Table Of ContentWhy Does Language Matter
to Philosophy?
For Jane Frances
Why Does Language Matter
to Philosophy?
Ian Hacking
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press 1975
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First published 1975
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Contents
Preface vii
1 Strategy 1
A. The heyday of ideas
2 Thomas Hobbes' mental discourse 15
3 Port Royal's ideas 26
4 Bishop Berkeley's abstractions 34
5 Nobody's theory of meaning 43
B. The heyday of meanings
6 Noam Chomsky's innatism 57
7 Bertrand Russell's acquaintance 70
8 Ludwig Wittgenstein's articulation 82
9 A. J. Ayer's verification 93
10 Norman Malcolm's dreams 103
C. The heyday of sentences
11 Paul Feyerabend's theories 115
12 Donald Davidson's truth 129
I. Tarski's theory 130 II. Problems and extensions
134 III. The theory of meaning 140 IV. The veri-
fication of J-sentences 144 V. Charity and hu-
manity 146 VI. The determinacy of translation 150
13 Why does language matter to philosophy? 157
A. The heyday of ideas 163 B. The heyday of mean-
ings 170 C. The heyday of sentences 177
Bibliography 188
Index 197
Preface
This book comes from a course of lectures first given in
Cambridge in the Easter Term of 1972 and repeated, in a
revised and augmented form, in Michaelmas 1973. Quite a
lot of people came, ranging from freshmen to graduate stu-
dents and faculty. Many of them had found themselves dis-
satisfied with recent linguistic philosophy, and yet knew that
in some way language has deeply mattered to philosophy. I
tried to describe, in a few case studies, some remarkable ways
in which language has mattered, and then speculated on why
this should have been so. The approach was often more his-
torical than the audience expected, but to understand why
language mattered we had to think not only how it has mat-
tered but also when it has mattered. None of us was con-
cerned with boring and ephemeral questions such as whether
linguistic analysis is worthy or iniquitous. We were trying to
understand the structure of something very striking about
philosophical speculation. I hope that students elsewhere
with doubts and fascinations similar to ours may find this
book helpful.
1. Strategy
I shall not begin by saying why language matters to philoso-
phy, but start with some evidence, examining a few familiar
problems in metaphysics and epistemology that have been
influenced by theories about language. The main body of the
book will illustrate how language has, from time to time, mat-
tered to philosophers. It is a collection of case studies, which
can usefully introduce newcomers to the subject. Only the
final chapter tries to guess about the nature of language and
philosophy in an attempt to explain some features of the case
studies. Only then do I try to answer the question Why does
language matter? The final conjectures, although by no means
original, are at present non-standard. The reader is not
obliged to accept them. In the case studies I aim at objectiv-
ity, providing data on the basis of which you can judge the
situation for yourself. This objectivity is slightly spurious
because I inevitably select and interpret the data in my own
way. I try to refrain from editorializing until the end.
Before getting down to work, a variety of remarks are
needed, mostly negative. First, many philosophers writing in
English seem to have settled down to discuss the pure theory
of meaning. They do not appear to study language and mean-
ing in order to understand some philosophical problem-
what we could call applied philosophy of language-but
write almost exclusively about the nature of meaning itself. A
sizeable proportion of potential philosophy graduate students
applying to English-speaking universities say they want to do
