Chapter 7
In: The Lvov-Warsaw School and Contemporary Philosophy of Language
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Abstract
The central theme of Strawson’s philosophy of language was the dichotomy of subject and predicate in a sentence. Stemming from a seminal distinction of referring use and ascriptive/attributive use in his early work, On Referring (1950), this dichotomy was used as explanans in arguments in semantic controversies with Russell. Later, it became a very important explanandum for Strawson, motivating his deep metaphysical enquiries, undertaken for the sake of grounding subject–predicate distinction in ‘something that conditions our whole way of talking and thinking’ and ‘reflects some fundamental features of our thought about the world’. This theme was given its first full-blown account in a major work, Individuals (1959), according to which the dichotomy of subject and predicate must be grounded in a parallel metaphysical dichotomy of object and concept. Elaborated further in a series of papers, it was given even fuller exposition after nearly a quarter of a century in Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar (1974), a book of which Strawson wrote: ‘Of all my books [it] is probably the most ambitious and certainly the one that has received the least attention’.
The aim of the paper is to show that Strawson’s grammatical ideas indeed require a deep explanation but that the explanation provided by Strawson himself is not satisfactory. Then, I will argue that Strawson’s ideas can be augmented with and organised by a different grounding of the central dichotomy. Namely, what provides a proper grounding for these ideas and thus a promising interpretative scheme is Ajdukiewicz’s Categorial Grammar (cg). Conversely, Strawson’s philosophy sheds some light on the foundations of cg.