Philosophical language — inasmuch as it is a “distorted abstraction of the language of the actual world” (Marx, “German Ideology”), of ordinary language — is detached from ‘actual life,’ from the myriads of techniques and practices that give sense to our concepts. Philosophers, in abstract away from, and failing to pay attention to, the practices in which our language is embedded, have rendered their philosophical (pseudo)concepts useless, and consequently senseless, by removing these concepts from their proper place in our language, our practices, in our lives. Philosophical (pseudo)concepts become idle: they no longer do the work we need them to do. It is only by “bringing words back from their [philosophical] to their everyday use” (PI §116) that we can render them useful and sensical again, and avoid the conceptual confusions wrought by “language on holiday” (PI §38). The reason for this grim predicament of philosophy is that many philosophers persist in treating concepts as objects (i.e., Platonism) and all expressions as descriptions (i.e., Representationalism, ‘the Augustinian picture of language’). In effect, they are treating language /in toto/ as answerable to reality; this is one root of metaphysics: the conflation of conceptual and factual matters, of rules and propositions, and the assimilation of the former into the latter. This conflation renders metaphysics nonsensical because “[logical]-grammar is antecedent to truth. It delimits the bounds of sense, hence any description of reality put forward to justify grammar presupposes the grammatical rules. And since nothing lies beyond the bounds of sense but nonsense, then its ‘description’ cannot justify drawing the boundaries thus.” (Baker & Hacker, “Skepticism, Rules and Language”) Metaphysics is hoisted by its own petard, since the intelligibility of a comparison of any segment of logical-grammar with reality will presuppose some logical-grammar — some standards of correctness, validity, or truth according to which we can evaluate whether or not some proposition is correct or incorrect, valid or invalid, true or false. “All standards of ‘correctness,’ ‘validity,’ and ‘truth’ are relative to the logical rules or principles of one or another formal language or linguistic framework. Since standards of ‘validity’ and ‘correctness’ are thus relative to the choice of linguistic framework, it makes no sense to ask whether any such choice of framework is itself ‘valid’ or ‘correct.’ For the logical rules relative to which alone these notions can first be well defined are not yet in place. Such rules are constitutive of the concepts of ‘validity’ and ‘correctness’ and are in this sense /a priori/ [conceptual] rather than empirical [factual].” (Michael Friedman, “Dynamics of Reason”)
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 23:42:25 +0000
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