Key Ideas in Linguistics and

Philosophy
JOEISA M. PRESBITERO
 IMPLICATURE
‘I meant what I said, and I said
what I meant’
 IMPLICATURE
 When a sincere performance of a speech act takes place in a
certain context of utterance, what is conveyed by the performance,
under the circumstances, beyond what is then being literally said
by it
 Required report divided into two parts: REPORTING WHAT WAS
SAID and REPORTING WHAT WAS CONVEYED BEYOND
WHAT WAS SAID.
Proponent: H.P. Grice
 Delineate whatever is conveyed beyond what is said when
a certain speech act is sincerely performed in a certain
context of utterance
 Context of Utterance: Speaker, Speech Act and Hearer
 Two ideas: speech acts performed in conversational
contexts of utterance and what is conveyed but not said is
what follows from the speaker’s observing those maxims
Proponent: H.P. Grice
(C) Cooperative Principle: Make your conversational
contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk
exchange in which you are engaged.
 Supermaxims and Maxims: Quantity, Quality, Manner
and Relations
Example:
A: Have you read the present top best-selling book?
B: I saw the movie.
 The answer flouts the CP
 Relation Maxim: Relevant answer
 Quantity and Quality: the Speaker not answering the posed question in the
affirmative
 Therefore, the conversational implicature is the speaker had not read the book
 If speaker answers “NO”, his reaction would have been less cooperative and
informative
Particularized Conversational Implicature vs.
Generalized Conversational Implicature

A: Most of my colleagues read

fiction.
B: Have your read the top best-
selling book?
Conversational Implicature vs.
Conventional Implicature

Conversational Implicature is produced by a

performance of a speech act what is beyond beyond
what is said independently
Conventional Implicature rests on conventions that
govern the use of certain expressions like “BUT”,
“WITH”
Proponent: Kasher
(R) Rationality Principle: Given a desired end,
one is to choose that action which most
effectively, and at least cost, attains that end,
everything else being equal.
Proponent: Laurence Horn

(Q) The Quantity Principle : make your

contribution sufficient; say as much as you
can, given the R-Principle
Proponent: Stephen Levinson
(M) The Manner Principle do not use a marked
expression without reason. A marked expression
indicates an unusual situation, while an unmarked
expression indicates a usual one. A sincere speech
act that describes a certain action as ‘not reasonable’
has an M-implicature that the action is not perfectly
reasonable.
 INDETERMINACY
 No definite pronouncements about the meanings of
expressions and utterances precisely because there
are no meanings about which to be definite
 Meaning does not exist as an autonomous entity
but only in observable behaviours within a
language community
Proponent: W.V.O. Quine
 Translation is indeterminate because words themselves do not have
meaning; all that linguists can do is observe patterns of behavior in
relation to particular language use

 We are radical translators developing a ‘translation manual’ – in

other words, a recipe for going from sentences in some entirely
unfamiliar language to sentences of our own language

 Translation is a matter of fitting a complete manual to all the

sentences of the other language
Example:
A native speaker utters the one-word sentence:
NS: Gavagai.
 You guess it means ‘Lo, a rabbit’. Before adopting
this as ‘the’ correct translation, however, you must
rule out alternatives.
 Quine holds that it will be possible to tweak other
parts of the manual to accommodate the
discrepancy.
Proponent: Kripke
Indeterminacy Puzzle. It is not a matter of
ignorance as to which you mean: there is
simply no fact of the matter as to which you
meant in the past, or which you mean now.
Example:
‘Is this a book I am reading?’

 Your answer depends on what you mean by ‘book’.

Perhaps ‘book’ refers now, as in the past, to quooks
 To apply familiar word in a novel context, there is nothing
in virtue of which our application is correct or incorrect,
since nothing in previous uses determines that the word
means one thing rather than another
 INNATENESS
Some aspects of linguistic competence are
genetically specified rather than learnt
through experience
Proponent: Noam Chomsky
 Humans possess domain- and species specific knowledge
of the structure of possible languages, which enables
human young to acquire language with speed, efficiency
and uniformity
 humans are genetically hardwired for language: children
are born equipped with a universal grammar
 INTEGRATIONISM
Language must be seen as action
embedded in context
Integrationism Highlights
Telementation. The speaker transfers
undistorted and comprehensible ideas to the
hearers.
 Critic: Do the meanings understood by the hearers are
those intended by the speaker?
Integrationism Highlights
Determinacy of Linguistic Sign. This relies
mainly on words having determinate meanings
which are known to and accepted by, both
interactants.
 Critic: Are lawyers unnecessary since much of their work
involves negotiating over the precise application of laws
to individual cases – that is, exactly what the law ‘means’
in a particular context?
Integrationism Highlights
 Language exists but languages do not. A
language’ implies determinate signs and a fixed
code which are, at least potentially, shared by all
speakers of that language.
Critic: Who decides which parts of ‘English’ belong to the code
and which do not?
 INTENTIONALITY
 Rene Decartes, Father of Intentionality
 Directedness or aboutness
 the property of mental states whereby they are about, or
directed towards,
 states of affairs in the world, typically expressed in
language through such ‘intentional verbs’
 ‘believe’, ‘desire’, ‘know’, and ‘intend’
Proponent: Franz Brentano
 Idea is derived from Aristotle’s mental inexistence:
 the notion that when one thinks of an object, one has an object ‘in mind’, but
the object in mind does not ‘exist’ in the same way that the object in the
world exists
 ‘every mental phenomenon is characterized by . . . the
intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we
might call . . . reference to a content, direction toward an object,
. . . or immanent objectivity’
 all mental phenomena are intentional; indeed, that something is
intentional defines it as a mental phenomenon –
IRREDUCIBILITY THESIS: the mental cannot be reduced to
physical
Proponent: Edmund Husserl
 Extends the concept of intentionality to all experiences of thought,
feeling or will
 The basic character of intentionality is the property of being a
consciousness of something.
 experience of perceiving a sheet of white paper in a dim light, to
draw a distinction between perceptual experience and something
perceived. The concrete experience of the paper appearing from
a particular angle, with lack of clarity because of the light, is a
conscious experience, and description of that experience is
phenomenological description
 COGITO ERGO SUM (I THINK THEREFORE I AM) “ I have
consciousness of something”
Computer vs. human
 John Searle was given three batches of Chinese Writing.
 1st Batch: Chinese Writing (Script)
 2d Batch: Rules in English (Story)
 3rd Batch: Instructions correlating to first two batches (questions)
 Searle is manipulating symbols. NOTE: He is not a native Chinese
speaker
 Computer, although can be programmed with the sum total of all
information, this would not mean it understands the world.
 Understanding is an intentional phenomenon that only human
can.
Intentionality vs Representative Content
and Psychological Mode
 “I predict that you will leave the room” – predicting
 Intentional verb: believe
 “I believe that you will leave the room” –psychological belief
and its representative content is that “you will leave the
room” – CAN BE TRUE OR FALSE
 Beliefs are true or false while intentionality are complied
with, and desires are fulfilled or unfulfilled
 INTUITION
 Speakers’ introspective judgments about aspects of their
language
 speakers share systematic intuitions about their
languages and that these should be used as data in
studying language
 Often referred to as “grammaticality judgments” yet
misleading
Proponent: Noam Chomsky
 Chomskyan Revolution
 In studying Language, techniques must be based on a
number of factors, including intuition, and also that
speakers’ intuitions provide evidence for the existence of
an internalized language system which should be the
object of study for linguistics
 Explore the intuitions in studying language
Proponent: Noam Chomsky
(1) (a) John is easy to please.
(b) It is easy to please John.
(2) (a) John is eager to please.
(b) It is eager to please John.

 NO logical reason why 2b could not be another

way of saying 2a by analogy with the pattern in
1a and 1b.
 Chomsky on Naturally-occurring
data
 element of luck in whether a corpus will provide
relevant examples
 the object of study as an internalized system—
‘competence’ and distinguished from language in
actual usage — ‘performance’
 LANGUAGE GAMES
Language use can be compared to a game, where
conversational participants are the players and the
goal of their conversation can be reached if they
perform certain types of moves within the context of
publicly-known rules
Proponent: Ludwig Wittgenstein
 strives to understand how we acquire the meanings
of words
 simply knowing how to name a concept is not
sufficient for us to be able to use the word in a
conversation
Proponent: Jakko Hintikka
 Semantic Games of Lorenzen and Lorenz: VERIFIER
and FALSIFIER
 Coordination Game (problem-solving game): shared
knowledge of the purpose of the game helps players to
code and interpret meaning efficiently and successfully
 Signalling Games: evolves between a sender and a
receiver if the receiver reacts appropriately to the
sender’s signal by choosing an action that matches the
state of the world
Game-Theoretical Approaches
 construction of form-meaning pairs in terms of
solution concepts– Nash Equilibrium– a profile
with the players’ best response to the choices of
other players, all of whom are trying to maximize
their payoff.
Pragmatic Phenomena
 use of game-theoretical results concern indirect
speech acts and under specification, credibility,
question-answer pairs and grounding
 Language Game serves as a loose metaphor
rather than as a vehicle for precise formalization
 LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT
 Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) is the
hypothesis that thinking and thought are conducted
in a mental language (‘mentalese’) that is innate,
distinct from all natural languages, universal
among all thinking beings, and physically realized
in the brain
Proponent: Jerry Fodor
 “propositional attitudes”, which are described by
sentences of the form
‘Mary believes that pigs might fly’.
‘S As that P’
where S is the subject who holds the attitude
A is an ‘attitudinal’verb such as ‘believe’,
‘desire’,‘hope’, ‘intend’
P is any sentence
Theses
 Representational Theory of Mind (RTM)
 Thinking is thoughts joined up – in other words, causal sequences of tokenings
of this mental representation of the attitude, be it belief, desire, or whatever
 Symbolic System (mentalese)
 Chomsky’s Competence
 Mentalese has its own grammar and one which is, moreover, universal
 Language of Thought is distinct
 Not identical to any spoken language

 nativist or innatist hypothesis

 the language of thought is held to be universal in humans, and to be genetically
determined.
Chomsky on LOTH
 Language is uniquely human
 Language is at least partly possessed by all
species which have cognitive process
 LOTH holds that a being needs a language in
order to learn a language – and that language is
mentalese
 LANGUE/PAROLE
 Langue denotes a system of internalized, shared
rules governing a national language’s vocabulary,
grammar, and sound system
 Parole designates actual oral and written
communication by a member or members of a
particular speech community
Proponent: Ferdinand de Saussure
 3 Aspects of Language:
1. Langage refers to the anatomical ability and psychological need or
urge of humans to create a system of linguistic signs for expressing
ideas
2. Langue represents a system of rules, usages, meanings and
structures that are products of the human ability to create language
and are shared by members of a specific speech community;
collective knowledge and linguistic awareness
3. Parole is concrete realization of a collectively-internalized system
and also reflects the personality, creativity and physiological
capabilities of an individual speaker; individual production of
language
Langue
 Language is acquired through the socialization
process; it is not created through a speaker’s ingenuity
or experimentation
 members of a speech community share possession and
comprehension of a body of signs (signes)
 a sign consists of two components: a signifier
(signifiant) and a signified (signifié)
Langue
 Signs are actually linked to clusters of meanings or
associations and not to specific things
 the word ‘house’ does not refer to a specific object
in the world but rather to a concept involving
images and associations that speakers have in mind
when they say or write the word
 the connection between the series of sounds and
the cluster of images and emotions is arbitrary.
Langage, Langue and Parole
Langage becomes a reality in langue –
and ultimately in parole – through the
rules governing the use and organization
of signs
Noam Chomsky’s response
Langage is transformed to language
capacity
Langue is competence
Parole is performance
 LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY
Vocabulary and linguistic structure of one’s
native language limits or influences one’s
Weltanschauung or world view
Proponent: Benjamin Lee Whorf
 Language limits, or at least influences, the way a speech
community conceives of its world view and reality
 Stuart Chase: ‘All higher levels of thinking are
dependent on language’ –Linguistic Determinism
 Linguistic Relativity states that our native language
influences our thoughts or perceptions
 Linguistic Relativity is that structure and vocabulary of
one’s mother tongue influences one’s world view
Whorfian Hypothesis: Linguistic Relativity
“Linguistic relativity principle’, means that
users of markedly different grammars are
pointed by their grammars toward different
types of observations and different evaluations
of externally similar acts of observation, and
hence are not equivalent as observers but must
arrive at somewhat different views of the
world”
Proponent: Edward Sapir
 “Language is a guide to ‘social reality’ . . . it
powerfully conditions all our thinking about social
problems and processes”
 No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to
be considered as representing the same social
reality
Key Ideas in Linguistics and
Philosophy
JOEISA M. PRESBITERO