Philosophy of Grammar

I am planning a history of the notion of philosophical nonsense and naturally difficult historical and exegetical questions have come up.  Charles Pigden has argued that the notion goes back at least as far as Hobbes and that Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (on some interpretations) and pragmatists such as William James, as well as numerous Twentieth-Century philosophers make use of it.  In this ‘paper’ I put forward for general discussion such questions as whether Hobbes was the first 'nonsensicalist', whether Kant was a 'nonsensicalist' at all, which philosophers if any have considered contradictions to be meaningless and whether Wittgenstein thought that his concept of criterion could legitimately be used verificationistically.  I shall continue to add further questions as they occur to me.

There are passages in Wittgenstein where he compares his method to psychotherapy and one or two where he seems to suggest that the ‘patient’ has the last word on his ‘illness’ and ‘cure’.  This paper tries to take these seriously, especially in connexion with the idea that victims of philosophical confusion talk nonsense.

Philosophical accusations of talking nonsense made in a polemical spirit are bound to fail, since the only way one can effectively criticise another’s utterance is by attaching some meaning to it.  But if the other acknowledges the possibility that his puzzlement arises from his having been taken in by nonsense, then perhaps a co-operative investigation of this suggestion might be fruitful.  Indeed self-diagnosis ought in principle to be possible.  Ought it not to have happened at least once in the history of philosophy if philosophical nonsense has ever been exposed? 

But there are difficulties.  For example:
a) We must ask whether or not philosophical nonsense, when exposed as such, is supposed to lose all appearance of meaningfulness.  Either answer is problematic.
b) The acknowledged similarity of the methodology under investigation to that of psychoanalysis exposes it to many of the familiar objections to the methodology of psychoanalysis, especially those that draw attention to the misleading influence of suggestion by an authority-figure.
c) The proposal that relentless cross-questioning of a suspected nonsense-talker will eventually lead her to ‘dry up’ (if she really is talking nonsense) seems to involve a version of the so-called Socratic Fallacy.

I am planning a history of the notion of philosophical nonsense and naturally difficult historical and exegetical questions have come up.  Charles Pigden has argued that the notion goes back at least as far as Hobbes and that Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (on some interpretations) and pragmatists such as William James, as well as numerous Twentieth-Century philosophers make use of it.  In this ‘paper’ I put forward for general discussion such questions as whether Hobbes was the first 'nonsensicalist', whether Kant was a 'nonsensicalist' at all, which philosophers if any have considered contradictions to be meaningless and whether Wittgenstein thought that his concept of criterion could legitimately be used verificationistically.  I shall continue to add further questions as they occur to me.

The GO model proposes a co-generative view of the emergence of language. Most conventional linguistics models conceive of language as a representational system of symbols which refer to events, either mental or external to the organism. This representational function is said to motivate the linguistic system and (depending upon the linguistic model) largely control its form. The GO (Generative Oscillation) model proposed here recognizes the representational role of language. However it notes that as the mental linguistic system itself becomes efficiently organized, it creates an internal logic and drive of its own. To some extent this internally motivated linguistic system is conceived to override the external motivation to represent another reality. Since the internal linguistic system is dynamic and generative, it may give rise to linguistic output which seems strange in an inter-human communicative context (or even within the reflective mind of the creator). Thus while the external communicative context can become a constraint on unmotivated non-representational "internal language", it might not eliminate it. The Generative Oscillation model proposes that actual language production is an oscillating compromise between the representational function of language and the mental "language bot" itself (i.e. an internal self-organizing system) which is generating language strings just because that is what language language bots do. As far as I know, the Generative Oscillation Model, or anything like it, had not been suggested before in linguistics at the time of writing. Some conventional linguists may find it a bit "off the wall".

I am planning a history of the concept of philosophical nonsense and naturally difficult historical and exegetical questions have come up.  Charles Pigden has argued that it goes back at least as far as Hobbes and that Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (on some interpretations) and pragmatists such as William James, as well as numerous Twentieth-Century philosophers make use of it.  In this ‘paper’ I put forward for general discussion such questions as whether Hobbes was the first nonsensicalist, whether Kant was a nonsensicalist at all, which philosophers if any have considered contradictions to be meaningless and whether Wittgenstein thought that his concept of criterion could legitimately be used verificationistically.  I shall continue to add further questions as they occur to me.

The flight of a bird is not in wings, but in the shape of the space-time enclosed by each wing from instant to instant. In other words, flight is a grammar of relationships. An infinite variety and number of wings may participate in this grammar of flight relationships, but it is the grammar alone which remains constant.

This paper was accepted at the VCC (Verbs, Clauses, and Constructions) International Symposium, organized by the Department of Modern Languages, University of La Rioja, in 2014 (Logroño, Spain, 22-24 October (http://vcc2014.nerthusproject.com/downloads/Final-Programme.pdf);
original title: A Case Study of the Zero Article in Italian

espanolSe estudian en este trabajo las relaciones textuales e ideologicas que existen entre la Filosofia del Entendimiento (1881) y el pensamiento gramatical de Andres Bello. Se mantiene la hipotesis de que algunas innovaciones gramaticales del autor se explican por la influencia de diferentes corrientes ideologicas expuestas en su obra filosofica, y esto puede ser demostrado mediante textos. EnglishThis article is devoted to analyze the existing textual and ideological relations between the Filosofia del Entendimiento (1881) and the grammatical ideas of Andres Bello. The authors start from the hypothesis, that some of the grammatical innovations introduced by Bello can be explained by the influence of different ideological tendencies exposed in his philosophical works, which can be demonstrated on the basis of his texts.

This article investigates the semantics of the protasis of the manumission law of the Covenant Code (Exodus 21:2a). Despite the proposal by John Van Seters that the slave there purchased must “already” have been a slave, such a restriction of meaning goes beyond the evidence. Critical for understanding the semantic issue is the overlooked distinction between two types of verbal object: “affected” and “effected” objects. Moreover, verbs of creation and appointment are frequently ditransitive. Such verbs may also leave the affected object implicit while specifying only the effected object. This construction emphasizes the change in status undergone by the grammatical patient, as in the case of the manumission law. Attention to the contractual language of biblical law permits, in turn, a more adequate concept of the grammatical concept of effected object.

Keywords:
Exodus 21:2a; manumission law; historical linguistics; Biblical Hebrew grammar; Hebrew semantics; effected object; transitivity; grammatical patient; John Van Seters; biblical slave laws; protasis; Covenant Code; Hebrew slave; Albrecht Alt; Sara Japhet; Anton Jirku; Eckart Otto; nisbe form; “Canaanite slave”; effected-object accusative; affizierte Objekt; cognate accusative; Verbs of creation and appointment; 1 Sam 8:5; marriage law; Deut 24:5; double-object construction; Lev 22:10-11; Gen 47:18-19; Exodus 21. Biblical manumission laws.

“Philosophical categories and 'thought forms': Considering the relation between (Greek) logic and (Arabic) grammar (From Aristotle to al-Fārābī)“

In diesem Beitrag sollen die historisch-genetischen Relationen zwischen Grammatik, Logik und Ontologie bzw. zwischen den Dimensionen von Sprache, Denken und Wirklichkeit in drei Schritten entwickelt werden: 1. im Hinblick auf die aristotelischen Kategorien hinsichtlich ihrer Ableitung von der griechischen Sprache; 2. im Hinblick auf die Rückanwendung logischer Kategorien zur Beschreibung von Sprache imzuge der Entwicklung zentraler griechischer und europäischer Grammatiktraditionen; 3. unter dem Schlagwort „Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad“ im Hinblick auf die zentrale Frage nach dem Verhältnis zwischen (griechischer) Logik und (arabischer) Grammatik innerhalb der arabischen Philosophie. Dabei wird eine konkrete Untersuchung linguistischer Fallbeispiele – allem voran der Gegensatz zwischen existenziellen Verbalformen und Kopula-Konstruktionen im Arabischen – letztlich zu den global-historischen Dimensionen einer interkulturellen Geschichte der Philosophie und Sprachwissenschaft zurückführen.