Philosophers in the Anglo-Americabn tradition during the Twentieth Century followed the idea that there is wisdom in language in that its various forms-- it tenses, its contradictions, its phrases-- reveal the fundamental ways in which reality is constructed. That is very different from the Continental philosophers in the Twentieth Century, the various Existentialists, who would go to no effort to twist around language by inventing new terms so as to plumb the depths of experience which language itself could only indicate. A good example is G. E. Moore, one of the foundational creators of what was called “ordinary language philosophy”. He proposed what is called Moore’s Paradox. Moore proposed the sentence “It is raining and I believe it is not raining”. How is that possible? It seems contradictory even so the first statement is a fact and the second is a belief. If it is obviously raining and if a person sincerely thinks that it is not raining, how can it be possible to utter that statement? There must be something in the language that would indicate that it would show that the compound statement was contradictory even though it is not. But there is no paradox at all if language does not embody wisdom but that a term such as “and'' is not a monitor of meaning, just a conjunction. Language is just a makeshift account and it often errs. Language is not up to describing what it does in ordinary as well as peculiar cases. Here are two cases that show how language leaves us tongue-tied, and so has to be unpacked. The first of these concerns the trouble language has handling time and is an easier problem to unravel than is the second case, which deals with the trouble language has handling qualities.
A friend told me he and his wife had been to the restaurant where she first met me. “I have become a grandfather since I met Pamela there,” I replied. The sentence was funny because it did not give away the fact that I met Pamela thirty years ago. I could have given the sentence a complex construction that would have alluded to that fact. I could have said: “Since that long ago time when I first met Pamela, I have had the time to become a grandfather.” I could have alluded to the fact that I had been in Pamela’s company many times between our first meeting and the present. But the truth of the matter is that language does not require telling the whole story. It allows time to be foreshortened, as it is in our imaginations. Events that are far apart in time (or space) can be juxtaposed, held in the mind just about simultaneously. That is an irony of the human condition. All the moments we have lived through are available to be compared with any other moment in our lives. Indeed, any time since the creation of the universe is available for comparison to any other time since the creation of the universe.
If language and imagination (never mind which came first) can do that, then how are we to sequence which events are related to which other events? We need a way to solve this problem, for otherwise all events would be simultaneous, and there would be no narrative. We generate narratives by supposing that some events caused some other events while some others that took place at the same time or even “closer” to the subsequent event than the event in question did not cause the subsequent event. So we segment events by placing them along a time line of causation.
If that is correct, then there is no before and after if there is no causation. Before and after are not indications of possible causation but the logical consequence of thinking that there is causation. Then we can say that the cause has to come before the consequence. Events quite removed by time from their putative consequences are still candidates for cause because they can be seen as more general and therefore more profound causes, the cause that set intervening causes into motion or that intersected with or “took advantage” of intervening events to “cause” the final outcome, as when we say either that Von Hindenburg or Frederick the Great or the geopolitical position of Germany in the European land mass was the cause of the rise of Hitler. It is in line with that thinking that Saint Augustine, who was quite concerned about how time fit itself into the nature of things, the fall of man set in motion the chain of events that in some sense caused God to sacrifice his Son (even if the entire chain of events was already part of God’s plan-- though “plan” is the wrong word, a mere anthropomorphic metaphor, since a plan, as people use the word, sets a set of actions in motion so as to achieve an end, while God simply saw or knew how everything would unfold). There are a lot of other intervening events, such as the number of religious cults at the time of Jesus, that could also be held responsible, and theologians spend a lot of ink distinguishing between the ultimate reason provided by St. Augustine and the only contingent or enabling reasons provided by history.
Practically speaking, everywhere people look for causes, which they more or less correlate with time. So judges find the proximate cause of a crime rather than the underlying causes that have to do with poverty or the nature of human emotion. They are looking for events rather than conditions, though it is difficult to understand how an event is anything other than a complex of conditions that coincide, perhaps circumstantially with one another. Young people are tempted into gangs because of a lack of family solidarity and that happens time and again, and crimes follow from that condition, or at least so sociologists tell us.
In similar fashion, we learn to distinguish the particular event that made us sour on the boss or an old girl friend as well as the particular event which decided us to shift away from a childhood religious or political allegiance. Sure, such changes can come on “gradually”, but that simply means that there are a great number of events that accumulate in the same direction to “cause” us, as we say, to change in a manner so gradual that we no longer know the particular straw that broke the back of our religious conviction.
The idea of cause is therefore a way to fill in a lacuna of our imagination, as that is expressed in language. It allows us to establish time markers as ways of seeing how events are related rather than looking at conditions and circumstances as all the explanation that is needed. Language is so heavily invested in time that it invents tenses as one of the main complications of language to describe different kinds of time, and it takes a mighty effort to even in part unlearn the habits of language.
Let it be noted that this is a very different explanation of cause than the one offered by St. Augustine, who thought the cause of human action was mental, an act of will, rather than an act of imagination through which we sort out events. It is also a different explanation from that offered by David Hume, who thought cause could be reduced to its indicator, the proximity of events in time, or Kant, who thought that cause was based on the appreciation of time rather than the other way round, or even Spinoza, who thought cause was indeed an invention of the imagination, but who also thought that imagination was an inferior power, the refuge of those who could not use reason to see how events were just special cases of ever more general events, all events eventually part of the undifferentiated mind of God. I am suggesting, instead, that we play tricks on ourselves, invent causation, and therefore the entire set of problems attendant to that idea, simply so as to make rational sense of everyday life, to sort out events. That way, a reference to an event thirty years ago is a joke because it could not be a cause, as that is commonly understood, unless there was a long explanation, such as that I had met my future wife through having met Pamela at that particular restaurant thirty years before.
Here is the second, more complex problem in the use of philosophy to provide explanations to linguistic created quandaries, rather than the other way round, even though that is what linguistic philosophers think: that philosophy solves philosophical problems by making use of the wisdom embedded in language rather than the sloppiness inevitable to a language created by people who are other than God. The second problem is also resolved through the refusal to find wisdom in language, but this time the resolution requires a fix-it of language to make language serve more complicated purposes, language made more agile to handle the more complicated thoughts that are available to the modern mind than were available to the minds that collectively created the English language or other languages
“It is a beautiful day,” I say. You reply: “How beautiful is it?” We already know we are engaged in making a joke, because I have been given permission to proceed to a punch line, such as “It is such a beautiful day that the swans in the park are kissing their own wives.” Ordinarily, we do not ask “How much?” of a description which does not invoke the comparative. The day either is or is not beautiful. The same is the case with other adjectives, such as brave or willing or, even, tall. He is tall enough to be considered tall. It is possible but not necessary to ask how tall he is.
Indeed much of social life is given over to making non-comparative statements. Americans are proud of their country (as if other peoples are not proud of theirs?). This candidate is honest or dishonest, it being cynical to suggest that all we can do is ask if a candidate is more honest than his opponent. We can even say the painting is beautiful for a variety of reasons without asking whether there are degrees of beauty which can be assigned to paintings. I have never heard of an art critic who set up a scale to distinguish paintings as more or less beautiful rather than masterpieces, close to masterpieces, somewhat flawed, banal, or failed. Rather, paintings are closer or farther from being perfect paintings rather than compared on a dimension of beauty. The same is true of God and other good things. God is perfectly good and everything descends from that, rather than God is better at everything from goodness to power to being, those measures independently established so that God can be put somewhere or other on the scale-- hopefully at the better end. So Fearless Fosdick says of Dick Tracy “That is real detective work.” The description is intensified by claiming it is closer to the perfect ideal of detective work, rather than that it is better detective work given a measure of what detective work consists of.
So how come people in both their ordinary and spiritual lives insist on giving descriptions which are either/or? It may be that language does not allow us easily to proceed in the other direction. Were we to insist that everything have its comparative measure, most talk would have to cease. We could not have opinions on politicians or on girl friends if we had to compare them to one another rather than decide which one of them was good enough to be considered good enough for me. Taking action requires being definitive, and so we construct a language that allows us to assert true propositions as categorical. This girl is wonderful enough to be wonderful and so can be my girl friend. Language allows us, requires us, to focus on the particular instance, the particular event, before us, and assert its qualities rather than how its qualities can be compared to the same quality or qualities found in other instances or events. It would be disrespectful to tell a girl friend that she is better at being a girlfriend than x but not as good at being a girlfriend as y, or that she ranks higher in one respect but less high in another. Rather, comparatives arise as a subversive thought, as when one is astonished to allow one to tell oneself, in one’s own heart of hearts, that a girl friend one is fond of does not measure up on a set of measures not comparable to one another (and so distinct qualities or measures), and so some pretext should be found for getting rid of her. Similarly, while bosses can say some employees are better than others, they tend not to say that to their faces unless they are about to fire them or to give them ratings, which are ruses designed to get around the fact that language discourages comparatives and that the true evaluation of the candidate to job promotion was good enough or somehow flawed to the extent that the person should not be kept on. All I am saying, if I am correct in noticing what are considered public or legitimate forms of argument and observation, is that the literary way of seeing things, which is as old as Plato, in that it holds instances are imperfect realizations of archetypes rather than the scientific way of seeing things, which is as old as Aristotle, in that it imagines qualities as dimensions, remains what seems the essential way of going about noticing and explaining.
So where do comparatives come from, if they are not the ordinary way language leads us to think? They come from the social sciences, which are an intrusion on social life as it is ordinarily led because it keeps insisting on doing what language finds difficult to do, which is take the measure of a person or a situation by finding a yardstick (what sociologists call a “dimension”) on which to compare instances of opinion, allegiance, social similarity, or whatever. So it is a shock to students when you ask them to tell you how much they love their families, or you ask them to tell you the measures on which they compare their ways of life to the ways of life of people who are in other social classes. This new consciousness, still making its way, still not legitimate as ordinary discourse, so much so that you need to instruct students in this unnatural way of speaking, to ask “how much?”, is the invention of the nineteenth century, and so an example of the fact that the possibilities of language are still evolving, and so not grounded in the nature of people as language bearing animals.
Sociologists and other social scientists will say that there is no social science without comparison, whereby they rule out the kind of comparisons made by critics of one poem to another as not really comparisons at all, however much there is talk of “better” or “worse” poems, unless someone (no one ever has) proposes a measure for how good a poem may be. They have been very successful over the past century in getting people to adopt their vocabularies about both causation and comparison because it suits a scientific age. Students sit for tests of relative knowledge rather than for tests that show whether they have enough knowledge to be considered educated people. Employees sit for psychological profiles so that their employers can know if they are a bit more likely to be diligent at their jobs and a bit less likely to shoot someone. Polls tell politicians, journalists and the public whether one candidate is more trusted than another.
And yet all of this flies in the face of the age old wisdom of language, which is that people are known to be one thing or another rather than more or less of something. The persistence of un-scientific language is evidenced by the fact that students have to be taught to think differently from the way they ordinarily think, and that people in the humanities continue to find an insistence on comparison arbitrary, superficial and slightly ridiculous. Why compare apples and oranges other than to know they are both fruit? It is unnecessary to know just how much more orange are oranges than nectarines. I can still pick out a good fruit or a good poem or a good novel. And I can pick out the theme that provides sense to my historical narrative, even if I can’t be sure that, for example, seventeenth century England was a more violent age than twentieth century America, or even eighteenth century England, if I had to show that were the case by comparing the number of criminal events or the levels of street violence in the two periods, rather than relying on an anecdotal sense that the age did seem particularly violent.
And yet it is good to fight language. For otherwise students think that Virginia Tech shows us that students are violent, when there are in fact few deaths in schools, though noticing that requires making a comparative statement: more or fewer deaths than occurs on the street? At home? On the highways? Among that age group? Such a pursuit means only experts can talk about the matter, which is not what we want to be the case, preferring to rely on our judgment of what is the normal background case against which the extraordinary case is compared. If it seems extraordinary then it must be so, and statistics are a distraction. The revolutionary nature of social science thinking is not just that it has new findings; it is that new findings are relevant to old arguments and make old forms of argumentation obsolete. It will be a long time before social science makes much headway as anything but an excuse for policies arrived at otherwise through a sense of how things are.
Maybe that is just as well, given the primitive nature of social science inference. After all, evolutionary processes take a long, long time, and that applies to language as well as to life. For the nonce, qualities persist as unquantified, just as time remains the quantified measure of change. I suggest the reason for the resistance to this change in language towards the quantification of quantities is that it makes qualities something less like what they were and more like other things, such as trees or roses. Redness would become a substance of which it could be said there is more or less of it rather than the redness which is the characteristic of a rose even if there are roses that are more pinkish as well. Usual language makes the pinkness an additional quality, any given rose a combination of its color qualities, rather than subject to the measurement of color. It may be that various departments of consumer affairs already insist on a color measurement for roses, but general language usage does not seem to be much bothered by the matter for the moment.
In sum, language encourages one direction of thought or another, but language also allows us to form ways of thinking that abrogate and redefine both time and qualities, and that is quite an imaginative accomplishment.