Most readers will have had at least some exposure to John Searleās interview by Tim Crane, which was published earlier this week. It was then hotly debated in the philosophical blogosphere at large (in particular at the Leiter Reports). Together with Peter Ungerās interview published roughly around the same time, it seems that the āold guardā is on a Quixotesque crusade to chastise the younger crowd for the allegedly misguided, sorrow state of current philosophy. Now, I do think there is some truth to be found in what Searle says about the role of formal modeling in the philosophy of language, but his objections do not seem to apply at least to a growing body of research in formal semantics/philosophy of language. Moreover, it is not clear whether his own preferred methodology (judging from his seminal work on speech acts etc.) in fact does justice to what he himself views as the primary goal of philosophical analyses of language.
Here are the crucial passages from the interview (all excerpts from the passage posted by Leiter), the main bits in bold:
Well, what has happened in the subject I started out with, the philosophy of language, is that, roughly speaking, formal modeling has replaced insight. My own conception is that the formal modeling by itself does not give us any insight into the function of language.
Any account of the philosophy of language ought to stick as closely as possible to the psychology of actual human speakers and hearers. And that doesnāt happen now. What happens now is that many philosophers aim to build a formal model where they can map a puzzling element of language onto the formal model, and people think that gives you an insight. ā¦
And this goes back to Russellās Theory of Descriptions. ā¦ I think this was a fatal move to think that youāve got to get these intuitive ideas mapped on to a calculus like, in this case, the predicate calculus, which has its own requirements. It is a disastrously inadequate conception of language.
ā¦ Thatās my main objection to contemporary philosophy: theyāve lost sight of the questions. It sounds ridiculous to say this because this was the objection that all the old fogeys made to us when I was a kid in Oxford and we were investigating language. But that is why Iām really out of sympathy. And Iām going to write a book on the philosophy of language in which I will say how I think it ought to be done, and how we really should try to stay very close to the psychological reality of what it is to actually talk about things.
I am largely in agreement with Searle both on what the ultimate goals of philosophy of language should be, and on the failure of much (though not all!) of the work currently done with formal methods to achieve this goal. Firstly, I agree that āany account of the philosophy of language ought to stick as closely as possible to the psychology of actual human speakers and hearersā. Language should not be seen as a freestanding entity, as a collection of structures to be investigated with no connection to the most basic fact about human languages, namely that they are used by humans, and an absolutely crucial component of human life. (I take this to be a general Wittgensteinian point, but one which can be endorsed even if one does not feel inclined to buy the whole Wittgenstein package.)
I also agree that much of what is done under the banner of āformal semanticsā does not satisfy the requirement of sticking as closely as possible to the psychology of actual human speakers and hearers. In my four years working at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) in Amsterdam, Iāve attended (and even chaired!) countless talks where speakers presented a sophisticated formal machinery to account for a particular feature of a given language, but the machinery was not intended in any way to be a description of the psychological phenomena underlying the relevant linguistic phenomena. It became one of my standard questions at such talks: āDo you intend your formal model to correspond to actual cognitive processes in language users?ā More often than not, the answer was simply āNoā, often accompanied by a puzzled look that basically meant āWhy would I even want that?ā. My general response to this kind of research is very much along the lines of what Searle says.
However, there is much work currently being done, broadly within the formal semantics tradition, that does not display this lack of connection with the āpsychological realityā of language users. Some of the people I could mention here are (full disclosure: these are all colleagues or former colleagues!) Petra Hendriks, Jakub Szymanik, Katrin Schulz, and surely many others. (Further pointers in comments are welcome.) In particular, many of these researchers combine formal methods with empirical methods, for example conducting experiments of different kinds to test the predictions of their theories. In this body of research, formalisms are used to formulate theories in a precise way, leading to the design of new experiments and the interpretation of results. Formal models are thus producing new insights into the nature of language use (pace Searle), which are then put to test empirically.
And this brings me to my second objection to Searle: to what extent do the ātraditionalā methodologies in philosophy of language, in particular the methodologies employed by the ordinary language philosophy school (to which Searle may be said to belong), in fact stick as closely as possible to the psychology of language users? It seems to me that the best, if not the only, way to stick closely to the psychology of language users is to resort systematically to empirical methods, like conducting experiments or examining large corpora of text or speech (among others) ā in other words, precisely the kinds of methods the people I was talking about in the previous paragraph seem to be employing, alongside formal methods.
But this is not what Searle and many other philosophers of language seem to have done or still do: by and large, these ātraditionalā methods consist in consulting oneās own linguistic intuitions, being thus essentially introspection-based, or at best discussing oneās intuitions with oneās (equally philosophically trained) colleagues. As many have argued before me, it is not in any way clear that the introspection-based methodology is adequate to make these theories sufficiently empirically informed, and thus close to the psychology of language users. (But perhaps I am interpreting āpsychology of language usersā in a way different from Searleās.)
(On this topic, here is a plug for the spectacular Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, edited by Gillian Russell and Delia Graff Fara, which among other awesome features contains a whole section on different methodologies. Plus, the paperback edition is coming out next week!)
Thus, I conclude that it is not the use of formal methods as such that alienates the philosopher of language or linguist from āthe psychological reality of what it is to actually talk about thingsā. Formal methods can (and perhaps should!) be employed in the analysis of language, provided that other methodologies also be brought in, in particular methodologies that increase the empirical content of these theories.
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