336 The subjectivity of utterance

10.6 SUBJECTIVITY AND LOCUTIONARY AG ENCY

In several sections of this chapter, especially in the preceding sec­tion on modality and mood, I have invoked the notion of subjec­tivity. I will now explain what is meant by the term 'subjective' in this context. This is all the more important in that the word 'subjective' tends to be given an irrelevantly pejorative inter­pretation in everyday English. It is also the case that the notion of subjectivity itself has not figured as prominently as it should have done, until recently, in works on linguistic semantics written in English.

Indeed, it is probably true to say that the majority of such works - and especially those which adopt, or are strongly influ­enced by, the viewpoint of formal semantics - are seriously flawed, both theoretically and empirically, by their failure to give due weight to the phenomenon of subjectivity. This failure is perhaps attributable to the empiricist tradition, which still bears heavily on mainstream British and American philosophy, psychology, sociology and, to a lesser extent, linguistics. The reassertion of so-called Cartesian rationalism, by Chomsky and others, over the last thirty years has done little to remedy the defects of empiricism in this respect. For British empiricism and Cartesian rationalism (in the form in which it has been taken over and reinterpreted by Chomsky) both share the intellectual-ist - and objectivist - prejudice that language is essentially an instrument for the expression of prepositional thought. This prejudice is evident in a large number of influential works, which, though they might differ considerably on a wide variety of issues, are at one in giving no attention at all to the non-propositional component of languages or in playing down its importance. The same intellectualist and objectivist prejudice is evident, as we have seen, in standard logical treatments of mod­ality, in which objectivism is closely connected with pro-positionalization. But, as I have emphasized in other sections of this chapter, objectivism is also to be found in standard treat­ments of deixis (including tense), aspect, and other phenomena.

But what exactly is meant by 'subjectivity' (in the present con­text)? I have just mentioned Cartesian rationalism. What is

10.6 Subjectivity and locutionary agency 337

now at issue is one of two historically connected, but logically separable, aspects of what is commonly referred to as Cartesian, or post-Cartesian, dualism. One of these is the doctrine of meta­physical dualism: the doctrine that there are two radically differ­ent kinds of reality, matter and mind. This is of no direct concern to us here. The other is the dualism of subject and object: in cognition, feeling and perception, on the one hand, and in action or agency, on the other. (It is this latter dualism, of course, which explains, ultimately, the grammatical opposi­tion both of 'subject' and 'object' and also of 'active' and 'pas­sive'.) Although metaphysical dualism is of no direct concern to us here, its historical connexion with subject-object dualism is worth noting. For it is this historical connexion, no doubt, which accounts for the pejorative associations of the term 'sub­jective'. 'Subjectivity' in the empiricist tradition was associated with a certain kind of unscientific and untestable mentalism; 'objectivity', with a sturdy nineteenth-century (now outmoded) scientific materialism. Without going further into this question, let me say that 'subjectivity', as the term is being used here, denotes the property (or set of properties) of being either a sub­ject of consciousness (i.e., of cognition, feeling and perception) or a subject of action (an agent). It denotes the property of being what Descartes himself called a "thinking entity" (in Latin, 'res cogitans') and identified, as others have done, with the self or the ego. In saying this, I am not however committing myself to a sharply dualistic, Cartesian or post-Cartesian, oppo­sition of the subject and object of cognition.

So much then for the general notion of subjectivity. What is of concern to the linguist is, more specifically, locutionary sub­jectivity: the subjectivity of utterance. If we accept uncritically for the moment the post-Cartesian (and post-Kantian) distinc­tion of the (internal) subjective ego, or self, and the (external) objective non-ego, or non-self, we can say of locutionary subjec­tivity that it is the locutionary agent's (the speaker's or writer's, the utterer's) expression of himself or herself in the act of utter­ance: locutionary subjectivity is, quite simply, self-expression in the use of language.