“[Expressions] can and are violated by unconsciously crossing ordinary uses of expressions with half-understood technical ones.” — P.M.S Hacker
It can be asked why philosophers, academics and scientists use everyday words in new ways. Why don’t they simply create completely new technical terms (i.e., neologisms) to do the jobs they need to do? Is it because these new uses (or meanings) of the everyday words are strongly related to the old uses (or meanings)? Is it because academics, scientists and philosophers want to elicit easier understanding by using everyday words in new ways? Alternatively, are such philosophers, academics and scientists simply playing fast and loose with everyday words?
The British philosopher P.M.S. Hacker (1939-) has a very-strong position on these issues.
The fairly obvious point is that Hacker’s position on how academics, philosophers and scientists use everyday words in new ways is philosophical. More accurately, it’s a very-clear expression of a very particular philosophy. That philosophy is Wittgensteinianism — as expressed, in this case, by a late-20th and early-21st century British philosopher.
Peter Hacker believes in what’s been called the “linguistic-therapeutic approach” to philosophy, as originally advanced by Ludwig Wittgenstein. That is, he believes that the words and concepts used by everyday people should be taken as given by philosophers. Consequently, he sees the role of philosophy (as did Wittgenstein) as one of dissolving (or resolving) philosophical problems by examining (among other things) how words are actually used in everyday life. More precisely, Hacker deems such philosophical problems to be primarily conceptual in nature. To him, this also means that these problems can be dissolved (or resolved) purely by “linguistic analysis”.
Take a specific example of this. Hacker believes that the “problems” and “mysteries” of consciousness dissolve once we realise that everyday words are either being (to use his own word) “misused” or that new technical terms simply don’t have any real content.
For example, Hacker believes that the term “qualia” is a (as Daniel Dennett has also put it ) “philosopher’s artefact”. (See Hacker here.)
Clearly this philosophical stance is related to what was once called ordinary language philosophy.
This was a philosophical stance (rather than a specific school) which saw traditional philosophical problems as being rooted in the misunderstandings philosophers make when they distort (or simply change) everyday words. The upshot is that using everyday words in new ways can often create philosophical problems, rather than help solve them.
Despite all the above, philosophers, academics and scientists aren’t the only (as it were) culprits here. Laypeople are too. That is, everyday words often take on new meanings among laypeople. Indeed, it’s a commonplace to state that language always changes and adapts. And even in everyday terms, the same word can be used in different ways within different contexts. (This is something that Wittgenstein himself emphasised.)
Consequently, is what some philosophers, academics and scientists do really that different to what the “folk” do?
Hacker on Philosophical & Scientific Violations of Everyday Words
There’s something a little off-putting about Peter Hacker’s stern 1950s-Oxford-University (or public school) way of putting things.
Take the following passage from Hacker’s ‘Languages, Minds and Brains’ contribution to the book Mindwaves:
“[I’m only concerned with] what makes sense and what does not. The bounds of sense can be violated by the misuse of technical, not ordinary expressions no less than the misuse of ordinary ones.”
Hacker sounds like a Wittgensteinian professor who’s giving one of his own philosophy students a good telling off. More specifically, his phrase “the bounds of sense” seems a little pompous. (That phrase is actually borrowed from Peter Strawson’s book The Bounds of Sense.) It’s not entirely clear what the words “bound of sense” mean within Hacker’s philosophical context.
Hacker also refers to technical terms being “misuse[d]”. This is odd because technical terms are coined by specific academics, scientists, philosophers, artists, novelists, etc. at specific times for specific purposes. So such terms are virtual neologisms anyway — even when it’s a case of using everyday words in new ways.
So can we be so strict about technical neologisms? After all, the terms “wave”, “spin” and “information”, for example, are very technical and very specific, yet the words themselves also have an everyday use and origin.
Yet, on the surface at least, surely it’s taking a tremendous liberty if a philosopher, scientist or academic uses an everyday word in a completely different way. This is Hacker’s take on that issue:
“And, in particular, [expressions] can and — in the cases I have examined — are violated by unconsciously crossing ordinary uses of expressions with half-understood technical ones.”
Of course, a scientist, academic or philosopher may well argue that he’s not using that everyday word in a completely different way. But he will usually admit that he is using it in some kind of different way. (For example, the physicist’s use of the word “information” is — arguably — not completely divorced from its everyday use.)
Hacker also talks of “unconsciously crossing ordinary uses of expressions with half-understood technical ones”. Yet usually it is conscious — often very conscious — crossings of ordinary terms with new technical uses that can be seen. In addition, new technical uses of everyday words may be very well understood (i.e., not “half-understood”) and still bear no relation to how they’re used by laypersons.
Hacker’s Examples From Psychologists and Neurophysiologists
Hacker then comments on neurophysiologists and psychologists using everyday words in new ways. (This is his own personal bugbear.) He writes:
“Secondly, it is not open to the neurophysiologist or psychologist to shrug off these criticisms on the grounds that he is using ‘language’, ‘represent’, ‘communicate’, ‘recognize’, etc. in a special technical sense, and that it is not he but his gullible reader (such as myself) who is guilty of crossing the ordinary use with his special technical one."
Firstly, it’s entirely understandable that when a layperson reads a word that he’s read many times before that he expects it to be used in the same way as before. Moreover, he’ll understand it in the same way as before. That said, the philosopher, academic or scientist may simply say that this reader should already know that the word is being used in a technical and/or new way because the context in which these words are embedded will make that very clear. In other words and to take Hacker’s own examples: if the layperson reads the words ‘language’, ‘represent’, ‘communicate’ and ‘recognize’ in the context of a piece of psychology or neurophysiology, then perhaps the reader should already know — or at least suspect — a technical meaning (or use) for these words.
That said, these technical uses of everyday words also crop up all over the place. They most certainly don’t only appear in academic papers. They can be found in popular journalism, in “popular science” books, on television/radio, etc. That is, the occur when and where no specialised knowledge is assumed or required. And, in these cases, technical terms — under the guises of everyday words — most certainly wont be understood in their new senses. What’s more, it can be argued that at least some academics, scientists and philosophers actually play on this conflation. And they do so because these crossovers (between everyday words and their new technical uses) make their words and theories more sexy, radical and saleable. In other words, such academics, philosophers and scientists know full well that they’re using old words in a technical way, even though they also know that these words will only be understood in their everyday senses.
So at least some academics, philosophers and scientists know that many (to use Hacker’s words) “gullible reader[s] [will be] guilty of crossing the ordinary use with [their] special technical one[s]” — and that’s precisely what they want! That crossing is a means to make their theories more sexy and saleable.
[Think here of Markus Gabriel’s book title Why The World Does Not Exist. In that book Gabriel uses the words “world” and “exist” in very technical ways. Yet when these words are actually understood in their philosophical and technical senses, then that immediately softens the impact of the title’s sexy punch.]
As it is, Hacker argues that the guilty academic, scientist or philosopher is having his cake and eating it. He writes:
“For were he so to argue, the initial analogy with which his story began, and which so impresses us all, is no analogy whatever [].”
In other words, such an academic, scientist or philosopher wants laypeople to fuse the everyday word with the same word used in his/her own technical manner. Or, in Hacker’s own example, such a academic, scientist or philosopher starts off by using that word in a way that’s akin to an “analogy”, and then he/she castigates the layperson for not taking it in its purely technical sense.
What’s more, it’s quite possible that some technical terms can’t be understood at all analogically. (Think here of the many disputes in quantum mechanics about the word “spin” or even “wave”!) Yet such everyday words are often used analogically simply to (as it were) entice the layperson in. More specifically and with Hacker’s own examples, the words ‘language’, ‘represent’, ‘communicate’, ‘recognize’ as used by (some) psychologists and neurophysiologists simply don’t have the same meanings as those very same words as they’re used in their everyday contexts.
A Less Stern Position on Semantics
A more (to use a word from Hacker) everyday position is to argue that it’s not really that “sense” is being “violated” or that “ordinary expressions” are being “misused”. It’s mainly a simple problem of understanding what some people say or write.
That said and as Humpty Dumpty once stated:
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
So Humpty Dumpty was right to argue that people — and that includes scientists, academics and philosophers — are free to use everyday words in their own new ways. However, surely that’s only as long as they back up their new uses. And there’s still a problem with Hacker’s word “misuse”. In fact it’s hard to even fathom who — or what — would decide if a term had been misused and what arguments would be deployed to characterise such misuse. On the other hand, it’s easy to understand basic problems of communication.
Perhaps this is to be too liberal. After all, if a scientist, philosopher or academic uses the word “cat” to refer to beans, then surely he’s misusing the word “cat”. Sure, that’s an extreme and silly example — but it gets the point across.
My own personal take on this is to say that when I’ve asked people to explain to me what they mean (or to “define [their] terms”), others have said that my request is “rhetorical”, “political” or “arrogant”. This is very odd. I simply want to know what people mean by their words. Now should I have pretended that I understood their use of words? Should I have patronised the writer of the words? Should I have simply guessed and based my guess on some kind of purely emotional, intuitive and immediate reaction to the words?
It’s easy to accept that some responders may ask for definitions for rhetorical, political or arrogant reasons. However, surely that isn’t always the case. And even if they do, then that still means that there must have been a problem with communication.
Now of course there are many complex and difficult issues relating to understanding, conversational implicature, “the play of the sign”, semantic indeterminacy, the inscrutability of reference, etc. However, I don’t think that these philosophical or semantic issues are that relevant to what’s just been discussed in this essay. In simple terms, if I don’t understand what people are saying, then I don’t understand what people are saying.
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Note: More Passages from Peter Hacker
Here is a handful of other passages from Hacker’s ‘Languages, Minds and Brains’ contribution to the book Mindwaves:
“But, of course, there is no picture in the visual cortex representing what we see.”
“There are no symbols in the brain that by their array express a single proposition, let alone a proposition that is known to be true.”
“[] I flounder in the mixed metaphors [] cells are not in the business of building perceptual concepts [] or any other kind of information in either sense of the term.”
“[W]hen biologists talk of the ‘genetic code’ they are not using the word ‘code’ in the sense in which a code is essentially related to a language…”
“[H]e comes perilously close to saying that when a person sees an object there is a map, a representation of the object. [] But now he must explain who or what sees or reads the map. If it is neither the mind nor a gnostic cell, what can it be?”
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