Ordinary Language Philosophy: A Meta-philosophical Critique of the Language of Philosophy

1. Ordinary Language Philosophy: A Meta-philosophical Critique of the Language of Philosophy Brian Dominguez Berry 14 May 2018

2. Questions • How is language used in philosophy? • What is our investment in the ordinary?

3. Overview • General remarks on ordinary language philosophy • Austin on performatives • Wittgenstein on language games and private language • Cavell on the significance of claims about ordinary language

4. “Ordinary” as opposed to what? • A reaction to traditional philosophical language. • A reaction to logical positivism and the project of ideal language. • Most typified in the figures of J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

5. The Philosophical Tradition is Skeptical about: • Whether or not the world exists and whether we can know it. • Whether or not other minds exist and whether we can know them / communicate with them. • Whether or not we have free will.

6. Ordinary Language vs. Philosophical Language • The contrast does not only aim at philosophical technical words, but primarily at philosophical (mis) appropriations of ordinary words. • In metaphysics: being, existence, reality, world, to know, to see, to perceive, etc. • In ethics: freedom, volition, desire, choice, opinion, etc. • The ordinary concepts of ‘existence’ and ‘freedom’ are defined in a privative sense—when they are threatened in some specific way. Philosophy overgeneralizes in a context that is not warranted.

7. Strawson on Ideal Language The central idea of early analytic philosophy “was the idea of translation, or an ideal paraphrase as the proper goal of philosophical analysis—even though this goal might itself be a mere ideal. On this conception of analysis, the principal philosophical problems would be resolved if one could translate sentences of ordinary language which contained problematic concepts by means of other sentences—expressions which would exhibit clearly the underlying complexities of these concepts; or if one could transpose ordinary sentences whose grammatical structure was misleading into a form which would exhibit clearly the true structure of the thoughts they expressed or the facts they signified.” (P.F. Strawson, “Analysis, Science, and Metaphysics,” in The Linguistic Turn 312)

8. Two Pictures of Clarity • One way of defining philosophy would be that it aims at conceptual clarity. • Logical positivism/analytic philosophy: approaches scientific criteria for clarity. Concepts should be exact and potentially useful. • Ordinary language philosophy: strives for self-knowledge, aims to make an individual’s thoughts clear to themselves.

9. Ordinary Language Critique of Ideal Language • Metaphysical language is not ordinary language. That is, metaphysical problems emerge from a departure from the ordinary (misuse of ordinary concepts/words). • Formal logic is a poor model for natural language (a critique of the correspondence theory of language, which takes naming/referring to be the primary function of language).

10. Correspondence Theory • The correspondence theory of language sees language as fundamentally referential: language refers to the world. (Descriptive fallacy.) • We evaluate the truth or falsity of language based on if it corresponds to something in the world. • Ex.: “The cat is on the mat.” • Any proposition that lacks a clear means of evaluating its truth is non-sense. • Ex.: “God exists.”

11. J.L Austin (1911–1960) • Worked with British Intelligence during WWII, where he was instrumental in deciphering German encryption. • Spent his career at Oxford, where formed what would be known as “Oxford philosophy.” • Most widely known for his work on speech-acts / performative utterances.

12. How To Do Things With Words • How To Do Things With Words comprises Austin’s William James Lectures that he delivered at Harvard in 1955. • Brings together material that Austin had been developing for years at Oxford on performative utterances or speech acts.

13. Performative Utterances / Speech Acts • Not all sentences are meant to saysomething about the world—some are meant to dosomething. • Ex.: “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth.” • Such utterances are not true or false, but rather felicitous or infelicitous.

14. Conditions for a Felicitous Performative • (A. 1): “There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances.” • (A. 2): “The particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invoking of the particular procedure invoked.” • (B. 1): “The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and …” • (B. 2): “Completely.” (How To Do Things With Words 14–15)

15. Sincerity • (Gamma. 1): “Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend to so conduct themselves, and further…” • (Gamma. 2): “Must actually so conduct themselves subsequently.” (15)

16. “When I say 'I promise' and have no intention of keeping it, I have promised…. [With gamma failure] we speak of our infelicitous act as ‘professed’ or ‘hollow’ rather than ‘purported’ or ‘empty.’” (16) “I do.”

17. Etiolation “A performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance—a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special ways—intelligibly—used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration. Our performative utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as issued in ordinary circumstances.” (22)

18. Generalizing Speech-acts • “What we need to do for the case of stating, and by the same token describing and reporting, is to take them a bit off their pedestal, to realize that they are speech-acts no less than all these other speech-acts that we have been mentioning and talking about as performative” (“Performative Utterances” 250). • “Very few statements that we ever utter are just true or just false. Usually there is the question are they fair or are they not fair, are they adequate or not adequate, are they exaggerated or not exaggerated? … ‘True’ and ‘false’ are just general labels for a whole dimension of different appraisals…. If, then, we loosen up our ideas of truth and falsity we shall see that statements, when assessed in relation to the facts, are not so very different after all from pieces of advice, warning, verdicts, and so on” (250–51).

19. Speech-acts and Epistemology “When I say ‘I promise’, a new plunge is taken: I have not merely announced my intention, but, by using this formula (performing this ritual), I have bound myself to others, and staked my reputation, in a new way. Similarly, saying ‘I know’ is taking a new plunge. But it is not saying ‘I have performed a specially striking feat of cognition, superior, in the the same scale as believing and being sure, even to being merely quite sure’: for there is nothing in that scale superior to being quite sure. Just as promising is not something superior, in the same scale as hoping and intending, even to merely fully intending: for there is nothing in that scale superior to fully intending. When I say ‘I know’, I give others my word: I give others my authority for saying that ’S is P’.” (Austin, “Other Minds” 99)

20. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) • Son of a wealthy Austrian family. Spent most of his career at Cambridge. • The ‘early’ Wittgenstein refers to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), which is associated with logical positivism. • The ‘later’ Wittgenstein’ refers to his post-positivistic Philosophical Investigations (1953).

21. ‘Early’ Wittgenstein • “The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.” (Preface, Tractatus) • “The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” (Introduction, Tractatus)

22. “Lecture on Ethics” (1929) • “If a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world.” (Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics” 40) • “Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any proposition in language, is the existence of language itself.” (44) • “Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” (44)

23. “Later” Wittgenstein and Augustine • Wittgenstein opens his Philosophical Investigations with a quote from St. Augustine’s Confessions about learning language. • “When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their prior places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.” (In Philosophical Investigations §1).

24. Wittgenstein’s Critique of Augustine “These words, it seems to me give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names.——In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands. Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of word. If you describe the learning of language in this way you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like ‘table’, ‘chair’, ‘loaf’, and of people’s names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself.” (PI §1)

25. Block, Pillar, Slab, Beam “That philosophical concept of meaning has its place in a primitive idea of the way language functions. But one may also say that it is the idea of a language more primitive than ours. Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones; there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, ‘beam’. A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.——Conceive this as a complete primitive language.” (PI §2)

26. Language-Games “We can also think of the whole process of using words in (2) as one of those games by means of which children learn their native language. I will call these games ‘language-games’ and will sometimes speak of a primitive language as a language-game. And the process of naming the stones and of repeating words after someone might also be called language-games. Think of much of the use of words in games like ring-a-ring-a-roses. I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, a ‘language-game’.” (PI §7)

27. Countless Kinds of Words “But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command?—There are countless kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’, ‘sentences’. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.) Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a life-form…. [Here Wittgenstein lists 15 uses of language]…. —It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.)” (PI §23)

28. [Austin Criticizing ‘Infinite’ Uses of Language] “Certainly there are a great many uses of language. It’s rather a pity that people are apt to invoke a new use of language whenever they feel so inclined, to help them out of this, that, or the other well-known philosophical tangle; we need more of a framework in which to discuss these uses of language; and also I think we should not despair too easily and talk, as people are apt to do, about the infinite uses of language. Philosophers will do this when they have listed as many, let us say, as seventeen; but even if there were something like ten thousand uses of language, surely we could list them all in time. This, after all, is no larger than the number of species of beetle that entomologists have taken the pains to list.” (Austin, “Performative Utterances” 234)

29. Meaning as Use • “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word meaning it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer.” (PI §43) • “We said that the sentence ‘Excalibur has a sharp blade’ made sense even when Excalibur was broken in pieces. Now this is so because in this language-game a name is also used in the absence of its bearer.” (PI §44)

30. Forms of Life • “It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle.—Or a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering yes and no. And innumerable others.——And to imagine a language means to imagine a life-form.” (PI §19). • “One human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country’s language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet with them.” (PI II, p. 223)

31. Private Language “We could even imagine human beings who spoke only in monologue; who accompanied their activities by talking to themselves.—An explorer who watched them and listened to their talk might succeed in translating their language into ours. (This would enable him to predict these people’s actions correctly, for he also hears them making resolutions and decisions.) But could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences—his feelings, moods, and the rest—for his private use?——Well, can’t we do so in our ordinary language?—But that is not what I mean. The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.” (PI §243)

32. Idle Language • As a rough equivalent of ‘non-sense,’ the later Wittgenstein has several metaphors for language that does not engage with a particular form of life: • A lever not attached to its mechanism. • An idling engine. • Language on holiday. • Walking on ice.

33. Austin and Wittgenstein • See language in fundamentally anti-essentialist terms. • But nonetheless emphasize that language is not relativistic, that we tend to ultimately agree in language. • Philosophical language is an instance in which we depart from but ultimately return to agreement in language. • Methodologically, they invite us to imagine a context in which something might be said.

34. Austin’s Methodology • On the topic of “excuses” (and ethics more broadly), Austin explains why it is methodologically attractive to “proceed from ‘ordinary language’, that is, by examining what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it.” (“A Plea for Excuses” 181) • “First, words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean tools.” (181) • “Secondly, words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness.” (182) • “Thirdly, and more hopefully, our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing.” (182)

35. Ex.: Accident vs. Mistake “You have a donkey, so have I, and they graze in the same field. The day comes when I conceive a dislike for mine. I go to shoot it, draw a bead on it, fire: the brute falls in its tracks. I inspect the victim, and find to my horror that it is your donkey. I appear on your doorstep with the remains and say—what? ‘I say, old sport, I’m awfully sorry, &c., I’ve shot your donkey by accident’? Or ‘by mistake’? Then again, I go to shoot my donkey as before, draw a bead on it, fire—but as I do so, the beasts move, and to my horror yours falls. Again the scene on the doorstep—what do I say? ‘By mistake’? Or ‘by accident’?” (“A Plea for Excuses” 184)

36. Cavell on Ordinary Language Philosophy • Stanley Cavell (b. 1926) Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, at Harvard. • Must We Mean What We Say? (1969) is an apparently eclectic book of essays on topics ranging from Austin and Wittgenstein to Beckett and Shakespeare. • Concerns itself with situating philosophy with regard to other disciplines, such as art and science.

37. Claims about what we would ordinarily say • “That what we ordinarily say and mean may have a direct and deep control over what we can philosophically say and mean is an idea which many philosophers find oppressive.” (Cavell 1) • “But the philosopher who proceeds from ordinary language is concerned less to avenge sensational crimes against the intellect than to redress its civil wrongs; to steady any imbalance, the tiniest usurpation, in the mind. This inevitably requires reintroducing ideas which have become tyrannical (e.g., existence, obligation, certainty, identity, reality, truth . . .) into the specific contexts in which they function naturally.” (Cavell 18)

38. Types of Statements about Language • Instances of what is said in a language (“ We do say . . . but we don’t say—”; “We ask whether . . . but we do not ask whether—”). • Explications— statements which make explicit what is implied when we say what statements of the first type instance us as saying (“ When we say . . . we imply (suggest, say)—”; “We don’t say . . . unless we mean—”). • Generalizations, to be tested by reference to statements of the first two types. (Cavell 3)

39. Example: Implications of Intent • When we ask, “Is X intentional?” we imply that there is something fishy about X. • What is the connection between the words and their implication? Must there be a connection?

40. The logical status of the ‘must’ • “Either (1) we deny that there is any rational (logical, grammatical) constraint over the ‘pragmatic implications’ of what we say…” • “Or else (2) we admit the constraint and say either (a) since all necessity is logical, the ‘pragmatic implications’ of our utterance are (quasi-) logical implications; with or without adding (b) since the ‘pragmatic implications’ cannot be construed in terms of deductive (or inductive) logic, there must be some ‘third sort’ of logic; or we say (c) some necessity is not logical.” (Cavell 10)

41. Not Empirical Claims • “I am prepared to conclude that the philosopher who proceeds from ordinary language is entitled, without special empirical investigation, to assertions of the second sort we distinguished, viz., assertions like, ‘We do not say “I know . . .” unless we mean that we have great confidence . . . ,’ and like ‘When we ask whether an action is voluntary we imply that the action is fishy.’” (Cavell 12) • “Such speakers do not, in general, need evidence for what is said in the language; they are the source of such evidence… to tell what is and isn’t English, and to tell whether what is said is properly used, the native speaker can rely on his own nose; if not, there would be nothing to count.” (4)

42. Categorial Declarative “Necessary and not analytic: it was— apart from the parody of Kant— to summarize, and partly explain, this peculiarity that I called such statements categorial declaratives: declarative, because something is (authoritatively) made known; categorial, because in telling us what we (must) mean by asserting that (or questioning whether) x is F, they tell us what it is for an x to be F (an action to be moral, a statement claiming knowledge to be a statement expressing knowledge, a movement to be a move).” (Cavell 31–32)

43. De-psychologizing Psychology “We know of the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl to undo the “psychologizing” of logic (like Kant’s undoing Hume’s psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe such a book as the Philosophical Investigations is to say that it attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology, to show the necessity controlling our application of psychological and behavioral categories; even, one could say, show the necessities in human action and passion themselves. And at the same time it seems to turn all of philosophy into psychology— matters of what we call things, how we treat them, what their role is in our lives.” (Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” 91)

44. Ex.: The “necessity” of judgements of value 1. A: Canary wine is pleasant. B: How can you say that? It tastes like canary droppings. A: Well, I like it. 2. A: He plays beautifully doesn’t he? B1: Yes; too beautifully. Beethoven is not Chopin. Or he may answer: B2: How can you say that? There was no line, no structure, no idea what the music was about. He’s simply an impressive colorist. (Cavell 91)

45. Application to Epistemology A: There is a goldfinch in the garden. B: How do you know? A: From the color of its head. B: But goldcrests also have heads that color. A: Well, I think it’s a goldfinch (it’s a goldfinch to me). This is no longer a feeble rejoinder, a retreat to personal opinion…the price here is that he is either mad, or doesn’t know what the word “know” means, or is in some other way unintelligible to us. (Cavell 92)

46. Artist, Critic, Philosopher • “The problem of the critic, as of the artist, is not to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways. Then his work outlasts the fashions and arguments of a particular age. That is the beauty of it. Kant’s “universal voice” is, with perhaps a slight shift of accent, what we hear recorded in the philosopher’s claims about “what we say”: such claims are at least as close to what Kant calls aesthetical judgments as they are to ordinary empirical hypotheses.” (Cavell 94) • “If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definition but also (queer as this may sound) in judgements. This seems to abolish logic, but does not do so—It is one thing to describe methods of measurement, and another to obtain and state results of measurement. But what we call ‘measuring’ is partly determined by a certain consistency in results of measurement.” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §242)