Category Archives: history of ordinary language philosophy

Dick Moran Keeps it Real

November 26, 2012 By in education, history of ordinary language philosophy, Kant, Kierkegaard, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, reading, Self-knowledge, skepticism, teaching, writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

There’s much to profit from in Moran’s recent interview at 3am magazine.  The section on Experimental Philosophy is a tour de force.

As to ‘experimental philosophy, I can’t claim to be very well versed in it, but it seems to be a research program in its early days. I think that by now, even its practitioners are beginning to realise that simply asking people, outside of any particular context, about their “intuitions” about some concept of philosophical interest is not really going to be informative since without any philosophical background to the question, the respondents themselves can’t really know just what question they are being asked to answer, what their responses are responses to. There are just too many different things that can be meant by a question like, “‘Was such-and-such an action intentional or not?”, for example. And without further discussion or further analysis, the experimenters themselves can’t know what answers they are being given by the respondents. It’s not good data. So I can imagine experimental philosophy evolving in a way to account for this, and starting to include some philosophical background to the investigation, perhaps even some philosophical history, to provide the needed context to the particular intuitions that they are trying to expose and test for. At that point, the experimental situation might also become less one-sided, with a researcher examining a respondent, and could allow for the experimental subjects themselves to ask questions of the experimenters, including questions of clarification and disambiguation, and perhaps even challenges to the way the experimenter has framed the questions.

Later it might be found useful to conduct such experiments in small groups rather than individually, with one experimenter and one subject, and instead the respondents could be encouraged to discuss the questions among themselves as well as with the experimenter. People could meet in these groups two or three times a week and perhaps some relevant reading could be assigned, to clarify and expand upon the question, and the respondents would be given time to do the reading, and asked to write something later on about the question in connection with the reading and the discussions they have had. Then the experimenter could provide “comments” on this writing for the experimental subjects themselves. I think grading the results would be optional in such an arrangement, and probably of no experimental interest, but other than that I think something like this could be the future of experimental philosophy. It’s worth trying anyway.

Frege Betraying Frege

September 18, 2012 By in Frege, history of ordinary language philosophy, logic Tags: , , , Leave a comment

“We speak not only of the relation of a city to a country of which it is the capital or of a man to a child of which he is the father, but of the relation of an object to a function of which it is the argument.  But whereas the first relation finds expression in sentences that have in common the expression ‘capital of’ and the second have in common the expression ‘father of’, the function-argument relation finds expression in complex designations such as ‘the capital of Holland’ and ‘Rembrant’s father’, which have no expression in common.  For this relation is not one that can be put into words at all.  We might say, echoing Tractatus 4.121, that it is not something we can express by means of language, but something which expresses itself in language…

“Frege’s thesis that a concept is a particular case of a function embodies the fundamental insight that the sense in which we speak of the relation of an object to a concept it falls under is the same as that in which we speak of the relation of an object to a function of which it is an argument.  As there is no expression for the latter, so there is none for the former.  If therefore we use the locution ‘a falls under the concept F‘ and write ‘Gold falls under the concept malleable‘ in place of ‘Gold is malleable’, we do not express in words a relation that is expressed in the shorter sentence without words.  Frege thus betrays his own insight when we allows himself to be persuaded that because ‘falls under’ is a transitive verb, it stands for a relation…

“Since ‘falls under’ is not a relational expression, it follows that phrases of the form ‘the concept F‘ are not singular terms.  Unlike ‘the city of Leeds’, which designates a certain city, ‘the concept malleable‘ does not designate a certain concept.  Hence we cannot regard the verb and accusative of ‘Gold falls under the concept malleable‘ as signs in their own right.  In combination they form an expression for a concept, but in themselves are not expressions for anything.  Frege of course recognized that phrases of the form ‘the concept F’ are not concept-words, but if you take ‘falls under’ to be a genuine Beziehungswort, as Frege did in “On Concept and Object”, you have in consistency to construe such phrases as singular terms.  Frege was thus forced to equivocate:  as a singular term a phrase of this form must stand for an object, so by parity with ‘the city of Leeds’ it should stand for an object that (somehow) represents a concept.  –And yet how easy it is to go astray here!  For in our sentence there is expressed a relation between gold and the concept malleable.  So what is more natural than to assume that ‘falls under’ is an expression for that relation?  And yet the right conception is so close at hand!  For if ‘the concept malleable‘ is not an expression for a concept, it cannot stand for the second term of the relation of an object’s falling under a concept.  And so ‘falls under’ cannot itself be an expression for that relation.  We thus reach the conclusion that the relation expressed in our sentence is not expressed by it.”   (Peter Long, “Formal Relations”)

Reading Ebersole, Reading Bouwsma

May 10, 2012 By in history of ordinary language philosophy, Philosophy, reading, writing Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

(A section from an unpublished essay.)

Their pages crucially differ in animating spirits: I have talked about one
as mulish the other as sprightly. But I can say more. At an even deeper
level, Ebersole’s pages are animated by a strictness of linguistic conscience.
Bouwsma’s are animated by a spontaneity of linguistic consciousness—a lin-
guistic hilaritas libertatis. For example, there is an deep-going reason why
Bouwsma was attracted to and imitated pages of James Joyce, and self-
consciously built unacknowledged quotations or near-quotations of literary
works into the structure of his essays. Bouwsma provokes his reader ver-
bally, reminds his reader of all of the highways and byways of words, of all
the wonders of words, and of how their wonders can and should make us
marvel at them. Ebersole minces words. He was a working poet as well as a
working philosopher, but anyone who knows Ebersole’s poetry knows that in
it the same strictness of linguistic conscience is on display. I cannot imagine
Ebersole on a spree among words like Bouwsma’s in this passage of his John
Locke Lectures, a passage describing Plato’s Realm of Being:

Imagine…a museum—a museum, deep in calm, fixed in breath-
lessness, done in silence, clothed in invisibility, awful, laid away
in heaven. And the walls thereof are purest essence, some quint-
essence, some tri-essence, but none semi-essence. If senescence is
no wall, for neither is oldness nor youngerness any ness at all, all
is evermore and never the less. And of what essence and what
essences are those walls? Of all heavenlinessences are they and of
brightlinessence of the beaminest. Essences participating in one
another, they ring-round this conjugation of hyper-supers…This
is the museum of quiddities, of whatnesses in their highest nest,
tucked away, ensconced, waiting for the refiners defining, so fine
are they. The museum of none-such such-and suches.

Line up alongside that this from Ebersole’s (anticipatory-posthumous au-
tobiographical) poem, “Conversation with a Dead Philosopher” (a crow is
speaking):

The clock can’t tell you what it says
the way a human tells you.
Maybe I am just a mess of gears and wheels,
and everything I say
is just like half past two—
where I can’t tell you
what I say at all.
People stopped and puzzled when I talked,
wondered what to make of
anything I said.
And if I made them ask themselves
What of heads or tails to make
of a philosopher’s talking,
that was a good thing I did,
I would say.
Yes, I would say that.
Then he flew away,
calling “caw-caw.”

Here is another, related deep difference: it makes sense to say that Eber-
sole and Bouwsma each aims at a kind of simplicity, a philosophical sim-
plicity. But the simplicities aimed at are not the same. We can borrow
a pair of terms from French criticism in the nineteenth century: simplicité
and simplesse. The first we might call naive simplicity, the second
sophisticated simplicity.  The first is simplicity as a native endowment,
an unspoiled innocence or uncorruptedness.  The second is simplicity
as a complicated disposition, an achievement of disciplined responsiveness.
Ebersole presents himself as the simple man.  Bouwsma presents
himself as the simple wise man.  Ebersole’s mulishness, his strictness of linguistic
conscience, his simplicité mean that he is prone to be charged with failing to be a
philosopher by being a plain man. Ebersole can seem Xenophonic. Bouwsma’s
sprightliness, his spontaneity of linguistic consciousness, his simplesse mean
that he is prone to be charged with failing to be a philosopher by being a sophist.
Bouwsma can seem Protagorean.