Linguistic philosophy
I can offer two examples of its use to approach, and indeed in my view dispose of, supposedly deep or difficult philosophical questions: my articles on love and on truth.
First, linguistic philosophy is to be distinguished from philosophy oflanguage, which is actually to the science of linguistics what the philosophy of science is to normal science (physics, chemistry and all that). That is, linguistic philosophy is nothing to do with linguistics as such, and another term (which indeed is used as the title of the Wikipedia article on it) is “ordinary language philosophy”.
The Wikipedia article defines ordinary language philosophy as a school that regards problems as having their roots in linguistic misunderstanding. It lists a group of noted English philosophers, as well as “the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein” as being those mainly associated with the school.
I have not studied the works of those philosophers extensively though I own and have read copies of the main books of Wittgenstein. Also, I have no intention of duplicating here what Wikipedia says about that school, its members or their books and ideas. All that I can usefully say is why this is my approach to philosophy.
The term “philosophy” has been used (originally in Greek or Latin) for over 2,000 years and its meaning has changed a little in that time. Originally it encompassed almost all of knowledge, or at least what would now be called scientific knowledge. It also encompassed some intellectual aspects of religion, and for centuries western “philosophy” was so tied up with Christianity that the works of Aristotle were treated almost on a par with the Bible by the Church. After the enlightenment and the recommencement of scientific inquiry, slowly branches of what is now called science were divided off and by the end of the 19th century “philosophy” meant what was left. The philosophy of science is the closest part of philosophy to science, and is a discipline that has the job of scrutinizing the way scientists are thinking and looking at what can be said about the intellectual and practical processes by which science works in the modern era (in the 20th and 21st centuries, shall we say).
The traditions of philosophy, however, have been slow to die out. There are still plenty of examples of “philosophers” — meaning people either who are teachers of that subject at univesities or who write books and about articles about it — spending a lot of time and words talking about questions which used to preoccupy people called philosophers in past ages. However, I maintain that many of those preoccupations, especially in such areas as cosmology (and for religionists theology), psychology, and linguistics, are with areas that should be left to the specialists in those areas.
For example, In 1936 A.J. Ayer wrote Language, Truth and Logic, which is said to have introduced logical positivism into England. At that time he was only 25. When I read that book many years ago, I saw that a lot of it was wrong-headed and of course Sir Alfred Ayer (as he was by 1978) later said that a lot of his ideas back then were wrong and he disowned them. [1] However, he was not alone: at the time we had had Wittgenstein, some of the work of Bertrand Russell, and others who were preoccupied with issues that were really matters of how human languages work (in Britain, for example, about how English worked). Since the late 19th century the science of linguistics (previously called philology) had been established as an empirical subject, in which workers collected data about more than ever before about actual languages in use by peoples around the world, and tried to discover relations between languages (structures and vocabularies) and the overall structural patterns of individual languages when studied in depth as never before. So just as speculation about the universe by philosophers was replaced by astronomy and cosmology, speculation about the physical world by philosophers was replaced by physics, and speculation about the human mind by philosophers was replaced by psychology, so speculation by philosophers about the use of language by human beings was replaced by its own science. by
Quite sensibly, in my view, the Oxford ordinary language philosophy school, particularly people like J.L.Austin, turned the old habit inside out. Whereas previous philosophers had attempted to use their traditional philosophical arguments to look at language (as well as at the physical world), now these men used the approach of linguistics to look at the supposedly traditional philosophical questions.
The result was very interesting. As Bryan Magee and Bernard Williams concluded when discussing this [2] (they called it “linguistic philosophy”) Austin and his colleagues tended to pull traditionally vexed philosophical questions apart for scrutiny so successfully that many of the questions just melted away: they were no big deal, when you finally came down to it. This applies to the question I have looked at in my article on love: once you look carefully enough at how people use the word, the question “what is love” vanishes away. If anything, it is a subject for psychology, perhaps psychiatry or psychotherapy, and for remedial work a matter for romantic novelists and marriage guidance counsellors. It is certainly not a question about which philosophers have any business wasting any time.
And the sae can be said for a lot of other supposedly deep questions. Anything to do with language is for the linguisticians, about science is for the scientists, and about Plato or Descartes is for the historians and biographers. The fact that there are certain people whose lives and ideas are still studied by undergraduates on philosophy degree courses does not mean that any of their ideas should be of any interest to modern philosophers.
The main problem with this view is that a great many professional philosophers will violently disagree with me; I don't know of any who take my view of what should now be the business of philosophy. The reason for this is very simple: most of what they still do most of the time, what they spend most of their undergraduate teaching time if they are university professors, for example, is tied up with areas of knowledge that were (as I have mentioned above) called philosophy in past centuries before scince took off properly and started to take ownership of the various well known areas of knowledge and inquiry. Thus we see philosphers still preoccupied with questions that they should leave to linguisticians, psychologists, physicists and others, because old habits die hard perhaps but mainly because if they stop doing that there is going to be precious little for most of them to do.
There are two (quite separate) areas that I recognize as in some way their domain: epistemology, and ethics. The first of these is the chief component of what is also called the philosophy of science. It is all about the rationale for science and the scientific method, seen in the abstract and away from preoccupations of individual sciences. The purpose of epistemology is to ensure we understand as much as we can about the way the process which is what is properly called science works. It deals with such ideas as the difference between deduction and induction as mechanisms of inference; and can even have input to the work of those people busy with ways of deriving better evaluations of the degrees of success achieved by paticular scientific research programmes, and in the same vein better estimates of the likelihood of rival future (planned) scientific research programmes to achieve success if supported by research grants and funds, of which there are never enough to go around.
The subject of ethics, also called moral philosophy, is, I think, a genuinely separate field of work which has to do with matters of social policy, good governance of civil societies, the framing of wise criminal legislation and the penal systems of modern societies. What acts are "immoral", that is, wrong in some way and needing to be outlawed? And what are appropriate sanctions — punishments — to be meted out by society to offenders? This is related to politics, and thus to the university subject called political science; but it is different from that; it is also related historically to theology, but in a secular world, or even a multi-ethnic, multicultural, multi-religion world, we need the subject or specialism of moral philosophy or ethics almost as a forum for debate, or a source of experts who can contribute specialist technical knowledge of the issues and implications for debate, about how any given modern society can best deal with the issues of crime and punishment (to quote a famous Dostoyevsky novel title).
Mind you, even in these two remaining areas where I still grant that there is valid work for people who call themselves philosophers (for I reckon a lot of the others are wasting their time and our money), I reckon that “ordinary language philosophy” is the best starting point. For, in these as in many other areas of ublic debate, both ordinary people and professional communicators such as broadcasters, including interviewers and discussion moderators, tend to use crucial words and to assume as they do so first of all that the words are unambiguous in themselves, and second that everybody understands them in the same way, without any of what I call “baggage” or else with the same, shared baggage. To attack the key words semantically andfrom the standpoint of usage, of ambiguity, and of incompatible ideas of the set of baggage attached to those words can often reduce points of apparent contention almost to nothing. If they cannot, the process certainly clarifies enormously precisely what the different points of view or opinions are of various parties or factions about issues of major public interest.
Thus, linguistic or “ordinary language philosophy” is one of the few remaining services philosophers should be prepared to perform for modern society. To that extent, I consider myself as capable as anyone in the role of philosopher.
Whenever I read about philosophy, I find one of the same small group of things.
- The article is preoccupied with history, with telling the reader what various philosphers of the more or less distant past thought or wrote about some topic.
- The article attempts to discuss, present arguments about, and draw conclusions about, issues that should be left to empirical inquiry by specialists in other fields (see above).
- The article is preoccupied with some non-issue which only really exists in anybody's mind because of some massive linguistic error or confusion.
Note [1] Men of Ideas (BBC, 1978) edited by Bryan Magee and the philosphers he interviewed. Chapter 6: LOGICAL POSITIVISM AND ITS LEGACY, interview with Sir Alfred Ayer Note [2] Men of Ideas (BBC, 1978) CHAPTER 7: THE SPELL OF LINGUISTIC PHILOSOPHY, interview with Bernard Williams