Pragmatism in a Modern Register

Pragmatism, at least in its classical form as found in James, suggests that we build our world as organisms by reacting to it. To the extent the idea that language is the tool or mechanism for world building (though this is not explicitly found in any explicit form in James or other classical pragmatists) is correct, it would amount to a pragmatic account of language.

This doesn't mean we build our world through language as individuals but as a community of language users, although each individual in the community not only enrolls in the implied world the language characterizes but has a part in elaborating or altering it. . . .

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Value, Truth and Fact

Science, as the pursuit of knowledge about the tangible world, the world we can observe via our senses, is about developing beliefs which fit with things we already think we have reason to take to be true. And judgment, the assessment of those reasons, is no less valuational than moral claims are. It's just that scientific pursuits, the search for truths about the world, rely on different facts: the publicly observable sort which others can see and agree to. Moral truths, on the other hand, which also involve observations of course, look elsewhere, i.e., they oblige us to consider what is the case about ourselves and, by extension, others who are selves like us. They require attention to a concept rather than something we can see in the world and the concept is that of selfhood, i.e., what we understand about ourselves, our own way of being in the world. Rather than to theories about how things are as in scientific questions, moral questions focus on how we are. Moral valuation has a different target than the valuing we usually think of as truth-making. Its ground is the concept of what we, ourselves are, in this case of being a self, a subject in a world. . . .

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Language and Thought: Separate but Equal?

Some have argued that there is a realm of thought that is outside of language and yet parallel to it, a kind of extra domain in which humans communicate without words, sharing their innermost selves with others. This doesn't seem quite right though. Or at least not right in the sense that what is being proposed is a kind of special language, a language without words. The argument goes further, suggesting that because non-human animals can recognize one another and communicate, that something very deep is happening here and that this shows that language is really only a surface phenomenon, that real communication is much deeper and language superficial. Here a kind of mysticism obtains, a belief in the power of the poetry of souls, of inner contacts between speakers that transcends what is said. Look at other creatures, the supporters of a view like this suggest, see how they know one another and without words. And can't our pets see us and understand our wants and needs, too? And can't we understand theirs and all without the exchange of linguistic utterances? . . .

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Conceiving Concepts

Not long ago I had a discussion with a gentleman concerning the nature of our linguistic capacities, of language that is, and how we accord meaning to sounds, symbols, gestures, etc., the many things that we employ when speaking or writing in a language. When we got to explaining meaning, the semantics of our words and statements, we hit a hidden rock for he was adamant that meanings are found in concepts but when asked to explain what he took concepts to be he indicated they were what he termed "linguistic entities." I demurred, saying that entities are things we come into sensory contact with in the world. They have physical form, observable presence. And here our discussion foundered for he was absolute on this point, that concepts were, indeed, entities albeit of a non-physical sort.

I agreed that one can use terms in various stipulative ways and so he could stipulate that the term "entity" need not be used only for physically determined things. One could adopt a platonic picture of reality and claim all sorts of existents beyond what is observable through the senses but I pointed out that doing so introduced confusion because, when we normally speak of entities, we speak of physical phenomena whether directly observable or indirectly so. How, I asked, can we observe the "linguistic entities" he asserted concepts must be? His view, finally, seemed to boil down to the claim that concepts must be understood as abstractions, but abstract entities, like numbers are sometimes taken to be, and that "linguistic entity" basically serves a purpose by delineating, and so creating, a referent we can talk about. Deploying a nominative then, a naming word, serves to create the thing named.

The problem with this, however, is that it doesn't matter whether we call concepts a kind of entity if, by using that term, we still can't get any closer to what we're trying to denote . . . .

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Logic, Language and Life

Updated on August 5, 2021 by Stuart W. Mirsky

If Chomsky is right, that language is an emergent feature of the human brain, then practice a la Wittgenstein, seems to play second fiddle at best to the explanation of language's occurrence and how it works. More, it makes what we know about our world a function of what we ARE rather than where we are and among whom we stand -- which I think is a better way of accounting for human knowledge and human disagreements. While the implications of a thesis like Chomsky's for philosophical thought may not be massive (we can get away with philosophizing whether we think language is a genetic endowment or a learned practice), it does have some bearing on how we understand our world and our place in it (both traditional philosophical concerns). And it certainly affects how we explain and work with human language in its many variations. In what follows I address this issue with regard to Robert Hanna's position on the underpinnings of logical reasoning:

In Rationality and Logic (MIT Press—A Bradford Book, January 2009), Robert Hanna argues for an innate logical capacity along the lines of Chomsky's innate "universal grammar" consisting of a certain functional capacity to arrange information in the mind in ways that enable language to happen, underpinning the various and diverse grammatical mechanisms which every language uses to make sounds into sense. Of course, our brains have all sorts of capacities, but the one which distinguishes us from other animals, especially other primates, is language, and for Chomsky, this requires an underlying capacity to forge meanings through the syntactical methods speakers use to arrange their sounds, signs or gestures. Ours is not the largest brain in the animal world nor the most complex, yet our brains have what other animal brains lack. We speak and are spoken to, making something more than noise out of our utterances. Chomsky argues that this facility appears so abruptly and so rapidly in human children, and involves so much complexity in grammatical expression (which differs dramatically from language to language), that no child could possibly learn it all, with its seemingly infinite possibility of expression, unless something more than mere experiential learning were at work. ....

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On the Question of the Timelessness of Moral Judgment

In the matter of making moral judgments we must somehow get to the point of recognizing the other as like ourselves. Of course this is not unique to human beings. Dogs do it. Cats do it. Apes do it. Even the birds and the bees do it. The issue is not this sub-rational recognition which all these creatures have and which we possess in common with them, however. We know others at a basic level by their appearance and behavior. But the issue isn't that but, rather, when and how it becomes a part of our deliberative consciousness, the one that thinks ABOUT things and stuff.

Those other creatures don't seem to have this capacity (to think about things though they certainly can remember and react). To think about something we need the capacity to turn our sensory inputs into a world, to make it more than just our immediate impinging environment so that it becomes part of an extended domain in time and space, with a past and a future and a here and a there. China exists for us but not for these other animals even if they share our world, as known by us, with us. It is language capability that enables us to frame our inputs as a world and to relate to its many parts in a valuing way. The world we observe is horizontally existent, the things in it vertically existent on an imaginary vector between each of these and us.

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Moral Judgment and Relativism -- A Rejection of "Wokeism"

. . . Today's advocates of "woke" thinking want to condemn people like Abraham Lincoln, a man who opposed slavery in his time, ran for president on a platform that would halt its spread west beyond those states in which it was already firmly established, and who advocated for slavery's gradual end. Was Lincoln also a racist? In terms of modern American standards it would probably be fair to say he qualified. Yet he seems to have been not just an intelligent man but a fundamentally decent one whose sympathies were with the oppressed Africans who were enslaved in the American south. But he was not, by his own admission, arguing for political equality for freed slaves. He shared the prejudices of his time (though I think it's reasonable to say he would have been as woke as the next person in our own era if he had had the knowledge of human nature and of America's history since his death which we have).

So should Lincoln or Washington, or Jefferson or others who actually held slaves in their lifetimes, for that matter, whatever their writings and speeches promoted, be condemned as racists in our modern sense because they followed the practices of their own era? Who among us isn't influenced by the practices and beliefs contemporary with ourselves? Who doesn't formulate his or her judgments in terms of these? Should those men of our past, who were human beings with all the flaws humans possess, with all the imperfections, be judged by today's standards when they did not live in an environment that expressed or was governed by our standards? We all live in the times we live in but sometimes some of us see beyond our times, even if only imperfectly. . . .

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