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Ep. 240: David Lewis on Possible Worlds and Language Games (Part Two)

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On “Scorekeeping in a Language Game” (1979) and “Truth in Fiction” (1978).

Lewis’s account of possible worlds can be applied to conversation: As we speak, each sentence adds to the “conversational score” (the set of assumptions that enable us to understand each other) while reducing the field of possible worlds that the picture we’re painting together could potentially represent. What are the gravitational forces within this kind of scorekeeping? Also, when an author creates a fictive “world,” how do facts about that world logically relate to those of the actual world? With guest Matt Teichman.

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End song: “Real Life” by Matt Wilson, as interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music #118.

Ep. 240: David Lewis on Possible Worlds and Language Games (Citizen Edition)

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On Ch. 4 of Lewis’s book Counterfactuals (1973) and the essays “Scorekeeping in a Language Game” (1979) and “Truth in Fiction” (1978).

What makes a sentence about possibility true? Lewis thinks that we need possible worlds that really exist in order to make sense of our modal intuitions. He uses this possible-world talk to make sense of conversations and the worlds created by fiction writers. With guest Matt Teichman from Elucidations.

End song: “Real Life” by Matt Wilson, as interviewed for Nakedly Examined Music #118.

Episode 191: Conceptual Schemes: Donald Davidson & Rudolf Carnap (Part Two)

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Finishing Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974) and moving on to Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (1950).

Carnap claims that we talk about mathematical objects or subatomic particles or whatever, we’re not really (contra Quine) making metaphysical claims. Ontological questions like “Are there really numbers?” are just pretentious nonsense. With guest Dusty Dallman.

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End Song: “Shut Up” by Chandler Travis, as heard on Nakedly Examined Music #46.

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Episode 191: Conceptual Schemes: Donald Davidson & Rudolf Carnap (Part One)

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On Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974) and Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (1950).

What does it mean to say that we grasp the world through a conceptual scheme? Are schemes different between cultures or even individuals, such that we can’t really understand each other? Davidson thinks that this doesn’t make sense. With guest Dusty Dallman.

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Episode 191: Conceptual Schemes: Donald Davidson & Rudolf Carnap (Citizen Edition)

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On Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974) and Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (1950).

What does it mean to say that we grasp the world through a conceptual scheme? Are schemes different between cultures or even individuals, such that we can’t really understand each other? Davidson thinks that this doesn’t make sense. Carnap gives us a picture of multiple, domain-specific vocabularies and doesn’t see a problem with the concepts of one not being translatable into concepts of another.

End Song: “Shut Up” by Chandler Travis, as heard on Nakedly Examined Music #46.

Episode 186: J.L. Austin on Doing Things with Words (Part Two)

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Continuing on How to Do Things with Words (lectures from 1955), covering lectures 5–9.

Austin tries and fails to come up with a way to grammatically distinguish performatives from other utterances, and so turns to his more complicated system of aspects of a single act: locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary. In doing so, he perlocutionarily blows our minds.

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Episode 186: J.L. Austin on Doing Things with Words (Part One)

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On How to Do Things with Words (lectures from 1955).

What’s the relationship between language and the world? Austin says it’s not all about descriptive true-or-false statements, but also includes “performatives” like “I promise…” and “I do” (spoken in a wedding) that are actions unto themselves. They can’t be true or false, but they can be “unhappy” if social conventions aren’t fulfilled (e.g., you try to marry a pig). Austin thinks performatives will change your whole view of language and of linguistically expressed philosophical problems!

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Episode 186: J.L. Austin on Doing Things with Words (Citizen Edition)

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On How to Do Things with Words (lectures from 1955).

What’s the relationship between language and the world? Austin says it’s not all about descriptive true-or-false statements, but also includes “performatives” like “I promise…” and “I do” (spoken in a wedding) that are actions unto themselves. They can’t be true or false, but they can be “unhappy” if social conventions aren’t fulfilled (e.g., you try to marry a pig). Austin thinks performatives will change your whole view of language and of linguistically expressed philosophical problems!

End song: “The Promise” by When In Rome. Listen to Mark interview singer/songwriter Clive Farrington on Nakedly Examined Music #40.

Episode 160: Orwell on Totalitarianism and Language (Part Two)

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Continuing with 1984. How does the book relate to real-world politics? Is this something that we should actually be afraid our society will turn into? Was he predicting history, or was it satire, or what? We discuss the the realms of intimacy vs. surveillance, how a state might “contain” a mind that it controls, and “doublethink.”

Episode 160: Orwell on Totalitarianism and Language (Part One)

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On the novel 1984 (1949) and the essays “Politics and the English Language” (1946) and “Notes on Nationalism” (1945).

What’s the relation between language and totalitarianism? Orwell shows us a society where the rulers have mastered the art of retaining power, and one element of this involves “Newspeak,” where vocabulary is limited to prevent subversive speech, and ultimately thoughts. Do our linguistic habits and the Orwellian lies of our leaders point to a slippery slope toward the world of 1984?

Episode 160: Orwell on Totalitarianism and Language (Citizen Edition)

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On the novel 1984 (1949) and the essays “Politics and the English Language” (1946) and “Notes on Nationalism” (1945).

What’s the relation between language and totalitarianism? Orwell shows us a society where the rulers have mastered the art of retaining power, and one element of this involves “Newspeak,” where vocabulary is limited to prevent subversive speech, and ultimately thoughts. Do our linguistic habits and the Orwellian lies of our leaders point to a slippery slope toward the world of 1984?

End song: “Civil Disobedience” by Camper Van Beethoven from New Roman Times (2004), written by Jonathan Segel as interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music ep. 38.

Episode 128: Hilary Putnam on Linguistic Meaning

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On “The Meaning of Meaning” (1975). If meaning is not a matter of having a description in your head, then what is it? Hilary Putnam reformulates Kripke’s insight (from #126) in terms of Twin Earths: Earthers with H20 and Twin Earthers with a substance that seems like water but is different have the same mental contents but are referring to different stuff with “water,” so that word is speaker-relative in a certain way. With guest Matt Teichman.

End song: “In the Boatyard” by Mark Lint & the Madison Lint Ensemble (2004, finished now).

Episode 128: Hilary Putnam on Linguistic Meaning (Citizen Edition)

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On “The Meaning of Meaning” (1975). If meaning is not a matter of having a description in your head, then what is it? Hilary Putnam reformulates Kripke’s insight (from #126) in terms of Twin Earths: Earthers with H20 and Twin Earthers with a substance that seems like water but is different have the same mental contents but are referring to different stuff with “water,” so that word is speaker-relative in a certain way. With guest Matt Teichman. Learn more.

End song: “In the Boatyard” by Mark Lint & the Madison Lint Ensemble (2004, finished now).

Topic for #128: Hilary Putnam on Linguistic Meaning

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We were rejoined by Matt Teichman to continue our Kripke thread, discussing primarily Putnam’s essay “The Meaning of Meaning” (1971) about water here vs. water on “Twin Earth” where that stuff that runs in rivers and streams has a different chemical composition. Putnam puts forth a positive theory of meaning that involves holding a stereotype of a term (e.g., that water is wet) but also where your meaning is determined by extension, i.e., what your term in the real world actually refers to, so that we and the Twin Earthers mean something different even though we seem to have the same psychological state when talking about water.

Episode 126: Saul Kripke on Possibilities, Language & Science

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On Naming and Necessity (1980). What’s the relationship between language and the world? Specifically, what makes a name or a class term pick out the person or things that it does? Saul Kripke wanted to correct the dominant view of his time (which involved a description in the speaker’s mind), and used talk of “possible worlds” to do it! With guest Matt Teichman.

End song: “Reason Enough” by Mark Lint.

Episode 126: Saul Kripke on Possibilities, Language & Science (Citizen Edition)

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On Naming and Necessity (1980). What’s the relationship between language and the world? Specifically, what makes a name or a class term (like “tiger”) pick out the person or things that it does? Saul Kripke wanted to correct the dominant view of his time (which involved speakers having some description in mind, and it’s that description that hooks the word to the thing), and used modal language to do it: He talked about other possible worlds (other ways our world could have turned out, not literal other dimensions or something). His account had implications for metaphysics and science, in that he claimed that if we find a scientific truth like “heat is the motion of molecules,” then this would be true in all possible worlds. We might think that we could have discovered that heat was something else, but really, if we imagine a world in which that happened, what those scientists would have been looking at was actually not heat at all. With guest Matt Teichman. Learn more.

End song: “Reason Enough” by Mark Lint.

Topic for #126: Saul Kripke on Possibilities, Language, and Science

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We were rejoined by Elucidations’ Matt Teichman to talk about one of the most readable yet still very weird texts in the canon of analytic philosophy, Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1980), about what makes a name actually refer to some particular person (Kripke says it’s NOT because the name implies a description that you then have in your head that makes it refer), how this works for general terms (does “human” refer likewise because of some definition we have in mind?), and what implications this has for science. Really! There are some!

About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

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