[lit-ideas] Ryle's Fido
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- Date: Fri, 9 May 2014 06:42:34 -0400 (EDT)
A friend of mine once found a cat amidst a storm. He named the cat "Moses".
It turned out to be a female cat, and he was wondering if "Moses", in
Hebrew, has a feminine counterpart -- although "Mosesa" did pretty well. Oddly
"Moses" is one name that Witters discusses as he proposes something like a
'general' criterion, however, fuzzy -- for why introduce a general variable
for 'name' (Wittgenstein's capital "N"), if not -- in Section 79 of his
posthumous Philosophical Investigations.
But it may be different with dogs.
The naming of cats is a difficult matter, Eliot, after all argued. His
implicature seems to be that the Queen's naming her first corgi "Susan" by
contrast was, figuratively, a 'piece of cake'.
'Fido'-Fido
McEvoy is considering Wittgenstein's 'say'/'show' distinction as it applies
to 'names'. MceEvoy defends a continuity in Wittgenstein's thought and
chooses 'names' as an example. The challenge is to provide a 'criterion' (I
think McEvoy calls it) for 'naming', which is lacking as something SAID in
Wittgenstein, if not as something 'shown'.
I was reminded of Ryle's 'Fido'-Fido (first proposed in "The theory of
meaning", in C. A. Mace, "British philosophy in the mid century", 1957), and
McEvoy proposes three nice scenarios:
i. Fido!
as uttered by the owner of Fido.
ii. Fido.
as a reply to ("What's the name of your dog?")
and
iii. I name this [ship] the 'Fido'.
as uttered by the Queen. The better expressed phrasing by McEvoy appended
below. McEvoy wants to give priority to (iii). It is in scenarios like (iii)
that one can speak of an Utterer (to use Grice's parlance) -- the Queen --
NAMING. And of course, I would agree (with the Queen) that the priority is
on NAMING, not NAMES.
(i), with 'Fido' as vocative is not naming Fido, while it is a phrase
intended to _call_ Fido. While (ii), expanded as "The dog's name is Fido' seems
to REPORT a naming that has occurred in the past, even if one may argue
that one names a thing N every time one uses the expression N, and not the
'baptismal' fixation (to use Witters's and Kripke's wording).
On top of that, the discussion then turned to Augustine, so I double
checked Witters' quotation -- now in the Loeb Classical Library --:
Augustine says:
"Cum majores homines APPELLABANT rem aliquam
et cum secundum earn vocem corpus ad aliquid movebant, videbam
et tenebam hoc ab eis VOCARI rem illam, quod SONABANT
cum earn vellent ostendere
hoc autem eos veile ex motu corporis aperiebatur: tamquam VERBIS
naturalibus omnium gentium
quae fiunt vultu et nutu oculorum
ceterorumque membrorum actu
& sonitu vocis indicante affectionem animi in petendis
habendis, rejiciendis, fugiendisve rebus
ita VERBA in variis SENTENTIIS locis suis posita
& crebro audita quarum rerum SIGNA essent
paulatim colligebam
measque jam voluntates
edomito in eis SIGNIS ore
per haec enuntiabam.
---- Augustinus, Conf. I. 8.
I don't think Witters cared to provide a translation for this, but the
current edition of Philosophical Investigations does, and it involves so much
more than merely 'pointing at things' via ostension, while 'ostendere' IS
used. The translation in the current edition of Philosophical Investigation
goes as per below, where I capitalised some of the notions -- other than
NAMING -- that Augustine relies on:
"When my elders NAMED some object & accordingly moved towards something, I
saw this and I grasped that the thing was CALLED by the sound they UTTERED
when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily
movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression
of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body,
and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having,
rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard WORDS repeatedly used
in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to
understand what objects they SIGNIFIED; and after I had trained my mouth to
form
these signs, I used them to express my own desires."
---- It seems to evoke what Colin McGinn called a telementational (that he
also applies to Grice) theory of communication. Note that Augustine focuses
on "DESIRES" and "INTENTIONS", alla Grice, and allows for various 'things'
to be 'called' this or that. It is a 'genetic' account of how Augustine
got to learn Latin (in the North of Africa, as I recall), first by being an
addressee, and ultimately becoming an utterer.
---- The Stanford Encyclopedia for 'names' gives a nice reference to a
later section of Philosophical Investigations (McEvoy claims that Witters's
point about he (Witters) not being able to provide by something that HE SAYS a
theory of naming applies to the first sections) where something like a
Kripkean 'criterion' is provided. In any case it strongly reminded me of Grice
in "Vacuous Names". Grice goes on to provide some technicism, notably the
idea of a
DOSSIER.
So the idea is that
'Fido'
gets attached to a 'dossier', which may include:
'Ryle's dog'.
Have you seen Ryle's dog?
Have you seen Fido?
Have you seen the loud poodle that lives up Banbury lane?
Have you seen the canis familiaris that belongs to the Waynflete professor
of Metaphysical Philosophy?
and so on. It is according to circumstances that one will choose one or
another item in one's dossier for 'Fido'.
There seems to be a CRITERION behind all this. Grice is into a
formalisation of this.
Df
Fido is a dog.
Where 'D' is a PREDICATE, and 'f' is a singular name -- that Quine
rejects. Usually, 'Fido' involves
{f}
the singleton -- or one-member class. 'Dog' doesn't. Extensionally defined,
it points to Fido and the Queen's corgis for example, such as "Susan".
Cs
Susan is a corgi.
'Corgi', like 'Dog', is a predicate. 'Susan' is a name.
(Outside Wales, corgis have been made popular by Queen Elizabeth II who has
at least four in her retinue at all times. Her first corgi was called
Susan. She currently keeps two corgis and two Dorgis (corgi/dachshund cross).
Some portraits of Queen Elizabeth II include a corgi. Some don't).
We are considering Wittgenstein on
'naming'.
The passage from the Stanford Encyclopedia on Names that led me to the
Wittgenstein quote is as follows:
Aristotle's mother might have used the name ‘Aristotle’ with a different
semantic value (corresponding to a different (cluster-)description) to a
present-day Aristotle scholar. Frege (1952, 1956) and Russell seem to have
held the context-sensitive view. Wittgenstein is often cited as a proponent of
the cluster view, but attention to the text (1953, section 79) reveals
that he is advocating context-sensitivity.
So let us revise this section. It should be a later section than the
sections McEvoy having in mind as EVIDENCE that Witters is trying to show that
one cannot try to express in words ('say') what 'naming' is, only 'show', for
lack of 'criteria'.
In Section 79 Wittgenstein writes:
"If one says
i. Moses did not exist.
this may MEAN various things."
"It may mean:
ii. The Israelites did not have a single leader when they withdrew from
Egypt——or:
iii. The Israelite's leader was NOT called Moses——-or:
iv. There cannot have been anyone who accomplished all that the Bible
relates of Moses——or:
v. etc. etc.
"We may say, following Russell: the NAME "Moses" can be defined by means of
various descriptions."
"For example, as
vi. "Moses" names the man who led the Israelites through the wilderness.
vii. "Moses" names the man who lived at that time and place and was then
called 'Moses'.
viii. "Moses" names the man who as a child was taken out of the Nile by
Pharaoh's daughter.
and so on.
"And according as we assume one definition or another the proposition, our
original utterance
i. Moses did not exist.
acquires a different SENSE, and so does every other proposition about
Moses."
"And if we are told, in general
ib. "N did not exist"
we do ask: "What do you mean? Do you want to say . . . . . . or . . . . . .
etc.?"
"When I make a statement about Moses,— am I always ready to substitute some
one of these descriptions for "Moses"?"
"I shall perhaps say as follows."
"By "Moses" I understand the man who did what the Bible relates of Moses,
or at any rate a good deal of it."
"But how much?"
"Have I decided how much must be proved false for me to give up my
proposition as false?"
"Has the NAME "Moses" got a fixed and unequivocal use for me in all
possible cases?
"Is it not the case that I have, so to speak, a whole series of props in
readiness, and am ready to lean on one if another should be taken from under
me and vice versa?"
"Consider another case."
"When I say
B. N is dead.
something like the following may hold for the meaning of the NAME "N":
I believe that a human being has lived, whom I
(1) have seen in such-and-such places, who
(2) looked like this (pictures)
(3) has done such-and-such things, and
Crucially:
(4) N bore the name "N" in social life.
Asked what I understand by "N", I should enumerate all or some of these
points, and different ones
on different occasions.
So my DEFINITION of "N" would perhaps be
B2. N is the man of whom all this is true.
But if some point now proves false?
Shall I be prepared to declare the proposition
B. N is dead.
false—even if it is only something which strikes me as incidental that has
turned out false?
But where are the bounds of the incidental?
If I had given a definition of the name N in such a case, I should now be
ready to alter it.
And this can be expressed like this:
I use the name "N" without a fixed meaning.
But that detracts as little from its usefulness, as it detracts from that
of a table that it stands on four legs instead of three and so sometimes
wobbles.
Should it be said that I am using a word whose meaning I don't know, and so
am talking nonsense?
Say what you choose, so long as it does not prevent you from seeing the
facts.
And when you see them there is a good deal that you will NOT say.
"The fluctuation of scientific definitions: what to-day counts as an
observed concomitant of a phenomenon will to-morrow be used to DEFINE [or name]
it."
It seems to me that Witters IS offering something like a 'criterion' (and I
should double check what other word McEvoy uses here) for 'naming'. It may
be a 'fuzzy' criterion, or a multifarious one, to reflect the multifarious
'pragmatics' of names -- and not just the rather simple semantics alla
{f}
{s}
Philosophers who look at logic as an auxiliary to provide, in a
metalanguage, for criteria for their original puzzles are redeemed.
Wittgenstein
seems to display, rather, an a priori, as it were, opposition to formalisation
(or metalinguistic approaches) of any kind.
Once the 'semantics' of names is more or less fixed or settled, one CAN
give room for a more fluid 'pragmatics' of names -- "She was a Garbo", for
example, we can say of someone -- other than Garbo -- who displays some sort
of the elegance that Garbo displayed, and so on. And while most discussions
of Grice's 'Vacuous Names' have focuses on the vacuity issue, what he says
about identificatory and no-identificatory uses, dossiers, and such,
applies, of course, to FULL names, too -- and not just vacuous like "Pegasus"
and
"Bellerophon" (that Quine had made famous in his rejection of names in
"What there is" -- Pegasus exists = something pegasusises) or "Marmaduke
Bloggs", Grice's own invention: the Lancashire geographer who climbed Mt
Everest
on hands and knees but who turns out to be the journalists's invention).
Grice wrote 'Vacuous Names' in the heat of Donnellan's recent invention of
an attributive/referential uses of 'names' and 'descriptions', that Grice
rejects, and replaces for 'identificatory' and 'non-identificatory' uses of
'the' and related 'referential' expressions, and he is at his best in
identifying implicatures (NEVER SENSES) that attend his favourite scenario on
which he expands in the final sections of that essay:
"Jones's butler got the hats and coats mixed up"
where Grice distinguishes a non-identificatory use from a fully
identificatory use of "Jones' butler". An application to the simpler Ryle's
'Fido'
may be in order.
"So, the whole point is that Fido, whoever he is, should not be allowed to
do as he pleases."
Grice notes that the use of 'whoever he is' indicates that the name has
only been introduced by the 'stroke of a pen', rather than, say, via
acquaintance.
Ryle laughed at all that. His idea of 'Fido'-Fido was to show the early
Wittgenstein wrong. And he explores Plato's confusions. Plato had only one
word to his disposal: 'onoma', which can stand for 'name', 'noun' -- and WORD.
The English language has richer distinctions, and 'noun' should be used
instead of 'name' as good style dictates. I'm not sure how delicate in his
choice of words Witters is. It seems his use of "N" (his general term for
'name') is pretty vague. For one, quotations may seem in order in cases where
he doesn't use them -- ""N" is N's name," for example.
Ryle called 'Fido'-Fido a 'grotesque' THEORY and Carnap is right in
correcting Ryle here: you may call it 'grotesque' but, Carnap notes, is more of
a
theoretical decision on how to deal with 'names' in one's system rather
than a 'theory' proper.
And so on.
Cheers,
Speranza
In a message dated 5/8/2014 12:31:48 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
the view that 'Fido' names the dog Fido if it is used as a name of Fido:
but this does not explain how 'Fido' names Fido (it no more does this than
saying "'The snow is white' is true iff the snow is white" explains how the
linguistic statement can refer to a non-linguistic reality). To give
examples where names name is not to give an explanation of the naming-relation
but merely to illustrate it: what the challenge asks is to provide an
explanation so that the relation is captured in language, perhaps by way of
some
"theory" or "criterion" by which we can determine that a word is being used
as a name and not otherwise. Consider the difference between a dog owner
uttering 'Fido' when (a) asked the name of his dog (b) shouting at Fido - (b)
is not a use of 'Fido' to name Fido in the same sense as (a), or perhaps at
all (and even in (a) 'Fido' may report Fido's name rather than 'name' Fido
in some other sense, as when (c) the Queen names a ship 'Fido').
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