ABSTRACT
The upshot of our discussion on philosophy and its relationship to science is the main topic for this last chapter. We are concerned to see what follows from our conclusions as well as what those conclusions are.At the start of our discussion, we asked what it was that philosophy was concerned with and our conclusion was (and is) that philosophy is a ruminative activity which is in some sense ultimate with respect to all knowledge. Everything we do, everything we say, all the beliefs we hold about reality and ourselves are subject to such detailed scrutiny.We wonder who we are, how we came to be here and what life and the world mean. We do not, in the narrower confines of philosophy, dwell on the sense of wonder or mystery we feel, nor say too much about space and time. When we hear space is “finite but unbounded” we pause but do not necessarily despair of understanding. This is easy to do if we are committed to dealing with everyday matters which are hardly likely to be influenced by our misgivings over the implications of Relativity Theory.Philosophers, and this also includes anyone reflecting on life 296
and our language, can make a mystery out of almost anything. It is rather like looking at a word for a long time and gradually losing all confidence in whether it has been correctly spelt or not. The longer you look the odder it seems. This sense of wonder is certainly what often sparks off the philosopher, but as in every other field of activity, we soon pick out special problems and concentrate on them. A few professionals get used to each others’ way of talking and the terminology becomes accepted by convention, although this is probably less true of philosophy than of a science. Every time you think you have actually happened upon some conceptual bedrock, someone else quickly turns it into quicksand.We said above that philosophy was “in some sense ultimate”, and I think we have to admit that if, as we have argued, science and philosophy are to be brought closer together, then one cannot deny the scientist the right to say, “Whatever you do by way of contemplative acts or rumination, whatever languages and logical grammars you erect, I shall continue to treat your behaviour scientifically. I shall set up theories and models which deal with “philosophising”. The philosopher may insist that such further work will still be subject to his prior analysis, and the scientist will say in turn that the further analysis will then also become a part of his theory. So there is some point in accepting a two-way transaction between philosophy and science. it is a situation rather like that of mutual knowledge specified by Schiffer (1972) in clearing up the possibly harmful infinite regress implicit in Grice’s approach to meaning.This turns us to explanation and explication. We accept that scientific method and logical analysis go together and explanation and explication are principal parts of each. We would now place heavy emphasis on the contextual nature of such work. One can certainly argue that each method is intended to discover the truth. The enormity of this task forces us, in practice, to break down the truth into specialised fields of endeavour and also, as a result, imposes a contextual constraint on our research.We say now that we define, describe, explain, analyse, etc., only to the extent that we are answering a particular question,
solving a particular problem or clarifying a particular point at issue. The fact is that most of our time in science, philosophy and life is spent in just this way.We have to admit that a backcloth to this sort of work is a discussion of ontological and epistemological questions, and that the decisions we make on both these scores are interdependent (independent of, and interacting according to, context) with the traditional issues of meaning, truth and the like. I shall argue that we do not usually possess the information necessary to tell us that one view is wrong and the other right, but we can argue a case for one by putting reasons for accepting the criteria or the alleged facts. More important is to discover what the consequences are of accepting certain criteria, and this in passing gives us some information as to its likely truth.I have tried to say why I believe the correspondence theory of truth is the one which best fits the facts. This I think goes with a critically realistic view of the world, which accepts the need for assuming a world independent of us, and tied to us by our observations. We naturally run into difficulties now as soon as we ask about the relations between the observer and the observed. This means that all the cognitive terms are in need of analysis.This in turn leads us to talk and answer questions about cognition that are couched in many different forms. The reasons for this are partly connected with the motives behind our questions and our talk. If I am concerned with logic I try to bypass many of these “philosophical” issues, as I can with truth by no more than a Tarski-like rule. If I try to set up some sort of language or language grammar (conceptual picture) by which I can better understand the world, then I am concerned mainly with its consistency, but still need to make a reasonable choice of “maps”. It is for this reason that we (may) need to look at the processes underlying (or being) such matters as perception, memory, and the like and not merely consider them as acts, which we might otherwise, for a “logical enquiry” (explication) of a philosophical kind.For my logico-philosophical convenience I might talk of a world of facts, but such facts would include objects, or the
properties of objects (when it suited me) and relations between objects (structure) and especially the causal relations (functions). I would suspend some languages for some purposes and involve others for others, and would regard someone who wished to write about the world entirely in terms of appearance (Goodman, 1951) as a man performing an exciting and interesting experiment. For my part I would generally want to assume that my words (components of my language) should either represent facts (label objects, etc.) or be syncategorimatic. But this is not always so, since many words will be other than descriptive, e.g. they will be conceptual, evaluative, and so on.The language used (for whatever communicative modality) would clearly be subject to syntactic rules - made up by me for formal languages and discovered by me (as a scientist discovers different plants in botany) in the case of natural languages, until such time as, in view of their incompleteness, I made up my own rules, and I would try to fit in as far as possible with ordinary usage; but I could not do so at every level of precision — as the process of formalisation of terms makes clear.Meaning is given by the fairly complicated process of understanding the intention of the user, the interpretation of the listener(s), the reference of the terms, the conventions of the language, and of such pragmatic factors as gesture and facial expression at the very least. Definitions will help clear up contextual vagueness; it is as Wittgenstein so often said (in many cases) the use of the term which is its meaning.I can abstract from this total behavioural context and consider “telephone” conversations which are restricted to the auditory channel, eliminating many of the behavioural (particularly visual) cues and clues. I can further abstract this to the “letter writing” conversation, where all behavioural clues are restricted to those I can put into the written word in the form of sarcasm, innuendo and the like.I can refine my concept of meaning as necessary, by definitions, relative to the “conversational context”. Similarly, I can refine any other of the basic concepts such as truth, knowledge, in any way appropriate to my needs.There are now some matters of fact that need to be decided
upon, since these give some guidance to our preferred usage. In the case of such matters as imagination, we would like to know more of the facts, and we can make some progress from introspective evidence, but presumably the neurophysiological field is the likely source of a breakthrough. This may not affect our linguistic usage, but the whole point of this book is largely lost if anyone denies the possibility of it doing so.Logic too can be regarded in various ways. It can be thought of as being plausible, sensible, reasonable, etc., and logical behaviour is just such behaviour which is far more than mere inference making. At the “letter writing” level of conversation logic does not need to be confined to the formal inference making of the Propositional calculus, Predicate calculus, etc., or even inductive logic, which is never a matter of strict entailment.The two current philosophers who are perhaps most opposed to meaning as espoused by Bennett, Searle and the like are Davidson and Chomsky.Davidson (1970, pp 97-98) has argued that there are no laws of the mind and the mental realm is anomalous. The resulting Davidsonian theory, as is well-known, makes meaning depend wholly on truth-values.He also argues (1975) that “thought depends on speech”. He says (op. cit. p 9): The system of such beliefs identifies a thought by locating in a logical and epistemic space . . . I have the thought of going to the concert but until I decide whether to do, I have no fixed belief that I will go; until that time I merely entertain the thought. He then says, on the same page: The chief thesis of this paper is that a creature cannot have thoughts unless it is an interpreter of the speech of another. and then the link: An interpreter knows the conditions under which utterances of sentences are true. and finally the dismissal of teleological explanation as adequate on the grounds of its appeal to reason.
