NETAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 8, Nos. 2 and 3, April/July 1977

ON TALKING ABOUT PHILOSOPHY

MORRIS LAZEROWITZ

The opening sentence of Professor Gill’s paper “On Reaching Bedrock’’ has the arresting quality of a paradox. ”he sentence reads: “One of the most perplexing problems of philosophy arises from the fact that in talking about philosophy one must be doing philosophy.”’ At first glance the sentence appears to call our attention to a supposed feature of philosophy, which represents it as indeed a remarkable subject. For it is not true in general that to talk about a discipline or an art is to practice or do work in that discipline or art. We can make statements about geometry or cartography, for example, without doing geometry or making maps. To assert that geometry was given its first organization by Euclid is to make a statement about geometry, not to do geometry, and to state that cartography antedates the art of handwriting is to talk about cartography without doing it. Gill’s statement apparently implies that philosophy is an exception to a general fact. But it seems plainly possible to make statements about philosophy which are not themselves philosophical statements. The words, “The paradoxical proposition that motion does not exist is supported by lines of reasoning which have been in debate for more than 2000 years”, count as talk about philosophy but not as doing the philosophy referred to. The question thus arises as to whether Gill’s sentence is to be read in the normal way as expressing a claim about how statements about philosophy are related to statements in philosophy, i.e., to philosophical state- ments. The assertion about Zeno’s philosophical paradox is not itself a philosophical assertion, regardless of whether it is made by someone who knows philosophy. I once was present at a discussion in which it was maintained that a good shoemaker or a good carpenter must be a philosopher. But no one ventured to say that making shoes well was doing philosophy. And I think that no one would say that the statement about Zeno’s paradox, which certainly refers to philosophical material, is itself philosophical. A question thus arises as to the proper reading of Gill’s sentence.

IMetaphilosophy, Vol. 5, 1974, p. 277.

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The attempt to understand rightly the sentence “In talking about philosophy one must be doing philosophy” requires our determining the use the term “must” has in it, i.e., whether “must” is being used to denote what might be called a natural necessity, the denial of which is a theoretical possibility, or whether its use is to denote a logical necessity, the denial of which is not a theoretical possibility. The first is exemplified by the statement that friction must generate heat, the second by the statement that a pyramid must have six edges. To put the difference between the two kinds of necessity in Leibnizian terms, a natural necessity holds for some only out of all pos- sible worlds while a logical necessity holds for no fewer than all possible worlds. A statement which asserts a natural necessity is empirical, such that experience is required to determine its truth-value, whereas one which makes a putative logically necessary claim requires, for its acceptance or rejec- tion, not experience, but an examination of the meanings of terms. If, now, the term “must” in the sentence “In talking about philosophy one must be doing philosophy” is taken to denote natural necessity, the sentence is to be understood as meaning that whenever a person talks about philosophy, for example, about the paradoxes of motion, he finds that in addition to his talk he is also doing the philosophy of the paradoxes, or perhaps philosophy related to them. The sugges- tion is that when a philosophical idea is mentioned, regardless of the context, one’s mind is moved to philosophize, that a nonphilosophical train of thought starts up a philosophical train of thought. I might report that in my own case intro- spection reveals nothing of the sort. It will be remembered that Hume declared that on self examination he could discover no impression of a simple and continued self, although he allowed that some metaphysicians might differ from him in this regard? To speak for myself, I sometimes mention philosophical problems without finding philosophical thoughts accompanying them. And I am not inclined to suppose that the opposite invariably occurs in the mind of a person who says that in talking about philosophy one must be doing philosophy. In any case, it is hard to think that Gill bases his general proposition on inductive evidence, nor does he pretend to do so. Indeed it seems plain that his words are not open to an

*But since he asserted that “there is no such idea” (Treatise, Pt. IV, sec. vi), there is some reason for thinking that he made his observation about meta- physicians with tongue in cheek.

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interpretation which would make it appropriate to preface them with the phrase “Experience shows that . . .”. In sum, it would be unrealistic to suppose that the sentence “In talking about philosophy one must be doing philosophy” is used to express an empirical proposition, one for the testing of which it is necessary, in Kant’s language, to ‘go beyond concepts’.

If, however, we give up the idea that “must” is being used in the sense of natural necessity, the only remaining alterna- tive would seem to be that it is used in the sense of logical necessity. On this alternative, the sentence is to be understood as expressing, or as intended to express, an a pn’ori truth. It is to be construed as making an entailment-claim, to the effect that talking about philosophy entails doing philosophy. As is known, conventionalists hold that a priori true propositions are verbal, that they are statements about the actual use of terminology in the language. If conventionalism is taken at face value, that is, as an account of the nature of necessary propositions, then the various well-known criticisms, e.g., that verbal propositions are not logical necessities, are conclusive. The fact that conventionalism is held in the face of these criticisms shows, in my opinion, that the standard, and admittedly natural, reading of conventionalism is not the right one. Nevertheless, the standard reading shows us the way to a correct understanding of what it is for a sentence to express a logically necessary proposition.

Consider how the following two sentences are related to each other:

(1) A llama is an animal. (2) Usage insures the correctness of applying ‘animal’ to

The first sentence expresses a nonverbal, necessary proposition, the second a non-necessary, verbal proposition. But the fact that (1) expresses an a priori truth implies and is implied by the fact that (2) expresses a factual truth about the use of words in the English language. Thus in understanding (l), or in knowing its meaning, we know that what (2) says is true, and this is all that is to be known. To put the matter shortly and without going into the required qualifications, a sentence whose use is to express a logical necessity has only verbal point, a point which is conveyed without being expressed by the sentence. The visible difference between (1) and (2) is a difference in mode of speech: the first is in the ontological

whatever ‘llama’ applies to.

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mode, in which no term is mentioned, the second is in the verbal mode, and is explicitly about words. Conventionalist doctrine is a result of minimizing this difference, and Platonism results from highlighting it in various ways. It is useful to recall John Wisdom’s mnemonic slogan: “It’s not the stuff, it’s the style that ~tupifies”~.

To return to Gill’s sentence, taking “must” to mean the “must” of logical necessitation, the sentence may be rewritten as (1’) Talking about philosophy entails doing philosophy, and the corresponding verbal sentence will be (2l) The expression ‘doing philosophy’ correctly applies to what- ever ‘talks about philosophy’ applies to. If (1*) expressed a valid entailment-claim, then (2l) would be the verbal point conveyed by (1’). But (2l) does not express a fact about actual usage. It is not true that as a matter of English usage the phrase “does philosophy” correctly applies to what is referred to by such expressions as “talks about the number of studies which have been written on Kant’s philo- sophical antinomies” and “talks about the current interest in philosophical ethics”. And a philosopher who asserts (1’) is not ignorant of the facts about the actual use of the expres- sions “talks about philosophy” and “does philosophy”. He makes his statement in the face of what he knows about these expressions. When this happens, there is, so far as I know, only one acceptable explanation : re-edited terminology, not actual usage, is being presented, but in a mode of speech which creates in some people the idea that actual usage is being called to our attention, To sum up, the sentence “In talking about philosophy one must be doing philosophy” is neither about what talking about philosophy is nor, indirectly, about the use in the English language of “does philosophy”. Rather, it presents an academically stretched use of the expression “does philosophy”, or of the word “philosophizes”, in which by semantic fiat it is made to apply to what is referred to by “talks about philosophy”. The sentence would express an a prim’ truth, and “must” would denote logical necessity, if the academically stretched use of “does philosophy” gained currency in the language, became standard usage.

SMITH COLLEGE

Vhilosophy and Psycho-analysis, (Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. 38.