CHESS AS A MODEL OF LANGUAGE

L. J O N A T H A N COHEN

The history of natural science abounds with good and bad models
- pumps for the heart, planetary systems for the atom, and so on.
Many of these models made an important contribution to the advance-
ment of scientific understanding. Linguistics has been less fortunate,
perhaps because language is so widely pervasive in human life that it
leaves little room for any non-linguistic activity to be available as its
model. Accordingly, among the very few models for language that
have ever attracted attention, chess is probably the best known. Both
Saussure, who proposed the model in linguistics, and Wittgenstein,
who proposed it in the philosophy of language, were highly seminal
thinkers in their respective fields. But, at least so far as their published
writings show, neither Saussure nor Wittgenstein ever investigated
the implications of the model in any depth. And until this has been
done, with an appropriate rigour and thoroughness, we shall know
neither the true value of the model nor even the underlying reasons
for its plausibility. I shall consider the model, however, primarily in
relation to the semantics of natural language, rather than in relation
to syntax, morphology or phonology (where Saussure also applied it).
The significance of the model turns out to be substantially richer in
the former case than in the latter.
There are thus three main issues to be explored:

(I) How is chess to be characterised, in its role as a model

for natural language?
(I1) What is the structure of knowledge about chess'?
(III) What are the implications of this for the structure of
linguistic theory?

In exploring issues (I) and (II) we shall make an extensive detour into
essentially non-linguistic topics. But this is inevitable if an adequate
foundation is to be laid for dealing with (III).

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 L.J. COHEN

1. Whatever the features of chess that are indeed relevant to the

analogy w i t h natural language, it is clear that the movement of solid
pieces on a squared board is not among them. Chess can even be played
by correspondence. So some more abstract characterisation is needed,
and preferably a characterisation that makes chess seem as much
like a lingt~istic activity as it can do. Let us take a hint from the
literature of artificial intelligence, where work on chess-playing pro-
grams turns out to have close affinities with work on theorem-proving
ones. Chess, like draughts (checkers), noughts-and-crosses (tic-tac-
toe), and many other games, may be viewed as a theorem-proving
contest.
If one looks at it quite formally, the system in which such theorems
are to be proved needs three kinds of primitive notation in its object-
, . t f B t t t
language: thirty-three piece-symbols (WP1 , WP2 , . . . WPs ,
'BP1 ', 9 9 9 'BPs', 'WRI ', 'WR2 ', 'BR1 ', 'BR~ ', etc., corresponding to
the pieces of each side plus a symbol 'A' - the null-designator -
corresponding to the absence or any piece), the numerals 1 to 8
(corresponding to rows or files), and a two-place functor, 'Occ',
mapping ordered pairs of numerals on to piece-symbols (corres-
ponding to the occupation of a particular square, or row-file inter-
section, by a particular piece or by none). Thus 'Occ(1,1)=WRl'
would correspond to the position of White's queen's-side rook at the
start of the game. Of course, obvious economics are possible here.
For example, one could reduce the number of symbols required by
fourteen if one introduced two player-indices, B and W, and gave the
functor three argument-places instead of two. But for present
purposes it will be more important to keep the formal structure
perspicuous than to introduce notational economies or abbreviations.
An atomic formula is constructed whenever the Occ-functor's
argument-places are supplied with an ordered pair of numerals, and
its value-place with a piece-symbol. A well-formed formula (describing
a state of the game) is constructed by concatenating 64 atomic
formulas, with different combinations of numerals in each atomic
formula and not more than one occurrence of any piece-symbol
other than 'A'. Wff are called either 'white wft" or 'black wft~, because
in all of them the atomic formulas are ordered by their row-numerals,
with these running from '1' to '8' in white wff and from '8' to '1' in
black wff (corresponding to whether it is White's or Black's turn to
move). A single appropriately constructed white wff is given as a

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 CHESS AS A MODEL OF LANGUAGE

primitive wff or postulate (corresponding to the situation from which

the game begins).
Transformation-rules, along with certain constraints on their
application, then specify, for White and Black separately, which
transformations of a given wff are permissible (i.e. what kinds of
moves can be made). For this purpose we have to introduce an appro-
priate syntactic metalanguage. So let us assume that the object-
language notation is self-representing in this metatanguage, that 'x'
and 'y' stand for any numeral indifferently, and that we also have
other notation as required, such as 'W' for any piece-symbol with
'W' as its initial letter, 'B' for any piece-symbol with 'B' as its initial
letter, 'Pi' for any piece-symbol with ' P I ' , 'P2', - .- or 'Pa, as its
second letter, and so on. We can also use O1, O2 . . . . to denote
atomic formulas of the object-language indifferently, and Sl, $2 . . . .
to denote wff. One transformation-rule for White (regulating White's
pawn-moves) will then be: 'If both Occ(x,y)=WPi and Occ(x+ 1,y)= A
occur in a given wff, it is permissible to transpose WPi and A in the
wff.' And we may suppose that similarly appropriate rules are stipu-
lated for all piece-symbols.
The application of transformation-rules is subject both to certain
specific constraints and also to certain general ones. For example,
some specific constraints restrict the application of certain trans-
formation-rules (those corresponding to castling, moves after queen-
ing, and taking en passant) in terms o f the transformational history
of the wff concerned. One important general constraint concerns
check-theorems. A white check-theorem (corresponding to a position
in which Black threatens to capture White's king) is defined as any
wff $1 from which a wff $2 is derivable by a single application of
one transformation-rule for Black such that, for some B other than
BK, $2 has B where $1 has WK and S~ has A where $1 has B; and a
black check-theorem is defined analogously. It is then a general con-
straint on applications of transformation-rules for White that they
may not generate a white check-theorem (move into check), and
analogously for Black. Other general constraints prohibit so-or-so
many repetitions of the same wff (position) or so-and-so many
transformations without a deletion (capture) or Pi transposition
(pawn-move). Most importantly of all, each player has to derive a
theorem in turn by transforming either the primitive wff (if he has
first move) or the theorem last derived by his opponent, and for
each such derivation only one transformation-rule may be applied
(only one move at a time). With each derivation the order of the
atomic formulas is changed, so as to reverse the order of occurrence

53
 L.J. COHEN

of the row-numerals (marking whose move it is): i.e. white and black
wff alternate with one another down the sorites of theorems.
If a player derives a check-theorem of opposite colour and his
opponent cannot legitimately derive any theorem, then the player
has won the game (checkmate). But, if a player cannot legitimately
derive any theorem from a wff that is not a check.theorem of his
own colour, the contenst is drawn (stalemate).
The structure of chess is being represented in this way as a game
in which one theorem is proved in each member of a self-generating
sequence of postul,~te-systems. Alternatively it is a natural-deduction
game in which the two players derive alternate lines and each succes-
sive line has as its sole premiss the immediately preceding one. And
when we think of chess thus as a theorem-proving or natural-deduc-
tion contest, we interpret a wff as being true if and only if, via the
ordered set of atomic formulas that compose it, the wff corresponds
to a position that is reachable in some correctly played game.
Every true wff is apparently derivable. Moreover, not every wff is
derivable: for example, no pair of players could legitimately derive
a wff describing a situation where all eight pawns of both sides are
passed pawns and every other piece is in its initial position. Of
course, this does not establish the consistency of the system. But the
ordinary rules for playing chess have been rather well tested in
practice and no inconsistency is ever reported.
2. Now the obvious way to describe the part played by a certain
piece-symbol within a given wff S i (the position of a particular piece
in a given state of the game) is with the help of a 4-place meta-
linguistic predicate, 'At', that will indicate the atomic formula in
which the piece-symbol occurs within Si. Thus we might have
'At(WK,1,4, Sl)' or 'At(BQ, 8,5, $2)'. Such a description is atom-
istic, in the sense that no one statement of this kind entails any
other. This is because for all atomic formulas O1 and 02, and for
any true wff in which the two atomic formulas O1 and O2 both
occur, there is always another true wff in which O1 occurs but O2
does not. For any obtainable chess-situation in which two particular
piece-positions occur it is easy enough to invent a different situation
in which one of the two piece-positions occurs and the other does
not. So, if a whole chess-situation is conceived under this mode of
description, it is conceived as a system of mutually independent
elements.
However an atomistic description of this kind exploits only the
opportunities provided for a would-be describer by the formation-

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rules o f the system. It proceeds just by indicating one out of sixty-

four atomic formulas that the formation-rules allow to be con-
calenated into a single wff. A quite different kind of description
could be constructed by a describer who exploited the information
given by the system's transformation-rules along with the constraints
on their application. Such a describer would need to invent a vast
number of new relational predicates in the syntactic metalanguage.
These predicates would map ordered n-tuples (n~<33) of piece-
symbols on to wff, in accordance with the transformational potential
of any given wff. They would thus correspond to the familiar
category of chess-players' predicates that map ordered n-tuples of
pieces - including the null-piece - on to chess-situations, like
is a situation in w h i c h . . , threatens - - - ' , 'is a situation in which
... forks--- and- - - ' ,, ' i s a situation in which . . . pins
.... into shielding - - - , and so on. For example, if 'Thr'
(threatens) is an appropriately defined predicate o f this type, then
its application would be illustrated by the fact that, where Si is a
black wff for which both 'At(WKt,I,2,Si), and 'At(BQ,3,1,Si)'
are true, 'Thr(WKt,BQ,Si)' is also true. An ordinary player might
not be able to discern many o f these rather complex relations,
which would depend for their existence, in regard to any one wff
(or state of the game) on the various possible series of transforma-
tions (or moves) that could legitimately be made thereafter. Never-
theless an enormous number o f such relations would always exist,
whether or not predicates had been invented to describe them,
in the sense that they would be objectively determined by the
transformation-rules within the finite possibilities o f the game.
Moreover, to describe a wff in terms of a relation in which any one
piece-symbol stands to any other piece-symbol is implicitly to
describe the wff in terms o f the converse relation in which the latter
stands to the former. Also, for any piece-symbols Z~, Z2 and Z3
and any relation R I , such that RI (Z~ ,Z3), there will always be
another relation R2 and zero or more other pieces symbols Z4,
Zs 9 9 9 Zaa, such that R 2 ( Z I , Z2, Za " 9 9 Z 3 3 ) entails RI (Z2, Za).
So a full knowledge of all the relations of this kind that affect any
one piece-symbol in a particular wff - i.e. a full knowledge of the
piece-symbol's relational role - would also be full knowledge of
all the relations affecting any other piece in that situation. Of
course, in practice no human being is ever likely to have such total
knowledge, except perhaps in very simple end-game situations.
But in principle the systemic implications are undeniable. (I use
'systemic' here as the opposite of 'atomistic': a mode of describing

55
 L.J. COHEN

the several elements of an ensemble is systemic if and only ff the

full description of any one element entails the full description
of every other, whereas it is atomistic if and only if no one such
description entails any other.) Any conjunction of propositions
that provided a comprehensive description for the relational role
of one piece in a particular chess-situation would implicitly also
provide a comprehensive description for the relational role of any
other piece in that situation. So the roles are systemically inter-
connected, in the sense that if the role of any one piece-symbol
in the corresponding wff had been different, the role of every other
piece would also have been different. Equally anyone, who knew
the relational role of a particular kind of piece in whatever situ-
ation was shown him or her, would know all there was to know
about the power of potential of such a piece in chess. So no-one
could have perfect knowledge of this power or potential for any
one kind of piece without also having it for every other; and, if
a change in the rules affects one kind of piece's power or potential,
it also affects every other's.

1. It emerges from what has been said so far that there are two
opposite poles for descriptions of the part played by a particular
piece in a given chess-game situation. So far as mere logical possibil-
ities are concerned, these descriptions may gravitate more towards
the atomistic pole where they would concern themselves only with
piece-positions, or towards the systemic one where they would
concern themselves only with pieces' relational roles, or even per-
haps be equally attracted by both poles. But under what kind of
description are we to suppose that an ideally skilled chess-player
registers his awareness of the part played by a particular piece in a
given situation? The answer to this question is crucial to our enquiry,
for if chess is to be a model for language the structure of a chess-
player's knowledge has to be thoroughly explored: it is his know-
ledge that has to be compared with a speaker-hearer's one.
Now the skill of an ideally skilful chess-player does not consist
just in an ability to play the game according to the rules. The object
of the game is not just to make legitimate moves for as long as the
game lasts: the object of the game (though not necessarily of every
actual player) is to win it. So one is tempted to conceive of a skilled
chess-player's ability as consisting in his capacity to win most

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games against most opponents. But it is also wrong to think only

in terms of successful outcomes. All of these could conceivably
be achieved by threats, bribery or colossal luck; and, if only a few
players - all of them grandmasters - were left alive, any one of
them might still be very skillful, even if he now lacked the capacity
to win most games against most opponents. A person's ability to
play the game skilfully, therefore, includes not just a capacity to
defeat the ordinary run of opponents but a capacity to achieve
these defeats in a certain way - by masterly play. How then do
the masters play?
Research on the nature of a chess-player's knowledge has been
conducted in two main ways. The first has attempted to discover
directly, by psychological experiment, how people think when they
play chess, and in particular how players who are of different
standards differ from one another in their thought-processes. The
second has attempted to construct an artificial chess-player by
means of a computer programme, and to devise programmes that
would play better and better chess as judged by the standard of the
human players they can beat. But these two lines of research have
not been wholly independent or autonomous. Each has to some
extent been influenced by the other; and, while the psychological
work has applied experimental techniques that are backed by
successes in other fields of cognitive psychology, the computer work
has made use of certain programming strategies that have turned out
fruitful in relation to other theorem-proving problems.

2. The most extensive experimental investigations so far were made

by de Greet. 1 He employed (though not all at once) a panel of
twenty-four subjects, who varied substantially in their chess-playing
ability. There were six grandmasters (Alekhine, Euwe, Fine, Flohr,
Keres and Tartakower), four masters, two lady-champions of the
Netherlands, five strong players (roughly corresponding to experts
on the U.S. Chess Federation Scale) and five skilled players (ranging
from class A to class C on the U.S. Chess Federation Scale).
De Groot's method was essentially introspectionist. He showed his
subjects a series of chess-situations, taken from actual games, and
told them in each case which side was due to move. Each subject
was instructed to work out what he or she thought was the best
move and, so far as they were able, to do all their thinking aloud.
These 'protocols', as introspectionist psychologists call such subjects'
verbalisations, were then recorded, analysed and interpreted by
de Greet.

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 L.J. COHEN

One of the main tasks that de Greet in effect set himself was
to test the hypothesis that expertise at chess consists in the capacity
to work o u t to greater and greater depths the various possible
consequences of a particular move and then evaluate these con-
sequences. We can call this the atomistic hypothesis, because it
assumes that an ideal player first registers a given situation as a set of
piece-position assignments (like a wff in the above formal system)
and then applies the transformation-rules to search out all the
possible moves and their consequences (also registered as sets of
piece-position assignments) to some chosen depth. Now, if the
atomistic hypothesis is correct - and perhaps some people are
tempted to adopt it when they first learn the game - good players
would differ from bad primarily by their capacity to calculate such
consequences to a greater depth. Experience would improve players
of equal calculative capacity only so far as it affected their evalua-
tions of the various situations consequent upon different possible
moves; and, if the consequences could be worked out far enough,
differences of value between different possible consequences would
often be sufficiently obvious in terms of conventional numerical
weightings for the various pieces and for the degree of advancement
o f the pawns, together with a summation of these weightings for
each consequential situation considered. Hence, according to the
atomistic hypothesis, experience should matter far less than cal-
culative capacity.
This atomistic hypothesis seems to have been substantially
disconfirmed by de Groot's results. It describes a style of thinking
sometimes adopted by novices, or a form of post mortem analysis
that is sometimes carried out in the academic study of chess-games
after they have been played, rather than the thought-processes of
good players while actually playing. De Groot's results show, for
instance, that grandmasters do not search to a greater depth than
experts. Both tend to explore to a depth of two or three pairs
of moves. Nor is it possible to distinguish the protocol of a grand-
master from the protocol of an expert player or a master solely
o n structural or formal grounds. 2 Both seem to register a given
situation under a set of relational descriptions; and these descrip-
tions operate, in accordance with strategic maxims accepted by
the player or by means of analogies with remembered games, to
select those alternative moves of which the consequences are worth
considering. Similar descriptions are then applied to the conse-
quential situations as a basis for their evaluation, which is conducted
qualitatively, in terms of similar analogies or strategic maxims,

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rather t h a n quantitatively, by a summation of piece-weightings.

But the substantial superiority that one grade of player has over
another seems to be due, according to de Greet, partly to the
greater ability that he has acquired to perceive the important rela-
tionships of various kinds that are present in a given situation and
partly to the greater ability that he has acquired to apply appropri-
ate analogies and principles to the situation thus perceived, to
construct hypotheses therefrom, and to test out these hypotheses
in his imagination. What makes the better player better, there-
fore, is - in the main - not his calculative capacity but how he
has learned from experience to perceive a given situation and hypo-
thesise about it.
To confirm the superior perceptual capacity of the better player
de Greet carried out a supplementary series of experiments in
which his subjects were asked just to memofise presented situations
and then reconstruct them from memory while verbalising their
thought-processes as much as possible. The correctness of a recon-
struction was scored by assigning one point for each correctly placed
and identified piece and subtracting one or two points for various
kinds of error. The result was that the better players not only
achieved higher scores but they also achieved them in shorter times.
And de Greet inferred from the players' protocols that this was not
due to the better players' retaining in their memories a register of
a larger set of piece-positions, as the atomistic hypothesis would
suggest. Instead

the position is perceived in large complexes, each of which

hangs together as a genetic, functional and/or dynamic unit.
For the master these complexes are of a typical nature. Such
a complex - a castled position, a Pawn structure, a number of
co-operating pieces . . . . or Rooks on the seventh rank boxing
in a King, etc. - is to be considered as a unit of perception and
significance . . . Unusual characteristics o f a position (an
exposed piece, a far advanced Pawn, a battery of heavy pieces,
queer doubled Pawns) stand out against a typical background,
claim the attention - and consequently are the easiest to
remember. Further, the essential relations between the pieces,
their mobility and capturing possibilities, their co-operation or
opposition, are often perceived and retained better than the
position of the pieces themselves . . . Finally, remarkable
support for dynamic perception comes from the errors in
reproducing the position: a piece is often put on the square

59
 L.J. COHEN

which it wants to be on or on a square that an enemy or

another own piece disputes .3
De Groot's conclusion seems well justified: the master 'sees more
than' the expert (i.e. the inferior player), 'especially the more
important things'. 4

3. Experiments by Chase and Simon s with three subjects - a

master, a class A player and a beginner - confirm de Groot's con-
clusion. Chase and Simon inferred from the relative frequencies
of different types of errors made by the better players in recalling
a situation that the absolute location of pieces is not as important
as their relative location - i.e. their location relative to other pieces
on the board and relative to squares under their control. 6 Chase
and Simon also found that even in randomised piece-distributions
good players apparently noticed the same kinds of structures as
they perceived in situations from actual games. And in the Chase-
Simon experiments, as in de Greet's, the better players were faster
at the task of perceiving, memorising and reconstructing presented
situations. Moreover, these experiments confirmed another of
de Groot's findings: the good player first perceives a situation in
chunks of closely interrelated elements, as he scans the board,
and he then integrates the chunks in his mind. Masters notice the
same kinds of structures as inferior experts, but the better players
seem to recall bigger chunks and more of them. 7 Even if this ap-
parent superiority of recall among better players were actually a
guessing artefact, as has been suggested, ~ it still demonstrates the
value of assuming the pieces' relative locations to be more important
than their absolute ones. Indeed, de Greet found in his experiments
that the masters were substantially quicker and more successful
than inferior players at the task of integrating their separately
perceived chunks. Chase and Simon's master did not have quite
as much success at his middle game recalls as de Groot's masters.
But this seems to have been due to the fact that Chase and Simon
chose their situations at some arbitrary point in the game, some-
times in the middle of an exchange, whereas de Greet chose quiet
situations. Chase and Simon's master complained that he had trouble
'getting the sense' of some of their situations. 9 Chase and Simon
conclude that
chess skill depends in large part upon a vast, organised long-
term memory of specific information about chessboard
patterns . .. Although there clearly must be a set of specific

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aptitudes (e.g,, aptitudes for handling spatial relations) that

together comprise a talent for chess, individual differences
in such aptitudes are largely overshadowed by immense
individual differences in chess experience) ~
In sum the good chess-player learns more and more to look at
situations systemically; and instead of his superiority's being some-
how a matter of innate insightfulness, as it may sometimes seem to
the novice, it is largely the product of practice and experience.
Attempts have been made to achieve a further refinement in our
experimentally attested knowledge of how good chess-players
think. But these experiments tend to be conducted with too few
subjects to justify any high degree of confidence in the conclusions
drawn from them. 11 Moreover the introspectionist methodology
that de Greet and others have used in this area has not been without
its critics. For example, Neisser has suggested that, when subjects
think aloud during experiments on problem-solving, the procedure
'will substantially change the nature and course of the thought
process, by limiting it to the main sequence') 2 Conceivably, if
Neisser's suggestion is correct, the poorer performance of inferior
players at the task of memorising and reconstructing chess-situations
could be due just to the limitations imposed on them by having to
produce their verbal protocols concurrently. However, this issue is
easily resolved by experimentation; and though Chase and Simon's
experiments were not deliberately designed to resolve it, the absence
of verbalisation from their experimental requirements does not
seem to have given them different results from de Groot's.
4. As a more serious objection, however, it might be argued that
the superior memory-skills of better players may be an effect rather
than a cause of their superior playing-skills. Even if the latter are not
due to greater depths of calculation they may be due wholly to the
possession of superior evaluative criteria. So the atomistic hypo-
thesis, it might be claimed, has not been conclusively refuted by
de Groot's experimental results and, correspondingly, those results
fail to establish the rival hypothesis that, the better the player, the
closer he comes to conceiving of a given chess-situation as a systemic
ensemble. The only way to counter this objection is to show some-
how that bringing a player closer to such a systemic conception
could in fact bring about an improvement in his play. But it is not
easy to see how this could be shown by psychological experimenta-
tion, since it might take quite a time to improve someone's play and
it would be very difficult to conduct a properly controlled experi-

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 L.J. COHEN

ment in play-improvement, isolating the player from all other

influences, if the experiment had to proceed for several months.
In any case I think that the point at issue has in fact been demon-
strated by the course of post-1945 research in t h e computerised
reconstruction of chess-playing ability. Better and better chess-
playing programmes have been constructed as the programmers
moved from a relatively atomistic conception of chess-situations
to a much more systemic one. The objectively attested merits of
the various programmes, as judged by their frequencies of wins and
losses against other programmes or against players of various dif-
ferent standards, seem to vary more or less directly with the extent
to which systemic considerations have been introduced into their
construction.
Researchers in artificial intelligence face the same intrinsic
difficulty in regard to the design of chess-playing programmes
as they face in regard to the simulation of other forms of problem-
solving and proof-delivery. Their natural enemy is the combina-
torial explosion of possibilities. In any one chess-situation the
number of possible moves, according to Good, 13 cannot exceed
321, but the maximum for only three pairs of moves is then 3216 .
Even if we suppose that on average only thirty legal alternatives
are available 14 at each move we get a figure of over 700 million
alternative possible outcomes for three pairs of moves. Again,
also according to Good, is the number of possible chess situations
is 1046-+3, so it is quite impracticable for a computer to be pro-
grammed to store some appropriate move for each situation that
might occur or some appropriate evaluation for each situation
that a possible move might generate. Even if three situations were
processed per milli-microsecond it would take at least 102~ centuries
to complete the store.
Clearly some severe constraints have to be imposed. There are,
in general, three forms that such constraints can take, either separ-
ately or in combination with one another. One is to limit the depth
of search - the number of further, consequential move-possibilities
that are explored. Another form of constraint is to adopt strategies
for selecting only certain types of move for consideration. And a
third is to store some appropriate set of criteria for evaluating situa-
tions as they come up. But all three forms of constraint may be
given either an atomistic or a systemic slant.

5, The first important chess-playing programme was devised by

Turing 16 in 1948. Turing's program considered two pairs of moves

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 CHESS AS A MODELOF LANGUAGE

ahead at most, and further restricted the depth of search by ending

exploration when a quiet situation was reached, i.e. a situation in
which there were no capture possibilities. His main criteria for
evaluating situations were built on the attachment of different
numerical values to different kinds of pieces, and the optimal move
was determined by a so-called 'minimaxing' procedure: at each
node the programme seeks to minimise the value of the best situa-
tion its opponent's next move can create. Only if minimaxing
revealed several equipollent alternatives were other criteria of
evaluation brought into operation, and these supplementary criteria
looked at such features as backwardness of pawns, piece-mobility,
defendedness, etc. Thus Turing's programme was almost entirely
atomistic, in that it registered situations very largely as sets of
piece-position assignments, and evaluated them primarily in terms
of a value assigned separately to each piece without regard to the
context of relationships with other pieces in which it was located.
Ending the search at a quiet situation was very much in line with this
atomistic orientation, since it ensured that the total values of the
pieces on either side would nto be altered by the next move even
though that move might - conceivably - be of immense strategic
significance. Some of Turing's supplementary criteria of evaluation,
such as pawn-backwardness, were also atomistic, being concerned-
just with which squares were occupied by which pieces. Systemic
features, such as mobility or defendedness, were of very minor
significance overall.
Turing's programme played rather poor chess, and the same is
true of other similar programmes, such as those devised by Bernstein
and by a research group at Los Alamos in 1958.17 But Shannon is
had already suggested ways in which substantial improvements
might be made. Most of these were more systemic in conception,
such as the proposal that isolated and doubled pawns, as well as
backward ones, should have reduced values, or the proposal that the
exposedness of a player's king should reduce the value of the situa-
tion for him. Also he thought that only a weak game could result
from requiring an evaluation after three pairs of moves, although
some form of limitation was required in order to reduce the time
taken to work out each move. His proposal was to explore certain
variations rather further, until some quasi-stability was reached.
The function determining which variations to explore would, on
his view, assign large values to all forceful moves (checks, captures
or attacks) and to developing moves. It would assign medium values
for defensive moves, and it would assign low values for all other

63
 L.J. COHEN

moves. Again, so far as the evaluation of final situations was con-

cerned, Shannon saw the need to introduce relational considera-
tions here too. Such features as a passed pawn, a doubled rook,
a pin, etc. were all to be suitably evaluated. Indeed he thought
that a programme ought, ideally, to be capable of self-improvement
by learning from experience,just like a human player.
Further proposals for the construction of better chess-playing
programmes were later put forward by Good. 19 Good recommended,
for example, that strategic principles should be collected from good
books on the game, and introduced into the programmes. He men-
tioned such principles as the maxim of attacking the bases of an
opponent's pawn-chains and defending one's own, or the maxim of
looking for a counter-attack as a form of defence. But only a few
of these systemically-minded proposals have so far been actually
implemented in workable programmes.
Whereas the Los Alamos programme searched all move-possi-
bilities to a depth of two moves, Bernstein's programme 2~ searched
only seven plausible moves to this depth. The Greenblatt chess
programme 21 was somewhat more sophisticated. It adopted a
number of heuristic strategies in the exploration of possible moves,
some of which were designed to ensure that exchanging sequences
and variations involving checks were examined until they reached
quiescence. As a result the Greenblatt programme could apparently
play about 2000 for the United Kingdom;22 and it certainly
defeated the programme constructed by J. J. Scott on rather more
atomistic lines. Scott's programme ~a searched each move to a
fixed depth, irrespective of the relational features of the situations
that emerged. Its evaluations were mostly atomistic. It assigned
different numbers of points for the various pieces on the board,
and for the degree of each pawn's advancement. The only trace
of a systemic point of view in its evaluations was in the assignment
of points for piece-mobility and the existence of attacking or defend-
ing relations. But even here the number of points assigned was made
to depend on the nature of the pieces involved rather than on their
other roles in the situation. So the defeat of Scott's programme by
Greenblatt's gives some degree of confirmation to the hypothesis
that the more systemically the components of a chess-situation
are registered the better the play that results.
The Newell, Shaw and Simon programme accordingly aims24
not only at making good moves but also at doing so for the right
reasons - that is, in the light of consequences deduced from noticing
certain circumstances in the situation. At the beginning of each

64
 CHESS AS A MODEL OF LANGUAGE

move a preliminary analysis establishas a certain type of situation,

and this established situation-type then evokes a set of goals appro-
priate to it in a suitable order of importance. The goal-list then
controls the remainder of the processing: the selection of
moves, the contingencies to be explored, the static evaluation and
the final choice procedure. But only six goals are available for con-
sideration: safety of the king, balance of piece-values, control of
the centre of the board, piece-development, attacking on the side
of the opponent's king, and pawn-promotion.
There is thus clearly an immense gap still between a master's
ability to perceive a situation in terms of its most significant sub-
patterns and the corresponding ability of any existing computer-
programme. Newell and Simon 2s envisage the possibility that in the
years required to attain mastership a chess-player might acquire a
tacit vocabulary of sub-patterns comparable to the word-recognition
vocabulary of persons able to read English or Chinese. These vocabu-
laries are of the order of between 104 and l0 s symbols, so sequences
of seven such symbols could be used to encode between 1028
and 10 as different overall situations. In sum, the consensus of
current researchers in artificial intelligence is that what needs to be
added to existing chess programmes, as Michie puts it, ~ is not more
speed and memory but better descriptions for registering the salient
and significant features of any situation. Even Greenblatt's pro-
gramme, as Good pointed out, 27 seems unable to form a plan that
is naturally expressed by a description rather than by the application
of evaluation-functions to an analysis - albeit a selective analysis -
of possibilities. Such programmes do not altogether eliminate the
exponential growth of the tree of consequences: they only serve
to control i t ) 8 And a good programme also needs to include
the ability to perceive higher-level features, like those of
exhibiting a developed position, a combination controlling
the centre, or a weak King's side, and to follow the higher
level maxim of preferring moves that serve more than one
function.Z9
But some further progress has been made by following up
Shannon's proposal that a chess-playing programme should be made
capable of self-improvement by learning from experience. Samuel's
1959 programme 3~ for playing draughts (checkers) showed that a
suitably instructed computer can profit systematically from its
experience of playing a game. For the terms that are used by this
programme to pick out value-relevant features of given situations

65
 L.J. COHEN

are assigned weighting co-efficients that may be adjusted in the light

of the programme's experience after playing each move. Terms that
eventually appear to be unimportant for descriptive purposes may be
replaced by new ones drawn from a reserve list. Indeed each situation
scored has its score stored for a certain period in any case so as to
accelerate future processing, and this storage is further preserved
so long as it continues to prove useful. Similarly the Atkins-Slate
programme sl for chess can store memories of its moves in previously
encountered situations and can monitor its own success when play-
ing against itself or another player, by using large differences
between the estimated and the actual score for a particular situation
to assign blame or credit to the previous four moves. It takes
account of at least thirty relevant features in its evaluation-function,
and can be taught not only the standard opening gambits but also
standard ways of winning end-games. Not surprisingly therefore
it is reckoned a better player than the Greenblatt programme - on
the level of board 500 for U.K. rather than board 2000.

6. Research in machine intelligence thus confirms the findings of

experimental psychology in relation to skill at chess playing. The
player improves as he moves from a purely or nearly atomistic
point of view to a more systemic one, and as he learns from ex-
perience which relational features in chess-situations are important.
Admittedly learning from experience is necessary in relation to
any task involving inductive judgement - i.e. any task involving
the evaluation of hypotheses in the light of currently available
information. One has to learn what are the relevant variables that
need to be represented in the information, s2 But the need to learn
from experience is especially significant here because, if an atomistic
conception of chess situations were appropriate, it would be quite
unnecessary to learn a vocabulary of relational concepts for describ-
ing or registering these situations. All one would need to know
would be that a chess-board has eight rows and eight flies.
Of course, no computer programme yet operates at the standard
of a master, let alone a grandmaster. But we can understand why
this is so if we compare the relatively short lists of relational features
that are registered and evaluated by even the best programmes with
the immense variety of these that are perceived by the best human
players, as their experimental protocols (and also their occasional
writings) reveal. Moreover it is not only technical difficulties that
programmers encounter when they try to make the programmes
include more of what a good human chess-player already knows.

66
 CHESS AS A MODEL OF LANGUAGE

There is also an overall impediment that obstructs any attempt to

construct computer-simulations of human skills at theorem-proving.
The versatility of the human brain often enables it to spot an
analogy between a formal structure encountered in a wff of a proof-
system and this-or-that pattern encountered in reality. Thus stored
memories of visually perceived shapes, for example, may suggest,
via appropriate interpretations of a formal system, some feature
of hitherto unsuspected relevance in certain wff of the system. Even
new theorems may sometimes be conjectured as a result of such
memorised experience. Correspondingly it may well be that a good
human chess-player's ability to perceive significant relations in a
chess-situation is due at least in part to an unconscious ability
to exploit analogies between the spatial and causal structures of his
perceptual world and the formal structures regulated by what I
earlier called the transformation-rules of chess. The familiar termin-
ology of chess-description - 'blocking', 'threatening', 'defending',
'controlling', 'pinning', 'forking', etc. - are all examples of such
analogies at a fairly elementary level. There is something essentially
metaphorical about the use of a word like 'threaten' or 'defend'
to describe the relations imminent in a given chess-situation if we
think of these relations quite formally in terms of the permissible
transformations of a given wff. So even the three-dimansionality
of chess-pieces on a board, with their different shapes and sizes, may
help to stimulate the visual memory and imagination of a human
player. But the typical computer-programme is altogether too
specialised to exploit any of these advantages that the human player
has. It has no way of learning from experience that will help it to
introduce new terms into its descriptive vocabulary for chess-
situations, as a human player does. At best it can only revise the
significance-weightings of the terms already present in its vocabulary.
Even the Atkins-Slate program incorporates no procedure for
forming new concepts. And certainly no programmer so far has
made any attempt to reproduce the ability of a human player to
profit in his play from aspects of his past experience that at the time
were quite unconnected with the formal structure of the game as a
theorem-proving contest. There seems no reason why this should
be an intrinsic impossibility for researchers in artificial intelligence.
But it is obviously a task of immense difficulty and complexity,
and the fact that it has not so far been accomplished helps to explain
why the best computer-programmes are still so much worse at
playing chess than the best human players. We just have to accept
that, as a result of its superior versatility, the brain of a good human

67
 L.J. COHEN

player has advanced much further than the best computer-programme

towards registering any given chess-situation as a systemic ensemble.

III

1. The actual playing of ordinary chess, when the players move

solid, three-dimensional pieces on a squared plane surface, may be
viewed as an interpretation of the formal system described in (I),
just as a species of inference in people's minds may be viewed as an
interpretation of a natural deduction sequence. Similarly what
constitutes expertise at chess may be understood, as shown in (II), in
terms of the corresponding ability to manipulate this underlying
system, Can natural language be somehow so matched up to chess
that it, or at least some important part or aspect of it, appears as an
alternative interpretation of the same underlying formal system?
This degree of structural isomorphism is unlikely to be attainable,
because of the highly idiosyncratic nature of one kind of board-
game as compared with another. Why should natural language
resemble chess any more than draughts or go or nine men's morris
or Abbot's ultima? But the extent to which such a matching is
unobtainable is the extent to which chess fails to constitute a
structural model for natural language.
Wittgenstein's method of matching was a fairly crude one. He
thought of chess just as one paradigm for the concept of a game -
a paradigm which he invoked in support of his conception of
linguistic activity as being like a kind of game. ~3 Nor was the para-
digm even a good one for this purpose, For, as we have seen, the
underlying structure of chess may be viewed as a theorem-proving
game with an artificial language, and the features in which linguistic
activity resembles chess may thus be due to their common linguistic
structure and not to their common membership of some wider
category of reality - the category of games. So it may be that we
can learn more about chess from the study of language than about
language from the study of chess.
Saussure pursued the analogy in greater detail, but he drew it
in two rather different ways. According to one account ~* a chess-
situation is to be compared with a synchronic language-state, and
presumably the rules about what moves are legitimate are to be
compared with the various laws about possible forms of linguistic
change, Just as only isolated linguistic elements are outwardly
changed in the passage from one language-state to the next, so

68
 CHESS AS A MODELOF LANGUAGE

too only one chess-piece is moved. But just as every individual

phonological or morphological alteration has its counter-effecl
on the rest of a linguistic system, so too every individual move has
a repercussion otl the rest of the chess-situation. Or, in other words,
while atomic predicates suffice to describe the change superficially,
systemic ones are required for a more perceptive characterisation.
According to Saussure the comparison is weak at only one point:
'the chessplayer intends to bring about a shift and thereby to exert
an action on the system, whereas language premeditates nothing'.
Human intelligence renders every synchronic state systemic, but the
initiation of a change is due to accidental circumstances, not intel-
ligent planning.
However, this pattern of comparison is certainly not so fruitful
in relation to the semantics of natural language, because it is not
at all so easy to spot what would constitute the counterpart of a
single chess-move. As Jost Trier pointed out, 3s when in 1300
the Middle High German word 'wfsheit' no longer expressed the
same unity of intellectual, technical, courtly and religious knowledge
that it did in 1200, this marked a change also in the meanings of
several co-ordinate words, together with their synonyms, antonyms
and associations. Moreover the systematic interconnections between
words in a particular semantic field are manifested in far more
important ways than in the interlocking network of changes that
have to occur when any change occurs. They would be manifest,
even if no changes occurred, in the interlocking network of implica-
tions, inferences, contradictions, incongruities, etc. that these words'
meanings generate. So, if chess-players' moves are to be regarded
as the counterpart of diachronic semantic change, t h e systemic
descriptions that articulate move-potential must just be the counter-
part of field-theoretic descriptions that articulate possible patterns
of semantic change without stating the synchronic implications,
etc. that underlie these patterns. Finally, while some of a chess-
player's systemic predicates can carry him through sequences of
several possible moves, it is not normal for linguists to characterise
any synchronic languate-states - whether phonological, morph-
logical, syntactic or semantic .... in terms of even one potential
pattern of change, let alone several.
But Saussure also suggests a rather different pattern of com-
parison. He speaks of chess as being like a language, where 'elements
hold each other in equilibrium in accordance with fixed rules'. 36
Rules, not shape or material, are what keep the true nature of a
chess-piece constant throughout a particular game, just as it is rules,

69
 L.J. COHEN

not outward form, that determine the synchronic identity of a

word. And if the analogy is drawn in this way we must suppose that
Saussure is implicitly thinking of a particular chess-situation as the
analogue of a sentence, while the relationship between one situation
and the next is to be compared with some logical, grammatical
or conceptual relation between sentences rather than with a histor-
ical or diachronic relation between successive language-states.
Such a comparison does indeed bring chess and natural language
much closer together, because it enables us to put the sentences
of a natural language on the same plane of comparison as the wff of
the formal system that underlies chess.
Of course, relevant features of disanalogy are still to be found.
In particular, if a chess wff $1 is transformed into a wff $2, any
piece-symbol that occurs in $2 must also occur in $1 ; whereas two
sentences of natural language may have important logical or gram-
matical relations to one another and yet be composed wholly or
partly of different words, like 'Yesterday was Monday' and 'To-
morrow will be Wednesday'. Again, the number of wff (situations)
is finite, even though astronomically large, while the number of
sentences in a natural language is generally agreed to be infinite.
Also natural language is richer in levels of articulation (phoneme,
morpheme, word, sentence) and enormously richer in the variety
of its rules. Nor has winning at chess any precise counterpart in the
outcome of any sequence of transformations to which a given
sentence of natural language may be exposed - such is the hetero-
geneity of the speech-acts for which these sentences are required.
In any case the chess model would be of no value n o w if it
merely served to clarify the Saussurean point that the identity
of an element in any linguistic system is determined by the rules
of the system rather than by the sensible characteristics of the
element. That point is readily intelligible to-day without the use of
a clarificatory analogy, partly because of the enormous influence
that Saussurean ideas have themselves exercised on linguistics and
partly because of widespread contemporary familiarity with the
operation of rule-governed systems in formal logic. If that were all
there was to say for the model, we should indeed learn more about
chess by thinking of it as an interpreted language-game than we
learn about language by thinking of it as a game like chess. For the
chess model to be attributed any current value it must help to
clarify some current issues. So I shall now try to show that this
model can in fact still be useful: specifically, it can assist the dis-
cussion of so-called 'holistic' and 'molecular' theories of meaning.

70
 CHESS AS A MODEL OF LANGUAGE

But here too, as with any other analogical model for understand-
ing the terminology of a scientific theory, the value of the model
may well be relative to a particular stage in the development of
human ideas. When we've mastered the sense of some new theoret-
ical terminology, with the help of the model, we may be able to
communicate its sense to subsequent generations without the help
of the model. Or we may still need its help for pedagogic purposes.

2. According to Davidson, if we decided

not to assume that parts of sentences have meanings except
in the ontologically neutral sense of making a systematic
contribution to the meanings of the sentences in which they
occur
then one direction in which this decision points
is a certain holistic view of meaning. If sentences depend for
their meaning on their structure, and we understand the mean-
ing of each item in the structure only as an abstraction from
the totality of sentences in which it features, then we can give
the meaning of any sentence (or word) only by giving the
meaning of every sentence (and word) in the language. Frege
said that only in the context of a sentence does a word have
meaning; in the same vein he might have added that only in
the context of the language does a sentence (and therefore a
word) have meaning.
Hence, on Davidson's view, such a holism pervades his own proposal
to identify a theory of meaning for the language L with a theory
that recursively generates Tarski-type definitions of truth for each
sentence of L.
To such a holism D u m m e t t has opposed what he calls a 'molecu-
lar' view of language s8 :
Any acceptable theory of meaning must give recognition
to the intereonnectedness of language. Since words cannot
be used on their own, but only in sentences, there cannot be
such a thing as a grasp of the sense of any one word which
does not involve at least a partial grasp of the senses of some
other words. Equally, an understanding of some one sentence
will usually depend on an understanding not merely of the
words which compose that sentence, and of other sentences
that can be constructed from them, but of a certain sector of
the language, often a very extensive one. The difference

71
 L.LCOHEN

between a molecular and a holistic view of language is not

that, on a molecular view, each sentence could, in principle,
be understood in isolation, but that, on a holistic view, it is
impossible fully to understand any sentence without knowing
the entire language, whereas on a molecular view, there is,
for each sentence, a determinate fragment of the language
a knowledge of which will suffice for a complete understand-
ing of that sentence.

Such a conception allows the sentences and expressions of a

language to be arranged in a partial ordering (with minimal elements),
according to whether the understanding of one expression is or is
not dependent upon the prior understanding of another. And
Dummett argues that some such ordering is required if we are to
allow for the progressive acquisition of a language. 'On a holistic
view . . . the relation of dependence . . . obtains between any one
expression and any other: there can be nothing between not know-
ing the language at aH and knowing it completely.' Dummett regards
the molecular view of language as being confirmed by the fact that
in practice, once we have reached a certain stage in learning
our language, much of the rest of the language is introduced
to us by means of purely verbal explanations; and it is reason-
able, as well as traditional, to suppose that such explanations
frequently display connections between expressions of the
language a grasp of which is actually essential to an under-
standing of the words so introduced. That is to say, in effect,
that the possibility of explaining certain expressions by
purely verbal means is an essential characteristic of the mean-
ing they possess.
Unfortunately, however, a number of different issues have some-
how got tangled up together in this famous Dummett-Davidson
controversy, and the chess model will turn out to be quite helpful
when we seek to unravel them.

3. If Davidson were right in supposing that in a truth-conditional

semantics for natural language L 'we can give the meaning of any
sentence (or word) only by giving the meaning of every sentence
(or word) in the language', it would seem to follow that if the
meaning of any one word had been different, as given in such a
semantics, then the meaning of every other word would also have
had to be different. Yet in fact this is quite obviously not the

72
 CHESS AS A MODELOF LANGUAGE

case. Suppose that some English word had a different meaning

from what it actually has: for example, suppose that brother meant
cousin and cousin meant brother. What would need to be changed
in a Davidsonian semantics for English? Clearly, if English were also
the metalanguage, nothing at all would need to be changed in the
verbal formulation of the postulates and theorems. Theorems like

(1) 'A boy loves his brother' is true if and only if a boy loves
his brother

would be derivable 39 just as before. Of course, what the theorem

asserted would be different since one of its metalinguistic terms
had a different sense. But unfortunately there is no way to express
this difference within the semantics. When the facts underlying other
empirical theories - in physics, say, or economics - are found to be
different from what had been premissed, the theories are either
reformulated or at the least some express stipulation could and
would be added about how certain terms are to be reinterpreted.
But, though a Davisonian semantics is an empirical theory,4~ it
certainly differs from all other empirical theories in this respect.
So, even if two speakers of a natural language L differ from one
another in what they take the meanings of certain words to be,
they might still construct Davidsonian theories of meaning in L
that were verbally quite indistinguishable from one another.
Obviously differences might show up immediately if the two theories
were constructed in a metalanguage other than L. But the canonical
form of a Davidsonian semantics - the one which trades on its
Tarskian pedigree and carries immediate conviction with a native-
speaker - requires object-language and metalanguage to be the
same. And there we shall certainly not be able to use the method
of inspection in order to tell whether, if an alteration is made in
one theorem, like (1)above, and appropriate adjustments are made
in order to preserve consistency, then all the other theorems are
altered also. Since the initial alteration is not inspectable, afortiori
the whole procedure of checking by inspection is not available.
If we turn now to consider the situation where object-language
and metalanguage are different, the alleged interconnectedness
of meanings in Davidsonian semantics is still not properly in evi-
dence. If we envisage a change in the meanings of one or two words
in the object-language, but no changes in the metalanguage, then
certainly this change should show up in the form of directly cor-
responding alterations in the T-sentences, or theorems, of the

73
 L.J. COHEN

semantics. If the French fr~re meant the same as the English cousin,
instead of brother, then an English version of the semantics for
French would include among its theorems
(2) 'Un garcon aime son fr6re' is true if and only if a boy loves
his cousin
instead of

(3) 'Un garcon aime son fr6re' is true if and only if a boy loves
his brother.
Similar alterations would need to be made in every T-sentence in
which the noun fr~re appeared within the quoted context. But
what other alterations would need to be made? It is not apparent
that the form of a Davidsonian semantics would compel any other
alteration whatever, unless the word in question were part of the
very small logical vocabulary with which the semantics operates.
All the other T-sentences could remain just as they were, without
any inconsistency's being thereby introduced into the system.
Of course, the French language might in fact be an interconnected
system, and such a change in one kind of sentence's meaning might
in fact bring about changes in the meanings of every other kind of
sentence. These changes would, no doubt, be reflected in the appro-
priate Davidsonian semantics. But the fact that the semantics would
then be taking a systemic view of French would be a contingent fact
about its description of French rather than a necessary feature
of any truth-conditional semantics. If another language suffered a
similar change in the meanings of one or two words, and this
language were not an interconnected system, then the appropriate
Davidsonian semantics for this language would not present a
systemic description of it. There is nothing in the Tarskian apparatus
of semantical notions like satisfaction and reference, from which
Davidsonian T-sentences must be derivable,41 to compel a more
systemic treatment,
Davidson himself seems to suggest, in the passage quoted above
(on p. ) that this kind of semantics is systemic because it reveals
the meaning of a word only as an abstraction from the totality of
sentences in which it features, while each sentence depends for its
meaning on its own component items. But this is not in fact suf-
ficient to ensure the presence of genuinely systemic interconnections.
Admittedly, if the meaning of a word is supposed to be given by the
totality of T-theorems in which it has a quoted occurrence, then,

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 C H E S S A S A MODELOFLANGUAGE

since for any two words in L there is always some sentence in L

that includes them both, it will not be possible for the meaning of
any one word to be shown as having changed - in a semantics
where the object-language and meta-language are different - without
its also being shown that the meaning of every other word has
changed. In this respect Davidsonian semantics exhibits a certain
apparent systemicity. But the chess model will show why this
systemicity is only apparent. One way to describe the part play-
able by a king's pawn (before queening) in a game of chess would
be to enumerate the totality of obtainable situations 0.e. of true
wff in the formal system) in which that piece figures. Obviously,
if a rule were introduced that barred a king's pawn from taking
into the queen's file, we should then have to alter not only our
description of the part playable by the king's pawn, but also any
descriptions constructed on analogous lines for other pieces. Never-
theless this mode of description would still be a thoroughly atom-
istic one, in the sense that within each situation enumerated no one
piece-position entails any other. A properly systemic description
of the part played by a piece in a particular situation would have
to exploit the transformation-potential of the situation, thus ex-
hibiting the interconnections between the relational role of the
piece in question and the relational roles of all the other pieces
in the situation. It is this kind of systemic description that an
ideally skilful chess-player has to register.
In sum, to regard the meaning of a word as being given by the
totality of T-theorems in which it has a quoted occurrence is to
use the term 'meaning' in a sense that makes it much harder to
discern what a genuinely systemic semantics would be like. Of
course, the meaning of a sentence is indeed different if the mean-
ing of one of its components is different. But this does not suffice
to ensu/e that the meanings of the other components also are
different unless the meaning of the sentence itself has to be treated
as an ensemble of interconnected elements. And certainly David-
son's Tarskian semantics can hardly be construed as requiring such
a treatment of sentence-meaning. For example, the predicates that
occur now in this sentence, now in that sentence, are not supposed
by Tarski somehow to change their nature as now this function, now
that function assigns entities to their free variables. But, if therefore
the sentence-meanings in Davidsonian semantics are not systemic
ensembles, then the elements that compose these meanings can vary
independently of one another; and so the fact that each sentence
depends for its meaning on its own component items does not suf-

75
 L.J. COHEN

rice to establish that the word-meanings in the language - abstracted

as they may be from the totality of sentences in which they occur -
are all interconnected with one another. Afortiori it has not been
established that the sentence-meanings are all interconnected.
Davidson's theory of meaning is as thoroughly atomistic as its
Tarskian foundations would lead one to suppose.
It may well in fact be the case that, as Davidson puts it, 'we can
give the meaning of any sentence (or word) only by giving the
meaning of every sentence (and word) in the language'. But David-
son himself has not given any argument for accepting that this
thesis is valid in a sufficiently important sense of 'meaning'. He has
not given any argument for supposing that by exhibiting a T-sen-
tence like (1) as derivable within a small part of a semantics for
English we could not represent the meaning of the sentence quoted
therein just as accurately as if we had exhibited its derivability
within a complete semantics. Davidson's holism is a gloss on his
theory. It is a certain way of relating the concept of meaning to an
axiomatisation of the truth-conditions for sentences of a natural
language. But it is not intrinsic to such an axiomatisation.
In saying this I am judging a Davidsonian semantics by the
criterion Davidson himself puts forward 42 - the degree of insight
such a semantics affords into how the machinery of our linguistic
accomplishments is structured. The problem is analogous to the
question, discussed in (II) above, about how a chess-player's know-
ledge is structured. Davidson claims to be giving a systemic answer,
but in fact his answer is a purely atomistic one. So far as that part
of the linguistic machinery is concerned which is responsible for the
truth of (1), we shall learn no more from a complete Davidsonian
semantics than we could learn from quite a small part of it. But
of course the argument that I have given for this conclusion assumes
that we could in practice be in a position to study a partial fragment
of an adequate semantics for a natural language. It assumes that
such a study can be conducted in abstraction from whatever epis-
temological problems there may be in discovering the semantics.
It assumes the position of someone who has at his disposal an
already compiled syntax and semantics of a given natural language,
rather than the position of someone who has to compile this and
may not be able to rest reasonably assured that he has got it as right
as he can until he has in fact completed the task. Davidson himself
argues 43 that an investigator of a foreign language ought not to
rest content with any other criterion than that the totality of
T-sentences should optimally fit 'evidence about sentences held

76
 CHESS AS A MODEL OF LANGUAGE

true by native speakers'; and - since such an investigator's decisions

about meanings depend so much on decisions whether to impute
true beliefs to native speakers or false ones - optimality of fit,
on Davidson's view,44 is achieved by assuming native speakers
right as often as possible according to our own view of what is
right. This 'holistic constraint', as Davidson 4s calls it, certainly
ensures that the investigator of a foreign language would not be
entitled to pronounce on the meanings of words in any one Sentence
until he was capable of pronouncing on the meanings of words in
all other sentences, and that if he had to alter any part of his seman-
tics he might have to alter every other part of it. Nor is it at all
unreasonable to insist thus that an investigator should wait until
his semantics covers the whole of the foreign language before having
confidence in any part of it, since before that point he could not be
sure which already conjectured hypotheses might later need to be
adjusted in order to maintain consistency with the meaning-assign-
ments that emerge as being appropriate for the hitherto uninter-
preted sentences.

4. There is an obvious temptation - which Davidson's publications

on the subject do not reduce - to confuse the holism that Davidson
describes as constraining the semantic investigation of a foreign
language with the systemic view of meaning that he takes to be the
outcome of assuming that parts of sentences have meanings only
in the sense of making an interconnected contribution to the mean-
ings of the sentences in which they occur. The former, epistemo-
logical thesis seems so obviously well-founded, and the latter, onto-
logical thesis seems so obviously to need further support, that
the one might well be intended to buttress the other. A sentence like
'we can give the meaning of any sentence (or word) only b ~ giving
the meaning of every sentence (and word) in the language ,'~ slides
easily in the mind from being a way of saying that investigation
can only unravel the meaning of one sentence or word with optimal
adequacy through a process that also unravels the meaning of every
other with optimal adequacy, to being a way of saying that the
actual meaning of all words and sentences are interdependent.
But it would certainly be more charitable to suppose that David-
son himself does not take his epistemological thesis to support his
ontological one. For in the epistemological thesis the holism that is
asserted concerns the beliefs of a linguistic investigator and how they
constrain one another: in the ontological thesis the systemic claim
that is made concerns 'the workings of a natural language' which, on

77
 L.J. COHEN

Davidson's view,47 it is the ambition of a semantic theory to account

for. And it is easy to think of other kinds of investigation which
are subject to a holistic constraint, in Davidson's sense, and yet
do not yield knowledge of systemic ensembles. For example,
the object of your investigation might be to discover which pieces
occupy which squares in an unseen chess-situation, where you
may not ask the row or f'de number of any piece's square, but
may ask such questions as 'Does White have a Queen?', 'Is there a
black pawn on the same f'de as White's Queen?', 'Is White's Queen
adjacent to another of White's pieces?', and so on. Here the facts
to be established - the set of piece-positions, as I called them above
( p . ) - are viewed atomistically, but the beliefs in the investigator's
mind may need continuous readjustment as the answers to his
questions feed him with fresh information. And here too, as David-
son remarks in the case of linguistic investigation, there may be quite
a range of acceptable theories, even when all obvious questions have
been asked. The chess-analogy can generate an indeterminacy like
that which haunts the problem of constructing a semantics for a
foreign language. But it is clear that the holistic structure of the
investigation is quite compatible with the presence of a completely
atomistic structure in the facts under investigation. You are out to
compile a list of piece-positions, not of relational roles. (And this
analogy with chess also suggests the indefensibility of claiming
that, at least from an anti-realist point of view, there can be no
more to a semantics than the evidence from which it is compiled.)
Hence the plausibility of Davidson's holistic epistemology cannot
serve to buttress his otherwise unsupported thesis that a truth-con-
ditional semantics for natural language is also holistic, in the sense
of constituting a systemic ensemble. The meanings of individual
words within such a semantics are conceived just as atomistically
as are the piece-positions within an atomistic description of a chess-
situation.

5. Indeed, according to the chess-model, a truth-conditional

semantics only loses its atomistic character to the extent that
interpretational elements are added to it. We need to be able to
derive theorems not only like (1) but also like
(4) 'A boy loves his brother' is true if and only if 'A boy loves
his male sibling' is true.
The precise variety of forms such theorems would take need not
concern us here. But, just as the totality of T-sentences in a purely

78
 CHESS AS A MODEL OF LANGUAGE

Davidsonian semantics would have to secure an optimal fit with

'evidence about sentences held true by native speakers', so too the
totality of derivation-rules or transformational-rules in inter-
pretationally enriched semantics would have to secure an
optimal fit with evidence about inferences that all native speakers
believe valid. The systemic meaning of a word in a natural language
would then be determined by its relations of synonymy, subalterna-
tion, antonymy, etc. to other words, and these relations would be
revealed by the inferential potential of the sentences in which it
occurred. Of course, we have no names for most of these relations.
But we also have no names for most of the relations that chess-
pieces have to one another in virtue of the transformational poten-
tial of the situations into which they enter.
Even Davidson admits that 'there is no giving the truth conditions
of all sentences without showing that some sentences are logical
consequences of others'. 4a But strictly logical consequences, which
even a purely truth-conditional semantics reveals, are only a small
fraction of the consequential relationships that a systemically
enriched semantics would reveal. Nor would such an enriched
theory need actually to develop a vocabulary for these relationships,
any more than the transformation-rules of chess need to be stated
in terms of expressions like 'attacks', 'defends', etc. It is wrong to
suppose that a semantics cannot exhibit interrelations of synonymy,
for example, unless it also embodies some concept of synonymy or
analyticity in a term of its meta-language. The fact that a theorem
like (4) was derivable from the postulates of the theory Would
certainly imply that it exhibited what would intuitively or pre-
systematically be regarded as an analytic truth. But, quite similarly,
the derivability of a theorem like (1) implies its being a contribu-
tion to the exposition of sentence-meaning. If you view (1)merely
as an asserted truth-functional biconditional, you have no reason
to think of it as a contribution to the exposition of meaning, since
as a mere truth-functional assertion it would have to tolerate quite
severe distortion by the substitution of truth-functionally equivalent
expressions. What (1) implies is only tied down to the exposition
of meaning by the insistence that (1) has to be thought of as a
theorem within an appropriate deductive system. Any substitutions
that are not licensed by the postulates of that system are illegitimate.
In just the same way we should have to regard a sentence like (4)
as being tied down to semantic analysis, in the present context,
by force of its derivability within such an (appropriately enriched)
system.

79
 L.J. COHEN

Of course, a genuinely systemic semantics would be enormously

complex. It is very far from being the case that, in order to exhibit
the required system of semantic relations, all we need to achieve is,
as Evans proposed, a9 'a specification of the underlying real essence
which a word has in common with many other words, and of which
the validity of certain inferences involving it is a consequence'.
The fact is that this kind of specification could at best (i.e. even if
we were happy with a doctrine of real essences) provide a founda-
tion for only one kind of semantic relation, out of the enormous
number of different kinds that are relevant here. For example,
it could not cope with the relations that depend on certain words'
being members of an ordered set, like the day-names in
(5) 'Yesterday was Monday' is true (for S at t) if and only if
'To-day is Tuesday and to-morrow is Wednesday' is true
(for S at t).
Compare other calendrical terms, or the everyday vocabulary of
weights and measures, kinship, etc. Indeed, it may well be that the
project of completing a systemic semantics for any one synchronic
state of a natural language would be at least as vast and imprac-
ticable as the project of completing an account of the systemic
knowledge of piece-roles that an ideally competent chess-player
would have.
Nevertheless the astronomical size and complexity of such a
project does not justify anyone in disregarding its logical possi-
bility and in thereby misrepresenting what would constitute a
truly systemic semantics. It is an old point so that the ability
to speak and understand a language must include something other
than the ability to map paraphrases on to wave-forms. But it does
not follow that the ability to speak and understand consists solely
in a postulationaUy derivable knowledge of sentential truth-condi-
tions. A machine that was able only to utter grammatical sentences,
and paraphrase those it heard, independently of their socio-physical
context of utterance, would not constitute a model for a normal
speaker-hearer but rather for a schizophrenic speaker a person
out of touch with reality, who utters grammatical sentences, or
strings of sentences at random, and thus gives no indication that
he knows what they refer to or when they are true. But a person
who knew only the occasions for the true utterance of each sentence
would be equally degenerate or abnormal as a speaker. He would be
cut off from recognising very many of the consequences of what
others say, unable to see most of their inconsistencies, and blind

80
 CHESS AS A MODEL OF LANGUAGE

to most of their agreements or disagreements with one another or

with himself. In his atomistic conception of sentence-meanings he
would be like a chess-player who knows which pieces are on which
squares but does not know what relations (of threat, defence, etc.)
hold between the pieces. He might not be schizophrenic, but he
would certainly be pathologically disconnected in his speaking and
understanding.

6. Finally, we can try to clarify the comparison of a genuinely

systemic (i.e. non-Davidsonian) semantics with a molecular semantics
like that which Dummett has proposed.
If we take a chess-player's knowledge of piece-roles as our para-
digm of systemic knowledge, it is evident that the systemic character
of an ensemble is quite compatible with the possibility that some of
the interconnections between its elements are much more important
than others. If this is not reflected appropriately by a chess-playing
programme's evaluation-function, the programme will play badly
and lose its games against players whom it might otherwise defeat.
Correspondingly some of the relations revealed by a systemic
semantics might be of very little importance to our linguistic
understanding. This has been fully recognised by those who use a
spreading-activation theory of human semantic processing, like
Quillian~s, to explain experimental results in this area. For example,
Collins and Loftus sl write that in this kind of theory
a concept can be represented as a node in a network, with
properties of the concept represented as labeled relational
links from the node to other concept nodes. These links are
pointers, and usually go in both directions between two points.
Links can have different criterialities, which are numbers
indicating how essential each link is to the meaning of the
concept. The criterialities on any pair of links between two
concepts can be different; for example, it might be highly
criterial for the concept of a type-writer that it is a machine,
and not very criterial for the concept of a machine that one
kind is a typewriter. From each of the nodes linked to a
given node, there will be links to other concept nodes and
from each of these in turn to still others. In QuiUian's theory,
the full meaning of any concept is the whole network as
entered from the concept node. s:
Dummett's thesis, however, is not that semantic relations can be
arranged in a partial ordering with regard to their importance: it is

81
 L.J. COHEN

that a natural language's sentences and other expressions can be

arranged in a partial ordering (with minimal elements) according to
whether the understanding of one expression is or is not dependent
upon the prior understanding of another. Now, admittedly a child
might conceivably be taught several sections of its vocabulary
in initial isolation from one another by a process of verbal explana-
tion that leads on from one word to another. But the semantic
knowledge that the child acquires thus is still of a fairly shallow and
rudimentary sort. The child has not mastered its language at any-
where near an adult level until it has learned how to combine words
from many different sections of its vocabulary into a single sentence,
or into a single set of consecutively uttered sentences; oand in order
to be able to do this satisfactorily a speaker must know how the
implications of these different words bear on one another. An
adult speaker normally wishes to avoid inconsistency or absurdity,
and an adult hearer normally seeks to interpret an utterance in a
way that will avoid imputing inconsistency or absurdity to it.
The extent to which either objective is attainable must vary with
the amount of knowledge that the speaker or hearer has about
the semantic interrelations of the words used to construct the
utterance. Hence, if the 'dependence' that understanding one ex-
pression has on understanding another does not mean just the
initial order of superficial acquaintance by verbal explanation,
it is a dependence that submits neither to partial ordering nor to
well-ordering. Understanding any word's meaning depends to at
least some extent on understanding every other's, even though it
depends much more on understanding the meanings of some than
of others, since the semantic relations between some meanings
are much more important than those between others. Just as
Davidson's remarks about the holistic procedures involved in learn-
ing a foreign language supply no justification for accepting a
systemic conception of what the learner has to learn, so too
Dummett's remarks about the molecular procedures involved in a
child's learning its mother-tongue supply no justification for reject-
ing such a systemic conception. The epistemology of the subject
does not determine its ontology.
Indeed poets and prose-writers of distinction, who would typ-
ically be regarded as having a very good command of their native
language, often dazzle us by the felicity with which they combine
elements from different areas of their vocabulary. These grand-
masters of literature are much more skilful than the rest of us at
finding analogies, similes, metaphors, and other verbal imagery

82
 CHESS AS A MODEL OF LANGUAGE

to illumine the sense of what they want to say, where the wrong
implication would destroy it.
What, then, of Dummett's argument that systemic semantics pro-
dudes the progressive acquisition of language? Well, it is certainly
not the case with the conceptual apparatus for registering chess-
situations that 'there can be nothing between not knowing the
language at all and knowing it completely'. To a novice the rela-
tional role of a knight may seem quite independent of that of a
bishop. Perhaps in all the games that he or she has so far played
these two pieces have never taken part in any obvious combination.
But the expert player who understands the roles of these pieces
better may well do so because he perceives their interdependence.
Analogously the purpose of a semantic theory should be to articu-
late the semantic knowledge of an ideally skilled speaker-hearer,
not of a learner or child. Of course, one should distinguish, when
considering the skill of an ideal speaker-hearer, between semantical
and rhetorical ability. Such a speaker's semantical ability includes
an awareness of semantical relations between different words:
his rhetorical ability includes the capacity to exploit these rela-
tions in order to make his point. Analogously one can distinguish
a chess-expert's mastery of the relational vocabulary for describing
piece-roles, from his ability to compare structural features of the
present situation with remembered features of previous games in
order to design winning strategies. ~

THE QUEEN'S COLLEGE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY
OXFORD
ENGLAND

NOTES

1 A.D. de Greet, Thought and Choice in Chess, 1965 (which is a revised

version of the author's Het Denken van den Schaker, 1946).
2 Ibid., p. 319.
a Ibid., pp. 329-333.
4 Ibid., p. 334.

83
 L.J. COHEN

s W.G. Chase and H.S. Simon, 'The Mind's Eye in Chess', in Visual Infor-
mation Processing, ed. W.G. Chase, 1973, pp. 215-281.
6 Ibid., p. 225.
7 Ibid., p. 237.
8 D. Allan Allport, 'The State of Cognitive Psychology', Quarterly Journal
of ExperimentalPsychology 27, 1975, p. 146.
9 Ibid., p. 223.
10 Ibid., pp. 2 7 8 - 9 .
11 E . G . A . Newell and H.A. Simon, 'An Example of Human Chess Play
in the Light of Chess Playing Programs' in Progress in Biocybernetics, ed.
N. Wiener and J.P. Schad~, 2, 1965, pp. 1 9 - 7 5 (one subject) and D.A.
Wagner and M.J. Scurrah, 'Some Characteristics of Human Problem-
Solving in Chess', Cognitive Psychology 2, 1971, pp. 4 5 4 - 4 7 8 (three
subjects).
12 U. Neisser, 'The Multiplicity of Thought', British Journal of Psychology
54, 1963, p. 13.
ta J. Good, 'A Five-year Plan for Automatic Chess', in Machine Intelligence
2, 1968, ed. D. Dale and D. Michie, 1969, p. 108.
14 Cf. A. Newell, J.C. Shaw and H.A. Simon, 'Chess Playing Programmes
and the Problem of Complexity', IBM Journal of Research and Develop-
ment 2, 1958, p. 324.
is Op. cir., p. 106.
16 A. Newell, J.C. Shaw and H.A. Simon, op. tit., p. 323. Cf. D. Michie,
On Machine Intelligence, 1974, p. 27f., and A.M. Turing, 'Digital Com-
puters Applied to Games', in Faster than Thought, ed. E.V. Bowden,
1953, pp. 286-310.
17 Cf. A. Newell and H.A. Simon, Human Problem Solving, 1972, p. 673ff.
t8 C.E. Shannon, 'Programming a Computer to Play Chess', Philosophical
Magazine 41, 1950, pp. 2 5 6 - 2 7 5 .
19 l.J. Good, 'A Five-year Plan for Automatic Chess', in Machine Intelli-
gence 2, ed. E. Dale and D. Michie, 1968, pp. 8 9 - 1 1 8 .
20 A. Bernstein, 'A Chess-playing Program for IBM 704', Chess Review
July, 1958, p. 208f.
21 Cf. R. Greenblatt, D. Easflake and S. Crocker, 'The Greenblatt Chess
Program', in Proceedings of the Fall Joint Computer Conference, 1967,
pp. 801-810.
~2 I.J. Good, 'Analysis of the Machine Chess Game J. Scott (White) ICL-
1900 versus R.D. Greenblatt PDP 10' in Machine Intelligence 4, ed.
B. Meltzer and D. Michie, 1969, p p . 2 6 7 - 9 .

84
 CHESS AS A MODEL OF LANGUAGE

23 J.J. Scott, 'A Chess-Playing Program', Machine Intelligence 4, 1969,

pp. 255-266.
A. Newell and It.A. Simon, op. cit, p. 705, and A. Newell, J.C. Shaw
and H.A. Simon, 'Chess Playing Programs and the Problem of Com-
plexity' IBM Journal of Research and Development 2, 1958, pp. 3 2 0 -
335. Cf. A. Newell, J.C. Shaw and H.A. Simon, 'Report on a General
Problem-Solving Programme', in Information Processing. Proceedings
of the International Conference on Information Processing, UNESCO,
1960, pp. 256-264.
2s Op. cir., p. 781ff.
26 D. Michie, On Machine Intelligence, 1974, p. 138ff.
27 Ibid.
28 A. Newell and H.A. Simon, 'An example of Human Chess Play in the
Light of Chess Playing Programs' in N. Wiener and J.P. Schad6 (eds.),
Progress in Biocybernetics 2, 1965, p. 23.
29 Ibid., pp. 2 6 - 7 and 55.
3o A.L. Samuel, 'Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of
Checkers', 1BM Journal of Research and Development 3, 1959, pp. 211 -
229.
31 Cf. D.N.L. Levy, 'Computer Chess - a Case Study in the CDC 6600',
in Machine Intelligence 6, 1971, ed. B. Meltzer and D. Michie, pp. 151 --
163.
32 Cf. L. Jonathan Cohen, The Implications of Induction, 1970, passim.
So judgments about how much certain evidence inductively confirms a
particular hypothesis are empirical - not analytic, as Carnap supposed.
33
E . G . L . Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell,
1953, pp. 80-2. The concept of a language-game seems to have occurred
to Leibniz, who spoke of inventing a lucius to be played, for pedagogic
purposes, with his philosophical language: Opuscules et Fragments
ln~dits de Leibniz, ed. L. Couturat, Paris, 1903, p. 290. Leibniz refers
in this passage to John Wilkin's work on a philosophical language; and
Wilkins had himself written about several games that might help people
to learn the various categories of written expressions within his arti-
ficial language (el. his An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philo-
sophical Language, 1668, p. 442). Similarly Wittgenstein referred exten-
sively to language-games as a mode of pedagogy in his preliminary studies
for Philosophical Investigations, later published as The Blue and Brown
Books, 1958 (e.g.p. 81).
34 F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics , ed. C. Bally and
A. Sechehaye, trans. W. Baskin, New York: Philosophical Library,
1959, pp. 8 8 - 9 .

85
 L.J. COHEN

35 Der Deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes, vol. I, Heidelberg,

1931, esp. pp. 1 - 4 ; 'Deutsche Bedeutungsforschung', Germanische
Philologie: Ergebnisse und Aufgaben: Festschrift ff~r O. Behaghel, ed.
A. G6tze et al., 1934, pp. 173-200, esp. p. 188; and 'Das Sprachliche
Feld', Neue Jahrbticher f~r ICissenschaft und Jugendbildung, 1934,
pp. 4 2 8 - 4 4 9 .
36 Ibid., p. 110, cf. p. 22.
a7 D. Davidson, 'Truth and Meaning ', Synthese 17, 1967, p. 308.
aa M. Dummett, 'What is a Theory of Meaning? (II)'in Truth and Meaning:
Essays in Semantics, ed. G. Evans and J. McDowell, Oxford, 1976, p. 78f.
a9 Strictly speaking, the subject of the left-hand clause in each of these
theorem-stating biconditionals should be a structural description of
the sentence concerned, rather than a self-naming quotation of it. But it
is convenient to foltow Davidson in the iicence he allows himself to
employ the quotational form.
4O Cf. D. Davidson, 'Truth and Meaning', loc. cit., p. 311.
41 CL D. Davidson, 'Radical Interpretation', in Dialectica 27, 1973, p. 321;
and 'True to the Facts', Journal of Philosophy lxvi, 1969, p. 757f.
4~ 'Truth and Meaning', [oc. cit., p. 311.
4a 'Radical Interpretation', loc. cit., p. 326.
44 Ibid., p. 324.
4s Ibid., p. 326.
46 'Truth and Meaning', op. cir., p. 308.
47 Ibid., p. 311.

4a D. Davidson, 'Semantics for Natural Languages', in Linguaggi nella SocieM

e nell Tecnica, Milan, 1970, p. 184f.
49 G. Evans, 'Semantic Structure and Logical Form', in Truth and Meaning:
Essays in Semantics, ed. G. Evans and J. McDowetl, Oxford, 1976, p. 210.
so CL L. Jonathan Cohen, critical study of The Structure of Language:
Readings in the Philosophy of Language, ed. J.A. Fodor and J.J. Katz,
1964, in Philosophical Quarterly 16, 1966, pp. 1 6 5 - 1 7 7 ; and D. Lewis,
'General Semantics', in 'Semantics of Natural Language', ed. D. Davidson
and G. Harman, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972, p. 169.
st A.M. Collins and E.F. Loftus, 'A spreading-activation Theory of Semantic
Processing', Psychological Review 82, 1975, pp. 407 -428.
52 Ibid., p. 408. A.L. Glass and M.J. Holyoak, 'Alternative Conceptions of
Semantic Theory', Cognition 3(4). 1974, pp. 3 1 3 - 3 3 9 , offer further
empirical arguments (based on reaction-time experiments) for a network

86
 CHESS AS A MODEL OF LANGUAGE

model of semantic processing. Cf. also A. Lehrer, Semantic Fields and

Lexical Structure, Amsterdam, 1974, p. 71.
53
For helpful comments on an earlier version of the present paper I am
grateful to Professor A. Kasher and to participants in discussions of the
paper at the universities of Oxford, Warwick and Western Ontario and at
a meeting of the British Society for Philosophy of Science.

GRAZER
PHILOSOPHISCHE S T U D I E N
BAND 14 1981 VOI UME 14
Autslitze ,4 rticles
l-|ow to Make the World Fit Our Language: An Essay
in Meinongian Semantics . . . . . . . . . William .J. R A P A P O R T
Reference and Meinongian Objects . . . . . . . . . . Daniel t t l I N T E R
Das sogenannte .paradigm case argument": F+ine Familie
von anti-~keptischen Argumentatio.sstrategien . . . . . Eike wm SAVI(;NY
Unsaturatedness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peter M. SIMONS
Criteria of Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . Herlinde STUI)ER
Free Agency. A Non-Reductionist Causal Account . . . . Wilhelm V O S S E N K U | | I
A .Journey to Eden: Geach on Aristotele . . . . . . George ENGI EBRI:.TSI-N
Because God Wills It . . . . . . . . . . . . Robert I. R I C I I M A N
Besp~etbungen Rev~eu' Dtlth'~
G. P. BAKER & P. M. S. HACKER (eds.): Wittgenstcit):
Understanding and Meaning, Oxford: l~,lackwcll 1980 Mark I IFI MI'
Crispin W R I G H T : Wittgenstein on the #oundatiom
o] Mat hematicL London: Duckworth 1980 . . . . . ( har[vs Met ARTY
David W I G G I N S : Sameness and Substance, Oxford:
Blaekwell 1980 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peter M SIMON:',
Marie B U N G E : Ontology 1, Ontology II, l)~wdrecht:
Reidel 1977/1979 . . . . . . . . . Peter P. K I R S C I t I ' N M A N N
Wolfgaug STEGMf3IJ.ER: The Structurali~t VteT*, o[ I ],eories,
B e r l i n - - H e i d e l b e r g - N e w York: SpHligt,t 1979 . . . . . . Ren6 TIIOM
tlerau~geber I:d~tr
Prof. Dr. Rudolf I t A I I E R , lnstitut fiir I'hdosophie, LIniversit~it (;raz, tteinrldastral~c 2t~.
A 8010 Gra~', Osterreidl/Austria

87