Ordinary language as a philosophical benchmark

Ordinary language as a philosophical benchmark

If philosophy ignores the way we actually use language it simply cannot do what it promises, which is to to help us bring clarity to the muddle.

There are two strategies that offer themselves immediately. 1. Make the muddle disappear by changing things, or, 2. by trying to understand the muddle and the way it works so that what appeared to be a muddle gently acquires the contours of comprehensible structure.

The challenge with regard to our thinking about the world is that meaning is fundamentally indeterminate. When translating someone’s words for their meaning, many translations are possible. As such, we can understand each other in many ways.

I cannot know for sure what my interlocutor is trying to say to me; I must, to some extent at least, gamble on what they are saying and how best to respond…. “Do you mean…?” “Is this what you want to say?” “Am I understanding you right?”

The opportunity for understanding is created by 1. our umwelt,1 that is the space created by the way our sensory and cognitive system interacts with things in the environment that holds both in order to accommodate and service our body, and 2. the biographical and thus uniquely structured frames of reference each of us evolves on that basis.

The opportunity of understanding is just as much a risk of misunderstanding each other. “No…not quite…, what I meant was…” “Huh? I don’t understand. Do you mean…?”

In this space of conceptual interaction one can find all the legitimate as well as the infinite illegitimate ways of understanding a proposition. “That’s not right, surely…”, “Ah, ok, yes, I think I’m beginning to get it…”

In so far as meaning can be shared it is determined on the basis of norm and negotiating practices. “Oh… is that what you mean by it. Aha….! I thought you meant…” “Mind you, you could look at it like this….”

Cultures and sub-cultures and the individuals that form them, acquire and negotiate their own norms with regard to the meaning of words, sentences and texts, sometimes simply to differentiate themselves from others. Do you greet your friend with the word ‘Bro’? Do you know why the various forms of Caribbean patois are so different to the colonizing language they were designed to be different from? Guess.

Individuals in a community can, despite the norms trying to stabilize meaning, nevertheless disagree as to the meaning of each word or sentence or text, both on the basis of their differing frames of reference, and, in so far as they can be distinguished, on the basis of their own ideological positions and socio-cultural and technological embeddedness.

Furthermore, what we deem to exist as thing is not determined by the the world alone but in interaction between our cognitive and conceptual working and the behaviour of the world. (That is discussed in the sections on things and concepts) Things form where the world and the cognizing subject, always situated within a community, meet.

The meaning of an utterance just is the use made of it. That is both the use intended by the sender and the use actually made of it by the receiver. These will perhaps overlap to a degree, but will rarely overlap completely.2

Meaning then is generated in use. In fact meaning just is the use made of something. And as meaning is a fitting together of things, it has both a metaphysical as well as an aesthetic dimension.

The above sentences have woven into them some of the conclusions of Willard van Ormon Quine’s seminal book Word and Object of 1960 and Wittgenstein’s paradigm shifting Philosophical Investigations of 1953.

These books and this kind of thinking initiated or fitted within the Ordinary Language School of philosophy.3

That school argues on the one hand that philosophical confusion arises when language is taken out of its ordinary context or used differently to the norm and subsequently not taking that potential disconnect into account by mapping it. On the other it argues that philosopshical depth can be achieved thoguh the analysis of ordinary language and its role in intentional behaviour, like design.

A way of overcoming the fundamentally indeterminate nature of meaning is to try to determine meaning through norms, thereby trying to restrict possibilities of interpretation.

Philosophers are as much subject to this requirement as anyone else. And so, we need to understand the normative nature of thought and what that means with regard to our intentional activities.

Should we be glad that meaning, in so far it can be determined, is always normatively determined? The answer to this question will be an unconditional yes, but even if we weren’t, there would not be a lot we can do about it. Why we should at least be happy about it is that it gives us access to the little freedom we have, which is to learn to act sensibly without disturbing or disrupting the determined nature of the universe. Learning uses the determined nature of the universe to the extent that we can reflect upon the past in order to do better in the future. That is the full extent of our freedom.

What we can do is grasp how it all works. It is one thing to understand the behaviour of the unvierse, it is another to understand a subset of that behaviour, which is the behaviour of language as thought. By examining how words are used in everyday settings, we can understand ambiguities and confusions by mapping their actual workings and so either use them to our advantage or avoid them where possible. The same could be done for images and numbers and gestures, but here I will concentrate on words.

Ideal Languages

Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and the early Wittgenstein aimed to create ideal, logical languages to clarify thought. With this they hoped to increase precision and rule out ambiguity.

Such an ideal language might be judged favourably if judged on its own terms. But to what extent will it clarify the muddle? In fact an ideal language might just as easily pose its own problems, thereby adding to the muddle, rather than solving the supposed problems of ordinary language.

Here is a simple example

Imagine the sentence “The cat is on the mat.” In Russell’s ideal language, this would be broken down into:

“There exists an object, x, such that x is a cat” (∃x)(Cx)

“There exists an object, y, such that y is a mat” (∃y)(My)

“x is on y” (Oxy)

But this is not actually complete as we would also want a definition of ‘is’ of ‘on’ and of ‘the’. By the time we have it all sorted out the cat will already have done its worst on that mat. This kind of ideal language is a language that expresses thought, but is useful primarily to analyze whether a statement made in ordinary language is legitimate, whether an argument is valid, as such it can, after the analysis has been completed and we have reverted to ordinary language, strengthen the clarity and the persuasiveness and structure of arguments. Interestingly it also shows up restrictive boundaries of much of our thought.

Take the famous example of Peter van Inwagen’s thesis that Determinism and Free will are incompatible.4

  1. If determinism is true, then every action is the necessary result of past events and the laws of nature.
  2. We have no control over the past or the laws of nature.
  3. Therefore, we have no control over our actions.
  4. If we have no control over our actions, we don’t have free will.
    ⟹ Therefore, if determinism is true, we don’t have free will.

This is often formalized using modal logic (to capture necessity and possibility) and temporal logic (to capture time-based dependencies).

In Modal Logic:

Let:

  • P = a proposition about the past
  • L = laws of nature
  • → = entails
  • □ = necessity
  • ◇ = possibility

Then, we might represent the core idea like this:

(P ∧ L) → A

□(P ∧ L)

⟹ □A

Well that appears to settle it then. Van Inwagen’s own conclusion was that Free will exists therefore Determinism must be the problem. And perhaps he was right. Not so much about determinism per se, but about his view of determinism. That is where I locate the problem. To my mind it is a poor understanding of what determinism can entail. To give him his due he lived in the age when computer learning was only a dim idea. We now know that learning is something that is not incompatible with determinism in the least and we also know that the freedom that says: if we could do a or b, we choose on the basis of a belief or we perform a gamble to do either a or b.

A gamble is not necessarily incompatible with determinism as mechanics of the gamble will be the tiny little nudges that makes a penny on its side fall either this way or that way. Gambles are just letting physics do its thing.

And if we choose on the basis of belief then this too is not incompatible with determinism as belief is just as much of a causal agent as everything else is in the universe, so why should it be different?

To say that our belief was predestined is a curious way of putting things. There is no knowing agent who knows our beliefs. The complexity of causality is such that the notion of predestination, although perfectly valid in theory has no practical consequence at the scale of the universe as a whole. If I have two options and earlier experience or the teachings of my peers tells me that a in this situation is better than b, I shall do a. Unless of course I am in an experimental mood and what to see what happens if I do b. But then my experimental mode is part of the determined universe that supplies the last cause. Freedom is the ability to do what one wants and one learns to want. And if one learns that A is not a good idea well then we try b or c or z. None of that is at all incompatible with determinism, because determinism is not just this little syllogism:

  1. If determinism is true, then every action is the necessary result of past events and the laws of nature.
  2. We have no control over the past or the laws of nature.
  3. Therefore, we have no control over our actions.

It should, in the light of the above go:

  1. If determinism is true, then every action is the necessary result of past events and the laws of nature
  2. The laws of nature (including the ones we do not yet know about) must necessarily include our ability to learn and to (often stochastically) predict events. (Our sensory apparatus allows us to see, hear, smell and feel things coming from a distance in time and space)
  3. It also allows us to learn from the past and from others
  4. Therefore we have control over our actions in so far as we are able to learn from the past to choose appropriate actions in the present to hope for a better future.
  5. Therefore if determinism is true we are able to act intentionally with good hope, if we wish to call that free will then so be it.

So how has formal logic helped us here? Well it didn’t. It was rather the paucity of the definition of determinism as put in ordinary language that helped me. In fact to put it in the terms of modal logic will merely show that I master another language. And that is the problem with formal logic, it cannot give definitions because it cannot describe things in terms of the properties it has as a result of my interaction with the thing. Without that formal logic is held to ransom by our definitions and the richness or paucity of our concepts.

The charms of precision

So what happens if we seek precision by giving everything very precise definitions and keeping to them? Such a strategy would make it perhaps harder to spot conceptual overlap whereby concepts refer to universals to allow all sorts of particulars to collect under their banner and so would make analogies harder to spot as there would be less conceptual overlap in words.

This in contrast to how ordinary language achieves precision.

Ordinary language philosophers (like the “reformed” later Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell, Ryle, Hanfling and many more) argued that natural language, despite its apparent messiness, is in fact already very precise as long as you understand the game you are playing and are willing to practice at it, and so learn to play it well.

Ordinary language philosophy focuses on how language actually works in everyday contexts and looks at what that can give us.

Now, language is a tool to express thought as well as a tool to communicate thought.

Ordinary Language philosophy encourages thinkers, that is those who use language to express thought and so construct models of the world or parts of it, to test their ideas against the ordinary use of words in the attempt to communicate about those models.

That is good advice as it is very tempting as a philosopher to wish to tie words down to specific and precise meanings that is convenient only to their specific purpose.

That is because it is thought, and not without good reason, that a word can only be properly objectified and stop being ambiguous if it is precisely defined. Subjective meanings and ambiguity, in this light, are seen as problems.

This may well be so, but this in itself causes all sorts of problems. Not least the increasing separation of philosophy from quotidian life.

Frege, Russell and the younger Wittgenstein were not the first to wish for an ideal language. In fact, philosophers have a tradition of constructing language to model their world in the way they want to.

Socrates encouraged his interlocutors to define the word they were discussing intensionally rather than extensionally, that is, by getting to the essence of the word instead of listing things that the word conjures up. It is all very well to say that john is an example of virtue, but what is it that John actually does to be virtuous and what is it that makes that doing virtuous exactly? Plato’s Socratic dialogues often left the discussion unresolved or rather in a state of aporia.

Famous examples of ‘difficult’ philosophers are Kant, (who was struggling, very precisely, with very new ideas), Hegel (did the same but became the king of difficult philosophers and despite the brilliance of his ideas, many feel that the language he designed was unnecessarily obtuse), Heidegger is famously contorted. Sartre, in his seminal work l’Être et le Néant, (1943) did an imitation of Hegel. Deleuze on occasion got me completely confused, although I gladly forgive him. And Derrida simply loved and lived for ambiguity.

Only those philosophers thought to have real treasure hidden in their arcane language can mobilize armies of intrepid readers prepared to do the work of learning that language and to plough through the wilderness of esoteric concepts beating paths of meaning through the jungle of their words.

Analytical philosophers tend to use ordinary language, and there is also another group of philosophers who eschewed the obtuse language of their colleagues such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Frege. But each of these, especially Nietzsche, raise other problems of interpretation.

The use of language cannot be a judgment of superiority of one philosophy over another. Some see philosophy as a creative practice focusing on generating descriptions of appearance and ideas how to place humanity it is environment, others try to get to the bottom of things and want to sifting out the nonsense.

Specialist Languages

In a similar vein, and for very similar purposes we leave it to specialists to develop very precise vocabularies for their professional field of interest. Do you know what a gusset is?

Taylors need words for all parts of all clothes and ways of stitching them together. Butchers need words for every part of a cow, pig or chicken, for every method of cutting and for every kind of useful knife and all its parts. Architects and Structural engineers have a partly overlapping technical vocabulary but move into their own bubbles with a single step to the side. Would any architect be familiar with the notion of staggered bolt-hole design? Are you?

An expert in a particular field can be easily distinguished from someone unfamiliar to the field by the way both speak.

The one will use the a specialist vocabulary to describe something or some situation. But this “jargon” is generally only understood by other specialists in the same field. Listen to civil servants, structural engineers, tailors, doctors, lawyers and cabinet makers talk to others of the same profession about what keeps them busy and you will know what I mean. It is like listening to a foreign language.

The non-expert talking about the same thing will use their everyday vocabulary to describe more circuitously what it is they want to say. This person will perhaps be understood by many, but because their description is not an expert description, its sophistication will perhaps not be at the level of what the expert can say about things.

It is, in a self-defeating sense more efficient for the discipline itself and more comfortable for experts to let them play together in their own language bubble. (Comfort zones are conceptual) It costs much less energy than trying to communicate with people who are very different. But that also has its price, namely the isolation of specialist disciplines, and subcultures which is a bad thing for very different reasons.

Universals versus Particulars

What are the advantages and disadvantages of precision in language? This can get a bit complicated but let’s have a go.

Essentially words are very much like sets. If you see gentle rain falling on to a stretch of calm water you see hundreds of little circles form, increase in size and intersect. That is a nice image of what a frame of reference looks like, a collection of concepts, held in words images, numbers, bodily gestures, movements and bodily expressions all of them intersecting and overlapping as they grow as people become familiar with them, accreting more conceptualized properties, making the space of implications in which inferences find their path richer and more sophisticated and if properly disciplined, more precise.

Let’s we concentrate on words for a moment. We have nouns, and proper nouns or names, verbs, articles, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions. Each has its own peculiar role in the game of expressing thought and communicating it.

Proper nouns name particular objects such as John, or The Titanic, or in some cases very particular kinds of thing such as a Volkswagen Beetle. Ordinary Nouns refer to some type of thing like ‘boat’ ‘sail’ ‘rudder’. Verbs typify and group types of activity.

Such words are conceptually captured or enriched, through their definition and further descriptive elaboration, with conceptualized properties that may or may not be legitimately attributable to them.

In this way universals can be defined, but also particularized. So, there are chairs and there are chairs with plastic orange seats; there are chairs that look like animals and chairs that are broken and so forth. There are infinite possibilities, whereby all chairs show a family resemblance. Some will share characteristics a, b and c, others c, d and f, and yet others a, and f and sometimes g but not always.

And then there are yet other words that require you to perform some sort of operation in your thinking on those nouns and verbs.

Adjectives and adverbs specify the nouns and verbs you use, giving them a specific character, that is specifying properties. With the word ‘and’ which is a coordinating conjunction, you couple things whilst with the word ‘or’ you exclude one thing in favour of another.

Pronouns determine the geometry of a conversation or a spatial setting from the perspective of the speaking or thinking subject and their interlocutor, whilst prepositions situate us and our things in space and time. Articles allow us to switch between the universal and the particular.

All these types of words together allow a complex compositional image and narrative to be made in which we can become as precise as we would like to be. The price we pay is the number of words we use to get somewhere and the energy we are required to spend in learning how language works and maintaining our skills regarding language.

Particularly the invention of having virtual universals (things that can only exist conceptually) that are able through characterization and specification to refer to particulars (things we can bump our head or toes against as we move though space) is pure genius. Having just one word for all the possible things belonging in a set like ‘chair’, or ‘colourful’ makes language light enough to carry around with us and precise enough to say almost anything.

Each universal can be particularized through further specification using adjectives, the placing of it in a spatial and temporal context and so forth. Similarly each particular thing can be universalized.

So the lesson the philosopher needs to take from all this is that they must not assume that their precise definition is in all ways ‘better’ than the ordinary use of words. That would not be accurate. As such the dream of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russel to come up with a precise ‘ideal’ language was nice and served its purpose as a philosophical thought experiment, but it will not serve our daily lives or philosophy terribly well in all cases.

Similarly, if precision in language means we have to multiply the names of things by giving everything we identify through a description, so that, for instance, we have a name for chairs with orange seats and a separate name for chairs with red seats, instead of just calling them “chairs with orange seats” and “chairs with red seats”, we would be increasing the conceptual weight we have to carry through our quotidian lives. The system of universals or types of things being able to describe particulars as wel smaller subsets of types of things, is incredibly efficient and allows us may roads to Rome.

The pleasures of ambiguity

On the other side of precision lies ambiguity. As such, in order to be precise it is just as important to come to grips with the kinds of ambiguity that are possible in our use of language and either prevent them from occurring, by for example tying a word down in a particular context: “When I use the word ‘expressive’ in this essay I specifically mean…” or using ambiguity to your advantage, if that is your thing.

The purpose of philosophy, however, is to achieve clarity about what there is and how it works and what that means to us. So we deal with ambiguity by trying to understand how it works.

William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) is wonderful example of how you can become precise using ordinary language even about such things as ambiguity itself. Empson classifies seven ways in which language can be ambiguous—meaning that a word, phrase, sentence or paragraph can hold multiple meanings or interpretations at once:. Ambiguity occurs:

  1. When a word or grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once.
    • Example: A pun or metaphor that suggests two meanings simultaneously.
  2. When two or more alternative meanings are resolved into one.
    • Example: Ambiguity that adds richness, where different readings can be harmonized.
  3. When two meanings are contrasted.
    • Example: An irony or paradox where multiple meanings conflict or resist resolution.
  4. When the author discovers his idea while writing.
    • The ambiguity reflects the writer’s uncertainty or changing thought.
  5. When the author is apparently trying to make a statement and fails to do so clearly.
    • This could stem from emotional conflict, psychological complexity, or contradiction.
  6. When a statement says nothing, or the readers are forced to invent meaning.
    • The text is so vague or abstract that interpretation becomes entirely personal.
  7. When two meanings of the word or passage cancel each other out.
    • The ambiguity is irreconcilable, leaving a contradiction or irresolvable tension.

Since Empsom, thinkers like Jacques Derrida argued that ambiguity is a fundamental condition of language itself—meaning is always deferred, unstable and organizes itself into hierarchies of value.5 Derrida, like Quine, would say that every text is indeterminately interpretable. This is partly because there are always two at work on a text, the writer and the reader who must interpret the text and inevitably does so by measuring it against their own frame of reference. Paul Grice has explored how context resolves or creates ambiguity.6

Ambiguity can be used as a power tool for resisting dominant or normative interpretations, or indeed imposing such interpretations. As such forms of Patois are resistance languages meant to establish a secretive communication but whose main purpose was rather to confuse and exclude oppressive forces.

Levels of interpretation

Regarding the indeterminate interpretability of words and sentences we have the ability to read on all sorts of levels of interpretation. Bible studies, for example, identify at least four levels at which a religious text can be and has been interpreted, the literal, the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical.

The literal is interpreted according to its grammatical construction and its historical context, the moral looks for a message about how to respond well or correctly (within the strictures of a religious doctrine) to things. (see also the section on theory and practice) The allegorical looks for the foreshadowing of later events or personifications of ideas and the anagogical is the mystical level whereby we assign a special ecstatic significance to words.

Interestingly, mathematics has its own kind of indeterminacy in that you cannot tie down a number to something specific, unless you do so on your own responsibility. In Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1910,12 & 13) one is eventually defined using set theory as a class containing one element, or in modern notation: {x | ∃y. x={y}}. and so the proof of 1+1 = 2 requires us simply to define each element in the equation to prove that it is true. As such if we see an apple and see another we now have two.

One can denote any whole defined by us as a whole, however many parts it is made of, and whatever that whole is itself part of and call it one. On the anagogical level it would be legitimate to say that 3 = 1 = 1/∞.

According to the normal grammar of mathematical operations such an equation would not be legitimate.

And yet 3 is a unit and so is one divided by infinity. Just as a trinity is a unit and any apple is made up of a near infinite number of parts if you go down all the way to beyond 10-33. So, as ‘one’ is defined as a class containing one element and as that element can be any whole… the anagogical equation I just gave to show how any whole can be made up of parts, and is itself a part of a larger whole cannot so easily be dismissed.

To know all about knowing

Philosophers have wrestled with the idea of knowledge right from the start of philosophy. What counts as knowing something? What counts as knowing it well? How do you acquire knowledge? What is the best way of acquiring knowledge?

Plato in the Theaetetus came up with a very forceful definition of knowledge which we still take seriously, which says that to know something is to commit to a belief that is true because it can be properly justified. It is not enough to guess correctly, in order to know something is true you must be able to underpin your commitment to its truth through the use of reasoning.

Fair enough. Sounds good. But… How do we know that something is true? (see also the section on truth and the section on how subjectivity works)

And what ways of justifying something are legitimate?

This gets us into a very detailed enquiry for which most of us have neither the time or the inclination.

Let’s start off with a different look at what knowledge is: Knowledge is information that has been processed for use. Information is held by everything in our environment, including ourselves. To say that knowledge is held in our environment would be to become mystical about it. Sure, it is possible to say that the universe “knows itself” but what is it you are thereby saying. You are saying something like, “The tree knows when to shed its leaves.” It is not wrong but it means that you attribute the whole mechanics of behaviour the ability to know something.

I would think it is more useful to reserve the activity of knowing for a more self-conscious activity, whereby we consciously process the information abounding in our environment for use. For one that accords better with our ordinary use of the verb to know, which is almost invariably associated with a conscious subject doing the knowing. And where it isn’t we are always aware of the peculiarity of talking that way and get around it by saying things like: “it’s almost as if the tree knows when to shed its leaves”. In other words ordinary language is able to get around the problem of where exactly the distinction between conscious, subconscious and unconscious behaviour lies. And it solves that with short qualifying descriptions. So if we agree that knowing is what conscious subjects do when processing information from the environment for use, then we can be delightfully clear about the difference between subjects and objects. Objects hold information, subjects hold knowledge. (See also the section on How subjectivity works)

So, what happens when a subject share their knowledge with another subject? In order to lead useful lives we cannot really help relying on others to tell us what something is or how it works. And they may do so without always giving us the reasons for describing it in that way or doing things in that way. Reasons make things lengthy, cost energy. So what is it that the receiving subject acquires, knowledge or information? I would suggest they receive information as we say that the learning subject still needs to “make it their own”, or “to adopt what was being said”.

If the receiving subject does not do that through the processes of analysis: “So, what did they really say?” and “how do I know that it is true and accurate?” and critique: “what does it mean to me, what can I do with it?” the one subject’s knowledge is adopted cold by the otehr subject. You can imagine the mess that inevitably follows from that: fake knowledge. It is nothing new. It has been around from the start, some of it sanctioned by the powers that be. Talking of power, who do we accept as authority? What is that authority based upon? Whose so-called ‘truth’ do we accept as really ‘true’ and have they really done the business of demonstrating a truth and justifying the belief? And what do we do with people whose ‘truth’ we reject?

With all these possibilities the word know is of an interesting shape. At the same time, everyone knows what they mean when they use the word ‘know’ in a sentence even though they may well be hard put to explain it to another.

Written down you cannot see the difference between the sentence “I know.” and “I know”. But we all know how a small inflection in the ‘melody’ of the utterance can generate a completely different meaning, so that the first becomes an angry and impatient response to someone telling you the obvious, while the second could is a device to curt short the threat of a lengthy sermon on the virtues of brushing one’s teeth. And we all know that there are many forms of ‘I know’ that can mean a variety of things.

We gladly use such subtleties and know what we want to achieve by them. Whether they achieve their intended goal is uncertain. That depends on the receiver. Nevertheless, the word ‘know’ is used for all sorts of situations in a perfectly understandable way.

People know what they mean when using it and that use is not always about true justified beliefs. Often the word is used to convey a conviction someone is committed to whilst they know that they cannot rationally justify that knowing or know that it is true.

To call somebody a know-all is not to set them up as a fountain of knowledge worthy of our undivided attention. Quite the opposite.

As such the word know may include Plato’s rather clever definition but how poor would our language be if that were all that was possible to do with the word ‘know’?

Think of all the ways you yourself use the word ‘know’. Knowing the strict definition of knowing might make you think that every time you use the word ‘know’ you do so illegitimately. But that is precisely wrong.

As long as you know what you intend to say and as long as your interlocutor eventually grasps your meaning and, through negotiation, you both agree that communication has taken place (we have facial expressions and words to convey this) there is no issue.

Language is a handy portable thing so that with as few a word as effective, we can think and communicate well about a host of issues.

So for philosophers to become all finickity and precious about words creates a distance between their way of speaking and how people ordinarily speak. That is sometimes justified, but then that approach will have its reasons. Spinoza wrote in Latin partly to make sure his ideas were safely kept away from the dangerous mob. Kant may have been motivated by a similar concern. Ideas can cause riots and violence.

We could get philosophers and others to look at knowing from their various specialist disciplines in a rigorous way and get them to set up possible benchmarks for strict uses of the word so that, should it be necessary, you could calibrate your own use of the word against theirs.

Conversation and complexity

That is why careful thinking about words and their meaning in use is not a bad thing.

But it is your use that is correct for you. But, being correct for you may not be to your satisfaction as others will have different translations of the word ‘know’ and demand something else from you in the use of that word. But that is why conversations are such fun. They are negotiations of meaning that, when they go well, end in a satisfying sense of everything fitting together coherently and consistently, that is harmoniously. A good conversation is a beautiful thing.

Each conversation has as one of its more important functions to compare meanings and so calibrate what distance we have to travel to understand each other. “No, no, no, no I didn’t mean that! (…) I meant… ” “Oh sorry, I thought you meant…”

A conversation in ordinary language is capable of coping with the most complex of subjects such that a conversation between two people has the effect of changing each other’s frame of reference, both in the structure of its concepts, the number of concepts held by that structure, their wealth in properties conceptualized and so the shape of each of their space of implications through whcih inferences beat their paths.

The reason for these moves in the language game is that we each of us learn the meanings of words in our own unique fingerprint way.

Each person is born in a unique space and learns about the world in their own unique conceptual space and in the their own time and sequencing.

Words work reasonably accurately if everyone has the same idea of the universal it refers to. And there are many uncontroversial words that we do not have to spend too much time on calibrating in any conversation.

But all words are particularized differently by each person. If both of us are asked to conjure up ‘a table’ the chance that we both think of the same table is pretty slim and yet we all know what a table is.

And as to the rest, much of what we think is muddled and only partially formed. We need a life to enrich our conceptual world and by the time it is rich enough we run the risk of forgetting.

If philosophy ignores the way we use language it simply does not do what it promises, which is to clarify. To set up some ideal language as better that ordinary language is not just to insult the gods with the arrogance of a limited humanity, it is to move away from what philosophy is about, which is to help us clarify the muddle.

© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

  1. Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, translated by Joseph D. O’Neil, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. and Jakob Johann von Uexküll, Environment and inner world of animals, Bio Cybernetics, Translated by Robert Boettcher, Julius Springer, 2021 (1909). See also Giorgio Agamben, “Umwelt” in The Open: Man and Animal, translated by Kevin Attell (Originally published in Italian in 2002 under the title L’aperto: l’uomo e l’animale), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. ↩︎
  2. W.V.O.Quine, Word and Object, (1960) ↩︎
  3. For a wonderful account of Ordinary Language Philosophy see Oswald Hanfling, Philosophy and Ordinary Language: The Bent and Genius of our Tongue (2003) as well as his earlier Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy (1989) ↩︎
  4. Peter van Inwagen, An essay of free will, Oxford, 1983 ↩︎
  5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976 and Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978 (1967) ↩︎
  6. Paul Grice. “Logic and conversation”. In Cole, P.; Morgan, J. (eds.). Syntax and semantics. Vol. 3: Speech acts. New York: Academic Press, 1975, pp. 41–58. ↩︎