Wittgenstein says somewhere early in the Investigations, that naming a thing is like attaching a label to it. (This is the origin of the causal theory of reference.) It (may be) like this. No one can know that Harry loves Sally until they have a sound theory of love, or at least the eros part of it. One can’t come to know what love is simply by watching how Harry and Sally behave. ‘Love is a special way of feeling.’ Learning that these impressions on one’s palm are ‘connected’ to the sensation of water flowing over the palm of one’s other hand, that they refer to it and not to the square root of 9, cannot simply be a matter of having these two sensations at once. Often one has several sensations at the same time—an itching behind one’s shoulder blades, a flash of light—without inferring that either of them ‘means’ or refers to the other. Suppose though, that meaning and inferring were occult mental processes, ‘occult’ insofar as they cannot be identified by neurologists or by metaphysicians. Thus, being nowhere, they are not ‘derived from experience.’ Still, there must be _something_ identifiable as referring.
‘Meaning x,’ and ‘referring to x,’ are close enough for philosophical work. In ‘A means x by y,’ there is supposed to be some relation between x and y, namely, that of meaning: there must be a meaning relation between x and y in order for this schema to work. Call it ‘M.’ ‘M’ just means that x and y stand in a certain relation. ‘But how do we know that ‘M’ itself means that?’ asks Bradley, standing in for Achilles. We need a further relation, M-sub-1, make sure that ‘M’ means that…
This is my response to Walter’s worries, or to his theory, or to his worry of a theory. A child learns what is being referred to when someone gestures or speaks through trial and error (just as adults do when, e.g., talking to someone who speaks poorly the language one speaks oneself, or when talking with the victim of a stroke). A child (or an adult) ‘gets it,’ when he or she can do certain kinds of things, can give certain responses, of which there is no a priori list. This is a small part of what we mean when we try to distinguish speaking from mere sound. All of this is done in the open: had Helen Keller later said, ‘It was as if a choir of angels were singing to me,’ we’d be reluctant to say that this was what grasping the meaning, the referent, of a word amounted to,
I’m sure I’ve got Walter mostly wrong, but that never stopped a philosopher from forging ahead, regardless.
Robert Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
