Knowledge and Language: Selected Essays of L. Jonathan Cohen

343 Pages·2002·11.93 MB·English

by  L. Jonathan Cohen (auth.)

Knowledge and Language
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Editors
ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University
JURGEN RENN, Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science
KOSTAS GAVROGLU, University of Athens
Editorial Advisory Board
THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University
ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh
SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University
JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University
MARX W. WARTOFSKYt, (Editor 1960-1997)
VOLUME 227
KNOWLEDGE
AND LANGUAGE
Selected Essays
of L. Jonathan Cohen
by
L. JONATHAN COHEN
Queen's College, Oxford,
and Fellow of the British Academy, United Kingdom
edited and with an introduction by
JAMES LOGUE
Somerville College,
Oxford, United Kingdom
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Ubrary of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5955-0 ISBN 978-94-017-2020-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2020-5
Printed on acid-free paper
AII Rights Reserved
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
Contents
Preface vii
Publisher's Note ix
Introduction xi
James Logue
1
On the Project of A Universal Character 1
2
On A Concept Of Degree Of Grammaticalness 15
3
The semantics of metaphor 27
4
Can The Logic Of Indirect Discourse Be Formalised? 41
5
Some Remarks On Grice's Views About The Logical Particles Of 49
Natural Language
6
Can The Conversationalist Hypothesis Be Defended? 67
7
How Is Conceptual Innovation Possible? 77
8
Natural Language Definitions 95
9
A Problem About Ambiguity In Ttuth-Theoretical Semantics 113
10
The Individuation of Proper Names 119
11
Third World Epistemology 141
12
Guessing 155
v
vi KNOWLEDGE AND LANGUAGE
13
Bayesianism versus Baconianism in the Evaluation of Medical Diagnoses 175
14
Are People Programmed to Commit Fallacies? 195
15
Inductive Logic 1945-1977 221
16
Some Historical Remarks On the Baconian Conception of Probability 245
17
Twelve Questions about Keynes's Concept of Weight 261
18
Some Steps towards a General Theory of Relevance 279
19
Should A Jury Say What It Believes Or What It Accepts? 293
20
Are There Ethical Reasons For Being, Or Not Being, A Scientific 313
Realist?
Preface
I am very grateful to Kluwer Academic Publishers for the opportunity
to republish these articles about knowledge and language.
The Introduction to the volume has been written by James Logue,
and I need to pay a very sincerely intended tribute to the care and
professionalism which he has devoted to every feature of its production.
My thanks are also due to Matthew MeG rattan for his technical as
sistance in scanning the articles onto disk and formatting them.
1. Jonathan Cohen
vii
Publisher's Note
Thanks are due to the following publishers for permission to reproduce
the articles in this volume.
Paper 1 On the project of a universal character. Oxford University Press.
Paper 2 On a concept of a degree of grammaticalness. Logique et Analyse.
Paper 3 The semantics of metaphor. Cambridge University Press.
Paper 4 Can the logic of indirect discourse be formalised? The Association for
Symbolic Logic.
Paper 5 Some remarks on Grice's views about the logical particles of natural
language. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Paper 6 Can the conversationalist hypothesis be defended? Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
Paper 7 How is conceptual innovation possible? Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Paper 8 Should natural language definitions be insulated from, or interactive
with, one another in sentence composition? Kluwer Academic Publish
ers.
Paper 9 A problem about truth-functional semantics. Basil Blackwell Publisher
Ltd.
Paper 10 The individuation of proper names. Oxford University Press.
Paper 11 Some comments on third world epistemology. Oxford University Press.
Paper 12 Guessing. The Aristotelian Society.
Paper 13 Bayesianism versus Baconianism in the evaluation of medical diagnoses.
Oxford University Press.
Paper 14 Are people programmed to commit fallacies? Basil Blackwell Publish
ers, Ltd.
Paper 15 Inductive logic 1945-1977. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Paper 16 Some historical remarks on the Baconian conception of probability. The
.Tournai of the History of Ideas.
Paper 17 Twelve questions about Keynes's concept of weight. Oxford University
Press.
Paper 18 Some steps towards a general theory of relevance. Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
Paper 19 Should a jury say what it believes or what it accepts? The Cardozo
Law Review.
Paper 20 Are there ethical reasons for being, or not being, a scientific realist?
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
ix
Introduction
James Logue
It is a privilege and a pleasure to be asked to write an introduction to
this collection of papers by my former teacher and colleague L. Jonathan
Cohen. Jonathan Cohen's career to date as a professional philosopher
has spanned more than fifty years. During this time he has produced a
very large body of extremely influential and important work - indeed, a
great deal of it seminal and ground breaking - in philosophy of science,
the philosophy of induction and probability, epistemology, philosophical
logic, the philosophy of language, jurisprudence and political philosophy,
among other fields. The papers in philosophy of language and episte
mology which make up this volume exhibit all the qualities most charac
teristic of Cohen's work: originality and insight, a distinctive analytical
perspective, great clarity, rigour and cogency of argument, elegance and
wit. Their reproduction here will, I hope, be a stimulus to new work on
a wide range of important topics.
With the obvious exception of the previous paragraph, I have written
this introduction in consultation with Jonathan Cohen: I hope that that
has saved me from misrepresenting his views. But, of course, it should
not be taken as a statement of his own overview of the papers. As to
how it reflects my own views, it would obviously be inappropriate for
an introduction of this sort to stray into becoming a critique: so, in
summarising the papers, I have resisted the strong temptation to add
comments of my own, except in a couple of clearly signalled instances.
It would be a mistake to see these twenty papers, written over a period
of more than forty years, as part of a single consciously unified project.
Nevertheless, there is a great deal of continuity and thematic unity as the
papers move through philosophy of language via general epistemology to
confirmation, induction and probability. It is, perhaps, easier to see this
continuity by tracing a route backwards through the papers (not chrono
logically, but as they appear here). The last group of papers is largely
Xl
XII KNOWLEDGE AND LANGUAGE
concerned with how empirical knowledge may be acquired through ev
idence in states of uncertainty. The middle group explores how such
evidence often requires or results in conceptual innovation and is given
to us in language the meaning of which is not always easy to determine.
The first group asks how a theory of meaning can be constructed both
for natural and for artificial languages. {That is, so to speak, the logical
ordering of the thought behind each paper: the present order has been
chosen to facilitate thinking one's way into the issues.} This thematic
unity is underpinned by Cohen's common commitment to the richness
both of language and of enquiry and his pluralist opposition to simplis
tic and dogmatic formalizations such as are offered by certain kinds of
compositional semantics and by monistic interpretations of probability.
In the remainder of this introduction, where I summarise each paper in
turn, I shall regularly draw attention to the many connections among
them which are generated by these threads which run through much of
Cohen's philosophy.
The first ten papers focus on issues in the philosophy of language.
Paper 1 (On the Project of a Universal Character [1954]) begins by
attacking a widely held view that Leibniz was the solitary originator in
the seventeenth century of the project of developing a 'universal char
acter' - an artificial language, suitable for the new science of the day.
Leibniz intended his universal character to fill three main roles. It was to
be an auxiliary language facilitating communication between scientists
of different nations; it was to act as a simplified notation for science;
and it was to be an instrument for discovery and demonstration. But
a number of Leibniz's contemporaries and predecessors also articulated
and attempted to carry out just such a project. Bacon [1605, 1623]
and Descartes [1629] both discussed its possibility and desirability; from
Descartes' time onwards the project seems to have become a common
place, with numerous writers - the best known being Mersenne, Dal
garno and Wilkins - carrying it through in some detail and with a clear
commitment to the need for a universal character to fill the three roles
Leibniz identifies. What was distinctive about Leibniz's position was
solely his conception of a calculus (independently important as a progen
itor of modern formal logic) which would operate on the formulae of his
character so as to lay bare the implications of what was already known.
Cohen argues that the failure of these seventeenth-century projects -
which contributed nothing towards either enhancing international com
munication or promoting scientific discovery - has implications for how
we now ought to view the relationship between science and language.
It is a fundamental mistake, he says [po 11] "to think that the same
language could serve adequately both as an unspecialised international