Jean-François Lyotard was a postmodernist sociologist and philosopher who wanted to tie philosophy to political issues and concerns. One way of doing that was to focus on language games. (Lyotard got his cue for this from Wittgenstein.) By stressing the reality of language games, Lyotard believed he could defend the multiplicity of communities from any metanarrative onslaught. Specifically, this essay focusses on Lyotard’s technical account of the language game of science.
Jean-François Lyotard once stated that “the road is [ ] open for an important current in postmodernity”. That important current was the philosophical realisation that “science plays its own game”. But claiming that science is a game isn’t the end of the story. If science is only one game among many, then “it is incapable of legitimating the other language games”. More clearly, “[t]he game of prescription [ ] escapes it”. What’s even worse (or better) is that “it is incapable of legitimating itself”.
Was all this some kind of commitment to language-game incommensurability on Lyotard’s part? Not necessarily. There are other ways of arguing that science can’t legitimate other language games without needing to bring on board incommensurability. (Lyotard was clearly influenced by Thomas Kuhn.) Indeed, even if a language game is commensurable with science (whatever that may mean), the latter may still not (as it’s often put) have the right to try and legitimise it. Indeed, the members of a given language game may fully understand and accept the language game of science and yet still not be beholden to it.
As for science legitimating science. This is something that many philosophers have recognised. (This isn’t a reference to postmodernists or poststructuralists alone.) It obviously involves the problem of circularity. But that’s not the only problem. One other problem will be touched upon later when it comes to what Lyotard called “syntactic systems” and the fact that they exist before science can offer any empirical statements or theories. In other words, syntactic systems and empirical theories/statements exist on two different levels.
Lyotard also took science to be a language game which tells “stories”. Or at least he favourably quoted Peter Medawar stating that “[s]cientists are building explanatory structures, telling stories”. Of course, anything can be a metaphor of anything if the creator of the metaphor tries hard enough. Thus, science can indeed be deemed to be a language game which tells stories. (See metaphors which aren’t justified.)
Wittgenstein on Language Games
Lyotard hints that Wittgenstein himself took science to be a language game. (Wittgenstein did believe that science is a language game.) He said that Wittgenstein “did not opt for the positivism that was being developed by the Vienna Circle”. Instead, he “outlined in his investigation of language games a kind of legitimation not based on performativity”. What’s more, Lyotard claimed that language games are “what the postmodern world is all about”. (Note that Lyotard didn’t say this: Language games are what postmodern philosophy is all about.)
Lyotard then told his readers that when it comes to science (as well as every other language game), “legitimation can only spring from their own linguistic practice and communicational interaction”.
All the above can be summed up by saying that Lyotard believed that each language game (including science) is self-legitimating. More rhetorically, he believed that each language game is a self-enclosed universe which is untouchable by other language games or any metanarrative. (This is a counterargument against what was said earlier about incommensurability.) Of course, critical things can be said about language games (or about other language games). However, ultimately, they still have free rein. Stated that way, then, this is a exposition of pure relativism. Yet, of course, many have denied this, especially in Wittgenstein’s case.
[Lyotard’s use of the word “performativity” can probably be only fully understood in the context of the contents of his book The Postmodern Condition as a whole. See here.]
Where we have language games, we also have rules.
Rules and Formal Systems
Lyotard stressed the fact that science has rules. More relevantly:
“The argumentation required for a scientific statement to be accepted is thus subordinated to a ‘first’ acceptance [ ] of the rules defining the allowable means of argumentation.”
There needs to be at least some things in place before one person can argue his case to any other person. For start, both discussants must share a language (i.e., in order to understand each other). Many other things are required too. However, Lyotard was focussing on rules here — the rules found in scientific “argumentation”.
Of course, the statement “I feel that the earth is flat” wouldn’t pass muster in scientific — or any — circles. However, is there an actual rule to outlaw such statements from science? Well, yes and no.
Lyotard got more technical and specific when he asked the following question: “Is there a model for scientific languages?” The rules he’d previously mentioned will be found in these scientific languages.
Lyotard also asked if “there is just one” model for scientific languages. He then asked the obvious question: “Is it verifiable?”
It can now be said that the content of a scientific statement or theory (its empirical content) may well be verifiable. However, what of the rules of the scientific language itself? In simple terms, various things must ground the verifiable, or must already be assumed before scientists get around to verifying statements or theories.
Lyotard put it simply when he said that even when it comes to scientific speculation, “one must accept [ ] the set of rules [required] in order to play the speculative game”. In addition, in order to “understand this language”, scientists must understand “certain formal and axiomatic presuppositions that it must always make explicit”.
So Lyotard also focussed on the “syntax of a formal system” which underpins a scientific theory. Again, the syntax itself can’t be verified. Moreover, the standards expected of a formal system (such as “consistency”, “syntactic completeness”, “decidability”, and the “independence of the axioms in relation to one another”) are certainly not verifiable. Lyotard then added that “completeness” is not only unverifiable: it can’t even be had. (This is something that Lyotard told his readers “Gödel has effectively established”.)
[The link between such unverifiable systems and the fleshy reality of science is a difficult thing to make sense of and to establish.]
Yet all this technical theorising was but a preamble for what Lyotard attempted to derive from it: his political positions.
Prescription and the Consensus of Experts
This isn’t only about unverifiable syntactic systems: it’s also about what Lyotard called “the consensus of experts”. After all, we wouldn’t have any syntactic systems in the first place if experts hadn’t already agreed on what syntactic systems are, and what can be said and done within them. In fact, Lyotard believed that we’re really dealing with “a modality of prescription” here.
More importantly, the role of what Lyotard just called “prescription” is fundamental. In very simple terms, and it is simple, nothing in science is prescriptive. Almost by definition, the enforcement of rules must come before scientific practice. Yet the rules themselves aren’t scientific. And we’ve already seen that syntactic systems aren’t scientific either — at least not in any strict empirical sense.
Little Language Games
Lyotard approached language games from another angle too. This angle emphasised the difference between “denotative statements” and “prescriptive statements”. [I covered this in greater detail in my previous essay ‘Jean-François Lyotard’s Language Games of Truth and Justice’.]
In simple terms, Lyotard believed that “denotative statements” belong to one language game, and “prescriptive statements” belong to another. Thus, did Lyotard reach his conclusions about language games via the case of different kinds of statement?
Lyotard analysed (or described) denotative statements and prescriptive statements. He provided the statements “The door is closed” and “Open the door” as examples. Lyotard stated that
“[t]he two statements belong to two autonomous sets of rules defining different kinds of relevance, and therefore of competence”.
More broadly, Lyotard argued that “there is no relation of consequence as defined in propositional logic” between the statements “The door is closed” and “Open the door”. He explained as follows:
“There is nothing to prove that if a statement describing a real situation is true, it follows that a prescriptive statement based upon it (the effect of which will necessarily be a modification of that reality) will be just.”
A prescriptive statement may well be “based upon” denotative statements, but that’s not enough to demonstrate that the prescriptive statement is just. (In this case at least, the words “based upon” simply mean something like “about” or “a response to”.) And such a relation isn’t enough to necessitate a “relation of consequence as defined in propositional logic”. (All this, of course, is reminiscent of the fact-value distinction, as well as the naturalistic fallacy.)
Lyotard again explored the differences between denotative statements and prescriptive statements in order to get his larger political point across. He wrote:
“The important thing is not, or not only, to legitimate denotative utterances pertaining to the truth, such as ‘The earth revolves around the sun,’ but rather to legitimate prescriptive utterances pertaining to justice, such as ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ or ‘The minimum wage must be set at x dollars’.”
So this is where politics enters the picture.
Conclusion
Lyotard’s position on language games was essentially political — and perhaps moral — in that it was a defence of the multiplicity of communities from any metanarrative onslaught.
This naturally leads to what Lyotard called “postmodern science”.
Lyotard not only deemed science to be a language game which tells stories, he was also advocating — or moving toward —postmodern science. What is that? According to Lyotard, it’s a science that’s not deterministic, and which involves (or stresses) uncertainty, chance and the limits of knowledge. Indeed, all these features were deemed (by Lyotard) to work against scientific unification.
So, rather than quote Lyotard himself, here’s a passage (written some ten years after The Postmodern Condition) from a professor of philosophy of religion and theology, David Ray Griffin, which will show readers one of the directions in which postmodern science can go. Griffin advised his readers to
“follow Bohm in replacing the language of ‘laws’ with the more inclusive notion of ‘orders,’ for the reasons Evelyn Fox Keller has suggested: the notion of ‘laws of nature’ retains the connotation of theological imposition, which is no longer appropriate but continues to sanction unidirectional, hierarchical explanations”.
Apart from a battle against the unification of the sciences, Lyotard’s focus on uncertainty, chance, etc. was also his means of counteracting the misuse of science, of stressing the limitations of science, and of agitating for the importance of the diversity of knowledges-in-the-plural outside of science itself.
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