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On Plato’s mid-period dialogue from around 388 BCE. How do words relate to the things they represent? Featuring Mark, Wes, and Dylan.
We’re all familiar with the feeling when we see someone really hot but with a very dweeby name that something seems to have gone wrong. We also know Native names like “Running Eagle” that may or may not seem to really fit the person with that name, and some people even have ironic nicknames, like a huge guy named “Tiny.” This is the sort of phenomenon that this dialogue deals with, though Socrates and his pals Hermogenes and Cratylus quickly get past proper names to talk about concept words like justice, wisdom, being, and judgment.
They start with the question as to whether the words chosen to represent concepts are merely conventional, meaning that really any word could just as well be used for any purpose, or whether words are meant to in some way describe their concepts. If they accurately describe concepts, i.e. real phenomena in the world, then talking about the meanings of words should be a good way to learn about the world: a good way of doing philosophy.
To prove to Hermogenes that words are not merely conventional, Socrates first describes naming (assigning a word to a concept) as an activity like the construction of a tool for cutting. Clearly some saws and axes can be well made, and others can be poorly made, and this is not just a matter of opinion, but a matter of how well they do the job of cutting. So what is the job of words? To cut the world into pieces for us to think about (to “divide being”)! Socrates then spends a long time looking at the etymology of various Greek words to say that, for instance, the word “human” (in Greek “antrhopoi”) puts for a theory about what human beings are, because the Greek word is just a compressed evolution of “anathron ha opope,” which literally means “one who observes closely what he has seen.”
Apparently lots of intellectuals did this kind of thing, and a twist late in the dialogue has left scholars wondering whether the whole exercise might not have been some kind of joke. After demonstrating to Hermogenes that many words refer to movement and flow, and theorizing that these original word-makers had a correspondingly Heraclitan view of nature whereby everything is always in motion, Socrates then switches to argue with Cratylus (who had come in with this idea that names are not merely conventional, but is silent for the first 3/4 of the dialogue) that first, one can give etymologies just as well that depict the universe as mostly stable (not in motion), second, that etymology is not a useful way to actually achieve insights about the concepts that words are about (they’re only as good as the theories of the original word-makers), and third, that the Heraclitan view of nature is absurd, since we wouldn’t even be able to coherently talk about things if they were always changing.
So probably Plato didn’t ultimately believe that words are descriptions of things (much less the parts of word, where individual sounds refer to flow or stoppage according to whether air is stopped as we utter them), but he sure does spend a lot of time on them in this dialogue. He certainly seems to find it an interesting exercise to use etymologies to think about how we intuitively view things in the world.
This whole issue certainly seems archaic, and so Plato’s take on language here is not as central to the philosophy of language as his takes on ethics or knowledge. But the idea of an ideal language where every element perfectly matches the thing it represents is one that came back in the early 20th century among logicians like Russell, Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists who saw the ambiguities in language as having caused most philosophical problems. A perfectly logical language would make the relations between philosophical claims completely transparent, and it would do this by ensuring that every symbol had exactly one, unambiguous meaning, and that complex symbols could be decomposed into simple symbols which would be rooted to (on some accounts) atomic perceptions (like “red dot appearance at location XYZ”).
Similarly, Socrates describes a language where complex Greek words can be definitively traced to being combinations of simpler words, and these basic words gain their resemblance to things in the world via the character of their component sounds. With such a system, it’s not just whole sentences that be true or false (e.g. “the cat is on the mat”), but individual words (“cat” is true if and only if that word accurately reflects the essence of cats) and even sounds (the hard “c” sound is appropriate in “cat” if and only if the essence of cat involves some sort of harshness naturally connoted by that harsh, cutting sound). Of course, language doesn’t and couldn’t work that way, but if one imagines like Plato that the language we actually use, like everything else in our imperfect sensory universe, is just a pale imitation of some perfect version in the realm of the forms, then perhaps this could be an ideal toward which regular language does and should strive. Even though language will never attain this, it provides a standard for judging the words we do have, and etymology (as many philosophers since including notably Heidegger and Leo Strauss) can be useful in teasing out our philosophical intuitions and the history of ideas.
On the other side, we can wonder with Hermogenes how “conventional” language can be. As Hermogenes initially argues, we can not only as communities but as individuals just call any concept by any word we want, and as long as we know what we mean, then that’s a legitimate name for that thing. This is arguably how language evolves: One person calls something out in a new way, it catches on within a small community, and then this spreads. We spend some time talking about how this might relate to Wittgenstein’s private language argument, which is more focused on my “naming” my private mental states than on my quirkily using the word “horse” to refer to what other people mean by “human,” which is the sort of example that Hermogenes and Socrates discuss.
Buy the C.D.C. Reeve translation we’re using or try it online.
Image by Chris Warr (aka Solomon Grundy). Audio editing by Tyler Hislop.
Transcript
0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 324 is something like, how do words relate to the things they represent? And we read Plato's mid period dialogue, the Cratylus, written somewhere around 388 BCE. For more information, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, whose middle name was improperly given as Danger.
0:36 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, worshipper of Hodidus Ton Oinon in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
0:42 Mark: The translation that we're using, it's in the Plato Complete Works edited by John M. Cooper. The specific translator for this dialogue is CDC Reeve. This is a very weird dialogue. It's sort of like the Parmenides in that there's a whole section of it that you're just like, I'm supposed to actually read this with my, with my eyes, supposed to wade through this. Because it's largely about etymology, it touches the question that, you know, I mentioned at the beginning. I mean, it seems obvious to us, words are there by convention. They don't depict, they don't represent.
The word dog doesn't sound like how a dog sounds. It doesn't sound like how a dog looks. Oh, but maybe if we look at the etymology, Plato would say it'll be animalist, Barkius or whatever. You know, we'll say, oh, okay, this is the kind of thing that he's doing. And of course he's doing it in ancient Greek, which is a nice way to remind us, the readers, about what all these ancient Greek words are. It's nice to see those. But he's playing with this hypothesis that maybe words actually do, in a very direct way, represent what the things that they are supposed to, you know, that they refer to, they don't just point at, but they actually depict in some way.
So then it should be possible to have a name that is wrong.
2:00 Wes: Yeah, the question is whether names for things belong to them, quote unquote, by nature, whether they are non conventional. And Mark, as you just pointed out, we are used to thinking of language as entirely conventional. The word is for cat, as cat in one language and gato in another, and so on and so forth, you know, through hundreds of thousands of languages. So it seems kind of crazy to look at this at the level of names and ask whether a particular name has been, what, assigned by the gods or has some other natural relationship to things. Ultimately, Mark, as you pointed out, Imitation, maybe syllables sounding like something in nature.
But I think we should look at this in light of our recent conversations on universal grammar, where we looked at the alternative. One is Chomsky's alternative, that there's a component of the brain that is biologically evolved to produce grammar. And the other option, that our cognitive abilities that support language use are more general and that grammar itself is conventional in its development. That doesn't mean that grammar, even if it's psycholinguistically conventional in its development, is entirely conventional. So one could think that even if universal grammar is not embedded in the brain, that there is, there must be something universal about grammar.
There must be a common, fundamental grammar to all languages. And maybe that's just ontology, right? So subject and verb corresponding to thing and event. We could look for those sorts of universals. We look for that kind of natural relationship between language and things on a propositional level. If we want to make sense of it, we could make better sense of this sort of idea that there's something natural and non conventional about language at the level of grammar, as it must correspond in some sense to ontology. So Plato gives us a weird variation on that, where we're looking at the things at the level of names, which seems patently absurd, but it's very clear from the dialogue that that is an entirely ironic frame, that he's joking with us through the whole thing and giving absurd etymological derivations, and even giving etymological derivations that are clearly the wrong ones, like Hades, right?
Literally, place where things are not seen. He wants to give an alternative etymological.
4:35 Dylan: My favorite one is Aletheia, which in other dialogues he points out is unforgetting, or the river Lethe, the river of
4:43 Wes: forgetting, we have to ask why he's doing this. And in the end, right, he's putting all this effort into showing how language might be or how naming might be natural. He's going to say, actually, no, it's not. This is kind of a fool's errand that we've been engaged in. So we're going to have to say why he did that. I will say that unlike Mark, I kind of dreaded the etymology section, reading about it beforehand in the secondary literature. And then I actually quite enjoyed it, especially the connection to Heraclitus and all of that.
5:12 Dylan: The only thing I would add is, even though we end in a kind of a muddy place, because while Cratilus's point of view, that there are fixed names for things and such, that if you speak the name of something, you'll always be right there. It becomes absurd very quickly. But there's going to be some amount of convention that has to be there. But Socrates also ties this up with knowing what things are and how we know things. And so the question of naming isn't completely divorced from the question of ontology and isn't completely divorced from the question of how we learn or how we know. And it gets muddy in that respect because there's going to be this challenge for if we have names for things, then how do they relate to what the things are? Even if we have it as a convention, what does it mean to have, I think, a convention about what things are?
6:17 Mark: The end is very compact compared to the amount of time spent on the etymologies and the amount of time initially supposedly establishing this thesis that names are in fact descriptions of things. Because his first interlocutor for most of the dialogue is not Cratylus, but Hermogenes. Cratylus and Hermogenes are having a debate without Socrates, I guess. And Socrates comes upon them and Hermogenes thinks that names are given only through convention. And so Socrates argues him out of that, that if names were only given through convention, it would be impossible for a name to be incorrectly given.
And the example that's given right off the bat is Hermogenes name himself, which is son of Hermes. It's related to Hermes, but that would imply he is quick witted. He is quick in ways that Hermogenes himself admits that he is not. So either that name was. Is somehow wrong and we can definitely see how, I think, with our associations of names. I mean, if somebody is named Vlad or Butch, there are people that might have that name ironically, or maybe even a name like Tiny when it is applied to a very large person. Like there are clearly some names that we think that is wrong.
Or you might have a child and you think you figured out the name beforehand, but then you actually see the child and you know that is not a Deborah, that is a Susan instead, or whatever. And so it's probably not entirely arbitrary, entirely subjective and whimsical that there is some sort of convention that there are associations with these names. Vlad goes with Vlad the Impaler. So you'd have to have some other famous Vlad who's in musical theater or something that you have in mind to sort of counter that association.
8:05 Wes: That's a conventional association. I mean, that still leaves you in the realm of convention though, those associations. I think you're on firmer ground if you Say the first namers, the rule givers, Some sort of. Probably not. Not even Homo sapiens. Well, I guess Homo sapiens, but early modern humans hundreds of thousands of years ago. The ancients using language. The. Yeah, the ancient ancients. Some of the syllables or words they're using could sound like. Could be sound like syllables or words. They could sound like. They could be imitative.
Certainly some of his etymologies are correct, a few of them according to the secondary literature. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if some words are portmanteaus. It doesn't matter if some words have imitative components, because that's not what language comprehension is about, which Socrates actually points out in this dialogue. Even if everything were perfectly imitative or derivative for more complex words, that is not how language comprehension actually works. That's not what happens when you hear a word or a sentence. You don't hear a likeness to things, or you don't even think about the portmanteau, if that's what it is, how it breaks down into these words with other meanings.
Language comprehension works in a different way. And likewise we are hooked up to the things themselves in a different way. Language is not the medium through which we get at the things themselves. And that leads us to the theory of forms.
9:34 Mark: I guess I read the end as he's more tempering this thesis that he's developing throughout here. As you said, not only do our whole words, you could find their origins. And we even do this right in the cult of St. John's right of looking at the ancient Greek root of a modern word. Steven Pinker had pointed out that gender he makes a big thing of this is not about sex. Gender is just from the word genre. So it just means divisions. So it just happens to be that the primary division that people considered salient in human beings was between men and women.
And so the word gender, that is one type, but there it could be brown haired and black haired, it could be old and young, it could be any number of things. That could be the genders. It just happens that that's the one that we use most often. So that word evolved and solidified. So maybe there's something interesting to uncover. I don't think it's actually that important.
10:33 Wes: I think you're right. And this is also very popular in continental philosophy, the method of association as opposed to the method of reasoning, not unrelated to the influence of psychoanalysis as well. But these are genealogical derivations. We can do genealogy if we want to know something about the psychology and the origins of ideas or morality or names, all of that stuff. So they can be informative in that sense because they are elusive and they can bring out. They can give us certain ideas, but they can't be demonstrative. They don't prove anything.
They're just suggestive, let's put it that way. So in other words, even if you show that gender is, as Steven Pinker describes it, that doesn't get us to a natural relationship between names and things or even propositions and ideas and things. So in other words, just because what's salient to people is sex and the division between the sexes, let's say that doesn't tell us the truth about sex and gender, tells us what the folk theory was. Am I misunderstanding you or as the
11:46 Mark: argument proceeds, then he does say, well, even if we can judge the accuracy of a current word by looking at its roots, where do those roots come from? Are those conventional or are those natural? If we want to say that names, words have a natural relationship, a representative relationship, I keep using that word. But a depictive relationship, I think is better between the words and the things.
12:13 Wes: Imitative.
12:14 Mark: Imitative, yes. Okay. That's the word that he uses.
12:16 Wes: And he stresses for the primary words, for the more complicated words. Right. They can be broken down into more primary words that have their meanings.
12:25 Dylan: Yeah, There's a kind of elementalness. Right. I mean, as he goes through this, you have the imitation portion of words that get broken down. And then he gets to the idea of there being elemental words for which all words are made up of elemental sounds, elemental positions of your mouth.
12:42 Wes: So R is indicative of flow, or maybe indicative is the wrong word, but brings to mind flow, and in that sense is imitative, partly because of the way we use our tongues when creating that sound.
12:54 Mark: I'm trying to remember the difference between R and L, because L is definitely
12:59 Wes: flowing, whereas softness, I think.
13:03 Mark: Yeah, G is. G is gluey. You know, things that restraining the hard p T, those are the stopping the flow. So a lot of these etymologies come down to something flowing well and something not flowing well. And he ends up attributing to the ancient name givers who came up with these initial elements, and I think even put them together is that seemingly everything is related to a picture of the universe that is roughly Heraclitean, that everything is in constant flux and change and flow. And I've never actually heard this attributed to Heraclitus, that if you have a picture that everything is flux and flow, then the things that flow the fastest are the best.
And the things that are relatively stuck in place are on this picture the worst. Right? The telos of that sort of universe is to move in and shaken. And so, you know, the derivation of a word like good ends up being free flowing. And a word like bad is, you know, stopping is, is restraint from the flow. And so this is where then he comes back to is like, well, does this prove that, that the world is actually like Heraclitus saw it and Plato thinks no, actually this just there is an element of conventionalism because it's people trying to make their language reflect how they see the world, but how they see the world might be wrong.
And this is what he sort of leaves us with is that he and Cratylus disagree, but they don't really get into it. They just like, let's, let's talk about this on another day. I, I think actually that the world is not flow and flux. And so whatever method that those original name givers used, that they look to the things and they came up with sounds, well, why don't we just look to the things? Why don't we try to come up with better names or put aside this naming business altogether, which is going to be interesting but a little bit beside the point, and actually get knowledge from the things themselves.
15:00 Wes: Yeah, he does give arguments in the end, right. So the first argument he gives against Cratylus is that, well, we can actually redo all these etymologies to suggest that the name givers were interested in stasis, or that at least the names can be associated with stasis just as much as they can be associated with flux. And then he goes on to talk about how it must be possible to learn things independently of names, because the first rule givers had to do that. They can't learn through names, they must be acquainted with the things themselves to do that.
And then finally, if everything is flowing and moving, things can't be any particular way at all and therefore we can't know them. And knowledge is changing. So if you want to say, you know, this is the old argument that if we want to say, if there's such a thing as knowledge, things must be stable. So he's giving this anti Heraclitean argument in the end, and what that means is an entirely unclear because it may be that Socrates and Plato think the world of appearance is flux and essentially Heraclitean, with a world of forms in the background that are the place of knowledge, the fixed static area that we can know, or it may be that Heraclitus is entirely wrong either way.
There is an argument at the end against the view that Socrates at least thinks is implied by Cratilus's point of view that names are naturally related to things. And then Cratylus, of course, of course can't respond and condescendingly suggests that Socrates keep inquiring into these things.
16:40 Mark: It sort of circles around that there's a. Some version of this at the beginning where he's actually just straight up Socrates giving an argument against Heraclitus. You know, in brief, that just the fact that there are good people and bad people, right, there is good and bad, there is this and that they are distinct. If Heraclitus was actually right, then as soon as you name something, it's already ceased to be that thing. It just wouldn't be possible to have concepts at all.
17:09 Dylan: On one interpretation of Heraclitus, right? So he's picking a particular interpretation of what flow would be things changing. He's saying. Well, at least in the version that you say what things are, are changing, that's what he says. That can't be true. It can't be true that what something is, is changing all the time.
17:28 Wes: For Plato, he associates the Heraclitean point of view with relativism. And the ultimate argument against relativism, the way you back people in a corner, is to bring up ethics. Oh, are you saying there is no fact of the matter about whether murder is wrong? No fact of the matter about whether people are good and bad. And then you can get them to admit that. And once you get them to admit that, you get them off that relativism beat and you get them to admit that some things are know and stable, fixed and mind independent. So there's this association of the possibility of mind independence and fixity stasis.
18:05 Dylan: Why is ethics the angle for that? The best one?
18:08 Wes: Because people's ethical intuitions are the things to which they're most attached.
18:13 Dylan: They're not attached to falling down the stairs. I mean, like, why wouldn't relativism just fall prey to physical facts in the world?
18:20 Mark: I mean, I think you could give a good excuse. Why? Why did you fall down the stairs? Well, because they were stairs, but they're constantly changing. It wasn't my stepping that was wrong, it was the stairs themselves. They're just constantly changing everything.
18:32 Dylan: It was a fact of the matter, right?
18:34 Wes: Yeah, if you're not a relativist.
18:35 Dylan: Yeah, well, no, what I'm saying is I'm just confused about it doesn't seem to Me, this might be a tangent. We don't have to go down. But I don't understand why ethics is the strongest piece of intuition for why relativism can't in its strong form be true.
18:53 Wes: Well, let me make that argument. It is for Plato, because it's the way he does it in all his dialogues. The argument is that first of all, if you fall down the stairs and you're hurt, you can easily say, well, that was my experience. That's the way it seemed to me. If you're a contemporary relativist, and it is a very popular view in one form or another. And even the concept of social construction, I think implies it to some extent, the idea that there are conceptual schemes and that reality, in fact, that there is a kind of natural relationship between what we call reality and language naming, and that discourse and naming and language in fact have a kind of priority.
So you can say it seems this way to me because of convention, because of my particular conceptual scheme, my culture, but it may not be true. Even quarks may be socially constructed. Even quarks may just be a manifestation of human practice. How does Protagoras put it? Measure of all things? Man is the measure of all things. So but when you get to ethical claims and say, oh, do you mean murder is not wrong? People, I think, are a little more uncomfortable going there. They're going to that kind of relativistic place. They can say, well, the world really isn't as it seems on a factual level.
And sometimes that verges into skepticism. I think people are confused about whether they're relativists or skeptics. Skepticism is on much firmer ground. I don't know. I don't know what the truth is. The world may not be as it seems to me, as opposed to the world is not in any particular way. It's always in the eye of the beholder. I just think that people are more attached to their ethical intuitions about the intuition that ethics is non relative. You'll find, of course, lots of people who will accept the claim that there's something relative about ethics as well, but they don't behave that way.
They're the first two people today who talk about discourse being dispositive of reality are also interested in fundamental ethical truths, which is to say that power relations and injustices are embedded in discourse, and we need to change the discourse to change those relations. So there are fundamental moral ethical truths that are more fundamental even than discourse. So even contemporary relativists would stick to their guns on fundamental ethical truths about what is just and. But we have to change in society.
21:27 Mark: I want to point out an ambiguity. The way that Dylan had put it was whether what is is changing. I note it down. So the question could be, and that Socrates actually says things have. Do you believe that things have some fixed being or essence of their own? So the question is, if you ask what is, is that changing? Are you asking about the essences? Are you asking about the individual objects? Because it could be that the individual objects, though they retain the same essence, they are changing. And this is that difference between maybe the world of appearance actually is flux. They're not changing so much that they're all the time stopping being associated with that particular essence. Right. A fox is always changing its position and changing its matter and changing, but it remains a fox, at least until
22:14 Wes: it is dead or it participates in the form of fox, which is the unchanging, stable thing.
22:21 Mark: I mean, I think Plato believes the stronger claim as well that the things are not so much of a flux. If only the forms were fixed and still appearance was completely a flux and you couldn't even just pick out objects from it, then still we couldn't do metaphysics, right? We're not in touch with the forms. We couldn't even do science. We couldn't do everyday reasoning. So yes, there has to be enough fixity in individual things, enough connection with the forms, enough participation in the forms. That itself has to be something stable. And I think that's a stronger anti. You know, so he's not Heraclitean on appearance and Parmenidean in forms.
23:00 Wes: It's actually unclear and there's lots in Plato to suggest. He doesn't think empirical science is possible. We in fact have intellectual intuitions of the forms. We're beamed up the opposite of beam me down, Scotty. We can just directly access the forms and we don't need to worry about having to be mediated through the Heraclitean flux of appearance. But I think scholarly consensus. Well, I don't know if it's consensus or not, but some scholars think he's just ambivalent about it. He doesn't know how to address that problem, but suggests at various places that if we are to have knowledge, it must be direct intellectual intuitions of forms.
23:40 Mark: I feel like we've hit the summary. Should we dive into a bunch of quotes here or there are other overall points that we still want to.
23:48 Dylan: Well, there's some interesting things to talk about as we go along.
23:51 Wes: I mean, yeah, I want to get into the argument, because I think it is very subtle and interesting in many places.
23:59 Dylan: Do you want to start from the beginning?
24:01 Wes: Yeah. So we start on 383A with Cratolus's claim that the correct name for each thing belongs to it by nature. And it'll turn out that he's going to claim that there is no such thing as an incorrect name. They're just things that are names and things that are not.
24:16 Dylan: And this is through the voice of Hermogenes. Hermogenes is paraphrasing Cratylus.
24:22 Wes: Right. Later on we'll hear from Cratylus himself. So I was just looking forward to future claims by Cratylus.
24:27 Mark: You know, I should throw out that Cratylus. So the one thing I think we know about him historically is that he was a Heraclitean philosopher. He's the guy he's attributed to that Heraclitus supposedly said, you can't step into the same river twice. And that Cratylus himself, over and beyond that said, you can't even step in
24:43 Wes: the same river once he's mentioned by Aristotle. So we get independent verification of Cratylus existence and the fact that he was very influential on Plato. Aristotle says Plato was very influenced by Heraclitean philosophy and Cratylus in particular. So Hermogenes says, actually it's by convention, rules and usage establish. And Socrates quizzes them and says, you mean communal usage as well as private. Yeah. So you could have someone, could be a man and have the public name man attributed to him, but I might call that person horse in my own little private language, and that would be perfectly fine. So convention is very radical for Hermogenes. It's not just public communal usage practice, but we can name anything we want.
25:35 Dylan: When I read that, it just seemed like a kind of stupid lack of consistency that you would have to have to have communication be true at all. I mean, I guess it points to the question of genuinely private languages that get engaged, because we've talked about whether those are possible to exist, whether a private language actually exists.
25:54 Mark: Right. The issue being, if you come up with a private name yourself, how do we even know if you're using it consistently? But I guess if Hermogenes thinks that consistency is not really the issue, it's just, do you use it to refer to that thing? I guess the private language, Some of what it's concerned with is it's not about private words for public things, it's about private words for private things. It's not actually a danger. If I sometimes refer to you as Sneaky Joe. And you might not know that I might call you by something else, because I clearly have you in mind.
And insofar as I actually want to write about you, or I would have to translate Sneaky Joe into Dylan Casey. But if I'm talking about my own pain, then nobody else can see that. And so my coming up with some name that even kind of describes it, there's something very amorphous about that, that there's no potential way that I could find out. I'm sorry, I don't mean to rehearse the entire private language argument, but I do think it's different than what's going on here.
26:59 Wes: It's perfectly acceptable to Wittgenstein for you to create your own language and keep your diary in that language. Private language isn't prohibited in that sense, or impossible in that sense. So that would be the kind of thing that Hermogenes is actually talking about. And so it could actually work. Of course, it's not going to work at a communal level.
27:19 Dylan: Yeah, it gets to the question of what you mean by use. So to me, in either case, what you mean by use implies consistency in use.
27:29 Wes: Well, he's also piggybacking on language that he has already learned. No one could do this for themselves. Right. Historically, evolutionarily. Right. If there were no such thing as language, no one is going to invent language by themselves. That is absolutely impossible. And then the other aspect of this is that the possibility of using different names doesn't mean that being itself isn't public in mind, independent. So privacy in this Hermogenean sense doesn't imply anything about being. That's the next thing that Socrates is going to go on about.
Being is not relative or private to each particular person. And again, he brings up the ethical in this early context in the dialogue. He's going to bring it up later, again with Cratylus. So there are good and bad human beings. Protagoras is right. No one would be wiser than anyone else. No one would be good, no one would be bad. All things would have perhaps all attributes simultaneously. That's a different philosopher. But he makes that association. So he says, 386e. It's clear that things have some fixed being or essence of their own. They are not in relation to us and are not made to fluctuate by how they appear to us.
They are by themselves in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by nature. So he wants to lay down that groundwork, whether or not we agree with Cratylus or Hermogenes. We agree that being itself is non conventional.
28:56 Dylan: The next thing is one of the things we hadn't talked about yet was this idea of actions with respect to these things. I guess this falls into the ethical question as well. The question of the action versus the action being done well or not and whether the cutting. You can cut something with a knife, but did you cut it well? And then that there is a natural action to something and it goes into this direction of well, if you're not doing it according to the way it ought to be done, then you're not actually doing the thing, you're not actually doing the action. Right. So if you're not cutting well, then in some way you're not actually cutting. You're doing some other action, but you're not actually doing the cutting.
29:42 Wes: We can derive something normative from the naming relation, this relation between human beings in the world. That's really interesting.
29:50 Dylan: Yeah.
29:50 Wes: Because naming is an action. If you say things in the natural way to them, quote unquote, then you succeed in that action. We can succeed or fail in our actions. Dylan, you just gave the example of cutting. Cutting can succeed or not succeed. It's an objective thing in some sense. Right. It's not cutting unless you succeed. And to succeed you have to perform it in accord with the actions nature. You have to use a sharp knife, for instance, or whatever.
30:20 Dylan: The quote that he has it, what is it, 386A in this collection, it's page 105. It says we choose to cut and accord with the nature of cutting and being cut and then end with the nature natural tool for cutting will succeed and cut correctly. So this is a very, very typical Socratic move to talk about things in this way. But whenever I read it I want to say, well, it just seems strange that there isn't a gradation. The fact that I'm not using a knife optimally doesn't mean I'm not cutting something. Right. Just because I'm using a dull knife doesn't mean that my hack job that I did through the stake isn't cutting the stake.
31:05 Wes: Later on he's going to say there is gradation at the end of the argument with Cratylus when he argues with Cratylus, that's very important to his argument that there is a gradations to success. He can be more or less successful in naming.
31:16 Mark: Well and importantly, it is still naming even if it's incorrect naming. That's Cratylus position is that if you name something incorrectly, actually you just haven't named it at all. You are speaking nonsense. This is the first time I recall seeing that thing that is used by Hobbes, by Hume, by the logical positivists that somehow all false claims, but certainly certain kinds of unsuccessful claims are purely nonsense.
31:42 Wes: It's not just that they're especially philosophical claims. So when you do metaphysics, you're not having a real debate about. It's not just, oh, this is true or not true, you know, just speaking nonsense. I think the move to the normative is really important here because that's Cratilist's claim that there's something normative in naming. They line up. They can line up or not line up with the nature of things names. So Socrates is buttressing that argument in the beginning by saying the opposite of the thing that he's going to say later. In order to defeat Cratylus, typical Socratic fashion, he's going to set up this argument that in the end is just going to get demolished.
But there are elements, of course, of truth in this at the level of language. So he moves on to say some statements are true and others are false. So we do know that there's something normative in language, even if there isn't in names. It's certainly there at the level of propositions. And then he's going to make the bogus move of saying, well, if you drill down from the proposition that can be true or false to the parts, then they can be true or false as well. And that's kind of fishy, right? That that normativeness just permeates all the way down to the elements so that we can get support for Cratilus's very radical point of view.
33:01 Dylan: Yeah, so the very sounds are normative mouth positions.
33:04 Wes: They can be imitative or not.
33:06 Dylan: Just before we continue with that, I wanted to, in the section 106, we glossed over that naming is an action. But I wanted to ask you guys about this, right? I mean, he gives all these examples of you take a drill and you drill with it, you have a shuttle and you weave with it. I guess it wasn't completely clear to me that naming is a tool use simply in the same way as manipulating other things.
33:33 Wes: I think you're right. We should go over that argument in detail because it's so weird. It draws these comparisons that turn out to be. They don't seem to line up actually very well. So Dylan, I think you're right. He's setting us up when he talks about success or correctness of action. He's setting us up for this next section where he talks about naming as a tool. So you can name things as you choose them. There's a natural tool for naming things. In the same way that we have to use the right tools when we weave or drill or cut. Naming is like that.
34:06 Mark: Yeah. The obvious dis. Analogy between naming and weaving or carpentry or something is that we know what the point is for those other things. Right. It's to make the cloth, it's to build the thing out of wood. Well, what are we doing when we are naming? I mean, it seems like we are just. We want to have a word that I use and you know what I'm talking about. But that's not what Socrates says the purpose is. It's a. It's a tool for dividing being. Is that just a different way of saying what I just said?
34:37 Wes: We're supposed to say what the tool is for naming. Naming is analogous to weaving. The tool is the shuttle. Then he makes this really odd move of saying naming is the tool. I think the natural analogy would be to say that the naming tool is the mind in its contact with the things themselves, which seems to be what he'll do later on. He's fudging this argument in order to support Cratilus's position. The naming activity also turns out to be the tool. And then he's going to define that tool by saying, well, what is naming for? It's for dividing being who uses it well, it's the instructor that uses it well. And then the tool turns out to be the rules of naming. So the rules, suddenly what's analogous to the shuttle are the rules.
35:26 Dylan: Yeah. And the weaver. The analogous is the rule setter.
35:31 Wes: The rule setter uses rules to weave the names.
35:37 Dylan: Yeah. So Socrates says at the end of this bizarre section, this is 107, he says, it follows that it isn't every man that can give names Hermogenes, but only a name maker. And he, it seems, is a rule setter, the kind of craftsman most rarely found among human beings.
35:56 Mark: Yeah, the elitism is an ongoing thing here. And it's unclear, like, I think Cratylus ultimately believes that the original names for the elements at least, were given by the gods. And that's something that Socrates plays with earlier in the dialogue, is that, hey, when I'm doing these etymologies, I'm just doing my best to put things together, but really the reasoning is divine and that we're sort of, you know, we can't know anything about the gods. He says that straight up. But we're gonna just speculate and do the best we can. So he seems to be implying there that we don't actually have all the tools at our disposal that the original rule setters did.
But then later, Socrates clearly thinks that we do. In fact, they were looking to being. They had a theory about being. They constructed names that aligned with their theory of being. Well, I have a different theory of being and I could construct names along, you know, or I could evaluate their names as ill given according to my philosophy, because they don't actually reflect the nature of things.
36:55 Wes: Right. So that's the move from Cratylus position to the convention position of Hermogenes. So he makes this joke that he's divinely inspired, right. And Euthyphro has filled him with wisdom and that he needs to be purged of that as if there's something bad about that. So he's a prophet in the way he's speaking through here. One, just one of the many.
37:16 Dylan: He's in danger of becoming too wise
37:18 Wes: the things included in the dialogue. Yeah, that's supposed to point us to the irony of this, this whole account, so that if we are to link up names and nature non conventionally, he's foreshadowing what Cratylus claims when he's backed into a corner at the end, which is that the gods must have set the names. We have to be prophets in touch with what the gods originally did as rule setters. Instead of the analogous thing is to be intellectual intuiters in touch with the forms of the things themselves or however you want to put it.
37:52 Mark: Is that really a contrast? Because the insofar as we are intellectually intuitive, we are divine. Isn't that sort of the Socratic take? There's going to be a Euthyphro dilemma thing, right? Euthyphro not a character in this dialogue. He's just brought up as apparently somebody that is really good at this genealogy thing.
38:13 Dylan: He refers to him as I was accosted by Euthyphro earlier. So there's a kind of funny timeline at least amongst this dialogue with some of the others that his discussion with Euthyphro that happened in the Euthyphro happened just a little, you know, a little bit before this.
38:28 Mark: So the Euthyphro logical conflict is question about piety and goodness more generally. Is, is it objective or is it just because the gods say that's what it is? Which would be a version of the thrasymachus position in the Republic that justice is what the strong say it is. Well here it's maybe the gods came up with these names and the names are right because the gods gave them those. And so there would be no way for us to double check. And that's just something Socrates is going to reject. But I think maybe Cratylus, he doesn't really tell us there's something he's sympathetic about the Heraclitean view. And if this is what the original namers were referring to, well, maybe they had some insight that we don't.
39:09 Wes: The contrast is between knowledge as some kind of acquaintance with the things themselves or the forms or nature or essence, and knowledge as an awareness of this original rigged system rigged by the gods that connects names and things. So we get a non discursive, non linguistic acquaintance with the things themselves, which ultimately grounds naming versus the gods, grounding the naming and us being aware of those arbitrary connections. I mean, if the gods did that, it almost looks like convention. It looks more radical than convention because they are not beholden to the things themselves, to nature. They just do it willy nilly.
39:53 Dylan: Part of what seems so weird about naming as a tool and in the end the kind of tool of the rule setters. And maybe those rule setters are the gods. It's like it's this piece that we're talking about right now of correspondence with the way things are versus having made them up. But I think this gets blurred too because Socrates does this working with crafts again, blacksmiths and weavers and stuff. But we don't engage with the question of well, where did the blacksmith learn to be a blacksmith? Not in the sense of an everyday blacksmith. Or is it that maybe the conceded that blacksmithing has always been around forever or the creation of those activities. But when we think about naming, we immediately begin thinking about well, how were the first names made? Like what was the genealogy and process of naming that came along?
40:47 Wes: And it's emergent originally. Which adds a special irony to what he says on page 109 of our edition, which is that the rule setters must actually have supervisors. And those supervisors turn out to be the dialecticians. And the dialecticians are on an analogy to for instance, the captains of ships must supervise the builders because the captains of ships are more intimately acquainted with what ships are for and how they need to be built. And you get little hints of teleology here, right? This is really about function, what supervises the rule setters.
Function is what supervises the rule setters and language use. It's Ultimately we have to look to language users and language use as the supervisor of rule setting. And it's emergent. The rules are emergent upon that. But here Socrates is instead going to say we look to the dialecticians, we look to the philosophers, the people who know how to ask and answer questions. And maybe, maybe it's. That's because they are the people who are. Understand the things themselves, are in contact with the things themselves.
41:54 Mark: I think instead of supervisor, we should use client. The ones. It's the lyre players who decide whether the lyre makers have made good lyres because they try to play it and it doesn't work very well, you know, or they attain the heights of. But they're not in there. They don't go in there and actually supervise the making of the lyres. You know, they don't have, you know what, the new Gibson guitar factory. We've got a bunch of excellent players. We got Steve Vai to come and oversee each builder as they construct it. Like that would not actually help.
42:28 Wes: You're reminding me of office space. Have you seen that where one of the people who's getting fired laid off because he doesn't really do anything. He's like, I bring the specifications from the client to the software team. Yes.
42:42 Dylan: And even, even the case with the captain of the ship, like the last person you'd want to have tell you how to build the ship is the captain of the ship. Right.
42:50 Mark: They know a certain amount about the surface, the function and not the actual inner workings.
42:56 Wes: It's about function. And this is why I love Plato's dialogue so much, this sort of irony where he's. Of course, he knows that the ship captain is not the supervisor and it's really more about function and something emergent rather than top down. So that when he tells us it's dialecticians or the rule setters, he knows that language is actually an emergent phenomenon. And he's trying to suggest that through this crazy suggestion that ship captains are supervisors.
43:22 Mark: Well, let's wrap up part one here. I suppose if people between now and next week want to actually experience this dialogue. I hope we haven't entirely discouraged you. This is just another one of those things. I feel like it should never be read the first time, once you read it the second time. So I did this as an audiobook. There's audio versions out there. And it was terrible. Like the beginning was good, the end was good, but the whole middle just throwing out these Greek terms and I'm listening to double speed or whatever Like I was just ready to be like, wait a second.
So we're in our note taking. We're just going to skip that whole middle part, right? But then I kind of had heard, well, maybe actually this is the glossary. So when he's talking about episteme, when he's talking about all these words that come up throughout the Platonic canon, he actually is saying something insightful applicable to the rest of his project. And just having that in mind, I don't know that that's actually true, but having that in mind made so that I actually did go to take notes in this, and it's an over 50 page dialogue. I had no problem just going through the whole thing, you know, with care and not skimming large portions of it.
It actually was enjoyable throughout.
44:27 Wes: Yeah, I found it actually really enjoyable and I was surprised by that. But purely from a literary standpoint, I think it's enjoyable. And then there are important little tidbits in there, including about Heraclitus, I think, and the idea of what's stable and steadfast versus flowing and moving.
44:45 Mark: All right, folks, if you're a Partially Examined Life supporter, you'll find part two in your feed already. If you support us through Apple, it'll be there next week. Everybody else, yeah, you'll get to hear it, but you have to wait. And you might as well just go to partialexaminelife.com support and not have to wait anymore. Isn't life better? You don't have to hear ads. You don't have to hear any of this nonsense.
45:07 Wes: Remember, if you become a client, you're also a supervisor.
45:11 Mark: That's right.
45:12 Wes: Of the rule setter.
45:13 Mark: That's right. You can use the contact form to tell us exactly what we're doing wrong at every little bit. That'd be great.
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