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10 DON’T ASK, LOOK!
other hand, philosophers often would like to know in which way an expression cannot be
used. In this case, the evaluation of acceptability is of primary importance.
5: Coming up with variations, again, requires active linguistic competence.
2 and 6: Ideally, hypotheses and conclusions are not drawn from one’s active or passive
knowledge of the object language. Probably what is called for in these steps is the faculty of
judgment.
In the process I have outlined, the reliance on intuition in the sense of active knowledge of
the object language is problematic in two ways. First, the one who thinks of the examples
usually has an investment in specific hypotheses that might bias his examples. Second, everyone’s
linguistic competence, especially the active part of it, is limited, and can therefore serve
only as a limited source of data. This point is also pertinent to the historical Oxford-based
Ordinary Language Philosophy, whose proponents sometimes seem to have confused their
very sophisticated variety of English with English as such. Also, it is worth mentioning that
philosophers who are not native speakers of English have limited linguistic competence and
are thus disadvantaged with respect to linguistic analysis of English expressions. This is
problematic, since English is, more often than not, the object language of philosophical research.
You might think that my six-step schema misrepresents what is usually done. I readily admit
that I have idealised the facts considerably. Most importantly, there are several ways in which
philosophers do try to overcome the limits of their own intuition.
3.2 Arming the Armchair
The most time-honoured way to overcome the limits of one’s linguistic intuition is simply to
consult a dictionary.
J. L. Austin recommended using dictionaries to identify the pertinent expressions for an
analytical task at hand. He suggested simply sifting through the dictionary from A to Z to
identify expressions of interest. What he might have had in mind, over and above a simple
reminder of words one cannot recall instantly, was that dictionaries contain information on
word families and word fields. Word families consist of words that are etymologically related—those
whose lexical roots share a common ancestry. For example, the word family of
‘hope’ also contains ‘hopeful’, ‘hopelessly’, ‘unhope’, ‘wanhope’, etc. Word fields, on the other
hand, contain words with related meanings. The word field of ‘hope’ contains ‘desire’, ‘wish’,
‘belief’, and ‘expectation’, but also ‘fear’, ‘despair’, etc. Word families and fields are explicitly
listed only in special dictionaries, but they form the basic grid of lexicology, and information
on them can be gleaned even from alphabetically organised dictionaries.
Dictionaries also, of course, contain accounts of the presumed meanings of words. And although
the definitions sought in philosophy differ in function, focus, and degree of precision
from the paraphrases of meanings given in lexicography, 3 dictionaries may at least be helpful
for formulating preliminary hypotheses about meanings.
However, dictionaries are not to be trusted unquestioningly.
First of all, dictionaries are not without error. Some mistakes may be individual and unsystematic;
others, especially omissions, may have systematic causes. For example, not all dictionaries
are descriptive. Especially some older dictionaries are normative to some degree.
And all dictionaries represent the choice of some material over other material. Not everything
can be recorded. One way in which this is relevant is that most dictionaries do not record
recent developments.
3
Cf. Wiegand 1989.