My Dissertation, Part 3: Ordinary Language Philosophy

Here we find ourselves at the furthest point in our detour during a dissertation ostensibly about transhumanism. Last week I introduced the theological concept of natural law, promising it would pay dividends for thinking about bioenhancements and other ethical questions, and this week I introduce another school of thought: ordinary language philosophy. (Fair warning—this is a dense one.)

To understand ordinary language philosophy, one must understand its roots in the work of the twentieth-century philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and how he changed how people thought about language. Before his time, the dominant view of language was that words acted essentially as names attached to objects, as labels that referenced one or more particular meanings. In such a model, “ball” names a round object, “player” a person kicking the ball, and “score” either the action of kicking the ball in the net or the cumulative number of times that has happened. However, Wittgenstein found this naming model to be fundamentally misleading.

Instead, Wittgenstein asserted, “the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” Words, in his account, do not merely point to objects but enact particular functions and provoke certain responses. Wittgenstein demonstrates the way language reflects use in his example of the builders: one can imagine two builders who work together on a project through a primitive language of sorts, by simply calling to each other “slab!” or “beam!” and the other brings the relevant materials. Of course “slab” names the slab—an image of the slab might appear in the builder’s mind or he might point to it—but does it refer only to that slab or to all slabs? And if one builder calls out “slab!” and the other simply allows an image of a slab to appear in their mind, he has heard his colleague and maybe even understood him to an extent but in no way has he actually participated in their language.

With this example in mind, Wittgenstein introduces the notion of language-games. By use of the term “game,” Wittgenstein intends to highlight that our speaking is “part of an activity, or of a form of life.” As with the builders, language organically develops in a give-and-take fashion around use-cases in a particular context; it emerges from the dynamic and evolving interactions between individuals and within communities. The builder’s assistant learns “slab” first because the other points to a slab and says the word, but he learns the meaning of “slab!” when he watches another worker carry over a slab in response or when he is harangued for bringing over a beam instead. All of this—not just the words—the thoughts and the actions become a part of their language-game.

Wittgenstein’s game metaphor also leads to his concept of family resemblance. The term “game” has a wide variety of uses: board games, Olympic sports, children’s imaginative play, game theory—these share no singular core meaning, yet their overlapping characteristics bind them under the umbrella of games. Like individuals within a family tree, the image of games underscores how various instances of a concept are connected by a network of overlapping similarities, rather than by a singular quality common to all cases.

The metaphor of games should likewise direct our attention to the presence and surfacing of rules within these games. Just as games are bound by participants’ acknowledgement of certain rules, so language is similarly contingent on shared practices that function in many ways like game rules. Some rules are spoken, others are implied or understood. Some rules are strictly enforced, others are more like guidelines that can be broken. And still, for other rules, to break them is to step outside of the game—it is not an infringement but to simply play something else entirely. These rules, rather than being arbitrary prescriptions for a preferred approach, are articulations of the game itself, emergent descriptions of how the game has been constructed to function. The regulation for soccer players to kick the ball with their feet is not an imposition for the most convenient game, it is a recognition of what the game is—to pick the ball up is to not play soccer. Or more fundamentally, to not try to win is to not play soccer.

Taken cumulatively, the rules of our games suggest a grammar for language and our life in words. And grammar indicates a web of sense: some things make sense within this grammar, other things do not (and thus strike us as misplaced or absurd). When someone employs language in ways that deviate dramatically from this established coherence, we are compelled to say, “That doesn’t make sense… that’s not what that means.” Crucial to this point is the role of the community. Life in community is an ongoing negotiation of both language and practice. The grammar of our lives is communally maintained, disputed, and revised as we speak to and interact with one another. Of course, this communal nature introduces inherent risk into language—the risk of the individual. There always remains the possibility that someone might challenge or reject the communal meaning—“That is not what I mean by _____.” We can imagine any number of such cases: “That is not what I mean by seasoning,” one might insist, “for me, sand, not salt, is seasoning.” For some matters, we may be content to label the person eccentric and go on about our lives. For other matters, the individual might lead to change within the community; either we agree that their way is better than ours (“Who knew sand could be so tasty?”) or we may ostracize them from the community (“Well, we’ll see how that works out for you…”). Still, in other matters, having no metaphysical basis, having no appeal beyond the community, seems to give us no ground to stand on, and the disagreement seems more dire—“The Trinity isn’t what I mean by God.” And in those circumstances we may still say, “Well, we’ll see…” but more often all that is left for us to do is acknowledge that they simply spoke to the wrong people, that they’re not a part of our group.

This emphasis on the community may be worrisome. Wittgenstein, so far, seems to be leading us toward the prospect of a purely conventional reality—one in which language and concepts, everything that structures our lives, emerge out of their practical use and adoption by the community we find ourselves in. Everything is merely conventional. As Stanley Cavell phrases it, “We begin to feel, or ought to, terrified that maybe language (and understanding, and knowledge) rests upon very shaky foundations—a thin net over an abyss.” This contingency marks a decisive departure from what we saw last week. For Aquinas, language and our social conventions reflect reality precisely because reality itself has an intelligible, rational order independent of our conventions. The idea that we find in Wittgenstein, by contrast, that our words and concepts could float free from any moorings in reality, might seem dangerously fragile—a universe reduced to communal decision and relativity.

Yet even if Wittgenstein resists conceiving of language as hooking onto something external to itself—something to be verified, the really real, or the “metaphysical”—he still holds that we have criteria for our concepts in language. We are agreeing on something. And these criteria for agreement, the standards or norms guiding meaningful language use, exist around and on and in our forms of life. The forms of life are, for Wittgenstein, the “rough ground” on which our language finds traction. Others describe our criteria as stimuli and pressures we respond to in order to learn how not to “bump into things,” or they depict our life in words as resembling bats’ use of echo-location, where our language-games are refined by how they actually make contact in the world.

What we find, then, is that reality itself necessitates that we live in certain ways—ways that orient us practically and conceptually. Things make sense precisely insofar as they cohere within our ordinary practices of life and the world we encounter daily. All conventions find their ultimate foundation in nature. This rootedness may be more immediate in some conventions than others. The human reaction to wince in pain is more natural than the need to call a pencil a “pencil” instead of, say, a “frindle”—yet even in the latter case, there is some material history to its name, a reason we call it that.

Consider the game of soccer. The rules of soccer are clearly a creation of convention—there was no preexistent game of soccer. Yet its rules nonetheless resonate with our communal sense of what is achievable, enjoyable, and collectively comprehensible. The size of the ball, the width of the field, the number of players on the field—all of these are calibrated (intuitively or meticulously) to correlate with something naturally recognizable about human bodies, group coordination, and spectators’ pleasure. Of course, these rules can change and have changed as either the world around the game changes or as we refine and negotiate what rules make sense.

All of this leads, finally, to what is meant by “ordinary language philosophy,” that is, Wittgenstein’s therapeutic approach to philosophical confusion. He believed philosophers invent their own problems by wrenching words from the contexts in which they normally function—“when language goes on holiday.” Detached from ordinary use, words begin to misbehave, producing pseudo-questions about truth, knowledge, or being (“Is that table really real?”). The task of philosophy, then, is not to discover new facts but to dissolve confusion by grammatical investigation—by returning words from their nonsensical use to their everyday homes. Clarification restores meaning, for when we attend to the criteria embedded in ordinary language, we rediscover the sense our practices already contain. By refusing appeal to some metaphysical court of appeals beyond human agreement, Wittgenstein insists that understanding arises only within our shared linguistic life. When disagreement arises, it is we, not an external authority, who must make sense together.

This then is the core of ordinary language philosophy: a reorientation away from appeals to outside authority and toward our ordinary lives and how our language and social conventions normally operate. There is a lot of disagreement here with Aquinas’s conception of natural law, but hopefully, the overlap is already manifesting. If not, that’s the topic for next week. How does ordinary language philosophy complement natural law, and jointly, what do they tell us about Christian ethics?