[MUSIC PLAYING] The
two terms linguistic philosophy and linguistic
analysis are both used to mean the same thing. And that is a technique of doing philosophy
which developed mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world, and which came to fruition in the 1940s
and '50s. Though I think it's fair to say that the way almost everybody since then has
done philosophy has been influenced by it. The two great centers of activity in it were
Oxford and Cambridge. At Oxford, the most influential figure was JL Austin. And to a
lesser degree, Gilbert Ryle. At Cambridge, it was incomparably Wittgenstein. These and
the other individuals involved all differed among themselves naturally, but they had certain
basic tenets in common. Perhaps the chief of them can be put this
way. Ever since Socrates, philosophers have tended to ask questions like, what is truth,
or what is beauty, or what is justice, on the assumption that each of these words stands
for something, perhaps an invisible or abstract something. But anyway, something that has
its own existence independently of how the words are used. It was as if the philosophers
were trying to pierce through the question through the language to some non-linguistic
reality that stood behind the words. Now the linguistic philosophers came along
and said that this was a profound error. And an error, what's more, that leads into other
serious mistakes in our thinking. There are, they said, no entities for which
these words stand. Language is a human creation. We invented the words and we determine their
use. Understanding what a word means is nothing more nor less than knowing how to use it. So taking a notion like truth, when you fully
understand how to use the word truth correctly and its associated words like true, truthfulness,
and so on, then you fully understand its meaning. This meaning simply is the sum total of the
word's possible uses, not some incorporeal entity that exists in some abstract realm. From this, linguistic philosophers went on
to say that the only satisfactory way to analyze the categories of human thought, or the concepts
in which we try and come to terms with the world or communicate with each other, is by
investigating how they're used. And doing linguistic philosophy consists in carrying
out such investigations. In fact, the most famous book in linguistic philosophy is called
Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein. Normally such an investigation would be into
one concept of the time, as it might be say, The Concept of Mind, which is the title of
what is probably the second most famous work in linguistic philosophy, a book by Gilbert
Ryle. For some years after the publication of these two books-- Ryle's in 1949, Wittgenstein's
in 1953-- linguistic analysis exercised an enormous spell on philosophy. And in those
years, it came at the very least to color the way the subject was practiced by almost
everyone in the English speaking world. To discuss it now on this program, we have
someone who has spent many years each at both Oxford and Cambridge. Bernard Williams, now
one of the two professors of philosophy at Cambridge, was an undergraduate at Oxford
in the heyday of linguistic philosophy there. Well, Bernard Williams, the philosophy that
linguistic philosophy represented a breakaway from was primarily logical positivism, wasn't
it? Logical positivism was the prevailing orthodoxy of one generation, linguistic philosophy
of the next. And I think a way in which we can continue the characterization of linguistic
philosophy that I started in this introduction is by talking about the contrast between it
and logical positivism that it broke away from. I think we were very conscious of the difference
from logical positivism. And perhaps more conscious than people will be looking at all
later on. But the real difference, I think, was this,
that positivism tremendously thought of the canon of human meaningful discourse and knowledge
as being science really. It admitted that there were other forms of discourse as well.
But it measured the meaningfulness of other discourse by really, the standards of science. And for positivism, philosophy almost was
the philosophy of science. Whereas linguistic analysis or linguistic philosophy was tremendously
and self consciously aware of the variety of different forms of human discourse, the
many different ways of talking, many different sorts of meaning, besides scientific meaning.
And the business was to try and discover how these various other sorts, as well as the
scientific sorts, worked. Not to measure everything by the canons of science and pronounce the
other sorts meaningless. The logical positivists did in fact quite
explicitly say, didn't they, that any statement which was not empirically verifiable was meaningless? Yes. Except for the, as it were, segments
of mathematics which was just true in virtue of the meanings of words, as it were. But
certainly, all the statements of ethics or aesthetics or religion. And indeed, many everyday
psychological statements, I suspect, by the positivist canon were meaningless. So whereas, for example, the logical positivists
would have said that religious talk was meaningless, talk about god and so on was meaningless,
because there was simply no way in which any of it was verifiable, the linguistic analysts
might have been inclined to say before we pronounce this meaningless, let's have a very
close look at what precisely the concepts are that are being used here, how they're
being used, how they function within this universe of discourse and so on. Oh yes. I mean, they not only might have been
disposed, they were very disposed to say that and were always publishing books called Faith
and Logic. That was the title they tended to have. Because it has got a rather curious,
ironical, two sided aspect, that business. Because although linguistic philosophy, for
instance, was as you say, kinder towards religious language than positivism had been, which at
least did it the honor in a sense of showing it off the premises as empirically meaningless,
the linguistic analysts were a little disposed to say well, here we have this form of discourse,
which is one form of human life like any other. And of course, it implicitly already gave
an extremely, as it were, humanistic interpretation of religion. It tended just to regard religion
and religious belief as a form of human life, as an expression of human needs. And while
there are many, including some now among the clergy who would agree with that, it wasn't
perhaps everybody's traditional idea of religious belief. We've distinguished linguistic philosophy
from logical positivism. There's another distinction which I think is very important that we should
make at the outset of this program. And that's the distinction between linguistic philosophy
and the philosophy of language. Those two phrases are so similar. But I think someone unfamiliar with philosophy
could easily be forgiven for mixing the two up or for supposing that they were names for
the same thing. But they're not, are they? And I wonder if you would make clear what
the distinction is? Well, I think that there is an important distinction
there in the following sense. That the philosophy of language as I understand it is a branch
of philosophy. It's an area of philosophy. It's that part of philosophy which particularly
concerns itself with questions raised by language itself. It's now a very flourishing and indeed
in many ways a very technical subject. And of course, it borders very closely on theoretical
linguistics. Whereas I think we understood linguistic philosophy
or linguistic analysis to be not a branch of philosophy, but a method of philosophy
which addressed itself to philosophical questions raised all over the place. I mean, the questions
of metaphysics, of ethics, questions about the meaning of ethical statements, what one
ought to do and so on, and all other branches of philosophy, but offered a certain method
for addressing those same questions, one which particularly laid emphasis on being self conscious
about language in which those questions were raised. And of course, it did offer a certain promise,
didn't it? I mean, precisely because the idea was that there was no content in any part
of our conceptual scheme that was not put there by us, and therefore, if you carried
out a thorough analysis of the way a particular concept functioned, there was no remainder.
Nothing was left over. The projection of this into philosophical investigation was expected
to result in the problem's being finally solved, wasn't it? Well, yes. The phrase that so often was used,
and I think still can be. It was not solved but dissolved. The idea was that many of the
traditional problems of philosophy had been based on a misunderstanding, a very simple
idea of how our language worked. And once the two became self conscious about
the way our language worked, came to understand the kind of meaning that we'd given our expressions,
you'd see that, as it were, you couldn't just put some words together and hope that these
problems would find their own destination, if I can put it that way. Thought couldn't
just whiz through the words and get to reality. Our questions meant just what we made them
mean, as it were. It was only our practice which determined what these questions meant. Now that meant that a lot of questions of
philosophy weren't one question at all. The idea was they were often a collection of different
worries, different puzzles which had been put together under some simplifying formula,
that when you saw through that-- and remember it's also called linguistic analysis-- and
analytically taken the problems apart-- then you'd find that many of the traditional questions
of philosophy had not just been solved, but had disappeared. You no longer needed to ask
them anymore. And the promise that this offered of this being so was very great and extremely
exciting. And I mean, there really were people around
who were saying the whole of philosophy would be over in 50 years. It would all be finished. We'd have exhaustively analyzed the use of
all the basic concepts. And when we've done that, there'll be nothing left to do. Or at least you'll have got rid of the ones
that give rise to the problems. The characteristic philosophical problems. The traditional philosophical problems. Yes. Sure. But of course, that's slightly at odds with
another promise, as it were, held up by linguistic philosophy, and it's this. The logical positivists
kept philosophy tied to science's apron strings in a way that you described a moment ago.
But as you explained, the linguistic philosophers were prepared to look at anything and everything. Yeah. And one consequence of that was that philosophical
techniques were thought of as being techniques that could be applied to literally every field
of human discourse that there is. Mmm. There's no reason why you shouldn't, on these
assumptions, have a philosophy of medicine, a philosophy of economics, a philosophy of
population theory, a philosophy of sport, a philosophy of anything. Because in any field,
let's take medicine for example, you could take some of the characteristic and central
concepts. In medicine it would be, shall we say, health, disease, cure. All of which are
in fact, deeply problematic concepts once you start seriously considering them. And you could, as it were, give them the treatment.
You could turn the blowtorch, as it were. You could use these philosophical techniques
of analysis on them, thereby clarifying all discourse in that particular field. Now the
very fact that this was thought to be applicable to all fields of human discourse seems to
present you with an endless task-- Ah. If you're thinking in terms of exhaustive
analysis. Yes. That's why I think one wouldn't want
to say that anyone ever thought that all the concepts could be clarified. What they thought
was that the problems could be. I mean, the major problems could be dissolved. And that's
because there was a view about where the major problems came from. Of course, there are philosophical conceptual
questions to be answered about medicine. And I mean, there are. I mean, people now are
equally interested in, and perhaps even more interested in these same issues you just referred
to about health and so on. Interesting application of course, that is in the case of mental health,
where the very concept of mental illness has been found problematical by some people and
philosophical inquiry has gone on on that basis. But no, to go back to the preoccupations of
linguistic philosophy, the central problems, I think, were found to arise in two sorts
of ways. First of all, with enormously general concepts. Not concepts as specific as health, but ones
that arise all over the place. Like the notion of something being the same as something else
or the notion of something causing something else or just the notion of something changing.
The concepts of time and space and so on, these are notions which we use in all fields
of discourse. And their very general character gave rise to, as indeed traditionally has
given rise to, a central corpus of philosophical problems in trying to understand these notions. The second important area was perceived, and
I think rightly perceived, to arise on the borderline between two different kinds of
discourse. For instance, on the borderline between talking about physical things and
talking about psychological things. And the book by Ryle to which you referred,
The Concept of Mind, was specifically an attempt to apply the sorts of techniques that linguistic
analysis used to questions like how do we know that other people have experiences? What
is it for a living solid thing to have faults? And questions of this kind. Now indeed, these were not new problems. Put
in that form, they are very old problems of philosophy. And the whole point was that if
you took that area where the problems were very pressing and used these techniques, the
problems wouldn't look the same as they did before. They would dissolve into a series
of separate conceptual issues that we might be able to handle. Apart from this promise of solutions to all
problems, which is obviously extremely attractive, what was the special appeal of linguistic
philosophy to so many very clever people? Because it did seem to have a sort of spellbinding
people for many people. People caught it almost like a disease. Yeah. I think there were less deep and more
deep reasons for that. I think that one of the deeper ones was that it presented, in
almost all its forms, it presented some contrast or other between the depth and serious of
the motivation and the everydayness of the style. The examples were everyday. There was a rather
deliberate attempt to avoid portentous philosophical technical terminology of any kind. It didn't
sound high flown. There was possibly a rather downbeat style. And because one felt at the same time that
actually, though it didn't necessarily look like it, one was doing something rather serious,
that provided a particular kind of what might be called Socratic pleasure. It had, as it
were, the everyday, rather dry ironical aspect of the material serving what, as it were,
we all knew was a deeper purpose. Now that came out rather differently in the Wittgenstein
style to which you referred and in the Oxfordian style, which is rather more deliberately dry. Yes. There's a remark of Austin's which was rather
famous at the time. When he would give one of these seminars and he would be concerned
with what, I mean, portentous [INAUDIBLE] problems about free will and responsibility
and so on. But actually he would never say that. What he was doing, he was discussing
the difference between doing something inadvertently or by mistake or accidentally and so forth. And at some point, some visitor would say,
Professor Austin, what great problems of philosophy are illuminated by these inquiries? To which
Austin would say, "Roughly all of them." [LAUGHS] And this somehow struck the note. Yeah. I mean, as you can see in the-- I think a lot of people were misled by the
triviality of the examples. I mean, mind you, this has gone on throughout the history of
philosophy. Yeah. I mean, in an earlier generation there was
a well known moral philosopher who wrote chapter after chapter about the problems raised by
whether or not you ought to give a book back once you'd borrowed it, and what kind of an
ought that was and how-- Well, only one chapter, to be fair. [LAUGHS] Well, one chapter, yes. But I mean, that was
the subject of many jokes. Yeah. But of course, the point there was that this
was not a man agonizing over whether or not to return a book, but considering the whole
nature of moral obligation and so on. Now in the case of linguistic philosophy, I think
this was also true, wasn't it? Although linguistic philosophers, as you say, deliberately adopted
a rather deflationary style and deliberately employed trivial seeming examples, there was
a serious reason for employing trivial examples. Namely they wanted nothing in what they were
saying to hinge on the particular example. That's right, that's right. And they realized
that I think part of the idea was that if you took some immediately obvious grand or
dramatic or apparently profound example, then you were faced with two alternatives. Either it really was profound, in which case
it was almost certainly too complex and hard to start with. We ought to have gotten there
by taking some more everyday concern first. Or else it wasn't and it was just bogus. It
was part of, as it were, the traditional rhetoric of philosophy. And of course, part of the charm of doing
the subject this way was that it deflated, it exposed much of a traditional rhetoric
of philosophy. I think myself that there was a deep concern behind the choice of the simple
examples, the downbeat style. Though to be fair, it was probably rather more urgently
felt in the Wittgensteinian styles than it was in some of the Oxfordian styles, where
I think some of it really was just done because it was fun. Yeah. I mean, and so on. Now I think one has to
say-- this isn't our major point I think at the moment-- but I myself want to say that
I think this was a much sounder enterprise when people were talking about perception
or the theory of knowledge. I think you really should be able to talk about that in a very
everyday context. Or again, when one was talking about certain problems and theory of meaning
that it was when one was talking about ethics or politics. And it's not uncharacteristic that in fact,
political philosophy never never prospered under this regime at all. It's just not a
subject that ever took to it. And I think that's connected with this fact. I mean, it's
because the categories of the dramatic and the serious are themselves political and moral
categories. Yeah. And that's not true about seeing and knowing
and counting and these other concepts. I suppose another aspect of the appeal of
linguistic philosophy to clever people is the inculcation of the very salutary self
consciousness about the use of language. I mean, almost the inculcation of a new kind
of responsibility. The insistence that it really does matter that you express yourself
scrupulously clearly. Yes. I think this is extremely important,
what the nature of this self awareness was. And it's interesting that though some people
have criticized linguistic philosophy for being pedantic or just lexicographical or
trivial in these respects or worrying too much about small points of verbal formulation,
in fact it's the same demand that is being made often by poets. For instance, by Auden
in much of his work. And by very self conscious writers, in particular, oddly enough by Yeats,
who felt that somehow the integrity of meaning, the fact that you should say no more and less
than what you mean or that you should be self aware about what that is is itself a bulwark
against, as it were, dissolution, terror, splurge. Karl Kraus, George Orwell. There's almost
a literature articulating that point of view, isn't there? The feeling of the resistance of the pollution
of the mind by muddled speech. And that the resistance that they wouldn't have been put
in the downbeat tone that was then prevailing, certainly at the Oxford end of the proceedings.
It would rather more in the Wittgensteinian way. And we have to remember that Wittgenstein
came from Vienna, where this had for a long time been a very deeply felt concern. At the Oxford end, it wouldn't have been put
like that. Because that would itself sound rather high flown. But in fact, that was undoubtedly
part of the motivation, and in my view an important one. I think this is a point worth making, that
this did make it at Oxford for example, where you and I both studied the subject. I think
it did make it enormously valuable form of intellectual training for young people, for
students. This insistence on clarity, on responsibility, on paying serious attention to very small
differences and distinctions in meaning. It's a very good form of mental training, quite
apart from its philosophical importance. Yes, it certainly had very positive aspects.
I think it has to be said that it had some negative aspects in that respect as well. Yeah, I want to come to those later and not
quite yet. Yeah, sure. Yeah. We've talked about the commitment to clarity.
But this raises one or two questions in one's mind immediately. For example, the most distinguished
of all the linguistic philosophers I suppose most people would agree was the later Wittgenstein.
And no one could say that he is clear. On the contrary, a profoundly difficult philosopher
to understand. And I might link this with another point,
which you may want to take separately, I don't know. But I'll make it now. I do think that
the linguistic philosophers, because of their passionate commitment to clarity, profoundly--
and I mean the word profoundly-- underrated the value of some philosophers who aren't
clear, because they're not clear. And the outstanding example there I would
say is Hegel. When we were undergraduates, Hegel was dismissed with utter contempt by
most professional philosophers, largely because he is obscure. Difficult to read, difficult
to follow. It was dismissed as being garbage, rubbish, not worth serious intellectual consideration. Now that was obviously a profound mistake.
In other words, clarity was given importance as a value in philosophy, which I think in
retrospect, it can be seen not actually to have. I think clarity turns out to be a more complex
notion than perhaps people thought, or some people thought at the time. I think the case
of Hegel is complex, because I don't think it just was because he was difficult. It was
certainly because he was difficult in a certain way. For instance, I don't think that Kant
ever underwent the degree of dismissal to which you refer. No, no. And I don't think anyone could say that Kant
or [INAUDIBLE] language were of a preeminently easy kind at the very least. I think also,
one has to add that there were certain historical reasons why Hegel was ideologically suspect
to a extremely high degree. I mean, it was thought that a particular-- [INAUDIBLE] totalitarian. Totalitarianism. And he was thought, I think
somewhat erroneously, to be connected with as it were, Hitlerian deformations in the
German consciousness. And errors of this kind were committed, but of a kind which are not
unfamiliar. I think there was a historical context to that. But you're right in saying that the view of
the history of philosophy was very selective and in a way, governed by some concept of
clarity. Now there's certainly a difference, if you look at the writings of Austin, and
you look at the writings of Wittgenstein. Now it's not because when one says that the
difference is the Austin's are clear in a way that Wittgenstein's isn't. I think what
one means is, doesn't one, that Austin's is somehow more literal minded than Wittgenstein? Yeah. Sure. You see, there are very few sentences in the
Philosophical Investigations which you referred to which aren't perfectly straightforward
sentences. They don't have ambiguous grammar or obscure nouns in them. They-- What is difficult to understand is why he's
saying them. That's right. I mean, they contain sentences
like, "If a lion should speak, we would not understand him." Yeah. Now that sentence, the point is, the question
is, why is it there? Yeah. And I think that why it's difficult to follow
is because of an ambiguity, a very deep ambiguity, about how far it's harnessed to an argument.
In Austin, or any of another of many other linguistic philosophies we could refer to,
there are, as in some other philosophers, pretty explicit arguments. There's a good
deal of therefore and since and because and it will now be proved in a certain way. [LAUGHS] Yeah. In Wittgenstein, there are extremely few.
I mean, it consists of curious sorts of conversations with himself. And epigrams and apothegms and
reminders and things of this kind. And this is connected with a very deeply radical
view he had about philosophy that had got nothing to do with proof or argument at all.
So radical was his view about the peculiarity of philosophical problems that he thought
that so unlike was his approach to them to that of solving a problems in the sciences
that he thought you didn't do it by trying to argue somebody into something. You did
it by, as he says at one point, "Assembling reminders of the way we normally go on." Which
philosophy tends to disposes us to forget. It's more like trying to get people to see
things in a certain way-- That's right. Which works of art commonly do, don't they? Yeah. Plays and novels and so on. With the suggestion that when we see them
in this way, we will see them in a way uncorrupted by the theoretical oversimplifications of
philosophy. Yes. Yes. Whereas now that strain is common to all versions
of linguistic philosophy. It's very important idea that, that the idea of clarity here is
connected oddly enough with substituting complexity for obscurity. It's allowed to be complex,
because life is complex. Yes. And while one of the great accusations against
previous philosophers is that, although they've been dark and difficult and solemn, what they've
actually done is vastly oversimplified. They've produced contrast between appearance and reality
or something. But the suggestion is if you actually think about the various ways in which
things can appear to be one thing or really be another and so on, or what reality might
be taken to be, you'll find that our whole collection of thoughts about this is much
more complex than we'd originally supposed. We were saying a few minutes ago how, whatever
it was, say 20 years ago in the new dawn of linguistic philosophy, people were inclined
to think that given enough time by the use of these techniques, the fundamental problems
of philosophy would be solved in about 20 years. Well, 20 years has now passed, and
of course, the fundamental problems of philosophy have not been solved. And although linguistic philosophy had these
very great merits that we've talked about, the commitment to clarity and all the other
things we've just been discussing, there was clearly something fundamentally mistaken in
its expectations for itself or its attitude to the subject. And let's now talk about what
its shortcomings were. Fair to say of course that all bright dawns
of philosophical revolutions-- and we can list about five immediately which people have
said, we have now found the right path-- why is philosophy been floundering around before?
Now we now have the right path. They all tend to encounter their own problems of their own
methods before very long, and that of linguistic analysis is not alone in that. I think that what the basic mistake, if we
can speak of a basic mistake, it's basic limitation was that it underestimated, in my view, the
importance of theory. It above all underestimated the importance of theory inside philosophy.
It had a rather ancillary tendency to underestimate the importance of theory in other subjects
as well. I don't think it had a very clear idea about the importance of theory, even
in the sciences. Let me make sure that I know what you mean
when you talk about the unimportance of theory. The linguistic analysts tend to pick up with
their tweezers one concept at a time and analyze it, sometimes in Austin's case, almost in
dissociation from everything else, without any reference to an explanatory area as background
and so on. Is that what you're referring to? That's the sort of idea. Yes. I think that what we tend to do is to pick
up some distinction or opposition and go very carefully into that and the various nuances
that might be attached to that, and order or state them. Without perhaps enough reflection
on what background made this distinction or set of distinctions rather than some other
set of distinction of any interest or importance. 'Cause you were doing the subject in a piecemeal
way. And indeed the word piecemeal-- That's right. Was one that you yourselves often used, wasn't
it? Frequently. Piecemeal was a term of praise. And there was rather an interesting analogy
which Austin used at one point when people complained about the multiplication of distinctions.
And he said, why are people so afraid of the multiplication of distinctions, distinctions
of sorts of language or whatever it may be. He said, whatever there are, there are over
10,000 subspecies of a certain kind of beetle or beetles or some sort of insect. And why
can't we just discover that number of distinctions about language? But the answer of course is that our grounds
for distinguishing species of beetles from one another are grounded in a certain theoretical
understanding of what makes species different, an understanding given by the theory of evolution.
Unless you've got some background theoretical understanding, anything's as different from
anything else as you like. You've got to have it rooted in the sense of what makes one distinction
more important than another. You've got to have a frame of reference. A frame of reference. And that framework is a theory. I think that has to be said, yes. And I think
that that wasn't adequately acknowledged. I mean, people did say, they varied to the
degree to which they said you can do it bit by bit or you have to do more at a time. But I think the acknowledgement that the problems
were only set by, the distinctions were only given as substance by a background of some
more theoretical or systematic understanding. That point, I think, was more generally overlooked. I was talking earlier about the way linguistic
philosophers tended to bring the tool kit to any one of a variety of different fields
of discourse. And that I think relates now in our present stage of this discussion to
one of the important shortcomings of linguistic philosophy in practice as an approach. And
that was that philosophers tended to regard philosophy too much as separated from, or
at least separable from any subject matter. I remember one of the most distinguished philosophers
in the country saying to me about 15 years ago, you don't have to do anything to be good
at philosophy. All you have to be is clever and interested in the subject. [LAUGHS] Well, I think that he was certainly
more honest than some. Why, I think that a lot of people thought that, but wouldn't have
had the cheek to say it. I think that remark sounds-- and perhaps it's quite interesting
historical reflection as you imply on how things looked-- that that remark would certainly
have sounded at least a great deal less quaint when it was uttered than I think it indisputably
does know. Yes. And this was connected with-- and I think
this is in a way, another side of the point we were making earlier about the revolutionary
sense of this philosophy. You see, it worked in part by making one feel that the nature
of philosophy had been misunderstood. That people had gone on about philosophy just as
if they were charting the philosophical realm or doing a sort of special kind of super science.
And now we had a sort of self consciousness about philosophy, which meant you couldn't
assume it was like that. And as I said already, in the case of Wittgenstein,
the self consciousness was so profoundly doubting that he had grave doubts about the existence
of philosophy at all, except as a kind of-- well sometimes some of his followers said
neurosis or aberration or something that happens when our conceptions of ourselves go wrong.
Now that radical feeling, revolutionary feeling about philosophy, also made people frightfully
and overly self conscious about what philosophy was and encouraged the feeling that it was
frightfully different from anything else. That in turn made everybody think that the
sciences for instance, were not, in themselves, philosophical. They didn't have a philosophical
part to them. There was philosophy and there were the first order subjects. Now I think now that people would once more
be very conscious that there are parts of science which are themselves the philosophy
of science. There's parts of linguistics which are the philosophy linguistics. There's a
good deal of psychology which is the philosophy of psychology. And here there's a no man's
land which you both have to have philosophical skills and also you have to know about these
sciences or the other relevant subjects and that this dichotomy can't be made. Another way in which looking at philosophy
in this disassociated way made the approach defective was that it resulted in its lacking
any historical sense, didn't it? I mean, there was very little sense among the linguistic
philosophers that the concepts that they were analyzing actually have histories. They change
their use. And they were so concerned with use. Their
use changes over the course of time. And paid played remarkably little attention to the
intentions of the language users who use of language they were discussing if these were
figures from the past. Ah. Well, I think there's two different points
there. I mean, I think there's a point about all concepts having a history. I mean, that
any concept you care to take has got some history. And with regard to that, I think that they
had, if a slightly narrow line, a perfectly defensible one, which was to say let's look
at it now as a functionally operating system. And it's like, in a way it was like a certain
kind of anthropology, as it were. I mean, it wasn't anthropology, but it shared the
idea of-- But it meant that when they considered the
ideas of Locke or Descartes-- Ah, yes. Or any dead philosopher, they tended to argue
with this dead figure as if he was a colleague in their common room. That's right. Indeed. No, that's an important
point, because I mean, when you come to the history of philosophy, there of course you
get something else. And there's no doubt at all that the approach to a lot of the philosophy
of the past was of a. Might be called a sturdily anachronistic character. And the remark about
saying treating it all as if it was written in the philosophical magazine this month or
something was actually made by somebody in praise of this method. [LAUGHS] What can be said about it is a very curious
fact that of course it's theoretically indefensible. I mean, it's not difficult to see that that's
quite a funny way of going about looking at these writings that come from the past. The odd fact is that as a matter of fact,
he's rather productive. And in fact, rather stimulating and in fact, has had a more robust
legacy then you might have expected in a way. And indeed, more robust than kinds of the
history of philosophy which were just rather passively guided by excessive concern for
being anachronistic. Yes. We've been talking about shortcomings
in linguistic philosophy. And I think each one that we've considered now has some substance
to it. I want to raise one which you may not think has much substance to it, but which
was the commonest criticism of all. And that is that non-philosophers tended to regard,
and still tend to regard linguistic philosophy as footling. Yes. And linguistic philosophers were accused of
just playing with words, just being frivolous and so on. What would your comment be on that? Well, the answer to that is that some of it
of course was. I mean, some of it was pedantic, footling, and boring. But I think that the reason it's very boring
fact, which is very important here, which is that at all times in all eras, and whoever's
doing it, at least 90% on a generous estimate, of philosophy that's done is not much good.
It's never going to be of any interest much to anybody later on except historians. And
that's true of most subjects, but it's especially true about philosophy. And so it's not surprising that a lot of linguistic
philosophy wasn't much good, because a lot of philosophy of any kind isn't much good.
It had a special way of being bad, we which was being footling and frivolous and pedantic
instead of being pompous, empty and boring in that sort of way as a lot of other philosophy
is. I mean, there are really two ways in which
philosophy can be. And it can either be pedantic or it can be bogus. Linguistic philosophy
made a speciality out of being bad by being pedantic. Well, in some ways, a more honorable
way of being bad than being bogus. If you go beyond its deformation to the bad
examples, it's not true. What is read as the frivolity of worrying about what these sentences
actually sound like was exactly an essential and constitutive part of that kind of self
understanding about language. Ringing it to hear exactly what note the sentence makes,
which we referred to before and which is-- But what you're dead against-- and I know
this from previous discussions with you-- is the idea which is so popular because it's
self indulgent. Oh, don't worry about what I actually say. It's what I mean that matters. That's right. That was what linguistic philosophy
was frightfully good at stopping people saying. And what was much more important, stopping
them feeling. That the idea that somehow I have my meaning here, my little sentence I'm
trying to convey it to. If it doesn't convey it to you, that's partly through some failure
of imagination on your part. We have a responsibility to make our words
express what our means, 'cause in the end we don't have these meanings just inside ourselves
independent of what we're disposed to say. Our sentences are our meanings. Our meanings
are not just independent of them. I think you've drawn up a very good balance
sheet now of, as it were, what was good about linguistic philosophy and what was not so
good about linguistic philosophy. What do you think we are left with at the end? What
is the legacy of it? I mean, I would start answering my own question
making one point and that is that the legacy is an enormous one. It's a very big one. I
have stressed I think a couple of times already in this discussion that the way everybody
does philosophy has been influenced by linguistic philosophy. What other things are we left
with at the end of this? Well, I think that the point we touched on
last, this point about our responsibility to our meanings rests with us. And I think
that the idea also that philosophical problems won't necessarily have the shape which the
tradition gave them. This rather radical thought that what was called the philosophical problem
is often just a bracket or a bag in which there's an area of disquiet which has to be
unraveled by the kind of sensitivity which linguistic analysis encouraged. I think these
are very positive inheritances indeed. And I think that when you join it to the new
concern, the regained concern with theory, which philosophy now very much manifests,
you get an extraordinarily fruitful combination, if you see what I mean, from these two elements
from the past. And I think it's worth saying, and I think this is quite interesting, as
it were, short term historical fact. That although philosophy is now very different
than what it was even 25 years ago-- this is 25 years ago that we're talking about,
and people now are doing things rather different than what we were doing at that point in the
'50s-- there's been in our tradition, in our locality, much less disowning of that way
of doing philosophy than is often the case under such a change. I would say there's less
disowning than the linguistic analysts showed towards positivism, for instance. That in fact, it's regarded, although the
limitations and the deformations that we've touched on are perceived and I think properly
emphasized, there's much less disposition to say, oh they were just going on in a fuddy-duddy,
pointless way. We now have the way of doing it. I mean, people do say we now have the
way of doing it, all right. But then they always did and they never had.
Yes. But the sense that a positive contribution
has made to that by not just an added sensitivity to language, but the grasp of this fundamental
proposition that we can't get to philosophical reality independent of these actual words
we are disposed to say. And it's a very important fact about ourselves and our pattern of our
life and our philosophical needs that these are the words we are disposed to say, this
consciousness I think, remains. Something that I value enormously and which
linguistic philosophy has obviously has a great deal to do with is the extension of
philosophical inquiry to new areas of subject matter. I mean, the notion that we have touched
on already that you can apply techniques of linguistic analysis to concepts in any field
has resulted in the development of the philosophy of economics, of history, of population theory
I mentioned earlier. Some of the most surprising things. And I think this is very valuable
and very important. And this is partly a product of that willingness
to look at each thing by itself that we referred to. Yes, yes. It's helped now, the point we made before,
by the fact that the harsh borderline between philosophy and these first order sciences
themselves has been much dissolved. I think there's one further point that I think might
be added there, which I think's an important one if we could just mention it. I think that
in the '50s, particularly in the Oxford variety of linguistic philosophy, it tended to think
that what philosophy should do is tidy up and make neater the untidy borders between
the concepts between the ideas in these various subjects, either within the subject itself
or between that subject and common sense. For instance, let's take the rather problematical
case of psychoanalysis. A lot of concepts used in psychoanalysis, like an unconscious
wish or again, possibly an unconscious belief, cause a lot of trouble to our ordinary conceptual
ideas. We're not used to this idea. And perhaps the philosophers then thought, well, we can,
as it were, tidy this up. We can analyze it, we can make clear what the situation is. I think they'd underestimated the important
sense in which new scientific discoveries make their own conceptual room. That as it
were, they just tear down pieces of language and thought that are around them in an essentially
untidy and indeterminate way. And the fact that a lot of our most fruitful thought at
any given moment might just necessarily be indeterminate, poorly thought out, and unclear
is an important notion, which you've got a bit more room for now. And I think perhaps
linguistic philosophy didn't have enough room for. Yes. Well, we're coming to the end of our
discussion now. I think the point I would want to make finally about linguistic philosophy
is that I think that used as a technique, it's of enormous and permanent value. And
that it was only radically defective so long as it was regarded as being in itself a total
conception of philosophy. There was a period, the period that we were
talking a lot about in the '40s and '50s, where many philosophers thought that the whole
of philosophy consisted of doing this. Well, that I think, is clearly not the case. And
probably very few people now would believe that it is. Provided it's kept in its place
as an ancillary technique, then I think it is of enormous and permanent value. Yes. As long as one accepts that, if I can
put it this way, the bag in which the tools come has an absolutely fundamental idea in
it which gives it its shape. This idea we've talked about about the non-independence of
language and thought. It's not just a bag of tools which can be applied to any old set
of tasks. Because the idea that shapes those tools themselves is one which has modified
our understanding of the mind and our understanding of language. Well, thank you very much, Bernard Williams. [MUSIC PLAYING]
