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

respect the use-mention distinction, the difference between using a sign or word to communicate and merely mentioning it. When Palin first introduces his two signs, he does not use them—thankfully, for his audience would not know what they are intended to mean. Instead, he first mentions them so that he may explain the meanings they will have later on when he uses them. Yet someone at the BBC supposes that Palin mentions and uses this second sign. For just as he folds his arms “The End” appears and Palin lurches into linguistic damage control:

Oh, no no! Sorry! Just demonstrating! Haven’t finished! Haven’t started yet. [pauses, and realizes he’s forgotten to use the new pause-gesture] Oh dear! [makes pause gesture] Nearly forgot the gesture! I hope none of you are nipping out into the kitchen getting bits of food out of those round brown mats which the . . .

It doesn’t look good. Palin’s being sucked into a self-referential whirlpool of qualifications and explanations. But he refuses to be beaten. He takes a deep breath and begins again.

Good evening [makes pause gesture]. Tonight I want to talk about . . .

This time, all goes well until Palin reaches his eighth word, “about.” That’s when the BBC shuts him down: “We interrupt this program to annoy you and make things generally irritating.”

What the Fly Saw

After the episode was over, most philosophers would have returned to their nightly reading. Devotees of ordinary language philosophy, specifically, may well have opened Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) Philosophical Investigations to read passages like this:

When I say: “My broom is in the corner,”—is this really a statement about the broomstick and the brush? Well, it could at any rate be replaced by a statement giving the position of the stick and the position of the brush. And this statement is surely a further analyzed form of the first one.—But why do I call it “further analyzed”?—Well, if the broom is there, that surely means that the stick and the brush must be there, and in a particular relation to one another. . . .

Or this:

It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle. . . . But why should I not on the contrary have called the sentence [in such a language] “Bring me a slab” a lengthening of the sentence “Slab!”?—Because if you shout “Slab!” you really mean: “Bring me a slab”.—But how do you do this: how do you mean that while you say “Slab!”? Do you say the unshortened sentence to yourself? And why should I translate the call “Slab!” into a different expression in order to say what someone means by it? And if they mean the same thing—why should I not say: “When he says ‘Slab!’ he means ‘Slab!’”?107

With Palin’s performance fresh in their memory, at least a few of these philosophers must have looked up from their books and thought, “hey, wait a minute!” Palin’s joke, at least in part, was on them. Beneath the silliness of his character and the quality of his performance there lay the outlines of a pointed critique of Wittgenstein and his philosophical legacy, ordinary language philosophy.

This critique is first suggested by Palin’s strikingly Wittgensteinian character and style. Both focus like a laser on words and their use, and both urge us to appreciate the complexities of this “whole process of talking.” Like Wittgenstein’s prose, moreover, Palin struggled to contain his rapid fire thoughts in the form of a dialogue with himself, in which he makes assertions, interrupts himself, offers objections or corrections, and poses questions and answers. Second, there is something deeply wrong with this Wittgensteinian performance precisely because it has no effect. Consider the Pythons’ better known satire about England’s Ministry of Silly Walks. Humor aside, this sketch offers a disarmingly accurate interpretation of bureaucratic life as a whirlwind of insignificant techniques and pointless procedures (in this case, involving walking). These silly styles of walking are plainly silly and pointless to us, but to the bureaucrats that cultivate and oversee them, they are serious business indeed. Palin’s obsession with linguistic precision, his dedicating all his concentration and intelligence to reducing ambiguity and clarifying meaning, is serious business as well. His skills and acuity make him a model ordinary language philosopher. Yet, like the bureaucrats in the Ministry, he never really achieves anything. For all Palin’s tortured efforts and analysis, he tell us exactly nothing about Holland’s most famous aperitif.

The Story of Ordinary Language Philosophy: Britain’s Most Influential Philosophical Program

“That’s not a critique,” ordinary language philosophers might reply. “That’s the whole point!” Indeed, Wittgenstein argued persuasively that the proper subject of philosophy was not aperitifs or anything else amenable to empirical or scientific study. Rather, the subject of philosophy was language. This is because, Wittgenstein argued, our so-called philosophical problems about nature, ethics, epistemology and so forth are really just tangles or confusions in our language and our linguistic habits. Through proper philosophical analysis they can be untangled and, once they are, they disappear and cease to perplex us. For the philosopher of ordinary language, therefore, philosophy is really a struggle of our own making, “a struggle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (§109).108 Much as flies find it difficult to find their way out fly bottles designed to catch them, we find it difficult to extricate ourselves from our verbal bottles. Wittgenstein asked himself, “What is the aim of your philosophy? And then he answered: “To shew the fly the way out of the fly bottle” (§309).

Wittgenstein was not alone in promoting this linguistic revolution in philosophy in Britain. Others such as Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) and J.L. Austin (1911-1960) took philosophy to be the study of our words and linguistic actions. There were differences and controversies about the proper methods and goals of philosophical analysis. But agreement was at hand that philosophy had found its calling in the analysis of language. A.J.