Linguistic behaviour (review)

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REVIEWS417 seriously may prove infuriating and frustrating. In its present state, Itkonen's is a rather rough-hewn piece of work. Nevertheless, it is a substantial and important book, and I recommend it as high-priority reading for anyone with a serious interest in the philosophical foundations of the scientific study of language. REFERENCES Anscombe, G. E. M. 1957. Intention. Oxford: Blackwell. Apel, Karl. 1967. Analytic philosophy of language and the Geisteswissenschaften. Dordrecht: Reidel. Habermas, Jürgen. 1970. Zur Logik dur SozialWissenschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Harre, Rom, and Paul Secord. 1973. The explanation of social behavior. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield & Adams. Hempel, Carl. 1965. Aspects of scientific explanation. New York: Free Press. Lyas, Colin (ed.) 1971. Philosophy and linguistics. London: Macmillan. Mischel, Theodore (ed.) 1974. Understanding other persons. Oxford: Blackwell. Saunders, John, and Donald ?e??e. 1967. The private language problem. New York: Random House. Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Collected papers, I: The problem of social reality. The Hague: Nijhoff. Taylor, Charles. 1964. The explanation of behavior. New York: Humanities Press. von Wright, George. 1971. Explanation and understanding. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Winch, Peter. 1958. The idea of a social science. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical investigations. Transi, by G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan. [Received 28 June 1976.] Linguistic behaviour. By Jonathan Bennett. Cambridge: University Press, 1976. Pp. x, 272. $17.95. Reviewed by Gilbert Harman, Princeton University 1. This is philosophy—not linguistics, psychology, sociology, or anthropology; 'conceptual analysis' rather than 'empirical description'. The book is by no means a neutral survey of the issues, but is full of arguments. I strongly recommend it to anyone who is willing to argue back, which is what I will do in the course of this review. claims. Occasionally the claims are not well defended; e.g., he argues that teleological explanations cannot be Hempelian deductive-nomological (D-N) explanations because D-N explanations must satisfy the requirements of the thesis of atomism, while teleological explanations cannot meet these requirements. However, he fails to show that this is so. Hempel argues that explanations making essential use of dispositional concepts (i.e. dispositional explanations) can be reconstructed as D-N explanations, and that one type ofteleological explanation (namely, explanations which refer to an agent's intentions, beliefs, and desires) is dispositional explanations . Itkonen does not establish either that dispositional explanations can meet the requirements of the thesis of atomism, or that teleological explanations cannot be usefully treated as a type of dispositional explanation. The book is a paperback, photo-reproduced from a rather poorly edited typescript. It lacks an index, but includes a fairly detailed table of contents. 418LANGUAGE, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 (1977) Following Grice 1957, Bennett treats 'speaker meaning' as basic, arguing (a) that what a speaker 5 means on a particular occasion depends on what S intends to be communicating, and (b) that the meanings of linguistic expressions depend on regularities in what speakers mean by the expressions they use, where the regularities in question tend to be (but are not necessarily) conventions in the sense of Lewis 1969. B's over-all aim is to offer 'a view of language—that is, language in general, not any particular tongue—as essentially a matter of systematic communicative behavior' (ix). Now this is a one-sided view of language. There are symbol systems that are used primarily for communication, e.g. Morse code. But there are others that are used mainly for calculation, e.g. the special notations of mathematics. Language surely has both uses, and the second is as important as the first. We use language to help solve our theoretical and practical problems. By stating our ideas in words, we make them precise; we are able to calculate their consequences, to test them, and to improve them—and this is an essential aspect of language. A system used only for communication, like Morse code, is not a language. Philosophers typically emphasize either the communicative or the calculative use of language, and ignore the other. The logical positivists emphasized the calculative use when they put forward the verification theory of meaning, and we find the same emphasis in, e.g., Quine 1960. B, however, plays down the calculative use. He...

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