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Content and CommunityAuthor(s): Harry A. Lewis and Andrew
WoodfieldSource: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 59 (1985), pp.177-214Published by:
Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Aristotelian SocietyStable
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4106754Accessed: 22/08/2010
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY
Harry A. Lewis and Andrew Woodfield
I-Harry A. Lewis
I
Can a being have thoughts and yet not be a member of a
community? Is the content of individuals' thoughts determined by
features of the community of which they are members? These are
distinct questions. A link would be made between the second
question and the first if any fixing of content could be shown to
require a community; for contentless thoughts would be no thoughts
at all. A positive answer to either question may seem obvious, or
paradoxical, depending how it is taken. A hermit can be allowed
thoughts, and if any human being lacks a community, surely he does.
But this example might be held not to break a necessary tie between
thought and community, for the hermit will have developed his
capacity for thought in the bosom of his family, and if we read his
writings, even after his death, we could be held to enrol him in
our community. A thesis so plastic will not be easy to refute. An
empirical disproof would appear not to be open to us: for how could
we detect thought if not by conversing, and thus creating at least
a 'community' of two? But a step or two of argument is needed to
show that the very notion of a solitary thinker is incoherent, and
a further step to show that any thinker may belong to a
fully-fledged community. In this paper I explore some aspects of
recent arguments to community.
I take a being to have thoughts just in case attitudes
('propositional' attitudes) can be truly ascribed to it. I speak of
'content' to distinguish the attitude proper (whether it be belief,
remembering, or wondering whether) from the Fregean thought or
Russellian proposition to which the attitude is directed. I see no
need for a prior commitment to a 'theory' of content, if such is
possible, or to a view of the logical form and ontology of
attitude- ascriptions in general. In particular, I take no view as
to whether content is 'private' or 'public'-since I regard the
question as
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178 I-HARRY A. LEWIS
confused. ('Content' can be ascribed to what one person tells
another just as much as to what a single person believes.) And I
shall henceforward assume that the being to whom attitudes are
ascribed is human. On the other hand, I am not prepared to take the
notion of 'community' as well understood. The arguments that
interest me purport to reveal the necessity of community for
thought, or for language and so for thoughts too. I have indicated
already that the notion of membership of a community is at risk of
being stretched. In addition, the notions of social group that are
invoked are not all the same, nor are the functions assigned to
such groups in the argument.
II
A direct connection between thoughts and community was claimed
by Tyler Burge in his paper 'Individualism and the Mental'.' Burge
purports to show that a person's mental contents are constituted in
part by his social environment: 'No man's intentional phenomena are
insular. Every man is a piece of the social continent, a part of
the social main.' (p. 87). The central argument that he used has
been rehearsed before,2 but it is of sufficient interest to bear
repetition. My purpose will be served by adapting one of Burge's
simpler examples, while echoing his presentation in other respects.
We are to imagine that Jane has a large number of attitudes
commonly attributed with content clauses containing the word 'sofa'
in oblique occurrence. For example, she thinks (correctly) that
sofas are items of furniture, that they are for sitting on, and
that they are heavily upholstered. In addition to these
unsurprising attitudes, she thinks falsely that John has a new sofa
in his living room (for in fact, it is an armchair). Her false
belief results from the absence from her experience of any
corrective to the application of the word 'sofa' to single-seaters.
She talks to John of his new 'sofa', and he points out that it is
an armchair: sofas are not
'French, P. A., Uehling, T. E. and Wettstein, H. K. (editors)
Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume 4 (1979) Studies in
Metaphysics, pp. 73-121.
2 By Philip Pettit, in 'Wittgenstein, Individualism and the
Mental', at pp. 446-55 of Weingartner, Paul (editor), Epistemology
and the Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the 7th International
Wittgenstein Symposium, Vienna: Halder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1983; by
Steven Stich, in his 'On the Ascription of Content' at pp. 200-203
in Woodfield, A. (editor) Thought and Object, Oxford: Clarendon
Press (1982); and by Andrew Woodfield in 'Thought and the Social
Community', Inquiry 25 (1982) pp. 435-50.
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CONTENT AND CX)MMUNITY 179
single-seaters, as any dictionary could have told her. Jane is
surprised, but gives up her belief. This story corresponds, so far,
to the 'first step' in Burge's 'thought-experiment'. In the second
step, we are invited to imagine the circumstances altered: whereas
nothing has been different in Jane's physical history and
non-intentional mental phenomena, furniture-salesmen,
lexicographers and informed laymen apply 'sofa' not only to sofas
but also to armchairs. The standard use of the term in the imagined
circumstances is to be conceived to encompass Jane's actual misuse.
The third step is an interpretation of this latter case. In the
counterfactual situation, Jane lacks some-probably all-of the
attitudes commonly attributed with content clauses containing
'sofa' in oblique occurrence. She lacks the occurrent thoughts or
beliefs that John has a new sofa in his living room, that many of
her other friends have sofas, that sofas are for sitting on, and so
on. Thus Jane's counterfactual attitudes differ from her actual
ones, but only in virtue of a difference in social environment.
Burge claims wide scope for this argument: it can get under way 'in
any case where it is intuitively possible to attribute a mental
state or event whose content involves a notion that the subject
incompletely understands'. He regards such incomplete understanding
as common: 'One need only to thumb through a dictionary for an hour
or so to develop a sense of the extent to which one's beliefs are
infected by incomplete understanding' (p. 79).
What is the 'community' to which this argument appeals, and what
is its function in the argument? The community includes specialists
(the furniture-salesmen of the example), lexico- graphers and
informed laymen. These people agree on their use of the term in
question; but there is no suggestion that they form part of the
community solely by virtue of that agreement. On the other hand,
their function is to establish a 'standard use' over against
Jane's. In addition, they define 'the' notion of sofa.
Burge moves easily between talk of divergent usage and talk of
divergent belief, as his remark on dictionaries shows. In fact he
goes further: for he embraces the paradox that we (individuals)
'think with' notions of which our mastery is incomplete. I find no
difficulty in accepting that we severally fail to master
thejointly- owned notion of sofa, or of harpsichord. (To refer to
this
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180 I-HARRY A. LEWIS
phenomenon as the 'linguistic division of labour', after
Putnam,3 would only serve to promote the conflation of belief and
usage that I have just noted.) What seems perverse, indeed to beg
the question in favour of Burge, is to claim that we severally
'think with' this jointly-owned notion. Jane would be held to
'think with' a notion of sofas that excluded armchairs, in her very
judgment that an armchair was a sofa. The alternative would be to
recognize that Jane's notion of sofa was different from that of
others, and that she could only 'think with' her own notion. In
certain cases, it might still be convenient for a standard user of
'sofa' to report Jane's beliefs by using that term; but this would
be a practical decision (as Woodfield suggests).4 Burge offers
normal practice as a reason for rejecting the attribution of a
notion that just catches the misconception. However, practice has
many motives. He seems also to hold that attributing such a notion
to an individual will involve treating her beliefs as true. If the
only way of ascribing unusual notions to an individual is to allow
all her beliefs to be true, then the view that we think with our
own notions seems to be in trouble. (I shall return to this point
later.)
Andrew Woodfield has argued persuasively that Burge's argument
fails,5 through inattention to the variety of languages that are
involved in the imagined cases. Woodfield shows that the phenomena
in question allow of clear characterization where Jane's attitude
is identified by way of a linguistic disposition, and the language
in which the attitude is reported is thought of as the same as
Jane's or alternatively as relevantly different. One effect of his
critique is to split off the social elements involved from the
attitudes. The role of social factors in Burge's examples is to
identify one language that might be used to reportJane's state of
mind. A similar conclusion can be drawn if we replace the idea of
the divergent individual by that of a small community with its own
dialect. Such a dialect-owning community could diverge from its
host-community in just the way that Jane diverged from hers,
whereas any problems thought to derive from the fact that Jane is a
single individual
3 Putnam, H., Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mind, Language and
Reality, Cambridge University Press (1975) pp. 227 ff.
4Woodfield, op. cit. p. 446. 5 In his paper 'Thought and the
Social Community' cited above.
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 181
could not exist for a community. But its usage would by Burge's
argument fail to determine the contents of the attitudes expressed
by it, until reference was made to the ways of the host- community.
The only contrast needed in order to characterize the phenomena
presented by Burge is that between languages. He makes no use of
the contrast between individual and community except to that
end.
The claimed direct link between content and community is thus
revealed as mediated by the notion of language identity. This
suggests that the argument needs to be re-cast. The link taken for
granted by Burge between (on the one hand) the social factors that
fix the language and the notions it expresses and (on the other)
the contents of individuals' thoughts, needs to be made good. Even
if it established its ostensible conclusion, Burge's case would
fall short of showing that there could not be a solitary thinker;
for it is an unargued assumption that his thinkers are members of
communities. He does not suggest that there would be no attitudes
without community, but only that where a person already belongs to
a community, some facts about the community enter into the
determination of the content of her thoughts.
III
We shall consider a less direct argument to show the
impossibility of a solitary thinker, to wit: any thinker must have
a language; any language-user must have a community; so any thinker
must have a community.
We should not assimilate thinking too readily to a use of
language. There are many attitudes whose content is not literally
expressed by any sentence of their owner's language. A variety of
examples may be used to argue for this observation, if indeed
argument is required. If there are de re attitudes properly
expressed using indexical pronouns, their content will not
typically be expressed by any complete sentence, where what the
sentence expresses is taken to be what it brings to its contexts.
Any figurative or metaphorical use of language may lend itself to
the expression of attitudes whose contents cannot be 'translated'
into another sentence taken literally. Nonetheless, if I say 'It's
raining and it's not raining', what I think, and what I convey, may
be true, even though the sentence I utter, taken
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182 I-HARRY A. LEWIS
literally, is false. Does anyone wish to insist that in such a
case the speaker and the hearer must have in mind some other
sentence, whose sense 'It's raining and it's not raining' used
figuratively, precisely captures? For another class of examples,
consider what might be called 'indexical predicates' as in 'Peter's
shirt was this colour', 'Mary jumped up like this'. Does anyone
wish to insist that understanding such sentences, as uttered with
appropriate gestures, requires that speaker and hearer apply or
invent a word to express what the whole predicate, complete with
context, contrives to convey? A person's beliefs are sometimes
identified with that subset of the sentences of her language that
for her express truths. But many things held true cannot be found a
sentence of the believer's language that (taken literally)
expresses them. The relation between content and language is looser
than that. Thus a strong form of the argument from thought to
language is invalid: it is not the case that all contents must be
expressible by literal or portable uses of sentences. But the
evidence just adduced has no tendency to show that thought is
possible for a creature without language, since it draws on
examples where whatever is expressed or conveyed exploits a use of
language.
For a defence of the first step of our indirect argument, we may
turn to the view defended by Donald Davidson in his 'Thought and
Talk',6 namely, that any thinker must be an interpreter of
another's speech. I do not need to consider all of Davidson's
argument, but only to review the social elements involved.
The alleged relation between thought and interpretation is
indirect: an 'interpreter' is not said to be interpreting whenever
he thinks, just as our hermit is not forever learning from his
parents. Davidson is not concerned with the development of the
capacity for thought in the individual's lifetime, but with the
general conditions for thought.' This enables us to suggest that
the capacities in question might be exercised in thought while
remaining unexercised in interpretation. Thus insofar as a
social
6 Davidson, D., Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford:
Clarendon Press (1984) pp. 155-70.
SI recognize that this account of Davidson's purpose may be at
odds with his talk (on p. 170) of the 'emergence' of the contrast
between truth and error. see below, p. 193.
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 183
element in thought is held to derive from the thinker's
interpreting activities, it could remain a theoretical possibility
rather than a necessity. A similar conclusion might be reached by
another route, if it could be accepted that there are human beings
who both think and use language but have never practised radical
interpretation. Someone who has learned only one language has
arguably never indulged in radical interpretation, since the latter
activity (as described by Davidson) requires that the interpreter
already possess a language into which the alien sentences are
translated. The capacity for radical interpretation in such a
person would remain a capacity only. It is only half an answer to
this to propose that normal communication between users of 'the
same' natural language involves translation between idiolects; for
the learning of one's first language cannot be construed as
translation. To be sure, Davidson says that 'all understanding of
the speech of another involves radical interpretation'.8 It follows
that he holds the notion of idiolect intelligible; for he
recognises that the assumption that a fellow-member of the same
speech-community shares one's language requires an empirical
grounding, and that must be found in facts about that individual. I
shall be returning shortly to the topic of idiolects.
Even if we allowed that any thinker must at some time have
practised interpretation, would that show that she must have been a
member of a community? In what ways is interpretation a community
activity? It requires two players; and two languages. If we
stipulate that it is the interpretation of another person's speech
that is in question, then of course the two players must be
different people. On the other hand, without that stipulation it is
not obvious that one person could not play both parts. An example
might be that of a bilingual translating her own work. The fact
that the one human being understands both languages does not
guarantee that the translation is effortless. Such translation,
however, could hardly be termed 'radical', at least not in Quine's
terms ('the translation of a language of a hitherto untouched
people' from which 'all help of interpreters is excluded'9).
Nonetheless we should recognize that inter-
8'Radical Interpretation', at p. 125 in Inquiries into Truth and
Intelpretation, op. cil. 9 Quine, W. V. 0., f'ord and Object,
M.I.T. Press (1960) p. 28.
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184 I-HARRY A. LEWIS
pretation requires in the first place two roles rather than two
people, even if it is only when we credit the bilingual with two
personalities that we can make sense of the hypothesis that both
roles could be played by one person.
If interpretation is taking place, must interpreter and
informant be members of a community? If we hark back to the
forerunner of radical interpretation, Quine's radical translation,
we are apt to assume that they are severally members of
communities, but not that they are fellow-members of any one
community. For the moment we may hold in suspense the assumption
that there are two communities in the background, responsible for
the languages, and focus on the activity of interpretation. This is
usually talked of as a collaborative activity; for more than the
passive observation of speech- behaviour is needed to establish
experimentally the patterns of assents, dissents or neither
(Quine), or the pattern of holdings-
*true (Davidson), that forms the empirical basis of
interpretation. There is, however, a lack of mutuality in this
supposedly 'social' activity, for it is motivated only by the
interpreter's need to associate sentences held true with observable
situations or with the interpreter's occurrent beliefs. There seems
no reason to honour a pair related by no more than the minimal
requirements for interpretation with the title 'community'.
Interpretation requires also two languages. These are usually
represented as the languages of communities; but that they are
communal languages is a background assumption, not an argued
conclusion. Moreover it is not clear that we have a ready-made
argument for the communal nature of language from the premiss (even
if granted) that any language must at some time have been
interpreted. For all this could yield would be further pairs of
interpreters and informants. Although an actual human community
could provide the personnel for such activities, they could be
carried on without it; after all, the facts of human generation by
pairwise relations of mothers and fathers do not make siblings of
us all. Furthermore, both Quine and Davidson find ultimately that
pairs of speakers of 'the same' natural languages are indulging in
radical translation or interpretation. As I have noted already,
this view has to find intelligible the restriction of a language to
a single speaker.
Thus the first step provides no easy transition from thought
to
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 185
community. At best it brings us to the second: the thesis that
to have a language is to be a member of a community. Perhaps, by
another path, we can show that anyone who possesses a language must
also have a community.
Before proceeding we should draw one lesson from the dis-
cussion of radical interpretation. It might seem that an activity
requiring a minimum cast of two fails to qualify as communal on
arithmetical grounds alone. If we could find a need for a third
player, or a twenty-second, perhaps it would then be com- munal. It
is not numbers that count, however; the activities in which the
numbered persons are involved, and the concepts we must invoke to
describe those activities adequately, determine whether they are to
be deemed a 'community'. Thus I am prepared to allow that there
could be a community of two; but also, there could be activities
involving a cast of thousands (e.g. treading this path) that fail
to constitute them a community.
Many activities involving language are social (conversing,
debating, commanding) and others are not ( writing one's diary,
doing a crossword, soliloquy). Thus someone who has a language need
not use it exclusively in social activities. Moreover it is
conceivable that our hermit, having once learned his language,
never again uses it in a social activity. Is there a sense in which
having a language, as distinct from using it, requires a community?
A positive answer is immediately forthcoming if the only possible
languages are languages of communities. For example, if one holds
that any language will contain observation sentences in the sense
of Quine-
A sentence is observational insofar as its truth-value, on any
occasion, would be agreed to by just about any member of the speech
community witnessing the occasion.10
-then indeed it will be communal. However, Quine's approach
appears to take it as an axiom that a necessary condition of
objectivity in perception-reports is communal agreement. I am not
prepared to accept that without argument, and shall confront it
anon. An alternative reason that might be offered for accepting
that there will be social elements in any language, is that the
proper purpose of language is communication (or some
" Quine, W. V. O., The Roots of Reference, Open Court (1974) p.
39.
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186 I-HARRY A. LEWIS
other supposedly social activity). It will be clear by now that
I do not regard such claims as arguments. Language is used for many
things, not all of them social. If, per contra, a proper purpose is
one for which something might never actually be used-as can
certainly happen in the case of artefacts-then the required
conclusion does not follow.
Care over the distinction between having a language and using it
is necessary because of an associated distinction, that between the
community responsible for a language and the community within which
it is used. (The common tendency to talk of 'the' community blurs
this distinction, among others.) An example would be a bilateral
international negotiation-a transient community of diplomats-in
which each side spoke its native tongue. If the participants were
appropriately trained, communication could be achieved and the
negotiation would proceed; but the communities to which the
languages were answerable would be different from the community
within which the languages were used. (As Davidson observes,"
communication between two parties does not require identity of
language. I note .too that the claim that anyone who has a language
is a member of a community is not the same as the claim that any
language is a community's language. In particular, a person may use
a community's language but be excluded from it; or fail to
understand its language but be included in it. To date we have
found no reason to deem all and only the speakers of some language
to be thereby the members of a genuine community, rather than a
mere set.)
IV We can now refine the second step, and look for argument to
either of two conclusions: that any language is a community's
language (not just one individual's); or that anyone who has a
language must belong to a community (whether or not her language is
also the community's language). If either conclusion is true, there
will be some latent contradiction in the notion of a lifelong
social isolate who possesses an idiolect: a language all his own,
spoken by no one else.
If social isolation is conceptually, if not psychologically,
" In 'Thought and Talk', op. cit. p. 157.
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 187
acceptable, possession of an idiolect is not as favourably
placed. It is not enough to define 'idiolect' as 'the language of
one person'. For a helpful discussion, the description must be
filled out to give a hand-hold to arguments about the
intelligibility of the notion. I propose to be generous: let us
allow S's idiolect to have a syntax, to have perceptible
sentence-tokens, and to include sentences that fail to express its
owner's beliefs, and sentences that express falsehoods. It is thus
not a 'private' language in any of the following senses: it is not
restricted to reporting 'private' phenomena such as sensations; it
does not have only private tokens (such as inner speech-acts); and
it is not (at least not by stipulation) unlearnable by others.
My generosity is not motivated. A 'language' so defined as to
express its speaker's beliefs unerringly, would be no language.
Whatever seemed right would indeed be right in that case. The
language could not be learned except by someone with independent
access to those beliefs; and so it could not be learned. For
parallel reasons, a 'language' defined as unerringly expressing
truths could convey nothing to anyone; it would, for example, be
useless in testimony. Thus if the idiolect is to have the autonomy
required of a genuine language, neither of these approaches to
definition is open to us. It might seem inconsistent to reject them
while also rejecting Burge's claim that we 'think with' communal
notions, as I did above. For Burge sees the only alternative to be
to attribute (to Jane) notions that exactly capture her
misconceptions; and this seems tantamount to attributing to her a
language that exactly captures her beliefs, or alternatively one
that cannot fail to express truths. (These apparent alternatives
collapse into each other when what 'seems right'-is believed-'is
right'-is true.) I accept that to attribute notions exactly
capturing misconceptions leads to absurdity, but reject the thesis
that there is no other alternative to attributing communal notions.
The third possibility involves showing how an idiolect-speaker
could detect error-how he could come to recognize a mistaken
classification, for example. I believe that it can be shown, and I
shall attempt to do so shortly.
Does possession of an idiolect, as defined, reveal its owner as
a member of a community? Empirically, for human speakers, I have no
doubt that the answer is 'yes'. But is this due to more
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188 I-HARRY A. LEWIS than the limitation of human intelligence?
Let us ask how such a language might be acquired. If S, our
idiolectophone, is to be a lifelong social isolate, he cannot have
learned it at his mother's knee. (But I note that someone could
learn an idiolect socially. His parents might invent it, and teach
it to him, without his meeting any other person who spoke it.) Thus
we must assume he invented it. This he did either by replicating
within himself those elements of language learning given socially
to the rest of us; or by finding an alternative way in to language.
It would beg the question to say that the latter is impossible; for
that is just what the human race, taken collectively, achieved. We
have yet to uncover the essential social element in language
creation, that would show how the race could achieve what no
individual, however well-endowed intellectually, could. An
assumption of this treatment of idiolects has been that an idiolect
will be different from any other language. Nothing in the
definitions proposed required this, however, and it need not be so.
Two people could share the same idiolect just as they could share
the same height; except that 'share' is a dangerously ambiguous
term to use there. If we allow that the notion of idiolect is
intelligible, I cannot see that we can rule out the possibility of
the independent invention by two people of the same language,
however improbable it may be. A version of Wittgenstein's comments
on his sensation- reporting language might still be thought to
provide a conclusive refutation of the thesis that an idiolect, as
described, is possible. In spite of my generous description, it
might be held that a solitary user of the 'language' could not
muster a distinction between correct and incorrect use. In the case
of the impoverished 'language' of Philosophical Investigations 258,
Wittgenstein had an argument to show why 'whatever is going to seem
right to me is right'. So a defence ofthe idiolect should take the
form of showing how its user could come to detect error. (It is not
enough to claim that the language can in fact be misused; a sense
must be given to discovery of the misuse.) This calls for the
possibility of checking on the correctness of past usage. I am
making the simplifying assumption that the usage in question is
'fact-stating discourse'. This abstraction away from the complexity
of the real world is defensible ad hominem; and I know of no one
who allows that a 'fact-stating' idiolect might be
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 189
possible, but that (e.g.) irony demands a communal language.'2
The fundamental idea in Wittgenstein's argument is that of
comparison: crudely stated, it is a comparison of the way it
seems to S with the way it is. That statement masks a vital
distinction, however. We should not confuse two quite separate
claims: the one, that S has nothing with which to compare the way
it seems to him; the other, that the detection of error requires
access to the facts. The former claim is one that (I accept) was
made by Wittgenstein of the user of the private
sensation-language.'3 Some have also interpreted his discussion of
rule-following as implying that any idiolect would be as deficient
as the sensation-language."'4 The counter to that claim requires
only the demonstration that S can check his usage against something
else and come to a reasonable decision. To characterize this
process as checking for errors, the acquisition of the knowledge
that he was wrong, requires the further judgment that S
(eventually) gets it right. Now, as far as I can see, what
Wittgenstein has to say reduces to this: the only possible point of
comparison available to the user of the sensation-language derives
from the judgments of his community. It is a separate matter
whether the community is right, or whether we have to say:
'Whatever seems right to the community is right, and there's an end
on 't.' (This last is the position ascribed to Wittgenstein by
Crispin Wright.'") The interpretation that finds in Wittgenstein
the view that any rule-following requires the community is driven
also to the conclusion that for Wittgenstein the sole possible
source of objectivity lies in the community. If one succumbs to the
temptation of saying, resignedly, that to avoid scepticism we must
hold that what the community accepts is, by definition, true, then
the conflation of the two claims is complete. I find just such a
conflation not only
'2Cf. Davidson, pp. 164-5. 13Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical
Investigations (translated by G. E. M. Anscombe),
Oxford: Basil Blackwell (1953) sections 258 to 323. 14For
example, Peacocke, C., 'Reply [to Baker]: Rule-following: The
nature of
Wittgenstein's arguments'; Wright, C., 'Rule-following,
Objectivity and the Theory of Meaning'--both papers to be found in
Holtzman, H. and Leich, C. M. (editors) Wittgenstein: to follow a
rule, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, respectively at pp.
72-95 and pp. 99-117; and Kripke, S., Wittgenstein on Rules and
Private Language: an elementary exposition, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1982.
5 Wright, op. cit. p. 106.
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190 I-HARRY A. LEWIS
in the cited discussions of Wittgenstein, but also in 'Thought
and talk', where Davidson moves from a notion of the 'social truth'
of sentences to 'the idea of an objective, public truth'.'6
So, in defence of my idiolectophone S, I need primarily to show
that he can do as well as a member of a community in comparing his
usage with some standard. I do not need to show that he is bound to
get it right. For not every community is bound to get it right
either. (This embarrassing fact is often suppressed by talking of
the source of comparisons as 'the' community, presumed unique and
unanimous.)
Wittgenstein himself was particularly concerned to deny that
meaning could be grasped 'in a flash':
But what about this consensus-doesn't it mean that one human
being by himself could not calculate? Well, one human being could
at any rate not calculate just once in his life.'7
Taking our cue from this, let us compare the individual's
instantaneous and unchecked judgment both with the same judgment in
the context of communal agreement and with the same judgment as one
of a series by that individual. For I submit that any reinforcement
provided for an individual's momentary judgment by his community
can be paralleled by reinforcement available from the history of
his own judgments. Schematically: many minds on one occasion of
judgment can be paralleled by one mind on several occasions. If
'agreement in judgment' is possible at one moment for many minds,
it is also possible for one mind at many times.18 Appropriate but
entirely analogous assumptions are needed in both cases. Let the
judgment in question be 'This is an oak tree'. If several people
assent to that sentence at the time, they must (in order to agree)
refer to the
" Davidson, op. cit. pp. 165, 170. 17 Wittgenstein, L., Remarks
on the Foundations of Mathematics (edited by G. H. von
Wright, R. Rhees and G. E. M. Anscombe, translated by G. E. M.
Anscombe), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956: II 68. (On Wittgenstein's
special concern with the instant, see also Baker, G. P. and Hacker,
P. M. S., Scepticism, Rules and Language, Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1984; and cf. Lear, J. 'The Disappearing "We"', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 58 (1984), p. 235.)
8 The same proposal is made by Simon Blackburn, 'The Individual
Strikes Back', Synthese 58 (1984) pp. 281-302, at p. 294.
Blackburn's paper is congenial to the position argued here; it came
to my attention too late to be taken properly into account in the
preparation of the present paper.
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 191
same object, and mean the same by 'oak tree'. If one person
assents to it on several occasions, in order for hisjudgments to be
in agreement, his reference and his language must likewise concur.
The many-person case is not yet revealed as privileged. We are by
now, however, alerted to the ambiguity of 'agree'. Two people may
assent to the same thought, without coming to an agreement that it
is true. The former is a necessary condition of the latter, but it
is not sufficient. If the latter is conceived as a social act
involving two people, there will be no obvious analogue for a
single person. However, a step from the one to the other is the
recognition of sameness of assent. And the persisting individual
may follow the momentary colleague at least to this point. As this
is the crucial step for comparison and so for checking, let us look
closely at it.
First I must note that the term 'judgment' is misleading. The
kind of agreement that (according to the 'communitarian'
interpretation) underpins rule-following is agreement (or better,
coincidence) in pre-linguistic responses, not in judgment proper.
And that is how it should be, if the claim is that language could
not have developed without coincidence of responses. Of course, a
possible position would be that some social communality of
pre-linguistic responses was required for any individual to have a
language. But that would be an unsupported claim, and only if some
content could be given to the alleged communality could it be
evaluated. Once such content was given (e.g. along the lines of
mutual perception of responses) I could seek to model it in the
persisting individual. There is a further problem in the notion of
genuinely social sharing that is supposed to take place prior to
language: the mutuality or communality involved would have to be
possible for creatures without language.
So the claim that needs scrutiny is this: the only intelligible
kind of checking of responses is inter-personal; even given time, I
cannot compare my own responses one with another. And this claim
hardly needs to be refuted. To compare any two responses, the least
that is needed is the awareness of the responses, the awareness of
that to which they are responses, and the awareness that they are
both responses to that stimulus. (This is intended to be a minimal
characterization. Clearly no less will do. I do not find it
plausible myself that all these
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192 I-HARRY A. LEWIS
attitudes could inhabit a mind as yet incapable of language.)
The responses in question being construed as behavioural, I see no
difficulty in allowing the responder himself to be aware of them.
He can be simultaneously aware of them, either by memory of one or
both, or by their persistence (if they are traces, such as marks on
the bark of a tree). Simultaneous perception of responses in two
people is not obviously easier in practice, and surely not in
principle. Awareness of the cause is entirely analogous. The
crucial step is the next. How could an individual come to know, of
his own responses to some event, that they are caused by it? As
long as we recognize in the 'response' an item of observable
behaviour, I cannot see that such causal knowledge is any more
difficult for the individual of himself than for any person of
anyone, whether himself or another. Such knowledge is no more
difficult to acquire than the knowledge that contact with a
particular kind of plant causes a rash.
Thus, if comparison amounted to no more than this, the
idiolectophone could indulge in it. On the other hand, the account
does not yet appear to give us any notion of decision-for example,
of choice between two different responses to the same stimulus. The
short answer to this objection is that any description adequate to
allow for such choice will ascribe a language to the chooser, and
so rule out the process of comparison from counting as a
precondition of language. But a better reaction is to point out
that even this inadequate account already undermines the claim that
all objectivity requires agreement in response as a precondition.
For any perception of agreement in responses requires in the
perceiver a capacity to recognize the same responses again. The
correctness of that recognition is required for the process to
start at all, and so cannot be explained by it.
Can we help the argument to community by lifting the two
artificial constraints that we have imposed, namely, that the
judgment of the member of a community was to be taken at an
instant, and that the relevant conception of agreement in responses
was to be pre-linguistic? Let us lift them in turn and in the
orderjust given. We can see that inter-personal comparison (as
distinct from mere coincidence) of judgment needs time anyway. But
if we hold firm to the contrast between comparison and correction,
we can see that nothing can now undermine the
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 193
ability of S (our solitary) to make comparisons, once it has
been granted. On the other hand, if comparison requires a fully-
fledged language, we are still withholding that. Moving from
consideration of comparison to that of correction, what we find is
that the cost of conceding to the social being the extra reasons
for preferring one response over another that become available once
(e.g.) memory is allowed its due role, is the creation of new
opportunities for scepticism. If the agreement in judgment has to
be discovered, it can only be discovered by one who already knows
what we must then allow the solitary to know as well.
If we lift the second constraint, we shall allow ourselves to
ascribe a genuine language to S, and seek to find in this a covert
reference to a community, to be revealed by scrutinizing the
process of checking. Users of natural languages do 'correct' their
own usages without social prompting or comparison in each case; we
are all (in that respect) hermits for much of the time. We may
detect inconsistencies in our own writings or in our remembered
thoughts; we may come to see as false recorded or remembered
reports of perceived objects or events. In both cases a retention
of meaning through time is required: but it is as much an
assumption of social as of individual comparison that such
retention occurs in individuals. (How else could the radical
translator or interpreter build up an account of his informant's
language?) Once more we do well to keep apart the notions of
comparison and of coming to know one was wrong. 'Social truth' can
be seen to provide no more than a point of comparison not available
to the solitary, unless it is held apriori to guarantee objective
truth. I ought to note here a claim of Davidson's that would, if
proven, settle the question in favour of the community: 'Someone
cannot have a belief unless he understands the possibility of being
mistaken, and this requires the contrast between truth and
error-true belief and false belief. But this contrast, I have
argued, can emerge only in the context of interpretation which
alone forces on us the idea of an objective, public truth."' I do
not pretend to understand completely how this very compressed
argument works. But for present purposes the crucial sentence is
the last, with its claim that the sole
9 Davidson, 'Thought and Talk', op. cit. p. 170.
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194 I-HARRY A. LEWIS
possible source of a notion of incorrectness is 'the context of
interpretation'. We may accept that the individual who compares and
modifies his responses has the concept of incorrectness (even if
his decisions are sometimes wrong). We may further accept that
someone who indulges in radical interpretation needs that concept.
However I cannot see that any argument is offered by Davidson to
show that the concept could arise in an individual in no other way.
Indeed, it would seem to be an intellectual rather than an apriori
difficulty: could not a very clever and inventive isolate come up
with the concept?
V
The role of 'community' in the arguments considered gives little
support to the conclusion that the oft-repeated claim, 'language is
a social art', is anything more than a general empirical truth. The
most that the arguments establish is a series of contrasts: in
Burge's case, a contrast between the possessor of an attitude with
her language and the language in which an attribution of that
attitude is made; in the discussion of radical interpretation, a
contrast of two roles, interpreter and informant, and two
languages; in Wittgenstein's discussion of rules, a contrast
between individual and communal judgement. As we have seen,
analogies exist between the relation of individual to community and
the relation of one community to a larger of which it is part; and
between the relation of two non-intersecting communities and the
relation of two individuals. At the limits, we can place the
hypotheses of the isolated user of an idiolect; and of an error by
all mankind. It needs no new argument to defend the intelligibility
of the latter. The former seems to me equally to survive renewed
attacks. In both cases, it is possible to understand why we cannot
produce examples. No one can produce an example of a current belief
of his own that is false. Likewise I cannot, unfortunately,
introduce you to a lifelong social isolate, or invite you to
interview an idiolectophone.
In between these extremes we should recognize, not a sharp
division between individual and community, but roles and
relationships, vertical and horizontal, that may hold now between
individuals, now between groups, now even within a single person.
Wittgenstein, when he was, according to some, in
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 195
the midst of arguing that any rule-use required a community,
remarked:
A human being can encourage himself, give himself orders, obey,
blame and punish himself; he can ask himself a question and answer
it. We could even imagine human beings who spoke only in monologue;
who accompanied their activities by talking to themselves.-An
explorer who watched them and listened to their talk might succeed
in translating their language into ours.20
The multiple possibilities of language creation and language-
use argue the need for care over terminology. A good example is the
use of the word 'public', as in 'public language'. Does this mean,
'language with perceptible sentence-tokens', 'language learnable by
third parties', or 'communal language'? Part of my own position is
that a language with perceptible (and enduring) sentence tokens
need not be communal; careless talk of 'publicity' could render
this view unintelligible. (Perceptible 'clothing' of thoughts is a
necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for community of
language.) A related ambiguity in the expression 'grasping the
meaning' has been remarked upon by Gilbert.2'
Our critical discussion suggests an opposite conclusion to that
being argued for by the supporters of community; far from its being
a prerequisite of language, language is a prerequisite of
community, and no mass conspiracy to set it up, no wordless social
contract, needs to be postulated.
A key notion to emerge is that of the reliability of the
individual language-user even when a member of a community. It is
clear that agreement alone could not guarantee objectivity; at
best, it could be only one among many factors. If the idea of the
individual as an autonomous 'responder' or 'measuring- instrument',
in Mark Wilson's phrase,22 is introduced, a complementary view to
the one attributed to Wittgenstein becomes attractive. Agreement in
judgment shows us the truth because only the assumption that the
world is as it is thus represented can explain the fact that we
react in a similar way. There are three contributors to this
process: a world, open to
20 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, op. cit. section
243. 21 Gilbert, M., 'Has Language a Social Nature?', Synthese 56
(1983) pp. 301-18. 22 Wilson, M., 'Predicate Meets Property',
Philosophical Review 91 (1982) p. 255.
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196 I-HARRY A. LEWIS
perception; a reliable human perceiver; and a language. In my
view the role of the community is secondary. It can, but need not,
provide a language. It does provide alternative human perceivers,
so that what we collectively agree on, the inter- section of our
several belief-sets, is likelier to represent the world than any
one individual's total belief-set. It is because people are
likelier to be reliable about what they perceive than about what
they merely imagine that inter-personal agreement is a test of
objectivity. We consign that about which we disagree to the zone of
the 'subjective' not primarily because it is uncomfortable, but
because disagreement is evidence that it is not 'out there' at all.
There is an analogy here between two quite different areas of
divergence of belief: morals, and advanced science. For what is
least disputedly 'objective' is that which all of us can agree
about with minimum training. Such agreement, however, is the
evidence, not the essence.23
2" In preparing this paper I have benefited from discussions
with Mark Johnston, Philip Pettit, Pamela Tate and Roger White.
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY
Harry A. Lewis and Andrew Woodfield
II-Andrew Woodfield I
Two Kinds of Meaning I agree with the individualist thrust of
Harry Lewis's paper as far as thoughts and concepts are concerned.
The conclusion of my paper will echo Lewis's view, but I hope to
display the issues from a slightly different angle. Before
discussing thought, the argument will touch on the notion of
linguistic meaning. Here I think I do disagree with some of the
things that Lewis says. When he talks about content in connection
with linguistic items, I find that he is too individualist. With
any luck, there will be enough disagreement over this to provoke a
pleasant debate.
In section II, I maintain, despite my individualism, that there
are also such things as communal thoughts, which are emergent from,
or supervenient upon, community activities. I make use of Grice's
distinction between sentence or word meaning and speaker's
meaning.' Words and sentences possess standard meanings which
remain invariant over the many uses to which particular utterances
may be put,2 whereas what a speaker means on a particular occasion
is up to the speaker.
I rely upon this intuitive contrast, because I want to hold up
standard linguistic meanings as my models when I introduce the
notions of communal thought and communal concept. The senses in
which a thought or a concept might be said to be essentially
communal become clearer if we consider the matter in the light of
this contrast.
In fact, it is possible to construct several different notions
of communal thought. There is nothing ontologically wrong with
thoughts that are communal. Controversy comes in over the questions
whether they are the only kind of thoughts, and whether they are
more basic than individualist thoughts. I do
'Grice, H. P. (1968) 'Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning and
Word Meaning', Foundations of Language 4, 1-18.
2 Davidson, D. (1975) 'Thought and Talk', p. 164, Inquiries into
Truth and Interpretation, Clarendon, Oxford 1984.
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198 II-ANDREW WOODFIELD
not think they are the only kind, nor do I think they are basic,
as section III will reveal.
Let us start by considering actual human languages, such as
Arabic, English, Mandarin or any of the several thousand or so
others that are in daily use. Some, like Cornish, are dying out. It
is said that only two persons are left who can speak fluent
Cornish. I find it helpful to say that the basic purpose of a
language is to facilitate communication. The truth of this
functional claim depends, I think, upon facts about how the
language originated. A genuine language has to have evolved because
it has successfully mediated communication in the past, or if it is
an artificial language, it has to have been designed for that
purpose. The concept of a natural language is partly explicated by
the platitude that natural languages have evolved for sending
messages. The various components of a language are there for the
same purpose, but derivatively, as the organs of a body are there
to keep the whole animal alive, or as the parts of a machine are
tailored to its overall purpose. The thesis holds, as Aristotle
says, 'generally and for the most part'. It is not falsified by
putative counter-examples of the 'Robinson Crusoe' kind in which a
language is not used for communication. All sorts of exceptional
situations are imaginable. Platitudes about functions can admit of
exceptions and yet reveal essential truths.
Lewis is right that individuals who talk to one another do not
ipso facto bind themselves into a community. It happens that people
who converse a lot tend to live close together, conse- quently they
tend to enter into social relations and adopt shared norms. Using
the same tool is not sharing a norm.3
Yet, if one considers any living natural language, with all its
richness and tradition, one knows that there must have been a
3A related point is made by Bach and Harnish, when they note
that successful communication in L requires what they call the
'Linguistic Presumption': 'The mutual belief in the linguistic
community C that
(i) the members of C share L, and (ii) that whenever any member
S utters any e (expression) in L to any other member
H, H can identify what S is saying, given that H knows the
meaning(s) of e in L and is aware of the appropriate background
information' (Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish (1979) Linguistic
Communication and Speech Acts, p. 7. MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass.
Without such a presumption, neither S nor H would be entitled to
assume that e means to the other what it means to himself. So the
mutual belief is something else that is shared by people who
converse in L. But of course this is not sufficient to forge a
social community.
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199 CONTENT AND COMMUNITY
society that sustained its development. I am inclined to think
that a word's having a meaning in L is an emergent property, not
completely analysable in terms of what the totality of speakers of
L have meant when they have used the word.
So instead of trying to define 'social community', let us look
at how it could possibly have come about that words and sentences
have standard meanings.
Suppose that word W has a meaning M in L now. Its meaning is
what it is now because the activities of many people in the past
established it as such, and also because W is (or would be) used
with that meaning by a sufElciency of the present population. It is
not a coincidence that the present users accord it the same meaning
as the earlier people. The current lot do this because they know
that M is the established meaning. Generally, they speak in
accordance with a rule to the effect: 'Respect previously
established meanings; don't be a Humpty-Dumpty'. They do this
because it facilitates the efElcient exchanging of messages.
Roughly, then, W has a standard meaning M in L because, and in
so far as, people treat it as having that meaning. This statement
seems circular, like saying that a coin is a 1 coin because, and in
so far as, it is treated by people as a 1 coin. In both cases, the
short statement tries to sum up a long story. The story is not
viciously circular, it describes a historical process that contains
cyclical subprocesses. It is a kind of historical explanation
rather than a meaning-analysis. Similarly, to explain why a certain
type of coin is worth one pound Sterling is not to ofTer a semantic
analysis of 'This coin is worth one pound Sterling'. The concept of
the pound Sterling belongs to a higher level of discourse and is
linked in with other concepts to do with finance and economics. The
concepts exercised in the back- ground story do not belong to this
finished surface scheme.
There are several hallmarks which serve to fix the notion of
standard meaning more clearly. I shall mention three. First, the
meaning that a given word has in L is a matter that transcends what
any individual may say or believe, and the answer to it is usually
objectively decidable, once the word has entered the lexicon. A
newcomer to the language has to discover the answer by empirical
inquiry. Even a native-speaker can be wrong about the meaning of a
word in L. It is even possible to imagine circumstances in which a
majority of the speakers of L have
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200 II-ANDREW WOODFIELD
mistaken beliefs about the meaning of W. But this would be an
unusual situation. Generally, if most people think that W means M,
this is a good sign that it does; there is a continuous gentle
pressure maintaining things thus. When a new word ('wally',
'frisbee', 'software') is coined, it does not have a standard
meaning; the process of standardisation goes hand in hand with the
assimilation of the word into the lexicon. One person can be
responsible for starting this process, but the word has to catch on
among a significant subset of the population before it can be said
to be a part of the language. The initiator is not in control of
the word once it has entered the public domain. Its eventual
standard meaning could be different from the meaning that the
inventor originally assigned.
The second hallmark is stability. Once W has acquired a meaning,
it will keep it, no matter how often or how rarely the word is
uttered, and regardless of the purposes for which it is uttered
(cf. Davidson's 'autonomy of meaning', op. cit. note 2). Once in
the communal pool, a meaning stays there indefinitely, and the fact
will be registered by all competent dictionaries. Some words lose
currency and are perceived as obsolete. But they can sometimes be
revived. Given the current craze for old- fashioned cuisine, rare
words like 'posset' and 'medlar' could become popular again. They
continue to bear the original meanings that they had in
Shakespeare's day.
Certain words ('nice' is an example) have an old meaning which
is hardly known, plus a new meaning. Such words are ambiguous. Both
meanings are standard, in my sense of the term, even if one is
better known the other.4
I do not say it is impossible for a word to change its standard
meaning(s), or to lose all meaning. Clearly, keeping a meaning
depends in some loose way upon a continuity of practice among
temporally spread-out L-speakers. But it is difficult to define a
precise requirement. If a word were forgotten by everybody
throughout the twentieth century, then remembered in the
twenty-first, it could be said, at the later time, that the word
meant so-and-so during the previous century but no one living then
was aware of the fact. Languages, like libraries and other
4 Dictionaries sometimes list a 'standard' (i.e. a dominant,
received) meaning plus a 'non-standard' (subsidiary, slang,
regional) meaning. On my use of the term, both dictionary meanings
would be standard, that is, communal and stable.
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 201
repositories of traditions, grow bigger all the time, or get
wiped out, but they rarely shrink. In George Orwell's 1984,
'Newspeak' is deliberately impoverished English; but the case is
fictional.
The third characteristic is the presence of social procedures
for determining correct meanings. One would expect to find such
procedures wherever a community prizes its native language and is
concerned that it should function well. Occasionally, an official
body is set up, like the Royal Commission on Abortion, to
adjudicate the meanings of legally important key terms ('foetus',
'viable', 'alive'). When the problematic term is technical or
scientific, or is a natural kind term,5 scientific experts will be
accorded a big say. If the word is not technical, savants like
etymologists, dialect-specialists, and philosophers are asked for
their views. Eventually the public 'decides' by adopting a certain
meaning as standard. It is hard for an authority to compel the
public to use a word in a certain way. The Acad6mie Frangaise
failed in its efforts to ban 'le weekend' and 'le parking' from
French.
In cases of urgency which attract official attention, one can
imagine that a single individual might have the power to legislate
a meaning. But this could occur only if the person were acting in
an official capacity, on behalf of the whole community. If a
nonentity tried to issue an edict, it would carry no weight.
No doubt there are other criteria of standardisation. We shall
let these three suffice for our purposes.
Lewis spoke of idiolects. By 'S's idiolect', I mean the version
of a natural language which is spoken by S. One is free to christen
the version by its own name, as if it were a different language
altogether. For instance, it might be said that Ronald Reagan
speaks Reaganish. But this is clearly not a private language (not
for nothing is Reagan known among his staff as 'The Great
Communicator'), and there could be other people who spoke in
exactly the same idiosyncratic way as Reagan. Reaganish would then
be their dialect, which would not stop it being Reagan's idiolect.
Although it is nominally essential that S speaks his own idiolect,
it is never an essential property of S's idio- lect that it be an
idiolect. The words in it will have standard meanings; S had to
learn it, he can have false beliefs about
5Putnam, H. (1975) speaks of a 'division of linguistic labour'
in 'The Meaning of "Meaning" ', Philosophical Papers, vol. II:
Mind, Language and Reality, C.U.P., Cambridge.
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202 II-ANDREW WOODFIELD
meanings in it, and he is not responsible for those meanings.6
We now turn quickly to speaker's meaning. I do not wish to
examine Grice's notion in depth.' I simply wish to bring out the
fact that the notion is individualistic.
S ironically says 'You cooked a fine stew', meaning that the
person he is addressing cooked an unpleasant hotpot. The fact that
S meant this is independent of whether anyone understood him; it is
also indifferent to whether S is a member of a community; also the
sentence he uttered does not mean what he meant. What S meant
depends solely on S's state of mind at the time. S, who believes
there is someone within earshot, intends to make that person go
through an inference about S's reason for speaking. The hoped-for
inference is to include a number of 'mutual contextual beliefs'.
Ironical remarks demand more decoding than straightforward sincere
utterances do. John Searle' has applied the same idea to explain
how people understand metaphors. The interpreter has to see that
the words uttered are not to be taken literally, but can be used as
clues for puzzling out the speaker's meaning. The same idea works
for many other figures of speech, such as hyperbole, euphemism, and
malapropism.
While the example well illustrates the contrast between two
levels of meaning, it is noteworthy that the hearer has to know the
sentence-meaning first in order to retrieve the speaker's meaning.
Indeed, in sophisticated speech-acts, S can be counted on to
exploit H's previous knowledge of L.
It might be urged, therefore, that the example is no good for
proving that speaker's meaning is the more basic kind, and also
that it casts doubt on the basis that speaker's meaning is purely
individualistic. The scenario presupposes that there are sentence-
meanings available, which, so I have argued, are communal.
Well, I am not in fact arguing that speaker's meaning is basic.
But even so, the objection fails to establish the contrary thesis,
on two counts. The notion of speaker's meaning, pure and simple,
does not entail prior knowledge of any language. Some of Grice's
(1957) examples are of 'primitive' utterances lacking
SThis point is made by Michael Dummett in 'The Social Character
of Meaning' (1974) p. 425, in Truth and Other Enigmas, Duckworth,
London 1978.
7 See Bach and Harnish (op. cit.) pp. 149-154 for some
criticisms of it. 8 Searle, J. R. (1979) 'Metaphor', in A. Ortony
(ed) Metaphor and Thought, C.U.P.,
Cambridge.
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 203
prior linguistic significance.' Secondly, even in real life
where S and H share an environment, a language and a community,
these contextual facts are not truth-conditions of 'S meant that
someone had cooked an unpleasant hotpot'. What is necessary is that
S should suppose that these conditions obtain.
It is clear that we are dealing with a duality of kinds of
meaning, not just a distinction between types and tokens. S can on
one occasion utter a token of sentence-type z and mean that P, then
on another occasion S can utter a second token of sentence z and
mean that not-P. But the two sentence-tokens have the same standard
meaning on both occasions. They inherit it from the sentence-type
of which they are tokens. This reveals an important link between
the two contrasts. The fundamental possessors of standard meanings
are types (words or sentences). With speaker's meaning the polarity
is reversed; particular utterances are their vehicles. To determine
which message an utterance carries you must look to the
psychological circumstances of production. And this is precisely
the reason why the notion is individualist.
II Some Non-Individualist Conceptions of Thoughts and Concepts
Taking the concept of standard sentence meaning as our model, we
may now introduce the concept of a standard thought in community C.
We shall henceforth speak, for example, of 'the standard thought
that P', and also of 'the standard K concept'. For brevity's sake
we may omit the reference to community C.
These notions are hardly new. The standard thought that P is
just what many philosophers have always meant by 'the proposition
that P'. The link with standard meaning brings this out very
clearly, since many writers define a proposition as something
expressed by a declarative sentence (in virtue of its standard
meaning).
Questions need to be raised about the ontological status of
standard thoughts. Are they creations arising out of communal
activity? Are they supervenient upon social activities and
relations? If the former, are they artefacts, or are they natural
products? If the latter, are they epiphenomena or are they causally
efficacious?
'Grice, H. P. (1957) 'Meaning', Philosophical Review 66,
377-88.
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204 II-ANDREW WOODFIELD
Not all philosophers who espouse standard thoughts have tied
them closely to sentences. Frege, despite saying 'thoughts are
senses of sentences',' weakens the connection by allowing thoughts
that are never expressed. I have been unable to discover whether
Frege ever said that thoughts can be independent of language
altogether. He does state, however, that a thought exists prior to
anyone's grasping it."
Frege's precursor Bolzano, whom a German commentator recently
described as a 'logical Plato','2 held similar views. He wrote, '.
. . by proposition in itself I mean any assertion that something is
or is not the case, regardless whether or not some- body has put it
into words, and regardless even whether or not it has been
thought.''" He also affirms that 'There is indeed no doubt that
thinkability is a property of any proposition, but it is also ob-
vious that it does not form part of the concept of a
proposition'."4
Again, the connection with language is not completely severed by
this formulation, since a proposition might exist only in so far as
it could be put into words. Moreover, Bolzano is not committed to
propositions as Platonic entities, for he says 'One must not
ascribe being, existence or reality to propositions in
themselves'.' The Fregean tradition flourishes today. Popper
advocates the objectivity of 'World 3', whose denizens are
autonomous of any mind.'" Christopher Peacocke consciously adopts
Fregean terminology in his recent book.'7
Frege's logicist motivation is well-known. Both he and Bolzano
deplored the post-Kantian tendency to 'psychologise' logic, which
in their view propagated doubts about its objective validity. If
thoughts can be shown to be objective, then presumably logical
relations between them can also be objective.
0oFrege, G. (1918 originally) 'Thoughts', p. 4, in Logical
Investigations, (ed) P. T. Geach, Blackwell, Oxford 1977.
" Frege (op. cit.), p. 18 footnote: 'A person sees a thing, has
an idea, grasps or thinks a thought. When he grasps of thinks a
thought he does not create it but only comes to stand in a relation
to what already existed-a different relation from seeing a thing or
having an idea.'
"2 See the editor's introduction (p. xxix) to Bernard Bolzano
(originally 1837) Theory of Science, edited and translated by Rolf
George, Blackwell, Oxford 1972.
'"Bolzano, (op. cit.) pp. 20-1. '4ibid. p. 26. '5ibid. p. 21. 16
Popper, K. (1972) Objective Knowledge, esp. chapters 3 & 4.
Clarendon, Oxford. 17 Peacocke, C. (1983) Sense and Content
Clarendon, Oxford (see esp. p. 106).
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 205
Still, it is tempting to wonder if Platonism is really
necessary, if one's main concern is to ensure the shareability of
thoughts. All one really needs (so it might be urged) is the
distinction between thought-particulars and thought-universals. The
latter are by their very nature shareable, that is, possessable by
many subjects. The same goes for ideas, pains, indeed any mental
entity for which the particular/universal distinction makes
sense.
But Frege did not say this, because he would not have been
satisfied that it ensured the supra-psychological status of logic.
The Aristotelian conception of a 'thought-kind' entails (a) that a
kind exists only if at least one particular of that kind exists,
and (b) that relations obtain only among the kinds that exist. This
limits the scope of logic to the domain of what has actually been
thought.
It is very important for Frege, then, that the thought-type
comes first. This guarantees the anti-individualism and the anti-
psychologism. But there is no need for him to view thoughts as if
they were Platonic Forms, disjoined altogether from human
activities. For there remains the other possible position, that
thoughts are cultural products, emergent out of the intellectual
and linguistic life of human collectives.
At this point we need to say more about what a constitutively
communal thought might be. It seems to me that there are several
ways to go here, and it is up to each theorist to construct the
concept he wishes to use. But certain general specifications can be
laid down. On any view, a standard thought is going to be something
like a cognitive tradition or institution. We already employ such
notions as, for example, 'the Spanish concept of masculine pride',
'the British notion of fair-play', etc. However, we do not wish to
limit ourselves to ideas that are cherished by the culture in which
they arise. We want to include concepts that have never yet been
explicitly recognised or formulated, but which are in some sense
available in the cultural repertoire. Every participant in the
culture, including infants who are born into it, has all the
standard concepts of C available, waiting to be grasped. This
legacy is to be counted among the advantages of civilised living in
C.
The model of standard meaning serves us well, since we already
know what it means to say that a possible sentence of L, never yet
uttered, already has a meaning in L. This is because
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206 II-ANDREW WOODFIELD
sentences are composed of words which already have meanings; a
similar compositionality carries over to the domain of thoughts and
concepts.
Standard thoughts are composed of standard concepts, then, but
it is left as an open possibility that some standard concepts in C
are not easily expressible in L. There may be room for such things
as implicit standard concepts, which explain features of the life
that is led in C, styles, forms of pictorial representation, and so
on. One can imagine that the Spanish language might never have
possessed the word 'machismo', but that Spanish life might still
have included the same range of characteristic male responses to
certain life-situations. There could be a point in saying that
Spanish life contained dramatic representations of male pride which
were not explicitly recognised as such. There is no doubt that
literary critics, historians of ideas, anthro- pologists, and
sociologists do find it useful to operate with such theoretical
notions, which are analogous to notions used in individual
psychology. Indeed a persuasive case could be made that the
English-speaking world implicitly possessed the concept of
machismo, even before the time, not long ago, when it borrowed the
word from Spanish.
Do standard thoughts lodge in the group mind? There is no harm
in using the metaphor, but no need to commit oneself to any group
mind. The notion of standard thoughts can be explicated reasonably
well without it, on analogy with the concept of standard meaning.18
Analogues of the three marks of standardness are easily
discernible. The fact that stable cognitive traditions exist is
empirically verifiable. If it were not so, there would be no such
disciplines as sociology or history of ideas. Also the participants
in C can be collectively responsible for determining the identity
of a standard concept or thought. Questions like the following can
be raised: which thought does sentence z express? Which standard
thought was speaker S expressing? There will be cases where what
has to be decided is the rightness or wrongness of certain
ascriptions. It will be an unfailing characteristic of such cases
that the individual thinker is not authoritative about the content
of the thought he was entertaining. Other people, interlocutors or
outsiders, can
8 Cf. M. Dummett, (op. cit.) pp. 427-8, where he speaks of
'knowledge possessed by the community as a whole'.
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 207
correct S about its identity. Tyler Burge, in his ingenious
anti- individualist argument, sets up clearly-defined situations in
which precisely this kind of phenomenon occurs. The Cartesian
intimacy between subject and thought-content gets sundered when the
thought is communalised. S can aim at a certain thought and miss
it, yet be under the impression he has hit it. Thus we find Burge
saying that his argument gets under way 'in any case where it is
intuitively possible to attribute a mental state or event whose
content involves a notion that the subject incompletely
understands."'9 Burge treats standard concepts as symbolic
instruments for people to 'think with'. Operating with thoughts is
seen as a cognitive skill, at which some people are more adept than
others. Burge sees the community as 'defining' the notion of sofa;
my third criterion is clearly applicable to his conception of a
notion.
I have said there are many alternative methods of constructing
conceptions of communal thought. To see some of these, it is
helpful to focus on the different ways one might try to explicate
the 'grasping' relation. I shall sketch just four possible methods,
two of which seem reasonably plausible.
(1) The 'Dasein' Model. For a (suitably receptive) S to think a
standard thought it is sufficient for S to be appropriately
ensconced in the relevant cultural environment. Nothing hinges on
S's inner condition. Two individuals could be internally identical,
one of whom thinks that P, the other does not, solely because the
former stands in the external relation, the latter does not. This
Hegelian or Heideggerian position entails the wholesale rejection
of the Cartesian concept of mind. The model not only conflates
'having a thought' with 'having a thought available', it is also
wholly at odds with what is known about the dependence of cognition
upon brain processes.
(2) The 'Internalised Token' Model. S thinks standard thought T
iff there is a token of T, (call it t), inside S, and S stands in
the 'thinks*' relation to t.20 The crucial feature of this model is
that the inner token t is itself a standardised entity. The
9 Burge T. (1979) 'Individualism and the Mental' p. 79, Midwest
Studies in Philosophy vol. IV (eds) P. A. French, T. E Uehling and
H. K. Wettstein, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
" For more on 'thinks*' see Hartry Field (1978) 'Mental
Representation', Erkenntnis 13, 9-61.
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208 II-ANDREW WOODFIELD
token is not identical with the neural state, if any, which
'realizes' it. Token-thoughts are like pound-notes; they supervene
on the physical stuff, but their identity-conditions distinguish
them from anything physical. Each token is of a certain type
essentially; the type, in its turn, is essentially standard; so the
token is too.
The thought-token is analogous to a speech-act token in this
respect. S says 'Je demande que la porte soit fermne', thereby
performing the act of asking in French that the door be shut. What
S does is constitutively social under that description. The sounds
produced would not warrant that description unless the French
language existed, which in turn allows one to infer, given that
French is a natural language, that French society sustained its
evolution.
Many writers espouse this position, including Hegel, Marx, L. S.
Vygotsky,"2 JulianJaynes.22 Many in this camp like to say that the
individual thinker 'internalises' or 'appropriates' the cul- tural
objects. When individuals make contact with a standard thought,
they create a copy of it inside their heads, rather as a magnetic
tape records a message. A great deal of social and tech- nological
stage-setting is required before this can happen.
(3) The 'Cultural Osmosis' Model. When S thinks a standard
thought, S enters into a complex relation with something public,
but S can do this only by satisfying a number of internal and
external conditions. They would probably include at least the
following: S's brain is currently in a certain type of physical
state; S has gone through certain kinds of appropriate training
(has learned a language, learned the norms of a group, acquired
certain skills); S is in social contact with others and counts as a
member of a community. Also certain linguistic and social rules
must be in force in C; standard thoughts supervene on the shared
practices. To gain the right kind of access to them, S must be
brought into the group and must agree with others in judgments and
behaviour. S must be disposed to react in certain ways
spontaneously, without reflecting. This position is inspired by
Wittgenstein.
Certainly, where hybrid psychological states are concerned,
21Vygotsky, L. S. (1962) Thought and Language MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass. 22Jaynes, J. (1976) The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 209
contextual conditions, as well as purely psychological
conditions, affect the truth of ascriptions. But the osmotic model
takes externalism further than the mere recognition of hybrids; it
denies the validity of the inner/outer distinction which is
employed by those who talk of 'purely psychological states'.
Individual minds themselves supervene on group life, rather as
pieces of metal are brought to life by being used as money.
(4) The 'Measuring Stick' Model. This view, which I hold, says
that when S grasps a standard thought, S has an individual thought
which is complete in itself and has its own content. The individual
thought stands in a certain relation to the standard thought. It
has a similar role in S to the role that the standard thought has
in the system of standard thoughts. Other people, in ascribing
thoughts to S, identify S's individual thought by specifying the
standard thought which most closely resembles S's individual
thought, availing themselves of the imperfect resources of their
own language. The background to this view is a theory of
content-ascriptions which I have outlined elsewhere.23 It is an
individualist view, yet it does not deny that standard thoughts
exist. It treats them on a par with standard meanings. Nor does it
deny that individuals can enter into cognitive con- tact with them.
But the contact is indirect, being mediated by individual thoughts.
It is possible for S to be aware that he or she is thinking the
content ofa standard thought that P. This would be the case if S
thought that P, and knew that this content was specifiable through
the sentence 'P'. In other words, S has an in- dividual thought
plus a background of semantic knowledge. I shall say more in
defence of the fourth model in the next section.
III Individualist Thoughts Are More Basic Are there such things
as irreducibly individualist thoughts, in addition to standard
thoughts? In this final section I defend an affirmative answer.
No sane believer in standard thoughts will wish to deny outright
that people perform individual acts of thinking. But he may well
try to offer a reductive analysis, saying that an individual
thought is nothing but a person entering into a
23Woodfield, A. (1982a) 'On Specifying the Contents of Thoughts'
in Thought and Object (ed) A. Woodfield, Clarendon, Oxford.
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210 II-ANDREW WOODFIELD
relation with a standard thought. He then uses one of the models
just sketched of the nature of this relation. I call this position
'reductive', but it goes in the opposite direction from a
microreduction. It analyses the mental partly in terms of the
sociological.
At first sight, the position seems paradoxical. To claim that
individual acts of thinking are always acts of grasping communal
contents undermines the initial contrast, which my exposition
relied on, between speaker's meaning and standard meaning. For
speaker's meaning is a matter of speaker's thoughts and intentions.
The proposal is, in effect, to relocate speaker's meaning on the
communal side of the divide.
The claim must be that individualist thoughts (and speaker's
meanings) are social in a different and possibly deeper sense than
that which was invoked when the original contrast was drawn. The
deeper sense of 'social' must turn on a theoretical account of what
it is for a person or a sentence to mean, with the theory showing
that all meaning involves something social in the background. And
it might be argued that the 'paradox' is more apparent than real.
It seems like a paradox only because of my mode of exposition of
the contrast.
Nevertheless, even if speaker's meaning did ultimately involve a
social relation, I should still maintain that there are thoughts
and (non-semantic) intentions which are irreducibly individualist.
Ultimately the case for individualism does not rest essentially on
the theory of meaning, but upon positive independent
considerations, some of which I shall shortly provide.
To be individualist, a thought has to meet the following
conditions. These are obverses of the conditions for com- munality,
not only because they say opposite things, but also because they
apply to particulars first, kinds second. Clearly, individualist
thought-particulars, if they exist, are not going to be
ontologically derived from Platonic thought-types. Indi- vidualist
thought-kinds are Aristotelian: they exist through having
members.
First, each individualist thought depends upon the cognitive
activity ofjust one person, and belongs to that person. But two or
more people can have individualist thoughts that are similar. These
may be grouped together, and it may be natural for a
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 211
third-person to characterise the various thoughts using the same
'that'-clause each time.
Second, the subject of an individualist thought is responsible
for keeping it alive or letting it disappear. With long-lasting
thought-contents, such as the contents of (core) memories and
(core) beliefs, S keeps them in existence by storing them and not
forgetting them. S's stock of retained thoughts is a distinctive
possession; the more thoughts there are in stock, the less chance
there is of another person having an exactly similar set.
Third, the subject is the ultimate authority concerning
questions about the identity of his or her own individualist
thoughts (though S's verbal expressions of those thoughts may be
liable to linguistic correction).
There can be no doubt that we do operate with such a notion.
That we have it is proved by the fact that readers of Harry Lewis's
paper, and of this paper, will find our individualist locutions
perfectly natural. They will tend to agree with Lewis when he says
that it is perverse to claim that people severally 'think with' the
jointly-owned notion of sofa, for 'Jane would be held to "think
with" a notion of sofas that excluded armchairs, in her very
judgment that an armchair was a sofa' (Lewis, p. 180). In the
earlier paper of mine to which Lewis refers,24 I described the
typical 'correction-reaction' of a man who discovers he has been
under a standing misapprehension as to the meaning of a certain
word. He realizes he may have some beliefs that were picked up
through reading or hearing a sentence containing that word. His
interpretation of those sentences was faulty at the time. In the
interests of truth and consistency, his beliefs must be reviewed,
and some beliefs may have to be modified or jettisoned. The most
natural way to describe this checking-routine, which is familiar to
everybody, is to make full use of the individualist notion of
belief. One can then convey the needed contrast between the
standard belief, expressed by the sentence that S misunderstood,
and the belief which S acquired upon being stimulated by that
sentence (though the latter belief may be difficult or impossible
to capture in a sentence of L).
The individualistic, 'Cartesian' conception of thought that
24Woodfield, A. (1982b) 'Thought and the Social Community',
Inquiry 25, 435-50.
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212 II-ANDREW WOODFIELD
we use so readily does not countenance thought-contents which
their subjects 'misunderstand', or 'incompletely grasp'. No wedge
can be driven between subjects and their respective thoughts.
Thinking is an act whose content is created by the subject;
contents are not at arm's length, nor are they objects for S. S
neither grasps nor fails to grasp them, nor stands in any
'cognitive relation' whatever to them. To say that S 'thinks with'
concepts can be misleading, unless you constantly bear in mind that
concepts are not objects for S.
Not only do we use these notions, we need to use them.
Individualism is deeply embedded in the common-sense view of what a
mind is. When we try to explain what is going on in
language-learning, and in cases of conceptual innovation, there
really is no alternative to the individualistic account.
Consider the case of a little girl learning to speak. Her
stumbling speech-acts are intelligently controlled, despite her
frequent mistakes. Her parents can usually guess what she means
(speaker's meaning), and they can often furnish inten- tional
explanations of why she made the mistakes that she made. They see
that her responses were rational in the light of the limited verbal
data to which she had been exposed. Such explanations attribute
thoughts, beliefs and intentions to the child. In the attributions,
English words will be used in their standard senses, but it will
not be assumed that the girl has mastered those senses. On the
contrary, the parents will explicitly say things like 'Susie
believes that "cat" means any small black animal with a tail'.
Now the point I wish to make is simple. The parents are using a
type of explanation which presupposes that Susie thinks
intelligently when she speaks, but she 'thinks with' notions that
are not the standard notions. She 'uses' her own primitive
prototype notions of other things (like black, animal, tail) in the
course of 'building' a concept resembling the standard cat concept.
Her success will depend largely upon her learning the standard
meaning of 'cat'. But the parents need to ascribe thoughts to her
in order to explain how she learns this. So she must have her own
individual thoughts prior to the time when she can avail herself of
the standard thoughts.
What would Burge say about language-learning? Well, he warns
against a typical 'philosopher's response' to his thought
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CONTENT AND COMMUNITY 213
experiments, that of reinterpreting the subject's false belief
about the world, such as Jane's belief that an armchair is a sofa,
as a false belief about the meaning of the word 'sofa'.25 It is
wrong, he says, to equate having the concept of sofa with knowing
the meaning of the word 'sofa'. A person could have one without the
other. A foreigner might have the concept without knowing the
English word. I agree entirely with this point, of course. And I
wish to emphasise that standard meanings are not the same as
standard concepts. Some standard concepts may be tacit in C; So
people could, in principle, possess the sofa notion in the absence
of any synonym in their language for 'sofa'. But I think a major
motivation for separating 'having a concept' from 'u