Willard Van Orman Quine is one of America’s best known logical essayists and natural logicians. His essays are frequently reprinted and his essays on language and its nature have been anthologized. Willard Van Orman Quine is said to be one of America’s foremost natural logicians, an “out and out intellectual”, with a brilliant mind that working through problems in mathematics, logic, and natural science, unconnected with formalism and post-modernism. He rejected reduction and plurality, and regarded truth as a subjective experience. According to Richard Rorty, “Quine’s method is logical in its deepest aspects… his approach is non-metaphysical in its conceiving of concepts and meanings…” [p1} In his paper” Logic and Language”, quoted by John Locke, Quine writes, “That every idea comes from some object, and that no ideas are worthless, when embraced by the man who loves it, and that all knowledge is personal”. This may sound like a metaphysical thesis, but it is simply a statement of a fact many people already know there is a direct connection between logic and language, no matter how far our minds may stretch to push the connections beyond the obvious boundaries of our bodies and minds.
In his logical works, and especially in his lectures, he maintained that the physical world and all its parts are nothing more than physical devices used for the proper functioning of intelligent life. In the Topics of Metaphysics, his last major work, he said, “I conceive of no fixed law that science may assume as a reality”. Although he never saw a need for the development of a science of absolute truths, his rejection of reduction and his preference for personal predicates over universal theories made him a pioneer in interpreting causation as a matter of personal physical actions. Thus, according to Richard Rorty, “To say that science can’t learn anything from experience, is to say that man can’t learn anything from his experiences”. Rorty further explained, “To say that science can’t discover what it doesn’t already know, is to suggest that the universe is governed by an unknown and unknowable inner force which rules unperceived by us.”
Unlike Descartes, who denied that any one science can speak to all reality, van der Papen saw the connection between all knowledge and personal ethics. It is the belief of his school that all natural knowledge can be verified by reason. He said, “To know is to give credence; and it is not so difficult a thing, when it appears, to give credence to things which are not certain”. The greatest challenge facing philosophy today is not to find a unified field of thought independent of both science and religion, but rather to find a way to reconcile these systems of thought with each other, within the framework of the personal ethics of pure humanism.
Descartes’ philosophy of mind was revolutionary, but only among his contemporaries. He is the one, for example, who gave a name to the phenomenon of Descartes’ error, that his mind did not in fact understand the propositions of his science. James Clerk Maxwell (one of the few twentieth-century naturalists to recognize Descartes’ brilliance) commented, “It appears strange that he should have introduced a language, which so completely destroyed the ideas of all the others before him…to give a name to a system which nobody had ever thought of”. It seems that Descartes’ theory of knowledge, as developed by his many students, is still a source of controversy, even though some of its most influential critics have been brought virtually to their knees by recent scientific discoveries.
The work of Robert Baran, however, is perhaps the best-known contribution to the development of a scientific philosophy of mind. His notion of a “linguistic psychology” was, as he himself pointed out, an attempt to bring science and personal behavior into closer contact. The field of linguistics has made great strides forward through the development of psychology. But Baran’s work shows that there are still great differences between the two disciplines. This book is a thorough examination and explanation of these differences, including why they are so strong and what can be done to reduce or eliminate them.
In this respect, Baran is like many others who have searched for a psychological explanation of language and communication problems. There has always been a tension between science and personal experience. Science, it seems, can’t easily explain certain facts because of language and communication difficulties. On the other hand, most people seem to be unable to communicate effectively with others even when the underlying facts are perfectly clear. In these circumstances, someone must be able to translate the communication difficulties into a simpler form of verbal expression.
Willard van der Papen managed to translate this difficulty by developing a theory of structural grammar which combined aspects of linguistic psychology with established linguistic structures. He generalized a wide range of grammatical elements such as prepositions, agreements, and numbers to show that all communication occurs according to a set of rules, which he called grammatical code. These rules govern the arrangement of information in the language, and the distribution of meaning from one word to the next. These notions, and his generalized model of grammatical code, led him to develop his ideas about how the brain comes to understand language.
The structure of his model includes five elements – three major ones, and two minor ones. He discovered that a major component shared by all languages is an abstract idea about human relationships, and he named this element paramecium. Another component shared by all languages is the idea that words are definite or indefinite, depending on the usage used, and he called this element presuppositionalism.