Friends,
While scanning the philosophy texts on my bookshelf, and simultaneous recalling some spoken exchange that had happened earlier in the seminar room, I was led to reflect on the thought that philosophy seems to have only ever been conducted through linguistic means. I was therefore compelled to explore the hypothesis that philosophy is an exclusively linguistic enterprise—an exploration only just begun and which I share with you here. Although a whole plethora of terms would need to be more precisely defined for the below account of this exploration to be sufficiently clear, I am satisfied that the gist of the idea, as well as some hint of its potential relevance, comes through.
Here is the strong form of the hypothesis:
Philosophy is an exclusively linguistic enterprise. In fact, it always has been. The point is easily realized if one adopts a certain broad sense of “linguistic,” one which holds all speech and writing, all thought and conceptuality, to be linguistic. This sense of “linguistic” is arguably common to deconstruction and neopragmatism. Any example of philosophy I can think of seems to have been exclusively either spoken, written, thought, conceptualized, or some combination of these, and hence to have been linguistic. Of course, it is possible that some paradigmatic or indisputable example of philosophy not having taken place in any of these forms may have escaped my mental inventory. Still, so long as I am not mistaken in this, the hypothesis seems to follow, and the very idea of philosophy as something other than exclusively linguistic begins to appear inconceivable.
Though I will not detail or unpack them here at all (though I can do so later on), the consequences of embracing this hypothesis are potentially immense, especially for our understanding of the limits and capacities of our field.
Obviously, if one does not adopt the above sense of “linguistic,” then the claim that philosophy is not (merely) a linguistic enterprise becomes defensible. For example, certain emergentist, naturalistic theories of language—whether from phenomenology, classical pragmatism, or cognitive science—could support a strong counterclaim. This would be that philosophy, while it certainly has been linguistic, may actually be an enterprise that encompasses both linguistic and non-linguistic practices—paradigmatically, the practices of the pre or non-linguistic body. If linguistic practices are emergent from or (more strongly) continuous with certain non-linguistic practices, then the fact that philosophy is linguistic need not entail that it has not itself emerged from or is not continuous with non-linguistic practices that could be called philosophical in the important sense. In other words, on this line of reasoning, philosophy need not necessarily be seen as exclusively linguistic, and it is at least conceivable that philosophy could take a non-linguistic form.
My suspicion at this point, however, is that the claim that philosophy can take a non-linguistic form might be unacceptable to us. What motivates this suspicion is my current inability to imagine what a non-linguistic form of philosophy might be. Though this may be due to a failure of imagination, it could be that my inability to generate any suitable examples of non-linguistic philosophy results from the “truth” of the claim that philosophy cannot actually take a non-linguistic form. I really scratch my head, then, when I suspect that accepting this truth implies that truth itself, to the extent that it is inextricably bound up with the enterprise of philosophy, is exclusively linguistic.
I would very much appreciate any thoughts or criticisms you might have to contribute to this ongoing exploration.
In the spirit of an e-linguistic philosophy,
David
