Table Of ContentLanguage and
Thought
Lang uage and
Thought
John L. Pollock
Princeton University Press
Princeton, New Jersey
Copyright @ 1982 by Princeton University Press Published by
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Jersey In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
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TO MY PARENTS, WHO WEREN'T
Q UZTE S URE WHAT I WAS UP TO,
BUT ENCOURAGED ME ANYWAY.
Contents
Preface
I. The Statemental Theory of Meaning
1. The Traditional Theory of Language
2. Propositions
3. Statements
4. Sentence Meaning
5. Lexical Meaning
6. Stating, Sending, Referring, and Predicating
6.1 Stating
6.2 Propositional Sending
6.3 Predication
6.4 Reference
11. Traditional Theories of Proper Names
1. Introduction
2. The Connotation Theory
3. Searle's Theory
4. The Denotation Theory
5. The Historical Connection Theory
111. The Meaning of a Proper Name
1. Introduction
2. Referring
3. De Re Propositions
3.1 The Existence of De Re Propositions
3.2 The Subject of a De Re Belief
3.3 De Re Propositions
3.4 Propositional Designators and Concepts
4. Statements and Propositions
5. The Sense of a Proper Name
6. Hereditary Designators
7. Proper Names and Rigid Designation
8. The Meaning of a Proper Name
IV. Singular Terms
1. Introduction
2. Definite Descriptions
3. Other Hereditary Singular Terms
4. Token Reflexives
4.1 'I'
4.2 'Now' and Temporal Reference
4.3 'Here'
V. The Traditional Theory of Predicates
1. Introduction
2. Analytic and Synthetic Predicates
3. The Historico-ScientificT heory
VI. Synthetic Predicates
1. Synthetic Predicates and Social Knowledge
2. Change of Sense
2.1 The Radical Sense Change Theory
2.2 The Conservative Sense Change Theory
2.3 Nomic Equivalence
2.4 Nomic Kinds
3. Synthetic Attributes
4. Meaning
VII. Nons ynthetic Predicates
1. Conceptual and Definitional Predicates
2. Definitional Predicates
3. Conceptual Predicates
VIII. The Alethic Modalities
1. Propositional Modalities
2. De Re Necessity
3. Statemental Modalities
4. Sentential Modalities
IX. Doxas tic and Epist emic Sentences
1. Introduction
2. Propositional Doxastic Sentences
3. Nonpropositional Doxastic Sentences
4. Knowing What t Is
5. Believing To Be
6. Doxastic Quantification
7. Reflexive Knowledge and Belief
8. Knowing What Some F Is
X. Languages, Institutions, and Conventions
1. Introduction
2. Three Kinds of Rules
Contents
3. Participation
4. Conventional Institutions
5. Languages as Institutions
XI. Stating
1. Stating as Participating
2. Semantical Rules
3. Stating
4. The Sent-Proposition
XII. Nondeclarative Sentences 253
1. Meaning and Nondeclarative Sentences 253
2. Requests, Commands, and Yes/No Questions 259
3. Wh Questions 262
Appendix: A General Statemental Semantics 265
1. Introduction
2. Diagrams and Intensions
3. Compositionality
4. Semantical Occurrences
5. Lexical Sending
6. The Path of the Analysis
Bibliography 289
Index 29 5
Preface
A philosophical theory of language can aim for completeness in
either of two senses. It may strive for "horizontal completeness",
which would require it to give an account of all parts of language-
singular terms, predicates, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nondeclarative
sentences, speech acts, etc. Alternatively, it may strive for "vertical
completeness", analysing some linguistic notions in terms of others,
but ultimately providing an analysis of language which does not
take any semantical or linguistic notions as primitive. Vertical
completeness requires that the theory not presuppose notions of
meaning, reference, semantical rules, etc., but instead provides
analyses for these notions in terms of nonlinguistic and nonseman-
tical notions. The theory of this book aims at vertical completeness.
The objective is to start with nonlinguistic notions and build up a
complete theory of language out of them. To assess the extent to
which this goal has been achieved, the reader is referred to the final
section of the appendix where the path of the analysis is reviewed.
The book also attempts to achieve a certain amount of horizontal
completeness, but that is more of a task for linguistics than phi-
losphy, and no claim is made to real horizontal completeness in
this book.
I first began thinking about this material in 1965 in response to
the attack on analyticity by Quine and Putnam. The orientation
of the work has changed over the years, and it now touches on
analyticity only peripherally. Nevertheless, in my mind it lays to
rest the ghost of those early concerns. I began serious work on the
book in 1975, and a first draft was completed in 1977. The book
has subsequently gone through two complete rewritings and several
somewhat less extensive revisions, but the philosophical content
has remained roughly constant. The changes have been mainly
concerned with style of presentation.
This book reflects my feeling that is a lamentable lack of precision
in most contemporary work in the philosophy of language. This
is true even of those works that give the appearance of precision
by making heavy use of logic and formal semantics. Such works
Preface
have tended to ignore the question of how formal semantics is
supposed to bear upon more fundamental philosophical questions.
I have tried to achieve a much greater degree of precision in the
current work. But there is a problem inherent in such a goal. Pre-
cision and readability are to some extent incompatible with one
another. Readers of early versions of this book were unanimous in
their opinion that the book was too hard to read. Thus the bulk
of the revisions which the book has undergone have been concerned
with striking a reasonable balance between precision and readability.
No doubt many will complain that the book is still too hard to
read, but I feel that it would be a mistake to sacrifice further precision
in the interest of readability.
Because the philosophical content of the book was substantially
completed four years ago, I have not been able to keep the refer-
ences entirely up to date. I am sure that there are some highly
relevant recent publications that have been overlooked in the bib-
liography, and I apologize to those authors for my oversight.
While I am on the topic of the bibliography, let me confess to
another habit which may or may not be a bad one. I frequently
develop my own position in response to criticisms of other views
which I term 'traditional views' or 'the received view', but I rarely
accompany the description of such views with extensive biblio-
graphical citation. These are always views that I feel are or have
been current, but it is not always easy to pin them on individual
philosophers. It may even be that no one has ever held them. This
does not really make any difference. They are views that I think
are worth discussing regardless of who has held them. The ultimate
business of the philosopher is to get at the truth on various issues,
and not to say who said what. Although insofar as possible one
should give credit where credit is due, in the last analysis it is the
business of the historian rather than the philospher to trace views
to their originators.
Very little of the material in this book has been published in the
form of articles. This is partly because the presentation is highly
systematic and the material does not lend itself to being split into
article length portions. It is also partly because I kept thinking that
I was about ready to publish the material in book form and did
not wish to put the effort into writing separate articles on the
material. There are, however, two exceptions to this. Much of the
first chapter was published in an article entitled "Propositions and
statements" in The Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. The material
xi
