What is this?

Consider the black item to the right here on your screen. Is it a token of the Latin alphabet letter pee, the Greek letter rho or the Cyrillic letter er? The question cannot be settled by asking which font, and where in the font, the glyph is taken from, because I drew the drawing in Inkscape rather than using any font, precisely to block such an answer. Nor will my intentions answer the question, since I drew the thing precisely to pose such a philosophical question rather than to express any one of the three options.

There are two interesting questions here. The first is an ontological one. Is a token on screen something different from the pattern of light? If it's the same as the pattern of light, then there is at most one token, there being at most one relevant pattern of light (perhaps none, if our ontology doesn't include patterns of light), though this token is a token of pee, and a token of rho and a token of er. If a token is not identical with a pattern of light, then we might as well keep on multiplying entities, and say that there is a pattern of light and three tokens, of pee, rho and er, respectively, with the first entity constituting the latter three.

The second one is a philosophy of language one. What determines whether or not the pattern of light is or constitutes a token of, say, rho? Is it my intentions? If so, then indeed we have tokens of pee, rho and er, as making these was my intention, but we do not have a token of the Coptic letter ro or a token of the letter qof in 15th century Italian Hebrew cursive, since I didn't think of these when I was doing the drawing. Is it the linguistic context? But then it's not a token of any letter, since a displayed png file in an analytic philosophy post is not a the kind of linguistic context that determines a token.

Or is it that the pattern of light is or constitutes tokens of all the letters it geometrically matches, whether or not it was intended as such? If so, then we also have a letter dee (just turn your screen). But now suppose a new alphabet is created, and it contains a letter that looks just like the drawing. It would be odd to say that if a new language were created on another planet this instantly would multiply the entities on earth (at the speed of light? faster?). So it seems that on this view, we should say that the pattern of light is or constitutes tokens of all the letters in all the alphabets that will ever exist. But future actions shouldn't affect how many things there now are. So on this view, we should be even more pluralistic: the pattern of light is or constitutes tokens of all the letters in all possible alphabets.

We thus have two questions: one about ontology and one about what is being tokened. Both questions have parsimonious and profligate answers. The parsimonious answer to the ontology question is that there is one thing, which can be a token of multiple things. The profligate one is that we have many tokens. The parsimonious answers to the language question are that intentions and/or context determines what's been tokened. The profligate answer has an infinite amount of tokening.

We probably shouldn't combine the two profligate answers. For then on your screen there are infinitely many physical things, all co-located (and some perhaps even with the same modal profile). That's too much.

That still leaves three combinations. I think there is reason to reject the combination of ontological profligacy with parsimony on the philosophy of language side. The reason is that tokens get repurposed. Consider a Russian who has a Scrabble set and loses an er tile. She then buys a replacement pee tile, as it looks pretty much the same (I looked at online pictures--both have value 1 and look the same). Then it seems that a new entity, a token of er, comes into existence if we have ontological profligacy and linguistic parsimony. Does a mere intention to use the tile for an er what magically creates a new physical object, a token? That seems not very plausible.

That leaves two combinations:

• ontological and linguistic parsimony
• ontological parsimony and linguistic profligacy.

Lying and being sincere at the same time

Sam is a politician speaking to a large multilingual audience, and is planning on offering them slogans that uniquely appeal to each language group. By coincidence, there is something, s, that he can say which is such that in Elbonian it means that he loves to hunt while in Baratarian s means that he is an avid cyclist. Sam actually loves to hunt but hates cycling, but knows that saying that he loves to hunt will tend to appeal to Elbonian speakers, whom he also tends to respect and does not wish to deceive, and that saying that he is an avid cyclist will tend to appeal to Baratarian speakers. So Sam utters s.

In so doing, Sam is sincerely asserting to Elbonian speakers that he loves to hunt and lying to Baratarian speakers that he is an avid cyclist. But there is Jane in the audience who is a completely bilingual Elbonian and Baratarian speaker. Did Sam lie to Jane?

One might say: It depends on how Jane understood him. But that's not right. To lie to someone does not require the interlocutor to understand one at all. If I write to you in a letter of recommendation that says that Jim is the worst student I have ever had, while in fact I know he is the best student I have ever had, and you misread the "worst" as "best" in the letter (after all, typically, in a letter of recommendation a superlative is positive, so you're primed to read it as "best"), nonetheless I lied to you, but unsuccessfully. Jane might have understood s in Elbonian, or in Baratarian, or just been confused by s. But nonetheless it seems that Sam both lied and spoke sincerely to Jane. He lied to Jane qua Baratarian speaker, since he asserted to all Baratarian speakers that he was an avid cyclist, and he spoke sincerely to all Elbonian speakers, including Jane, that he loved to hunt.

But this is odd. And it also means that it is difficult to make the token the unit of meaning. And that's a problem for nominalists of the Goodman and Quine variety.

Sentence tokens

It is tempting to identify sentence tokens with certain noises or inscriptions. But this is mistaken, if we want meaning and truth to be a function of the sentence token. For it is easy to imagine a case where a speaker with a single noise says two things, one a truth in language L₁ and the other a falsehood in language L₂, to two different interlocutors. It's kind of hard to come up with examples using actual languages, except of the one word sort. My favorite there would be pointing at a bottle and saying to two people, one a speaker only of English and the other a speaker only of German "Gift", and each ignorant of the other's presence (we can imagine them on either side of a divider). To the speaker of English, one has said that the bottle is a present; the speaker of German has been warned that it is poison. A different kind of example can be produced using ambiguity and context. If I've just been talking with Fred about rivers and with George about finances, and neither was a party to the other conversation, I can say: "I was by the bank yesterday", deliberately telling Fred that I was by the riverbank yesterday and telling George that I was visiting a financial institution. The two claims might be both true, or both false, or one true and the other false.

So if we want sentence tokens to play the role of resolving ambiguity, taking care of indexicals, etc., so that meaning and truth would be a function of the token, the tokens can't be noises and inscriptions. They could be noise (or inscription) and intention pairs, or they could be utterings (maybe in each of my above cases, I deliberately do two utterings with one same noise, just as I might do two mosquito killings with one well-placed slap), or they could be noise and understanding pairs (if we prefer to locate meaning on the side of the listener), or they could be acts of hearing.

Taking up into language (Language, Part III)

We can take items in the world up into language. An easy, though very unlikely, example would be if I came across a bunch of rocks randomly deposited by an avalanche, and noticed that they were arranged into the shape of the word "here". I then took more rocks and added to the left of the ones already there "There was an avalanche" and then to the right of them I put a period. The resulting production would count as my inscription of the sentence "There was an avalanche here." That one of the words in the sentence was not shaped by me is irrelevant. I took something in nature which wasn't a word though it was shaped like a word, the word "here", and made a token of the word "here" out of it, without actually touching it. The bunch of rocks thus got taken up into a linguistic item, much like a stump can be taken up into being a chair just by my treating it as a chair--which can happen without my even touching it (e.g., I can treat it as a chair by trying to sit on it, but tripping forward accidentally).

Likewise, word tokens from one language can be taken up into linguistic items in another language. I can write a note by gluing in words cut out from newspapers, including foreign newspapers, and I can do so with no regard for what meaning the snippets had in their original language. Thus, I can take a German newspaper story about a poison, and cut out the word "GIFT" (which means "poison") from the headline, and then take some words from an English-language newspaper, and put together the note "YOU HAVE BEEN A GREAT GIFT IN MY LIFE." And, no, I wouldn't be saying that you've been a poison! The snippet would thus have been taken up into a new linguistic item. The original meaning of the snippets I use is irrelevant. New linguistic items are made of them.

We could say that the rocks in my initial example already were a token of the English "here" even before I got to it, and the token "GIFT" in the German headline was already both a token of the German "Gift" and the English "gift". I suspect this is mistaken. It makes sense to ask of a sentence token in isolation what language it is in, even if the orthographically or phonologically same sentence could figure in more than one. So that won't do. My suggestion is that we are mistaken in identifying the token with just the inscription. The token includes the inscription, but includes the context--and hence the intentions of the speaker--into which that inscription was taken up. If this is right, then once again linguistic tokens are more than just inscriptions and sounds, but include context, as in my earlier posts on language.