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

Logic; your philosophy department sincerely believes that this class will make you a better citizen. But, as some of you might have noticed in Symbolic Logic, the theory of argument asks that you grant certain crucial statements beforehand, without argument. Statements like, for example, that something can’t both be true and false at the same time. Well, if holism is true, then we can’t count on our fellow citizens accepting such statements. Nor can we count on being able to convince them that they ought to accept such statements, if they don’t! We shouldn’t even call them crazy if they don’t accept such statements, though we do it anyway! In short, if holism is true then the whole notion of argument, and of reason, is up for grabs. Would you like to see what that looks like?

“Argument Clinic,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 29, “The Money Programme”

Ah, you laugh, you laugh. But be aware, on some philosophical accounts, you’ve just witnessed a small piece of the end of civilization.

Of course, not all the post-positivists were as deeply imbued with this apocalyptic vision. Indeed, some were decidedly unimpressed by the news that rationality could not be the foundation of society, they having already decided that rationality was overrated. After all, we’d been managing marginally well as a species so far without much of it, so there was no reason now to worry about everything falling apart. What grabbed these folk about semantic holism was that it suggested that it took only a very small difference in the linguistic behavior of two individuals to warrant the conclusion that they were speaking altogether different languages. For example, if you and I mean very different things when we make the noise “My brain hurts,” and if this difference reverberates throughout the rest of our linguistic utterances, then maybe it makes sense to say that we are speaking different languages, despite the fact that each sounds like English and even despite the fact that we think we understand each other perfectly well. Now, if you also suspect that a speaker’s language plays a big role in determining the nature of the world in which the speaker lives, then you can put these two together and conclude that each of us has our own world, perhaps wildly different than our neighbors’. This line of reasoning has been tossed around in the philosophical literature quite a bit in the last forty years; you could run off and read all about it in the library, or you could get the basic idea from Monty Python.

“Nudge Nudge,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 3, “How To Recognise Different Types of Trees from Quite a Long Way Away”

Different worlds, indeed, and perhaps different languages too. They eventually do “connect,” of course, though not quite in the manner desired by Norman, the man on our left.

I spoke about the project of founding society on reason, and about the blow that that project was dealt by semantic holism. Very recently, things have gotten even worse for that particular project. Imagine that holism could somehow be circumvented, so that we could all be assured that we shared the same language and the same world. It now looks, in light of empirical evidence about human reasoning, as if even these rosy conditions shouldn’t make for optimism about rationality in society. What the empirical evidence has suggested—and, to be fair, this is the topic of heated debate—is that, from the point of view of logic, human reasoning is very bad indeed, and that there’s little hope of improving it. We’re wired up, psychologically speaking, to reason badly. How badly, exactly? About as badly as the individuals in the following clip.

Burn The Witch, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The folks who fail to see what’s so funny about this, by the way, are exactly the folks who at one time or another have taught Introduction to Logic; they don’t need psychologists or their empirical studies to tell them about the reasoning abilities of the average citizen. To the rest of the analytic world, however, it’s been something of a shock, although, as I said, there’s quite a bit of debate over the whole matter.

I know what some of you are thinking. It’s something like, “Okay, I’m convinced. The best expositor of contemporary analytic philosophy is Monty Python. But let’s not get carried away. There’s a lot more to philosophy than analytic philosophy, and what do these Monty Python people have to say about all of that? Not much, I imagine!” Those of you saying this have in mind Continental philosophy, named I believe after the continental breakfast. I could go on at length in thorough refutation of this complaint, but as my area of specialty, not to mention my topic today, is analytic philosophy, I’ll refute it with a single counterexample. Here it is.

“The Cheese Shop,” Episode 33, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Salad Days”

Now I hope you see that Mr. Mousebender’s attempt to get a little cheese resembles various other life experiences, most obviously, perhaps, a typical attempt to register for classes at a university. But I’d like to suggest something more grand. I’d like to suggest that the cheese shop is life itself, as described to us by existentialism. Mr. Mousebender is our existentialist hero, creating himself through choices of cheese in an uncooperative, nay, unfeeling world. Mr. Wensleydale, the keeper of the cheese shop, is the burden of life incarnate, who, in the fashion of Sisyphus’s rock, unfailingly returns a negative answer only to be queried again by our hero. Did Nietzsche, Sartre, or Camus, those all-stars of Continental philosophy, ever put it any better, in any of their often abstruse and sometimes impenetrable scribblings? Say no more, say no more.

I know there are some folks out there who are still unconvinced of the philosophical stature of Monty Python. This is not because they worry that Monty Python has ignored continental