Tennis with Lolita and Eddy

I was playing tennis with my friend Eddy yesterday, as I have done thousands of times before. We were at the Coral Gables Country Club (which is less tony than it sounds). It was a clear crisp sunny day, which is unusual for Miami (humid, hot). We were virtually alone at noon on a clay court. Eddy is a sixty-eight-year-old retired Swiss banker—slim, fit, fast, skilled, hard-hitting, six-foot tall. The man can play tennis (no weakness on the backhand). That morning I had been reading Brian Boyd’s gripping biography of Nabokov, which had reached the point at which Lolita was written (700 pages in). As it happens, I had suggested to Eddy that he read that novel. He opened his tennis bag and pulled out a brand-new copy of the book. He had brought it in order that I could indicate to him what part of the preliminaries he should read (he had the annotated version), since I had told him not to skip the Foreword by John Ray, Jr., PhD. So, there we were on the tennis court book in hand, with Nabokov’s words spilling out (“white widowed male”, “light of my life”)—he being himself a tennis player and chronicler of Lolita’s tennis game. I told Eddy that in a few days he would be reading the greatest description of the game of tennis ever written. I wonder what he will make of the book whose magic never seems to dim. I wonder what discussions we will have of it on court as he reads it. Will it affect our tennis? Eddy, me, Nabokov, Lolita—all together on the tennis court—a sublime confluence, in my book. We went on to play for nearly two hours in that bright clear air. If only Vladimir could have witnessed it.

Folk Philosophy

Is there such a thing as folk philosophy? We have heard of folk physics and folk psychology, but does philosophy have a folk version? Is there a determinate philosophy held by ordinary blokes (and blokettes)? Such a philosophy would have to be common to all (normal) human beings, part of human nature, possibly innately fixed. It would have to be ancient and indeed prehistoric—certainly not a result of formal education. People since antiquity might well share certain beliefs about the world, but would that count as a philosophy? They all believe in space and time, earth and sky, minds and bodies, right and wrong—but do they have a philosophy of these things? It has been supposed that they do: G.E. Moore believed in something called commonsense philosophy and P.F. Strawson believed in “descriptive metaphysics” (i.e., a study of a universal human system of metaphysical beliefs about reality).[1] If there were a folk philosophy in this sense, it would presumably cover the basic areas of academic philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, etc. Theories within academic philosophy could agree or disagree with the philosophy of the folk (“bloke philosophy”), so they could be complacent or revisionary (to use Strawson’s term): you could be a commonsense philosopher, sticking with what you have always believed as a human being, or you could be an anti-commonsense philosopher, out to correct the philosophical mob (“bespoke philosophy”). It would be like folk physics and folk psychology: you might insist that the folk are right about the physical and psychological worlds, or you might accuse them of error in the light of modern science (then you are a revisionary physicist or psychologist). You might applaud the folk bloke or you might condemn him (conceivably you might have a different “feminist” attitude toward folk blokette philosophy). For example, you might hold that the folk believe in naïve realism about perception, accept materialism about ordinary objects, and reject skepticism about our knowledge of the external world. Depending on your academic philosophical views, you would then either congratulate the folk or criticize them. What you would not do is deny that they have a philosophical opinion—an opinion about what is true philosophically. You would suppose that everyone is a philosopher at heart, as everyone is a budding (if fallible) physicist or psychologist at heart. Philosophical views are thus thought to be natural to us, part of being human (unlike other animals).

I think this view is false: the folk don’t philosophize, whether they be ladies or gentlemen. There is no such thing as folk philosophy or commonsense philosophy or “descriptive philosophy”. Thus, there is no such thing as revisionary philosophy (corrective, critical) if that means taking a negative stand against what the folk believe philosophically. There is no such thing as the “metaphysics of the stone age”, right or wrong—or the epistemology or moral philosophy of the stone age. No philosophical theory is either accepted or rejected by the unwashed mob, nor even by the refined aristocracy (kings and queens have no philosophy, unless instructed in it or are unusually academically inclined). The simplest way to see this is to consider animals and children: surely no dog or ape or strapping toddler believes any particular philosophical doctrine; no philosophical proposition enters their bright and breezy little minds. No lively preschooler is a naive realist about perception or a materialist about the external world. Here you might suavely protest my confidence: “But surely, my good man, even beasts and babes believe that objects continue in existence when you are no longer perceiving them—they are instinctual realists” (at this point the protestor looks around the room expecting to see a sea of nods). But this is completely wrongheaded (the nods are few and far between), because that commonsense observation does not demonstrate adherence to a recognizable philosophical theory; for it is quite compatible with Berkeleyan idealism. There is no commitment here to the materialism opposed by the resourceful bishop of Cloyne, or implicit rejection of his idealist alternative (the idea of a table persists in the mind of God). The cited belief is not a philosophical belief; it is neutral between metaphysical theories. Similarly, a belief in human fallibility is not an acceptance of the skeptical philosophy; nor is moral judgement the acceptance of a particular normative philosophical theory (say, utilitarianism or deontology). All that is at a different level—the meta level, we might say. Beasts, babes, and rednecks (I mean no disrespect) don’t dabble in philosophical theories and arguments; they just get on with life. Philosophy is for us nerds.

The point is not that your average tinker or tailor is never a freelance philosopher—he may well be of that turn of mind—but rather that he is not one simply in virtue of being a normal human. Everyone thinks about things that are of interest to professional philosophers (bodies, minds), but that does not imply that everyone thinks philosophically about these things. The folk may even think about things in a way that is relevant to philosophers, but that doesn’t make them philosophers either.  The regular old cove down at the pub is simply not thinking about philosophy as he drinks his pint (or at any other time), any more than untutored stargazers are doing astronomy. Philosophy is not in the human genotype and not in the human environment either; it isn’t part of universal folk cognition. It arises from other sources. Just so, ordinary speakers are not closet scientific linguists consciously equipped with this or that linguistic theory (say, late Chomsky or early Chomsky); there is no folk linguistics (why should there be?). The fact is that the physical environment and the psychological environment present practical challenges to the imperiled member of Homo sapiens, but the “philosophical environment” presents no such challenge; you can live a perfectly healthy life and not give philosophy a second thought (I am talking about survival and reproduction). There are pressing reasons why folk physics and folk psychology exist (also folk chemistry), but they don’t go over to some supposed folk philosophy. No philosophy is “common sense” in the sense philosophers have intended by that phrase. Nor is there such a thing as folk neurophysiology or folk renaissance literature or folk Latin. These are all specialist studies not universal human competences. They aren’t part of general human biology. There is no philosophy instinct shared by all members of the human species: that is, there is no set of philosophical doctrines installed in us by our genes or our environment.

There is no natural ontogeny to philosophy either. Children don’t go through a dualist phase which they grow out of by age 8. They do go through developmental phases in their understanding of the physical world and other minds, but they don’t exhibit a maturational sequence in their grasp of philosophy (ditto astronomy and renaissance literature). So, let’s not overdo the whole mental module thing; some of the human mind is notmodular and not pre-programmed. Maybe in Vulcans philosophy has its own genetically fixed module with a specific set of beliefs built in: but we are not Vulcans. Philosophy arises in us from mysterious human capacities for reflective thought, probably triggered by conceptual snarl-ups and puzzling experiences (dreams, ethical dilemmas), and no doubt from matters of intellectual taste. There is no philosophy gene or philosophical environmental niche. I think people have supposed that there is such a thing as commonsense philosophy, or such a subject as descriptive metaphysics (describing the human conceptual scheme in its philosophical part) because they confuse general principles with philosophical propositions—as with the example of the persistence of unperceived objects. The whole idea of ordinary language philosophy really rests on the myth of commonsense philosophy, the thought being that such a philosophy must have withstood the test of time (or come from the hand of God); but if there is no such thing, then ordinary language contains no philosophical tenets or tendencies. It may furnish data for philosophy but not doctrines. There is no philosophical knowledge embedded in common sense or in ordinary language. Nor, by the same token, is there any philosophical error embedded in it, so no revision of such error is necessary. Ordinary language is all right as it is, philosophically, though it may not be all right ethically or politically or astronomically. Philosophical theories belong to philosophers not regular chaps and chappesses.[2]

[1] See my “Is Descriptive Metaphysics Possible?” for background to this paper.

[2] They may also belong to religions, but again these are not part of commonsense as understood by philosophers (e.g., the belief in immortality). For the record, I don’t think that common sense believes in free will as a philosophical doctrine; it just believes that people are often free to do as they please (they are not confined or in jail or some such). The folk have no view about whether or not this is compatible with determinism or whether there are other viable notions of freedom. Of course, it is quite possible for ordinary non-philosophical people to become philosophers relatively quickly; the intellectual ability was present all along. It is just that there is no philosophical doctrine embedded in what they ordinarily believe. They don’t have philosophical beliefs. Philosophy belongs in the classroom not in the billiard hall (or on the tundra).

Deception, Mimicry, and Meaning

If mimicry lies somewhere in the evolutionary history of meaning,[1] and mimicry involves deception, then deception is at the heart of meaning. Language is custom-made for lying. Speech has lying in its DNA, literally. The octopus can change its color and texture to mimic its environment to an uncanny degree, the better to fool a potential predator. I see no reason to deny that this is a conscious intentional act on the octopus’s part: it is trying to deceive another animal, to produce a false belief (or some equivalent). It is telling a lie. It isn’t under the illusion that it has become part of its environment; it knows quite well that it is still a squishy tasty octopus. Butterflies deceive with their wing designs, the better to survive in a world of butterfly eaters. Some predators mimic their prey in order to get in close. Some male animals impersonate females so as to elude the notice of the presiding alpha male, thereby gaining mating opportunities. We also have stick insects, parrots, and cuckoos. Deceiving is a tried-and-true means of surviving and reproducing. Humans disguise themselves in war and love (camouflage and make-up, respectively), impersonate others, play mimetic games, wear wigs, dress up, etc. Human life is rife with mimetic deception. With it we communicate falsehoods constantly. We could even say that genes are mimics, copy-cats: they copy each other as they are passed down the ancestral line. The mimetic gene. Genes can’t survive without the power to imitate other genes. The biological world is an imitation game.

Now suppose we have persuaded ourselves that meaning in human languages depends on mimetic neural machinery and overt behavior; in short, that speech acts are imitative. To make things simple, let’s suppose that the speech act is (perhaps covertly) mimetic (think onomatopoeia). The phonology mimics the phonology of other speakers, and the meaning itself is constituted by acts of mimicry, internal and external, past and present, original or derivative (for concreteness you might think of it as an imitative act of the imagination). Then we can draw the following conclusion: meaning is inherently deceptive—not all the time, to be sure, but potentially, dispositionally, intrinsically. It is built for lying, designed for it. It can easily slip into lying mode. But isn’t that exactly what we observe about human speech? it functions as a powerful organ of deception. It isn’t as if sentences stubbornly refuse to tell a lie; they are practically on the point of it all the time. Language is not designed with truthfulness in mind; it is designed with lying in mind. It is really good at lying. It has an uncanny ability to deceive, like the octopus’s epidermis. And that is not surprising, given that its roots lie in deceptive mimicry.

Did speech evolve precisely so as to deceive—is that why meaning exists? Not to inform, but to misinform. We can imagine such a scenario: a social animal striving to survive in a world of competitors, conspecific and interspecific. Lying is a way of life (part of the species’ “form of life”). Bartering, mating, befriending, stealing, tricking, bull-shitting, manipulating, exploiting: all these will naturally call on a person’s ability to tell a convincing lie, of varying shades of gray. Those with the “gift of the (deceptive) gab” will win out in the struggle for survival—the smooth talkers, the oracular fibbers. Speech is power, and power requires persuasion. It could be done with non-linguistic imitation perhaps, but language streamlines the process; it is the greatest engine of deception ever invented by nature—even better than the octopus’s skin! Thus, the human brain assigns precious space to language and its deceptive machinery. True, we sometimes use it non-deceptively—we call that “teaching”—but we also, and primarily, use it manipulatively, employing our prior mimetic prowess. This would explain why only we have the awesome power of language at our disposal; for we are the deceptive animal par excellence. We live by strategic deception. Language is cognitively expensive, so a species will not adopt it lightly; but our social existence came to depend on our ability to mislead and deceive and misdirect. Call this the “deception hypothesis”: meaning evolved in humans in order to prop up and promote our deceptive proclivities (it wasn’t for the poetry or the altruism). We deceive, therefore meaning exists. Language has allowed us to become unbelievable liars (very believable ones). We can out-deceive all-comers. Meaning is saturated with the bitter juice of deception. A proposition is a lie waiting to happen. The theory of meaning is therefore the theory of linguistic mimetic deception. Syntax and phonetics are the enablers of mendacious meaning. Children start lying as soon as they start talking; they aren’t stupid, they realize what kind of power they now possess. Semantic knowledge is knowledge of the possibilities of deception—you just have to produce a few sounds in a grammatical order and you can control the world! To mean is to have power over other people’s minds—the greatest power of all. Propaganda is just the natural upshot of the mimetic history of human speech. Language is built on deceptive foundations. It is as if the octopus had a language that evolved from its powers of mimicry; that language would have deception built into its foundations. Thus, the mimicry theory of meaning leads to the deception hypothesis. We have lying in our linguistic bones. Meaning is fundamentally unethical.[2]

[1] See my “Meaning Explained (Finally)”.

[2] This isn’t to say it can’t be ethical; it clearly can. Some of us are more ethical speakers than others. But the theory I am sketching awards pride of place to the deceptive powers of meaning: this is what recommended meaning to amoral natural selection—what gave speakers the edge in the fight for survival. It wasn’t that speaking could benefit other people (how would that help me?); it was that speaking served the speaker’s interests by allowing a measure of control over others. Crudely, speaking enables me to enlist you in my survival plans, by hook or by lying crook. The gene for meaning is a selfish gene, and lying is just one tool at its disposal (a particularly sharp one). Meaning is a device (an adaptation, a weapon) for misleading individuals with whom I am competing. No doubt this produced an evolutionary arms race in which humans tried to out-deceive each other linguistically. As it were, Shakespeare is the alpha male (Jane Austen is the alpha female). Insincerity is like a sharp tooth—good for getting your way in a ruthless world. Ethics pits itself against meaning, inter alia.

My Honest Views

I think David Lewis was off his rocker, I think Donald Davidson was far too impressed by elementary logic and decision theory, I think Willard Quine was a mediocre logician with some philosophical side-interests, I think Daniel Dennett never understood philosophy, I think Michael Dummett was a dimwit outside of his narrow specializations, I think P.F. Strawson struggled to understand much of philosophy, I think Gilbert Ryle was a classicist who wanted philosophy gone by any means necessary, I think Gareth Evans had no philosophical depth, I think John Searle was too wedded to common sense, I think Jerry Fodor had no idea about philosophy and didn’t care, I think Saul Kripke was a mathematician with a passing interest in certain limited areas of philosophy, I think Hilary Putnam was a scientist-linguist who found philosophy incomprehensible, I think Ludwig Wittgenstein was a philosophical ignoramus too arrogant to learn some history, I think Bertrand Russell was only interested in skepticism, I think Gottlob Frege was a middling mathematician with no other philosophical interests, I think the positivists were well-meaning idiots, I think Edmund Husserl had no interest in anything outside his own consciousness, I think Martin Heidegger and John-Paul Sartre were mainly psychological politicians, I think John Austin was a scientifically illiterate language student, I think Noam Chomsky was neither a professional linguist nor a philosopher nor a psychologist but some sort of uneasy combination, I think the vast majority of current philosophers have no idea what philosophy is about and struggle to come to terms with it, I think philosophy has been a shambles since Descartes, I think Plato and Aristotle were philosophical preschoolers, I think no one has ever really grasped the nature of philosophical problems, I think the human brain is a hotbed of bad philosophy (and that is its great glory).