Topics Language

Question Lewis Carroll spoofed logic, semantics, and language in <i>Alice</i> with constructions such as (paraphrased): must I mean what I say when I say what I mean, to which the response was I see what I eat isn't the same as I eat what I see. Chomsky cited "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like bananas". My question is, are such constructions possible in all languages (presumably the above examples are not always directly translatable) especially non-Indo-European ones and, if not, what are the philosophical/linguistic ramifications of this? Does it just boil down to word play in any given language or are there linguistic universals at play? I once read a bilingual Chinese/English American (!) philosopher claiming that Chinese was more conducive to essaying logical analysis than English and, as far as I know, all writing about linguistic philosophy has been in 'Western' languages, usually English. Is this significant? Do individual languages or language families rather than language itself colour our perception of the world?

Accepted:
November 15, 2005

Comments

I would be surprised if examples like Chomsky's didn't exist in all human languages. The example rests simply upon the fact that "flies" can be either a noun or a verb and "like" can be either a verb or a, uh, what is it in that construction? a preposition? Both sentences Chomsky cites are therefore, in principle, ambiguous, although one reading in each case is so odd that it is often pragmatically unavailable. That is to say, these examples are essentially just examples of so-called structural ambiguity, that is, of ambiguities that arise because of different possible analyses of the logical structure of a sentence rather than because of different meanings a single word can have.

Carroll's examples seem quite different. It's not that there is some ambiguity in "I eat what I see". (At least, if there is, it's not relevant to this example.) What that means is: Anything I see, I eat. Similarly, "I see what I eat" means: Anything I eat, I see. These need not both be true. It does not, however, follow that "I V1 what I V2" is never equivalent to "I V2 what I V1". And I think what's bothering Alice is that "I say what I mean" and "I mean what I say" seem, to her, equivalent. But this is less clear because it's much less clear what "means" means here. "I say what I mean" seems to mean something like: What I intend to communicate [for afficionados: mean, in Grice's sense], I express directly in the words I use [say, in Grice's sense]; "I mean what I say" may mean: What is expressed directly by the words I use, I intend to communicate, but it also seems to mean something like: I'm not lying or attempting to mislead. But if we ignore the latter reading, then it seems to me Alice was correct: When we say what we mean, we must mean what we say.

It's not true that "all writing about linguistic philosophy has been in 'Western' languages". Most is, nowadays, but there are analytic philosophical traditions in the non-Western world. There are, for example, lots of analytic philosophers in South Korea. Moreover, there was a significant tradition in philosophy of language in India several centuries ago on which a fair bit of work has now been done. That said, I see no reason to doubt that the way logical relations are expressed in one's own language can color one's approach to the subject.