The Angry Young Philosopher
Words and Things.
by Ernest Gellner
Beacon Press. 270 pp. $5.00.

Ernest Gellner knew full well that sooner or later the role of Angry Young Philosopher would have to be cast. But he could only have dreamed that Words and Things would become the most discussed work of English philosophy since A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic. Professor Gilbert Ryle made the dream come true by refusing the book a review in Mind on the ground that it was abusive of certain identifiable teachers of philosophy at Oxford. There can be no doubt that Gellner’s attack on linguistic philosophy is offensively ill-mannered and brazenly unfair, but much the same could be said of St. Augustine on the Pelagians, Pascal (not to mention Ryle) on Descartes, Nietzsche on Kant, Croce on Mill, or Sartre on Camus. To be sure, few of these aggressors (save Ryle) are discussed in the pages of Mind, which, incidentally, Wittgenstein found of less interest than Street and Smith detective stories. But I had always referred this omission to the regrettable insularity of English philosophy and not, as Ryle’s stand now makes equally plausible, to the intransigence of English manners. Whether this stand was wise or just may be debated. There can be no doubt that it was courageous. The fact that Gellner, alluding, I take it, to Ryle’s surprise conclusions, had characterized him as the O. Henry of English philosophy, made it inevitable that he should be suspected of partiality in refusing a review; arid the fact that the book came with a preface from Bertrand Russell, endorsing its contentions, guaranteed that Ryle’s decision would promptly be submitted to public scrutiny. Russell brought the matter to light in the London Times, and provoked the lengthiest controversy in its columns since the Suez crisis. It is a pity, therefore, that Gellner, who was trained in philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, and teaches philosophy and sociology at the London School of Economics, has not written a better book. There is enough truth in what he might have said for him to have made the effort to say it. As it is, the book will be treated by Oxford philosophers as vulgarly sensational and unworthy of refutation, and their response will seem only to confirm Gellner’s charges of snobbery and evasion. The bystander, as usual, will see a measure of truth everywhere.

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The linguistic philosopher, so the story goes, fancies the history of philosophy from Plato to the positivists a continuous affront to common sense in the form of paradoxical denials of obvious truths. The traditional philosopher, on the contrary, imagines himself uttering profound and unrecognized truths when he avers that one cannot knowingly do evil, or that one can never be certain in matters of empirical fact. The linguistic philosopher diagnoses these paradoxical denials of what is commonly thought and said as linguistic confusion: the traditional philosopher who supposes himself to have told us something that we have not known about knowledge or certainty has only changed the meaning of “know” or “certain.” Gellner, who takes conceptual innovation in science, philosophy, and politics to be a main task of thought, is appalled by what he believes to be the conceptual conservatism of the linguistic philosopher. His main attack is therefore directed against those arguments which he regards as the main supports of the linguistic status quo, in particular against the notorious “paradigm case argument.” Gellner supposes that to undermine this argument is to shake the intellectual, if not the social, foundations of the linguistic school. Russell, who claims in his introduction to concur in most of Gellner’s views, defines the argument as “reasoning from the actual use of words to answers to philosophical problems, or from a conflict in actual uses to the falsehood of a philosophical theory.” “Mr. Gellner,” he continues, “quotes as an example of this argument what some, at least, of the linguistic philosophers regard as a solution of the free-will problem. When a man marries without compulsion, we may say, ‘he did it of his own free will.’ There is therefore a linguistically correct use of the words ‘free will,’ and therefore there is free will.” “No one can deny,” continues Russell, “that this is an easy way to solve age-old problems.” And it is doubtless this travesty which leads Gellner to put in epigraph to his book a statement of Russell’s claiming that “the later Wittgenstein . . . seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which Would make such activity unnecessary. I do not for one moment believe that the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is true. . . .”

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Few in possession of the evidence will take seriously Russell’s accusations of indolence against the possessed Wittgenstein, and few, I hope, will suppose that the “argument” presented by Russell can be the essence of an intellectual movement which has attracted so many lucid and brilliant minds. The issues involved are of the greatest subtlety and it will be quite impossible to say anything substantial about them here. It is worth indicating, however, that if indolence is uncharacteristic of Wittgenstein, it is highly characteristic of Gellner who devotes only seven unbuttoned pages in an extremely repetitious book to the argument he thinks so crucial. In them he relies almost entirely on the criticisms made by J. N. W. Watkins of some relatively crude remarks of Professor A. G. N. Flew, who is best known (and best considered) as an anthologist and not an articulator of linguistic philosophy. It is highly questionable whether there is, as Flew suggests, a paradigm case argument, and even more so whether the phrase “free will” is a paradigm, or even a plausible, case oh which to direct the argument. But even Flew’s remarks are not treated quite fairly, and the only major figure mentioned in connection with the argument is the late Professor J. L. Austin whose remarkable paper, “Other Minds,” is dismissed in one sentence in the middle of a footnote. Can Gellner really ask us to believe that this masterly thinker Was guilty of supposing, what we are asked to believe all linguistic philosophers guilty of Supposing, that if a word is correctly used it must apply to something? Or that he was not aware that one might use the word “miracle” correctly even if there are in fact no miracles to which it might apply? Professor Austin Was as vibrantly aware of the received distinction between connotation and denotation as Gellner—if he did not exploit the distinction everywhere it is because he was never indiscriminate. He used to say that the fatal mistakes in a work of philosophy are to be found between the lines of the first page. Gellner’s book, which makes no reservations, can be recommended without any to the reader who wants the mistakes put on the line—and the issues spelled out in black and white.

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Gellner’s refutation of the paradigm case argument is meant to liberate us from the conceptual conservatism of the Oxford philosophers. And Gellner’s reasons for wanting to achieve this result seem to derive from his notion that conceptual conservatism implies political conservatism. I believe this argument to rest on nothing more elevated than a pun. But the argument is necessary if Gellner is to transform the intellectual debate between the Linguistic Philosopher and the Traditional Philosopher into a social struggle between the Establishment and the Angry Young Man. Gellner reports, what is quite true, that many of the linguistic philosophers “feel in their bones” that common sense is right as against philosophical paradox. But Gellner, exploiting a dubious epistemological distinction between bones and hearts, assures us “that in our hearts we know full well [that] we do not know whether people have feelings, whether we are free to choose our aims, whether induction is legitimate, whether morality is truly binding or merely illusory, etc.” I do not choose to question Gellner’s reasons of the heart (reasons of a type that have often supported the most conservative political positions), but it might be useful to point out that some common-sense philosophers might well turn the argument back on Gellner. If we do not know that other people have feelings (still worse, if we do not feel it in our hearts), then isn’t the conviction which lies at the basis of most liberal and radical thought, that we must relieve men of their pain and suffering, in extreme jeopardy? If we do not have any rational reason to believe that people are in pain, do we have any rational reason to attempt to relieve them of it? The suggestion that “conceptual” conservatism implies “political” conservatism is plainly ridiculous (as the leftish politics of many linguistic philosophers might have suggested).

There is no doubt that linguistic philosophy has given an absurdly narrow definition to philosophy and its problems, but it has, I think, made remarkable contributions to the discussion of a number of them. And, for those interested in philosophy (Gellner’s derogation of l’art pour l’art indicates that he may not be one of them), this fact must be of more permanent interest than the fact, if it is a fact, that some of the fellow-travelers of the movement are smug, unintelligent, upper class, superciliously apolitical, unhistorical, and anti-scientific, and hold positions which might be better held by philosophers teaching at the London School of Economics.

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