Philosophy of language

I am taking more and more liberties. MAc asked on another thread in le salon:

macumbreira:
What is philosphy of language ?

TomcatMurr
Mac, to answer your question.

Very generally, at its broadest, the philosophy of language is the field of study which seeks to answer questions such as:

what is language
where does it come from
how does it work
how does it shape our ideas, the way we see the world
what is the relationship between language and consciousness, language and mind

It intersects with disciplines such as semiotics, grammatology, translation theory, phenomenology, neuroscience, psychology, literary criticism, anthropology and sociology, theoretical and applied linguistics.

Touchstone figures are:

Saussure
Barthes
Wittgenstein
Jakobsen
Lakoff and Johnson
Chomsky
Whitehead
Russell

Mm. Any additions, anyone?

PimPhilipse
Is evolutionary biology considered off-limits for the philosophy of language?

TomcatMurr
No, indeed not. Especially where evolutionary biology intersects with neurobiology.

A good introduction for general readers of some of the issues in the philosophy of language - primarily from a linguistic perspective, but he does touch on some of the other areas I have mentioned- are Stephen Pinker's books. However, Pinker needs to be approached with caution. He places for too great an emphasis on psychology and medical models of conducting linguistic research, and I am not convinced that they offer an accurate picture of language and how it works and what it is for.

I humbly offer for general perusal this post for more on Pinker.

http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2007/09/l...

anna_in_pdx
Sapir and Whorf as well, though I guess they are pretty discredited by now. (I have a bachelor degree that required some linguistics, but they were all introductory courses lo these many years ago...)

Third_cheek
tomcatMurr is right, it's a huge field and there's really no straightforward answer to determine whether a philosopher is dealing in philosophical issues of language, mind, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of literure and criticism, philosophical semantics, semiology, etc.

It would be easy to go on adding to the list of candidate philosophers, since the large part of the analytic tradition is given over to related issues. It was also an important area in scholastic philosophy of the middle ages.

I'll add Quine, just for the hell of it. Most of his work was as a logician and philosopher of logic, but his Word and Object touches on very many of the areas of philosophy that tcm has mentioned. It also touches on issues in metaphysics, logic, epistemology.

To see how language might be implicated in all these diverse issues, you could start by considering a classic analytic philsophical problem:

How does the sentence "The cat sat on the mat" mean that 'The cat sat on the mat'?

It seems pretty simple, but very quickly we find ourselves in a tangle of very subtle and complicated issues.

Macumbreira
I was particularly impressed with prof. Steven Mithen's " evolution of the mind"
A great book and a strong recommendation. Mithen indeed referred to Pinker, which I have here on my TBR pile but not started yet.

Mr.Durick
In a back corner of the linguistics department where fewer would see me I enjoyed reading Frege and Strawson. I don't remember what they said though, except that Venus as a referent can be problematic or some such.

Robert

TomcatMurr
Anna, you mentioned Whorf and Sapir, a pet theory of mine. Their hypothesis was largely discredited due to the evil machinations of the psychologists. However, I think it's clear that anyone who speaks more than one language, especially with experience of living in a foreign linguistic culture, knows the hypothesis to be true. It is making something of a comeback now, although under another name. There is a brilliant young linguist at MIT who is doing fascinating work in this area - her name escapes me but I will try to find out more.

A_musing
For the Philosophy of Language Crowd, I heartily recommend Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid. It's not philosophy of language per se, but more about language acquisition and intervention. The Whorf-Sapir fans will find it interesting, since she summarizes some of the research into the way in which brain function differs in different languages and how that affects language acquisition. It is a popular book, but she's also got some wonderful technical work worth reading.

Merleau-Ponty is a lot of fun on issues of language acquistion and epistemology and overlooked by many; Plato on Socrates' opposition to the written word is fundamental in my mind.

Philosophy to add to the list: Hegel. Logic.

So what about taking Third_Cheek's idea and going with it as a starting point:

How does the sentence "The cat sat on the mat" mean that 'The cat sat on the mat'?

I am confused. What does "the cat sat on the mat" mean? I think I'll go eat some green eggs and ham with a fox in a box.

Old chestnut:

A philosophy professor says at the beginning of the first session of the new term, "Has anyone here taken a philosophy course before?" A student answers, "What do you mean by 'here'?" The prof says, "Anyone else?"

While eating green eggs and ham with a fox in a box is a perfect koan response to the question, I suspect that in Third_Cheek's problem we are now supposed to examine the concepts cat, mat and sat, individually and together and their influences, seen and unseen, upon each other. I am most emphatically not a philospher. I like Berkeley. I am prepared to muse briefly that perhaps if the cat is not seen to be sitting on the mat, then neither the cat nor the mat really exist.

But as a translator, I am much more interested in the fact that MY languages, Slovak and Czech, are filled, among other things, with dimunitives and the language invites you to form dimunitives easily. So when in English we have the bald word "cat", I can translate it into Slovak with perhaps a hundred different dimunitive words. Which is right? What did the original writer in English intend? Can I tell? And what if I decide, that even if he intended THIS meaning, I prefer THAT one. To ME, THAT sings more. Do I have the right to recreate? Perhaps more precisely, do I have a DUTY to recreate?

I have not been translating from English into Czech or Slovak but from Slovak and Czech into English. There, the problem is related although somewhat different. If a writer, as Kolenic, whom I am reading right now, delights in sentences filled with almost nonsensical versions and variations on common words and English does not lend itself to that, what do I do? Let's stay with "cat". Let's posit that on this page Kolenic has used forty different dimunitive variations on "cat". We will start in English with "kitty" and "kittykins" and soon run out of sensible possibilities. Yes, there is "piglet" but do we want to go to "kitlet"? Adding adjectives is of course possible but gets awkward and cumbersome. Tiny, puny, cute, miniscule...... No. In the original language it is a single word.

A major translator I know, translating the body of a major poet I know, says in the preface that some poems did not get translated into English because of "technical issues" which he does not elucidate.

I suspect that if Kolenic gets translated, some passages will get omitted for "technical reasons."

>4 polutropos: Andrushka,

Perhaps the solution is simply to make up a portmanteau word. I find such words delightful and often more evocative than a long phrase.

But but but

(and of course you are right, and I appreciate the suggestion)

the point is that in the original there are many many many variations. The translation will usualy not lend itself to that.

OF COURSE not a phrase.

macka -- cat

a few Slovak possibilities:

maca
maciatko
macicka
macicienka
maculicka
macilienka
macilienko
mnauka
mnauko
cicka
cicuska
ciciatko
ciculienko
cicienka

That's just very quickly without much thought. All of them are variations on the one word, all perfectly sensible without in the least pushing the language. Can I run with it this way in English? I don't think so. So the solution has to be elsewhere.

>4 polutropos: we are now supposed to examine the concepts cat, mat and sat, individually and together and their influences, seen and unseen, upon each other.

We could start there, or we could ask ourselves how we know that the sign 'cat' refers to the concept 'cat'. Why doesn't the sign '%$Q' in our language refer to the concept 'cat'? How do we all know that 'cat' refers to 'cat'?

Perhaps the rest of your post would be more comfortable in the translation thread, as you raise issues central to the process of translating. Who is the major translator and the major poet you mention? Why the mystery lol ?

What you say about diminutives is interesting, coz in most languages I know of, a diminutive is not used to signify size so much, as to signify cuteness or fondness or great familiarity. In Chinese, for example, given names of friends are prefixed with Shiao, which means little, so we call our friends Little Plum, or Little Willy (well, perhaps not that one....)

English is deficient in these kind of diminutives. Perhaps we are to distant with each other, too formal?

Are diminutives a cultural universal among all languages?

I love that word list, btw. Can you give some indication as to how to pronounce 'c'? Is it like 's', like 'k' or like 'ch' in English?

I will cut and paste my translation theorizing into another thread. Cuteness, fondness and great familiarity are of course all functions of the Slavic dimunitives as well.

And I appreciate your pronunciation question. Since English also lacks the appropriate accents I cannot add them here. In most cases above there is supposed to be a "hacek" over the "c" which makes it into a "ch" English equivalent. That is the case with all the "c"s in the first seven examples. There is also a hacek over the "n" in the next two, making the "n" sound like "gn" in "lasagna". The remaining five words have no hacek and the "c" is pronounced like "ts" in "tse-tse fly" or "zz" in "pizza".

Hacek as in Jaroslav?

macicienka is my favourite. Murruschka macicienka. Sounds great.

Jaroslav HaSek, with an "s". But the "s" also has a hacek on it, making the sound "sh".

And yes, macicienka is indeed a beautiful word which suits you. (It is definitely feminine, though.)

I could now go through a similar list of variations on the word for Tomcat, which is Kocur.

Dominick pronounced his name: Hasheck. The Canadian tough his name Kos-er. Joey Kocur, ie. Koh-sir. Not kosher.

The Dominator was absolutely true to his Czech heritage and language in pronouncing it Hasheck.

The Canadian tough I am pretty sure was born in Canada and did not speak any Slavic language. So, I, too, have heard announcers pronounce his name exactly as you say, Koh-sir. However, in Slovak, in which his name indeed means tomcat, there is NO accent on the "c" which makes the Slovak pronunciation "Ko-tsoor"

Š alt0138, š alt0154 but apparently c hacek is not on the normal (IBM?) keyboard or in ASCII or something.

Robert

A Tomcat named cocu ? LOL

That the sign cat means that well known furry feline is because c a t combined constitue the sound "cat".

The real question is why homo sapiens sapiens when they were distributing sounds to indicate certain things connected the sound "cat" "kat" "chat" to that specific animal ?

I read somewhere that if you would go backwards into the development of indo - germanic you could have glimpses of that Ur language and how it developed. but I always kept wondering why that sound / word was chosen for that specific thing / animal ?

Tomcat has quoted well in his review : In the beginning was the word.

A Tomcat named cocu ? LOL

That the sign cat means that well known furry feline is because c a t combined constitue the sound "cat".

The real question is why homo sapiens sapiens when they were distributing sounds to indicate certain things connected the sound "cat" "kat" "chat" to that specific animal

I read somewhere that if you would go backwards into the development of indo - germanic you could have glimpses of that Ur language and how it developed. but I always kept wondering why that sound / word was chosen for that specific thing / animal

Tomcat has quoted well in his review : In the beginning was the word.

I think typically the assignment of sound to meaning is arbitrary. Even onomatopoeia varies language to language as does imitation as say the sounds animals make.

It is dangerous to say ur-language. An expert will come along and say there is nothing "ur" about it. A good bit of Indo-European vocabulary has been reconstructed, but where various branches diverged causes some apparent cognates to have slightly different roots.

Robert

17 : I cannot agree on arbitrary. I am sure there is a hidden system or logic behind the naming of things. Why are Mama and Papa nearly universal words ?

A good bit of Indo-European vocabulary has been reconstructed. Do you know where I can find more on this topic ? It really fascinates me.

In relation to English, Indo-European gets a good introduction in the back of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language with a very long word list. I got some of what I said from an anthropology text, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language I think. A historical linguistics text heavy on Indo-European could be interesting; they all (those in English) used to be, but the last one I picked up looked more than I liked at Pacific languages.

'Arbitrary' is the buzzword. Mama and Papa are near universal because they are very natural sounds to make and are often made first in a family environment. I have not studied developmental linguistics, but that explanation is common.

Robert

čČ I was able to get c haček from the Word insert symbol table in an awkward cut and paste procedure.

Robert

of course from the cat's POV, the act of mat sitting redefined the mat as a throne for the duration.

>18 Macumbeira: Why are Mama and Papa nearly universal words ?

You're right, they are nearly universal words, but this has more to do with the physiology of sound production, than with meaning. /m/ and /p/ are both labials (made with the lips), /m/ with lips closed, and /p/ is a plosive. These are the most basic sounds the human mouth is capable of and the easiest for an infant to stumble across at the very start of speech acquisition. Basically, they are one small step up from blowing raspberries and blowing bubbles, the first things a baby does with its mouth (apart from mewling and puking). It's parent's delighted responses, that teach baby, "oh this sound has meaning, if I do it again I get these nice responses." in that sense, the meaning is totally arbitrary.

Sausure argued, -I think rightly- that the sounds we affix to concepts are arbitrary and become fixed only through convention. There may have been some original Ur- onomatopeia, but, as Robert said, onomatopeia is a vexed area.

BTW

"cat" "kat" "chat" beware of false friends: the Chinese for cat is "mau".

Murr, (or anyone else with knowledge of languages of the East),

yes, in Indo-European languages, Mama and Papa , but also in Mandarin? Hindi? Japanese?....

Truly universal?

nearly universal. In Chinese Mama and papa, yes, ma and pa yes (although pa is pronounced more like ba). Don't know about Hindi or Japanese.

Arabic does not have a "p" so they say "baba" instead of "papa".

Come to think of it in Slovak while mama is the one, the other is tata.

"t" is a different (I would think more difficult) sound formation from p/b. Requires tongue to the teeth. Why are those damn Slovak babies so difficult? Or perhaps smarter? Is that it?

baba and mama in swahili too ( but ofcourse Swahili is strongly influenced by Arabic )

#4, "I am prepared to muse briefly that perhaps if the cat is not seen to be sitting on the mat, then neither the cat nor the mat really exist."

Sort of like Kansas, right? It's a place I know only as an abstraction on a map. If I've never been there, it doesn't exist for me.

That's what my wife tells me when she has to repeat a story I have forgotten. She says, "Well, if you don't remember it, it's new to you".

don't mistake map for territory.

18> "Nearly universal" seems like an oxymoron to me.

The anthropological and biogical issue: In Estonian, "isa" means 'papa'. It's from the Finno-Ugric language group, so obviously quite different. I suspect that the similarity of the word for father in so many of the cases mentioned is down to two factors - the extension of Latin following the Roman colonisations of North Africa, parts of the Middle East, and much of Europe, and also the practical simplicity of making and replicating the sounds. The sound of papa and mama may be among the easiest for infants to reproduce, assuming a human larynx, so the prevalence of these simple words may have less to do with whatever 'linguistic' processes the brain has evolved to cope with and more to do with the immediate ease with which infants are able to stumble upon the relevant arrangement of tongue, breath, throat etc.

I don't want to push the analytic philosophical line, but one might consider whether norms of correctness are essential for any word having meaning, and what this implies for our understanding of meaning. A related issue one might consider is whether the word "cat" is at all meaningful in isolation from some more complex structure involving other words. For example, if I say "CAT" meaningfully then least thing I'm doing may be picking something or things out as being 'cats'. If that's right, then perhaps the word is meaningful because it implies a wider structure like that of a proposition 'It is a cat'. This is called the "context principle" in analytic philosophy - a word only has meaning in the context of a sentence or proposition. And, are indexicals 'it' that' 'here' etc any different? What about relational words ('on')?

Just a few ideas to pull the discussion away from the empirical issue of anthropology.

PS The above problem of the meaning of "cat" is much the same whether we discuss written or spoken language. Idealism doesn't seem to resolve the issue either - Berkeleyan metaphysics just reiterates the problem according to a different story about how the referent subsists, but the problem remains. It would be nice if idealism did help, since I'm a sympathiser.

Some philosophers have tried to resolve the issue along lines similar to the idealists, by claiming that the problem lies with our understanding of what it is for something to be 'true' or 'false'.

I need a drink...

30, 'very universal' then.

I think 'mama' and 'papa' are not from the human larynx but from the human lips.

What about phrases of a single word like vocatives; "Cat!"? There is a credible notion (see, among other places, the New Oxford American Dictionary) that we understand words, in isolation, with target images or ideas, the important part being in isolation.

Robert

>30 Third_cheek: you said exactly what I was about to re mama and papa (although I likely would have been less eloquent). Japanese, just for a little more non-Indo-European perspective

father: chichi/otoosan
mother: haha/okaasan
grandmother: baba/obaasan (or -chan)
grandfather: jiji/ojiisan (or -chan)

If discussing why "the cat sat on the mat" means what it means, even more so are slang and other expressions, "in the hot seat", "who wears the pants in this family" - we may be the last generation to whom that seems to make sense, "step on it" - is the hurry up from the image of stepping on a gas pedal or something else?

I remember reading something about the language of the cetacae (whales, dolphins, porpoises), postulating that their language might be more relationship oriented, as, for example, a kitten says "I want milk" by rubbing against its owner's leg - which is also saying "I have a dependent relationship with you"

Does anybody remember that Startrek episode (John luc Picard one) where they came upon some humanoids that spoke entirely in metaphore that was based on their own folklore "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra." Picard eventually gets it and tries to relate telling part of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

32> You're absolutely right about the 'lips'. How could I have forgotten those?

The case for the isolated word is an interesting one. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that we might be able to learn to respond with the appropriate word signs in isolation from other words or language proper. However, there are reasons to think that this doesn't tell us that the words mean something when taken in isolation.

Here's a loose story about one way in which analytic philosophers engage with this issue:

I suggested earlier that one issue is that we might need norms of correct/incorrectness to be operating if we want to say that a word is being used meaningfully. Behind this is the idea that words like "cat" if used meaningfully (in some language), can't just be applied to anything at all. If a person says "cat" at any number of random and unrelated instances then I'd want to say that this is either meaningless or the word is being given a different meaning on each occasion, so the recurrence of the sound "cat" is irrelevant to its meaning.
What follows from this idea is that, even in the case of the child who has learnt the correct use of just one word, it is possible that the child could say "cat" and be wrong, and although having learnt the use he is usually right, it is not his use that determines rightness - he could still make a mistake. Note that this seems a necessary implication if we want to say that the child has 'learnt' to use the word. If the child weren't using the word in such a way, then it's difficult to see how it could be meaningful at all, at least not in any sense relevant to language.
We are now able to say that for such a word as "cat" to mean anything it needs to be possible that in some applications the use word "cat" says something 'false' and on others 'true'. If that is the case, then perhaps we also have to admit that such a use of "cat" (where the child means what we mean by "cat" if he/she says it when confronted with a cat image) is shorthand for "... is a cat." The child's use of "cat" is shorthand for a longer sentence expressing a proposition.

Now we are on the road to the context principle. Note that this plays neatly into the hands of Chomsky's fans, despite my being a sceptic about some of their claims. We've also taken one of the more difficult cases for the context principle, whereas the meaning of all relational words and grammatical structures being dependent upon their being applicable to whole sentences is relatively uncontroversial.

One interesting consequence of this view is that the structure of signification is never just a simplistic 'referring to' or 'pointing toward' from sign to thing or concept. Another is that we haven't even started on the trickier issue of how people can intend 'cats' in different ways when they use the word cat - I might say "cat", and only ever intend to refer to domestic cats, whereas another person might have lots of cats from literary fiction in mind, and this might influence the ways in which they are able to use the word. This doesn't contradict the previous claim that "cat" has to be used in a 'truth' functional context if it is to be meaningful - we are not putting a limit on bounds of 'correctness' when we say this.

This isn't thorough rigorous argument, but I hope it gives a flavour of one aspect of the philosophical issue, and the kind of thinking that gives rise to it. These are kinds of problems that early analytic philosophers such as Russell, Wittgenstein and Frege were grappling.

There are lots of sticky problems with this approach, so feel free to tear it t pieces. For example, what is meant by 'truth'? How does this relate to Wittgenstein's celebrated assertion that 'language is use' (sic.)? Does this imply anything about metaphysics? What does it mean to say that we 'know' what a word means? Are metaphors only meaningful where they are truth-functional?

Pass the bottle, Mac.

>32 Mr.Durick: We understand words, in isolation, with target images or ideas, the important part being in isolation.

Roberto, I would disagree with this for many reasons. First, randomly, what is a 'word'? In the flow of speech, as Martin will no doubt confirm, elision, concatenation and so on blurr the boundaries of 'words'. Secondly, Lexically, many 'words' are actually compounds: 'of course' being a classic and oft quoted example. Thirdly, the presence of idioms as a large percentage of language makes the words-in-isolation theory very problematic. How are we to understand 'wears the pants' taking words in isolation? Fourthly, I think, but I'm not up to speed on the research, doesn't neural processing of language reception work at the string level, rather than word level? the current theory is that language production at least operates on a string level rather than words-in-isolation level, but I'm not sure if the same holds true for reception. I imagine it would, just from my own experience of trying to decode Chinese.

(incidentally, this is one of my faves: in UK English 'pants' are what you wear under les trousers ie underwear. I have visions of the family sharing one set and passing them round. Quite. Ugh.)

Third-Cheek, I'm so unfamiliar with the analytical philosophy angle, that I need time to work on the rest of your comment in >37 Third_cheek:. How about a thread on analytical philosophy and language for beginners?

When was the last time you actually had a hard time distinguishing the words in your speech? Even in languages with heavy infixing words can be distinguished if the specialists in those fields are to be believed. We can identify and define all the words in 'wear the pants.' Now idiom or metaphor (in the broad sense) can get us to a different meaning than is apparent from the sum of the words, but the metaphorical meaning of 'wear the pants' is not so recondite that a native speaker from the world in which women wore skirts and dresses couldn't figure it out. I would defer to a dictionary for a definition of 'word.'

Compounds and collocations are analyzable at some level anyway and sometimes, as with metaphor, become single words. 'Bathroom' is one of my favorites. Of course it is a room in which to bathe; clustering plumbing our crappers went in the same room so bathroom is an easy euphemism for perhaps shithouse. My academic adviser had a problem with someone saying, for example, "The dog went to the bathroom on the carpet." I wouldn't use bathroom like that, but if I heard it I wouldn't make much of it.

The rough among my acquaintances when I was a boy said that girls wear pants; men wear trousers. Tailors on the other hand talked about men's pants and even had a hypercorrected 'pant' for one pair.

The word in isolation thing is interesting psychologically. I first heard of it in a linguistic anthropology course. The authors had actually done peer reviewed experiments. None of us, probably, personally defines a word by the limits of its meaning. We hear the word bird and think of what we typically ideate as a bird -- for me it's a robin. Now it could be lexicographically important too. One can take a definition as identifying a sort of target and then allowing expansion from that target. My understanding of The New Oxford American Dictionary is that they were trying for that; sadly, Oxford hasn't been able to do a proper dictionary of American English yet.

It is hard for a newcomer to a language, for example an artificial intelligence program, to find word breaks in continuous speech, but that is a deficiency of the newcomer. I realized I was getting a handle on Japanese before I really new anything when it no longer sounded funny to me. I'm curious about any research that talks about phrases versus words.

Now I know in technical semantics words have a different meaning than strings of words, and I think that is far from settled. When I was a graduate student, mind you over 2½ decades ago, the reference of a noun was an object to which the noun referred (that nexus ended up in some kind of infinite regress which is the religious part of it) while the reference of a sentence was its truth value. That limited sentences to be expressions of propositions though. Erotetic logic, I was told, found felicity to be the guiding notion in the semantics of questions.

I'll go now.

Robert

>39 Mr.Durick: Pants/trousers: I realize it's gauche to ask you to date yourself, but can you give us a sense of what era we're talking about here? My father's parents both said "trousers" for men (and my grandmother used "slacks" for women) when I was little, but my dad said "pants" for both genders. I recall "trousers" sneaking into his speech over my teen years, eventually pushing "pants" out entirely, for both genders. The really interesting thing, though, is that the rest of the family has followed suit--my mother (who came to Canada after marrying him at 23 and picked up many of her English habits from him) and sister both use it in seemingly free variation with "pants" for men (and always "pants" for women). I am the family's last trouser-free bastion (ha ha) and could never use the word--to me (b. 1980) it sounds old-timey. I'd like to get a sense of the word's history!

It would have been in my first 17 years in Western Massachusetts; I was born there late in 1944. I think men in my neighborhood, school teachers, lawyers, and so forth didn't worry about saying pants, and trousers was just a little heavy in those circles although one could say it. Other, rougher demographics were the source of the little saying. That would have been into the early sixties.

Robert

38> I know, it was a dense passage. The context principle in analytic philosophy of language is almost unbreachable these days, and not just in analytic philosophy, the arguments in favour being so numerous and persuasive. Still, that isn't an argument in itself, so we need to follow these things through to see where they may or not be going wrong. I'm open to the possibility that it could be wrong, but if tomcatmurr's comment about the current neuroscientific evidence is right, then it looks as though the current science backs it up.

I'm afraid my introduction to this particular problem may have been a little dry. Sorry!

Here's another problem with the idea that individual words can be meaningful in isolation: If a child with a single word vocabulary says "cat" when presented with a 'cat' image, then do we have any way of showing that the child does in fact mean 'cat' rather than meaning 'correct response when presented with such an image' or 'the thing that makes the teacher say "well done" '?

This is of course a slighly different issue, it's partly about the epistemology of translation. Quine summed this up nicely with his celebrated "crum-gavagai" argument in Word and Object. Late Wittgenstein makes a similar point. Though I'm not proposing an ad hominem argument.

On 'pants' and 'trousers'> I think I'm with tomcat here - trousers is more common in my experience, pants being primarily an American expression meaning the same as trousers, the domination of eg movies and TV by American media might suggest otherwise, but we read a lot too, and much of it isn't written or edited by Americans.
Old world? Not at all - pants is shorthand for pantaloons, which seems pretty old-world to me (it's from the French pantalons). I like both words, it makes the language richer, and the confusion between American 'pants' and British 'pants' is funny, after all. It may be that a greater proportion of the world's speakers for whom English is the first language are using 'trousers' - certainly the Indians and Pakistani's I know use British English, so it can't even be argued that 'trousers' is esoteric. In fact, I'd put money on it that Indians generally use 'trousers'. So, India having an enormous population, and being one of the future economies that may overcome Western domination, if one wants to play safe, one might be best going to business meetings in a pair of trousers.

Porius: that was the perfect interlude to get us to pause and reflect on each other's points, and remind us - me at least- what language is all about: sheer heart-stopping beauty of thought and expression.

43,44> Shakespeare does indeed kick ass... and arse.

Nicholas Pennell and Dicky Pasco also deliver the speech with chilling results.

>41 Mr.Durick:, 42 Thanks, that all makes sense. I am Canadian, and in this as in many things, we maintain both British and American usages side by side; there is also this funny phenomenon with my father where, as he gets older, he increasingly prefers the British terms and disprefers the American--although why he does that is an intriguing and baffling question in itself, it does make the 'trousers' issue clearer.

>42 Third_cheek: one might be best going to business meetings in a pair of trousers.

Surely you mean a pair of tight trousers, no?

Robert, I'm still not convinced by your arguments in 39, and I will be coming back to them, so don't think you are off the hook, matey. BTW, can you explain 'erotetic logic' please. Yes, I know I can look it up somewhere, but I prefer to hear it from your own fair lips.

3rd Cheek: I'm slowly getting a handle on what you said, but likewise, can you explain further Quine's crum gavagi argument, so that we can all celebrate it, if you would be so kind.

J'aime les pantalons!

49> Moi aussi! J'aime les pantalons. Tous les personnes devons chanter "Nous aimons les pantalons!"

Tight pantalons... jodpurs I reckon.

Sorry, my French is a little rusty, hope that made sense.

I'll tell you the 'crum-gavagai' thing another time, maybe once I've reminded myself what it was supposed to show - the indeterminacy of translation, among other things - but I'll be embarassed if I make a hash of it.

Mr Durick> I still think there's something to what you have to say, so please don't think I'm writing it off. One thing I'd want to hold onto is that the word "cat", in English, does is some way refer to an object 'cat' or 'cats' as you say; and I don't think the context principle requires that we think otherwise, only that things are more complicated and less direct than that simple correspondence.

it' is "doivent chanter"

nous devons, vous devez, ils doivent

51> Thanks Mac! So what did my 'devons' mean? Is it an entirely different verb I'm confusing, or was it the first-person plural (which was, slightly perversely, my intention)?

it should have been third pp, you used first pp

if there is a pun, then I didn't get it : )

Are you in Talinn ? I have been there a lot, loved that place.

Viru Valgeeeeeeee !

TomCat, erotetic logic is the logic of questions. My adviser got the book on it; I begged off.

Robert

oh that does sound interesting!!!!Questions is one of my pet theories and will be the topic of a later workshop.

Robert, I have been rereading your post, and I think I agree with Third-cheek. There is a lot in what you say, but I do believe the boundaries of a 'word' are not so clear cut as dictionaries imagine. in French, for example, what is the status of qu'' as in qu'est ce que sest? (dreadful spelling probably, but I think you get the point)

I also couldn't help noticing this wonderfully intriguing sentence from your post 39:

the reference of a noun was an object to which the noun referred (that nexus ended up in some kind of infinite regress which is the religious part of it)

This is very similar to Eco's idea in The Name of the Rose, about signs referring to signs referring to signs. The original object becomes a unicorn, a magical, mythical, probably illusionary 'animal'.

and 3rd cheek in 50> Just to be clear though, according to semiotic theory, the sign refers to a concept of an object, not the object itself, otherwise, if the object is not present, it cannot be talked about: sign, signified and signifier. at least that is my understanding, but remember, je suis un amateur!

p.s. wetsuit bottoms.

53> That's good, I was shooting for fpp. That was the perversity. No pun, no great joke, just messing with the language - I was aiming for: 'Everyone (we) must sing/chant "We love trousers!" '

56> Yes, I was simplifying a little, not wanting to muddy the waters with yet more complicated issues already. Still, there are other problems for 'concept'.

'Object' needn't mean actual real thing, and one of the ideas that get's abandoned along the way is that the sign/word refers to an 'object' directly, so you can put a bracket around each of the instances of 'object' in my earlier statement if you like. I was using 'object' just to mean whatever that thing is that the word is supposed to refer to (whether or not it does) but that's not a technical claim. Unfortunately, the claim that a 'concept' must be the referent of a sign is an oversimplification too - we need to specify what we might mean by concept in order to see this - but that's no criticism of your using it - we have to use something in order to get started.

I may be a little bit low profile for a few days. Christmas and all that...

P.S. I draw the line at wetsuit bottoms! Enough about the trousers!! :)

>30 Third_cheek: an oxymoron is a cultural construct and therefore relative.

>39 Mr.Durick: at the risk of attempting to flog a dead horse back to life, I'd like to come back to this as I feel somewhat dissatisfied with it.

MR D, you might have dealt with 'wear the pants' on a particular level, but I don't feel you have dealt satisfactorily with the idiom issue on a general level. Phrasal verbs for example are impossible for non-native speakers to understand: for example: take off (leave the ground) take someone off (imitate someone in a humorous way, especially when used as a noun) take something off (derobe in readiness for naked activities!!). The presence of these kind of opaque compounds surely argues against the decoding of language at the isolated word level, no? And while it MAY be possible to decode isolated words, is that really what we do all the time as part of our normal onstream reception and production?

From 56:

Robert, I have been rereading your post, and I think I agree with Third-cheek. There is a lot in what you say, but I do believe the boundaries of a 'word' are not so clear cut as dictionaries imagine. in French, for example, what is the status of qu'' as in qu'est ce que sest? (dreadful spelling probably, but I think you get the point)

I think the status of 'qu'' is that it is 'que' in a mash of words technically called something like elipsis or elision.

I think that better dictionaries (OED, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Collins) are not slipshod and do not blithely assume anything, even about word boundaries. Their editors carefully reach decisions about such matters on a respectable basis. Oh dear, some editors fail. But some boundaries do change. Back to my friend 'bathroom;' I believe that arose from two words but has become one word for some people now; it means something different to them than the mere collocation means.

I may say more about that when I reply to 58, a subject that is way beyond my expertise but about which I will conjecture anyway.

Robert

Qu'est-ce que c'est ?

Robert, I look forward to continuing our discussion on this.

I have just received Life Sentences:Literary Judgments and Accounts, by William H. Gass, which I Ordered after reading a review of it in the NY times Book Review.

Hermeneutics anyone?