Scholarship on the relations between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Charles S. Peirce

Philosophy

Thirty years ago Richard Rorty detected the similarities between Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953) and the philosophical framework of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), the founder of pragmatism. Rorty tried to show that Peirce envisaged and repudiated in advance logical positivism and developed insights and a philosophical mood very close to the analytical philosophers influenced by the later Wittgenstein (Rorty 1961). In spite of that, the majority of scholars have considered both thinkers as totally alien. Some scholars have attributed the pragmatist flavor of the Philosophical Investigations to the influence of Frank P. Ramsey, who awoke Wittgenstein from the dogmatic slumber of the Tractatus. Nevertheless, the real scope of the influence of American pragmatist philosophy in Wittgenstein's later thought is not clearly known. The purpose of my paper is not to describe the common themes between Wittgenstein and Peirce, but the way in which recent scholarship has established some links between both philosophers.

To appear in I. Angelelli y M. Cerezo, eds., Studies on the History of Logic. Proceedings of the III Symposium on History of Logic, Gruyter, Berlin, 1996, 281-294. SCHOLARSHIP ON THE RELATIONS BETWEEN LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN AND CHARLES S. PEIRCE* Jaime NUBIOLA University of Navarra, Spain It is now over thirty years since Richard Rorty pointed out the similarities between Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953) and the philosophical framework of Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), the American logician who was the founder of pragmatism. The view put forward by Rorty is that Peirce had envisaged and repudiated positivist empiricism fifty years earlier, and had developed a set of insights and a philosophical mood very similar to those of contemporary philosophers working under the influence of the later Wittgenstein. The affinity between Peirce's philosophy and the more recent tendency born of the rejection of the Tractatus and the positivism of the Vienna Circle, gave rise to an expectation that the study of Peircean pragmatism and the writings of the later Wittgenstein in ever closer comparison would shed increasing light on both philosophers' work (Rorty 1961). Similarly, on a more recent occasion Christopher Hookway emphasised that the best approach for understanding Peirce is to see him as an analytic philosopher avant la lettre. It is well known that Karl-Otto Apel identified Peirce's thought as the milestone in the process of semiotic transformation from transcendental philosophy into analytic philosophy (Apel 1981). Many of the distinctive features of analytic philosophy are already present in Peirce, and many of the problems which concerned Peirce most are central to contemporary philosophical debate. In this sense, the best way to approach Peirce is by assuming that he was attempting something similar to present-day analytic philosophy of language, as both his goals and his basic ideas have much in common with the latter (Hookway 1985: 141). In spite of this proximity, academic research focusing on the thought of Wittgenstein and Peirce has almost always tended to handle these two writers quite separately. It has sometimes been said that the notoriously pragmatist flavour of Philosophical Investigations was due to the influence of Frank P. Ramsey: according to this interpretation, it was the young Ramsey who, by awakening Wittgenstein from the dogmatic slumber of the Tractatus, guided Wittgenstein's reflections in a pragmatic direction (Passmore 1957: 425). However, little precise information is available as to the actual way in which American pragmatist philosophy might have helped mould the thought of the later Wittgenstein. The writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein do not contain a single mention of Charles S. Peirce, but it might well be wrong to draw any conclusions from this, as Wittgenstein's scant regard for the academic practice of acknowledging intellectual property is notorious. In both the preface to the Tractatus and that of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein apologises for not using the traditional bibliographical apparatus in work of an academic nature: "I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before me by another" (1922: 27). "For more than one reason what I publish here will have points of contact with what another people are writing today. -If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine, -I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property" (1988: 17). In fact, neither Wittgenstein's pupils nor his colleagues recall hearing him mention Charles S. Peirce (Hardwick 1979: 30, n.5). By contrast to this, towards the end of his life Wittgenstein took a * I wish to thank Christian J.W. Kloesel and Christopher Hookway for their bibliographical suggestions, and Jorge V. Arregui and Eduardo Guerrero for their comments on the first draft of this paper. Also I am indebted to Ruth Breeze for her careful English translation. 2 considerable interest in William James, and read his work. In his lectures, Wittgenstein refers to him fairly often in order to illustrate the confusions to which the mind is subject in philosophy, and for a while William James's The Principles of Psychology was the only book Wittgenstein kept in his room (Thayer 1968: 313). In 1968 H.S. Thayer gave voice to a hope that a historian would one day clear up the question of the relationship between American pragmatism and Wittgenstein's thought. Twenty-five years later, however, the relations between Wittgenstein and Peirce are still not wholly explained, as we lack any proof of a direct link. There are some connections, in the form of people who had some kind of link with Peirce and were in direct contact with Wittgenstein; but as Hardwick indicated (1979: 26), the missing link probably lies in Wittgenstein's conversations with Ramsey in the last two years of the latter's life. "What Wittgenstein owed to Peirce is not easy to say," Deledalle writes (1990: 134), but the suggestion that the pragmatic vein running through the later Wittgenstein is of a Peircean nature would seem plausible (Hardwick 1979: 25). In concrete, the aim of my paper is to describe in some detail not so much the overlap between Peirce and the later Wittgenstein, which has been discussed by various scholars (Mullin 1961; Rorty 1961; Ransdell 1976; Bambrough 1981; Haack 1982; Gorlée 1989; Hookway 1990; Fabbrichesi 1993), as the concrete lines along which academic research has established the historical connection between the two philosophers. To this end, now that I have outlined the background to my paper, I propose to divide my discussion into three parts of different lengths. First I shall summarise the information available about Peirce's reception in British philosophy in the first thirty years of this century, with particular reference to Lady Welby, Charles Ogden and Bertrand Russell. I shall then report in some detail on Frank Ramsey's role as the link between Peirce and Wittgenstein. Finally, by way of conclusion, I shall provide a brief overall evaluation of the academic research into the relations between these two thinkers. 1. Peirce's reception in British philosophy: Lady Welby, Ogden and Russell. Victoria Welby was Peirce's main intellectual contact in the last years of his life, when he was living the life of an impoverished hermit in Milford, Pennsylvania. Lady Welby was a leading figure in British semiotics at the turn of the century. She had no formal university education, but was an enthusiast for the study of signification, and had invented a new science of language, which she called "Significs". She contributed to Mind, and knew personally or corresponded with many of the intellectuals of the day. The epistolary relationship between Peirce and Lady Welby, which was to last nine years, started in 1903, when she sent him a copy of her book What is Meaning?, which Peirce reviewed enthusiastically together with Russell's The Principles of Mathematics. He devoted only the first paragraph of his review to Russell's book, reserving two pages for that of Lady Welby. His review began with the statement "Two really important works on logic are these; or, at any rate, they deserve to become so" (Hardwick 1977: 157). Lady Welby had a certain knowledge of pragmatic philosophy. She had corresponded with William James, the British pragmatist F.C.S. Schiller, and the Italian pragmatists Vailati and Calderoni (Hardwick 1977: xxix), and was to be responsible for circulating Peirce's ideas in Britain. With this in mind, she sent copies of Peirce's letter of 12 October 1904, in which he had sketched out his complete theory of signs, to many friends and colleagues, including Russell, Cook Wilson and Ogden. In particular, Lady Welby had fixed upon Ogden in Cambridge as being a student of Peirce (Lady Welby's letter, 2.5.1911; Hardwick 1977: 138-139), and she passed on to him the papers concerning existential graphs which Peirce had sent her, which she was unable to understand. One of Lady Welby's aspirations was to bring about a meeting between Peirce and Russell, and in fact she acted as an intermediary between them, though to no avail (Hardwick 1977: xxx). Many years later, Russell was to acknowledge that Lady Welby and F.C.S. Schiller had set a precedent for his own philosophical development towards the problem of the relations between language and facts, as in the Principia Mathematica he had taken language to be something transparent which could therefore be used without itself being the object of attention (Russell 1959: 11). In 1923, Charles Ogden, the former pupil of Lady Welby, joined with I. A. Richards to publish the book The Meaning of Meaning, which was to have a certain importance in British philosophy. In this book, which is subtitled "A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism", Ogden included an appendix which is an introduction to Peirce based on extracts from three of his letters to Lady Welby (12.10.1904, 14.12.1908 and 14.3.1909) and two articles 3 published in The Monist in 1905 and 1906 (Ogden 1923: 432-444). In March 1923, Ogden, who had translated and published the Tractatus with the aid of Frank P. Ramsey, who was then a student (Wittgenstein 1973: 8), sent a copy of The Meaning of Meaning to Wittgenstein, who was working as a country schoolmaster in Puchberg. In Wittgenstein's letter acknowledging receipt of the book, he explained to Ogden that he had been suffering from some nervous complaint for a month, and "this is the reason why I have not yet been able to read your book thoroughly" (Wittgenstein 1973: 69). As Ogden believed that his book went some way towards providing a causal solution to the problem of meaning outlined in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein felt obliged to give an appraisal of the book, and he answered frankly that in his view, Ogden had not entirely grasped the problems which he had tackled in Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1973: 69). In a letter to Russell on 7 April, he went further on the subject of The Meaning of Meaning: "Is it not a miserable book?! Philosophy is not as easy as that! The worst thing is the introduction of Professor Postgate Litt. D. F. B. A. etc. etc. I have seldom read anything so foolish." (Monk 1991: 214). This introduction was in fact omitted from later editions. In view of this reaction, Wittgenstein may well not have reached the final pages of The Meaning of Meaning which included the passages from Peirce, but it is also possible that he did indeed read this section and thus had his first exposure to Peirce's thought. In any case, he must have read the highly favourable references to Peirce in the preface, where he figures among the authors whose ideas Ogden and Richards acknowledge, as well as the first page, on which it is stated that Peirce had recognised the importance of the problem of meaning, but had felt that he should forego his ambition to attempt to solve it on the grounds of his advanced years and financial hardship (1923: ix and 1). Even so, Ogden's account is somewhat confusing, focusing as it does especially on classifications, and tends rather to discourage the reader from taking on Peirce directly. Hardwick was able to show that the posture adopted by Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning was, in the last instance, incompatible with that of Peirce, because even though they defended a triadic relationship between thought, symbol and reference, they did so in a simplistic manner which quite lacks the breadth and subtlety of Peirce's semiotics (1979: 27). In The Principles of Mathematics § 27 Bertrand Russell acknowledged the importance of Peirce's work on logic, particularly his algebra of diadic relationships. "I have always thought very highly of Dr. Peirce for having introduced such a method," he wrote later to Lady Welby (Hardwick 1977: xxx). In fact, Peirce's modifications to Boole's logic had been known and valued among European logicians and mathematicians in general terms ever since Schröder's extensive discussion of them in his Algebra der Logik. (In the 1898 Cambridge Lectures, published just a few months ago, Peirce remarks lightheartedly that Schröder seemed to have fallen in love with his algebra of diadic relationships. Peirce 1992: 150.) In British philosophical circles, some works of James and Dewey were also known, although they were probably not subjected to careful scrutiny (Thayer 1968: 304-305). At the international philosophy conferences in 1900, 1904 and especially the one held in Heidelberg in 1908, the pragmatist propositions of the American philosophers were the focus of international debate (Geldsetzer 1981). Up to 1923, however, Russell showed not the slightest interest in Peircean semiotics, despite attempts to bring them together on the part of Lady Welby, who believed that the work of Russell and Peirce confirmed her semantic theories. Years later Russell wrote that "Peirce himself, like Leibniz, gave to the world only fragments of his system, with the result that he has been very thoroughly misunderstood, not least by those who professed to be his admirers. I am -I confess to my shame- an illustration of the undue neglect from which Peirce has suffered in Europe. I heard of him first from William James when I stayed with that eminent man in Harvard in 1896. But I read nothing of him until 1900, when I had become interested in extending symbolic logic to relations, and learnt from Schröder's Algebra der Logik that Peirce had treated of the subject. Apart from his work on this topic, I had until recently read nothing of him except the volume entitled by its editors Chance, Love and Logic." (Russell 1946: xv). That anthology, published by Morris Cohen in 1923, had a clear and accurate introduction to the main issues in Peirce's philosophy and distinguished his ideas from James' pragmatism. Alfred J. Ayer stressed the historical interest of this selection, since until then English philosophers had derived their mainly unfavourable ideas of pragmatism from the popular writings of James and Schiller (Ayer 1968: 4). Along this line, Susan Haack has suggested that the root of the uncongeniality between Russell 4 and pragmatist philosophy can perhaps be traced back, at least in part, to Russell's personal hostility towards F. C. S. Schiller as a representative pragmatist. Although inWisdom of the West Russell was to write that Peirce had been beyond doubt "one of the most original minds of the end of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever" (1959: 267), these quotations serve to indicate that Russell's acquaintance with Peircean thought was probably very limited and, in any case, it long postdates the end of his relations with Wittgenstein. 2. Frank Ramsey as link The relationship between Frank P. Ramsey (1903-30) and Wittgenstein is well known, and Wittgenstein duly acknowledges Ramsey's influence in the preface to Philosophical Investigations: "I was helped to realize these mistakes -to a degree which I myself am hardly able to estimate- by the criticism which my ideas encountered from Frank Ramsey, with whom I discussed them in innumerable conversations during the last two years of his life" (1953: viii). Ramsey's connection with Peirce's writing and ideas proves to have been closer than that of Ogden, and is well documented. Ramsey had become aware of Peirce's logic through Russell, Schröder and, perhaps, the detailed outline provided by C. I. Lewis in A Survey of Symbolic Logic (1918). Thayer suggests that Ramsey may have heard about Peirce's interest in the theory of signs and meaning from Russell (1968: 305), but it was certainly Ogden, whom he had helped on the translation of the Tractatus at the age of eighteen, who was his main source of information about Peirce's work. 2.1. References to Peirce in Ramsey's writing Below is a brief outline of the evidence for Ramsey's knowledge of Peirce's work: 1923. In Ramsey's long and perceptive review of the Tractatus in Mind, the only person quoted apart from Russell and Wittgenstein himself was Charles S. Peirce. Ramsey pointed out (1923: 468) that the use of "proposition" in Tractatus, unlike Russell's use of the word in The Principles of Mathematics, was ambiguous, and that this ambiguity could have been avoided had Wittgenstein introduced Peirce's distinction between "type" and "token". We know that Ramsey had already written this review before visiting Wittgenstein in Puchberg, but it is not known whether they talked about this observation in the visits of 1923 and 1924 (Thayer 1968: 310). 1924. In Ramsey's rather critical review of The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, published the next year in Mind, he emphasises that "the excellent appendix on Peirce deserves especial mention" (1924: 109). Ramsey was greatly impressed by the extracts from the letters to Lady Welby (Houser and Kloesel 1992: xxii). The Meaning of Meaning (1923: 280-281) also includes an extract from Peirce's 1906 article in The Monist, in which he explains the distinction between "type" and "token". 1926. In "Truth and Probability", read in part at the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge, then compiled posthumously in his Philosophical Papers (1990: 52-94), Ramsey quotes Peirce on three occasions (52, 81-2, 90n), and explicitly takes Peirce as the basis for his final paragraphs on the pragmatic justification for the intellectual habits of inference, observation and memory. Ramsey maintains that induction is a habit, and that as such it requires no logical justification, as there can be no justification which does not proceed by induction. "Induction is such a useful habit, and so to adopt it is reasonable. All that philosophy can do is to analyse it, determine the degree of its utility, and find on what characteristics of nature this depends." "It is a human logic", and "its business is to consider methods of thought, and discover what degree of confidence should be placed in them" (1900: 94). That is, Ramsey maintains that induction has no formal justification, but this does not make its use any the less reasonable, as its reasonableness is pragmatic (Thayer 1968: 310). In Ramsey's short intellectual biography, this study marked "the beginning of something new", as Sahlin has recently shown (1990: 67, 102), as it "is imbued with the pragmatism of Peirce". It seems clear that he owed this pragmatic orientation to his reading of Peirce (Hookway 1980: 91). Ramsey quotes Peirce from the anthology Chance, Love and Logic . 5 1927. In "Facts and Propositions" Ramsey does not quote Peirce, but in the final paragraphs, after underlining his great debt to Wittgenstein, "from whom my view of logic is derived", he adds: "Everything that I have said is due to him, except the parts which have a pragmatist tendency, which seem to me to be needed in order to fill up a gap in his system" (1990: 51). This recognition of a gap in the Tractatus which could be filled satisfactorily by pragmatism lends support to the suggestion that Ramsey might have tried, in the course of his conversations with Wittgenstein over the subsequent two years, to explain both the problem and the pragmatist solution which he had drafted. Yet the point should be made that in this passage, much to the surprise of readers today, Ramsey attributes his pragmatism to Russell, not Peirce: "My pragmatism is derived from Mr Russell; and is, of course, very vague and undeveloped. The essence of pragmatism I take to be this, that the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects" (1990: 51). The reference to Russell as the source of Ramsey's pragmatism is certainly somewhat disconcerting, since Russell was not a pragmatist, nor was he ever considered one. Russell knew the works of William James, and some of Peirce's writing, but in his publications he had never defended a pragmatist position. By pushing the literal meaning of Ramsey's words, Hardwick interprets it as a statement to the effect that Russell had introduced him to pragmatism, and in fact the superficial description of pragmatism which he puts forward is a paraphrase of Peirce (1979: 28). 1929. Lastly, Ramsey explicitly mentions the Peircean notion of truth as the final opinion which everyone would reach in the long run, in "General Propositions and Causality", which was among the work published posthumously (1990: 161). 2.2. The conversations between Ramsey and Wittgenstein in 1929 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in January 1929, and until Ramsey's death in January 1930, Ramsey was not only his most valued counterpart in philosophical conversations, but also his closest friend. In these discussions, to borrow the interpretation put forward by Monk (1990: 260), Ramsey was a mathematician struggling with the problems of the bases of mathematics, while Wittgenstein's interests lay rather in extracting the philosophical root from which the confusion about mathematics grew. We do not know exactly what was said in these conversations, but one of Ramsey's last essays, entitled "Philosophy", is of particular interest in this context, as it seems to reflect his fundamental disagreement with Wittgenstein. As Hardwick suggested (1979: 28), "Philosophy" could be read as the most faithful summary available of those "innumerable conversations" to which Wittgenstein acknowledged his indebtedness in his preface to Philosophical Investigations quoted above. In fact, his later rejection of some of the theses of Tractatus is in keeping with the criticisms which Ramsey sets out here. In "Philosophy", which scarcely amounts to seven pages, Ramsey expressly touches upon many of the issues which would later be extensively worked over by Wittgenstein in The Blue and Brown Books and the Philosophical Investigations: the nature and end of philosophy, what a definition is, what it is to understand a word and recognise whether or not a definition is correct, vagueness, the notion of meaning as an explanation of use and essential key to truth, the analysis of complex sensations for which we have no name, the appeal to our own mental states or those of others, and so on. As everyone knows, by contrast to the views held in the Tractatus on the figurative character of language, the meaning of which rests on its logical structure, the later Wittgenstein advocated a much richer analysis of language games, of human linguistic conduct in its colourful wealth and variety. The two explicit criticisms of Wittgenstein which Ramsey put into writing in "Philosophy" are perceptive and well-aimed. The first is the absurd posture of the Tractatus, which condemns philosophy to being nonsense, then goes on to pretend "that it is important nonsense!" (Ramsey 1990: 1). The second, which almost closes Ramsey's note, runs as follows: 6 "The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and woolliness, is scholasticism, the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category. A typical piece of scholasticism is Wittgenstein's view that all our everyday propositions are completely in order and that it is impossible to think illogically." Ramsey's response to this mirrors the reply which the later Wittgenstein might have given: "This last is like saying that it is impossible to break the rules of bridge because if you break them you are not playing bridge but (...) not-bridge" (Ramsey 1990: 7). Twenty years later, in Wittgenstein's last notebooks, published by Anscombe and von Wright under the title On Certainty, the subjects whose absence Ramsey had noted appear at every turn: the basis for common sense beliefs, the justification for induction, the habits of memory, what is reasonable, and so on. As Bambrough has suggested, when in paragraph 422 of On Certainty Wittgenstein comes close to calling himself a pragmatist, what he has in mind is the practical dimension of thought. Peirce's habits and Wittgenstein's language games turn out to be alternative expressions for a common strategy of resisting the abstract theorising of much traditional philosophy (Bambrough 1981: 266). Furthermore, On Certainty can be understood as a defence of critical Peircean commonsensism as against Moore's theory of common sense. 3. Critical survey of academic research into the relations between Wittgenstein and Peirce The oldest reference I have been able to find to the possible influence of Peirce on the thought of the later Wittgenstein dates from 1961. This is a conjecture by the Australian scholar Gasking, in a paper given at the University of Illinois in the spring of that year. Albert Mullin contrasted it with a personal communication from Bertrand Russell saying that he doubted that Peirce could have had any influence on Wittgenstein. Mullin himself concluded not only that it was improbable that one thinker should have influenced the other, on the grounds of their utterly different philosophical styles, but also that their thought is complementary rather than similar (1961: 4-5, i). In the years that followed, Thayer (1968: 304-313), Hardwick (1977b: xxxi and 1979) and Deledalle (1981) defended the thesis that Ramsey had brought Peirce's ideas to Wittgenstein's attention. This would shed light on, though not entirely explain, the clearly pragmatic aspects of the later Wittgenstein (Schmitz 1985: clii-cliii). Along these lines, Hardwick wrote in 1979 that the importance of Peirce's influence on Wittgenstein through Ramsey had not been fully explored, and particularly emphasised that "what is needed is a careful study of the themes common to Peirce and Wittgenstein. Such a study would provide a context of interpretation which would add an important dimension to the understanding of Wittgenstein's later work" (1979: 29). In the last few years some work has been done in this direction, despite the obstacles posed by the fact that Peirce and Wittgenstein are the focus of two very different academic communities between which there is little communication. In the face of the striking disparity between the two philosophers as far as their attitudes to science were concerned, Joseph Ransdell highlighted the philosophical tradition or the systematic character of their thought. He found "a fundamental point of agreement in their philosophies" which could be described as two versions (Wittgenstein's being the more sceptical, that of Peirce the more optimistic) of a common conception of human reason and language, in which these are essentially understood not as the private property of individuals, but rather as thought exercised communally (Ransdell 1976: 405, 431). In 1981, Ingemund Gullvåg made great play of the similarities between Wittgenstein and Peirce to draw attention to "the possibility that the writings of Peirce influenced Wittgenstein indirectly, through Ramsey, and that they may, after Ramsey's death, have influenced him directly" (1981: 83). 7 In the same year, Renford Bambrough pointed out the broad overlap between the two philosophers. When Wittgenstein recalls in paragraph 81 of Philosophical Investigations that "F.P. Ramsey once emphasised in conversation with me that logic was a 'normative science'", the Peircean scholar cannot help thinking that Ramsey was repeating Peirce's motto, even though this expression was not original to Peirce, and the idea is to be found in other authors who do not use this expression. This impression is reinforced when one goes on to hear in the Investigations many echoes of ideas, expressions, analogies and comparisons which are now well known thanks to the eight volumes of Peirce's Collected Papers (Bambrough 1981: 263-264). In 1985, Christopher Hookway cast some light on the question of the analysis of vagueness and indeterminacy. Following in the footsteps of Rorty 1961 and Fairbanks 1964, Hookway was able to show that Peirce, Ramsey and the later Wittgenstein not only agreed that the vagueness and indeterminacy of the meaning of predicates is benign and tolerable, but all three are to be found defending vagueness, which "is, rather, a virtue, -something in the absence of which we would simply be unable to say, or think, or do the things we want" (Bell 1990: ix). In view of all this information, it seems that scholarly research into the relationship between Wittgenstein and Peirce can scarcely yield any new facts. There is, however, a growing interest in the unified or integrating study of the great currents of thought which have run through the philosophy of our century. In this framework pragmatist philosophy in the Peircean tradition and analytic philosophy, heir to the later Wittgenstein, can be understood as different aspects of an integrated stream of contemporary philosophical reflection. One of the factors which explain the success of analytic philosophy in the United States can be traced back to that pragmatic orientation of American academic philosophy, which takes its main source from Peirce. Bibliographic references Apel, Karl-Otto. 1981. Charles S.Peirce. From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Apel, Karl-Otto. 1985. La transformación de la filosofía. Madrid: Taurus. Ayer, Alfred J. 1968. The Origins of Pragmatism, San Francisco, CA: Freeman, Cooper Bambrough, Renford. 1981. Peirce, Wittgenstein, and Systematic Philosophy. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 6: 263273. Bell, David and Neil Cooper, eds. 1990. The Analytic Tradition. Meaning, Thought and Knowledge. Oxford: Blackwell. Cohen, Morris R. ed. 1923. Chance, Love and Logic. Philosophical Essays by the Late Charles S. Peirce. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Deledalle, Gerard. 1990. Victoria Lady Welby and Charles Sanders Peirce: Meaning and Signification. In Essays on Significs, edited by A. Eschbach, 133-49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fairbanks, M.J. 1964. C.S.Peirce and Logical Atomism. New Scholasticism 38: 178-188. Fabbrichesi, Rossella. 1993. L'immagine logica in Peirce e in Wittgenstein. In Peirce in Italia, edited by M.A.Bonfantini and A. Martone, 393-398. Naples: Liguori. Geldsetzer, Lutz. 1981. Bibliography of the International Congresses of Philosophy. Proceedings, 1900-1978. München: Saur. Gorlée, Dinda L. 1989. Wittgenstein et Peirce: Le jeu de langage. Semiotica 73: 219-231. Gullvåg, Ingemund. 1981. Wittgenstein and Peirce. In Wittgenstein, Aesthetics and Transcendental Philosophy, edited by K.S.Johannessen y T.Nordenstam, 70-85. Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky. Haack, Robin. 1982. Wittgenstein's Pragmatism. American Philosophical Quarterly 19: 163-171. Hardwick, Charles S. 1977. Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hardwick, Charles S. 1979. Peirce's Influence on Some British Philosophers: A Guess at the Riddle. In Peirce Studies 1: 25-29. Lubbock: Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. 8 Hookway, Christopher. 1980. Inference, Partial Belief and Psychological Laws. In Prospects for Pragmatism. Essays in Memory of F.P.Ramsey, edited by D.H.Mellor, 91-108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hookway, Christopher. 1985. Peirce. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hookway, Christopher. 1990. Vagueness, Logic and Interpretation. In The Analytic Tradition. Meaning, Thought and Knowledge, edited by D. Bell and N. Cooper, 61-82. Oxford: Blackwell. Houser, Nathan y Christian Kloesel. 1992. The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press Monk, Ray. 1991. Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage. Mullin, Albert A. 1961. Philosophical Comments on the Philosophies of Charles S. Peirce and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Urbana, Ill.: Electrical Engineering Research Laboratory, University of Illinois. Ogden, Charles K. and I.A. Richards. 1923. The Meaning of Meaning. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Passmore, John. 1957. A Hundred Years of Philosophy. London: Duckworth. Peirce, Charles S. 1936-58. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by C.Hartshorne, P.Weiss, and A.Burks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1992. Reasoning and the Logic of Things. The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898. Edited by K.L.Ketner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ramsey, Frank P. 1923. Review of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Mind 32: 464-478. Ramsey, Frank P. 1924. Review of The Meaning of Meaning, Mind 33: 108-109. Ramsey, Frank P. 1990. Philosophical Papers, edited by D.H. Mellor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ransdell, Joseph. 1976. The Pursuit of Wisdom: A History of Philosophy. Santa Barbara, CA: Intelman Books. Rorty, Richard. 1961. Pragmatism, Categories, and Language. Philosophical Review 70: 197-223. Russell, Bertrand. 1903. The Principles of Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1946. Foreword to James Feibleman's An Introduction to Peirce's Philosophy Interpreted as a System, New York: Harper. Russell, Bertrand. 1959. Wisdom of the West. London: Macdonald. Russell, Bertrand. 1959. My Philosophical Development. London: Allen & Unwin. Sahlin, Nils-Eric. 1990. The Philosophy of F.P.Ramsey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitz, Walter H. 1985. Victoria Lady Welby's Significs. Introduction to Victoria Welby. Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretive Resources. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Thayer, H.S. 1968. Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism. New York: Bobs-Merrill. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations.. Edited by G.E.M.Anscombe and R.Rhees. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1973. Letters to C.K.Ogden with Comments on the English Translation of the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. Edited by G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1972. On Certainty, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.


Indeterminacy and assertion

Philosophy

Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 1 Indeterminacy and Assertion 1. Introduction This paper will appeal a recent argument for the indeterminacy of translation to show not that meaning is indeterminate, but rather that assertion cannot be explained in terms of an independent grasp of the concept of truth. In particular, it will argue that if we try to explain assertion in terms of truth rather than vice versa, we ultimately will not be able to make sense of the difference between assertion and denial. This problem with such 'semantic' accounts of assertion then illustrates why we need not worry about the purported argument for indeterminacy. We tend to assert those things we take to be true, and even when we lie, we at least present our utterances as true. It is thus natural see a close conceptual connection between truth and assertion. This close connection can be formulated, for any speaker S and sentence P, as: S asserts P <=> S presents P as true. This biconditional presents us with the possibility of understanding either of its sides in terms of the other.1 We can call these two explanatory possibilities the semantic account of assertion and the pragmatic account of truth. The pragmatic account starts with an account of the speech act of assertion and tries to abstract semantics (content) from it, while the semantic account starts with a theory of truth and tries to connect pragmatics (force) to it. The two approaches can be outlined (roughly) as follows: The semantic account of assertion. Step one: Give an independent account of truth. Step two: Explain assertions as utterances that purport to express the truth. The pragmatic account of truth. Step one: Give an independent account of assertion. Step two: Explain truth in terms of successful assertions. 1 One could also, of course, take the two to be interdefined. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 2 The pragmatic account has generally been taken to have trouble with the second step: the understanding, or replacement, of the concept of truth with that of (idealized) successful assertion.2 The first step (coming up with an independent account of assertion) is hardly trivial, but it has generally attracted less criticism than the second. On the other hand, for the semantic account, the first step has usually been the most controversial. Independent accounts of truth, whether in terms of coherence or correspondence, have been surprisingly hard to come up with.3 Comparatively little attention has been given to the second step, that is, explaining assertion in terms of truth. It has often been assumed that, once we have a notion of truth on board, it will simply be a matter of course to explain concepts like assertion and belief in terms of it.4 This paper will argue that this second step of the semantic account is not nearly as unproblematic as it might initially seem. In fact, it may pose more serious problems for the semantic account than the first step. Indeed, the problem that this step in the semantic account of assertion faces is, in many ways, simply a mirror image of that which faces the second step of the pragmatic account of truth. Namely, just as the pragmatic account of truth has trouble explaining how our assertional practices can constitute something as apparently response independent as truth, the semantic account of assertion has a problem explaining just how something as transcendent as non-pragmatic truth can actually get a grip upon our linguistic practices. With the semantic account, whether a certain utterance counts as an assertion becomes, in principle, 2 This can be done either through some sort of identification, as in the theories of Peirce, James, and more recently Putnam (Peirce 1878, James 1907, Putnam 1981), or in terms of the pragmatics of truth talk, as in various redundancy or 'prosentential' theories which can be understood as denying that "true" picks out a property (Grover, Camp and Maxwell 19??, Brandom 1994). 3 Failures at this first step in the semantic account have often been what drove people towards the pragmatic account 4 Davidson, for instance, helps himself to the concept of truth and simply defines belief and assertion in terms of 'holding true' (Davidson, 1984). Lewis characterizes languages in purely semantic terms and provides the following answer to the problem of "what the members of a population P must do in order to make it the case that a certain possible language £ is their actual language"( Lewis 1969, p.177.) The convention whereby a population P uses language £ is a convention of truthfulness and trust in £. To be truthful in £ is to act in a certain way: to try to never utter any sentences of £ which are not true in £. To be trusting in £ is to form beliefs in a certain way: to impute truthfulness in £ to others. (Lewis 1972, p 167.) That we can characterize speakers as being truthful and trusting is taken to be fairly unproblematic. Indeed, Lewis characterizes the interpretee's utterances as assertions through the "principle of truthfulness" that states that speakers tend only to utter sentences in their language that they take to be true. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 3 independent of any fact about the speaker's non-semantically specified behavior.5 If the force of what we say is determined by our attitude towards independently specifiable semantic values (and cannot simply be equated with specific modes of behavior), it will always be at best a hypothesis that people are making utterances with assertive force (albeit a hypothesis that fits our behavior extremely well).6 2. Force and the Massey permutation. A serious consequence of treating force as conceptually derivative from content is highlighted by Gerry Massey's argument for the indeterminacy of translation.7 Massey's argument illustrates that our interpretation of an entire language could be drastically permuted provided that one assumes an independent grasp on the concepts of truth and falsity.8 Massey considers a "first-order quantificational language with identity, alethic modalities, deontic modalities, and prosentences, as well as interrogative, assertive, rejective, imperative, and preventative forces"9 (which we will call "Massey-English"), and then describes two ways in which it could be translated. The first is simply a homophonic translation (manual h). The second is a "dual manual" (manual d), which Massey describes as follows: First, in the sentence-mapping dimension, d translates each operator (sentence connective or quantifier) and prosentence by its dual, i.e. conjunction by disjunction, necessity by possibility, prohibition by permission, universal quantification by existential quantification, and 'Yes' by 'No' (and vice versa in each case of course). Negation is self-dual, so d translates '-' by itself. The manual d also translates each predicate by its complement, e.g., 'R' by '#R' (non-R).10 5 I.e., other than its being understood as aiming at the truth. 6 Lewis' principle of truthfulness actually seems like more than a well confirmed hypothesis. He claims that "the fundamental principles of our common-sense theory of persons implicitly define such concepts as belief, desire and meaning," and that if such fundamental principles (which include the principle of truthfulness) are made explicit, they would "have a status akin to analyticity." (Lewis 1974, p. 112.) This might suggest that Lewis' account is, in some sense, closer to the pragmatic. If the principle of truthfulness is taken to be analytic, then it is analytic that our assertion-like behavior really is assertion, and not denial. Identifying assertion with assertion-like behavior (i.e.: assertion just is a certain type of verbal behavior), which is essential to the pragmatic account, amounts to making the principle of truthfulness 'analytic,' so Lewis's methodology could be understood as involving a type of backhanded commitment to the pragmatic account. 7 Most recently presented in Massey 1992. 8 Though the language in question is still an artificial language and represents only a fragment of any natural language such as English. 9 Massey 1992, p.333. 10 Massey 1992, p.333. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 4 As a result, a sentence in Massey-English such as "All rabbits are vegetarians" will be translated by the homophonic manual as "All rabbits are vegetarians" and by the dual manual as "Some rabbits are non-vegetarians." The dual manual will translate each sentence of Massey-English as what is, intuitively, its contradictory. Such a manual would be radically out of touch with the linguistic behavior of the speakers of Massey-English were it not for the fact that the dual manual treats assertion as denial, so when the homophonic manual treats a speaker as asserting that all rabbits are vegetarians, the dual manual will treat a speaker as denying that some rabbits are non-vegetarians. The dual manual thus seems to be able to account for the speakers' utterances just as well as the homophonic one. Crucial to Massey's attempted proof of indeterminacy is, of course, the claim that the force of the speaker's utterances is up for grabs in just the same way that their meanings are. Massey gives, as evidence for this claim, a friend of John Searle's who "had gone through life believing that English speakers use the borrowed Greek expression 'hoi polloi' to refer to the few, i.e. to the elite." This mistaken belief did not hamper his ability to communicate because he also "believed that English speakers typically use sentences containing the expression 'hoi polloi' ironically." As a result, neither Searle's friend nor his interlocutors detected the different referents assigned to "hoi polloi" by the speaker and his friends. "Though the one takes the rabble and the other takes the elite to be the referent of the expression, this semantic discrepancy is exactly offset, and so masked, by the different forces -literal versus ironic -that they assign the customary use of sentences containing 'hoi polloi.'"11 Massey takes the moral of this story to be that "difference of force can offset difference of meaning."12 Massey further argues that while the "hoi polloi" example of content/force compensation is for a single word, one can have entire languages based upon this principle. Indeed, he claims that there is one such language, "Upside-Down Walbiri", which he characterizes as follows: 11 Massey, p. 331. The example can be found in Searle 1987. 12 Massey, p. 331. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 5 The male rites of passage of the Walbiri, an indigenous people of central Australia, incorporate the dualization that characterizes the [dual] manual. Boys undergoing initiation are placed in a ceremonial hut with adult males who while in the hut speak only the language they call "Upside-down Walbiri." Upside down Walbiri results from Walbiri by the systematic interchange of expressions with their opposites (antonyms). For some days these linguistic goings-on bewilder the boys. But one by one each boy undergoes a eureka experience after which he understands and speaks Upside-down Walbiri effortlessly.13 Massey thus takes the sort of inversion he has in mind thus not to just be a theoretical possibility, but also something that actually happens That the force of an utterance is also something the interpreter must determine is a point that Massey takes Quine to have missed: At times Quine seems to believe that force is determinate in a way that sentence-mapping translation is not, but this position is incoherent. What speakers mean by what they say is never given by a sentence alone, but by a sentence together with a force. The candidates for translation -the arguments of translation functions -are not forceless sentences but rather sentences imbued with force.14 According to Massey, the radical interpreter is simply faced with a set of sentences, and the force with which they are uttered is just as much up for grabs as their content. However, Massey's denial that "force is determinate in a way that sentence-mapping translation is not," presupposes a semantic account of assertion. Consequently, if the semantic account of assertion is correct, Massey's argument may show that translation is indeterminate. On the other hand, those sympathetic with the pragmatic accounts of truth and assertion may be more inclined to take Massey's argument to simply constitute a reductio of the semantic account of assertion and the resulting idea that "that utterance typically has the force of assertion (or rejection) is an analytical hypothesis."15 This latter position will be the one developed in what follows. 13 Massey p. 338. 14 Massey, p. 332. 15 Massey p.341. Furthermore, it should be noted that Massey's indeterminacy would be a reductio of the semantic account of assertion in a much stronger way than Quine's "Gavagai" could be understood as a reductio of the radical interpretation process. Quine's indeterminacy thesis was not taken as a simple reductio of his methodology because the methodology (all there is to meaning must be available to an interpreter) seemed well motivated (considerations of publicity, the tie between meaning and communication, etc.) and did not have an appealing alternative (the inability to provide any plausible alternative being the main problem with many criticisms of Quine's methodology). On the other hand, the semantic account of assertion is less well motivated, and the alternative pragmatic account has been motivated and developed quite independently of any concerns about avoiding indeterminacy. Because of this, the temptation to take indeterminacy simply as a consequence rather than a counterexample is much less tempting in Massey's case than it is in Quine's. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 6 3. Winning. To see how Massey's argument contributes to a reductio of the semantic account of assertion, it may be worthwhile first to look at the structurally similar (though simpler) case of winning and losing games. Knowing how to, say, play chess involves knowing more than simply how the pieces can be legally moved. Someone who knew all those rules, including that the person who put his opponent in checkmate 'won,' but did not know that the object of the game was to win, would not be able to play chess properly.16 This parallel suggests that we can see something like a force/content distinction in games as well as in languages, and the connection between truth and assertion could be seen as having the following correlate for any player S: S is competing <=> S is trying to win. This biconditional gives one either the option of trying to understand winning in terms of competing (winning just is whatever people compete for -the pragmatic picture) or understand competing in terms of winning (competing is just trying to win -the semantic picture). The semantic picture, where winning (and thus losing) are taken to be independently intelligible, allows the concept of anticompeting (trying to lose) to be on just as good conceptual footing as competing (just as the semantic account of assertion leaves it on equal footing with denial). If one accepts the semantic account of competing, a case analogous to Massey's dual manual could be constructed for the interpretation of a pair of chess players. We could either interpret them as playing a game in which one won if one placed one's opponent in checkmate (the 'homophonic' game), or as playing "anti-chess" in which one won if one was placed in checkmate by one's opponent. Both manuals match the players' behavior equally well because while the first treats the players as trying to win (competing), the second treats the players as trying to lose (anti-competing). A difference in games played is compensated for by a difference in the object of playing the game.17 One could then, presumably, come to have such doubts 16 For a discussion of this, see Dummett 1973, p. 296. See also Brandom 1994. 17 The second interpretation would, of course, also insist that the meanings of "win" and "lose" had been switched, so that players who claimed that they wanted to win 'really' meant that they wanted to lose, etc. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 7 about how to interpret one's opponent, and, ultimately, oneself. How, then, do we really know that we are trying to win rather than trying to loose? However, it seems doubtful that the 'dual manual' for chess players represents an intelligibly distinct alternative to the homophonic one: the indeterminacy results make us lose our grip on the idea that we ever really had an independent understanding of what winning and losing were. Winning isn't of any value if isolated from succeeding at what you are trying to do in a particular gaming situation (winning if you are competing, losing if you are anticompeting). When detached from the pragmatics of competition then, there seems to be no intelligible difference between winning and losing.18 Competing at Chess and anti-competing at Anti-Chess are supposed to be different practices, but for them to be so, one needs to give a substantive account of the difference between winning and losing, but once winning and loosing are divorced from any connection to human behavior, it is hard to see where such an account could be found. It is worth remembering that we can teach people how to play games without making any reference to the concept of winning. One plays chess by trying to put one's opponent in checkmate, one plays baseball by trying to score more runs than one's opponent, one plays hearts by trying to 'score' fewer points than any of one's opponents, etc. One could successfully play any of these games without knowing that what one was trying to do was "winning" and one could presumably have a culture that played all sorts of games, but had no word in their language corresponding to "winning." Still, each game has a preferred outcome, and one could introduce into the language a term that picked out all and only those preferred outcomes ("let's call what we try to do in each game 'winning'"). Such a term, once introduced, would be quite useful (for instance, it can make talking about games simpler ("I think the Pirates will win" vs. "I think that the Pirates will score more runs than their opponent"; "Whatever game he plays, he always wins" vs. "when he plays chess he puts his opponent in checkmate, when he plays hearts he scores the 18 It seems, of course, otherwise when working within our gaming practice: we can specify the rules of a game and what constitutes winning it without making any reference to the fact that we try to win, we can play by the rules and deliberately lose, etc. (Just as we can specify what constitutes winning an individual game, we can specify the truth conditions for individual sentences.) But all of these practices, like those of lying, stealing, etc. can only work parasitically as exceptions and cannot exist independently of the more integrated practices they seem to flout or rise above. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 8 fewest points, ...")). With such a term in play, games can be specified independently of any explicit reference to what any of the players actually try to do (since such a reference is implicit in the concept of "winning" itself). However, once games are specified in this way, it can be tempting to think that "winning" picks out an independently intelligible property. Consequently, one may come to think that certain outcomes are preferred because they have this property, and that one could coherently describe certain practices where this property was never preferred (indeed, where it was dispreferred). These imagined practices would correspond to inverted games, and the intelligibility of such games rests on the assumption that "winning" picks out an independently intelligible property. Such an assumption, of course, sits badly with the genealogy suggested above. While the concept of winning allows one to specify games with no explicit reference to what players try to do, the implicit reference remains. As a result, there can be no purely 'semantic' description of games which have no reference to what players try to do, and no coherent description in which players always try to lose.19 Consider again the person we are trying to teach how to play chess. As stated before, teaching him the rules about how the pieces can be moved is certainly not enough, and telling him that the person who puts their opponent in checkmate is the 'winner' need not help either. If the player sees no reason to want to be called the "winner", he may try to win, lose, make the game continue as long as possible, see to it that there are as few as possible pieces left on the board, or whatever. Yet the rules for moving the pieces and the stipulation that the person who places his opponent in checkmate wins seem to be all that is involved in the 'semantic' characterization of chess. It might then seem that, in order to learn how to play the game, the player needs to be taught an additional rule, namely, that each player should try to be the 19 The only way in which it might be possible is a game in which all the players tried to loose but were each under the mistaken impression that the others were trying to win (compare Lewis's discussion of a community of deluded liars in Lewis 1972). The potential parallel with language should be obvious. Just as the concept of truth allows us to specify languages with no reference to how speakers actually try to use the language, the reference is always there implicitly. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 9 "winner." However, this last 'rule' is not plausibly considered a rule of chess. Rather, it is at best a clarification of what it is to be a winner in a game -if one doesn't know that one is supposed to try to win, then one doesn't know what winning is.20 It is because we have this general understanding of what winning is that lists of rules need only state what is required to win, not that one should try to win as well.21 It seems, then, that an interpretation in which everyone openly tried to lose would not be a coherent one (it would involve everyone trying for the allegedly dispreferred outcome). One could imagine a society like ours in which everyone tried to do what was called "losing", but that would only give us reason to treat their word "losing" as meaning the same as our word "winning." Of course, given our general practice of trying to win games, we can certainly make sense of someone trying to lose a game. For instance, we can imagine a skilled chess player deliberately playing badly so that he will not be put in the embarrassing position of having beaten his boss. However, even in such cases, the player is still at least pretending to try to win. If he were too obvious in his attempts to lose, the boss would probably be even more upset with him. A particular game of chess in which both players were openly trying to lose would be almost unrecognizable,22 and, indeed, would almost inevitably result in a draw.23 This suggests that our 20 In this respect I think that Searle, at best, expresses himself unhappily when he claims that: I think that there are rules crucial to competitive games which are not peculiar to this or that game. For example I think that it is a matter of rule of competitive games that each side is committed to trying to win. Notice in this connection that our attitude to the team or player who deliberately throws the game is the same as that towards a team or player who cheats. Both violate rules, though the rules are of quite different sorts. (Speech Acts, 34.) While we could understand someone as having violated a rule if they threw a game, the rules need make no reference to winning; someone who throws a chess game violated the rule of trying to put your opponent in checkmate, etc. The idea that "trying to win" is an independent rule suggests that there could be freestanding non-competitive games (as opposed to competitive games played non-competitively) which still made reference to winning. 21 Just as our stating when a sentence is true is enough for us to know how to use it (we need not add, that, for this sentence, like most others, we use it when it is true). 22 Though we can, of course imagine cases where both participants tried to lose while putting on the pretense of trying to win. Instances of this purportedly could be seen at a number of track meets where it became known that the runner who came second would be tested for drug use. In such races, once it became clear that a certain runner would win, many of the other runners made a noticeable effort not to come second. While it was quite obvious that the runners were trying to let others pass them, they could not do this overtly (by, say, stopping or running backwards) and so had to put on a pretense of trying for the second spot (the results were, supposedly, quite comical). 23 I am speaking here, of course, about a single playing of chess which takes place against a general background of trying to win. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 10 idea of trying to lose makes sense only against a general practice of trying to win, and thus the fact that there are particular cases of trying to lose does not imply that there could be a practice in which everyone always tried to lose without even making a pretense to try to win.24 4. Assertion and the Dual Manual Just as the resultant possibility of anti-competing at anti-chess suggests that we don't have a grasp of winning and loosing independently of our grasp of competing. Massey's manual should suggest that we don't have a grasp of truth and falsity independently of our grasp of successful assertions. Just as the actual practice of competition is what provides the traction that allows us to distinguish winning from loosing, the actual practice of assertion is what provides the traction that allows us to distinguish truth from falsity. What Massey shows is that if we take truth and falsity as primitive, and thus treat it merely as an "analytical hypothesis" that our linguistic practice is one of assertion rather than denial, assertion and denial, truth and falsity, each become impossible to distinguish from one another. Quine is precisely right to assume that "force is determinate in a way that sentence-mapping translation is not." There are certain sorts of behavior which we can simply characterize as asserting,25 and truth is understood (though perhaps not defined) in terms of that.26 What Massey shows is that if we divorce assertion from any such direct behavioral connections, then it will ultimately be indistinguishable from denial. It has been argued here that the fact that it makes room for the type of dual manual that Massey describes can serve as reductio of the semantic account of assertion.27 The claim that 24 This phenomenon is, of course, structurally similar to stealing, lying and, at least according to some, having false beliefs. Each represents something which could, and does, occur against a background of owning, truth-telling and true belief, but none of these could turn out to be the rule rather than the exception. 25 For a characterization of this speech act, see Dummett 1973, Stalnaker 1978. 26 The claim that assertion and denial are on the same conceptual footing may stem from the focus on 'assent' and 'dessent' within the Quinean tradition. This later pair do seem to be on the same footing conceptually. 27 The resulting defense of the claim that we can know that our interlocutors are generally making assertions rather than denials is thus stronger than Ramberg's defense of a similar assumption on Davidson's part (Ramberg 1989, p. 68). According to Ramberg, the assumption that our interlocutors are making assertions is, like the principle of Charity, a presupposition of our engaging in the interpretive process. This comparatively add hoc Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 11 such a manual provides a reductio presupposes that we cannot, ultimately, make sense of the possibility of such dual manuals. However, Massey argues that permutations of the sort he describes are not only possible, but they actually happen from time to time. The two most prominent examples he gives are that of the ironist and "Upside Down Walbiri", but upon closer investigation neither of these turn out to be real examples of such dual manuals. For instance, the ironic use of "hoi polloi" that Massey appeals to is clearly parasitic upon general practices of non-ironic assertion,28 and it is far from clear whether it could be generalized. For instance, while Searle's friend could use sentences containing "hoi polloi" ironically, and while for certain utterances the question of whether the speaker was being ironic might come up, this could not generally be the case. The literal-meaner and the confused ironist might apply the phrase "hoi polloi" to the same groups of people, but there is plenty of other evidence that will separate the two. If one sincerely asserts a sentence using the term 'hoi polloi' one may defend it if challenged, while the ironist will usually claim to be misunderstood if his utterance is challenged in the same way.29 The difference in force will correspond to a difference in how the speakers react to contradiction, requests for clarification, etc. Because of this, the case of irony points to, at best, a need to consider a wider range of behavioral evidence when determining force, not a type of indeterminacy. A better example might then be lying, since, unlike the ironist, the liar will be inclined to defend his utterance if challenged etc. Unfortunately, lying is a type of assertion, and while it makes sense against a background of sincere assertion, a practice in which everyone lied all the time and everyone knew it would be unworkable.30 We can 'throw' a game while pretending to win, and we can occasionally lie while pretending to tell the truth, but just as a gaming practice cannot explicitly revolve exclusively around losing, one could not have a non-parasitic linguistic practice explicitly based upon lying. way of dealing with the Massey cases leaves it coherent to assume that there could be such inverted practices, its just that we can't interpret others if we do. 28 I.e., Searle's friend takes most of his and others' utterances to be non-ironic. 29 Which is part of the reason why irony should not be equated with denial. If there is an 'ironic force' it plays a role significantly different than merely being the opposite of assertion. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 12 A more serious case is "Upside-Down Walbiri", since Massey claims that it shows how an entire language (not just a small subset of a standard one) could be characterized by a dual manual. However, the claims Massey makes about Upside-Down Walbiri turn out to be almost entirely unsupported by the source he cites for them.31 In particular, there seems no reason to say that Upside-down Walbiri "incorporates the dualization that characterizes the [dual] manual." Not only is there no evidence for any dualization of logical connectives, quantifiers, or force (indeed, imperative and assertive force are clearly preserved), but the 'antonyms' in Walbiri are nothing like Massey's predicate complements.32 That "Upside-Down Walbiri" is not characterized by anything like the dual manual for Walbiri should not be surprising. Indeed, if such dualization were to occur, the results should be indistinguishable from Walbiri, which would defeat the purpose of having a special language. 30 For a discussion of this, see Lewis 1969, 1972. 31 Hale 1971. 32 Indeed, pace Massey, there is little reason to think that Walbiri has a set of 'antonyms' any richer than what is implicit in most languages. For instance, Walbiri antonyms for, say, most biological terms, are constructed along principles that would seem to be available to the speakers of any language. Hale describes this process as follows: It is apparent that the principle employed here is that of opposing entities which, according to some taxonomic arrangement or other, are most similar, i.e., in formal terms, entities which are immediately dominated by the same node in a taxonomic tree. Thus, members of a given class of objects are opposed to other members of the same immediate class -a large macropod is opposed to another large macropod (kangaroo/euro), a eucalypt is opposed to another eucalypt (red-gum/ghost-gum), and so on. (Hale 1971, p. 476.) The Walbiri antonym structure is of interest then because the presence of Upside-down Walbiri makes explicit the type of abstract semantic structures of the sort that usually remain more implicit in other languages, and thus "provides us with a surprisingly uncluttered view of certain aspects of this semantic theory and is certainly not irrelevant to the much discussed, though occasionally incoherent, question of whether the semantic structures we, as students of language and culture, imagine to exist do, in fact, have any 'reality' for the speakers who use the system."( Hale 1971, p. 478.) Furthermore, while Massey claims that the adults in the hut speak "only" Upside-down Walbiri, what Hale actually says is that "one guardian speaks [Upside-down Walbiri] while the other answers, or rather interprets the message, in Walbiri." (Hale1971, p. 474.) The dialogs the initiates would hear would thus be something like the following: A: Withhold fire from him. B: I should give you water. A The other is quenched. B: You are thirsty. Needless to say, this sort of running translation will make Upside-down Walbiri much easier to learn than simple immersion. It should be noted that, even if what Massey said were true about it, the learnability of an 'Upside-down' language parasitic on one's own does not show that a dual-language could be learnt as one's first language. That is to say, Upside-Down Walbiri may still be parasitic on Walbiri in a way that would prevent it from showing that denial is conceptually on par with assertion. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 13 5. Conclusion If assertions were understood in terms of truth, the sorts of indeterminacy that Massey has in mind would be a coherent possibility. They are not, however, a coherent possibility, since their existence would undermine our grasp on the concept of truth itself. Consequently, the type of cases that Massey focuses on show not that meaning is indeterminate, but rather that the semantic account of assertion (and thus Massey's argument for indeterminacy) is dubiously coherent. This alone is hardly enough to establish the alternative, pragmatic, approach to truth and assertion, but it provides further motivation for trying to develop the pragmatic line. Henry Jackman Presented at the Feb 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. 14 Works Cited Brandom, R. 1994. Making it Explicit, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Davidson, D. 1984. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: OUP. Dummett, M. 1973. Frege, Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hale, K. 1971. "A note on the Walbiri tradition of antonymy", in Steinberg and Jakobovits, ed., Semantics: an Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy Linguistics and Psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971. James, W. 1907, 1979, Pragmatism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lewis, D. 1969.Convention, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lewis, D. 1972. "Languages and Language". In Lewis 1983. Lewis, D. 1974. "Radical Interpretation", in Lewis 1983. Lewis, D. 1983. Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. New York: OUP. Massey, G. 1992. "The Indeterminacy of Translation: A Study in Philosophical Exegesis," Philosophical Topics, vol. 20, n.1. Peirce, C. S. 1878. "How to Make our Ideas Clear", in Writings of Charles S. Peirce, Volume 3: 1872 1878, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Putnam, H. 1981. Reason, Truth and History, New York: CUP. Ramberg, B. 1989. Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language. New York: Blackwell. Stalnaker, R. 1978. "Assertion" in Davis, S. (ed). Pragmatics, a Reader. New York: OUP, 1991. Searle, J. 1987. "Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person", The Journal of Philosophy Vol. LXXXIV, no.3, 123-146.


Energy, risks, and metatechnology

Philosophy

EDITOR LETTER Energy, Risks, and Metatechnology Luciano Floridi Published online: 3 May 2011 # Springer-Verlag 2011 Technologies lower constraints and expand affordances. By doing so, they continuously redesign the feasibility space of the agents who enjoy them. The more empowering or enabling technologies become, the more likely they are to change the nature and scope of the risks that they may bring, both in terms of undesirable outcomes (possible damages or losses) and in terms of missed desirable outcomes (potential benefits or opportunities). As a consequence, technologies, by their very nature, tend to redesign the corresponding space of risks in which agents operate and interact. Like a string of paper dolls, it seems that technologies cannot shape actual constraints and affordances without also shaping the corresponding risks, both positive and negative. A risk-free technology is therefore an oxymoron, as recent disasters and crises affecting the energy industry have painfully reminded us. Nevertheless, the intrinsically risky nature of technologies should not be reason for despair, for technologies can also reduce the space of risks and make it more manageable, and this is ground for some cautious optimism. Let me explain. Through time, the rather simple dialectics of constraints, affordances, and risks transforms the set of risk takers into a subset of the much larger set of risk runners. The identification of a chariot driver as the only taker and runner of the same relevant risks seems already implausible, to the extent that, even in ancient Rome, there were laws regulating traffic and driving behaviours. Such identification becomes inconceivable once we consider a taxi driver. Now, in politically organised societies, the risk runners, or stakeholders, seek to protect themselves from the consequences of the actions of the risk takers through systems of regulations about standards, protocols, licences, controls, deployment conditions, proper use, safety measures, and so forth. Once such regulations become formalised into legislation, risk management can rely on legal systems and safety technologies (Smith 2011) in order to establish constraints and provide affordances in the development or use of a Philos. Technol. (2011) 24:89–94 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0026-7 L. Floridi (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com technology. They both work in the same direction and both can be seen as part of the solution. Together, legal systems and safety technologies constitute what I would like to call a metatechnology, that is, a technology that operates on and regulates other technologies. The idea that some technologies might be used to implement "the safe, effective, and economical use" of some other technologies is not new. It was already theorised in (Bross 1987), following the Three Mile Island accident (1979). Indeed, one could argue that the first governor designed by Watt in 1788 was already a classic example of a metatechnology. What I have in mind here, however, is something slightly different (Floridi 2007). It is the view that a metatechnology should be understood as comprising not only the relevant technologies that deal with the appropriate technologies but also the rules, conventions, laws, and in general the sociopolitical conditions that regulate technological R&D and the following use or application of technologies. It is this broad concept of metatechnology that provides the aforementioned ground for some cautious optimism, in the following sense. Consider potential negative risks first, the missed desirable outcomes of a technology. Much of the information economy has been made possible by ICT working as a metatechnology, enabling agents to identify benefits and exploit opportunities (Van den Hoven, in (Floridi 2010)). Likewise, as a metatechnology, legislation can deal with negative risks by offering incentives to agents to become potential risk takers. Germany is a good example. Because of its solar subsidy, Germany's solar energy market is by far the biggest in the world, with a total installed capacity in 2011 equivalent to 40% of the world's total. Admittedly, known risks are a bit like pain: they might be unwelcome, but they often signal the presence of some important trouble. So incentives, like painkillers, should be dispensed with care, as they might have serious counter effects, in terms of hiding old problems, delaying their solutions, or causing new ones. In the case of solar panels, Germany recently amended its feed-in tariff law in order to slowdown the exponential growth in installations because of its financial costs and distorting effects on the energy market. Likewise, from an environmental perspective, it is important to recall that five of the top ten solar panel makers in the world are from China, which dominated 40% of the world's market in 2010. Unfortunately, Chinese industry has been repeatedly criticised for its very poor record on working conditions, human rights, and environmental concerns. A similar analysis could be offered for the sustainability of corn-based ethanol and coal-to-liquid synthetic fuels. Nevertheless, all this should not make us despair. If carefully handed, incentives may turn into investments and build the essential bridge that will be required if the energy industry is to transit from polluting to cleaner and renewable sources. That the path might be narrow does not mean that it is not worth pursuing. That it might be the only path merely reinforces the urgency of taking the right steps. Consider next the potential undesirable outcomes of a technology. A metatechnological legislative approach is often at its best not when it provides affordances by offering incentives to counterbalance negative risks, but when it imposes constraints by enforcing disincentives to cope with positive risks, that is, when it focuses on the don'ts rather than the dos. In this case, the path is much broader and is represented by four main strategies: prevention, limitation, repair, and compensation. 90 L. Floridi Once again, no metatechnological strategy is infallible. Prevention may be too radical when it imposes a complete ban on a particular technology. For example, in the 1970s, Italy, one of the earliest adopters of nuclear energy, was the third largest producer in the world, but a referendum in 1987, immediately after the Chernobyl disaster (1986), resulted in the phasing out of all existing plants, causing an increasing dependence on energy imports and subsequent electricity prices much higher than the EU average. Unsurprisingly, the country is now reconsidering the possibility of building nuclear plants (although recent events in Japan have halted the political process). After all, Italy buys electricity from its neighbouring France, which produces almost 80% of its electric power through its nuclear network. Relative prevention-understood as measures that allow a technology to develop but seek to prevent, or at least limit, the realisation of its risks, like anti-lock braking system-and, when this fails, limitation and repair of unwanted outcomes actually occurred, are metatechnological strategies that allow for degrees, so they may be more carefully tuned. Yet, this means that the more flexible such strategies are, the more they tend to rely on the correct coordination between relevant legislation and safety technological solutions. Both may still fail. For example, on 11 March 2011, following the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, the 16 nuclear plants in Japan affected by the earthquake were switched off within 2 min (including Fukushima), with cooling procedures initiating immediately and correctly. It was evidence of remarkable resilience that almost all nuclear plants could survive undamaged such a natural disaster of Biblical proportions. Following current legislation, the Fukushima plant was protected by a seawall designed to withstand a 5.7 m. (19 ft.) high wave, but the wave that struck it was about 14 m. (46 ft.) high and easily flooded the generator building. The ensuing problems and hazards were a consequence of a failure of the safety as much as of the legal metatechnological systems. In all these cases, however, the crucial point is to realise that increasingly unwanted outcomes require ever more advanced, forward-looking, and sophisticated kinds of metatechnologies (legislation and safety technologies), not less. This is where good design can make a very significant difference, both by decreasing the chances that unwanted outcomes might occur and by incorporating high degrees of resilience that can make the effects of such unwanted outcomes negligible when they do occur. The second worst thing, after a system's failure, is a system incapable of coping with it successfully. Compensation, the fourth metatechnological strategy, may also be unsuccessful, if badly designed. Compensations are not strategies to cope with the unwanted outcomes of a technology, in the same sense in which home insurance is not a way of coping with fire hazards. They should not be seen as deterrents either. If that is the goal, then legislation should probably ban the technology in question or set up a fine and a points system in which the relevant international authority, for example the International Atomic Energy Agency, is empowered to issues fines and demerits to agents for the losses or damages caused by their technological mistakes (compare this to some countries' legal systems whereby a driver's licencing authority issues demerits to drivers convicted for road traffic offences). Compensations are a means to manage the costs before (insurance premium) or after (repayment) a technology fails. They too may be less than effective, if not carefully calibrated. In 1990, after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, the Oil Pollution Act was passed by the US Energy, Risks, and Metatechnology 91 Congress in order to make "holders of leases or permits for offshore facilities [...] liable for up to $75 million per spill, plus removal costs". This might have seemed a reasonable compensation cap at the time, but-although the exact damages caused by the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion on the 20 April 20, 2010 remain unknown-it is clear that the costs of private economic and public natural-resource claims far exceed the $75 million cap on existing oil spill legislation. Recall that even the costs for damaging natural resources and for private parties' claims in the much smaller case of the Exxon Valdez reached $2.3 billion. So, what is required is to reconsider the design of such legislation, and this is why the White House, correctly, is currently seeking to raise the cap, while BP pledged to waive it, probably in an attempt to avoid highest payments due to violations of safety regulations. Clearly, there are no risk-free technologies, not even in an Amish-style approach to life, because technologies push the limit of the feasible and this, inevitably, comes at some risks. The only technologies completely safe are those never built. And there are no cost-free solutions for the management of technological risks either. But, it is equally clear that there are metatechnological ways of dealing successfully with the risks implicit in any technology. We should invest more and better in our metatechnologies because the future will only be more technologically complex and challenging than the past. Of course, by coping with technologies' positive and negative risks, both legislation and safety technologies may still run into positive and negative risks of their own. But, there is no problem of a regressus ad infinitum here. For handling metatechnological risks is no longer a technological issue, but an ethical one. What to privilege, how to find and allocate limited resources, and which risks run by whom might be deemed acceptable by whom in view of whose advantages: these and similar questions do not have uncontroversial answers. They are open problems that require informed, reasonable and tolerant debate, and an open mind-a philosophical attitude, in other words. 1 About the Issue This issue is published less than 4 months after a calamitous earthquake generated an immense tsunami that struck Japan on 11 March 2011, causing the worst natural disaster in the history of that country, with immense damages, huge human suffering, and the tragic loss of thousands of lives. As is very well known, the tsunami damaged the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which is still not entirely under control at the time of writing. The risks related to nuclear contamination and the ensuing emergency have caused a wave of international reactions. Some might be discounted as demagogic, hysterical, or merely uninformed, but it is undeniable that an international, well-informed, and reasonable debate on energy policies in general, and on the future of nuclear energy in particular, is much needed. Nuclear energy is very expensive and might be significantly hazardous for a very long time. Yet, it is not riskier than carbon-fossil energy. So far, the Fukushima reactor has not caused a disaster even vaguely comparable to the one caused by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in terms of either human, environmental, or financial costs. Likewise, it is worth recalling that, every year, thousands of workers die in China's coal mines. 92 L. Floridi Nuclear energy is also much cleaner and global warming may make it an essential option, despite its high costs, as long as natural gas, renewable sources, and better technologies do not enable us to replace it. What is clearly a matter of political and scientific discussion, and therefore a metatechnological question, is whether, where, and how nuclear plants might be built. The goal of this issue is to contribute to such a debate. The two research papers on causality, although they do not directly deal with nuclear energy, indicate that aetiological analyses are far from being simple, uncontroversial, or devoid of consequences. Phyllis McKay Illari (Why Theories of Causality Need Production: An Information Transmission Account) analyses the role of production in causal inferences and defends an informational account to support it. George Darby and Jon Williamson (Imaging Technology and the Philosophy of Causality) further support a mechanism-oriented understanding of causality and the thesis that, "at least in the health sciences, to establish the claim that C is a cause of E, one normally needs evidence of an underlying mechanism linking C and E as well as evidence that C makes a difference to E". It would be easy to extend such analyses to the energy industry. Any change in the causal interpretation of some technological events modifies the nature and allocation of moral and legal responsibilities as well. The two research papers on technological effects concentrate on design and prediction issues. Neelke Doorn and Sven Ove Hansson (Should Probabilistic Design Replace Safety Factors?) evaluate the trade-off between two ways of handling safety issues at the design stage: the safety factors or margins approach and the probabilistic risk assessment approach, concluding that both are necessary and may be complementary. Sven Ove Hansson (Coping with the Unpredictable Effects of Future Technologies) argues that "methods such as technology assessment and risk analysis have failed to predict the effects of technological choices" and therefore that we need to switch to an approach based on the evaluation of scenarios, what he calls "alternative future developments". The four papers lead to a research paper by BehnamTaebi (The Morally Desirable Option for Nuclear Power Production) on the ethics of nuclear power production and the problem of intergenerational justice. This concerns the potential tension between the duty to promote, or at least protect, the well-being of future generations by exploiting our energy resources as well as we can-which would prima facie support the development of nuclear energy-and the duty not to put at risk those same generations, which speaks against the development of nuclear energy systems that might represent a long-term burden. Finally, the issue hosts two invited commentaries. One, by Wade Allison (We should stop running away from radiation), deals with the nature and implications of nuclear radiations, and suggests a rather bold thesis, namely that we should learn to live with the risks implicit in nuclear energy. The other, by Sabine Roeser (Nuclear energy, risk and emotions), addresses the emotional and heated nature of debates on nuclear energy and argues that emotions can be a source of practical rationality insofar as they can help to grasp the moral aspects of risky technologies. Therefore, they should not be discounted as mere expressions of irrationality. The energy problems we are currently facing are not going to disappear. If anything, they are being exacerbated by the industrialization of an increasing number Energy, Risks, and Metatechnology 93 of countries, the rising living standards of their populations, and by ever more pressing issues related to global warming. We should address them now and decisively, from a metatechnological perspective, if we wish to tackle them before they become unmanageable or, even worst, irreversible. And we should probably be ready to make some sacrifices in terms of consumptions and costs, if our ethical analyses of current and foreseeable metatechnological risks demand them. A better world might well be a more demanding one, both morally and economically. References Bross, I. D. J. (1987). Metatechnology: a technollogy for the safe, effective, and economical use of technology. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2(2), 145–153. Floridi, L. (2007). A Look into the Future Impact of ICT on Our Lives. Information Society, 23(1), 59–64. Floridi, L. (2010). The Cambridge handbook of information and computer ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, D. J. (2011). Reliability, maintainability and risk: Practical methods for engineers including reliability centred maintenance and safety-related systems (8th ed.). Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. 94 L. Floridi