Language and Human Understanding

X. The Gulf between Saying and Naming, the Verbal and the Nominal: "Force"-Potential as Integral to "Sense"

446 X The Gulf between Saying and Naming, the Verbal and the Nominal “Force”-Potential as Integral to “Sense” Section 1. Full Sentences Distinguished from Clauses in General: Relation of Force to Sense On the face of it every complete “speech”-sentence—that is, something whose identity includes its sense and therefore includes everything relevant to sense arising from its context of utterance—is coordinate to an act of utterance or linguistic deliverance—“cognate” to the speech-act in the sense I explain in chapter XII.1 As a result, of its very nature, every such sentence has “force”, an idea Frege expressed by the word Kraft in his article “Negation”.2 It carries its force as part of its sense or “discourse-significance” (shown precisely in its situation in utterance), force being possessed only by complete speech-units—whether 1. In this work, I uniformly use upper case for “P”, “Q”, and so forth, even when discussing Wittgenstein ’s Tractatus and Anscombe’s An Introduction. The latter works, together with Dummett in Frege, 318, speaking in reference to the Tractatus, and Geach in reference to Frege’s doctrine, use lower case for “p”, “q”, and so forth. In other contexts, Geach and Dummett do not maintain uniform practice. 2. Where Frege, “Negation”, translated by P. T. Geach in Frege: Translations, ed. Geach and Black, has “assertively”, the original, “Die Verneinung”, Beitrage zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 1 (1919), has “with assertive force”, with Kraft as the word for “force” (“Die Verneinung”, 145–46); cf. “Negation”, 120, 123, 127, 129, which also has “assertoric force” and “assertorically” on 128–29. Compare “this constituent of its [a sentence’s] meaning, which, following Frege, we may call its assertoric “force”, in Dummett, Frege, 302–3. “force”-potential as integral to “sense”    447 statements, commands, questions, suppositions, or wishes. For, in the way we explained in chapter III, the sense of a sentence is best taken to mean its “direction ”, its discourse-significance as speech or parole, arising with language at the level of actual use, embracing every public aspect of meaning, rather than in any more restricted sense such as that of Frege’s Sinn. Because every clause is a potential sentence, clauses as such have the potentiality of force as part of their sense, and this is why the verb has a special “saying” character, whether it occurs in a clause or a sentence. This insight must not be subverted by sophistry. (a)  Two ways in which clauses occur and the special character of clauses Force belongs to utterances or “sentences” only as taken as wholes in the situation of the speech-act, whether the force be that of a statement, a command , a request, a wish, or some other kind. By contrast, apart from conjunctions , subordinate clauses have no force, even though if they had occurred naked, not embedded, they would each have had their own distinctive force: “I order ...”, “I appoint ...”, “I warn ...”, “... shall ...” (except in the grammatical first person), “the sentence of the court is ...”, and so forth. As embedded they make no statement, give no order, make no appointment, give no warning, establish no law, deliver no court sentence. We must now consider the implications of this situation for the “sense” or “discourse-significance” of clauses, even when embedded or expressed without commitment. For it is the peculiarity of clauses among the many different kinds of utterance-constituent that their sense is such that if they were to occur alone as complete linguistic deliverances in their own right, then they would have force, the kind of force appropriate to a clause of the kind concerned, and that this force would belong to their sense, giving them their “direction” as complete linguistic deliverances—in Wittgenstein’s analogy, like arrows. They would then constitute committed linguistic deliverances in their own right, “speech-units”, using the word “speech” in a broad sense including linguistic delivery in writing or any other medium as well as speech. Occurring “naked” in this sense will involve occurring linguistically without such intonations as remove the assertoric character of what is said (e.g., the intonations characteristic of rhetorical questions); not in socially recognized “pretend” or fictional contexts such as are provided by novels, dramatic performances, and story-telling; as well as not as a clause embedded and within a complex statement such as a negation, a question, a disjunction, or a conditional. Thus what distinguishes clauses, whether they occur in any of these spe- [18...