bigideas

We just learned, via the blog of the Berlin-based research institute Phlox, about an odd example due to logical positivist Moritz Schlick illustrating where meaning resides in a language.

To paraphrase, take a chair and define 26 different positions it can occupy in a room, including orientations (so which way it’s facing and which way up it is are significant). Assign each of these a latter of the alphabet. Well, now you can “translate” any English text we like into a bizarre chair-waving dance that, to the initiated, communicates just as well as the text you’re reading now.

As it stands this is a straightforward letter-substitution code, no stranger than Morse code and really not very different at all from semaphore.

Schlick’s point here is that there’s nothing meaningful about flags or chairs or marks on paper; it’s how they’re arranged in relation to one another that’s important. The key here is that atoms don’t have meaning, only whole sentences do, and it’s this that Schlick is looking to foreground.

He points out, trivially but importantly, that “the ring is lying on the book” and “the book is lying on the ring” are both composed of exactly the same letters and, indeed the same words, yet the mean quite different things. If we understand the first sentence then we don’t have to have the meaning of the second explained to us; we understand because natural languages aren’t symbolic, they’re semantic.

The important thing for Schlick, though, is that there are atoms of meaning — in this case, words — and there are atoms of “stuff” to which they refer. We can understand the two sentences because there’s a ring and a book and some frame of reference (such as a co-ordinate system) that enables us to understand “on top of”. The two sentences mean different things because they combine these atoms in different ways.

Schlick is, I think, thinking of something like the mathematical notion of “isomorphism” when he thinks of replacing letters of the alphabet with positions of a chair. What the individual atoms are don’t matter; their formal relationships are the thing. Yet the meanings of the units of a language must be set at some level; in our case, the likeliest candidate is words:

What is a proposition, after all? In my opinion it is a series of sounds or other symbols (a “sentence”) together with the logical rules belonging to them, i.e., certain prescriptions as to how the sentence is to be used. These rules, culminating in “deictic” definitions, constitute the “meaning” of a proposition. [... the proposition "the church has two spires"] is [verified] by looking at the cathedral and at the sentence in the book and by stating that the symbol “two” is used in connection with the symbol “spires” and that I arrive at the same symbol when I apply the rules of counting to the towers of the cathedral.
[Emphasis as in the original]

So “t”, “w” and “o” are meaningless letters, replaceable by flags or chair-positions or whatever you please, but “two” has a kind of intrinsic meaning. Its meaning does not arise from the relationship between the letters that comprise it.

Schlick’s use of the word “deictic“, though, suggests a more subtle idea than the one conjured up in Saussure’s famous diagram that opens the Course in general Linguistics:

This was the old notion that a meaning was a kind of shared mental picture that was attached to each word in a language. “Deictic” words, on the other hand, acquire their meaning from their contexts; words like “her” and “that tree” are partially deictic.

For Schlick, “the church has two spires” means, I think, by establishing a series of deictic links between the words in the sentence and real or imagined objects; a particular church and a pair of spires. The complication, of course, arises getting from the simple nouns-pointing-at-objects arragement to the meaning of the sentence; for that, we require meanings for “two” and “has”.

“Two” isn’t too hard; I think Schlick would see it as getting its meaning from the formal rules of counting and, if pushed, would tell you it can be fully justified by translation into some sort of “protocol sentence” involving bijections of sets. I’m not sure such an account could be made to work, but it might. “Has” is much more difficult. Certainly it names some kind of relationship, but the relationship “x has y” is very different depending on what x and y are. The church doesn’t seem to own its spires as property, for example, which would be a natural interpretation of “has” in some other contexts. So “has” seems to rely on context for its meaning, too.

Typically for a Vienna Circle positivist, however, Schlick is not here suggesting that words contain meanings; rather that a whole sentence acquires a meaning in the way it is used. In this case it’s used in relation to a church, and the question of how many spires it has. For him, in principle, the words could be replaced by other words without destroying the meaning of the sentence. So, for instance, we know that “die Kirche hat zwei Helme” means the same thing as “the church has two spires” because it’s used in the same way.

All that said, as with all positivists, Schlick has no ultimate recourse but to “ostensive” definitions of basic terms; definitions that involve pointing at the sky and saying “this is ‘blue’” and so on. Such definitions were certainly among the atoms of meaning for the positivists: the reduction of a statement to a series of “simple sentences about the empirically given” was an ideal to be striven for, and preserved any meaning it had to begin with.

It’s easy, today, to think that the logical positivists were naive, and even that they’re not worth the bother of reading. But the question of where meaning is in relation to sounds or illuminated pixels on a computer screen is still, so far as I know, no better understood now than it was in Schlick’s day. Is it possible that it’s an unanswerable question? Is meaning something that happens in the presence of — but not inside — a whole piece of language, along with its audience? If we go too far down that road we’ll end up talking about something unfashionable like poststructuralism.