Beyond the Tractatus Wars by Read Rupert; Lavery Matthew A.;

Author:Read, Rupert; Lavery, Matthew A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

VI

Compositionalism may be described (to borrow a term used by John McDowell in his work on the philosophy of perception) as a “factorizing” conception of our linguistic capacity.45 The user of language is presented as a sort of two-headed creature: we have knowledge of the meanings of words, and, in addition, we have knowledge of how to use those words to express complete thoughts. When we perform successful linguistic acts we simultaneously exercise both kinds of knowledge. When we utter words in isolation or instances of substantial nonsense, we exercise the first, but not the second, kind of knowledge. The second kind of knowledge is presented as dependent on the first one; but nothing seems to exclude that it is, at least in principle, merely optional in relation to it.

The alternative conception that I want to attribute to the Tractatus, on the other hand, can be described as a form of “disjunctivism.” According to epistemological disjunctivism (as elaborated, especially, by John McDowell46), either something is a perceptual experience by being a disclosure of how things are in the world, or it is at most the illusion of a perceptual experience. There is no epistemic highest common factor between veridical perceptual experience and perceptual illusion. Similarly, according to what we might label “semantic disjunctivism,” either words are used in a meaningful way by being employed for the expression of meaningful propositions, or they are not used in a meaningful way at all—they are used at most with the illusion that we are using them meaningfully. There is no logical or semantic common factor between the use of words in the expression of thoughts and the occurrence of words outside the context of significant propositions. The capacity to use a word with a meaning, and the capacity to use it in the expression of thoughts, are linked by a necessary, internal relation. Something is not recognizable as an exercise of the first capacity without it also drawing on our competence to exercise the second capacity.

The Tractatus, I am suggesting, rejects compositionalism by acknowledging the conceptual dependence of the meanings of words on the meanings of sentences. It does so by adopting a strong version of the context principle entailing the austere view of nonsense: words have meaning only in the context of significant propositions. Moreover, as I argued in previous sections, the Tractatus is also characterized by a simultaneous and symmetrical rejection of contextualism: it acknowledges the conceptual dependence of the meanings of sentences on their logical articulation. For the Tractatus, the exercise of the capacity to understand and form complete sentences is, at one and the same time, the exercise of our capacity to use sub-sentential elements in the expression of thoughts. The dependence goes both ways, and is therefore an interdependence. The two capacities (of making sense, and of using sub-sentential words for making sense) come in one single package. Instead of speaking of two necessarily interconnected capacities it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of two aspects of a single capacity—the capacity to speak and understand a language.

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