Page 99 - Oswald Ducrot, Slovenian Lectures, Digitalna knjižnica/Digital Library, Dissertationes 6
P. 99
Lecture V
[i.e. counterfeit] dollar”. Try to work that out with the logical notion of
falsehood! Admiring a work of art, I can say “This work is a true [or real]
master-piece!”. Try to explain that expression “true” with the logical no-
tion of truth. And when to say ill of someone, I say “He’s a true [i.e. real]
fool”, what does the logical notion of truth or of falsehood have to do with
it? In German, to say that someone has gone the wrong way, one says “He
has taken the false way (den falschen weg)”. What does the notion of false-
hood used here have in common with the logical notion that has the same
name? Let me sum up: we have spoken of truth and falsehood as notions
within the language-system but those notions are quite different from the
homonymous notions in logic. The “true” in the language-system certainly
has something to do with the good and the “false” with the bad: there is ap-
proval in the adjective “true” and disapproval in “false”. Of course, the anal-
ysis should be carried on further. I only wanted to show that to describe
those words, one had to turn away from the logical notions. So much for
the first type of encounter.
Second type of encounter: the linguist can use the ideas of truth and
falsehood as a means of carrying out his enquiry. For example, the seman-
tician can say: “To study language, I am going to ask under what condi-
tions sentences are true in the logicians’ sense of the word and under what
conditions those sentences are false, there again in the logicians’ sense of
the word”. Logical linguistics, which uses the logical notions of “true” and
“false”, does exist: it is called truth-conditional semantics. That form of re-
search can be extraordinarily subtle and complex, because, of course, one is
not going to be content with ascribing truth-conditions to each sentence of
the language-system one by one. On the contrary, one is going to construct
the calculus whereby the truth-conditions of a sentence can be obtained
from the description of its components. Let us take for instance the case
of operators, that is to say words which transform a simple sentence into a
more complex sentence (thus one can postulate that little transforms Peter
has eaten into Peter has eaten little). Their semantic description will consist
in saying how they transform the truth-conditions of the simple sentence
to produce those of the complex sentence. Such a conception of seman-
tics can be considered as a “structural” one in that it describes each com-
ponent of the language system, not in itself, but in relation with its combi-
nation with others. Everything I have said from the beginning of these lec-
tures makes you see that this form of structuring seems impossible to me:
the influence of a word on another through its phrastic combinations can-
not be described in truth-conditional terms according to me, since I refuse
[i.e. counterfeit] dollar”. Try to work that out with the logical notion of
falsehood! Admiring a work of art, I can say “This work is a true [or real]
master-piece!”. Try to explain that expression “true” with the logical no-
tion of truth. And when to say ill of someone, I say “He’s a true [i.e. real]
fool”, what does the logical notion of truth or of falsehood have to do with
it? In German, to say that someone has gone the wrong way, one says “He
has taken the false way (den falschen weg)”. What does the notion of false-
hood used here have in common with the logical notion that has the same
name? Let me sum up: we have spoken of truth and falsehood as notions
within the language-system but those notions are quite different from the
homonymous notions in logic. The “true” in the language-system certainly
has something to do with the good and the “false” with the bad: there is ap-
proval in the adjective “true” and disapproval in “false”. Of course, the anal-
ysis should be carried on further. I only wanted to show that to describe
those words, one had to turn away from the logical notions. So much for
the first type of encounter.
Second type of encounter: the linguist can use the ideas of truth and
falsehood as a means of carrying out his enquiry. For example, the seman-
tician can say: “To study language, I am going to ask under what condi-
tions sentences are true in the logicians’ sense of the word and under what
conditions those sentences are false, there again in the logicians’ sense of
the word”. Logical linguistics, which uses the logical notions of “true” and
“false”, does exist: it is called truth-conditional semantics. That form of re-
search can be extraordinarily subtle and complex, because, of course, one is
not going to be content with ascribing truth-conditions to each sentence of
the language-system one by one. On the contrary, one is going to construct
the calculus whereby the truth-conditions of a sentence can be obtained
from the description of its components. Let us take for instance the case
of operators, that is to say words which transform a simple sentence into a
more complex sentence (thus one can postulate that little transforms Peter
has eaten into Peter has eaten little). Their semantic description will consist
in saying how they transform the truth-conditions of the simple sentence
to produce those of the complex sentence. Such a conception of seman-
tics can be considered as a “structural” one in that it describes each com-
ponent of the language system, not in itself, but in relation with its combi-
nation with others. Everything I have said from the beginning of these lec-
tures makes you see that this form of structuring seems impossible to me:
the influence of a word on another through its phrastic combinations can-
not be described in truth-conditional terms according to me, since I refuse
