LEWIS, Harry WOODFIELD, Andrew. (1985) 'Content and Community'

Content and CommunityAuthor(s): Harry A. Lewis and Andrew WoodfieldSource: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 59 (1985), pp.177-214Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Aristotelian SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4106754Accessed: 22/08/2010 14:42

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The Aristotelian Society and Blackwell Publishing are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes.

http://www.jstor.org

CONTENT AND COMMUNITY

Harry A. Lewis and Andrew Woodfield

I-Harry A. Lewis

I

Can a being have thoughts and yet not be a member of a community? Is the content of individuals' thoughts determined by features of the community of which they are members? These are distinct questions. A link would be made between the second question and the first if any fixing of content could be shown to require a community; for contentless thoughts would be no thoughts at all. A positive answer to either question may seem obvious, or paradoxical, depending how it is taken. A hermit can be allowed thoughts, and if any human being lacks a community, surely he does. But this example might be held not to break a necessary tie between thought and community, for the hermit will have developed his capacity for thought in the bosom of his family, and if we read his writings, even after his death, we could be held to enrol him in our community. A thesis so plastic will not be easy to refute. An empirical disproof would appear not to be open to us: for how could we detect thought if not by conversing, and thus creating at least a 'community' of two? But a step or two of argument is needed to show that the very notion of a solitary thinker is incoherent, and a further step to show that any thinker may belong to a fully-fledged community. In this paper I explore some aspects of recent arguments to community.

I take a being to have thoughts just in case attitudes ('propositional' attitudes) can be truly ascribed to it. I speak of 'content' to distinguish the attitude proper (whether it be belief, remembering, or wondering whether) from the Fregean thought or Russellian proposition to which the attitude is directed. I see no need for a prior commitment to a 'theory' of content, if such is possible, or to a view of the logical form and ontology of attitude- ascriptions in general. In particular, I take no view as to whether content is 'private' or 'public'-since I regard the question as

178 I-HARRY A. LEWIS

confused. ('Content' can be ascribed to what one person tells another just as much as to what a single person believes.) And I shall henceforward assume that the being to whom attitudes are ascribed is human. On the other hand, I am not prepared to take the notion of 'community' as well understood. The arguments that interest me purport to reveal the necessity of community for thought, or for language and so for thoughts too. I have indicated already that the notion of membership of a community is at risk of being stretched. In addition, the notions of social group that are invoked are not all the same, nor are the functions assigned to such groups in the argument.

II

A direct connection between thoughts and community was claimed by Tyler Burge in his paper 'Individualism and the Mental'.' Burge purports to show that a person's mental contents are constituted in part by his social environment: 'No man's intentional phenomena are insular. Every man is a piece of the social continent, a part of the social main.' (p. 87). The central argument that he used has been rehearsed before,2 but it is of sufficient interest to bear repetition. My purpose will be served by adapting one of Burge's simpler examples, while echoing his presentation in other respects. We are to imagine that Jane has a large number of attitudes commonly attributed with content clauses containing the word 'sofa' in oblique occurrence. For example, she thinks (correctly) that sofas are items of furniture, that they are for sitting on, and that they are heavily upholstered. In addition to these unsurprising attitudes, she thinks falsely that John has a new sofa in his living room (for in fact, it is an armchair). Her false belief results from the absence from her experience of any corrective to the application of the word 'sofa' to single-seaters. She talks to John of his new 'sofa', and he points out that it is an armchair: sofas are not

'French, P. A., Uehling, T. E. and Wettstein, H. K. (editors) Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume 4 (1979) Studies in Metaphysics, pp. 73-121.

2 By Philip Pettit, in 'Wittgenstein, Individualism and the Mental', at pp. 446-55 of Weingartner, Paul (editor), Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the 7th International Wittgenstein Symposium, Vienna: Halder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1983; by Steven Stich, in his 'On the Ascription of Content' at pp. 200-203 in Woodfield, A. (editor) Thought and Object, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1982); and by Andrew Woodfield in 'Thought and the Social Community', Inquiry 25 (1982) pp. 435-50.

CONTENT AND CX)MMUNITY 179

single-seaters, as any dictionary could have told her. Jane is surprised, but gives up her belief. This story corresponds, so far, to the 'first step' in Burge's 'thought-experiment'. In the second step, we are invited to imagine the circumstances altered: whereas nothing has been different in Jane's physical history and non-intentional mental phenomena, furniture-salesmen, lexicographers and informed laymen apply 'sofa' not only to sofas but also to armchairs. The standard use of the term in the imagined circumstances is to be conceived to encompass Jane's actual misuse. The third step is an interpretation of this latter case. In the counterfactual situation, Jane lacks some-probably all-of the attitudes commonly attributed with content clauses containing 'sofa' in oblique occurrence. She lacks the occurrent thoughts or beliefs that John has a new sofa in his living room, that many of her other friends have sofas, that sofas are for sitting on, and so on. Thus Jane's counterfactual attitudes differ from her actual ones, but only in virtue of a difference in social environment. Burge claims wide scope for this argument: it can get under way 'in any case where it is intuitively possible to attribute a mental state or event whose content involves a notion that the subject incompletely understands'. He regards such incomplete understanding as common: 'One need only to thumb through a dictionary for an hour or so to develop a sense of the extent to which one's beliefs are infected by incomplete understanding' (p. 79).

What is the 'community' to which this argument appeals, and what is its function in the argument? The community includes specialists (the furniture-salesmen of the example), lexicographers and informed laymen. These people agree on their use of the term in question; but there is no suggestion that they form part of the community solely by virtue of that agreement. On the other hand, their function is to establish a 'standard use' over against Jane's. In addition, they define 'the' notion of sofa.

Burge moves easily between talk of divergent usage and talk of divergent belief, as his remark on dictionaries shows. In fact he goes further: for he embraces the paradox that we (individuals) 'think with' notions of which our mastery is incomplete. I find no difficulty in accepting that we severally fail to master thejointly- owned notion of sofa, or of harpsichord. (To refer to this


phenomenon as the 'linguistic division of labour', after Putnam,3 would only serve to promote the conflation of belief and usage that I have just noted.) What seems perverse, indeed to beg the question in favour of Burge, is to claim that we severally 'think with' this jointly-owned notion. Jane would be held to 'think with' a notion of sofas that excluded armchairs, in her very judgment that an armchair was a sofa. The alternative would be to recognize that Jane's notion of sofa was different from that of others, and that she could only 'think with' her own notion. In certain cases, it might still be convenient for a standard user of 'sofa' to report Jane's beliefs by using that term; but this would be a practical decision (as Woodfield suggests).4 Burge offers normal practice as a reason for rejecting the attribution of a notion that just catches the misconception. However, practice has many motives. He seems also to hold that attributing such a notion to an individual will involve treating her beliefs as true. If the only way of ascribing unusual notions to an individual is to allow all her beliefs to be true, then the view that we think with our own notions seems to be in trouble. (I shall return to this point later.)

Andrew Woodfield has argued persuasively that Burge's argument fails,5 through inattention to the variety of languages that are involved in the imagined cases. Woodfield shows that the phenomena in question allow of clear characterization where Jane's attitude is identified by way of a linguistic disposition, and the language in which the attitude is reported is thought of as the same as Jane's or alternatively as relevantly different. One effect of his critique is to split off the social elements involved from the attitudes. The role of social factors in Burge's examples is to identify one language that might be used to reportJane's state of mind. A similar conclusion can be drawn if we replace the idea of the divergent individual by that of a small community with its own dialect. Such a dialect-owning community could diverge from its host-community in just the way that Jane diverged from hers, whereas any problems thought to derive from the fact that Jane is a single individual

3 Putnam, H., Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mind, Language and Reality, Cambridge University Press (1975) pp. 227 ff.

4Woodfield, op. cit. p. 446. 5 In his paper 'Thought and the Social Community' cited above.

CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 181

could not exist for a community. But its usage would by Burge's argument fail to determine the contents of the attitudes expressed by it, until reference was made to the ways of the host- community. The only contrast needed in order to characterize the phenomena presented by Burge is that between languages. He makes no use of the contrast between individual and community except to that end.

The claimed direct link between content and community is thus revealed as mediated by the notion of language identity. This suggests that the argument needs to be re-cast. The link taken for granted by Burge between (on the one hand) the social factors that fix the language and the notions it expresses and (on the other) the contents of individuals' thoughts, needs to be made good. Even if it established its ostensible conclusion, Burge's case would fall short of showing that there could not be a solitary thinker; for it is an unargued assumption that his thinkers are members of communities. He does not suggest that there would be no attitudes without community, but only that where a person already belongs to a community, some facts about the community enter into the determination of the content of her thoughts.

III

We shall consider a less direct argument to show the impossibility of a solitary thinker, to wit: any thinker must have a language; any language-user must have a community; so any thinker must have a community.

We should not assimilate thinking too readily to a use of language. There are many attitudes whose content is not literally expressed by any sentence of their owner's language. A variety of examples may be used to argue for this observation, if indeed argument is required. If there are de re attitudes properly expressed using indexical pronouns, their content will not typically be expressed by any complete sentence, where what the sentence expresses is taken to be what it brings to its contexts. Any figurative or metaphorical use of language may lend itself to the expression of attitudes whose contents cannot be 'translated' into another sentence taken literally. Nonetheless, if I say 'It's raining and it's not raining', what I think, and what I convey, may be true, even though the sentence I utter, taken


literally, is false. Does anyone wish to insist that in such a case the speaker and the hearer must have in mind some other sentence, whose sense 'It's raining and it's not raining' used figuratively, precisely captures? For another class of examples, consider what might be called 'indexical predicates' as in 'Peter's shirt was this colour', 'Mary jumped up like this'. Does anyone wish to insist that understanding such sentences, as uttered with appropriate gestures, requires that speaker and hearer apply or invent a word to express what the whole predicate, complete with context, contrives to convey? A person's beliefs are sometimes identified with that subset of the sentences of her language that for her express truths. But many things held true cannot be found a sentence of the believer's language that (taken literally) expresses them. The relation between content and language is looser than that. Thus a strong form of the argument from thought to language is invalid: it is not the case that all contents must be expressible by literal or portable uses of sentences. But the evidence just adduced has no tendency to show that thought is possible for a creature without language, since it draws on examples where whatever is expressed or conveyed exploits a use of language.

For a defence of the first step of our indirect argument, we may turn to the view defended by Donald Davidson in his 'Thought and Talk',6 namely, that any thinker must be an interpreter of another's speech. I do not need to consider all of Davidson's argument, but only to review the social elements involved.

The alleged relation between thought and interpretation is indirect: an 'interpreter' is not said to be interpreting whenever he thinks, just as our hermit is not forever learning from his parents. Davidson is not concerned with the development of the capacity for thought in the individual's lifetime, but with the general conditions for thought.' This enables us to suggest that the capacities in question might be exercised in thought while remaining unexercised in interpretation. Thus insofar as a social

6 Davidson, D., Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1984) pp. 155-70.

SI recognize that this account of Davidson's purpose may be at odds with his talk (on p. 170) of the 'emergence' of the contrast between truth and error. see below, p. 193.


element in thought is held to derive from the thinker's interpreting activities, it could remain a theoretical possibility rather than a necessity. A similar conclusion might be reached by another route, if it could be accepted that there are human beings who both think and use language but have never practised radical interpretation. Someone who has learned only one language has arguably never indulged in radical interpretation, since the latter activity (as described by Davidson) requires that the interpreter already possess a language into which the alien sentences are translated. The capacity for radical interpretation in such a person would remain a capacity only. It is only half an answer to this to propose that normal communication between users of 'the same' natural language involves translation between idiolects; for the learning of one's first language cannot be construed as translation. To be sure, Davidson says that 'all understanding of the speech of another involves radical interpretation'.8 It follows that he holds the notion of idiolect intelligible; for he recognises that the assumption that a fellow-member of the same speech-community shares one's language requires an empirical grounding, and that must be found in facts about that individual. I shall be returning shortly to the topic of idiolects.

Even if we allowed that any thinker must at some time have practised interpretation, would that show that she must have been a member of a community? In what ways is interpretation a community activity? It requires two players; and two languages. If we stipulate that it is the interpretation of another person's speech that is in question, then of course the two players must be different people. On the other hand, without that stipulation it is not obvious that one person could not play both parts. An example might be that of a bilingual translating her own work. The fact that the one human being understands both languages does not guarantee that the translation is effortless. Such translation, however, could hardly be termed 'radical', at least not in Quine's terms ('the translation of a language of a hitherto untouched people' from which 'all help of interpreters is excluded'9). Nonetheless we should recognize that inter-

8'Radical Interpretation', at p. 125 in Inquiries into Truth and Intelpretation, op. cil. 9 Quine, W. V. 0., f'ord and Object, M.I.T. Press (1960) p. 28.


pretation requires in the first place two roles rather than two people, even if it is only when we credit the bilingual with two personalities that we can make sense of the hypothesis that both roles could be played by one person.

If interpretation is taking place, must interpreter and informant be members of a community? If we hark back to the forerunner of radical interpretation, Quine's radical translation, we are apt to assume that they are severally members of communities, but not that they are fellow-members of any one community. For the moment we may hold in suspense the assumption that there are two communities in the background, responsible for the languages, and focus on the activity of interpretation. This is usually talked of as a collaborative activity; for more than the passive observation of speech- behaviour is needed to establish experimentally the patterns of assents, dissents or neither (Quine), or the pattern of holdings-

*true (Davidson), that forms the empirical basis of interpretation. There is, however, a lack of mutuality in this supposedly 'social' activity, for it is motivated only by the interpreter's need to associate sentences held true with observable situations or with the interpreter's occurrent beliefs. There seems no reason to honour a pair related by no more than the minimal requirements for interpretation with the title 'community'.

Interpretation requires also two languages. These are usually represented as the languages of communities; but that they are communal languages is a background assumption, not an argued conclusion. Moreover it is not clear that we have a ready-made argument for the communal nature of language from the premiss (even if granted) that any language must at some time have been interpreted. For all this could yield would be further pairs of interpreters and informants. Although an actual human community could provide the personnel for such activities, they could be carried on without it; after all, the facts of human generation by pairwise relations of mothers and fathers do not make siblings of us all. Furthermore, both Quine and Davidson find ultimately that pairs of speakers of 'the same' natural languages are indulging in radical translation or interpretation. As I have noted already, this view has to find intelligible the restriction of a language to a single speaker.

Thus the first step provides no easy transition from thought to


community. At best it brings us to the second: the thesis that to have a language is to be a member of a community. Perhaps, by another path, we can show that anyone who possesses a language must also have a community.

Before proceeding we should draw one lesson from the discussion of radical interpretation. It might seem that an activity requiring a minimum cast of two fails to qualify as communal on arithmetical grounds alone. If we could find a need for a third player, or a twenty-second, perhaps it would then be communal. It is not numbers that count, however; the activities in which the numbered persons are involved, and the concepts we must invoke to describe those activities adequately, determine whether they are to be deemed a 'community'. Thus I am prepared to allow that there could be a community of two; but also, there could be activities involving a cast of thousands (e.g. treading this path) that fail to constitute them a community.

Many activities involving language are social (conversing, debating, commanding) and others are not ( writing one's diary, doing a crossword, soliloquy). Thus someone who has a language need not use it exclusively in social activities. Moreover it is conceivable that our hermit, having once learned his language, never again uses it in a social activity. Is there a sense in which having a language, as distinct from using it, requires a community? A positive answer is immediately forthcoming if the only possible languages are languages of communities. For example, if one holds that any language will contain observation sentences in the sense of Quine-

A sentence is observational insofar as its truth-value, on any occasion, would be agreed to by just about any member of the speech community witnessing the occasion.10

-then indeed it will be communal. However, Quine's approach appears to take it as an axiom that a necessary condition of objectivity in perception-reports is communal agreement. I am not prepared to accept that without argument, and shall confront it anon. An alternative reason that might be offered for accepting that there will be social elements in any language, is that the proper purpose of language is communication (or some

" Quine, W. V. O., The Roots of Reference, Open Court (1974) p. 39.


other supposedly social activity). It will be clear by now that I do not regard such claims as arguments. Language is used for many things, not all of them social. If, per contra, a proper purpose is one for which something might never actually be used-as can certainly happen in the case of artefacts-then the required conclusion does not follow.

Care over the distinction between having a language and using it is necessary because of an associated distinction, that between the community responsible for a language and the community within which it is used. (The common tendency to talk of 'the' community blurs this distinction, among others.) An example would be a bilateral international negotiation-a transient community of diplomats-in which each side spoke its native tongue. If the participants were appropriately trained, communication could be achieved and the negotiation would proceed; but the communities to which the languages were answerable would be different from the community within which the languages were used. (As Davidson observes," communication between two parties does not require identity of language. I note .too that the claim that anyone who has a language is a member of a community is not the same as the claim that any language is a community's language. In particular, a person may use a community's language but be excluded from it; or fail to understand its language but be included in it. To date we have found no reason to deem all and only the speakers of some language to be thereby the members of a genuine community, rather than a mere set.)

IV We can now refine the second step, and look for argument to either of two conclusions: that any language is a community's language (not just one individual's); or that anyone who has a language must belong to a community (whether or not her language is also the community's language). If either conclusion is true, there will be some latent contradiction in the notion of a lifelong social isolate who possesses an idiolect: a language all his own, spoken by no one else.

If social isolation is conceptually, if not psychologically,

" In 'Thought and Talk', op. cit. p. 157.


acceptable, possession of an idiolect is not as favourably placed. It is not enough to define 'idiolect' as 'the language of one person'. For a helpful discussion, the description must be filled out to give a hand-hold to arguments about the intelligibility of the notion. I propose to be generous: let us allow S's idiolect to have a syntax, to have perceptible sentence-tokens, and to include sentences that fail to express its owner's beliefs, and sentences that express falsehoods. It is thus not a 'private' language in any of the following senses: it is not restricted to reporting 'private' phenomena such as sensations; it does not have only private tokens (such as inner speech-acts); and it is not (at least not by stipulation) unlearnable by others.

My generosity is not motivated. A 'language' so defined as to express its speaker's beliefs unerringly, would be no language. Whatever seemed right would indeed be right in that case. The language could not be learned except by someone with independent access to those beliefs; and so it could not be learned. For parallel reasons, a 'language' defined as unerringly expressing truths could convey nothing to anyone; it would, for example, be useless in testimony. Thus if the idiolect is to have the autonomy required of a genuine language, neither of these approaches to definition is open to us. It might seem inconsistent to reject them while also rejecting Burge's claim that we 'think with' communal notions, as I did above. For Burge sees the only alternative to be to attribute (to Jane) notions that exactly capture her misconceptions; and this seems tantamount to attributing to her a language that exactly captures her beliefs, or alternatively one that cannot fail to express truths. (These apparent alternatives collapse into each other when what 'seems right'-is believed-'is right'-is true.) I accept that to attribute notions exactly capturing misconceptions leads to absurdity, but reject the thesis that there is no other alternative to attributing communal notions. The third possibility involves showing how an idiolect-speaker could detect error-how he could come to recognize a mistaken classification, for example. I believe that it can be shown, and I shall attempt to do so shortly.

Does possession of an idiolect, as defined, reveal its owner as a member of a community? Empirically, for human speakers, I have no doubt that the answer is 'yes'. But is this due to more

188 I-HARRY A. LEWIS than the limitation of human intelligence? Let us ask how such a language might be acquired. If S, our idiolectophone, is to be a lifelong social isolate, he cannot have learned it at his mother's knee. (But I note that someone could learn an idiolect socially. His parents might invent it, and teach it to him, without his meeting any other person who spoke it.) Thus we must assume he invented it. This he did either by replicating within himself those elements of language learning given socially to the rest of us; or by finding an alternative way in to language. It would beg the question to say that the latter is impossible; for that is just what the human race, taken collectively, achieved. We have yet to uncover the essential social element in language creation, that would show how the race could achieve what no individual, however well-endowed intellectually, could. An assumption of this treatment of idiolects has been that an idiolect will be different from any other language. Nothing in the definitions proposed required this, however, and it need not be so. Two people could share the same idiolect just as they could share the same height; except that 'share' is a dangerously ambiguous term to use there. If we allow that the notion of idiolect is intelligible, I cannot see that we can rule out the possibility of the independent invention by two people of the same language, however improbable it may be. A version of Wittgenstein's comments on his sensation- reporting language might still be thought to provide a conclusive refutation of the thesis that an idiolect, as described, is possible. In spite of my generous description, it might be held that a solitary user of the 'language' could not muster a distinction between correct and incorrect use. In the case of the impoverished 'language' of Philosophical Investigations 258, Wittgenstein had an argument to show why 'whatever is going to seem right to me is right'. So a defence ofthe idiolect should take the form of showing how its user could come to detect error. (It is not enough to claim that the language can in fact be misused; a sense must be given to discovery of the misuse.) This calls for the possibility of checking on the correctness of past usage. I am making the simplifying assumption that the usage in question is 'fact-stating discourse'. This abstraction away from the complexity of the real world is defensible ad hominem; and I know of no one who allows that a 'fact-stating' idiolect might be


possible, but that (e.g.) irony demands a communal language.'2 The fundamental idea in Wittgenstein's argument is that of

comparison: crudely stated, it is a comparison of the way it seems to S with the way it is. That statement masks a vital distinction, however. We should not confuse two quite separate claims: the one, that S has nothing with which to compare the way it seems to him; the other, that the detection of error requires access to the facts. The former claim is one that (I accept) was made by Wittgenstein of the user of the private sensation-language.'3 Some have also interpreted his discussion of rule-following as implying that any idiolect would be as deficient as the sensation-language."'4 The counter to that claim requires only the demonstration that S can check his usage against something else and come to a reasonable decision. To characterize this process as checking for errors, the acquisition of the knowledge that he was wrong, requires the further judgment that S (eventually) gets it right. Now, as far as I can see, what Wittgenstein has to say reduces to this: the only possible point of comparison available to the user of the sensation-language derives from the judgments of his community. It is a separate matter whether the community is right, or whether we have to say: 'Whatever seems right to the community is right, and there's an end on 't.' (This last is the position ascribed to Wittgenstein by Crispin Wright.'") The interpretation that finds in Wittgenstein the view that any rule-following requires the community is driven also to the conclusion that for Wittgenstein the sole possible source of objectivity lies in the community. If one succumbs to the temptation of saying, resignedly, that to avoid scepticism we must hold that what the community accepts is, by definition, true, then the conflation of the two claims is complete. I find just such a conflation not only

'2Cf. Davidson, pp. 164-5. 13Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations (translated by G. E. M. Anscombe),

Oxford: Basil Blackwell (1953) sections 258 to 323. 14For example, Peacocke, C., 'Reply [to Baker]: Rule-following: The nature of

Wittgenstein's arguments'; Wright, C., 'Rule-following, Objectivity and the Theory of Meaning'--both papers to be found in Holtzman, H. and Leich, C. M. (editors) Wittgenstein: to follow a rule, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, respectively at pp. 72-95 and pp. 99-117; and Kripke, S., Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: an elementary exposition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.

5 Wright, op. cit. p. 106.


in the cited discussions of Wittgenstein, but also in 'Thought and talk', where Davidson moves from a notion of the 'social truth' of sentences to 'the idea of an objective, public truth'.'6

So, in defence of my idiolectophone S, I need primarily to show that he can do as well as a member of a community in comparing his usage with some standard. I do not need to show that he is bound to get it right. For not every community is bound to get it right either. (This embarrassing fact is often suppressed by talking of the source of comparisons as 'the' community, presumed unique and unanimous.)

Wittgenstein himself was particularly concerned to deny that meaning could be grasped 'in a flash':

But what about this consensus-doesn't it mean that one human being by himself could not calculate? Well, one human being could at any rate not calculate just once in his life.'7

Taking our cue from this, let us compare the individual's instantaneous and unchecked judgment both with the same judgment in the context of communal agreement and with the same judgment as one of a series by that individual. For I submit that any reinforcement provided for an individual's momentary judgment by his community can be paralleled by reinforcement available from the history of his own judgments. Schematically: many minds on one occasion of judgment can be paralleled by one mind on several occasions. If 'agreement in judgment' is possible at one moment for many minds, it is also possible for one mind at many times.18 Appropriate but entirely analogous assumptions are needed in both cases. Let the judgment in question be 'This is an oak tree'. If several people assent to that sentence at the time, they must (in order to agree) refer to the

" Davidson, op. cit. pp. 165, 170. 17 Wittgenstein, L., Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (edited by G. H. von

Wright, R. Rhees and G. E. M. Anscombe, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956: II 68. (On Wittgenstein's special concern with the instant, see also Baker, G. P. and Hacker, P. M. S., Scepticism, Rules and Language, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984; and cf. Lear, J. 'The Disappearing "We"', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 58 (1984), p. 235.)

8 The same proposal is made by Simon Blackburn, 'The Individual Strikes Back', Synthese 58 (1984) pp. 281-302, at p. 294. Blackburn's paper is congenial to the position argued here; it came to my attention too late to be taken properly into account in the preparation of the present paper.


same object, and mean the same by 'oak tree'. If one person assents to it on several occasions, in order for hisjudgments to be in agreement, his reference and his language must likewise concur. The many-person case is not yet revealed as privileged. We are by now, however, alerted to the ambiguity of 'agree'. Two people may assent to the same thought, without coming to an agreement that it is true. The former is a necessary condition of the latter, but it is not sufficient. If the latter is conceived as a social act involving two people, there will be no obvious analogue for a single person. However, a step from the one to the other is the recognition of sameness of assent. And the persisting individual may follow the momentary colleague at least to this point. As this is the crucial step for comparison and so for checking, let us look closely at it.

First I must note that the term 'judgment' is misleading. The kind of agreement that (according to the 'communitarian' interpretation) underpins rule-following is agreement (or better, coincidence) in pre-linguistic responses, not in judgment proper. And that is how it should be, if the claim is that language could not have developed without coincidence of responses. Of course, a possible position would be that some social communality of pre-linguistic responses was required for any individual to have a language. But that would be an unsupported claim, and only if some content could be given to the alleged communality could it be evaluated. Once such content was given (e.g. along the lines of mutual perception of responses) I could seek to model it in the persisting individual. There is a further problem in the notion of genuinely social sharing that is supposed to take place prior to language: the mutuality or communality involved would have to be possible for creatures without language.

So the claim that needs scrutiny is this: the only intelligible kind of checking of responses is inter-personal; even given time, I cannot compare my own responses one with another. And this claim hardly needs to be refuted. To compare any two responses, the least that is needed is the awareness of the responses, the awareness of that to which they are responses, and the awareness that they are both responses to that stimulus. (This is intended to be a minimal characterization. Clearly no less will do. I do not find it plausible myself that all these


attitudes could inhabit a mind as yet incapable of language.) The responses in question being construed as behavioural, I see no difficulty in allowing the responder himself to be aware of them. He can be simultaneously aware of them, either by memory of one or both, or by their persistence (if they are traces, such as marks on the bark of a tree). Simultaneous perception of responses in two people is not obviously easier in practice, and surely not in principle. Awareness of the cause is entirely analogous. The crucial step is the next. How could an individual come to know, of his own responses to some event, that they are caused by it? As long as we recognize in the 'response' an item of observable behaviour, I cannot see that such causal knowledge is any more difficult for the individual of himself than for any person of anyone, whether himself or another. Such knowledge is no more difficult to acquire than the knowledge that contact with a particular kind of plant causes a rash.

Thus, if comparison amounted to no more than this, the idiolectophone could indulge in it. On the other hand, the account does not yet appear to give us any notion of decision-for example, of choice between two different responses to the same stimulus. The short answer to this objection is that any description adequate to allow for such choice will ascribe a language to the chooser, and so rule out the process of comparison from counting as a precondition of language. But a better reaction is to point out that even this inadequate account already undermines the claim that all objectivity requires agreement in response as a precondition. For any perception of agreement in responses requires in the perceiver a capacity to recognize the same responses again. The correctness of that recognition is required for the process to start at all, and so cannot be explained by it.

Can we help the argument to community by lifting the two artificial constraints that we have imposed, namely, that the judgment of the member of a community was to be taken at an instant, and that the relevant conception of agreement in responses was to be pre-linguistic? Let us lift them in turn and in the orderjust given. We can see that inter-personal comparison (as distinct from mere coincidence) of judgment needs time anyway. But if we hold firm to the contrast between comparison and correction, we can see that nothing can now undermine the


ability of S (our solitary) to make comparisons, once it has been granted. On the other hand, if comparison requires a fully- fledged language, we are still withholding that. Moving from consideration of comparison to that of correction, what we find is that the cost of conceding to the social being the extra reasons for preferring one response over another that become available once (e.g.) memory is allowed its due role, is the creation of new opportunities for scepticism. If the agreement in judgment has to be discovered, it can only be discovered by one who already knows what we must then allow the solitary to know as well.

If we lift the second constraint, we shall allow ourselves to ascribe a genuine language to S, and seek to find in this a covert reference to a community, to be revealed by scrutinizing the process of checking. Users of natural languages do 'correct' their own usages without social prompting or comparison in each case; we are all (in that respect) hermits for much of the time. We may detect inconsistencies in our own writings or in our remembered thoughts; we may come to see as false recorded or remembered reports of perceived objects or events. In both cases a retention of meaning through time is required: but it is as much an assumption of social as of individual comparison that such retention occurs in individuals. (How else could the radical translator or interpreter build up an account of his informant's language?) Once more we do well to keep apart the notions of comparison and of coming to know one was wrong. 'Social truth' can be seen to provide no more than a point of comparison not available to the solitary, unless it is held apriori to guarantee objective truth. I ought to note here a claim of Davidson's that would, if proven, settle the question in favour of the community: 'Someone cannot have a belief unless he understands the possibility of being mistaken, and this requires the contrast between truth and error-true belief and false belief. But this contrast, I have argued, can emerge only in the context of interpretation which alone forces on us the idea of an objective, public truth."' I do not pretend to understand completely how this very compressed argument works. But for present purposes the crucial sentence is the last, with its claim that the sole

9 Davidson, 'Thought and Talk', op. cit. p. 170.


possible source of a notion of incorrectness is 'the context of interpretation'. We may accept that the individual who compares and modifies his responses has the concept of incorrectness (even if his decisions are sometimes wrong). We may further accept that someone who indulges in radical interpretation needs that concept. However I cannot see that any argument is offered by Davidson to show that the concept could arise in an individual in no other way. Indeed, it would seem to be an intellectual rather than an apriori difficulty: could not a very clever and inventive isolate come up with the concept?

V

The role of 'community' in the arguments considered gives little support to the conclusion that the oft-repeated claim, 'language is a social art', is anything more than a general empirical truth. The most that the arguments establish is a series of contrasts: in Burge's case, a contrast between the possessor of an attitude with her language and the language in which an attribution of that attitude is made; in the discussion of radical interpretation, a contrast of two roles, interpreter and informant, and two languages; in Wittgenstein's discussion of rules, a contrast between individual and communal judgement. As we have seen, analogies exist between the relation of individual to community and the relation of one community to a larger of which it is part; and between the relation of two non-intersecting communities and the relation of two individuals. At the limits, we can place the hypotheses of the isolated user of an idiolect; and of an error by all mankind. It needs no new argument to defend the intelligibility of the latter. The former seems to me equally to survive renewed attacks. In both cases, it is possible to understand why we cannot produce examples. No one can produce an example of a current belief of his own that is false. Likewise I cannot, unfortunately, introduce you to a lifelong social isolate, or invite you to interview an idiolectophone.

In between these extremes we should recognize, not a sharp division between individual and community, but roles and relationships, vertical and horizontal, that may hold now between individuals, now between groups, now even within a single person. Wittgenstein, when he was, according to some, in


the midst of arguing that any rule-use required a community, remarked:

A human being can encourage himself, give himself orders, obey, blame and punish himself; he can ask himself a question and answer it. We could even imagine human beings who spoke only in monologue; who accompanied their activities by talking to themselves.-An explorer who watched them and listened to their talk might succeed in translating their language into ours.20

The multiple possibilities of language creation and language- use argue the need for care over terminology. A good example is the use of the word 'public', as in 'public language'. Does this mean, 'language with perceptible sentence-tokens', 'language learnable by third parties', or 'communal language'? Part of my own position is that a language with perceptible (and enduring) sentence tokens need not be communal; careless talk of 'publicity' could render this view unintelligible. (Perceptible 'clothing' of thoughts is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for community of language.) A related ambiguity in the expression 'grasping the meaning' has been remarked upon by Gilbert.2'

Our critical discussion suggests an opposite conclusion to that being argued for by the supporters of community; far from its being a prerequisite of language, language is a prerequisite of community, and no mass conspiracy to set it up, no wordless social contract, needs to be postulated.

A key notion to emerge is that of the reliability of the individual language-user even when a member of a community. It is clear that agreement alone could not guarantee objectivity; at best, it could be only one among many factors. If the idea of the individual as an autonomous 'responder' or 'measuring- instrument', in Mark Wilson's phrase,22 is introduced, a complementary view to the one attributed to Wittgenstein becomes attractive. Agreement in judgment shows us the truth because only the assumption that the world is as it is thus represented can explain the fact that we react in a similar way. There are three contributors to this process: a world, open to

20 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit. section 243. 21 Gilbert, M., 'Has Language a Social Nature?', Synthese 56 (1983) pp. 301-18. 22 Wilson, M., 'Predicate Meets Property', Philosophical Review 91 (1982) p. 255.


perception; a reliable human perceiver; and a language. In my view the role of the community is secondary. It can, but need not, provide a language. It does provide alternative human perceivers, so that what we collectively agree on, the inter- section of our several belief-sets, is likelier to represent the world than any one individual's total belief-set. It is because people are likelier to be reliable about what they perceive than about what they merely imagine that inter-personal agreement is a test of objectivity. We consign that about which we disagree to the zone of the 'subjective' not primarily because it is uncomfortable, but because disagreement is evidence that it is not 'out there' at all. There is an analogy here between two quite different areas of divergence of belief: morals, and advanced science. For what is least disputedly 'objective' is that which all of us can agree about with minimum training. Such agreement, however, is the evidence, not the essence.23

2" In preparing this paper I have benefited from discussions with Mark Johnston, Philip Pettit, Pamela Tate and Roger White.

CONTENT AND COMMUNITY

Harry A. Lewis and Andrew Woodfield

II-Andrew Woodfield I

Two Kinds of Meaning I agree with the individualist thrust of Harry Lewis's paper as far as thoughts and concepts are concerned. The conclusion of my paper will echo Lewis's view, but I hope to display the issues from a slightly different angle. Before discussing thought, the argument will touch on the notion of linguistic meaning. Here I think I do disagree with some of the things that Lewis says. When he talks about content in connection with linguistic items, I find that he is too individualist. With any luck, there will be enough disagreement over this to provoke a pleasant debate.

In section II, I maintain, despite my individualism, that there are also such things as communal thoughts, which are emergent from, or supervenient upon, community activities. I make use of Grice's distinction between sentence or word meaning and speaker's meaning.' Words and sentences possess standard meanings which remain invariant over the many uses to which particular utterances may be put,2 whereas what a speaker means on a particular occasion is up to the speaker.

I rely upon this intuitive contrast, because I want to hold up standard linguistic meanings as my models when I introduce the notions of communal thought and communal concept. The senses in which a thought or a concept might be said to be essentially communal become clearer if we consider the matter in the light of this contrast.

In fact, it is possible to construct several different notions of communal thought. There is nothing ontologically wrong with thoughts that are communal. Controversy comes in over the questions whether they are the only kind of thoughts, and whether they are more basic than individualist thoughts. I do

'Grice, H. P. (1968) 'Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning and Word Meaning', Foundations of Language 4, 1-18.

2 Davidson, D. (1975) 'Thought and Talk', p. 164, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Clarendon, Oxford 1984.

198 II-ANDREW WOODFIELD

not think they are the only kind, nor do I think they are basic, as section III will reveal.

Let us start by considering actual human languages, such as Arabic, English, Mandarin or any of the several thousand or so others that are in daily use. Some, like Cornish, are dying out. It is said that only two persons are left who can speak fluent Cornish. I find it helpful to say that the basic purpose of a language is to facilitate communication. The truth of this functional claim depends, I think, upon facts about how the language originated. A genuine language has to have evolved because it has successfully mediated communication in the past, or if it is an artificial language, it has to have been designed for that purpose. The concept of a natural language is partly explicated by the platitude that natural languages have evolved for sending messages. The various components of a language are there for the same purpose, but derivatively, as the organs of a body are there to keep the whole animal alive, or as the parts of a machine are tailored to its overall purpose. The thesis holds, as Aristotle says, 'generally and for the most part'. It is not falsified by putative counter-examples of the 'Robinson Crusoe' kind in which a language is not used for communication. All sorts of exceptional situations are imaginable. Platitudes about functions can admit of exceptions and yet reveal essential truths.

Lewis is right that individuals who talk to one another do not ipso facto bind themselves into a community. It happens that people who converse a lot tend to live close together, conse- quently they tend to enter into social relations and adopt shared norms. Using the same tool is not sharing a norm.3

Yet, if one considers any living natural language, with all its richness and tradition, one knows that there must have been a

3A related point is made by Bach and Harnish, when they note that successful communication in L requires what they call the 'Linguistic Presumption': 'The mutual belief in the linguistic community C that

(i) the members of C share L, and (ii) that whenever any member S utters any e (expression) in L to any other member

H, H can identify what S is saying, given that H knows the meaning(s) of e in L and is aware of the appropriate background information' (Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish (1979) Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, p. 7. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Without such a presumption, neither S nor H would be entitled to assume that e means to the other what it means to himself. So the mutual belief is something else that is shared by people who converse in L. But of course this is not sufficient to forge a social community.

199 CONTENT AND COMMUNITY

society that sustained its development. I am inclined to think that a word's having a meaning in L is an emergent property, not completely analysable in terms of what the totality of speakers of L have meant when they have used the word.

So instead of trying to define 'social community', let us look at how it could possibly have come about that words and sentences have standard meanings.

Suppose that word W has a meaning M in L now. Its meaning is what it is now because the activities of many people in the past established it as such, and also because W is (or would be) used with that meaning by a sufElciency of the present population. It is not a coincidence that the present users accord it the same meaning as the earlier people. The current lot do this because they know that M is the established meaning. Generally, they speak in accordance with a rule to the effect: 'Respect previously established meanings; don't be a Humpty-Dumpty'. They do this because it facilitates the efElcient exchanging of messages.

Roughly, then, W has a standard meaning M in L because, and in so far as, people treat it as having that meaning. This statement seems circular, like saying that a coin is a 1 coin because, and in so far as, it is treated by people as a 1 coin. In both cases, the short statement tries to sum up a long story. The story is not viciously circular, it describes a historical process that contains cyclical subprocesses. It is a kind of historical explanation rather than a meaning-analysis. Similarly, to explain why a certain type of coin is worth one pound Sterling is not to ofTer a semantic analysis of 'This coin is worth one pound Sterling'. The concept of the pound Sterling belongs to a higher level of discourse and is linked in with other concepts to do with finance and economics. The concepts exercised in the background story do not belong to this finished surface scheme.

There are several hallmarks which serve to fix the notion of standard meaning more clearly. I shall mention three. First, the meaning that a given word has in L is a matter that transcends what any individual may say or believe, and the answer to it is usually objectively decidable, once the word has entered the lexicon. A newcomer to the language has to discover the answer by empirical inquiry. Even a native-speaker can be wrong about the meaning of a word in L. It is even possible to imagine circumstances in which a majority of the speakers of L have


mistaken beliefs about the meaning of W. But this would be an unusual situation. Generally, if most people think that W means M, this is a good sign that it does; there is a continuous gentle pressure maintaining things thus. When a new word ('wally', 'frisbee', 'software') is coined, it does not have a standard meaning; the process of standardisation goes hand in hand with the assimilation of the word into the lexicon. One person can be responsible for starting this process, but the word has to catch on among a significant subset of the population before it can be said to be a part of the language. The initiator is not in control of the word once it has entered the public domain. Its eventual standard meaning could be different from the meaning that the inventor originally assigned.

The second hallmark is stability. Once W has acquired a meaning, it will keep it, no matter how often or how rarely the word is uttered, and regardless of the purposes for which it is uttered (cf. Davidson's 'autonomy of meaning', op. cit. note 2). Once in the communal pool, a meaning stays there indefinitely, and the fact will be registered by all competent dictionaries. Some words lose currency and are perceived as obsolete. But they can sometimes be revived. Given the current craze for old- fashioned cuisine, rare words like 'posset' and 'medlar' could become popular again. They continue to bear the original meanings that they had in Shakespeare's day.

Certain words ('nice' is an example) have an old meaning which is hardly known, plus a new meaning. Such words are ambiguous. Both meanings are standard, in my sense of the term, even if one is better known the other.4

I do not say it is impossible for a word to change its standard meaning(s), or to lose all meaning. Clearly, keeping a meaning depends in some loose way upon a continuity of practice among temporally spread-out L-speakers. But it is difficult to define a precise requirement. If a word were forgotten by everybody throughout the twentieth century, then remembered in the twenty-first, it could be said, at the later time, that the word meant so-and-so during the previous century but no one living then was aware of the fact. Languages, like libraries and other

4 Dictionaries sometimes list a 'standard' (i.e. a dominant, received) meaning plus a 'non-standard' (subsidiary, slang, regional) meaning. On my use of the term, both dictionary meanings would be standard, that is, communal and stable.


repositories of traditions, grow bigger all the time, or get wiped out, but they rarely shrink. In George Orwell's 1984, 'Newspeak' is deliberately impoverished English; but the case is fictional.

The third characteristic is the presence of social procedures for determining correct meanings. One would expect to find such procedures wherever a community prizes its native language and is concerned that it should function well. Occasionally, an official body is set up, like the Royal Commission on Abortion, to adjudicate the meanings of legally important key terms ('foetus', 'viable', 'alive'). When the problematic term is technical or scientific, or is a natural kind term,5 scientific experts will be accorded a big say. If the word is not technical, savants like etymologists, dialect-specialists, and philosophers are asked for their views. Eventually the public 'decides' by adopting a certain meaning as standard. It is hard for an authority to compel the public to use a word in a certain way. The Acad6mie Frangaise failed in its efforts to ban 'le weekend' and 'le parking' from French.

In cases of urgency which attract official attention, one can imagine that a single individual might have the power to legislate a meaning. But this could occur only if the person were acting in an official capacity, on behalf of the whole community. If a nonentity tried to issue an edict, it would carry no weight.

No doubt there are other criteria of standardisation. We shall let these three suffice for our purposes.

Lewis spoke of idiolects. By 'S's idiolect', I mean the version of a natural language which is spoken by S. One is free to christen the version by its own name, as if it were a different language altogether. For instance, it might be said that Ronald Reagan speaks Reaganish. But this is clearly not a private language (not for nothing is Reagan known among his staff as 'The Great Communicator'), and there could be other people who spoke in exactly the same idiosyncratic way as Reagan. Reaganish would then be their dialect, which would not stop it being Reagan's idiolect. Although it is nominally essential that S speaks his own idiolect, it is never an essential property of S's idiolect that it be an idiolect. The words in it will have standard meanings; S had to learn it, he can have false beliefs about

5Putnam, H. (1975) speaks of a 'division of linguistic labour' in 'The Meaning of "Meaning" ', Philosophical Papers, vol. II: Mind, Language and Reality, C.U.P., Cambridge.


meanings in it, and he is not responsible for those meanings.6 We now turn quickly to speaker's meaning. I do not wish to

examine Grice's notion in depth.' I simply wish to bring out the fact that the notion is individualistic.

S ironically says 'You cooked a fine stew', meaning that the person he is addressing cooked an unpleasant hotpot. The fact that S meant this is independent of whether anyone understood him; it is also indifferent to whether S is a member of a community; also the sentence he uttered does not mean what he meant. What S meant depends solely on S's state of mind at the time. S, who believes there is someone within earshot, intends to make that person go through an inference about S's reason for speaking. The hoped-for inference is to include a number of 'mutual contextual beliefs'. Ironical remarks demand more decoding than straightforward sincere utterances do. John Searle' has applied the same idea to explain how people understand metaphors. The interpreter has to see that the words uttered are not to be taken literally, but can be used as clues for puzzling out the speaker's meaning. The same idea works for many other figures of speech, such as hyperbole, euphemism, and malapropism.

While the example well illustrates the contrast between two levels of meaning, it is noteworthy that the hearer has to know the sentence-meaning first in order to retrieve the speaker's meaning. Indeed, in sophisticated speech-acts, S can be counted on to exploit H's previous knowledge of L.

It might be urged, therefore, that the example is no good for proving that speaker's meaning is the more basic kind, and also that it casts doubt on the basis that speaker's meaning is purely individualistic. The scenario presupposes that there are sentence- meanings available, which, so I have argued, are communal.

Well, I am not in fact arguing that speaker's meaning is basic. But even so, the objection fails to establish the contrary thesis, on two counts. The notion of speaker's meaning, pure and simple, does not entail prior knowledge of any language. Some of Grice's (1957) examples are of 'primitive' utterances lacking

SThis point is made by Michael Dummett in 'The Social Character of Meaning' (1974) p. 425, in Truth and Other Enigmas, Duckworth, London 1978.

7 See Bach and Harnish (op. cit.) pp. 149-154 for some criticisms of it. 8 Searle, J. R. (1979) 'Metaphor', in A. Ortony (ed) Metaphor and Thought, C.U.P.,

Cambridge.


prior linguistic significance.' Secondly, even in real life where S and H share an environment, a language and a community, these contextual facts are not truth-conditions of 'S meant that someone had cooked an unpleasant hotpot'. What is necessary is that S should suppose that these conditions obtain.

It is clear that we are dealing with a duality of kinds of meaning, not just a distinction between types and tokens. S can on one occasion utter a token of sentence-type z and mean that P, then on another occasion S can utter a second token of sentence z and mean that not-P. But the two sentence-tokens have the same standard meaning on both occasions. They inherit it from the sentence-type of which they are tokens. This reveals an important link between the two contrasts. The fundamental possessors of standard meanings are types (words or sentences). With speaker's meaning the polarity is reversed; particular utterances are their vehicles. To determine which message an utterance carries you must look to the psychological circumstances of production. And this is precisely the reason why the notion is individualist.

II Some Non-Individualist Conceptions of Thoughts and Concepts Taking the concept of standard sentence meaning as our model, we may now introduce the concept of a standard thought in community C. We shall henceforth speak, for example, of 'the standard thought that P', and also of 'the standard K concept'. For brevity's sake we may omit the reference to community C.

These notions are hardly new. The standard thought that P is just what many philosophers have always meant by 'the proposition that P'. The link with standard meaning brings this out very clearly, since many writers define a proposition as something expressed by a declarative sentence (in virtue of its standard meaning).

Questions need to be raised about the ontological status of standard thoughts. Are they creations arising out of communal activity? Are they supervenient upon social activities and relations? If the former, are they artefacts, or are they natural products? If the latter, are they epiphenomena or are they causally efficacious?

'Grice, H. P. (1957) 'Meaning', Philosophical Review 66, 377-88.


Not all philosophers who espouse standard thoughts have tied them closely to sentences. Frege, despite saying 'thoughts are senses of sentences',' weakens the connection by allowing thoughts that are never expressed. I have been unable to discover whether Frege ever said that thoughts can be independent of language altogether. He does state, however, that a thought exists prior to anyone's grasping it."

Frege's precursor Bolzano, whom a German commentator recently described as a 'logical Plato','2 held similar views. He wrote, '. . . by proposition in itself I mean any assertion that something is or is not the case, regardless whether or not some- body has put it into words, and regardless even whether or not it has been thought.''" He also affirms that 'There is indeed no doubt that thinkability is a property of any proposition, but it is also obvious that it does not form part of the concept of a proposition'."4

Again, the connection with language is not completely severed by this formulation, since a proposition might exist only in so far as it could be put into words. Moreover, Bolzano is not committed to propositions as Platonic entities, for he says 'One must not ascribe being, existence or reality to propositions in themselves'.' The Fregean tradition flourishes today. Popper advocates the objectivity of 'World 3', whose denizens are autonomous of any mind.'" Christopher Peacocke consciously adopts Fregean terminology in his recent book.'7

Frege's logicist motivation is well-known. Both he and Bolzano deplored the post-Kantian tendency to 'psychologise' logic, which in their view propagated doubts about its objective validity. If thoughts can be shown to be objective, then presumably logical relations between them can also be objective.

0oFrege, G. (1918 originally) 'Thoughts', p. 4, in Logical Investigations, (ed) P. T. Geach, Blackwell, Oxford 1977.

" Frege (op. cit.), p. 18 footnote: 'A person sees a thing, has an idea, grasps or thinks a thought. When he grasps of thinks a thought he does not create it but only comes to stand in a relation to what already existed-a different relation from seeing a thing or having an idea.'

"2 See the editor's introduction (p. xxix) to Bernard Bolzano (originally 1837) Theory of Science, edited and translated by Rolf George, Blackwell, Oxford 1972.

'"Bolzano, (op. cit.) pp. 20-1. '4ibid. p. 26. '5ibid. p. 21. 16 Popper, K. (1972) Objective Knowledge, esp. chapters 3 & 4. Clarendon, Oxford. 17 Peacocke, C. (1983) Sense and Content Clarendon, Oxford (see esp. p. 106).


Still, it is tempting to wonder if Platonism is really necessary, if one's main concern is to ensure the shareability of thoughts. All one really needs (so it might be urged) is the distinction between thought-particulars and thought-universals. The latter are by their very nature shareable, that is, possessable by many subjects. The same goes for ideas, pains, indeed any mental entity for which the particular/universal distinction makes sense.

But Frege did not say this, because he would not have been satisfied that it ensured the supra-psychological status of logic. The Aristotelian conception of a 'thought-kind' entails (a) that a kind exists only if at least one particular of that kind exists, and (b) that relations obtain only among the kinds that exist. This limits the scope of logic to the domain of what has actually been thought.

It is very important for Frege, then, that the thought-type comes first. This guarantees the anti-individualism and the anti- psychologism. But there is no need for him to view thoughts as if they were Platonic Forms, disjoined altogether from human activities. For there remains the other possible position, that thoughts are cultural products, emergent out of the intellectual and linguistic life of human collectives.

At this point we need to say more about what a constitutively communal thought might be. It seems to me that there are several ways to go here, and it is up to each theorist to construct the concept he wishes to use. But certain general specifications can be laid down. On any view, a standard thought is going to be something like a cognitive tradition or institution. We already employ such notions as, for example, 'the Spanish concept of masculine pride', 'the British notion of fair-play', etc. However, we do not wish to limit ourselves to ideas that are cherished by the culture in which they arise. We want to include concepts that have never yet been explicitly recognised or formulated, but which are in some sense available in the cultural repertoire. Every participant in the culture, including infants who are born into it, has all the standard concepts of C available, waiting to be grasped. This legacy is to be counted among the advantages of civilised living in C.

The model of standard meaning serves us well, since we already know what it means to say that a possible sentence of L, never yet uttered, already has a meaning in L. This is because


sentences are composed of words which already have meanings; a similar compositionality carries over to the domain of thoughts and concepts.

Standard thoughts are composed of standard concepts, then, but it is left as an open possibility that some standard concepts in C are not easily expressible in L. There may be room for such things as implicit standard concepts, which explain features of the life that is led in C, styles, forms of pictorial representation, and so on. One can imagine that the Spanish language might never have possessed the word 'machismo', but that Spanish life might still have included the same range of characteristic male responses to certain life-situations. There could be a point in saying that Spanish life contained dramatic representations of male pride which were not explicitly recognised as such. There is no doubt that literary critics, historians of ideas, anthro- pologists, and sociologists do find it useful to operate with such theoretical notions, which are analogous to notions used in individual psychology. Indeed a persuasive case could be made that the English-speaking world implicitly possessed the concept of machismo, even before the time, not long ago, when it borrowed the word from Spanish.

Do standard thoughts lodge in the group mind? There is no harm in using the metaphor, but no need to commit oneself to any group mind. The notion of standard thoughts can be explicated reasonably well without it, on analogy with the concept of standard meaning.18 Analogues of the three marks of standardness are easily discernible. The fact that stable cognitive traditions exist is empirically verifiable. If it were not so, there would be no such disciplines as sociology or history of ideas. Also the participants in C can be collectively responsible for determining the identity of a standard concept or thought. Questions like the following can be raised: which thought does sentence z express? Which standard thought was speaker S expressing? There will be cases where what has to be decided is the rightness or wrongness of certain ascriptions. It will be an unfailing characteristic of such cases that the individual thinker is not authoritative about the content of the thought he was entertaining. Other people, interlocutors or outsiders, can

8 Cf. M. Dummett, (op. cit.) pp. 427-8, where he speaks of 'knowledge possessed by the community as a whole'.


correct S about its identity. Tyler Burge, in his ingenious anti- individualist argument, sets up clearly-defined situations in which precisely this kind of phenomenon occurs. The Cartesian intimacy between subject and thought-content gets sundered when the thought is communalised. S can aim at a certain thought and miss it, yet be under the impression he has hit it. Thus we find Burge saying that his argument gets under way 'in any case where it is intuitively possible to attribute a mental state or event whose content involves a notion that the subject incompletely understands."'9 Burge treats standard concepts as symbolic instruments for people to 'think with'. Operating with thoughts is seen as a cognitive skill, at which some people are more adept than others. Burge sees the community as 'defining' the notion of sofa; my third criterion is clearly applicable to his conception of a notion.

I have said there are many alternative methods of constructing conceptions of communal thought. To see some of these, it is helpful to focus on the different ways one might try to explicate the 'grasping' relation. I shall sketch just four possible methods, two of which seem reasonably plausible.

(1) The 'Dasein' Model. For a (suitably receptive) S to think a standard thought it is sufficient for S to be appropriately ensconced in the relevant cultural environment. Nothing hinges on S's inner condition. Two individuals could be internally identical, one of whom thinks that P, the other does not, solely because the former stands in the external relation, the latter does not. This Hegelian or Heideggerian position entails the wholesale rejection of the Cartesian concept of mind. The model not only conflates 'having a thought' with 'having a thought available', it is also wholly at odds with what is known about the dependence of cognition upon brain processes.

(2) The 'Internalised Token' Model. S thinks standard thought T iff there is a token of T, (call it t), inside S, and S stands in the 'thinks*' relation to t.20 The crucial feature of this model is that the inner token t is itself a standardised entity. The

9 Burge T. (1979) 'Individualism and the Mental' p. 79, Midwest Studies in Philosophy vol. IV (eds) P. A. French, T. E Uehling and H. K. Wettstein, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

" For more on 'thinks*' see Hartry Field (1978) 'Mental Representation', Erkenntnis 13, 9-61.


token is not identical with the neural state, if any, which 'realizes' it. Token-thoughts are like pound-notes; they supervene on the physical stuff, but their identity-conditions distinguish them from anything physical. Each token is of a certain type essentially; the type, in its turn, is essentially standard; so the token is too.

The thought-token is analogous to a speech-act token in this respect. S says 'Je demande que la porte soit fermne', thereby performing the act of asking in French that the door be shut. What S does is constitutively social under that description. The sounds produced would not warrant that description unless the French language existed, which in turn allows one to infer, given that French is a natural language, that French society sustained its evolution.

Many writers espouse this position, including Hegel, Marx, L. S. Vygotsky,"2 JulianJaynes.22 Many in this camp like to say that the individual thinker 'internalises' or 'appropriates' the cultural objects. When individuals make contact with a standard thought, they create a copy of it inside their heads, rather as a magnetic tape records a message. A great deal of social and tech- nological stage-setting is required before this can happen.

(3) The 'Cultural Osmosis' Model. When S thinks a standard thought, S enters into a complex relation with something public, but S can do this only by satisfying a number of internal and external conditions. They would probably include at least the following: S's brain is currently in a certain type of physical state; S has gone through certain kinds of appropriate training (has learned a language, learned the norms of a group, acquired certain skills); S is in social contact with others and counts as a member of a community. Also certain linguistic and social rules must be in force in C; standard thoughts supervene on the shared practices. To gain the right kind of access to them, S must be brought into the group and must agree with others in judgments and behaviour. S must be disposed to react in certain ways spontaneously, without reflecting. This position is inspired by Wittgenstein.

Certainly, where hybrid psychological states are concerned, 21Vygotsky, L. S. (1962) Thought and Language MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 22Jaynes, J. (1976) The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,

Boston, Houghton Mifflin.


contextual conditions, as well as purely psychological conditions, affect the truth of ascriptions. But the osmotic model takes externalism further than the mere recognition of hybrids; it denies the validity of the inner/outer distinction which is employed by those who talk of 'purely psychological states'. Individual minds themselves supervene on group life, rather as pieces of metal are brought to life by being used as money.

(4) The 'Measuring Stick' Model. This view, which I hold, says that when S grasps a standard thought, S has an individual thought which is complete in itself and has its own content. The individual thought stands in a certain relation to the standard thought. It has a similar role in S to the role that the standard thought has in the system of standard thoughts. Other people, in ascribing thoughts to S, identify S's individual thought by specifying the standard thought which most closely resembles S's individual thought, availing themselves of the imperfect resources of their own language. The background to this view is a theory of content-ascriptions which I have outlined elsewhere.23 It is an individualist view, yet it does not deny that standard thoughts exist. It treats them on a par with standard meanings. Nor does it deny that individuals can enter into cognitive contact with them. But the contact is indirect, being mediated by individual thoughts. It is possible for S to be aware that he or she is thinking the content ofa standard thought that P. This would be the case if S thought that P, and knew that this content was specifiable through the sentence 'P'. In other words, S has an individual thought plus a background of semantic knowledge. I shall say more in defence of the fourth model in the next section.

III Individualist Thoughts Are More Basic Are there such things as irreducibly individualist thoughts, in addition to standard thoughts? In this final section I defend an affirmative answer.

No sane believer in standard thoughts will wish to deny outright that people perform individual acts of thinking. But he may well try to offer a reductive analysis, saying that an individual thought is nothing but a person entering into a

23Woodfield, A. (1982a) 'On Specifying the Contents of Thoughts' in Thought and Object (ed) A. Woodfield, Clarendon, Oxford.


relation with a standard thought. He then uses one of the models just sketched of the nature of this relation. I call this position 'reductive', but it goes in the opposite direction from a microreduction. It analyses the mental partly in terms of the sociological.

At first sight, the position seems paradoxical. To claim that individual acts of thinking are always acts of grasping communal contents undermines the initial contrast, which my exposition relied on, between speaker's meaning and standard meaning. For speaker's meaning is a matter of speaker's thoughts and intentions. The proposal is, in effect, to relocate speaker's meaning on the communal side of the divide.

The claim must be that individualist thoughts (and speaker's meanings) are social in a different and possibly deeper sense than that which was invoked when the original contrast was drawn. The deeper sense of 'social' must turn on a theoretical account of what it is for a person or a sentence to mean, with the theory showing that all meaning involves something social in the background. And it might be argued that the 'paradox' is more apparent than real. It seems like a paradox only because of my mode of exposition of the contrast.

Nevertheless, even if speaker's meaning did ultimately involve a social relation, I should still maintain that there are thoughts and (non-semantic) intentions which are irreducibly individualist. Ultimately the case for individualism does not rest essentially on the theory of meaning, but upon positive independent considerations, some of which I shall shortly provide.

To be individualist, a thought has to meet the following conditions. These are obverses of the conditions for communality, not only because they say opposite things, but also because they apply to particulars first, kinds second. Clearly, individualist thought-particulars, if they exist, are not going to be ontologically derived from Platonic thought-types. Indi- vidualist thought-kinds are Aristotelian: they exist through having members.

First, each individualist thought depends upon the cognitive activity ofjust one person, and belongs to that person. But two or more people can have individualist thoughts that are similar. These may be grouped together, and it may be natural for a


third-person to characterise the various thoughts using the same 'that'-clause each time.

Second, the subject of an individualist thought is responsible for keeping it alive or letting it disappear. With long-lasting thought-contents, such as the contents of (core) memories and (core) beliefs, S keeps them in existence by storing them and not forgetting them. S's stock of retained thoughts is a distinctive possession; the more thoughts there are in stock, the less chance there is of another person having an exactly similar set.

Third, the subject is the ultimate authority concerning questions about the identity of his or her own individualist thoughts (though S's verbal expressions of those thoughts may be liable to linguistic correction).

There can be no doubt that we do operate with such a notion. That we have it is proved by the fact that readers of Harry Lewis's paper, and of this paper, will find our individualist locutions perfectly natural. They will tend to agree with Lewis when he says that it is perverse to claim that people severally 'think with' the jointly-owned notion of sofa, for 'Jane would be held to "think with" a notion of sofas that excluded armchairs, in her very judgment that an armchair was a sofa' (Lewis, p. 180). In the earlier paper of mine to which Lewis refers,24 I described the typical 'correction-reaction' of a man who discovers he has been under a standing misapprehension as to the meaning of a certain word. He realizes he may have some beliefs that were picked up through reading or hearing a sentence containing that word. His interpretation of those sentences was faulty at the time. In the interests of truth and consistency, his beliefs must be reviewed, and some beliefs may have to be modified or jettisoned. The most natural way to describe this checking-routine, which is familiar to everybody, is to make full use of the individualist notion of belief. One can then convey the needed contrast between the standard belief, expressed by the sentence that S misunderstood, and the belief which S acquired upon being stimulated by that sentence (though the latter belief may be difficult or impossible to capture in a sentence of L).

The individualistic, 'Cartesian' conception of thought that

24Woodfield, A. (1982b) 'Thought and the Social Community', Inquiry 25, 435-50.


we use so readily does not countenance thought-contents which their subjects 'misunderstand', or 'incompletely grasp'. No wedge can be driven between subjects and their respective thoughts. Thinking is an act whose content is created by the subject; contents are not at arm's length, nor are they objects for S. S neither grasps nor fails to grasp them, nor stands in any 'cognitive relation' whatever to them. To say that S 'thinks with' concepts can be misleading, unless you constantly bear in mind that concepts are not objects for S.

Not only do we use these notions, we need to use them. Individualism is deeply embedded in the common-sense view of what a mind is. When we try to explain what is going on in language-learning, and in cases of conceptual innovation, there really is no alternative to the individualistic account.

Consider the case of a little girl learning to speak. Her stumbling speech-acts are intelligently controlled, despite her frequent mistakes. Her parents can usually guess what she means (speaker's meaning), and they can often furnish intentional explanations of why she made the mistakes that she made. They see that her responses were rational in the light of the limited verbal data to which she had been exposed. Such explanations attribute thoughts, beliefs and intentions to the child. In the attributions, English words will be used in their standard senses, but it will not be assumed that the girl has mastered those senses. On the contrary, the parents will explicitly say things like 'Susie believes that "cat" means any small black animal with a tail'.

Now the point I wish to make is simple. The parents are using a type of explanation which presupposes that Susie thinks intelligently when she speaks, but she 'thinks with' notions that are not the standard notions. She 'uses' her own primitive prototype notions of other things (like black, animal, tail) in the course of 'building' a concept resembling the standard cat concept. Her success will depend largely upon her learning the standard meaning of 'cat'. But the parents need to ascribe thoughts to her in order to explain how she learns this. So she must have her own individual thoughts prior to the time when she can avail herself of the standard thoughts.

What would Burge say about language-learning? Well, he warns against a typical 'philosopher's response' to his thought


experiments, that of reinterpreting the subject's false belief about the world, such as Jane's belief that an armchair is a sofa, as a false belief about the meaning of the word 'sofa'.25 It is wrong, he says, to equate having the concept of sofa with knowing the meaning of the word 'sofa'. A person could have one without the other. A foreigner might have the concept without knowing the English word. I agree entirely with this point, of course. And I wish to emphasise that standard meanings are not the same as standard concepts. Some standard concepts may be tacit in C; So people could, in principle, possess the sofa notion in the absence of any synonym in their language for 'sofa'. But I think a major motivation for separating 'having a concept' from 'u

LEWIS, Harry WOODFIELD, Andrew. (1985) 'Content and Community'

Documents

Transcript of LEWIS, Harry WOODFIELD, Andrew. (1985) 'Content and Community'