Monty Python and Philosophy, Gary Hardcastle [portable ebook reader TXT] 📗

a couple of sentences that can be verified—or, at least there is a sense in which they can. Even so, is their meaning really determined by the ways that we would go about verifying them? For instance, is the meaning of Mrs. Non-Smoker’s reply simply our being able to verify that one cannot eat a piston engine raw? Perhaps. But, this seems so only if she is simply asserting a fact. Of course, the joke is made in her appearing to do just this!

With the exception of the contradictions already considered, we can easily agree that every statement made in the dialogue is true, or at least verifiably true. Even so, the conditions that underwrite their truth, and the ways by which we would verify their truth, do not appear to account for why what the women are saying is absurd (or funny). For, the joke of the skit is that even though we completely understand the meanings of their sentences, we cannot make heads or tails of what they are saying. As I mentioned above, the difference being drawn here is admittedly odd. Although I’ll not be able to make it look less odd, I think that I can make it a bit clearer.

For starters, then, imagine that we meet for coffee and you say, “Hello, good to see you,” and I extend out my hand, my eyes sort of wide open as I stare at it, and utter, “This is my hand.” Although you clearly understand the meaning of the sentence I just uttered (it isn’t as though I uttered, “Gobily gook muk not me fancy cakes”), my guess is that for all that you would nevertheless find my uttering “This is my hand” here a bit creepy. Rush Rhees has an answer as to why you would:

But “what it makes sense to say” is not “the sense these expressions have.” It has more to do with what it makes sense to answer or what it makes sense to ask, or what sense one remark may have in connexion with another.19

The distinction that Rhees is making, I think, is what I want to bring out: there is a difference between the meaning of a sentence (its sense) and what it makes sense to say. According to Rhees, this is the sort of shift that Wittgenstein makes when moving from his earlier to his later work. He is less interested in asking “What is the meaning of a sentence?” and more interested in asking “What is it to say something?” In uttering, “This is my hand,” you might think that I was simply offering a bit of trivial information. However, the more likely reaction to my behavior would be to quickly fish around for a context in which it would make sense for me to say, “This is my hand,” and say it so that it wouldn’t count as a piece of trivial information. For example, you might think to yourself: this idiot thinks that I think that he doesn’t have a hand. The point to stress here is that although the Verification Principle might work to account for the meaning of the sentence “This is my hand,” it does nothing to help us understand why uttering it in this context is so creepy.

Even when given reasons for the purchase of the piston engines, the reasons are strange. The strangeness, I think, stems from the fact that Mrs. Smoker’s answer to the question “Why did you buy that?” is connected in all the right ways to this question, though it cannot be accepted (by us) as an answer. For, given the cost of living, and the fact that these ladies are of the working-class (and so must spend their money wisely—this is why being working-class is significant here), one buys a piston engine only if one is in need of one. To be sure, that it would be on sale at the time one needed to purchase such a thing would be a matter of good fortune—one worthy of note. But, one doesn’t buy such a thing simply because it is a bargain! That the engines are gift-wrapped makes things even stranger. For, though one might buy a piston engine on sale knowing that one will most certainly need one in the near future, one wouldn’t normally go the extra step and have the thing gift-wrapped. And so, even granting that reason is at work, the assumption doesn’t go very far in making the exchange between these women intelligible.

Wittgenstein in his later work seems to have abandoned the Verification Principle, which he claims to have never held in the first place. Now, why he would abandon something that he never held is itself a bit curious, but be that as it may, he appears to abandon it and introduces another: the Meaning-as-Use Principle.20 This principle says: “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” This could go far in helping explain away the worry about Mrs. Gorilla’s and Mrs. Smoker’s contradictory statements. For instance, we might say that it has become customary among these women to use a phrase of the form ‘No, . . . P’ when asked whether one has been P-ing. So, when Mrs. Non-Gorilla asks, “Been shopping?” the appropriate response (if one has in fact been shopping) is “No, . . . been shopping.” If this is the accepted form of response, then we might say that the sentence ‘No, . . . been shopping’ means “Yes, I’ve been shopping” or something like this. The phrase gets its meaning here by its being used to confirm that one has been shopping.

But, what of the other statements in the dialogue? For example, when Mrs. Non-Smoker says, “You can’t eat that raw!” she appears to be using it to inform Mrs. Smoker of a simple fact about eating such things