How to Do Other Things With Words

Summary

Nomina si nescis, perit et cognitio rerum.

(Lucretius, quoted by B. F. Skinner in Verbal Behavior, 1957, p. 441).

John Austin's masterpiece, How to Do Things with Words, was not just a contribution to philosophy; it has proven to be a major contribution to linguistics, one of the founding documents of pragmatics, the investigation of how we use words to accomplish various ends in the social world. Strangely, not much attention has been paid by philosophers – or by psychologists and linguists – to how we use words in private, you might say, to think. As Wittgenstein (1967, p. 17e) once noted, ‘It is very noteworthy that what goes on in thinking practically never interests us.’

John Maynard Keynes was once asked if he thought in words or pictures. His reply was ‘I think in thoughts.’ This is in one way an admirable answer. It abruptly dismisses the two leading mistakes about what thinking might be. But it also encourages that lack of interest that Wittgenstein noted. What, then, are thoughts, if not words or pictures? And more particularly, what is the role of words in thinking? To this overdue question, I want to explore, very tentatively, a few neglected avenues.