Phil 426/526, B1 “Philosophy of Language”

Phil 426 "Introduction to Philosophy of Language"

Tue/Thur 1230-1350

Prof: F.J. Pelletier

Assiniboia Hall 2-65

No Phone, due to budget cuts (call Department 780-492-3307)

This page will be the place where I post (links to) readings, assignments, due dates, and general announcements, so you should monitor this for class information. Most of my downloadable documents are pdf, so you need a pdf reader to read them. A reader is free and can be downloaded from here.

A syllabus for this course is here. Graduate Students taking this course as Phil 526 should read not only the regular Phil 426 syllabus, but also the Phil 526 addendum to that syllabus, available here!! We will read the Hornsby/Longworth text pretty much in order, although sometimes I will add another relevant reading. As I remarked on the syllabus, the textbook has "introductions" to each reading, and each reading is followed by a "commentary" that asks questions about the reading. You should always have read the assigned materials before the class when they are discussed so that you can meaningfully contribute to the discussion. (The first reading…the Locke three parts [Intro, the reading itself, and the commentary]…should be done by Tuesday September 14^th, the second day of our Tue/Thur class.)

This course was added after I had agreed to go to various European conferences and workshops. This means that I will be out of town for some portions of the semester, and that we will have to discover a time that the missed classes can be made up. I wish to make them up during the term, rather than after classes are finished. The first trip I am taking is also the soonest, and the longest. I will be in Europe from 15-25 September, thereby missing class on Sept. 16, 21, and 23. Another class will be missed in November, and a final class will be missed in December. We therefore need to make up five class periods of 1h20m, for a total of 6h40m. We will decide later, as a group, when these can be made up. A class schedule…but one that may be revised at various times…can be located here.

We will cover Part 1 of the book (the "Reference and Meaning" section) in the first two weeks of lecture—but recall that I will be away during that time. [Jan. 7, 12, 14], so you should read these three articles: Locke, Mill, and Frege. Be sure to think about the various questions that are asked in the "commentaries" for these articles. This will form the basis for class discussions; and don’t forget that these form a substantial portion of your grade in the class. (And also, pay attention to the "conclusion" to this Part I (on pp. 41-42), which is about technical terminology as used by philosophers of language. I will also try to introduce some other technical terms that you will come across in readings.)

The next topic for lectures and discussion is in the readings of Part 2 ("Speech and Action") of our book: : John Austin "Performative Utterances", William Alston "Meaning and Use", and a short two paragraphs from John Searle's book Speech Acts. In their commentary on the Searle work, the editors devote a little time to Paul Grice's theory of meaning, which is in an article called "Meaning". You can download it from here. It is sort of a difficult read, but you may enjoy it nonetheless. This article occasioned a number of responses, many of which had the form of counterexamples to the proposed analysis of meaning. Even I participated, back in the days of yore. John Searle and Stephen Schiffer were the main people in this debate. Schiffer's 1972 book Meaning. Here is a statement of Grice's definition of meaning along with a list of purported counterexamples to the definition. We will not be covering this definition of meaning in detail (along with all the counterexamples and reformulations), but you should have at least an acquaintance with this sort of definition, since it is now so common and popular.

A topic that comes up in discussions of meaning is the “Humpty-Dumpty” theory of meaning, according to which you can mean anything you want by any utterance you make. Here is Chapter 6 of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. It’s all good fun and a short read, but the stuff on meaning that everyone talks about is just about at the half-way mark of this chapter.

Besides the extra Grice reading, I think we should do some further reading from Austin, particularly his book How to Do Things with Words (1962). Here is a short selection from that book explaining the different categories of speech acts or illocutionary acts that he has come up with. Lots of examples and discussion of how the differing categories are to be told apart. Elsewhere in How to Do Things with Words, Austin talked about different ways that performatives might go wrong; here is a "list-like" categorization of his account. Finally in this speech act realm, here is a one-page summary of Searle's definition of what a promise is (in speech act theory).

Try to read the materials as soon as you can. My apologies for not getting this to you earlier; but start with the Austin article in the book. You might follow this with Searle’s selections and the further material on this website for Austin. Then read the Alston material last. All along, of course, you should look at the Introductions and Discussion that our editors provide for the readings.

The course schedule says that the first assignment will be handed out on Oct. 7^th and would be due a week later on Oct. 14^th. I want to delay this by one class period, so as to be able to cover a little more material before the first assignment. It will therefore be passed out on Tuesday, Oct. 12^th, and due a week later on Oct. 19^th. It will be available for download off of this page. Here is that first assignment. Please make sure your name/student id number and the course number is either on the first page or on a title page. You can submit hardcopy, if you wish. This is to be handed in at the beginning of class on Oct. 19^th. Otherwise, submit your work electronically to me. This is also due at the beginning of class on Oct. 19^th. I said in class that I preferred electronic submissions (but don’t mind hardcopy). I can read works in doc, docx, txt, pdf, rtf, dvi, tex, ps and maybe some others. But I can't read WordPerfect (wpd) things, so please save/print wpd documents as either rtf or pdf and send that.

A topic that will come up a few times over the course of the semester is that of “mutual belief” or “mutual knowledge” (sometimes called “common knowledge” or “common belief”), and of its relationship to conventions. And, what all that has to do with language. One of the important papers on this topic is by David Lewis called “Language and Languages” (1975). Here is a scanned copy of this paper. Read through p.12 (it starts on p.3)…or all of it if you have the time and energy. (Ignore my underlines and comments. Since it’s a scanned copy, expect it to be a slow download.) This paper uses the notion rather than defining mutual knowledge, but I’ll introduce it in lectures. As I said, the topic will come up intermittently over the semester.

For next week’s classes (week of Oct 18-22), start reading the material in part 3 of our textbook (“Meaning and Truth”). The readings are Davidson, Soames, and Wright. In addition, Tarski’s theory of truth is mentioned at the end of the editors’ wrap-up summary. Since they don’t include any Tarski reading, here is something by him for your edification. It’s Tarski’s “informal account and defense” of his earlier (1936) more formal account of “the semantic theory of truth”. It’s sort of interesting reading, at least from a historical point of view. Tarski’s main works are collected in Tarski, A. (1956 [1^st edition];1983 [2^nd edition]): Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, first edition edited by J.H. Woodger; second edition, ed. by J. Corcoran. The English translation of Tarski’s 1936 paper is in this volume: Tarski, A.: "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages", translation by J.H. Woodger. The original German article is Tarski, A. 1936: "Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen". Studia Philosophica, 1: 261–405. I will talk about his general theory, mentioning his general theorem about the indefinability of ‘truth’ in “semantically universal languages.” You might also want to look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Tarski: And if you’re keen on reading about the life and loves of Tarski (as well as very informed discussions of his philosophy thrown in) be sure to read A. Feferman & S. Feferman 2004: Alfred Tarski. Life and Logic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. It’s full of juicy tidbits, including some nasty stuff about his student, Richard Montague!

Don’t forget: the first of the make-up classes is Friday Oct. 22, 3-6pm in our regular classroom (ESB 1-31).

The article by Crispin Wright (in the “Meaning and Truth” section) is a very broad explanation of a series of related views on the relation between truth and meaning. In the course of discussing these views, he talks about Tarski’s T-Sentences, about conventions, and about (Semantic) Compositionality. I discussed the T-Sentence materials in class, and there’s a link above to a Tarski article. We’ve also looked at Lewis’s notion of a convention (link above) and its relation to common knowledge/mutual belief. The third of these topics, semantic compositionality, is also an explicit topic in part 5 of our textbook. But you maybe should investigate it earlier. Here is a link to an entry called “Compositionality, Philosophical Aspects of” that I wrote for K. Brown (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Elseview Press, 2006, Vol. 2, pp. 712-716). Semantic compositionality is the second of the three types of compositionality that are discussed.

The next topic we’ll discuss, after the “Meaning and Truth” section, is Section 4 “Knowledge of Language”. These readings are hard…there’s no way around that fact. Read the editors’ introduction to the entire chapter to get some sort of feel as to what is going to be discussed. Many of you will have already had some introduction to Noam Chomsky’s earlier theory of the knowledge of language, involving a competence vs. performance distinction. So a question here is: just what sort of knowledge is Chomskean “competence”? Dummett is widely regarded as one of the more obscure writers in recent British philosophy. But he always seems to have some important point to make behind the difficult paragraphs. Again, read the editors’ introduction and discussion.

Assignment 2 is here, or rather, will be on Wednesday Nov. 3^rd. It is due electronically by the regular class time (12:30 pm) on Thursday, Nov. 11^th…except that there is no class that day. (Holiday). If you can’t turn it in electronically, notify me in advance and we’ll make other arrangements.

Don’t forget: the second of he make-up classes is Monday Nov. 15, 3-5.50. Room ESB 235.

Also note: there is no class on Thursday, Nov. 18^th. I will be in Latvia.

Here is a copy of Paul Grice’s “Logic and Conversation” (1975 version). We will be discussing this next time. The article starts with a very general overview of some of his views on philosophy of language, which are not particularly relevant to what we will be talking about. We will be interested in his notion of implicature, which starts on p.166, second column. We will be paying particular attention to his notion of “conversational implicature”. As you will see, Grice divides implicatures into two broad categories: conventional and non-conventional. The conversational implicatures are a subgroup of the non-conventional ones.

Recall that final papers are due electronically before midnight on Tuesday, December 14^th. The course syllabus said that 426 students should aim for a 8-12 page paper and that 526 students should aim for a 12-18 page paper. The syllabus also said that you should choose a topic in consultation with me. I don’t want to insist on this, and if you wish to work entirely on your own, then you are certainly allowed to do so. But please be careful to make your paper relevant to some aspect of this course. If you want to consult with me, you can do this either electronically by email, or make an appointment to talk with me. It would be good if you had some thoughts about the sorts of things you find interesting in the topics of this course, in order to facilitate a conversation about a paper topic (and readings). [About making an appointment with me: keep in mind that I will be in Latvia from Nov. 17-22^nd, and in Amsterdam from Dec. 5-10^th.]

I have written some things about the “style” of a paper. It was written for graduate students (in Computing Science), and so it is a bit of over-kill for this course. Still, I think you’ll find some helpful thoughts about how to organize and write a paper, even in Philosophy.

The previous “how to write a paper” discusses plagiarism at the end. Here is the link to the University of Alberta’s statement on plagiarism. (If you are further curious, check out the links on the right side of the page).

The last readings for the course are Bergman and Davies, both about metaphorical meaning. They are both in the final part of our textbook. (We will not be reading the Bach paper that is also in that part of the book).

Here is the third and last assignment for the semester. It is due electronically by 12.30 on Tuesday December 7^th. There is no class on Dec. 7^th, because I will be in Amsterdam. (This class has already been made up).