Abstract
The appearance in 1945 of the idea of the open texture of empirical concepts, which anticipated Friedrich Waismann’s thesis of a many-level-structure of language, led to a re-evaluation of “context”. It widens the sense of context that we are accustomed to mentioning as being Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning in his later philosophy. The new idea Waismann brought into the landscape is how to “clarify the context”, which is in a way a very non-Wittgensteinian question as well as an “explanation of context”, where open texture plays a key role. But despite the amount of literature about open texture, this idea of Waismann is still not properly understood. Open texture must be situated as an obstacle to exhaustiveness of definition for internal reasons not only because of unforeseen conditions that could always arise in the future, but also by virtue of an a priori aspect of the texture of concepts. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to propose an interpretation of open texture as an immanent property of a concept, that is, as something that is underlying its nature.
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Notes
There are only a few collections of papers on Waismann’s legacy, and few papers among them on the notion of open texture. However, at least two impressive collections are devoted mainly to this idea: one is in French, edited by Jean-Philippe Narboux and Antonia Soulez (2008), and the second in English, edited by Dejan Makovec and Stewart Shapiro (2019).
As Michael Beaney famously said, “Friedrich Waismann is one such philosopher who has dropped from the radar of contemporary philosophy but who was extremely influential and well regarded in his lifetime” (2019, vi).
The English term “open texture” is an arbitrary translation of the original German “die Porosität der Begriffe”. The English version (“open texture”) was suggested to Waismann by William Kneale (Waismann, 1945, 121), and it is this version that has become widely accepted. The term, according to Waismann, for the fact that however tightly we think we define an expression, there always remains a set of (possibly remote) possibilities under which there would be no right answer to the question of whether it applies. This is its porosity, or open texture.
Although Waismann’s interests were limited mainly to the analysis of empirical concepts (in “Verifiability” he says that “open texture is a very fundamental characteristic of most, though not of all, empirical concepts, and it is this texture which prevents us from verifying conclusively most of our empirical statements” [Waismann 1945, 123]), the epistemological significance of the open texture argument unexpectedly began to manifest itself in other types of discourse, for example, in analytic philosophy of law and cognitive psychology. Because of H. L. A. Hart (1961), the idea of open texture, which Hart expounded in legal language, was given a second life and became thoroughly established as a methodological principle for the analysis of legal concepts. It is important to note at this point that “Waismann was writing about language in general; Hart was writing about language in the context of law —in particular, in the context of applying and interpreting rules—and the problems to which his ideas responded derive from that context” (Bix, 1991, 66). Anyway, the notion of the open texture of legal language and its concepts has proved so fruitful that the notion has become an independent subject of study and has acquired a new interpretation in the different context—the context of law is a really good example (especially see Miller 1972; Bix, 1991; Lyons, 1999; Anderson, 2010; Schauer, 2013; Bunikowski, 2016). Hart’s idea of open texture, in turn, has some influence on the formation of a prototype theory in cognitive psychology. This influence is traced in the following aspects. First, the idea of open texture of legal concepts was provided by Hart in his The Concept of Law (1961) twelve years earlier than the idea of prototype was expressed by cognitive psychologist Eleanor Rosch in “Natural Categories” (1973). Second, it is not the chronological primacy that is important, but the observed similarities in the terminology used and in the shared methodological attitudes. Hart, considering the ambiguity of meaning, distinguished the core and penumbral meaning, or the core and penumbra of concept. The prototype theory employs such similar terms as the central meaning of category and its peripheral meaning. Both Hart and proponents of the prototype theory shared Wittgenstein’s view of nondiscreteness, blurring of the boundaries of concepts, and continuity and randomness in the definition of things and their naming, which leads to the inevitability of the problem of indeterminacy in both cases. And, third, the idea of Hart’s open texture, like a prototype theory, arose as a reaction to, among other things, the traditional Aristotelian way of organizing categories and defining concepts by necessary and sufficient conditions. Thus, one could propose that Waismann’s idea of open texture through Hart has influenced in some ways a prototype theory (for more details, see Charnock [2013, 130]; about the differences between Waismann’s open texture, Wittgenstein’s family resemblance, and Rosch’s prototype theory, see Way [1991, 209–216]).
This famous example of open texture was put forward by H. L. A. Hart and later elaborated upon in many different ways by many different scholars (see Bix 1991 Bix, 2019; Bell, 1998; Schlag, 1999; Schauer, 2008 Schauer, 2019; Slocum, 2019). For the most recent discussion about the no-vehicles-in-the-park rule, see Struchiner et al., (2020).
These fictional things are not borderline cases of a vehicle in the usual sense. And, of course, the vehicle example in this sense is not the sort of extreme and barely imaginable cases Waismann (and, from the same period, Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin) was speaking about: cats that suddenly become nine feet tall, or disappear and then reappear a man. But in the unusual sense it can be considered in this way. It must be clarified that an unusual sense is meant here. The vehicle example as Hart and his commentators use it (a vehicle in the usual sense) is about the way in which some term has a clear core meaning (cars and trucks) and an unclear or vague one with respect to currently known fringe examples, such as roller skates, toy trucks, motorized wheelchairs, etc. While this case is interesting on its own, I will not argue the points here. I just want to clarify whether a definition of vehicle would be correct if we substitute the definiens by fictional terms (Quidditch flying broomstick, magic carpet, etc., which can be used as a vehicle in the unusual sense). And I tend to think that it will be, if and only if a sentential context would not change its meaning: A vehicle in a fictional discourse would still mean a tool for transporting people and cargo. I do not feel that such an extension of vehicle distorts Waismann’s original idea. We can and do often say, when a sentence has been used in our presence, that the question of its truth or falsity does not arise on this occasion because we can understand it. One such situation is this when fairy tales are told to us. We know that a Quidditch flying broomstick or a magic carpet do not exist “but storyteller is for our entertainment making the peculiar use of words which we can call speaking as if they do” (Hart, 1951, 204). My interpretation could be treated as another way to show the importance of context dependence even for definition of fictional terms for which the same problems arise (e.g., incompleteness and nonexhaustiveness). A similar idea can be found in Searle (1975).
Peter Ingram has provided an explanation on how open and closed concepts should be distinguished: “A concept is open if its conditions of application are emendable and corrigible, if I cannot list exhaustively all the conditions of application because unforeseeable or novel conditions are always forthcoming or envisageable. With an open concept new applications are possible where I shall have to make a decision whether to extend the concept to cover the new case, or (arbitrarily) to exclude the new case from coverage. A concept is closed only when both the necessary and sufficient conditions for its application can be stated” (1985, 48).
Thus, synthetic statements, for Waismann, are always open because of the open texture of language, whereas analytic statements are closed. But Kyle Wallace suggested that by contrast there are empirical concepts which are closed: (1) referentially null expressions (since no experience could alter the concept); (2) metrical expressions (since they refer to no objects or entities that are themselves manifestly measurable); (3) general attribute terms (since they too refer to no objects that in turn exhibit attributes); and (4) certain types of first order relational terms (since they are not objects that can have properties or which can stand in concrete relations to other things) (1972, 41). A similar idea can be found in Shapiro & Roberts (2019).
Waismann argues that mathematical concepts, being not empirical, have a closed texture. Perhaps the natural numbers are closed in Waismann’s sense, but should we think that this holds of all mathematical concepts? Do, for example, infinite decimals have a closed texture? Waismann does not answer this question directly and precisely. He speaks mainly on the natural numbers, as a convincing case of closed texture, and leaves open these questions.
There is a huge literature on the vagueness problem and how it may be eliminated or resolved (as most representative, see Waldron 1994; Williamson, 1996; Endicott, 2000; Shapiro, 2006 Shapiro, 2013; Keil and Poscher eds. 2016). This is the first reason that I do not consider vagueness in detail; the second is that providing an assessment of vagueness is not my main goal here. However, because the notion of vagueness can shed some light on open texture, I briefly consider it. In addition, the third reason is that vagueness was not a primary interest of Waismann’s. Thus, I focus here solely on the idea of open texture treated as the possibility of vagueness.
I am going to argue that the extreme examples used by Waismann in describing open texture and the mere changing of context are closely connected, although one can think otherwise (for example, that open texture could be extended to changes of context).
Of course, we can complete the definition by settling necessary and sufficient conditions for being a vehicle. If circumstances change we may decide to change the definition and therewith the concept. But in Waismann’s sense such a definition will be always incomplete due to the open texture of terms involved.
This idea was developed also by Quine (1961, 42–46; 1992, 2–6). Reductionism of this type is seriously concerned with what observation sentences are, that is, those statements that describe an immediate experience. An important difference, however, is that Quine starts from an indeterminacy of what is considered the initial impression, whereas Waismann sees the main problem in terms that are used in a description.
Here “model” is used in a technical sense, in the sense of mathematical logic, that is, what is set axiomatically.
Notably, this refers to the logic of fictional discourse. A remarkable pragmatic analysis of the phenomenon of fiction can be found in Searle (1975). And this may make it seem that Waismann’s open texture as related to presupposed context that could be different is similar to what Searle discussed in “Literal Meaning” (1978), namely a metaphorical or ironical utterance meaning. Indeed, Searle perfectly moves the study of metaphor into the pragmatic area of fiction, leaving studying a metaphor in the traditional position, recognizing the purely linguistic duality of meaning. However, Searle’s theory has some limitations that derive from the fundamental belief in the homogeneity of literal meaning that is embedded in it. It rather demonstrates the desire to avoid ambiguity, rather than reflecting the absolute nature of the literal-metaphorical classification (see Katz 1981). But Waismann’s theory is not about the literal-metaphorical distinction, although he does refer to imaginable cases. He was doing this mainly to show that the incompleteness of description causes the incompleteness of definition and the role of context.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful conversations and comments on earlier drafts of this paper I am indebted to Brian Bix, P. M. S. Hacker, Antonia Soulez, and Valeriy Surovtsev. I would like to thank Jean Kollantai, MSW, for her review of style and the anonymous reviewers who provided extremely helpful and constructive suggestions.
Funding
The work on this paper has been supported by the Council for Grants of the President of the Russian Federation for State Support of Young Russian Scientists (Award Number MD-137.2020.6), and by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
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Ogleznev, V. Friedrich Waismann’s Open Texture Argument and Definability of Empirical Concepts. Philosophia 51, 273–286 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00510-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00510-2