Page 189 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

something fundamental about the way language works and fulfills its communicative function.
1. PreliminaryConsiderations
Among the most general if simple-minded questions one can ask about language is: how is it that a sequence or combination of words can be used to represent things in the world? Another question is: how is it that we can understand sentences composed of familiar words but which we have never heard before? Questions such as these raise a more general issue, namely, what (if any) are the most general and abstract constraints on what and how language can be said to represent? The idea that language has a representational function is probably as common as it is ancient. Indeed, the notion of representation itself carries with it the suggestion of some sort of matching or correlation of language with what lies beyond it. Thus sentences (and the words of which they consist) get their meaning, if not their truth and reference, by virtue of such a relation. Where truth is concerned, the traditional notion has been that of correspondence. A sentence, or rather the proposition it expresses, is said to be true if it corresponds to reality. The exact nature of this correspondence has proved difficult to articu- late, but some recent theories of meaning have taken the notion of truth as central to the project of explain- ing meaning and understanding. According to this kind of approach, understanding a sentence is know- ing the conditions for it to be true. The attractiveness of the picture theory of meaning is that it promises to deliver a detailed account of this representational relationship between language and the world.
2. Elementsof aTheory
The most comprehensive and sustained articulation of a picture theory of meaning is undoubtedly that due to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his famous early work, the Tractates Logico-Philo- sophicus, he speaks of sentences or propositions as pictures. For him, the essence of representation is description, and a proposition represents what he calls a possible 'state of affairs.' By itself, a proposition neither asserts or denies anything. Crucial to Wittgen- stein's account are two theses: (a) isomorphism, i.e., there must be a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of a proposition and the elements of the state of affairs it represents. In other words, it must have the same structure and number of elements as the reality it portrays; (b) atomism, i.e., every prop- osition is a function of its constituent expressions, and in the case of the most basic or elementary prop- ositions, these constituent expressions must be simple names, expressions which are not further analyzable and which appropriately and uniquely identify indi- vidual basic objects—the most fundamental con- stituents of reality. These simple names have reference only; their role or meaning resides solely in their hav-
ing such unique reference. The picturing relationship, therefore, depends ultimately upon this basic relation between names and objects. More complex prop- ositions are functions of such elementary prop- ositions, that is to say, they are truth-functional compounds generated by means of logical constants or operators such as 'not,' 'and,' 'or,' etc.. The truth status (truth-value) of such compounds depends entirely on the truth possibilities assigned to the con- stituent propositions. Thus in the case of negation, for example, the proposition // is not the case that it is snowing is false if it is in fact snowing and true if it is not snowing. Any logic satisfying this compositional feature is usually described as 'extensional', and where just the two truth values 'true' and 'false' are oper- ative, the logic is generally also called 'classical.' An important characteristic of the elementary prop- ositions which distinguishes them from all the others, is that they are independent of one another: no one of them depends for its truth (or comprehension) on any other elementary proposition. As to the logical constants themselves, their function is not rep- resentational: they merely signify the operations by which the compound propositions are generated.
3. ProblemsandCriticisms
Some problems are specific to Wittgenstein's own ver- sion of the theory, and they have produced a con- siderable secondary literature of exegesis and interpretation. Among these problems are the notion of 'logical form' (the form elementary propositions are supposed to share with the corresponding state of affairs) and the fact that the 'basic' objects are not explicitly characterized. In this latter respect, the account differs from the theory of logical atomism put forward by Bertrand Russell. However, there are more general difficulties. First of all, there is a problem with any austerely extensional treatment of language. There are a number of constructions which are not readily or immediatelyaccommodated within such a scheme, e.g., modal contexts of the form 'Necessarily p" or 'Possibly /?,' and statements of 'prepositional attitude'likeJoanbelieves(hopes,fears) thatp,which at least prima facie look like logical functions of the constituent proposition/?. However, in neither of these cases does the truth-value of the constituent prop- osition totally determine the truth-value of the com- pound. For example, it could be true that Joan believes that the Earth is flat regardless of whether the proposition that the Earth is flat is true or false. Second, there is a wide variety of propositions for which the pictorial analogy seems counterintuitive or implausible. Examples of these include not only those mentioned above, but also the highly abstract prop- ositions of mathematics, the general or law-like state- ments of the kind typical of scientific theory and physics in particular, and those propositions which conspicuously exhibit the feature commonly termed
Picture Theory of Meaning
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