My Thesis: Section 2, part 1

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OK.... Perhaps my worst part of the dissertation (Hacker fans jump on and maul me now).  I know what I'm trying to say but I don't quite manage it.  So much so, that I actually want to write a note on it.  But I'm rushing now and won't return to a computer until after the Sabbath.  Feel free to talk about me behind my back!!!

2- AUGUSTINIAN PICTURE OF LANGUAGE

Grasping and Intention

At the beginning of the Investigations (PI 1), Wittgenstein presents a quote from Augustine trying to recall how he learnt language as a child. We see him trying to work out what his ‘elders’ meant by a word by attending to the ‘natural language of all peoples’. That is, by paying attention to the parents’ actions, movements and tone of voice, the child comes to learn what is being signified by a word and how it is used in language. Attending to these reveals the parent’s ‘state of mind’; for example, what they are intending to point out. This account suggests to Wittgenstein a picture of the essence of language which he finds misleading. Examining this picture will enable me to better illuminate the intersection between the Tractatus and the Investigations. In later sections, we will see how this helps us better understand the criticisms that Wittgenstein makes of his earlier doctrine that there is a general form of the proposition. It is against this criterion that my interpretation should be judged and not whether it has ruled out all competing interpretations or applications of the Augustinian picture. In fact, it would be impossible to do so if we take it seriously as a picture, and not as laying out a recognizable philosophical theory. However, I will bring textual evidence to make it plausible, will align it with the questions Wittgenstein was trying to answer in both periods and will bring to light these answers.

The orthodox view, which I will lay out below, sees the Augustinian picture to be primarily concerned with affecting a correlation between a name and an object. If all words are names (as the picture seems to imply) then they are simply labels for existent features of reality. The interpretation of this picture that I will be presenting, on the other hand, places it firmly within the question of how language manages to communicate a sense or express a thought. This is not only a question of fundamental importance for the Tractatus but also for Augustine:

And undoubtedly, words were instituted among men... so that anyone might bring his thoughts to another’s notice by means of them.[1]

We have a picture here whereby words communicate thoughts. When a child learns a language they have to ‘grasp’ what is being expressed by a particular word or phrase. In the context of teaching, parents have to ‘make known’ to the child the thought being expressed through non-verbal means. According to the Augustinian quote, this is partly done via pointing to something and naming an object. However, the important point to bear in mind is that it is not about naming objects. It is about grasping the elders’ intention and, once the child has ‘heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentence’, about ‘us[ing] them to express my own desires’.

In terms of describing a learning situation, Wittgenstein thinks it unremarkable. Indeed, he thought ostensive teaching (via pointing to objects) was an important part of the child’s training in learning to speak a language (c.f. PI 6). It is part of the process whereby a child comes to understand how a piece of language is used. However, to see why he did think the quote was misleading, consider the fact that there are three characters:

1. The elders- who understand the meaning of ‘x’ and its contribution to the expression of thought. They help the child to grasp that meaning

2. Augustine as child- who comes to understand its meaning.

AND

3. Adult (philosopher) Augustine- Commentating on what was going on when his earlier incarnation observed the pointing.

It is this third character is problematic as, in talking about what the elder’s meant to point out, he is led to have a misleading conception about what is involved in a term having meaning. However, before we get on to this, it should be said that the points that are being made are not confined to (or specifically about) a child learning language. The characters could equally be 1) any fully competent language user who understands a particular expression who explains it to someone else 2) a fully-competent language user who is the recipient of the explanation 3) the philosopher who has a particular (pre-philosophical but misleading) conception of what understanding the expression consists in.

The Augustinian picture leads us to misconstrue the meaning of a word (e.g. ‘red’) as signifying a state of affairs (or something about a state of affairs). We get the impression that ‘red’ is about what is pointed to when we learn the word. This view of what explaining the meaning consists in (encouraged through ostensive teaching) is illustrated by the following quote:

By means of ostensions. In this case we explain the use of a word in statements by constructing various propositions by means of that word and each time pointing to the fact in question. In that way we become aware of the meaning of the word (Ostension really consists in two acts- in an external action, pointing to various facts, and a thought-operation, namely learning what they have in common).[2]

In the case of the child, the parent may not vocalise a proposition but they will point to the fact that corresponds to the thought “This [whatever is pointed to] is red”. So for example, they will point at that which corresponds to the thought “The chair is red”, if there is indeed a red chair in the vicinity. The child will learn the meaning of ‘red’ once many red things pointed to and has heard the word ‘red’ in many sentences. They will do so by learning the comment element in the various facts “The lamp is red”, “The block is red”, “This blood is red” i.e. that given by the propositional function “ζ is red”. On this picture then the meaning of ‘red’ is the sense of the sentence saying that something is red.

Following on from the passage quoted above, he compares explaining the meaning by ostension as opposed to by definition. Whilst definition remains within language, “[o]stension steps outside language and connects signs with reality”[3]. As such, the child manages to grasp the meaning non-linguistically by realising the reality that is pointed to. This is “as if the child could already think, only not yet speak” (PI 32). Wittgenstein’s critique of the Augustinian picture of language suggests one cannot grasp the colour, for instance, simply from pointing and/or naming. The elders may perform precisely the same action is they meant to point out the shape (PI 33). Only when accompanied by training cans ostensive teaching lead to the word being used in the same way as the rest of the linguistic community. It is training, and not the queer power of the mind (‘grasping’), that allows us to learn the meaning of a word.

However, one shouldn’t see Wittgenstein’s main target as a form of mentalism. As Kenny points out[4], the way Augustine sees a child learning language (e.g. through shaping natural reactions) is similar to Wittgenstein’s own views. The problem is more that it leads the philosopher (the third character) to misconstrue what is involved in understanding what a word means (e.g. for first character). It is fair enough to say that the elders intend to point out something red, given that they know the meaning of red. However, as Goldfarb notes, “The trouble comes when we segment the description, i.e., when we take “naming”, “wishing to point”, and so on, as if they pick out isolatable phenomena, whose character can be given independently of any surrounding structure.”[5] Just as a child can only point out something red given training, the adult can only name it given the rest of language. Kirwan[6] points out that Augustine, in this passage, is interested in how language is learnt and not what is learnt. However, it is precisely the lack of focus on what is learnt which causes confusion. It tears the learning away from the contexts in which it is used and the roles it has.

Relationship to the orthodox view

Many of the elements in this picture seem to fit into a fairly standard interpretation of the picture: meaning as a mental phenomenon, reaching out to reality, the meaning of a word becoming its contribution to the sentence, being able to isolate what is being pointed out etc. Perhaps I have worded it oddly talking about the philosopher’s mistake about what is grasped but it is much the same- “Well, of course it is his mistake!” However, one thing I have been very deliberate about is not to talk about the reference of a name or about the method of signification or about a ‘correlation’ between language and reality. Instead, I was simply talking about ‘thoughts’ and how philosophers will view someone grasping the sense in independence from the content of the thought and its contexts of use. There is no attribution of a theoretical error or false philosophical thesis about meaning. This is prior to philosophical theorizing.

The orthodox view, on the other hand, seems to associate the Augustinian picture of language with the following three theses: “Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands” (PI 1). The suggestion seems to be that Augustine is saying that the function of all words is to name an object, and that a word only has a meaning if it fulfils that function. That this is how Wittgenstein interpreted the passage seems to be supported when he comments, “Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of word” (PI 1). Whereas Wittgenstein compares the diverse function of words to different tools in a toolbox (PI 11), Augustine insists that “no one uses words except for the purpose of signifying something”[7]. Signification here is just a correlation between language and reality. The problem then is that Augustine treats all words on the model of nouns where, so to speak, there is a thing which we label with a sign.

This problem is not conceived of as one particular to Augustine but is meant to be applicable to a wide range of philosophical theories. Baker and Hacker are of this view when they claims that “[n]umerous sophisticated accounts of meaning are unconsciously rooted in the Augustinian picture, and this manifests a disease of the intellect.”[8] Now whilst we can see a definite tendency for philosophers to see meaningful terms as referring to objects, we can also see that no theory fully conforms to this conception of this version of the Augustinian picture. For example:

• As Kirwan[9] points out in the passage Wittgenstein quotes, Augustine is concerned with the learning of language and not what is learnt. Elsewhere he has a relatively sophisticated account of different modes of signification, and doesn’t treat them all like nouns.
• Frege took all sorts of words to have a reference e.g. truth-values and numbers. However, he was also keenly aware of the different logical roles of words in sentences, and made us aware of the different roles of concepts and objects.
• Whilst the three theses above bear a strong resemblance to Wittgenstein’s view of a fully analysed language in the Tractatus, no meaningful words in everyday language refer to objects in the Tractarian sense.

In what way then is the Augustinian picture a criticism of past philosophers? Hacker himself admits:

Wittgenstein did not intimate that Frege cleaved to the Augustinian picture in its naive, pre-theoretical form- indeed, it is not clear that anyone has. Certainly Augustine himself did not do so in his philosophical writings. But that does not... show that Wittgenstein was ill advised to begin his masterwork with that quotation.[10]

The solution is to say that they did hold the Augustinian picture but not in its naive form, but a suitably refined and qualified version of it. According to Hacker, the Augustinian picture gains its importance from being an Urbild or proto-theory that lies at the root of all philosophical theories of meaning. Though they do not square in all respects with the Augustinian picture; that is not because they abandoned it, but because they are refinements of it. For example, it is true that Frege did not hold that ‘Some man’ in ‘Some man is rich’ named an object. However, his theory did hold that any significant word that contributed to its truth-value must have a referent.

Hacker’s interpretation throws up many queries regarding the relationship between the pre-theoretical form of the Augustinian picture and the theories that supposedly follow. Firstly, if a theory is significantly different from the proto-theory, on what basis do we judge whether a theory is a refinement of it rather than an abandonment? Secondly, in what way does criticism of the proto-theory affect the full-blown theory? One has to agree with Goldfarb that “it surely does not do to use the label “Augustinian conception” at will, and then take any considerations against its crude features as directly refuting or undermining the philosophers so labelled”[11].

Another look

My position avoids these difficulties by denying that the problem is specifically one about objects being the references of names and the reason I will say the GFP is misguided is not specifically because the bearer is the meaning of the name. Instead, it is a misleading view about the nature of intending, grasping and understanding that leads to a mistake in the elucidation of the sense of the sentence. If, for the moment, we accept that my interpretation fits the quote. How does it avoid the three theses that explicitly talk about objects being the bearers of a name? The three theses laid out above are not the Augustinian picture of language according to the Investigations! It is indeed from the picture of language that the meaning of a word is its bearer. Indeed, we will see in this essay how the Augustinian picture led to the GFP where all names in an analysed language stand for objects. However, something following from the Augustinian picture is not the same as being that picture and to say that something follows from the picture doesn’t tell us why it does.

The actual picture is: “the individual words in language name objects- sentences are combinations of such names” (PI 1). Here there is no claim that the object is the meaning of the word or that the purpose of uttering a word is to refer to that object. The claim is a philosophical thesis of sorts but it is rather otiose on its own. On this point, there is no reason to think Wittgenstein attributed Augustine a view any stronger than the following from Russell: “Words all have meaning, in the simple sense that they are symbols which stand for something other than themselves”[12]. Again, in terms of the thing named, neither the picture nor Wittgenstein’s interpretation of it demand any more of natural language than that a “thing is whatever is sensed or understood or is hidden”[13]. There is no need to conceive of all things as the kind of object we could encounter and correlate with a name.

To say that each word signifies is to say that it makes a specific contribution to the expression of a thought. The suggestion I am making then, is that when Augustine is talking about naming an object (e.g. red), he is not talking about the bearer of a name but the object of thought. By talking about the ‘object’ of thought, I am not saying anything about the vehicle of thought, but the content of the thought- what the thought is about. A good way to explain this is with the following quote:

The Stoics said that three things are linked to one another, the thing signified, the thing that signifies, and the thing come upon. Of these the thing that signifies is an utterance… the thing signified is the very state of affairs revealed by an utterance…. and the thing come upon is the external subject[14]

Here, ‘the thing come upon’ is the bearer of the name and as such, it is that which we can point to if the thing exists. However, it is not the bearer that is the thing signified but the very state of affairs revealed by an utterance. Thus to learn the meaning of an expression of language, is to understand what it signifies. It is this which is taught to the child when learning the use of a word and explained to a language-user who doesn’t understand the sense of an expression. The philosopher tries to elucidate what is involved in such an understanding.

---

[1] (Kirwan, 2001) p. 190

[2] Wittgenstein (WWK p.246) as cited in (Hacker, 1986) p. 77

[3] ibid

[4] (Kenny, 1974)

[5] (Goldfarb, 1983) p.272

[6] (Kirwan, 2001)

[7] Augustine, as cited by (Kirwan, 2001) p.191

[8] (Baker & Hacker, 1980) p. 32

[9] (Kirwan, 2001)

[10] (Hacker, 2001) p.240

[11] (Goldfarb, 1983) p.267

[12] As cited in (Baker & Hacker, 1980) p. 52

[13] Augustine as cited by (Kirwan, 2001) p.193

[14] Sextus Empiricus as cited by (Kirwan, 2001) p. 196

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