and every. The study of categorematic words (or terms) and their properties was also developed greatly.^[7] One of the major developments of the scholastics in this area was the doctrine of the suppositio.^[8] The suppositio of a term is the interpretation that is given of it in a specific context. It can be proper or improper (as when it is used in metaphor, metonyms and other figures of speech). A proper suppositio, in turn, can be either formal or material accordingly when it refers to its usual non-linguistic referent (as in "Charles is a man"), or to itself as a linguistic entity (as in "Charles has seven letters"). Such a classification scheme is the precursor of modern distinctions between use and mention, and between language and metalanguage.^[8]

There is a tradition called speculative grammar which existed from the 11th to the 13th century. Leading scholars included, among others, Martin of Dace and Thomas of Erfurth.

Early modern period[link]

Linguists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods such as Johannes Goropius Becanus, Athanasius Kircher and John Wilkins were infatuated with the idea of a philosophical language reversing the confusion of tongues, influenced by the gradual discovery of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs (Hieroglyphica). This thought parallels the idea that there might be a universal language of music.

European scholarship began to absorb the Indian linguistic tradition only from the mid-18th century, pioneered by Jean François Pons and Henry Thomas Colebrooke (the editio princeps of Varadarāja, a 17th century Sanskrit grammarian, dating to 1849).

In the early 19th century, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard insisted that language ought to play a larger role in Western philosophy. He argues that philosophy has not sufficiently focused on the role language plays in cognition and that future philosophy ought to proceed with a conscious focus on language:

If the claim of philosophers to be unbiased were all it pretends to be, it would also have to take account of language and its whole significance in relation to speculative philosophy ... Language is partly something originally given, partly that which develops freely. And just as the individual can never reach the point at which he becomes absolutely independent ... so too with language.^[9]

Hence, language began to play a central role in Western philosophy in the late 19th century, especially with Port Royal in France, and in the English-speaking world and other parts of Europe. The foundational work was Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, published posthumously in 1916.

The philosophy of language then became so pervasive that for a time, in analytic philosophy circles, philosophy as a whole was understood to be a matter of philosophy of language. In the 20th century, "language" became an even more central theme within the most diverse traditions of philosophy. The phrase "the linguistic turn" was used to describe the noteworthy emphasis that modern-day philosophers put upon language.^[7]

Major topics and sub-fields[link]

Composition and parts[link]

It has long been known that there are different parts of speech. One part of the common sentence is the lexical word, which is composed of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. A major question in the field – perhaps the single most important question for formalist and structuralist thinkers – is, "How does the meaning of a sentence emerge out of its parts?"

Many aspects of the problem of the composition of sentences are addressed in the field of linguistics of syntax. Philosophical semantics tends to focus on the principle of compositionality to explain the relationship between meaningful parts and whole sentences. The principle of compositionality asserts that a sentence can be understood on the basis of the meaning of the parts of the sentence (i.e., words, morphemes) along with an understanding of its structure (i.e., syntax, logic).^[10]

It is possible to use the concept of functions to describe more than just how lexical meanings work: they can also be used to describe the meaning of a sentence. Take, for a moment, the sentence "The horse is red". We may consider "the horse" to be the product of a propositional function. A propositional function is an operation of language that takes an entity (in this case, the horse) as an input and outputs a semantic fact (i.e., the proposition that is represented by "The horse is red"). In other words, a propositional function is like an algorithm. The meaning of "red" in this case is whatever takes the entity "the horse" and turns it into the statement, "The horse is red."^[11]

Linguists have developed at least two general methods of understanding the relationship between the parts of a linguistic string and how it is put together: syntactic and semantic trees. Syntactic trees draw upon the words of a sentence with the grammar of the sentence in mind. Semantic trees, on the other hand, focus upon the role of the meaning of the words and how those meanings combine to provide insight onto the genesis of semantic facts.

Nature of meaning[link]

Generally speaking, there have been at least six distinctive explanations of what a linguistic "meaning" is. Each has been associated with its own body of literature.

1. Idea theories of meaning, most commonly associated with the British empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, claim that meanings are purely mental contents provoked by signs.^[12] Although this view of meaning has been beset by a number of problems from the beginning (see the main article for details), interest in it has been renewed by some contemporary theorists under the guise of semantic internalism.^[13]
2. Truth-conditional theories hold meaning to be the conditions under which an expression may be true or false. This tradition goes back at least to Frege and is associated with a rich body of modern work, spearheaded by philosophers like Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson.^[14][15]
3. Theories of language use, for example theories by the later Wittgenstein, helped inaugurate the idea of "meaning as use", and a communitarian view of language. Wittgenstein was interested in the way in which the communities use language, and how far it can be taken.^[16] It is also associated with P. F. Strawson, John Searle, Robert Brandom, and others.^[17]
4. Constructivist theories of language are connected to the revolutionary idea claiming that speech is not only passively describing a given reality, but it can change the (social) reality it is describing through speech acts, which for linguistics was as revolutionary discovery as for physics was the discovery that measurement itself can change the measured reality itself. Speech act theory was developed by J. L. Austin, although other previous thinkers have had similar ideas.
5. Reference theories of meaning, also known collectively as semantic externalism, view meaning to be equivalent to those things in the world that are actually connected to signs. There are two broad subspecies of externalism: social and environmental. The first is most closely associated with Tyler Burge and the second with Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke and others.^[18][19][20]
6. Verificationist theories of meaning are generally associated with the early 20th century movement of logical positivism. The traditional formulation of such a theory is that the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification or falsification. In this form, the thesis was abandoned after the acceptance by most philosophers of the Duhem–Quine thesis of confirmation holism after the publication of Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism.^[21] However, Michael Dummett has advocated a modified form of verificationism since the 1970s. In this version, the comprehension (and hence meaning) of a sentence consists in the hearer's ability to recognize the demonstration (mathematical, empirical or other) of the truth of the sentence.^[22]
7. A pragmatist theory of meaning is any theory in which the meaning (or understanding) of a sentence is determined by the consequences of its application. Dummett attributes such a theory of meaning to Charles Sanders Peirce and other early 20th century American pragmatists.^[22]

Other theories exist to discuss non-linguistic meaning (i.e., meaning as conveyed by body language, meanings as consequences, etc.)^[23]

References[link]

Investigations into how language interacts with the world are called theories of reference. Gottlob Frege was an advocate of a mediated reference theory. Frege divided the semantic content of every expression, including sentences, into two components: sense and meaning. The sense of a sentence is the thought that it expresses. Such a thought is abstract, universal and objective. The sense of any sub-sentential expression consists in its contribution to the thought that its embedding sentence expresses. Senses determine reference and are also the modes of presentation of the objects to which expressions refer. Referents are the objects in the world that words pick out. The senses of sentences are thoughts, while their referents are truth values (true or false). The referents of sentences embedded in propositional attitude ascriptions and other opaque contexts are their usual senses.^[24]

Bertrand Russell, in his later writings and for reasons related to his theory of acquaintance in epistemology, held that the only directly referential expressions are, what he called, "logically proper names". Logically proper names are such terms as I, now, here and other indexicals.^[25][26] He viewed proper names of the sort described above as "abbreviated definite descriptions". Hence Barack H. Obama may be an abbreviation for "the current President of the United States and husband of Michelle Obama". Definite descriptions are denoting phrases (see On Denoting) which are analyzed by Russell into existentially quantified logical constructions. Such phrases denote in the sense that there is an object that satisfies the description. However, such objects are not to be considered meaningful on their own, but have meaning only in the proposition expressed by the sentences of which they are a part. Hence, they are not directly referential in the same way as logically proper names, for Russell.^[27][28]

On Frege's account, any referring expression has a sense as well as a referent. Such a "mediated reference" view has certain theoretical advantages over Mill's view. For example, co-referential names, such as Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain, cause problems for a directly referential view because it is possible for someone to hear "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" and be surprised – thus, their cognitive content seems different.

Despite the differences between the views of Frege and Russell, they are generally lumped together as descriptivists about proper names. Such descriptivism was criticized in Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity.

Kripke put forth what has come to be known as "the modal argument" (or "argument from rigidity"). Consider the name Aristotle and the descriptions "the greatest student of Plato", "the founder of logic" and "the teacher of Alexander". Aristotle obviously satisfies all of the descriptions (and many of the others we commonly associate with him), but it is not necessarily true that if Aristotle existed then Aristotle was any one, or all, of these descriptions. Aristotle may well have existed without doing any single one of the things for which he is known to posterity. He may have existed and not have become known to posterity at all or he may have died in infancy. Suppose that Aristotle is associated by Mary with the description “the last great philosopher of antiquity” and (the actual) Aristotle died in infancy. Then Mary’s description would seem to refer to Plato. But this is deeply counterintuitive. Hence, names are rigid designators, according to Kripke. That is, they refer to the same individual in every possible world in which that individual exists. In the same work, Kripke articulated several other arguments against "Frege-Russell" descriptivism.^[20]

Mind and language[link]

Innateness and learning[link]

Some of the major issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind are also dealt with in modern psycholinguistics. Some important questions are How much of language is innate? Is language acquisition a special faculty in the mind? What is the connection between thought and language?

There are three general perspectives on the issue of language learning. The first is the behaviorist perspective, which dictates that not only is the solid bulk of language learned, but it is learned via conditioning. The second is the hypothesis testing perspective, which understands the child's learning of syntactic rules and meanings to involve the postulation and testing of hypotheses, through the use of the general faculty of intelligence. The final candidate for explanation is the innatist perspective, which states that at least some of the syntactic settings are innate and hardwired, based on certain modules of the mind.^[29][30]

There are varying notions of the structure of the brain when it comes to language. Connectionist models emphasize the idea that a person's lexicon and their thoughts operate in a kind of distributed, associative network.^[31] Nativist models assert that there are specialized devices in the brain that are dedicated to language acquisition.^[30] Computation models emphasize the notion of a representational language of thought and the logic-like, computational processing that the mind performs over them.^[32] Emergentist models focus on the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge out of simpler biological parts. Reductionist models attempt to explain higher-level mental processes in terms of the basic low-level neurophysiological activity of the brain.^[33]

Language and thought[link]

An important problem which touches both philosophy of language and philosophy of mind is to what extent language influences thought and vice-versa. There have been a number of different perspectives on this issue, each offering a number of insights and suggestions.

Linguists Sapir and Whorf suggested that language limited the extent to which members of a "linguistic community" can think about certain subjects (a hypothesis paralleled in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four).^[34] In other words, language was analytically prior to thought. Philosopher Michael Dummett is also a proponent of the "language-first" viewpoint.^[35]

The stark opposite to the Sapir–Whorf position is the notion that thought (or, more broadly, mental content) has priority over language. The "knowledge-first" position can be found, for instance, in the work of Paul Grice.^[35] Further, this view is closely associated with Jerry Fodor and his language of thought hypothesis. According to his argument, spoken and written language derive their intentionality and meaning from an internal language encoded in the mind.^[36] The main argument in favor of such a view is that the structure of thoughts and the structure of language seem to share a compositional, systematic character. Another argument is that it is difficult to explain how signs and symbols on paper can represent anything meaningful unless some sort of meaning is infused into them by the contents of the mind. One of the main arguments against is that such levels of language can lead to an infinite regress.^[36] In any case, many philosophers of mind and language, such as Ruth Millikan, Fred Dretske and Fodor, have recently turned their attention to explaining the meanings of mental contents and states directly.

Another tradition of philosophers has attempted to show that language and thought are coextensive – that there is no way of explaining one without the other. Donald Davidson, in his essay "Thought and Talk", argued that the notion of belief could only arise as a product of public linguistic interaction. Daniel Dennett holds a similar interpretationist view of propositional attitudes.^[37] To an extent, the theoretical underpinnings to cognitive semantics (including the notion of semantic framing) suggest the influence of language upon thought.^[38] However, the same tradition views meaning and grammar as a function of conceptualization, making it difficult to assess in any straightfoward way.

Some thinkers, like the ancient sophist Gorgias, have questioned whether or not language was capable of capturing thought at all.

There are studies that prove that languages shape how people understand causality. Some of them were performed by Lera Boroditsky. For example, English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for accidents. However, Spanish or Japanese speakers would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself." In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford University speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone was asked whether they could remember who did what. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers.^[40] In another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction", accompanied by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except in the last sentence where one used the agentive phrase "ripped the costume" while the other said "the costume ripped." The people who read "ripped the costume" blamed Justin Timberlake more.^{[citation needed]}

Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blue in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in Brazil, whose language has only terms like few and many instead of numerals, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.^[41]

In one study German and Spanish speakers were asked to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." This was the case even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender.^[42]

There are also studies in which people were asked to look at a series of images of imaginary aliens. Whether each alien was friendly or hostile was determined by certain subtle features but participants were not told what these were. They had to guess whether each alien was friendly or hostile, and after each response they were told if they were correct or not, helping them learn the subtle cues that distinguished friend from foe. A quarter of the participants were told in advance that the friendly aliens were called "leebish" and the hostile ones "grecious", while another quarter were told the opposite. For the rest, the aliens remained nameless. It was found that participants who were given names for the aliens learned to categorize the aliens far more quickly, reaching 80 per cent accuracy in less than half the time taken by those not told the names. By the end of the test, those told the names could correctly categorize 88 per cent of aliens, compared to just 80 per cent for the rest. It was concluded that naming objects helps us categorize and memorize them.

In another experiment a group of people was asked to view furniture from an IKEA catalog. Half the time they were asked to label the object - whether it was a chair or lamp, for example - while the rest of the time they had to say whether or not they liked it. It was found that when asked to label items, people were later less likely to recall the specific details of products, such as whether a chair had arms or not. It was concluded that labeling objects helps our minds build a prototype of the typical object in the group at the expense of individual features.^[43]

Social interaction and language[link]

A common claim is that language is governed by social conventions. Questions inevitably arise on surrounding topics. One question is, "What exactly is a convention, and how do we study it?", and second, "To what extent do conventions even matter in the study of language?" David Kellogg Lewis proposed a worthy reply to the first question by expounding the view that a convention is a rationally self-perpetuating regularity in behavior. However, this view seems to compete to some extent with the Gricean view of speaker's meaning, requiring either one (or both) to be weakened if both are to be taken as true.^[35]

Some have questioned whether or not conventions are relevant to the study of meaning at all. Noam Chomsky proposed that the study of language could be done in terms of the I-Language, or internal language of persons. If this is so, then it undermines the pursuit of explanations in terms of conventions, and relegates such explanations to the domain of "meta-semantics". Metasemantics is a term used by philosopher of language Robert Stainton to describe all those fields that attempt to explain how semantic facts arise.^[11] One fruitful source of research involves investigation into the social conditions that give rise to, or are associated with, meanings and languages. Etymology (the study of the origins of words) and stylistics (philosophical argumentation over what makes "good grammar", relative to a particular language) are two other examples of fields that are taken to be meta-semantic.

Not surprisingly, many separate (but related) fields have investigated the topic of linguistic convention within their own research paradigms. The presumptions that prop up each theoretical view are of interest to the philosopher of language. For instance, one of the major fields of sociology, symbolic interactionism, is based on the insight that human social organization is based almost entirely on the use of meanings.^[44] In consequence, any explanation of a social structure (like an institution) would need to account for the shared meanings which create and sustain the structure.

Rhetoric is the study of the particular words that people use to achieve the proper emotional and rational effect in the listener, be it to persuade, provoke, endear, or teach. Some relevant applications of the field include the examination of propaganda and didacticism, the examination of the purposes of swearing and pejoratives (especially how it influences the behavior of others, and defines relationships), or the effects of gendered language. It can also be used to study linguistic transparency (or speaking in an accessible manner), as well as performative utterances and the various tasks that language can perform (called "speech acts"). It also has applications to the study and interpretation of law, and helps give insight to the logical concept of the domain of discourse.

Literary theory is a discipline that some literary theorists claim overlaps with the philosophy of language. It emphasizes the methods that readers and critics use in understanding a text. This field, an outgrowth of the study of how to properly interpret messages, is unsurprisingly closely tied to the ancient discipline of hermeneutics.

Language and continental philosophy[link]

In continental philosophy, language is not studied as a separate discipline, as it is in analytic philosophy. Rather, it is an inextricable part of many other areas of thought, such as phenomenology, semiotics, hermeneutics, Heideggerean ontology, existentialism, structuralism, deconstruction and critical theory. The idea of language is often related to that of logic in its Greek sense as "Logos", meaning discourse or dialectic. Language and concepts are also seen as having been formed by history and politics, or even by historical philosophy itself.

The field of hermeneutics, and the theory of interpretation in general, has played a significant role in 20th century continental philosophy of language and ontology beginning with Martin Heidegger. Heidegger combines phenomenology with the hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey. Heidegger believed language was one of the most important concepts for Dasein: "Language is the house of being, which is propriated by being and pervaded by being."^[45] However, Heidegger believed that language today is worn out because of overuse of important words, and would be inadequate for in-depth study of Being (Sein). For example, Sein (being), the word itself, is saturated with multiple meanings. Thus, he invented new vocabulary and linguistic styles, based on Ancient Greek and Germanic etymological word relations, to disambiguate commonly used words. He avoid words like consciousness, ego, human, nature, etc. and instead talks holistically of Being-in-the-world, Dasein.

With such new concepts as Being-in-the-world, Heidegger constructs his theory of language, centered on speech. He believed speech (talking, listening, silence) was the most essential and pure form of language. Heidegger claims writing is only a supplement to speech, because even a reader constructs or contributes one's own "talk" while reading. The most important feature of language is its projectivity, the idea that language is prior to human speech. This means that when one is "thrown" into the world, his existence is characterized from the beginning by a certain pre-comprehension of the world. However, it is only after naming, or "articulation of intelligibility", can one have primary access to Dasein and Being-in-the-World.^[46]

Hans-Georg Gadamer expanded on these ideas of Heidegger and proposed a complete hermeneutic ontology. In Truth and Method, Gadamer describes language as "the medium in which substantive understanding and agreement take place between two people."^[47] In addition, Gadamer claims that the world is linguistically constituted, and cannot exist apart from language. For example, monuments and statues cannot communicate without the aid of language. Gadamer also claims that every language constitutes a world-view, because the linguistic nature of the world frees each individual from an objective environment: "... the fact that we have a world at all depends upon [language] and presents itself in it. The world as world exists for man as for no other creature in the world."^[47]

Paul Ricœur, on the other hand, proposed a hermeneutics which, reconnecting with the original Greek sense of the term, emphasized the discovery of hidden meanings in the equivocal terms (or "symbols") of ordinary language. Other philosophers who have worked in this tradition include Luigi Pareyson and Jacques Derrida.^[48]

Semiotics is the study of the transmission, reception and meaning of signs and symbols in general. In this field, human language (both natural and artificial) is just one among many ways that humans (and other conscious beings) are able to communicate. It allows them to take advantage of and effectively manipulate the external world in order to create meaning for themselves and transmit this meaning to others. Every object, every person, every event, and every force communicates (or signifies) continuously. The ringing of a telephone for example, is the telephone. The smoke that I see on the horizon is the sign that there is a fire. The smoke signifies. The things of the world, in this vision, seem to be labeled precisely for intelligent beings who only need to interpret them in the way that humans do. Everything has meaning. True communication, including the use of human language, however, requires someone (a sender) who sends a message, or text, in some code to someone else (a receiver). Language is studied only insofar as it is one of these forms (the most sophisticated form) of communication. Some important figures in the history of semiotics, are Charles Sanders Peirce, Roland Barthes, and Roman Jakobson. In modern times, its best-known figures include Umberto Eco, A.J. Greimas, Louis Hjelmslev, and Tullio De Mauro.^[48] Investigations on signs in non-human communications are subject to biosemiotics, a field founded in the late 20th century by Thomas Sebeok and Thure von Uexkuell.

Major problems in philosophy of language[link]

Vagueness[link]

One issue that has bothered philosophers of language and logic is the problem of the vagueness of words. The specific instances of vagueness that most interest philosophers of language are those where the existence of "borderline cases" make it seemingly impossible to say whether a predicate is true or false of them. Classic examples are "is tall" or "is bald", where it can't be said that some borderline case (some given person) is tall or not-tall. In consequence, vagueness gives rise to the Paradox of the heap. Many theorists have attempted to solve the paradox by way of n-valued logics, such as fuzzy logic, which have radically departed from classical two-valued logics.^[49]

Problem of universals and composition[link]

One debate that has captured the interest of many philosophers is the debate over the meaning of universals. One might ask, for example, "When people say the word rocks, what is it that the word represents?" Two different answers have emerged to this question. Some have said that the expression stands for some real, abstract universal out in the world called "rocks". Others have said that the word stands for some collection of particular, individual rocks that we happen to put into a common category. The former position has been called philosophical realism, and the latter nominalism.^[50]

The issue here can be explicated if we examine the proposition "Socrates is a Man".

From the radical realist's perspective, the connection between S and M is a connection between two abstract entities. There is an entity, "man", and an entity, "Socrates". These two things connect in some way or overlap.

From a nominalist's perspective, the connection between S and M is the connection between a particular entity (Socrates) and a vast collection of particular things (men). To say that Socrates is a man is to say that Socrates is a part of the class of "men". Another perspective is to consider "man" to be a property of the entity, "Socrates".

There is a third way, between nominalism and radical realism, usually called "moderate realism" and attributed to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Moderate realists hold that "man" refers to a real essence or form that is really present and identical in Socrates and all other men, but "man" does not exist as a separate and distinct entity. This is a realist position, because "Man" is real, insofar as it really exists in all men; but it is a moderate realism, because "Man" is not an entity separate from the men it informs.

Nature of language[link]

Many philosophical discussions of language begin by clarifying terminology. One item which has undergone significant scrutiny is the idea of language itself. Those philosophers who have set themselves to the task ask two important questions: "What is language in general?" and "What is a particular, individual language?"

Some semiotic outlooks have stressed that language is the mere manipulation and use of symbols in order to draw attention to signified content. If this were so, then humans would not be the sole possessors of language skills.^[48] On the other hand, many works by linguist Noam Chomsky have emphasized the role of syntax as a characteristic of any language.^[51]

More puzzling is the question of what it is that distinguishes one particular language from another. What is it that makes "English" English? What's the difference between Spanish and French? Chomsky has indicated that the search for what it means to be a language must begin with the study of the internal language of persons, or I-languages, which are based upon certain rules (or principles and parameters) which generate grammars. This view is supported in part by the conviction that there is no clear, general, and principled difference between one language and the next, and which may apply across the field of all languages. Other attempts, which he dubs E-languages, have tried to explain a language as usage within a specific speech community with a specific set of well-formed utterances in mind (markedly associated with linguists like Bloomfield).^[52]

Formal versus informal approaches[link]

Another of the questions that has divided philosophers of language is the extent to which formal logic can be used as an effective tool in the analysis and understanding of natural languages. While most philosophers, including Frege, Alfred Tarski and Rudolf Carnap, have been more or less skeptical about formalizing natural languages, many of them developed formal languages for use in the sciences or formalized parts of natural language for investigation. Some of the most prominent members of this tradition of formal semantics include Tarski, Carnap, Richard Montague and Donald Davidson.^[53]

On the other side of the divide, and especially prominent in the 1950s and 60s, were the so-called "Ordinary language philosophers". Philosophers such as P. F. Strawson, John Langshaw Austin and Gilbert Ryle stressed the importance of studying natural language without regard to the truth-conditions of sentences and the references of terms. They did not believe that the social and practical dimensions of linguistic meaning could be captured by any attempts at formalization using the tools of logic. Logic is one thing and language is something entirely different. What is important is not expressions themselves but what people use them to do in communication.^[54]

Hence, Austin developed a theory of speech acts, which described the kinds of things which can be done with a sentence (assertion, command, inquiry, exclamation) in different contexts of use on different occasions.^[55] Strawson argued that the truth-table semantics of the logical connectives (e.g., Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \land , Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \lor

and Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.):  \rightarrow 

) do not capture the meanings of their natural language counterparts ("and", "or" and "if-then").^[56] While the "ordinary language" movement basically died out in the 1970s, its influence was crucial to the development of the fields of speech-act theory and the study of pragmatics. Many of its ideas have been absorbed by theorists such as Kent Bach, Robert Brandom, Paul Horwich and Stephen Neale.^[17]

While keeping these traditions in mind, the question of whether or not there is any grounds for conflict between the formal and informal approaches is far from being decided. Some theorists, like Paul Grice, have been skeptical of any claims that there is a substantial conflict between logic and natural language.^[57]

Translation and Interpretation[link]

Translation and interpretation are two other problems that philosophers of language have attempted to confront. In the 1950s, W.V. Quine argued for the indeterminacy of meaning and reference based on the principle of radical translation. In Word and Object, Quine asks the reader to imagine a situation in which he is confronted with a previously undocumented, primitive tribe and must attempt to make sense of the utterances and gestures that its members make. This is the situation of radical translation.^[58]

He claimed that, in such a situation, it is impossible in principle to be absolutely certain of the meaning or reference that a speaker of the primitive tribe's language attaches to an utterance. For example, if a speaker sees a rabbit and says "gavagai", is she referring to the whole rabbit, to the rabbit's tail, or to a temporal part of the rabbit. All that can be done is to examine the utterance as a part of the overall linguistic behaviour of the individual, and then use these observations to interpret the meaning of all other utterances. From this basis, one can form a manual of translation. But, since reference is indeterminate, there will be many such manuals, no one of which is more correct than the others. For Quine, as for Wittgenstein and Austin, meaning is not something that is associated with a single word or sentence, but is rather something that, if it can be attributed at all, can only be attributed to a whole language.^[58] The resulting view is called semantic holism.

Inspired by Quine's discussion, Donald Davidson extended the idea of radical translation to the interpretation of utterences and behavior within a single linguistic community. He dubbed this notion radical interpretation. He suggested that the meaning that any individual ascribed to a sentence could only be determined by attributing meanings to many, perhaps all, of the individual's assertions as well as his mental states and attitudes.^[15]

Notes[link]

References[link]

1. Aglo, John "Norme et Symbole. Les Fondement philosophiques de l'obligation, L'Harmattan, Paris.
2. Aglo, John (2001), 'Les Fondements philosophiques de la morale dans une société à tradition orale, le système adanu, L'Harmattan, Paris.
3. Aglo, John (2003), 'La Vie et le Vivre-ensemble. Le Principe organisateur de la vie dans le système adanu, L'Harmattan, Paris.
4. Luca Corchia, La logica dei processi culturali. Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia, Genova, Edizioni ECIG, 2010, ISBN 978-88-7544-195-1.

External links[link]

• Philosophy of Language, from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Sprachlogik short articles in the philosophies of logic and language
• Glossary of Linguistic terms
• What is I-language? - Chapter 1 of I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science.
• The London Philosophy Study Guide offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Philosophy of Language
• Carnap, R., (1956). Meaning and Necessity: a Study in Semantics and Modal Logic. University of Chicago Press.
• Collins, John. (2001). http://www.sorites.org/Issue_13/collins.htm
• Devitt, Michael and Hanley, Richard, eds. (2006) The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Greenberg, Mark and Harman, Gilbert. (2005). Conceptual Role Semantics. http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/CRS.pdf
• Hale, B. and Crispin Wright, Ed. (1999). Blackwell Companions To Philosophy. Malden, Massachusetts, Blackwell Publishers.
• Lepore, Ernest and Barry C. Smith (eds). (2006). The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press.
• Lycan, W. G. (2000). Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction. New York, Routledge.
• Miller, James. (1999). http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/1999m12.1/msg00185.htm
• Searle, John (2007). Philosophy of Language: an interview with John Searle. ReVEL, vol. 5, n. 8. http://www.revel.inf.br/site2007/_pdf/8/entrevistas/revel_8_interview_john_searle.pdf
• Stainton, Robert J. (1996). Philosophical perspectives on language. Peterborough, Ont., Broadview Press.
• Tarski, Alfred. (1944). The Semantical Conception of Truth. http://www.ditext.com/tarski/tarski.html

John Rogers Searle

Born	(1932-07-31) July 31, 1932 (age 79) Denver, Colorado, U.S.
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Intentionality · Social reality
Notable ideas	Indirect speech acts · Chinese room
Influenced by David Hume · J.L. Austin · Bertrand Russell · Ludwig Wittgenstein Gottlob Frege · P.F. Strawson Hubert Dreyfus
Signature

John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932, in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959, where, among his many distinctions, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004. Among his notable concepts are the "Chinese Room" argument against artificial intelligence.

Biography[link]

Searle's father, G. W. Searle, an electrical engineer, was employed by AT&T, while his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician. John Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he earned an undergraduate degree and a doctorate in philosophy and ethics.

Politics[link]

In the 1950s, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy" (McCarthy was then the junior Senator from Wisconsin).^[1]

While a professor at Berkeley in 1964, he joined the Free Speech Movement^[2] opposing policies of the university administration. Later, in 1969, he sided with the administration against the students over People's Park. Also in 1969, he served as chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California.^[3] He authored The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (1971).^[4] The book attempted to investigate the causes behind the campus uprisings of the era. In it, Searle notes: "I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and ... several radical polemicists.... Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred -- one might almost say terror -- of close analysis and dissection of argument." He asserts: "[M]y wife was threatened that I (and other members of the administration) would be assassinated or violently attacked."^[1] In an op-ed piece written shortly after 9/11, Searle maintained that:

We need to give up on the fantasy that we are going to find Bin Laden hiding in a cave, and when we do so, our troubles will be over... There will be plenty of others, perhaps reinspired by his martyrdom, to take up where he left off.^[5]

Further, he argued the attacks were part of a longer-term struggle whose only solution was to root out governments that supported terrorism.^[6]

Philosophy[link]

Speech acts[link]

Searle's early work, which did a great deal to establish his reputation, was on speech acts. He attempted to synthesize ideas from many colleagues including J.L. Austin (the term "illocutionary act"), Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.C.J. Midgley (the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules), and his own thesis, in 'Speech Acts,' that such acts are constituted by the rules of language. He also drew on the work of P.F. Strawson, John Rawls, and H. Paul Grice (the analysis of meaning as an attempt at being understood), Hare and Stenius (the distinction, concerning meaning, between illocutionary force and propositional content), and William P. Alston, who maintained that sentence meaning consists in sets of regulative rules requiring the speaker to perform the illocutionary act indicated by the sentence, and that such acts involve the utterance of a sentence which (a) indicates that one performs the act, (b) means what one says, and (c) addresses an audience in the vicinity. In his 1969 book Speech Acts, Searle sets out to combine all of these elements to give his account of 'illocutionary acts', which Austin had introduced in How To Do Things with Words.

Despite his announced intention^[7] to present a "full dress analysis of the illocutionary act", Searle in fact does not give one.^{[citation needed]} Instead, he provides an analysis of what he considers the prototypical illocutionary act of promising, and offers sets of semantical rules intended to represent the linguistic meaning of devices indicating further illocutionary act types (1969, 57-71).

Among the concepts presented in the book is the distinction between the 'illocutionary force' and the 'propositional content' of an utterance. Searle does not precisely define the former as such, but rather introduces several possible illocutionary forces by example. According to Searle, the sentences:

1. Sam smokes habitually.
2. Does Sam smoke habitually?
3. Sam, smoke habitually!
4. Would that Sam smoked habitually!

each indicate the same propositional content (Sam smoking habitually) but differ in the illocutionary force indicated (a statement, a question, a command, and an expression of desire, respectively) (1969, 22).

According to a later account, which Searle presents in Intentionality (1983) and which differs in important ways from the one suggested in Speech Acts, illocutionary acts are characterised by their having conditions of satisfaction (an idea adopted from Strawson's (1971) paper "Meaning and Truth" [9]) and a direction of fit (an idea adopted from Elizabeth Anscombe). For example, the statement "John bought two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if it is true, i.e. John did buy two candy bars. By contrast, the command "John, buy two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if John carries out the action of purchasing two candy bars. Searle refers to the first as having the word-to-world direction of fit, since the words are supposed to change to accurately represent the world, and the second as having the world-to-word direction of fit, since the world is supposed to change to match the words. (There is also the double direction of fit, in which the relationship goes both ways, and the null or zero direction of fit, in which it goes neither way because the propositional content is presupposed, as in "I'm sorry I ate John's candy bars.")

In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic^[8] (1985, with Daniel Vanderveken), Searle prominently uses the notion of "illocutionary point". (Although Searle does not mention earlier uses of the concept, it originates from Alexander Sesonske's article "Performatives".)

Searle's speech-act theory has been challenged by several thinkers, and in a variety of ways. A wide-ranging critique is offered by F.C. Doerge [10].^[9] Collections of articles referring to Searle's account are found in: Burkhardt 1990^[10] and Lepore / van Gulick 1991.^[11]

Searle-Derrida debate[link]

In the early 1970s Searle had a brief debate with Jacques Derrida regarding Speech Act theory. The debate was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood the basic points of the other.^[12] Searle was particularly hostile to the deconstructionist framework of Derrida and refused to let his response to Derrida be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection of the papers in the debate, Limited Inc. Searle did not consider Derrida's approach legitimate philosophy or even intelligible writing. Searle argued that he did not want to dedicate any attention to the deconstructionist point of view such as to not legitimize it. Some critics have consequently considered the debate a non-debate, but rather simply a series of elaborate misunderstandings^[13], while others have seen either Derrida or Searle as having gained the upper hand.^[14] The level of hostility in the debate can be seen from the fact that Searle in his reply stated that "It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions", to which Derrida replied that that sentence was "the only sentence of the "reply" to which I can subscribe".^[15] The debate has nonetheless frequently been interpreted as a prominent example of a confrontation between analytical and continental philosophy.

The debate began in 1972, when Jacques Derrida analyzed J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act in his paper "Signature Event Context". While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes "force", Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. He argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a "structure of absence" - the words that are left unsaid, because of contextual constraints, and by "iterability", the strictures on what can be said, given by what has been said in the past. Derrida argued that the focus on intentionality in speech act theory was misguided, because intentionality is restricted to be intentional about that which is already established as a possible intention. He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious or "parasitic" speech, and wondered whether this exclusion reflected that Austin had considered these speech genres to be governed by different structures of meaning, or simply by a lack of interest. In his brief reply to Derrida "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida", Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory was attempting to give a full account of language and meaning, when in fact its aim was much narrower, Searle considered leaving out parasitic discourse forms justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry.^[16][17] Searle agreed with Derrida's proposal that intentionality presupposes iterability, but Searle did not apply the same concept of intentionality used by Derrida, being unable or unwilling to engage with the continental conceptual apparatus.^[14] This in turn caused Derrida to criticize Searle for not being sufficiently familiar with phenomenological perspectives on intentionality.^[18] Searle also argued that Derrida's disagreement with Austin turned on his having misunderstood Austin's type–token distinction, and his failure to understand Austin's concept of failure in relation to performativity. Some critics have suggested that Searle was at fault for the unsuccesful nature of the exchange, by being so grounded in the Anglo-Saxon analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with the continental phenomenlogical tradition represented by Derrida.^[18]

Derrida in his response to Searle, "Limited inc, abc..." ridiculed Searle's positions, suggesting that Searle had formed a Société à responsabilité limitée (Society for Limited Responsibility) with Austin, because of the ways in which the ambiguities of authorship within Searle's reply circumvented the very speech act of the reply, since a clear sender of the message could not be established. Searle did not reply. Later in 1988, Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition to be problematic.^{[19][20][21][22][23][14][24][25]}

In 1995 Searle gave a brief reply to Derrida in The Construction of Social Reality, in which he called Derrida's conclusion "preposterous" and stated that "Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts. ..."^[26]

Intentionality and the Background[link]

Searle defines "Intentionality" as the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs in the world.^[27] The nature of intentionality is an important part of discussions of the Searle's "Philosophy of Mind". Searle emphasizes that the word ‘intentionality, (the part of the mind directed to/from/about objects and relations in the world independent of mind) should not be confused with the word ‘intensionality’ (the logical property of some sentences that do not pass the test of 'extensinalidade').^[28] In Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Searle applies certain elements of his account(s) of "illocutionary acts" to the investigation of intentionality. Searle also introduces a technical term the Background,^[29] which, according to him, has been the source of much philosophical discussion ("though I have been arguing for this thesis for almost twenty years," Searle writes,^[30] "many people whose opinions I respect still disagree with me about it.") Background he calls the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have and that are not themselves intentional states. Thus, when someone asks us to "cut the cake" we know to use a knife and when someone asks us to "cut the grass" we know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the actual request did not include this detail. Searle sometimes supplements his reference to the Background with the concept of the Network, one's network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense. Searle argues that the concept of a Background is similar to the concepts provided by several other thinkers, including Wittgenstein's private language argument ("the work of the later Wittgenstein is in large part about the Background"^[31]) and Bourdieu's habitus.

To give an example, two chess players might be engaged in a bitter struggle at the board, but they share all sorts of Background presuppositions: that they will take turns to move, that no one else will intervene, that they are both playing to the same rules, that the fire alarm won't go off, that the board won't suddenly disintegrate, that their opponent won't magically turn into a grapefruit, and so on indefinitely. As most of these possibilities won't have occurred to either player,^[32] Searle thinks the Background must be unconscious, though elements of it can be called to consciousness (if the fire alarm does go off, say).

In his debate with Derrida, Searle argued against Derrida's notion that a statement can be disjoined from the original intentionality of its author, for example when no longer connected to the original author, while still being able to produce meaning. Searle maintained that even if one was to see a written statement with no knowledge of authorship it would still be impossible to escape the question of intentionality, because "a meaningful sentence is just a standing possibility of the (intentional) speech act". For Searle ascribing intentionality to a statement was a basic requirement for attributing it any meaning at all.^[33][34]

Consciousness[link]

Building upon his views about Intentionality, Searle presents a view concerning consciousness in his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992). He argues that, starting with behaviorism (an early but influential scientific view, succeeded by many later accounts that Searle also dismisses), much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success. In Intentionality, he parodies several alternative theories of consciousness by replacing their accounts of intentionality with comparable accounts of the hand:

No one would think of saying, for example, "Having a hand is just being disposed to certain sorts of behavior such as grasping" (manual behaviorism), or "Hands can be defined entirely in terms of their causes and effects" (manual functionalism), or "For a system to have a hand is just for it to be in a certain computer state with the right sorts of inputs and outputs" (manual Turing machine functionalism), or "Saying that a system has hands is just adopting a certain stance toward it" (the manual stance). (p. 263)

Searle argues that philosophy has been trapped by a false dichotomy: that, on the one hand, the world consists of nothing but objective particles in fields of force, but that yet, on the other hand, consciousness is clearly a subjective first-person experience.

Searle says simply that both are true: consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain. (A view which he suggests might be called biological naturalism.)

Ontological subjectivity[link]

Searle has argued^[35] that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective.

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is epistemically subjective, whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is epistemically objective. In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) which are ontologically subjective, i.e. are experienced subjectively. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science".^[36] But the pain itself is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality".^[37] His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.

Artificial intelligence[link]

A consequence of biological naturalism is that if we want to create a conscious being, we will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle thereby means to contradict to what he calls "Strong AI", defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.^[38]

In 1980, Searle presented the "Chinese room" argument, which purports to prove the falsity of strong AI.^[39] (Familiarity with the Turing test is useful for understanding the issue.) Assume you do not speak Chinese and imagine yourself in a room with two slits, a book, and some scratch paper. Someone slides you some Chinese characters through the first slit, you follow the instructions in the book, write what it says on the scratch paper, and slide the resulting sheet out the second slit. To people on the outside world, it appears the room speaks Chinese—they slide Chinese statements in one slit and get valid responses in return—yet you do not understand a word of Chinese. This suggests, according to Searle, that no computer can ever understand Chinese or English, because, as the thought experiment suggests, being able to 'translate' Chinese into English does not entail 'understanding' either Chinese or English: all which the person in the thought experiment, and hence a computer, is able to do is to execute certain syntactic manipulations.^[40]

Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's "Strong AI" is really just another name for functionalism and computationalism, and that these positions are the real targets of his critique.^[41] Functionalists claim that consciousness can be defined as a set of informational processes inside the brain. It follows that anything that carries out the same informational processes as a human is also conscious. Thus, if we wrote a computer program that was conscious, we could run that computer program on, say, a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious, because it was running the same information processes.

Searle argues that this is impossible, since consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire. No matter how good a simulation of digestion you build on the computer, it will not digest anything; no matter how well you simulate fire, nothing will get burnt. By contrast, informational processes are observer-relative: observers pick out certain patterns in the world and consider them information processes, but information processes are not things-in-the-world themselves. Since they do not exist at a physical level, Searle argues, they cannot have causal efficacy and thus cannot cause consciousness. There is no physical law, Searle insists, that can see the equivalence between a personal computer, a series of ping-pong balls and beer cans, and a pipe-and-water system all implementing the same program.^[42]

Social reality[link]

Searle extended his inquiries into observer-relative phenomena by trying to understand social reality. Searle begins by arguing collective intentionality (e.g. "we're going for a walk") is a distinct form of intentionality, not simply reducible to individual intentionality (e.g. "I'm going for a walk with him and I think he thinks he's going for a walk with me and thinks I think I'm going for a walk with him and ...").

Searle's The Construction of Social Reality (1995) addresses the mystery of how social constructs like "baseball" or "money" can exist in a world consisting only of physical particles in fields of force. Adapting an idea by Elizabeth Anscombe in "On Brute Facts," Searle distinguishes between brute facts, like the height of a mountain, and institutional facts, like the score of a baseball game. Aiming at an explanation of social phenomena in terms of Anscombe's notion, he argues that society can be explained in terms of institutional facts, and institutional facts arise out of collective intentionality through logical rules of the form "X counts as Y in C". Thus, for instance, filling out a ballot counts as a vote in a polling place, getting so many votes counts as a victory in an election, getting a victory counts as being elected president in the presidential race, etc.

Rationality[link]

In Rationality in Action (2001), Searle argues that standard notions of rationality are badly flawed. According to what he calls the Classical Model, rationality is seen as something like a train track: you get on at one point with your beliefs and desires and the rules of rationality compel you all the way to a conclusion. Searle doubts this picture of rationality holds generally.

Searle briefly critiques one particular set of these rules: those of mathematical decision theory. He points out that its axioms require that anyone who valued a quarter and their life would, at some odds, bet their life for a quarter. Searle insists he would never do this and believes that this is perfectly rational.

Yet most of his attack is directed against the common conception of rationality, which he believes is badly flawed. First, he argues that reasons don't cause you to do anything, because having sufficient reason wills (but doesn't force) you to do that thing. So in any decision situation we experience a gap between our reasons and our actions. For example, when we decide to vote, we do not simply determine that we care most about economic policy and that we prefer candidate Jones's economic policy. We also have to make an effort to cast our vote. Similarly, every time a guilty smoker lights a cigarette they are aware of succumbing to their craving, not merely of acting automatically as they do when they exhale. It is this gap that makes us think we have freedom of the will. Searle thinks whether we really have free will or not is an open question, but considers its absence highly unappealing because it makes the feeling of freedom of will an epiphenomenon, which is highly unlikely from the evolutionary point of view given its biological cost. He also says: " All rational activity presupposes free will ".^[43]

Second, he believes rationality is not a system of rules, but more of an adverb. We see certain behavior as rational, no matter what its source, and our system of rules derives from finding patterns in what we see as rational.

Third, Searle believes we can rationally do things that don't result from our own desires. It is widely believed that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", i.e. that facts about how the world is can never tell you what you should do ('Hume's Law'). By contrast, in so far as a fact is understood as relating to an institution (marriage, promises, commitments, etc.), which is to be understood as a system of constitutive rules, then what one should do can be understood as following from the institutional fact of what one has done; institutional fact, then, can be understood as opposed to the "brute facts" related to Hume's Law. For example, Searle believes the fact that you promised to do something means you should do it, because by making the promise you are participating in the constitutive rules that arrange the system of promise making itself, and therefore understand a "shouldness" as implicit in the mere factual action of promising. Furthermore, he believes that this provides a desire-independent reason for an action—if you order a drink at a bar, you should pay for it even if you have no desire to. This argument, which he first made in his paper, "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'" (1964),^[44] remains highly controversial, but even three decades later Searle continued to defend his view that "..the traditional metaphysical distinction between fact and value cannot be captured by the linguistic distinction between 'evaluative' and 'descriptive' because all such speech act notions are already normative."^[45]

Fourth, Searle argues that much of rational deliberation involves adjusting our (often inconsistent) patterns of desires to decide between outcomes, not the other way around. While in the Classical Model, one would start from a desire to go to Paris greater than that of saving money and calculate the cheapest way to get there, in reality people balance the niceness of Paris against the costs of travel to decide which desire (visiting Paris or saving money) they value more.

See also[link]

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969)
• The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (political commentary; 1971)
• Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (essay collection; 1979)
• Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983)
• Minds, Brains and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures (lecture collection; 1984)
• Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (John Searle & Daniel Vanderveken 1985)
• John Searle and His Critics (Ernest Lepore and Robert Van Gulick, eds.; 1991)
• The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992)
• The Construction of Social Reality (1995)
• The Mystery of Consciousness (review collection; 1997)
• Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (summary of earlier work; 1998)
• Rationality in Action (2001)
• Consciousness and Language (essay collection; 2002)
• Freedom and Neurobiology (lecture collection; 2004)
• Mind: A Brief Introduction (summary of work in philosophy of mind; 2004)
• Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts (essay collection; 2007)
• Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays (2008)
• Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010)

Further reading[link]

• "Minds, Brains and Programs", The Behavioral and Brain Sciences.3, pp. 417–424. (1980)
• Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-27302-1
• Minds, Brains and Science (1984), Harvard University Press, hardcover: ISBN 0-674-57631-4, paperback: ISBN 0-674-57633-0
• "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?" (1990) Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association
• "Collective Intentions and Actions" (1990) in Intentions in Communication J. M. P. R. Cohen, & M. and E. Pollack. Cambridge, Mass.: . MIT Press: 401-416.
• The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) ISBN 0-262-69154-X
• The Problem of Consciousness, Social Research, Vol. 60, No.1, Spring 1993.
• The Construction of Social Reality (1995)
• The Mystery of Consciousness, Granta Books, (1997) hardcover: ISBN 1-86207-122-5, New York Review Books paperback: ISBN 0-940322-06-4
• Consciousness Ann. Rev. Neurosci. (2000) 23:557-78. Review.
• Rationality in Action, MIT Press, (2001) – contains (among other things) Searle's account of akrasia
• Consciousness and Language (2002), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-59744-7
• D. Koepsell (ed.) and L. Moss (ed.) "Searle and Smith: A Dialogue" in John Searle's Ideas About Social Reality: Extensions, Criticisms, and Reconstructions (2003), Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-1258-1
• Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004), Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-515733-8
• Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language and Political Power (2007), Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-13752-4
• Dualism revisited J Physiol Paris. 2007 Jul-Nov;101(4-6):169-78. Epub 2008 Jan 19.
• M. Bennett, D. Dennett, P. Hacker, J. Searle, Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language (2007), Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-14044-4
• The Storm Over the University

• Doerge (2006), Friedrich Christoph: Illocutionary Acts - Austin's Account and What Searle Made Out of It. Tuebingen: Tuebingen University. http://tobias-lib.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/volltexte/2006/2273/pdf/Dissertation_Doerge.pdf

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Searle

• John Searle's Machines Like Us interview
• Searle's homepage at UC Berkeley
• Conversations with Searle.
• Interview in Conversations with History series. Available in webcast and podcast.
• Conversations with History:John R. Searle on YouTube
• Video or transcript of an interview with John Searle on language, writing, mind, and consciousness
• John Searle at the Internet Movie Database
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• Webcast of Philosophy of Society lectures
• Philosophy of Language: an interview with John Searle ReVEL, vol. 5, n. 8, 2007.
• The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with John Searle 2011-06-13
• BBC Reith Audio Lectures - John Searle: Minds, Brain & Science (1984)

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Saul Kripke

Born	(1940-11-13) November 13, 1940 (age 71) Bay Shore, New York
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Logic (particularly modal) Philosophy of language Metaphysics Set Theory Epistemology Philosophy of mind History of analytic philosophy
Notable ideas	Kripke–Platek set theory Causal theory of reference Kripkenstein Admissible ordinal Kripke structure Rigid designator Kripke semantics
Influenced by Frege · Curry · Lewis · Russell · Tarski · Wittgenstein · Quine
Influenced Boghossian · Burge · Chalmers · Devitt · Evans · Field · Kaplan · Putnam · Salmon · Soames · Weinstein · Yablo

Saul Aaron Kripke (born November 13, 1940) is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Since the 1960s Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and set theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape-recordings and privately circulated manuscripts. Kripke was the recipient of the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. A recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Kripke among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years.^[1]

Kripke has made influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic, since he was a teenager. Unusual for a professional philosopher, his only degree is an undergraduate degree from Harvard, in mathematics. His work has profoundly influenced analytic philosophy, with his principal contribution being a semantics for modal logic, involving possible worlds as described in a system now called Kripke semantics.^[2] Another of his most important contributions is his argument that necessity is a 'metaphysical' notion, which should be separated from the epistemic notion of a priori, and that there are necessary a posteriori truths, such as "Water is H₂O." He has also contributed an original reading of Wittgenstein, referred to as "Kripkenstein." His most famous work is Naming and Necessity (1980).

Biography[link]

Saul Kripke is the oldest of three children born to Dorothy K. Kripke and Rabbi Myer S. Kripke.^[3] His father was the leader of Beth El Synagogue, the only Conservative congregation in Omaha, Nebraska, while his mother wrote educational Jewish books for children. Saul and his two sisters, Madeline and Netta, attended Dundee Grade School and Omaha Central High School. Kripke was labelled a prodigy, having taught himself Ancient Hebrew by the age of six, read the complete works of Shakespeare by nine, and mastered the works of Descartes and complex mathematical problems before graduating elementary school.^[4][5] He wrote his first completeness theorem in modal logic at the age of 17, and had it published a year later. After graduating from high school in 1958, Kripke attended Harvard University and graduated summa cum laude obtaining a bachelor's degree in mathematics. During his sophomore year at Harvard, Kripke taught a graduate-level logic course at nearby MIT. Upon graduation (1962) he received a Fulbright Fellowship, and in 1963 was appointed to the Society of Fellows.

After teaching briefly at Harvard, he moved to Rockefeller University in New York City in 1967, and then received a full-time position at Princeton University in 1977. In 1988 he received the university's Behrman Award for distinguished achievement in the humanities. In 2002 Kripke began teaching at the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan, and was appointed a distinguished professor of philosophy there in 2003. He was married to philosopher Margaret Gilbert.

He has received honorary degrees from the University of Nebraska, Omaha (1977), Johns Hopkins University (1997), University of Haifa, Israel (1998), and the University of Pennsylvania (2005). He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He won the Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 2001.

He is uncle of the notable television writer, director, and producer Eric Kripke.

Work[link]

Kripke models for modal logic systems

Kripke's contributions to philosophy include:

1. Kripke semantics for modal and related logics, published in several essays beginning while he was still in his teens.
2. His 1970 Princeton lectures Naming and Necessity (published in 1972 and 1980), that significantly restructured philosophy of language.
3. His interpretation of Wittgenstein.
4. His theory of truth.

He has also contributed to set-theory (see admissible ordinal and Kripke-Platek set theory)

Modal logic[link]

Two of Kripke's earlier works, A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic and Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic, the former written while he was still a teenager, were on the subject of modal logic. The most familiar logics in the modal family are constructed from a weak logic called K, named after Kripke for his contributions to modal logic. Kripke introduced the now-standard Kripke semantics (also known as relational semantics or frame semantics) for modal logics. Kripke semantics is a formal semantics for non-classical logic systems. It was first made for modal logics, and later adapted to intuitionistic logic and other non-classical systems. The discovery of Kripke semantics was a breakthrough in the making of non-classical logics, because the model theory of such logics was absent prior to Kripke.

A Kripke frame or modal frame is a pair Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,R\rangle , where W is a non-empty set, and R is a binary relation on W. Elements of W are called nodes or worlds, and R is known as the accessibility relation. Depending on the properties of the accessibility relation (transitivity, reflexivity, etc.), the corresponding frame is described, by extension, as being transitive, reflexive, etc.

A Kripke model is a triple Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,R,\Vdash\rangle , where Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,R\rangle

is a Kripke frame, and Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Vdash
is a relation between nodes of W and modal formulas, such that:

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash\neg A

if and only if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\nVdash A

,

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A\to B

if and only if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\nVdash A
or Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash B

,

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash\Box A

if and only if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \forall u\,(w\; R\; u \to u\Vdash A)

.

We read Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A

as “w satisfies A”, “A is satisfied in w”, or “w forces A”. The relation Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Vdash
is called the satisfaction relation, evaluation, or forcing relation. The satisfaction relation is uniquely determined by its value on propositional variables.

A formula A is valid in:

• a model Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,R,\Vdash\rangle

, if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A

for all w ∈ W,

• a frame Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,R\rangle

, if it is valid in Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,R,\Vdash\rangle

for all possible choices of Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Vdash

,

• a class C of frames or models, if it is valid in every member of C.

We define Thm(C) to be the set of all formulas that are valid in C. Conversely, if X is a set of formulas, let Mod(X) be the class of all frames which validate every formula from X.

A modal logic (i.e., a set of formulas) L is sound with respect to a class of frames C, if L ⊆ Thm(C). L is complete with respect to C if L ⊇ Thm(C).

Semantics is useful for investigating a logic (i.e. a derivation system) only if the semantical entailment relation reflects its syntactical counterpart, the consequence relation (derivability). It is vital to know which modal logics are sound and complete with respect to a class of Kripke frames, and for them, to determine which class it is.

For any class C of Kripke frames, Thm(C) is a normal modal logic (in particular, theorems of the minimal normal modal logic, K, are valid in every Kripke model). However, the converse does not hold generally. There are Kripke incomplete normal modal logics, which is unproblematic, because most of the modal systems studied are complete of classes of frames described by simple conditions.

A normal modal logic L corresponds to a class of frames C, if C = Mod(L). In other words, C is the largest class of frames such that L is sound wrt C. It follows that L is Kripke complete if and only if it is complete of its corresponding class.

Consider the schema T : Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Box A\to A . T is valid in any reflexive frame Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,R\rangle

if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash \Box A

, then Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A

since w R w. On the other hand, a frame which validates T has to be reflexive: fix w ∈ W, and define satisfaction of a propositional variable p as follows: Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): u\Vdash p
if and only if w R u. Then Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash \Box p

, thus Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash p

by T, which means w R w using the definition of Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Vdash

. T corresponds to the class of reflexive Kripke frames.

It is often much easier to characterize the corresponding class of L than to prove its completeness, thus correspondence serves as a guide to completeness proofs. Correspondence is also used to show incompleteness of modal logics: suppose L₁ ⊆ L₂ are normal modal logics that correspond to the same class of frames, but L₁ does not prove all theorems of L₂. Then L₁ is Kripke incomplete. For example, the schema Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Box(A\equiv\Box A)\to\Box A

generates an incomplete logic, as it corresponds to the same class of frames as GL (viz. transitive and converse well-founded frames), but does not prove the GL-tautology Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Box A\to\Box\Box A

.

For any normal modal logic L, a Kripke model (called the canonical model) can be constructed, which validates precisely the theorems of L, by an adaptation of the standard technique of using maximal consistent sets as models. Canonical Kripke models play a role similar to the Lindenbaum–Tarski algebra construction in algebraic semantics.

A set of formulas is L-consistent if no contradiction can be derived from them using the axioms of L, and Modus Ponens. A maximal L-consistent set (an L-MCS for short) is an L-consistent set which has no proper L-consistent superset.

The canonical model of L is a Kripke model Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,R,\Vdash\rangle , where W is the set of all L-MCS, and the relations R and Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Vdash

are as follows:

Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): X\;R\;Y

if and only if for every formula Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): A

, if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Box A\in X

then Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): A\in Y

,

Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): X\Vdash A

if and only if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): A\in X

.

The canonical model is a model of L, as every L-MCS contains all theorems of L. By Zorn's lemma, each L-consistent set is contained in an L-MCS, in particular every formula unprovable in L has a counterexample in the canonical model.

The main application of canonical models are completeness proofs. Properties of the canonical model of K immediately imply completeness of K with respect to the class of all Kripke frames. This argument does not work for arbitrary L, because there is no guarantee that the underlying frame of the canonical model satisfies the frame conditions of L.

We say that a formula or a set X of formulas is canonical with respect to a property P of Kripke frames, if

• X is valid in every frame which satisfies P,
• for any normal modal logic L which contains X, the underlying frame of the canonical model of L satisfies P.

A union of canonical sets of formulas is itself canonical. It follows from the preceding discussion that any logic axiomatized by a canonical set of formulas is Kripke complete, and compact.

The axioms T, 4, D, B, 5, H, G (and thus any combination of them) are canonical. GL and Grz are not canonical, because they are not compact. The axiom M by itself is not canonical (Goldblatt, 1991), but the combined logic S4.1 (in fact, even K4.1) is canonical.

In general, it is undecidable whether a given axiom is canonical. We know a nice sufficient condition: H. Sahlqvist identified a broad class of formulas (now called Sahlqvist formulas) such that:

• a Sahlqvist formula is canonical,
• the class of frames corresponding to a Sahlqvist formula is first-order definable,
• there is an algorithm which computes the corresponding frame condition to a given Sahlqvist formula.

This is a powerful criterion: for example, all axioms listed above as canonical are (equivalent to) Sahlqvist formulas. A logic has the finite model property (FMP) if it is complete with respect to a class of finite frames. An application of this notion is the decidability question: it follows from Post's theorem that a recursively axiomatized modal logic L which has FMP is decidable, provided it is decidable whether a given finite frame is a model of L. In particular, every finitely axiomatizable logic with FMP is decidable.

There are various methods for establishing FMP for a given logic. Refinements and extensions of the canonical model construction often work, using tools such as filtration or unravelling. As another possibility, completeness proofs based on cut-free sequent calculi usually produce finite models directly.

Most of the modal systems used in practice (including all listed above) have FMP.

In some cases, we can use FMP to prove Kripke completeness of a logic: every normal modal logic is complete wrt a class of modal algebras, and a finite modal algebra can be transformed into a Kripke frame. As an example, Robert Bull proved using this method that every normal extension of S4.3 has FMP, and is Kripke complete.

Kripke semantics has a straightforward generalization to logics with more than one modality. A Kripke frame for a language with Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \{\Box_i\mid\,i\in I\}

as the set of its necessity operators consists of a non-empty set W equipped with binary relations Ri for each i ∈ I. The definition of a satisfaction relation is modified as follows:

Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash\Box_i A

if and only if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \forall u\,(w\;R_i\;u\Rightarrow u\Vdash A).

A simplified semantics, discovered by Tim Carlson, is often used for polymodal provability logics. A Carlson model is a structure Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,R,\{D_i\}_{i\in I},\Vdash\rangle

with a single accessibility relation R, and subsets Di ⊆ W for each modality. Satisfaction is defined as:

Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash\Box_i A

if and only if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \forall u\in D_i\,(w\;R\;u\Rightarrow u\Vdash A).

Carlson models are easier to visualize and to work with than usual polymodal Kripke models; there are, however, Kripke complete polymodal logics which are Carlson incomplete.

In "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic", published in 1963, Kripke responded to a difficulty with classical quantification theory. The motivation for the world-relative approach was to represent the possibility that objects in one world may fail to exist in another. If standard quantifier rules are used, however, every term must refer to something that exists in all the possible worlds. This seems incompatible with our ordinary practice of using terms to refer to things that exist contingently.

Kripke's response to this difficulty was to eliminate terms. He gave an example of a system that uses the world-relative interpretation and preserves the classical rules. However, the costs are severe. First, his language is artificially impoverished, and second, the rules for the propositional modal logic must be weakened.

Kripke's possible worlds theory has been used by narratologists (beginning with Pavel and Dolezel) to understand "reader's manipulation of alternative plot developments, or the characters' planned or fantasized alternative action series," has become especially useful in the analysis of hyperfiction.^[6]

Intuitionistic logic[link]

Kripke semantics for the intuitionistic logic follows the same principles as the semantics of modal logic, but uses a different definition of satisfaction.

An intuitionistic Kripke model is a triple Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,\le,\Vdash\rangle , where Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,\le\rangle

is a partially ordered Kripke frame, and Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Vdash
satisfies the following conditions:

• if p is a propositional variable, Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\le u

, and Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash p , then Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): u\Vdash p

(persistency condition),

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A\land B

if and only if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A
and Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash B

,

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A\lor B

if and only if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A
or Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash B

,

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A\to B

if and only if for all Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): u\ge w

, Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): u\Vdash A

implies Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): u\Vdash B

,

• not Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash\bot

.

Intuitionistic logic is sound and complete with respect to its Kripke semantics, and it has the Finite Model Property.

Intuitionistic first-order logic

Let L be a first-order language. A Kripke model of L is a triple Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,\le,\{M_w\}_{w\in W}\rangle , where Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \langle W,\le\rangle

is an intuitionistic Kripke frame, Mw is a

(classical) L-structure for each node w ∈ W, and the following compatibility conditions hold whenever u ≤ v:

• the domain of M_u is included in the domain of M_v,
• realizations of function symbols in M_u and M_v agree on elements of M_u,
• for each n-ary predicate P and elements a₁,…,a_n ∈ M_u: if P(a₁,…,a_n) holds in M_u, then it holds in M_v.

Given an evaluation e of variables by elements of M_w, we define the satisfaction relation Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A[e]

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash P(t_1,\dots,t_n)[e]

if and only if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): P(t_1[e],\dots,t_n[e])
holds in Mw,

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash(A\land B)[e]

if and only if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A[e]
and Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash B[e]

,

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash(A\lor B)[e]

if and only if Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A[e]
or Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash B[e]

,

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash(A\to B)[e]

if and only if for all Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): u\ge w

, Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): u\Vdash A[e]

implies Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): u\Vdash B[e]

,

• not Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash\bot[e]

,

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash(\exists x\,A)[e]

if and only if there exists an Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): a\in M_w
such that Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash A[e(x\to a)]

,

• Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): w\Vdash(\forall x\,A)[e]

if and only if for every Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): u\ge w
and every Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): a\in M_u

, Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): u\Vdash A[e(x\to a)] . Here e(x→a) is the evaluation which gives x the value a, and otherwise agrees with e.

[edit] Naming and Necessity

The three lectures that form Naming and Necessity constitute an attack on descriptivist theory of names. Kripke attributes variants of descriptivist theories to Frege, Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, among others. According to descriptivist theories, proper names either are synonymous with descriptions, or have their reference determined by virtue of the name's being associated with a description or cluster of descriptions that an object uniquely satisfies. Kripke rejects both these kinds of descriptivism. He gives several examples purporting to render descriptivism implausible as a theory of how names get their references determined (e.g., surely Aristotle could have died at age two and so not satisfied any of the descriptions we associate with his name, and yet it would seem wrong to deny that he was Aristotle).

As an alternative, Kripke outlined a causal theory of reference, according to which a name refers to an object by virtue of a causal connection with the object as mediated through communities of speakers. He points out that proper names, in contrast to most descriptions, are rigid designators. That is, a proper name refers to the named object in every possible world in which the object exists, while most descriptions designate different objects in different possible worlds. For example, 'Nixon' refers to the same person in every possible world in which Nixon exists, while 'the person who won the United States presidential election of 1968' could refer to Nixon, Humphrey, or others in different possible worlds.

Kripke also raised the prospect of a posteriori necessities^{[disambiguation needed ]} — facts that are necessarily true, though they can be known only through empirical investigation. Examples include “Hesperus is Phosphorus”, “Cicero is Tully”, “Water is H₂O” and other identity claims where two names refer to the same object.

Finally, Kripke gave an argument against identity materialism in the philosophy of mind, the view that every mental fact is identical with some physical fact. Kripke argued that the only way to defend this identity is as an a posteriori necessary identity, but that such an identity — e.g., pain is C-fibers firing — could not be necessary, given the possibility of pain that has nothing to do with C-fibers firing. Similar arguments have been proposed by David Chalmers.^[7]

Kripke delivered the John Locke lectures in philosophy at Oxford in 1973. Titled Reference and Existence, they are in many respects a continuation of Naming and Necessity, and deal with the subjects of fictional names and perceptual error. They have never been published and the transcript is officially available only in a reading copy in the university philosophy library, which cannot be copied or cited without Kripke's permission.

In a 1995 paper, philosopher Quentin Smith argued that key concepts in Kripke's new theory of reference had originated from the work of Ruth Barcan Marcus more than a decade earlier.^[8] Smith identified six significant ideas to the New Theory that he claimed Marcus had developed: (1) The idea that proper names are direct references, which don't consist of contained definitions. (2) While one can single out a single thing by a description, this description is not equivalent with a proper name of this thing. (3) The modal argument that proper names are directly referential, and not disguised descriptions. (4) A formal modal logic proof of the necessity of identity. (5) The concept of a rigid designator, though the actual name of the concept was coined by Kripke.(6) The idea of a posteriori identity. Smith proceeded to argue that Kripke failed to understand Marcus' theory at the time, yet later adopted many of its key conceptual themes in his New Theory of Reference.

Other scholars have subsequently offered detailed responses arguing that no plagiarism occurred.^[9]

"A Puzzle about Belief"[link]

Kripke’s main propositions in Naming and Necessity concerning proper names are that the meaning of a name simply is the object it refers to and that a name’s referent is determined by a causal link between some sort of “baptism” and the utterance of the name. Nevertheless he acknowledges the possibility that propositions containing names may have some additional semantic properties,^[10] properties that could explain why two names referring to the same person may give different truth values in propositions about beliefs. For example, Lois Lane believes that Superman can fly, although she does not believe that Clark Kent can fly. This can be accounted for if the names “Superman” and “Clark Kent”, though referring to the same person, have distinct semantic properties.

In the article “A Puzzle about Belief” Kripke seems to oppose even this possibility. His argument can be reconstructed in the following way: The idea that two names referring to the same object may have different semantic properties is supposed to explain that coreferring names behave differently in propositions about beliefs (as in Lois Lane's case). But the same phenomenon occurs even with coreferring names that obviously have the same semantic properties:

Kripke invites us to imagine a French, monolingual boy, Pierre, who believes the following: “Londres est joli.” (“London is beautiful.”) Pierre moves to London without realizing that London = Londres. He then learns English the same way a child would learn the language, that is, not by translating words from French to English. Pierre learns the name “London” from the unattractive part of the city in which he lives, so he comes to believe that London is not beautiful. If Kripke’s account is correct, Pierre now believes both that "Londres" is "joli" and that "London" is not beautiful. This cannot be explained by coreferring names having different semantic properties. According to Kripke, this demonstrates that attributing additional semantic properties to names does not explain what it is intended to prove.

Wittgenstein[link]

First published in 1982, Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language contends that the central argument of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations centers on a devastating rule-following paradox that undermines the possibility of our ever following rules in our use of language. Kripke writes that this paradox is "the most radical and original skeptical problem that philosophy has seen to date." (p. 60) Kripke argues that Wittgenstein does not reject the argument that leads to the rule-following paradox, but accepts it and offers a 'skeptical solution' to ameliorate the paradox's destructive effects.

Whilst most commentators^{[citation needed]} accept that the Philosophical Investigations contains the rule-following paradox as Kripke presents it, few have concurred with Kripke when he attributes a skeptical solution to Wittgenstein. It should be noted that Kripke himself expresses doubts in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language as to whether Wittgenstein would endorse his interpretation of the Philosophical Investigations. He says that the work should not be read as an attempt to give an accurate statement of Wittgenstein's views, but rather as an account of Wittgenstein's argument "as it struck Kripke, as it presented a problem for him" (p. 5).

The portmanteau "Kripkenstein" has been coined as a jesting nickname for Kripke's reading of the Philosophical Investigations. The real significance of "Kripkenstein" was to put forward a clear statement of a new kind of skepticism, dubbed "meaning skepticism", which is the idea that for an isolated individual there is no fact in virtue of which he/she means one thing rather than another by the use of a word. Kripke's "skeptical solution" to meaning skepticism is to ground meaning in the behavior of a community.

Kripke's book generated a large secondary literature,^{[citation needed]} divided between those who find his skeptical problem interesting and perceptive, and others, such as Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, who argue that his meaning skepticism is a pseudo-problem that stems from a confused, selective reading of Wittgenstein. Kripke's position has, however recently been defended against these and other attacks by the Cambridge philosopher Martin Kusch (2006), and Wittgenstein scholar David G. Stern considers the book to be "the most influential and widely discussed" work on Wittgenstein since the 1980s.^[11]

Truth[link]

This section only describes one highly specialized aspect of its associated subject. Please help improve this article by adding more general information. The talk page may contain suggestions. (October 2009)

In his 1975 article "Outline of a Theory of Truth", Kripke showed that a language can consistently contain its own truth predicate, which was deemed impossible by Alfred Tarski, a pioneer in the area of formal theories of truth. The approach involves letting truth be a partially defined property over the set of grammatically well-formed sentences in the language. Kripke showed how to do this recursively by starting from the set of expressions in a language which do not contain the truth predicate, and defining a truth predicate over just that segment: this action adds new sentences to the language, and truth is in turn defined for all of them. Unlike Tarski's approach, however, Kripke's lets "truth" be the union of all of these definition-stages; after a denumerable infinity of steps the language reaches a "fixed point" such that using Kripke's method to expand the truth-predicate does not change the language any further. Such a fixed point can then be taken as the basic form of a natural language containing its own truth predicate. But this predicate is undefined for any sentences that do not, so to speak, "bottom out" in simpler sentences not containing a truth predicate. That is, " 'Snow is white' is true" is well-defined, as is " ' "Snow is white" is true' is true," and so forth, but neither "This sentence is true" nor "This sentence is not true" receive truth-conditions; they are, in Kripke's terms, "ungrounded."

Religious views[link]

Kripke is an observant Jew.^[12] Discussing how his religious views influenced his philosophical views (in an interview with Andreas Saugstad) he stated: "I don't have the prejudices many have today, I don't believe in a naturalist world view. I don't base my thinking on prejudices or a world view and do not believe in materialism."^[13]

Awards and recognitions[link]

• Fulbright Scholar (1962–1963)
• Society of Fellows, Harvard University (1963–1966).
• Doctor of Humane Letters, honorary degree, University of Nebraska, 1977.
• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1978–).
• Corresponding Fellow, British Academy (1985–).
• Howard Behrman Award, Princeton University, 1988.
• Fellow, Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea (1993–).
• Doctor of Humane Letters, honorary degree, Johns Hopkins University, 1997.
• Doctor of Humane Letters, honorary degree, University of Haifa, Israel, 1998.
• Fellow, Norwegian Academy of Sciences (2000–).
• Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2001.
• Doctor of Humane Letters, honorary degree, University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
• Fellow, American Philosophical Society (2005–).

Works[link]

Books[link]

• Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-59845-8 and reprints 1972.
• Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: an Elementary Exposition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. ISBN 0-674-95401-7. Sets out his interpretation of Wittgenstein aka Kripkenstein.
• Collected Papers, Vol. I. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Abstracts and articles[link]

• 1959. "A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic", Journal of Symbolic Logic 24(1):1–14.
• 1959. "Distinguished Constituents" (abstract), The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 24(4):323.
• 1959. "Semantical Analysis of Modal Logic" (abstract), The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 24(4):323-324.
• 1959. "The Problem of Entailment" (abstract), The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 24(4):324.
• 1962. "‘Flexible’ Predicates of Formal Number Theory," Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 13(4):647-650.
• 1962. "The Undecidability of Monadic Modal Quantification Theory", Zeitschrift für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik 8:113–116
• 1963. "Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic", Acta Philosophica Fennica 16:83–94
• 1963. "Semantical Analysis of Modal Logic I: Normal Modal Propositional Calculi", Zeitschrift für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik 9:67–96
• 1964. "Transfinite Recursions on Admissible Ordinals, I" (abstract), The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 29, No. 3, p. 162.
• 1964. "Transfinite Recursions on Admissible Ordinals, II" (abstract), The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 29, No. 3, p. 162.
• 1964. "Admissible Ordinals and the Analytic Hierarchy" (abstract), The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 29, No. 3, p. 162.
• 1965. "Semantical Analysis of Intuitionistic Logic I", In Formal Systems and Recursive Functions, edited by M. Dummett and J. N. Crossley. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co.
• 1965. "Semantical Analysis of Modal Logic II: Non-Normal Modal Propositional Calculi", In The Theory of Models, edited by J. W. Addison, L. Henkin and A. Tarski. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co.
• 1967. Research Announcement: "Deduction-preserving ‘Recursive Isomorphisms’ between Theories" (with Marian Boykan Pour-El), Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 73:145-148.
• 1967. "An Extension of a Theorem of Gaifman-Hales-Solovay," Fundamenta Mathematicae, Vol. 61, pp. 29–32.
• 1967. "Transfinite Recursion, Constructible Sets, and Analogues of Cardinals," Summaries of Talks Prepared in Connection with the Summer Institute on Axiomatic Set Theory, American Mathematical Society, U.C.L.A., pp. IV-0-1 - IV-0-12.
• 1967. "On the Application of Boolean-Valued Models to Solutions of Problems in Boolean Algebra," in Summaries of Talks Prepared in Connection with the Summer Institute on Axiomatic Set Theory, American Mathematical Society, U.C.L.A. (1967), pp. IV-T-1 through IV-T-7.
• 1967. "Deduction-preserving ‘Recursive Isomorphisms’ between Theories" (with Marian Boykan Pour-El), Fundamenta Mathematicae 61:141-163.
• 1971. "Identity and Necessity", In Identity and Individuation, edited by M. K. Munitz. New York: New York University Press.
• 1972 (1980). "Naming and Necessity", In Semantics of Natural Language, edited by D. Davidson and G. Harman. Dordrecht; Boston: Reidel. Sets out the causal theory of reference.
• 1975. "Outline of a Theory of Truth", Journal of Philosophy 72:690–716. Sets his theory of truth (against Alfred Tarski), where an object language can contain its own truth predicate.
• 1976. "Is There a Problem about Substitutional Quantification?", In Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, edited by Gareth Evans and John McDowell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 1976. "A Theory of Truth I. Preliminary Report," abstract, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 556.
• 1976. "A Theory of Truth II. Preliminary Report," abstract, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 556–557.
• 1977. "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference", Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2:255–276.
• 1979. "A Puzzle about Belief", In Meaning and Use, edited by A. Margalit. Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel.
• 1982. "Nonstandard Models of Peano Arithmetic" (with S. Kochen), in Logic and Algorithmics: International Symposium Held in Honor of Ernst Specker, H. Lauchli (ed.), University of Geneva: 277-295.
• 1986. “A Problem in the Theory of Reference: the Linguistic Division of Labor and the Social Character of Naming,” Philosophy and Culture (Proceedings of the XVIIth World Congress of Philosophy), Montreal, Editions Montmorency: 241-247.
• 1992. “Summary: Individual Concepts: Their Logic, Philosophy, and Some of Their Uses.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66: 70-73
• 2005. "Russell's Notion of Scope", Mind 114:1005–1037
• 2008. "Frege’s Theory of Sense and Reference: Some Exegetical Notes,” Theoria 74:181-218
• 2009. "Presupposition and Anaphora: Remarks on the formulation of the projection problem," Linguistic Inquiry 40(3):367-386.
• 2009. "The Collapse of the Hilbert Program," (Abstract) Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 15(2):229-231.
• 2011. "The First Person," Collected Papers Vol. I, Oxford University Press. The videos "The First Person" and "Questions and Answers" in which the paper is based are available here.
• 2011. "Two Paradoxes of Knowledge," Collected Papers Vol. I, Oxford University Press.
• 2011. "Nozick on Knowledge," Collected Papers Vol. I, Oxford University Press.
• 2011. "A Puzzle about Time and Thought," Collected Papers Vol. I, Oxford University Press.
• 2011. "Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities," Collected Papers Vol. I, Oxford University Press.
• 2011. "Unrestricted Exportation and Some Morals for the Philosophy of Language," Collected Papers Vol. I, Oxford University Press. Podcast of the talk available here.
• (Forthcoming). “Another Approach: The Church-Turing ‘Thesis’ as a Special Corollary of Gödel’s Completeness Theorem,” in Computability: Gödel, Turing, Church, and beyond, Copeland, B. J., Posy, C., and Shagrir, O. (eds), Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.