A Radical Challenge |
PAVEL MATERNA |
In general, Pavel Tichı is admitted to be (or, today, unfortunately, to have been) a very talented logician. In general, however, his conception of logic and of language is mostly ignored, as you can see when checking his "quotation index" (which does not mean that this real influence is neglectible). In this short commentary I intend to answer the question why this is a rather indisputable fact. I believe that such an explanation is necessary; not because I am a compatriot of Tichı but because his conception is, in my opinion, of much greater importance than his "quotation index" indicates.
First of all, I will try to characterize Tichı's conception, known as Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL), in few words only, stressing its somewhat provocative character.
TIL says: The s.c. "linguistic turn" is a reactionary turn (as applied to
logic): it supports the illusion that the task of logic is the study of strings of
characters (Hilbertian formalism!) whereas logic only uses these symbolic strings
to study extra-linguistic structures (exactly defined in TIL as
"constructions"). This standpoint, frequently and thoroughly argued for in many
articles and in the book The Foundations of Frege's Logic (hereafter "the
book"), has some not just popular consequences, in the first place one which is an
anathema for mathematical logicians: formal languages are an unnecessary roundabout, since
they need an interpretation, and everything which can be done via formal
languages can be done without them. Also, no metalanguages are needed, because a ramified
hierarchy of types together with constructions of any order does the job. Therewith
another heresy is connected: first-order systems are not sufficiently expressive, and
their having some "good properties" (in the first place, completeness) cannot
outweigh an essential lack of expressivity. Logic is not to stop where completeness and
decidability is impossible. (As for this claim, Tichı has got a good ally in Gödel, see
S.Feferman et alii, eds: Kurt Gödel Collected Works, Vol.II, Oxford University
Press 1990, 181.) An only seemingly circular characteristics of Logic is given by Tichı
in his article "Questions, Answers, and Logic" (American Philosophical
Quarterly 15, No 4, 275-284):
Logic is the study of logical objects (individuals, truth-values, possible worlds,
propositions, classes, properties, relations, and the like) and of ways such objects can
be constructed from other such objects.
This conception of logic is in good accordance with what logic really did especially in Russell's and Frege's time and what is (only partially) respected by the s.c. philosophical logic nowadays.
Among the consequences of this point, i.e., of an "anti-linguistic" orientation of logic, are objectual conception of variables", refutation of the theory of "implicit definitions", refusal of accepting "plurality of logics" and "non-classical logics" in particular. Now it is probably much clearer why this silence about TIL: Tichı's requirements are too radical in the era of "linguistic turn"; most of the points where Tichı says "No" became unmovable paradigms of contemporary logic. If the work of a well-known logician is based on these paradigms, will he/she be ready to realize such a "change of orientation" which would make his/her hitherto approach or even results doubtful? No; only "untutored minds", who did not yet create a logical system of their own, could impartially study Tichı's criticisms and his positive solutions, and compare them with the contemporary standard logic.
PAVEL MATERNA, A RADICAL CHALLENGE |
2 |
The same holds of another group of problems: I mean the problems connected with Frege's Sinn-Bedeutung dualism. Here the standard paradigm consists in uncritically accepting what Tichı calls Frege's Thesis, i.e., the claim that expressions refer to what is mediated by "determiners" (intensions, we would say) rather than to the determiners themselves. Tichı proved in many articles, as well as in the book, that this paradigm leads to wholly absurd consequences and that the problems which are frequently stated in the logical literature in the connection with Frege's Thesis are automatically (and simply) solvable when this thesis is abandoned. All the same, nearly nobody reacted to the clear arguments and proofs offered by Tichı: the paradigm (or better the prejudice) is too strong.
Omitting some other points due to which Tichı unvoluntarily became enfant terrible I come to the most recent Tichı's initiative illustrated by his Cracking the Language Code and The Analysis of Natural Language (published in the present number). This time not only logicians but also linguists are provoked: For Tichı (but also for Gödel) language is a code, and to crack this code is just what linguists (together with logicians?) should do. Tichı shows that Chomsky's idea of finding such rules which would make it possible to generate pairs <expression, meaning> has never been realized and that the main factor which makes this realization impossible is an old prejudice according to which the analysis of natural languages has to proceed in two stages: the first of them has to be the syntactical one, which is followed by the semantic analysis; both these stages should be taken apart as being fully independent. Tichı not only shows that to assume that "pure syntax" is possible leads to inadequate results of analyses, he began to realize a great project of Meaning Driven Grammar; an essential fragment survived its author and it can be hoped that even in this fragmentary form it will be published and will inspire at least some "untutored minds" in linguistic.
Concluding I would like to stress the following point. Tichı often criticized many famous personalities in logic (e.g., Quine, Montague, Kripke, Hintikka, Dummett, Kleene, Church, Russell, Frege). He was hard but not rude. Yet first, he always brought heavy arguments supporting his critical remarks and, second, he never was content with the "negative part" of his critique. If he demonstrated that a problem got a wrong solution by somebody he immediately offered the solution of it.
All the same, with the exception of the discussion about verisimilitude (Popper, Oddie, Miller, Niiniluoto and others) the criticized authors nearly never reacted to Tichı. Maybe they did not even read the articles in question.
So till the present day we can read articles and books where some pseudo-problems (as shown by Tichı) are "solved" or some genuine problems are solved wrongly.
The present number should help to change the state of affairs when Tichı's works are formally appreciated but really ignored. Tichı's challenge to logicians and linguists is radical but if it should be refused his work should be at least carefully studied.(1)
NOTES
1. The above formulations could create the impression as if Tichı's influence were zero. This would be an exaggeration. Indeed, Graham Oddie, now the Colorado University at Boulder, has been strongly influenced, which can be confirmed by studying, e.g., his theory of truthlikeness; also some logicians and philosophers in Czechia and Slovakia are in earnest with his challenge.