Based Academia, Part 4: The Perennial Philosophy of Language
Language has always been at the center of philosophy.
In this series, I have said a lot against several forms of philosophy of language. My goal in this post is to say something in favor of what I might call “the perennial philosophy of language,” an approach to language that is not modernist and restricted to one tradition but spans times and places.
However, there was a time when I lumped all philosophy of language together and avoided it like SARS-COV-2.
I steered away from the philosophy of language for several reasons. One of the reasons was that it was an obsession of those who were headed in a postmodernist direction: Language is interesting because it shows that language veils reality from us. Language was what continentals focused on: Gadamer, interpretation, horizons, and such.
On the other hand, analytic philosophy’s approach to language prominently featured symbolic logic. Yet, I found myself thinking plenty clearly and logically without the help of symbolic logic. The idea that teaching logic would make one more logical or critical thinking make one a critical thinker! Even analytic philosophy of language seemed like a way of getting distracted from reality and stopping at the words we use to talk about it.
Metaphysics was the philosophical interest in reality that both continentals and analytics thought couldn’t be done. We had to stop short of reality at language. Whereas I wanted to penetrate to reality itself. Metaphysics, especially Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics, seemed like the way forward.
But this dichotomy I discovered to be misguided. In fact, language has always been at the center of philosophy.
Socrates’ main obsession was with essences, verbally formulable definitions of things. This interest in our words was not something other than an interest in the realities these words represented or signified.
The concern with language is all throughout Plato's writings, especially, the Cratylus. The question is of the relationship between language and reality. Are there names for things that are the correct names? (Like these syllables are the right ones to name this kind of thing? Onomatopoeias are a case.)
Plato can actually be accused of similarly confusing of words with reality, like analytic philosophers. He treats language as our guide to reality. But the question is whether he is confused, or if that is simply how philosophy works. It makes one wonder whether there ever was an alternative to treating language as our guide to reality. For example, metaphysics, as the study of being, is in Plato and Aristotle - not to mention Parmenides - done by tracing the uses of the verb "to be," all the uses of "is."
My breakthrough in appreciating the role of language in philosophy came with understanding Aristotle's distinction between kinesis and energeia, action and activity, in a course at the University of Chicago. Aristotle finds that distinction marked in language by a distinction in our use of tense. For some verbs, once it has been said that you are x-ing, then it can be said that you have x-ed - dancing, for example. Anyone who has been dancing, for however short a period of time, has danced. For other verbs, there is no such implication - filling out a government form, for example. "I was filling out a government form." "So, you filled out a government form!" "Um, no."
Some distinctions are marked not by what words we use but by what kinds of words we use and how we use them. The idea is that our language tracks some of the distinctions in reality not by naming them but by the way in which names of things are used. The difference between count and mass nouns is another example; the test is whether and how it pluralizes, or whether we ask the question, “How many?” or, “How much?”
Also, many of the debates about dualism, the body and the soul - as evident since Descartes and Kant - come down to our usage of the word "I". For these reasons, I began to detect common threads between philosophers far removed in time and space - most notably, between Aristotle, Kant, and Wittgenstein, a trio that, not coincidentally, were at the heart of U of Chicago's graduate philosophy curriculum.
Having proved to myself that philosophy of language had its place in academic philosophy, I began to detect that it had just as much a place in popular philosophy. Whenever we ask whether a debate in society comes down to the definition of terms or we wonder whether we're debating about reality or just about words, philosophy of language is relevant. And whenever we debate anything else, we're using words, so philosophy of language is relevant. Words are the medium of thought, or perhaps, as Wittgenstein, thought is nothing but muted speech.
After escaping the presuppositions of certain forms of analytic philosophy, philosophy of language becomes helpful and fruitful in its own right.
In particular, I am trying to find a way to a realist philosophy of language - given that many of the philosophically-relevant debates of society come down to realism (there is a reality, and our words can accurately represent it) vs. nominalism (whether or not there is a reality, our words are merely our own projection). “Realism” doesn't mean the strongest form of what Plato talked about in the Cratylus, where there are correct words for things, down to the syllables and phonemes. But it does mean that words have meaning and linguistic properties that are based in reality. Language as such puts us in touch with reality.
In my dissertation, I'll be tracing connections between an ancient philosopher, Plato, and 20th century philosophers, Bertrand Russell, Saul Kripke, and others, towards the formulation of a realist philosophy of language. Here on my Substack, I'll be explaining what I'm up to and drawing broader implications. The most important point I'll be trying to make to my generally realist audience is that what I call the "divine dictionary" view of language is not the correct formulation of realism, and effectively gives the game to the social constructionists. That is the view that the meanings of words are like verbal entries in God’s dictionary that it is our task to guess. That is the most common version of a realist philosophy of language out there. Persuading you against it may be a hard sell, but I'll make the case, starting tomorrow morning.