Combining Philosophers

Ideas for John Austin, Edouard Machery and Richard Cartwright

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8 ideas

19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 1. Meaning

13950	People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter [Cartwright,R]
	Full Idea: No one ever asserts the meaning of the words he utters.
	From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 12)
	A reaction: Cartwright is using this point to drive a wedge between sentence meaning and the assertion made by the utterance. Hence he defends propositions. Presumably people utilise word-meanings, rather than asserting them. Meanings (not words) are tools.

13948	For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have [Cartwright,R]
	Full Idea: It does have to be acknowledged, I think, that every statement whatever is such that there is no one meaning which any sentence used to assert it must have.
	From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 11)
	A reaction: This feels to me like a Gricean move - that what we are really interested in is communicating one mental state to another mental state, and there are all sorts of tools that can do that one job.

19. Language / B. Reference / 3. Direct Reference / b. Causal reference

18612	Americans are more inclined to refer causally than the Chinese are [Machery]
	Full Idea: Tests suggest that American subjects were significantly more likely than Chinese subjects to have intuitions in line with causal-historical theories of reference.
	From: Edouard Machery (Doing Without Concepts [2009], 8.1.3)
	A reaction: This is an example of 'experimental philosophy' in action (of which Machery is a champion). The underlying idea is that Americans are generally more disposed to think causally than the Chinese are. So more scientific? What do the Hopi do?

19. Language / D. Propositions / 1. Propositions

13944	We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each [Cartwright,R]
	Full Idea: We need to distinguish 1) what is asserted, 2) that assertion, 3) asserting something, 4) what is predicated, 5) what is uttered, 6) that utterance, 7) uttering something, 8) the utterance token, and 9) the meaning.
	From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 05-06)
	A reaction: [summary of his overall analysis in the paper] It is amazingly hard to offer a critical assessment of this sort of analysis, but it gives you a foot in the door for thinking about the issues with increasing clarity.

13947	'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same [Cartwright,R]
	Full Idea: A person who utters 'It's raining' one day does not normally make the same statement as one who utters it the next. But these variations are not accompanied by corresponding changes of meaning. The words 'It's raining' retain the same meaning throughout.
	From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 10)
	A reaction: This is important, because it shows that a proposition is not just the mental shadow behind a sentence, or a mental shadow awaiting a sentence. Unlike a sentence, a proposition can (and possibly must) include its own context. Very interesting!

19. Language / D. Propositions / 4. Mental Propositions

13943	We can attribute 'true' and 'false' to whatever it was that was said [Cartwright,R]
	Full Idea: We do sometimes say of something to which we have referred that it is true (or false). Are we not ordinarily doing just this when we utter such sentences as 'That's true' and 'What he said was false'?
	From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 03)
	A reaction: This supports propositions, but doesn't clinch the matter. One could interpret this phenomenon as always being (implicitly) the reference of one sentence to another. However, I remember what he said, but I can't remember how he said it.

13946	To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words [Cartwright,R]
	Full Idea: In order to assert that p it is not necessary to utter exactly those words. ...Clearly, also, in order to assert that p, it is not sufficient to utter the words that were actually uttered.
	From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 07)
	A reaction: I take the first point to be completely obvious (you can assert one thing with various wordings), and the second seems right after a little thought (the words could be vague, ambiguous, inaccurate, contextual)

19. Language / F. Communication / 2. Assertion

13951	Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R]
	Full Idea: Whereas what is asserted can be said to be accurate, exaggerated, unfounded, overdrawn, probable, improbable, plausible, true, or false, none of these can be said of the meaning of a sentence.
	From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 12)
	A reaction: That fairly firmly kicks into touch the idea that the assertion is the same as the meaning of the sentence.