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Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 849–853 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Book review The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language Michael Devitt and Richard Hanley (Eds.), Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0-631-23141-7 (hardback) GBP 6...

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English Book Muryat i Magara Blackwell Companions t o Philosophy Wongso Adi Saput ra William G. Lycan Philosophy of language A cont emporary int roduct ion ali alhabsyi

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Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 849–853 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Book review The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language Michael Devitt and Richard Hanley (Eds.), Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0-631-23141-7 (hardback) GBP 65, ISBN-13: 978-0631-23142-4 (paperback) GBP 21.99. x + 446 pp. Also available online through Wiley InterScience subscription service This is no less than the nineteenth in the Blackwell Guides to Philosophy series. One might have expected Philosophy of Language to have appeared earlier in the series. It consists of an introduction and 20 chapters, often of about 15 pages each but sometimes more. Devitt and Hanley have assembled a genuinely distinguished set of authors. Following the introduction there are three sections: Foundational Issues, which consists of a single article by Martin Davies, followed by sections on Meaning and on Reference. This rather traditional principle of organization covers a reasonably broad range of topics. Given the importance of theories of meaning that depend on reference and truth there is considerable intermingling of content between the second and third sections. The way the series works is for authoritative authors to provide an overview of issues in the field, while not concealing their own positions. A reader of this journal who felt they wished to be exposed at a serious level to some of the main current themes in the Philosophy of Language could do well to look into this volume. There are other places to look, for example The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Language which has well over twice the number of pages and double the number of articles, some on more specialized topics. The Blackwell Guide has its place, though, being perhaps less daunting and significantly more portable. Devitt and Hanley’s 16-page introduction is indeed a good place to start for a reader with, say, a linguistics training and no great acquaintance with contemporary philosophy. It takes the reader through the topics discussed in the volume and thus lays out the nature of some of the obsessions and directions of philosophers with an interest in language. Martin Davies’ Chapter 1: Foundational Issues is understandably challenging, but worthy of interest from readers of this journal. It is one place where you will see a philosopher’s perspective on the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. But that is just one of a variety of foundational issues discussed, others being whether semantics can be a philosophical project, and the contrast between Davidson’s (1984) and Grice’s (1989) approaches to meaning. Chapter 2: The Nature of Meaning, by Paul Horwich, provides a kind of overview of the section on meaning. It covers: meaning scepticism, reductionism, language and thought, compositionality, normativity, externalism, deflationism, prospects for a use theory of meaning, and further problems. Looking through the authors referred to in that chapter gives you a good selection of the major players in the field. The semantics/pragmatics relationship, which was mentioned in Chapter 1, is developed more fully by Kent Bach in Chapter 8: Speech Acts and Pragmatics. The chapter covers performative utterances, the locutionary/illocutionary/ perlocutionary act distinction, kinds of illocutionary acts, Gricean reflexive communicative intentions (used to illuminate some illocutionary acts, as recommended by Strawson, 1972), conversational implicature and Bach’s (1994) own notion of impliciture, conventional implicature (the notion originated in Frege, 1952!), the semantics/ pragmatics distinction, including the distinction between wide context (where there is contextual information relevant to ascertaining the speaker’s intention) and narrow context (involving only information relevant to providing semantic values of context-sensitive expressions). There is also an interesting section on the significance of the semantics/pragmatics distinction. This illustrates Grice’s stance against postulating unnecessary ambiguities, showing how the phenomena can be explained in terms of implicatures. It also covers how a simplistic association of meaning and use by ordinary language philosophers can lead to error, for example the move from the observation that describing something as good is typically used to express 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2008.09.012

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approval of it to the conclusion that the meaning of ‘good’ is to express approval. This 20-page chapter provides an excellent introduction to a range of pragmatic phenomena. Indeed there are various chapters that engage with topics that relate to pragmatics. In Chapter 9: Figurative Language, Josef Stern surveys the history of the study of figurative language, mainly under the heading of metaphor, from Black (1962) and Goodman (1979), through to Rorty (1987), Searle (1993) and Davidson (1978). He considers our task is to explain how metaphors can have meanings different from the literal meanings, while still being dependent on them. He emphasizes his own position that the content of a metaphor is context-dependent, in a way that can be compared to Kaplan’s (1978) treatment of the content of an indexical such as ‘I’. Chapter 16: Descriptions, by Peter Ludlow and Stephen Neale, is a long chapter with some material of relevance to pragmatics. It mainly concerns definite descriptions, such as ‘the richest person in France’. It covers Russell’s theory of definite descriptions in which a sentence containing such a definite description is provided with a logical form in predicate logic. A significant part of the chapter concerns Keith Donnellan’s (1966) distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions. He claimed that Russell’s (1905) analysis was correct for the attributive use but that there was another use, the referential use, in which the description served to pick out the individual that speaker had in mind, in much the way suggested by Strawson (1950). Thus a speaker may utter, ‘‘Smith’s murderer is insane,’’ intending to make a claim about whoever murdered Smith, which exemplifies the attributive usage, while another speaker, employing the referential use, could utter the same sentence in order to attribute insanity to a particular person they have in mind, who it might turn out is not really the murderer. What is controversial is whether this is a semantic or a pragmatic distinction. In Chapter 17: Using Indexicals, John Perry covers, with great care, a wealth of philosophical literature on the subject including that of David Kaplan (1989) and developing his own insights. He develops a classification of indexicals in terms of a two dimensional matrix. One axis captures the difference between automatic reference determination, in the sense that the indexical and the context serve alone to specify the referent, in contrast to discretionary reference determination in which there is some contribution from the speaker’s intentions. The other axis makes a three-way distinction between indexicals that are narrow, in the sense that no more than the speaker, time and place are relevant indices, less narrow, in the sense that time and place of token perception are also important, and wide, in the sense that still further aspects of context are relevant. In Chapter 12: Vagueness, Stephen Schiffer deals with an area of potential interest to pragmaticians, as the resolution of vagueness is typically a pragmatic matter. The treatment here concerns more the epistemology and metaphysics of vagueness, however, for it develops the issue by discussing the Sorites Paradox. It uses as an example this inference with an evidently false conclusion: a person with $50 million is rich, you cannot remove someone from the ranks of the rich by merely taking 1 cent away from her fortune, and therefore, a person with only 37 cents is rich. Clearly, successive reductions of a cent will eventually reduce the fortune to 37 cents. A detailed discussion of attempts to resolve the paradox ensues. Readers of this journal may not wish to utilize the volume primarily to learn about the semantics/pragmatics distinction. They may wish to acquaint themselves with other kinds of topics typical of the Philosophy of Language. While Grice’s work is dealt with in many places in this volume, Frege’s work is mentioned even more frequently, which is probably a fair indication of the comparative influence of these two major figures in the Philosophy of Language. A chapter which deals with both Frege (1952) and Grice (1989) is Chapter 4: Brian Loar, Language, Thought, and Meaning. This chapter compares the way various important philosophers deal with those notions. Other philosophers included are Russell (1905), Davidson (1984) and Quine (1960). Thus the chapter describes Frege’s particular concept of a thought as the sense of a sentence, something that is public and objective rather than psychological in nature. In contrast, Grice’s account of speaker’s meaning is shown to rely on beliefs and intentions in the mind of the speaker in such a way that thought is presented as prior to language. On the topic of meaning, a truth conditions approach presented notably through the work of Donald Davidson is contrasted with use theory, broadly construed so as to include the work of Quine. Unsurprisingly, the truth conditions approach is represented in various chapters, using as a foundation Chapter 3: Truth and Reference as the Basis of Meaning, by James Higginbotham. This chapter proceeds systematically from Frege to Davidson and beyond, with reliance on work on formal semantics. More technical issues in formal semantics are developed in further detail in other chapters. Van McGee’s Chapter 20: Truth, mainly covers Tarski’s (1944) definition of truth, based on a systematic method of assigning denotations to terms. Tarski faces the problem of the liar paradox and Tarski’s own method of dealing with it is covered along with subsequent approaches, notably that of

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Kripke (1975). Max Cresswell’s Chapter 7: Formal semantics focuses on the use of intensional notions in the analysis of natural language (using modal and temporal devices and similar) in the style of Richard Montague (1974). This provides a contrast to Davidson’s reliance on standard predicate logic. Cresswell alerts the reader to some rich possibilities. For example, if time indices are not just moments but intervals there are prospects for handling not just tense but also aspect. The truth conditions approach has fostered detailed accounts of the reference of different kinds of expressions, and we hear about one kind in William Lycan’s Chapter 14: Names. He asks what makes a name refer to its bearer and what does a name mean. The referring question is answered by approaches in which associated descriptions are used to determine the referent or, in contrast, by Kripke’s (1980) causal-historical theory in which the referent is determined by a chain stretching back to the original assignment of the name and passed from person to person, each person intending to use it with the same reference as the person from whom they acquired it. The meaning question also covers descriptions theories and Kripke’s various lines of objection to them including this basic one. We may associate with ‘Ted Hughes’ the description ‘the Poet Laureate of England from 1984 to 1998’ but in considering other possible worlds, ways the world might have been, we appreciate that Hughes could easily not have become Poet Laureate, so what we understand by the name cannot contain that description. ‘Ted Hughes’ is a rigid designator, that is, it designates the same thing in all possible worlds in which it exists, while ‘the Poet Laureate from 1984 to 1998’ is nonrigid; it could designate different individuals in different worlds. This leads on to a discussion of the direct reference approach to names, which also appears in Chapter 10. In Chapter 15: General Terms and Mass Terms, Stephen Schwartz deals with issues parallel to the ones in the names chapter but concerning general terms, such as ‘tiger’ or mass terms such as ‘gold’. Again, description theories provide a classic approach. That approach can be expressed by saying that each speaker has in mind a concept of ‘tiger’ or ‘gold’ and that concept consists of a set of descriptions that provide conditions for being a tiger or being gold. Kripke (1980) and Putnam (1975) criticized any such approach, and say that natural kind terms are rigid designators just like proper names, while the kinds of descriptions that typically are associated with such terms are not rigid. For example gold is thought to be yellow and shiny but that need not be really so. Putnam’s position is that ‘meaning just ain’t in the head’ for we do not possess concepts in the head that fix the reference of those terms. This gives us ‘semantic externalism’, the view that semantics is not determined solely by a person’s psychological features but also by the physical and social environment. The theme of an analysis of the reference of different kinds of terms is continued in Stephen Neale’s Chapter 18: Pronouns and Anaphora. This discusses anaphoric uses of pronouns, starting with a comparison with bound variables in quantification theory, and moving on to the treatment of pronouns in standard theory generative grammar and then Chomsky’s later binding theory (Chomsky, 1981). The revival of Postal’s (1966) idea that pronouns are determiners is discussed. The long-standing philosophical puzzle of the correct analysis of sentences such as ‘‘If a man buys a donkey he vaccinates it,’’ is well discussed. The truth conditions model is further developed by Mark Richard in Chapter 10: Propositional Attitude Ascription. He discusses the two opposing approaches to propositional attitude ascriptions, such as ‘‘Mary believes that snow is white.’’ At the centre of the Fregean approach is the claim that the reference of expressions within the sentence believed is the customary sense. Opposed to that is the ‘direct reference’ approach to the significance of names in which there is no Fregean sense that can provide a reference in such situations. This is associated with Russell (1905), Mill (1843/1977), Kripke (1980), Kaplan (1978), and others. The latter approach loses the Fregean assumption that the semantics of an expression determines its epistemic significance for a user. The Russellian approach has problems showing how intentional states serve in explanations of behaviour. The Fregean approach has various problems raised notably by Kripke including that it predicts truth conditions of modal sentences incorrectly. In Chapter 19: Naturalistic Theories of Reference, Karen Neander takes the theme of reference further for she covers the reference not just of words and phrases but also, and more fundamentally, of mental representations. She considers the leading approaches to explaining reference naturalistically, that is, in a way that ultimately rests on science. One issue is whether the reference of many or most words or mental representations is atomistic in the sense of not depending on other words or concepts, or whether there is a relatively small set of basic words, or concepts, from which the references of the others are derived. Causal theories of reference provide prospects for a naturalistic theory and Fodor’s (1990) attempts to deal with the problems of a crude version of the causal theory are described leading up to a discussion of teleosemantic theories, notably of Millikan (1984) and Papineau (1984). The root idea of teleosemantics is that items have the proper function of doing what items of that kind were selected for doing, for

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example in Darwinian natural selection. Our belief forming mechanisms can be said to have been selected for by evolution and this may allow us to explain the representational properties of particular beliefs. A different naturalistic approach, the informational semantics of Dretske (1981) in particular, but also of Neander (1995) herself, is also discussed. In Chapter 11: Conditionals, Frank Jackson covers the ground very clearly and relatively briefly. Jackson discusses the classic view that the conditional in English is equivalent to material implication and explains the paradoxes that then emerge. He also explains the possible worlds approach to conditionals taken by, notably, Lewis (1973) and Stalnaker (1968) and also the ‘no truth’, probability based, approach taken by Adams (1975). The differences between indicative and subjunctive conditionals are covered. Moving away from the truth conditions approach, we see Alexander Miller in Chapter 5: Meaning Scepticism cover in considerable detail Quine’s (1960) argument for the indeterminacy of translation and the view that there are no determinate meanings, and dealing with arguments from Evans (1985), Wright (1997), Chomsky (1969) and Kirk (1986). He also deals with Kripke’s (1982) interpretation of Wittgenstein’s (1953) arguments about rule following, which are interpreted to conclude that linguistic expressions do not have a determinate meaning. This is a chapter that has a narrower focus than some others. Jerry Fodor’s and Ernie Lepore’s Chapter 6: Analyticity Again has more the character of a regular research article, though arguably it does also serve to introduce some current issues concerning analyticity. It responds to Boghossian’s (1997) argument that there are analytic truths on the assumption of meaning realism. The rebuttal depends on claiming that two concepts can be synonymous but distinct. The point is that, for Fodor and Lepore, analyticity requires not just synonymy but sameness of concepts. This relates to ongoing work by Fodor and others on the nature of concepts. In Chapter 13: The Semantics of Non-factualism, Non-cognitivism, and Quasi-realism, Simon Blackburn considers cases that provide a challenge for truth-conditional semantics. A non-factualist claims that in a certain domain linguistic forms are not used to represent the world but rather are to be understood in terms of the speaker’s mental state. For example, ethical language has been thought not to represent some moral reality, but rather to express our attitude to some activities. The supposed realm of moral facts is considered queer, hard to know about and not related to our interest in ethical issues. The Frege–Geach challenge to expressivism is explained (Geach, 1962). This points to the way that a moral claim can appear as the antecedent of a conditional which functions in an argument just as if it had a truth value. The relationship between non-factualism and minimalist theories of truth is discussed. The minimalist says there is no difference between saying p and saying, ‘‘p is true.’’ There is a huge amount of extremely intellectually valuable material in this volume. In places it can feel just a little repetitive, but that really just reflects the central position that certain authors and certain key ideas hold in the field. References Adams, Ernest, 1975. The Logic of Conditionals. Reidel, Dordrecht. Bach, Kent, 1994. Conversational impliciture. Mind and Language 9, 124–162. Black, Max, 1962. Metaphor. In: Black, M. (Ed.), Models and Metaphors. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, pp. 25–47. Boghossian, Paul, 1997. Analyticity. In: Hale, B., Wright, C. (Eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Blackwell, Oxford. Chomsky, Noam, 1969. Quine’s empirical assumptions. In: Davidson, D., Hintikka, J. (Eds.), Words and Objections. Reidel, Dordrecht. Chomsky, Noam, 198...