Niklas Forsberg on language and political extremism

This is a really interesting (if depressing) paper about politically motivated manipulation of language. Here's the abstract:

This article takes off from Wittgenstein’s observation that “When language games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change” (Wittgenstein 1969, §65), and Murdoch’s related observation that “We cannot over-estimate the importance of the concept-forming words we utter to ourselves and to others. This background of our thinking and feeling is always vulnerable” (Murdoch 2003, 260). I want to show that these two sentences contain an accurate observation about how our uses of words, and more importantly, how shifts in our uses of words, partake in transforming the moral landscape itself. Taking these two lessons to heart enables us to see more clearly that political and moral changes in public opinion are not simply rooted in people changing their opinions but must be traced back to conceptual changes that a community has “accepted”, as it were, unwarily. I discuss two examples of how the undercurrent of language has been altered with rather massive effects on the more familiar and visible level of “moral discourse”: the alt-right movement in Sweden, and political election strategies in Sweden.

They tell one themselves

Here's a nice passage from Anscombe:

So far as I know, the only places where Wittgenstein considers the expression itself to be what it expresses are aesthetic. A musical phrase, a bed of violets: such things may strongly give one the impression that they tell one something. What is it that they tell one? They tell one themselves, not something else.

(from "Frege, Wittgenstein, and Platonism", p. 163 in the electronic version of From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe).

Compare Schopenhauer's idea of all phenomenal things as embodied music (that perhaps sing or dance themselves), and Larkin's "The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said."

Orwell and Wittgenstein again

When I'm not taking a day off, my plan from now on this summer is to do something Schopenhauer-related every day. Mostly this will be writing in the form of blogging, although I doubt I'll actually post every time I write. And the plan itself could change, of course.

John Holbo's dissertation is Schopenhauer-related, and that's my starting point. Here's a quote in it from Wittgenstein (LC, p.2):

If I had to say what the main mistake made by philosophers of the present generation is...I would say it is that when language is looked at, what is looked at is a form of words and not the use made of the form of words.

This strikes me as an important thought to keep in mind if you're ever tempted, as I am, to see Wittgenstein as a kind of ally of Orwell's on questions of politics and language use. Orwell does talk about the uses made of forms of words, but he also seems to think that if only we get the forms right then the uses will take care of themselves. I do think there is something to this idea. Simple words and sentences can make evil and stupidity harder to hide. But it's not a particularly Wittgensteinian idea. 

Beyond bullshit?

My friend Chris Gavaler has co-written a piece with Nathaniel Goldberg on Trump and bullshit for Philosophy Now. If you're interested in this subject then, obviously, you might want to read it. Their conclusion is that a sample of Trump's speech is "beyond bullshit."

Here's the sample:

“He said something to the effect, ‘No we’re not leaving, because Donald Trump promised us that we’re not leaving.” Trump added, “I actually said I didn’t make [the promise]. When they played [my statement back], I said, ‘I did make it [to Carrier], but I didn’t mean it quite that way’.” As he explained: “I never thought I made that promise – not with Carrier. I made it for everybody else. I didn’t make it really for Carrier.” The promise was, he said: “A euphemism. I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in, because they made the decision a year and a half ago”

After quoting this they talk a bit about what Trump might have meant and about Grice on implicature, before drawing their conclusion. But they've already quoted Frankfurt saying that the bullshitter "is not trying to deceive anyone concerning [the particular subject he happens to be talking about]. What he cares about is what people think of him." And that seems very much like what Trump is up to, and not something that Trump somehow goes beyond.

In this case. actually, Trump seems to be trying to tell the truth, more or less. At least, he seems to be acknowledging that Carrier made their decision before he did anything about keeping them in the US, although he's also adding a claim that other companies will keep jobs in the US now because of him (which is doubtful). He just isn't very good at speaking precisely. It does seem true, though, that what he cares about above all else is what people think of him. Trump is thus not beyond bullshit but the ultimate example of the kind of person Frankfurt was talking about. (As, I believe, Frankfurt himself has said.)

Mulhall's riddle

Some questions that you might want to ask Stephen Mulhall when you read his new book:

1. if talk about God is nonsense, why bother?
2. if talk about God has a use, mustn't it thereby have a meaning after all?
3. if you accept that nonsense is nonsense, that there is no significant nonsense, then how comfortable can you be, or should you be, with the idea of deliberate uses of certain kinds of nonsense? Even if you aren't guilty of chickening out, are you nevertheless sneaking around? 

Some answers to the first question can be found in the passage I quoted earlier. For one thing, "everything in creation is a potential source of imagery for the divine, and the more of it we activate in religious language the better, since only thus can we acknowledge God’s superabundant variety." If religious language is nonsense then I'm not sure how successfully it can acknowledge anything about God, but the superabundant variety of creation, and the excellence of what is so superabundantly various, I would add (although I think a sense of appreciative wonder is already implicit in Mulhall's words, so I'm not adding much), can certainly make you want to sing its praises. For another thing, the "transcendence of God is best acknowledged precisely by following out the consequences of attributing contradictory attributes to him; for if he is both male and female, and we know that no person can be both male and female, we thereby appreciate that our idea of him as a personal God is itself a misrepresentation—a necessarily unsuccessful attempt to delineate that which is beyond delineation." Wonder might leave us speechless, or mouthing something with obviously minimal content, such as "Wow!", but Mulhall argues that it is better to speak:

The best way to appreciate the transcendence of God to human language is [for the reason just quoted] not to fall into silence, avoiding even the assertion that nothing is assertable of him, or to attempt some inconceivable synthesis of affirmation and negation; it is rather endlessly to employ that language in relation to him, and endlessly to experience its inevitable collapse upon itself.  

Silence, I suppose, can too easily become mere silence, "There are no words" a thoughtless cliche. The surest sign of being "lost in wonder, love, and praise" is that you attempt to express this wonder, love, and praise, even if you are bound to fail. These attempts at expression, though, it seems to me, since they are bound to fail, have to be understood as something like symptoms rather than as ends worth pursuing in themselves or means worth choosing for the sake of some other end. As Wittgenstein says at the end of the Lecture on Ethics, they are "a document of a tendency in the human mind." This makes the question "why bother?" moot. It is like asking why anyone should laugh when they are amused. Mulhall does have an answer, though, to anyone who thinks we should actively try to stop talking like this.

His answer to the second question, about whether religious talk must have a meaning after all, since it has a use, is this: "It could only mislead to say that being shouldered out of our language-games is just one more language-game, or to declare that words have a grammar when they fail us just as they do when we effortlessly employ them to word the world." In other words, as I understand it, you could call the use of (nonsensical) religious language a language-game, but it isn't a good idea. That seems fair enough.

The third question is the one that bothers me the most, although I'm not sure how troubling it really ought to be. Involuntary babbling praise is obviously OK (or: there is no point in trying to rule it out as somehow 'illegitimate'), but it isn't theology. Nonsense can be used deliberately though, as satire or in a reductio, for instance. This doesn't sound like theology either, though, although here my ignorance of theology feels like a problem. Perhaps there could be theological anti-theology that deliberately used nonsense to burst balloons and bring its targets back to earth and/or God. Some of Kierkegaard's work might be thought of this way. But this would always be a negative, reactive project.

Mulhall apparently accepts something like this idea, although he focuses on theology as a reaction to philosophy rather than to other theology. As he sees it, "In short, theology discloses philosophy’s perennial aspiration to a God’s eye view as both essential to its nature and essentially beyond its own grasp—not exactly because there is no such perspective, but rather because that perspective is and can only be a ‘perspective’, hence belongs to God alone, and so is realizable only as and through faith." So, roughly, theology shows something even if it has nothing to say ("the linguistic constructions to which theology is driven do not constitute an intelligible language"). Mulhall doesn't put it this way, though, talking instead about theology's not knowing something that philosophy does not know and yet nevertheless having something to tell it.

Still, you might wonder whether Mulhall hasn't just claimed on theology's behalf to know (or say) the thing that he says theology can tell (or show) philosophy. You might also wonder what idea of nonsense is at work in the following passages:

This recalls the Thomist claim that the perfections apply to God, but do so more appropriately or fittingly than they do to us. For in giving expression to that semantic priority by knowingly violating the grammar of ordinary perfection talk (e.g. by saying that God is loving if and only if one says that he is Love), we maintain the appropriate theological balance between acknowledging scriptural authorization for characterizing our relations to God as personal whilst not characterizing God as a person (hence, as subsumable under categories, genus, and species). 

and:

The only way of making sense of Abraham is to grasp the point of his not making sense—to see him as having a very particular use for a very specifically generated kind of nonsense.

As sophisticated as Mulhall's take on the story of Abraham and Isaac is, does he perhaps still (or thereby) come too close to making sense of what he says does not make sense? And is it really possible to maintain both that theology is nonsense and that one can maintain the appropriate theological balance between one thing and another by knowingly violating the grammar of ordinary perfection talk? That makes it sound as though there is a right way to violate these rules, and hence that such 'violation of grammar' is in fact an activity with rules of its own. I'm not sure what I think about these things. But this third question seems more serious than the first two.

Wittgenstein and the value of clarity again

Just in case anyone's interested, I've revised this paper. The new version is here.

More nonsense

I'm enjoying Stephen Mulhall's The Great Riddle very much. Here he is on religious language:

...insofar as God is the source of all that is, possessing in his being all the perfections he causes, then everything in creation is a potential source of imagery for the divine, and the more of it we activate in religious language the better, since only thus can we acknowledge God’s superabundant variety. And yet, using language in all these ways simultaneously will inevitably lead to us speaking contradictorily about God (as male and female, light and darkness, weakness and strength); and nothing we say about him can conceivably capture his nature anyway. But that transcendence of God is best acknowledged precisely by following out the consequences of attributing contradictory attributes to him; for if he is both male and female, and we know that no person can be both male and female, we thereby appreciate that our idea of him as a personal God is itself a misrepresentation—a necessarily unsuccessful attempt to delineate that which is beyond delineation.

The best way to appreciate the transcendence of God to human language is thus not to fall into silence, avoiding even the assertion that nothing is assertable of him, or to attempt some inconceivable synthesis of affirmation and negation; it is rather endlessly to employ that language in relation to him, and endlessly to experience its inevitable collapse upon itself. Religious language is thus essentially self-subverting language; the repeated collapse of its affirmations into complete disorder is its mode of order—it is, one might say, the only way the ‘language-games’ woven into honest, transparent religious language-games should be played.

Haslanger on gender

I've presented versions of my paper "Wittgenstein and the Value of Clarity" to three different audiences now. With two it went down well, the main criticism being simply that it really had little to do with Wittgenstein. There's something to that, I think, but I still think it has something (interesting) to do with Wittgenstein. With the third it went down less well, and I want to try to think through why that might have been and whether there is anything in the paper that I should change. So the following will be mostly me thinking out loud.

One problem, I think, is that an early example that I use in the paper is 'orca' versus 'killer whale.' I suggest that 'orca' is the better term because it leaves more possibilities open, doing less to prejudge what such a creature might be like. I don't mean to suggest, though, that (what might turn out to be a fantasy of) complete neutrality is either possible or always desirable. It isn't necessarily better to call neo-Nazis "members of the 'Alt-Right'" if what they actually are is neo-Nazis. The term 'Alt-Right' might be less likely to prejudice someone, but the point of my paper is to talk about the value of clarity in communication, and terms designed to hide badness (or, really, anything else, other things being equal) do not aid clear understanding. So two things I should probably emphasize are that I am not claiming that pure neutrality or concepts that simply reflect the world as it is are possible, and that I am also not claiming that more evaluative concepts are always less desirable than less evaluative concepts.

Another thing I should probably repeat or underline is that I am not against all linguistic or conceptual innovation. As I say in the paper, although perhaps only in a footnote, sometimes a new word, expression, or idea will be clearer than the alternatives (see footnote 14, for instance). In which case, if we value clarity, we should prefer the new option.

A paper by Sally Haslanger was brought up as a possible illustration of error on my part. I think the paper is this one. As far as I can see it doesn't go against what I mean to say, although of course it might go against what I actually say if I haven't been sufficiently careful. Haslanger does make some points that I think could be useful to me in making my point(s) though, so I'm glad to know about her paper. She writes about our everyday vocabularies serving both cognitive and practical purposes, and about the possibility of developing a theory that offers "an improved understanding of our (legitimate) purposes and/or improved conceptual resources for the tasks at hand" (p. 33). One thing I aim to do in my paper is to show that some people seem to care more about practical purposes and others more about cognitive ones. I also say that I think most of us care about both such purposes, although perhaps not equally. Haslanger is a good example of someone who cares about both. (See also p. 47, where she talks about the twin goals of understanding oppression and achieving equality.) And so long as she does not want to sacrifice understanding for the sake of practical purposes (on the contrary, it seems to me that she wants to improve understanding) then she is not opposed to the side that I really try only to identify and describe but which I might seem to take against the likes of Galtung. She also talks about semantic and political conditions on "appropriating the terms of ordinary discourse," (p. 35) and the concern with the semantic condition seems to match, or at least roughly track, my concern with clarity or accuracy, while the concern with politics matches Galtung's concern (which I think is legitimate, at least as long as this kind of concern does not completely override all other concerns. And even that might be OK in extreme cases).

Haslanger does sound a little like Galtung when she says (p. 36) that "the task is to develop accounts of gender and race that will be effective tools in the fight against injustice," but she also regards it as being important (p. 36) "to provide clear conceptual categories to identify the phenomenon needing explanation, e.g., categories that identify the kind of injustice at issue and the groups subject to it." On the next page she says that "her strategy is to offer a focal analysis," and then comments that a "focal analysis undertakes to explain a variety of connected phenomena" (p. 37). So far as one's aim is to explain, rather than to obscure for political (or other) purposes, then one is on the side of people like Wittgenstein, Orwell, and Williams rather than Galtung. Haslanger's aims are not purely consequentialist. One of her implicit aims is to help us to see what is there, to enable "us to recognize significant patterns in the ways that gender is instituted and embodied" (p. 38).

She also wants to change the way we conceptualize gender differences in order to provide "resources for thinking about other (actual) genders [than man and woman], and the political possibility of constructing non-hierarchical genders" (p. 43). This rejection of limiting concepts in favor of one's that reveal extra possibilities is exactly the kind of thing whose value I am trying to show. Whether there is one best way, or right way, to do this, as Haslanger, reasonably, doubts, is not the point. The point is that it is possible to value the revelation of previously unseen possibilities through the use of one concept or set of concepts rather than another, and that such valuing might be at odds with certain practical goals. For instance, Haslanger offers a (long) definition of what it is to be a woman that makes subordination essential to the concept. (See p. 42.) Hence, "it is part of the project of feminism to bring about a day when there are no more women," as she has (re)-defined women (p. 46). This obscures the possibility of its being good to be a woman, but it does so in order to reveal sexist oppression (as well as to help end such oppression). The goal is neither obscuring reality (or possibility) as such nor the achievement of some practical goal by means of such obscuring. Haslanger's goal is far more elucidatory and emancipatory than it is obfuscatory, even if some obfuscation is an (apparently) unavoidable part of her project. (Compare my example of A, B, and C on pp. 10-11.)
             
Near the end of her paper, Haslanger quotes Trey Ellis who wants to be, and feel, free to call himself black, at least some of the time, rather than African-American. This kind of freedom is another aspect of what I am trying to defend, or at least acknowledge the possible value of (another thing I need to do is get clearer on exactly what I am and am not arguing for). Haslanger sympathizes with Ellis, noting that what matters is not only what words we use but "what norms and expectations are taken to be appropriate" (p. 47). Roughly speaking, context matters. I agree. What will be the clearest way to say something in one context will not be in another. I don't (think I) mean to make any claim about what is or is not clear. My point is far more about the fact that clarity/understanding is a different goal than bringing about a practical effect such as political change. Haslanger seems to agree.

A problem with bullshit

In "On Bullshit" Harry Frankfurt says that, "the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony." This suggests that it is not the content of speech that makes it bullshit but something else, something like the motive for producing it. He also says:

The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are. 

And this: "However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something."

Generally when people lie it is because they are trying to get away with something. Perhaps some people simply enjoy deceiving others and lie for the sake of lying, but most lies are surely not of this type. People lie to get out of trouble, to impress others, to help make a sale, and so on. Their motive is unconcerned with how things are.

So how does lying differ from bull? Bull could be true, false, or half-true: the bullshitter does not care. Except that we never go around stating truths for no reason other than that they are true. We always mean to achieve something. (Hmm. Do we? At any rate, we do far more than state truths when we speak, and when we do state truths we rarely, if ever, do so simply because they are true.) So truthful bull seems not unlike normal truthful speech, except perhaps that the speaker has a vicious motive. And untruthful bullshit seems very much the same as normal lying. The clearest case of bull seems to be the half-truth. But then why do people tell half-truths? Isn't it usually because they care both about getting the result they want and the truth? (Even if they only care about the truth because they care about possibly getting caught in a lie.) Perhaps what Orwell calls "sheer cloudy vagueness" should be another category here, alongside half-truths. Like half-truths, though, a more or less meaningless cloud of words is what people produce when they want to say something (silence would be costly) but have nothing they want to say (because they are ignorant or because the truth is unpleasant).

We might need to distinguish between two kinds of bull: all speech (true, false, or nonsensical) by people who do not value truth or honesty as such (roughly: consequentialists), and carefully constructed half-truths or misleading whole truths told by people who do care about truth and/or honesty but also care about other things too, e.g. St Athanasius' saying "He is not far from here" when asked about his location and wanting to throw his ill-intentioned pursuers off the scent without actually telling a lie.  

Jennifer Saul (here) argues that you might as well "Just go ahead and lie" as mislead in the way that Athanasius did, but I disagree. Here's the conclusion of a longer version of her paper:

The picture sketched in this chapter is a very complicated one, which both rejects and respects both traditions with which we began this chapter. The first tradition holds that method of deception is never a matter of moral significance: lying and misleading are equally bad or good, and the moral status of any particular deception depends on such things as its goal or its consequences. The second tradition holds that lying is always wrong, and that misleading is always better than lying (even if it isn't always morally acceptable). The view developed here firmly rejects both of these.

Against the second view, I maintain that misleading is not always better than lying. I showed this through an examination of cases in which misleading was not morally preferable to lying. Further, I argued that there does not seem to be any good justification even for a defeasible version of this view-on which misleading is, except in certain special cases, morally better than lying.

But I do not agree with the first tradition's claim that method of deception is never a matter of moral significance. I take method of deception to be moral significance in all of the following ways:

(1) Whether an agent chooses to lie or merely mislead can make an important difference to moral evaluations of an agent.

(2) In an adversarial context like a courtroom, misleading is morally better than lying.

(3) Where there is a prior agreement that misleading is to be preferred to lying, misleading is morally better than lying.

And here's a key part of her argument, a case in which misleading is supposedly not morally preferable to lying:

Charla is HIV positive, but she does not yet have AIDS, and she knows both of these facts. Dave is about to have sex with Charla for the first time, and, cautiously but imprecisely, he asks (3).

(3) Do you have AIDS?

Charla replies with (4).

(4) No, I don't have AIDS.

Charla and Dave have unprotected sex, and Dave becomes infected with HIV. It is unquestionably true that Charla deceived Dave about her HIV status, and also unquestionably true that Charla did not lie--she merely misled him. Yet it seems completely absurd to suppose that Charla's deception was even a tiny bit better due to her avoidance of lying. In this case, misleading is in no way morally preferable to lying. If misleading was, quite generally, morally preferable to lying, it would be morally preferable in this case. Since it is not, we should reject the strong general claim (M).   

This seems wrong to me. I agree that in terms of what Charla did to Dave her misleading response was as bad as a lie. It might even be worse, because of the apparent sadism of toying with him like this. But as well as Dave I think we should keep in mind both Charla herself and what we might call truth, or respect for the truth, or respect for the value of truthfulness. (I think it might be most useful to think in terms of truth or even the dreaded Truth, but I don't mean this in a way that cannot be translated into naturalistic talk about relations between people.)

Mill says that one should not tell lies even when doing so would maximize utility because lying is bad for one's character, reducing one's honesty or commitment to truth-telling, making it more likely that one will lie in other, less justifiable, cases later. (He might also say the opposite somewhere else, but never mind.) This sounds like an empirical hypothesis, and a dubious one at that. But it can be taken in a different way, having to do with Anscombe's remark about its showing a corrupt mind if one is prepared to accept "in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration." Mill might be thinking that it is corruption of mind (in a way that might have nothing much to do with consequences) to lie, or perhaps to be prepared (in advance) to lie, over relatively trivial (non-life-threatening) matters. This case is life-threatening, of course, but does Charla fully understand that? We don't know. 

As well as thinking about cases in which misleading might seem just as bad as lying, it could be worthwhile to think about those in which there seems to be a difference. Consider Athanasius again. I don't know what really happened or why, but it is surely conceivable that he wanted to avoid lying while also helping to prevent (his own) murder. And that this was not because he wanted to keep his hands clean, although that is one possible motive, but because he wanted to act with due respect for God, who not only commanded that we not bear false witness but is also sometimes identified with Truth. Atheists won't be moved by such considerations, of course, but they might still care about truth and/or truthfulness. 

Here's a quick run through of Saul's paper.

"If the result is the same, and the motivation is the same, why should we have this moral preference?" for misleading over lying, Saul asks. The immediate motivation--deception--might be the same, but respect for truth might be part of the motivation in the case of misleading. (This is easier to imagine in Athanasius' case than Charla's.) Indeed the result would not be the same in this case either--if one merely misleads then one does not, apparently, disrespect the truth as much as if one lies. One has not violated the norm of not lying. Perhaps that is irrelevant, but it is hardly obvious that it doesn't matter.  
Saul does accept that misleading is better than lying in some cases (see points 2 and 3 above). In a courtroom lying is perjury while misleading is not. And then there's this, slightly odd, example: "A couple with an open marriage might [...] agree that lying about affairs is not acceptable while misleading is." (This seems odd because it sounds as though there is bad faith in the relationship. Why is misleading OK here if both partners are happy with the marriage's being open? The idea seems to be that whatever consenting adults agree to is OK, which I find hard to believe. Because a) is consent genuine when bad faith is involved (or does, e.g., one partner 'agree' to the open relationship because of fear of losing the other, and is agreement resulting from fear what we want to count as consent (if so, what's so great about consent?)?)?, and b) is 'OK' the right evaluation of, say, consensual cannibalism?          

And that's about it. (Although I have skipped the part where Saul discusses the "overwhelming majority of justifications for the belief that lying is worse than mere misleading" which "turn, in one way or another, on holding the audience more responsible for the falsehood they believe in the case of mere misleading." I don't see that as being a very promising line of attempted justification.) Saul draws the conclusion that I quoted above (from the longer version of the argument).  

My objection is partly that her argument is based on unrealistic examples and partly that her focus is too narrow. The two concerns are related. Saul appears not to look far beyond questions about motivation and results, and the motivations and results she focuses on are those directly involving people and their immediate future: what counts as Charla's motivation is sex with Dave, what counts as the relevant result is Dave's infection. Any possible concern with honesty on Charla's part is not mentioned. (And what is Dave's deal? "Do you have AIDS?" is surely not credible dialogue in the circumstances.) What about motivation and results as far as norms/principles/values and their violation go? Don't people in fact think and care about such things as well as wanting sex, information, etc.?         

Real life is not like the encounter we are presented with between Charla and Dave. And this matters because one thing that is missing from Charla is any concern with ethics. Perhaps she is meant to be a sociopath, like a dishonest version of Saga Norén. But if she were more normal she would surely have some thoughts, before of after, about her dishonesty. These might be in terms of the value of honesty or the badness of lying or deception. Or they might be about Dave and her abuse of his trust. We might then think about the value of general principles. Misleading and lying are both abuses of trust, but is one perhaps a greater abuse than the other? Might it be better if we all valued truth itself or honesty itself, in an abstract way, rather than only valuing concrete individuals such as Dave? 

The moral universe of these examples seems to be one in which people want various things and are entitled to pursue them as long as they don't break various rules (violate Dave's rights, produce needless unhappiness, or whatever it might be). The rules all immediately concern people. Not only are they not concerned with God, they are also not concerned with any value independent of people, such as beauty or truth. And this lack of concern with truth is what makes speech bullshit, at least according to Frankfurt.

I'm not sure how far it's possible to live without some values of this kind, though. Roughly: is act-consequentialism possible in practice? Or must we internalize principles (rules) of some sort if we are to behave ethically? And without some values of this sort, how can we make sense of valuing people or their wants or rights? Aren't people worth caring about partly because they are rational, and rational beings can discover truths, and truth is good? Or because people can love and love is good? Maybe that's not quite right. Maybe the value of people is more basic than that. But there are things about people that we value. And there are other things that we value too, like the beauty of nature. Motivations and results, on the other hand, surely matter, but don't seem to be the right kinds of things to be valued as good. Dave's continued good health might be good, for instance, but only because Dave is good. (Not morally good, but a good thing (in a non-instrumental sense) for the universe to contain.) This seems to be missing from Saul's thinking. But I'm reading a lot into one short paper. I've also relied heavily on rhetorical questions.

With that in mind, let's have a go at Saul's seemingly preferred example:

Consider for a moment the story of Frieda, who suffers from a peanut allergy so dire that even the tiniest amount of peanut oil could be deadly. George knows that, and invites her to dinner, murderously preparing a stir-fry with peanut oil. Frieda, appropriately cautious (though not cautious enough), asks, ‘Are there any peanuts in the meal?’, to which George replies ‘No, there are no peanuts’. Frieda eats the stir-fry, and dies. If misleading is always better than lying, then George did something slightly less bad by choosing his true but misleading utterance rather than a false one like ‘No, it’s perfectly safe for you.’ This seems clearly wrong.

One problem here, it seems to me, is that George's murdering Frieda casts a huge shadow over the example, obscuring any difference there might be in the ethics of lying and misleading. Another, related problem is that we don't know why he chose to mislead rather than lie. In some cases someone might make this choice because of fear of God or love of truth or a desire to be an honest person, but it's hard to imagine any of these motives at work in a cold-blooded murderer like George. It does not follow that such motives are generally irrelevant to the ethics of the deeds they motivate though. It is, as Frankfurt argues, hard to make sense of the nature and badness of bullshit if we don't accept the value of concern with truth or honesty.  

The point of Saul's examples, I take it, is to challenge the idea that misleading is always better than lying by finding cases in which it seems equally bad because the motive and result are the same either way. I think she's right that they are not always morally different. But I don't know how significant this is. Stealing $10 from a dying man doesn't seem significantly worse than stealing $5 from a dying man, but this does not show that the amount stolen is never relevant to how bad an act of theft is. Or take Mill's example of saving a man from drowning in order to torture him before he is killed. This might show that saving someone from drowning is not always better than not saving someone from drowning. But it still is generally better. 

The idea of having a motive along the lines of murder-without-lying is hard to imagine (or to value), but Athanasius' possible intention to avoid-being-murdered-without-lying seems both conceivable and conceivably valuable. Nor is it the same motive as avoid-being-murdered-by-any-means-necessary. So if we really do take motives seriously, and not only consequences, then misleading can appear to be better than lying. 

Finally, there is the question of consequences. Whether he lies or misleads, George still murders Frieda. And whether he lies or misleads, Athanasius still gets away unharmed. But there are other possible consequences that are not the same. If lying is worse than misleading then the consequence having lied is worse than that of having misled. We can't prove that lying is not worse than misleading by assuming this not to be the case. How might having lied be worse than having misled? To have lied is to have betrayed commitment to truthfulness to a greater extent than to have misled is. (I mean this to be analytic.) Is it therefore worse? It is if commitment to truthfulness is a good thing (generally, even if perhaps not always). And such commitment does seem to be a good thing. 

Or am I simply assuming that Athanasius-style 'bullshit' is better than student-who-hasn't-done-the-reading-but-won't-admit-it bullshit?

Three lions

Kelly Jolley visited VMI yesterday and gave an inspiring talk on "Wittgenstein: Philosophy as Poetic Composition." I spent most of the talk trying not to sneeze and may have misunderstood, but here are some thoughts that grew out of his presentation.

Much of the talk was about the line, "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." Usually I think this is taken as having to do with a distinction between word meaning and speaker meaning. So if a lion could speak we might understand his words, but would not understand him. Winch says that understanding another culture might be said to involve "understanding the inner maps according to which people of that culture navigate and the destinations they are trying to reach." If we think in these terms, then on a standard interpretation Wittgenstein is suggesting that we could never understand a lion's inner maps.

Wittgenstein makes a distinction between understanding him and understanding his sentences in TLP 6.54 ("My propositions elucidate by whoever understands me perceiving them in the end as nonsensical..."). On the other hand, in the conversations with Bouwsma, assuming that Bouwsma and my memory are reliable guides, he rejects the distinction between word meaning and speaker meaning. Or at least, if someone says something that I don't understand (e.g. in the middle of a conversation about politics he says that ham sandwiches are the most popular kind) then it is a mistake to say you know what he said but not why he said it. Because you don't know what "ham sandwiches are the most popular kind" means in this context. Perhaps it's a saying you don't know about violations of God's laws, in which case the point might be about politics after all, and the popularity of evil policies, the evils of populism, and so forth. You don't know. 

Kelly's suggestion, if I understood it, is that when we read Wittgenstein's famous lion line we think we understand it (and, indeed, we can't be sure we haven't understood it until we get to the end), and think it means we could understand the lion's words but not the lion. But if we think more slowly, more carefully, more expansively, we might realize that the idea, or perhaps I should say 'idea', of a speaking lion is actually not something we can form. What we cannot understand is neither the lion's words nor the lion himself but the being of a speaking lion. If it's a lion it does not speak, cannot speak. If it speaks, it isn't a lion. So you think you understand the sentence (as long as you don't think too much, i.e. enough, about it), but you really don't. It's like Augustine with time (“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”) The result, it seems to me, is not just the pleasure of encountering a clever puzzle. You also get a renewed appreciation for both lions and language, realities that resist combination and, so, are not just more of the same. The world is richer than that.

A second lion that this reminded me of is the one in the Lecture on Ethics. Wanting an example of a miracle, an event linked to what he calls his experience par excellence, namely that of wondering at the existence of the world, Wittgenstein says: "Take the case that one of you suddenly grew a lion's head and he began to roar. Certainly that would be as extraordinary a thing as I can imagine." This would be very unusual, obviously. But the example is stranger than that, I think. Because in what sense could there be a person with the head of a lion? It seems easy enough to imagine. But would this being live the life of a person or that of a lion? If it lived as a lion would its body still be human? Well, say what you choose, etc., but it's worth thinking a bit before making your choice. If the lion tries to run and bring down a gazelle with its claws, only to find itself jogging on two legs and flailing uselessly with fingers, is it a human with a lion's head, or more a badly disabled lion? And if it lives as a human, isn't the head of the body that lives this life at least in some sense thereby a human head, albeit a very badly formed one? Might the lion head try to eat the human body? Or the human body attack the lion head when it sleeps? In that case there is not really one being but two, at war with one another. I don't think we can really comprehend the idea of a human being with a lion's head. It is inconceivable, not just extraordinary.

The third lion is an imaginary one. The motto of the Tractatus is the following quotation from Ferdinand Kürnberger: “…and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.” The verbs rauschen and brausen don't seem right for lions, but they do mean noise, and not only might a 'speaking lion' and a 'person with a lion's head' produce nothing but noise, but in fact the words 'speaking lion' and 'person with a lion's head' seem to be little more than noise, since we can't (as far as I can see) really imagine anything in connection with them. Or rather, we can't imagine what we might seem to want to imagine. It's easy enough to picture a cartoon or Egyptian god. But this is likely to be only two-dimensional. If we try to imagine a four-dimensional version, living through time, we lose either the lion aspect or the human, linguistic aspect. This loss, though, feels like a gain. All we lose is a fantasy, and what we gain is a clearer, cleaner, refreshed understanding of reality.       

Winch and relativism, logic and life

I've discussed Peter Winch and relativism before (e.g., here and here). I concluded that, "Winch is probably only a relativist in trivial and misleadingly-called-'relativist' ways." Since then I've read more on the subject, by Winch, Cora Diamond, Jonas Ahlskog and Olli Lagerspetz. So perhaps it's time to revisit the issue.

One question that is relevant to the debate is the relation between logic and human behavior. Ahlskog and Lagerspetz say (in "Language-Games and Relativism: On Cora Diamond's Reading of Peter Winch," p. 294) that "a (or the) central motif in Winch's work" is the idea that, "in order to see what a proposition implies or excludes, we must look into how it enters the life of those who use it; for example, how speakers might react in face of challenges and complexities." 

This doesn't sound quite right if we think about propositions in a language we understand well. Obviously we don't have to look into anything in order to understand a proposition. That is, we might have to on some occasion, but sometimes I know quite well what you are implying without any further investigation. Perhaps that's not fair though. The words "in order to see" might imply a case in which one does not see, and so further investigation is required. The most obvious way to investigate would be to ask you what you are implying, which again does not involve looking at how speakers (plural) might (in general) react. Perhaps this still is not fair. Perhaps if I speak the language I have already done the necessary looking and seeing. This, we might think, is (at least in part) how I learned the language in the first place. But then this sounds uncomfortably like the so-called Augustinian picture of learning a language, as if I already had a language and then did some useful anthropological fieldwork among my elders. Still, I might be being unfair to Winch by treating other people's words as if they were his, and to Ahlskog and Lagerspetz by taking one sentence out of context and making a meal of it. I think there is a potential problem here though, even if I have hardly convicted anyone of anything so far.

One problem, or question apparently worth asking, is whether we should talk about "what a proposition implies or excludes" at all. That is, do propositions imply and exclude, or do people do this (in using propositions)? I think the answer is both. Say my daughter is driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway and, after a pause to watch the sunset, the van won't start. If I ask, "Did you leave the lights on?" then I might be implying that she is often careless and has negligently caused the battery to die. The proposition on its own does not imply this. It might be said, though, to imply that the van has lights that can be left on or not. [Perhaps this should be thought of as implying in a metaphorical sense. A sentence implies things in something like the way that Heidegger or Loos might see a vase as implying things about the lives of the people who use it.] If you don't know English or any language close enough to it to have reliably similar implications and exclusions then you might have to look into how speakers of this language use sentences such as "Did you leave the lights on?" Otherwise you don't, surely. Knowing a language means, in part, knowing the correct standard use of this kind of sentence. And we don't usually learn this kind of thing by doing anthropology. Talk about what propositions mean and how we know what they mean might encourage the adoption of an outside, anthropological, third-person perspective. And this could be problematic.

In "Can We Understand Ourselves?" (CWUO) Winch says that understanding another culture requires studying the behavior of members of the culture in question. And, according to him, we cannot start by finding out their beliefs and desires, because we see these for what they are (p. 197) “only through the behavior in which they are manifested.” He seems to suggest here that knowledge of behavior, or perhaps simply behavior, is somehow prior to psychology. I wonder whether they really come apart like this. That is, perhaps they should be thought of as two sides of the same coin, with no relation of priority or dependency between them. In The Idea of a Social Science he said that "the social relations between men and the ideas which men's actions embody are really the same thing considered from different points of view". That seems better to me. 

On the same page of CWUO on which he implies the contrary of the suggestion that we could understand others' actions by starting with their "internal 'desires and beliefs'," Winch says also that "neither words nor actions have per se any preeminent position." He also notes some peculiarities of the notion of understanding. An anthropologist might understand another culture, or some feature of it, quite well without being able to imagine (seriously or sincerely) engaging in its practices. On the other hand, there is a sense of understanding in which we do not understand people or what they do if we cannot relate to them in a more subjective way than this. If we cannot, that is, 'find ourselves in them,' whether they belong to our culture or another, then we cannot fully understand them. 

This sounds true, but does it amount to anything more than the assertion that we do not understand people that we do not understand? I don't see why, that is, one cannot come to understand liking music, or a certain kind of music, or football, to give some of Winch's examples. Although, of course, one might see nothing in any of these things. Doing so would involve seeing the point of, say, watching football, which involves something like seeing it as having a point, which is like (though perhaps not exactly the same as) wanting to watch football. It might not be possible to want to do everything, or to see every human activity as having a point. But of any given activity I see no reason why one could not come to see its point. One good thing, though, about Winch's emphasis on understanding others as finding oneself in them is that it points away from the kind of problematic third-person perspective that I identified (or gestured towards) above.          

At the end of CWUO Winch argues that "practical 'being in tune' with others lies right at the very centre of our understanding of other human beings" (p. 203). As Winch admits, his argument here is sketchy. For those who want a fuller treatment of the topic he recommends his paper "Eine Einstellung zur Seele." One thing he does in this paper is to question the philosophical notion (or at least David Wiggins' notion) of a person:

On this view [...] reacting to someone as a person is in the first instance classifying him as belonging to a certain natural kind and this in its turn involves having certain quasi-theoretical beliefs about him. Anything that is peculiar to our attitudes towards and treatment of persons flows from and is justified by the beliefs we hold about what properties persons essentially possess; and what justifies these beliefs is ultimately scientific investigation. [Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 81 (1980 - 1981), pp. 1-15, p. 12]

One thing that Winch objects to is Wiggins' treatment of our reactions or attitudes towards other human beings as requiring justification. Another is that the justification in question is theoretical. I agree. But Winch still seems to want to explain this attitude toward a soul, referring to such things as "my general experience of human life" (p. 13). I think it's fine to try to explain what Wittgenstein means by an attitude (or orientation, perhaps) towards a soul. But explaining where it comes from seems somehow misguided. The explanation doesn't seem very informative, although what's good about it is that it is much less oriented towards theory and justification than Wiggins seems to be. Perhaps that is the main point that Winch wants to make.

Earlier in the paper he says that Wittgenstein wants:

to urge that if we want to be clear what a belief (e.g.) that someone is in pain comes to, we should not allow ourselves to be hypnotized by its verbal expression ("He is in pain"), but should look at the whole range of behaviour, demeanour, facial expression, etc. in which such verbal expressions are embedded, and with which they are continuous, which give the words their particular sense and by some of which indeed the words may often be replaced (p. 3)

This might be true if it means that Wittgenstein thinks it's a good idea to look at behavior (etc.) if one wants to be clear what a belief is and is tempted to think that it must be something purely verbal or intellectual. It seems dodgier if it means that Wittgenstein has an answer to the question 'What is a belief?' and that this answer is: "it's a whole range of behaviour, demeanour, facial expression, etc. in which such verbal expressions are embedded, and with which they are continuous, which give the words their particular sense and by some of which indeed the words may often be replaced." That would make Wittgenstein seem like a kind of behaviorist, and like someone who wanted to answer philosophical questions by putting forward theses.

A problem with Winch is that it is not always clear what he is or isn't saying. This is surely one reason for the very different readings of Winch by Diamond, who sees him, ultimately, as a kind of relativist, and by Ahlskog and Lagerspetz, who defend him against this charge. It is useful to have both readings. Even if Winch is not a relativist, Diamond's criticisms could be helpful discussions of problems that would arise if one were to take his work in a certain way. But it also seems worth trying to work out whether the non-relativist reading of Winch is tenable.

Diamond's Winch thinks like Ilham Dilman, who states that:

[W]hen Dante in his book talked of the spheres of the heavens and put the earth at the centre of the universe, he was not talking about the same universe, the universe of modern astronomy. […] The universe, as conceived of in [the] world [of the Mediaevals], was not the universe of astronomy; it was the universe of their religion. […] Thus the skies of Dante's The Divine Comedy and the sky and the stars of astronomy belong to different universes of discourse. (Wittgenstein's Copernican Revolution, 2002, pp. 48–49, quoted in Ahlskog and Lagerspetz, p. 302.)   

Ahlskog and Lagerspetz say of this (on p. 303):

It seems indeed perfectly proper to say that Dante and we, in an important sense, have been talking of the same object: “that bright thing in the sky”. Winch would hardly have quarrelled with that. [...] [A]ssuming it is agreed (in some sense) that we disagree with Dante about the heavens, it will not be clear that our disagreement translates into “criticism”. For instance, Dante is not someone we would feel the need to refute. 

They are quite right that we would feel no need to refute Dante, partly because he is dead and partly because there is little at stake. But in "Criticizing from 'Outside'," Diamond brings up the example of people being punished for alleged witchcraft, not just in the past but today. If someone is executed for allegedly harming others by supernatural means might we not be tempted to criticize this practice? We might then feel the need to refute belief in witchcraft of this kind. And even if persuasive refutation seems hopeless, we might still insist that any punishment in these cases is unjust because the accused cannot possibly be guilty. Witchcraft isn't real.

I don't think Winch would have quarrelled with that. But whether he could consistently avoid such quarrelling while maintaining everything else he wrote is another matter. Not one I can settle now though.    

Bad language

I think I'm going to rename my paper on the value of clarity "The Ethics of Communication," a title suggested by James Klagge. It's a huge and understudied field, it seems to me. Lots of people talk about Orwell's essay on politics and the English language, but they tend to either agree uncritically or else dismiss it all for what often seem to be bad reasons. (The people I have seen dismiss it are Descriptivists, who David Foster Wallace takes on pretty successfully to my mind.) Lots of people have read Harry Frankfurt on bullshit, but not caring whether what you say is true or false as long as it gets results comes in many different flavors.

There is relatively little, as far as I know, that has been written on the ethics of language use. There is this course on social and political aspects of language, which looks great, and I haven't read most of what it covers, but it suggests to me that there is a field waiting to be ploughed. Maybe.

Anyway, as a step in the direction of the plough, here's a sort of list of concerns:

• George Orwell famously warns about thoughtless and vague language, but he doesn't address careful vagueness or how to speak about such subjects as ethics, religion, and art. 
• Harry Frankfurt, also famously, critiques bullshit: language intended to produce a certain effect but not concerned with truth. This is a broad category, though, including the relatively thoughtless (with the speaker perhaps hoping for no more than to be left alone) and the very careful (perhaps with very specific goals and clever ideas about how to achieve them). There is also the question of what to call language that is concerned with truth but that tries carefully to mislead without actually lying.
• Steven Poole writes about "unspeak": language that tries both a) to imply an argument without defending it or making it explicit and b) to silence opposition.
• I criticize what I have been calling "political correctness": language that is like bullshit but that is unconcerned, not necessarily with truth, but with conceptual accuracy. It is like unspeak, but it need not be deliberate. (I think I should perhaps call it something else because the term 'political correctness' is so loaded.)
• Another linguistic vice is straightforward lying, although the ethics of lying are rather complicated

David Egan, drawing on others and on Wittgenstein's game analogy, notes some other potential problems:

• Spoilsports (the relevant reference here is Gadamer, Truth and Method 1989, p. 102): not taking the (language-)game seriously 
• Triflers (see Suits, The Grasshopper 2005, p. 60): respecting the rules of the game, but not its goals
• Cheats (Suits again): recognizing goals but not rules
• Sophists (as Egan sees it, p. 12) are like spoilsports but also deny the very possibility of achieving the goal of the game, e.g. Thrasymachus denying the reality of justice

Huizinga (Homo Ludens 1995) regards spoilsports as especially bad, but also closely connected to revolutionaries who reject one language-game, or set of language-games, but introduce new ones instead.

So, can we put all this together to come up with an initial sketch of the landscape? I will probably have to read Suits one of these days, but in the meantime I'm struggling to imagine exactly what cheating in a language-game would be. Lying, perhaps. Trifling, as the name suggests, sounds a lot like not taking the game seriously, which is what defines a spoilsport. And sophists just seem to be a kind of spoilsports.

Deliberate vagueness, carefully constructed (Jesuitical?) bull, and unspeak all seem like forms of cheating. While thoughtless vagueness and bull are more like being a spoilsport out of laziness.

The interesting area, really, (at least to me) is bullshit. Which seems to be quite popular these days.

The value of clarity

I have a paper on Wittgenstein and the value of clarity up at academia.edu here. I'm not sure how much it has to do with Wittgenstein really, but I'm also not sure how much that matters.

More on Williams

I have a third, and probably final, post at philpercs about Williams on Orwell and Merton on language here. I might try to write something about how Wittgenstein's work embodies the virtues that Williams identifies as belonging to good writing, but we'll see.

Rowan Williams on good and bad uses of language

I have a couple of posts at philpercs about this, here and here. I highly recommend Williams' lecture.

Annoyed by Fish

I read part of an essay by Stanley Fish recently and found myself annoyed. This is a common reaction among philosophers (see here, here, here, and here, for instance). But why is this? Surely philosophers are used to people saying things they disagree with. Fish does say questionable things, things that have been called into question by Paul Boghossian and by Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, for instance.

I think it's more, though, that Fish comes so close to Wittgenstein that we expect more, for one thing, and feel as if he is serving up mere leftover (and mangled) crumbs from Wittgenstein's table, for another. As Martin Stone says, "In literary theory, discussion of Wittgenstein and Stanley Fish often occur in the same breath, and it is often said that Fish is “Wittgensteinian” in his views." Perhaps John Holbo hits the nail on the head when he writes, in a review of an anthology called The Literary Wittgenstein, that:

Two pieces are about how Stanley Fish is the opposite of Wittgenstein, in approximately the sense that one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. Fish is ponens, Wittgenstein tollens regarding the necessity of interpretation. That is, Wittgenstein sees the wrongness of the conclusion that ‘every reading is an interpretation’ as warranting rejection of premises.

To be fair, I should actually look at what Fish says and not just what other people say about him. Here is some Fish:

While I was in the course of vigorously making a point, one of my students, William Newlin by name, was just as vigorously waving his hand. When I asked the other members of the class what it was that Mr. Newlin was doing, they all answered that he was seeking permission to speak. I then asked them how they knew that. The immediate reply was that it was obvious; what else could he be thought to be doing? The meaning of his gesture, in other words, was right there on its surface, available for reading by anyone who had the eyes to see. That meaning, however, would not have been available to someone without any knowledge of what was involved in being a student. Such a person might have thought that Mr. Newlin was pointing to the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling, or calling our attention to some object that was about to fall ("the sky is falling," "the sky is falling"). And if the someone in question were a child of elementary or middle-school age, Mr. Newlin might well have been seen as seeking permission not to speak but to go to the bathroom, an interpretation or reading that would never occur to a student at Johns Hopkins or any other institution of "higher learning" (and how would we explain to the uninitiated the meaning of that phrase).

Context matters, in other words, as does our having learned what certain things mean in certain contexts. This is certainly true, but perhaps so certainly true that it does not need saying at such length. Fish presents the point as if someone might mistakenly think that the meaning of the gesture might be seen by anyone with eyes, but surely literally no one has ever thought this. A gesture or sound that means one thing in one language need not mean the same in another language and will not necessarily be understood by someone who does not know the relevant language. This should not need saying, and Fish's acting as if it does seems pretentious. And hence annoying.

He goes on:

The point is the one I have made so many times before: it is neither the case that the significance of Mr. Newlin's gesture is imprinted on its surface where it need only be read off, or that the construction put on the gesture by everyone in the room was individual and idiosyncratic. Rather, the source of our interpretive unanimity was a structure of interests and understood goals, a structure whose categories so filled our individual consciousnesses that they were rendered as one, immediately investing phenomena with the significance they must have, given the already-in-place assumptions about what someone could possibly be intending (by word or gesture) in a classroom. 

At least if you have read Wittgenstein, and I would think even if you haven't, this is obviously true. And the truth in what Fish says is good. The obviousness of a point that nevertheless keeps being made "so many times" by the same person is annoying though. And there is also a grain of falsehood too. Newlin's gesture is not simply invested with the significance it must have given the context. There is a reason, after all, why Newlin chose to make that gesture in that context. He knew what significance it would necessarily be "given" immediately and unanimously by everyone else present. Because that's the meaning that that gesture has in that context. (This is what it means to say that a gesture "has a meaning" in a given context.)

Fish says that, "One can respond with a cheerful yes to the question "Do readers make meanings?" and commit oneself to very little because it would be equally true to say that meanings, in the form of culturally derived interpretive categories, make readers." The cheerfulness about very little is also annoying because it seems unearned (because one is committed to so little). It is true that if Newlin had waved his hand and no one had understood what he meant then there would have been a failure of communication. But this doesn't often happen because his gesture "must have, given the already-in-place assumptions about what someone could possibly be intending (by word or gesture) in a classroom" the meaning that it has. A meaning that a word or gesture must have given already-in-place assumptions is not a meaning that is created by its audience. Or at least words like 'created' and 'made' are extremely misleading in this context. 'Confirmed,' maybe, although even that seems too strong. The inevitability created by what is already in place suggests that 'recognized' would be a better word.  

It's possible that Fish thinks that meanings must be made because he thinks they must be objects of some kind and recognizes that the audience has a role to play in the process of meaning and understanding. This might be a reason to think that no word or gesture could possibly have a meaning before it occurs and is understood. But this is to think that the meaning of a word must be an object, that having a meaning must be something like having a sandwich or a coin in one's pocket, which is to ignore Wittgenstein's work. I don't know whether to think that's annoying or just weird. Has Fish not thought to read the Philosophical Investigations? If he did but struggled with it, which would hardly be surprising even for a very intelligent reader, did he not think to ask someone what it was about? Or did he start theorizing about meaning without realizing that highly intelligent people have spent a lot of time working on this issue? Or did he realize that and just decide to ignore their work? It's half irritating half bizarre. Maybe I just need to read more Fish, but I don't feel very inclined to do so. 

David Foster Wallace on language

If you haven't already done so you should read David Foster Wallace's essay "Authority and American Usage." It's got Wittgenstein, ethics, comedy, and more. Some bits (by the way, SNOOT is an acronym for something or other relating to language snobbery, grammar Nazis, etc.):

This maybe goes too far. I think in general we should call people what they want to be called (Wallace implicitly recognizes this when he talks about PC English as a matter of politeness), but he's right that changing language does not change reality, and excessive focus on language means turning one's back on reality. Which is not good. 

I'm not sure that any reference to either Plato or Derrida is really helpful here, but this otherwise looks like a nice disposal of a badly thought out position.

This, on the other hand, is poor. Arguing from universal acceptance is weak, a is true only if we take 'interpret' in a special sense (as 'understanding', roughly), and b is only true if we take 'ideology' in a special sense (as 'way of thinking', perhaps). The main idea is that all language is political. This, it seems to me, is both true and false. It's true in the sense that language is a human product, a social product, and reflects various social relations and practices, past and present. There is obviously something political about this. Perhaps social relations are just by definition political. But the claim is false in suggesting that all attention to language is political and therefore important. Wallace's own insights on political correctness show this. 

  

(SWE = Standard Written English.) I think this is true, and why we owe it to our students to teach them SWE. It is easily understandable why many people would regard this truth as a bad thing, but that doesn't justify pretending that it isn't true. And it is understandable that many people would not want to teach SWE, because it's tedious or seemingly unchallenging intellectually, but that isn't a good reason not to do it. Matt Reed, in talking about college composition courses, writes:

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that most grammar instruction has been delegated to the K-12 system -- elementary schools were once called “grammar schools” for a reason -- with developmental courses available for the many students who still need to work on that. 101 [i.e. an introductory course on composition] is intended to address college-level skills.

I don't think the assumption he wants to make is reasonable at all. The reason we have these courses is because so many students do not know SWE well enough. Wallace again:

Reed's assumption "for the sake of argument" is contrary to a well-known fact. That's a bad kind of assumption to make for any reason. Not that we should necessarily have classes explicitly in SWE. They might not be needed at every college. And Wallace notes that such courses are said to have been proven ineffective. He suggests teaching them in a different way. Whether that would work remains to be shown. I have never had a class explicitly on English grammar or style, and I write as well as I want my students to. So direct instruction in how to write English might not be necessary. Perhaps all we need is the teaching of writing across the curriculum, and one or two courses in which students read excellent writing and are required to write in correct SWE about it. But Wallace is right to point out the practical (however regrettable or immoral) need for students to learn SWE and the fact that they aren't generally learning it now.   

In short, there is a lot of good stuff in Wallace's essay. It's a long essay, packed with footnotes (which is, and are, not always as funny as I take it they are meant to be, but hopefully you'll react differently), but well worth the time it takes to read it.