Re: Folk Psychology and Social Convention

Anthony Bucci <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...

> Have you read Susan Oyama's book _The Ontogeny of Information_?  I
> recommend you have a look at it if not.  She talks about the same sort of
> intensional/extensional split you are discussing, but she traces it
> through a variety of fields like computer science and evolutionary
> biology.  In computer science, it shows up as the syntax/semantics split
> (for instance).  In evolutionary biology, it shows up as the belief that
> it's all in the genes (vs. the environment or the organism's development).  
> Oyama's main claim is that these splits lead to a lot of problems and what
> we really need is some other way of looking at the world.
> 
> (btw a lot of people blame Descartes for all this, but that's neither fair 
> nor helpful).
> 
> These splits show up in many sciences and are often the centers of
> enormous debates.  In many cases the intensional side has won out.  In
> computer science, the syntax/semantics split remains and most people study
> syntax.  In evolutionary biology, neo-Darwinism has led to dogmatic focus
> on the genes (epitomized in Richard Dawkin's _The Selfish Gene_).  Part of
> the reason is that it's easy to get one's head around a syntactic system,
> whereas it is not at all clear what a semantic system should look like,
> and it's even less clear still how you might have one single system from
> which both syntax and semantics arise naturally (beware, I'm falling into
> my usual habit of equating syntax with intension and semantics with
> extension, which may muddy the waters, but I'm too lazy to rewrite that
> more precisely).
> 
> To my way of thinking, it's the last question which is the most
> interesting and relevant, since that's what we feel really happened in
> nature.  Syntax and semantics both arose concurrently from human language
> activity (beware, I just shifted from cs to linguistics).

<snip>

> To compare to linguistics and get the connection with David's post
> correct, you might say an intensional context is one which is internal to
> the speaker (e.g., a belief or desire), whereas an extensional context is
> one which is universally observable (It's raining, I weigh 175 pounds).  
> Clearly there are similar, parallel questions here: how do we relate the
> internal life of a speaker with their observable characteristics?
> 
> What I'm saying above is that these splits are artificial.  What we really
> want is a model which does not explicitly contain intension/extension 
> splits, within which such a split arises naturally.  At this high (and
> obviously sloppy) level you can see three possibilities:
> 
> i)   it's all intension and extension is explainable from intension;
> ii)  it's all extension and intension is explainable from extension;
> iii) it's something else and both intension and extension come from it 
> 
> I'm banking on iii).  Oyama tells us a lot of people have worked on i).  
> If I read him rightly, David is suggesting paying more attention to ii)
> (which isn't all that outrageous given the overweight of i)).

I think it's iii) as well.  And that these artificial splits in our
thinking are at least half of the problem.  But that's how thinking on
this question has evolved over the years, for a number of reasons.

So maybe the path to the answer lies in a more interdisciplinary
approach than we've seen so far, which seeks to avoid these artificial
splits and tries to see both intension and extension as aspects or
results of the same underlying phenomenon.

And since linguistics seems to be a good place to start, why not look
more closely at the relationship of the "internal life of a speaker
with their observable characteristics," as you say?  There are plenty
of "natural laboratories" in both the historical and current-day realm
that could serve as useful sources of data in this regard.

DV