VALUATIONS AND THE USES OF LANGUAGE

Educational heory Volume XVI October, 1966 Number 4

VALUATIONS AND THE USES OF LANGUAGE*

BY pHr.Lrp G. SMITH

I N T H E FIRST HALF O F THIS CENTURY DISCUSSIONS O F THEORY O F VALUATION (OR OF WHAT IS NOW FREQUENTLY CALLED META-ETHICS) SEEMED TO CONCENTRATE

TYPE. The four principal views appear to be the intuitive objectivism of G. E. Moore, the relationism of, say, Ralph Barton Perry, the contextual instrumentalism of John Dewey, and the positivistic noncognitivism of, say, Ayer and Stevenson. In each case the arguments were designed to show that in the use of such valuative terms as “good,” “ought,” or “right,” what was a t issue was some singular dominating characteristic. With some oversimplification we could say that in the arguments of Moore the dominating characteristic was an intuitive grasp of a non-natural, objective property. For Perry i t was some human interest. For Dewey, some means-end relation, and for Ayer and Stevenson, the expression of some imperative or emotion. Following the lead set by the later work of Moore, much of the argument proceeded by an analysis of the language behavior of persons engaged in disagreement about valuations. Examples of disagreements, alleged to be paradigms, were analyzed to show the adequacy of the theory held and the inadequacy of the alternative theories. Some of this work has a certain resemblance to Zeno’s analysis of the race between Achilles and the tortoise. But I shall reserve comment on this until later in this paper.

UPON AN ATTEMPT T O SHOW THAT ALL VALUE ASSERTIONS W E R E O F ONE GENERAL

Now, of course, these arguments have continued into the second half of the century. But I believe a significant new departure has been added. In con- temporary meta-ethics there appears to be somewhat less concern to support any preconceived theory of valuation and more concern to analyze valuative language, allowing the doctrinal chips to fall where they may. This is done in order to see

P H I L I P G. SMITH is Professor of Education and Chairman of the Department of HiJtop and Phi- IosopAy rg‘ Education at Indiana University, BLoomington, Indiana.

”Presidential Address delivered before the Philosophy of Education Society, April 4, 1966, at the Sheraton-Jefferson Hotel, St. Louis, Missouri.

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294 EDUCATIONAL THEORY

if some theory or theories of meta-ethics lie implicit in our use of language ;is it functions in the enormously varied situations of human valuing and disagreeing about values. Or to state this more accurately, and to say it in a way that could not be easily confused with a commonsense empiricism, the task of meta-ethics as it is now seen, is to construct retroductioely a theory of valuation complex enough to account for all the observable data, yet still coherent, and hopefully fruitful. In other fields such theories have sometimes been formulated by a n insightful genius as a fell swoop; more typically, however, such theories emerge as n resd t of extended cooperative inquiry. In any case, this afternoon J hope, a t best, to make only a modest contribution to theory building in meta-ethics and i n the process to say something useful about the relation to education of the problems encountered.

PERSOSAL PROBLEMS A N D INTERPERSONAL DISAGREEMENTS

a point of departure let me call attention to a short paragraph that zippears in the opening pages of Stevenson’s analysis of ethics and language. After stating that he is concerned to “obtain a general understanding of what constitutes a normative problem” he goes on to say:

There are certain normative problems, of course, to which the question is not directly relevant-those which arise in personal deliberation, rather than in interpersonal discourse, and which involve not disagreement or agreement but simply uncertainty. (3’7: 2)

On the face of it this seems very strange. Why should anyone interested in obtaining a general understanding of what constitutes a normative problem dis- miss, right a t the beginning, those problems involving personal uncertainty and deliberation? When is it that an individual is not engaged in personal deliberation, and is not uncertain about what is good, or what ought to be done, yet still has a problem?

What kind of problem remains?

Actually such a situation arises daily in any plural society. The problein is, of course, a problem of human relations. When I have no uncertainty about what is good or right or about what ought to be done and when you are equally certain that I am wrong, then our problem is: “How can we manage to get along?” Unless one or more persons involved in such a dispute has some doubts about what ought to be done, then, strictly speaking, there is no primary valuation problem. The problem is basically a matter of how to win friends and influence people.

Now it is true, of course, that such problems rapidly take on a moral or ethical dimension. This is to say that the question, “What is the right way for me to deal with a wrong-headed person?” does present (at least to me) a moral problem. When I am quite sure that X is better than Y, and you are equally certain that Y is better than X, the moral problem that we face is not the question of whether it is X or Y that is truly desirable (in contrast to what is merely desired). Our common moral problem is, rather, what ought a person to do when confronted by another human being who holds radically different desires, attitudes, or values. I t follows, of course, that if each of us hold settled but divergent convictions on this second order problem, then a third order problem arises. And so i t will go until a t least one of us reaches a

But notice what has happened.

VALUATIONS AND T H E IJSES OF LA~NGUAGE 29 5

point where he experiences some uncertainty-something problematic calling for personal deliberation.

Instead of looking to interpersonal discourse as being directly relevant to what constitutes a normative problem, he should have looked to what he dismissed, that is, he should have examined personal deliberation. One might conclude, therefore, that Stevenson’s book is nothing more than a careful analysis of the wrong problem. Or put mere gently, perhaps he inadvertently gave his book the wrong title. Tnstead of Fthirs and 1,anguage i t should have been called Human Relations and Language. L4nd it is not a t all surprising that an examination of the language used by perwns struggling to get along with each other in a free society reveals that emotive and persuasive uses of language come to the fore and seem to be the differentiating characteristic of this type of problem.

I t seems then that Stevenson has the situation reversed.

But this is not quite fair to Stevenson. In the first place in his more recent essays he now acknowledges that he should have paid more attention to personal uncertainty (38). And even in his earlier work he did note that many times persons who disagree about what is good or right or about what ought to be done are quite willing to take another look a t their own position: they are willing to try to understand other points of view, and willing to modify their own. 1 think i t is significant, however, that Stevenson admits this merely as a complicating factor rather than as a necessary condition for any paradigm case. I t is only after this complicating factor of sweet reasonableness is gotten out of the way that we get to what, for Stevenson, is the nub of the problem-that is, the divergent attitudes or other nun-cognitive factors.

In the second place, in spite of his opening dismissal of personal deliberation, Stevenson does, from time to time, make some reference to it. When doing so he treats i t in two ways: Sometimes he treats personal deliberation as if it were a special case of interpersonal disagreement. Now, of course, an individual may, in semi-schizoid fashion, argue with himself. H e may set up an imaginary op- ponent and try out arguments on him. I suppose most of us have played this little game a t one time or another and have enjoyed the smashing victories that we have won over our exceptionally intelligent and clever opponents. Vnfor- tunately, when we later try these same arguments against real opponents we discover that ordinary people are too obtuse to follow our line of thought and hence can’t realize that they have been soundly drubbed in the argument.

At other times Stevenson treats personal deliberation as a form of rationali- Since all of us are also familiar with this little game 1’11 pass over i t

’The point of all this is that because Stevenson did not view personal deliberation as directly relevant to ethical problems, he did not undertake a careful analysis of language as used in personal deliberation in contrast to the uses of language in interpersonal discourse. H e evidently took for granted that the function of language in personal deliberation is merely an unimportant variation of its function in interpersonal use.

In contrast to this and in line with the new departure in meta-ethics, I pro- pose to start with what I take to be an observable fact: i t is always some specific

zation. without further comment.


individual or person who has a problem-whether i t be a common-sense problem, a scientific problem, a problem of human relations, or a valuational problem. Therefore, any analysis of ethics and language should concern itself directly with the way in which language is used in personal deliberation, inquiry, or problem solving. And such deliberation or problem solving is, in the sense just indicated, always personal. The use of language in cooperative inquiry, its use for communication, and its use for influencing the behavior of others, are uses that are at one, two, and three steps removed from the primary consideration of its use as an instrument in solving a problem or formulating a judgment.

Perhaps another way of pointing to what is a t issue here is to note a distinction made by Paul Edwards concerning the different senses in which such phrases as “settling a dispute,” and “resolving an issue,” are used. (13: 27-28, 40-41) Edwards noted that a dispute is settled, in one sense, when all parties to the dispute come to hold the same view whether that view has been proven or not. In another sense, we say the dispute is settled when one view has been established by the weight of evidence, whether or not all parties accept the conclusion. Using this distinction we might then say that Stevenson seems to be primarily concerned with the way ethical disagreements are settled in the first sense. He is concerned with settlement in the second sense only to the extent that this kind of settlement may contribute to or be a cause of the first sense of settlement.

How, then, is language used in the investigation and resolution (in the second sense) of an ethical or other valuational problem? In order to explore this question, even in a cursory fashion, i t will be necessary to go into matters that are not customarily explored in meta-ethics. I shall attempt to go into these matters briefly, indicating what some of the problems are and what are some of the conclusions towards which a more exhaustive study would probably tend.

THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE I t has long been recognized that language is basically a social rather than an

individual affair. If man were a lone wolf rather than a social animal, if he were entirely self-dependent rather than interdependent, he would not have invented and developed languages for he would have had no need for communication. Philip Phenix has summarized this point of view in the assertion, “Language is a social invention that has been developed for purposes of communication.” (28: 215)

Unfortunately, along with this more or less truistic conception of language, many psychologists and other observers of human behavior have accepted the plausible notion that the human infant is born a self-centered and selfish creature who gradually becomes socialized. And language is viewed as an important if not the most important socializing factor. This way of thinking about man, language, and society seems especially plausible in a society profoundly influenced by the conceptions of man and society formulated by Hobbes and Locke. And, of course, these assumptions have influenced education both directly and indirectly.

Consider, for example, the work of Piaget in his studies of the private or so- called ego-centric speech of children. (20 and 29) Piaget evidently assumed that children a t first use simple language or rudimentary forms of language for thinking in a private, subjective, selfish, non-conventional manner. They are then

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gradually forced into more and more objective, rational, and socially acceptable modes of thought and discourse. As a part of this conception, thinking is viewed as largely a matter of sub-vocal speech or silent language-a kind of communicating with oneself not unlike communicating with others. Since language is in- herently social and conventional, i t gradually coerces children into a conventionality of thought which is, for the most part, salutary. For, after all, without the shared meanings that such a process produces, civilization would be impossible.

But other points of view are possible and the work of Vygotsky and others now studying children’s speech suggest radically different hypotheses concerning the relation of language to thinking and to individuality and sociality. -4s a result of very careful observations, Vygotsky concluded that:

1. 2.

3.

4.

I n their ontogentic development, thought and speech have different roots. In the speech development of the child we have found a preintellectual stage, and in his thought development, a prelinguistic stage. Up to a certain point in time, the two follow different lines, independently of each other. A t a certain point these lines meet, whereupon thought becomes verbal and speech rational. (43: 44)

Finally, he asserts, “. . . the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the socialized, but from the social to the individual.” (43: 20)

I n other words, it may not be the case that children are born ego-centric little individuals who are gradually socialized by language and other forms of inter- course. Quite the other way around, we may be born as little social blobs (perhaps superficially similar to little ants) and we attain individuality. And language is surely an important factor in this attainment.

The bearing on education is rather obvious. Perhaps this is one of the things John Dewey had in mind many years ago when he remarked:

The primary motive for language is to influence (through the expression of desire, emotion, and thought) the activity of others; its secondary use is to enter into more inti- mate sociable relations with them; its employment as a conscious vehicle of thought and knowledge is a tertiary, and relatively late, formation . . . . This distinction of the practical and social from the intellectual use of language throws much light on the problem of the school in respect to speech. That problem is to direct pupils’ oral and written speech, used primarily for practical and social ends, so that gradually it shall de- come a conscious tool of conueying knowledge and assisting thought. (10: 239)

With only a modest reconstruction of Dewey’s analysis we could arrive a t the

1. To exclaim-to vent feelings or emotions. This serves the useful function of relieving tension and hence of partially controlling one’s own behavior.

To communicate. This serves the useful function of influencing other people and hence of partially controlling other people’s behavior.

T o inquire. This serves the useful function of increasing understanding and hence of partially controlling experience.

following three uses of language:

2.

3.

25 li EDUCATIONAL THEORY

Perhaps, as Phenix says, language was invented for purposes of communication. Language is now used to inquire as well as to communicate; for the need to understand experience exists apart from the need to communicate with others. Talking to oneself is not the same as talking to someone else. The talking is done for a different purpose. Typically, we talk to others in order to command, to persuade, or to convey information; we talk to ourselves in order to control our experience by creating and exploring meaning.

I doubt i t , but in any event, language now has other uses.

In commenting upon this Vygotsky has said, “Inner speech is speech for oneself; external speech is for others. I t would be surprising if such a basic difference in function did not affect the structure of the two kinds of speech.” (43: 133) He goes on to say, “Speech for oneself originates through differentiation from speech for others. Since the main course of the child’s development is one of gradual individualization, this tendency is reflected in the function and structure of his speech.” (43: 133) He reported that as a result of many studies and experi- ments he concluded that, “predication is the natural form of inner speech; psy- chologically, it consists of predicates only.” (43: 145) “With syntax and sound reduced to a minimum, meaning is more than ever in the forefront. Inner speech works with semantics, not phonetics.” (32: 145) And finally, “Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.” (43: 149)

If Vygotsky is approximately correct, then it follows that inner speech is not, strickly speaking, a language. For any system of symbols in order to be a language must be discursive, that is, the symbols must be controlled by conven- tionalized rules of syntax and semantics and hence capable of signifying in some more or less standardized manner. I t follows that inner speech, while using many of the symbols of public language does not necessarily use them as language; that is, i t does not always, or even typically, use these symbols discursively. Con- sequently, even if all of thinking were silent or sub-vocal speech, it could typically be silent or inner private speech rather than silent public speech, and, hence, non- discursive, or perhaps, quasi-discursive.

One way to gain some insight into this situation is to consider the case of the bi-lingual person, perhaps in India, who thinks about his technical, professional problems in one language, say English, but communicates with his associates in some local dialect which has a structure significantly different from English. Suppose further that this person decided to write a book in his dialect called “HOW We Think.” One can imagine that the natives, after considering this book, n ight argue as to whether i t was essentially a logical or a psychological account of thinking. They might well conclude that while this account did bear some similarity to what they introspectively recognized as thinking, in any event, it was not an adequate account of the way they thought about their problems.

The fact of the conventionality of public speech, or the language of communication, influences our thinking and our understanding of thought in a t least two ways: first, to the extent that Phenix is correct-to the extent that language has been developed to facilitate communication and sociality rather than to serve the needs of controlled inquiry, to that extent language tends to coerce us into some conventionality of thought (in the pejorative sense of conventionality).

VALUATIONS A N D THE USES OF LANGUAGE 299

Another way to say this is to note the dominating influence of common sense on our thinking-including the influence of Bacon’s idols, and the like. And, of course, this is one reason why the various sciences have found i t necessary to develop more or less specialized or technical languages and notational systems designed better to serve the conditions of controlled inquiry.

.And second, any attempt to communicate to others the results of thinking about thinking must be expressed in the public language. Consequently, such accounts of thinking are, perhaps, similar to discursive accounts of non-discursive works of art.

But to return to the main thread of our problem, if the proper paradigm for a study of ethics and language is the case of an individual trying to think through what is good or right in some given situation, we see that a more adequate analysis of ethics and language awaits a more adequate understanding of the structure and function of inner speech and its relation to both the language of communication and the language of inquiry.

NO?U‘-DISCURSIVE THINKING R u t there is even more to the problem than this. For thought runs deeper

than language; deeper even then sub-vocal inner speech. ’The content of cognition is more than a string of discursive or quasi-discursive symbols. Professors Villemain, Champlin, and Ecker have written about qualitative structuring and qualitative problem solving. (12, 41 and 42) Without necessarily subscribing to all they have said, I think we must recognize two points:

Every situation has qualities. Now there is no serious objection to re- lating qualities to emotions, unless we set u p a dichotomy between reason and emotion and imagine that to be rational or reasonable means to have no emotions. On the contrary, reasonableness is itself a complex quality and one of the pervasive qualities of science, for example, is its rational, objective character. As Dewey pointed out, it is the pervasive qualities of any situation that tend to control the form of inquiry that can ap- propriately be conducted in that situation. In this sense, doing science is no less emotional than doing music, doing history, or making love. Rut the emotions of science are qualitatively different from the emotions of making love.

A4nyone who has some understanding of the qualitative aspects of various situations can to some extent, deliberately structure and restructure these qualities. And, of course, language is one of the tools we use to accom- plish such structuring. Indeed, so called persuasive or emotive use of language is a case in point.

I’nfortunately, however, our metaphysical heritage encourages us to talk as if emotive language (or as we sometimes say, “loaded words”) impinges directly upon the “emotions” of a person, arousing these emotions to the point that they impel the person to action-perhaps overriding “the intellect” in the process. But this is just a manner of speaking. All language is more or less emotive- more or less loaded-so that the introduction of any kind of language into a situa-

1.

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300 E D u c A n o l \ r A L ’I‘HEORY

tion may alter the qualities of that situation and thus alter the character of the response or interaction that takes place. In studies of the function of private speech in children’s thinking (15, also 4) it seems evident that children learn to use verbal mediators as control mechanisms in experience. The use of such mediators changes the quality of the experience and the character of the response. In short, it is these mediators that enable the child to make what, in the Hullfish and Smith book (19: 149-165) is called a “conceptual response.”

What seems to happen is that single words or brief phrases used i n a non- discursive fashion, serve as corrals for meaning-that is, for fixing associations of one kind or another, including, of course, qualitative relationships. I n short, these verbal mediators are vehicles for concept formation. And it appears that i t is not only words that function in this way but also muscular and emotional tensions, revealed in facial expression and body movement, and, no doubt, an endless range of mental images and changes in body chemistry that is extremely difficult to bring under controlled observation.

Thus i t is that we think with body as well as mind and we think not only with words but with qualities, colors, tones, images, muscular tensions, feelings of harmony and disharmony, compatibility and paradox, tension and resolution. Some of this cognition can be more or less adequately translated into or repre- sented by public language; some cannot. Some of it can be more or less adequately presented by various ar t forms.

I n a manner of speaking we could say that we believe, perhaps know, some things with the heart rather than the head. The mistake is to equate the head with all that is cognitive, discursive, and rational, and the heart with non-cognitive attitudes, qualities and emotions.

Even with public language we realize that there is more to talking than pronouncing the words involved. As Stanley Cave11 has remarked, “Since saying something is never merely saying something, but is saying someting with a certain tone and a t a proper cue and while executing the appropriate business, the sounded utterance is only a salience of what is going on when we talk.” (7:103) A speaker sometimes conoeys much more than is expressed by the discursive symbols em- ployed. Even in the classroom, teachers and students use language in ways that, frequently, are not very closely related to the way language is used to, say, express the results of physical science. Perhaps this is one of the difficulties in the work of B. Othanel Smith and his associates. (36) For even if we were to assume that all teachers and all students were taking John Dewey so seriously that they were actually trying to use language only as “a conscious tool of conveying knowledge and assisting thought” i t would surely still be a mistake to suppose that categories based on the language of the physical sciences would be adequate for understanding the talk involved in all the classrooms of our public schools.

F A C T A N D V A L U E

This brings us to a more direct consideration of emotive or persuasive language, the expression of attitudes, and the like, which is often alleged to be the crux of the difference between descriptive and normative arguments and judg-

VALUATIONS AND THE ~ J S E S OF LANGUAGE 30 1

ments. one attempts to move from fact to value, or from the is to the ought.

Involved here, of course, is the alleged logical impasse encountered when

Now from the time of Zeno, i t has been apparent to everyone (except certain philosophers) that anytime you can show that, in a foot race, Achilles cannot overtake a tortoise, there is something obviously wrong with the way in which you are posing the problem. Professor Levit has discussed some of the difficulties involved in the way non-cognitivists usually pose the problem of ethical disagreements. (22) Levit argues, in effect, that while in the abstract i t may sound plausable to speak of two fair, open-minded people, agreeing on all the facts and still disagreeing about what is good or right in the light of those facts, that actually you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have two people who at the very same time are open-minded, fair, objective, and impartial disagreeing because one or both of them are also partial and prejudiced.

But as i t stands I don’t believe i t shows that the non-cognitivists are fundamentally wrong in insisting that in valuational problems the truth of the relevant factual assertions is typically not the crux of the matter. What it does show is that words like “fair,” “open-minded,” “objective” and “impartial” are no less loaded-no less emotive language-than words such as “prejudiced,” “narrow minded,” “opinionated,” etc. Surely it is not a mistake to claim that disagreements about valuations are rooted in a difference in values rather than in a disagreement about the truth of a factual assertion. The mistake is rather, to assume, first, that the language of so-called descriptive or factual assertions is free from emotive (even persuasive) terms, and, second, that the presence of emotive language in valuational problems auto- matically removes these problems from the realm of the rational and the cognitive.

Following a lead sug- gested by A. E. Murphy in his The Theory of Practical Reason (26) we may note the different loading of the two terms “brother” and “male sibling.” Or still more dramatically, suppose that Mother’s Day were to be re-named “Female Parent’s Day.” Now remembering one of Wittgenstein’s suggestions that if you want to know what a word means you should consider how one learns to use the word, we recall that in the studies of children’s thinking we noted that terms are used to corral associations. These associations include what is usually called connotations as well as denotations.

But this way of thinking about meanings is not very helpful for our purposes. What is a t issue here is more nearly what C. 1. Lewis calls signification, that is, the properties or characteristics that must be present in order for the term to be applicable. (23)

Most of us have learned to use the term “male sibling” in some classroom in which some of the pervasive qualities were approximately those of science. But we have learned to use the term “brother” in the home, where, if we were fortunate, the pervasive qualities were rather different from those of science. For our purposes, the particular difference to note is that “male sibling” denotes a biological organism that is related to us by a common parent. The conceptual network corralled by this term includes systematic relationships with an array of more or less scientific matters. By contrast, the term “brother” denotes a

This is an interesting point.

Consider the way in which certain words are loaded.


person-a human being who stands in a very special relationship to us and to others whom we love. The network of meaning that is corralled by this term includes an array of obligations learned by living as a member of a family.

Thus it is that when someone is confronted by an inconvenient request for help from a male sibling and he ponders “Why should I put myself out in order to help him?” the retort “Because he is your brother,” constitutes one good reason for the conclusion “You ought to help him.”

Now it is frequently said that such an argument, in order to get from the is of “He is your brother” to the ought of “You ought to help him,” must contain another premise that states some general rule such as “One ought to help one’s brother.” And because i t is artificial i t merely postpones indefinitely the problem of justifying the ought and it intro- duces what Philip Rice once called in another context “the mountain range effect.” Indeed, this procedure eventually leads to the conclusion that Achilles can’t overtake the tortoise.

But this is artificial and misses the point.

I suppose that “He is your brother” would usually be called a descriptive statement; but when we remember that part of the meaning it corrals is a set of obligations, the mystery of getting from the is to the ought disappears. But before you conclude that all I have really shown is that here is a case of emotive use of language, remember that “male sibling” is also a loaded word. I t carries its own array of ordered associations, including certain qualities, emotions, and values drawn from “doing science,” rather than from “living in a family.”

Or consider again the two arguments: “He is your male sibling, therefore, you and he have a common parent,” and, “He is your brother, therefore, you ought to help him.” And it is just as artificial to make explicit the additional premise “Siblings have a common parent” as to add to the second argument the rule “One ought to help one’s brother.” To be sure, definitions are a different kind of norm than are ethical rules, but no less normative. And i f anyone wanted to start pushing for justification of the norms involved in even scientific arguments, he would eventually encounter the same kind of mountain range effect and might well conclude that a scientific Achilles can’t overtake the tortoise any better than a moral one. In science, however, this lack of abso- lutes that forces us into a systemic form of justification- a kind of non-vicious circularity-or perhaps better, a pragmatic spiral-in science, this is thought to be a great virtue and a sign of commendable humility and objectivity. !f7hy, then, this dual standard for justification of fact and value? If “good reasons” are good enough for science it seems especially perverse to abandon them in ethical questions while either searching for or remarking the impossibility of “perfect re as on \.

I t turn5 out then that while the fact-value distinction may be useful for some purposes, i t is worse than useless when it obscures the fact that all facts are them- selves embedded in values of some kind. Said more formally, every assertion, whether factual, analytic, valuative-indeed, every linguistic expression, whether an imperative, exclamation, or what not-if meaningful, will contain a t ieast one term that corrals a pattern of norms. I t is the normative that constitutes the

The difference is one of content, not of logic.

Moreover, both of these implicit rules are normative.

,,

VALUATIONS A N D THE USES O F LANGUAGE 303

basic mode of meaning. as big as the Ritz” are nevertheless, quite meaningful. violate our normative patterns, for example, “round square” or human slavery” that are the paradigms of meaninglessness.

Expressions with zero denotation such as “a diamond It is expressions that

democratic “

Another way of understanding this is to note the similarity of what I have just said to a closely related matter in theory of knowledge. Since the time of Hume, empirically oriented philosophers have generally agreed that the form and to some extent the content of human knowledge is rooted in man’s biological behavior. More specifically, man’s pre-rational behavior forecasts the forms of his logic of inference and implicit in his primitive habits was a cognitive content that approximates some of his later fundamental generalizations. For example, Russell said: “The forming of inferential habits which lead to true expectations is part of the adaptation to the environment upon which biological survival de- pends” and “I t is by reflecting upon such inferences that we make the principles explicit. And when they have been made explicit, we can use logical techniques to improve the form in which they are stated, and to remove unnecessary accre- tions.” (31: 507)

We are also familiar with Dewey’s discussion of the biological matrix of inquiry and of the emergence of logic from the forms of earlier rudimentary inquiry that turned out to be successful. While disagreeing about the possibility of direct knowledge, Russell and Dewey agreed that all forms of indirect or inferential empirical knowledge can be justified only in terms of principles that cannot them- selves be directly justified. But rather than invoking a traditional rationalistic assumption to shore up this inadequacy discovered in traditional empiricism, they both preferred to anchor human knowledge in pre-rational habits developed in response to basic biological needs. The string of inference needed to justify human knowledge and then to justify this justification, and so forth, eventually runs aground somewhere in some rudimentary form of the human activity of knowing.

N o w i t is surely only a modest extension of this notion to recognize that man is a truly social creature (not merely gregarious) as well as a biological creature and that the chain of justification for moral obligation eventually grounds into man’s rudimentary forms of sociality. Perhaps it is something of this kind that Professor Bertocci had in mind when recently he said, “Ought is an abstraction from oughting, a quality of human experience.” (3: 3)

I t seems to me that the considerations I have advanced ought to impell one at least to re-evaluate the usefulness for meta-ethics of the old positivistic set of dichotomies; fact-value, belief-attitude, cognitive-noncognitive, to say nothing of the still older rationalistic formulations. But, of course, these considerations can not force such a re-evaluation upon anyone still doing meta-ethics in the spirit of the first half of this century. For even in science one can hold to most any conceptual scheme if he is willing to make enough adjustments in other parts of the system.

In a recent essay called “Retrospective Comments” Professor Stevenson has given a rather dramatic illustration of man’s ability to make such adjustments in order to maintain his original assumptions. After acknowledging that in his


earlier works, ‘‘I was so intent on emphasizing the topic of disagreement that I said too little about the neighboring topic of personal uncertainty,” (38: 191) he nevertheless, proceeds to pose the following situation as an example of the kind of consideration to which he ought to have paid more attention.

Mr. Z is convinced that he ought to vote in the next election. He has until now, however, paid so little attention to local politics that the rival candidates are little more than names to him, and he doesn’t know for whom to vote. He accordingly reads up on the candidates, listens to their speeches, and in general takes steps toward making a decision . . . There is indeed personal uncertainty, but it arises from a desire (itself an attitude) that is directed toward developing attitudes to the candidates. (38: 198)

What a perverse way to state the problem No doubt we would all agree that in the process of reading u p on the candidates, listening to their speeches, and the like, Mr. Z will develop attitudes toward the candidates. And if we could observe his voting we could be reasonably safe in concluding toward which candidates he had developed the most favorable (or the least unfavorable) attitudes. But surely we would ordinarily say that he undertook the investigation to see if there were good reasons for voting for some candidates rather than others and that the development of attitudes was a concomitant phenomenon, not the “felt need” that triggered the investigation. Stevenson finally admits, “I emphasize an individual’s attitudes, in dealing with personal uncertainty in ethics, for the same reason that I would emphasize an individual’s beliefs in dealing with personal uncertainty in science.” (38: 203) In other words, his basic categories are not constructed retroductively to account for the data but are imposed a priori upon the data.

Perhaps even more striking is Stevenson’s acknowledgment that i t is no longer possible to maintain that ethical judgments are neither true nor false. (38: 214) But this leads him to conclude not that noncognitivism should be re-evaluated but that the words “true” and “false” must be appropriate or inappropriate on account of some linguistic rule that is purely syntactical. (38: 216) Thus, by “ad- justing O U ~ ” the usual semantic significance of “true” he is able to maintain his original categories even in the face of the data that his continued studies have forced him to acknowledge.

VALUATIONS A N D EDUCATION John Dewey, in his more Wittgenstein-like moments said, in effect, “if you

want to know what your philosophic ideas mean, note how they could be used in the conduct of education.” So let us see if we can make sense out of the things I have said by pulling them together in their bearing on education.

We have advanced the following considerations:

1. Children are born as elements in a social situation in which identity and individuality are potentials to be gradually realized rather than innate endowments.

Conventional speech or language is an essential glue for human society 2. and it is as a social instrument that i t is first learned by children.

VALUATIONS AND THE USES OF LANGUAGE 305

3. In the meantime, children begin to think-that is, to treat one thing as a sign of something else-and they gradually learn to adopt and to adapt portions of the public language for their private use. This is to say that they begin to attain identity and individuality. But the roots that nourish individuality must always remain in the soil of the public and the conventional, which supplies the normative network in which both facts and values have meaning.

4. As Dewey noted, with respect to language, the primary job of the school is to assist children in learning to use language as a conscious tool for conveying knowledge and assisting thought. Perhaps a more useful way of saying this would be “to use language for recognizing, conceptualizing, and solving problems.” And, of course, “problem” should be construed very broadly.

5 . But thinking and problem solving is essentially a personal affair, even though the particular problem may be classified as personal, social, scientific, moral, aesthetic, or what not. Moreover, thinking involves more than the use of language or discursive symbols used discursively. Consequently, the proper paradigm for the study of the role of language in thoughtful judgment or decision making (whether in science or in ethics) is precisely what Stevenson dismissed as not directly relevant, namely, those problems “which arise in personal deliberation, rather than in interpersonal discourse, and which involve not disagreement or agreement but simply uncertainty.” (37: 2)

Now, of course, personal deliberation is very difficult to study, first, because it is private, and, second, because even introspective reports involve an awkward translation of the non-discursive elements. But as Abraham Kaplan has pointed out, if you lose your wallet in the middle of a dark alley, it’s doubtful research procedure to move on until you come to a street light and start looking for i t there. (21)

Until recently, most of us assumed that the schools were doing a reasonably good job of teaching the sciences even though we knew they were not doing so well in the area of values. But as a result of such groups as the Physical Sciences Study Committee taking a sustained look a t curriculum and teaching methods, we realize that even science teaching has been rather poor. Note the main thrusts of PSSC Physics, the new biology, the new math, etc. The emphasis is, first, upon basic structures. Not the essential facts, in any bare-boned sense, but the foundational conceptual structures and methodology of the discipline. In short, the characteristic normative patterns that make the discipline a distinctive discipline. And the second main thrust has been the emphases upon the personally imaginative, creative, and problematic character of the work that actually goes on in the field in contrast to the neat and tidy conclusions presented in traditional text books.

With respect to values, specifically ethics and aesthetics, our public school programs are a shambles. And no doubt this is largely a reflection of the confusion and ambivalence in our society. Professor Scriven has commented “Almost everyone is brought up to believe that ethics is either a purely private affair or a matter of one’s religious commitment or (the “advanced” view) just a cultural

006 EDUCATIONAL 7’HEORY

phenomenon. clear that this cannot possibly be true.” (34: 1)

And yet everyone is also brought up in such a way as to snake

What happens, of course, is that most children are reared in such a way that they do learn to accept some of the obligations and to develop some of the virtues that are part of the fabric of human society. Moreover, they observe adults, a t least occasionally, behaving as if their decisions were made with regard for both moral rules or generalizations and for the consequences that seem likely to follow from the various alternative actions that are available. Yet when receiving deliberate moral instruction in home, church, or school, these same children are taught to believe one of the views of ethics that Scriven has mentioned.

I believe that from the kind of considerations I have discussed there will emerge a meta-ethics that will recognize that moral training must preceed moral education and that an important aspect of moral education is a rationalization (in a non-pejorative sense) of prior moral training, converting it into a base for rational moral behavior. I speak not of the union of faith and reason but of habit and intelligence. And the third factor needed to complete the picture is an aesthetic sensitivity cultivated in relation to the qualitative dimensions of man’s sociality.

I t is true, of course, that the environment of the pre-school years is crucial in the proper development of habit, intelligence, and sensitivity. But the human being is able to continue to learn and to reconstruct his experience so there is much than can be done in moral education during the school age years. If the sciences, the arts, and the social studies were all taught with these three factors in mind, there would probably be little need for direct inoral instruction. Al- though work in philosophy-especially problems in theory of knowledge and valuation--should be included in the high school curriculum. But this is needed in order to consolidate what is learned in all parts of the curriculum not to give special emphasis to ethics, which is now typically the case.

Unfortunately, some have thought that there is a necessary incompatability between training and education, habit and intelligently directed behavior, aesthetic sensitivity and rational evaluation. Both Scheffler (32) and Peters (27) have discussed this question in relation to education and Erikson has discussed the same problem from a Freudian standpoint. (14) And, of course, many years ago John Dewey noted “Only the man whose habits are already good can know what the good is.” (1 1 : 32)

Surely i t is now time that we rid ourselves of the notion that the cultivation of habit and sensitivity are opposed to intelligence and rational, responsible decision, and begin to construct a school program that, regardless of subject matter (whether science, citizenship, or fine arts) goes forward under aesthetically appropriate regimen, rhythm, and ceremony (not to be confused with ritual and propo- ganda) and instruction that, as Scheffler says, initiates students “into the rational life, a life in which the critical quest for reasons is a dominant and integrating motive.” (32: 107) I t is in such a setting that language can be transformed into a conscious tool for conveying knowledge, assisting thought, and attaining that constructive individuality which is the proper goal for a democratic education.

VALUATIONS AND THE USES OF LANGUAGE 307

1. 2.

3.

4.

5 . 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

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VALUATIONS AND THE USES OF LANGUAGE