Good morning, everyone and welcome to Saturday’s Morning Open Thread.
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
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For the next few Saturdays, I’m exploring language—its ways of working and our attempts to understand how it actually provides commonalities universal (or at least public) enough to allow communication. Today’s focus (like much of contemporary philosophy) is with the inconsistency, inadequacy, and muddle which characterizes ordinary language—how people actually tend to speak spontaneously.
Last week we explored some limitations on language (symbols and their meanings) in a lecture on the famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment. This week we will jump into the basics of our present day understanding of how language works, and that starts with Gottlob Frege’s paper “On Sense and Reference” (in German, "Über Sinn und Bedeutung"). Frege, by training, was a mathematician, not a philosopher, and approached both logic and language with that sort of scientific rigor.
Prior to this work, the accepted thought on such things as proper names and how we use them in communicating stretched back to Aristotle but (at the time) was best articulated by John Stewart Mill: essentially that proper names are arbitrary linguistic identifiers of entities that are at once singular, concrete and non-connotative. (Not “A rose is a rose is a rose,” but close to it.)
With his publication in 1892, Frege presented an alternative and radically different take on how language works; he proposed that even proper names (the subject of which are the references in the title), carry with them a sense that is separate from the name itself. Simple distinction, in a way, but a monumental one when we go from the basic naming of things to more complex ideas. In fact, Frege’s take on logic and language was so out of the main stream that it was largely ignored in his day.
The video below is a bit longer than the music I typically post, but well worth watching. To entice you, I will note that it begins with a video of Jay-Z interacting with a fellow passenger on the NYC subway and uses this interaction to work through Frege’s analytical theories—I found it entertaining and enlightening.
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Now that we have a fundamental understanding of language and meaning, I want to share this short verse from Emily Dickinson that I believe plays on the themes of reference and sense and even—perhaps—portends the different places those who came after Frege began to take his work.
I Never Saw a Moor
I never saw a moor;
I never saw the sea,
Yet know I how the heather looks
And what a billow be.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven.
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the checks were given.
— Emily Dickinson #1052
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?