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One of the downsides to my not writing more frequently is that when I actually do sit down to write I feel terribly out of date with everything.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 The second is to respond to your post on Austin (though I fear that response will probably now be very much out of date).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.

Language and thought

Wow, lots of interesting stuff from you recently. There's actually something in my own reading that I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on, but first I should respond to some of what you said. Most pressingly, I suppose, I should answer for what I said about thoughts and poo.

First of all, you say you don't recognize yourself in my characterization of thoughts sitting in the head like poo in the bowels, there yet unformed, and then given shape as they leave the body. Maybe it was the provocative way I put it? What I meant is that you seem to have a model of the relationship between thought and language such that thought is something that exists in the head independently, and language is a tool for putting those thoughts across to others, and that this tool can shape or distort the original thought. At one point in the post I was responding to you describe language as a "vehicle for thought." If language is a vehicle for thought, that suggests that thought is a kind of substance, something that can be transmitted but that requires a medium in which to be transmitted. Later on, your write: "Thoughts have to be coded before they can be communicated, and when they are decoded by someone else, they never quite match what they started out as." Here the metaphor isn't a vehicle but a code. A code is something that can be transmitted between two people, but what the code encodes is a message that exists independently of the code. Unpacking the metaphor, you seem to think of thought as a something that isn't quite language but enough like language that it can be "encoded" in language. It's these sorts of things that made me associate you with my poo analogy.

Actually, I think the code metaphor is quite telling: a literal code is a language that is translated from another language. If we follow the metaphor out, thought itself must be a kind of language in order to be encoded. And if so, do we have any better model for the kind of language that thought is than language itself?

It occurs to me that I don't have to reach as far as Wittgenstein to object to this model of the relationship between language and thought. Isn't this really one of the main targets of Derrida's work in the 60's and 70's? In "Signature Event Context," Derrida tries to deconstruct the notion that communication consists essentially of transmitting encoded thoughts from one mind to another, and in particular that writing is simply an extension of this transmission that allows us to communicate with people who aren't present. You know Derrida better than I do, so I'll let you judge whether you think he'd find your characterization of language as "something that couldn't possibly cause any objection."

In your defense, you insist that we can't simply say that thought = language and condemn children and others who don't think to thoughtlessness. I don't think I want to say anything as crude as that. But I do want to say that our concept of thought is closely tied to our concept of language, so that we're only able to ascribe thoughts to infants and animals by virtue of giving words to those thoughts. I think it's unproblematic to say that the infant wants its mommy even if it can't yet cry "mama." The mistake, I think, comes in then reifying this "thought," and thinking that there's a something in the infant's head which is the thought-that-I-want-mommy, and which we're identifying when we say the infant wants its mommy. That leap--from saying the child wants its mommy to saying that there's a definite thought in the child's head to the effect that it wants its mommy--then leads us to suppose that when the child learns to speak and says "I want mommy," it then too has a thought in its head, only now it's able to put that thought into words.

What I'm saying when I question your characterization of language is that I question this leap from how we talk about thoughts to the ontology of thoughts. Ascribing thoughts to infants, animals, and even other talkative people, is simply a way of talking, a way of describing behaviour that we find useful and illuminating. But if you think about how we use this language of thought ascription--and especially how we first come to learn to use phrases like "he's thinking..."--you'll see that this language doesn't really consist of descriptions of inner states, but descriptions of behaviour. Which isn't to say I'm a behaviourist--I'm not saying that thought is behaviour--but just that we learn how to talk about people's mental lives by seeing how they behave, not by seeing into their souls.

This might also explain what I said about thoughts on the tips of tongues. I (and Wittgenstein) wasn't denying that we can often have that experience, and that often we then find the words we were looking for. The point, rather, is that that expression ("it's on the tip of my tongue") isn't a description of my consciousness, where I can as it were see the thought sitting there, but through a thick enough haze that I can't accurately find words for it. Rather, it's a way of expressing the fact that I don't quite have the words I want, but I hope to come up with them soon. As Wittgenstein suggests, if no one ever then came up with the words, we wouldn't have use for this expression.

So yes, I agree with you that thought and language aren't the same thing, and that it's perfectly legitimate to talk about thoughts I can't find words for or what have you. But I want to resist the further inference that these thoughts are things of a sort, mental things, or even mental processes as you suggest.

From Vancouver, many months late

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As usual, I've read and thought far less than I should have in the months since I've written, so I have far less to report on that I should.

I have, however, read Of Grammatology for the first time, and tomorrow I'll finish Henry Staten's mostly excellent book, Wittgenstein and Derrida, which essentially (and I think rightly) aims to identify something like a deconstructionist method at work in Wittgenstein's writings (he calls Wittgenstein unique among Derrida's predecessors in having developed "a consistently deconstructive standpoint").

I was reading Of Grammatology more just to get a sense of what's in it and get a feel for Derrida's style than to do a detailed and critical reading. The stuff that's most relevant to my thesis are some of the essays in Margins of Philosophy (especially "Signature Event Context," "The Supplement of Copula," and "White Mythology") and Limited Inc. But I figured I really should at some point read Derrida's big book. I still think I should just read "Plato's Pharmacy." I read the first twenty pages before other things took over, but it still strikes me as the most lucid thing of Derrida's that I've read.

Still, it was good fun, even at a skimming pace that didn't allow for much careful rumination. Derrida's a wonderful reader of texts (and the attention he gives to Rousseau reaffirms my sense that I really need to get to know Rousseau a lot better) and I'm often impressed by how convincing his readings are considering how strikingly original they are too. There's a lot to learn from his intense attention to neglected details. I think my other reading in recent weeks has been affected by it (more on that in a bit).

I might as well say a few words about why Derrida's relevant to my thesis, which will also tie into my wanting to pick up the thread of our now long-stale conversation about logic and language. The starting point is Derrida's reading of Austin in "Signature Event Context," which will help me develop a question about the appeal to ordinary language in philosophy, which is whether and how "ordinary language" is supposed to exclude other forms of language. One easy answer to that question is that they're contrasting it with "metaphysical" language, which the heroes of my thesis are trying to expose not as an alternative form of language, but as nonsense, a misfiring attempt to say something that in fact results in saying nothing. But, as Derrida points out, Austin also seems to want to exclude all sorts of other "fictional" discourse, from words spoken on a stage to jokes to recited poems. This all seems innocuous enough within the context of Austin's project, but again, it's part of what's impressive about Derrida, that he can pull on the innocuous side remark and make the whole edifice collapse. To Derrida, Austin's exclusionary gesture is an attempt to retain a totalizing control over the words we utter, to be able to say and mean exactly what we want to say and mean, without risk of infelicity. This is all the more interesting as a line of criticism, since it implies a kind of psychologism--locating meaning in the mind of the intending speaker--that Austin very deliberately criticizes. So if he's at fault here, he's very subtly so.

I could go on at great length about all this. One thing it does for me is to help me distinguish Austin from Wittgenstein around the concept of ordinary language as home. Both Austin and Wittgenstein register sin-inflected expressions of disgust at philosophical language as somehow corrupting us and drawing us away from our ordinary inhabitation of the world and of language. But Austin seems to believe that there's such a thing as a fully satisfactory inhabitation of the world and of language that his appeal to ordinary language is supposed to get us back to. It's this nostalgia for a home that never existed in the first place that I think Derrida is essentially attacking. Wittgenstein, by contrast, also uses this metaphor of the ordinary as home but, I argue, is also aware of the ordinary as fundamentally unstable, not as a place of rest, but as a place of recognition of the impossibility of a place of rest.

In this respect, he shares with Derrida a sense of dynamic play being always at work in the workings of language. This notion of play is what I take to be central to the argument of my thesis. I can only envy Derrida's ability to read texts: his genius consists in large part, I think, of being able to find just the detail that will show that the most totalizing texts are constantly at play despite themselves.

This all ties in only tangentially to some of the stuff you said about logic and language many moons ago. As you know, I think I'm mostly in sympathy with most of what you say, or at least the spirit in which you say it. But I still object to the way you conceive of thought as something we struggle to put into words, and that's often distorted or enhanced or diminished by the effort of being put into words. What I'd suggest--and I draw this largely from Wittgenstein--is that you're working with a conception of thought that doesn't seem to me to be fully coherent. At least, it seems like you're operating with a picture of thoughts as these definite things that exist somewhere in the head, and which then take on a particular form when squeezed out of the mouth. Sort of like feces sitting in the bowels, which then take on the shape of distinctive turds when they come out the anus (I thought you'd appreciate the comparison). I'm not sure we can coherently talk about thoughts without their being linguistic. Or at least, if you ask yourself where this idea comes from, that there are thoughts in the head, it's because we sometimes say things and then claim we'd been thinking about them before and couldn't find words for them, or talk about things being on the tips of our tongues, implying that the thought's there but the words haven't come yet. But these manners of speaking aren't descriptions of thoughts bouncing about in our brains like turds in our bowels. They're just ways of speaking about the ways we speak. Or, to quote from the master:

"The word is on the tip of my tongue." What is going on in my consciousness? That is not the point at all. Whatever did go on was not what was meant by that expression. It is of more interest what went on in my behaviour.—"The word is on the tip of my tongue" tells you: the word which belongs here has escaped me, but I hope to find it soon. For the rest the verbal expression does no more than certain wordless behaviour.
James, in writing of this subject, is really trying to say: "What a remarkable experience! The word is not there yet, and yet in a certain sense is there,—or something is there, which cannot grow into anything but this word."—But this is not experience at all. Interpreted as experience it does indeed look odd. As does intention, when it is interpreted as the accompaniment of action; or again, like minus one interpreted as a cardinal number.
The words "It's on the tip of my tongue" are no more the expression of an experience than "Now I know how to go on!"—We use them in certain situations, and they are surrounded by behaviour of a special kind, and also by some characteristic experiences. In particular they are frequently followed by finding the word. (Ask yourself: "What would it be like if human beings never found the word that was on the tip of their tongue?")

I'm very tired and running out of steam, so I'll just say a few last things about animals. The first is that I've been reading some interesting stuff, starting with Coeztee's The Lives of Animals, moving on to a short collection of essays called Philosophy and Animal Life, with contributions from Stanley Cavell and (most interesting among them) Cora Diamond that deal with Coetzee's book, and now a book by my supervisor called The Wounded Animal. I won't go on at length here, but will hopefully return to it all sometime soon. Part of what I find fascinating is that the discussion deals on one hand with our relations with animals, and on the other hand with the tension between philosophy and literature and the "difficulty of reality" they both confront. And I don't think the two are just coincidentally related: part of my interest in animals comes from the difficulties they throw up for our own sense of our place in the world and our attempts to make sense of it.

I'm also trying to write a companion piece to Pork. The ultimate plan is to have a trio of short plays called Three Little Pigs, which are Pork, Ham, and Bacon, respectively. One of the things I've been reading is Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Pigling Bland, which is fascinatingly full of contradictions, which Potter herself must have been at least partly conscious of creating (it's in noting these contradictions that I think my recent reading of Derrida has heightened my sensitivity to such things). We have these pigs on a farm who behave for all the world like normal pigs until it's decided that they're too much hassle and are sold off. Pigling Bland then becomes an anthropomorphic pig who has to dress up like a proper young man and go off on his own into the world as young men in such stories so often do. Except he has to go off to the market, and we all know why pigs go to market (there's a similar tension in "This little piggie went to market..." which is all the more odd for the fact that one of the piggies eats roast beef). He even carries a note permitting him to cross county lines, which one would need if one were meat, but not if one were a person. And the story continues along these lines, with Pigling Bland ultimately escaping from the clutches of his (never explicitly named) butchers to start a life of farming potatoes. A Bildungsroman where the animal grows up into humanity. All very strange stuff, especially for a children's story. Though I guess children's stories are always deeply weird.