Wittgenstein and Speech Act Theory

Although some speech act theorists have denied any real connection between their own work and Wittgenstein’s, anyone who reads essays about speech act theory and then Philosophical Investigations will undoubtedly be struck by the similarities between the two ideas about language. Both begin by rejecting the idea that language can do nothing but state facts about the world; instead, they believe that language has many different uses in human activity. Given these significant similarities, I would like to explore the way in which Austin’s notion of felicitous and infelicitous speech acts might clarify Wittgenstein’s thoughts about language.

For Austin, utterances cannot simply be analyzed as either true or false because not all utterances make claims about the world. Thus, he suggests that it is better to analyze utterances as felicitous or infelicitous instead: felicitous utterances are those that succeed in performing the actions that they attempt, while infelicitous utterances are those that fail. Speech acts can become infelicitous for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they are performed in an improper context, the custom to which the appeal is not in place, and they are performed insincerely, in the absence of the proper intentions.

It is clear in Wittgenstein’s writings that the way in which a word is used determines its meaning. However, sometimes it is hard to know whether any use of a word that an individual might invent would then become a part of the word’s meaning, or if there has to be a certain number of individuals using the word in a new way in order for that new use to become a part of the meaning.

I think that Austin’s notion of infelicitous speech acts could really clear up this ambiguity in Wittgenstein because it allows us to talk about people using words in uncustomary ways without having to wonder whether their uncustomary use is an expansion of the meaning of the word. When someone uses a word in a new way, it is as if she is appealing to a custom that does not exist: there is no custom in which she can ground her use of the word, so the action that she is seeking to perform through her utterance fails, thereby rendering her speech infelicitous. Similarly, if someone were to use a word in the wrong context, we could describe her utterance as infelicitous instead of having to wonder whether we should allow that new use into the meaning.

I do not mean to suggest here that Wittgenstein is incapable of dealing with this issue within his own ideas—because there are more Wittgensteinian ways of addressing it—but I think that the analysis provided by Austin is a much clearer and less ambiguous way of solving the problem because it helps us understand exactly when we are justified in saying that some use of a word is illegitimate.

Religion and False Analogies

Wittgenstein comments on both religion and on the false analogies that people often draw when they use language, but I have yet to read any passage in which he puts those two ideas together. However, I think that bringing the notion of false analogies to bear on religion yields an interesting analysis that is perhaps more revealing than Wittgenstein’s own classification of religion as “nonsense”.

Wittgenstein believes that the same philosophic problems will plague human beings “[a]s long as there is a verb ‘be’ which seems to work like ‘eat’ and ‘drink’; as long as there are adjectives like ‘identical’, ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘possible’” (WR 55). I would argue that the same religious problems (or rather, the same problem of religion) will continue to plague us as well for the same reasons. In another statement of the same problem, Wittgenstein says, “The primitive forms of our language – noun, adjective and verb – show the simple picture to which it tries to make everything conform” (WR 61).

Due to the fact that we almost always formulate our linguistic utterances as arrangements of nouns, adjectives, and verbs, many false analogies arise. For example, we talk about both singing and existing as verbs. However, singing is an action and existence is a state; these two things are very different, but they appear to be connected by a false grammatical analogy. This false analogy, then, leads to the apparently deep (but actually meaningless) question that many philosophers seek to answer, such as, “What is being?”. After all, if we can answer, “What is singing?” we should be able to answer, “What is being?”. Unless, of course, the analogy between them is false.

There is another kind of false analogy that Wittgenstein does not mention explicitly, which deals with nouns rather than with verbs. The fact that we say both, “The cat is in the cupboard,” and “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” seems to suggest that both ‘the cat’ and ‘beauty’ are entities that exist, and that have the power to move from place to place. (If beauty is in my eye, couldn’t it conceivably go elsewhere?) However, since cats are entities and beauty is just a concept, the analogy is false. This, it seems to me, is the sort of false analogy that leads to religion.

When we talk about the world and the thoughts that we have about it, we always use nouns. Thus, we say things like, “We must seek justice,” or “Where has kindness gone?”, yet none of the things to which we are referring are actual existents that can be sought or that can leave us. It seems to me that some ideas of the divine might stem from an attempt to combine all of the (non-)entities that are assumed by the false analogies of language into one agent who provides the motive power that our language has implied that these concepts have. Thus, a god becomes the absolute manifestation of love, justice, power, generosity, etc.: by uniting these supposed entities, the god helps people answer the bad questions that Wittgenstein’s notion of false analogies identifies, such as “Where is justice?”. I suppose one could say that religion is a way of dealing with bad questions without allowing them to drive one crazy because it provides simple, all-inclusive answers to them in the form of one or several god(s).

Certainly this insight about religion is in keeping with Wittgenstein’s identification of religion as nonsense. It does, however, add a greater understanding of exactly what kind of nonsense at least some aspects of religion might be, and it makes it much more difficult for Wittgenstein to consistently maintain the kind of respect that he sometimes shows toward religion and other nonsense.

Early versus Late

One thing that has always puzzled me is how shocked and indignant some people become when they realize that a philosopher has changed his or her mind about something. It is as if people forget that every philosopher is a human being who lives through a wide array of experiences throughout the course of his or her life and who goes through a continuous process of philosophic (and personal) maturation. Really, we should be surprised when someone doesn’t change his or her ideas over a long period of time because it would be indicative of either extreme stubbornness or an unusually good theory that cannot be improved.

People make a particularly big fuss over the way in which Wittgenstein openly criticizes his own Tractatus in his later writings. There are clear passages in which Wittgenstein criticizes his former views, yet there are other passages that seem to rely on ideas that are at least extremely similar to his early views. Many critics seem to be quite disconcerted by these inconsistencies; they are frustrated because Wittgenstein cannot be reduced to a three-paragraph summary of “his position” (not “positions”) for an introductory textbook. A lot of ink has been spilled over the question of the similarities and differences between the early and late Wittgenstein.

Yet it seems to me that whether or not Wittgenstein changed his mind is neither an important nor an interesting question. What we should really be asking is whether or not he was right in any of his writings; all concerns about how those writings relate to each other must be secondary. It is a strange and parasitic kind of philosophy to sit around arguing about whether someone has changed his mind without actually assessing any of his ideas.

I think that one of things that Wittgenstein said that was right—regardless of when he said it—is that philosophers often make the obvious seem obscure. He does not seem to know whether these philosophers have intentionally “muddied the waters to make them appear deep” (as Nietzsche said of Kant) or whether they are honestly confused; I think that there have been instances of each kind. Philosophers tend to be people who either love knowledge and devote their lives to understanding everything as deeply as possible, or who despise knowledge and enjoy undermining it through sophistry and skepticism. It seems to me that the first type of philosopher might be prone to accidentally overlooking the obvious, while the second type is more likely to obscure the obvious intentionally for the sake of deceiving others.

Hegel strikes me as a philosopher who loved knowledge so much that he tried to see things as deeper than they are. I think Wittgenstein would have agreed with me that Hegel’s philosophy is the kind of nonsense that one cannot help loving and admiring despite its lack of sense. Sartre, on the other hand, sometimes seems to be deliberately complicating that which he writes in order to make other people feel that their existence is somehow unstable or absurd, that somehow there is a question about the fact that we “are”.

Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophers who make things seem deeper than they are provides an extremely helpful way to heal oneself from the potentially dangerous effects of some philosophers, who may or may not have produced those effects intentionally.