Russellian Semantics

M. Phil ( Applied Linguistics)

Presented to Professor Muhammad Aslam

Presenters:

Arshad Ahmad

Madiha Majeed

OutlineBiography of Russell

Russellian Semantics

•Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by

Russell

•Logically Perfect Language

•Knowledge by acquaintance versus knowledge by description

•Russell on Definite Description

•Truth Value

•Video

•Russell’s views on Language

•Ambiguity in Language (words/phrases)

•Language and World View

•Definite Descriptions/ Comparative study of Russell and Ordinary

Language Philosophers

•Activity (Math)

•Arabic Language and Ambiguity/Quine’s Views on Language and Logic

•Conclusion

Biography

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl

Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970). He was

born into one of the most prominent aristocratic

families in the United Kingdom. He was

a British philosopher, logician, mathematician,

historian, writer, social critic, political activist and

Nobel laureate in literature . He considered himself

a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist.

A Versatile Writer

If any twentieth-century author may be called a

versatile writer due to his broad and diverse interests

then Russell is one. He wrote almost on every

subject such as politics, religion, history, psychology,

linguistics, science, history, literature, mathematics,

sociology and ethics to name a few of them.

Introduction to MR. WITTGENSTEIN’S Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by RussellAccording to Russell, Wittgenstein discussed the principles of Symbolismand the relations between words and things in any language inTractatus. Then he applies the result of his inquiry to traditionalphilosophy.He showed some of the issues in traditional philosophy and theirsolutions arise out of ignorance of the principles of Symbolism or out ofmisuse of language.

Characteristics of Logically Perfect Language:

•A logically perfect language has rules of syntax which prevent nonsense

sentences.

•A single symbol has always a definite and unique meaning.

Knowledge by acquaintance versus knowledge by description

Russell (1912) holds that we can refer an object directly only if we

are directly acquainted with it which means to cognize it without the

intermediary of any process of inference.

He is of the view that only absolute simples are possible objects of

acquaintance.

They comprise sense data, one’s own inner states and certain

universals (General words such as ‘man’ or ‘cat’ or ‘triangle’ are said to

denote ‘universals’).

Acquaintance is a direct, non-judgmental and non-conceptual form

of awareness that Russell took to be crucial for both forms of knowledge

i.e., knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.

Russell on Definite Description

Russell says definite expressions unlike proper

names do not refer to individuals. They describe but do

not denote. To prove this, he gives examples of definite

descriptions such as the present king of France, the round

square and the golden mountain.

Second Presenter

Arshad Ahmad

Art for the sake of life

•No language ; No progress (Humans versus Animals)

•Brain (Hardware); Language/Culture (Software)

•Language is like tools. No count numbers, no mathematics, no

engineering.

In Philippine people have 92 words for rice, in Solomon

Islands people have 9 words for coconut representing its

different stages of growth. Some languages(Hopi in America)

do not have future tense.

• Language helps in thinking clearly and expressing our

thoughts convincingly although thinking is possible without

words.

•Significance of language in daily life

•Imaginary numbers

•Issue of equivocal expressions (Unzurna, Raaena) Ayaat

e Mutashabehat

the student of Plato who taught Alexander; Hunting dogs

•Our thinking is determined by our language. Linguistic

determinism(Sapir-Whorf video)

• (Tools determine what you can mend)

Hegel believes alphabetically written words

express our thoughts more clearly and

distinctly, whereas, Russel and Huxley believes

that Chinese heiroglyphics describes inter-

relationship of different things aptly.

Misuses of Language:

George Orwell says: Political language is designed to make lies

sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance

of solidity to pure wind.

Newspeak is a variant of English in which vocabulary is

strictly limited by government fiat. The goal is to make it

increasingly difficult to express ideas that contradict the official

line - and, in time, even to conceive such ideas.

(cf. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis).

Gottlob Frege Ludwig Witgenstein

‘Philosophical Investigations’

Bertrand Russell

The reference or "referent" of a proper name is the object

it means or indicates, its sense is what the name expresses.

The reference of a sentence is its truth value, its sense is

the thought that it expresses.

Proper names and descriptions have both sense and

reference.

Meaning determines truth conditions.

In Fregean terms, the sense of a sentence (a thought)

determines

its reference (a truth value).

Compositionality: The meaning of an expression is a

function of

the meanings of its parts.

In order to compute the meaning of an expression, look up

the

meanings of the basic expressions forming it and

successively

compute the meanings of larger parts until a meaning for

the

whole expression is found.

Wittgenstein says that a proposition is presentation of a thought. Factual

language is like description of pictures which correspond with reality. They

can be described as true. But all pictures at least describe a possible state of

affairs. Here we can see a connection between Wittgenstein’s account of

language and the idea of possible worlds which was developed by later

philosophers of ordinary language.

What is thinkable is also possible and what is thinkable can also be expressed

in a proposition. Therefore, a spoken or written sentence ( an Utterence=

perceptible signs) is a projection of possible state of affairs. Hence, his account

is truth-conditional one. He defines meanings in terms of the possible situation

which would make a proposition true.

Wittgenstein’s ideas in his later work Philosophical Investigations are different

than his ideas in Tractatus.

Tractatus offers a uniform account of the nature of language. It is defined in

terms of proposition and its role in expressing thought. But in his later work ,

he openly and explicitly rejects this idea of general account of propositions.

Now he sees language as a collection of different activities instead of being a

uniform phenomenon. He refers these different activities as ‘Language games’.

Hence, language is basically an activity. There are countless different language

games because there are countless, and ever changing, ways in which people

use language. For instance, giving orders, reporting an event or making a joke

etc.

In Tractatus , he says the name means the object. But in Philosophical

Investigations he rejects the idea that there can be any straightforward

relationship between words and objects. Therefore, meaning of a word should

be defined as its use in the language. So a word does not have one fixed

meaning but a family of meanings.

Russell says that the sentence “The present king of France is

bald.” is false because the ‘present king of France’ does not

exist. Hence, this proposition cannot be true.

According to Frege this sentence introduces a presupposition

that the definite description does refer that an individual

exists. In a situation when this is not in fact the case, the

sentence would fail to have a truth value. This is an

unfortunate example of an imperfection in language.

But Russell differs with Frege and says proper names and

definite description such as ‘the present king of France’ are

not same expressions. He says definite expressions do not

refer to individuals. They are not genuine referring

terms.They describe but do not denote. To prove this, he

gives examples of definite descriptions such as the round

square and the golden mountain which do not refer to

anything in the world.

‘The present king of France’ is a definite description. This

phrase seems to denote unique individual. But there is no

individual to which this expression refers. That is why it is

false.

Russell says proper names do not just denote rather they

directly refer to an object. He considers the demonstrative

‘this’ a proper name in the sense that it refers directly to one

object and does not describe the object at all.

Table-1

Peter Frederick Strawson(1919-2006) Rudolf Carnap (1897-1970) J.L. Austin (1911-1960)

Strawson attacks Russell for his misplaced attempt to

‘purify language’.

The use of definite descriptions presupposes the

existence of their referents. To use

them does not normally amount to saying that their

referents exist, or more broadly

to say something which logically entails that they

exist.

The cash value of the distinction between

presupposition and entailment is this:

If P entails Q, then if Q is false then P is false.

If P presupposes Q, then if Q is false then P is neither

true nor false.

Thus speaker’s meaning can be distinguished

sharply from semantic meaning: whereas the latter is

determined by linguistic

rules governing the use of expressions, the former is

determined by various special

intentions of the speaker, including Grice’s

cooperative maxims (thus conversational

implicature is most plausibly reckoned a matter of

speaker meaning

Rudolf Carnap( 1956: Meaning and Necessity)

Frege, Russell and Carnap were mainly concerned

with the philosophy of mathematics and attempted to

explain language in terms of regularities of

mathematics. Carnap was eager to produce a perfect

language which would obey logical rules unlike the

ordinary language.

Terms:

.Mr. John owns a Volvo Estate.

2. Mr. John owns a car.

3. Mr. John does not own a car.

4. Mr.John exists. (Presupposition)

There is no truth –functional relation between 1 and

4.

Meanings of words are made up of both an extension

and an intension.

Extension(an actual object or property

named)=Reference

Sense=Intension=Content of

thought=Proposition(Statement, Claim, Belief)

Truth value of a sentence= Meaning of a sentence

Presupposition: Have you stopped watching TV?

Managed and stopped are verbs which introduce

presupposition. Whereas ‘knew’ and ‘believed’ are

factive verbs

J.L. Austin drew a distinction between the meaning

of an expression and its function. Austin:

Performatives and constatives (denoting a

speech act or sentence that is a statement

declaring something to be the case.)

Happy/unhappy; felicitous/infelicitous;

appropriate/inappropriate speech acts.

A constative may be true or false but a performative

cannot be declared true or false. It is

appropriate or inappropriate.(Book; How to

do things with words)

GibertRyle(1900-1976) says: It is the use of a word

which should be considered in any

discussion not the word itself. In his article

‘The theory of meaning’, he argues that the

man Hilary , is the meaning of the phrase the

first man to stand on the top of Mt. Everest.

He argues that this is impossible; meanings

are not born and do not die and they never

wear boots. In ‘Philosophical investigations’,

Ryle claims, Wittgenstein realized that ‘the

use of an expression or the concept it

expresses , is the role it is employed to

perform , nor any thing , person or event for

which it might be supposed to stand.

If a=1b=1

1 - 1 = 1- 1

Second Method:

(a+b) (a-b) = a-b

(a+b) (a-b)/ (a-b) = a-b/a-b

L H S = a + b = 1+ 1= 2

R H S = a – b/ a – b = 1

False Result

Say not (to the Prophet), O Believers: "Have regard for us (ra'ina)," but "look at us (unzurna)," and obey him in what he says. Painful is

the nemesis for disbelievers. (2:104)Ahmed Ali

Allah states that in the Qur'an, there are Ayat that are Muhkamat, entirely clear and plain, and these are the foundations of the Book which are plain for everyone. And there are Ayat in the Qur'an that are

Mutashabihat not entirely clear for many, or some people. So those who refer to the Muhkam Ayat to understand the Mutashabih Ayat, will have acquired the correct guidance, and vice versa. This is why Allah

said,

﴿ُهنَّ أُمُّ اْلِكتَـِب﴾(They are the foundations of the Book), meaning, they are the basis of the Qur'an, and should be referred to for clarification, when warranted,

﴿َوُأَخُر ُمَتَشـِبَهـٌت﴾(And others not entirely clear) as they have several meanings, some that agree with the Muhkam and some that carry other literal indications, although these meaning might not be desired.

The Muhkamat are the Ayat that explain the abrogating rulings, the allowed, prohibited, laws, limits, obligations and rulings that should be believed in and implemented. As for the Mutashabihat Ayat, they

include the abrogated Ayat, parables, oaths, and what should be believed in, but not implemented.

Muhammad bin Ishaq bin Yasar commented on,

The Problem having the informative aspect

solely: incorrect picture of the whole

Blind men and the Elephant

Carnap, in his famous book Logical Syntax of Language (1934), advanced his Principle of

Tolerance, according to which there is not any such thing as a "true" or "correct" logic or

language. One is free to adopt whatever form of language is useful for one's purposes.

Philosophy should be piecemeal and provisional like

science; final truth belongs to heaven, not to this

world. Russell: An Outline of Philosophy.

Summary•Truth Value

•Russell’s views on Language

•Ambiguity in Language (words/phrases)

•Language and World View

• Comparative study of Russell and Ordinary Language

Philosophers

•Activity (Math)

•Arabic Language and Ambiguity/Quine’s Views on Language

and Logic

•Conclusion

References:

Carnap, R. (2000). Logical Syntax of Language. New York : Routledge.

Frege, G. (1980). On Sense and Reference. Oxford: Blackwell.

Russell, B. (1912). The Problems of Philosophy. London: Oxford University Press.

Russell, B. (1927). An Outline of Philosophy. London: Allen & Unwin.

Russell, B. (1940). An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. London: Allen & Unwin.

New York: W. W. Norton.

Russell, B. (1946). A History of Western Philosophy. London: Allen & Unwin.

Russell, B. (1948). Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. London: Allen & Unwin.

Russell, B. (1950). The Principles of Mathematics, London: Allen & Unwin.

Russell, B. (1956). Portraits from Memory, London: Allen & Unwin.

Russell, B. (1960). Nightmares of Eminent Persons. London: Allen & Unwin.

Wittgenstein, L. (2001).Tractatus Logico – Philosophicus. London: Routledge