A Philosophical Education (in Linacre Magazine)

In 1956, when I was a callow seventeen-year-old sophomore >early entrant= to the University of Chicago, I read my first twentieth century philosophical book, A. J. Ayer=s Language, Truth, and Logic. While I had already gorged on the Russian novelists, read through the then obligatory Hemingway and Faulkner, consumed Freud and a raft of popular sociologists, and managed to get myself expelled from my tenth grade social science class for issuing disparaging quotes from Marx and Schopenhaur, I was only then being introduced to Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, Pico Della Mirandola, Machiavelli, and Hobbes through the marvelous and soon-to-be-dismantled Robert Hutchins= great books curriculum, in which Natural Sciences I began with Aristotle=s Physics, Bk. II, continued with Galileo=s Dialogue, selections from Newton=s Principia, and on to papers by Laplace, Mach, Jeans and Einstein (a little earlier, James D. Watson and Lynn Margulis had also feasted here; more of them later).

Ayer=s book was so neat. Language is the tripartite mirror in which the world is captured. One facet consists of  analytic propositions, such as >2+2=4' and >All bachelors are unmarried males=; they rest on the conventions of language (thus disposing of mathematical and logic truth and disparaging the rationalists= absurd claim that such truths are necessary or even, to use the egregiously non-empirical phrase of Leibniz, true in all possible worlds). Another facet consists of the synthetic propositions of empirical science and everyday sensory experience that flesh out the analytic scaffolding with actual contingent facts expressed in our common Object Language, which for me supposedly ultimately rested on the hard foundation of my Phenomenal Language (the verifiability criterion of meaning). All other use of language C the windy railing of moralists, theists, and ideologues C was a strictly meaningless if occasionally heartfelt expression of emotion. Heady stuff!

I soon drank deep of Bertrand Russell, whom Ayer cast as Hamlet to his own humble Horatio, and of David Hume, whose skeptical contentions Ayer claimed merely to update and cast into a linguistic vein. With the further help of Hume and Russell, I emended Rene Descartes=s insufficiency skeptical I think; therefore I am to the minimalist There are experiences. I wryly chuckled in agreement with Russell=s saucy contention that the only materialists in the world were Russian commissars and American behavioral scientists. Common sense realism about physical objects leads to science which inevitably refutes realism. I didn=t see tables and chairs; tables and chairs were metaphysically dispensable logical constructions out of sense data, or as Ayer=s Vienna Circle colleague W. V. O. Quine put it, just as mythic as Greeks Gods, only pragmatically more viable. Even more vulgarly, I loved to tell the story of the two behaviorist who meet: both carefully observe each others behavior until one remarks You feel fine; how am I? Several months into this ecstacy, which may have been abetted by my impecunious reduction to a diet of  potatoes and margarine, I fortuitously met Arthur Pap, who treated me gently and talked philosophy with me patiently (and had not been told of the cancer that was soon and prematurely to take his life). I was Vienna Circle-ised! All this also matched my ongoing great books University of Chicago scientific education, which sent me through Darwin, Mendel, and Weismann unto Max Delbruck and Ernst Myer, and from the anti-realism of Mach, Heisenberg, and Kuhn to issues about the unification of biology and physical science exemplified in Erwin Schrodinger=s speculations about life and Crick-Watson=s discovery of the chemical structure of DNA. Heady stuff indeed!

Albie Burke had loaned me Language, Truth, and Logic. Also a University of Chicago student, he was a fellow tenant of the Monticello boarding house, which also housed a dozen sparely paid classical musicians, whose violins would soar up the very second the night time noise ban expired at 8AM. A staunch, level-headed farm lad, Albie was not subject to Ayer=s spell; indeed, he hadn=t finished the book. But if he was partially responsible for the onset of my ecstacy, he also moderated it. His parents came on a visit two months later, bringing along a gross of eggs from their farm. In the course of four glorious days I consumed more than half the gross, in eight to ten egg omelets, until Albie, who had after all invited me to feel free to have some eggs, mildly called a halt to my predations.

My ecstacy not only moderated but also, as is perhaps inevitable with such epiphanies, eventually settled into rehearsed argument and posture, or what J. L. Austin caustically called well worn ruts. Austin had in mind the ones that run you from the (1) familiar and unexceptional datum that under exceptional circumstances C e. g., mirage C your eyes may see distant water (or seem to see such) and your thirst-ridden mind equivalently believe there=s water over there onto, by intermediate stages, to (2) the enchantingly preposterous Russellian claim that All I ever can see is the inside of my brain. Myself then, a young nineteen year old and too naive to give practical thought to a career or minimal adulthood, still less to talk to my older peers and professors about such matters, I sleep walked into the Chicago philosophy graduate program. I thoroughly enjoyed two terms of  Professor Alan Gewirth=s masterfully detailed survey of  Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Hume, the successive stages in the grand synoptic understanding of the principles and structured dominions of modern science. I sought, as John Locke somewhat mock modestly announced, to be an >under-laborer in Mr. Newton=s garden,= although one like Locke concerned to see the garden as a whole.

Disaster and apostasy loomed in my third term, my first real encounter, at the graduate course level, with 20^th century Anglo-American philosophy. Young, prepossessed Professor NN -- a wholly confident J-Press Shop suited acolyte of Ordinary Language Philosophy, from Yale and not the supposed original flame of Oxford, and so perhaps additionally fanatical -- assigned us two G. E. Moore essays that comfortably asserted >common sense realism.= Notoriously, the stolid, gravitas-ridden pieces of Moore insisted that Hume=s >doubts= were patently absurd and self-contradictory. Moore had also >proved= the existence of the external world of objects by raising one hand, and then, to make it plural, the other, and then stoutly insisting that he was surer of their existence than of any dissenting assertion. Taking this to be an argument comparable to Samuel Johnson=s here-to-fore impossibly crude >refutation= of Hume, which consisted of kicking a stone, I submitted a scornful and confident critique of Moore to Professor NN, who gave me a failing grade of C and appended the comment >cavalier= in his neat red script by way of explanation.

Next up we read Russell=s Lectures on Logical Atomism, which I soon realized was supposed to exemplify the very worst sort of building houses out of cards, just the sort of language-on-holiday scientistic popularising poppycock that Wittgenstein=s Investigations, our final reading, righteously scourged, Wittgenstein now cast in the role of fully-realized Savior to Moore=s John the Baptist. Philosophy, my would be profession, now had nothing to do with science! Indeed, it guarded the world of everyday experience from the arrogant and improper intrusions of science -- the atomic physicist may seek to impress us by writing that >the table isn=t solid; it=s full of holes= but tables are paradigm cases of solidity. Rather >doing philosophy= had now become an esoteric form of linguistic psycho-analysis that fought off  the bewitchment of the mind by language, that left everyday experience and our common old city as it is, undistorted by grand card-house illusions. (While aside from mentioning that Wittgenstein disdained Russell=s attempts to write philosophy for the general reader, Professor NN never said anything about Russell=s vigorous and radical political and moral advocacy, but it was obvious to us that such gadfly-on-the-body-of-the-state activity was, conveniently, neither professional nor philosophical, and indeed the furthest thing from >doing philosophy.= Today it may seem a bizarre aberration that in 1940 a New York City Catholic judge barred the City College from creating >a chair of immorality= by hiring Russell to teach mathematical logic. Bizarre, yes; aberrant, no. Although Russell searched high and low, and very much needed the money, no American college or university dared to offer him a job.).

While I first >understood= my C grade rather as the third grader in a Catholic school understands how three can be one after the nun has suitably ministered to his knuckles with her ruler, I soon learned to do linguistic analysis in the Professor NN=s ordinary language manner. I received an A+ on my term paper, and paradigm case argument and don=t look for the meaning, look for the use! soon slipped as easily from my lips as you can=t get an ought from an is. Even in the full throes of conversion, I did notice a few incongruities. Professor NN wore three-piece J. Press suits, Wittgenstein, scruffy leather jackets; and when I briefly took to following Wittgenstein=s example in my philosophical prose, writing short conversational sentences, addressing my reader as >you,= dropping erudite footnotes, and avoiding all technical, scholarly, or philosophical terminology, the reaction was far more negative than >cavalier=. Deeper still, why were people trying to extract philosophical theses, theories, arguments, and general views, from a text that relentlessly disavowed, and railed against, such activity C to ascribe a philosophy of language to a man whose unsystematic >sketches= displayed our linguistic, perceptual, and cognitive life as full of  incoherence, families of resemblances, and illusions that tempt us to specious philosophical card house building??? Not long after Professor NN=s class, I closed my copy of Philosophical Investigations, and latterly looked askance at generations of would be Wittgensteinian philosophers and felt relieved when their ranks thinned and greyed.

In 1989, writing An Invitation to Cognitive Science, I cast Alan Turing as the original architect of the revolution that has transformed the behavioral sciences into cognitive sciences. But, as Thomas Kuhn insisted, a paradigm shift must also be fired by an accumulation of anomalies, recalcitrant and puzzling phenomena that increasingly irritate the old paradigm however much it strives to sweep them under the rug. One golden afternoon, sentences began to bubble up that had puzzled me thirty years earlier.

If the formation of concepts can be explained by facts of nature, should we not be interested, not in grammar, but rather in that in nature which is the basis of grammar ... But our interest does not fall back upon these possible causes of the formation of concepts; we are not doing natural science. (Investigations II xii).

 I began to giggle. Hadn=t psychologist Eleanor Rosch done several brilliant empirical studies of >family of resemblances= concepts? Hadn=t the visual perception people used ambiguous figures, such as the duck/rabbit example from Wolfgang Kohler that Wittgenstein had brooded about, as keys to mapping the largely unconscious structure of visual processing? Didn=t regularities in our >rule-following= rest on facts of nature rather than conventional imperatives? I reopened Investigations and it was all there: giggle turned to laughter and even tears. Wittgenstein was the anomaly collector for the cognitive revolution! Not that Wittgenstein was doing cognitive science: his investigation was not causal or experimental. Rather, his faithful and striking sketches of the >grammar= of our everyday cognitive/perceptual/linguistic life, its puzzles and illusion-breeders, provide a rich, pre-theoretic characterization of our mental life, one sharp and unbiased, and therefore particularly apt to feed the causal investigations of natural science. So there, Professor NN! (Having joyously re-opened the book, I also paid respectful and corrective tribute in >On What Sort of Speech Act Wittgenstein=s Investigations Is and Why It Matters= (Philosophical Forum 1997).)

Back, however, to the callow graduate student, transitioning himself into an ordinary language philosopher. I was particularly helped into making this transition more genuine than a schooled attempt to extract high marks by reading J. L. Austin=s Philosophical Papers and latterly, his two lecture series, published shortly after his premature death in 1960, when ordinary language philosophy, at least in the provinces, seemed at confident high tide. The Shakespearian richness and meticulous precision of his prose voice exemplified his conviction that ordinary language, if paid sufficient and respectful attention, repelled the overly abstract, overly general, jargon-tainted, lifeless and colorless sophistries endemic to philosophical discourse. Exceptionally, among philosophers of language more generally, Austin also deployed a thorough knowledge of  J. R. Firth=s speech act linguistics, which dominated the English linguistics of his day, and Austin further displayed an apt concern with linguistic theory and linguistics as a systematic scientific enterprise, devoting the lecture series How to Do Things With Words to the topic, prodigally using and inventing technical linguistic terminology.  While ordinary language is well-equipped to delineate our moral, personal, and cognitive everyday experience (what is today called >folk psychology= and its >intentional idiom=), it is singularly ill-equipped for systematic talk about phonological, morphological, and syntactic phenomena (indeed, I enlist Austin in this regard in my recent critique, >On Badly Reinventing Ordinary Language Philosophy= (Synthese 1999)). Mercifully, the term paper for Professor NN has not survived but its spirit, along with Austin=s inspirations, is amply displayed, for example, in my >In Respect of Liking= (Analysis 1968), which I submitted as a sample of written work when I sought admission to Linacre College as a B. Phil. candidate in 1970 at Rom Harre=s serendipitous suggestion. I already had my Chicago PhD but I needed an Oxford college attachment for my year=s leave from Lehman College.

Philosophically, Oxford had changed over the ten years. In 1960, A. J. Ayer had been regarded as an aged representative of a long refuted philosophical movement and his recent election as Oxford=s Wykeham Professor of Logic was widely-thought a fluke if not an outrage. By 1970, however, the  irrepressible Professor Ayer (or Freddie as everyone called him locally) had acquired some centrality. Visiting Americans, including Princeton philosopher David Lewis, attended his well packed seminars, while the few unregenerate ordinary language philosophers had become peripheral. Although I was never tempted to resume my ecstacy, Ayer carefully criticized my writings and gradually became a friend and remained so, even to the degree of tolerating my conversion to nativism and rationalism in my books on Chomsky and generative linguistics. However, what particularly impressed me about Oxford was the vigorous sense of community, coupled with a rapt attention to the latest philosophical developments. At a graduate class conducted by two junior fellows of University College, Gareth Evans and John McDowell, I found Peter Strawson and L. Jonathan Cohen in rapt attendance. In another class, when a young  lecturer spoke on the philosophy of law, seeming vindicating Ronald Dworkin=s criticisms of H. L. Hart, comments erupted from the audience, including I suddenly realized those of  Dworkin and Hart themselves. I found the environment so exciting that I took another year=s leave and actually sat for the B. Phil. exams. One question inquired after L. J. Cohen=s unpublished but locally presented criticisms of H. P. Grice=s unpublished William James Lectures on conversational implicatures. A question about Saul Kripke=s recent revival of Rationalism=s natural necessities allowed me the aside that Kripke=s >rigid designators= were an extension of Russell=s >logically proper names,= a notion that had been held up to particular scorn by Professor NN. True in all possible worlds was back! Such, often empirically-discovered, natural necessities much reduced the role of apriori and analytic truths, with the latter becoming rather trivial lexical truths. I was on my way back to becoming an under-labourer in Mr. Newton=s, or rather Mr. Einstein, etc.=s, garden, specializing in the cognitive science beds.  

I now could see that for the newly burgeoning science of linguistics, natural language rigidly designates an incompletely understood, richly-structured biological phenomenon, one whose scientific investigation is not much usefully advanced by polling English speakers as what they might mean by the term (Alan Turing made a similar point about intelligence, which he proposed to study by simulating human intelligence; this might, he supposed, mean simulating the native intelligence of the human child and then sending it to school). Eventually, the child=s language acquisition device, linguistic growth and development, and even embryology, came to seem relevant to me. I am now back to questions about the unification of the biological and other natural sciences, and like Turing, skeptical about the role of  neo-teleological evolutionary biology in this enterprise (see, for example, my >Turing and the Fragility and Insubstantiality of Evolutionary Explanations= in Philosophical Psychology 2001). James D. Watson has been working his way up from the DNA into elementary cellular processes and larger structures. Lynn Margulis and others have painfully established that for four-fifths of the existence of life on earth there has been no branching tree of life but rather a lattice with lateral gene transfers between Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukayota and their precursors. The eukaryote cell=s most vital organelle C mitochondria C evolved not through the endlessly gradual chiseling of natural selection but through the near instantaneous ingestion of a bacterium that settled into live symbiotically (a kind of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics, although few but Lynn Margulis dare call it that).

I returned to Linacre and Oxford for several terms during the 1980s and for briefer visits since. In a happy coincidence, Linacre had moved from south of Christ Church College to the sciences section of Oxford. I could accompany Rom Harre and my psycholinguist wife, Barbara Foorman, on walks across the road to Psychology colloquia. In 1986, Barbara=s connection with Wolfson College made it possible for our daughter Katherine, between her 24^th and 30^th months, to acquire an impeccable Oxford accent in the College=s creche. Katherine also, in perfect keeping with generative theory, over-generalized from the regularities of English modal auxiliary use to saying things like “I am going, amn=t I?,” blithely ignoring our hideously irregular form “I am going, aren=t I?” Very early in this process she announced, in a Cottswold restaurant, “I am a person,” which elicited an “Of course you are, my dear,” from a matronly woman at the next table. Curious to determine what this decidedly philosophical comment might mean, I asked “Is mommy a person?” After several repetitions this elicited a “Yesh.” ”Is daddy a person?” eventually called forth a negative. Oxford has done much for my education, and illuminated not only myself, but my heirs.

Justin Leiber, Philosophy Department, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306