The linguistic turn
Because there are these very general puzzles about how language works, puzzles that seem rather like the ones that are central to philosophy of mind and to epistemology, it should not be surprising that Western philosophy has been concerned from its very beginning with language.
Philosophers, as we have already seen, ask fundamental questions about mind and knowledge: language seems at least as interesting, as puzzling, and as important. We have also seen that issues about how language works come up very naturally in the course of philosophical thinking about other issues. In Chapter 1, we found ourselves thinking about private languages and language games while reflecting on the nature of our mental lives. We also discussed the ways in which language seems to require consciousness. In Chapter 2 we found language central to thinking about the verification principle. Then we ended up wondering about how it was possible for us to understand the word “know” and yet not be able to give a simple definition of its meaning. We'll see later that questions about language will come up in other ways in other areas of the subject. So in fact there are many answers to the question “Why does language matter to philosophy?” which is the title of a very engaging book by the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking. As Hacking shows, in different eras of philosophy, different reasons for reflecting on language have seemed important.Still, one perennial source of the appeal that language has for philosophers is the fact that language is the tool with which we do our work. The philosopher's product, in the Western tradition, is a text, a piece of writing. Philosophy, as we have already seen, is especially concerned with the careful exposition of arguments that illuminate the central concepts with which and through which we understand reality.
It is natural, therefore, that philosophers should have attended very closely to how language works, and, more especially, to questions about how to use language in valid arguments.But everybody has a reason for being concerned to understand language properly. Whoever you are, you will sometimes have to think through difficult questions. And when you do, you will almost certainly have to do it with language. Even if you believe you can do without language for your private thinking, you will need to use it if you want to discuss these problems with others, or to look for relevant information or argument in books. So that, though philosophers have to be very careful about language, the fact that language is the tool of their trade does not distinguish philosophy from most forms of other intellectual activity.
Nor does this fact explain the tremendous importance that has been attached to philosophical questions about language in the last hundred or so years of European philosophy. From the work of the German philosopher Gottlob Frege, more than a hundred years ago, to Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations in the middle of the twentieth century, some of the most influential philosophical writings have asked questions about how language works. In the philosophy of language, questions about language have been addressed not because care with words allows us to avoid confusion, but because the nature of linguistic meaning, or of what it is for sentences to be true or false, has come to be regarded as intrinsically philosophically important. Philosophy, whose traditional preoccupation is with concepts and ideas, has come, over the last century, to be centrally engaged with questions about words and sentences. In a phrase the American philosopher Richard Rorty has made famous, philosophy has taken a “linguistic turn.”
It will help you to see why language came to be so important to recent philosophy if we begin before the “linguistic turn.” So let's begin again with Cartesianism, which (as I have already said) has been the dominant philosophy of mind of the last three centuries.
In particular, let's consider the view of language that went with it.For Descartes, you remember, your mind and the thoughts you have are the things you know best. In this framework—which we find, for example, in Descartes' English contemporary, Thomas Hobbes—public language is naturally seen as the expression of these private thoughts. As Hobbes puts it, with his characteristic directness: “Words so connected as that they become signs of our thoughts, are called SPEECH.” Whether or not you share Descartes' view of thoughts, this is, surely, a very natural view of one of the major ways that language functions. But, for Hobbes, language had a more important function than its role in communication, one that I mentioned in Chapter 1.
How unconstant and fading men's thoughts are, and how much the recovery of them depends upon chance, there is none but knows by infallible experience in himself. For no man is able to remember... colors without sensible and present patterns, nor number without the names of numbers disposed in order and learned by heart From which it follows that, for the acquiring of philoso
phy, some sensible moniments are necessary, by which our past thoughts may not only be reduced, but registered every one in its own order. These moni- ments I call MARKS.
Hobbes is saying that the major function of language is to help us remember our thoughts, and he says that language is a system of “sensible moniments”—reminders we can see and hear. Thus, he claims in this passage that no one could remember “number,” that is, how many things there are of a certain kind, if they did not have the numerals, the written or spoken signs for numbers; and he implies that no one could count things unless they had learned the numerals in their proper order. He claims, too, that you could not remember what color things were if you did not have the names of the colors—the words “red” and “yellow” and so on—so that you could store away the memory of a sunset, for example, by storing away the words “The sunset was a spectacular red.” In fact, Hobbes believed that almost every word was a nam^ of a “thought”; and by a “thought,” like Descartes, he meant anything that you are aware of in your mind when you are conscious.
The heart of his view of language, then, was thatthe nature of a name consists principally in this, that it is a mark taken for memory's sake; but it serves by accident to signify and make known to others what we remember ourselves.
As I argued in the chapter on mind, Cartesian thoughts are essentially a private matter. For Hobbes, it is just “by accident” that names also have a role in public language. So far as Hobbes was concerned, Robinson Crusoe would have had just as much use for language before Friday arrived in his life as afterward. So far as Hobbes was concerned, then, it was only an accident that human beings do not have private languages, consisting of systems of “marks” that allow each person to remember his or her own ideas and that are not used in communication at all. If Hobbes were right, the fact that chimpanzees in the wild do not appear to use signs to communicate would not show that they didn't use sounds or gestures as marks for their thoughts.
You will remember that I argued in Chapter 1 that the extreme privacy of Cartesian thoughts raised serious problems for Descartes' theory. In particular, his theory raised in an especially acute way the problem of other minds. Wittgenstein's private-language argument brought this problem into sharp focus, and this led us to behaviorism and then to functionalism. Hobbes' theory is, in essence, that we use languages as private languages. Thus, behaviorists and functionalists are likely to object to Hobbes' view because they do not believe in the existence of the totally private states—the “thoughts”—that Hobbes, like Descartes, regarded as the one sort of thing that we each know for certain. Blaming the defects of the Cartesian view on its commitment to the existence of private mental states, behaviorists placed their confidence in the certain existence of public language. A significant part of the appeal that language has had for many recent philosophers as an object of philosophical study is that it is public.
Spoken and written languages, unlike the minds of their speakers and writers, are open to the inspection of all.But there is another, connected reason why the study of language has come to occupy a central place in recent philosophy: philosophers have come to believe that it is not, as Hobbes thought, an accident that language is a public phenomenon. As we saw in Chapter 1, Wittgenstein's private-language argument was supposed to show that Hobbes's notion that we use language as a “sensible moniment” was actually incoherent. But Wittgenstein also offered to show why Hobbes and Descartes might have come to make the mistake of thinking that a private language was possible. His explanation relies, like the Verificationist argument of Chapter 2, on an appeal to a fact about public language.
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