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May 03, 2005
Austin and the Exploding Canaries
Dear Reader,
I need your help tracking down an example...
I've just been chatting to Professor Linsky (henceforth, Bernie) about the various reasons that people reject the analytic-synthetic distinction. I said that one of them is connected with intensional vagueness. Some people think that the rules which govern our expressions need not, and often do not, extend to cover all possible cases. To take an example from Carnap, it might be indeterminate whether the expression "Mensch" (the German word meaning person) can be correctly applied to a creature which is half hawk, half man - the rules for using the expression, which work perfectly well in everyday life, just don't extend to decide that case. Or to take Donnellan's example, it might be indeterminate whether "mammal" can apply to a creature which breathes normally out of the water, but through gills under the water, so that if we discovered that some whales had (tiny, hidden, rarely used) gills, the rules for our language do not yet legislate on whether we should still think that all whales are mammals. It would be up to us, as speakers of the language, to decide on the best way to use the expressions "whale" and "mammal" in those circumstances. As a result, here and now, the content of the sentence "all whales are mammals" is not straight-forwardly necessary.
The related argument against analyticity goes like this: if a (non-indexical) sentence is analytic, then it expresses a necessary truth. But where the intensions of expressions are not defined for all possible cases, there may be no fact of the matter about whether the sentence is necessary. Yet if it were analytic, there would be. So the sentence is not analytic. (Usually it is then suggested that such partially defined intensions are widespread in natural language, and the conclusion is drawn that there are hardly any analytic sentences.)
Here's what I need from you: Bernie thinks that J. L. Austin once argued (like Carnap and Donnellan) that expressions need not be defined for all possible cases, and gave an example involving exploding canaries (or goldfinches?) which was later picked up and used by someone else. (Possibly Morton White?) I'd like to track down the Austin example in particular. Does anyone recognise it? If so I would be grateful if you could point me in the right direction, either in the comments (which may be anonymous, or, if you would prefer a more private method of communication, by emailing me at grussell - AT - artsci - DOT - wustl - DOT - edu (you get the actual address by uniform substitution of "@" for each occurrence of " - AT - " and "." for each occurrence of " - DOT - .") Thank you very much!
Update: 3/5/05 David Chalmers has alerted me to the fact that the passage in question (which concerns goldfinches) can be found in Austin's "Other Minds," reprinted in his Philosophical Papers which is available online if your library subscribes to Oxford Scholarship.
Posted by logican at May 3, 2005 03:48 PM
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Comments
It's goldfinches, from Austin's "Other Minds" (1946), which is most easily available in his Philosophical Papers. Here's a quote that I grabbed from elsewhere on the web:
If we have made sure it’s a goldfinch, and a real goldfinch, and then in the future it does something outrageous (explodes, quotes Mrs. Woolf, or what not), we don’t say we were wrong to say that it was a goldfinch, we don’t know what to say. Words literally fail us: "What would you have said?" "What are we to say now?" "What would you say?" … It seems a serious mistake to suppose that language (or most language, language about real things) is "predictive" in such a way that the future can always prove it wrong. What the future can always do, is to make us revise our ideas about goldfinches or real goldfinches or anything else.
Posted by: djc at May 3, 2005 06:57 PM
Hi Dave, it's good to hear from you. Thanks for answering my question so quickly.
Posted by: Gillian Russell at May 3, 2005 10:57 PM