Abstract
Can we lose our concepts? A case like ‘phlogiston’ invites a positive answer, though the sensefulness of ‘There is no phlogiston’ gives us pause. But concepts are about more than just ‘extension-determination’; hence Diamond’s examination of putative loss of moral concepts does point to a possible phenomenon. That loss of concepts could be regrettable seems to make room for the thought that having certain concepts could likewise be regrettable. Anscombe’s critique of the concept of ‘moral obligation’ appears to be suggesting this, but it presents a dilemma: do the relevant words and phrases have a ‘special sense’ or are they senseless? Either answer is acceptable, I argue; roughly speaking, confused use makes for confused meaning. Objections coming from a certain picture of the autonomy of grammar fail. A diagnosis of ‘confused use’ can lead naturally to our seeing speakers as caught up in a species of dishonesty or inauthenticity, and also to our referring to the ‘kind of nonsense’ being talked. This last phrase seems to fall foul of the sort of consideration Diamond raised when discussing nonsense in the Tractatus. However, the case of ‘secondary sense’ shows us how we can understand this reference to ‘kinds of nonsense’.
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Notes
- 1.
Ramsey sentences translate (or replace) sentences which employ ‘theoretical’ predicates by ones which employ existential quantifiers, variables and (esp. ‘observational’) predicates. The name derives from Ramsey 1929.
- 2.
See e.g. Diamond 1996. In this paper Diamond is more concerned to establish the view’s tenability than its truth.
- 3.
The qualification ‘in the character of having that force’ might appear to make room for the thought that ‘in the character of having semantic content S’ (or something along those lines) ‘ought’-statements could be inferred from ‘is’-statements. Anscombe does indeed think that the ordinary ‘uncorrupt’ concept ought allows us to make inferences like that: see her comparison of ‘ought’ and ‘owes’ in ‘On Brute Facts’ (Anscombe 1981, 22–5). But the remark I have quoted concerns the ‘ought’ which has, in the mouths of moderns, ‘become a word of mere mesmeric force’—‘ought’ as ‘morally ought’.
- 4.
For more on this move, see the final section of this paper. The move is often highlighted and undermined by Wittgenstein in his later writings; see for example 2009 sec. 350.
- 5.
That one can always reject substantive reasons for a moral judgment is the gist of Moore’s Open Question Argument, said to supply the test for whether a ‘naturalistic fallacy’ has been committed.
- 6.
Diamond highlights the distorting effect of this idea in her paper; see the discussion of the concept human being, (1988, 264–266). In particular, she stresses that one cannot correct the philosophical picture just by adding a second ‘function’ (for common nouns) to that of extension-determination, namely ‘evaluation’. The difference between ‘human being’ and ‘Homo Sapiens’ is not that the former expression carries some ‘evaluative’ connotation not carried by the latter.
- 7.
As Berger’s reference to proverbial traditions indicates, the privation he is discussing is not simply a matter of size of vocabulary: even a relatively small stock of words can yield a multitude of phrases, sayings, jokes, metaphors, all capable of embodying human wisdom.
- 8.
A claim construed thus will typically be defeasible—hence the use of ‘are liable’ after ‘People who (habitually) use concept C…’ What we have are constitutive but defeasible grounds, alias ‘criteria’.
- 9.
Might he not put the tangles and empty statements down to straightforward dimness or common-or-garden irrationality? To be able to do so, the observer would need to see in the Bloomsburyites’ conversations on other (relatively intellectual) subjects a similar degree of dimness. Moreover, the kinds of non sequitur, abrupt subject-shift, question-begging, etc. which manifest ordinary dimness differ from those which embody motivated nonsense. One of the differences lies indeed in the resort to a favoured vocabulary (‘morally ought’, ‘elitist’, ‘best practice’…).
- 10.
There is a parallel here with those causal explanations of a person’s behaviour which are resorted to when the reasons they give for what they do strike us as inadequate (without being consciously deceitful).
- 11.
See 2009 sec. 464.
- 12.
As in ‘NHS productivity’.
- 13.
In talking of concepts, I am of course talking, roughly, of words and their uses; some of the items mentioned—people’s visual cortices, for example—obviously play an enormously prevalent and important part in human life.
- 14.
More recently, Diamond has argued that a proposition of the Tractatus might (come to) have a use as a ‘solo proposition’, or ‘thinkable-with-no-alternative’—specifically, might (come to) have a use as indicating a path in thought not to be taken. (See Diamond 2019, 199.) And if it is ‘part of the business of thinking to guide, or help put back on track, the business of thinking’ (ibid., 227), and if Aristotle was right to say that ‘for theoretical thinking, the “well and badly” are truth and falsehood’ (ibid., 162), then a solo proposition, e.g. a path-blocker, might after all be counted true. Diamond doesn’t, though she surely could, apply this conclusion directly to such Tractatus propositions as have taken on the role of path-blocker (say). These will have ‘taken on’ that role only for those who can use them as such, i.e. who have ‘seen through’ their apparent substantialness. In that role, ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things’ could perhaps be counted true—but not in the (non-)sense that it expresses an ineffable truth.
- 15.
See the discussion of ‘Socrates is identical’ in Diamond 1991a, 196–7.
- 16.
See proposition 4.1272 of the Tractatus (1951).
- 17.
- 18.
An empirical hypothesis as to why I have that inclination might conceivably be true—as, that the ‘oo’ sound in ‘Tuesday’ stimulates, via audition, certain neurons in my brain adjacent to ones which….None of that, of course, would indicate that ‘lean’ functions as a metaphor (or as anything else).
- 19.
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Teichmann, R. (2021). Conceptual Corruption. In: Balaska, M. (eds) Cora Diamond on Ethics. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59219-6_3
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