Language, Philosophy, and Terms

Posted on April 6, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy | 10 Comments

One thing about the langugage turn in philosophy (on both continents) is that it tended to obscure certain differences that ought be made. I’m not saying that the language turn was bad. In a certain sense it was inevitable and a good thing. However I think sometimes it obscures some things.

Consider one example that I used to discuss in the old blog. The mental. Now one debate in philosophy is over externalism (whether of cognitions, terms, phenomena, or epistemolgy). However what is in contention is ultimately the range of what is covered by our linguistic terms. (One can be forgiven for missing this when reading the literature) Now from that one can make broader concerns. But in a way the debate is a debate about how to approach deeper debates. That is how we should approach the mind in our questioning.

Certainly debates about the best way to approach a problem go beyond language. However I often think that the issues are so conflated that it sometimes isn’t clear what’s the focus of concern.

An other example is more relevant to what I’m thinking about at the moment. (Which is why I brought it up)

Consider the debate about free will. Now in one sense it’s a debate about what we mean by free. The problem is that the debate of necessity moves beyond the usual range of the term in common speech. (Which arguably is where it acquired its meaning and role) Thus the debate isn’t just about whether someone is free in some physical circumstance (however unusual). Rather it’s a debate about ontological concerns.

If we consider common sense a set of theories dealing with the common experiences of some community and thus extensively tested in range, then problems should be obvious. That is once you leave the usual arena of use applying the meanings becomes dangerous.

One can see the language turn as something very useful in getting to the heart of philosophical questions. After all the philosophical questions and problems are posed in language. But one should also question whether that language is the best language to deal with them.

No one would say that physics, for example, should limit itself to the common use of terms like energy, mass, and so forth. Indeed we recognize that in science terms have specialized meanings. Why then not in philosophy? (Of course in philosophy there are those who pose questions in specialized language – something often condemned but which I think is actually a good thing)

I think this recognition of the problem of language can be dealt with. Consider Chomskey who normally I don’t agree with much. But he is very careful when using terms to distinguish the various uses they can have. (Especially with regards to the mental and externalism debate) That’s because his concern is with natural kinds and not with regards to the particular philosophical debates that have more to do with common language.

Comments

10 Responses to “Language, Philosophy, and Terms”

1 Tanasije Gjorgoski on April 7th, 2008 4:06 am

Hi Clark,

I tend to agree with you in that, that some of the problems are beyond language, and are really genuine problems (easiest examples to point would be e.g. examples from metaphysics, e.g. Zeno’s paradoxes).

But I think uncritical use of language IS a problem in philosophy. There is nothing wrong with using specialized language, but there can be problems like:
a) the meaning of the word is taken from everyday speech, without taking in account that it is related only to a use only in specific context. (I would guess that if there is problem with ‘free will’ it will fall into this group)
or
b) mixing up its everyday meaning, and some theoretical meaning, even they are different, and then drawing truths about the theory from truths about the everyday meaning (I would take “experience” to fall in this group)

So, I guess the issue is where to draw the line. Which are genuine issues, and which are the cases where we “first raise a Dust, and then complain, we cannot see”.

2 Clark on April 7th, 2008 10:39 am

Yeah. I’m not sure really.

Take the free will issue which I’m focused in on at the moment. It seems to me that the ultimate question is whether our instincts about free will are reconcilable with various notions: foreknowledge (for religious people) or determinism. Determinism is a pretty clear concept but free will isn’t. Thus the debate between the two main camps: the compatibilists and the Libertarians. (Then there are those who reject compatiblism but think free will is an illusion)

It seems to me to partially be a taking of concepts from an arena where they are applicable into an arena where they are not. But I also think there is a valid question about whether we just ought change our language somewhat. Moderate Libertarians seem most open to this although there are also revisionists with respect to responsibility – although while there have been many papers on the idea of revisionist accounts no one has yet given a really satisfactory account.

Part of the problem is, I’m convinced, that Libertarians want a kind of dualism. (Either by a variation of Cartesian dualism or ontological emergence) But this then ties the problem to commitments in the problem of mind debate.

So I think there’s a lot more going on than it first appears.

3 Michael Dorfman on April 8th, 2008 3:21 am

Good post, Clark. As you know, I’m suspicious of the “free will” debate, largely because of the issues that you raise here– when we are discussing “free will”, what, really, is at stake?

I’m curious to hear what you find to be the ontological concerns– what bearing does the presence/absence of free will have on the question of being?

I think your schematism of the various positions is quite useful: that we have “determinism” on the one side, and on the other hand “free will”, where “free will” can be further broken down into “compatibilists” and “libertarians” (which can then be further refined, etc.)

Personally, my questions are at the first level– determinism vs “something other than determinism” (regardless of whether we define this as LFW or Compatabilism, etc.) I’m not committed to determinism; rather, I’m still trying to understand how we could tell a determined universe from a non-determined universe, and what (possible) difference that would make.

4 Clark on April 8th, 2008 9:01 am

I think that relative to Being, especially in Heidegger, the focus is different. It is freedom as letting the thing be what it is. But what it is might be either Libertarian or not. I think the view of freedom in Heidegger is open to compatibilist readings in that freedom is freedom from imposition by the knower on the known.

With regards to whether we could tell a determined universe from an undetermined universe. I think that is something we could tell. The question that I think Mele is asking is whether we could tell an indeterministic universe from a Libertarian one given that they have all the same possible worlds.

5 Michael Dorfman on April 8th, 2008 11:40 am

I’m not sure I follow the ontological point; if we take the example of a rock– surely the rock “is what it is”, strictly speaking– and yet I haven’t (yet) seen anybody arguing that rocks have free will.

As for whether we could tell a determined universe from an undetermined universe– if you think it is something we could indeed tell, the obvious follow-up question is “How could we tell?”

6 Clark on April 8th, 2008 11:49 am

The freedom is in terms of how I restrict the appearance of the rock to me.

Heidegger discusses this in a few places although my favorite place is in the class notes published as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. The context is a kind of deconstructive reading of Leibniz so the freedom might be see in terms of how each monad is a kind of unveiling of things by God in harmony with what is outside of the monad. (The way Heidegger reads him makes it a tad more complex)

Back and the old blog I had two posts with quotes on this. Heidegger on Freedom and Heidegger’s Freedom.

7 Clark on April 8th, 2008 2:37 pm

BTW there is an interesting article I found on JSTOR called “Heidegger on Freedom: Political not Metaphysical” by Leslie Paul Thiele that is quite interesting here.

One quote:

Negative liberty, simply put, is freedom from constraint. It signifies the (political) space accorded the individual to pursue desires unhindered by teh impositions of others. … Positive liberty in contrast is not a freedom from but a freedom to. It denotes a freedom to do. But positive liberty entails doing not only what one desires, unhindered by external constraints, but what one should desire, unhindered by internal constraints such as irrational drives, weakness of character, false consciousness, or even shortsighted judgement. Free will is only truly free, in other words, when it actualizes the indvidual’s “objective” interests.

She then quotes from Heidegger’s rector address with respect to Heidegger’s view.

This will is a true will in that the German student body, through the new Student Law, places itself under the law of its own essence and in this way for the first time determines that essence. To give the law to oneself is the highest freedom.”

Now I think this is also a place where Heidegger is most troubling since the individual will grows out of the volk they are a part of. Heidegger of course then moves away from this.

Heidegger develops a new concept of freedom that effectively extends and reworks his prerectorial approach. By the early forties, he would write: “Freedom is not what common sense is content to let pass under that name: the random ability to do as we please, to go this way or that in our choice. Freedom is not license in what we do or do not do. Nor, on the other hand, is freedom a mere readiness to do something requisite and necessary and thus in a sense ‘actual.’ Over and above all this (‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom) freedom is a participation in the revealment of what-is-as-such.”

…Heidegger’s development of this disclosive freedom presents us with more than just another philosophical profile of a concept already overburdened with meanings. Heidegger’s mature understanding of freedom is radically distinct from its modern, metaphysical forerunners and their postmodern derivations; for it offers dignity in a freedom that celebrates guardianship rather than mastery.

Now I’d say that what she calls this latter view is pretty much his earlier view as well. (The view of the late 1920′s) You can see in his Niezsche lectures that he moves to this weird relationship between art and freedom that is somewhat disturbing and culminates in his rector speech. But I think after WWII he moves back to the view from the era of Being and Time.

8 Clark on April 8th, 2008 2:40 pm

One more Heideggarian quote:

It is misguided to think one understands freedom most purely in its essence if one isolates it as a free-floating arbitrariness. Moreover, the task is precisely the reverse, to conceive freedom in its finitude and to see that, by proving boundedness, one has neither impaired freedom nor curtailed its essence. (The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 196)

One more quote from the article.

Now fundamentally to interrogate this world demands a forgoing of pervasive efforts at its mastery; for fundamental questioning ceases the moment the presumptions and prejudices that necessarily precede such attempts at domination or control arise. To be sure, the disclosure of Being ensues from all human activities and experiences, including human efforts at attaining mastery. But herein Being, as well as the nature of human freedom, becomes obscrued. It is revealed only as forgotten. To reveal something as forgotten is to reveal something as no longer in question, as no longer fundamentally questionable. That we are, as Heidegger states, called upon to be the shepherds of Being indicates that we find our freedom not in a forgetful mastery but in a mindful, interrogative caretaking, in concernfully and questioningly letting the Being of beings be. Freedom is therefore most primordially manifest in our care-full being-in-the-world-with-others.

Disclosive freedom, Heidegger insists, is not merely one value among others. Nor either, is freedom a metavalue, the “value of all values” that allows one to choose between and secure other values (Cranston, 1967, 42). “Freedom,” Heidegger writes,

is not a particular thing among others, not something lined up as part of a row, but rather it prescribes and permeates the totality of beings as a whole. If we are to investigate freedom as the ground of possibilit of human being, then its essence is more primordial than man. Man, is only a guardian of freedom, . . . human freedom signifies now no longer: freedom as a property of man, but the reverse: man as a possibility of freedom. Human freedom is the freedom which invades and sustains man, thereby rendering man possible. (1976-89, 31:134-5; see also 1985a, 9)

Traditional Western thinking posits freedom as the autonomous subject’s most valued asset, as its capacity to define and control what it confronts. Heidegger, contrariwise, understands freedom as that which exposes human being to the undefinable and unmasterable, to Being. But what is beyond one’s power to master or define is also beyond one’s power to calculate and assess. Freedom, therefore, is that unique capacity of human being that allows a reaching beyond calculation and valuation.

9 Michael Dorfman on April 9th, 2008 1:20 am

Clark:The freedom is in terms of how I restrict the appearance of the rock to me.

I tend to classify that as an epistemological issue, not an ontological one.

I tend to view (in the absence of evidence to the contrary) the fact that there are conscious beings in this universe to be contingent, and not necessary. Clearly there was a time when only non-sentient beings existed, so I don’t see how sentience (or freedom, which presupposes sentience) can have a bearing on ontology, properly speaking.

Now, this is not to dispute that for Heidegger, freedom is what exposes the human being to Being, or that for Heidegger, freedom is “that unique capacity of human being that allows a reaching beyond calculation”.

My question is: how can we know, rigorously, what is “free” and what is a calculation that impersonates freedom?

Tom Stoppard raises this issue nicely in “Arcadia”, where a character suggests that if every particle in the universe could be suspended, and the position and direction and velocity of every particle understood, and if one were really, really good at maths, one could write the formula for the future.

And, naturally, Nietzsche got there before Stoppard, with the comsological version of Eternal Return.

So the question is: how could a being within a Nietzschean/Stoppardian universe know that the free will they think they have is illusory?

10 Clark on April 9th, 2008 8:59 am

Certainly taking it epistemologically rather than ontologically (in the traditional sense) is one possibility. This takes one to the question of the different senses of Being in Heidegger. While typically we talk about Being as Truth there’s also being as prime matter or something like it which must also be at issue. Since I take Heidegger as an ontic realist I see both moves as necessary.

Of course once you get into the question of ontic realism one can then return to the question of freedom in that sense. I tent to think of a kind of freedom in the ontic arena as well. (Thus I adopt the view of QM that rejects hidden variables and treats quantum indeterminacy as an ontic feature of the universe)

As to the Nietzschean question, isn’t Nietzsche’s position the dominant one in the free will debate? That is if we take our intuitive sense of free will seriously then we simply don’t have it.

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