EPM: Ch XII

Pete MandikChairman, Department of PhilosophyCoordinator, Cognitive Science LaboratoryWilliam Paterson University, New Jersey USA

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Ch XII: Our Rylean Ancestors Which one is Gilbert Ryle?

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A thought experiment: Imagine a group of people who… Don’t have words for thoughts,

impressions, or anything else mental Do have words for publicly

observable objects, bodies, and their motions

Do have words for words and their semantic properties

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What would this group of people need in order to

come up with the ideas of thoughts, impressions, and other things mental?

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They could construct a theoretical model based on…Words and their semantic properties

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Words and their semantic properties“Let it be granted, then, that these

mythical ancestors of ours are able to characterize each other's verbal behavior in semantical terms; that, in other words, they not only can talk about each other's predictions as causes and effects, and as indicators (with greater or less reliability) of other verbal and nonverbal states of affairs, but can also say of these verbal productions that they mean thus and so, that they say that such and such, that they are true, false, etc.” p. 92

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Words and their semantic properties, continued“And let me emphasize, as was pointed out in Section 31

above, that to make a semantical statement about a verbal event is not a shorthand way of talking about its causes and effects, although there is a sense of "imply" in which semantical statements about verbal productions do imply information about the causes and effects of these productions. Thus, when I say "'Es regnet' means it is raining," my statement "implies" that the causes and effects of utterances of "Es regnet" beyond the Rhine parallel the causes and effects of utterances of "It is raining" by myself and other members of the English-speaking community. And if it didn't imply this, it couldn't perform its role. But this is not to say that semantical statements are definitional shorthand for statements about the causes and effects of verbal performances.” pp. 92-93

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From Section 31 (The Logic of ‘Means’ pp. 66-67)“The truth of the matter, of course, is that statements of the form "'. .

.' means - - -" are not relational statements, and that while it is indeed the case that the word "rot" could not mean the quality red unless it were associated with red things, it would be misleading to say that the semantical statement "'Rot' means red" says of "rot" that it [is] associated with red things. For this would suggest that the semantical statement is, so to speak definitional shorthand for a longer statement about the associative connections of "rot," which is not the case. The rubric "'. . .' means - - -" is a linguistic device for conveying the information that a mentioned word, in this case "rot," plays the same role in a certain linguistic economy, in this case the linguistic economy of German-speaking peoples, as does the word "red," […]    We see, therefore, how the two statements"Und" means andand"Rot" means redcan tell us quite different things about "und" and "rot," for the first conveys the information that "und" plays the purely formal role of a certain logical connective, the second that "rot" plays in German the role of the observation word "red" -- in spite of the fact that means has the same sense in each statement, and without having to say that the first says of "und" that it stands in "the meaning relation" to Conjunction, or the second that "rot" stands in "the meaning relation" to Redness.”

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Back to the current chapter:“With the resources of semantical discourse, the language

of our fictional ancestors has acquired a dimension which gives considerably more plausibility to the claim that they are in a position to talk about thoughts just as we are. For characteristic of thoughts is their intentionality, reference, or aboutness, and it is clear that semantical talk about the meaning or reference of verbal expressions has the same structure as mentalistic discourse concerning what thoughts are about. It is therefore all the more tempting to suppose that the intentionality of thoughts can be traced to the application of semantical categories to overt verbal performances, and to suggest a modified Rylean account according to which talk about so-called "thoughts" is shorthand for hypothetical and mongrel categorical-hypothetical statements about overt verbal and nonverbal behavior, and that talk about the intentionality of these "episodes" is correspondingly reducible to semantical talk about the verbal components.” p. 93

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Continued“What is the alternative? Classically it has been the idea

that not only are there overt verbal episodes which can be characterized in semantical terms, but, over and above these, there are certain inner episodes which are properly characterized by the traditional vocabulary of intentionality. And, of course, the classical scheme includes the idea that semantical discourse about overt verbal performances is to be analyzed in terms of talk about the intentionality of the mental episodes which are "expressed" by these overt performances. My immediate problem is to see if I can reconcile the classical idea of thoughts as inner episodes which are neither overt behavior nor verbal imagery and which are properly referred to in terms of the vocabulary of intentionality, with the idea that the categories of intentionality are, at bottom, semantical categories pertaining to overt verbal performances.” pp. 93-94

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Some interesting implicationsIf the intentionality of thought

(‘aboutness’) is to be modeled on the meaning of words, then if meaning isn’t a relation, then ‘aboutness’ isn’t a relation either.

Against philosophers such as Plato and Meinong, we do not need to posit weird objects like the universal form of horse-ness or the inexistent gold mountain in order for our thoughts to be about horses or gold mountains.

We need no weird objects for our thoughts to be related to because aboutness isn’t a relation.

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THE END