In the old days, American philosophy subsisted on European
imports -- first Locke's New Way of Ideas, then Kantian rationalism, then Absolute
Idealism, then Logical Positivism, then Analytic Philosophy, then Ordinary
Language Philosophy, then Existentialism, then Phenomenology. The only native American philosophical school
was Pragmatism. Because of the structure
and timing of tenure, American Philosophy Departments resembled the alluvial
deposits of river beds. Young men [it was
almost always men] would take up the latest European import, and just about
when they got tenure and were sedimented for life, a new wave of Philosophy would
wash up and a new batch of junior men would get tenure doing it. If you cut a trough through a Philosophy
Department, you could read off the successive European imports like a paleontologist.
Back when I was a lad, some Oxford philosophers with too
much time on their hands spent a good deal of energy drawing subtle
distinctions among a variety of English words that, to a casual observer, might
seem to mean more or less the same thing.
This so-called "Ordinary Language Philosophy" was all the rage
on the East Coast for a brief time. J.
L. Austin, among others, made much of the fact, for example, that there was a
subtle difference of meaning between calling something an "accident"
and calling it a "mistake."
Josh Marshall runs a blog called Talking Points Memo that I
click on several times each day. This
morning, after I put the sheets in the washing machine as part of the wrap-up before
departing for Europe, I checked TPM.com and came across the following story:
"A San Tan
Valley, Ariz. woman, Melisah Havens, on Friday accidentally shot her husband
outside their residence because she thought he was an intruder trying to
burglarize her vehicle, police
told KTVK
Phoenix."
I
should explain that Marshall, in the fine old tradition immortalized by Lincoln
Stephens in his Autobiography, has
taken to listing every police report of gun lovers shooting themselves, each
other, or their children because they have not learned the first thing about
gun safety [in this respect following the lesson of their spiritual leader,
former Vice President Dick Cheney.]
Look
at that story again. As soon as I read
it, I heard the plumy voice of an Oxford Don saying, ever so superciliously,
"My dear fellow. You don't mean that
she shot her husband accidentally. Nor do you mean that she shot him unintentionally. You mean that she shot him by mistake."
I
guess Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophy was good for something after all.
4 comments:
Enjoy Paris! It's my favorite city; I'll be there in March, but far too briefly.
I had the same reaction to the story, as well as to the frequent use of "accident" in news reports of car crashes. Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote a smart book on "Traffic," had a series on his blog called "The Accidental Journalist," in which he pointed out "how predictable, preventable crashes are turned into accidents" by sloppy journalists.
It's also instructive to note how vehicles, not their drivers, are granted agency in stories about car crashes.
There's always Paris
and there's always
Searle
While I certainly agree with your ascerbic assessment of semantic hair-splitting, Austin's account of performative speech acts was, in its day, a much-needed corrective to the then dominant account of language as sign or representation. I wonder if "referentialism" is still dominant in analytic philosophy of language, about which I know very little.
Much as I admire Bob and his work, I think him barking at the wrong tree here. The distinction of mistake and accident determines the nature of the incident. More importantly, Austin was showing in his little story
(a footnote)that putting things in a revelatory context makes a difference and basis of being responsible for what one says. She did not shoot by accident (Aiming as it were at the duck in the next tree), nor did she shoot him unintentionally (she was trying to hit him); but she did shoot him by mistake. (Manslaughter 3 unless he lived and refuses to press charges).
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