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ON LINGUISTICS IN PHILOSOPHY,
AND PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS
ABSTRACT. After reviewing some major features of the interactions between Linguistics
and Philosophy in recent years, I suggest that the depth and breadth of current inquiry
into semantics has brought this subject into contact both with questions of the nature of
linguistic competence and with modern and traditional philosophical study of the nature
of our thoughts, and the problems of metaphysics. I see this development as promising for
the future of both subjects.
Our making it so was not a novelty. But our making so much of it was a
novelty, made possible by achievements especially in logic and the theory
of formal languages, by the concentrated effort of part of the represent-
atives of “the linguistic turn” in philosophy, and by the work of Rudolf
Carnap, W.V. Quine, and others.
It was exciting. There were things to be discovered. Only in the late
1970s, for example, did a coherent even if still partial theory of the
conditions on taking anaphoric pronouns as bound variables begin to
emerge, along with full accounts of restricted quantification, steps toward
a reasonable story about the logic of conditionals, and much else.
Latterly, the philosophy of mind (an appropriate label for a rather
loosely connected family of inquiries, more or less involved with the
cognitive sciences, or their interpretation) has become the center of specu-
lative philosophy, and the philosophy of language is no longer the general,
preferred format for philosophical exposition. I do not rehearse here the
1 Reprinted in Lewis 1998, 22.
ON LINGUISTICS IN PHILOSOPHY, AND PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS 575
steps taken in this direction. Instead, or so I shall argue, we can see the
beginnings of new problems and questions, within the philosophy of lan-
guage conceived as a specialty, not just within philosophy, but also within
linguistics.
Linguistics and philosophy, like steak and barbecue sauce, have much
to give each other. Philosophy has acted for many years as a kind of
logic delivery system to linguistics, a role that will doubtless continue;
and formal linguistics, by opening up investigations in philosophical logic
to the question of the details of particular sentences, their precise syntax
and combinatorics of meaning, has enriched and deepened these investig-
ations. What I wish to dwell upon, however, is the prospect of a common
enterprise, wherein elements typical of philosophy and those typical of
linguistics interact.
This common enterprise, I suggest, is the clarification of the nature of
our thoughts, what we actually express when we understand one another.
Assume, what is common enough although open to question, that this
clarification calls first of all for the exposition of the truth conditions of
sentences, as they occur as parts of total languages, and within the con-
texts of their potential utterance; and assume also that any correct account
of what we are inclined to assert must, over a wide domain, make us
pretty much right about the way things are.2 Then the truth conditions of
much of what we believe must be such as to be actually met; and this
implies that what turns up in the metaphysics of semantic investigation
cannot be passed off as a mere manner of speaking, but constitutes our
best conception of the way the world is.
Examples of metaphysical features that have been deployed in contem-
porary investigation are many: Davidson 1967 and subsequent work on
individual events; Montague 1960 on what he called “philosophical entit-
ies”; and elements such as propositions and individual concepts, advanced
in Carnap 1947, but now understood in terms of possible-worlds semantics
or counterpart theory, and others. If the proffered semantics employing
these elements is correct, then they must form, not merely part of our
conception of the world, but part of the world itself.
To say this much is not to commit semantics to an all-out realism with
respect to the elements invoked. It does, however, imply that the question
of realism must be taken seriously, including familiar questions of pos-
sible reduction or relativization of the objects involved, as for instance
whether individual events can be reduced to regions of space and time, or
whether possible worlds can be modeled as maximally consistent sets of
propositions.
2 This view is identified especially with Davidson 1984.
576 JAMES HIGGINBOTHAM
place within the general subject of linguistics.5 Given the premise that the
sentences we use express our thoughts, the study of semantic competence
– a “property of the mind”, to use Jackendoff’s terms – is a study at the
intersection of philosophical and linguistic interests and concerns.
To be sure, abstention is possible. On the philosophical side, one may
refrain on principled grounds from entering the area where the alleged
knowledge of meaning is inexplicit. A difficulty with this stance is that
explicit and inexplicit knowledge interact in producing rationalizing ex-
planations of behavior and understanding. Thus when one of my students
said to me that she had “hard-drived the diskette”, I grasped that she had
put the contents of the diskette onto the hard drive of her computer, the full
explanation of this ordinary event involving not only my explicit know-
ledge of diskettes and hard drives, but also the inexplicit knowledge of
denominal verb formation in English. The latter gives rise to a class of
verbs that involve placing the reference of the direct object within an object
of the sort classified by the noun from which the verb was derived. These
are the location verbs, including stable (the horse), shelve (the book), and
many, many others. The process is productive, as my student’s remark
shows; but her, and my, knowledge of the process was inexplicit. Insofar as
we offer a rational account of my coming to form the (correct) belief that
she said that she placed the contents of the diskette on the hard drive, the
premise expressing the productivity of the formation of denominal location
verbs must enter.6
As for abstention on the linguistic side, semantics can be pursued in
abstraction from metaphysical questions, or from issues of psychological
interpretation (of the sort that I am considering; that is, interpretations in
terms of competence), or from both. Such a self-imposed limitation would
seem to have little to recommend it.7
5 This view is not Chomsky’s. For discussion, see inter alia Larson and Segal 1995,
Chomsky 2001.
6 Of course, explanations in terms of inexplicit or tacit knowledge have long been
controversial. I elaborate further upon examples like those in the text in Higginbotham
1998.
7 As I understand his work, Montague, although he did not engage in the psychological
issues, was deeply interested in the metaphysics associated with his semantic theory, de-
fending as he did both higher-order logic and intensional logic upon philosophical grounds.
His expositions were generally in model-theoretic terms; but there was a recognized need
for absolute semantics as well. One sometimes hears it said that the passage from one to
the other is straightforward, as one simply stipulates an “intended model”. But matters
are trickier than that: what is wanted, on the truth-conditional conception anyway, is a
theory of truth simpliciter, not a theory of truth relative to a model or models M. A method
that overcomes some difficulties especially with unpacking the contribution of the modal
578 JAMES HIGGINBOTHAM
operators is given in Gupta 1980. For absolute theories, see Larson and Segal 1995, Heim
and Kratzer 1998.
ON LINGUISTICS IN PHILOSOPHY, AND PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS 579
structures an ambiguity that they would not possess on their own. There
are many other examples, as noted for instance in Szabo 2000. However
this may be, note that, over the substantial area where we expect compos-
itionality to be observed, there is a further question, namely that of the
universality of the functions f themselves. The lexica of human languages
differ; do their combinatorics differ as well?
I said above that we had to balance three unknowns: syntactic structure
(or whatever representations are submitted to interpretation); interpreta-
tion itself; and the nature of the mapping between these. Now, there are
a number of phenomena showing divergences amongst human languages
of the following sorts: either (a) they have apparently identical structures
(up to the choice of formatives) but different interpretations; or (b) they
have apparently divergent forms with the same interpretations (whereas
the similar forms either are confined to one language or the other, or have
different interpretations). In these cases, we have to ask whether, in case
(a), the identity of structure is only apparent, and in case (b) whether the
divergence of form is just a matter of syntax, or of usage, or a matter of
lexical semantics, or a matter of combinatorics.
I illustrate. The phenomenon (b) was widely appreciated in structuralist
linguistics. In Manhattan, some years ago, one said only I got a haircut as
reporting a normal trip to the barber shop, whereas in Brooklyn many said
I took a haircut, meaning just the same thing. But in Manhattan to say I
took a haircut would be either strange simpliciter, or else mean that for
some peculiar reason I cut my own hair (compare I took a bath to I got
a bath). This divergence could be put down to difference in interpretation
or usage in the two communities, and not a difference in the principles of
semantic projection. Likewise for English I have a headache versus French
La tete me fait mal: an English speaker would hardly say, “The (or: My)
head makes me ill”, and there is, I am told, nothing in French that would
convey the plain meaning in English-like syntax. Thus the phenomenon
(a) is implicated as well. The presumptive conclusion is that either simple
usage, or something in the basic lexicon or syntax, has the consequences
in question.
Even these simple examples, however, show that semantics cannot rest
with enumerations of meanings in various languages. Chierchia 1996, for
example (reviving a proposal in passing, and of course with different in-
tent, in Quine 1968, 35–36) has suggested that in classifier languages,
such as Chinese, common nouns enter the syntax unspecified for mass
or count; it is the classifier, when present, that creates the count term. If
correct, this account has located a semantic divergence amongst languages,
a “semantic parameter”, to adapt a term of Chomsky’s. But if there are
ON LINGUISTICS IN PHILOSOPHY, AND PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS 581
with the meaning of English to, and the answer to this question must be
combinatoric, not a matter of lexical accident.9
I have suggested that compositionality in human languages, and a com-
parative study of the principles that project meaning from parts to wholes,
are a new and important source for a deeper understanding of the expres-
sion of thought in language. In closing, I call attention to another domain,
which presents a manifest and serious challenge to our attempts fully to
understand what thoughts we express.
Socrates, it is said, asked for “definitions”, or anyway for “what it is”
for someone to be virtuous, or just, or to know that p. Generally, his dia-
logues ended in ignorance, though one or another necessary condition for
application of the term would emerge, for instance that virtue is a kind of
knowledge, or that to know that p it had to be true, and one had to believe
it (if these conditions are indeed correct). In concluding this discussion of
how parts of linguistics and parts of philosophy can, and in many respects
do, at present form a common enterprise, I call attention to issues in lexical
semantics, where as it seems to me the Socratic question goes together with
explanations of meaning, and of competence in the sense of Chomsky.
Consider in this regard the interpretation of the English progressive -ing
(sometimes but not always accompanied by verbal support, as we can see
from the difference between I saw John cross the street (he got to the other
side) versus I saw John crossing the street (he may not have made it)). Tak-
ing the syntax of the progressive for granted (it is a functional head, taking
what follows in some way as complement), about this construction we may
ask these questions: what is the logical syntax of the progressive? and,
what does it express? It is important to note that we may answer the first
question without the second; that is, that we may know the semantic role
that the progressive plays, without knowing exactly what its meaning is.
We may also know part of the answer the second question without knowing
the first; that is, as in the case of the notions examined in the Platonic
dialogues, we may know certain conditions that the progressive imposes,
without knowing the semantic type of progressive-plus-complement.
Volume 1, number 1, of this Journal contained an important article
by David Dowty on the English progressive (Dowty 1977). There, Dowty
proposed that the progressive took propositions as arguments, and further
9 The quick description above that I have given of certain differences between English
and Romance has some cross-linguistic support. The central observation is that in English,
but not in general in Romance (or, for instance, Korean) the preposition can take the role,
semantically speaking, normally reserved for the V, which then acts as a mere modifier. So,
to put the point roughly, John walked to the store means: John was to the store by walking.
We might say in this case that the P is the semantic head, although the V is the syntactic
head, of the construction.
ON LINGUISTICS IN PHILOSOPHY, AND PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS 583
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James Higginbotham
School of Philosophy, USC
3709 Trousdale Parkway
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0451
E-mail: higgy@usc.edu