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"Using Language to Get Outside Language"(1)
They say it can't be done. You can't use language to get outside language. The very idea. Thus Putnam: "our language cannot be divided up into two parts, a part that describes the world `as it is anyway,' and a part that describes our conceptual contribution," in order to see that our language conforms to reality as it is anyway.(2) Rorty concurs: "one cannot use a part of one's present theory to underwrite the rest of it."(3) They are anticipated, as in so much, by Wittgenstein, who in David Pears's rendering says,
... we cannot possibly justify our factual language by appealing to facts which can only be stated in it. In order to justify it, we would need to stand outside it and assess its appropriateness to phenomena specified in some entirely different way. But an independent specification of the phenomena is precisely what we lack.(4)
By contrast, there are the realists -- obsolescent and embattled diehards, or so it often seems -- who think not only that we can use language to get outside language, but that we do it all the time. Among those who think this, some go further and profess to explain just how we manage to do it.
But how do realists respond to the challenge that you can't use language to get outside language? So far as I know they haven't responded explicitly or directly. Mostly they continue developing their theories of language, trusting that the results will somehow make radiantly clear why you can indeed use language to get outside language. The trouble is, irrealists think they have conclusive a priori reasons to doubt you can. Indeed the problem is to get them to read the realist theories in the first place, or at least to read with due care. For they are convinced that however carefully constructed the realist's theory may be, it will at some point inevitably beg the essential question, namely whether in using language we can manage to refer to affairs outside language -- outside in the sense of existing and having certain traits independently of our linguistic representations of them. Irrealists know this, they think, without having to read a word of what any realist may have written -- nay, slaved over, lovingly revised and improved in light of tough criticism, defended at length against ill-informed and ill-motivated onslaughts of intractably incredulous opponents.
I regret to say I'm here to tell you that these skeptics about realist theories of language have a point. There does appear to be some sort of question begging involved in any attempt to use language to construct a theory about how language relates to what lies outside it, and in particular to construct a theory according to which aspects of language conform to reality as it is independently of our representations of it. So realists need to take time off from constructing their positive theories. They need to do some negative campaigning; they need to examine the credentials of the slogan, "You can't use language to get outside language." Otherwise irrealists will find it that much easier to peddle their wares, like this sample from Putnam:
... elements of what we call "language" or "mind" penetrate so deeply into what we call "reality" that the very project of representing ourselves as being "mappers" of something "language-independent" is fatally compromised from the start.... Realism is an impossible attempt to view the world from Nowhere.(5)
Rorty "whole-heartedly concurs,"(6) and he's not alone. In fact, many philosophers take it for granted that realism necessarily involves an attempt to view the world from Nowhere, or that it involves a God's-eye view or some other heroic disembodiment, some place outside history, or at least some sort of immediate intuition or insight into the relation of representation to represented, some absurd "metaphysics of presence" or spectator theory of knowledge. As George Levine says, "Antirealism, even literary antirealism, depends on a sense of the impossibility of unmediated knowledge."(7)
But.... What exactly is the argument for the impossibility of using language to get outside language, or conceptual scheme to get outside conceptual scheme? And how is this impossibility supposed to entail the rejection of realism? When one surveys the relevant irrealist remarks in key philosophers from Nietzsche on, what they add up to is a line of thought we may call the Immediacy Argument against realism. We could equally well call it the God's-eye-view Argument, or the View-from-Nowhere Argument:
(1) On pain of circularity, we cannot use a part of our language or conceptual scheme to ground or justify the whole of it, in the sense of showing that our language or scheme corresponds somehow to the things in themselves. We cannot use language to get outside language, or scheme to get outside scheme.
(2) Thus the only way realists could justify, or even make sense of, their position would be by stepping outside any language or scheme -- that is, by way of some unmediated access or View from Nowhere -- in order to see that our language or scheme corresponds to the things in themselves.
(3) No such immediacy or transcendence is possible.
(4) Therefore, realism is unjustifiable, indeed senseless.(8)
This line of argument, or something very like it, is what underlies the rejection of realism on the ground that you can't use language or scheme to get outside language or scheme. Or if this is not what underlies such rejection of realism, irrealists owe us a clear account of what does.
The general strategy behind the Immediacy Argument is this. Suppose we used one part of our language to describe the world "as it is anyway," and another part to describe our conceptual contribution, in order to show that they match. Since the part we use to describe the world "as it is anyway" must itself express or include or presuppose at least some of our concepts, we cannot appeal to it in order to justify those concepts, or even to criticize or shake them, on pain of question-begging circularity. Thus the only way realists could so much as make sense of their position would be by stepping outside language, which is absurd. We must therefore acquiesce in the necessity of having a language or conceptual scheme that is not justifiable (in the sense of our being able to show that it conforms to some independent reality). The reason is that the language or scheme is neither justifiable by appeal to matters themselves understood, if at all, only by means of the self-same language or scheme, nor justifiable by some view from outside language. Derrida puts the upshot this way, almost ruefully: "There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language -- no syntax and no lexicon -- which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulation of precisely what it seeks to contest."(9) Lyotard has much the same in mind when he speaks of "the tyranny of representational thought."
Well, before we admit defeat and join the parade, shouldn't we pause to inquire whether the Immediacy Argument is sound? To be sure, the irrealist conclusion (4) does follow from the premises, and most realists today would themselves certainly accept premise (3): no such unmediated or transcendent view is possible. Further, the subsidiary conclusion (2) is supported by premise (1), even if not entailed by it; granted (1), it seems likely that the only way realists could make sense of their position would be by way of some Immediacy or View from Nowhere, which is absurd. That leaves premise (1), an assumption which in one form or another has seemed utterly obvious to most philosophers for generations if not for centuries. Indeed in many circles the slogan "You can't use language or scheme to get outside language or scheme" is a truism, a touchstone, a shibboleth, a mantra, a stopper.
But is (1) really so obvious? After all, there exist some things we can use to get outside those things, as when we use doors to get out of doors, or windows to defenestrate. So why specifically can't we use language or scheme to get outside language or scheme? More precisely, why are we supposedly unable to use a part of our language or conceptual scheme to ground or justify the whole of it, in the sense of showing that it corresponds to or maps onto, often enough or nearly enough, how things are apart from our language or scheme? If realists can explain how we could use language in this way "to get outside language," immediacy arguments and their ilk collapse.
Some realists, themselves renouncing any immediacy or metaphysics of presence or View from Nowhere, have constructed detailed positive accounts of how to justify realism. Such accounts typically explore key relations among concepts, language and world according to which certain samenesses and differences in the world -- including certain objects, kinds or universals -- are found not made, and our concepts and language, often enough, conform to, map onto, or track them (not that this is the only or the primary role of language; far from it). One or another of these constructive accounts does suffice to justify realism, I believe, and I have my favorite. But by themselves they fail to address this urgent question: "Why is assumption (1) taken so utterly for granted? What argument, what strand of the history of philosophy, is driving the uncritical faith in (1) and in its implication (2) that only immediacy or a View from Nowhere could save realism?"
What makes this question so urgent? Well, unless assumption (1) can be disarmed, the suspicion will persist that realists' positive accounts, however ingenious, must inevitably be question-beggingly circular at some deep level. Somewhere any such account must be assuming what it is trying to show; somewhere it has already had to slip into the form, the logic and the implicit postulation of precisely that which it seeks to ground. The only interest in reading the account is to see just where the inevitable mistake occurs.
It turns out that the (1) presupposes something surprisingly blatantly false. Hence mantras like "We cannot use language to get outside language, or scheme to get outside scheme" are unsound. So too for immediacy arguments, in that their major premise (1) rests on a false presupposition. It further turns out that this presupposition runs throughout a crucial strand of the history of philosophy. Indeed, it helps to begin by recalling a bit of dialectic in Descartes in order to see just what the presupposition is.
Descartes concludes that we cannot, on pain of circularity, justify our factual belief in an external world by appealing to facts which themselves are objects of such external-world belief. The reason is that our most basic external-world beliefs x -- say the belief that there is a lump of wax in front of me -- are what ultimately justify our somewhat less basic external-world beliefs y; these in turn justify our still less basic external-world beliefs z. Consequently, if we appealed in turn to these still less basic beliefs z in order to justify our most basic external-world beliefs x, it would follow that our most basic external-world beliefs x justify themselves -- a tight little closed circle prohibited by the principle that no beliefs may justify themselves.
Now ask, "Why would it follow that our most basic beliefs x would justify themselves?" This would follow only if the kind of inferential justification involved is transitive; otherwise we could not conclude from "x justifies y," "y justifies z" and "z justifies x" that "x justifies itself." Since it never occurred to Descartes to question this presupposition of transitivity -- indeed he seems completely unaware of it -- he was forced to break out of the threatened circle, or try. To this end he argued from his very idea of God to the conclusion that the light of reason or "faculty of knowledge which God has given us can never encompass any object which is not true ... in so far as it is clearly and distinctly perceived."(10) (This latter move is widely supposed to have landed Descartes in a further circle -- what we call the Cartesian Circle, pointed out by Mersenne and Arnaud -- which arises when Descartes relies on clear and distinct ideas to prove the existence of God and on the existence of God to validate clear and distinct ideas.)
The transitivity presupposition -- that all the relevant forms of inferential justification are transitive -- is crucial. We can see it at work in a 20th-century parallel to Descartes's dialectic -- parallel, anyway, up to the bit about God. Wittgenstein concludes that there can be no noncircular grounding of our factual language. The reason is that the very use of factual language is presupposed by, hence part of what justifies, our most basic factual beliefs; they in turn justify more complex factual beliefs, including any about the relations between language and the world; therefore, if we appealed to the more complex beliefs to justify the very use of factual language (say on the ground that often enough it conforms to the world), it would follow that the very use of factual language justifies itself -- a tight little closed circle.
Again this would follow only if the relevant kind of inferential justification is transitive. The transitivity presupposed by Wittgenstein has the form, "x is part of what justifies y, y justifies x, therefore x is part of what justifies x." Since it never occurred to Wittgenstein to question this presupposition -- not that he was aware of it -- he reasoned further that because we have no View from Nowhere or other unmediated justification of factual language, there can be no noncircular justification of it at all.
Rorty merely generalizes this hackneyed argument-form, wittingly or not, in order to conclude that there must be final vocabularies, the factual included, beyond which there is no noncircular argumentative recourse, "only helpless passivity or a resort to force."(11) Much the same dialectic is at work in Kant's positing categories of the understanding which can be neither justified nor criticized by appealing to matters themselves understood only through the categories; we cannot use the categories to get outside the categories. Historicize the categories, as do many of Kant's successors, relativize them to forms of life or to methods of warrant or verification, or think of them as conceptual or as grammatical or as Derridian infrastructural matters of difference, and you have the recipe for today's typical irrealist. We cannot look on reality bare and compare it with our final vocabulary, or with our language, concepts or ideas of reality, in order to see whether they somehow correspond to reality, map it, conform to it, track it, carve it at the joints, whatever. There can be no such transcendental view, and "the demand for an adequate mode of expression," as Nietzsche says, "is senseless," so that our metaphysical views are only the product of the grammatical structure of our language, and "The world appears logical to us because we have made it logical."(12) You cannot use language to get outside language, or history to get outside history. Putnam likewise condemns any transcendent View from Nowhere: "The notion of comparing our system of beliefs with unconceptualized reality to see if they match makes no sense.... [T]he notion of a transcendent match between our representation and the world is nonsense."(13) We cannot justify belief in such a match by using language which presupposes it, no more than we could justify -- or criticize -- belief in a match between categories of the understanding and uncategorized things in themselves.
All these philosophers presuppose transitivity of the philosophically relevant forms of inferential justification. For not only do most of them run arguments like the one lately gleaned from Wittgenstein. All of them use variations on the Immediacy Argument against realism. And it is indeed true that many traditional realists did imagine some such dubious unmediated intuitive vision or mental grasp of word-world fit, some such God's-eye view. But this only shows they were victims of the same argument-form that lies behind the Immediacy Argument against them. The idea in both cases is as above: were there some inferential justification (or criticism) of word-world fit -- some further argumentative recourse -- it would give rise to a tight little closed circle. So there can be no noncircular inferential justification or criticism at this level of fundamentality. Therefore, if there is to be any justification at all it must be noninferential, that is to say by way of some immediate insight into the relation of representation to represented, some absurd transcendental View from Nowhere. Again the key presupposition is that the relevant forms of inferential justification are transitive.
The transitivity presupposition is what Putnam, Derrida and the rest share with Descartes. It is what makes them all "deep-structural foundationalists." Deep-structural foundationalism is the view that as regards suitably deep philosophical matters, there is always some point at which reason-giving must leave off, on pain of vicious regress or circularity. If reason-giving -- that is, inferential justification -- is transitive, then to give reasons for a belief, and reasons for those reasons and so on, is to set us off on a regress that can only be stopped by appeal to some belief that cannot be justified by anything further. This basic belief is either unjustified or immediately justified or justified only relative to some individual or form of life. (For details see Post (1996).)
To be sure, immediacy arguments are not the only kind of objection to realism. There remain further objections, to the effect that realism must be miserably essentialist or totalizing -- there is one right way of describing and explaining, one right vocabulary, the one true theory; that realism must be noumenal, scientistic, reductive, confrontational, or inimical to freedom, expressivism and the sense of wonder; and that it must suppose we can escape regimes of power and knowledge by escaping into some transcendental realm of truth and freedom. But realism entails none of these; there are minimal versions that simply are not essentialist, totalizing, noumenal, scientistic, reductive, confrontational, or inimical to freedom, expressivism and the sense of wonder; quite the reverse.(14) Irrealists have set up a scarecrow.
In any case, a number of these further objections to realism prove to rest finally on immediacy arguments, which rest in turn on the transitivity presupposition. For example, as Wolterstorff rightly remarks, "fundamental to contemporary anti-realism is the affirmation of nominalism -- that is, of ... anti-realism with respect to universals outside the mind." The radical world-making variety of anti-realism "is the resolute spinning out of the implications of nominalism," which has its roots in the medieval view according to which "natures as grasped by the mind are fundamentally altered from how they are in things."(15)
I would add only that when we inquire why we must not think there are natures or universals outside the mind, the typical modern reply -- and postmodern -- is that we could never justifiably believe that there are any. For in order to do so, the reply goes, we would have to adopt the absurd immediacy method of taking in one hand some segment of reality, and in the other the universals in the mind, then look to see that the universals in the mind answer to something in reality.
When we inquire further why there is allegedly no alternative to immediacy or a View from Nowhere, what we find is the assumption that any attempt at an indirect or inferential justification of belief in real universals must be circular. For suppose we tried to describe some segment of reality "as it is in itself," in order to infer, from this description, something about whether reality filtered by universals in the mind answers to reality "as it is in itself." Obviously, we cannot describe anything at all (say snow as white) without applying universals in the mind (say without applying snow-as-grasped-by-us and whiteness-as-grasped-by-us). So universals in the mind are presupposed by, hence part of what justifies, any description whatever, including any would-be description of some segment of reality. Therefore, if we appeal to the latter description to justify the universals in the mind (on the ground that they answer to real universals), we land in a tight little circle: universals in the mind are part of what justifies the would-be description of a segment of reality "as it is in itself"; this would-be description justifies the universals in the mind; therefore, the universals in the mind are part of their own justification, which is circular; therefore, we cannot use universals in the mind to get outside universals in the mind. It follows, we are told, that no noncircular inferential or argumentative justification is possible here; there is no alternative to a noninferential, immediate or View-from-Nowhere method of justification for belief in real universals. Since this is absurd, we could never know or verify whether there are real universals, and it is otiose to suppose there are.
Note, however, that a crucial move in this argument against real universals has the form, "x is part of what justifies y; y justifies x; therefore, x is part of what justifies x." And this is just to presuppose transitivity of the relevant form of inferential justification.
On the other hand, what exactly is supposed to be wrong with the transitivity presupposition on which assumption (1) rests? Well, for one thing, there are lots of counterexamples to it. Many of these counter the belief that if x is part of what justifies y, and y justifies x, then x is part of what justifies x. For example, by 1820 there was extensive observational and other evidence for Newton's theory TN of gravitation. As applied to the known solar system, including observed irregularities in the orbit of Uranus, TN entailed that there is another and unobserved planet X beyond Uranus, and entailed also certain key properties of X's orbit, including its semi-major axis, eccentricity, longitude of perihelion, and such further specifics as
Indeed, in context, TN justifies O, and by the 1840s TN was seriously offered as justification for O. When astronomers subsequently turned their telescopes to look at p at t, they observed a planet where it should be, called it Neptune, and thereafter offered O as a reason for, hence as part of what justifies TN. In fact they regarded O as a strong reason for TN, hence as a strong part of its justification, since O involved novel prediction. Nor did they withdraw their previous offer of TN as justification for O. To the contrary, they now regarded O as having dual justification, from TN and from observation. O was part of what justified TN, TN justified O, yet O did not justify itself even in part. The alleged transitivity principle fails.
Generalizing, it often happens that a hypothesis or account T and an evidential statement E are so related that on the one hand, E is part of what justifies T, and on the other, T justifies E. Typically this happens when there is also extensive evidence for T independent of E, as in the case of Newton's account. Parallel examples can easily be multiplied, to include the case of the discovery of Pluto, the case of starlight bent by the sun in conformity with general relativity, the case of the positron, and the case of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury (which was already known, not a novel prediction). It also happens when what E describes -- say the phase of Venus at p and t -- is among the phenomena we explain by T (as when we explain the phases of Venus plus the apparent motion of Mars by positing a sun-centered planetary system); E is then part of what justifies T, T justifies E (because T is justified by the available evidence and implies E), yet E does not justify itself.
Another form of non-transitive inferential justification involves mathematical probability, as do several varieties of inductive justification. Suppose x inductively justifies y only if relative to x, y is probable to a certain high threshold degree, say to at least 0.8; that is, P(y/x) is not less than 0.8. Suppose further that y justifies z in the same sense, so that P(z/y) is not less than 0.8. If transitivity held, x would have to justify z in the same sense, so that P(z/x) is not less than 0.8. But given only that P(y/x) is not less than 0.8 and P(z/y) is not less than 0.8, it follows only that P(z/x) is not less than 0.64. Since 0.64 is well below the threshold, transitivity fails.
Many other counterexamples to the transitivity presupposition have to do with inference to the best explanatory story, roughly what Peirce called abduction. The point of inference to the best explanation is not that we are to infer only one explanation of some phenomena, but that we are to infer only one from among the competing explanations. Typically the same affair can be explained in several different but compatible ways. When I notice that the water I just put on the stove is still not boiling, I may infer that I forgot to turn on the burner, or I may infer that the mean kinetic energy of the water molecules is too low. The latter explanation invokes constituent entities, the former does not. The two explanations are compatible; neither can be said, in the relevant sense, to be a better explanation than the other of why the water is not boiling. By contrast, an explanation in terms of the burner's not working does compete with the explanation that I forgot to turn it on. Of course there is no way to tell which is the better explanation given only that the water is not boiling. So I enlarge my data set -- I check to see whether the burner is turned on -- in order to narrow the field of potential explanations and decide whether to undertake repairs or lament my absent-mindedness. In general, "Given our data and our background beliefs, we infer what would, if true, provide the best of the competing explanations we can generate of those data (so long as the best is good enough for us to make any inference at all)"(16)
Now suppose x justifies y in virtue of y's being the best explanation of x, and y in turn justifies z in virtue of z's being the best explanation of y. If transitivity held, x would have to justify z in virtue of z's being the best explanation of x, a better explanatory story than any competitor. Three facts block this would-be transitivity. The first is that inference to the best explanation y results at best in y's being probable, to some threshold degree, given what it explains. Those varieties of abductive inference that do require some such threshold probability could not be transitive, for the reason given two paragraphs back. The second is that relations of explanation, unlike those not only of deduction but of reduction and causal and other determination, are not in general transitive; if x explains y and y explains z, it does not follow that x explains z (except cases of deductive explanations).(17)
The third is that even if explanation were transitive, best explanation could not be. Assume that y is the best explanation of x. This is to say that of the competing explanations we can generate of x, y is better than any other. Assume further that z is the best explanation of y in the same sense. If transitivity held, z would have to be the best explanation of x in the same sense, meaning that of the competing explanations we can generate of x, z is better than any other. But by hypothesis y is better that any other of the competing explanations of x. Transitivity fails.
There are other non-transitive forms of inferential justification, and like abductive inference some of them are used by realists in constructing positive accounts of word-world fit according to which certain samenesses and differences in the world are lovingly found not made, and our concepts and language, often enough, correspond to or map onto them. At least one of these accounts is on the right track, I believe, and it amounts to one long series of abductive inferences. But even if none of these accounts quite works -- at least not yet -- assumption (1) cannot be used against them, or against the realism they are meant to support, in order to show in light of (1) that at some level they must inevitably be question-beggingly circular. For the mantra that we cannot use language or scheme to get outside language or scheme rests on the flagrantly false presupposition that all the relevant forms of inferential justification are transitive.
1. Presented at The Down East Philosophy Conference on Representations: Qualitative and Linguistic, East Carolina University, November 8-9, 1996. Parts of this paper are taken from Post (1996).
2. Putnam (1992), 123. In what follows, realism about a class of affairs is the view that such affairs exist and have some traits independently of our evidence, theories, conceptual schemes, language, or the like; they are not made but found. Irrealism includes the view that the dispute between realists and their opponents is senseless, as well as the view that realism is just false.
3. Rorty (1979), 294.
4. Pears (1988), 14; cf. 255, on rules.
5. Putnam (1990), 28.
6. Rorty (1993), 443.
7. Levine (1993), p.13.
8. This argument is related to what Searle calls the Ding an Sich argument in Searle (1995), 173-174. But his criticism of the Ding an Sich argument affords neither diagnosis nor critique of what is driving premise (1) above, which premise is widely regarded as the ultimate realism-killer.
9. Derrida (1978), 280-281.
10. HR, I, 231; CSM, I, 203; AT, VIII, 16.
11. Rorty (1989), 73ff, 80. Cf. Rorty (1967), 1: "To know what method to adopt, one must already have arrived at some metaphysical and some epistemological conclusions. If one attempts to defend theses conclusions by the use of one's chosen method, one is open to the charge of circularity"; see also his discussion of Wittgenstein, on p. 10.
12. Nietzsche (1968), 625, 484, 521.
13. Putnam (1981), 130, 134.
14. Post (1987), (1991).
15. Wolterstorff (1990), 55, 63.
16. Lipton (1991), 58.
17. Cf. Post (1999), §3, on the non-transitivity in particular of
explanations mediated by interlevel theories (for example, explanations of some biological
affairs in terms of properties of large molecules, via the interlevel theory we call molecular
biology).
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