How Subversive is Ordinary Language Philosophy?

In his late thirties Ludwig Wittgenstein began to have doubts regarding his work in philosophy. This was new for him, and difficult. He had, after all, already taken care of everything. He had thought as a young man that he had worked out solutions to all the important basic philosophical problems, and he had quit philosophy. During his late 30's and 40's some among his friends led him to re-examine parts of that thinking. He found that his earlier work, which had already, to his horror, made disciples across Europe, had not been thorough enough. He began to deepen his approach to philosophy, to re-examine the steps by which he had been lured into mistakes and the processes by which philosophical problems often begin in (and foment) errors. Some of this later work was prompted by the insight that philosophical work can easily dissociate itself from ordinary conversations in which the terms and lines of thought made sense before the philosopher began to use them. The result is that the momentum of a philosophical line of thought and an underlying picture or model may substitute for intelligibility and then substitute for justification. This is particularly disastrous in the early stages of articulating issues, before the thinkers ever get to negotiating the conflicts and arguments for various possible solutions. He began, that is, to shift philosophical attention from the arguments for solutions to disentangling the lines of thought which generate problems. Since those lines of thought are fraught with seductions into error, the philosophers who do this work tend to have labored in different ways than other philosophers. They emphasize how examples of words, and uses of words, are different when there is no philosophy being done, different from the uses of words to which philosophers put them. There are several other philosophers besides Wittgenstein (who often seems sui generis) whose focus was like his in treating philosophical problems as needing dissolution rather than solutions. But, like Penelope unraveling threads at night, this work has not been popular among observers. Still, philosophical book publishers have been on it for a while, and journals are becoming more receptive. Over half a century after Wittgenstein's death, there are now a formidable and growing group of debaters, even though there are still journals and conference program committees who take only limited interest. Regarding sources, most of us who do this kind of work take our ordinary language methods indiscriminately from a variety of philosophers, many of whose relationships with each other have been notoriously prickly. I took my Ph.D. in the late 80's at the University of Oregon in a department dominated by a group of philosophers led by Frank B. Ebersole, one of the purest devotees to these ordinary language methods. There are now several national and international Wittgenstein Societies holding conferences and promoting research and electronic discussions on a global scale, and work originating as papers at those conferences

is seeping into a wider list of journals, much of it showing the influence of ordinary language methods. The recent conference on ordinary language philosophy and Frank Ebersole at Manchester included presentations regarding what is at stake, what valuable results might be found which are new or different from results of other approaches to philosophy. This should not obscure, though, the continuity between ordinary language methods and other traditional methods in philosophy. Arguments are still arguments. Issues are still issues. Clarifying issues still involves articulating how issues arise, what possible positions have been or could be taken, what is at stake, how the issues relate to other issues. Readers who wish to run particular problems to earth help thereby to do the main work of justifying ordinary language approaches if those approaches lead to insights. My answer to the question, how subversive? depends for its strength on the fact that it rests on common ground with philosophical methods in general. Debates about the methods are easily found and are recognizably philosophical. Subversion has been a conspicuous part of philosophy since the Daoists, since Heraclitus, since Socrates--since its beginnings. What was subverted then was usually any kind of religious orthodoxy--Gods and fates and social conventions leave those philosophers unperturbed, and their lack of vulnerability to the shoulds and pieties which are urged on all becomes an undermining challenge to those pieties and to those who would urge orthodoxy upon a culture or upon the world. This part is all old news. Philosophers urge a re-examination of our lives, of our assumptions, of truisms, by asking questions and by calling orthodox views into doubt. One need not haul up the enormous Jungian apparatus of stages of heroes, of fools and tricksters and Coyote and Raven, to acknowledge a connection with other attempts to deepen insights or to develop consciousness or to heal mistakes of thinking. One also need not make paradoxes and double-binds and being obscure into central characteristics of wisdom, even though the Greek skoteinos (dark or obscure) could be used of all these philosophers and of Wittgenstein as easily as it was used of Heraclitus. If I am challenged to re-examine and change my life, especially after I have worked to do this already and have put together a new life, --well, that is going to be hard. There are layers and layers to this work, and a philosopher who is in it for winning, for refuting others, for accomplishing the ascent to some peak and then taking a well-deserved rest while receiving admiring visitors, may find it too much to ask that she give up on that goal. Heraclitus again: "No matter how deep one plumbs the soul one will not touch bottom." Let=s plumb. We may approach subversion by thinking, first of all, of subverting positions. Here follows a list of positions like Homer's list of ships, and readers need only recognize a few to help make the point. If a philosopher, if you or I, endorse materialism or idealism or dualism or radical pluralism, then

ordinary language philosophy raises objections not only to the position but to the issue that generates those alternatives. If you are Kantian or utilitarian or a divine command ethicist or virtue ethicist or endorse an ethics of care or intuitionism or emotive grounds for ethics, then ordinary language philosophy is your enemy until you seriously consider giving all those up. If you think that language consists of signs or that language is a vehicle for conveying meanings or ideas or thoughts or propositional contents or messages or illocutionary act potentials or truth conduciveness or non-natural meaning or speaker's meaning or sentence meaning, then the ordinary language philosopher is going to say, and make it a refrain, like Groucho Marx as the college president in Horsefeathers, "Whatever it is, I'm against it!" If you think that knowledge is or is not justified true belief plus some ethically grounded internal or external further condition, ordinary language philosophy will work to deny you the beginnings of any of those positions. If you think the key to epistemology is either endorsing some form of closure principle or biting the skeptical bullet, the ordinary language philosopher backs you up into taking on logically prior issues. If you think that you or G.E. Moore must, looking at your hand held in front of you in broad daylight or looking at a big tree square in front of you in broad daylight, that you must either know or not know that it is a hand or a tree, then ordinary language philosophy will subvert that thinking. If you think that the criteria for good arguments are or are not to be found by mastering logic or scientific method or dialogic models, then you will find the news brought from ordinary language philosophy is harsh and unwelcome--or, perhaps, curious and promising of quite different approaches. My concern here is not to make the case for any of these but instead is to make claims about the stakes that might be involved. For any of these, if you want the case, you could look it up. If Wittgenstein or Ebersole show up among your results, I recommend reading them. But the story is not over yet, and we are not yet sunk far enough into the layers of this archaeological excavation. NextByou could see this foreshadowed in the treatment of positions--is subversion of problems or issues. I'll give an account of one or two of these with some armwaving at arguments, though still at such a speed it will seem we are drifting past, tail out. J.L. Austin works on the first one in Sense and Sensibilia, a diminutive book but one of philosophy's greatest hits. Consider the argument from illusion, for the claim that knowledge of the external world based on perception is, well, let's say it gently, problematic. We could give that argument as "The way things seem to (appear to, look to, are perceived by) me now could be the same whether the result of reality or the result of illusion (dream, mirage, afterimage, sensory malfunction, hallucination). Therefore I cannot tell the difference between reality and illusion. Therefore I need a licensed epistemologist to help me out." Not all the problems with this argument, perhaps the only argument in epistemology, are ordinary language problems. Some, though, are. One problem with the argument is a problem with the problem--that the first phrase ("The way things

seem to (appear to, look to, are perceived by) me now") can easily be taken to imply that whenever I do see, say, the world around me, then there is a way that that world seems or looks. This makes those perceptions, seemings, looks, experiences, ubiquitous in our seeing. But a quick check of the cases in which we would say that things seem or look some way reveals that we say such things in some instances of seeing and not others--conspicuously we say such things in cases in which there is some possible issue about whether we are seeing correctly--I say the barn looks red if there is some problem about having taken LSD or a quirk of the light or my sunglasses or the tinted windows in my lowrider. In many, in most, cases of seeing, the dog does not bark. The argument does some of its work by yanking the words seem, look, appear, perceive out of the gymbals in which they do their work. Instead the argument plugs them into an account that misleads us into endorsing an unargued picture of human beings looking out at the world through a scrim on which parade an ubiquitous and unending series of perceptions, a veil of Maya or appearances or representations, a scrim which serves to dissociate us from the world around us and to make knowledge into a philosophical problem. For a further bracing bit of cold water hurled on this problem, see Austin's seventh lecture of Sense and Sensibilia, his deconstruction (a word which cannot give him hives since he is dead) of "real." Another problem has been worked on by H.A. Nielsen, Don S. Levi, and me, among others, which work is subversive of most philosophical usage of the term "language," including Wittgenstein's usage. That work is also subversive of problems, classic and contemporary, in philosophy of language. (What is language, really? How is it possible for language to convey thoughts or meanings or the contents of one's mind to another's mind? To what extent are semantics, syntax, and pragmatics separable aspects of language? What is a word? To what extent is semantics compositional and rule-governed--that is, to what extent is the meaning of a sentence derivable from the meanings of its parts? Does one=s language shape one=s perceptions or one=s metaphysics? To what extent must language be hard-wired into human beings?) On whether we have been misleading ourselves by how we misuse the word Alanguage,@ we can begin with a quick survey of what Austin sometimes calls the top of the garden path. With that list of problems in philosophy of language set to one side but not out of mind, we consider our philosophical talk of language, including the talk articulating those philosophical problems about language, and contrast that talk with how we talk about language when not focusing on the philosophical accounts. That is, we provide ourselves reminders about how we use the word language when we are not doing philosophy. We philosophers might say, and we find it almost impossible to resist, that any time we talk to each other or converse with each other, any time one person says something to another or promises or sings catches or asks a barrista for a cup of coffee--we philosophers think and say that this involves language, that there is language present in the talking and conversing and asking and

singing catches. We think this is an exceptionless truth despite our usual paranoid vigilance about exceptionless claims. We are tempted to think that whenever we talk or etc. then there's language. Now note that the tempting claim is not consistent with ordinary language examples. There are many different cases when there's no philosophy going on in which we talk about language or languages, and we can imagine some explanation of that talk arising in the examples, showing us an explanation then of language or explanation of the use of the talk about language. (When and where these explanations show up or do not show up may be an important check against our tendency to offer the philosophical explanation, which fairly leaps forward, its hand in the air.) Here is a list of abbreviated cases:a. We are singing a catch in Portuguese and someone new to the group asks, "What language is that?" Later, at home, we report that we are learning to sing catches in other languages. If someone asks, "Really! Like what?" we include Portuguese in a short list. b. The children are conversing in particularly crude ways, and we warn them, "Watch your language." A child furrows his brow and says, "Huh?" and seven-year old Hannah explains: "Don't say shit, say poop instead." Their conversation switches gleefully to poop, and we cast our eyes heavenward and then at the liquor cabinet. c. I am at a conference in Germany, and I walk across the street from the conference and ascend the steps into the grand Engineering Library of the University of Leipzig, and ask the man at the entrance desk, "Are there any public computers here where I may check my e-mail?" He says, slowly and haltingly, "I am sorry, I have little English. Deutsche? Parlez-vous Francaise?" I kick myself once again for my provincialism, apologize, and say, overly defensively, "Except for English, the only languages I know are dead ones." He shakes his head and I retreat.d. A teacher in a literature class assigns an essay analyzing the language in the scene in Shakespeare's play in which Cleopatra comes on stage for the first time. One student asks a neighbor, "Language?" and is told, "You know--metaphors, similes, rhythm, imagery, rhetorical figures of speech, alliteration, assonance, rhyme, that iambic pentameter stuff." e. Ryle teaches us that if a farmer orients a new hand to the language of poultry, he is not talking about what the hens say but rather is talking about the vocabulary used by those who raise turkeys and chickens and guinea fowl and such. f. Java has not, perhaps to the surprise of those who look in from outside, displaced, say, Fortran as a computing language. The explanation may include comments about how the thirty-year history of CPU chips, from ones which handled one 8-bit instruction at a time at slow frequency to chips which can handle two 64-bit instructions at Megahertz clock speeds has changed the programmer's job. If the outsider's eyes have not glazed over yet, we talk about how many slices of contemporary time would fit into one slice of time for the old Z-80 chip, but how a Fortran instruction from then can still be used by many machines now. g. Working with a group to draft an official document, we keep returning to the first paragraph because the language is not quite right. The supervisor jokes (this might be too philosophical a joke), "What? You keep lapsing into Cajun?" and

is told as explanation of the concern about language that the paragraph is too broad and gaseous, that we need terms which are more narrow and more clear. Conspicuously, there are limits or boundaries of these cases even though there are many more, an indefinite number more, which could be given. These cases, that is, are not all cases of all conversations. Language is not ubiquitous in conversations or sayings or tellings. It is in particular kinds of circumstances that talk of language will make sense to the people in the case. This is in contrast to philosophers peering into the examples. With the silhouettes of language taped to the lenses of our flashlights, we will see those outlines, and so will think we see language, in every case. In the examples above some kind of talk of language arises or could arise. Each example is a case of what we could or would say when. Each, then, is an ordinary language example of language. Contrast them with a kind of example in which such talk would not arise, the dog does not bark although philosophers expect incessant and ubiquitous woofing, and try to give the moral of that story. Contrast the following, then, with all the examples above, not just c. which gives it its structure and its clearest contrast. i. Suppose I am not I, but rather you, that is, someone fluent in German. You, then, walk across the street from the conference and ascend the steps into the grand Engineering Library of the University of Leipzig, and ask the man at the entrance desk, in German, "Are there any public computers here where I may check my e-mail?" He tells you that there are computers on the second floor, but only for those who have a University account and login. There are, he continues, network connections for laptops, but those too require one be an authorized user. You have no such authorization, let us say, so you retreat. Unless the example is changed, unless other considerations are added in (which we are often mightily tempted to do), you have not said a thing about language and if you had, given only the example above, it would have been surprising or odd, a change of subject. Now, let us acknowledge how little is needed to change this example so that it would give rise to talk about language in the example, without forgetting that these changes are, however small, changes, and that if those changes are required in order to make talk about language intelligible in the example, that is evidence that language is not intelligible in the example as given. I sometimes call these matters the contagion of context. The thinnest of threads will connect one example to another, such as example c. above to this one, i, and thereby alter the second and help make sense of the talk, e.g. of language, which occurred in one example and now does not occur in the other unless we build in these changes. For example, had I, who do not know German, accompanied you to the Engineering Library of the University of Leipzig, we might very well find remarks about language apropos, of several different kinds. I might say, "I may finally learn German when I get back, after decades of kicking myself for learning only dead languages." Or, you may take a verbal jab at me: "So, Johannes, you ever consider learning a language people speak?" Many other kinds of context may bleed over into these listed

examples. There are other forms of contagion. Sometimes we wear our occupations on our sleeves, and generate families of related examples that way. If I am, or if you are, a linguist, we may carry our sample case of wares with us all the time. We will see language examples anytime something linguistically interesting happens (and we will think this is more frequent than in fact it is) or anytime an example shows something we are teaching or working on, from Grimm's Law to bilabials to relationships of socioeconomic class and forms of address to typologies of enclitics. For some of those we will or would or might say something about language. Other occupations may give rise to other cases. A literature teacher reading memos from administrators may ruefully notice the memos are not by Shakespeare and wonder who teaches people to write this leaden language. Note when we require some such contagion before talk of language can be intelligible in those cases. But in these cases in which some talk of language could be made sense of, already a subset of the cases in which we have conversations, there is a split between how the philosopher looking through the blinds into the examples will see the language in the examples and how the language in the examples would be remarked or explained by those in the room. "Leaden style of language?" a coach in the staff lounge asks. "What does that mean?" and the literature teacher reads part of the passage from Antony and Cleopatra about having a diver put a fish on Antony=s hook, and then a passage from the memo. "It is as if the principal has to put on gloves and an overcoat to think," she says. "This prose is SOO dreary. Why can he not liven up how he writes?" If one thinks of a continuum of styles in language, Shakespeare is near one end and the principal is near the other. But even when we succeed via the contagion of contexts to find this talk of language in the examples, the language in the examples is not the topic of the philosophers' problems--nothing about signs, communication, intentions, illocutionary act potentials, reference or meaning. The explanation of talk of language--already, remember, talk which would not occur in many, many cases--is not explanation which is recognizable in the philosopher's talk. And what shall we make of these absences? What is being talked about is not the philosopher's concept of language, and in many cases there would be no talk of language at all. Talk of language would change the subject or be baffling to those within the example unless the philosopher breaks the window with her flashlight and offers the philosophical account which rests not on the example but on something else, perhaps (you think?) a philosophical picture of language. Then, of course, we can talk about her notion of language and how she sees it as present in the example, and she and we may forget that that is not what was in the example until her act of violence. Again, what shall we make of those absences? Here is a suggestion, though it requires careful handling: in those examples

in which there is no circumstance or situational factor which would make sense of the talk of language, there is no language. If
someone present in the example is a linguist of the right obsessivecompulsive character, or if someone is a literature teacher or if

someone is writing for a literature teacher, or if there is a whole lot of potty talk going on, or if a committee is worried about how something has been worded and wants to change it before it is publicly released, or, and so on, then sure, there is language, just not the right kind of language for the philosopher to get traction. But, if not, not. I am going to pass by some issues; the case is not made such that those who are convinced language is present in every conversation will be slowed down, and I realize that. The ordinary language examples do not provide a proof. Instead, I take them to raise, as they always do, issues about burden of proof, issues about the need for opposing arguments, issues about begging the question or circular reasoning in the origins of problems, issues about substantives sending us looking for substances, about overextending grammatical analogies, about whether we have been misled by pictures. The main issue in this treatment, though, is whether there are arguments for the claim that language is present in all our conversations, arguments which rest on non-questionbegging support. Consider the possibility the right answer is No, that there are no non-circular arguments for the claim that language is present in all our conversations. Instead, we think such things because of the picture of language we see in Augustine, Locke, Peirce, Frege, Russell, Carnap, Fodor, Katz, Kripke, Derrida, and yes, Wittgenstein. It is the picture of language as a system of signs used for communication. The little drawing in Ferdinand de Saussure's notes for his course in general linguistics expresses this picture. Two people face each other--except that they are not people, really, but only heads--well, drawings of heads--and there are dotted lines from lips to ears. That picture helps to conjure up problems for the philosophy of language, roughly consistent with the main problems we have inherited from that Homeric list of authors. What is language, really? How do acoustic blasts get meaning? How might words relate to the world? How do meanings and reference get mapped onto sounds? And all those hoary mobs. And this picture is not just a Western picture. Though my colleagues in Eastern philosophy like to take jabs at our Western dichotomies and at Cartesian dualism, it seems to me this same picture is visible in Buddhist arguments for the conventionality of language. We could call it the picture of language as signs. Ordinary language philosophy undermines or subverts philosophical claims and also subverts philosophical problems. This is not quite the end of the story, though; we can see foreshadowed another kind of subversiveness. Ordinary language philosophy undermines the distinction between philosophy and other intellectual work, undermines the status of philosophy as a separate intellectual specialization. One place where this can be fairly easily seen is in ethics and in recent work on the question of whether there are moral experts. An approach to ethics ingrained in its history takes ethics to be a search for the right ethical theory or the right moral code or authority or for the best decision procedure for actions. Plato's Socrates in effect asks the religious authority, "Is an action

good because the gods say so, or do the gods say so because it is good?" The possibility of gods endorsing atrocities, as some indeed have, shows the answer cannot be that actions are good because the gods say so, and so it must be the case that if the gods get it right they do so because they can recognize good actions or think through the arguments for the claims they are good, not because they make them good by giving the word. Whether they do this by being good critical thinkers or by having been raised right is less important than that whether an action is good can be investigated and argued rather than simply determined by authority or by looking it up in an authority. Theories and schools and moral codes can be plugged into Socrates' question in the place occupied by gods. That is, we can go looking for counterexamples in which our favorite moral code or theory or philosopher might lead us into endorsing something as good even though it is not. The code or theory cannot just tell us that it is the right or the good code or theory, and telling how to appraise an action within an example requires that we take on the example by articulating all the relevant arguments and objections and then follow arguments where they lead rather than follow our desires. Examples have their own integrity and the ethical theories or codes are like counselors or advisors with whom we must keep our critical faculties. Like gods. An example may be a story of any of many different kinds. It may be a story of a drunken hired man killing a slave, or it may be a part of a film, or a cause for a court proceeding, something we tell or agonize about, an account which is a possible reason for divorce or for praise. Looking for an authority or a philosopher to tell us how to think cannot displace the prior requirement that the philosopher ground the philosophy in examples in which the philosopher can get it wrong or right. The examples then are basic, and the arguments relevant to the example are not the property only of philosophers. The philosopher enters into a debate regarding an example as a peer with those in the example, not from a position of privilege or power. It is striking that in Plato's Euthyphro the rich example at the center, of the old man who let his hired man die of exposure after the hired man had killed a slave, is never investigated or thought through, even though Plato seems to imply that in that investigation the religious authority and the philosopher will have to descend into the give and take of arguments. Neither philosophy nor any other discipline can displace the world of the example, just as no god can displace the relevant arguments. Finally, ordinary language philosophy is subversive of ideologies, including ideologies which think of themselves as subversive. In this way ordinary language philosophy returns to the subversive heart of the history of philosophy in general. To the extent that political conservatism, liberalism, libertarianism, communism, and other ideologies are supported by philosophical assumptions or pictures requiring terms be ripped from their gymbals, then ordinary language philosophy seems likely to be a force for undermining those as well. Those who know these ideologies well may be able to confirm that there are divisions between the grounds offered based on fierce observations of the depredations of abstract reasoning and the grounds which proceed

from those abstract chains of dialectic materialism or Ayn Rands principles or parodies of Adam Smiths invisible hand. In some ways this looks promising for those working as outsiders, with radicals who have founded their work on alienation from the values and assumptions of dominant cultures. Wittgenstein has been seen as an ally of feminists, for example, because his perceived emphasis on context looks as if it were like standpoint theory. That Cartesian dualism lends weight to an individualistic conception of human beings and so tends to lead to dissociation from the natural world, from other people, from families and institutions, means that undermining those fragmentations undermines a conceptual framework on which consumerism and nationalism and so war may depend. Tribal peoples who have roots in those tribes or in landscapes instead of only having hitching posts may take ordinary language to be help in finding those roots. That Platonism leads us to focus on eternal abstractions rather than the everyday moments of our lives and the concrete moments in which we live means that undermining Platonism may make allies of Wittgensteinians (and ordinary language philosophers) with approaches which look like Daoism or Zen. The job of being subversive radicals, which has attracted Marxists and then feminists and then indigenous peoples, is being taken up by some Wittgensteinians. The subversions which have been a crucial part of philosophy since the beginning still have homes in philosophy. One place they can be seen is in ordinary language philosophy.

Bibliography J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, Oxford U. P. 1962. O. K. Bouwsma, AThe Mystery of Time (Or, The Man Who Did Not Know What Time Is),@ Philosophical Essays, Univ. Nebraska 1965. Ferdinand de la Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique gnrale), compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, 1916, trans. Roy Harris (Open Court) 1983. Frank B. Ebersole, Things We Know, Univ. Oregon Books, 1967 (2 ed. Xlibris, 2001).
nd

Frank B. Ebersole, Language and Perception, Univ. Press of America, 1979 (2 ed. Xlibris, 2002).
nd

Don S. Levi, In Defense of Informal Logic, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000. H. A. Nielsen, AHow Language Exists: A Question to Chomsky=s Theory,@ Philosophical Investigations 5 (1):57-71. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, 1953.

Comments to John Powell, jwp2@humboldt.edu