index

Determinate meanings and logical spaces

click on images for full-size:

Tracks and systems

Curves and tangents

More than the marked paths

Divergent interpretations

Is there any determinate structure of meanings to ask for the origin of? Isn't any operative 'system' at most one axiomatization of items produced without reference to it? Does the system enter into the production of meaning, or only its retrospective organization (which is, though, more meaning?)

One could object that this whole question is bad, that there is no definite combinatorial space we inhabit, let alone a fixed logical space of possibilities.

Logical spaces, and formalized languages with grammatical restrictions on combinatorial space, these may be useful interpretative devices at times, but they are fictions. If they were real, Quine argues, they would sit there like Plato's forms, large abstract entities, collections of propositions and/or concepts. But, Quine asks, which abstract entities? How could we ever individuate them? And how assign them? His arguments about the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference try to show that there is no definite answer to the question about which such system is in effect right here and now, let alone with presumed historical and cultural others. Following on Quine, Davidson argues that there is really no such thing as language, in the sense of some great abstract system. There are only our "passing theories" about the relations we find among a finite set of sentences and behaviors.

In this case, the logical spaces we analyze would be at best like tangent lines coming off a curve. As we move in our career we might project our motion at any point into a vision of a system which regulates what people are saying and doing, but there are many tangents projectible from a curve, and they change constantly. There are no unique systems, semantic or syntactical, which our practice can be shown to uniquely embody. We revise our talk in response to the world, and all those wonderful Sellarsian systems and Platonic abstract forms wither away, except as interpretive tools.

But what is it to say they can be used as interpretive tools? How are Quine's translation manuals and Davidson's T-theories related to the spaces structured by language and practice? If you talk about theories and generalizations at all, does this problem recur?