INTRODUCTION

It is generally agreed that material bodies are extended in space they are three-dimensional objects. In the Second Meditation Descartes maintained that being extended was the essence of body, but most philosophers have been inclined to deny that extension alone is what constitutes body, for a body is something more than a bare geometrical figure. A bare geometrical figure is just a volume of empty space, but those spaces in which bodies are located are not empty but occupied. A body occupies a space in the sense that while it is located in that space no other material body can be located there: to occupy space is to exclude other bodies. It would seem that bodies must of necessity possess some property or properties over and above their geometrical properties; there must be something further which constitutes their materiality, their power to occupy the space in which they are located.

Locke recognised the need to characterise bodies more fully than they are characterised in Descartes's definition, and he saw that their materiality consisted in their ability to occupy space to the exclusion of other bodies. Consequently he introduced as his other essential and intrinsic characterisation of body the property of impenetrability, which just is the capacity of one body to prevent another body from occupying the space it occupies itself, whilst it occupies that space itself (Essay, 11, 8, 23).

TWO VERSIONS OF THE THEORY

By following the development of behaviourism in the face of various problems, we saw that it is naturally transformed into some form of physicalism. The forms of physicalism to emerge from this process were stimulus materialism and the causal theory of mind. However, a close examination of the stimulus theory has shown that it must inevitably develop in the direction of the causal analysis. The causal theory, therefore, appears to be the natural heir to the whole reductionist tradition of materialist thought.

There are two importantly different versions of the causal approach to the analysis of mind. According to the first, a mental state is whatever state mediates between stimulus and response in a certain sort of way. It is hypothesised that brain states will be found to have this mediatory role. These brain states are, therefore, identical with mental states, and this first version of the causal theory is, consequently, a form of the mind–brain identity theory. According to the second version of the theory, a mental state is a state of the organism as a whole, which that organism possesses in virtue of having some causal state which mediates appropriately between stimulus and response. The mediating state is not, in this case, identical with the mental, but is only the logical foundation of the organism's being in the mental state. This is, therefore, not a form of the mind–brain identity theory. The difference between these theories will be developed in the course of the discussion, and we shall see that it reflects different analyses of dispositional concepts.

PERCEPTION, BELIEF AND BEHAVIOUR

We have whittled the materialist options down to one, namely behaviourism with a realist theory of dispositions. This theory is functionalism. It does not suffer from behaviourism's inability to state the necessary and sufficient conditions for being in a given mental state, for statements of the form ‘s is in mental state M if and only if there is some state internal to s which grounds (or realises) his disposition to M-behave’ do state at least a plausible extensional equivalence. But the behaviourist's inability to cope with subjectivity or consciousness remains unremedied. In that sense, functionalism is just as counterintuitive as behaviourism. In this chapter I hope to improve on intuition by presenting an argument to show that all behaviouristic theories of perception are false. The argument works against traditional functionalism and the causal theory, and is essentially independent of the arguments employed in previous chapters.

A behaviouristic approach to perception is sometimes explicity married to a belief theory of perception (e.g. in Armstrong, 1968, chs. 10 and 11 Pitcher, 1971). In this case, perception is subjected to a two fold reduction. First, perceiving an object is analysed as no more than acquiring, in some appropriately immediate way, the belief that the object is present. Second, the possession of that belief is explained as no more than the possessing of a capacity to behave in the appropriate discriminatory way with respect to that object. The integration of the belief theory into the behaviouristic approach is, from the viewpoint of the latter, not merely natural but necessary.

I have tried to show that the principal contemporary forms of materialism are, despite their intellectual sophistication, quite hopeless. However, this essay is not just a survey of heterogeneous philosophical arguments whose only common feature is that they are fashionable and support physicalism. Their connexion is deeper and more systematic.

It is impossible to prove a priori that no form of materialism could work. Or perhaps that was proved right at the outset: the argument in the second section of chapter 1 is a perfectly general reason why no materialist theory could be adequate. The materialist theories are all more or less ad hoc ways of avoiding this knock-down argument. It is unreasonable to expect anyone to provide a further argument to show that all possible ad hoc evasions of the basic argument must be false. Nevertheless, the materialist strategies are systematically related. Given that it is subjectivity that poses the problems for the physicalist, there are only three options open to him. He might deny that subjectivity as normally understood poses any problem for materialism: he might provide a reductive analysis of it in physicalist or topic-neutral terms, or he might deny that it exists. We have discussed all these strategies in (I hope) their most sophisticated forms. It is true that I have not tried to prove that a new variant on these basic strategies could not be developed, but I cannot see what it could be. Any non-reductive theory which is materialist enough to preserve mechanism must lead to epiphenomenalism, as argued in chapter 1.

Predicate schemes are the meaning-relevant portions of paradigmatic sets

PARADIGMATIC SETS: CO-APPLICABLE WORDS

Contrast and meaning To have meaning, an expression must be in contrast of meaning; it must have differential meaning – function contrastively to something else (Lyons 1966: 422; 1963: 59). Equivocal words stand in diverse contrast patterns with other words: for example, they may not have the same opposites (sharp:dull;sharp:flat). That provides the purchase for modelling the meaning relationships under inquiry.

As Lyons described combinatorial contrasts, there are two basic kinds: syntagmatic and paradigmatic (1966: 70ff, 117, 428f, 460; 1977 vol.1: 48, 55). An expression paradigmatically contrasts with all other expressions that could have been inserted in its place (the remainder of the sentence remaining substantially unchanged) to produce replacement sentences that are semantically acceptable within the given environment and preserve the consistency (or inconsistency) of the original. A native speaker must not find the substituted result so incongruous that his critical reply would be the equivalent of ‘That's not English; one doesn't say that’.

The set of words in paradigmatic contrast with a given word may be imagined as a vertical list of words substitutable (under the conditions mentioned) for the same place, or role, in a given sentence frame, e.g. ‘The youth/young man/boy/urchin/girl/matron/etc. asked for a job.’ It is the list of co-applicable words (see definitions below).

Syntagmatic contrasts are the differing semantic and syntactic limitations expressions impose linearly upon what can be combined with them into an acceptable sentence.

THE HYPOTHESIS:

HYPOTHETICAL CONSTRUCTION

The meanings of salient words in figurative discourse can be hypothetically constructed as a shortest sequence of step wise adaptations from typical same words in nonfigurative discourse. The steps of differentiation are those already explained: proportionality, metaphor, denomination and paronymy.

The ‘double differentiation’ cases that involve both metaphor and analogy (or paronymy) are characteristic of figurative discourse. They are its semantic signature.

‘To be used figuratively’ and ‘figurative occurrence’ have three different senses in various contexts that follow. A word is said to be used figuratively, (1) if its being used in a certain way is constitutive of some classical figure of speech, e.g. ‘governed’ in ‘He governed himself and his province’, to create zeugma; (2) denominatively, for every word constitutive in some figure of speech (e.g. alliteration) and (3) the technical usage developed in this chapter for ‘occurring figuratively’, ‘is a figurative occurrence’ and the like: a word occurs figuratively just in case it occurs constitutively in figurative or heightened (as identified by likeness to paradigms in poetry and literature) discourse and its shortest path of hypothetical construction (by meaning adaptation) from a typical, not-merely-equivocal same word outside figurative discourse involves both analogy (or paronymy) and metaphor.

Hypothetical construction is successive domination that generates one sense from another. Different frame-expressions, that do not cause mere equivocation, successively differentiate a word from non-figurative discourse (in a typical occurrence) until an occurrence univocal with the figurative occurrence has been generated.

Why look for a systematic account of the meaning relationships different tokens of the same word have to one another (drop/stitch, drop/friend, drop/hint) when hardly anyone seems to have missed having one for five hundred years?

First, something with comprehensive philosophical consequences may have been overlooked. Both Aristotle's and the medieval Aristotelean writers' accounts of analogy (of diverse but related same-word meaning) affected the whole of those philosophies.

Secondly, the linguistic phenomena are pretty much as the classical writers said they were, though their explanation is not right. Such extensive data fairly beg us to probe for the hard bone of law underlying ‘focal meaning’, ‘family resembling terms’, ‘systematically ambiguous expressions’ and the panorama of verbal proportionality, metaphor, denomination and paronymy, remarked by philosophers of all epochs and persuasions.

Thirdly, there is no competitor for the classical account, despite its false foundations, mentioned in the Preface, and its limitations of scope and perspective, described in chapter 1. We need a competing portrayal, preferably one that construes the superficially chaotic data as the logical outcome of simple linguistic universals.

Fourthly, the analogy phenomena require revisions in the philosophy of language and probably in the philosophy of mind as well. A systematic study of same words refutes the assumptions that sentence meanings are the syncategorematic ‘sum’ of independent word/morpheme meanings (like a wall assembled out of varied stones) and that an ideal dictionary would have an entry for every meaning of every word in the language.

The same word often has different but related meanings (e.g. catch/fish; catch/ball). Some philosophers have proposed that shades and kinds of such differences can be explained systematically. Aristotle and Aquinas developed theories of analogy to account for such phenomena, theories they applied to the philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of nature, theology and ethics, and that distinctively characterized their philosophical styles and even their products, such as analogous definitions.

After investigating the analogy doctrines historically, (Ross 1958, 1961, 1962a and b) and applying them to religious discourse (1970b), I began to examine whether the ‘classical account’, the account developed from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas and Cajetan (1498), approximates the truth or points toward truths about meaning with similarly comprehensive consequences for contemporary philosophy.

By 1970 it emerged that the analogy phenomena have to be comprehensively redescribed because the classical theory suffers from limitations of scope and perspective (see chapter 1) and is based upon false premises, chiefly: (1) that word meanings are ideas (concepts-, thoughts-) in-the-mind-signified-by-conventional-sounds; (2) that sentence meaning is the molecular sum (syncategorematically computed) of the atomic meanings of the component words; (3) that different meanings for the same word are formally caused by differences in the referents, differences that are reflected in the conceptions, formed by abstraction, that are the meanings of the words; and (4) that only some words are analogical, equivocal, and the like.

MEANING DIFFERENTIATION

Words in English and other Indo-European languages, in suitably contrasting contexts, differentiate. For example, ‘She dropped a stitch’, ‘She dropped her hem-line’, ‘She dropped her book’, ‘She dropped a friend’, ‘She dropped her courses’. The meanings of ‘dropped’ are appropriate, fitted to the completion words and, so, differ. That is the generic linguistic phenomenon that includes mere equivocation, analogy and metaphor.

Words also adapt in predicate mode (e.g. to whether what is ascribed is ascribed as an action, state, proclivity, ability, etc.: ‘Jones plays golf’, ‘Smith plays the piano’, and to whether it is ascribed as a cause, effect, symptom, state, etc.) and to contrasts of ascription: to contrasting implied vantages, e.g. of agent or observer. Predicate mode and ascriptive differentiation are explained in chapter 5.

The meaning of any word, whether it be as common as the nouns, ‘chair’ and ‘ball’, or the verbs, ‘fix’, ‘strain’ and ‘look’, or whether it be statistically less common, like ‘investigator’, ‘interlocutor’, ‘expect’, or ‘anticipate’, differentiates relatively to some of its other occurrences. Consider the sets:

1. (1) The junk men took the chair.

2. (2) The chairman of the board took the chair.

3. (3) He dropped the ball on his first catch.

4. (4) He skipped the ball because of the late hour.

5. (5) He fixed the leak in the pipe.

6. (6) He fixed the time of the appointment.

7. (7) He fixed the race.

8. (8) […]

The classical theory of analogy of meaning, analogia nominum, explained how same words are partly the same and partly different in meaning, ultimately and fundamentally, by appeal to relevant sameness and difference in the sorts of things to which the words are applied.

Analogous terms differ from merely equivocal terms (which are also to some degree and in some respects partly the same in meaning) because the sameness and the difference in the analogous meanings are not merely coincidental, not merely haphazard, a casu, but are a consilio, conventional. In a law-like way they reflect metaphysical similarities and differences of the referents, that are preserved as similarities and differences in the concepts abstracted from such things. Those similar but differing concepts are the meanings of the words that are analogous.

The classical account of analogy involved several distinct inquiries, only the first of which will be pursued here. To use medieval Latin terms, there is analogia nominum, ‘analogy of names’ or ‘analogy of meaning’, a phenomenon I take to be ubiquitous, indigenous and characteristic in natural languages. It is an obvious characteristic by which natural languages differ from artificial languages and the most evident strength through which natural languages expand to incorporate new ideas and by which the language performs some of our thinking for us. It is the phenomenon investigated and explained in this book.

There is also analogia rationis, ‘analogy of reason’, analogous thinking or reasoning; and there is analogia entis, ‘analogy of being’, analogy among things.