Based Academia, Part 1: Words and the World

Toward a Based Philosophy of Language

The theoretical and the practical; the abstract and the concrete - most PhD students feel some tension there as, inspired by some pressing practical difficulty, they perform research that, under the pressure of the university, becomes increasingly technical and inaccessible.

Analytic philosophy of language certainly has that reputation, yet I, who had for years studiously avoided it for that reason, find myself proposing a dissertation on just that subject. “I’m not interested in language; I’m interested in reality,” I used to say as I studied topics that were more straightforwardly practical or metaphysical.

Now, I am persuaded that the questions I am examining in the philosophy of language are at the core of a proper philosophical approach. What changed? I discovered that, in diagnosing what was wrong with linguistically distracted forms of philosophy it became apparent what the proper role of philosophy and of language was. The problem was not the philosophy of language per se; it was the wrong approaches to the philosophy of language that are most prevalent. The answer lay in a proper understanding of language’s role in our thought and our apprehension of reality.

Nevertheless, the way in which I study language in philosophy is increasingly technical and inaccessible to my fellow man. It is not as though, in discovering the value of certain types of philosophy of language I found it to be accessible and practical. No, there is work for me to do in making it apparent to myself and others what the payoff of my studies are.

If I could put it in a nutshell, the current divide, in philosophy and culture, is between those who insist that language is separate from reality, socially constructed, and a tool for the social construction of reality itself, and those who think that our job is to guess the entries in a divine dictionary, the verbally formulable essences of things, the definitions of our terms. But in both of these views, language is too separate from reality to give us a solid appreciation of the real. In both cases, language appears to be an imposition on reality. The question is simply which language to impose, or whether to impose at all.

Another way to put the problem is that these approaches to language fail to be, as the internet would have it, based. A based approach to philosophy, thought, reality would ground our language in reality as it is, without a hint of imposition, whether that imposition is socially constructed - whether in the name of the oppressors or the oppressed - or divinely ordained.

And surprising as it may be, the key to a based philosophy of language lies in a philosophical point found at the intersection of some of Plato’s lesser-known dialogues and the lesser-known writings of Bertrand Russell. Who’d have thunk?

My goal in this series is to articulate the connections between these thinkers and topics in a way that is more accessible than what I am writing in my own dissertation. But the goal is not only to be more accessible; it is to describe the very purpose of why I am bothering to write the more technical dissertation - something you’re supposed to keep on the DL in academia. The task of articulating one’s thoughts in common human language, instead of analytic-speak, is not an optional one. It is, ultimately, the true test of whether what one is saying is based.