Monty Python and Philosophy (37 page)

Now, in response to this you might be inclined to say, as are my friends on occasion, something along the lines of “So what?
Big deal.” Well, hang on. We’ve just shown that if you admit that language gets its meaning by being hooked up with the world, so to speak, then you have to deny that, strictly speaking, sentences have meanings all by themselves. Instead, they have meanings only when they hang out with other sentences. Willard Van Orman Quine, a philosopher who has the distinction of being one of the best logicians of the twentieth century (and having a pretty cool name, to boot), put it best in 1951, in a now-massively famous paper titled “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (in his
From a Logical Point of View
[Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1951]). He said, “statements about the external world face the tribunal of experience not individually but only as a corporate body.” Quine’s remark is an expression of semantic holism—the view which opposes semantic reductionism. The key idea of semantic holism is that meaning is had by the whole language, but not by any of its parts alone.

Semantic holism has some absolutely marvelous consequences. One is that you can’t really assert a meaningful statement without sort of implicitly asserting a bunch of other statements—indeed, perhaps the entire language—at the same time. Another is that it seems possible to hold any arbitrarily chosen statement as true no matter what empirical evidence is presented against it, and to do so rationally, by rejecting and accepting the right related statements. So if you want to maintain that the cat is on the mat when everybody else denies it, you can do so by deciding that certain atmospheric phenomena are making it look like there’s no cat, or that the cat on the mat is a special kind of transparent cat, and so on. And you can maintain these claims by making still further adjustments in other claims. This sounds like silliness, but the point is that it is just the kind of silliness that verificationism had hoped to do away with.

I know, it’s been a long time since a clip. So let’s have two. First, watch how Monty Python conveys this conflict between verificationism and semantic holism, by means of parrot.

Mr. Praline, the man attempting to return the parrot, is our verificationist, as is evidenced by his attempt to verify the death of the
parrot by reference to experience, such as seeing that it’s motionless, its falling to the ground when sent aloft, its being nailed to its perch, and so on. The shopkeeper is our philosophically more sophisticated holist. He knows that maintaining the truth of other statements, concerning for example the bird’s strength and its affection for the fjords, will allow him to maintain that the parrot is alive. Notice who wins: the shopkeeper is never brought to accept that the parrot is dead. Indeed, the sketch could go on indefinitely without
that
ever happening.

Here’s a rather more graphic depiction of holism.

Despite the successive loss of limbs, it is the Black Knight who is our holist. That’s because he maintains as true that he shall prevent the bridge from being crossed, and he knows how to maintain it come what may. If King Arthur ultimately triumphs over the Black Knight to cross the bridge, it is for contingent and empirical reasons, I would argue, and not for any weakness in the Knight’s arguments. And you realize that I could even argue that Arthur didn’t cross the bridge at all; now
that’s
semantic holism.

I bet you’ve guessed by now what the second of the two revolts in contemporary analytic philosophy is. It’s the revolt against logical positivism, of course! If you’re starting to feel guilty again for not having written anything down, then write down the names ‘Carl Hempel’, ‘Thomas Kuhn’, ‘Norwood Russell Hanson,’ ‘Nelson Goodman,’ ‘Hilary Putnam’, and, of course, ‘W.V. Quine’. These are just a few of the prominent post-positivists. There are lots more. Indeed, it’s much easier to list all the living positivists, and barring a change in the philosophical winds it’s going to get easier and easier with the passing of every year.

At any rate, unlike most revolts, the revolt against positivism was either sufficiently sensitive or sufficiently indiscriminate—it’s hard to tell which—to retain the essentially correct aspects of what it was revolting against. Specifically, it retained positivism’s love affair with language. Post-positivists, like the positivists, believed that understanding anything really important, like how we know, what there is, or what’s right and wrong, meant first understanding
our language, which after all is pretty much the best and only means by which we express what we know, what there is, and what’s right and wrong. Throw in semantic holism, and it should come as no surprise that the story of analytic philosophy since the downfall of logical positivism is essentially the story of successive, multi-pronged and somewhat uncoordinated attempts to sort out the consequences of the fact that the unit of meaning in a language is not the sentence but the language itself.

One consequence of semantic holism, believe it or not, comes in the form of a threat to the very foundation of society. Let me explain. Holism seems to warrant bad reasoning, for it allows one to rationally maintain any statement come what may. That’s bad enough. But it took about half a second for analytic philosophers to realize that things were, potentially, much worse. You see, philosophers from way, way, back in the analytic tradition believed deeply that, one way or another, reason was the proper foundation for society; it was both the mechanism that runs society and the grease on which the mechanism turned. Ever eager to be of use, philosophers have worked hard at coming up with a theory of argument to describe how reason ought to work in daily life. This is why you, as undergraduates, are subjected to classes like Symbolic Logic; your philosophy department sincerely believes that this class will make you a better citizen. But, as some of you might have noticed in Symbolic Logic, the theory of argument asks that you grant certain crucial statements beforehand, without argument. Statements like, for example, that something can’t both be true and false at the same time. Well, if holism is true, then we can’t count on our fellow citizens accepting such statements. Nor can we count on being able to convince them that they ought to accept such statements, if they don’t! We shouldn’t even call them crazy if they don’t accept such statements, though we do it anyway! In short, if holism is true then the whole notion of argument, and of reason, is up for grabs. Would you like to see what that looks like?

Ah, you laugh, you laugh. But be aware, on some philosophical accounts, you’ve just witnessed a small piece of the end of civilization.

Of course, not all the post-positivists were as deeply imbued with this apocalyptic vision. Indeed, some were decidedly unimpressed by the news that rationality could not be the foundation of society, they having already decided that rationality was overrated. After all, we’d been managing marginally well as a species so far without much of it, so there was no reason now to worry about everything falling apart. What grabbed these folk about semantic holism was that it suggested that it took only a very small difference in the linguistic behavior of two individuals to warrant the conclusion that they were speaking altogether different languages. For example, if you and I mean very different things when we make the noise “My brain hurts,” and if this difference reverberates throughout the rest of our linguistic utterances, then maybe it makes sense to say that we are speaking different languages, despite the fact that each sounds like English and even despite the fact that we think we understand each other perfectly well. Now, if you also suspect that a speaker’s language plays a big role in determining the nature of the world in which the speaker lives, then you can put these two together and conclude that each of us has our own world, perhaps wildly different than our neighbors’. This line of reasoning has been tossed around in the philosophical literature quite a bit in the last forty years; you could run off and read all about it in the library, or you could get the basic idea from Monty Python.

Different worlds, indeed, and perhaps different languages too. They eventually do “connect,” of course, though not quite in the manner desired by Norman, the man on our left.

I spoke about the project of founding society on reason, and about the blow that that project was dealt by semantic holism. Very recently, things have gotten even worse for that particular project. Imagine that holism could somehow be circumvented, so that we could all be assured that we shared the same language and the same world. It now looks, in light of empirical evidence about human reasoning, as if even these rosy conditions shouldn’t make for optimism about rationality in society. What the empirical evidence
has suggested—and, to be fair, this is the topic of heated debate—is that, from the point of view of logic, human reasoning is very bad indeed, and that there’s little hope of improving it. We’re wired up, psychologically speaking, to reason badly. How badly, exactly? About as badly as the individuals in the following clip.

The folks who fail to see what’s so funny about this, by the way, are exactly the folks who at one time or another have taught Introduction to Logic; they don’t need psychologists or their empirical studies to tell them about the reasoning abilities of the average citizen. To the rest of the analytic world, however, it’s been something of a shock, although, as I said, there’s quite a bit of debate over the whole matter.

I know what some of you are thinking. It’s something like, “Okay, I’m convinced. The best expositor of contemporary analytic philosophy is Monty Python. But let’s not get carried away. There’s a lot more to philosophy than analytic philosophy, and what do these Monty Python people have to say about all of that? Not much, I imagine!” Those of you saying this have in mind Continental philosophy, named I believe after the continental breakfast. I could go on at length in thorough refutation of this complaint, but as my area of specialty, not to mention my topic today, is analytic philosophy, I’ll refute it with a single counterexample. Here it is.

Now I hope you see that Mr. Mousebender’s attempt to get a little cheese resembles various other life experiences, most obviously, perhaps, a typical attempt to register for classes at a university. But I’d like to suggest something more grand. I’d like to suggest that the cheese shop is life itself, as described to us by existentialism. Mr. Mousebender is our existentialist hero, creating himself through choices of cheese in an uncooperative, nay, unfeeling world. Mr. Wensleydale, the keeper of the cheese shop, is the burden of life incarnate, who, in the fashion of Sisyphus’s rock, unfailingly returns a negative answer only to be queried again by
our hero. Did Nietzsche, Sartre, or Camus, those all-stars of Continental philosophy, ever put it any better, in any of their often abstruse and sometimes impenetrable scribblings? Say no more, say no more.

I know there are some folks out there who are still unconvinced of the philosophical stature of Monty Python. This is not because they worry that Monty Python has ignored continental philosophy, but because they think Monty Python is insensitive to THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, where every letter in that expression is capitalized. Philosophy is a conversation going back to Thales, they will say, and if you don’t know what’s been said then you’re simply not doing philosophy, let alone good philosophy. This is a criticism leveled not infrequently at contemporary analytic philosophy, and though I agree with the sentiment, I do not agree that it works against Monty Python. As before, I rest my response on a single counter-example, prefaced with a comment or two. Good history of philosophy doesn’t just tell you what past philosophers said. It reveals connections between what they said, and connections between the philosophers themselves. And even better history discovers connections which are novel, surprising, and provocative. And the absolute best history of philosophy ties all this together and presents it in a manner so striking and harmonious that it just must be true. And since song is that thing which is striking and harmonious, the absolute most spectacularly best history of philosophy must be done in song. With this in mind, I present Monty Python’s “Bruces’ Philosophers Song.” It speaks for itself, and so, out of respect for Monty Python, whose brilliant explications of the central themes of contemporary analytic philosophy have gone unnoticed until today, and out of respect for the glorious history of philosophy, let us rise and sing the “Bruces’ Philosophers Song” with the members of Monty Python.