To "observe how we use words" is to make statements, in ordinary language, about the role, function, effects, and context of expressions. But in doing this, the concepts and presuppositions of that ordinary language are taken for granted and insinuated as the only possible view [...] It is true that certain things may be said in favour of ordinary language. It would not be in use, and it would not have survived were it not wholly without merit. But this argument, as in politics where it is often used to buttress conservatism, proves fairly little. Very silly and undesirable things often survive, and neither society nor language is such a tightly integrated whole as would disastrously suffer from alteration of some one part. (pp. 195-197)For Gellner, contra Wittgenstein, ordinary language can be improved upon by the very activity of reflecting on it, leaving a positive role for philosophy after all:
[T]here are many language games which become unworkable when properly understood: where self-consciousness not merely does not "leave everything as it is" but simply necessitates change. Many "conceptual systems", in primitive societies and in advanced ones, contain confusions and absurdities which are essential for their functioning. To lay them bare is to make such a framework unworkable. (p. 206)The notion of improving language (my paraphrase) would need a lot more working out than I see in this book, but presumably means something like "make the concepts and presuppositions underlying language use more internally coherent and in better accord with non-linguistic experience."
Such a standard would not necessarily imply that one language can be superior to another. For one thing, while such concepts and presuppositions certainly play a role in language use, they don't seem to be critical to the definition of a language; you can change them and leave the language sufficiently intact to be mostly understood by speakers who have retained the old ones. A single language has room for many different kinds of language use.
However, it would suggest a potentially interesting alternative to a purely descriptive approach to linguistics. If Linguistic Philosophy was the effort to identify ways in which attention to ordinary native speakers' usage might correct misunderstandings embedded in philosophical thought, would Philosophical Linguistics be the effort to identify ways in which attention to philosophical thought might correct misunderstandings embedded in ordinary native speakers' usage?
7 comments:
any statement that would be accepted as true in ordinary language is ipso facto true
This just has to be a caricature; nobody could believe that they themselves believe that. It would entail, for example, that when -4C Greeks used the word πλατύς, it meant 'flat', except when referring to the shape of the Earth, in which case it meant 'round'. Then there was a semantic shift, and by the -3C πλατύς meant 'flat' in all cases. Similarly, the current debate over future rises in sea level can be reduced to the meanings of certain numerical words like fifty and one hundred in particular restricted contexts. Still worse, a debate about whether someone fairly far away from us is really Charles or James reduces to a debate about the "meaning" of Charles and James, words that are normally seen as having no meaning except that of referring to their referents. Can anyone swallow that anyone could really swallow this? I don't think so.
Mea culpa: in summarising Gellner's already uncharitable description I've left out some essential qualifiers. The idea is more exactly that "paradigm cases" - usages of a term that are so generally accepted in a community that knowing them is part of knowing how to speak properly - are correct by definition, and legitimate disagreement can only arise for non-paradigm cases.. So, for a probably still slightly caricatured example, it's absurd to deny that humans have free will, since if they didn't the expression "free will" and related forms would have no meaning. I actually find this position, though not entirely convincing, rather attractive.
For the earth's flatness, the answer would presumably be that, as no one could perceive the whole earth at once, the shape of the whole earth can hardly be a paradigm example of the concept of "flatness", so the answer to that question is not determined by the language, unlike the answer to the question "Do we have free will?"
To be more accurate, the contexts in which a learner of Greek would naturally acquire "platys" would have been unlikely to include discussions of the shape of the earth as a whole due to this question's remoteness from everyday life and perception. Of course, they almost certainly would have included discussions of individual bits of the earth, although I understand there isn't much actual flat land in Greece.
it's absurd to deny that humans have free will, since if they didn't the expression "free will" and related forms would have no meaning.
I actually would have no trouble saying that if the theory of free will were rejected (on whatever grounds) that the term free will would then have no meaning. By the same token, now that we no longer believe in the phlogiston theory of combustion, it is fair to say that phlogiston no longer has a meaning. The OED, indeed, defines it as 'A hypothetical substance formerly supposed to exist in combination in all combustible bodies, and to be released in the process of combustion', but that is a purely retrospective definition, and not what it meant to actual users.
Philosophers (with some honorable exceptions like Quine and Dennett) tend to generalize from extreme instead of typical cases. When looking at belief, they consider religious beliefs or the like. But for me, the prototypical belief is true, trivial, and verifiable, like my belief that my keys are in my pocket now (I just put them there a few hours ago, after all).
Phlogiston was a theory-specific concept all along, so that may be legitimate for its case. Free will, on the other hand, is a part of regular pre-theoretical language use ("he left of his own free will"), and any theory of free will is a philosopher's extrapolation from the term's everyday usage. If it turned out that all our actions were predetermined by deterministic physical laws and a particular initial state of the universe, that probably wouldn't stop us using the expression "free will" in such contexts any more than the Copernican theory made us stop talking about "sunrise". If usage is meaning, then that implies that "free will", like "sunrise", has a meaning independent of any potentially false ideas it may presuppose.
"If it turned out that all our actions were predetermined by deterministic physical laws and a particular initial state of the universe, that probably wouldn't stop us using the expression "free will"
Whether it did or it didn't, ex hypothesi we wouldn't have any choice in the matter! (-:
"it's absurd to deny that humans have free will, since if they didn't the expression "free will" and related forms would have no meaning.
I actually would have no trouble saying that if the theory of free will were rejected (on whatever grounds) that the term free will would then have no meaning." (John Cowan)
The original statement puts me in mind of Anselm of Canterbury's "ontological argument" for the existence of God, later developed and formalized (apparently purely as an exercise in logic) by no less a mind than Kurt Gödel. I would happily take on Anselm in argument, but rather quail before Gödel, who irrefutably proved a number of counter-intuitive things. Bertrand Russell, to the end of his life, notoriously refused to "believe" Gödel's logically irreproachable Incompleteness Theorem.
My intuitive (knee-jerk?) response to John's comment would be simply to note that the fact that unicorns do not exist does not deprive the word "unicorn" of meaning. But intuition is a poor guide in this area, as we know to Russell's cost. Any full-time logicians out there?
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