CRITERIA FOR THE ACCEPTABILITY OF AN EXTRAORDINARY LANGUAGE GAME

22nd August 2010

  1. Problem: We begin with the presumption that W., like J.L.Austin (see Austin and Extraordinary Language Games), accepts - or must accept - that as well as the ordinary form of life (OFoL) with its ordinary language game (OLG) there are extraordinary forms of life EFoL) with corresponding extraordinary language games (ELG). (In §132 he writes that "reform {of language} for particular practical purposes, an improvement in our terminology designed to prevent misunderstandings in practice, is perfectly possible.")
  2. But then he implicitly claims that some of these ELG are acceptable, such as Physics, while some are not, such as Philosophy. For this claim to be anything more than arbitrary, he needs to provide us with general criteria for the acceptability of an ELG. If he does not, why should we not propose that Philosophy is like Physics, that philosophers, like physicists, are living an EFoL, and that they can have their own specialist vocabulary, and that, like physicists, they - perhaps unfortunately - sometimes use ordinary words with extra-ordinary meanings?
  3. W. can easily present examples to show that philosophers are not using OL in a way that is ordinary. Many of their uses are eccentric - indeed, if interpreted within the OFoL, nonsensical. But such examples become immediately irrelevant, once philosophers respond, as they naturally will, that they are an extraordinary community, with their own extraordinary linguistic system. Unless this response can be rebutted, a very large part of the later W.'s work is irrelevant, becoming no more than an extensive riff on the following uninteresting theme:

If philosophical sentences are taken to mean just what they would mean to people with no philosophical training, which is not their intended meaning, then they can be demonstrated to be misuses of language.

  1. To avoid this disastrous outcome, W. must discuss how ELGs develop, he must establish what distinguishes real, acceptable, ones from ones that are phoney, and he must show that philosophy is an example of one that is phoney.
  2. W.'s Solution: We have had difficulty finding any sign that W. has even recognised this problem. There is no clear discussion of it; far less a statement of the necessary criteria. This is sufficiently striking to make us conjecture that W. is avoiding it, and is instead preaching to those - including himself - who are inclined to be converted; for whom conversion is desirable; who already suspect that philosophy is all nonsense, and who are happy to have their suspicion apparently confirmed.
  3. Possible Solutions: If there are no such criteria then it would seem that any sub-community can invent a LG, and no-one can establish whether it is nonsensical. But the key word here is 'establish'. Many people may understandably wish that the world was different from the way it is: people could be nicer to each other; children could respect adults; cats could not eat goldfish; there could be an algorithm for establishing how well-supported empirical claims are; and there could be a set of criteria which, applied to a putative extraordinary language game, establish whether it is acceptable or spurious. But perhaps we are just crying for the Moon; our world is just more complicated and unsatisfactory than we would like. Annoying, but there it is.
  4. So there need not be a solution. We may just have to muddle along.
  5. Religious Language: This raises the possibility that, say, Christian religious believers can propose that they are living an EFoL, and are playing an ELG as part of it. As a result, they can then argue that criticism of their faith, as they express it in their EL, is likely to be unsound, if it comes from non-believers, because this involves incommensurable LGs. Believers have their FoL and LG; non-believers have theirs. Adjudication between them would appear to require a third FoL and LG which somehow contains both - which is relatively neutral. Without such a FoL, we appear to be condemned to a form of relativism, according to which any sub-community can devise an ELG associated with their EFoL, and claim that it is no less acceptable than any other.
  6. First Comparison: It is distressing for philosophers of science that there appear to be no justifiable, workable, criteria, which we can use to demarcate science from pseudo-science. Many proposals have been made. All have failed.
  7. Second Comparison: It is distressing for philosophers that there appear to be no justifiable, workable, criteria which will demarcate sense from nonsense. The verifiability criterion of meaning was one proposal. All have failed.

 

  1. Direction of a Solution: Suppose we view the problem from the perspective of the OFoL. If philosophers are indeed in an EFoL, and using in it ordinary words such as 'real', 'apparent', 'illusion', 'experience', 'perception', 'proposition', 'true', 'certain', 'doubtful', 'know', and ' believe', then it is at least possible that they are sometimes getting in a muddle as a result of taking ordinary language on holiday. Presumably their intended meaning of these words, compared to the ordinary meaning, is an adjustment rather than a wholesale change, since otherwise they would have either chosen another ordinary word, or invented a new word (as they sometimes have done). It seems possible that they have, at least sometimes, tangled the ordinary meaning and the new meaning, with arguments trading on ambiguity. Unfortunately, however, because of the nature of meaningOL (as helpfully elucidated by W. himself) we cannot reasonably demand that the new meaning is simply defined. What can we do?
  2. One possibility is to look for clarifications of puzzles that arise when we reflect on the OFoL. Physicists, for example, can defend their EFoL not just by experimental support, but also by showing that their new concepts (and hence the words that refer to them) can help to resolve puzzles that arise within the ordinary conceptual schema, and which it is powerless to tackle. For example, the ordinary word 'weight' gets into severe difficulties once, in our imagination or in reality, we leave the immediate surface of the Earth. In other words, the way of dividing up Nature, roughly, in the way that is ordinarily referred to by the word 'weight', is not ultimately plausible as a Natural division (classification; Kind).
  3. This "reflecting" does not have the force of the physicist's, because the latter's thinking is always underpinned - constrained - by inter-subjectively agreed observations; in the end it is Nature, via these observations, which forces - gently but firmly - the changes in classifications on us. In the case of Philosophy, this force, if it exists at all, is excessively gentle. The philosopher is not expecting to be able to make successful novel fact predictions on the basis of her new classifications. Instead she tries to draw our attention to familiar phenomena that we have not thought clearly about; she believes that she can imagine unusual scenarios, and communicate them to other people; she can suggest that the phenomena, and the scenarios, are best (most simply; with the least inconsistencies) described using some new classifications. The fragility of the relationship between the producer and her potentially sceptical audience, the appeal for a kind of trust, and the apparent need for an open-minded immersion in what is offered, makes Philosophy less like science than art. The artist knows that she has a genuine perspective that is worth communicating, but she cannot prove it if her audience is not prepared to at least give her the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, she is dangerously close to the position of the medium who claims that she cannot call up the spirits if a member of the circle is sceptical - a claim that, while remarkably convenient in protecting the medium from critical scrutiny, yet could be true.