The Magic Prism: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language [Paperback]

Howard Wettstein's The Magic Prism is an excellent book. Written by an established master in the philosophy of language who has made seminal contributions to the debates he discusses, it is at once eminently readable and philosophically challenging. The book draws its title from Walker Percy, who calls language "the magic prism" through which we come to perceive and know ourselves and our world (p. vii). Building on this idea, Wettstein argues throughout the book that in semantics, we should refrain from beginning with mysterious and inscrutable topics like "soul, mind, ideas, consciousness" and begin instead with language, which is available and undeniable (p. 62). If you want to understand language, don't try to get behind it, explaining it in veiled psychological terms; rather, take it as the starting point and describe the practices that enliven and sustain it.

The principal focus in the book is reference, and Wettstein spends most of his time defending the "direct reference revolution" against challenges from the Frege-Russell tradition and from the Kaplan-Perry direct reference apostasy. In the first two chapters, Wettstein supplies a nuanced account of the views on reference developed by the fathers of philosophical semantics, opening the book in a way that is reminiscent of Evans in Varieties of Reference. Chapters 3 and 4 find him adducing a compelling argument for considering the Kaplan-Perry approach to direct reference theory alongside the Frege-Russell tradition as targets for his critique, even given their significant differences.

These disparate approaches hold in common a picture of semantic reference that Wettstein calls "Linguistic Cartesianism" (p. 66). Roughly, this view involves commitment to the following theses: (a) reference depends on what is true of individual speakers, and in particular, whether they have a cognitive fix on the referent; (b) the cognitive fix is cashed out in terms of mental and linguistic representations; (c) the contribution of reference to linguistic significance must be understood in propositional terms, and (d) reference is a semantic relation to be explained in more fundamental, cognitive terms involving the contents of propositional attitudes.

The balance of the book, beginning with Chapters 4 and 5, presents a Wittgenstein-inspired approach to reference that involves the complete rejection of Linguistic Cartesianism. As Wettstein sees it, reference is a social phenomenon that can succeed even if speakers lack any sort of fix at all on the referent. Further, referring terms function within the social practice of reference as tags, working directly to connect speakers with the world without any representational or propositional intermediaries. These aspects of his view are summarized in his motto, "Linguistic contact without cognitive contact" (p. 75). Finally, as indicated above, reference is something to be described for Wettstein, not explained. This anti-explanationism is evinced in Chapters 6-9, in which he "dissolves" the puzzles of reference that have so exercised traditionalists. While I am uncertain about his treatment of explanation and propositions and I'm still not sure what his linguistic socialism amounts to, I have profited enormously from studying his analysis of the semantic debates and from reflecting on his own very stimulating perspective.

In my view, this is the best book on reference published in the last five years. It combines a careful critique of the analytic tradition in semantics with a provocative neo-Wittgensteinian account, thereby serving as a rich but somewhat surprising synthesis of the last 130 years of our business. For this reason, I highly recommend that you consider using it if you teach a philosophy of language course. In my experience, it has been tricky to work the later Wittgenstein into a philosophy of language course that focuses on the the Frege-Russell tradition in philosophical semantics---the Wittgenstein reading(s) has always seemed like a "now for something completely different" moment. But when I used this book in an upper-division philosophy of language class, it worked like alchemy, supplying a unified vision of how Wittgenstein relates to Frege, Russell, Kripke, Kaplan, and Perry. (And in so doing, it also helps us put together the Kripke of Naming and Necessity with the Kripke of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, which is also helpful.)