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

as piston engines. Mrs. Smoker replies, “Oohh, I never thought of that.” Of course, neither have we, but our never having thought of it is connected to our never having thought of eating piston engines to begin with, let alone cooked! Why has Mrs. Smoker not thought of it? How is Mrs. Non-Smoker using the sentence “You can’t eat that raw!”? Is it really being used to inform Mrs. Smoker? Why would she need to be informed about that?

To better see how the distinction—between the meanings of sentences and what it makes sense to say—may be of some help here, let me take the analysis in a slightly different direction. Looking at all of this from the audience’s point of view, for instance, we might speculate that Mrs. Smoker says what she does in order to provoke from us a laugh. Fine. But this doesn’t explain how she takes herself to be using the sentence. It only explains how the skit’s writers are using it. Now, if we say that it is really only this use for which we need an account—that is, an account of the writer’s use—I am reminded of a curious remark that Wittgenstein later makes in the Philosophical Investigations. He writes:

When I say that the orders “Bring me sugar” and “Bring me milk” make sense, but not the combination “Milk me sugar,” that does not mean that the utterance of this combination of words has no effect. And if its effect is that the other person stares at me and gapes, I don’t on that account call it the order to stare and gape, even if that was precisely the effect that I wanted to produce. (498)

Here, it appears that he is saying that there are cases in which I may use a sentence to produce a certain effect, but nevertheless my using it to produce this effect does not count as the meaning of the sentence. And so, he suggests that the meaning of “Milk me sugar” is not the order “Stare and gape at me!” even though my using the former is to get you to stare and gape at me. Of course, in being reminded of this passage, I am also reminded of my time spent in the U.S. Navy, when such sentences as “Milk me sugar” were used from time to time, especially while in port, and were just packed with meaning—though I will not go into this here. I mention it only because it is important to note that he is not saying that “Milk me sugar” is inherently meaningless. As my Navy experience has taught me, it is easy to invent contexts in which such a sentence has a life. I think that Wittgenstein would agree. What is important about this passage is that Wittgenstein is telling us that even though the skit’s writers use (via Mrs. Non-Smoker) the sentence “You can’t eat that raw! ” to produce laughter in the audience, for all that we should not count the meaning of this sentence to be the order “Laugh at what I am saying!” We should emphasize Wittgenstein’s saying that for a large class of cases the use determines the meaning. It just so happens that our piston engine skit is not a member of this class.

The difficulty, as I see it, is that neither the earlier Verification Principle nor the later Meaning-as-Use Principle work to explain what is going on in the piston engine skit, though I do think that they hint at an explanation. In what remains of the chapter, I want to explore what I take to be the hint, and offer a very brief sketch of what an explanation might look like.

Meaning and Practice

In Remarks on Colour, Wittgenstein writes:

When someone who believes in God looks around him and asks “Where did everything that I see come from?” “Where did everything come from?” he is not asking for a (causal) explanation; and the point (Witz) of his question is that it is the expression of such a request. Thus, he is expressing an attitude toward all explanations.21

In this passage, the point (Witz) of the believer’s question can be also translated as the joke of his question. That is, his expressing what he does in the form of a certain sort of question is a kind of joke. Here, the funny of the joke is akin, if not identical to, the wonder of the absurd. In other words, the absurdity one senses when lighting upon the difficulty in contemplating the origin of reality itself is a reaction that is much like the humor one senses when lighting upon the punch line of a joke. A natural reaction to both can be laughter. He continues:

What I actually want to say is that here too it is not a matter of the words one uses or of what one is thinking when using them, but rather of the difference they make at various points in life. . . . Practices give words their meaning. (58e, paragraph 317)

Notice that here he seems to sidestep the very notion of the use of words, as well as sidestepping the notion of the meaning of a sentence being what one is thinking while using the words, made famous by David Hume.22 What he focuses on instead is the idea that the import of words is “the difference they make at various points in life.” Connected to this is his saying that “practices give words their meaning.” The ideas of making a difference and practice are certainly compatible with both the Verification and Meaning-as-Use Principles, but there seems to be something more here. What that is exactly is admittedly unclear. Even so, I will suggest as I did above that here Wittgenstein is drawing the line between the meaning of a sentence on the one hand, and what it makes sense to say on the other. I will now take a closer look at this difference