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Modes of referring and the problem of universals,: An essay in metaphysics
164 pages, Unknown Binding
Published January 1, 1963
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April 13, 2024
For an obscure philosopher of language in the mid 20th century, this is an incredibly dense and forward thinking work.
DS Shwayder essentially offers a semantic scorekeeping framework to model how a statement refers to something. What differs from later scorekeeping models, like Brandom’s deontic scorekeeping model, is that Shwayder analyzes an ostensively referring expression (O.R.E.’s as he calls them), as his preferred discrete ‘object’ of analysis. As a discrete speech act, he considers them as moves in a language game, that have their own semantic relations elaborated in the conceptual relations that the expression purports to refer to.
So far, this is already a very complex way to try and get to universals, all with minimal pragmatic emphasis. He does look to particular and peculiar uses that elucidate the pragmatics, but he keeps them relegated to their conceptual purport in reference.
While I think there is a loss of resolution in respect to how inferences are made that allow us to justify and entitle our uses, his scope is purposefully limited for conceptual semantics just in a judgement itself, independent of the relations between judgements that would ground an argument. In some ways, this is truer to our ground-level empirical uses of statements that leave the argumentative forms implicit to the pragmatic contexts that situate them. But in other ways, the normative pragmatic contexts themselves are dim and taken for granted.
Perhaps the greatest sin in this monograph is one that frequently plagues midcentury analytic philosophers—that the emphasis on problems in foundations of mathematics obscures the conceptual primacy of universals themselves that are independent of philosophy of mathematics.
However the amount of time he spends on philosophy of mathematics (particularly the grueling last chapter) does show his sensitivity to the normative contexts that situate our mathematical uses as conceptual (semantic) uses. For example, his claim that our counting-uses situate our systematizing uses for numbering-uses is interesting, and which at the moment seems fundamentally right to me.
As a work of semantics, situating the different uses that grant us a secure reference is a tall order, and he provides a very interesting story of how we could refer to universals in this context. While this work did predate the popularity of debates on vagueness in Oxford and Cambridge, he can be forgiven for the potential scrutiny that those debates would have honed in on. For example, his emphasis on distinguishing-uses of O.R.E.’s could have contributed to the debate positively, but the higher order of semantics and logic for vagueness would seem to lead to different conclusions about the nature of universals, and one that would probably deflate his emphasis on mathematical universals that comprise the most grueling moments of this book.
Despite all this, I think DS Shwayder is an excellent albeit obscure figure working on the problem of universals with a distinct voice in the conversation. He is basically an analogue to an obscure scholastic monk who diligently provided an account of conceptualism on the problem of universals, obscured by the technical language of his milieu, that only God’s most neurotic soldiers would take an interest in.
In this respect, I can only recommend this book to more of God’s most neurotic soldiers who are interested in the problems of universals and midcentury analytic philosophy. I wouldn’t recommend reading this otherwise. Maybe if you are interested in modeling as a philosophical problem, this book might interest you, but the obscurity and density are both probably going to be barriers to your enjoyment. But if you are the target audience (the chances are high if you managed to find this book on Goodreads or even limp through this review), then I think you will be pleasantly surprised and absolutely delighted by DS Shwayder.
DS Shwayder essentially offers a semantic scorekeeping framework to model how a statement refers to something. What differs from later scorekeeping models, like Brandom’s deontic scorekeeping model, is that Shwayder analyzes an ostensively referring expression (O.R.E.’s as he calls them), as his preferred discrete ‘object’ of analysis. As a discrete speech act, he considers them as moves in a language game, that have their own semantic relations elaborated in the conceptual relations that the expression purports to refer to.
So far, this is already a very complex way to try and get to universals, all with minimal pragmatic emphasis. He does look to particular and peculiar uses that elucidate the pragmatics, but he keeps them relegated to their conceptual purport in reference.
While I think there is a loss of resolution in respect to how inferences are made that allow us to justify and entitle our uses, his scope is purposefully limited for conceptual semantics just in a judgement itself, independent of the relations between judgements that would ground an argument. In some ways, this is truer to our ground-level empirical uses of statements that leave the argumentative forms implicit to the pragmatic contexts that situate them. But in other ways, the normative pragmatic contexts themselves are dim and taken for granted.
Perhaps the greatest sin in this monograph is one that frequently plagues midcentury analytic philosophers—that the emphasis on problems in foundations of mathematics obscures the conceptual primacy of universals themselves that are independent of philosophy of mathematics.
However the amount of time he spends on philosophy of mathematics (particularly the grueling last chapter) does show his sensitivity to the normative contexts that situate our mathematical uses as conceptual (semantic) uses. For example, his claim that our counting-uses situate our systematizing uses for numbering-uses is interesting, and which at the moment seems fundamentally right to me.
As a work of semantics, situating the different uses that grant us a secure reference is a tall order, and he provides a very interesting story of how we could refer to universals in this context. While this work did predate the popularity of debates on vagueness in Oxford and Cambridge, he can be forgiven for the potential scrutiny that those debates would have honed in on. For example, his emphasis on distinguishing-uses of O.R.E.’s could have contributed to the debate positively, but the higher order of semantics and logic for vagueness would seem to lead to different conclusions about the nature of universals, and one that would probably deflate his emphasis on mathematical universals that comprise the most grueling moments of this book.
Despite all this, I think DS Shwayder is an excellent albeit obscure figure working on the problem of universals with a distinct voice in the conversation. He is basically an analogue to an obscure scholastic monk who diligently provided an account of conceptualism on the problem of universals, obscured by the technical language of his milieu, that only God’s most neurotic soldiers would take an interest in.
In this respect, I can only recommend this book to more of God’s most neurotic soldiers who are interested in the problems of universals and midcentury analytic philosophy. I wouldn’t recommend reading this otherwise. Maybe if you are interested in modeling as a philosophical problem, this book might interest you, but the obscurity and density are both probably going to be barriers to your enjoyment. But if you are the target audience (the chances are high if you managed to find this book on Goodreads or even limp through this review), then I think you will be pleasantly surprised and absolutely delighted by DS Shwayder.
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