A response to Mark Crimmins
AskPhilosophers
refers to people who believe there is a correct usage to words. (And
why was that allowed by the panel?) Isn't there plenty of room for
misunderstanding or mislearning a word's definition during normal
daily spoken communication? Can't there be a authoritative source for
a meaning of a word, at least, for the aforementioned reason?
It's pretty hard to define "common" usage? What's common? A majority?
10%? Two-thirds? If I start using a word "idiot" to mean "intelligent"
and others slowly start to adopt that meaning, at what point is it
correct? Would meaning become a "battle for the majority?" Isn't this
nihilistic?
Also, without an authoritative source of meaning, doesn't philosophy
itself become a perpetual irrefrangible debate? You've got to agree on
your terms, right?? You'd never change the terms in math, would you?
Are mathematicians freaks? I believe language is, and should be,
always evolving too, but isn't he going a little far in calling people
"freaks"?? What does he mean by that anyway?"
Mark Crimmins
You are referring to http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/question/
512
In this piece I sketch the reason many linguists are bemused by
"prescriptivists" who stamp their feet when people split infinitives
and use words in ways not mentioned in dictionaries (yet). Here's the
first paragraph:
--
Well, there's a panel of very wise elders who meet in an oaken room in
their black robes and officially confer meaning on words. At least,
that's the idea you'd get the way some people talk about "correct"
meanings, as they bemoan the fact that most people nowadays use the
"wrong" ones. Linguists find this funny, because really words mean
what people use them to mean. The linguistic-correctness freak wrongly
takes the meaning-makers to be fussy usage manuals and outdated
dictionaries, when the real tribunal is ordinary use. So "meat" comes
to mean edible flesh rather than food in general not because of a
dictionary change but because of a shift in ordinary usage.
Dictionaries respond to changes in usage; they don't mandate them.
--
The idea is that some people, "the correctness freaks" (and instead of
"freak" I might have used "fetishist" or "nut", any of which would of
course be meant hyperbolically), treat linguistic standards rather
like the rules of baseball: there's some authoritative rule-
determining body which we must obey, perhaps the dictionary and
grammar-manual writers.
The norms of language, linguists believe, are not settled by authority
in this way, but evolve organically as people use it. In this way
language is more like etiquette than baseball. Yes, there are
"experts" in etiquette, but their deliverances don't dictate what's
polite; (at best) they are simply observant, experienced, thoughtful
people trying to systematize rules that evolve as people actually
interact.
The thought that without the authority of rule-determining bodies
there will be chaos is quite unfounded. It hasn't happened with
eitquette, and it hasn't happened with language. In some cases the
rules of both sorts are clear, sharp and lasting; in other cases they
are vague and shifting.
You're right that in philosophy we do often assume that we mean the
same things by our words. But that no more requires a legislating
authority than do our assumptions that people generally know that one
is supposed to shake with their right hand.
In any case, the remainder of my response carved some room for
prescriptivism: some people in fact hold themselves and others to the
standards of dictionaries and grammar manuals, and this has important
consequences in certain special contexts. (But by no means is it
essential to the nature of language.)
For more about all this, you might check out the "Language Log" blog,
and search there for "prescriptivism".
- Mark C.
On Feb 7, 5:26 am, "AskPhilosophers" <AskPhilosoph...@gmail.com>
wrote: