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

theories of meaning will do. They have made Wittgenstein’s point! A complete analysis of what these women say in terms of syntax, semantics, truth-conditions, use, and so on, will not capture what it is about their exchange that makes us laugh. There is simply more going on in the park than there is dreamt of in our philosophy. For whatever it is that is left over after we have accounted for meaning, which some will say is all there is to account for here, it is the leftovers that work their magic on us. It is the stuff that Horatio’s philosophy cannot account for that seems to matter here.

5

Why Is an Argument Clinic Less Silly than an Abuse Clinic or a Contradiction Clinic?

HARRY BRIGHOUSE

Monty Python’s Flying Circus drove numerous young people of my generation into philosophy. Having been driven into philosophy and stayed, I’m startled to notice how many references to philosophy in Monty Python have some basis in the reality of philosophy as a profession. The Bruces’ Philosopher’s Song (also known as the Australian Philosophers’ Song), for example, is simultaneously a comment on the incongruity of an Australian accent (regarded by elitist Britons as crass and un-intellectual) combined with something as serious and high-brow as philosophy, and a tribute to the enormous influence that Australian philosophers had over English-speaking philosophy at the time, and still have.

Perhaps most striking of all to a practicing philosopher is the “Argument Clinic” sketch (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 29, “The Money Programme”). The customer enters the Argument Clinic, after a false start with Mr. Barnard in the abuse room:

MR. BARNARD: What do you want?

CUSTOMER: Well, I was just . . .

MR. BARNARD: Don’t give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings!

CUSTOMER: What?

MR. BARNARD: Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous, pervert!!!

CUSTOMER: Look, I CAME HERE FOR AN ARGUMENT, I’m not going to just stand . . . !!

MR. BARNARD: OH! Oh I’m sorry, but this is Abuse.

He then finds Mr. Vibrating in the argument room:

CUSTOMER: Ah, is this the right room for an argument?

MR. VIBRATING: I told you once.

CUSTOMER: No you haven’t.

MR. VIBRATING: Yes I have.

CUSTOMER: When?

MR. VIBRATING: Just now.

CUSTOMER: No you didn’t.

MR. VIBRATING: Yes I did.

CUSTOMER: You didn’t.

MR. VIBRATING: I did!

CUSTOMER: You didn’t!

MR. VIBRATING: I’m telling you I did!

CUSTOMER: You did not!!

Slyly evoking the English pantomime tradition, the professional arguer simply contradicts every statement that the man seeking the argument makes.24 The customer objects that

CUSTOMER: I came here for a good argument.

MR. VIBRATING: No you didn’t; no, you came here for an argument .

CUSTOMER: An argument isn’t just contradiction.

MR. VIBRATING: It can be.

CUSTOMER: No it can’t. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.

MR. VIBRATING: No it isn’t.

The customer goes on to draw the distinction as follows: “Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.”

What Kind of Argument Would You Like?

The sketch works for numerous reasons. It seems absurd to “try out” an argument clinic, especially when, as any British viewer at that time knew, any normal person could get abuse and contradiction for free, just by calling a tradesperson or trying to buy something out of the ordinary at a department store (most older Britons of the time would have found the cheese shop sketch only a slight exaggeration of their experience). The idea that someone is able to turn on and off the habit of irritated contradiction at will is also funny. One of the things that makes the sketch work is that the professional’s understanding of what an argument is fits well with a certain ordinary-language understanding of “argument.” But in that sense of argument it is so easy to have one that it is hard to imagine anyone paying for one. The customer who wants to engage in something akin to a verbal game of chess wants his ideas to be taken on, thought through, and refuted, in an intellectually stimulating process. He wants, in other words, something like a philosophical argument, but, unphilosophically, has failed to specify what he wants.

The professional contradictor does, in fact, display an ability to argue in this sense: he correctly distinguishes ‘argument’ from ‘good argument’ and rightly points out that an argument can consist of mere iterated contradiction. But his arguing about the argument just makes it even more frustrating for the client. He will not engage in a true argument about anything substantive.

Philosophers like the sketch for at least two reasons. First, argument is just about all we are good at: it is not at all uncommon for a philosopher to exclaim dismissively “but that’s an empirical, not a philosophical, issue,” and by that they mean that evidence is irrelevant: argument is the only guide to the truth. Second, frankly, the idea of a world in which our narrow range of skills find a market like the market for accountants and hairdressers strikes us both as delightful and absurd; we fantasize that in that world we might make more money.

But the sketch also poses a puzzle. As I mentioned, viewers at the time would have known that contradiction could be accessed for free just by walking into any shop or workplace. Why, though, would someone go to an argument clinic for a “good” argument? What the client wants is for someone to show him what is wrong with his own beliefs and reasons for those beliefs. Why would he pay for that? Doesn’t it seem, as I said earlier, absurd?

One possible reason would be, simply, for intellectual stimulation: a kind of work-out for the mind, or mental game of tennis. But there is another, rather different, reason, which I shall spend the rest of this chapter explaining. It is, in short, this: that only through a process of argument with other people can most of us hope to come to have true beliefs about matters of any complexity. In