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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.
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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.
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Image by Chris Warr (aka Solomon Grundy). Audio editing by Tyler Hislop.
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