Niklas Forsberg

‘Taking the Linguistic Method Seriously’: On Iris Murdoch on Language and Linguistic Philosophy

This chapter brings together Murdoch’s thoughts about language with other central aspects of her thought such as love, attention, perfectionism and morality. By making clear how Murdoch’s variety of linguistic philosophy differs from contemporary philosophy of language, this paper also shows that Murdoch’s philosophy contains the seeds for a fruitful form of philosophizing which brings the moral and aesthetic dimensions of language into view. “Taking the linguistic method seriously” means making clear the ways in which all concepts belong to a fabric that is changing on a personal level as well as an historical one. One of the things that Murdoch can help us see is that one problem with contemporary philosophy of language, is that it does not take the linguistic method seriously enough.

&c.: On Linguistic Regularity, Normativity and Language Acquisition

How do we know when learning has taken place? When is a teacher’s job done? One answer that may be drawn from Wittgenstein’s work is: when the pupil is able to go on alone. One temptation here is to say that a child has learned how to go on alone when she has grasped the regularity underlying the phenomena at hand—we know how to use a word in new contexts when we know what it means, or we know how to use the words we have learned when we know the rules that guide their correct use. This paper aims to show that we often misunderstand the point where the student is ready to part way with his or her teacher if we focus to strongly on rules. It is argued that it may be helpful here to think more about kinds of regularities in language use that are not so self-evidently “rule-like” in order to further make clear that regularity in language use, the normative force of language , does not depend on, or fall back upon, a kind of rule, or form of language, that precedes all articulations (correct and incorrect).

From self-reliance to that which relies: Emerson and critique as self-criticism

Abstract How is one to navigate between a thinking grounded in the individual and a claim for communality? In Emerson, this kind of difficulty comes into view in familiar sentences such as Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.’ How does the relationship between the personal and the universal look and function? In this paper, it is argued that Emerson may bring us clarity regarding the difficulties we are facing when it comes to questions about how we are to frame human personality, morality, and knowledge in the field of tension created by distinctions such as private/public, original/conventional, and particular/universal. A crucial thought in this line of reasoning is that that the critical philosophy Emerson pursues is also self-critical. The idea that true critique is self-criticism is then used as a tool to make clear that there’s no fundamental gap to be bridged here. The self-critical dimension makes clear the ways in which coming to share a world—learning from one’s teachers for example—is a matter of earning (shared) words. Therefore, Emersonian self-cultivation does not stand apart from the cultivation of something shared, but should be seen as a form of path towards a shared world.

The Grammar of Pain

Abstract This paper discusses Wittgenstein’s conception of grammatical investigations and shows how such an investigation, rightly understood, can elucidate the concept of pain. Philosophical attention to the concept of pain tends to lead philosophers in very different directions. A certain set of examples of uses of the concept might lead your thinking “outwards” towards behaviourism, whereas another set of examples might lead you inwards. I develop an understanding of grammatical investigations that does not hide complexities of language, arguing that grammar is as complex as the phenomenon of pain is. In divergence with e.g. Peter Hacker, I try to show how “grammatical investigations” cannot result in rules for the correct uses of language. The formulation of such rules tends to come together with a ‘one-sided diet’ (PI § 593). In contrast, I argue that what pain can teach us about grammar is that grammar, in Wittgenstein’s sense, is not, and cannot be, regulatory, and that it is the elasticity of a concept, if anything, that is its essence.

Knowing and Not Knowing What a Human Being Is

Abstract Iris Murdoch argued that much contemporary philosophy is guided by a faulty picture of the human being. Her claim was that philosophers had forgotten what a human being is. This paper traces Murdochs view of that kind of forgetting, and tries to show that we have good reason to re-open the question “What is a human being?” This question is important for philosophy in at least two respects. First, negatively, as a reminder that we do not normally treat our fellow humans as merely a biological creature having certain properties. Secondly, treating the question of the nature of the human as an open question also serves the purpose of destabilizing dominating pictures that still guide and form much contemporary moral philosophy. Thus, Murdochs criticism of mid-20th century philosophy is still highly relevant. On a more general level, this paper argues that Murdochs thoughts on how we are guided by pictures in philosophy also shows how a philosophical “illusion of sense” can be the result of what Murdoch calls “a general loss of concepts”. Methodologically, this means that the use of simplified and well-defined concepts as philosophical starting-points runs the risk of distorting the subject matter to such a point that it no longer is clear what the philosophy is about.