From the Tree to the Labyrinth (99 page)

Otherwise, it would be like saying that it is not true that the penal code establishes that whoever kills someone else must serve x number of years in prison, but that “usually” (that is, as a rule) whoever kills someone else gets x number of years in prison. If this were the only difference between Roman Law and Common Law, what we would have is identical conventions. The difference is that, in order to decide what is customary, Common Law, has recourse, not to a rule fixed once and for all, but to the precedent set by a previous case.

Now, Davidson does not deny that there are conventions according to which a “boat” always signifies a floating vessel; he simply decides that this is a marginal or obvious case (obvious because it is marginal and marginal because it is obvious), and he prefers to give his attention to the more dramatic cases. The dramatic cases are when we use the word “boat” to indicate something other than a floating vessel. The most convincing example, of course, is that of metaphor (think of the example of “sauce boat”). But we cannot build a theory of a language on its use of metaphor, unless it be to say that the meaning of all linguistic terms is originally metaphorical—and I do not believe this was Davidson’s intent.

The confusion lies in demonstrating that what is dramatic is normal and what is normal marginal, whereas in science the dramatic cases are always used as marginal examples to demonstrate that the normal cases are not as simple as we think. True, the principle that the exception confirms the rule is scientifically infantile (something proved by Popper’s falsificationist theory, according to which an exception calls the rule into question), but to state, as humorist Achille Campanile does, that “rules made up entirely of exceptions are rules fully confirmed,” is to state a paradox, and it is equally paradoxical to claim that the exception constitutes the rule. The rule for defining a rule, in the human sciences, is that it must allow for a number of exceptions, but that they must be controllable, that is to say, predictable. In the physical sciences, either all bodies fall according to the laws of gravity or, if only one body does not, the laws of gravity must be called into question. In the human sciences, on the other hand, the statistical rule is that the majority of human beings come together in heterosexual congress in order to procreate (otherwise our number would not have increased from two to six billion in a matter of fifty years), but this does not exclude the fact that some human beings choose not to procreate, which allows us to include Catholic priests and homosexuals among human beings.

Were it true that there is no such thing as meaning in the sense of sense 1, we would have no end of trouble understanding each other, and in fact, Davidson, though through gritted teeth, has never defended this thesis. What we may be sure of is that, in terms of sense 5, the principle of charity theory must be taken very seriously. It is then that we discover that Davidson, by suggesting that he is contesting sense 1 (which he nevertheless presupposes) and seeming to place in discussion, for purely academic reasons, senses 3 and 4, was in fact proposing the principles of the semantics in sense 5—in other words, a semantics not of terms, or of sentences, but of texts. From the lexicographic point of view, Davidson seems to be denying the evidence, but from the point of view of a theory of textual interpretation he is a fairly sane person, or—though he is not aware of it—someone with something serious to say about the interpretation of the meaning of texts (texts that, on top of everything else, produced as they are in complex situations, are always multimedia; made up, in other words, of words, demonstrative and deictic gestures, paralinguistic elements, and maybe even hypoiconic supports).

Allow me to remind you of a well-known example of Ducrot’s. The expression
je suis le rognon
(“I am the kidney”), uttered by a human being, is false (from the point of view of senses 3 and 4), but, when said in the context of a restaurant, accompanied by a gesture first pointing to the dish in the waiter’s hand and then to the speaker himself, it signifies unequivocally that the speaker is affirming that he is the one who ordered the kidney and not the one who ordered the sirloin steak.

In order to deny that semantics makes sense in sense 1, to affirm, that is, that words do not have meanings agreed upon by convention, it is customary to employ a quite fallacious argument. Meaning is identified with synonymy. Philosophers of language are more responsible for this fallacy than lexicographers. No sensible person versed in languages can believe that there are two synonyms that really do mean the same thing (and even the authors of dictionaries of synonyms offer their alternatives as possibilities
faute de mieux,
as stylistic variants to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, not as absolute equivalents). Once meaning and synonymy have been identified, however, the tendency is to demonstrate that, since there is no such thing as absolute synonymy (so much is obvious), there can be no meaning (which is not so obvious). This is the argument of those who hold that translation is an impossibility.

Let us consider a fairly curious text of Quine’s, “The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics,” which appears in his
From the Logical Point of View.
In it Quine speaks of lexicography and lexicographers, saying that lexicographers seem to be interested in the problem of meaning, and he is certainly correct. After which he opines that a lexicographer “differs from the so-called formal linguists only in that he is concerned to correlate linguistic forms with one another in his own special way, namely, synonyms with synonyms” (Bréal 1900). If by “lexicographer” we understand the author of a dictionary of synonyms, this is certainly what he does, though with all due caution, as we said before. But Quine seems to think that the only thing the lexicographer is interested in is deciding what linguistic forms are synonymous, that is, “alike in meaning.” This is not true. The lexicographer’s first task is precisely to establish why the same expression may have different meanings in different contexts. Rather than cultivate the myth of synonymy, a good lexicographer contests it.

If by “lexicographer” we understand someone who is writing a dictionary for tourists, and if he tells us “steak” is a synonym of
bistecca,
he may be taking advantage of the work of other lexicographers, but he is deliberately impoverishing it, though he may make it possible for an English-speaking tourist to order a
bistecca
if he happens to be in Italy. The good lexicographer is the one who explains that
cagna
is not a synonym of “bitch,” except in a few rare cases, so that in Italian I may define a lousy singer as a
cagna,
however impeccable her morals, but I could not call her a “bitch” in English without suggesting that she is of easy virtue (though her singing may be divine).

So lexicographers, real lexicographers, are indeed semanticists in sense 1, in that they endeavor to establish on what common bases we may legitimately use a word, but they are above all semanticists in sense 2 when they try to decide the nature of our lexicographic conventions, not in the caricatural terms of synonymy and homonymy, but on the basis of an inspection of the systems of content and basing their findings on a broad survey of previous texts and their meaning (sense 5).

When Quine says that lexicographers do not hold the monopoly on the problem of meaning, he appears to have in mind the authors of pocket dictionaries for tourists, rather than lexicographers who are scholars of structural semantics.

Just how debatable Quine’s ideas about lexicography are can be seen from the paragraphs which follow, in which he equiparates the work of the lexicographers to that of the phonologists who decide whether two phonemes are different according to whether or not the meaning of the word changes if we substitute one for the other within the same language. It is true that the phonologist decides that a given phoneme is different from another because, if we substitute one for the other within the same syntagm, we obtain two words with two different meanings (
ship
and
sheep,
for instance), but, when he does so, the phonologist is not concerned with the notion of meaning. He simply assumes that the native speaker (of whom he himself is a reliable sample) perceives a variation in meaning in the passage from one phoneme to another. He merely registers a fact, he does not remotely presume to define what a ship or a sheep is. The lexicographer on the other hand takes as a given the proof of substitution provided by the phonologist and is concerned with defining the difference between a ship and a sheep.

Let us go on to the fourth sense of semantics. It goes without saying that if we have such an impoverished notion of lexicography and meaning as that of synonymy, we are free to experiment with phenomena such as the substitution of apparently synonymous terms in opaque contexts (and clearly, someone who believes that Aristotle wrote the
Metaphysics
does not automatically believe that Alexander’s teacher wrote the
Metaphysics
). These are exercises of considerable importance for the study of logic, but not very important for understanding the way we speak. No speaker in his right mind, once it had been affirmed that “Giorgione” has three syllables, would affirm that “Barbarelli” too had three syllables.
³
I am one of the first to admit how many things we would have failed to understand if we had not performed exercises of this kind, but they have nothing at all to do with at least four of the five senses of semantics that I am talking about.

Let us come now to the differences between sense 3 and sense 4. It is my conviction that a truth-conditional semantics has nothing to do with the problem of reference. The problem of reference has to do with our ability to designate objects and states of the world, to reach an understanding on this act of designation (and hence it has something to do with sense 1), and—eventually (but this is not a semantic but an epistemological and gnoseological problem)—to say whether the object or the state of the world we referred to exists or is taking place to the extent that we referred to it. In simple terms, if I say that it is raining today, we have to be agreed on the meaning of “rain,” we have to grant that the speaker is saying that water is falling from the sky, and that (another problem) water is actually falling from the sky.

Let us take a look at Tarsky’s truth criterion. Its concern is with how to define the truth conditions of a proposition, but not with how to establish if the proposition is true when used for acts of reference. And saying that understanding the meaning of a sentence means knowing its truth conditions (that is, on what conditions the proposition expressed would be true) it is not the same thing as proving the sentence to be true or untrue.
⁴

Agreed, the paradigm is nowhere near as homogeneous as is usually maintained, and there are those who tend to interpret Tarsky’s criterion according to a correspondentist epistemology. But, whatever Tarsky may have thought,
⁵
it is hard to read in a correspondentist sense his famous definition:

The sentence [i] “snow is white” is true if, and only if, [ii] snow is white.

We are in a position to say what kind of logical and linguistic entity [i] is—it is a sentence in an object language L that conveys a proposition—but we have no idea what [ii] is. If it were a state of affairs (or a perceptive experience) we would be extremely embarrassed: a state of affairs is a state of affairs and a perceptive experience is a perceptive experience, not a sentence. If anything, a sentence is produced to express a state of affairs or a perceptive experience. But if what appears in [ii] is a sentence about a state of affairs or a perceptive experience, it cannot be a sentence expressed in L, since it must guarantee the truth of the proposition expressed in [i]. It must be, then, a sentence expressed in a metalanguage L
₂
. But in that case Tarsky’s formula ought to be translated as follows:

[i] The proposition “snow is white,” conveyed by the sentence (in L)
snow is white

is true if, and only if,

[ii] the proposition “snow is white” conveyed by the sentence (in L
₂
)
snow is white
is true.

It is clear that this solution is destined to produce a sorites of infinite sentences, each one expressed in a new metalanguage. If we assume Tarsky’s example in a naïve fashion, we find ourselves in the same boat (or wagon) as the editors of De Saussure who represented the relationship between signifier and signified with an oval split into two superimposed halves, in which the word
arbre
is contained in the bottom half while the top half contains a drawing of a tree. Now, the signifier
arbre
is certainly a word, but the drawing of the tree is not intended to be and cannot be the signified or a mental image (because what it is, if anything, is another nonverbal signifier that interprets the word below it). Seeing that the design excogitated by De Saussure’s editors had no formal ambition, only a mnemonic function, we can forget about it. But the problem with Tarsky is different.

We could of course interpret the definition in a strictly behaviorist sense: snow is white if, when confronted by the stimulus snow, every speaker reacts by saying it is white. But, apart from the fact that we would find ourselves up to our necks in the difficulties of radical interpretation, I do not believe this was what Tarsky had in mind, and, even if this was his intention, this would not be a way to decide whether a proposition is true, because it would simply tell us that all speakers are guilty of the same error of perception, just as the fact that for thousands of years all speakers declared that the sun sinks into the sea in the evening does not prove that the proposition was true.

It seems more convincing to admit that, in Tarsky’s formulation, [ii] stands conventionally for
the assignment of a truth value to
[i]. The Tarskyan state of affairs is not something we can check in order to recognize the proposition that expresses it as true; on the contrary, it is what a true proposition, or indeed anything that is expressed by a true proposition, corresponds to (cf. McCawley 1981: 161), in other words its truth value. In this sense Tarsky’s notion does not tell us whether it is more true to say that a cat is a cat than it is to say that a cat is a mammal.