Is the “Divine Dictionary” View of Language as Bad as Postmodernism?

The "divine dictionary" view is an inadequate realist response to social constructionism because it shares with social constructionism a common, fatal premise.

[Audio] Is the “Divine Dictionary” View of Language as Bad as Postmodernism?

I received this question on my first post, to paraphrase, “Do you really think that the ‘divine dictionary view’ ‘implies the same degree of imposition on reality’ as the postmodernist view?”

Here’s what I had written: 

If I could put it in a nutshell, the current divide, in philosophy and culture, is between those who insist that language is separate from reality, socially constructed, and a tool for the social construction of reality itself, and those who think that our job is to guess the entries in a divine dictionary, the verbally formulable essences of things, the definitions of our terms. But in both of these views, language is too separate from reality to give us a solid appreciation of the real. In both cases, language appears to be an imposition on reality. The question is simply which language to impose, or whether to impose at all.

Now, in one sense, of course, the “divine dictionary” view is preferable to the social constructionist view. The “divine dictionary” view is the most common way of trying to express a realist view of language. I get it. But I think it’s the wrong formulation and actually gives away the game.

The “divine dictionary” view is an inadequate realist response to social constructionism because it shares with social constructionism a common, fatal premise. To formulate that premise, let me introduce a distinction between two ways in which words can operate: as tags, and as nets. A word operates as a tag when it relates to objects by marking out something particular. A word operates as a net when it relates to objects by providing criteria for catching certain things and not others. And the premise that both the “divine dictionary” view and the social constructionist view share is that words, all substantive words, are nets. And the view that words are nets is, I believe, the source of the idea that words are subjective projections, imposed on reality.

John Stuart Mill proposed a theory of language that is quite commonsensical. In our terms, it was that proper names are tags and that general terms, including predicates, are nets. This makes a lot of sense. When we name a child, for example, we do not intend the name to signify something general of which this child is a particular. We do not mean to say, by calling a child “John,” that he really seems to exemplify what it is to be a “John.” We do not mean to categorize him with all the other “Johns.” We are giving him a tag, if one that requires other names to individuate him (last name, middle name). On the other hand, when we call John a baby, we do mean to say that he is caught in the net that is the word “baby”; he meets the general criteria for babyhood. Proper names are tags; general terms are nets.

Now, many proponents of the “divine dictionary” view and the “social constructionist” view may, at least in practice, hold that proper names are tags. That will be an exception to an otherwise “words-as-nets” view. (And of course, there are people, Native Americans among them, who view proper names as having meaning, general descriptions of which the child is taken or hoped to become an example. There may even be a class of names that are more like “titles.”)

Now, Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of analytic philosophy, famously introduced an argument for treating even proper names as “nets.” If something or someone has more than one proper name, a statement that identifies the individual under the one name with the individual under the other name is informative and significant. This could not be the case if the only contribution of each name to the meaning of the sentence was to identify the individual in question. Instead, each name had the same reference but a different sense. In the reception of the idea of sense, this has been taken to mean that even proper names refer by being nets that pick out just one individual. Hence, one can have multiple names for the same individual that differ in cognitive significance because they are two different one-object-catching nets that happen to catch the same individual.

This way of treating proper names held sway in analytic philosophy until it received a challenge by Saul Kripke in 1973, in his lectures, given off-the-cuff, “Naming and Necessity.” Kripke argued that Mill’s view of proper names was correct, against the Fregean view. But he also argued that the Mill-and-Frege view that general terms are nets, which we took to be the common-sense view, was incorrect. General terms also operated more like tags. But tags of “natural kinds.”

How could general terms operate like tags? We have to introduce one more detail. “Senses” of both proper names and general terms had come to be identified with descriptions. A description is the most characteristic version of a verbal net. A description is not inherently about an individual; it is general in character. It provides criteria that an object can meet or match or fail to match. And some descriptions apply only to one individual, some to many, some even to all, and some to none.

Now, Kripke was opposing the idea that, for each general term, there is an associated description that gives its sense. Why? Because, for a great many such terms, an accurate description of this sort is something that is sought through empirical inquiry, not something that is known to every competent language-user in knowing the word. For example, Kant is quoted as saying that the “sense” of the word “gold” is something like “precious, yellow metal.” (The accuracy of this portrayal of Kant is beside the point.) A couple things are wrong with this. One is that another metal could be found that met this description, but would not be gold. Another is that we could discover that gold actually did not meet even this description (at least, hypothetically). A more plausible description that capture gold more accurately would be “a substance with atomic number 79.” But, of course, the discovery that gold had this atomic number was just that, a discovery. Those inquiring into the atomic number of gold needed already to understand the word “gold” in order to make this inquiry.

While there is much more to say, the fruit of the Kripkean revolution is that even such general terms are effectively tags for “natural kinds,” kinds of things that exist in nature and are the objects of scientific inquiry. Think of them like tags in a store; those primarily do not name an individual but say what kind of thing it is, while name-tags at a party are for naming and tagging individuals.

Something I take from this philosophical discovery, if such there are, is that the idea of a word having a “definition” is itself flawed. A definition is supposed to be a clause that expresses the meaning of a word. But that is no different than a description that gives the sense of a word. But, following Kripke, I take it that no description gives the sense of a word, so no dictionary entry gives the meaning of a word. So there are no definitions.

Now, against the “divine dictionary” view, I could simply argue that there are no such things as definitions of words. But I want to say more. I want to say that the realist motivation of the “divine dictionary” view is better satisfied by a Kripke-inspired view of words, even general words, as tags. Notice the realism in Kripke’s empiricism about the “meaning of words.” Kripke argues that what a general term means is not determined by any description of which we are possessed. It is instead determined by empirical inquiry, by how things are in the world. That is the firmest grounding of words in reality that one could hope for. What our words mean depends on how things are in the world.

The idea of a word having a “definition” is itself flawed. Following Kripke, I take it that no description gives the sense of a word, so no dictionary entry gives the meaning of a word. So there are no definitions.

The realist view might go even further: There is no such thing as the meaning of a word. There is only the object it refers to. At best, “Gold” means, well, gold.¹ The fact that we all associate with it a certain description, including children, as a yellow metal, is interesting as far as language goes. There may be a certain amount of information about a thing that comes with competence in naming it at all. But this will not be the meaning of the word, but a piece of information, a proposition, about it. A piece of information that is even more “essential” to it, like having the atomic number 79, is a further piece of information about it, even one that may be necessary or essential, but not something that gives the meaning of “gold” but rather the nature of gold.

And that last contrast is really the important one. Are our inquiries ultimately into the meanings of words or into the natures of things? Often we end up quibbling about the former and arguing whether the meanings of words are socially constructed or built into the fabric of reality. But I am arguing that realism does not come with thinking that meanings of words are built into the fabric of reality but with thinking that words are tags of things the natures of which are examinable and knowable.

In Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman? Walsh receives, from the dozens of people he interviews, only two answers to the question. One way of hearing my argument is as siding with one of these answers over the other (or at least one way of hearing the other). In the finale of the movie, Walsh asks his wife the titular question, to which she responds, “An adult human female.” Now, this is easily heard as a dictionary definition. If it is heard that way, then the question “What Is a Woman?” has been glossed as, what is the definition of “woman?” The answer gives the definition.

Jordan Peterson’s response to the question is, “Marry one, and find out.” This first struck me as an odd cop-out coming from the fabled opponent of Bill C-16. Now it seems to me an indication that women are a real kind of thing, and you can find out what they are by interacting with one, by knowing one. (Biblical connotations welcome.) There is a reality corresponding to and “referred to” by the word “woman” that is empirically knowable. And that is the firmest guarantee of our words’ meaningfulness and connection to reality.

The problem with the divine dictionary view is that it shares with social constructionism the premise that words are nets, not tags. The realist view for which I argue is that words, both proper names and general terms, are tags for individuals and kinds, respectively. The question remains whether and, if so, why this implies the same degree of imposition on reality as the social constructionist view. To that I will return in a forthcoming post.

1. Call this a “disquotational theory of meaning.” Analytic philosophers speak about a disquotational theory of truth, according to which “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. Some theory!