Both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) are perennially best-selling children's classics. They also stimulate the imagination and are thus well-read among adults as well. Indeed, even if one has not read the works themselves, one often comes across characters such as Alice, the White Rabbit with the great big watch, egg-shaped Humpty Dumpty, and the King and Queen. We are so familiar with Carroll's works that we have only to hear a few lines of his nonsense to recognize it.
Many people are also aware that Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a mathematics professor and logician at Oxford University. It is also well-known that Queen Victoria, her interest piqued by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, requested other books by Carroll and ended up receiving a stack of difficult scientific works to read.
The two Alice books have also been analyzed by specialists. For example, the works have been discussed by literary critics specializing in nineteenth-century adult literature and by specialists on modern thought. Many people believe that the works had considerable influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein. The works are often cited by linguists, as well, and they take on an especially prominent role in the area of semantics, where particular passages from Carroll are almost always cited.
In this book, instead of simply quoting passages from Carroll as a starting point in elucidating semantic theory, I wish to interpret Carroll's works as semantic treatises. Doing so will not only increase our understanding of the two works but will also provide a good introduction to the semantic theories of our times.

Carroll was a logician working in the classical framework, but he also possessed great sensitivity toward words. On the one hand, classical logic is unwieldy, and it twists the meaning of words for its own ends. Carroll is a believer in this theory. On the other hand, Carroll realizes intuitively that classical logic is unable to capture the way words function in real life and is troubled by this discrepancy between theory and intuition. What Carroll does in the Alice books is incorporate this problem into the story in order to make the reader aware of it. Classical logic is represented by the strange characters in his stories, while common sense and Carroll's intuitions are given voice to by Alice. My book will build upon this interpretation of Carroll's works.
Carroll lived in an era where the study of logic was transforming itself, but he himself did not follow this trend. Because of this, he did not gain great renown as a logician. The Carrollian scholar R. D. Sutherland's words summarize the opinions of most: "... in both mathematics and logic Dodgson was not a particularly profound or significant thinker" (p.64); [rather] his concern with language found expression in his [literary] works" (p.15). However, it is perhaps his dissatisfaction as a logician that led to his success as a writer. His logic and his stories are not separate entities; together, they produce a coherent theory of semantics.
If one reads Carroll's works keeping this in mind, the peculiar things that happen in Wonderland and in the land beyond the looking glass start to make sense. The irritating conversations between the various characters become meaningful, and the author's message is put into relief. We become aware of why it is that, even though Carroll's characters speak strangely, we cannot dismiss it all as pure nonsense. Carroll is our guide, leading us to the discovery of modern semantic theory. Carroll's two stories presaged some of the major problems in modern semantic theory.
The classical theory that Carroll so strongly believed in was essentially replaced by symbolic logic in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Symbolic logic is a powerful theory backed by modern philosophy of language. It has succeeded in providing solutions to some major problems that Carroll battled with. On the down side, however, symbolic logic has created problems where, for Carroll, there was none. In this book, I would like to examine the problems Carroll came up against-both the ones which have been solved and the ones which remain unresolved-from the standpoint of modern semantic theory.
Some modern semanticists treat those who use symbolic logic when analyzing meaning as committing the same error as classical logicians, and they criticize these scholars as being "classical" or "Aristotelian." However, although these modern semanticists have the upper hand at present, they have failed to examine what it truly means to be "classical." In examining Carroll's works, I hope to elucidate each side's views on the subject and discover points of similarity as well as points of difference.
As we pursue Carroll's semantics, we are gradually drawn into the domain of pragmatics. To know the meaning of a word is not equivalent to knowing how to use the word. The characters in Wonderland and through the looking glass exhibit some sensitivity when they explain the meaning of a word, but they are not talented when it comes to using words for communication. These literal-minded characters cannot understand that words change their meaning depending on their context, nor can they understand that there are cases where meanings are conveyed indirectly without words. As a result, although what they say might be logical and without contradiction, sometimes it has no informational value and sometimes it is so far removed from reality that it stumps poor Alice.

In Part I, chapter one, I first discuss classical logic. Here, Humpty Dumpty is its star representative. What exactly was this Aristotelian, classical theory of logic which kept Carroll under its grip? What parts of the theory troubled Carroll? What sort of world view was reflected in this classical theory? These are the sorts of questions I will try to answer in this section. In 1.2, I try to elucidate modern symbolic logic. How did symbolic logic, which is part and parcel of the philosophy of language, overcome the limitations of classical theory, and how did it refine semantic theory?
In Part II, chapter three, I analyze several strange dialogues and episodes in the Alice books; I also (in tandem with Carroll) analyze word meanings and investigate how nonsense arises. Here, it is the White Knight who challenges the reader to mental gymnastics. In chapter four, I discuss various competing but often complementary modern theories in order to see which one Carroll's is most akin to, and I also examine the ways in which the theories have changed between Carroll's time and ours. In the process of doing so, we will have the opportunity to compare several different approaches of conducting meaning analysis.
In Part III, chapter five, I examine the conversations between Alice and other characters from the point of view of pragmatics. I show that social awareness and thoughtfulness toward others are of utmost importance in human interaction, and I also demonstrate that conducting conversations too logically leads to nonsense. Finally, in chapter six, I offer an overview of modern pragmatic and semantic theory. How does pragmatics exploit semantics? Alternatively, does pragmatics obviate the need for semantics?

In this way, semantics has much in common with logic and the philosophy of language which stands behind logic, and it forms the nucleus of pragmatics-semantics in a wider sense. My book will compare Carroll's ideas with those of modern theorists' concerning logical theory (Part I), semantic theory (Part II), and pragmatic theory (Part III). Readers may pick and choose those parts which interest them.

Contents

Part I: Logic

Chapter 1: Carroll the classical logician
1.1. The beginnings of cognitive science
1.2. Humpty Dumpty's term logic
1.3. The Aristotelian syllogism
1.4. Carroll's diagrams and Venn diagrams
1.5. Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles": infinite regress in syllogisms
1.6. Two-valued logic

Chapter 2: Modern symbolic logic
2.1. Propositional logic
2.2. Truth conditions
2.3. Predicate logic
2.4. The grammar and logic of subject and predicate

Part II: Semantics

Chapter 3: Carroll the semanticist
3.1. Hyper-naive realism: the semantics of substance and attributes
3.2. The necessary and sufficient conditions of word meaning
3.3. The White Knight and the name of the song
3.4. Jabberwocky: the first kind of nonsense
3.5. The Rabbit with the watch: the second kind of nonsense
3.6. The Red King's dream: the third kind of nonsense
3.7. Of cabbages and kings: the fourth kind of nonsense

Chapter 4: Modern semantics
4.1. Must a name mean something?
4.2. Saussure's structuralism
4.3. The analysis of semantic relations
4.4. Componential analysis
4.5. Formal semantics and cognitive semantics

Part III: Pragmatics

Chapter 5: Carroll the pragmaticist
5.1. Jam every other day: words in their context
5.2. Off with their heads: presupposition
5.3. It isn't manners for us to begin: social rules

Chapter 6: Modern pragmatics
6.1. External pressure and the theory of pragmatics
6.2. Face

Works Cited

Afterword

Topic Index

Name Index