[Serious Phil] Sean on polysemy

[Peter D]

--- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "larry_tapper" <Philscimind at ...> wrote:
>
> 
> Sean,
> 
> A response here on the one question of polysemy. Other points addressed later, perhaps.
> 
> SW> ...3. In my forthcoming book, which is under contract, i propose a new understanding of polysemy based upon Wittgenstein. You can get a glimpse of the idea here:
> > 
> > http://ludwig.squarespace.com/lecture-topics/2012/4/5/0391-polysemy.html
> 
> Thanks for the link, I hadn't noticed you had a lecture entitled Polysemy.
> 
> I ran the video twice because I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
> 
> Before you publish your new understanding of polysemy, I think you may need to look up the word and find out what it means. Just a suggestion.
> 
> Early in the lecture you say that you know you've got a case of polysemy when "you're in the wrong family". This is exactly backwards: polysemes are word senses in the same family.
> 
> In Table 10.2, you give some examples of what you think is polysemy, including:
> 
> bank --- financial or river
> mole --- rodent or growth
> crane --- bird or contsruction equipment
> 
> In fact, these are homonyms, and precisely examples of what polysemy is *not*.
> 
> A rough test for whether two word meanings (or senses) are polysemes or homonyms is whether you find separate entries in a dictionary. If they are sub-entries under the same entry, they are (at least arguably) polysemes. If they are separate dictionary entries, they are homonyms.
> 
> Another, similar test is comparison of etymologies. If the stymologies are different, you almost certainly have homonyms.
> 
> These tests are not foolproof or closed to debate, they just give you a clear right answer most of the time.
> 
> For example, the financial bank and the river bank have two completely different origins --- the first was originally French, the second Germanic. It is a mere historical accident that they ended up sharing the same morpheme in modern English. So they are clearly homonyms (*not* polysemes). 
> 
> All this is explained well enough in the Wikipedia article:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysemy
> 
> Now homonyms (i.e. what you mistakenly call polysemes) are not very interesting to philosophers or even linguists, because they arise by accident, more or less. But polysemes (i.e what you call members of the same family) are very interesting, because they raise all sorts of questions about multiple usages, the role of metaphor, what it takes to be part of a family, whether all family members need to have something in common, etc.
> 
> And in fact one of your favorite examples is a good illustration of the complexity of the topic. You ask me to bring you a chair and I present you with the Chair of the entomology department. That, you say, is a communicative blunder because the two are not members of the same family. 
> 
> The thing is, according to the standard dictionary plus etymology tests, those two senses of 'chair' *are* members of the same family, albeit distant relatives like fourth cousins. That is, if you look in a dictionary, the two senses are listed under the same entry. And that's because the latter sense comes from the notion that the chair of the department is the one who sits in the chair at the head of the table. I would say that's an example of 'metonymy' (mentioned briefly in the Wikipedia article).
> 
> Judging by your lectures, your intuition about this goes against the standard tests, and you would say, screw the dictionary, we're looking at two distinctly different families here, which your slide refers to as the seating family and the 'executive' family. 
> 
> And I would not say you're wrong about this. This just goes to show that the polyseme/homonym distinction is not always so hard and fast, as it is in cases like 'bank'.  
> 
> You continue:
> 
> SW> 4. Let's say i call "tire," as in fatigue or a car wheel, "polysemy," and you call it "homonym." 
> 
> That's a bad example because the two are trivially homonyms and there's no question about it. The mere fact that they are different parts of speech determines that.


And in Blighty we spell the second one "tyre" as well.

> SW> And we then have a dispute about whether there are multiple meanings here or multiple words. It seems to me that this is not a real dispute. How is this different from and idealist/realist dispute? If we accept your arrangement of the lexicon, it does not mean that there is not more than one "meaning" here, it means that the extra thingy gets spoken of a different way. And so if there is a dispute between X and Y over whether meaning is use, and the person says that the extra thingys are not meanings, they are just different words, it wouldn't matter one bit, so long as both agreed there were extra thingys. We'd just say, okay, words are use.
> 
> Actually I agree with you here, in the sense that I think disagreements about the nature of polysemy are artefacts of this or that linguistic model, and there is not necessarily an objective  fact of the matter one way or another.

All very well, but something hinges on the choice of mode.

> For example, some followers of H.P. Grice are skeptical about the whole idea of polysemy; and this follows from their inclination to draw a sharp dividing line between semantics and pragmatics.
> 
> However, I wouldn't say that this is remotely like metaphysical arguments between realists and idealists. These are dictinctions that matter to some linguists, and the pros and cons can be debated within the discipline of linguistics without reference to big imponderable questions like what's really real.
> 
> Larry 
> 
> 
> 
> --- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "seanwilsonorg" <whoooo26505@> wrote:
> >
> > Gosh, this is a huge confusion. 
> > 
> > 1. The two examples you cite below of deploying words out of their common use has to do with unknowingly changing their GRAMMAR (assertability conditions), not about what you call "linguistic facts" or with polysemy. Perhaps a better way to say it is that their sense has changed. In Moore's case, using "know" when he was never in a situation to remove doubt, meant that the grammar of the expression was something self-evidential. It this sense, saying you know you have a hand would be the same sort of thing a 5 year old would say, and it would mean the very same thing.
> > 
> > 2. When you say that it is not obvious that words have more than one meaning, I wonder if you also think it obvious that those words do not have more than one sense. Or that they get deployed with different grammars. Because it would seem very strange to deny these ideas. 
> > 
> > 3. In my forthcoming book, which is under contract, i propose a new understanding of polysemy based upon Wittgenstein. You can get a glimpse of the idea here:
> > 
> > http://ludwig.squarespace.com/lecture-topics/2012/4/5/0391-polysemy.html
> > 
> > 4. Let's say i call "tire," as in fatigue or a car wheel, "polysemy," and you call it "homonym." And we then have a dispute about whether there are multiple meanings here or multiple words. It seems to me that this is not a real dispute. How is this different from and idealist/realist dispute? If we accept your arrangement of the lexicon, it does not mean that there is not more than one "meaning" here, it means that the extra thingy gets spoken of a different way. And so if there is a dispute between X and Y over whether meaning is use, and the person says that the extra thingys are not meanings, they are just different words, it wouldn't matter one bit, so long as both agreed there were extra thingys. We'd just say, okay, words are use.
> > 
> > --- In Phil-Sci-Mind at yahoogroups.com, "larry_tapper" <Philscimind@> wrote:
> > >
> > > 
> > > PDJ> ...You *still* haven't explained why you think "which any competent
> > > language speaker might be brought to see for him or herself but which would seem to be beyond research and testing". Are you not in fact suggesting forms of research above.
> > > 
> > > SWM> Because linguistic analysis isn't about ascertaining the facts of usage but exploring the implications of the usages.
> > > 
> > > Ordinary language philosophers' apparent disdain for linguistic field methods has been a subject of controversy since day one, pretty much. A classic and well written example of that criticism is the following article by Benson Mates:
> > > 
> > > http://collins.philo.columbia.edu/olp/mates-1958-vsol.pdf
> > > 
> > > Note that this was written in 1958.
> > > 
> > > A defense of the typical OL approach is that it often involves facts of usage that are not really in dispute --- you just have to think of them.
> > > 
> > > For example, there was a celebrated discussion in phil of lang circles about the ordinary sense of 'voluntary', with contributions by Ryle, Austin, Searle, Grice, etc. 
> > > 
> > > A constant in this discussion was the observation that we don't ordinarily speak of an action as 'voluntary' unless something is fishy about it. For example, it would be very peculiar if I told you that I am posting this message "voluntarily" in the absence of any reason to think otherwise. That's one of those linguistic observations that are fairly obvious when you think about them. Yet you usually don't find that sort of information in a dictionary.
> > > 
> > > Another example, from Wittgenstein's On Certainty: "I know that is a tree", says LW, is the sort of thing only a madman or a philosopher would say, under ordinary circumstances. The idea is, that says something about the ordinary use of "I know" --- that it is a case of language on holiday unless there is some contextual basis for doubt. A similar point to the 'voluntary' observation. 
> > > 
> > > There are a lot of examples in the OL literature which are more or less like that, and in those cases it seems to me reasonable to excuse philosophers for ascertaining linguistic facts by introspection rather than honest field work.
> > > 
> > > On the other hand, I'm very skeptical about expounding some general theory of meaning while ignoring the work of empirically minded linguists, and in that respect I tend to agree with PDJ. 
> > > 
> > > A case in point is the problem of polysemy, also known as "words have many meanings". It is actually not entirely obvious that this is really the case, from a linguist's point of view. It depends on a lot of factors like the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics, one's definitions of 'word' and 'meaning', one's theory of metaphorical extension, the distinction between an alternative sense and a homonym, etc. This territory has been explored thoroughly by linguists as well as philosophers, and it seems to me that the philosopher who ignores the linguist is attacking the problem with a blunt instrument.
> > > 
> > > I could go into more detail about that if anyone is interested, but maybe that would be too far into the weeds for our present purposes.
> > > 
> > > Larry
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