Is the real world unreachable due to the mediation of language? Or has the linguistic turn in philosophy and academia gone too far?
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Join post-realist philosopher Hilary Lawson, professor of logic Michael Potter and philosopher of language John Searle as they discuss what debates over language add or takeaway from the discipline of philosophy. The three philosophers do not shy away from metaphysics and the potential of removing meaning from our understanding of the world.
Listen to learn more about the linguistic turn and its implications.
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With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. And Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as a part of your everyday routine, without needing to set aside extra time. As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their ever-growing catalog. Be inspired to explore your inner creativity with Viola Davis' memoir Finding Me. Find what peaks your imagination with Audible. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com/imagine or text-imagine to 500-500. That's audible.com/imagine or text-imagine to 500-500. Hello, and welcome to Philosophy for Our Time, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. My name is Alisa, and I'm a media producer here at the IAI. Today we have Philosophy's Linguistic Turn. Was it a mistake? With philosophers Hilary Lawson, Michael Potter, and John Searle. They will be discussing whether the real world is truly unreachable due to the mediation of language, or if rather the linguistic turn in philosophy and academia has gone too far. This debate took place in 2014 as part of the How the Light Gets Infestable that the IAI runs every year. Before I hand over to our host Robert Smith, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on your platform of choice, and visit iai.tv for hundreds more podcasts, videos, and articles from the world's leading thinkers. American philosopher of language, Hilary Lawson is the presiding genius really behind this festival and describes himself variously as a non-realist and a post-post-modernist philosopher. Michael Potter, immediately to my right, is the professor of logic at Cambridge University. My name is Robert Broden Smith, I'll be chairing the event, and the event will be focusing on this question of language, language, and philosophy, which is why we have eminent philosophers of language and philosophy here, and in particular we'll be trying to grapple with this notion of the what's sometimes known as the linguistic turn. Language is a subject which we cannot simply dismiss as secondary, we no longer think of language as nearly a transparent medium in which truth and reality can be expressed or debated, but the language itself has a materiality and as a medium needs to be dealt with in some way, and so the linguistic turn in a sense grapples with this idea that language can get in the way of reality and may indeed sometimes deceive us into thinking that a reality exists behind it in the first place, which it might not, and what we're trying to get at in this debate over the next hour is whether this linguistic turn quotes, is a good thing or a bad thing, whether language should be a focus for philosophy or not, and if that turn has indeed made, whether we should sort of turn back again and get on the main road. I was interested that you said in the introduction that the linguistic turn didn't have a moment when it happened, because some historians of philosophy had said that there was a moment, it was 1884, because that was when Fraga published a book about what numbers are, where he made a very distinctive move, where he said that the right way to try to answer the question, what numbers are, is to answer a slightly different question, which is how numerals, that's the same number of words, are used. He thought that the question what numbers are, if asked on its own, simply wouldn't produce a helpful answer, and I suppose my view on the overall question of whether that turn, if it happened in 1884, whether it was an important turn, it's not so much whether it was important, I think it was inevitable, when you mentioned Kant, and one could mention other philosophers before Fraga, who were interested in the relationship between thought and reality, which is what you were referring to, now I suppose what I think is that if there's an intelligible question with two sides to it, whether thought and reality share a structure, so the idealist is the person who says that thought and reality inevitably match up, that we can't really leave room in our conception for reality to be different from how we conceive it to be, and the realist is the person who denies that, now that's an intelligible question which has been debated for hundreds of years, but suppose that we didn't see a gap between language and thought, if we didn't see that gap, then the question that the realist and the idealist argue over would be the same as the question whether you can read off the structure of the world from the structure of language, now it seems to me that it's interesting whether or not you're an idealist, I can debate with an idealist, that someone who thought that the structure of language was a guide, a reliable guide to the structure of the world, that would just be a madman, I mean I wouldn't know how to debate with someone who thought that, so I suppose because of that gap it seems to be inevitable that philosophers have to be conscious of the gap between language and thought, I mean all what has to do is learn a language that isn't part of our you know western European cluster of languages to start to be inevitably aware that you can say the same thing but with a very different linguistic surface linguistic structure, so it seems to me that it's absolutely right, this was a vital and important turning philosophy, but to me it's inevitable, so I'm going to be interested to see what the other speakers have to say to see whether they can convince me that there's any way out of this, if it's a call to say, I don't know the way out. It seemed to me that the linguistic turn wasn't misguided in so far as it allowed us to escape from the romantic fantasy that we can describe the world in some neutral and objective way, we've humankind has been victim to these fantasies from the outset, whether it was in the form of sun gods or spirits or forces or history, we've had all sorts of fantasies about the ultimate character of the world, and at the turn of the 20th century when no doubt the linguistic turn can be placed, the new one on the block was science, science was the new way to have a ultimate account of the world, and it seems to me that in so far as an awareness of the non-neutral character of language is concerned, and the awareness of that, and the awareness that it points to the nature of that romantic fantasy, the linguistic turn was a positive thing. Where I think it was not a positive thing was the idea that we could somehow apply some neutral objectivity to language itself and arrive in an account of language, which was itself accurate and objectively true, and I guess within a few years of Russell's dream of founding philosophy on a sort of solid foundation of logical framework and turning philosophy into a science, Wittgenstein identified the flaw in this very idea that we can't from within language catch sight of the relationship between language in the world, that would be somehow to stand outside of language to describe how it is operating, and the idea that therefore that we can somehow drill down and spend our time providing a science of language seems to me to be a mistake, and of course the responses both within the one response to a recognition of this inability to describe where we are, both in the analytic tradition and in the continental tradition, was to avoid trying to say anything at all that was definitive about the ultimate character of language in the world, so Wittgenstein's later work avoids making any general claims about the world, and Derrida does a very similar sort of thing, however I think that is also a mistake in that simply to wander around in the language game or to be engaged in an expression of the undecidable character of meaning only makes any sense if you have provided Wittgenstein or Derrida with an overall account of what they're doing, we don't see that we're wandering around in a language game, we can't understand what the later Wittgenstein is about, we need that overall framework, and in terms of what I think that philosophy should do now, faced with the predicament, is that it seems to me it has to try and provide ways for us to make sense of our ability to be able to intervene in the world in lots of effective and powerful ways, but without being able to say how it is in some ultimate sense. Well I actually lived through a lot of the linguistic turn both as a student and then as a Don and Oxford, and the account that we've heard for the most part is not recognizable to me as the linguistic turn, so let me say how it seemed when you were in the middle of it, first of all I thought it was a wonderful period in the history of philosophy. Like everything else, it went out of fashion and it had some, it had its limitations and I'll mention some of those, but first of all a wonderful feature of this period is that philosophy became very much a dialogue instead of the continental style where you have a please deposition or the bombastic style of much 19th century philosophy. It was very conversational and a second feature of that was that it was very much concerned with clarity. Wittgenstein is often criticized for his obscurity, but I think if you read it carefully you can see he's trying very hard to be clear and he does say, he does make a number of very important clear claims and of course my old teachers in Oxford such as Peter Strawson and J.L. Austin were both obsessed with clarity and advanced very clear theses. However you have to judge a philosophical movement by its results and I think some of the results of linguistic philosophy were quite striking. One is it seems to me we have a much better conception of human communication in language as a result of the work of Austin and Wittgenstein and Grice and a number of other people and I myself work very much in that tradition. The theory of studying language use has now succeeded in a way that my teachers would have welcomed, namely it's given rise to an actual branch of linguistics, a branch of the science of linguistic all pragmatics where you study linguistic use. Furthermore I think in my own work I have found that you get a conception of the nature of society, of money and property and government and marriage and universities and cocktail parties and philosophy conferences. You get a much deeper conception if you see the role of language in constituting these phenomena, a language that does not in that way constitute the phenomena of atomic physics and we get a much deeper understanding of society by looking at the role of language in the Constitution of society. Furthermore there were a lot of specific philosophical problems that were actually benefited and advanced by the obsession with studying language and it would take me too long to give a catalog of these but if anybody wants to challenge me on that, Fraga was of course the father of this but there were lots of other results that came out of the study of language besides just a Fragan logic and a Fragan philosophy of mathematics. Now let me mention a limitation of the method. There is an endemic flaw in the method of studying language in that there was a constant temptation to confuse the conditions for calling something by a certain word, for the condition, for it to satisfy that word, that what it is for something to be a cause was the same as for what it was for us to correctly call it a cause. And there are a number of cases where you can show that these come apart that are obsession with the needs of communications that sometimes blinds us to the distinction between the reality and the language that we're using to describe the reality. However I had to say it was a great period to live through and one is almost reminded of what Kohler said about the French revolution. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heavy. What is the best kind of question that a philosopher can ask about language then? What's the given that we think it is important? There has been this philosophical turn towards it and that we don't believe anymore we can have direct access to reality or truth. What then can we do as philosophers? What can you do as philosophers? To guide us in terms of asking good questions about language. What business does a philosopher have with language and what's a really good question to ask about it? Who would like to have a pop of that, none of you. Reluctance to my right. John you're going to come in on that. I think there are two questions that are really of both parts of the same question. One is what's the relation between language and reality? An immensely complex question, not something that gets a simple answer and I tried to give us over simple answers by saying a language is tied to a bunch of images in the mind and they resemble it. They represent reality by looking like it. The second question which looks different but in fact is really the same question from a different angle as what's the nature of meaning? What is it to say something and means by it? I've written a number of books on both of these questions so I won't try to summarize it now but those seem to me that two really essential questions. That's very helpful. What's the relationship between language and reality and what do we mean by meaning? What about... I just want to say I entirely agree with that but the question is how you then go about it and what you draw from it. I think as I was saying at the outset that the recognition of the importance of the medium of language is a vital recognition and I agree with John's description. Although I wasn't there and he was I agree with his description that this was an exciting and dramatic project which was a new step for philosophy but the question is whether our examination of language is able somehow to get to the bottom of what language might how it might be functioning and whether we might be able to describe its relationship to the world. Now it would be my view that Wittgenstein at the end of the tractators demonstrated very neatly that it's not possible to do that and and given that it's not possible to do that then the puzzle becomes well how do we proceed from there? How do we make sense of our ability to be able to communicate and indeed to be able to describe the world even though we're not going to be able to find some ultimate account of language less even less so an account of how language links to the world and that seems to me to be a the fundamental question that philosophy should be engaged in but what the later Wittgenstein did and what happens in the in the European tradition is there's an avoidance of that question and it's avoidance because it said well we can't do it so we can't say what the nature of that relationship is so we're going to give up and we're going to either turn philosophy into a therapy or we're going to engage in a continuous deconstruction of our words including the ones that the Doridian account of language would use and that doesn't seem to be very useful I understand why they've got themselves into this self-referential puzzle but it seems to me we've got to do better than that we've got to have a go at providing an account of how it is possible for language to do the things that it does do even though it's not possible to describe the world objectively less so language objectively and Hilary just to check you're not hinting are you and this is not a rhetorical question you're not hinting that there are non-linguistic ways of accessing reality that we are oblivious to and ought to spend more time over well language itself is a word it's one of a words with lots of other words and we don't want to get too hung up on any one word as being the key uh or or not I I suppose in response to oppression no I'm not really suggesting that we've got some alternative way of uh talking about the world other than to use uh language but I have my own account of a response to this which uh would argue that a more a deeper underlying process the process of closure is responsible for creating the identity of things and of which languages are subset but this is that that will be my uh story I'm sure there will be other other accounts but I think what we have to do is we've got to get out there and try and provide these overall theoretical frameworks even though we know there is no ultimate one okay good idea please can I make a distinction between big questions and small questions which actually I think is quite a theoretically grounded distinction but it seems to me that there are two different things here one is whether a linguistic approach to philosophy can help can be helpful in solving small questions and the other is the kind of big question you're talking about the ultimate nature or account of the relationship between us and the world now the first sort small questions calling them small isn't to denigrate them they're small only in the sense that they don't address the big questions but nonetheless there can be enormous value in getting clear about some of those things um I mean John in his um introduction just meant hinted briefly in a couple of them but yeah I think that in the last hundred years in philosophy people have used that method on small questions have cleared up a lot of misunderstandings there are things people were confused about now if you read the right articles that you know they're on our reading lists for our undergraduates read those articles and you'll be less confused how could you give us what the audience a brief example a brief intelligible example of that was something that the the website language has really helped yeah the classic example I suppose yeah go right back to the birth of the subject which is Russell 1905 publishes a paper where he shows how at a stroke you can get rid of the puzzle of how you seem to be able to say things about things that don't exist like Pegasus or the golden mountain or the present king of France the puzzle is how can you say say something about something that doesn't exist some people have tried even after Russell have tried to think well since you said something about the present king of France namely that he doesn't exist there must be a fictional present king of France who happens not to exist Russell at a stroke and a really elegant piece of logic showed there's a way of explaining such talk such that the temptation to think about shadowing non-existent objects just drops away instantly can you I think that's that's just a piece of clarity could you share that with the audience how it's done yeah yes Russell showed how to analyze sentences which seem to refer to a non-existent object into a collection of sentences none of which do so the present king of France is bold is the standard example he analyzed that into there is at least one present king of France and there's at most one present king of France and every present king of France is bold and the phrase the present king of France doesn't occur in analysis okay so it's it's quantifiers okay quantification of I wouldn't accept this did get to the better than what the issue was and that's because the very framework in which is which it was set up in terms of reference and predicates and so forth is a framework it's not how language works it's a way of holding it which indeed it's possible to identify all sorts of laws with which a bit can shine identified so I don't think there are definitive responses in that way which isn't to say that Russell's paper wasn't useful and a helpful way of seeing how if you hold language in that way these are one sorts of response to how you then might go about the outcome mmm sorry I interrupt you no no John yeah your original question was are there ways of accessing reality other than language and it seems to me the answer to that question is obviously yes and one dog's regular Russell and now Tarski and Tarski accesses reality every day without benefit of words how does he do it he uses perception and action now the fascinating thing about human beings is our perceptions and actions are loaded with linguistic components in a way that my dogs are not all the same there is a phenomenon of perception that is prior to language and indeed a great deal of language can only be understood in terms of its relation to perception and action now I agree of course with Hillary that the predicate calculus is only one form of language but it is a form of language that is reference and predication that identifies the identification of objects and their properties that if you're going to talk about how language functions that is an essential part of the functioning language it's not the whole story but it's absolutely an essential part if it's the case that language as it were comes downstream of perception we have perception first and then we have language why are philosophers bothering with language why not stick with perception if that gives you a more upstream contact with reality on the assumption that philosophers ought to try and get at reality in the truth and sort of slough off everything else because there are lots of things that are beyond our perceptual capacities most of the natural sciences go beyond perception but secondly and this is more fascinating for this particular discussion a great many of our experiences can only be had in the form that we have them if we're possessed of a language I may see the color red or feel a pain without language but there are all kinds of things like perceiving a certain source of causal relations or pick your favorite feeling the angst of post-industrial man under late capitalism my friends claim to have from that and I believe my my doggy does not suffer from that to have that sort of experiences you have to have a language it's a language of the post of perception they are in the case of human beings they're inextricably angled up with each other and that's rectangle it's fascinating to sort out okay indeed john absolutely rightly points out there is more language in sense there is perception the however I would make the move of saying that the process that's going on in perception is similar to the process that's going on in language and and that indeed language is a form of the same process and that process is the process of closure which is the holding of that which is different as the same now I think that's happening at the level of the perception in sensation and it is happening at the level of language and indeed to answer your question Robert I think that that question of that process how do we create a world which enables us to intervene effectively how do we get a framework I should say which enables us to intervene effectively in the world does seem to me the central question and what is the nature of that process and I would encourage a broader one than language yeah Michael I suppose the one comment I'd make is that I mean if Hillary wants a big question well a big question is how do we differ from other animals and the most obvious difference is something to do with language there are other differences but certainly one kind of difference is to do with language now there are various places where one reads people talking about the language of other species dolphins or dogs or whatever yeah but in every case when one looks at it there's something very problematic about calling the sequences of calls language in the sense that there seems to be no other species that has the ability to do anything remotely like kind of grammatical structures that we have what what there are many species that have particular calls that mean particular things we are the species that can chain together lots and lots and lots of these calls to make wholly new expressions or thoughts that anyone else in the room can understand even though they've never heard any any thought like that expressed and that ability to chain things together seems to me to be one of the things that distinguishes us from other animals so on my scale of things it's a big enough question to ask how we explain that what's going on when that happens and that's a difference of kind not just degree the way in which humans have language is of an order of magnitude different from the way in which dolphins have language so several orders of language yeah yeah I feel I agree with that that is an absolutely basic point about language that it has what is often called as a generative capacity most of the sentences you hear you've never heard before and yet you understand them effortlessly but another remarkable factor of human language is we create a reality by representing that reality as existing so think of money private property government marriage cocktail parties and universities not to mention professors and philosophy seminars all of these have our actual facts in the world if they can be you have true or false descriptions of them but they are all created by representing them as existing now that seems to be an absolutely fascinating phenomenon and as far as I know no other animal has that well let me pick up on that because I think this moves the debate forward a little I mean I began with a very crude distinction between the world over their reality and language over here the language that we speak the language of humans in this case rather than the language of animals but I think what John Searle has just said indicates that that set up that model is pretty simplistic it's not simply that reality is over there and language is here as the language could simply mirror or represent reality John here is talking about generating reality through the representation of it now if that's true let's let's ask the devil's advocate question which is okay is there no reality until we speak do if you're asking that question seriously the answer is of course there's a reality before we speak we know this from the history of the universe it went on literally for billions of years before anybody taught okay so what's the difference yeah I'd like to think it's quite as straightforward as that if language creates our particular reality that we can't privilege any of our overall descriptions and the one that John gave us there that we know that since the beginning of time there are millions of years that have passed and that we find ourselves in this situation of course is a theory which is expressed within language and has the character of the of the frameworks that language gives us so we can't somehow step outside when we choose and just say let's call call and end to this problem of our we're operating within the framework of the language which creates our reality but nevertheless somehow be able to talk about the scientific world as if it doesn't have those same constraints of course of course but one mustn't slide from there being something that's relative to us something that's relative to how we represent the world to the conclusion that everything is up to us it seems to me that it may indeed be that we have some choices to the conceptual scheme we use to understand the world and that that conceptual scheme has changed over time as for example I mean John mentioned things at cocktail parties that didn't exist thousands of years ago there are many concepts that we now have that people in past times didn't have but nonetheless given whatever concepts we have then we are answerable to the world that the world constrains us language constrains us and confidence but also the world constrains us and I would entirely agree with that but it that doesn't involve us then in thinking that we can provide any privileged bit of language which enables us to say how it finally is anywhere so I agree a relatively a relativelyist position in which we just have different perspectives on the world and say somehow spin-free of reality is patently absurd and I think that's one or a philosophy it seems to me is to provide an account which explains how it is that our accounts of the world are so effective even though they're not the same thing as the world and never will be and I think that's one of the gramps is we've made in the I mean in though there was a myth that grew up in the early part of the 20th century that we could find out what the basic bits were the places where we locked onto the world and that we could construct everything else out of those basic bits now hardly any philosopher now thinks that I think it's progress I think we now understand why that kind of approach can't work okay John yeah come here look I identified a set of phenomena that are linguistically constituted they're not just represented by language but their very existence requires language and those are things like money private property cocktail parties and I could go on and on but that's not true of everything that's not uh forget that there are a hundred a billion stars like our son in our galaxy and there are a hundred billion galaxies now it's hard to uh to be confident that we've got the final figures but nonetheless there is a reality that exists totally independent of our representation now that doesn't mean that we can characterize it independently of representing I entirely agree with a bit in shine point that there's no non-intentional no non-linguistic standpoint from which we can survey the relations between language and reality to access their attitude and their adequacy but we're always locked in language but nowhere locked in language there's still a reality on the other side of language which we can represent but the problem is I can't see John how you can say that um because you're using language to say it and when you say there are a hundred billion stars out there you see it sounds as if you think that you've somehow reached through language to actually describe how it ultimately is in a way that you don't think is true of money and the other examples but I can't see how you can really make a distinction between these different sorts of use of languages if certain sorts of scientific uses of the term somehow escape the problems that beset the rest of language okay let me answer that question directly we have a causal connection between ourselves and the astronomical world which where the astronomical world is not communicating through us to us with language on the contrary we're using language to try to get adequate categorize for characterizing astronomical world but when it comes to the world of cocktail parties and money we're not engaged in a set of causal transactions with an independently existing reality we're engaged in a reality that exists only because we represent it as existing now that's the crucial distinction and forget about natural science and so on there's a just common sense distinctions about how we cope with reality okay well sorry well I let me bring michael in just I don't want to make it a garlic between the two of you michael I agree with John although I agree with John so can I agree come on yeah I the notion that there are some bits of language which are to do with human interaction and therefore are a function of language itself and there are other bits of language which somehow I'm not to do with our human frameworks but are able to describe the world directly seems to me a confusion and and that and that the way that we describe all parts of the world whether it's houses and societies, currencies or atoms and molecules are part of our linguistic frame and they have a character that follows from that linguistic character I just want to ask our panel now about if you like what the agenda is the philosophy the philosophy language agenda is now for the next generation the next phase michael well I think in terms of how we do it my view is whatever works I think that the reason that linguistic turn is still being talked about was but it worked to an extent it's not the only tool in the philosophy toolbox it's one of the tools and if you make this distinction small and big problems in philosophy as I said before lots of small problems it seems to be helpful now I think Hillary's complaint seems to be that philosophers have focused too much on small questions and forgotten a bit questions now I'm sure as an at the descriptive level that's right most of them have but one reason for that is that we're not all geniuses at the level of Wittgenstein most of us just have to you know have to go with what we've got and if we can solve a small question that's better than solving no question at all so you know philosophy is professional philosophy is a large group of people now there are thousands of philosophy academics at various universities who want to have problems to tackle to keep philosophy as a live discipline so most of them inevitably are going to deal with problems which to be loud side of the discipline are going to seem scarcely worth troubling with and I agree that if the result of that was that no one dealt with the big ultimate questions about the nature of our relation to reality that would be a shame I hope some people will speaking of myself I'm reluctant to dive dive headfirst into that pool just because I'm I have a sense of what a big pool it is and what great people before me have have drowned in it so I managed not to mix that little bit you did uh Hillary yes well I think that the small questions that Michael is referring to unfortunately the difficulty is that you can't answer a small question until you've got the big framework within which you're answering it so you can answer a small question in lots of different ways depending on the overall framework you have so for example I mean given the framework that I'm operating with and that I've tried to develop I don't operate with a notion of reference well that's going to make a lot of the the conversation irrelevant to the much of the much of the detail of those small questions arguments so I think you operate with a notion of reference I refer to as Hillary that reference no that's your way of understanding how I do you're just imposing your notion of I have to be operating I'd have to in order to counter you I'd have to paint the story of how I think language is functioning which would not apply that and you can't just say no this is how it is there are different ways of holding things and there is a way of holding things which will be in terms of referencing you within the Froggaean tradition but it's not it's not a definitive one and and the idea that it's going to become a definitive one and philosophers all going suddenly agree and we can stop discussing this seems to me to be a mistake so I don't think we can answer those little tiny questions without the broader framework so I do think we have to examine the broader framework now I accept your point Michael that it's very tough Wittgenstein identified this problem just as I say a few years after Russell set us the dream and and that it seems to me we just as philosophers we should just grapple with that until we have got some framework which we think works and grappling with that means providing a framework which accounts for the operation of language and its relationship to the world but without assuming that it is the ultimate story how can we do that that it seems to me is the goal of philosophy and what it as it currently is and philosophers should attempt to provide frameworks which are useful they should attempt to provide frameworks which people can go and do things with that they can intervene in the world with that are are useful but without a notion that somehow a philosopher at some point is going to come along with the answer and we can all close down our academies and all of our thought and think well it's all over now because we've solved it because we're not going to solve it okay John okay well I'm going to talk about big questions and small questions there is a single big question which is the overriding question in philosophy and indeed I would say an intellectual life generally the question is so large that we're embarrassed to state it explicitly because we don't we don't know how to explain to our students that we're very we're very unsatisfactory with our ability to answer it here's the question as a result of 300 years of linguistically constituted investigations as well as using all sorts of wonderful empirical methods we have a pretty good conception of how the world works even understanding quantum mechanical nature of the chemical bond by the way something that does not depend on language though it has to be represented in language the world consists of physical particles and fields of force these are organized into systems and some of those have evolved into us okay now that's a picture of the world as a big picture of the world consisting of mindless meaningless physical particles we can hardly doubt that but now look at us look at our human reality and the question for philosophy is how can we give an account of the human reality of language consciousness thought of what we think it was three well society and all the other distinct of the arts and the ethics and and our capacity to engage in philosophical discussion how does that fit into the basic reality and indeed it's not enough that it fits in we have to show how it's a natural consequence we know too much to pretend to be ignorant we simply know too much about how the world works and that i take it is a task of philosophy and is the fundamental task of philosophy and it's one that i you know a lot of other people have devoted our lives to and of course we won't get a final answer to that but we do make some striking progress and i could give you a number of examples of what i think is real progress in dealing with this large question by i as uh a michael put it adopting a piecemeal approach getting answers to specific local questions and they add up to something very important okay it is up to a bunch of philosophers to say well we don't accept that hydrogen atoms have one electron they do whatever we think okay john thank you very much can i ask you to join with me in thanking our panelists for the wonderful thanks for listening to today's episode of philosophy for our times if you enjoyed it don't forget to give a like on your platform of choice and visit iai.tv for hundreds more podcasts videos and articles from the world's leading thinkers see you next time [Music]
