Two Concepts of Freedom

It is hard not to feel the pull of both of the standard positions on free will. On the one hand, it seems right to say that a free action is one that is in accordance with the agent’s desires, as opposed to one that is forced on the agent in some way (the OED defines “free” as simply “not under the control or in the power of another”). This is quite compatible with determinism–physical, psychological, or divine. On the other hand, it seems right to insist that freedom requires the ability to do otherwise, which is ruled out by determinism. If an agent has no alternative to acting as he did, how can his act be free? But surely the future course of nature is always necessitated by antecedent conditions, so there are no alternative actions the agent could have performed. Thus the will is both free and not free, a contradiction. Depending upon what conception of freedom we choose to adopt, we get different answers to the question of whether free will exists. But it is assumed that there is a single thing (denoted by “free will”) over which the combatants are contending.

            I want to suggest that this debate is afflicted by a methodological problem, and once this problem is fixed the solution drops out quite naturally. The problem consists in extracting the word “free” from its normal linguistic context and trying to analyze it in isolation. In fact, there are two very different notions expressed by standard locutions, which generate different answers to the question whether free will exists. Both answers are correct, so that one type of locution has application while the other does not. The locutions are “free from” and “free to”. We say that an agent is free from constraints or influences that potentially limit his range of actions: illnesses, obligations, engagements, coercion, upbringing, genes, or divine interference. In this vein we can sensibly ask if the agent is free from his desires and free from his physical condition (including his brain states): here the answer appears to be universally in the negative. I am not free from my own psychology or my own physiology—though I may be free from external coercion or prior obligations or God’s dominion. The determinist adds up all the antecedent states of the world and declares that we are not free from this totality. Again, this seems logically permissible: we simply ask whether my freedom-from extends to all of the factors bearing down on me, specifically my mental and physical states. And the answer is clear: I am not free from all of that. I don’t have that kind of freedom. In the relevant sense, I could not have acted otherwise (though there are perhaps other senses in which I could have acted otherwise, e.g. I could logically have had a different psychology). Put simply, we don’t have freedom from the past—the locution “free from” does not apply to the totality of past facts (though it applies to various subsets of these facts). It is quite true that we are free from X for many values of X, so we are free relative to these values, but we are not free from all values of X. We don’t have complete freedom-from. So we can forget having that kind of freedom. Determinism rules out freedom-from.

            But it doesn’t follow that we don’t have freedom-to. I have freedom to do Y if I can act on my desire to do Y. The locution “free to” allows application in conditions in which I do as I please, as opposed to acting against my desires because of external (or internal) coercion. That is what “free to” means (as the OED records): I have a set of desires (wishes, inclinations, commitments, etc.) and I can either act in accordance with them or against them, thus acting freely or not.  [1] This has nothing to do with being free from all prevailing conditions: indeed I am not free from my desires (which may causally determine me to act as I do), but that doesn’t mean that I can’t act in accordance with them! I am free to follow my desires, because not prevented from doing so, even though I am not free from them. I may sometimes not be free to follow my desires, if I am imprisoned or shackled or subject to physiological upsurges that prevent me from acting as I wish; but much of the time I am free to do pretty much as I please (but see below). Quite often I am free to do exactly as I please, with no impediment at all to my freedom to do as I please. This is in no way compromised by my lack of freedom from antecedent conditions. Freedom-to is just a different concept from freedom-from; the locutions have quite different meanings and conditions of application. The compatibilist is thus right to insist that freedom-to is consistent with determinism, while the incompatibilist is right to maintain that freedom-from is inconsistent with the facts of historical determination. But the two theorists are not disagreeing with each other, once we distinguish between the two sorts of locution with their different meanings. The reason we feel the pull of each position is that both positions are perfectly correct so far as they go; we only get confused because we conflate the two concepts. And the reason we do that is that we yank the word “free” from its normal linguistic context and ask questions like “Does free will exist?” or “Is free will compatible with determinism?” Strictly speaking, these questions are ill formed, because they try to sever the concept of freedom from its surrounding grammatical context, which alone gives the word sense. We violate Frege’s context principle, or we fail to heed Wittgenstein’s warning about the perils of taking language on holiday. We are like someone who perplexes herself about freedom by trying to integrate the meaning of the locution “free with” (“John is rather free with his money”) with “free from” and “free to”. Is it that a free agent is one who is free with his actions? Can we be free with our past? Are our desires free with us? None of these sentences makes sense and can only generate pseudo-problems. Likewise, we should not try to shuttle between “free from” and “free to”, as if asking whether we are free to change our past or free from the future. In fact “free from” is a backwards-looking locution while “free to” is a forwards-looking locution: one connotes independence from the past; the other connotes dependence on desire in relation to the future. Am I free to act as my desires prompt me to? That is the question of freedom-to. Am I free from everything that has led up to this moment? That is the question of absolute freedom-from. And the answers are respectively: yes, I am free to act on my desires as opposed to being made to go against them; but no, I am not free from the conditions leading up to and surrounding my action, including my desires. I have freedom-to but I don’t have freedom-from. That is all that needs to be said, or can be said; there is no further question expressible as “Am I free?” or “Do I have free will?” It is not that I both have free will and don’t have it, or that I have to reject the plausible things said by the compatibilist and the incompatibilist; rather, I just have to return the word “free” to its natural environment tightly coupled with the prepositions “from” and “to”. Then (and only then) I will understand the import of our talk of freedom. The correct assessment of the philosophical upshot of this examination is thus twofold: (a) we are not free from our past, since our actions are determined by it; but (b) this does not rule out a robust sense in which we are free to act on our desires (the only kind of freedom-to there is). As a matter of fact, if we were free from our past, that would not provide an acceptable notion of freedom, since it would amount merely to randomness; and if we had the ability to act otherwise than our desires indicate (including our moral and prudential desires), that would not be a form of freedom-to. No occurrence in nature is free from the past, including human action; and nothing but acting on desire can add up to freedom-to. Nor is there any notion of freedom that is purer or better than freely acting on one’s desires—as if we are only really free when discarding our desires and acting in a vacuum.  [2] For instance, a person who acts on his desire to save the world (perhaps putting aside his other selfish desires) is the paradigm of a free agent—and it is no impediment to this that his desire follows strictly from his genes and his upbringing. He couldn’t have acted otherwise, but so what—he was free to act on his most cherished desire. He was free to act on his altruistic desire despite attempts by others to thwart him, though his action wasn’t miraculously free from his mind and nervous system. The former freedom is not undermined by lack of the latter freedom.  [3]

            The difference between the two concepts is illustrated by a difference in their logic. An action is either free from a factor X or not; in particular, either actions are determined by antecedent conditions or they are not. It is an all-or-nothing matter. But forward-looking freedom-to is not so simple: a good case can be made that we are partially free in this way but not completely free. Am I really free to do exactly what I please, even in the most favorable conditions? Don’t I have all sorts of unrealistic desires that I can never act on? I would dearly love to fly like a bird, but I am not free to do so—the laws of nature prevent me from so acting. Don’t I also have a lot of conflicting desires that keep me from fulfilling all of them? Realistically, we can’t always do exactly what we please—we are not completely free. We are pretty free most of the time (if we are lucky), or more free than our neighbor, but we are not totally free. Freedom-to is not an all-or-nothing matter, unlike freedom-from. It operates in different conceptual terrain. It doesn’t breathe the same air. The logical behavior of “free to” is not the same as that of “free from”. This is why the compatibilist and the incompatibilist often seem like they are talking past each other: for they are talking about different things. The word “free” crops up in their discourse about these things but not because they have an identical subject matter—any more than its occurrence in “free with” discourse (compare also “tax-free”, “free as a bird”, “free society”, “free radicals”, “degrees of freedom”, “stimulus-free”, etc.) We mustn’t mix language games; we mustn’t tear “free” free of its linguistic auxiliaries. We mustn’t confuse one concept with another. Then we can accept that we have plenty of “free to” freedom but zero “free from” freedom—though remaining wary of that dangling use of “freedom”. Both are legitimate uses of the word “free”, but the constructions in which they occur have quite different import.

            The intuitive idea of determinism is that the future is bound by the past, not able to escape its clutches, its shackles. This conflicts with the idea that we are free from the past and hence have alternative courses of action open to us. Thus we don’t have this kind of freedom. The intuitive idea of voluntary action is that we are often able to act without constraint or interference from sources external to our own desires, wishes, inclinations, preferences, values, and so on. This in no way precludes our actions from being genuinely free: to do what you want because of what you want is the very essence of freedom. Not indeed freedom-from, since we are not in so acting free from our desires (values etc.), but freedom to follow these desires without external impediment. Both lines of thought are perfectly sound: but, contrary to traditional thinking, they are not in conflict with each other. The plain fact is that we are free (to) but we are not free (from). I would recommend never using the word “free” in philosophical discourse without its attached preposition. That will make us free from confusion and free to stop worrying about the problem of freedom.  [4]

  [1] The fundamental idea of free action is surely freedom from other people: it is doing what you want irrespective of the wishes and actions of others. Internal factors can operate like other people, but the basic idea is that of interpersonal constraint or restraint. This has nothing to do with determinism; it is purely a matter of being free to act on one’s desires independently of others. So the notion of freedom is a social notion at root: if there are no other people, the question of freedom cannot arise. It is other people who put one’s freedom in jeopardy, not the past or one’s internal physiology or the laws of nature or one’s own desires. Have philosophers and others succumbed to a kind of anthropomorphism about such factors, modeling them on interfering human agents? That would explain a lot. 

  [2] It is sometimes said, quite correctly, that we are not compelled to act on our desires—we can resist their urgings and refuse to act on them. However, this is so only because we have other mental states that countermand these desires, typically commitments to values that conflict with the desire in question. These may take the form of second-order desires to the effect that the first-order desire ought to be resisted. The fact that a certain desire may incline us to action without compelling us should not be converted into an argument against psychological determinism, let alone physical determinism; for the reason for resistance will itself be another desire, possibly a value judgment, or some other psychological factor.  

  [3] It is instructive to consider free animal action. We recognize the difference between a caged or bound animal and a free-ranging one: the difference is the difference between the animal acting as it desires and being prevented from so acting. To be sure, its actions are determined by its genes, upbringing, and impinging stimuli, but that has nothing to do with the distinction between being caged and being free-ranging. Animals can be free to act on their desires or not so free, but they are certainly not free from the antecedent state of the world—they must act as they do. Still, there is all the difference in the world between being free to act on their desires and being coerced in various ways. The case is precisely analogous in the case of humans.

  [4] I have been fretting about freedom for over fifty years and have wavered between different positions, most recently favoring the compatibilist position. This is my attempt to lay the subject to rest, at least so far as I am concerned.

Desire and Understanding

In the course of a perceptive description of a cat James Joyce writes: “She understands all she wants to” (Ulysses, p.48). The cat doesn’t try to understand what she has no wish to understand, let alone what she cannot understand; she doesn’t try to acquire knowledge that doesn’t interest her. Her desire and her understanding are in perfect harmony. Nor does anyone try to force knowledge and understanding on her. She has what might be called desire-dependent understanding. Presumably other animals are the same way: they understand what they want to understand—what they need to understand to survive, what fits their natural life-style. We could even state a law of zoology: animals understand only what they desire to understand, neither more nor less. There is synchrony, a coordination of the mental faculties. They don’t know things they are not interested in knowing, and they do know what they want to know. That seems only right and proper.

            But humans are the exception to this rule: they understand a lot they have no desire to understand. I am not thinking so much of knowledge of unwelcome facts, though this is real enough; I am thinking of the process of formal education. We are a species that sends our kids to school for many years in order to learn things they are generally resistant to learning; no other species does this. We haven’t always done it: there was a time when human children were not forced to acquire knowledge they had no desire to acquire. But for centuries we have been forcing our children to learn what they desire not to learn—what they have no wish to learn. We have been filling them with desire-denying knowledge. Imagine if the same were true of (say) lions: instead of training their cubs in hunting skills in the usual way, they pack them off to boarding school to force them into endless lessons on correct predatory behavior, keeping them stuck indoors, giving them mountains of homework, forcing them to take stressful written examinations in how to bring down an antelope. We can suppose that the cubs don’t take kindly to this, suffering from maternal deprivation, jungle homesickness, performance anxiety, insomnia, and lifelong neurosis. We can even suppose that this education, so contrary to their natural inclinations, produces serious trauma with the inevitable PTSD. As it is, however, they are not subjected to this desire-denying regimen, but simply play with their mothers and siblings and gradually acquire the necessary skills. So far as I am aware there are no instances of lion cubs refusing to be taught hunting, feigning illness to avoid it, playing truant, and resenting the whole educational process. But human cubs experience the exact opposite: they really don’t like to do what they are coerced into doing on a daily basis for years on end. Their natural desires and their imposed educational program are completely out of sync. Their inclinations are violently flouted (sometimes literally).

            You would think this state of affairs might occasion serious reflection on the part of educators. Generally speaking, to thwart an organism’s natural psychological make-up is considered unwise: this degree of desire suppression might be thought to have some untoward psychological consequences. Isn’t school really a type of prison, psychologically speaking (it has often been experienced this way)? Isn’t it possible that education is inflicting massive trauma on its victims, causing neurosis, anxiety, low self-esteem, and general emotional sickness? And this is happening at a particularly vulnerable time in a human being’s life, when he or she has little in the way of emotional defenses. Could it be that deep-seated and widespread unhappiness results from this systematic violation of human desire? Isn’t it obvious that this is mental cruelty analogous to forcing cats to learn mazes all day? The standard response to this kind of concern is that they will thank us in the long run. There will be misery now, yes, but when they grow up they will feel the benefit. Granted no one would put children through this agony just for the sake of it—they are clearly not happy with the prevailing state of affairs—but the end justifies the means.    [1] We should always be wary of this type of argument (“spare the rod spoil the child” etc.) but there is this special consideration too: the reason for adopting this painful means to eventual happiness is the economic structure of the society that we now live in. So the defense of the oppressive nature of education is that it is necessary to survive in the economic world we have created—not that it is psychologically healthy for children and the adults they will become, or even tolerable. You might as well say, “Yes, I know it’s extremely damaging psychologically, but it’s the only way to prevent people from becoming destitute given the society we have created”. The fundamental point is that we are flouting a zoological law that ensures psychological harmony throughout the animal kingdom. Of course, people do like to learn things, even at school, some people more than others, but the form this has taken under relentless economic pressure is undeniably oppressive, going completely against the grain for almost everybody. (I am no exception: I recall the dread that ”Double Maths” used to instill in me, and I was pretty good at maths.) You would think the system might try to mitigate these deleterious effects, or at least openly acknowledge them; but it is has grown up with a naïve and outdated developmental psychology that pays little attention to the possibly traumatic effects of subjugation to a deeply disliked educational regime. James Joyce’s cat would not tolerate it for a moment–there would be all manner of biting, scratching, and screeching. Really, education should be against the law! And corporal punishment for failing at your lessons or “talking in class”—a class 1 felony.    [2]

            All this combines with a curious inconsistency: children are denied knowledge of what they want to know while being force-fed what they don’t want to know. I am speaking of sexual knowledge. True, things have improved somewhat, but even now there is a reluctance to teach sex with the rigor and determination with which (say) calculus is taught. And sex is a pretty important subject about which people have a lot of natural curiosity (I am here including love, family, friendship, human decency etc.). Shouldn’t children be given a full and deep education in such matters, possibly including examinations, advanced courses, and remedial classes? You can be sure it would be well received: it fits nicely with the human desire to know what it wants to know. And subjects that appeal less naturally to young people (for that is what they are) should be framed in such a way that their epistemic desires are properly respected. Otherwise we run the risk of producing a race of psychologically damaged, thwarted, depressed, warped, anxious victims. We can all now see how awful earlier pedagogical practice was, as we can see the same with respect to earlier child labor practices; but the fundamental problem hasn’t been solved, namely that education, as we have it today, is radically contrary to people’s natural desires. It is against human nature, to put it briefly. If children could learn mathematics in the way they learn their language—quickly, naturally, painlessly—things would be different, but sadly that is not the case given the way the human mind is structured. As things stand, we simply do not desire to learn things the way they are taught to us, or even at all in some cases. Does anyone believe it would be wise to teach every child Sanskrit or metallurgy or medieval manuscript writing on pain of serious punishment—for hours a day, year after year? Does anyone think that the fact that children would hate doing this is no reason not to impose it? We should always respect innate human psychology and not assume it can be violated with impunity. The element of coercion in current educational methods is a source of real concern (or should be), as are the psychological effects of the kind of education now taken for granted. The successful boy or girl is the one who survives this regime with the least psychological damage. I recall the day when I took my very last examination (I was 24) and the intense feeling of liberation I felt after the oppression of my earlier years. The system is frankly inhuman and despotic. It took me several years before the trauma began to wear off and I could live without the nightmare of a typical English education haunting me. And I don’t mean kids shouldn’t have to work so hard (I still work hard); I mean that their wishes in the matter of learning should not be routinely disregarded. They should be treated more like James Joyce’s cat, or as the lioness treats her cubs, or as the gorilla treats its aspiring little gorillas. It works for them; it should work for us (also primates). We should take a more biologically informed view of education. It’s a good idea in education to take a close look at the mind you are trying to educate and not suppose it is like a piece of putty you can mold at will, or as consisting just of a faculty of knowing that is independent of the rest of the human psyche. Children have desires about what they know and how they come to know it, which should be taken into account. So I advocate what might be called desire-sensitive education. 

    [1] Presumably we would all agree that other things being equal it would be preferable simply to download all this stuff into children’s brains so as to avoid the years of toil and heartache associated with traditional education. But of course this is not technically feasible, so we must resort to standard techniques of arduous instruction. Let it be noted that technological efforts to ease the process of education have long been sought, most recently in the form of the computer.

    [2] What would we think if the side effects of a formal education were even more severe than they are today? What if reading, writing and arithmetic caused actual physical pain and actual mental disorder? Would we still try to justify them by the instrumental value of a sound education in the 3 R’s? What if education made people go blind on a regular basis? I hope no one would argue that this would be good for children from a character-building point of view!

Meaning, Use, and Time

I propose to do a Kripke: I will describe an argument that was prompted by reading Wittgenstein—which I neither attribute to Wittgenstein nor endorse myself.  [1] I think it fits many of the things he says, and I also think it is interesting and compelling; but I don’t want to defend it as an interpretation by engaging in elaborate exegesis, and neither do I wish to give it a full defense as an independent argument. (In fact, just between us, I believe it isWittgenstein’s argument, and I also think it is basically sound, but it is not my intention here to establish these propositions; so let’s keep my real opinion hush-hush for the moment.)  The argument has to do with the relation between meaning and use, and centers on how both relate to time. Put very simply, it says that use is spread out over time while meaning exists at a time, so that meaning cannot be use; and yet meaning must be use, there being nothing else it could be. So we have a puzzle, a paradox: meaning must be what it cannot be; in its very nature it cannot be what it intrinsically is. This is a situation calling for philosophical treatment, possibly quite radical treatment; some major surgery is going to be required. I take it the paradoxical element is clear: it is paradoxical to claim that meaning is extended use over time and also that words mean what they do at particular times irrespective of what might be true earlier or later. That does not require elaborate argument; what is less obvious is the truth of the two propositions that lead to the paradox. I will venture to quote a section from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that expresses the paradox I am interested in (strictly the reader should interpret “expresses” weakly in this sentence given my official position): “But can’t the meaning of a word that I understand fit the sense of a sentence I understand? Or the meaning of one word fit the meaning of another?—Of course, if the meaning is the use we make of the word, it makes no sense to speak of such ‘fitting.’ But we understand the meaning of a word when we hear or say it; we grasp it in a flash, and what we grasp in this way is surely something different from the ‘use’ which is extended in time!” (138) Other sections that return to, and elaborate on, this initial formulation include 139, 141, 184, 187, 188, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, and 204. Here we see stated the apparent conflict between the use conception of meaning and the fact that we understand a word at a given time—entirely not just partially. We don’t have to wait to know the future use in order to know what the word means now as the meaning unfurls over time; yet the temporally extended use is the meaning. How can both of these things be true?

            It is very important to see that use is extended over time; this is not disputed by Wittgenstein but simply accepted as obvious by him. We find him being quite explicit about this in sections 198 and 199 (which I won’t quote in full): use is always extended use, repeated use, recurrent use. This is because rules cannot be followed just once: “a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom.” (198) In section 199 we read: “It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on.—To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order,  to play a game of chess, are customs(uses, institutions).” We should really speak of the extended use theory (conception, picture) of meaning; a single isolated use just won’t cut it, according to Wittgenstein. Of course this is quite correct empirically: linguistic use isspread out over time, often a very long time. Notice that Wittgenstein is not saying that meaning and rule-following consist in abilities to use or dispositions to use; he is saying that that meaning consists in repeated use itself (compare the locution “Is he still using?” asked of a drug addict). To understand a word is not to have an ability or disposition to use a word in a certain way over time—that might be possessed at or time or be manifested only once—it is actually to use it regularly over time. That is, meaning is matter of actions performed repeatedly over time: how many such actions must be performed is hard to specify, but a decent number is required. Meaning is something temporally distributed, like a habit or a fitness regimen or a custom. Some facts (things, properties) exist at a time in temporal isolation, while others are essentially spread out in time; meaning is of the latter type. As examples of the former type we might list: shape, size, color, mass, modal status, spatial occupancy, function, geometric relations (such as isomorphism), and picturing. The last item is of special significance because in the Tractatus Wittgenstein compared meaning to picturing, construed geometrically (lines of projection etc.); and picturing is an at-a-time type of fact. Most properties are like this: temporally isolated, punctate, of the moment. They don’t go on through time indefinitely; they can be instantiated just once, requiring no other times for their existence. But meaning, according to Wittgenstein, is different, belonging as it does to the more rare category of the temporally extended. It isn’t the only such property—we also have rule following in general as well as some non-rule-following facts (habits etc.)—but it is an instance of the rarer type.  [2]

            What else can we say of meaning if it consists of extended use? Well, what is a use? Wittgenstein gives us little guidance, but I think the following must be uncontroversial: uses are actions, and these actions are utterances. They are acts of speech, which are utterances (generally vocal but sometimes gestural). The acts occur in certain contexts and circumstances, and they have a history as well as future consequences: meaning consists in such situated utterances, according to Wittgenstein. We may then deduce that meanings are given by specific concrete acts of utterance—generally sounds made by mouths. To say that meaning is use is to say that meaning is, or includes, sound (or possibly hand movements in the case of deaf speakers). What else could linguistic use be? Intentional purposive sound, to be sure, situated-in-a-form-of-life sound, community sound if you like—but still sound. What is sound? We might construe it subjectively as auditory impressions, or we might construe it objectively as physical waves in the atmosphere—in either case meaning is being explained in terms of sounds (along with their “surroundings”). We might then reasonably wonder whether meaning itself has anything to do with sounds, as opposed to the expression of meaning: do meanings sound like anything, can they be measured by a speech spectrograph, what has meaning got to do with the sounds coming out of people’s mouths? But Wittgenstein does not raise such concerns; they suggest the possibility of a category mistake. What he does bring up is the question of at-a-time meaning: how can it be true that I understand a word when I hear or say it? The meaning seems to be right there then not to be in the process of unfolding itself over time: it seems to be present in the instant, hermetically cut off from anything past or future. Some theories of meaning acknowledge this fact: the image theory, Frege’s sense and reference theory, dispositional theories, Gricean intention-based theories, the picture theory, and others. But a use theory cannot acknowledge it in any straightforward way, or so it seems: it apparently has to deny an apparently obvious fact. Hence the paradox, since this fact is not seriously deniable. Something therefore has to go: either meaning is not use after all, or common sense is in error in supposing that meaning can exist whole and entire at a given time. Wittgenstein tries to remove the paradox having first presented it (shades of Kripke’s Wittgenstein): it is a kind of skeptical paradox and it receives a skeptical solution. What that solution is supposed to be I have not ventured to explain, and I think Wittgenstein’s remarks on the subject are obscure, as well as fleeting. The closest he comes to anything you can get your teeth into is section 187, which concludes with these enigmatic words: “When you said “I already knew at the time…..” that meant something like: “If I had then been asked what number should be written after 1000, I should have replied ‘1002’.” And that I don’t doubt. This assumption is rather of the same kind as: “If he had fallen into the water then, I should have jumped in after him”.—Now, what was wrong with your idea?” But I won’t attempt to penetrate this fog here; my concern is with the apparent paradox that leads up to it. For it certainly does seem as if we have a real puzzle before us: there is a definite clash between the use theory of meaning and the temporal facts of meaning. How can meaning exist ata time and yet only exist over time?  [3]

            It might be thought that there is a way out: simply claim that meaning determines use, and is determined by it, without being use. That is, something obtains at a given time that fixes future use but it isn’t identical with future use. We thus modify the original formulation of the use theory to read as follows: meaning consists in an at-a-time fact that determines future use. This seems like our commonsense view: there is something about me now that fixes, anticipates, entails how I will subsequently use my words—and this is what meaning is. The use is contained in the meaning, inherent in it, uncoiling as I make my linguistic journey through time. But famously this is what Wittgenstein contests (at least in the form in which we are tempted to think of it) and which Kripke’s exposition emphasizes: there is no current fact capable of this kind of determination. Or if there is it is not of the kind that philosophers have supposed and common sense seems to assume. Thus the paradox has no evident solution: the inescapably correct extended use theory is inconsistent with the obvious fact of at-a-time meaning. We are stuck with two apparent truths that are inconsistent with each other. This was Wittgenstein’s worry, what he struggled with in the relevant sections of the Investigations (at least this is the interpretation that might naturally occur to one upon reading these difficult pages). Not that there is no fact of meaning at all (as in Kripke’s interpretation) but that there is no present fact: extended use is a type of fact and it suffices to capture meaning (Wittgenstein assumes), but it won’t help us understand how meaning can exist during short intervals of time. It can’t be the fact of meaning if meaning can occur in its absence, i.e. ahead of all those repeated uses. Meaning can’t be extended andcompacted, spread out over time and yet squeezed into a moment. It can’t relate to time in both these ways. It seems to be both like shape or color or picturing and like a habit or a custom or a practice: but that is not possible. It must be one thing or the other. This is what makes meaning paradoxical and philosophically challenging. This is why we need a new meta-philosophy to handle the problem. This is why the Tractatus was barking up the wrong tree: it didn’t just propose a false theory of meaning; it failed to grasp the underlying problem.

            Compare the pragmatist theory of truth. Suppose we say that truth consists in usefulness. Then we add that usefulness is a matter of how things turn out in the future (“in the long run”). It will follow that truth is spread out over time. Truth is a matter of ongoing success not a matter of current correspondence or momentary coherence. Pragmatism is a future-looking doctrine, because it stresses human action, which is distributed in time. And it is not the doctrine that truth determines success, as if it is another property merely correlated with success; it issuccess—usefulness, desire-satisfaction. Truth looks ahead, and it depends on what happens in the future. The result is that nothing can be said to be true (or false) at a time before the proposition in question has had a chance to demonstrate its usefulness. There can’t be at-a-time truth. This looks like a problem for the pragmatist theory, though the bullet-biting pragmatist may opt to declare that the consequence is acceptable—truth can never really exist before usefulness has been exemplified. Given that the use theory of meaning is a type of pragmatist theory, we can see how such theories tend to produce these kinds of problems and puzzles: use and usefulness are cross-temporal facts, because actions are spread out in time. If I were to say that perception is a matter of actions, we would have the same result: nobody could ever perceive anything in a temporally isolated way. If to see something red now consists in what the perceiver goes on to do in the future, then obviously no one could see something red now unless such a future exists. This kind of theory seems obviously false given the facts of perception, but in the case of meaning things are not so clear, because meaning is not so phenomenologically striking. If a property holds in virtue of future facts, then clearly there have to be such facts for it to hold (this is obvious for the utilitarian view of the good, for example). We might try going dispositional in these cases, but that will raise problems of its own (explored by Kripke). The recent popularity (and obscurity) of this kind of approach is testament to the severity of the underlying problem.  We really do need to appeal to actual use, but then we are saddled with the time problem (we could call it the “time-meaning problem”). How is meaning related to use-in-time? Are they identical, or are they distinct and contingently correlated? Is there a determination relation between them (supervenience)? Is the link real but mysterious, or is meaning perhaps illusory? This is a characteristic philosophical problem with the usual range of options. In a way Wittgenstein is doing traditional philosophy in raising it, however unconventional his own response may be.

            Kripke compares Wittgenstein’s skeptical paradox to Hume’s treatment of causation. I see a similarity too, but a different one. If causation were a necessary relation, it could intelligibly hold at a specific time, since modal properties are at-a-time properties. But if we despair of finding such causal necessitation, plumping instead for constant conjunction, then again we get a problem with time. For constant conjunction occurs over time; and then we have to suppose that causation can’t be an at-a-time property. For one event to cause another at time t is for other similar events to cause similar events in the past and future: so there can’t be one-off causation and causation must be temporally dispersed. We try to find something observable for causation to be, but all we can find is future constant conjunctions; so causation turns out to be extraneous to what is happening at a given moment of causal interaction. Meaning, too, turns out to reside in uses that lie in the future relative to the present act of meaning, thus rendering problematic the very notion of meaning-at-time. Regular uses are like constant conjunctions—at some distance from the fact they are supposed to encompass (as judged by what is known at the time). There is obviously a general problem here with certain philosophical tendencies or theses, with meaning just one (striking) example.

            I actually think there are several distinct strands in Wittgenstein’s discussion of meaning in these sections of the Investigations, intertwined in complex ways; the theme I have extracted is just of them, though a central one. The problem doesn’t have to do with facts versus non-facts, or the individual versus the community, or the inner versus the outer; it has to do with the conflict between meaning-as-use and meaning-as-known. Linguistic use is spread out over time, but linguistic knowledge is of the moment: how can those two truths be reconciled? I have not tried to delve into Wittgenstein’s attempted resolution (a daunting task), being content to have articulated the problem he raised.

  [1] See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1984)

  [2] It is noteworthy that Wittgenstein makes very little play with the notion of a disposition in these sections of the Investigations, not even considering it as a possible resolution of his puzzle (in this he contrasts sharply with Kripke’s interpretation of him). I think this is because he simply didn’t take it seriously as an account of what meaning and understanding might be. There are many reasons why he might have taken this view, but surely it sacrifices a great deal of what he finds attractive in the actual-extended-use theory. Also, it is just plain obscure: how can my knowledge of what I mean now consist in knowledge of what I am disposed to do in the future, even assuming there is such a thing? Why is what I do in the future determined by my current dispositions? We have become far too sanguine about the notion of a disposition in the period following Wittgenstein’s Investigations. The positivists would have regarded the notion as positively mystical, and certainly not usable as a basic philosophical tool. What (the hell) is a disposition?  

  [3] The puzzle would affect analyticity: how can a sentence be analytic at a certain time, given that its meaning is fixed by what happens later? Wouldn’t we have to wait to see how the words are used in the future? And nothing presently available can fix this. So analytic truth starts to look problematic—a central plank of positivist philosophy (and not only that). And how can analyticity consist in conventions if conventions are human practices that are spread out in time?