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Contours and Barriers: What Is It to Draw the Limits of Moral Language?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2009
Abstract
Does language limit the moral thoughts we can have? To answer that, I distinguish between two kinds of limits: (1) Boundaries or barriers fence things out. Identification and erection of linguistic barriers, defines, diagnoses, or places restrictions on what language can in principle grasp or be, and often involves abstraction from actual linguistic behavior. This is typically preformed by remarks I call ‘theses’; (2) Contours or outlines give real-life portrayals. Drawing the contours of a linguistic activity involves a certain attention to reality: to detail and particularity (‘Was this greeting contrived or genuine?’), and we typically draw contours by using remarks I call ‘helpers’. I examine the possibility that confusion can be diagnosed in Sabina Lovibond's attempt to apply the idea that moral language has necessary boundaries, and explain the alternative of drawing linguistic contours. I then examine Richard Rorty's position according to which the fact that we can shape our language indicates that the boundaries of language do not encompass all possible sense, and compare Rorty's discussion with Sarah Bachelard's discussion of euthanasia. My claim here is that trying to improve on the language we have might be part of drawing its contours, rather than redefining its boundaries. The discussion reveals a difference between two kinds of contour drawing, and thus between two kinds of helpers: ones that help to draw the contours of the actuality of linguistic activities, and ones that help to draw the contours of their potentiality. Finally, I argue that the value of drawing contours instead of barriers is that the former better reveal the fact that we care about our ways of making sense.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2009
References
1 McDowell, , ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist, 62 (1979), 331–50, 331CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 See McDowell's, Mind and World (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 93Google Scholar.
3 This ‘quietism’ in ethics parallels McDowell's quietist reading of Wittgenstein on rule-following. Here, too, our next move in following a mathematical series is justifiable only from within the language and knowledge we have as members of a linguistic life in which we develop mathematical series, teach the practice, correct those who fail to do it right, and so on. Only within there are standards of objectivity.
4 Lovibond, , Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Ethical Formation (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University press, 2002).
5 Ethical Formation, op. cit. note 4, 32. The quotation contains a quotation from McDowell's Mind and World, op. cit. note 2, 91.
6 Ethical Formation, Op. cit. note 4, 50. Lovibond's italic.
7 Op. cit. 50.
8 See Diamond's, Cora ‘Wittgenstein, Mathematics, and Ethics: Resisting the Attractions of Realism’, in Sluga, H. and Stern, D. (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 226–260, 246CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There, the idea of indirection is connected with Lovibond's views. Indirections are also discussed in Diamond's, ‘Wright's Wittgenstein’, in The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT press, 1991), 206–223, 210–2Google Scholar, and Diamond's, ‘Does Bismarck Have a Beetle in His Box?’ in Crary, A. and Read, R. (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 2000), 262–92, 267–8Google Scholar.
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10 Philosophical Investigations, op. cit. note 9, §374. I slightly altered Anscombe's translation.
11 Similar potentially confusing modes of presentation can be found in the writings of other quietists. McDowell writes: ‘If one attempted to reduce one's conception of what virtue requires to a set of rules, then, however subtle and thoughtful one was in drawing up the code, cases would inevitably turn up in which a mechanical application of the rules would strike one as wrong – and not necessarily because one had changed one's mind; rather, one's mind on the matter was not susceptible of capture in any universal formula’ (op. cit. note 1, 336). And again: ‘[T]he ascription of value that one cites in giving an agent's reason for an action, so far from revealing the rationality in the action to an imagined occupier of the external standpoint, need not even be intelligible from there’, in ‘Non-cognitivism and Rule-Following’, in Holtzman, S. H. and Leich, C. M. (eds.), Wittgenstein: to Follow a Rule, (London: Routledge, 1981), 141–162, 155Google Scholar. Alice Crary argues against the view that it is ‘possible to make sense of the idea of a wholly non-circular mode of discourse’, in ‘Wittgenstein and Ethics: A Discussion with Reference to On Certainty’, in Moyal-Sharrock, D. and Brenner, W. (eds.), Readings of Wittgenstein's On Certainty (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 275–301, 293CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I do not hold that these potentially confusing modes of presentation signify actual confusions on those writers' part. Below, I indicate how I think such quietist remarks ought to be read.
12 At some point, Lovibond talks about a ‘fantasized external standpoint’ and a delusion of an intellectual vantage point that would presumably allow for fully explicit reasoning. At the same time, she thinks the conception of this vantage point is intelligible enough to reject, and argues that ‘it’ ‘is in fact inaccessible’ (Ethical Formation, op. cit. note 4, 22). To perform this feat, Lovibond has to occupy the same, or a very similar, and according to her confused, vantage point. It would thus seem inevitable to ascribe to Lovibond the very same fantasy she diagnoses, if only the content of this fantasy could be clarified. In fact, nothing that made sense could, for that very fact, be the content of those fantasies and delusions. This is why Lovibond utilizes the language of fantasies and delusions, rather than of mistaken opinions.
13 Priest, Graham, in Beyond the Limits of Thought (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, makes a distinction between four kinds of limits: of the expressible, of the iterable, of cognition, and of conception. My argument helps to explain why classifications such as this do not solve the problem. Those categories are normally tied to one another, and we do not in fact have clear ideas of the one without the other. For instance, we do not have a clear idea of a thought whose reality does not involve expressibility. How a thought is expressed is normally part of its reality – its contours. So, we may argue that we can conceive of things we cannot express, thinking we have thereby separated two domains, and shown how the limits of the expressible can be crossed. But the problem will come back to haunt us when we try to draw the contours of (or characterize or even hint at) that which is conceivable but inexpressible. The philosophical problem is not solved merely by making those classifications. This is of course not to say that issues about those categories cannot be separated.
14 It should be noted that drawing the contours may be attempted in different ways. Wittgenstein's understanding of the ways in which that might be achieved has changed dramatically from the Tractatus to his later writings. Nevertheless, the kind of perspective thereby achieved on philosophical questions marks continuity in Wittgenstein's philosophy. See Diamond's, Cora ‘Criss-cross Philosophy’, in Ammereller, E. and Fischer, E. (eds.), Wittgenstein at Work: Method in the Philosophical Investigations (London: Routledge, 2004), 201–220Google Scholar; and Conant's, James ‘Why Worry about the Tractatus?’ in Stocker, B. (ed.), Post Analytic Tractatus (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 167–192Google Scholar.
15 This is partly why Wittgenstein argues: ‘If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them’ (op. cit. note 9, §128).
16 This does not in itself imply that there is room for dialetheism, defended by Graham Priest. According to Priest, there are true sentences whose negations are also true. ‘[T]he limits of thought are boundaries which cannot be crossed, but yet which are crossed’ (Beyond the Limits of Thought, op. cit. note 13, 3). However, there is room for investigating the usefulness of the law of non-contradiction.
17 Consider the sentence ‘to think truly is to think what is the case’. It can be used as a helper, e.g. in describing the activity of thinking the truth. Lovibond argues it is a ‘truistic thesis’ (Ethical Formation, op. cit. note 4, 19). She takes McDowell to infer from it ‘that for language using animals, the content of experience is essentially such as to lend itself to conceptual articulation’ (op. cit. 19–20). She then goes on in a footnote to ask whether ‘the uncontroversial fact that we often find it hard to put our thoughts and feelings into words’ discredits the inference, or constitutes counterevidence against it. This strengthens the impression that she uses the sentence as a thesis rather than a helper.
18 Philosophical Grammar, R. Rhees (ed.), A. Kenny (trans.), (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 185; Zettel G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (eds.), Anscombe, G. E. M. (trans.), (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), §320.
19 See, for example, Baker, G. P. and Hacker, P. M. S., Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar, and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 38Google Scholar.
20 Philosophical Investigations, op. cit. note 9, §83.
21 Op. cit. §133.
22 Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999Google Scholar.
23 Bachelard, ‘On Euthanasia: Blindspots in the Argument from Mercy’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 19(2) (2002), 131–40CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
24 Op. cit. note 22, 9.
25 Rorty insists that the process is completely contingent. At one point he compares language to a coral reef, and argues that ‘This analogy lets us think of ‘our language’ […] as something that took shape as a result of a great number of sheer contingencies' (op. cit. 16). He also claims that ‘genuine novelty can […] occur in a world of blind, contingent, mechanical forces’ (op. cit. note 22, 17), and shares an evolutionary picture of language: new languages, like ‘new forms of life constantly [kill] off old forms – not to accomplish a higher purpose, but blindly’ (op. cit. 19). He often treats thinking as passive, saying that vocabulary changes may be a natural result of prolonged muddles and confusion, at the end of which we simply find ourselves asking different questions and in general utilizing a new vocabulary and a new way of problematizing things. ‘Europe did not decide to accept the idioms of Romantic poetry, or of socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will that it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others’ (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit. note 22, 6). Rorty thus stirs clear of any positive suggestion about how these changes come about. Despite first impression, Rorty is not committed to completely non-intentional explanations that leave no room for reasoned changes. He argues that a language that has been newly accepted might be ‘a tool which happened to work better for certain purposes than any previous tool’ (op. cit. 19). At least to some extent and sometimes, then, vocabularies develop in response to certain purposes, and we might be a causal factor in the process.
26 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit. note 22, 8. Rorty thereby accepts a Davidsonian view of metaphor; op. cit. 19. See also Rorty's, ‘Unfamiliar Noises: Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor’, in his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 162–72Google Scholar.
27 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit. note 22, xvi. Rorty's main goal is the articulation of a conception of a utopia. However, he also utilizes his conceptual tools to describe past events.
28 Rorty rejects the idea that changes of vocabulary are aimed at truth. He goes further: ‘The moral is not that objective criteria for choice of vocabulary are to be replaced with subjective criteria, reason with will or feeling. It is rather that the notions of criteria and choice (including that of ‘arbitrary’ choice) are no longer in point when it comes to changes from one language game to another' (op. cit. 6).
29 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, op. cit. note 22, 12-3.
30 Another interesting difference between Rorty and Bachealrd is that Rorty is interested in much bigger chunks of language. The narrower focus of Bachelard's investigation helps to get into focus the particular needs and purposes that motivate her investigation.
31 ‘On Euthanasia…’, op. cit. note 23, 136.
32 Op. cit. 138.
33 Op. cit. note 23, 133.
34 Op. cit. note 23, 132.
35 Bachelard thinks we have a choice: we may bring into the way we make sense of human suffering the idea of a kindness that we do to suffering animals by putting them out of their misery. This, she says, would give expression to a ‘particular understanding of the human’ (op. cit. 136). Alternatively, she argues, we may bring in ideas about how we mourn our dead, pray, and recognize each other's humanity, or fail to – ideas that reflect the meaning of being human in ways that make it foreign to the kindness there is in putting an animal out of its misery.
36 A theory of that sort might, for instance, be inspired by Richards', I. A. context theory of meaning, see Richards on Rhetoric, Berthoff, A. E. (ed.), (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 111–18Google Scholar; or by Davidson's, Donald ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, in Grandy, R. and Warner, R., (eds.), Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 157–74Google Scholar.
37 Diamond, , ‘Losing Your Concepts’, Ethics 98, (1988) 255–277, 269CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 For further discussion see Diamond's, Cora ‘Truth: Defenders, Debunkers, Despisers’, in Toker, L., (ed.), Commitment and Reflection (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 195–221Google Scholar, and Conant's, James ‘Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell’ in Brandom, R. B., (ed.), Rorty and His Critics, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 268–341Google Scholar.
39 Philosophical Investigations, op. cit. note 9, §374.
40 For their helpful comments, I wish to thank Prof. Cora Diamond, Prof. Kelly Jolley, Prof. Eric Marcus, Dr. Keren Gorodeisky, the participants at the Wittgenstein Workshop at the University of Chicago, at the Auburn University Philosophical Society, and at the Ben-Gurion University, and the Hebrew University departmental colloquia.