Language and Empiricism - After the Vienna Circle

198 Pages·2008·0.71 MB·English

by  Siobhan Chapman

Language and Empiricism
After the Vienna Circle
Siobhan Chapman
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Language and Empiricism
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Also by Siobhan Chapman
ACCENT IN CONTEXT
KEY IDEAS IN LINGUISTICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
(co-edited with Christopher Routledge)
KEY THINKERS IN LINGUISTICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
(co-edited with Christopher Routledge)
PAUL GRICE, Philosopher and Linguist
PHILOSOPHY FOR LINGUISTS
THINKING ABOUT LANGUAGE: Theories of English
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Language and Empiricism
After the Vienna Circle
Siobhan Chapman
Senior Lecturer in English Language,
University of Liverpool
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© Siobhan Chapman 2008
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Vienna Circle 7
2 Falsification and Scientific Method 28
3 Holism 49
4 Ordinary Language Philosophy 68
5 Speech Acts and Implicatures 88
6 Oslo Philosophy 108
7 Interpretation and Preciseness 127
8 Empiricism in Linguistics 152
References 175
Index 186
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Introduction
This book is about different attitudes to empiricism in the study of lan-
guage. It is the product of two apparently unrelated ideas that I have
held for some time, voiced on occasion, but had not until recently
explored in much detail. The first is that the logical positivism of the
Vienna Circle had an impact on the development of present-day lin-
guistics that has not generally been fully recognized. I had a hunch that
this impact came about largely indirectly, as a result of adverse reactions
to the Vienna Circle from philosophers of language who were more or
less contemporary with it. The second idea, and one that is perhaps
more widely held, is that disagreements in recent linguistics over the
role and nature of data are in many cases wrongly focussed and even
unnecessary. Linguists from different traditions are not looking at a
single phenomenon and choosing radically different types of data by
which to investigate it; they are simply investigating different subjects.
These two ideas started to link together when I came across the work
of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. I was already familiar with
J. L. Austin’s reaction against logical positivism, and his advocacy of
‘ordinary language philosophy’, which proceeded from the painstaking
analysis of the philosopher’s own linguistic usage. But here was Naess,
working at much the same time as Austin, similar in his dislike of the
Vienna Circle’s high-handed and dismissive attitude to ordinary
language, yet pioneering the very different techniques of ‘empirical
semantics’. Austin worked in his armchair using contemplation and
intuition. Naess worked on the streets of Oslo using clipboard and ques-
tionnaire. The similarities between Naess’s now obscure work and main-
stream, present-day disciplines such as sociolinguistics were too attractive
to ignore. So too was the real-life debate that developed between Austin
and Naess over methodology. Both ordinary language philosophy and
1
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2 Language and Empiricism
the empirical semantics of the Oslo school of Philosophy developed, in
part, as reactions to logical positivism. Each proposed a methodology
for the empirical study of language, and each had striking resonances
with the two sides in the debate about data in linguistics.
The different responses to the Vienna Circle from Austin and from Naess
sent me back to the work of the Vienna Circle itself, and to some of the rest
of the debate that it generated among its contemporaries. My main focus
in this book, then, is not on present-day linguistics but on discussions of
language that took place roughly during the half century from 1920
onwards. I am convinced that the story of these discussions should be of
more than passing historical interest to linguists. Commenting in 1956 on
what he saw as ‘the revolution in philosophy’ that had established analytic
and linguistic methods as the dominant force, the British philosopher
Gilbert Ryle wrote:
The wise rambler occasionally, though not incessantly, looks back
over his shoulder in order to link up the place he has got to with the
country through which he has recently passed. It is equally wise for
thinkers occasionally, though not incessantly, to try to fix in retro-
spect the courses that they have followed and the positions from
which they have moved.
(Ryle 1956: 1)
My aim in this book is to offer just such a retrospective view for those
currently working in the various fields of present-day linguistics. The
view is often obscured, in part at least, because some of the relevant
courses run through the territory of philosophy. Work from philosophy
has in many cases been highly influential on the development of
linguistics, and in others can offer relevant insights and contributions
to current debates in the subject, but is often not familiar, or not
accessible, to linguists. There is no obvious reason why a linguist should
decide to sit down with a copy of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia
Mathematica, for instance, or to hunt out some of the more arcane
publications of a Norwegian ecologist who long ago visited Vienna. But
these are just two examples of the unlikely sounding sources that have
a lot to tell us about what people said about language during the twen-
tieth century, and how they decided it should be studied. Austin is still
widely known and read by linguists. But even in the case of Austin’s
work, there are aspects that are rarely discussed and a philosophical
context that can shed a lot of light on what he was doing and why.
Linguists know about speech acts. They do not necessarily know the
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Introduction 3
story of how Austin pioneered a methodology that sparked something
close to a national debate on the nature and the purpose of the study of
language.
Austin’s major impact on present-day linguistics has been felt and is
acknowledged chiefly in pragmatics. Other branches, however, are more
reticent on the subject of philosophical forebears, and here too Ryle’s
50-year-old words prove relevant. In his overview of the revolution in
philosophy, he outlined the reasons why attempts to trace the prece-
dents of current thinking can be valuable. Switching metaphor, he sug-
gested that: ‘Like reports of Royal Commissions, they help the student
to understand the contemporary scene – partly by disabusing him of
fashionable misconceptions of what is going on’ (ibid.). Ryle’s analogy
is undoubtedly grandiose, even self-aggrandizing, but the point he was
making can nevertheless be carried over to the contemporary linguistic
scene. Branches such as sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics rarely
have much to say about early origins of the approaches they embody,
other than in celebrating the contributions of individual pioneers of the
disciplines themselves. Yet philosophers were saying remarkably similar
things about the purpose and methodology of language study several
decades before the acknowledged founding of these branches of lin-
guistics. In drawing attention to possible philosophical precedents I do
not intend to belittle the importance of these developments in linguis-
tics, or to claim that what they are doing is in some way ‘old hat’.
Rather, my ambition is that identifying a philosophical pedigree for
these approaches will afford them a position in the more general theo-
retical debate about language with which they have not always seemed
fully to engage.
This book begins with a chapter on the intellectual context and the
main doctrines of the Vienna Circle. This focusses on the notion of ver-
ification as a criterion for meaningfulness, and the implications of this
for the Vienna Circle’s views, both explicit and implicit, on language.
These views were by no means the start of the philosophical link
between language and empiricism. Discussions germane to the role of
empiricism in language study can be traced back at least as far as the
work of Aristotle, and were certainly prominent during the European
Enlightenment. But the work of the Vienna Circle represents the high-
point of the revolution in philosophy that Ryle identified, a revolution
that saw the analysis of concepts, and of the language in which those
concepts are expressed, taking central philosophical place.
Perhaps as a result of the extremes to which it pushed the revolution,
logical positivism generated enthusiasm and hostility in equal measure.