윌리엄 P. 올스튼, 언어철학 (William P. Alston, Philosophy of Language)

*William P. Alston, Philosophy of Language, Prentice-Hall

(참고: 윌리엄 P. 올스튼, 언어철학, 곽강제, 민음사)

 

[참고 서적]

1. 김방한, 언어학의 이해, 민음사

1-1. 김방한, 언어학 논고, 서울대

2. 페르디낭 드 소쉬르, 일반언어학 강의, 최승언, 민음사

2-1. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Open Court

3. 이정문 외, 언어과학이란 무엇인가, 문지

4. R. C. Old Field & J. C. Marshall, Language, Penguin

5. 이규호, 말의 힘(언어철학), 제일

6. 로만 야콥슨, 문학 속의 언어학, 문지

 

-역자 해제

*언급론은 언어적 표현의 의미를 그 표현이 연상시키는 관계와 동일시하며, 관념론은 언어적 표현의 의미를 그 표현이 연상시키는 관념과 동일시하며, 행동론은 언어적 표현의 의미를 그 표현의 발언을 유발하는 자극과 그 발언이 청자에게 일으키는 반응으로 보거나 아니면 이 둘 중의 어느 하나와 동일시한다. (205)

*제2장에서는 비트겐쉬타인의 후기 철학의 암시와 오스틴의 착상을 결합하여 의미에 관한 새로운 일반이론의 가능성을 탐구하고 있다. 저자의 기본적 생각은 <언어적 표현의 의미는 그 언어 공동체에 참여하는 사람들이 언어적 표현을 가지고 하는 행위의 함수>라는 것이다. (209)

*퍼어스는 어떤 표시를 다른 것의 표시일 수 있게 해주는 효력의 종류를 기준으로 삼고, 모든 표시를 <오직 표시 자체가 지닌 특징들에 의해서 그것이 지시하는 대상을 가리키는 표시>(표상 icon), <지시 대상으로부터 받는 영향에 의해 그 대상을 나타내는 표시>(지표 index), <오직 또는 주로 이러저러한 뜻으로 사용되거나 이해된다는 사실에 의해 표시 역할을 하는 표시>(상징 symbol)로 나누었다. 저자는 언어가 세 번째 상징의 부류에 속한다고 본다. (211)

*저자는 제1장과 제2장에서 문장의 의미는 어떤 조건들이 성립해 있지 않는 한 어떤 종류의 상황에서 발언되어서는 안된다는 규칙에 의해 발언자가 규제를 받는다는 사실의 함수임을 밝혔었다. 그러니까 실증주의자들의 요구는 <문장은 그 문장의 발언행위가 적어도 하나 이상의 다음과 같은 규칙, 즉 그 발언에 일정한 조건들이 부여되어 있어야 할 뿐 아니라 그중의 어느 조건이 성립한다는 주장은 경험적으로 확증되거나 반증될 수 있어야 한다는 규칙을 준수하면서 이루어질 경우에만 의미를 갖는다>고 표현할 수 있다는 것이다. (214)

 

-1. Theories of Meaning

*The referential theory is based on an important insight--that language is used to talk about things outside (as well as inside) language, and that the suitability of an ｅxpression for such talk is somehow crucial for its having the meaning it has. But in the referential theory, this insight is ruined through oversimplication. The essential connection of language with "the world," with what is talked about, is represented as a piecemeal correlation of meaningful linguistic units with distinguishable components of the world. What the preceding discussion has shown is that the connection is not so simple as that. Speech does not consist of producing a sequence of labels, each of which is attached to something in "the world." Some of the meaningful components of the sentences we use to talk about the world can be connected in semantically important ways to distinguishable components of the world, but others cannot. Hence, we must look elsewhere for an account of what it is for an ｅxpression to have meaning, remembering that the account must be framed in such a way as to give due weight to the fact that language is somehow connected with the world. (19)

*More often than not, when people set out to clarify the concept of meaning they do so by asking, "What sort of entity is linguistic ｅxpression in order to be the meaning of that ｅxpression?" Theories of meaning are quite often expressed as answers to this kind of question. Thus, the referential theory generally takes the form of an identification of the meaning of E with that to which E refers, or alternatively with the relation between E and its referent; the ideational theory identifies the meaning of E with the idea(s) that give rise to it and to which it gives rise; and behavioral theories typically identify the meaning of an ｅxpression with the situation in which it is uttered, with responses made to its utterance, or both. There is something fundamentally wrong with this way of conceiving the problem. This can be seen by noting that we run into absurdities as soon as we take seriously the idea of identifying a meaning with anything otherwise specified (that is, specified in terms that do not include 'meaning' or any of its synonyms or near synonyms) No matter what sort of entity we try to identify meaning with, we find many things that we would be prepared to say about an entity of that sort but would not be prepared to say about a meaning, and vice versa. (20)

*The moral of all this is that it is a basic mistake to suppose that "meanings" are entities of a sort that are otherwise specifiable. If we are to speak of meanings as a class of entities at all, we shall have to recognize that they are so unique as not to admit of being characterized in any other terms. The almost universal tendency to raise the problem of meaning in this form may come from the supposition that in specifying the meaning of a word, what we are doing is identifying the entity that is so related to that word as to be its meaning. (21)

*Then what are we doing when we say what a word means? What we are doing is exhibiting another ｅxpression that we are claiming has at least approximately the same use as the one whose meaning we are specifying. (21)

*The use, then, of words is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for are their proper and immediate signification. (22) [John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding]

*Man, though he has great variety of thoughts, and such, from which others, as well as himself, might receive profit and delight; yet they are all within his own breast, invisible and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made to appear. The comfort and advantage of society not being to be had without communication of thoughts, it was necessary that man should find out some external sensible signs, whereof those invisible ideas, which his thoughts are made up for, might be made known to others. . . . Thus we may conceive how words which were by nature so well adapted to that purpose, come to be made use of by men, as the signs of their ideas; not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitarily the mark of such an idea. (23) [Jon Locke, ditto]

*The simplest forms of the behavioral theory are to be found in the writings of linguists who, not surprisingly, take over ideas from behaviorally minded psychologists with little awareness of the complexities involved. Thus, Leonard Bloomfield says that the ". . . meaning of a linguistic form. . ." is ". . . the situation in which the speaker utters it and its response which it calls forth in the hearer. The crudity of this definition is mitigated by the qualifying statement: "We must discriminate between the non-distinctive features of the situation. . . and the distinctive, or linguistic meaning (the semantic features) which are common to all the situations that call forth the utterance of the linguistic form." (26)

*This, Morris tries to provide in the concept of a disposition to respond. To say that someone has a disposition to make a certain response, R, is simply to say that there are conditions, C. under which he will do R. It is to assert a certain hypothetical proposition of him--'if C. then R.' Now, even though there is no one response that is universally, or even generally, elicited by the utterance of "Come in now," it may be that this utterance regularly produces a disposition to come in if the hearer has a strong inclination to obey the speaker. In other words, it may be that this utterance brings it about that a certain hypothetical proposition comes to be true, namely, that if the hearer is generally inclined to obey the speaker, he will come into the house. (28)

*Behavioral theories err in conceiving this behavioral involvement in oversimplified terms. They suppose that a word or sentence has a certain meaning by virtue of being involved, as response and/or stimulus, in stimulus-response connections that are basically similar, except for complexity, to a simple reflex like the knee jerk. Unfortunately, no such connections have ever been found, the fact that a sudden loud utterance of "Look out!" typically elicits a start. (31)

 

2. Meaning and the Use of Language

*What we need is a classification of the different sorts of actions that involve the use of sentences. In general, when a person utters a sentence, we can distinguish three sorts of actions that he is performing. 1. He utters a certain sentence, for example, 'Would you please open the door?'. 2. He brings about one or more results of this utterance, for example, he gets the hearer to open the door, he irritates the hearer, he distracts someone who is reading. 3. He does something that falls between actions 1 and 2, for example, he asks someone to open the door. The reason for saying that 3 falls between 1 and 2 is this. Unlike 1, it is not simply the utterance of a certain sentence. No matter what sentence is specified (for example, 'Would you open that door?'), it is conceivable that one might utter that sentence without asking anyone to open any door, one might for instance, be giving an example or testing his voice. Action 3 does not go beyond the utterance of a sentence by essentially involving a certain effect, as in the case of 2. There is no particular kind of effect that the utterance must have if the speaker is to be said to have asked someone to open a door. His utterance may have the effect of getting the hearer to open the door; it may arouse amusement, scorn, terror, or incredulity; or it may produce no effect at all. In all these cases, it could be true that the speaker asked someone to open the door. I am not saying that an action of this category normally has no effect. I am saying, rather, that the truth of the claim that an action of this sort has been performed does not depend on the production of any particular sort of effect. We shall return to the question of the way this kind of action goes beyond the mere utterance of a sentence.

Borrowing some terminology from John Austin, I shall call actions of these three sorts 1. locutionary, 2. perlocutionary, and 3. illocutionary. The distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts is of crucial importance for our purpose. (35)

*A wider survey will reinforce the impression that sameness of illocutionary-act potential is what constitutes sameness of meaning for sentences. 'Das is gut' and 'That's good' are both used to positively evaluate something. In the cases in which 'Can you reach the salt?' and 'Please pass the salt' mean the same, they are both used to make the same request. 'That's my paternal grandmother' and 'That's my father's mother' and both used to identify a person in the same way. (36)

*Thus, a sentence has a meaning if and only if it has illocutionary-act potential; and to know what a sentence means is to know what its illocutionary-act potential is--in the practical, know-how sense of being prepared to use it to perform certain illocutionary acts and not others and of being able to recognize misuses--not necessarily in the theoretical sense of being able to say what its potential is. (39)

*What is required for a given illocutionary act, in addition to the utterance of an appropriate sentences, is not that certain environmental conditions actually hold or even that the speaker believe them to hold, but only that he take responsibility for their holding. In other words, what is required is that he recognize that what he is doing is governed by rules requiring that the conditions hold. (43)

 

3. Language and Its Near Relations

*Peirce has made popular a threefold distinction of "signs" into icon, index, and symbol.

 

Icon- a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own. . . .(2.247)

Index- a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object. (2.248)

Symbol- a sign which is constituted a sign merely or mainly by the fact that it is used and understood as such. . . . (2.307) (55)

 

(퍼어스는 어떤 표시를 다른 것의 표시일 수 있게 해주는 효력의 종류를 기준으로 삼고, 모든 표시를 <오직 표시 자체가 지닌 특징들에 의해서 그것이 지시하는 대상을 가리키는 표시>(표상 icon), <지시 대상으로부터 받는 영향에 의해 그 대상을 나타내는 표시>(지표 index), <오직 또는 주로 이러저러한 뜻으로 사용되거나 이해된다는 사실에 의해 표시 역할을 하는 표시>(상징 symbol)로 나누었다. 저자는 언어가 세 번째 상징의 부류에 속한다고 본다. (211) )

*We know very little about the mechanisms by which new worlds come into being and old words change their meaning, but what we do know about it indicates that conscious decision and deliberately adopted conventions have very little part to play. (57)

*Speech comprises the totality of verbal behavior that goes on in a community; whereas language is the abstract system of identifiable elements and the rules of their combinations, which is exemplified in this behavior and which is discovered by an analysis of the behavior. (61)

 

4. Empiricist Criteria of Meaningfulness

*In order to understand and be able to use a sentence, one must not only know the meanings of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, one must also understand the significance of the syntactical form of the sentence; and for many sentences, one must understand various kinds of words that serve to connect nouns, adjectives, and verbs into sentences so as to affect the meaning of the sentence as a whole. one must be able to distinguish semantically between 'John hit Jim,' 'Jim hit John,' 'Did John hit Jim?' 'John, hit Jim! and 'John, please don't hit Jim.' This means that before one can engage in conversation one must be able to handle and understand such factors as word order; "auxiliaries' like 'do,' 'shall,' and 'is'; and connectives like 'is,' 'that,' and 'and.' These elements can neither get their meaning by association with distinguishable items in experience nor be defined in terms of items that can. Where could we look in our sense perception for the object of word-order patterns, pauses, or words like 'is' and 'that'? And as for defining these elements in terms of words like 'blue' and 'table,' the prospect has seemed so remote that no one has so much as attempted it. (68)

*If we try to assign truth values to sentences, we run into hopeless dilemmas. Is the sentence 'I am hungry' true or false? on one occasion, a speaker might say something true by uttering that sentence and on another occasion a speaker might say something false by uttering it. If we regarded the sentence as the bearer of truth value, we would have to think of it as constantly oscillating between truth and falsity, or even as being both true and false at the same time (if at the same time one speaker said truly that he was hungry and another speaker said falsely that he was hungry). but it is the sentence, not an assertion or statement made by uttering a sentence, that either has or does not have a meaning. (73)

*There are many sentences in the language that are obviously meaningful but that just as obviously are not usable for making assertions. These include, for example, interrogative sentences like 'Where is the butter?' imperative sentences like 'Please go out quietly,' and interjections like 'Splendid!' Such sentences are used to ask questions, make requests, or express feelings and attitudes. When we are using sentences in these ways, questions of truth and falsity do not arise; consequently criteria of meaningfulness in terms of verifiability have no application. (73)

*Utterances like 'God created the heavens and earth,' which positivists take to be unverifiable, figure heavily in the discourse of the man in the street. It may be claimed that when people say things like this they are really confused, in that they are violating standards of meaningfulness to which they are firmly attached, and that by reflection on what they are doing, they could come to see that what they are doing is meaningless by their own standards. But nothing has been done to show that this is actually the case. (78)

*[Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. one explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, . . . So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. " But perhaps he is an invisible gardener." So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. . . . But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movement of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. . . . At last the Sceptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?]

 

As this story suggests, what starts out as a genuine assertion will be reduced to a mere picture preference if we remove any possibility of putting it to an empirical test. (80)

*To adopt the verifiability criterion is to rule out even wondering whether such things are so; and it would seem that any principle that would prevent our recognizing the fact that a certain sort of thing exists it unreasonable. Thus, to show that a certain supposed assertion cannot be empirically tested is not to show that it is not an assertion; it is hypotheses and claims as to the nature of the physical world. And it is hardly surprising that metaphysics and theology should turn out to be very different from science." (81)

 

5. Dimensions of Meaning

*As Waismann puts it, when we form a concept, we only have certain kinds of situations in mind; as a result, the concept, we only have certain contingencies. This feature of a term Waismann calls "open texture," or "possibility of vagueness." His claim is that this kind of indeterminacy can never be completely eliminated; for although we can make a decision as to what we would say in any given kind of case, for example, vanishing into thin air and not reappearing, there will always be an indefinite number of other conceivable cases with respect to which the concept it still not delimited. (95)

*the difference between metaphor and simile is somewhat analogous to the difference between 'My son plays baseball' and 'I have a son and he plays baseball,' where what is presupposed but not explicitly asserted in the first is explicitly asserted in the second. (99)

*we cannot give paraphrases of 'God has punished me' or 'I feel constricted' in terms that do not themselves involve quasi-metaphors. This means that the indeterminacy characteristic of metaphors is indelibly stamped on these areas of our talk. It is not clear either exactly what we are saying or what would be required to confirm or disconfirm it. Concentration on statements of this sort is perhaps partly responsible for the mistaken view that metaphorical statements are inherently untestable. (There may well be other reasons why theological statements, in particular, are refractory to empirical test; (105-6)

 

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공부의 부족과 머리의 부족을 절감할 따름이다. 언어와 언어활동의 의미를 끈질기게 추적하는 것은 내가 지속적으로 해나가야 할 작업이다. 언어의 명확한 사용은 위에 언급한 두 가지에 대한 성찰이 있어야 가능할 것이다.