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Pure Pragmatics and Epistemology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Sellars*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
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Extract

The attempt to draw a clear distinction between Philosophy and the empirical sciences can almost be taken as the defining trait of the analytic movement in contemporary philosophical thought. The empirical science that has most frequently threatened to swallow up questions of particular interest to philosophers since the time of Descartes has been psychology. Characteristic, then, of analytic philosophy has been the rejection of what it terms psychologism, that is to say, the mistake of identifying philosophical categories with those of psychology, whether introspective or behavioristic. It is clear that to launch an attack on psychologism, thus conceived, presupposes that one has a list of philosophical categories which one is able to identify as such; and this in turn presupposes an ability to sketch, at least in a general way, a distinctly philosophical account of these concepts, although a systematic account along non-psychologistic lines may be a distant and ill-defined goal. The analytic movement in philosophy has gradually moved towards the conclusion that the defining characteristic of philosophical concepts is that they are formal concepts relating to the formation and transformation rules of symbol structures called languages. Philosophy, in other words, tends to be conceived of as the formal theory of languages. From this standpoint, consequently, psychologism is conceived of as the psychological treatment of concepts which are properly understood as formal devices defining a mode of linguistic structure.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 1947 , pp. 181 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1947

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References

1 We shall draw a distinction, perhaps sharper than that usually drawn, between the formal theory of languages, and the empirical study of historical language-behavior. See below, note 10.

2 “Realism and the New Way of Words,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming.

3 In “Realism and the New Way of Words” 1 have formulated this point more generally as follows: “Since the meaning and the meaningfulness of symbols alike are defined in a purely formal manner, we can say that the identity of formally indiscernibles is fundamental to the pure theory of languages. Thus, predicates are differentiated only in terms of conformation rules, individual constants only in terms of the predicates with which they are associated. Formal science makes use of empirical marks, but this is an empirical fact about formal science, and it would be a mistake to suppose that the empirical difference of mark from mark is reflected necessarily in a difference of formal status. Thus, in the absence of a formal distinction between ‘φ’ and ’ψ’, ”’φ’ designates ψ“ is not formally different from ”’φ’ designates φ“. The Leibnitzian conception of identity is merely an application of this insight to individual constants. Where we refuse this identity without explicit formal differentiation, it can be understood to be implicitly assumed.”

4 Since writing the above, I have come to the conclusion that the terminology of the argument can be improved as follows: A calculus with resources which permit the formulation of expressions Ei with respect to which the function' world-story (Ei)’ is decidable in view of the conformation rules of the calculus, will be called an empirical language form. As we have pointed out (note 3 above) the predicates of a calculus have determinate meaning (in a non-psychological sense) only by virtue of the conformation or combining rules relating to them. But an empirical language must be determinate in meaning not only with respect to its predicates but also with respect to its individual constants. This determinate meaning involves the functioning of these constants in one story. Thus we shall define an empirical language as an empirical language form, the formal status (and hence the ‘meanings’) of the individual constants of which is fixed in relation to one of the world stories formulable in it. This definition clarifies in a non-psychologistic way the notion that the primary non-logical expressions of a language must have determinate meaning. In terms of these definitions, where I use the expressions ‘verified-in-S’, ‘true-in-S’ etc., I could also say, ‘verified sentence of L’, ‘true sentence of L’ etc., where S is the meaning basis of L.

5 I refer to the debate concerning the indubitability of protocol sentences or Konstatiengen. See below, pp. 32–3.

6 “Realism and the New Way of Words.”

7 If it were a theorem in pure pragmatics that a story must contain at least one sentence that is confirmed in S but not verified in S, then an essential though minimal thesis of realism would be a philosophical tautology. If, on the other hand, it could be proved that a story can contain no such sentence, realism would be a self-contradictory position in philosophy.

8 In “Realism and the New Way of Words” 1 have formulated this point more generally as follows: “By the enlarged conception of the formal mode of speech as including pragmatic statements, we are enabled to clarify certain perennial problems relating to existence. The term ‘exists’ as ordinarily used has a sense consisting of syntactical, semantical and pragmatic elements. The last of these is the key to the Platonism issue, for it is to Platonism that a factualistic interpretation must lead. The pragmatic element is suggested by the statement, ”to say that an individual or class exists is to say that the corresponding individual or class term is meaningful.“ Since existence in this sense is (on our interpretation) as non-factual a notion as the syntactical sense that was clarified at Cambridge, one can admit, nay, insist, that classes exist without swallowing a two-storied world. Needless to say, the question as to the existence of the class lion, is to be distinguished from that as to the existence of lions. For the latter, given a meaningful language, the analysis of Russell is adequate. It is essential to note that the pragmatic sense of existence applies only to the designata of the factual terms of the object-language, (e.g. a exists is equivalent to ‘a’ designates a and ‘a’ is meaningful; red exists is equivalent to ‘red’ is a class term, ‘red’ designates red, and meaningful (‘red’).”

9 An exploration of this issue would lead to an examination of the pragmatic structure of temporal stories; to an analysis of the substance-mode relationship, and of the concept of dispositional property; that is to say of the syntax of thing, property and event words. I have sketched the direction such an analysis might take in the “Realism” paper.

10 One of the central theses of this paper concerns the terms ‘language’ and ‘meta-language.’ We have insisted that two irreducibly different usages of the term ‘language’ must be distinguished, namely, the factual and the formal, or, more suggestively, the descriptive and the constitutive. In the factual-descriptive usage, a language is a set of socio-psychologico-historical facts. In this context, the concepts in terms of which we describe a language are factual concepts, such as goal-behavior, substitute stimuli, etc., together with a strong dose of statistics. The “meta-language” in terms of which we describe a language thus understood is a “meta-language” in a purely factual sense; from the formal standpoint it is no more a meta-language than is language about non-linguistic socio-psychologicohistorical states of affairs. As long as we are dealing with languages in the factual sense, we are not making use of the concepts of the formal theory of language, even when we talk about sentences, meaning, and having the same meaning as. In such a context, the latter concepts are purely factual.

What, then, would it be to talk formally about an historical language such as French? To talk about a language, in the formal sense of the term ‘language’ is, as we have seen, to posit the language, that is to say (schematically) to constitute the language-cum-story-of-a-world-in-which-it-is-used. It is nonsense, however, to talk about positing French as an historical language. Does this mean that one who is talking formally about (positing) a language, cannot be talking formally about, say, French? The answer consists in drawing a distinction; or, better, in introducing a new sense to the expression “talking about a language.” The schematic formal language-behavior (positing) of a logician Jones will be said to be about the French language, if a stratum of that behavior conforms to the verbal habits of French speaking people. This account is clearly an over-simplification; yet in terms of it we are able to clarify the customary distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ semiotic. After one has made the fundamental distinction between formal linguistics and socio-psychologico-historical linguistics, we turn our attention to the former, and classify the activities of the formal student of language according to whether or not a stratum of his utterances gears in with our own language habits, or those of a recognizable historical group of individuals. Although the activities are equally formal and pure in both cases; it is useful, though misleading, to refer to the case where there is this gearing in as “applied semiotic.” The important thing is to avoid confusing “applied semiotic” in this sense with socio-phychologico-historical linguistics. The following analogy may be helpful; The theory of chess is a branch of the pure theory of “capture” games; as such a branch it must be carefully distinguished from the descriptive study of historical chess games.

Note that the pragmatic formal mode of speech of whatever metalinguistic level clarifies the relation of the factual to the formal elements in a “world.” In this sense, the formal mode bends back on itself. As fact, a metalanguage of this level can be described in psychological terms. However, as formal mode of speech, it must “itself” be constituted in a more complex metalanguage. This new constituting is autonomous, and is “about” the former only in this factual-descriptive sense that the manipulations of the former are glimpsed in its manipulations. See also footnote 11 below.

11 The point we have been making concerning the nature of a meta-language (see p. 32 above) can be generalized. All the expressions of a language of whatever level belong to that level, even should they be, for example, meta-meta-language expressions “about the relation of its immediate object-language (a meta-language) to a first-level language.” It is clear that this irreducible stratification of languages can be transcended only by abandoning formal categories and talking in psychological terms regarding symbol-behavior, and symbol-behavior “about” symbol behavior, where only psychological categories are involved, and even “about” (not to be confused with the semantic term ‘designates’) is a factual predicate. There is no formal elevator that takes us from one meta-linguistic level to another. Each level formally “reconstructs” the lower levels. It is clear from this that the notion of reconstruction is a factual one, as is the notion of levels in this context.

12 As a first approximation, the notion of a world which includes a confirmer of the designating story (which, of course, has no theological implications) can be characterized as a set of co-experiences which token (1) all sentences of the story, as well as (2) the meta-sentences which assign pragmatic predicates to the type sentences making up the story. The next step would be the clarification of the notion of a world which contains items which are tokens of sentences characterizing the assignment of pragmatic predicates as analytic or self-contradictory.

13 The term ‘tautology-habit’ is clearly not a term in formal science. As I am using the term, it stands to the ‘tautology’ of formal science as the ‘language’ of descriptive to the ‘language’ of formal linguistics (see footnote 10 above). As a descriptive term, ‘tautology-habit’ is a dispositional term corresponding to ‘tautology-behavior’, (roughly) behavior which has the consequences characteristic of “It is raining or it is not raining.”