Political Evil and the Family

What is the psychology of political evil, including political violence? By “political evil” I mean evil directed towards groups, as opposed to specific individuals: races, nationalities, religions, party affiliation, educational attainment, style of dress, etc. This kind of evil has a distinctive intentionality: whereas individual-directed intentionality takes in a concrete individual, an object of perception, group-directed intentionality posits a generalized, abstract, stereotypical type, often an object of fantasy. It is a kind of reified meta-individual, created in the mind from disparate sources, seldom rooted in fact, cartoon-like. It is possible to entertain this curious object of thought without knowing any individual instance of its purported type. It is a sort of fiction, though masquerading as fact. It is depersonalized, dehumanized, a symbol more than an actual person (often animal imagery is invoked to accentuate it—pig, dog, rat, cockroach, etc.).[1] The nature of this intentionality allows people to perpetrate evil with less ambivalence, because it doesn’t present its object as a three-dimensional human being with specific characteristics. This may be the result of cognitive limitations: it is difficult for the human mind to represent a multitude of objects in all their specificity; it’s much easier to boil it all down to a few easily remembered features, especially if those features reflect prejudices and predilections. In any case, restraints on evil actions stemming from recognition of a common humanity are removed or reduced by such ways of thinking. This is the power of the stereotype, the meme, the caricature. Political evil thrives in such a psychological environment, especially when driven by external forces (fear-mongering, propaganda, indoctrination)). All this is familiar stuff, one aspect of evil’s notorious banalities; and it is sound psychology as far as it goes. But it doesn’t explain why people engage in evil to begin with: why this need (for that is what it appears to be) to select a group and persecute members of that group? What is the root cause of political evil? Why is the human psyche so prone to it? One naturally turns to the family: is there anything about family relations that could underlie the tendency towards political evil (animosity, violence, oppression)? Family dynamics often leave a mark on the adult psyche, scarring and shaping it—this is a platitude of developmental psychology. The first point to note—and I am not alone in observing it—is that the family is a proto-political system, a mini-society. It is a group of individuals, locked in a power structure, vying for dominance, or at least a piece of the pie. There is much rivalry and resentment, particularly in children. In some families, violence is the outcome, in others strict discipline, in others simple neglect. Families are not all harmony and light (surprise, surprise). There are asymmetries of power: parents beat children but not vice versa. There is a good deal of hatred swirling around the family unit (homicidal, according to Freud). But there is also love mingled with the bad stuff: you love the ones you also hate (resent, envy, dislike). This produces cognitive dissonance: the same object invites opposite feelings, thus giving rise to a sense of intolerable disharmony. The sufferer accordingly seeks dissonance reduction, possibly by denying the love or rejecting the hate, neither being easy. However, there is a third way: sublimation—direct the bad feelings elsewhere. At any rate, point some of the antipathy at someone else, as much as possible consistent with the reality principle. This could be a fantasy object—a bogeyman, a villain encountered in books or films or oral tradition, or some other tribe. Think of it as a negative-affect proxy-object—like a wall you hit when you can’t hit what you really want to. So: family dynamics, cognitive dissonance, sublimation, proxy objects. The psyche is searching for an object of resentment to substitute for the father (say) and it lights upon whatever serves that purpose; what better than an imaginary group that embodies features of the family hate-object? The group may symbolize power, strength, wealth, potency, authority, intellectual superiority, immovability—thus replicating the features of the father (or mother or older sibling). You can hate or attack this group as you cannot hate or attack your family members. The greater the oppression within your family the stronger will be your animosity towards the chosen group. So, it is not so much the broken family that fuels political evil as the intact family—not the dissolution of the family but its continuing stranglehold. When you can’t escape its clutches your need for a sublimated outlet will be at its strongest. Thus, we can predict that young people will be the most vulnerable to engaging in political evil, because they are the most enmeshed in family power dynamics; they are ripe for “radicalization”. And this will be accentuated according to the degree of control and oppression existing within the family. Hatred of out-groups will be higher in societies with oppressive family structures—in what we now think of as traditional families. For example, racism will be more prevalent (other things being equal) in societies that beat children for minor infringements (I’m thinking of eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain). The psychological mechanism is clear: family power dynamics, resentment, cognitive dissonance, sublimation, proxy objects, racism (or any -ism that comes to hand). The psyche will be only too happy to latch onto anything that will reduce the cognitive dissonance produced by the traditional family. But notice that there is no easy way out of this problem for the psyche, since families have to impose some sort of dominance hierarchy (just as in animal families). There is really no other way to bring children up; it’s built into the family unit. This explains the persistence of political evil: power asymmetry is a universal property of families, and cognitive dissonance is a psychological fact, so sublimation onto proxy objects will always be an attractive option (even a necessary one). Combine this with the depersonalizing peculiarities of group-directed intentionality and you get a potent psychological brew for breeding political animosity. People will readily hate the neighboring tribe as long as they have been subject to family oppression, but oppression within families comes with the territory (or at least felt oppression). Still, we can predict that minimizing the oppression, especially actual violence, will work to moderate political hatred, though it cannot eliminate it. Also, explaining the source of political hatred might help mitigate its hold over people, because it reveals its irrational roots; it isn’t that the hated group really warrants the hatred. Such hatred will be less contagious the better it is understood, because its true nature has been exposed.[2]

[1] Notice how common it is to describe the “enemy” as “animals”: this enables people to deny that they are targeting actual human beings. The tendency is well satirized by Monty Python in the Holy Grail film when John Cleese, as a Frenchman, taunts the British soldiers as “pig dogs”: this is puzzling to them because it has never occurred to them that they might be regarded as sub-human. The French meanwhile are regularly described by the English as “frogs”, because they actually eat such things! This is all grist for the manufacture of dehumanizing stereotypes, which are invaluable in licensing political evil. Such are the powers of human intentionality.

[2] This essay was prompted by recent events, but I have intentionally avoided discussing actual historical examples of political evil so as not to get distracted by complex and controversial factual and ethical questions. It should be obvious what kinds of events I have in mind. Of course, many factors enter into the causation of human actions situated in historical contexts; my purpose has been to identify the central psychological mechanisms. In a fuller account, behavioral contagion and other forms of conformity would also be added to the picture. It is undeniable that stereotypes spread with the greatest of ease. Why?

Accent Philosophy

I propose to open up a new field of philosophy: accent philosophy—the philosophy of accents.[1] This may sound like a dull subject, but in fact it sets the pulses racing: for accents penetrate to the heart of what we are as human beings–as living, breathing, speaking people. It is actually a deeply political subject, and hence controversial. Because I mean to raise a normative question: are some accents better than others? Yes, you read right: I intend to enter the territory of prescriptive pronunciation. Surely to condemn it! you expostulate. Actually, no, I intend to argue that accents are subject to normative assessment: some are better than others, objectively, absolutely, non-relatively. Orthodoxy denies this: accents can be described but not prescribed (or proscribed). Prescriptive grammar is bad, and so is prescriptive phonology (how the voice sounds when speaking). That is the politically correct non-elitist non-snobbish and obviously enlightened thing to say. But is it true? Tradition supposes otherwise: it used to be thought that some accents sound more intelligent, refined, mellifluous, and pleasant than others—which are variously characterized as coarse, crude, unintelligent, ugly, grating, annoying, unpleasant, and other such epithets. Surely, I am not proposing to go back to that! Well, not quite, but not so far distant from it: I do think that there are good and bad ways to speak accent-wise, so we can reasonably criticize a speaker for speaking one way rather than another. Moreover, whole regions—whole countries—can be criticized for how they pronounce words. So, as I say, accent philosophy, as I conceive it, is likely (certain) to raise hackles: it seems to go against everything we have been taught to believe about democracy, equality, tolerance, liberalism, and basic human decency. Am I really going to argue that Cockneys don’t speak proper and Geordies need elocution lessons and royals set the standard for correct pronunciation? Am I saying there is something wrong with people who don’t pronounce words in a certain way? Let’s wait and see. First, we need to establish some terminology in which to frame our accent philosophy; I have already introduced some of it. Thus, we have accent prescriptivism and accent descriptivism, and these can be more or less global: it might be thought that a particular accent is defective in one respect but not in others, so that it is only partially defective; or it may be riddled with bad sounds. We also have accent-quality relativism and absolutism: relativism says that accent evaluation may be acceptable within the group using it but there is no absolute standard of accent goodness; absolutism insists that there are objective community-independent criteria of accent evaluation, so that a whole community can be condemned for speaking badly. It may be that some individuals or groups rank lowest on a scale of accent goodness; and this may even be measurable. Accent subjectivism holds that accent quality can consist in nothing but subjective reaction—how it sounds to a particular hearer—while accent objectivism holds that accent quality is a matter of objective fact and may fly in the face of people’s subjective reactions. It might even turn out that Queen Elizabeth II had the worst accent of all! (Don’t worry, royalists, that isn’t going to happen.) In other words, the familiar philosophical categories can be carried over to accent philosophy. I will be defending a limited absolutist objectivist prescriptivist position—but you will be relieved to hear that I do not advocate corporal punishment for children who can’t talk right. No punishment for vowel deviance or consonant delinquency; this is a kind and gentle prescriptivism. Before I embark on this quixotic task, let me dispose of a common error about accents—the idea that there is nothing to the evaluation of accents than class distinctions. We call an accent good when an upper-class person uses it and we call an accent bad when a lower-class person uses it. Now I don’t want to say there is nothing to this point, but I don’t think it goes deep enough. Consider this thought experiment: a rich respected person speaks like a drunken sailor from Ipswich (I pick that town at random) while a lowly kitchen maid speaks like her majesty the Queen—do we really want to say that we would judge the former accent superior and the latter inferior? If not, why not? Isn’t there something internal to the speech of these two individuals that signals vocal merit or the lack thereof? Soon I will venture some suggestions about what this might be, but just intuitively doesn’t that sound wrong? Isn’t Lawrence Olivier’s accent intrinsically superior to that of the bloke in the pub mumbling and mewling and mangling his words? One reason for this is that certain features of speech impede communication: slurring words, omitting syllables, speaking too softly, or too quickly. Since the main purpose of speech is communication, these features will detract from the purpose of speech and therefore count as defects. So, there is an objective measure of vocal quality, viz. ease of communication. If an accent has features that impede communication, it is to that extent defective; those features ought to be removed or remedied. What might these be? I will start with some imaginary cases. What if someone developed the habit of pronouncing every vowel the same way? He might say, “I pied the piper to piper the rime” meaning to say “I paid the piper to paper the room”. Obviously, this would impede communication, since many distinct words would be pronounced in the same way, confusing the hearer. It would be necessary to appeal to context to disambiguate what is said. Call this “vowel merging”: then we can say that vowel merging is an accent defect because it makes communication more difficult. Or consider consonant-dropping: a speaker has the habit of dropping terminal t’s and d’s from words, saying things like “I apprecia- the suppor- from the crow- and the ban-” intending to say “I appreciate the support from the crowd and the band”. This is likely to cause confusion in hearers who don’t have this habit, especially when the word uttered sounds like a word which actually lacks a terminal t or d (“high” and height”, “cry” and “cried”). It is an accent that will impede communication. Now a real example: words like “fit” are pronounced like “feet”—the i-sound turning into an ee-sound. Clearly, this will lead to much confusion in hearers, because there are many pairs of distinct words in English that will end up being pronounced the same way (“it” and “eat”, “sit” and “seat”, etc.). This is an accent that speakers should strive to correct; it is a defective way to pronounce words—according to an objective criterion. It is also extremely common among people who speak English as a second language (especially native speakers of Spanish, Italian, and French). But it isn’t just foreigners who have bad accents that interfere with communication: native English speakers have much the same problem. In fact, I chose my imaginary examples to illustrate defective actual accents of the same general type: vowel-merging and consonant-dropping are common features of spoken English. To avoid tedium, I will be brief. Everyone knows the tendency among certain groups to pronounce “rain” as like “Rhine” and “line” as like “loin”, but recent British pronunciation has introduced an ee-sound into the oo-sound, so that “roof” sounds like “reef”. We also have the tendency in some regions (Essex?) to pronounce “know” like “Neigh”. It is very common in England to drop terminal t’s, so that “port” becomes “pour”. Put these together and you get “noy” for “night” and “toy” for “tight”, or something close to that. In some dialects the word “know” gets perilously close to “gnaw” (Geordie). In American English “hot” becomes “hat” (pronounced the English way) and “hat” becomes “het” (i.e., the e-sound is introduced into it); and t’s get transformed into d’s (“wetting” sounds like “wedding”). There is no o-sound, so that “ontology” sounds like “untulugy”. The result of all this is that there are fewer phonetic resources in American English than in British English, which makes reliance on context more imperative. This is not ideal, though in practice comprehension is not much affected, at least among native speakers. No doubt the reason these kinds of deviation from the ideal are not more extreme and frequent is that this would impede communication much more seriously, as in my imaginary cases. You can’t go around pronouncing all vowels the same way or making do with only two consonant sounds! All workable accents have to respect the needs of communication, which are that semantically distinct words generally have distinct pronunciations; ambiguity can only be tolerated so far. As a matter of principle, then, accents must abide by these rules and are defective to the extent that they don’t—objectively, absolutely, and prescriptively. There is such a thing as mispronunciation. And the larger your audience the more you have to obey these basic rules: you can’t expect your hearers to be fluent in the accent you grew up with. By all means stick with the accent you were inducted into, but bear in mind that vowel-merging and consonant-dropping are not good ways to proceed. You don’t have the right to speak in whatever way appeals to you. Expect to modify your accent as you move around the world (Geordies take note). I suggest developing accent virtue, obeying accent rules, and attending to accent consequences: it is virtuous to pronounce distinct vowels distinctly (Italians always do); you should obey the rule that proscribes consonant-dropping; and it is morally responsible to weigh up the communicative consequences of patterns of speech. In other words, cultivate good speech habits and avoid bad ones. This is an area of the normative, and prescription is sometimes advisable. A sound accent philosophy will be based around a principle of objective rightness in how we speak. So: keep your vowels pure and your consonants clear; and don’t think the accent you grew up with is sacrosanct.[2]

[1] The OED defines “accent” as “a particular way of pronouncing a language, associated with a country, area, or social class”. This covers a lot of ground; I will only deal with a limited aspect of the general phenomenon here. I leave aside purely aesthetic questions and focus on questions of efficiency. It is an interesting fact that most speakers of a given language deplore the way certain others speak it, though not usually the way they speak it. Is this just stupidity? Maybe they are right to be thus censorious. Accent philosophy (part of the philosophy of language) will address such questions.  

[2] I myself first spoke Geordie (up to age 3), then I spoke Kentish, then there was an infusion of Lancashire; now I speak in the way I think best (not a trace of American). I often see British correspondents, on American news shows, with excruciating British accents that Americans apparently don’t notice; I think, “Come on, surely you can do better than that!”. As for Queen Elizabeth’s accent, it strikes me as hilarious, though I don’t hate it (or love it)—at least it sounds like she is trying. Nice vowel purity and meticulous terminal t’s. Bit prissy, though—can she hear what she sounds like? Probably not.

On the Concept of a Conceptual Scheme

The phrase “conceptual scheme”, as it is used in philosophy, anthropology, and the history of ideas, is intended to signify a particular conception of the conceptualizing mind, namely that our ways of thinking of the world are contingent, variable, and sometimes non-translatable.[1] That is, as a result of various historical, cultural, and practical facts, the human conceptual apparatus is not an essential invariant attribute of the mind but can vary in ways that prohibit mutual understanding. My conceptual scheme may be radically different from yours, so much so that we cannot communicate with each other; our ways of thinking are “incommensurate”, mutually unintelligible. In the extreme case, there could be aliens whose conceptual scheme is completely disjoint from the human conceptual scheme (itself various) and simply not comprehensible by us. Conceptual schemes can be as various as anatomy: differently shaped bodies, differently shaped minds. This conception of conception is to be contrasted with what might be called the “conceptual system” conception, for want of a better term: the idea that conceiving minds are essentially uniform, fixed either by an unvarying reality or a genetic blueprint, and hence always mutually intelligible. According to this view, there is only one type of conceptual repertoire available to all humans (and perhaps all thinkers if we include possible aliens), while according to the “conceptual scheme” view there could be (and actually are) many radically different kinds of conceptual repertoire. There are multiple conceptual schemes (according to one view) but only one conceptual system (according to the other view)—the system but a scheme (compare: many anatomical schemes but only one cellular system). Notice that we have to insert the word “radically” into this characterization of the distinction, because clearly people can differ in the range of concepts they have learned, use, and understand, according to their education, interests, and occupation. The idea is rather that there are either many non-translatable schemes or a unique translatable system: the distinction depends on whether you think concepts can exist without being available to other concept users or whether they must always be so available. Are concepts parochial or universal, idiosyncratic or shared? Do we live in different conceptual worlds or in the same conceptual world? Is there a multiplicity of incommensurate conceptual standpoints or just a single shared conceptual standpoint? I am going to argue for a limited (but quite strong claim), viz. that the concept of many conceptual schemes is not a possible concept for us. We cannot form such a concept, so the doctrine of many conceptual schemes is not a doctrine we can understand. Maybe there could be many incommensurable schemes but we cannot think such a thing: we cannot have the concept of an alien conceptual scheme. The argument for this takes the form of a dilemma. On the one hand, we might be able to think of another person’s conceptual scheme by having concepts of their concepts; but that would imply also having their concepts, so that the scheme would not be truly alien and incommensurate. On the other hand, the other person’s scheme might be truly inconceivable by us, but then we could not think about it, having no concepts with which to conceptualize it. Therefore, we cannot have the concept of an alien conceptual scheme. The first horn of the dilemma is easy to grasp: for me to have the concept of the concept of red I must have the concept of red. In order to think about the concept of red I need to be able to think about red; I don’t have the concept of that concept unless I have the concept it is a concept of. If I think of you as having a certain concept, I must know what that concept is, but I can only know that by having the concept in question. I don’t know what your concept is unless I know what it is about, but then I have to be able to conceptualize what it is about, which is to say I must have the concept of that thing. Knowledge of someone else’s conceptual scheme presupposes access to that conceptual scheme, but that means that I must share the concepts that constitute it. Having a concept of a concept implies having that concept. So, we are pushed to the second horn of the dilemma, which is less simple to state. I must be thinking of the other person’s conceptual scheme in some less direct way, but what might that way be? I clearly can’t study or investigate the alien conceptual scheme, because that would require me to have concepts of the concepts comprising it; but can I perhaps refer to it without knowing what it is composed of? Can’t I say “That conceptual scheme” pointing at the individual, or “His conceptual scheme”? Here the problem is that mere pointing and referring don’t add up to conceiving: I have no mode of presentation of the other’s conceptual scheme, just a blank act of reference to I know not what. I don’t know what I am talking about—literally. I don’t have any conception of the alien scheme precisely because it is alien. I only have words not genuine content-bearing thoughts.[2] It is a different matter with alien anatomy: here I can see the alien body and make perceptual judgements about it—I am not limited to blind pointing. But I can’t see the other person’s incommensurate conceptual scheme, and I can’t conceive it either (by definition); so, I have no mental representation of it—nothing that could ground the application of the phrase “conceptual scheme”. I know what my conceptual scheme is because I am aware of my own concepts, but I don’t have any insight into his because I have no access to it. The phrase “conceptual scheme” as applied to others with alien conceptual schemes has no sense for me: I have no way of thinking of such schemes precisely because they fall outside of my conceptual capabilities. I can think of alien anatomies without sharing them because I can perceive and conceive them, but I have no way of thinking of alien conceptual anatomies without sharing them (by using concepts of concepts). Likewise, I can think of alien perceptual systems and alien belief systems because I can conceive these things in the usual way: I can observe the senses involved or imagine forming different beliefs from the ones I hold. But I am cognitively cut off from alien conceptual schemes, so I have no means of representing them other than by brute reference without sense or knowledge. I have, as Russell would say, no acquaintance with alien conceptual schemes, so the idea of an alien conceptual scheme has no meaning for me. It only seems to me that I grasp the concept because I tacitly assume that the scheme is not really alien—that I can enter into its “world”. If we are told that Eskimos have a different conceptual scheme from us because they have more conceptual distinctions for snow than we do, we can easily understand the nature of their snow-directed conceptual scheme—but that is simply because it is not really alien to us. The difficult case is that of the radically alien scheme that has no overlap with ours, for then we have no way of entering into the scheme in question. No doubt people exaggerate the variations in human conceptual schemes—they are never that alien—but the rhetoric (the intention) is to claim that there might be radicallydifferent conceptual schemes; and that poses problems of intelligibility. To repeat: we can have no conception of a truly alien conceptual scheme; we cannot conceive of concepts we don’t have, since our concepts limit what we can think about. I can’t conceive of what lies outside of my range of concepts–trivially. Thus, the concept of a conceptual scheme (as opposed to the concept of the conceptual system) has no meaning for me; it isn’t a concept I possess. It has no descriptive or discursive content for me. I can have the concept of a conceptual order—an arrangement of concepts—but I can’t have the concept of a conceptual scheme in the sense intended by that phrase, i.e., the idea of an arrangement of concepts that might be completely unintelligible to me. That is not something I can form a conception of, since (as Ramsey said in another context) I can’t say it and I can’t whistle it either—I can’t directly specify what that alien mind might be like, and I have no indirect way of getting my mind around it either (it can’t be “shown”). This means that I can’t describe my own set of concepts as a conceptual scheme, since that phrase has no sense for me, as it is intended by its users (it is a technical term). I can’t think of my own set of concepts as one scheme among many that may differ dramatically from mine. Maybe there are beings in the universe equipped with completely different concepts from me, but I can’t conceive of what this would consist in, since I am confined to my own concepts. The situation is similar to what Hume envisaged in the case of causal necessity: we can use the words “causal necessity”, and even succeed in referring to something real with them, but we don’t really know what they mean, since causal necessity is not something we grasp (have knowledge of, comprehend). Or as I might put it, we are “cognitively closed” to alien conceptual schemes, trivially so, even if we can use these words to refer to them. The important point is that the case is not at all like so-called incommensurate conceptual schemes that actually overlap with ours—this we can grasp perfectly (Eskimos, the Hopi Indians, historical holders of “paradigms”, etc.). It is really not difficult to understand the ways of thought being contemplated in these cases, as evidenced by the people reporting them; but a genuine case of untranslatability is a very different type of case—here we don’t know what is being contemplated. We really can’t grasp what an alien thought would be, if there were such a thing.[3]

[1] Davidson discusses translation as a criterion of identity for conceptual schemes in his classic “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1973).

[2] Is it even clear that the word “conceptual” can be meaningfully applied to alien forms of cognition (or even the word “cognition” come to that), since that word derives from our own conceptual scheme? Who is to say that what the aliens are doing involves concepts in our sense? Maybe that is a misdescription of what goes on in their heads. Maybe their psychology is so different from ours that the word “concept” is inappropriate. That would mean that even to call what they have a “conceptual scheme” goes beyond what we can know of their inner workings. We don’t even have the right concepts to characterize the most general form of their intellectual make-up. The phrase “conceptual scheme” might itself be too parochial: we can’t say they have a different conceptual scheme from ours (or cognitive, intellectual, thinking scheme).

[3] Of course, there is a tradition of identifying necessities of thought of various kinds—properties that all possible thoughts must have: obedience to universal logic, the subject-predicate form, categories of space and time, reference to material particulars, indexical devices, dependence on sense-data, etc. I have not discussed these, but they certainly pose a threat to claims of infinite conceptual plasticity and the cultural determination of thought. I would certainly resist the idea of the relativity of truth to a conceptual scheme or suggestions of metaphysical anti-realism arising therefrom. My own view would be that the concepts an individual possesses are mainly a function of genetic endowment and a fixed objective world, so that variations in concept possession are local and minor.

Late Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein died in 1951 (a year after I was born) at age 62. This was 30 years after publishing the Tractatusand two years before the Investigations was published. As everyone knows, he changed his views dramatically in the years following the publication of the Tractatus—perhaps the most dramatic self-repudiation in the history of philosophy.  That work was pre-Socratic in tone: “all is logic” was its theme—and truth-functional logic at that. The book reads like the working out of an idee fixe, as if designed to be rejected, set up for failure; and very hard to understand. Ramsey challenged Wittgenstein with a more pragmatist philosophy, and pragmatism prevailed; the eventual result was the Investigations. Clearly Wittgenstein was not averse to changing his mind; he seems to have relished it. Very little of the earlier work survived this volte face: he speaks of that work as if written by someone else, someone utterly benighted. The question I want to ask is counterfactual: what if Wittgenstein had lived until he was in his eighties? What would he have made of later developments in philosophy? We have to guess, but our guesses can be informed. Some may believe that his views would have remained the same through the fifties and sixties, since he had arrived at the definitive truth (we might call these people “Wittgensteinians”). I don’t think so: I think he would have changed with the times, as he had before. The Investigations is notably backwards-looking, concerned with Wittgenstein’s early influences—Frege and Russell, in particular. Not much was going on in philosophy of language between the time of TLP and PI (Carnap doesn’t seem to have made much of a mark on Wittgenstein); things started picking up in the late fifties and sixties—too late for Wittgenstein to know about. I think he would have liked what he saw for the most part: Strawson, Grice, Davidson, Searle, Putnam, and others. I doubt he would have taken to Quine—too scientistic, too logic-obsessed. I’m not sure what he would have made of Kripke and Lewis, or Montague and Kaplan.[1] The reason he would be receptive to such developments is that they fall between TLP and PI: they take logic seriously but they also respect the forms of natural language. Davidson’s use of Tarski’s theory of truth would particularly strike a chord: that approach precisely combines formal logic and actual speech (isn’t Wittgenstein the father of radical translation as a philosophical method?). They are also radically anti-empiricist in their assumptions: there is no talk of sense-data and the like, and no obsession with skepticism (unlike Russell). But I suspect Chomsky would have the biggest impact on Wittgenstein: he would have loved Chomsky. Why? Because Chomsky introduced formal linguistics and he connected the study of language to the functioning of the human mind—surface structure and deep structure, transformational grammar, competence and performance, biological naturalism and unconscious computation, innateness and modularity. It’s science without scientism, rigor without rigidity, description without desiccation. You might retort: “But Chomsky’s doctrines are completely antithetical to Wittgenstein’s!” That might well be true, but the whole point is that Wittgenstein was able to change his mind; and I think he would have. He would have seen the merits of the new approaches and accepted them, as he already had twice in his life (the first time in adopting the new logic under the influence of Frege and Russell). He wouldn’t have clung dogmatically to the old ways (as some “Wittgensteinians” do). It was his own work that partially led to the new ideas, both his early and later work, and he would have been well aware of that. He would appreciate the synthesis. He would also admire the novelty (who could not see that Grice was onto something?). Russell, for his part, would remain stuck in the mud, great man though he was, because of his life-long commitment to empiricism and his fear of skepticism. But Wittgenstein was not afraid of skepticism and saw through empiricism (he wasn’t a big Hume enthusiast—not that Hume was as empiricist as he was commonly supposed to be). Wittgenstein would have the same response as other philosophers of the period: this was good stuff, a step forward. I think he would view PI as too behaviorist in the light of the new philosophy of mind, and he wouldn’t be anxious to banish everything in TLP (it wasn’t totally wrong!). So, if he managed to produce a third book (Cognitive Grammar: An Exploration), it would also represent a change of position, a new beginning. That would be a very interesting book, produced at the height of his powers. The “Wittgensteinians” would be non-plussed.[2]

[1] Model-theoretic semantics might well have struck him as a shade too close to the crystalline formalism of the Tractatus; and those worlds Wittgenstein invokes are suspiciously redolent of possible worlds in modal model theory.  Lewis would surely raise the specter of metaphysics run amok. Tarski, by contrast, keeps it real (sequences, satisfaction, Convention T).

[2] In my opinion PI was a timely response to contemporaneous philosophy, especially philosophy of language. But by the late Sixties philosophy had moved on and that book was no longer very relevant to current discussions. I think that Wittgenstein would be well aware of this had he lived longer and would have modified his position accordingly. However, this is not the view of die-hard “Wittgensteinians” who want their hero to have anticipated and refuted the philosophical future. In the same way, Russell’s philosophy of language looks quaint today, however revolutionary it may have seemed at the time (that sparkling new logic!). It’s an interesting question what the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus would have made of the Investigations had he read it: he might well have viewed it as thoroughly retrograde, logically illiterate, and metaphysically timid. All that pointless description! So much slavish adherence to the appearances!