I’ve been quite busy lately with a lot of different things (including a most interesting workshop on the notion of form in 19th and 20th century logic and mathematics last week), so my blogging has not been very copious. I have, to be sure, written at least 3 or 4 blog posts in my head, but the extended mind thing is still not working as it should on the mind-world axis (^_^) (That’s a Japanese emoticon; I like them better, you don’t need to tilt your head to the side!)
Anyway, I wanted to comment on a post by Alva Noë, which Eric Schliesser brought to our attention last week. In the discussion prompted by the post, differences between analytic philosophy of language and continental philosophy of language have come up, and this is what I would like to talk about in connection with Alva’s post. He makes a good case for the claim that, when it comes to language, “it's variation all the way down, even at the level of the individual.” This is not an armchair claim, it is something established by empirical and historical studies of language (and really, that languages change all the time is something that we all ‘know’ on a phenomenological level).
I am an analytic philosopher, there’s no denying that, both with respect to methods and with respect to the literature that constitutes the background for my work. But way back, as an undergraduate, the first contact I had with philosophy of language was rather on the ‘continental’ side (as much of my undergraduate education, with its good old French, historical approach). In that context, the focus was precisely on language variation, on the perennial creative power of language to recreate and reinvent itself, while at the same time not in any way jeopardizing communication and understanding. I’m thinking specifically of Meleau-Ponty’s La Prose du Monde, but I guess similar points could be made about other authors (e.g. Heidegger).
Alva Noë makes the point that variation in language can be seen as analogous to variation in perception: “To perceive a word is to perceive something that is, of its basic nature, open to varieties of ways of showing up.” And just as our different perceptions of a tomato can all be ‘unified’ when we say that we see a tomato (and thus not that we see one of the ways in which a tomato appears to us), language understanding is perfectly possible amidst this constant flux of variation and change. “We achieve access to that which is invariant (the color, the word) not because we are blind to variation, but because we are so fluent in our mastery of variation that we can let it recede for us and rest in the background.”
What does this have to do with the analytic-continental divide in philosophy of language? As I said, my first contacts with philosophy as an undergrad were essentially ‘continental’, it was only much later that analytic philosophy entered my life (to stay). So when I first started thinking about language and language use from an ‘analytic’ point of view, it became clear that, while continental philosophy (at least the authors I had read) emphasized variation and plasticity, analytic philosophy emphasized rule-following and homogeneity. Tellingly, in the continental authors I have in mind, the examples of language use that are brought in to illustrate the points being made are often those of what could be described as obviously creative and ‘deviant’ uses of language, such as poetry, that is to say language uses that epitomize even more clearly the fact that “it’s variation all the way down”. By contrast, the examples in analytic philosophy are typically of boring, 'plain' language use: “The grass is green”, “The cat is on the mat” etc.
Arguably, it is under the influence of a certain ‘Wittgensteinian’ conception of language as (strict) rule-following (I use scare quotes because in Wittgenstein’s texts themselves one also finds suggestions of a different, ‘creative’ conception of language) that analytic philosophy of language came to focus on uniformity and rule-following. The only classical text in the analytic tradition focusing on variation---‘rule breaking’--- is Davidson’s famous "A derangement of epitaphs". But then, significantly, because of all the variation, Davidson concludes that there is no such thing as language! Well, indeed, there is no such thing as strict rule-following homogeneous language, and if that is what one understands by ‘language’ (as seems to be the case in most of the analytic tradition), then there is no such thing as language… Analogously, but for different reasons, Kripkenstein concluded that there is no such thing as meaning. But these skeptical conclusions all rest on a mistaken understanding of language at a very basic level, namely failure to appreciate that “it’s variation all the way down”.
This may be one of the reasons why I slowly but surely lost interest in analytic philosophy of language (also for its typical lack of empirical basis). But perhaps at some point in the future I will have the time and the energy to go back to a different conception of language, one which I encountered in some continental authors at the very beginning of my philosophical life, where variation rather than rule-following is emphasized.
Recent Comments