The Concept 'Horse' Paradox and Wittgensteinian Conceptual Investigations by Jolley Kelly Dean; Phillips Professor D. Z. ; Ruhr Dr. Mario von der

Author:Jolley, Kelly Dean; Phillips, Professor D. Z. ; Ruhr, Dr. Mario von der
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2007-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

The Direct Object is not a Direct Object

Let’s go back to the sort of sentence Valberg called on initially to introduce improper singular terms. Consider (2’) again.

(2’) The predicate2 of (1) is: bald.

Valberg claims that his inspiration for presenting terms is a passage from Anscombe’s “The Intentionality of Sensation”. In that passage, Anscombe is talking about the peculiarity of grammatical knowledge, of grammatical comments. What Anscombe appreciates, and what Valberg intends to appreciate, too, is that we cannot ply the use/mention distinction so as to make clear what grammatical knowledge consists of or so as to make clear the character of grammatical comments. Anscombe thinks that an expression of grammatical knowledge, a grammatical comment, involves a “special use” of a word or phrase. For example, when we ask “What does the sentence [‘John sent Mary a book’] say John sent?” we answer by using the phrase “a book”. But when we do so we are not naming a piece of language. That is, we are not mentioning the phrase “a book” when we answer the question—if we were, our answer would be clearly false. Anscombe’s answer to the question of what the sentence says that John gave Mary is captured in a Valbergian sentence:

(A) What the sentence says John gave Mary is: a book.

Here the final phrase is a presenting phrase. And Valberg explicitly thinks of his presenting terms as an Anscombian bequest. But he also thinks he has found a way to improve upon his inheritance.

To make this clear, I need to explain what Anscombe is doing in more detail. Anscombe wants to make clear how we should think about the intentionality of sensations. Her work on that specific problem, luckily and unluckily, is not important for my immediate purpose. What is important is the way in which Anscombe preps to work on that problem. She does it by thinking about intentional objects generally. She notes that it is extremely tempting to treat as intentional objects bits of language; but it is also extremely tempting to treat as intentional objects what bits of language stand for. Anscombe notes that grammarians do talk of bits of language as the intentional, the “direct” or “indirect”, objects. She then writes that:

However, the matter is not so easily settled. Of course I do not want to oppose the practice of grammarians. But it is clear that the concept of a direct object—and hence the identification of the sentence-part now called the direct object—is learned somewhat as follows: the teacher takes a sentence, say “John sent Mary a book” and says: “What did John send Mary?” Getting the answer “A book” he says: “That is the direct object.” Now the question does not really suppose, and the pupil, if he goes along with the teacher, does not take it, that any particular people, of whom the sentence is true, are in question, and so we may say that when the teaching is successful the question is understood as equivalent to “What does the sentence

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