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Two Dogmas of Linguistic Empiricism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

John King-Farlow
John King-Farlow
Affiliation:
Universities of Alberta and Guelph
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Extract

The first person singular is the nucleus on which all the other referential devices depend… The final point of reference, by which a statement is attached to reality, is the speaker's reference to himself, as one thing and one person among others… The world is always open to conceptual re-arrangement. But the re-arrangement is only the addition of new tiers of discrimination to a foundation that remains constant: the recognition of persisting things singled out by active observers who have a statable standpoint as objects among other objects. It is in judgments of perception that the notion of identity, and principles of individuation, are given their earliest sense. That beings, who are capable of action and observation, are born into, and move among, a world of persisting objects is a logical necessity and not a contingent matter of fact. (Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action, London: Chatto and Windus, 1959, pp. 40, 87).

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 1972 , pp. 325 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1972

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References

1 Ziff, Paul, Semantic Analysis, Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1960, pp. 54–59Google Scholar; Chomsky, Noam, Cartesian Linguistics, New York: Harper and Row, 1966, pp. 5–30Google Scholar; Descartes, Meditation IV.

2 Compare these helpful words of Norman Malcolm: “Let us see something of how Wittgenstein attacks what he calls ‘the idea of a private language’. By a ‘private’ language is meant one that not merely is not but cannot be understood by anyone other than the speaker. The reason for this is that the words of this language are supposed to ‘refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations’ (P.I. 243)”. Malcolm, N., Knowledge and Certainty, Toronto: Prentice-Hall of Canada, 1965, p. 97Google Scholar.

3 I have tried elsewhere to diagnose a wide variety of related anthropocentric obsessions in modern philosophy: “Myths of the Given and the ‘Cogito’ Proof”, Philosophical Studies (U.S.), 1961; “Truth Preference and Neuter Propositions”, Philosophy of Science, 1963; “Man, Beast and Philosophical Psychology”, (with E.A. Hall), British Journal for Philosophy of Science, 1965; “Dialogue Concerning Natural Metaphysics”, (with J.M. Rothstein), Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1968; “Wittgenstein's Primitive Language Games”, Philosophical Studies (Ireland), 1969Google Scholar; “Quantification Theory and Ontological Monism”, Zeitschrift fur allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie/Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 1972.

4 Cf. Wittgenstein, L.Philosophical Investigations, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953)Google Scholar, Part I, Sections 199, 202, 241, 242, 281–284, etc. Cf. also Malcolm, Knowledge and Certainty: pp. 117–120 and 130–140. Note especially Malcolm's “I wish to argue against Price that no amount of intelligible sounds coming from an oak tree or a kitchen table could create any probability that it has sensations and thoughts.” (Op.cit., p. 134). Wittgenstein's aphorism on lions appears at P.I. II, p. 223.

5 See Grice, H.P., “Meaning”, Philosophical Review, 1957, pp. 377–388CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Utterer's Meaning and Intentions”, Philosophical Review, 1969, pp. 147–177; Searle, J.R., Speech Acts (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1969), pp. 43–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.