Contextual Definition

Sentences are the primary unit of meaning. To know the meaning of a word is just to know how it contributes to the truth conditions of sentences in which it appears.

Many philosophical mistakes arise from the misleading forms of ordinary language. It is important, in order to do philosophy, to improve ordinary language, both by introducing precisely defined terms and by discovering the logical forms of what is being said, which are often quite different from the surface grammar.

Many philosophical mistakes arise from failing to carefully attend to the way in which we use words. Philosopher's definitions are frequently distortions that cause trouble.

Indefinite Descriptions

According to Russell,

I met Sally.
and
I met a woman.
are not so parallel as they seem. The parallel suggests that, since it is appropriate to ask, "Who is Sally?," that it is equally appropriate to ask "Who is a woman?," and that causes trouble: there is no particular woman who is the referent of "a woman," and yet there certainly isn't anything other than a particular woman (an indefinite woman?) that is the referent of the term. There is a long tradition, starting with Plato's Academy and continuing up to the present day (in Russell's day, Boole: today, Kit Fine) of looking for an object to be the referent of "a woman." Some of you have probably heard that, in algebra, $x$ refers to the unknown, as if, in addition to the other numbers, there was a special one, the unknown number.

Russell wants to clear away the very possibility of such nightmares by taking the logical form of the second sentence to be very different from that of the first. The logical form he proposes is

There is something that I met that is human and female.
The contribution of "a woman" to the proposed logical form is not a single constituent. It leaves traces all over the sentence. Thus, if we take that to be the underlying logical form of the sentence, the temptation to find an object to be the referent of "a woman" is removed, and that is Russell's main goal. He thinks that a lot of philosophers have wasted a lot of time trying to find objects to fill roles for which there is simply no need, like indefinite women and, as we'll see below, nonexistent unicorns.

Russell's analysis of the sentence has the virtue that it make it clear that the sentence will be true if there is any woman whom I met and that it doesn't matter, nor is it stated who. Only real women can make the sentence true, but no particular one is required. Trying to find the object that can make the sentence true is a quest that can only lead to bizarre monsters.

This is, I think, all so familiar today that we hardly notice it as novel or controversial. We also think that a variable is something much like a blank that may be replaced by a number not as a name for some weird indefinite or unknown number. That isn't because Russell was saying something trivial, it is because he won so completely that we can barely remember that there was once an issue.

Note that Russell's analysis relies heavily on the idea of the context principle: the meaning of "a woman" is not something one specifies outside of a sentence and then builds up the sentence from. The meaning of "a woman" makes a complex contribution that gets spread through the sentence, and one can only make sense of that idea if one thinks that the primary unit of meaning is the sentence.

Dummett says, and he may well be right, that such contextual definition is the primary distinguishing characteristic of analytic philosophy.

Definite Descriptions

1.  Scott is the author of Waverly.
2.  The present king of France is bald.

Most philosophers today only remember the second example. The overall strategy is to take phrases in a sentence and take them to play a complex, distributed role, so that they do not have separate meanings. "The present king of France" is a great candidate for that, since France is not monarchy, it is difficult to find an appropriate object to serve as its referent, if we take it to be independently meaningful. Some philosophers have concluded that the sentence is not meaningful, since it has a component that is missing a meaning. (It can be argued that Strawson is an example.) Other philosophers, who feel that the sentence is meaningful, have been driven to making up an object for "the present king of France" to stand for, namely the nonexistent present king of France. (Meinong is the philosopher of that sort whom Russell ridicules. Russell was also, at one time, a philosopher of that sort.)

For Russell, the first example was just as important. Frege asked why the sentence

The morning star is the evening star.
is informative, while the sentence
The morning star is the morning star.
is not. After all, both sentences just assert the identity of a certain object with itself. Sure, the words used are different, but the sentence doesn't say anything about the words, only about the object, so why should that matter?

To understand Russell's solution, we need to look at what he takes to be the logical form of sentences in which definite descriptions occur.

The logical form of 1:

There is at most one thing that is a present king of France, there is at least one thing that is a present king of France, and something that is a present king of France is bald.
The logical form of "Scott is Scott" is just
Scott is Scott.
The logical form of 2:
There is at most one author of Waverly, there is at least one author of Waverly, and Scott is an author of Waverly.
The last two sentences have very different logical forms, and so it is not at all surprising that one is informative and the other not. Of course, Frege's example succumbs to the same analysis.

It is traditional to make a big deal out of Russell's analysis of

It is not the case that the present king of France has hair.
That is important, but it has distracted attention away from Russell's main concerns, which are as above.

Quine uses

It is not the case that the winged horse Bellerophon rode exists.
Russell's theory removes the apparent difficulty of making assertions of nonexistence.

Strawson

Strawson makes two important points. The first is that many sentence can be used to make different statements in different contexts. For example, there was surely some time at which sentence 2 was true. He says that a sentence is meaningful if it is possible that it can be used to make a true statement. Just because it has been inappropriately used at some time does not make it meaningless.

Russell quite rightly complains that that has nothing to do with what he was talking about. Russell had, in other places, given a theory of variation with occasion of use, his theory of "egocentricity." Strawson's suggested version is much broader than that of Russell (who was mostly concerned with "I," "you," and "that." Strawson's complaint led to much more attention to such issues. But there is an interesting difference in orientation here: Strawson is interested in the context independent "meaning," while Russell is interested in the meaning given the context. When I say "I" it means (Russell version) Shaughan Lavine. "I" always refers to the speaker (Strawson version). David Kaplan calls the Strawson meaning the "character" and the Russell meaning the "content." It is an ongoing debate which is most important, whether one is eliminable in terms of the other, and so forth, but the idea begins here.

Strawson says that in saying that the present king of France is bald, one does not say that there is exactly one present king of France, contrary to Russell. He grants that "The present king of France is bald" can only be true if there is exactly one present king of France, but he says that that is not said by the sentence but presupposed by it: you wouldn't use the sentence to make an assertion if you didn't already believe that there is exactly one present king of France. Thus, to seriously use "The present king of France is bald" to make a statement today is not, as Russell claims, to say something false, it is to make a mistake. The words can't, in fact, be used today to make a statement. Nothing false has been said, since no statement has been made at all. The appropriate reply is not "You're wrong," but "You haven't succeeded in claiming anything."

Note that Strawson, in saying that, is proposing an analysis of the logical form of the sentence that is as different from its surface form as Russell proposes: he is putting a presupposition on its usability. That will equally enable him to free himself of the kinds of silliness Russell wanted to block, but it is not nearly as different from Russell's proposal as he makes it seem.

Russell's response is a shrug: "Well, if you insist, but it seems to me simpler to just use the word "false" to mean "anything other than true" instead of saddling ourselves with the needless complexity of a theory of presuppositions."

That is a perfect example of the difference in their attitude toward language, a difference that is still being played out in every area of philosophy today.

-- ShaughanLavine - 26 Apr 2007