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In defense of the dictionary: A response to Haiman
Lingua 55 (1981) 53-61 North-Holland Publishing Company
53
DISCUSSION In defense of the dictionary: A response to Haiman William FRAWLZY
This paper is a response to John Hairnan’s ‘Dictionaries and Encyclopedias (L~Q+vM 50. 329-57). It is argued that Hairnan Ws in his attempts to blur the distinctions which have been traditionally taken to separate dictionaries from encyclopedias: language’ culture: subjective fact/objective fact; essenceiaccidence; semantics;pragmatics; analytic truth/synthetic truth; proper nouns/common nouns. Haiman’s case is built on oversigtits, oversimplifications, and paradoxes. He blurs no distinctions. and he does not subsume the dictionary under the enc.)-clopedia. The dictionary is a distinct entity.
In a recent article in this journal, John Haiman (1980) argued that there is no distinction between (theoretical) dictionaries and (theoretical) encyclopedias because the traditional criteria for distinguishing between the two are misconceived. He argued that there is no distinction between linguistic knowledge and cultural knowledge, none between subjective and objective f&t, none between essence and accidence, none between semantics and pragmatics, none between analytic and synthetic knowledge, and none between common and proper names. Since dictionaries are said to contain the first member of the above pairs of distinctions while encyclopedias are said to contain the second member, his blurring of these distinctions consequently blurs the distinction between encyclopedias and dictionaries. This distinction, to him, “is not only one that is practically impossible to make, but one that is fundamentally misconceived. Dictionaries we encyclopedias*’ (Haiman 1980: 331). Thus, for Haiman, not only is the distinction blurred, but the encyclopedia subsumes the dictionary. I am unconvinced by any of his arguments. 1 find that paradoxes, oversights, and irrelevancies abound in his essay, and I want to examine his claims closely to point out these problems. The upshot of my investigation is a defense of the autonomy of the dictionary. Haiman blurs no distinctions .and in fact eliminates his very position by his own arguments. Haiman’s fust set of arguments (pp. 331-36) is designed to show that linguistic knowledge is cultural knowledge. From the onset, however, he does not address this 0024-3841/81/0000-OOOO/SO2.50
o 1981 North-Holland
question proper. He immediately construes the linguistic/cultural distinction as the sense/ referen& intension;cxtension distinction. I do not see how tInis construal eliminates or iIluminabe#s the problem of language :md culture. 1 suspect that he intends this argument to show lihat linguistic knowledge has its analogue in intension and that cultural knowledge has its analogue in reference. but this is never clearly stated. It is patently untrue, ofcourse, that linguistic knowledge is sense while cultural knowledge is reference: if ethnoscience has taught us anything. it is that cultural knowledge is a complicated intensional structure (see Werner 1972. 1978, for representative arguments) But even if we grant Haiman’s construal of the distinction, the arguments are flawed. The gist of his position is that intension is “useless unless the words are at some point anchored in reality. Denc>tation is the basis of mear;ing” (Hairnan 1980: 336). He goes to great pains to demonstrate the referential origins of meaning, with all sorts of invocations of empiricists in support: “There are reasons no less powerful [than the I’act that even mathematics has conceded t? empiricism in its basic tenets, WF] for recognizing the provisional and empirical cha:;icter of the basic units from which definitions are put together” (Haiman 1980: 336). Even if culture could be called reference (and language called sense), this argument is wrong. It is, first of all, predicated upon a logical fallacy - argl;ment from the source. Tc clair,l that meaning is ultimately referential, that all meaning comes from denotation and this is not true is to say nothing about all meaning.’ Ultimate tests of meaning are not the only tests of meaning; no amount of appeal to tne origins of something will explain the present nature of something. I am not indistinct from my parents because I come from them. nor is mutton ultimately or ‘really’ sheep because sheep are its source. What Haiman wants to do here is to use the old logical empiricist arguments that all terms in any language are reducible to observational terms (he invokes Russell, pp. 333-34. on ‘object terms’) through correspondence rules and reduction stdtemenis - that any theoretical terms (terms of sense) are meaningful only in their reduction ta verified terms (see Carnap 1928. for the most lucid exposition of this position). Such empiricist reductionism, however, has been refuted for at least half a century. We now know that all observational terms (i.e., referential terms) are only contingently meaningful and further that all terms of sense can be antecedently meaningful: meaningful without recourse to empirical reduction (see Feyerabend 1972; Sup!w 1974). Specifically, there are no ‘object terms’, and terms which are otherwise meaningful are so without any ielation to the world. Haiman can be allowed his oversight of recent work in the philosophy of science, but he cannot be excused from avoiding any mention of those semanticists who have worked successfully within completely intensional structures of meaning: namely the ’ 1 might also point out here that dwofariotl does not mean r+ww, and thus his argument falls from the beginning. All terms have denot;ltion (core meanings). bul not all terms have reference (object in the world). We all know what a ur~icorwis: we can identify its fundamentally meaningful features (denotation). But none of us has had sensory input from the animal (reference).
workers in Artilicial Intelligence and the representation of knowledge. Schank and Abelson (1977) Winograd (1972). and many, many others (see especially the collection edited by Charniak and Wilks 1976) have repeatedly demonstrated that elaborate systems -,f meaning based on sense relations can be developed: Schank’s Conceptual Dependency and Causal Syntax are perfect examples. These intensional systems, moreover, are neither ultimately defined in terms of synonymy (as Haiman, p. 333, says ali such systems are) nor in terms of the reduction of sense to reference. No one could seriously claim that computers have experience of the world! They have no culture, no denotation4 encyclopedia; they do not learn meaning li-om ostension. Computers have classic intensional systems of meaning. with relations of causality and such defined in terms of other concepts internal to the system, and these intensional structures allow computers to process sentences and texts perfectly well, to reproduce such texts, to abstract them, to answer questions about them. and to make inferences about them. All of this is done on the basis of extracting meaning from a text by means of a dictionary of sense relations - defined a-experientially. But all of Haiman’s arguments on this first distinction arc. I suggest, a sidestep. a cover-up of his true intentions. He is actually an adherent of the new bandwagon position against rationalism and universal grammar. His attempt to recast ail linguistic knowledge in terms of cultural knowledge to subsume the dictionary by the encyclopedia - is actually a disguised version of recent arguments against universal linguistic knowledge, against a-cultural lingui$ tic knowledge. Haiman, like Russell and Quine before him. points “out that the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance [encyclopedia, WF] and knowledge by description [dictionary. WF] ‘varies considerably from one person to another’” (Haiman 1980: 335), and that “there is no unquestioned stock of shared experience” (Haiman 1980: 335) - i.e., there is no absolute, comtnon world. But Haiman has overlooked J presupposition in his (and Russell’s and Quine’s) argument: to argue for the culture-specilicity of the distirwtiorrbetween knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description presupposes the distinction between the two. What is at stake, here, is the validity of the distinction only, not its variance; the distinction may vary from person to person, but the distinction itself remains intact despite the variance. Haiman has confused, at this point, values with variables, as most people who want to get rid of universals do. It is the values for the variables on this distinction which each ‘culture decides - as each culture decides its own values (terms) for variables on a universal color gradience (see Berlin and Kay 1968) --. rrot rite vuriabks. To argue about universal variables on the basis of values is a needless and dangerous conflation, and one which Haiman will be guilty of later, as we will see. The fmt set of rebuttals has been quite complicated, and in actuality, I do not think that Haiman’ fist claim for the unity of linguistic and cultural knowledge merits all this overkill. His point, here, is simply built on a paradox. If all meaning is experience and if there is “no unquestioned stock of shared experience”, then there is no denotation, except in the trivial sense that the world exists. but does so differently for every im!ividual. There is, then, no such thing as culture - no common knowledge across individuals - and thus there is no such thing as the encyclopedia.
Haiman has a penchant for paradox. If we consickr his next set of arguments - for the blurring of the distinction between objec:ive and subjective fact (pp. 336-39) 2 we find another one. Haiman argues that “there are no hard facts, and all science is ethnoscience” {Haiman 1980: 337). There is no objectivity for Haiman; the world is
Essence/accidence, or corejperiphery as it is more commonly known, is a universal dihrcfiorl, not a universal value. In fact, the universality of this distinction has been repeatedly demonstrated by Eleanor Rosch, in her work on the internal structure of cognitive-semantic categories. She has shown in numerous places (Rosch 1973. 1975, 1978, e.g.) that adult semantic categories are universally structured from prototypical to peripheral instances. In studies of color-naming, for example, Rosch has shown that speakers of languages without certain color terms can be taught the color terms they lack, and that they learn these new terms in a manner which replicates Berlin and Kay’s claims for universality of color-term structure: specifically, they learn the terms in the evolutionary gradience of variables which Berlin and Kay posit, and more importantly, they organize their. cognitive-semantic categories from prototype to periphery (from essence to accidence). Essence/accidence is therefore not a tendentious philosophical distinction which can be blurred just because it appears to be metaphysical. Essence; accidence is a universal principle of the organization of cognitive-semantic categories. a fact which has been empirically validated across cultures.L Now, while Haiman’s previous positions seem to be based on paradoxes and oversights, his next set of arguments is based on an oversimplification. He argues that there is no distinction between semantics and pragmatics, that semantics is pragmatics, and thus the dictionary (semantics) is really the encyclopedia (pragmatics). He does this by showing that a “constructed context” (a la Makkai’s contextual adaptability principle) can render any statement meaningful, even if that statement is “normally” ungrammatical and meaningless. I mdwstand wq~jks is, then, meaningful if it is understood in the context of: What does John like ,Ji?rhrdfbst:’ I mdwstand [that it is] ruajj%s [that Job likes fbr hreal#stj. I have no objection to his demonstration that anything cai be made meaningful: to situating the utterance, In this, I think that Haiman is quite correct. What I do object to, however, is his calling this pragmatics and contrasting it with semarltics in order to put forth a convenient distinction for him to blur. Once he recasts this problem in terms of semantics/pragmatics, he can assume that everyone knows that there
2 I must also say that even if we &Id find believable evidence for eliminating the essencei accidence distinction - which we cannot - this blurring in no way supports Hairnan’s original claim: to make the dictionary into the encyclopedia. To do this, we would have to prove that all essence is accidence, which would be very diflicult to do since if everything is accidence, then no generalizations can be made at all, and an absolute statement such as All essem~~ is accidmce is nonsense because the meaning of all terms - even the terms arridertce and essrnt~e is variable and contingent. Haiman, in ciaiming that all meaning is culture-bound and variable, falls into what I call Wharfs Epistemological Dilemma: If all meaning is accidence, if all meaning is culture-bound, how does one ever find this out. ‘7 In any case, all that a blurring of essence and accidence does is to tell us that it is difficult to distinguish between a dictionary and an encyclopedia in some cases, not that the latter subsumes the former. If the two are indistinct, then we ate equally justified in claiming that the dictionary subsumes the encyclopedia.
is a semantics,pragmatics opposilion in linguistics and can capitalize on the most abused term in the linguistics literature: ~~,q~rti~s. USC. and What is prugmutic.~. ‘) How does Haiman define it‘? He calls it (*f>lrtL>.vt, upp~f~p~;atcn~,s.s. All of these are theoretical catch-&. As far as I am concerned, those terms are meaningless since they admit anything under their provinces (yet they are the most commonly misconceived labels for prrrgnwrics). They are borderless notions and give us no explanations (I assume that explanations dcrivc from disthvioru made in the world). Prcrgnwti~.~, as t3r as I can tell, has two meanings in the linguistics literature: ( 1) I/~,wM-.w, (2) 2lc.f.In the first sense, l)~qqnttrti~.sis, then. a completely semantic notion since research h;rs shown us that discourse structure can be captured entirely within the mechanisms post&ted for semantic analysis. Grimes’ (1975) work, ti>r example. demonstrates. by means of rhetorical predicate structure, that a lirst-order propositiontil logic describes discourse. Furthermore. discourse itself has been shown to have its own prrtgmrrk structure (see Van Dijk 1977). How could something which is supposedly pragmatics have additional pragmatic structure’? Discourse is a semantic entity. The other definition of p~*qq~mtic~.s wt seems to be sound. but construing pragmatics as act presupposes a distinction between pragmatics and semantics. Searle’s (1969) work demonstrates this clearly: there is a precise distinction between the force of a statement and the content of a statement. No amount of inclusion of extralinguistic, scicial information disturbs this dichotomy, although this information may tcli us why statements have the force they do. But the validity of the distinction remains intact when a sound definition of ptwgttturks is used. To reiterate. I must say here that Haiman has indeed shown that meaningfulness depends in some cases on information beyond the proposition, but not that this information can be called pcrgtttcttic.s. He therefore cannot resort to arguments based on an assumed distinction in linguistics when no one knows what the element in question (prrrgnttrti~~s) means. Haiman clearly dots not knou, what it means, and a serious excursion into a definition of it reveals that it is distinct from semantics: the dictionary.’ encyclopedia distinction is thus salvaged. Haiman next sets out to blur the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements an old program which supposedly blurs the distinction between dictionaries and encyclopedias since the former contain analytic statements while the latter contain synthetic ones. His argument is entirely Quine’s famous argument: “I have almost nothing to add to Quine’s very satisfactory demolition of the analytiq’synthetic distinction” (Haiman 1980: 349). And he refuses to consider Katz’s (1972) counters to Quine because he assumes that Linsky’s (1972) responses to Katz have demolished Katz’s position. I have no intention of recapitulating the entire analytic/synthetic debate. I simply want to point out that a reasoned and full consideration of all the si:ies of this debate reveals that the analytic,‘synthetic distinction remains. Haiman gives JS none of that. Quinedemonstrated that whiie there are clear cases of analytic and synthetic sentences (A hudtelor is mtttwrid and foittr is hew, respectively), there are also sentences which
indeterminately synthetic. SUOII. n/rile by Ihc rub o!’ language true by experience? Since we cannot decide this rigorously, Quine maintained that there is no clear criterion for this distinction, apart from verification by experience, and thus all sentences are ultimately synthetic since experience must be the final arbiter for all truth. What Haiman selectively chooses to avoid is Grice and Strawson’s (1956) immediate response to Quine: namely that the criteria1 problem is relevant only for indeterminate instances and that clear cases of the distinction (such as the above two sentences) are not discredited by indeterminate c;tscs. Illustration of points where the analytic,synthetic distinction is undecidable merely casts the distinction onto ;I scale rather than onto a dichotomy:
or
In iiny GISC. the cxislcncc. the qucs~ion of whcthcr
if ~hcy do cxkl.
they arc an~~lyric or synthetic.
st;htemcnts which art’ clearly clnssiliahlc our hesitation
of stalcmcnts ;I~OUI which it is pointless to pres
over which has difftxnt
~OCS not cn~ail the non-c’xistcnct’ of’
in one ar another sources. (G-ice
of thcsc ways and of slatsmcnt>
and Strawson
1956: 1%)
Furthermore, Hairnan’s complete disregard of Katz’s arguments in assuming that they are disproven forces him to overlook the fact that Katz has indeed set out 11 rigorous criterion for determining analytic vs synthetic: namely mental computation. ;I semantic’ matching procedure derived from theoretical definition (the reader is asked to consult the original statements on the matter in Katz 1967):’ And nowhere does Haiman explicitly mention Linsky’s refutation of Katz. where Linsky concedes that Katz, minimally, has found an adequate criterion for defining analytic vs synthetic: “Katz’s procedure leaves him unopen to the charge of explicating analyticity and contradictoriness in terms of a concept equally in need of explication . , . Thus, we escape what may be called ‘Qume’s circle’. . .*’ (Linsky 1972: 476). What Linsky counters are several extensions of Katz’s proposal, not the original criterion on which to base the analytic. synthetic distinction, which is the whole issue at stake here. Thus, Katz’s procedure stands and Quine’s argument cannot be summoned irr fo/o in support of a blurring of dictionaries and encyclopedias. In his discussion of this problem, Haiman confesses: “in attacking the distinction between analytic and synthetic truth, I may be attacking a straw man . ...’ (Haiman 1980: 349). I disagree with his self-denigration, He is ;tttacking a crucial issue in the encyclopedia,‘dictionary debate, but he ;tssumes that the problem is well-settled in his favor when he attacks it. This is not a straw-man technique; this is question-begging. The issue is hardly settled. What is a straw man, however, is Hairnan’s final argument for blurring the diStillCtiOll between dictionaries and encyclopedias. He argues (pp. 350-54) that there is no thus there is no distinction in meaning between proper nouns and common nouns; ’
And this mental match is not the vicious synonymy which Quine and Haiman
of using lkr the analytic straightforward
criterion:
see Katz (lY67: 42-43).
mutching procedure.
~cuse everyone
where hc describes synonymy its ;I
60
Dixussio~i
distinction between an encyclopedia and a dictionary because the former are said to contain proper nouns while the latter contain common ones. I find Hairnan’s position that proper and common nouns have the same meaning compelling and convincing: they each have only sense, accidental designation, variable meaning, This is Russell’s position, that “there corresponds to every name [proper or common, WF] a ‘backing description’ which gives it its sense” (Haiman 1980: 351). And Haiman adheres to this unity of meaning for proper and common nouns: “My own view is that of Russell” (Haiman 1980:353). This, as I said, is very compelling, but I have two problems wit it: (I) I fail to see how it is at all relevant to the discussion; (2) on a closer look, I see that this position puts him back in his original paradox of eliminating the very thing he wants as his ultimate expiicans. As to (I), Haiman claims that a blurring of the distinction between proper and common nouns will blur the distinction between encyclopedias and dictionaries because “All lexicographers agree that a distinguishing characteristic of encyclopedias is that they include entries for proper names, while purely linguistic dictionaries do not” (Haiman 1980: 350). Frankly, the only people who make such a claim are the people Haiman cites (Malkiel and Haas). Most lexicographers distinguish between dictionaries and encyclopedias on the basis of amount of information and the insertion of (Good Lord) ‘context’ into definitions. The question of proper and common nouns is a pseudo-issue, raised to controversy for the sake of controversy only. As to (2), if nouns are similarly meaningful through sense, then whatever happened to the ultimate explicans of rcfirertce, which grounded all meaning in cwltlrre? “The ‘backing descriptions’ (and hence the sense)” (Haiman 1980: 352) of language are crucial to all meaning because it “is by virtue of this descriptive backing, which the man on the street shares. with Einstein’s colleagues, that he refers to the same individual as they do” (Haiman 1980: 354). Thus, sense determitm reference! Haiman’s original argument was that sense derivedjiom reference! I thought that his original claim was that intension was ‘really’ extension. I also thought that there was supposed to be “no unquestioned stock of shared experience” (Haiman 1980: 335), yet “thanks to a core of common culture which we share with our interlocutors”, ‘we can talk to each other. I thought Haiman would have us believe originally that cultu~ = rejkrence = world = experience. Thus, there is no common experience, but there is common experience. This is very odd logic, to say the least. Here, Haiman’s arguments ‘stop, and they end on the paradoxical note on which they began. He has attacked the dictionary/encyclopedia question on the proper criteria1 grounds. As Katz (1972: 76) says: “The question . . . is not whether there is such a distinction, but rather on what basis it has to be drawn”. But he has clearly not demonstrated that any of the traditional criteria for distinguishing between the two are faulty or blurred. He argues from oversight, oversimplification, and paradox, One can only conclude that the dictionary withstands this onslaught of encyclopedic reduction and remains a distinct entity.
61
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53
DISCUSSION In defense of the dictionary: A response to Haiman William FRAWLZY
This paper is a response to John Hairnan’s ‘Dictionaries and Encyclopedias (L~Q+vM 50. 329-57). It is argued that Hairnan Ws in his attempts to blur the distinctions which have been traditionally taken to separate dictionaries from encyclopedias: language’ culture: subjective fact/objective fact; essenceiaccidence; semantics;pragmatics; analytic truth/synthetic truth; proper nouns/common nouns. Haiman’s case is built on oversigtits, oversimplifications, and paradoxes. He blurs no distinctions. and he does not subsume the dictionary under the enc.)-clopedia. The dictionary is a distinct entity.
In a recent article in this journal, John Haiman (1980) argued that there is no distinction between (theoretical) dictionaries and (theoretical) encyclopedias because the traditional criteria for distinguishing between the two are misconceived. He argued that there is no distinction between linguistic knowledge and cultural knowledge, none between subjective and objective f&t, none between essence and accidence, none between semantics and pragmatics, none between analytic and synthetic knowledge, and none between common and proper names. Since dictionaries are said to contain the first member of the above pairs of distinctions while encyclopedias are said to contain the second member, his blurring of these distinctions consequently blurs the distinction between encyclopedias and dictionaries. This distinction, to him, “is not only one that is practically impossible to make, but one that is fundamentally misconceived. Dictionaries we encyclopedias*’ (Haiman 1980: 331). Thus, for Haiman, not only is the distinction blurred, but the encyclopedia subsumes the dictionary. I am unconvinced by any of his arguments. 1 find that paradoxes, oversights, and irrelevancies abound in his essay, and I want to examine his claims closely to point out these problems. The upshot of my investigation is a defense of the autonomy of the dictionary. Haiman blurs no distinctions .and in fact eliminates his very position by his own arguments. Haiman’s fust set of arguments (pp. 331-36) is designed to show that linguistic knowledge is cultural knowledge. From the onset, however, he does not address this 0024-3841/81/0000-OOOO/SO2.50
o 1981 North-Holland
question proper. He immediately construes the linguistic/cultural distinction as the sense/ referen& intension;cxtension distinction. I do not see how tInis construal eliminates or iIluminabe#s the problem of language :md culture. 1 suspect that he intends this argument to show lihat linguistic knowledge has its analogue in intension and that cultural knowledge has its analogue in reference. but this is never clearly stated. It is patently untrue, ofcourse, that linguistic knowledge is sense while cultural knowledge is reference: if ethnoscience has taught us anything. it is that cultural knowledge is a complicated intensional structure (see Werner 1972. 1978, for representative arguments) But even if we grant Haiman’s construal of the distinction, the arguments are flawed. The gist of his position is that intension is “useless unless the words are at some point anchored in reality. Denc>tation is the basis of mear;ing” (Hairnan 1980: 336). He goes to great pains to demonstrate the referential origins of meaning, with all sorts of invocations of empiricists in support: “There are reasons no less powerful [than the I’act that even mathematics has conceded t? empiricism in its basic tenets, WF] for recognizing the provisional and empirical cha:;icter of the basic units from which definitions are put together” (Haiman 1980: 336). Even if culture could be called reference (and language called sense), this argument is wrong. It is, first of all, predicated upon a logical fallacy - argl;ment from the source. Tc clair,l that meaning is ultimately referential, that all meaning comes from denotation and this is not true is to say nothing about all meaning.’ Ultimate tests of meaning are not the only tests of meaning; no amount of appeal to tne origins of something will explain the present nature of something. I am not indistinct from my parents because I come from them. nor is mutton ultimately or ‘really’ sheep because sheep are its source. What Haiman wants to do here is to use the old logical empiricist arguments that all terms in any language are reducible to observational terms (he invokes Russell, pp. 333-34. on ‘object terms’) through correspondence rules and reduction stdtemenis - that any theoretical terms (terms of sense) are meaningful only in their reduction ta verified terms (see Carnap 1928. for the most lucid exposition of this position). Such empiricist reductionism, however, has been refuted for at least half a century. We now know that all observational terms (i.e., referential terms) are only contingently meaningful and further that all terms of sense can be antecedently meaningful: meaningful without recourse to empirical reduction (see Feyerabend 1972; Sup!w 1974). Specifically, there are no ‘object terms’, and terms which are otherwise meaningful are so without any ielation to the world. Haiman can be allowed his oversight of recent work in the philosophy of science, but he cannot be excused from avoiding any mention of those semanticists who have worked successfully within completely intensional structures of meaning: namely the ’ 1 might also point out here that dwofariotl does not mean r+ww, and thus his argument falls from the beginning. All terms have denot;ltion (core meanings). bul not all terms have reference (object in the world). We all know what a ur~icorwis: we can identify its fundamentally meaningful features (denotation). But none of us has had sensory input from the animal (reference).
workers in Artilicial Intelligence and the representation of knowledge. Schank and Abelson (1977) Winograd (1972). and many, many others (see especially the collection edited by Charniak and Wilks 1976) have repeatedly demonstrated that elaborate systems -,f meaning based on sense relations can be developed: Schank’s Conceptual Dependency and Causal Syntax are perfect examples. These intensional systems, moreover, are neither ultimately defined in terms of synonymy (as Haiman, p. 333, says ali such systems are) nor in terms of the reduction of sense to reference. No one could seriously claim that computers have experience of the world! They have no culture, no denotation4 encyclopedia; they do not learn meaning li-om ostension. Computers have classic intensional systems of meaning. with relations of causality and such defined in terms of other concepts internal to the system, and these intensional structures allow computers to process sentences and texts perfectly well, to reproduce such texts, to abstract them, to answer questions about them. and to make inferences about them. All of this is done on the basis of extracting meaning from a text by means of a dictionary of sense relations - defined a-experientially. But all of Haiman’s arguments on this first distinction arc. I suggest, a sidestep. a cover-up of his true intentions. He is actually an adherent of the new bandwagon position against rationalism and universal grammar. His attempt to recast ail linguistic knowledge in terms of cultural knowledge to subsume the dictionary by the encyclopedia - is actually a disguised version of recent arguments against universal linguistic knowledge, against a-cultural lingui$ tic knowledge. Haiman, like Russell and Quine before him. points “out that the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance [encyclopedia, WF] and knowledge by description [dictionary. WF] ‘varies considerably from one person to another’” (Haiman 1980: 335), and that “there is no unquestioned stock of shared experience” (Haiman 1980: 335) - i.e., there is no absolute, comtnon world. But Haiman has overlooked J presupposition in his (and Russell’s and Quine’s) argument: to argue for the culture-specilicity of the distirwtiorrbetween knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description presupposes the distinction between the two. What is at stake, here, is the validity of the distinction only, not its variance; the distinction may vary from person to person, but the distinction itself remains intact despite the variance. Haiman has confused, at this point, values with variables, as most people who want to get rid of universals do. It is the values for the variables on this distinction which each ‘culture decides - as each culture decides its own values (terms) for variables on a universal color gradience (see Berlin and Kay 1968) --. rrot rite vuriabks. To argue about universal variables on the basis of values is a needless and dangerous conflation, and one which Haiman will be guilty of later, as we will see. The fmt set of rebuttals has been quite complicated, and in actuality, I do not think that Haiman’ fist claim for the unity of linguistic and cultural knowledge merits all this overkill. His point, here, is simply built on a paradox. If all meaning is experience and if there is “no unquestioned stock of shared experience”, then there is no denotation, except in the trivial sense that the world exists. but does so differently for every im!ividual. There is, then, no such thing as culture - no common knowledge across individuals - and thus there is no such thing as the encyclopedia.
Haiman has a penchant for paradox. If we consickr his next set of arguments - for the blurring of the distinction between objec:ive and subjective fact (pp. 336-39) 2 we find another one. Haiman argues that “there are no hard facts, and all science is ethnoscience” {Haiman 1980: 337). There is no objectivity for Haiman; the world is
Essence/accidence, or corejperiphery as it is more commonly known, is a universal dihrcfiorl, not a universal value. In fact, the universality of this distinction has been repeatedly demonstrated by Eleanor Rosch, in her work on the internal structure of cognitive-semantic categories. She has shown in numerous places (Rosch 1973. 1975, 1978, e.g.) that adult semantic categories are universally structured from prototypical to peripheral instances. In studies of color-naming, for example, Rosch has shown that speakers of languages without certain color terms can be taught the color terms they lack, and that they learn these new terms in a manner which replicates Berlin and Kay’s claims for universality of color-term structure: specifically, they learn the terms in the evolutionary gradience of variables which Berlin and Kay posit, and more importantly, they organize their. cognitive-semantic categories from prototype to periphery (from essence to accidence). Essence/accidence is therefore not a tendentious philosophical distinction which can be blurred just because it appears to be metaphysical. Essence; accidence is a universal principle of the organization of cognitive-semantic categories. a fact which has been empirically validated across cultures.L Now, while Haiman’s previous positions seem to be based on paradoxes and oversights, his next set of arguments is based on an oversimplification. He argues that there is no distinction between semantics and pragmatics, that semantics is pragmatics, and thus the dictionary (semantics) is really the encyclopedia (pragmatics). He does this by showing that a “constructed context” (a la Makkai’s contextual adaptability principle) can render any statement meaningful, even if that statement is “normally” ungrammatical and meaningless. I mdwstand wq~jks is, then, meaningful if it is understood in the context of: What does John like ,Ji?rhrdfbst:’ I mdwstand [that it is] ruajj%s [that Job likes fbr hreal#stj. I have no objection to his demonstration that anything cai be made meaningful: to situating the utterance, In this, I think that Haiman is quite correct. What I do object to, however, is his calling this pragmatics and contrasting it with semarltics in order to put forth a convenient distinction for him to blur. Once he recasts this problem in terms of semantics/pragmatics, he can assume that everyone knows that there
2 I must also say that even if we &Id find believable evidence for eliminating the essencei accidence distinction - which we cannot - this blurring in no way supports Hairnan’s original claim: to make the dictionary into the encyclopedia. To do this, we would have to prove that all essence is accidence, which would be very diflicult to do since if everything is accidence, then no generalizations can be made at all, and an absolute statement such as All essem~~ is accidmce is nonsense because the meaning of all terms - even the terms arridertce and essrnt~e is variable and contingent. Haiman, in ciaiming that all meaning is culture-bound and variable, falls into what I call Wharfs Epistemological Dilemma: If all meaning is accidence, if all meaning is culture-bound, how does one ever find this out. ‘7 In any case, all that a blurring of essence and accidence does is to tell us that it is difficult to distinguish between a dictionary and an encyclopedia in some cases, not that the latter subsumes the former. If the two are indistinct, then we ate equally justified in claiming that the dictionary subsumes the encyclopedia.
is a semantics,pragmatics opposilion in linguistics and can capitalize on the most abused term in the linguistics literature: ~~,q~rti~s. USC. and What is prugmutic.~. ‘) How does Haiman define it‘? He calls it (*f>lrtL>.vt, upp~f~p~;atcn~,s.s. All of these are theoretical catch-&. As far as I am concerned, those terms are meaningless since they admit anything under their provinces (yet they are the most commonly misconceived labels for prrrgnwrics). They are borderless notions and give us no explanations (I assume that explanations dcrivc from disthvioru made in the world). Prcrgnwti~.~, as t3r as I can tell, has two meanings in the linguistics literature: ( 1) I/~,wM-.w, (2) 2lc.f.In the first sense, l)~qqnttrti~.sis, then. a completely semantic notion since research h;rs shown us that discourse structure can be captured entirely within the mechanisms post&ted for semantic analysis. Grimes’ (1975) work, ti>r example. demonstrates. by means of rhetorical predicate structure, that a lirst-order propositiontil logic describes discourse. Furthermore. discourse itself has been shown to have its own prrtgmrrk structure (see Van Dijk 1977). How could something which is supposedly pragmatics have additional pragmatic structure’? Discourse is a semantic entity. The other definition of p~*qq~mtic~.s wt seems to be sound. but construing pragmatics as act presupposes a distinction between pragmatics and semantics. Searle’s (1969) work demonstrates this clearly: there is a precise distinction between the force of a statement and the content of a statement. No amount of inclusion of extralinguistic, scicial information disturbs this dichotomy, although this information may tcli us why statements have the force they do. But the validity of the distinction remains intact when a sound definition of ptwgttturks is used. To reiterate. I must say here that Haiman has indeed shown that meaningfulness depends in some cases on information beyond the proposition, but not that this information can be called pcrgtttcttic.s. He therefore cannot resort to arguments based on an assumed distinction in linguistics when no one knows what the element in question (prrrgnttrti~~s) means. Haiman clearly dots not knou, what it means, and a serious excursion into a definition of it reveals that it is distinct from semantics: the dictionary.’ encyclopedia distinction is thus salvaged. Haiman next sets out to blur the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements an old program which supposedly blurs the distinction between dictionaries and encyclopedias since the former contain analytic statements while the latter contain synthetic ones. His argument is entirely Quine’s famous argument: “I have almost nothing to add to Quine’s very satisfactory demolition of the analytiq’synthetic distinction” (Haiman 1980: 349). And he refuses to consider Katz’s (1972) counters to Quine because he assumes that Linsky’s (1972) responses to Katz have demolished Katz’s position. I have no intention of recapitulating the entire analytic/synthetic debate. I simply want to point out that a reasoned and full consideration of all the si:ies of this debate reveals that the analytic,‘synthetic distinction remains. Haiman gives JS none of that. Quinedemonstrated that whiie there are clear cases of analytic and synthetic sentences (A hudtelor is mtttwrid and foittr is hew, respectively), there are also sentences which
indeterminately synthetic. SUOII. n/rile by Ihc rub o!’ language true by experience? Since we cannot decide this rigorously, Quine maintained that there is no clear criterion for this distinction, apart from verification by experience, and thus all sentences are ultimately synthetic since experience must be the final arbiter for all truth. What Haiman selectively chooses to avoid is Grice and Strawson’s (1956) immediate response to Quine: namely that the criteria1 problem is relevant only for indeterminate instances and that clear cases of the distinction (such as the above two sentences) are not discredited by indeterminate c;tscs. Illustration of points where the analytic,synthetic distinction is undecidable merely casts the distinction onto ;I scale rather than onto a dichotomy:
or
In iiny GISC. the cxislcncc. the qucs~ion of whcthcr
if ~hcy do cxkl.
they arc an~~lyric or synthetic.
st;htemcnts which art’ clearly clnssiliahlc our hesitation
of stalcmcnts ;I~OUI which it is pointless to pres
over which has difftxnt
~OCS not cn~ail the non-c’xistcnct’ of’
in one ar another sources. (G-ice
of thcsc ways and of slatsmcnt>
and Strawson
1956: 1%)
Furthermore, Hairnan’s complete disregard of Katz’s arguments in assuming that they are disproven forces him to overlook the fact that Katz has indeed set out 11 rigorous criterion for determining analytic vs synthetic: namely mental computation. ;I semantic’ matching procedure derived from theoretical definition (the reader is asked to consult the original statements on the matter in Katz 1967):’ And nowhere does Haiman explicitly mention Linsky’s refutation of Katz. where Linsky concedes that Katz, minimally, has found an adequate criterion for defining analytic vs synthetic: “Katz’s procedure leaves him unopen to the charge of explicating analyticity and contradictoriness in terms of a concept equally in need of explication . , . Thus, we escape what may be called ‘Qume’s circle’. . .*’ (Linsky 1972: 476). What Linsky counters are several extensions of Katz’s proposal, not the original criterion on which to base the analytic. synthetic distinction, which is the whole issue at stake here. Thus, Katz’s procedure stands and Quine’s argument cannot be summoned irr fo/o in support of a blurring of dictionaries and encyclopedias. In his discussion of this problem, Haiman confesses: “in attacking the distinction between analytic and synthetic truth, I may be attacking a straw man . ...’ (Haiman 1980: 349). I disagree with his self-denigration, He is ;tttacking a crucial issue in the encyclopedia,‘dictionary debate, but he ;tssumes that the problem is well-settled in his favor when he attacks it. This is not a straw-man technique; this is question-begging. The issue is hardly settled. What is a straw man, however, is Hairnan’s final argument for blurring the diStillCtiOll between dictionaries and encyclopedias. He argues (pp. 350-54) that there is no thus there is no distinction in meaning between proper nouns and common nouns; ’
And this mental match is not the vicious synonymy which Quine and Haiman
of using lkr the analytic straightforward
criterion:
see Katz (lY67: 42-43).
mutching procedure.
~cuse everyone
where hc describes synonymy its ;I
60
Dixussio~i
distinction between an encyclopedia and a dictionary because the former are said to contain proper nouns while the latter contain common ones. I find Hairnan’s position that proper and common nouns have the same meaning compelling and convincing: they each have only sense, accidental designation, variable meaning, This is Russell’s position, that “there corresponds to every name [proper or common, WF] a ‘backing description’ which gives it its sense” (Haiman 1980: 351). And Haiman adheres to this unity of meaning for proper and common nouns: “My own view is that of Russell” (Haiman 1980:353). This, as I said, is very compelling, but I have two problems wit it: (I) I fail to see how it is at all relevant to the discussion; (2) on a closer look, I see that this position puts him back in his original paradox of eliminating the very thing he wants as his ultimate expiicans. As to (I), Haiman claims that a blurring of the distinction between proper and common nouns will blur the distinction between encyclopedias and dictionaries because “All lexicographers agree that a distinguishing characteristic of encyclopedias is that they include entries for proper names, while purely linguistic dictionaries do not” (Haiman 1980: 350). Frankly, the only people who make such a claim are the people Haiman cites (Malkiel and Haas). Most lexicographers distinguish between dictionaries and encyclopedias on the basis of amount of information and the insertion of (Good Lord) ‘context’ into definitions. The question of proper and common nouns is a pseudo-issue, raised to controversy for the sake of controversy only. As to (2), if nouns are similarly meaningful through sense, then whatever happened to the ultimate explicans of rcfirertce, which grounded all meaning in cwltlrre? “The ‘backing descriptions’ (and hence the sense)” (Haiman 1980: 352) of language are crucial to all meaning because it “is by virtue of this descriptive backing, which the man on the street shares. with Einstein’s colleagues, that he refers to the same individual as they do” (Haiman 1980: 354). Thus, sense determitm reference! Haiman’s original argument was that sense derivedjiom reference! I thought that his original claim was that intension was ‘really’ extension. I also thought that there was supposed to be “no unquestioned stock of shared experience” (Haiman 1980: 335), yet “thanks to a core of common culture which we share with our interlocutors”, ‘we can talk to each other. I thought Haiman would have us believe originally that cultu~ = rejkrence = world = experience. Thus, there is no common experience, but there is common experience. This is very odd logic, to say the least. Here, Haiman’s arguments ‘stop, and they end on the paradoxical note on which they began. He has attacked the dictionary/encyclopedia question on the proper criteria1 grounds. As Katz (1972: 76) says: “The question . . . is not whether there is such a distinction, but rather on what basis it has to be drawn”. But he has clearly not demonstrated that any of the traditional criteria for distinguishing between the two are faulty or blurred. He argues from oversight, oversimplification, and paradox, One can only conclude that the dictionary withstands this onslaught of encyclopedic reduction and remains a distinct entity.
61
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