Unshadowed thought; representation in thought and language.

by Charles Travis

This book mounts a sustained attack on ideas that are dear to many practitioners of analytic philosophy. Charles Travis targets the seductive illusion that--in Wittgenstein's terms--"if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it, he is operating a calculus according to definite rules." This book rejects the idea that thoughts are essentially representational items whose content is independent of context. In doing so, it undermines the foundations of much contemporary philosophy of mind. Travis's main argument in Unshadowed Thought is that linguistic expressions and forms are occasion-sensitive; they cannot be abstracted out of a concrete context. With compelling examples and a thoroughgoing scrutiny of opposing positions, his book systematically works out the implications of the work of J. L. Austin, Hilary Putnam, and John McDowell. Eloquently insisting that there is no particular way one must structure what one relates to, no one way one must represent it, Unshadowed Thought identifies and resists a certain strain of semantic Platonism that permeates current philosophy--a strain that has had profoundly troubling consequences for our ideas about attitudes and beliefs and for our views about what language might be.

Genres: Philosophy

Hardcover

First published January 29, 2001

Reviews

[Nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Travis's most interesting book, because it stays away from Wittgenstein exegesis and concentrates on his criticism of others and the exposition of his own view.

Roughly, a "shadow" is a representation that represents a particular state of affairs in virtue of having a particular structure. A sentence is a representation with a particular (syntactic and semantic) structure. If a sentence is taken to represent the world as being a certain way in virtue of its structure, then it's a shadow. Travis thinks our thought isn't correctly described in terms of shadows because (1) a given representational structure (a sentence or sentence-like thing) can be used to represent the world as being many different ways, and (2) different representational structures can be used to represent the world as being the same way.

Examples of (1) are Travis's familiar occasion-sensitive cases, like: "The ink is blue" or "Pigs grunt", which say different things (have different truth conditions) when used on different occasions.

Examples of (2) are cases like the following: the sentences "Pigs grunt" and "Grunting is a form of porcine vocalization" can, in suitable circumstances, say the same thing. So can "George Orwell was a great essayist" and "Eric Blair was a great essayist", and "The leaves are green" and "The leaves are painted green".

The target of this attack is supposed to be someone like Fodor, who holds that thoughts are structured representations in the language of thought. It's much less obvious that Travis succeeds in getting Davidson (especially the Davidson of Nice Derangement) in his sights.

Unfortunately, Travis doesn't have much to say about the "indexicalist" response to his view, which is becoming more popular.