Philosophy 391: Derrida vs. Searle Regarding Context
Fall 2003; Thursdays 3:30-5:oo, CRN 43174; Art 025; Prof. J. W. Powell, Ph.D.
jwp2@humboldt.edu; office hours 11 MWF, 3:30 Tues, plus informal hour at Wildberries, tba
Description: To what extent do contexts limit our ability to make abstract claims in philosophy?
One fairly recent development in philosophy (meaning within the last hundred years) centers on the role played by contexts in limiting what philosophers can say about philosophical problems, especially problems about language--about the meanings of words, about what language is, about the words or the concepts good, know, real, true, exist (or be), meaning, subjective, action, and a host of others. For instance, if real is not about the same things in different examples, then philosophisizing in an abstract way about "reality" may be a mistake. If meaning is not the same in some examples as it is (or they are) in other examples, then simple, abstract accounts of the place of meaning in a theory of language may also be suspect. How deeply this cuts into traditional methods of doing philosophy is unclear, but one possibility may be that it makes abstract work in philosophy impossible or very difficult. Even if that turns out not to be so, it may require a reconsideration of contexts or examples in any philosophical accounts which propose abstract answers to philosophical problems.
Jacques Derrida, the enfant terrible French deconstructionist philosopher, read a paper in Montreal in 1971 entitled “Signature Event Context,” which prompted a debate about these matters, including an exchange with Derrida and John Searle, the –well, enfant terrible doesn’t quite fit, but formidable, let us say-- UC Berkeley author of important works in philosophy of language. Their exchange showed up in part in the first issue of Glyph, and then in overlapping part with additions in our text, below.
Text and Readings: J. Derrida, Limited Inc (Northwestern Univ. Press: 1988) is the main text and the only thing you'll have to buy. I'll make available J. Searle's "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida" from Glyph: vol. 1 (1977). We may set the stage with one look at how context has been treated, "Rethinking Context: an Introduction" from Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (Cambridge U. P.: 1992). We will look at other readings by J. L. Austin, bits from Wittgenstein, and materials from earlier seminars on method.
Grading and Requirements: Each participant will take turns presenting on the readings. Those who prefer can do this by providing each of us in the group a two page handout telling what claims are made in the reading and suggesting questions for us to work on. The rest will do so orally. Those who wish to provide helpful background materials may substitute that for a presentation, but only if you make arrangements in advance. In addition, each participant will write a two- to four-page paper at the end. Note that these requirements are fairly stiff for a one-credit course. That is because we are not doing this for the credits or grades--we are instead trying to take on important contemporary issues in philosophy and think them through.
Goals: 1. We will clarify what Derrida and Searle are saying. 2. We will clarify the issues they address--what those issues are, how they arise, what's at stake, how they are related to other issues in philosophy of language. 3. We will articulate what issues they should have addressed and what they should have said.
Notes: This course is another in a series of reading group seminars on philosophical methods, most of them centering on whether Wittgenstein's ordinary language methods can be applied to problems in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language.
Our record is one of mixed successes and failures. This is partly because getting clear on what the issues are regarding methods is a recurrent and difficult task, which often prevents our getting to answers on particular philosophical questions. On the other hand, it seems such clarity regarding the issues is pretty rare, and perhaps we have some contribution to make on those matters, even if we don’t nail down results regarding a particular problem.
Nevertheless, we do yearn for answers to standard philosophical problems. The group in past semesters has worked putting together Wittgensteinian or ordinary language (the two may not be the same) positions on Russell's Problems of Philosophy. I can provide some of those materials, and I abbreviate another toward the end of this syllabus.
This semester we are going to look at problems in philosophy of language which plunge us more immediately into methodological issues.
Derrida is not a clear or straightforward writer, but this book is perhaps more clear than most of his work. Nevertheless, exposition will be one of our unavoidable chores, the work to extract what he is saying. Searle's article is an interesting contrast, with a blunt, no-nonsense tone and a straightforward agenda. Between the two, there are several issues raised. We will try to make the issues clear as well as the positions of both thinkers on those issues, and we will also decide who is right and who wrong. Here are abbreviations of some of the issues:
Is that which is communicated by means of language to be identified with the intentions of the speaker? Searle defends an affirmative answer, Derrida negative.
Is writing importantly different from, and parasitic on, speaking? If so, what makes the difference? This is the issue in which context plays an important role in understanding the two philosophers' positions. Searle claims the answer is yes and that the difference arises out of the permanence of writing and so its comparatively contextless nature, and not, as he attributes to Derrida, the reiterability of the linguistic elements in different contexts that makes writing and speaking the same.
How can we properly understand J. L. Austin's views on context? Derrida quotes from Austin's How to Do Things with Words, p. 147: "The total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating." Searle's first formidably influential book is Speech Acts(Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), written after working under Austin at Oxford. Searle understandably regards himself as an authority on what Austin was thinking. Derrida, however, is clearly more sympathetic toward a view of "linguistic elements" which takes them to be bound or limited by the contexts in which they occur in an extreme way, and this is consistent with parts of Austin's view. At this writing, I'm inclined to think Derrida has Austin right and Searle has him wrong, but my main interest is in the stakes involved. In particular, there are hints that Searle thinks our ability to formulate any general account of language depends on our ability to treat language in a context-free way. In this I think Searle may be right, but what this means may be corrosive for all philosophy of language.
Let's think about an example (This is from an e-mail exchange in a previous semester on dichotomies):
>to jwp: words are conventional. so are dichotomies. and articles of >convention always have some sort of problem. i woke up thinking that >this morning. so, i guess what i am saying is that yes, words are >conventional and there are big problems attached to that that most >people won't acknowledge because for the most part, they get the job >done--even if it's only a half ass job. >i think. *furrowed brow*
>what would you say the criteria needs to be to classify something >"conventional?" and is the plain people criteria different from the
>philosophy people criteria? > >uhh, yeah. >dayna
Dear Dayna,
Terrific. Lessee. Is the plain people criterion different from the philosophical people criterion for deciding? Yes. The plain people criterion is built on nonphilosophical examples, conversations about words and opposites and dichotomies and conventions and nature and necessary, in which no philosophical thinking has to be assumed in order for the plain people to make sense of what is going on *deep breath*
and the philosophical criterion is whether it is tempting to think they are conventional given the irresistible philosophical temptations to schematize and abstract what language is, what communication is, what persons are, and is nonsense.
Way different.
For instance (I've been wanting to write out this for some time for the dichotomies group, so I'll do the articulation in this note to you and then print this off for them, and this is going to take a while): Is it true that (as was claimed routinely up til about the 70's in human action theory, which thought of itself as doing basic foundational work in ethics) everything people do is either voluntary or involuntary?
** (I’ll refer to this later.) The philosophical story goes, of course, as follows: Human actions are bodily movements resulting from an act of will. When you flinch from the unexpectedly hot oven door or you blink because the bit of leaf got hurled by the breeze too close to your eye, that's not really you doing it but your body acting on reflex, so we need to distinguish between blinks and winks. The human actions are the things we do rather than our body does for us, and it is those that we can be praised or blamed for. One of the favorite examples, showing this debate goes back to the 50's, was poking your arm out the window to signal a left turn. Now I might have someone in the back seat that I use as a turn signal, having hooked up electrodes in shoulder and triceps so when I push a button his arm goes out, but it would be, umm, misleading (false? maybe) to say that he did the signaling. So we distinguish between me raising my arm and my arm going up. The human actions are the things we do that are voluntary. Almost all the things we do except for these things we can list, like digestion and reflexes and unconscious turnings in our sleep and dreaming and our eyes working the way they do and for that matter my arm obeying me when I raise it--most of the things we do that are of interest to us are voluntary, the rest involuntary.
It follows from the philosophical story that my writing to you is voluntary, your reading is voluntary, my walking up and getting a scone and a cup of coffee at Wildberries and reading the paper is voluntary, etc.
But there's a problem. The problem is that this account is at odds with the way nonphilosophical conversations or examples go. Now it might be we have ways to deal with that, but let's first look at and get clear on the extent of the problem.
Suppose I'm not a philosopher, and I’m sitting at Wildberries drinking coffee and reading Jon Carroll, and you walk up and ask me, "Did you come here voluntarily?"
I am likely, depending on how well I know you, to look around and wonder what's going on. I need some way to make sense of this question. There is a possibility that it does not make sense. It may be, for instance, that it is an expression of your paranoid schizophrenia, and the correct response will be to back away and call the guys from Sempervirens to take you away.
But there is a way to make sense of the question in some examples. (The phrase "in some examples" winds up later being important to the argument.) That would go like this. You know my ex-wife. You know my present girlfriend. You know that my ex-wife is looking for me, thinks that we need to talk, and that I am not, Not, NOT, wanting to talk to her but am avoiding her. You know that my girlfriend agrees with my ex-wife, thinks that my ex-wife and I need to talk. You were in Wildberry's earlier and happened to see my ex-wife there standing in line for coffee and she asked for it for here rather than to go, and then you saw my girlfriend heading back down toward campus with a grim look on her face as you walked out to go to the art supply store. It took a while at the art supply store, and by the time you got done your Ramone's insulated mug was about empty so you go up to Wildberries' to get a refill and a sandwich. You get it and then you see me reading Jon Carroll. You walk over and ask, "Did you come here voluntarily?"
The idea is that you think maybe my girlfriend set this up, coerced me into coming up to talk to my ex-wife, though of course I don't want to do that.
It may be I know nothing of all this, and so it doesn't make sense, but then when you explain I will start folding up the paper and looking around apprehensively and tell you, Oh, no, I didn't know any of that, do you see her around still, I think I'm late for my office hours, nice to see you. Later you might talk to my girlfriend and both of you laugh at me, you saying as a part of that conversation, "I thought you forced him to go up there, but it turned out it was voluntarily."
What though of other cases in which there is no ex-wife, no girlfriend, no we need to talk, no person who sees the possibility of coercion--in other words, all the cases so far when I have been up at Wildberries' drinking coffee and reading Jon Carroll? Weren't those voluntary? If we deny that, are we saying then that they are INvoluntary, which seems really weird? The proper response is that the question and the dichotomy do not make sense in those cases, and that my sitting drinking coffee in those cases is neither voluntary nor is it involuntary until we have a way in the case to make sense of the claim or the question.
[an objection] But surely we do have a way to make sense of the claim, namely the philosophical line of thought that I marked with the double asterisk up above. There are the things we do by reflex or while asleep or our body does for us, and then there are the things we do on our own as a result of our own will, and those latter things are the ones that are voluntary and all the rest are involuntary.
[the objection answered] The plain person, though, can have a question, namely, what's the argument that this huge set of philosophical matched luggage that shows us how to allocate the dichotomy is right? is not nonsense? The fact that the terms do make sense in some cases and not in a great many other cases seems to suggest that the philosophical line of thought is based only on buying something like a Cartesian sketch of human beings, the body like a ship and the mind like the captain as Descartes tells us,, and if it's not able to be made sense of in the examples except for accepting that sketch, then maybe the sketch is mistaken and here's a place where that shows. Perhaps philosophers have to misuse the words to make this story fly. As soon as there is a question whether philosophers have correctly understood acts of will or what voluntary is then we need more arguments that these terms do make sense in the examples where for the plain person they do not.
We haven't gotten to the part about the word voluntary and the voluntariness laid up in heaven. That's next, though. j.