Preface: Progress in Philosophy

            People complain about philosophy. Among the other complaints, that it’s too hard, that there are no answers, that it’s not about anything, is a wail by students and some professors that we make no progress. All these complaints are just false. The difficulty is high but just right, the answers are not the expected ones, its topics are curious but interesting and sayable. Progress, though--that’s harder. Granted, the progress we do make is often difficult to see clearly, but it’s there. Sometimes there’s clear evidence, as when Socrates made progress and so was sentenced to death.

            Usually, though, it’s harder to tell when philosophers make progress. We often don’t. Many, many of the books in our section of the library are worthless as far as progress goes. When we do make progress, it is often of a paradoxical kind. For instance, much of the progress made consists in showing earlier answers will not work after all. Sometimes, too, we make progress by kicking disciplines, our children, out of the nest--the hard sciences all began as kinds of philosophy, as did rhetoric, law, psychology, and the social sciences, and they were sent away when it became clear that there was something at which they could make a living. (Sometimes the kids come back home to live, despite our rolling eyes--quantum physicists are currently sleeping on our couch, psychologists in perception and cognition keep raiding the refrigerator, literary theorists swipe our underwear.) Finally, for some of us, assessing progress and teaching about progress accomplished is made more difficult, because the progress we make looks like doing nothing at all, or it looks like backing away from questions. This is because the philosophers who make this kind of progress show, going question by painstaking question, that those questions should not be answered so much as dissolved once we anatomize the thinking behind them.

            Being clear about progress is made worse by the philosophical questions themselves: What can we know about reality based on appearances? What decision procedure ought we use to live a moral life? What is Truth, or Justice, or Art? What are the standards for determining whether an argument is a good one? How is it possible for words to refer to the world? Why does there exist something rather than nothing? How can there be such a thing as free will? You, Reader, may have favorites to add to this list. Not everyone gets pulled in by these questions, but some who get pulled in hope for answers. Some who refuse to get pulled in so far as to actually think about them will be adamant about nonnegotiable answers, always wrong answers. But for those who do get pulled in, the pull feels irresistible. The questions are born by springing fully armed from our foreheads like the Greek Goddess of Wisdom springing forth from the forehead of Zeus. We widen our eyes at the questions; we have to enter the battle. It feels like it’s them or us. Turns out, it’s hardly ever us. The questions keep sounding their brassy call, and they sound the same now as they always have. But philosophers still gear up. Hearing those questions, we cannot turn away, even if progress seems unlikely.

            The question, “What is language?” looks more mild-mannered than most of those above. It has a record, though. Its record includes encounters with many of our most illustrious philosophers. (Herein follow two paragraphs of namedropping, easily skipped.) Documents from the following encounters are central to that record and are generally recognized as enduringly valuable. Plato’s dialogue The Cratylus, written roughly 2300 years ago, takes up a major piece of the question, what is language?--namely, what are names and how do they work? St. Augustine’s dialogue Ad Magisterium asks and answers the whole question, and finds in that answer another proof of God’s existence. John Locke begins Book III of his massive Essay on Human Understanding with a careful and eloquent account of words as public signs of private ideas. John Stuart Mill, of Utilitarianism fame, presents an account of names and other pieces of language, including a treatment of the sign and office of the copula, in his A System of Logic. C.S. Peirce incorporates a theory of language into his theory of logic, and that into his theory of signs and signification.

            More contemporary philosophers have not let up, though most of the following are more specialized than those above. Bertrand Russell, John Searle, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, have all had at problems of how words refer to the world, and Searle has put together a broad account of language in terms of speech acts, and poured an account of mind as a foundation. Charles Morris and Rudolph Carnap developed general accounts of meaning, and Morris’s behaviorism shows up again in B.F. Skinner’s Linguistic Behavior (the review of which by Noam Chomsky is the funeral bell tolling for behaviorism and then a fanfare for an old rationalist account). Jerrold Katz, Jerry Fodor, Kim Sterelny are among those advocating an account featuring relations between public languages and a universal, private language of thought. H.P. Grice and Searle are the head architects for a Leavittown of theories of meanings based on intentions. Several logicians (some following Stanley Montagu) and information theorists (some following Carnap) persist in thinking that language can profitably be regarded as another formal system in their disciplines. Donald Davidson and Willard van Orman Quine rely on accounts of language which feature processes of understanding reduced to or based on recognizing conditions for utterances being true or satisfied. Jacques Derrida expands on a lesson from John L. Austin (who would cackle at the result) to present a view of language as including everything that exists, incorporating an insight found in Peirce that what the signs of language stand for are other signs. (Here I stop most namedropping, except for a brief eruption, four bunched names, below.)

            The anthropologist Edward Sapir famously remarked that “Everything about language is interesting.” He was not thinking of the theories of those philosophers listed above. But at least one thing about all those accounts is interesting, and that’s not their lack of progress. It is that, though of course they emphasize their disagreements, philosophers do agree on a core account of what language is. They all subscribe to a view of language as consisting of external, public, perceivable signs which stand for something else. How to characterize the something else occasions tankers of spilt ink, and the vocabulary keeps shifting, but language is thought by all those above except Austin to be a system of signs. On this account, language serves the purpose of communicating meanings or ideas or whatevers, which whatevers exist prior to any linguistic exchange, and language serves that purpose by our deploying signs. Those signs are public proxies or standins serving as the bearers of those meanings or whatevers, and it is the signs which cross the intervening space between speakers and hearers. There are the sounds which come out of our mouths (or the marks on the pages or letters on the screen, which Aristotle says are signs of the sounds as the sounds are signs of affects of the soul)--and then there is whatever they stand for. The two things and their relations to each other, as generated by speakers and as understood by hearers, are our language. The internal something elses, as I said, are the topic for disagreements, and are called any of several things: meanings; ideas; thoughts; information; messages; propositional content or just content; intentions--and then, in the face of these contesting terms, some philosophers ride to the rescue with more technical vocabulary: interpretants, dispositions to behave, sentences in mentalese or brainese, illocutionary act potentials. But the curious thing is that philosophers have fought over the signified but take the signs to be clear and obvious--or at least easy.

            The linguist Collette Grunevald once remarked to a group of graduate students that linguistic theorists seem to be waiting for another big insight, another revolution like Chomsky’s. Not much theoretical progress is presently being made. I attribute this to those theorists taking for granted the view I investigate here.

            I came to this problem--what is language? is it really a system of signs?--after having done graduate work in literature, linguistics, and psychology, disciplines in which I still hear no uneasiness and way too much enthusiasm about the account of language as signs. In philosophy, questioning this account, and questioning traditional problems in the way I do here, is relatively recent and uncommon, and has been traumatic to the discipline. On these topics at conferences can be heard raised voices, impatience, bitterness, disgust, feet walking away--unlike other topics on which there is simply disagreement without that disagreement murdering interest or civility. Perhaps some of the trauma is due to personalities of some questioners, a small group of testy, aloof, uncompromising thinkers who have overused the word nonsense and who have withering senses of humor. But I think it is partly that we are in on the achievement of some real progress and we don’t know how to cope. These thinkers, after all, are working without the usual net of peer support in the discipline. Here are some of their names, bunched up so we can evade having to deal with them: Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Oets K. Bouwsma, Frank Ebersole. There are a few others who could be included, and several dozens who would think they should be included. I’m convinced these four are not well understood, and that the record of earnest exposition (massive in the case of Wittgenstein) shows that that exposition doesn’t work--their ideas are too challenging to be taken seriously by philosophers who have made up their minds about the legitimacy of philosophical problems.

            What’s required, I think, is what I attempt here: to use what we can learn from them in our work on philosophical problems, one problem at a time. It’s hard to do this, and it takes time. Each problem comes with its own sets of ideas to be investigated, its own implications for how to think about examples, its own wording (and how we say it makes a difference), its own assumptions, its own garden path. Though what we learn working on one problem may help us in our work on some other problem, the help is not in the form of shortcuts. It is, rather, in the form of respect for examples, respect for the alarming power of philosophical problems, respect for the intelligence and wariness we need to make progress.

            This book, then, is schizophrenic in the etymological sense of having split interests. It is an investigation into a problem, the problem of whether language is a system of signs, but it has a subtext (and an appendix) about method in philosophy. Because claims about methods are seductive and distracting, because the issue of proper method is timely in philosophy, and because the topic of methods is bottomless and uninstructive if pursued out of any context of work on a problem, the focus for most of the book is on the problem. The methods used are consistent from beginning to end, but the questions about method begin to take center stage toward the end, and then the main objections to the methods used here are examined in the appendix. Working on those objections, rethinking how philosophers would be led to make those objections, has confirmed me in thinking the methods cannot be understood separate from philosophical work until after that work has been done--we cannot keep looking in the mirror while we unplug the drains. And, after work has been done using these methods, that work stands on its own separate from any claims about methods. That is, the work on the problem stands as a set of questions, investigations, and arguments. If it has been done well--if the questions are the right questions and if the arguments in answer to those questions are sound--then worries about method are not so much answered as dissipated.

            My involvement on this problem and my methods took shape during graduate work at the University of Oregon. I got this problem from Frank Ebersole. I’m not sure he ever meant for me to work on it, though, and I started by changing it into a different problem, from one about signal systems to one about signs. Still, it’s his fault. He remarked on aspects of thinking of language as signs and signals several times shortly before he retired from the University of Oregon. The department then, in the 70's and 80's, was remarkable in ways which are clearer to me now, since what made it terrific has gone away. More than half the faculty were heavily influenced by Wittgenstein and by Ebersole, and we graduate students were regularly able to talk to internationally-known visitors envious of our community of thinkers. Further, we--faculty, graduate students, visitors--argued, endlessly. We went at it hammer and tongs in seminars, offices, hallways, colloquia, taverns, and homes. The issues were old-chestnut problems in philosophy but we had found how to make them live issues and how to make progress on them possible. The next day someone would bring in a paper or article or excerpt, and we’d go again. Sometimes we had to change our minds. I try to recapture bits of this for students now, with mixed success. From Bouwsma by way of Bob Herbert I’ve taken the practice of writing regular letters to my classes, clarifying progress or possibilities for progress, and illustrating methods based on examples. For about the last ten years, I’ve been collecting these letters into themes, including the theme of language as signs. In seminars and reading groups we sometimes sand them down, and we often get to argue. Sometimes someone will change her or his mind, still and always a disconcerting and exhilirating experience. So the problem of language as signs, its treatment here, the articulation of methods, and the process by which problem and treatment have come together--all make a package. I’m not sure, but I think the package is bound by a kind of wholistic logic which good philosophy requires and which I hope helps make this work worthwhile.

            The first chapter lays out the view that language is a system of signs in sympathetic terms. The second provides a selection of what are usually called “ordinary language” arguments against the view--reminders about how the view requires us to think in terms which are inconsistent with how we think about language and signs when we are not doing philosophy. Those arguments have been unpersuasive among philosophers, and Chapter Three begins the work of investigating separate pieces of the view in detail. Chapter Three takes up an argument for the view which is familiar among philosophers, using Jerry Fodor’s formulation: we cannot be thinking in a public, natural language, because animals and preverbal infants think with no such language. I show this argument is not an argument at all but is rather an expression of the view in question. Chapter Four takes up Locke’s argument, widely endorsed since, that the relations between particular words and their meanings are arbitrary or conventional rather than natural or necessary, “else there would be but one language amongst all mankind.” I argue that the alternatives (conventional vs. natural or necessary) are both generated by taking the division between words and their meanings to be the division between signs and signified--in other words, the question is a result of adopting the view of language as signs. Attempts to argue for the legitimacy of the (not answers but) question without taking the view for granted only serve to call it into question more. In Chapter Five I investigate whether we talk in order to communicate something which is otherwise hidden and invisible. We are tempted to think that you and I talk because I cannot read your mind or you mine. Though Wittgenstein has a famous set of comments on the notion of a private language, it remains a strong temptation to think that language gives public form to something (thoughts, ideas, intentions, feelings, content, meaning) which without language would be unknowable to all but the person whose something it is. Examples help point to the incoherence of this view and show that even if it were not incoherent, remedying the invisibility of those internal whatnots would still leave us with a need for language. Chapter Six takes up a hoary question about boundaries of effability--the possibility that there are limits to what can be said which are more restrictive than what can be thought, say, or felt. The account of language as signs provides one easy way to make sense of this idea, but investigation of examples shows the problem is not one that makes sense unless we just grant that account. Chapter Seven investigates how to make sense of the notion that there are things which are in language and other things which are not. I show how the view of language as signs shows us how to think this. I then show how one reaction to finding problems with the notion resonates with Wittgenstein’s early work and with some work of Jacques Derrida, who, it seems, agree to bite a bullet, agree that everything is language, that the limits of language are the limits of our world. I then investigate that reaction using examples, and the reaction is revealed as a kind of rear-guard attempt to save the view of language as signs. Chapter Eight uses examples as guides toward alternative views of language, feeling our way toward what language might be if it is not a system of signs. The results will be frustrating or maddening to those who really, reeelly want an answer to the question, “What is Language?” Those results are dependent on the kinds of examples in which the question comes up, the results lack the theoretical unity which would make them responsive to the question, and the results involve us in reminders about other goals in investigative work of this kind, other, that is, than choosing among competing answers. Wittgenstein has drawn an analogy between this work and therapy; our investigation is like therapy for a neurosis–the object may be that the question gets evaporated once we understand the mistakes or the assumptions we had to make in asking it. If this investigation works, that is, the result may only be a landscape clear of brambles, including clear of the question. Finally, the appendix takes up what I take to be the serious arguments against the methods I use in this work, the first two articulated by John Searle (“the assertion fallacy”) and H. P. Grice (“conversational implicature”), and another the generally unspoken belief that philosophical work is like scientific work.

            Acknowledgments: The wider discipline still offers little peer support for this kind of work, and I’m no good at using a net anyway. Still, I have been saved from failures by several philosophers, whether they were interested or not: Frank Ebersole, Don Levi, Will Davie, Bob Herbert, Henry Alexander, Tom North, Karen Petersen, Jeff Johnson. I’ll skip the names of those who taught me by example what not to do. My colleagues at Humboldt State University, despite taking teaching more seriously than at any other university I know, have been unfailingly encouraging and kind regarding this research. I’d also like to thank Socrates, William James, and Iris Murdoch; the audiences for my presentations at the University of Minnesota, the American Philosophical Association, the Navajo Studies Conference, and the North American Wittgenstein Society; and the students in my classes who have questioned and fought back.