What Human Language Shows about the Relation Between Mind and Reality
Patrick Duffley
Professeur titulaire
Département de langues, linguistique et traduction
Université Laval
Chomskyan linguistics attempts to achieve objectivity in its treatment of meaning by recourse to truth-conditional semantics, treating sentences as abstract objects whose meaning can be defined by truth-conditions, a position which assumes that the analysis of truth need not make reference to any subject who knows truth. Truth-conditional semantics also objectifies sentence meaning, defining it in terms of the way the world must be in order for the sentence to be true of it. This however makes the meaning of even the simplest sentence into an infinite set of situations, as any sentence can correspond to an endless multitude of slightly different real-world scenarios.
In reaction to the objectivist approach, Saka 2007 pleads in favour of incorporating into the analysis of language the subjects who speak, hear and use it. Since a sentence cannot exist in the abstract, but is always the product of a specific act of language carried out by a speaker at a particular time, one must take into account the impact of the situation of utterance and the speaker’s intentions on the message conveyed. Saka proposes a subjectivist account which claims that truth and falsity, as attributes of sentences, statements and beliefs, are just like sentences, statements and beliefs themselves: both are products of agent-subjects, and hence ultimately grounded in the subject’s beliefs. The position defended in this paper is that while such an account is adequate for the analysis of linguistic meaning, it poses grave problems for the understanding of truth.
The job of the linguist is to explain why the speaker chose certain linguistic signs in a given utterance and not others. The obvious answer to this question is that the forms chosen signify the way the speaker sees the content of the message he wishes to convey. Whether the way he sees things is the way they really are is irrelevant to the task of explaining why he talked about them the way he did. Thus the proposal to explicate meaning in terms of attitude-conditions which reflect the speaker’s take on a situation rather than in terms of truth-conditions seems promising for linguistic analysis.
Attitude-conditions however still treat meaning only on the level of the utterance, which is not the level at which there is a stable correlation between sign and meaning, since any utterance necessarily involves situational factors pertaining to the particular circumstances in which it is made. Since language functions as an instrument of communication, however, there must be a level where there is a stable sign-meaning correlation: although communication does not require that utterances be autonomous objects with autonomous meaning, it does require intersubjectivity on the level of the mental content attached to the linguistic signs. This intersubjectivity points to an ability to know reality in the same way as other human beings do, as there is no way to explain the convergence of individual subjectivities otherwise.
Saka, on the other hand, proposes that it is rational to retain our beliefs even if they are not justified by any correspondence to reality. This position is destructive of both science and rationality, however, as well as of itself, for it would imply that it is just as rational to subscribe to truth-conditional semantics as to attitude-conditional semantics. What is at stake here is the tension between subjectivity and objectivity, the relation between mind and reality. I propose that subjectivity and objectivity are in a correlative gradient relationship. At one extreme, there are utterances such as expletives, whose main function is to express how the subject feels. At the other extreme are utterances such as philosophical or scientific statements, which attempt to abstract away from personal subjectivity and to reflect the way things are. The scientists or philosophers who make such statements remain human nonetheless, and so one must take into account their communicative intention and the context provided by the theory to which they subscribe in determining the truth or falsity of what they say. As Artigas (2000: 203) so aptly puts it: “scientific truth combines contextual, semantic, and pragmatic features, which correspond to the theories of truth as coherence, as correspondence, and as praxis. We will meet unsolvable problems if we separate these features. Such problems arise, for example, if we try to establish truth as a correspondence conceived as completely independent of theoretical construction and pragmatic intervention. An interpretation of this kind would amount to illegitimately making scientific truth absolute because the value of our knowledge would be considered as though independent of our concepts, their references, and the real problems we try to solve with them.” The perfectibility of scientific truth is a reflection of the limitations of the knowing subject. However this does not make such truth purely subjective: just because the human mind is not omniscient does not mean it is incapable of grasping reality and can only express its own attitudes or feelings.
References
Artigas, Mariano. 2000. The Mind of the Universe. Philadelphia and London: Templeton Foundation Press.
Saka, Paul. 2007. How to think about Meaning. Dordrecht: Springer.