e.g. 'Screwdriver' means 'a tool created to turn screws' — invizzy

Turn of the Screws? I thought it was orange juice and vodka. Screw turner! Outlandish.

Maybe a side issue, but you don't think 'screwdriver' means something like 'a tool created to turn screws'?
I know there is a drink called a 'Screwdriver', so the word can mean something else, but is it odd for a word to have two meanings? Surely that sort of thing happens all the time without being a problem for my theory?

But - language as such is a matter of 'intra-utterance' relations. All of it.

I think this is a really good point. But can you see the claim I'm attempting to make? Perhaps I mean to say something else? That 'to be','to mean', and 'to cause' are EXCLUSIVELY 'intra-utterance relations' or some such?

Interesting to revist these ideas four years later. I think I had some things correct and others wrong. Yet the thrust - that some words are referring to a relationship between words and things rather than just things and things - is important.

These days I feel these 'intra utterance' words track Aristotle's four causes very nicely.

So with the material cause that Aristotle talks about, the orthodoxy is that Aristotle is talking about the material that makes something up - the usual idea of thing-in-the-world statue and thing-in-the-world bronze.

I think, however, that this an example of intra-utterance relations. Aristotle is REALLY talking about the relationship between the word we use for the material (the words ‘the bronze’) and a particular statue, not the statue and the bronze itself.

When Aristotle gives the example of bronze and a statue as a cause and effect it is tempting to think of the obvious relationship between them. I can understand why people look at the relationship between the bronze and the statue and say ‘Hey, the relationship must be that the statue is made out of the bronze’.

My claim is that the relationship is actually between the words ‘the bronze’ and the statue, and ‘the statue’ and the bronze. This looks a little more complicated than ‘what the statue is made out of’, but I think this word/thing relationship will allow us to have a more parsimonious explanation for why Aristotle draws up these four types of causation in the first place.

So what IS the relationship between ‘the bronze’ and the statue, and ‘the statue’ and the bronze?

A meaningful use of the words ‘the bronze’ are - in an important sense - sufficient to give information about a particular bronze statue. By this I mean that the words ‘the bronze’, no matter when they are meaningfully used, will necessarily refer to the stuff that a particular bronze statue is made of. I suppose you could say bronze is fungible in that regard, meaning that bronze is functionally identical wherever it is: ‘bronze’ will always refer to any bit of bronze you need because bronze (as bronze) is interchangeable.

So this, what I call the ‘sufficient’ relationship between the words ‘the bronze’ and a particular bronze statue, is what I claim is one part of the ‘material cause’ relationship. (Because necessity and sufficiency are two sides of the same coin you could equally say that ‘bronze’ necessarily describes the particular statue - if it describes the bit of bronze here it necessarily describes the bit of bronze anywhere).

The second part is that the words ‘the statue’ is NOT sufficient to give information about the particular bronze, seeing as ‘the statue’ doesn’t necessarily refer to bronze things, it could just as easily describe something made of marble.

So we can see there’s an interesting relationship here.

Naively we think the relationship of a material cause should be between the particular statue and the particular material that makes it up, but I’m saying the relationship Aristotle is interested in is the sufficient relationship between the WORDS ‘the bronze’ and the particular statue, and the insufficient relation between the WORDS ‘the statue’ and the particular bronze that makes it up.

The benefit of this idea, is that the rest of the causes just follow the same pattern with different permutations of sufficiency. The four causes: sufficient / not sufficient, sufficient / sufficient, not sufficient / not sufficient, not sufficient / sufficient.

For the formal cause we say the ratio of 2:1 causes the octave: Here words ‘the ratio of 2:1’ necessarily gives information about a particular octave, while ‘an octave’ necessarily gives information about the ratio of 2:1.

For the efficient cause we say the father causes the child. Here ‘the father’ is not necessarily giving you information about a particular child (because unlike bronze, fathers are not interchangeable thus it could be someone else’s father), and ‘a child’ is not necessarily giving you information about a father seeing as not all children have fathers.

For the final cause we say health causes walking: here ‘health’ is not necessarily giving you information about particular walking (health unlike bronze is not interchangeable, it could be talking about someone else’s health), but ‘walking’ necessarily gives you information about health, namely that you (will) have it.