Anthony Kenny - Philosophy in the Modern World - Chapter 5 synopsis

The following is a synopsis of chapter 5 of Anthony Kenny's Philosophy in the Modern World' - 'Language'

Frege on Sense and Reference

• 1892 paper - Sense and Reference
• Is identity a relation?
• It cannot be a relation between objects that signs stand for.
• It cannot be a relation between signs because signs are arbitrary.
• Frege distinguished between two kinds of signification:

1. Reference of expression - the object it refers to
2. Sense of expression - the mode which a sign presents its object

• An identity statement is true and informative if the sign of identity is flanked by two names with the same reference but different senses.
• All sentences have signs, sense and reference.
• Using signs we express a sense and denote a reference.
• The sense of a word = what we grasp when we understand the word.
• Images are subjective and so are personal.
• The sense of a sign is common to all uses of the language - therefore senses are public and can be passed through generations.
• Frege says that sentences can lack reference, but this is because they contain names that lack a reference, eg Odysseus.
• If a name lacks a reference it does not affect the thought.
• We are driven to accept a sentence's truth value as the reference.
• The relation between a sentence and it's truth value is the same as that between a name and its reference.
• May philosopher accepted Frege's idea of a difference between predication and assertion, but rejected the notion that complete sentences have a reference of any kind.

The Pragmatists on Language and Truth

• Charles Sanders Peirce = similar to Frege.
• Both rejected the traditional way of distinguishing between subject and predicate.
• Propositions are either complete or incomplete (unsaturated) symbols.
• Proper names - Frege called them arguments. Peirce called them indices.
• Frege's concept of expressions and functions Peirce called icons.
• Peirce general theory of signs = Semiotics
• Peirce defined signs in three classes:

1. Natural signs. Eg, a cloud is a sign of rain
2. Iconic signs. Should share with its object some feature that each could have if the other did not exist. The method of interpreting this feature should be fixed by convention.
3. Symbols - determined by convention. most importantly, words.

• Since Peirce, theorists are divided semiotics into three disciplines:

1. Syntactics - the study of grammar.
2. Semantics - the study of the relationship between language and reality.
3. Pragmatics - the study of social context and the purposes and consequences of communication. Meaning and truth.

• Peirce and James explained meaning in similar ways.
• For James the truth of a belief depends on its consequences, or the consequences of believing it.
• Truth is not the same as reality.
• Truth is something known, thought or said about reality.

Russell's Theory of Descriptions

• Critic of James - attacked the pragmatists account of truth in an article in 1908 - Transatlantic Truth.
• For Russell, one proposition could be true and the other false.
• He was interested in different kinds of meaning that words and phrases might have and the way they might turn out to lack meaning.
• Any genuine proper name must stand for something, it must 'directly represent some object.'
• Frege and Russell aimed to construct a language that would be a more precise instrument than ordinary language.
• For Frege and Russell, it is essential that such a language should contain only expressions with a definite sense.

The Picture Theory of the Proposition

• Wittgenstein built on Russell's theory of descriptions to analyse the descriptions of complex objects.
• Sentences can be meaning but false.
• Wittgenstein believed language disguised the structure of thought beyond recognition.
• It is the job of philosophy to uncover thought through analysis.
• In his diary on 29/09/1914, Wittgenstein stated that propositions are essentially pictorial in nature.
• He defined picture not only as drawings and painting but as musical scores, maps, etc.
• Representation: What is it representative of? Whether it represents correctly or incorrectly.
• Pictorial form = possibility of structure.
• Pictures can be more of less abstract.
• Logical form = the minimum a picture must have to portray a situation.
• There is an important contrast between names and what they refer to.
• To understand a name is to grasp its reference.
• To understand a proposition is to grasp its sense.
• What Wittgenstein meant by calling a proposition a picture can be summed up in nine theses:

1. A proposition is essentially a composite.
2. Elements of a proposition are correlated by human decision with elements of reality.
3. The combination of these elements presents a possible state of affairs.
4. A proposition stands in an essential relation to the possibly situation it represents - shares a logical structure.
5. Relationships can only be shown because logical form can only be mirrored not represented.
6. Every proposition is bipolar - either true or false.
7. A proposition is either true or false by agreeing or disagreeing with reality.
8. A proposition must be independent of the actual situation.
9. No proposition is a priori true.

Language Games and Private Languages

• Wittgenstein thought that philosophy is an activity not a theory.
• Ordinary language is embedded in social structures and activities that Wittgenstein called language games.
• Understanding language is a state rather than a process.
• Mental mechanism doctrine - to understand the meaning of a word is to call upon an appropriate image in connection with it.
• To name something is not sufficient to confront it.
• 'Pain' is not a private language.
• There cannot be a language whose words refer to what can only be known to the individual speaker of that language - there can be no private language.
• This is completely contradictory to the following philosophers:

Descartes: Language has meaning while existance of ones own body remains uncertain.

Hume: It is possible for thoughts and experiences to be recognised and classified while the external world is in suspense.

Mill and Schopenhauer: Man can express the contents of his mind in language while questioning the existence of other minds.

All these theories require the possibilty of private language. 

Philosophy in the Modern World - Chapter 8 synopsis

The reading for HCJ this week is chapter 8 from Anthony Kenny's book Philosophy in the Modern World. The following is a synopsis of the key points in the chapter in preparation for my seminar paper this week.

Bentham on Intention and Motive:

• Bentham explored the effect of moral character depending on the presence or absence of different cognitive and affective elements.
• His approach reflects Aquinas' but he differs in terminology and moral evaluation.
• Aquinas believed that an act is intentional if it chosen as a means to an end. If an action is an unavoidable consequence or accompaniment to such a choice it was not intentional but only voluntary.
• Bentham argued that 'voluntary' was the wrong word for Aquinas to use and he should have used 'intentional'.
• Bentham believed in the same distinctions as Aquinas, but said that they were distinctions of intention.
• A consequence is either directionally intentional or obliquely intentional.
• A directly intentional action is either ultimately or immediately intentional depending on whether the action was a motive or not.
• Bentham wanted to define intention in cognitive terms
• He believed that intention is a key criteria for moral and legal evaluations of actions.
• Intentions are not good or bad in themselves, the consequences make them good or bad.
• Consequences are dependent on circumstances, and circumstances are either known or unknown by the agent.
• If the circumstances are known by the agent an act is an advised act. An unadvised act is when the circumstances are not known by the agent.

Reason, Understanding and Will:

• Both humans and animals have a sense of understanding and sensation.
• Only humans have the ability to reason and a capacity for reflection which allows us to have language, freedom and science.
• Abstract knowledge can be retained and shared.

Schopenhauer:

• Both humans and animals have wills but only humans can deliberate.
• Ethics is based on morals but morals are abstract
• Will is present and active in the universe.
• All will rises from a want, which implies a deficiency in something and therefore all will comes from suffering
• The definition of a genius is someone who is 'imaginative and restless...dislikes mathematic and lives on the borderline of madness.'
• Rejects the idea of the dualism of mind and body
• 'The body is nothing more than the objectification of the will and its desires.'

Experimental Vs Philosophical Psychology:

• The science of the mind was introduced in the 19th century though empirical and experimental methods.
• Professor of psychology, Wilhelm Wundt introduced the science of the mind in 1879 in Leipzig.
• In 1878 William James set up a psychology lab in Harvard University - the first doctorate was awarded.

William James:

• Wrote Principles of Psychology in 1980 - a summary of new findings in psychology.
• Theory of emotions - proposed emotions are perceptions of bodily processes; all states of consciousness can be called 'feelings'.
• Some feelings are cognitive and some are not.
• For a feeling to be cognitive there must be in the world another entity resembling the feeling in its quality and the feeling must be directly or indirectly operate upon this entity.
• Consciousness is essentially a private, internal phenomenon, capable of existing in isolation from any body.

The Freudian Unconscious:

• In his book Introductory Lecture of Psychoanalysis, Freud stated that the greater part of our mental life is unconscious.
• Only a fraction of what we know and believe is present to consciousness in the sense of being an object of our immediate attention.
• Freud believed that there are three sets of phenomena that reveal the existence of the unconscious:

1. Trivial everyday mistakes: Freud suggests that these mistakes are not accidental, they reveal the hidden motives of the unconscious
2. Reports of dreams: Freud called dreams 'the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind' but we cannot interpret our own dreams, we need a psychoanalyst. He believed that dreams are our repressed wishes and are coded, but when stripped down they are usually sexual. Dream codes are unique to each dreamer, they cannot be universalised.
3. Neurotic symptoms: The interpretation of neuroses by a psychoanalyst is dependant on the patient accepting the interpretations, but often patients do not accept this.

• Freud explained that mental harmony is dependant on the conflict between the ID, Ego and Superego.

Philosophical Psychology in the Tractatus:

• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was written by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
• Wittgenstein tried to explain the model of the mind.
• He accepted that psychology is genuine empirical science and thought that philosophy of the mind was on a par with psychology.
• In Tractatus he states that a thought is a logical picture of facts.
• Wittgenstein identified thoughts with propositions which could be either a sign/sentence or a thought. A sign or sentence is a relation between spoken words. A though is a relation between physical elements.
• Thinking a thought involved a psychic element in the sense of mental images or internal impressions.
• Meaning is conferred on signs by us and our conventions - these are not facts of science.

Intentionality:

• Brentano reintroduced intentionality into philosophy in the 19th century.
• In his book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) Brentano wanted to marl off physical from physical phenomena.
• He claimed that there are two kinds of action:

1. Transient: Actions that change their object
2. Immanent: Actions that change the agent not the object

• Brentano's distinction between physical and physical phenomena corresponds to the distinction between immanent and transient actions.
• Husserl took this over from Brentano.
• Husserl tells us that consciousness consists of 'intentional experiences or acts'.
• Every mental acts is a certain kind belonging to a certain species.
• He called individual acts the noesis and the specific content the noema.
• Acts have matter and qualities - so do imaginations, perception, emotion and volition. For example, seeing Rome and imagining Rome have the same content (Rome) but different qualities (imagining and seeing).

Wittengstein's Later Philosophy of Mind:

• Wittengstein's later philosophy was a direct reaction to Bertrand Russell, who ignored intentionality.
• Wittgenstein believed that intentionality was all important in understanding and language.
• He thought that the human mind is not a spirit and that there is not such thing as the self.
• Thought and understanding are not processes - there are different criteria of 'thought' and 'understanding'
• He demolished the concept that the connection between consciousness and expression is merely contingent - if this was true then theoretically everything in the universe could be conscious.
• The only evidence that humans are conscious is that we all consciousness in ourselves.
• Experiences one can have is dependent on how one can behave.
• It is wrong to identify the mind with behaviour - it is even more wrong to identify the mind with the brain.
• Connection between mind and brain is contingent, discoverable by empirical science.