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

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein considers the following sorts of cases:

Suppose that I were the doctor and a patient came to me, showed me his hand and said: “This thing that looks like a hand isn’t just a superb imitation—it really is a hand” and went on to talk about his injury—should I really take this as a piece of information, even though a superfluous one? Shouldn’t I be more likely to consider it nonsense, which admittedly did have the form of a piece of information?23

By ‘nonsense’ here, Wittgenstein does not appear to have in mind the idea that the sentence is meaningless. The sentence “This is my hand” is no doubt meaningful. But suppose, in line with what Wittgenstein says in the above passage, that I walk into a doctor’s office having injured my hand and say, “Hey doc, I’ve injured my hand.” So far, so good. But, now suppose that as I say this, I extend my hand and continue, “Oh, and this is my hand.” Such a remark may be followed by the doctor’s asking, “Did you hit your head, too?” As Wittgenstein says, it would be strange to take this as a piece of superfluous information, though one could do that. Rather, it would very likely be taken as a sign of my having something more seriously wrong with me than an injured hand. The idea here, I think, is that where it makes sense in this context for me to say “Hey doc, I’ve injured my hand,” it does not make sense for me to say “This is my hand.” The sentence just doesn’t have a life in this context. To be sure, I can imagine contexts in which it would make sense to say it (again, I am reminded of my Navy days), but my visit to the doctor’s office here isn’t one of them. What is determining what it makes sense to say? Practice! By this Wittgenstein seems to mean the practice or the way of people in a community. He doesn’t mean it in the sense that we do when we tell a kid to go and practice scales on the piano. As he puts it in Philosophical Investigations, he is considering a people’s form of life: “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” (p. 8e, paragraph 19).

We might think of the ritual of greeting, or the telling of what brings one to the doctor, as language games. This is what Wittgenstein famously called them. “Here,” he says (again, in Philosophical Investigations), “the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (p. 11e, paragraph 23). The things people do in communal life, their practices, underwrite what it will make sense to say. That seems to be very different from the conditions that underwrite the meanings of sentences (truth conditions, for example).

A bit later in On Certainty, Wittgenstein writes:

This is certainly true, that the information “That is a tree”, when no one could doubt it, might be a kind of joke and as such have meaning. A joke of this kind was in fact made once by Renan. (p. 61e)

And, he even produces a joke about a philosopher (G.E. Moore?):

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again “I know that that’s a tree,” pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.” (p. 61e)

The statement “That is a tree” in the second passage is akin, I think, to “This is my hand” in the first and to “I know that that’s a tree” in this last passage. That Wittgenstein would feel compelled to tell the onlooker that his philosopher friend is not insane but only doing philosophy is important—he wouldn’t want the onlooker to react to his friend as the doctor reacts to the patient in the above injured-hand case. These cases, I think, help to illuminate our piston engine case (and show that my initial impulse to borrow René Magritte’s “This is not a pipe” was not far from the mark).

Along the lines of the cases Wittgenstein introduces above, we might say that what strikes us as funny about Mrs. Non-Gorilla’s reply (to the question of why she bought the piston engine) is that it is not really a reason for buying the engine after all, even though it takes the form of one. To be sure, we could count it as a lousy reason for buying it, but then we shouldn’t be laughing at Mrs. Gorilla, as much as we should be pitying or rebuking her (for being so shallow or so stupid). And, we could take “No, . . . been shopping” as a customary response to the question “Been shopping?” but if we did, again we shouldn’t find this funny, as much as we should find it an interesting custom. But, these aren’t strangers with strange customs! They are working-class women at the park, who live somewhere in England (at least, this is the premise of the skit). Rather, the joke arises in its not being a response at all, even though it takes the form of one. Although we are led to believe (at first) that we are watching the social interaction of women in the park, who express interest in what the others have done, and so on, the joke is that we are not watching anything of the sort. And though the scene at first appears ordinary enough, at the end, along with Mrs. Smoker and Mrs. Non-Smoker, we walk off dazed and confused, reminded of something Hamlet tells Horatio: “There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.” Alas, Monty Python has pulled back the curtain. For, none of the philosophical