The rules that we've looked at so far apply to every use of language.
But we want to focus on those rules that are important specifically to arguments.
At least normally, misspelling, or mispronouncing a word
doesn't affect an argument. Of course, if you pronounce one word so
that it sounds like another word, it can be very confusing and people won't
understand you, or if you misspell it so badly they don't
know what word you wanted, the arguments not going to work.
but normally misspelling and mispronunciation don't make the argument
bad. Instead,
what affects the argument is what's going to affect the proposition that's going to
express the meaning of the sentence, because that going that's going effect
whether the premises justifies the conclusion of or, whether they explain
the conclusion, and so we need to focus on those rules of language which that in
particular deal with the meanings of words of sentences.
So what's meaning? Well, one thing I can tell you is we're
not going to be talking about the meaning of life in this course.
The meaning of life is a totally different topic.
We're also not going to be talking about whether clouds mean rain, in the sense of
giving some indication or evidence that there's going to be rain.
We're concerned with the meanings of words and sentences in language.
We're concerned with linguistic meaning in particular.
So, how are we going to understand linguistic meaning?
Well, one way to think about the meanings of words and sentences is to ask how you
would explain them to someone who doesn't understand them, like a small child or
someone who doesn't speak this language. Well, if somebody said,
what's the meaning of the word chair, you might go well, when I use the word
chair, I'm referring to these things, you know, something like this.
and when I say I am sitting on the chair what I mean is my body is above the
chair. And so, that approach to teaching
language suggests to many people that what words mean is the same as what they
refer to. and what sentences mean are the facts
that they try to describe. Now that view of language is often called
the referential or descriptive view of language.
So is this referential or descriptive theory adequate?
No, no, no, no, absolutely not. That theory does not cover a lot of
language that's extremely important. Just think about greeting someone in the
morning. Hello.
Are you referring to an object when you say hello?
Or think about the word not in a, in a sentence,
and that, the word not is going to be crucial to arguments.
But does the word not refer to something, separate from the other things?
Well if it did, then there would be more objects in the room when I'm not sitting
on the chair than when I am sitting on the chair.
So you cannot understand the meanings of many words, like hello, or not, or for
that matter am, or sitting. Many words don't fit this referential or
descriptive theory of meaning. So, if meaning is not referential
description, what is it? Well, here were going to take our cue
from Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great 20th century Austrian philosopher, who argued
that meaning is use. If you want to understand the meaning of
the word hello, you don't look for some object that it refers to, you ask how is
it used? And the answer's obvious, it's used to
greet people. If you want to understand the meaning of
the question, where's the library? The answer is, well, a question is used
to inquire about the library, to ask where the library is.
If you want to understand the meaning of an imperative like, give me a pizza, then
that is a way of ordering a pizza. You're using that phrase to order a
pizza. So the meaning of the phrase is given by
the way those words are used in normal situations by competent speakers of the
language. Now this point about meaning being used
is very important, to the language of argument.
As we saw, the word not does not refer to an additional object.
And the same goes for the word and"," when you say I am sitting in the chair
and I am in the office. The word and doesn't refer to an object either.
So if we want to understand what the word and is used to do then we have to think
about what people do with it. And what they do is they conjoin
different sentences. They don't add an extra object or an
extra fact. They just conjoin sentences, and form a
whole sentence out of two parts, each of which was a sentence to begin
with. And when we look more closely at the uses
of language, we see that language is used in a lot of different ways.
Use is diverse. Just take a simple example.
I'd like to give you a little piece of personal advice.
You ought to floss your teeth every day. So what did I just do?
I uttered a bunch of words. I made physical motion in the air.
But in addition, those words were meaningful. You ought to floss your teeth
every day. Each of those words is meaningful in the
language, and I put them together in an order that
was grammatical. So, the whole thing makes sense.
When you make a meaningful utterance like that, we're going to say you perform a
linguistic act, and there's a linguistic level of the use
of language that we will study in one lecture, the next lecture.
But in addition, when I said you ought to floss your teeth everyday,
I also gave you a piece of friendly advice.
I advised you, and notice that even if you don't follow
my advice, I still advised you. And, if you don't follow my advice and
your teeth rot out, then I can say, Look, you should've listened to me, because I
advised you to floss your teeth every day.
So the speech act level occurs even when it doesn't affect your actions at all.
That's the second level of use of language, the speech act level, and we'll
talk about that in more detail two lectures from now.
The third level of language has to do with the production of certain effects.
Maybe when I say you ought to floss your teeth every day, I persuade you.
And what that means is, I bring about a certain effect on your behavior, or your
thought, or your attitudes. Well, that's what we're going to call the
conversational level, and conversational acts are the acts of bringing about those
effects, and persuasion is one example. So now we have three levels of language.
We have the linguistic level which is the meaningful utterance, producing a
meaningful utterance. We have the speech-act level, advising is
a nice paradigm of that which can be accomplished even if it, you're not
persuaded. And we have persuading you, which is the
conversational level. So there's the linguistic level, the
speech-act level, and the conversational level.
And each of these levels will be explored in more detail in one of the next three
lectures. But here's a little warning, and you have
a choice. The material in the next three lectures
is a little bit more abstract and difficult than some of the things we've
been through so far. Now, I think it's fascinating and we're
going to try to make it fun. And it's really important to understand
how your language works. But it's not absolutely essential to the
things that we're going to cover in the rest of this course.
So, it's up to you. You can listen to these three lectures if
you want, and there will be some exercises
throughout those lectures that will test your understanding,
but none of that materials going to be on the quiz.
So you can listen to the next three lectures, and I hope you do and I hope
you enjoy them, but you don't have to in order to be able
to go through the rest of the course and do well on the quiz at the end of this
part.