The odd result of the strong involvement of many different disciplines in linguistic theory has been not more and better thought but a greater state of confusion and a marked tendency for everyone to return to the starting point regardless of how much progress may have been achieved in previous work. . . . This is surely a case of being condemned to relive history because one will not learn from it, the same steps being retraced many years after they first led to a dead end.
John M. Ellis, Language, Thought, and Logic (Northwestern UP, 1993), 8-12.

I don’t see how a person can care about history without being at least a closet-Whig, believing covertly in some kind of progress. Ellis’s point is that, because Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ferdinand de Saussure had not read Charles Sanders Peirce, they repeated some of his work unnecessarily, and because Whorf did not read any of his predecessors, he fell into some errors that they had worked their way through.

Unfortunately, though, in this case, the failure to take account of previous thinkers – of their thoughts, their confrontation with linguistic problems — precipitates the triumph of a deeply misguided theory of reference, encapsulated by Ellis this way:

We have a word for cats because cats exist . . . . We have words for the things we want to communicate . . . . Semantics is about matching words to what exists; and syntax and grammar are about a particular language’s ordering and structuring the process of communicating those facts. (9)

This is the “commonsense” view, Ellis says, that we cannot seem to escape: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sec. 115). The theory of reference, Ellis says, “is the theory with which we all start, the one that is virtually there in the language we speak” (9). Wittgenstein opens his Philosphical Investigations by quoting St. Augustine’s account of the origin of language, that common-sense view: “When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out” (sec. 1, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe) — and then Wittgenstein exposes that common-sense view in order to poke holes in “labeling theory” (Ellis 12) predicated upon the idea that language learning occurs through ostention or pointing at things.

Jonathan Culler opens his book Ferdinand de Saussure, an explication of Saussure’s ideas, by asking, how does anyone point to brown? Teaching a child the meaning of the word brown by pointing can only work if one hands a child different colored balls that are in other respects the same and showing him or her the difference: this one is blue, that one red, this one brown. One learns the meaning of a word based on its difference from other words in one’s own language. Even knowing that something is “the same” as something else depends upon knowing differences between classes of things.

Wittgenstein explodes the theory of reference in two ways:
First, he takes Augustine’s scenario, and tries to imagine when someone would say the name of a thing in ordinary life. He imagines people calling for things, and, in that case, shows that it is not possible to determine any one underlying linguistic structure as the meaning of the word when called.
Second, he explores things, showing that, when we ordinarily use words for them, we create sentences that do indeed correspond to what happens in the world — we can say, “the pot’s boiling” — but it makes as much sense to see the word “pot” as signifying a thing in which water can boil as it does to ask whether the water in the picture of a pot-plus-steam is boiling. Words represent things whose qualities and operations have been linguistically rather than physically determined, and we know these word-things not through true propositions, but by asking, “what would we say when X?”

Saussure’s notion that words have meaning determined differentially as well as Wittgenstein’s explorations of “grammatical illusions” pose serious challenges to any theory of reference.

There is one powerful motivation for adhering to the theory of reference, for resurrecting Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Descriptions without answering the challenges posed to it by Wittgenstein, Saussure, Peirce, Whorf, and the way that Chomsky’s theories break down. That motivation is computational linguistics: in the hands of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, the notion that language primarily refers to or denotes things allows approximating both semantics and syntax to mathematical logic; it promotes, as I will show in my next posting about Richard Montague, belief in the possilbility of finding or creating a universal grammar. Both of these ideas are especially conducive to computational linguistics, to AI, to mapping natural language onto computer functions.*

In my next posting, I’ll describe some 17th- and 18th-century versions of the argument for universal grammar as well: thinkers such as James Harris and John Horne Tooke may have some confronted logical problems that call into question “Montague Grammar.”

Roland Barthes’s essay, “The Death of the Author,” has had precisely the opposite impact of its intent. Its intent was to prevent critics from achieving finality in their interpretations of a text by claiming to know the author’s intention:

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’ — victory to the critic. (Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath [New York: Hill and Wang,1977], 147.)

Paradoxically, cultural studies is full of “victories” for critics, of moments when the critic triumphantly claims to know better than a writer what motivates that writer’s text, a cultural producer his or her production. That is, uncritically deployed, gender, sexual-preferance, heterosexism, racism, sexism, classism, the economy, politics — these are as much “hypostases” susceptible of standing in for “Author” as “society, history, psyche, liberty,” Barthes’s examples.

It is possible for someone who lived before me to know more about something than I do, and so I’m trying to extract those things here, but not in a way that is naively anti- or a-theoretical.

First, a definition of ideology: “the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in” (Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction [Minnesota UP, 1983],14.)

Language is never co-terminous with the ideologies it is capable of promoting, if for no other reason than that some of them contradict each other.  Common sense is often equated with ideology insofar as adhering to it seems to be a way of avoiding the task of thinking for oneself, the Enlightenment’s primary dictum (Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”). 

Common sense is invoked when Ludwig Wittgenstein promises to bring language “back” from its philosophical to its everyday use as a way of conducting “therapy” for anglo-american philosophy (he’s implying here that this field of philosophy is symptomatic).  Ernest Gellner (Words as Things) accuses Wittgenstein’s work of promoting “things as they are,” William Godwin’s definition of ideology (the main title of his novel Caleb Williams, first published in 1794), because Wittgenstein says that philosophy should intend to leave things as it finds them.  But the idea there is that, in trying to change the designations of words, philosophers remain in the grip of a grammar they don’t see.  If your goal is to leave things as they are, the task has to be trying to figure out how* they are.  Wittgenstein examines the common-sense meaning of words in order to find the locus of the “picture” that “held us captive” — i.e., the way that language creates a grammar of things, of what they can be and how they can interact, that, unplumbed, inhibits our thinking.  By examining how words typically work, Wittgenstein can see the assumptions about the being of things that philosophers have uncritically inherited from ordinary language.

* To me, this approach accomplishes the same release from a focus on reference as does Foucault’s when he says, don’t ask who wields power, but how it works (Michel Foucault, “On Power,” Politics, Philosophy, Culture, trans. Alan Sheridan [Routledge, 1988], 103). It reminds you that the word “power,” no less than the personification “Power,” is a “grammatical illusion,” not a really existing thing, and so sentences have to be used describing all the things that collectively constitute “power” when we speak about “it,” point to “it,” invoke “it” in any way.