Categorial Analysis

Selected Essays of Everett W. Hall on Philosophy, Value, Knowledge, and the Mind

E. Maynard Adams

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780807868478, 9780807809297
• eBook ISBN: 9781469643854
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The essays in this volume have been selected for their contribution to Everett W. Hall's mature philosophical position, which was grounded in careful linguistic analysis and directed toward philosophically clarifying the major areas of culture. He emerges as skillful, meticulous, and patient in his exploration of language as a means of interpreting the categorial structure of the world.

Originally published in 1964.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Part I · The Philosophical Enterprise

1 ·On Establishing Philosophical System

A current criticism of the now extinct speculative metaphysician is that he lacked intellectual responsibility; he spun a system out of his head (or abdomen) and so—at least by implication, the criticism continues—he constituted an instance of wishful thinking.* There may be some truth in this accusation, but contrariwise it should be emphasized that this species did, to a remarkable degree, exhibit a sense of accountability that is now pretty lamentably absent from philosophical writing. I refer to the honesty in admitting and the assiduity in exploring the consequences of one’s philosophical commitments. Casualness has literary attractions (when it is worked out carefully enough to be wholly natural to the author) but it is conducive to a certain laxity in intellectual morals for which a dose of quondam system building may be, in the end, the only corrective.

But I fear I am giving the wrong impression. I would like to use ‘philosophical system’ in a very broad sense, to include any point of view and way of doing things philosophical that is at all articulate and worked out, even one which refuses to be strictly formulated and amounts essentially to a sort of “style” of carrying on the philosophical task. Even for the latter there remains the genuine question: Why adopt the given mode rather than some other? If, for example, it is said that when one philosophizes he (usually unknowingly) is just proposing the adoption of certain linguistic conventions, the unavoidable problem remains: Why adopt this proposal, and just what sort of reasons are relevant to a decision on it? Perhaps it’s only a question of taste, but how are we to tell? Shall we say that whether it’s all a matter of taste is itself simply a matter of taste? In any case, I mean to include questions of this sort, as well as more traditional ones, under the title of the present essay.

Recent discussions have made most of us aware that there is something queer about any attempt to prove a particular philosophical system or disprove others. Not that this should come as any new revelation. Aristotle remarked that it was a sign of immaturity if one did not know when to stop trying to prove things. But there is something more involved here than the absurdity of trying to prove one’s first principles (in the sense of one’s ultimate premises). Philosophy is a peculiar subject in that it includes itself in its own domain of inquiry and generalization. As Professor Fitch has put it, it is self-applicative. It may not at first be seen—indeed, many philosophers have never attained the insight—how odd this is and what a unique predicament it entails. In fact it is sometimes supposed that other investigators sometimes discover themselves in similar circumstance. A neurologist, let us say, studies the functions of the prefrontal lobe and this may be itself considered an instance of one of these functions. A psychologist, to cite another example, investigates the higher mental processes; should we not grant that he might in the course of his investigations exhibit some of these?

But with the philosophical undertaking self-applicativeness is somehow more vital. In scientific inquiry, the possibility of self-application means essentially no more than an added area of instances of any proffered generalizations. Of course negative instances (if sufficiently stubborn in their negativity) are fatal to the universal proposition they belie, but self-applicative ones are no more so than any others; they take no precedence. But in philosophy they are apparently more potent. This is revealed, for example, in our normal hesitancy to accept Russell’s escape from the paradox of dogmatic skepticism. It will be remembered that he told the skeptic, when confronted with a self-application of “There is equal evidence for and against any proposition whatever” to avoid the skeptical consequences by bringing in a type-rule. In the first place, we immediately see that the self-application here is not an ordinary negative instance, i.e., just a case of a proposition for which the skeptic should admit more positive than negative evidence. It comes rather as a crucial instance—and this in more than a Baconian sense. We have here a paradox: the skeptic must grant special favors to his own position if he would avoid self-destruction. And, speaking of it as “a paradox,” I hasten to add that there is more to it than the so-called “logical paradoxes” (syntactical, semantical, and pragmatic), so that adherence to a type-rule will not insure one against intellectual disaster. The philosopher must apply his position to itself; this is involved in its being a philosophical position. So the skeptic must find a place for his own dogmatism, the nominalist for his own conceptual realism, the contextualist for his own abstraction, the pragmatist for his own theoreticism, and so on. In whatever way these paradoxes are met, they cannot simply be laughed off or side-stepped by some special exception granted to a given philosophic standpoint when it finds itself a case of itself.

But there is more to this queerness of the self-applicative character of philosophic inquiry than the paradoxes to which it frequently gives rise. I refer to the sort of thing I assume the Greek skeptic had in mind when he used the argument of “the criterion.” We have all observed our opponents winning bloodless victories by translating us, quite without our consent, into their terminology. Have we always been so keen to note how we have succeeded in establishing our own position—by begging it from the start? There is an obvious sense in which this is all too often true and certainly constitutes a lack of finesse, to say the least. A case in point is John Dewey’s appeal to American philosophers to accept pragmatism as most fitting to the American cultural ethos (in German Philosophy and Politics). But although it may be done in a far subtler way, it seems always to turn up in the end and cannot be considered reprehensible unless the very philosophic enterprise is so. It would appear that the philosopher must pull himself up by his own bootstraps, for his answers to the question: What is the basis of any philosophic system? What is its method? Its criterion of success? are reflective of and utlimately peculiar to his own system and they must enter the strife which constitutes philosophy as an activity. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is beyond challenge in any philosophy, not even that nothing is beyond challenge (which after all is peculiar to the family of philosophic systems of which the author’s is a member).

A word more on this last point. Every philosopher is in the “categorio-centric predicament” (to coin a solecism on the model of R. B. Perry’s ‘ego-centric predicament’). Despite his best efforts he cannot construct a justification of his system that gets down to some extra-systemic bedrock; he cannot write a warranty of his categories except in language that exhibits them. Now this applies to itself, too. What shall I say then to one who denies it? I can try various expedients. First, I can show him that he is mistaken. When he attempts, as he no doubt will, to uphold the view that his own position is presuppositionless, I can try to point out to him unrecognized commitments. Thus when Husserl thought his phenomenology to be quite innocent of epistemological involvements he was unaware of the full character of what he had produced. And when the little band of analysts at Oxford place their own writings outside metaphysics and in the area of literary criticism, the empirical examination of ordinary grammar or, perhaps, studies in composition for philosophical writers, one need only point out that this, if adhered to, would destroy their anti-metaphysical animus entirely.

If this does not work too well, either because my opponent denies his commitments outright, or because, more subtly, he points out that he is involved in commitments only as viewed from my standpoint and in my terms, I can try another dodge; I can show that there is no alternative. Try to avoid system and one ends in complete chaos, which, unfortunately, is itself a rival system (in the sense we are here concerned with). Common sense, science, traditional religion, immediate experience—all seem to furnish an escape only because the categories they exhibit are so mixed up and fuzzy. But the categories are there. (Are there physical things? minds? events? qualities? relations? goods and evils? Such questions would strike dumb your man-on-the-street not because he does not know the grammar of the language but because he cannot imagine anyone questioning these things, which, I take it, is a symptom that they are categories in his “system.”)

Suppose one seeks evasion via skepticism; again one would be caught. I am thinking now not of the paradox in skepticism already alluded to, but of the categories it tacitly yet essentially involves. Skepticism becomes entirely empty if denied such concepts as ‘opposition,’ ‘dogmatic position,’ ‘equally weighty arguments,’—all of which are categorially loaded. One can of course propose linguistic proposals as one’s basis, but the footing of this higher-order proposal appears insecure indeed, unless perhaps one tacitly reverts to common sense and admits philosophers’ talk and all that sort of thing. Here Fichte might have something worth paying attention to: the infinite ego posits itself (and thus of course its own positing).

But why go on? It would be impossible to cover the avenues of escape that could be tried and of course someone might at some time hit upon one that does offer egress, but up to the present I, just to speak for myself, have found none. There seems to be no alternative to the categorio-centric predicament.

Finally, I may just be reduced to silence. I mean that if someone uses a language (say everyday English) and, despite the devices I have just brought in, continues in it to say that he is in no categorio-centric predicament, that he is innocent of any over-all commitments, then I can say nothing significant, communication has broken down completely, and however familiar his individual words his total statement fails to make sense. Now this failure would be for me or in my (attempted) translation of what he, from his standpoint, is saying. But this is just another way of admitting that I remain in a categorio-centric predicament. And what else would you expect?

The truth is that (from my standpoint—need I always so qualify?) the only way a philosophical system can be refuted is to show that it is internally inconsistent. And even this need not be fatal. On the one hand, such a refutation may be, and usually is, ad hominem. It shows a fault not so much in the system (or its ideal blueprint) as in the builder; it reveals a poor technician rather than an untenable plan, or, possibly, a timid constructor who is not willing to appear ridiculous. On the other hand, where inconsistency is integral to the point of view itself, then it, from that outlook, furnishes no self-refutation. Certain species of mysticism that resort to ineffability and (if this really is a different cubby-hole) numerous varieties of Hegelianism are instances. I hope I make myself understood; a system that essentially involves a contradiction is, from my standpoint, refuted by that fact. I am simply adding that from its standpoint it is not. Here, however, communication breaks down completely.

Such an outcome is one of the things that induce in philosophers a mental cramp (to use a vulgar phrase John Wisdom ascribed to Wittgenstein). Unfortunately the assuaging of the discomfort is not as simple (for most of us) as the verbal therapist would suggest. The trouble is not something due simply to grammatical confusions and eliminable by seeing the differences as well as the similarities in the various uses of expressions. One is reminded of the story (I am sure it must be apocryphal) of the distressed maiden who, without benefit of the law, found herself pregnant and, in this quandary, went to her general semanticist who gave her this sage advice, “Remember, ‘pregnancy’ is just a word, and words can’t harm you.”

But though the philosopher’s perplexities are very real and, I believe, finally inescapable, he is a human being and has a way of rebounding. We are incurably philosophic and no one can talk us out of being so by harping on the discomfort into which it leads us. Though we should not ignore the queerness of the philosophic undertaking, we need not, just as we cannot, dispense with it.

It is a rather trite remark to say that we have recently witnessed in England and America a major shift in philosophical approach that may be characterized as a change from speculative construction to linguistic analysis. Yet hackneyed as it may appear, it bears repetition, particularly in that its exact import is not often grasped. There was, and perhaps still is, the mistaken impression that this alteration was far more foundational than we now can see was the case. It was supposed that the very subject-matter of philosophy, not merely its methods and tools, were changed; and since this modification was to assign philosophy a content-field already being investigated (however poorly) by other disciplines, this appeared to have the shocking consequence that philosophy was not merely to be modified but to suffer complete annihilation.

Thus when Carnap, despite a principle of linguistic tolerance, insisted that all philosophical statements must (for purposes of clarification) be translated from the “material” to the “formal mode,” it looked, certainly to him and most of his disciples, as though he were saying that philosophy has, properly, no subject matter of its own, it is just a study of the logical syntax of language (i.e., its content is just that of logic). Now of course this involved a mistake in sizing up Carnap’s own program. For in part this was not merely a shift from a study of the world, in certain of its broader aspects, to an investigation of language-forms, but was also, supposedly, a demonstration that the former material was not there for possible study, or, if not a demonstration of this, at least a denial of it. Such a denial, however, is clearly not classifiable as a statement concerning syntax (so far as one tries to translate it into the latter it loses its very point). Moreover, Carnap’s program was posited on the uncriticized assumption that the study of syntax is not a study of the world, that in this situation one may abstract from any reference the language, when actually used, may make to extra-linguistic fact. Tied up with this is his distinction between L-laws and P-laws, his concept of consequence of the null class of premises, etc., all of which reveal the Wittgensteinian¹ presupposition that strict implication is tautological, and conversely, that there are no necessary connections in the area of fact. When a John Stuart Mill makes claims like the last against a Kant, everyone recognizes a philosopher busy at his traditional job and with his traditional problems. It is difficult to see where the new mode has changed this save in the tools and techniques adopted. And a cursory review of Carnap’s more recent writings indicates that he has himself given up the program of replacing the traditional subject-matter of philosophy by logical syntax—he seems to have brought back, through suggested formalizations, many of the traditional problems and their traditional answers.

The other branch of the analytic school (which I shall dub the “in-formalists” to contrast their stand with the formalism of the logical positivists) likewise apparently thought, in the first exuberance of youth, that it had abolished all distinctive content to the philosophic inquiry. We have not yet attained much of a vantage point, but looking back on what already seems a movement that has spent its initial momentum, it appears that these philosophers hurried off in several directions at once, perhaps all eagerly seeking to slay the dreaded monster, Metaphysics, but not in complete agreement as to where he lurked. Each would void philosophy of all distinctive content, but they differed in their reassignment of it. John Wisdom showed a tendency to give philosophy over to the study of neuroses of a certain variety, namely, those brought on by superficial similarities in the grammar of ordinary expressions. Gilbert Ryle (particularly in The Concept of Mind) was inclined to put philosophy in the field of behavioral psychology, more particularly in that branch which concerned itself with the study of dispositional speech tendencies. Ludwig Wittgenstein (as now revealed in his Philosophical Investigations) made the philosopher a gamesman, inventing and studying model languages as games. Others of the band would assimilate the philosophic subject matter to that of philology, particularly to the study of current English usage, with perhaps some special emphasis on the colloquialisms of English philosophers. (This last opens the horrid prospect of philosophers wholly absorbed in the empirical study of their own speech habits as abnormalities in the general customs of Englishmen. Should this materialize on any wide scale, John Wisdom’s type of therapy might well be demanded.)

But despite these divergences, a family resemblance in the breed can be detected by any perceptive witness. They are all out to empty philosophy of any special content of its own. They are reformists, “do-gooders,” who are interested not merely in doing something positive themselves but in having it replace something else that formerly went under the title of “philosophy,” something that concerned itself not solely with language or human behavior but with the larger world. Now the skeptical onlooker wonders what earthly connection the positive job done by these people (and it is usually accomplished with much éclat, whatever its final worth and bearing) may have with the negative. A brilliant review of Essays in Logic and Language by J. Holloway points this up in one of the aspects of the informalist movement; the reviewer summarizes it: “For empirical facts about how language functions cannot be made to imply anything about metaphysical insight or about what insight sees.”² Similarly, the game of inventing linguistic games can hardly by itself get rid of traditional philosophic problems, nor can a literary study of dispositional traits of human behavior. Linguistic therapy may, indeed, in one sense do the trick: if successful it may end the inner strain, but as Wisdom himself in honesty has admitted, some drugs may likewise fill the bill; if the individual philosopher is cured of his anxiety, it does not follow that the objective causes are removed, they may be there to plague anew and they may be genuinely and uniquely philosophic.

It is true that more recent expressions of informalism have been very adroitly formulated so that the negative thing is never (or hardly ever) said. In this they show that they have learned from the unfortunate earlier experiences of G. E. Moore who explicitly claimed to have refuted materialists, phenomenalists, and neo-Hegelians by appeal to true statements couched in correct everyman’s English. But does it help much jus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I. THE PHILOSOPHICAL ENTERPRISE
• PART II. ETHICS AND VALUES
• PART III. KNOWLEDGE, LANGUAGE, AND THE MIND
• The Writings of Everett W. Hall