Analytical Philosophy

 

If language is not a self-sufficient system of signs without outside reference, nor a set of logical structures, what else could it be? Social expression. Rather than pluck theories from the air, or demand of language an impossible logical consistency, we should study language as it is actually used. So suggested Wittgenstein. Much that is dear to a philosopher's heart has to be given up — exact definitions of meaning and truth, for example, and large parts of metaphysics altogether. And far from analyzing thought and its consequences, philosophy must now merely describe it. But the gain is the roles words are observed to play: subtle, not to be pinned down or rigidly elaborated. Games, for example, do not possess one common feature, but only a plexus of overlapping similarities. Not all words have such subtleties, and physical objects we can name and employ in simple contexts — fetch the hammer! etc. But troubles arise when we make hammer the subject of a more complicated situation. Employ abstract words like events or public and the complications multiply. Go one step further and talk of knowledge, or meaning or truth and we have created the elaborate mystifications that philosophers have hitherto revelled in — i.e. rather than getting on with the job of sorting out the confusions. To see through the bewitchment of language is the task of philosophy.

Wittgenstein left no fully worked-out system behind him, but his subtlety and stringency of thought were very influential. Gilbert Ryle, as early as 1931, called philosophy the task of detecting of the sources in linguistic idioms of recurrent misconstructions and absurd theories. His 1949 book The Concept of Mind attacked the Cartesian notion of a disembodied mind in a physical body, the "ghost in the machine". We should not worry how an elusive mental entity could control a physical object. Men were not machines but clever animals, and their thinking is only a more subtle form of animal intelligence. And as for asking what thinking is — that was a "category mistake", since thinking is an activity, not an entity. If propositions have something in common — thinking intelligently, let us say — then the concept of thinking intelligently is simply a handy abbreviation for a family of propositions.

Common sense will resolve many difficulties, thought Ryle, and we do not need detailed linguistic analysis. But his part-contemporary, J.L. Austin, looked at language more closely, though without reducing everything to linguistics. Even though "Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations" philosophy was compelled to straighten out usage to some extent. Austin analyzed with great subtlety the philosophical distinctions between could and should, knowing and promising, and what we mean by real or corresponding. His best-known contributions came in his William James Lectures How to do Things with Words where he distinguished utterances by the acts they performed. Locutionary acts conveyed meaning (e.g. tell us the storm is coming), illocutionary acts conveyed force (e.g. warn us that the storm is coming) and perlocutionary acts produced a certain effect (e.g. succeed in warning us that the storm is coming). The terminology has not caught on, and indeed Austin died prematurely, without substantiating these approaches, but his work unsettled many easy assumptions — distinctions between stating and describing, the factual and the necessary, is and ought. Meaning lies in the total speech act, said Austin, and not in the constituent propositions abstracted from context and intention.

Searle built on Austin's view that speech is rule-governed and that we should understand those rules. But he also recognized a greater number of different types of speech act (perhaps exceeding ten thousand) but grouped them under five general categories — assertives (stating, reporting), directives (requesting, ordering), commissives (promising, offering), expressives (thanking, apologizing, congratulating), declaratives (correspondences between propositions), and categories of content & reality (sentencing, christening).

Paul Grice was more concerned with differences in intention between the said and the meant, and in analyzing conversational situations. Implication was conveyed by general knowledge and shared interest. And an action intended to induce belief would have to a. induce that belief, b. be recognize as such by the hearers, and c. be performed with every intention of being recognize as such.

Perhaps we should put away grand theories and study language on an ad hoc basis, as a scientist does, making as few assumptions as possible. Of all the schools of analytical philosophy, the pragmatic is the most arbitrary and heterogeneous. Included are philosophical contributions by Rorty, Quine and many others, aspects of sociology theory, and some branches of linguistics (phonetics, laboratory analysis of verse metre, psycho-linguistics, etc.) Many workers in this group are realists: they believe that the world exists independent of our minds or senses. The methods of science therefore apply — i.e. objective analysis, observation, deduction of laws that hold independent of the investigator and his society.

A potted account: the fuller article can be found on TextEtc.

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Analytical Philosophy

 

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