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Cogbum, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1999 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Neil Tennant, Adviser Professor Stewart Shapiro Adviser Professor William Taschek Department of Philosophy UMI Number: 99413 08 UMI Microform 9941308 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. Ail rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ... Surely some revelation is at haig^ Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi ■Roubles my sight... W.B. Yeats- ABSTRACT Michael Dununett, Neil Tennant, and Crispin Wright all appeal to a priori re­ strictions on a philosophical explanation of linguistic competence (the “theory of meaning”) to criticize classical logic and semantics. They also use these restrictions to defend verificationsim. In the negative part of my project I uncover interesting structural analogies between the Dummettian arguments for logical revision to show that they all require the truth of a stronger, and less plausible, form of verificationism than even the logical positivists were willing to countenance. This result, I argue, genuinely is a modus tollens from which we should conclude that the explanatory demands Dummett and others place on the theory of meaning are mistaken. I then draw from the linguistic, lexicographic, and psychological Hterature to undermine the Dummettian view that an explanation of competence should recursively correlate dispositions necessary and sufficient for grasp of meaning with the aspects of mean­ ings generated by a compositional semantics. Thus is eliminated the Dummettian impetus to identify such dispositions with the ability to recognize verifications. In the positive discussion I: (1) characterize and defend a conception of tacit knowledge which renders the postulation of the mental reality of classical semantics both explanatory and plausible, (2) show that many traditional philosophical ques­ tions concerning the epistemology of language can and should be recast as questions concerning how the theory of sentence meaning (compositional semantics) inter­ acts with the theory of word meaning (lexical semantics), and (3) defend a roughly Davidsonian alternative to Dummett's theory of grasp of meaning. 11 Dedicated to Enuly Beck 111 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my adviser, Neil Tennant. For many students, the most difficult thing about graduate school are the long periods of time between receiving positive feedback, encouragement, and suggestions for research avenues. Neil’s students do not suffer this lack. Neil’s commitment to philosophy and his students completely overshadows vanity; my philosophical disagreements with him have been nurtured. All of us who took courses with Neil during the composition of The Taming of the True count ourselves among the blessed. I have learned how to do philosophy from NeU. I also thank Stewart Shapiro for encouragement and enthusiasm. The most excit­ ing philosophical conversation I have had has been over the course of a few years and in weekly installments over lunch with Stewart. The positions I defend owe much more to Stewart’s input than I have been able to note. My practice of taking empiri­ cal linguistic semantics seriously in the context of philosophical “theory of meaning” debates owes its genesis to Stewart’s encouragement. The non-foundationalist phi­ losophy of logic presupposed in the entire monograph is Stewart’s. I thank William Taschek. At certain times I have needed someone to admonish me with Kripke’s phrase, “there is no mathematical replacement for philosophy.” If Neil introduced me to the joy of using and reflecting on formalisms, and Stewart the joys of an Aristotelian methodology in metaphysics and the philosophy of language, William constantly encouraged me to reflect on the limitations of formalisms and empirical theories and results. As with Stewart, the content of this monograph owes much to William. The bits of Quine and Davidson I love are Quine and Davidson as taught by WiUiam. The whole strategy of using the logical positivist’s discussions IV of verifiability to critically explore Dummettian anti-realism was suggested to me by William. Finally, philosophical conversations with William have been invaluable. I thank Craige Roberts. Our discipline would be incomparably richer if every philosopher of language and mind took Craige’s Montague Grammar and lexical se­ mantics course sequences. Before taking classes from her I was ignorant and ignorant of my ignorance. My biggest regret upon graduating is that I cannot continue my linguistic studies here. I thank my parents. Every virtue I have, philosophical and otherwise, I owe to their example. I thank John Chaplin, Ty Lightner, and Ed Slowik. The first year of graduate school is hard both intellectually and emotionally, and John, Ty, and Ed’s mentorship helped immensely. I thank Jack Arnold, Eric Caudill, Roy Cook, Jon Curtis, Cathy Hyatt, David Merli, Joe Salerno, Mark Silcox, Eric Ward, and AJan Westcoat for exciting philo­ sophical discussion and paper proof-reading. Aristotle is right about friendship. VITA October, 1970 ............................................................................. Bom—Mesa, Arizona June, 1993 ................................B.A. Philosophy, The University of Texas at Austin December, 1995 ....................................M.A. Philosophy, The Ohio State University 1994-present Graduate Teaching Assistant, The Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Philosophy VI CHAPTER 1 THE MANIFESTATION CHALLENGE Dummett’s challenge to classical truth conditional semantics rests upon the fol­ lowing three claims: 1. Knowing the meaning of a sentence requires knowing what it would be for that sentence to be true, 2. All that is involved in knowing the meaning of a sentence is knowing how to use that sentence correctly, and 3. Given 1. and 2., the assumption that all true sentences are verifiable al­ lows us to provide the best explanation of knowledge of the meaning of a sentence. Then,^ Dummett goes on to argue that 4. The assumption that all true sentences are verifiable provides strong evi­ dence for the incorrectness of classical truth conditional semantics, as well as evidence for the correctness of intuitionistic constructive semantics. In this chapter I shall only be concerned with explicating the first three of these claims, and will not address the fourth until Chapter 3. ^In some of his earlier work (e.g.- (Dummett (1959)) Dummett writes as if the notion of truth should be replaced with that of verifiability, but came to regard this as infelicitous. For example, On the way of putting it I adapted, one first proposes explaining meaning, not in terms of truth, but in terms of the condition for correct assertion, and then declares that, for statements whose meaning is so explained, the only awimissible notion of truth will be one under which a statement is true when and only when we are able to arrive at a position in which we may correctly assert it. But, in that case, it would have been better first to state the restriction on the application of ‘true’, and then to have held that the meaning of a statement is given by the condition for it to be true in Uun, restricted, sense of W , (Dummett, (1978, p. xxii)) Throughout, we shall follow Dummett's later usage, presenting him as seeking to characterize truth a certain way, rather than replacing truth with something else. For Dummett, the claim that knowledge of the truth conditions of a sentence is necessary for understanding that sentence is to be explicated with a “theory of reference” for the natural language in which the understood sentence occurs. Such a theory consists of a recursive syntax and compositional semantics; then, “what it would be for a sentence to be true” is taken to be the truth conditions assigned by the semantics to the sentence in question. The claim that correct use is necessary and sufficient for knowledge of meaning is to be explicated with a “theory of sense” added to the theory of reference. This theory will correlate with the truth conditions of the semantics a set of dispositions,^ possession of which are necessary and sufficient for understanding the natural language sentence correlated with that truth condition by the theory of reference.^ Finally, Dummett holds that these dispositions are a speaker’s ability to recognize verifications of the sentences.