thought, language, and Austin

One of the downsides to my not writing more frequently is that when I actually do sit down to write I feel terribly out of date with everything. I mean, I feel like tell you that I've really enjoyed your thoughts on John Locke, but I worry you'll reply "John who?" while digging back through hazy memories of how you spent your summer.

But I will have three things to say. The first is to continue our conversation about poo and thoughts, which fortunately isn't linked to any particular readings we've been doing lately (though I'm curious whether your reading of Limited Inc has made my position clearer to you), so doesn't maybe feel the lag in time as much. The second is to respond to your post on Austin (though I fear that response will probably now be very much out of date). And the third is to say a few words about Derrida based on a second draft of the chapter I've been working on.

So, thought and language. I'm not quite sure what to say here. At least, I'm not sure what to say that isn't just a variant on things I've already said, so I worry that what I will have to say here won't move the conversation forward any. But here are some thoughts anyway.

It seems like your resistance to what I'm saying is at least in part motivated by the sense that I'm denying something important, that is, that I'm trying to deny that there's anything going on inside of us beyond the stuff that we can put into words. Would my position be any more palatable if I reaffirmed that I don't mean to be denying this, or anything for that matter? Rather, what I'm trying to do is to shift from looking at the mysterious things-inside-of-us to looking at the ways we talk, or struggle to talk, about them. And the reason I'm trying to do that is that I think talking about our inner life as consisting of things-inside-of-us on analogy to the way that we can talk about the world around us as consisting of things-outside-of-us is a bad analogy. On one hand, it gets my access to other people's minds wrong: it sets up a framework for other minds scepticism, where each person is a shell covering over an inner world about which we have only the indirect and unreliable testimony of their words and behaviour. One problem with this position is that it implies that there's some more direct and reliable testimony that we could access if only circumstances were otherwise. On the other hand, it gets my access to my own mind wrong: my mind doesn't consist of thoughts and moods and sensations floating about that I can point to in the way that I can point to bits of my body or bits of the world. You might say that my access to my own mind is too close to work on the sort of object-and-designation model that we use for talking about things in the outside world. When I talk about what's going on inside of me, I'm not describing inner facts, I'm expressing them. And that's why my descriptions of other people's inner states aren't some sort of second-best unreliable description: their own testimony isn't description at all.

I'm not denying that we have moods, or that they're sometimes difficult to express, but I am saying that when we do express moods, what we're doing is precisely expressing them, not describing them. It's not as if they're these cloudy regions of inner space that are difficult to find an accurate description for. It's rather that our vocabulary in many respects falls short of our desire to express how it is with us sometimes.

I should also add that moods are distinct from the sorts of thoughts we began by talking about in that they don't have propositional content. That is, I can have the thought-that such-and-such, but I don't have a mood-that anything; I simply have a mood. And one of my initial concerns was the notion that propositional thoughts are somehow able to sit in the head in non-verbal form before being given the clothing of language and sent out into the world. And part of my point there is simply that whatever ineffable something is going on inside of you, it can't be the thought-that such-and-such because if it had propositional content it would necessarily be linguistic.

I don't know if any of that helps or adds anything. I'm not feeling particularly eloquent. But hopefully it will at least keep the ball rolling. And maybe something I said will click in a way that's helpful. I think it would help if I could sit you down with the Philosophical Investigations and maybe The Claim of Reason. At least that would make you see the position I'm arguing from, even if it doesn't make you agree.

Incidentally, this all connects with Austin, so I might as well talk about him in the same post. Because one of the signal contributions of How To Do Things With Words, I would have said, is precisely that it undermines the model of communication on which language is simply a means of transmitting mental contents from one mind to another. If that were the case, "I promise" would be the description of an inward act, and you could break promises using Hippolytus' line (which Austin actually distorts by quoting out of context) about how "my tongue swore but my heart did not." Performative utterances, if nothing else, are a fine example of the fact that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting thoughts.

And then Derrida's criticism of Austin precisely takes the form of saying that Austin is still married to a conception of language that ties it closely to consciousness. I sort of half-buy Derrida's criticism. But at any rate, you can see how both Austin and Derrida share this sense that language isn't simply a matter of transmitting pre-existing thoughts. I don't know if they help you see why I want to resist that view.

As for the value of Austin more generally, well, I don't know if further study or discussion has changed your opinion of him or reaffirmed it. I think in part it helps to see Austin within his philosophical context, and in particular working at a time when logical positivism is in the ascendant and when A. J. Ayer is the big cheese at Oxford. This is a school of thought according to which utterances can be divided into scientific propositions that make assertions about the world and "non-cognitive" utterances expressing emotion or metaphysics or religious sentiment or whatever else, and that lack any real propositional content. So one of the things Austin's doing is complicating and undermining that picture. And that part of his project might be less evident and feel less pressing in a time when logical positivism isn't so prominent.

Though there's still a tendency often to assume that statements are descriptive. It's a very tempting assumption. And here I have to confess to some impatience with your remark that Austin's not saying anything you don't already know. Austin himself remarks in the very first paragraph that nothing he's going to say is particularly difficult or contentious, and the tone throughout is marked with the bemusement of someone who's not entirely sure why he's bothering to tell us all of this. This notion of saying nothing that isn't already obvious is characteristic not just of Wittgenstein as well, but also phenomenology. It's one of the similarities I remark on between Wittgenstein and Heidegger, for instance: in Being and Time, Heidegger claims to simply be describing what's before us, and that if we haven't noticed something like the distinction between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit before, that's because it's so obvious that we often pass over it. Like Poe's Purloined Letter. So simply saying that Austin's saying things that are obvious isn't in itself a criticism. It's only a criticism if you want to say that he's saying things that are both obvious and unlikely to cause problems when we pass them over unnoticed. And I think he has some claim to make on that score.

And for my own part, I'm writing a thesis about this notion of appealing to ordinary language and I find Austin very interesting for methodological reasons. I think that aspect of his work, while on full display in How To Do Things With Words, has a more obvious critical edge in Sense and Sensibilia or "A Plea for Excuses." For whatever that's worth.

As for insults, I'm not sure I have much to add there. Except to suggest that the point of insulting people is, to borrow a phrase, to give them a tongue-lashing, that is to give them the verbal equivalent of a blow. And just as there are no conventional forms of beating people up (as there are with other physical actions, like handshakes or hailing taxis), there are no conventional forms for insulting them. "I insult you" simply wouldn't have the desired perlocutionary force. Part of Austin's interest in performative utterances is precisely that he thinks they're too often assimilated to locutionary or perlocutionary acts.