Language is a physical phenomenon. Organisms1.1 may emit complexes of sounds, and commit complexes of marks to surfaces, and each of these modes of action seems to have physical effects on certain classes of other organisms of the species. In other words, people speaking and writing affect other people or cause them to react. Indeed we can categorize organisms according to the kinds of aural and inscriptional complexes they are capable of having as systematic effects.
The foregoing can be expressed in more familiar terms. By means of spoken and written language we communicate, for example, our desires to other humans. Success depends upon their understanding of what we say or write. And although our choice of interlocutor determines which fellow human is actually persuaded to do our bidding, in relevant respects the bidding that gets done is the same, and that commonality accounts for what we refer to as the meaning of the spoken or written language. For example, the effects of asking for a cup of coffee will be similar whether Bill or Jeff executes the deed.
In this thesis we will eschew the more familiar language - the language with which we are more familiar, our everyday tongue - in favour of the more neutral account. We seek an explanation, and the comfortable familiarity of our language is apt to fool us into thinking that there is no aspect of the phenomenon that we do not already sufficiently understand.
In the language of linguistic description, we say that the causal significance of spoken and written language (in the example, the connection between the complex of sounds or inscriptions on the one hand, and the abstracted commonality on the other) is conventional. The sound complex works because the addressee is au fait with the conventions; the interlocutor understands the convention. But what, in more neutral terms, can be meant in saying that the connection is conventional? At least that there is nothing in the physical character of the complex itself that accounts for the connection. In consequence, many distinct complex-types will have the same effect within a single linguistic community, and no single complex-type will have the same effect across all linguistic communities. Independently of a certain attunement or adjustment of the interlocutor to the complex, the complex has no power to bring about the effect. It must mean at least that the causal connections that do exist between complex-types and these abstracted commonalities must themselves have causal histories. It has in some way come about that a particular sound complex has that connection with that physical state of things.
Perhaps even the requirements of understanding on the part of the addressee and of the presence of a convention, are an exaggeration.
In broad terms, David K. Lewis[40] analyses social conventions as regularities in their solution of recurrent coordination problems, that is, situations of interdependent decision in which common interest predominates. For Lewis, systems of communications, such as language, are proven to be conventional by the assignment of particular truth conditions to sentences or other items in the vocabulary.
It is unclear how much we can verbalize the understanding we have (or require to have) of the individual elements of speech. And in the ordinary way in which we speak of conventions, we have learned no such conventions, much less attended any. We simply find ourselves, at a certain stage of linguistic development, attuned to the requirements of speech. Perhaps the neutral language of dispassionate observation provides a more accurate account of the available data.
This thesis concerns itself with providing an observationally supportable physical description of what is usually referred to as the conventionality of language. In fact, the very notion of conventionality provides an excellent illustration of the features of language that interest us, since it is vexingly difficult to say what it is, yet language users typically have no difficulty in knowing when and how to use the term. Meanings are said to be conventional. That is, for a particular meaning, there is nothing about the physical character of a word that better suits it to bearing that meaning than some other. In this way, words are arbitrarily matched with meanings. This is not to say, however, either that words have, in general, been arbitrarily chosen to go with meanings, or that it is locally accidental that words have acquired the meanings they have. The connections between words and their meanings do have histories, and their histories do afford some explanation of their association. To be sure there may have been some random or unpredictable events in that history but nothing that would warrant that understanding of arbitrariness as it is applied to language and meaning. We stress that, meaning itself, as a word and a concept, also presents a semantic challenge. Its use is subject to the forces which influence the use of all vocabulary.
There is, however, an apparent element of commonality in our uses of language, that may warrant our speaking of the conventionality of use. Thus, though we have difficulty in saying what conventionality is, we generally find nothing puzzling about the uses of the word that we encounter in the speech of other people. Somehow we come to participate in these conventions. But the conventions are of a character that we can participate in them without being aware in any detail of what the conventions are. It cannot be excluded that the conventions of language use are in part rooted in our physiology and, in part, in the nature of the features of our social organization. To put the point more dramatically, it cannot be excluded that the conventionality of human linguistic behavior is like the conventionality of human mating behavior. Some aspects come under conscious control, but much is triggered in ways over which we have little control at all, and neither category of behavior need be precisely or deeply or even consciously understood by individual human organisms for them to function in ways that occasion suitable responses. And again, though some such conventions have a cultural history, and would have been different had cultural development been different, we do not suppose that they are arbitrary in any other sense.
Not all of language presents this kind of puzzle and, in respect of such vocabulary the question of conventionality settles itself differently. For example,indexical vocabulary (such as pronouns of person, place, and time, (eg. I, here, now)), object vocabulary (such as concrete nouns (eg. giraffe, chair, house)), property vocabulary (such as adjectives of color and size), are comparatively unproblematic. We can readily give an account of the occasions in which they are used, and of their meaning by reference to things of the right sort. Within this category fall those meanings for which Kripke's theory [39] most readily applies. Kripke proposed a causal theory of meaning in which proper names and natural kinds are not solely definite descriptions. More specifically, they are rigid designators whose reference point to objects identically across all possible worlds.
Nevertheless, though we can readily accede to Kripke's account of meaning for some such range of vocabulary, doing so depends upon not questioning too closely what we understand by the word meaning in his claims. And the words meaning and causal are ones to which his theory less adequately applies. Indeed, much of the language with which philosophers find themselves preoccupied - the language that occasions attempts at the construction of philosophical theories, theories of meaning, theories of causation, theories of mind, and so on - falls within the category that concerns us here. As mentioned, this account does not itself offer anything that could be called a philosophical theory, though it does have implications for the likelihood of success of such theories.