Extraordinary Language Philosophy

Extraordinary Language Philosophy

The legacy of commonsense philosophy and ordinary language philosophy is not dead.[1] It still haunts the precincts of academic philosophy. I wish to put on record my opposition to it (not that I hate everything about it, correctly understood). Taken literally, the idea of common sense is the idea of common sense—widespread, shared beliefs and presuppositions. It is a statistical notion—what most or all people think. It is opposed to what specialists think, or intellectual elites, or experts, or professionals. It is what amateurs or the unschooled think. We are told to defer to these folks—to folk philosophy. This is terrible advice: the general populace is often ill-informed, ignorant, prone to groupthink, and unreflective. To hell with them. If the learned disagree with the ignorant, go with the learned. If the average bloke believes in substance dualism or naïve realism or total freedom from causality, he is just plain wrong, as can be quickly demonstrated; you do need some expertise to think well about these issues. We want good sense not common sense. No one thinks that commonsense physics or astronomy is the way to go, or commonsense medicine. Maybe we can accept that refined or sophisticated common sense is a sound basis for philosophy, but not raw uninformed common sense. Is Russell’s theory of descriptions common sense? Hardly—you do have to grasp a bit of logic to get it. It is pure luck if common sense and good sense converge—that is, rigorous, peer-reviewed, expert knowledge. This is surely uncontroversial to the point of tedium. If common sense were the royal road to philosophical excellence, every Tom, Dick and Harry would get an A on a philosophy exam without taking any philosophy courses. Philosophy requires a lot more (and a lot less) than common sense.

A more interesting question concerns the language of philosophy: should it be ordinary language or some other kind of language? There are two questions here: should philosophy be about ordinary language, and should it be conducted inordinary language? And what is ordinary language anyway? The idea is supposed to be that ordinary language is non-technical language, whatever that is exactly. But isn’t language “technical” only if people don’t use it much? What is technical language for you and me might not be so for a theoretical physicist. Doesn’t technical language sometimes get absorbed into the mainstream, as with “gene” and “galaxy”? I think it is clear enough that philosophy should not be confined to studying the language most people speak; we can also talk about the technical languages of the sciences as well. We do have philosophy of physics and biology, after all. The interesting issue concerns the kind of language we use in doing philosophy, whether it is about language or not, technical or non-technical. This would usually be taken to be a question about the use of technical language in philosophy—is it good or bad? I think it is unavoidable to some degree, though it should not be indulged in for its own sake (to seem impressive, say). But I want to introduce a third option: the use of extraordinary (non-technical) language—ordinary language used extraordinarily. What does this mean?

I can best explain what I have in mind by switching to literature. What is the best way to write fiction—in plain English or jazzed-up English (or any other language)? Should novelists write like Kingsley Amis or Vladimir Nabokov? Should James Joyce have given us Finnegan’s Wake as well as Ulysses (or Dubliners)? I won’t expatiate on this issue; I use it to make a distinction in linguistic styles. The answer I prefer is that the prosaic style is just that—it verges on the dull and pedestrian. It can be plodding and boring. The souped-up style is more evocative and stimulating—more poetic, in a word. To put it baldly, I favor the Nabokovian style of writing philosophy, with the emphasis placed on the language used and its resonances. I think philosophy should be written in a more literary style (not in the social sciences style). Thus, I advocate extraordinary language philosophy—what some prosaic types like to call “flowery”. I would like to found a school: Extraordinary Language Philosophy (ELP). We read literary texts and try to emulate them; but we also read scientific texts written a certain style, often old-fashioned (Darwin and Dawkins provide good examples). I won’t mention any actual philosophers, but old hands will know who I mean (there are many[2]); they are in short supply today. The point I am making is that ordinary language philosophy is misguided if it prefers the literal and stolid; we need extraordinary ordinary language, with some technical terms thrown in. Not Finnegan’s Wake level extraordinary, or even Lolita level, but above the level of the science report or textbook of botany. Philosophy is (or should be) an essentially literary subject, even when dry as dust.[3]

In sum, then, I favor elitist, erudite, anti-democratic, extraordinary, poetic, possibly technical philosophy—not prosaic, plodding, lumpen, pseudo-scientific philosophy. Of course, clarity is always paramount, and obscurity is never a virtue, but that is no reason to applaud the pedestrian verbiage that passes for philosophy these days. You don’t need to be boring to be serious.[4]           

[1] It was designed to combat the excesses of Hegel and company, and it spawned analytical philosophy. But it went too far and became an ideology from which we are still in the process of escaping. It also had political undertones. I won’t go into this.

[2] I will mention P.F. Strawson as exemplary, and he had ambitions to be a poet. However, I think he was somewhat inhibited stylistically by the philosophical atmosphere in Oxford at the time. Individuals is pretty poetic in its way.

[3] I would say that my book Logical Properties is a virtual poem of the abstractly logical.

[4] I have not discussed the idea that language use is the arbiter of philosophical truth, which few people today would recommend. I take it Grice refuted such a view by distinguishing logical implication from conversational implicature. This has nothing to do with ordinary language, given that specialist language is also used. Nor does it coincide with common use. Ironically, these terms were not carefully analyzed by the proponents of the philosophy in which they feature.