Susana Nuccetelli (ed.) - Philosophy of Language: The Central Topics

There is another, possibly more fundamental, use of the notion: to tilt our perspective on the epistemology of language away from the subjectivist views of Frege and Russell and toward a more communitarian outlook. The notion that a referent can be carried by a name from early past to present suggests that the language itself carries meanings, and thus that we can acquire meanings through the instrument of language. This frees us from the constraints of subjectivist semantics and provides the opportunity for an instrumental use of language to broaden the realm of what can be expressed and to broaden the horizons of thought itself.

On my view, our connection with a linguistic community in which names and other meaning-bearing elements are passed down to us enables us to entertain thoughts through the language that would not otherwise be accessible to us. Call this the Instrumental Thesis .

The Instrumental Thesis seems to me a quite important, though often tacit, feature of contemporary theories of reference, and one that distinguishes them from many earlier views. It urges us to see language, and in particular semantics, as more autonomous, more independent of the thought of individual users, and to see our powers of apprehension as less autonomous and more dependent on our vocabulary.

Contrary to Russell, I think we succeed in thinking about things in the world not only through the mental residue of that which we ourselves experience, but also vicariously, through the symbolic resources that come to us through our language. It is the latter vocabulary power that gives us our apprehensive advantage over the nonlinguistic animals. My dog, being color-blind, cannot entertain the thought that I am wearing a red shirt. But my color-blind colleague can entertain even the thought that Aristotle wore a red shirt.

One need not fall in love to speak of love. One need not have grieved to speak of grief. The poet who has never felt or observed love may yet speak of it if he has heard of it. The fact that the language to speak of it and to enable us to have heard of it exists may show that someone once felt love. But it need not be the poet. And as with love, so with Samarkand (and red, and Aristotle). Our own individual experience may play a dominant role in providing the conceptual resources with which we address the world, but it does not play the whole role.