-- By J. L. Speranza
---- for the Grice Club.
I see that R. B. Jones has credited Carnap with crediting Frege with the denotatum-significatum distinction (the latter sometimes identified with 'sinn', i.e. 'sense'). Apparently, the use by Carnap, of 'signficatum' relates to the founder of pragmatics: Morris. In his influential book (so pragmatist it hurts) book, "Signs, language, and behaviour," he proposes:
"Those conditions which are such that
whatever fulfills them is a denotatum
will be called the significatum
of a sign"
1946:16
Grice is writing "Meaning" just two years after that (Gri48), but we don't see any such Latinate terms. At this point he would object to the use of 'technical' vocabulary like that and stick with 'what is meant'. "Meaning" is concerned primarily with the way English speakers use the word "... mean ..." and only secondarily with an actual 'theory' (or analysis, as I prefer) of meaning.
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I would have thought that Carnap got his semantics from Frege, Wittgenstein (in whose Tractatus it appears as metaphysics) and Tarski. I should be surprised (even perhaps, concerned) it he had got much more from Morris than the word "pragmatics".
ReplyDeleteI suppose your point is specifically about the word "significatum", which he does not seem to me to use much (if at all).
In Carnap's "Introduction to Semantics" there is a nice little terminological appendix (glossary?) in which it does not appear.
In Carnap's earlier syntactic work there isn't (so far as I am aware) any equivalent term (though L- equivalence classes would do) in his later "Meaning and Necessity" the method of extensions and intensions prevails and so it it the intentions which correspond to senses or significata (if that's the plural). Later still, in the Schilpp volume, intensions seem to have been displaced by relative designata, where direct designata are the extensions.
RBJ
Excellent. So, indeed, it was Frege alright. I had occasion to discuss this vis a vis Mill in tutorials with my PhD thesis advisor, E. A. Rabossi. For some reason, he had written (on record -- in an essay on "Peri Hermeneias" --) that Aristotle had been refuted by Mill.
ReplyDeleteFor Mill, it is all reference, no sense. Or all sense, no reference, I forget.
I shared Rabossi's feelings, but wanted to delve deeper. After all, I was marvelled by what Dodgson had done to Mill in that Humpty Dumpty: For Humpty Dumpty, contra Mill, general common names have no 'sense', only reference: 'glory', 'impenetrability'. On the other hand, common proper names (like "Alice", or "Humpty Dumpty") have SENSE, never mind reference.
Austin, in How to do things with words, cursorily dismisses Frege's as a simplification, but is willing, to move to more interesting things, to allow that by his 'phatic' act he means Frege's "sense" and "reference" which had been thus mistranslated by Geach. "Sinn" und "bedeutung".
I am thinking of translating Grice to the Latin. I have the title alright: "Logica et Conversatio" and it's "implicatura" for implicature.
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So, where did Frege get the 'sense' (sinn) and 'bedeut-ung' from? One wonders.
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While Carnap uses 'designatum' (indeed plural designata, etc. because while neuter, there is nothing really 'neuter' about them), I would expect Mill to have used 'denotatum'.
To denotate is NOT to designate, but philosophers hardly, for one, care for a distinction here.
If Carnap uses de-sign-ate, it IS at least cognate with SIGN-ificat-um
There is a 'sign' hidden there somewhere.
So we may consider that.
In the end, it boils down to the formalism, and I wanted to bring this to R. B. Jones's attention, too, when we agree to stick with 'propositio'. But we need to inquire further, and deeper, into the components of the propositio. For it's only when we start to consider the 'items' and the 'features' (to use idiomatic English) that we can make sense of Carnap's intensions, and Grice on alpha and beta resultant procedures (in WoW:Essay 6).
For an extensionalist (as Carnap and Grice are, at bottom) defines an intension in terms of set-theory, i.e as to whether the items that belong in a feature ALSO belong in another feature. L-equivalence.
At this point, I would also delve on 'equivalence'. Because, while we play with 'intensions' here, we merely mean truth-functional 'iff'.