What is a wife? From a philosophical point of view, it looks like the word `wife’ is a predicate and so should stand for a condition, presumably one that humans meet or don't meet at times. And so the first question is, which condition? And then the next questions would be about the importance of the property, its relation to issues of equality, social structure and the like.

But the first question isn’t so simple. When we read Marilyn Yalom’s book,A History of the Wife很明显，“妻子”这个词(以及它翻译的其他语言中的词)在不同的时代和文化中有不同的含义。在许多时代和文化中，做妻子就是拥有某种财产。这在当代美国不会被接受。当代的美国妻子在法律上与丈夫是平等的，事实上往往在教育、经济和许多其他方面都比丈夫优越。那么，wife的意思变了吗?那么它只是模棱两可吗?系统的模糊?它不是模棱两可，但仍然设法在不同的时间代表不同的属性吗?这是怎么回事?它是否依赖于上下文? Is there an unarticulated constituent hidden in their somewhere: a wife is a wife in a culture at time?

These issues, which don’t connect too much with what we talked about with Marilyn Yalom, do connect with things I have been thinking about in connection with the problem of freedom and determinism.

It seems to me that when philosophers think about words that have a big role in ordinary life, they need to distinguish three questions, which I’ll get to in a minute. By words that play a big role in ordinary life I mean, in the freedom and determinism case, the phrases we construct with the word `can’, as in ``I can finish this blog in less than an hour,” which may or may not be true. It seems to me very likely that these can-phrases, or their translation, were in use in human activity long before philosophers began worrying about what they meant, and that the conditions that they stand for almost certainly played a role in human thought and activity before there were words for them. And I suspect the same is true for the word `wife’.

In contrast, words like `free-will’ and `democracy’ and `social contract’, although they now enter into all sorts of conversations by non-philosophers, probably had their beginnings with reflective thinkers of some sort, theologians, philosophers, and their ilk.

Now, with the first kind of word, it seems to me that two ideas from twentieth century philosophy (you remember it), are very useful --- two ideas not always thought to be very connected. One is Wittgenstein’s idea of a language game, and the other is the idea of direct reference.

维特根斯坦认为，通过构建原始的“语言游戏”来思考单词的意义是有用的，在这种游戏中，单词是与人类活动相结合的语言小片段的一部分，因此人们可以生动地看到单词在原始情况下所做的工作，在这种情况下，它们开始有意义，或可能有意义。最著名的是他的建筑助手语言游戏，其中只有四个单词，积木，柱子，平板和其他东西，我不太记得了。(Those who would like to delve into gory detail about this language game can go to my paper ``Davidson’s Sentences and Wittgenstein’s Builders, available athttp://www-csli.stanford.edu/~jperry/phil.html.)

In this case, one can see that the words are used to stand for a condition or property --- I try to use `condition' for something perhaps rather complex, not something nature necessarily offers up as important independently of human activity --- that plays a certainrolein the life of humans. Humans know how to tell the difference between pillars and slabs, they use them for different things in building, and so forth and so on. The words get meaning by being connected with this role; a pillar is the sort of thing the builder uses for certain purposes in certain building situations, and the assistant gets praise for bringing if the builder says `pillar’ but not if he says `slab’.

这个角色可以被认为是提供了一个描述，建造者和助手可以将其与柱子联系起来，这样柱子就可以被视为满足描述的所有事物的共同条件。但这是一种很奇怪的看待它的方式。首先，这个语言游戏的玩家在他们的描述中没有任何其他的词汇。词语和条件之间联系的关键是它们的活动，而不是它们的概念装置。如果他们对楼板和柱子之间的差异有了自己的看法，这些看法可能就不准确了。对于如何正确定义“板”和“柱”，建造者和助手可能会有不同的，甚至不一致的意见。这并不重要，只要他们同意延长——只要助理带着正确的积木。重要的是条件在他们的活动中所起的作用，而不是他们对板和柱的决定性的看法。这就是直接引用的联系。

So that’s the first question: what role that things play in human activities, especially the sorts of activities that might have been in place before the word, or any words, were in place, is the word connected to.

Now in the case of `wife’, it seems reasonable to suppose that people were linking up in male-female relatively long-term relationships long before language in general or the word `wife’ in particular came along. The words `wife’ and `husband’ get at two roles in these relationships, being the female member of such a relationship, and being the male member.

那么问题来了，如果有的话，人们会怎么看待这些角色的占用者呢?普通人会做什么假设?神学家，哲学家，法官和其他各种概念和法律权威提出了什么观点?在不同的时间和地点，哪些进一步的实践，取决于这些观点的一部分或全部，以及为什么?It is the answer to this question that, in part, a book likeThe History of the Wife,tells us about.

Given this framework, we can get a handle on the original problem, how can `wife’ stand for so many different conditions or relationships, and still in some sense have the same meaning? There can be a basic role in a widespread and long enduring human activity that the word is associated with in many cultures and times, but the opinions about what goes along with playing the role can different from culture to culture and age to age.

But it is more complicated, because of the third factor. Some of the opinions are codified in various ways that have some sort of official status. There are laws in various places and time about wives, whether or not they are property, whether or not they can own property, whether there can be more than one to a husband, whether there can be more than one husband for a wife. Laws, secular and religious, may establish an official meaning for a word that diverges from its root-role. A man and a woman may marry, but never live together; they may live with other people, but still be husband and wife. A man and a woman may live together and rear children, but not marry, so not be husband and wife.

This generates a new sort of question: what should a wife be, in order that these various practices that have been codified in more and less informal ways, make sense, given one or another set of ideas about people and justice and the like? Or, are the people that fall in the extension of `wife' as used, deserving of the treatment so codified? If not what should be changed? The extension (males can be wives, since there is no justification in sex and gender for not allowing them the privileges that come with being the spouse of breadwinning male?). The practices (wives should not be treated as property, because wives are persons, and persons can't be property)? To understand the dynamics of the issue, who and what is a wife, we would probably have to develop some account of how all of these factors fall into a sort of equilibrium, relative to the mores of a given society and a given age.

Isthat哲学分析包括什么?

What a mess.