Page 117 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

terms. A sentence is said to be stimulus analytic if it commands assent no matter what sensory stimu- lations the subject is undergoing. As Quine recognizes, this only roughly approximates to the traditional notion since it fails to discriminate between sentences of the kind No bachelor is married and cases like There have been black dogs.
In Two dogmas' Quine takes the concept of logical truth to be relatively unproblematic, though he implies that nothing is gained by regarding logical truths as analytic. He assumes that the explication of logical truth does not require the notion of analyticity or any of the other problematic notions with which it is linked. P. F. Strawson has argued that this assump- tion is false (Strawson 1957). The statement No un- illuminated book is illuminated is true, and indeed logically true, on readings which take the two occur- rences of illuminated to have the same meaning. But it does not remain true on a reading which gives the first occurrence the sense of /// and the second the sense of decorated. So it does not remain true under all interpretations of its nonlogical vocabulary, but only on those interpretations which give the same meaning to all occurrences of its nonlogical vocabu- lary. Strawson's point is that Quine cannot after all dispense with the notion of sameness of meaning even at the level of logical truths.
Work by Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke on theor- etical terms in science and on natural-kind terms casts doubt on the idea that the meanings of such terms are captured by analytic statements. Their discussions point to the deeper issue of whether the use of terms
like these is governed by the sort of rules which would generate analytic truths. Among other important issues also discussed by Putnam and Kripke is whether all necessary truths are analytic truths and whether only analytic truths can be known a priori. Scepticism about analyticity is widespread, but for a more opti- mistic review of the issues, see Boghossian 1997.
See also: A Priori; Concepts; Meaning: Philosophical Theories; Natural Kinds; Necessity.
Bibliography
Ayer A J 1946 Language, Truth and Logic,2nd edn. Gollancz, London
Boghossian P A 1997Analyticity.In: Hale B,Wright C (eds) A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Blackwell, Oxford
Carnap R 1956 Meaning and Necessity, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL
Grice H P, Strawson P F 1956 In defense of a dogma. The Philosophical Review 65:141-58
Katz J J 1972Semantic Theory. Harper and Row, New York Kitcher P 1984 The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge.
Oxford University Press, New York
Kripke S A 1980 Naming and Necessity. Blackwell, Oxford Putnam H 1975 Mind, Language and Reality Philosophical
Papers, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Quine W V O 1960 Word and Object. MIT Press, Cambridge,
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Quine W V O 1961 From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn.
Harvard UniversityPress, Cambridge, MA
Strawson P F 1957 Propositions, concepts and logical truths. The Philosophical Quarterly 7:15-25; repr. in Strawson
(1971)
Strawson P F 1971 Logico-Linguistic Papers. Methuen, Lon-
don
The content and use of the term 'communication' is even by humanistic standards extremely ambiguous, and it has therefore often been difficult to use in prac- tical, empirical work. The most exact use of the term has been standardized in Shannon and Weaver's infor- mation theory. Within the tradition of semiotics, the value of communication as a term has been ques- tioned, and in linguistics the term has sometimes been used as a synonym or part-synonym with more exactly defined terms such as use, parole, text, behavior, and performance. In spite of this, certain theorists—often those with a background in cybernetics—have used 'communication' as a generic term for all theories about man, in the same way as semioticians have defined the domain of semiotics.
A very simple and general, but neither unprob- lematic nor uncontroversial, way of defining com- munication is to view it as an information process going on between at least two human communicators (not necessarily two persons as long as one can com- municate with oneself) embedded in a context, and a situation. More specifically, communication can be defined as a generic term covering all messages uttered in different contexts and situations.
A message can be divided into sign-vehicle and meaning. The sign-vehicle then covers all possible variants on the expression plane of linguistic utter- ances, and meaning covers all possible variants on what is called, in the glossematic school, the content plane. In this way, communication is used as a socio-
Communication K. L. Berge
Communication
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