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26
The Myth of Objectivism in Western Philosophy and Linguistics
Our Challenge to the Myth of Objectivism
The myth of objectivism has dominated Western culture, and in particular Western philosophy, from the Pre-socratics to the present day. The view that we have access to absolute and unconditional truths about the world is the cornerstone of the Western philosophical tradition. The myth of objectivity has flourished in both the rationalist and empiricist traditions, which in this respect differ only in their accounts of how we arrive at such absolute truths. For the rationalists, only our innate capacity to reason can give us knowledge of things as they really are. For the empiricists, all our knowledge of the world arises from our sense perceptions (either directly or indirectly) and is constructed out of the elements of sensation. Kant's synthesis of rationalism and empiricism falls within the objectivist tradition also, despite his claim that there can be no knowledge whatever of things as they are in themselves. What makes Kant an objectivist is his claim that, relative to the kinds of things that all human beings can experience through their senses (his empiricist legacy), we can have universally valid knowledge and universally valid moral laws by the use of our universal reason (his rationalist legacy). The objectivist tradition in Western philosophy is preserved to this day in the descendants of the logical positivists, the Pregean tradition, the tradition of Husseri, and, in linguistics, in the neorationalism that came out of the Chomsky tradition.
Our account of metaphor goes against this tradition. We
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see metaphor as essential to human understanding and as a mechanism for creating new meaning and new realities in our lives. This puts us at odds with most of the Western philosophical tradition, which has seen metaphor as an agent of subjectivism and, therefore, as subversive of the quest for absolute truth. In addition, our views on conventional metaphorthat it pervades our conceptual system and is a primary mechanism for understandingput us at odds with the contemporary views of language, meaning, truth, and understanding that dominate recent Anglo-American analytic philosophy and go unquestioned in much of modern linguistics and other disciplines as well. The following is a representative list of these assumptions about language, meaning, truth, and understanding. Not all objectivist philosophers and linguists accept all of them, but the most influential figures seem to accept most of them.
Truth is a matter of fitting words to the world.
A theory of meaning for natural language is based on a theory of truth, independent of the way people understand and use language.
Meaning is objective and disembodied, independent of human understanding.
Sentences are abstract objects with inherent structures.
The meaning of a sentence can be obtained from the meanings of its parts and the structure of the sentence.
Communication is a matter of a speaker's transmitting a message with a fixed meaning to a hearer.
How a person understands a sentence, and what it means to him, is a function of the objective meaning of the sentence and what the person believes about the world and about the context in which the sentence is uttered.
Our account of conventional metaphor is inconsistent with all of these assumptions. The meaning of a sentence is given in terms of a conceptual structure. As we have seen, most of the conceptual structure of a natural lan-
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guage is metaphorical in nature. The conceptual structure is grounded in physical and cultural experience, as are the conventional metaphors. Meaning, therefore, is never disembodied or objective and is always grounded in the acquisition and use of a conceptual system. Moreover, truth is always given relative to a conceptual system and the metaphors that structure it. Truth is therefore not absolute or objective but is based on understanding. Thus sentences do not have inherent, objectively given meanings, and communication cannot be merely the transmission of such meanings.
It is not at all obvious why our account of these matters is so different from the standard philosophical and linguistic positions. The basic reason seems to be that all of the standard positions are based on the myth of objectivism, while our account of metaphor is inconsistent with it. Such a radical divergence from the dominant theories of such basic matters calls for explanation. How could it be possible for an account of metaphor to call into question the fundamental assumptions about truth, meaning, and understanding that have emerged from the dominant trends in the Western philosophical tradition? An answer to this requires a far more detailed account of the objec-tivist assumptions about language, truth, and meaning than we have given so far. It requires stating in more detail (a) what the objectivist assumptions are, (b) how they are motivated, and (c) what their implications are for a general account of language, truth, and meaning.
The point of this analysis is not merely to distinguish our views on language from the standard views but to show by example how influential the myth of objectivism is in Western culture in ways that we usually don't notice. More importantly, we want to suggest that many of the problem areas for our culture may come from a blind acceptance of the myth of objectivism and that there is another alternative short of recourse to radical subjectivity.
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How Standard Theories of Meaning Are Rooted in the Myth of Objectivism
The myth of objectivism, which is the basis of the objec-tivist tradition, has very specific consequences for a theory of meaning. We would like to show just what these consequences are, how they arise from the myth of objectivism, and why they are untenable from an experientialist point of view. Not all objectivists hold all of the following positions, but it is common for objectivists to hold most of them in some form or other.
Meaning Is Objective
The objectivist characterizes meaning purely in terms of conditions of objective truth or falsity. On the objectivist view, the conventions of the language assign to each sentence an objective meaning, which determines objective truth conditions, given certain elements of context called "indexicals": who the speaker is, who his audience is, the time and place of the utterance, the objects referred to by words like "that," "this," etc. Thus, the objective meaning of a sentence does not depend on the way any given person happens to understand it or on whether he understands it at all. For example, a parrot might be trained to say "It's raining" without any understanding at all of the meaning of this in English. But the sentence has the same objective meaning whether it is said by a parrot or a person, and it will be true if it happens to be raining and false if it isn't raining. Given the objectivist account of meaning, a person understands the objective meaning of a sentence if he understands the conditions under which it would be true or false.
The objectivist assumes not only that conditions of objective truth and falsity exist but that people have access to them. This is taken as being obvious. Look around you. If there is a pencil on the floor, then the sentence "There is a pencil on the floor" is true, and, if you speak English and
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can perceive the pencil on the floor, you will correctly take it as being true. It is assumed that such sentences are objectively true or false and that you have access to innumerable such truths. Since people can understand the conditions under which a sentence can be objectively true, it is possible for a language to have conventions by which such objective meanings are assigned to sentences. Thus, on the objectivist view, the conventions that a language has for pairing sentences with objective meanings will depend upon speakers of the language being able to understand the sentence as having that objective meaning. Thus, when the objectivist speaks of understanding the (literal) meaning of a sentence, he is speaking of understanding what makes a sentence objectively true or false. In general, the objectivist notion of understanding is limited to understanding conditions of truth or falsity.
This is not what we have meant by "understanding." When we say that the objectivist views meaning as being independent of understanding, we are taking "understanding" in our sense and not his.
In the objectivist view, objective meaning is not meaning to anyone. Expressions in a natural language can be said to have objective meaning only if that meaning is independent of anything human beings do, either in speaking or in acting. That is, meaning must be disembodied. Frege, for example, distinguishes the "sense" (Sinn), the objective meaning for a sign, from the "idea," which arises
from memories and sense impressions that I have had and acts, both internal and external, which I have performed.... The idea is subjective.... In the light of this, one need have no scruples in speaking simply of the sense, whereas in the case of an idea one must, strictly speaking, add to whom it belongs and at what time. [Frege, 1966, pp. 59-60]
Frege's "sense" is objective disembodied meaning. Each
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linguistic expression in a language has a disembodied meaning associated with it. This is reminiscent of the conduit metaphor, where "The meaning is right there in the words."
The Fregean tradition continues to this day in the work of the disciples of Richard Montague and many others as well. In none of this work on semantics is the meaning of the sentence taken to depend in any way on the way a human being would understand it. As Montague puts it, "Like Donald Davidson, I regard the construction of a theory of truthor rather, of the more general notion of truth under an arbitrary interpretationas the basic goal of a serious syntax and semantics" (1974, p. 188). The important words here are "arbitrary interpretation." Montague assumed that theories of meaning and truth are purely mathematical enterprises, and his goal was to maintain an "arbitrary interpretation," untainted by anything at all having to do with human beings, especially matters of human psychology or human understanding. He intended his work to be applicable to any kind of being at all in the universe and to be free of any limitation imposed by any particular kind of being.
Fitting the Words to the World without People or Human Understanding
The objectivist tradition views semantics as the study of how linguistic expressions can fit the world directly, without the intervention of human understanding. Perhaps the clearest statement of this position is given by David Lewis:
My proposals will also not conform to the expectations of those who, in analyzing meaning, turn immediately to the psychology and sociology of language users: to intentions, sense-experience, and mental ideas, or to social rules, conventions, and regularities. I distinguish two topics: first, the description of possible languages or grammars as abstract semantic systems whereby symbols are associated with aspects of the world; and second, the description of the psychological and
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sociological facts whereby a particular one of these abstract semantic systems is the one used by a person or population. Only confusion comes of mixing these two topics. [Lewis 1972, p. 170]
Here Lewis follows the practice of Montague in trying to give an account of how language can fit the world"how symbols are associated with aspects of the world"---that is sufficiently general and sufficiently arbitrary that it could fit any conceivable psychological or sociological facts about how people use language and how they understand it.
A Theory of Meaning Is Based on a Theory of Truth
The possibility of an account of objective truth, independent of any human understanding, makes a theory of objective meaning possible. Under the objectivist account of truth, it is possible for a sentence by itself to fit the world or not. If it does, it is true; if not, it is false. This gives rise directly to an objectivist account of meaning as based on truth. Again, David Lewis puts it most clearly: "A meaning for a sentence is something that determines the conditions under which the sentence is true or false" (1972, p. 173).
This has been generalized to give meanings for performative sentences, like orders and promises, by the technique in Lakoff(1972) and Lewis (1972). The technique uses the definition of truth in terms of "fitting the world, " which is technically defined by conditions of satisfaction in a model. Felicity conditions of speech acts are similarly defined in terms of conditions of satisfaction, or "fitting the world." When we speak of "truth" and "falsity" below, it should be understood that we are speaking in terms of conditions of satisfaction and that we are including speech acts as well as statements.
Meaning Is Independent of Use
The objectivist account of truth requires that meaning, too, be objective. If meaning is to be objective, it must exclude
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all subjective elementsthat is, anything peculiar to a particular context, culture, or mode of understanding. As Donald Davidson puts it: "Literal meaning and truth conditions can be assigned to words and sentences apart from particular contexts of use" (1978, p. 33).
According to the myth of objectivism, the world is made up of objects; they have well-defined inherent properties, independent of any being who experiences them, and there are fixed relations holding among them at any given point in time. These aspects of the myth of objectivism give rise to a building-block theory of meaning. If the world is made up of well-defined objects, we can give them names in a language. If the objects have well-defined inherent properties, we can have a language with one-place predicates corresponding to each of those properties. And if the objects stand in fixed relations to one another (at least at any given instant), we can have a language with many-place predicates corresponding to each relation.
Assuming that the world is this way and that we have such a language, we can, using the syntax of this language, construct sentences that can correspond directly to any situation in the world. The meaning of the whole sentence will be its truth conditions, that is, the conditions under which the sentence can be fitted to some situation. The meaning of the whole sentence will depend entirely on the meanings of its parts and how they fit together. The meanings of the parts will specify what names can pick out what objects and what predicates can pick out what properties and relations.
Objectivist theories of meaning are all compositional in naturethat is, they are all building-block theoriesand they have to be. The reason is that, for the objectivist, the world is made up of building blocks: definable objects and clearly delineated inherent properties and relations.
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Moreover, every sentence of the language must contain all of the necessary building blocks so that, together with the syntax, nothing more is needed to provide the truth conditions of the sentence. The "something more" that is ruled out is any kind of human understanding.
Objectivism Permits Ontological Relativity without Human Understanding
The logical positivists (e.g., Carnap) attempted to carry out an objectivist program by trying to construct a universally applicable formal (logical) language that had all of the building-block properties mentioned above and all of the other characteristics we have discussed so far. Richard Montague (1974) claimed to have provided a "universal grammar" that would map natural languages onto such a universally applicable formal language.
Quine, reacting to such universalist claims, argued that each language has its own ontology built into it, and what counts as an object, property, or relation may vary from language to language. This position is known as the "on-tological relativity" thesis.
It is possible to maintain an ontological relativity thesis within the confines of the objectivist program without any recourse to human understanding or cultural difference. Such a relativistic position gives up on the possibility of constructing a single universally applicable logical language into which all natural languages can be translated adequately. It claims instead that each natural language carves up what is in the world in different ways---always picking out objects that are really there and properties and relations that are really there. But since different languages may have different ontologies built in, there is no guarantee that any two languages will, in general, be commensurable.
The relativistic version of the objectivist account of meaning thus claims that meaning and truth conditions are objectively given, not in universal terms, but only relative to a given language. This relativistic objectivism still holds
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to the myth of objectivism in claiming that truth is objective and that there are objects in the world with inherent properties. But, according to relativistic objectivism, truths expressible in one language may not be translatable into another, since each language may carve up the world in different ways. But whatever entities the language picks out exist in the world objectively as entities. Truth and meaning are still objective in this account (though relative to a given language), and human understanding is still ruled out as irrelevant to meaning and truth.
Linguistic Expressions Are Objects: The Premise of Ohjectivist Linguistics
According to the myth of objectivism, objects have properties in and of themselves and they stand in relationships to one another independently of any being who understands them. When words and sentences are written down, they can be readily looked upon as objects. This has been the premise of objectivist linguistics from its origins in antiquity to the present: Linguistic expressions are objects that have properties in and of themselves and stand in fixed relationships to one another, independently of any person who speaks them or understands them. As objects, they have parts---they are made up of building blocks: words are made up of roots, prefixes, suffixes, infixes; sentences are made up of words and phrases; discourses are made up of sentences. Within a language, the parts can stand in various relationships to one another, depending upon their building-block structure and their inherent properties. The study of the building-block structure, the inherent properties of the parts, and the relationships among them has traditionally been called grammar.
Objectivist linguistics sees itself as the only scientific approach to linguistics. The objects must be capable of being analyzed in and of themselves, independently of contexts or the way people understand them. As in objectivist philosophy, there are both empiricist and rationalist traditions in
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linguistics. The empiricist tradition, represented by the latter-day American structuralism of Bloomfield, Harris, and their followers, took texts as the only objects of scientific study. The rationalist tradition, represented by European structuralists such as Jakobson and American figures like Sapir, Whorf, and Chomsky, viewed language as having mental reality, with linguistic expressions as mentally real objects.
We have just seen how the myth of objectivism gives rise to a view of language in which linguistic expressions are objects with inherent properties, a building-block structure, and fixed relationships among the objects. According to the myth of objectivism, the linguistic objects that existand their building-block structure, their properties, and their relationsare independent of the way people understand them. It follows from this view of linguistic expressions as objects that grammar can be studied independently of meaning or human understanding.
This tradition is epitomized by the linguistics of Noam Chomsky, who has steadfastly maintained that grammar is a matter of pure form, independent of meaning or human understanding. Any aspect of language that involves human understanding is for Chomsky by definition outside the study of grammar in this sense. Chomsky's use of the term "competence" as opposed to "performance" is an attempt to define certain aspects of language as the only legitimate objects of what he considers scientific linguisticsthat is, what we have called objectivist linguistics in the rationalist mode, including only matters of pure form and excluding all matters of human understanding and language use. Though Chomsky sees linguistics as a branch of psychology, it is for him an independent branch, one that is in no way dependent on the way people actually understand language.
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The Ohjectivist Theory of Communication: A Version of the conduit Metaphor
Within objectivist linguistics and philosophy, meanings and linguistic expressions are independently existing objects. Such a view gives rise to a theory of communication that fits the conduit metaphor very closely:
Meanings are objects.
Linguistic expressions are objects.
Linguistic expressions have meanings (in them).
In communication, a speaker sends a fixed meaning to a hearer via the linguistic expression associated with that meaning.
On this account it is possible to objectively say what you mean, and communication failures are matters of subjective errors: since the meanings are objectively right there in the words, either you didn't use the right words to say what you meant or you were misunderstood.
What an Objectivist Account of Understanding Would Be Like
We have already given an account of what the objectivist means by understanding the literal objective meaning of a sentence, namely, understanding the conditions under which a sentence would be objectively true or false. Objec-tivists recognize, however, that a person may understand a sentence in a given context as meaning something other than its literal objective meaning. This other meaning is usually called the "speaker's meaning" or the "utterer's meaning," and objectivists typically recognize that any full account of understanding will have to account for these cases, too (see Grice 1957).
Take, for example, the sentence "He's a real genius," uttered in a context where sarcasm is clearly indicated. On the objectivist account, there is an objective meaning of the sentence "He's a real genius," namely, that he has great intellectual powers. But in uttering the sentence sarcastically, the speaker intends to convey the opposite meaning,
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namely, that he's an utter idiot. The speaker's meaning here is the opposite of the objective meaning of the sentence.
This account of speaker's meaning could be represented, in the appropriate sarcastic context, as follows:
(A) In uttering a sentence S (S = "He's a real genius"), which has the objective meaning M (M = he has great intellectual powers), the speaker intends to convey to the hearer objective meaning M' (M' = he's a real idiot).
This is how meaning to someone might be accounted for in an objectivist framework. Sentence (A) is something that could be objectively true or false in a given context. If (A) is true, then the sentence S ("He's a real genius") can mean he's a real idiot to both the speaker and the hearer if the hearer recognizes the speaker's intentions.
This technique, which originated with the speech-act theorists, has been adapted to the objectivist tradition as a way of getting meaning to someone out of the objective meaning of the sentence, that is, out of its conditions for objective truth or falsity. The technical trick here involves using two objective meanings, M and M', together with sentence (A), which also has an objective meaning, in such a way as to get an account of speaker's meaning and hearer's meaning, that is, meaning to someone. This, of course, involves recognizing a speaker's intentions as being objectively real, which some objectivists might deny.
The example we have given is one of sarcasm, where M and M' have opposite meanings, that is, opposite truth conditions. Speaking literally would be a case where M¡¯ = M¡¯. The objectivist program sees this as a general technique for accounting for all cases of meaning to a person, especially where a speaker says one thing and means something else:
exaggeration, understatement, hints, irony, and all figurative language---in particular, metaphor. Carrying out the program would involve formulating general principles that would answer the following question:
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Given sentence S and its literal objective meaning M, and given the relevant knowledge of the context, what specific principles allow us to predict what the speaker's meaning M' will be in this context?
In particular, this applies in the case of metaphor. For example, "This theory is made of cheap stucco" would, on the objectivist account, have a literal objective meaning (M) which is false, namely, this theory is made of inexpensive mortar. The literal objective meaning is false because theories are not the kind of thing that can be made up of mortar at all. However, "This theory is made of cheap stucco" could have an intended speaker's meaning (M') which might be true, namely, this theory is weak. In this case, the problem would be to give general principles of interpretation by which a hearer could move from the sentence S ("This theory is made of cheap stucco") to the intended speaker's meaning M (this theory is weak) via the objective meaning M (this theory is made of inexpensive mortar).
The objectivist sees all metaphors as cases of indirect meaning, where M ¡Ù M'. All sentences containing metaphors have objective meanings that are, in the typical case, either blatantly false (e.g., "The theory is made of cheap stucco") or blatantly true (e.g., "Mussolini was an animal"). Understanding a sentence (e.g., "The theory is made of cheap stucco") as metaphorical always involves understanding it indirectly as conveying an objective meaning M' (the theory is weak) which is different from the literal objective meaning M (the theory is made of inexpensive mortar).
The objectivist account of understanding is thus always based on its account of objective truth. It includes two kinds of understanding, direct and indirect. Direct understanding is understanding a literal objective meaning of a sentence in terms of the conditions under which it can be objectively true. Indirect understanding involves figuring
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out when the speaker is using one sentence to convey an indirect meaning, where the conveyed meaning can be understood directly in terms of objective truth conditions.
There are four automatic consequences of the objectivist account of metaphor:
By definition, there can he no such thing as a metaphorical concept or metaphorical meaning. Meanings are objective and specify conditions of objective truth. They are by definition ways of characterizing the world as it is or might be. Conditions of objective truth simply do not provide ways of viewing one thing in terms of another. Hence, objective meanings cannot be metaphorical.
Since metaphor cannot he a matter of meaning, it can only he a matter of language. A metaphor, on the objectivist view, can at best give us an indirect way of talking about some objective meaning M' by using the language that would be used literally to talk about some other objective meaning M, which is usually false in a blatant way.
Again by definition, there can be no such thing as literal (conventional) metaphor. A sentence is used literally when M' = M, that is, when the speaker's meaning is the objective meaning. Metaphors can only arise when M' ¡ÙM. Thus, according to the objectivist definition, a literal metaphor is a contradiction in terms, and literal language cannot be metaphorical.
Metaphor can contribute to understanding only by making us see objective similarities, that is, similarities between the objective meanings M and M'. These similarities must be based on shared inherent properties of objects---properties that the objects really have, in and of themselves.
Thus, the objectivist account of meaning is completely at odds with everything we have claimed in this book. This view of meaning and of metaphor has been with us since the time of the Greeks. It fits the conduit metaphor ("The meaning is right there in the words") and it fits the myth of objectivism.