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Killing a man is not defending a doctrine, it is killing a man.

Sebastian Castellio (1515-1563)

Acting with words

In my blog last week, I wrote about J.L. Austin’s language theory. John Searle became that much inspired by Austin’s work, and also by the work of P.F. Strawson, that he has developed their ideas into a theory of what he called “speech acts”. Searle elaborated his views in his dissertation, titled “Sense and Reference”, which became the basis of his famous book Speech Acts, published in 1969. This book is full of ideas and theoretical insights. Here I want to focus on Searle’s classification of illocutionary acts, since it gives a good impression of how we act with words when we speak.
Originally Searle presented in his Speech Acts a kind of taxonomy of eight types of illocutionary acts. By combining some types, later he distinguished five main types:
1) Assertives
2) Directives
3) Commissives
4) Expressives
5) Declarations
Ad 1) Assertives are statements or assertions that something is the case. However, they do not utter objective facts like locutionary acts but views, as the name already implies. So, they are more than simple factual sentences like “The cat is on the mat”. For instance, an utterance like “I am an expert in pinhole photography” is an assertive in Searle’s sense, since I claim to be such an expert, although it may be false. Assertives try to convince the speaker. Here are some other ones: suggesting, putting forward, swearing, boasting, concluding.
Ad 2) Directives are utterings that are meant to make someone else act. “Can you open the window?” “Can you give me the pen?” are examples. Besides questions they can be orders, requests, invitations, advices, begging, and so on.
Ad 3) Commissives commit the speaker to future actions. “I promise you that I’ll come tomorrow.” Or less explicitly: “I’ll buy the book for you.” Or “Tomorrow I’ll be at home.” So commissives are more or less explicit promises, plans, vows, bets, oaths, and the like.
Ad 4) Expressives tell how the speaker feels about the situation. “Thank you” is a case in point, or “I like it”, “Sorry”, etc. So here one must think of thanking, apologizing, welcoming, deploring, and the like.
Ad 5) Declarations are utterings that make something happen by its content. Austin would call them performative sentences. Marrying a couple and declarations of war are examples. It will be clear that such an uttering is only valid if the speaker is entitled to make the declaration concerned. If this is not the case, we say, for instance, that the speaker is a crook, an actor, an imitator, or something like that.
That’s how we act with words. 

Sources
- “3.1.3 Searle’s Classification of Speech Acts”. https://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/projects/milca/courses/dialogue/html/node66.html#searleclass
- “Cultural Reader”. https://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2018/01/speech-acts-classifications.html
- John Searle. American philosopher”. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Searle
- Searle, John, R., Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
- Searle, John R., “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts”. file:///C:/Users/bijde/AppData/Local/Temp/7-08_Searle.pdf

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We should not take the absence of the word to be equivalent to the absence of thought.

Martha C. Nussbaum (1947-)

Words and deeds

You don’t need to write thick books and many articles to have a big impact on philosophy. Wittgenstein, for instance, published only one article and one book (the Tractatus) during his life. His Philosophical Investigations were more or less ready for publication, when he died. His other later published works were lecture notes taken by students and fragments and notes by Wittgenstein himself that were not (yet) meant to be published. Or take Edmund Gettier. His publication list is also short, but he has become famous by an article of only three pages (“Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”). His other works have been forgotten, but this article, published in 1963, is still much discussed and belongs to the classics of epistemology.
Also J.L. Austin’s (1911-1960) publications list is short. Moreover, his most famous work How to do things with words has been published in 1962, so two years after his death, and it has not been edited by himself. It has become one of the most influential books in the philosophy of language, but the ideas Austin developed in this little book help also to understand what we do in daily life, when we are speaking. Actually, these ideas are very simple and looking back one wonders why nobody have had them before. But as it happens so often, ideas need a fertile soil to shoot, in this case the breeding ground of the relatively new analytical philosophy. Austin tells us that his first views on the theme were formed in 1939 and next he used them in an article in 1946. However, he fully developed his views only in his William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955, which were published only seven years later, in 1962.
Traditionally, certainly during the first days of analytical philosophy, language was seen to exist of statements that can be true or false. “The cat is on the mat”, is a typical example of such a statement. The cat is there on the mat or it isn’t there. In the first case the statement is true, in the second case it is false. But stop! This is quite a limited view on language, so Austin. Not all sentences are descriptive in this way and so not all sentences have a “truth value”. Take this sentence: “I do” (meaning “I take this person to be my lawful wedded wife/husband”). Or take these words: “I name this ship ‘Queen Elizabeth’ ”, while smashing the bottle against the stem. With sentences like these we don’t state a fact that can be true or false. Such sentences are also not meant to utter a statement that has a truth value. No, with such a statement we perform an act. By saying “I do”, I take the other person as my spouse. The utterance is not a description of what happens, which can be a right or a wrong description, but the utterance is an action; it is performing the act of marrying the other itself. Therefore Austin calls such a sentence a “performative sentence”. Although a performative sentence cannot be true or false, nevertheless something can go wrong. Then we say that this sentence was not uttered at the right place, it was a mistake, it was fake, it was infelicitous, or something like that.
Austin makes also clear that by speaking a sentence we can do different things. Take for example again the sentence “The cat is on the mat”. When uttering this sentence, we can mean to say that a certain animal is at a certain place, and nothing more. Austin calls uttering a sentence in this way a locutionary act. However, usually we have a further aim when uttering this sentence. For instance we want to inform you, so that you’ll not step on the cat; or maybe you are looking for the cat. Then we utter a warning, or give information, etc. Austin says then that we perform an illocutionary act by uttering this sentence. But it is also possible that we want that the person we are addressing brings the cat to us, or that this person gives the cat some milk: we want to bring about or achieve something with our words. If so, then we perform a perlocutionary act by uttering our sentence.
People often say: No words but deeds. Now we know that it is false contradiction. But who didn’t know that words can hurt … or can make you happy?

Source
J.L. Austin, How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

Random quote
The relative independence of the motorway in the landscape demonstrates the independence that travelling has gained in our society.

                                                                            Ton Lemaire (1941-)

Lost or left behind

Philosophers write about all kinds of ingenious and difficult themes that are often remote from day life. They (and I must say that I am often among them) write about questions that only philosophers find interesting. It also happens that what they say or write what seems obvious to everybody, unless she or he is a philosopher. “The world is everything that is the case”, Wittgenstein famously wrote. What else could the world be? But he elaborated this in a little book that became one of the classics of modern philosophy. Heidegger even wrote “The nothing nothings”, which everybody, if s/he is not a follower of Heidegger, would call nonsense. Especially the first half of the last century was a period with many obscure and difficult to understand – for non-philosophers – writings. Was this the reason that there was a reaction to this in philosophy called “ordinary language philosophy” that wanted to bring back philosophy to what words mean in everyday life instead of constructing complicated structures of theoretical constructs? However, this attention for daily words and objects gradually faded away and abstract thinking became mainstream again, certainly in analytical philosophy, which still is one of the most important streams in western philosophy. Philosophical articles have become increasingly complicated and can usually be understood only by philosophical experts. Even if you are a philosopher but not an expert you often feel lost. In a sense it is normal. Although I exactly know how to keep my income in balance with my expenses, I am not a bookkeeper, and now and then I need one to help me. However, sometimes I wonder, whether themes from daily life that are actually normal for everybody are not too much neglected.
Take for instance the picture at the top of this blog. It shows a box with pastry on a bench. You may say: Nothing special. However, I didn’t take the picture, after I had put the pastry there for a picture. No, I found the box with pastry there on a bench near a road junction, left behind. When you know this, it may raise several philosophical or sociological questions: What has happened that the pastry was left behind? Why didn’t the eaters take it with them? Hadn’t what remained of the pastry any worth for them? Although pastry isn’t really expensive for most people, you don’t throw it away but keep it for later. Moreover, didn’t the pastry eaters care for the environment? You simply don’t leave your waste behind (and it can be fined, too). Certainly, if such things like people leaving behind their waste (or certain kinds of waste) often happen, it says a lot about society and the people who make up that society.
It is for such reasons that I have several series of photos of daily life and of objects lost or left behind on my Dutch photo website. Since bikes are popular in the Netherlands, you find there two series of bike photos (look for fiets of fietsen in the column left): How people park their bikes everywhere and how they turn bikes into objects of art or simply leave them behind, broken. I think that these photos are not only photographically interesting, but also philosophically and sociologically. They show that bikes are an integrated part of Dutch daily life and they show an aspect of this daily life and how bikes are used and treated.
Other objects I like to photograph are lost gloves and mittens (handschoenen and wanten). Also these photos have a philosophical meaning. It’s obvious that I seldom find them in summer. Gloves are lost in the cold season, when people wear them. When lost, some are lying on the ground for weeks. Nobody seems to care for them. The owner didn’t do any effort to get it back, or s/he didn’t know where s/he had lost it or lived too far away to make it worth the effort. But look! Sometimes a passer-by has taken up the glove or mitten and has laid it on a striking place, like a pole or a gate, so that the owner can easily find it and so that the glove or mitten doesn’t become dirty. This action says a lot about the mentality of people who find objects. They know that a lost object like a glove has worth and that the owner may want to look for it in order to get it back. In this way they take care of someone they don’t know, a stranger. Maybe they bring the lost object even to the police or a depot for lost objects. However, I am afraid that the latter happens less and less. But doesn’t this say something about our present mentality and how we were in the past? Be it as it may, have you ever heard about a monkey or a wolf that finds an object in the wood and thinks: “Hm, maybe someone of a neighbouring group has lost it. Let me put it on that pole, hoping that the owner will find it there”? Objects lost or left behind say a lot about who we are; more than you might think.

Random quote
In sharing a language, in whatever sense this is required for communication, we share a picture of the world that must, in its large features, be true.

Donald Davidson (1917-2003)

Are philosophers moral experts?

Aristotle, the most significant moral philosophers in the history of Western philosophy

In the abstract of his article “Are moral philosophers moral experts?”, Bernward Gesang writes: “I call people moral experts if their moral judgments are correct with high probability and for the right reasons.” It’s a theoretical article about the question whether there are moral experts. I don’t want to discuss the article here, but I think that it is reasonable to say that moral philosophers and in fact philosophers in general are moral experts in this sense. And if such philosophers are moral experts, they shouldn’t be influenced in their judgments by irrelevant factors. For instance, an experiment showed that holding a warm cup of coffee makes you have more positive attitudes towards a stranger than when you hold a cup of ice coffee. (see this blog). Other possible influences on judgments found are the presence of an odour, the presence or absence of direct physical contact or the order in which hypothetical moral scenarios are presented. (see Schwitzgebel and Cushman 2012, p. 135) Philosophers should not be influenced by factors of this kind, when judging a moral problem, for if so they don’t pass judgment for the right reasons. However, are philosophers really free from the influence by irrelevant factors? It’s what the authors just mentioned, Schwitzgebel and Cushman, wanted to know. “Because of their extensive training, professional philosophers are a ‘best case’ population for the skilful use of principled reasoning to influence moral judgment, and they have occasionally been explicitly described as such by psychologists”, and judging studies in this field, “[t]here is some empirical cause for optimism about philosophical expertise in moral reasoning”, so Schwitzgebel and Cushman (p. 136). However, because they had some doubts about the value of such studies, they decided to test the expertise of philosophers on moral questions for so-called order effects: Philosophers and non-philosophers were presented three series of two moral problems. Half of them got them in the order AB and the other half in the reverse order BA. Would the order presented have an impact on their judgments of these moral problems? If the philosophers would be experts, they should not be influenced by such an irrelevant factor like order of presentation, or at least less than non-philosophers.
One of the questions the test persons had to pass a judgment on concerned the so-called “doctrine of the double effect”: It is worse to harm a person as a means of saving others than to harm a person as a side-effect of saving others. An example of this doctrine is the trolley problem, which I have discussed several times before in my blogs (see here). In short it’s this: Switch: A driverless, runaway trolley on a railway is heading for a tunnel, in which it will kill five people, if nothing stops it. A bystander can save their lives by turning a switch and redirecting the trolley on to another track. However, then a man walking on that track will be killed instead of the five. Push: Alternatively, a bystander can stop the trolley by pushing a fat man from a footbridge on the track. The test persons had to read these cases either in the order Switch-Push or in the order Push-Switch and then rate the hypothetical action on a seven-point scale from (1) ‘extremely morally good’ to (7) ‘extremely morally bad’ with the midpoint (4) labelled ‘neither good nor bad’. (In fact the test was more complicated, but we can ignore it in this blog; see Source below). The result was, so Schwitzgebel and Cushman, that “Push was rated better when presented after Switch than when presented first, and Switch was rated worse when presented after Push than when presented first. Thus, respondents tended to assimilate their responses to the second scenario to their responses to the first scenario.” (pp. 141-2). This was the average result of all test persons, and we should expect, if philosophers are moral experts, that they would be less influenced by the order of presentation of the hypothetical cases than non-philosophers. However, what was the case? The philosopher maybe did slightly better than non-philosophers, but not significantly. Tests for the two other moral problems in the investigation showed about the same results. Even more, when the results on the three tests were aggregated philosophers appeared to be more influenced by the order of presentation of the cases than non-philosophers (p. 356).
Philosophers are supposed to do better than non-philosophers in passing moral judgments. We can ask what “better” involves, but anyway they should not be influenced by irrelevant factors. However, the investigation by Schwitzgebel and Cushman doesn’t support this view: Judgments by philosophers seem to be as much influenced by irrelevant factors as judgments by non-philosophers. At least, philosophers are as much vulnerable to order effects as lay persons, while they should be resistant to them. As the authors say: “Our analysis found no support for the view that philosophical expertise enhances the stability of moral judgment against order effects.” (p. 147) Since in the investigation the judgments by philosophers also appeared to be not fundamentally different from those passed by non-philosophers, it calls into question whether philosophers are really moral experts. Of course, there is much more to say about the moral expertise of philosophers and about the expertise of philosophers in general. For example, we may expect that they are better in logic and that they are better deductive reasoners. However, we should not overestimate their expertise, for philosophers are as human as humans are. 

Source
Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman, “Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-Philosophers”, Mind & Language, Vol. 27, No. 2 April 2012, pp. 135–153. Or here.