YOU TALK FUNNY

(Portrait of me and Figaro drawn by Peter’s daughter Sophia, age 7 and super adorable)

Hello all! My brainiac philosopher cousin Peter Adamson was kind enough to do a guest blog entry for me! He’s used to being published by Oxford University Press and stuff so this is kind of a big step up for him (congrats big guy!). Enjoy!:

Nature or convention

In ancient Greece they were already thinking about language. Aristotle is famous for this: he wrote a lot about logic (in fact he invented logic) and also about what makes something a meaningful sentence, and so on. However, as often, Plato anticipates some of what Aristotle was doing, and he has an interesting discussion of a problem that was already a standard topic of dispute among Greek intellectuals. It’s in part interesting that they even thought it was worth arguing about, because to us the debate is apt to seem silly. Plato, however, thought that it was interesting enough to write a whole dialogue about it, called the Cratylus.

The debate is this: “are names by nature or convention”? What this means is, take a word like anthropos (Greek for “man,” hence anthropology, and as you know my cousin Meg digs anthropology so this example is just for her). The “by convention” option says that we Greeks only call man anthropos because that happens to be our word for it: it could have been anything (like it could have been man, or Mench, or whatever). That seems obviously correct, right? Well, not necessarily, because there was the other option, which attracted Plato. This other option, “by nature,” says that you can use the right word for man or the wrong word. You might use the wrong word and be understood, but only one word is the word that actually picks out man from everything else.

So, that sounds crazy, right? Why would anyone think this? Here are two reasons:

1. In the case of some words, it’s clearly true. The obvious example is cases of onomatopoeia, like “woof” and “bang”. Here it isn’t a mere coincidence that we say “woof” or “bow wow” for the sound Megan’s dog Figaro makes, and in fact in different languages people say relatively similar things (e.g. in German they say “wauwau” which is pronounced “vow vow”). Plato suggests extending this idea to cover normal words, and argues that certain letters or sounds might signify certain things onomatopoetically, so for instance he says the sound “s” is for motion or speed and gives examples of Greek words that have to do with flowing or moving around, which have s in them.

2. Another phenomenon to consider is etymology. For instance, as I pointed out above, “anthropology” has Greek roots: it comes from anthropos (man) and logos (account, study), so it means “study of man”. In this sense it is the “right” word for the discipline it names. The etymology tells you what it means and if you knew some Greek but didn’t know what the English word “anthropology” meant, you could figure it out. So, what if all words are like that? What if all words are etymologically derived from other words, and thus appropriately express a complex meaning? In the Cratylus Plato provides lots of rather outlandish-sounding examples; for instance the word aither (the source of our “ether”) is aei thei rhoen, which means “always running and flowing.” The idea is that if you are an expert in etymology, you can see from the composition of a word what it means. In other words, you can see that it is the “right” word; it isn’t only by convention. Now, someone might say: that doesn’t show that all names are by nature, because the names further back in the history were by convention: if anthropos and logos were conventional, then so is “anthropology.” But that doesn’t settle the debate. Obviously the pro-convention side can’t just assume these earlier names were conventional, that would be begging the question. They have to convince us that all names are originally just arbitrary or conventional, before they become the etymological basis for later names. But how do you prove something like that?

This brings us to an interesting problem that people still argue about: how do names get to have the meanings they have? Plato thought the original names, from which our current names would be etymologically derived, would have been given by someone who knew what they were doing. All names were sort of like our onomatopoetic words, and (to the one who knows) would just embody or display what they meant. A central example for him was the names of Gods, which most Greeks would want to say were somehow religiously significant: few would want to say that the name “Zeus” was just chosen at random. (Think about the religious charge of names like Jehova or Allah in other traditions and you’ll get a sense of it.) But he wanted to broaden this out to cover all names. On this story the expert in language can see how these original names have been distorted or carried on in modern language, and uncover an original insight of the primordial name-giver.

But even if this is wrong, and the original name-giver names by convention, what exactly is happening when they associate a certain sound with a certain object? A famous 20th century philosopher, Saul Kripke, has an influential theory that the reason why a given word means a given thing is that we can trace back our use to an original act of “dubbing” or “baptism”: the obvious example would be giving actual proper names. So the reason Megan’s name is Megan is that my aunt and uncle at one point dubbed her Megan: that’s what makes the name her name, and that begins a tradition or causal sequence which makes her still called Megan (e.g. I call her Megan because they told my parents the baby’s name was Megan, so when I was a little kid I was taught that my baby cousin’s name was Megan, and now my daughters have been told by me to call her Megan, etc. etc.). As far as I know Plato is the first extant author to talk in any detail about names as deriving from a causal chain that starts with an original name-giver. But you can see echoes of the idea elsewhere in ancient texts, like in Genesis when Adam names the animals.

As I say this picture is one that philosophers still use. What is different, and maybe for us hard to wrap our minds around, is his idea that in many cases the original, wise, maybe divine name-giver gave the name they chose for a very specific reason, and that learning about those original names would allow us to share some of the insight of the name-giver.

If you want to read more about this, I’d recommend the following webpage:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-cratylus/

And this page from the same source talks a bit about Kripke’s view; this page does get kind of technical though.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/names/