Theory of fictions bentham pdf

Though Mill went further in the exploration of the workings of language as a symbolic system, 55 his intellectual relationship with Bentham is obvious in the way in which Mill stressed the link between language and logic:. Grammar [ The principles and rules of grammar are the means by which the forms of language are made to correspond with the universal forms of thought.

The distinction between the various parts of speech, between the cases of nouns, the moods and tenses of verbs, the functions of particles, are distinction in thought, not merely in words [ Therefore, Bentham appears as the heir of a tradition that came to see language not only as the instrument but also as a constitutive part of the matter of thought.

In his reflection on logic, this was made obvious: logical relations, expressed in words, do not exist outside language. But in putting the study of logic, and therefore of language, at the basis of the utilitarian system he initiated a major trend of focus: language study was not instrumental any longer, but formed the core of epistemology.

The European Enlightenment was based on the idea that knowledge was attainable by men making full use of their intellectual faculties. This entailed a reflection on the conditions of knowledge and the exploration of the tools with which it could be reached: which mode of definition can convey accurate knowledge?

Which type of meaning can be reached? What is to make sense of something? The eighteenth-century reflection on definition hinged on two particular developments in linguistic theory: the nature of general words, and the identification of the smallest significant parts of speech. For both, Locke set the agenda. It is from a study of the nature of words and their relation to the world that problems of meaning were approached.

As we have seen, the Benthamic system derives its justification from a close study of the world within a logical arrangement based on an analysis of language. Within a logical arrangement, each term could be defined by its genus , the class it belonged to — the level immediately superior in a tree of knowledge — and its differentiam , the characteristics that made it different from all the other objects of the same class.

In his early works, Bentham started from this method of definition to attack Blackstone:. What is the office of a definition? In the first place to convey to our apprehension some idea as signified by the word defined, and to teach us to distinguish the idea so signified by that word from any idea that can be signified by any other word. But he immediately pointed out the necessity of having a clear view of what the genus and the differentia referred to in a specific case.

In the Fragment on Government , the insufficiency of such a method of definition was brought out:. The common method of defining - the method per genus et differentiam , as logicians call it, will, in many cases, not at all answer the purpose. Among abstract terms we soon come to such as have no superior genus.

A definition, per genus et differentiam , when applied to these, it is manifest, can make no advance: it must either stop short, or turn back, as it were, upon itself, in a circulate or a repetend. It is from his will to define words in a legal context that Bentham realised the existence of some words to which classical definition could not apply. For definition, being nothing but making another understand by words, what idea , the term defined stands for, a definition is best made by enumerating those simple ideas that are combined in the signification of the term defined.

Though they could not be thus defined, names of simple ideas were the only ones which could be immediately known because they referred to sensation. It was then possible to ascribe different modes of existence to things, according to the kind of definition that could apply to them.

Such an awareness of the problems of fixing the meaning of things was inscribed within the ongoing debate on nominalism, which had been revived by Hobbes after taking its sources in medieval thought. Throughout the whole field of language, parallel to the line of what may be termed the material language, and expressed by the same words, runs a line of what may be termed the immaterial language.

He defined it in Chrestomathia :. In insisting on the correspondence between abstract words and words that have a meaning that can be directly understood in terms of sense-perception, Bentham remained in the line of thought opened by Locke. He therefore denied the existence of abstract ideas:. To his brother Samuel he wrote:. He afterwards credited Horne Tooke with laying the philosophical foundations that made the theory of fictions possible.

Moreover, within a utilitarian system where the only valid system of reference was pain and pleasure, relating all words to sense-impressions was the only way to make sense of them.

Such an assertion has to be balanced in the case of Bentham: though archetypation is close to the etymological method, it does not depend on it solely. The main discovery Bentham has received credit for, in linguistic analysis, has been the claim that no meaning was to be found outside a proposition. This being the case, if nothing less than the import of an entire proposition be sufficient for the giving full expression to any the most simple thought, it follows that no word, being anything more than a fragment of a proposition, no word is in itself the complete sign of any thought.

This opinion was repeated by H. Starting from Frege makes Bentham appear as a forerunner, whereas a closer study of eighteenth-century linguistic thought replaces him at the end of a longer process of discovery. His originality seems to be less in the wording of an intuition that was latent in Condillac and Hartley but rather in its integration as the cornerstone of his reflection on meaning and words. Two separate developments in linguistics challenged this conception: with Hartley and his followers, the study of parts of speech revealed the problem posed by words such as prepositions and copulae in general in a Lockean system of definition and called for a new system of signification in which meaning was not to be found in the word but in the relation it bore to other words in the sentence.

They also both derived from Locke in the sense that they were dependent on the study of language as inseparable from thought. Bentham himself stated the seminal importance of Lockean theory on this point:. Upon this field of observation the logic of Aristotle and his followers did not penetrate. There are many words used in abstract sciences, which can scarce be defined by any other words; and yet, by their grammatical form, seem to be excluded from the class of particles.

Such are identity, existence, etc. The use of those must therefore be learnt as that of particles is. Such a trend in the analysis of parts of speech developed within the framework of a new conception of the origins of language. His opposition to Condillac hinged on their conflicting understanding of the operations of analysis and synthesis.

Only at a later stage in the history of mankind was this immediacy lost in discourse. The idea that words are not significant in themselves was thus the outcome of a tradition that went back to the roots of the European Enlightenment. Simple propositions themselves are elliptical:. The proposition , simple as it is, is, in its import, complex; and if it be considered as designating.

That to which it gives expression is the supposed matter of fact which supposing me to speak truly was the object of my thought; - that of which it does not contain the expression is that thought itself; the only matter of fact of which the discourse in question is strictly and immediately the assertion, is left to be inferred from the context, from such words as are actually uttered. Therefore, language can be understood as a system of will, which functions at two different levels: in propositions themselves and in words, endowed with moral connotation as the result of human imposition.

But it also has deeper consequences on a philosophical level: language study appears to be a necessity for active political involvement, not only a bias to explore the workings of the mind. Another striking trait of scientific philosophy [since the nineteenth century] has been an increasing concern with the nature of language.

In responsible circles this has not been a retreat from more serious issues. It is an outcome of critical scruples that are traceable centuries back in the classical British empiricists Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and are clearer in Bentham. It has been appreciated increasingly in the past sixty years that our traditional introspective notions -our notions of meaning, idea, concept, essence, all undisciplined and undefined- afford a hopelessly flabby and unmanageable foundations for a theory of the world.

Control is gained by focusing on words, on how they are learned and used, and how they are related to things. It is maybe in that light that Bentham seems the most innovative: reform in politics was inseparable from reform in language.

Etymology and paraphrasis stressed that words were only understandable as part of a linguistic system and not with reference to any outside criteria of truth: meaning was imposed by society and the individual. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Follow Following. TheoryReader Join 90 other followers.

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