 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? What's in a name? Plato's Cratylus In these podcasts I've made a big deal of saying that Plato dealt with nearly all the topics philosophers have thought about ever since. I suppose even sympathetic listeners will have the suspicion, though, that there are some significant issues in contemporary philosophy that don't arise in Plato. So what might these be? Well, here's an obvious thought. Since the work of the great logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege in the 19th century, philosophers in the analytic tradition have been extremely interested in language. This seems in fact to be a distinctive feature of 20th century philosophy in general, a fascination with language and problems about language. So how about philosophy of language, then? Is this an area where Plato has little to tell us, or just yet another area where Plato is a pioneering genius? You may not be surprised to hear that it's the latter. Plato may have been the first person to do philosophy of language, and he certainly authored the earliest work on the topic, a dialogue called the Cratylus. Of course, this dialogue doesn't tackle all or even most of the problems dealt with in contemporary philosophy of language, but it does tackle one of the most central problems – how do words have meaning? Maybe I'd better explain what the problem is before looking at how Plato deals with it. If I utter a random string of syllables, like Gibaldog tankferder, that doesn't mean anything. In some sense I haven't even said anything, I haven't produced a piece of language, so I haven't managed to communicate. But if I say a word like frege, or philosophy, then I do communicate, at least to people who know what these words mean. So what exactly is the difference? How do some strings of noises, or symbols in the case of written language, come to have meaning while others don't? To answer this question is to explain how words get their power to communicate, and thus to establish something fundamental about what language is. Nowadays one popular theory about how words come to have meaning is that someone has to stipulate that a given sound or set of symbols will from now on represent some particular item. The most obvious example is naming. When a baby is on the way, the parents confer with one another, and, after overcoming bitter disagreement, of the sort which makes each of them wonder if their partner is going to be mature enough to raise a child, an agreement is reached. The baby gets a name. Mama and Papa Frege dubbed their child Gottlob. Maybe they should have thought about that one a bit more. And thus stipulated that this word would refer to the infant logician. So here's a theory about how names, and words in general, get their meaning. It happens through an act of arbitrary dubbing. As it turns out, this is one of the theories that Plato considers in The Cratylus. Sharp-eared listeners may remember that I mentioned the name Cratylus way back in episode 5 when I was talking about Heraclitus. No doubt you're all saving the older podcast episodes for your own children and grandchildren to listen to someday. But to save you the trouble of digging out episode 5, I'll remind you that Cratylus was a radical follower of Heraclitus. He's the one who said, you can't even step into the same river once, and that you can't talk about things, because they keep changing. You can only point at them with your finger. He's one of the three main characters in this dialogue. The others are Socrates and a man named Hermogenes. When the dialogue begins, Hermogenes and Cratylus have already been arguing about words and how they get their meanings. Hermogenes adopts the theory of arbitrary dubbing. For him, people can use whatever sound they want and associate any meaning with it, and then it's just a matter of usage and convention as to whether that association sticks. Cratylus disagrees. He has been arguing that words have their meaning by nature. So what we have here is a nice example of the opposition we saw the Sophists making between convention and nature. And the question of the dialogue is simply, do words have their meanings by convention or by nature? It's clear to us why words might have their meaning by convention, but what about nature? Cratylus's position becomes clearer as the dialogue goes along, and we also start to understand how his view that words are by nature would relate to his notorious Heraclitianism. Cratylus thinks that everything has a correct or a true name. If you don't use the right word for something, you haven't named it at all, so it turns out that you haven't even said anything. This suits Cratylus perfectly, because he wants it to turn out that you can't say anything false. He agrees with the Protagorean relativists and Heraclitians of Plato's Theaetetus, which I discussed back in episode 22. At least he agrees with them to the extent that he thinks there is no such thing as falsehood, but he's giving a reason different from the reasons we get in the Theaetetus. His reason is that to use language is nothing but uttering the right word or expression for what you are thinking about. Cratylus goes so far as to say that if you use the wrong word for something, you haven't actually used a word at all. A word in the proper sense is just the expression, which means what you want to say. So on his view, there is no such thing as using language falsely. That then is the dispute Socrates enters into at the beginning of the dialogue. Does each thing have a word for it which is correct by nature, or can anything be called by whatever word we want just by convention? Socrates starts by arguing against Hermogenes, who defends the conventional view. Socrates says that words are man-made items like tools, and like tools they have a function. Used as a hammer is for banging in nails, so a word is for meaning a certain thing. This seems plausible, but it suggests that you can't use just any sound to mean anything you want, just as you can't bang in nails using tapioca pudding. But if it's clear what makes some things suitable for banging nails and others not so suitable, it's not so clear what would make some sounds suitable for being words and others not. Socrates has an answer ready. He says that the right word for something should somehow reveal its nature. This he says is what the great poet Homer must have thought. He quotes passages where Homer says that a river, for instance, has one name used by the gods and another name used by humans. So Homer must have believed that the gods are using a true name, one might say the real name, which expresses an insight that mere humans lack. But can Socrates provide any examples? Why, he's glad you asked! He now launches into a long series of etymologies of Greek words, trying to show in each case that the word in question perfectly expresses the thing to which it refers. He gives etymologies for the names of the gods, features of the natural world like the moon, ethical virtues, and so on. To give you just a flavor of this, he suggests that the hero in Homer's Iliad, Hector, is called Hector because in Greek hektor can mean one who holds, and hektor is the protector and ruler, thus the holder or possessor, of Troy. Or take the word theos, which means god. This is where we get the word theology, for instance. Socrates says this relates to the Greek verb thein, which means to run, because the ones who devised the name thought that the heavens were divine and the heavens are always running their course above us. Speaking of which, one of my favorite etymologies is of the Greek word for heaven, also the name of a god, Ouranos. Socrates suggests that this comes from the phrase horo ta ano, which means looking at things above. Socrates' etymologies are ingenious, but rather fanciful and often extremely far-fetched. Some readers have wondered how seriously we are meant to take the whole exercise. Socrates says several times that he is in the grip of a divine inspiration, which is why he's able to produce all these brilliant etymologies. But could that be Plato signaling us to take this with a grain of salt, since he elsewhere contrasts divine inspiration with the possession of true knowledge? Or maybe the whole thing is a kind of joke, a parody of something the Sophists did. The Sophists are indeed mentioned several times in a rather teasing way, but it's not very plausible to say that the whole thing is just a joke. For one thing, Plato has clearly put a lot of effort into this. For another, he has Socrates label a few selected etymologies as less serious. This suggests that the others mentioned are more serious. More plausible, I think, would be to say that Plato is competing with other authors who offered etymologies. Perhaps he's displaying his ingenuity and ability to suggest clever derivations for Greek terms. But even so, he may think that there are serious philosophical reasons for producing such derivations. What might that be? Well, we already know the answer. If Socrates is right that the correct words reveal the natures of things, then we could discover the natures of things by producing etymologies of their correct names. The analysis of names would turn out to be a way of doing philosophy. But there are several problems. Firstly, Socrates admits that some words have crept into Greek from foreign languages, so no etymology is possible in these cases. More worrying, he assumes that the Greek of his own day is corrupted. In the Greeks spoken in the 5th century BC, the original correct word may have been altered significantly. Letters or even whole syllables may have been added or subtracted, as when pronunciation changes to make a word easier to say. So in some cases, he suggests that we need to eliminate letters from a Greek word to discover its correct etymology. This obviously makes it even easier to let one's etymological fancy run wild. But before we run wild, an even worse problem might give us pause. If I etymologize the word for god by saying that it's based on the word for run, then why is the word for run necessarily a correct word? It looks like each word's meaning is simply a function of the meanings of the words on which it is based. So what makes any of those words natural, or revelatory of the natures of things? To stop this regress, Socrates suggests that there is a way that words could be real, natural representations or likenesses of the things they refer to. This is, basically, onomatopoeia. If I may indulge in a little etymology of my own, this word onomatopoeia comes from, wait for it, ancient Greek. And the first part, onoma, is the Greek term I've been translating in this episode as word. Sometimes people translate onoma as name rather than word, but that might be misleading since Socrates is happy to refer to a common noun, or even a verb, as an onoma. At any rate, onomatopoeia is of course when a word literally sounds like what it means, for example words like bang, splash, or tweet. Socrates' suggestion, then, is that all real or natural words are onomatopoeic. This seems hard to believe, but Socrates argues that if we take the idea seriously, we'll see that when words were originally bestowed upon things, the people who bestowed them were expressing certain ideas about the natures of things and crafting words to match. These ancestors of ours, it would seem, were Heraclitians. They used certain letters to suggest that things are constantly changing. For instance, Socrates says, the Greek letter rho is supposed to signify rapid change because the tongue vibrates when pronouncing it. The letter lambda is supposed to represent gliding or flowing. Now Socrates gives examples of how this onomatopoeic code was used to build words expressing a Heraclitian theory. To give a very basic example, the very word for flow or flux in Greek begins with a rho, which signifies change. Then after using onomatopoeia as a starting point, these Heraclitian ancestors built further words etymologically. For instance, the Greek word for wisdom itself, phronesis, is supposed to relate to a Greek word for motion, phora. Thus Greek, or rather the carefully designed ancestor language of Greek, contains within it a kind of secret philosophical theory, namely that it is the nature of things to be in constant change. Now I know what you're thinking, since when is Plato a Heraclitian? Is he really having Socrates claim that the wise ancestors who devised the original true version of Greek were flux theorists like the ones he attacks in the Theaetetus? Well yes and no. Socrates does seem convinced that these ancestors had Heraclitian ideas, but he also points out that it is one thing to discover a philosophical theory encoded in our language, and another thing to decide whether that theory is true. Perhaps the ancestors were Heraclitians, but then perhaps they were wrong. And that brings us to Socrates' refutation of the Heraclitian in the room, Cratylus. So far Socrates has been refuting Hermogenes' theory that language is entirely conventional. Now he points out against Cratylus that language cannot be entirely natural either. The account he's just presented was very much to Cratylus' taste, but it allows for things like the corruption of words. As we saw, sometimes a letter might be added to or removed from a word to make it easier to say. When this happens, people are still able to use the word to communicate, to express meaning. So it can't be the case that only the true, natural words function as words. There must also be a role for convention. Socrates thus takes a sort of middle view between Hermogenes and Cratylus. Words have their meanings by both nature and convention. So it's no surprise that he also rejects the most radical idea of Cratylus, namely that it's impossible to speak falsely because a real word or string of words must successfully mean the thing it is about. Socrates has already suggested, with his idea about onomatopoeia, that words are likenesses of the things they mean. So they're a bit like paintings, they're representations. But if I hold up a painting of say, Buster Keaton, and say it's a painting of Charlie Chaplin, then there is a mismatch between the painting and the thing that is supposedly represented. I've got the wrong silent movie comedian. Similarly, it must be possible for me to apply a word to the wrong thing. The falsehood occurs because of a mismatch between the representation and what it is meant to represent. Notice how Socrates here uses the idea that words are likenesses of things, which fits perfectly into Cratylus's own theory that words are by nature, to undermine Cratylus's more radical claim that falsehood is impossible. Notice also that Plato is here returning to the question, familiar from the Theaetetus, of how falsehood is possible, and coming up with an answer a lot like the one we saw there. Just as in the Theaetetus, Socrates talked about imprints in wax which are mismatched with objects of perception, so here he treats words as representations mismatched with the things they are supposed to represent. In taking a middle view between the naturalism of Cratylus and the conventionalism of Hermogenes, Socrates tries to preserve two possible functions of language. On the one hand, we use language simply to communicate our intentions. For this purpose, convention seems to be enough. If I stipulate that this baby with the logical twinkle in his eye is to be called Gottlob Frege, and the right people get the message, then that will be his name. But on the other hand, Socrates is sympathetic to the hope that words can do something more ambitious. They can reveal the natures of things. This takes us back to the flux theory of the ancestors who devised the original words for things. As I said earlier, even if this does turn out to be the theory encoded in our language, that wouldn't show that the theory is true. To discover whether the theory is true, we need to do something other than analyzing the words that have been assigned to the things around us, we need to decide whether the principles that guided that process were the right ones. As it turns out, Herakleitianism is rejected. The dialogue ends with a reassertion of what I'm tempted to call good old fashioned Platonism. Perhaps the ancestors were flux theorists, but if so then our language is devised on false principles. For the right philosophical theory, which we can use to correct the assumptions built into our language, is not a theory of radical change, but a theory of stability. I have a dream, Socrates says. In my dream, it seems to me that there may be beauty itself, goodness itself, and so on. And surely beauty itself is always the way it is and not constantly changing. And then won't such things be the objects of true knowledge? Here Plato does what he famously fails to do in the Theaetetus. He affirms the theory of forms, or something like it, as a preferable alternative to the flux theory of Heraclitus and his followers. So at the end of the Cratylus, Plato seems for a change to actually talk like a Platonist. If we read the whole dialogue again with this ending in mind, we might even convince ourselves that there is room for a true language, albeit perhaps not ancient Greek, whose words express Platonic forms rather than a world of change and flux. If philosophy could be done by linguistic analysis, it would have to analyze just such a language. But if this was Plato's dream, he never tried to turn it into a reality. He did write a dialogue about the world around us, how it came to be, and how it relates to the forms. But this dialogue does not proceed by analyzing the Greek language or any other language. And it admits that the theory it presents is a tentative one, only a likely story, as its main character says. In this story, the world is revealed as the work of a divine craftsman, made as an image of the forms. As in the closing pages of the Cratylus, Platonism is alive and well in this next dialogue we'll be looking at, the Timaeus. But the Platonism in the Timaeus is combined with some new and rather unexpected ideas. I don't want to give too much away, but let me just ask you this. Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and wondered if you might be made of triangles? If so, then next week's episode is for you, here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.