In his paper 'are there a priori concepts?', JL Austin asked
when we ask 'Do - we possess the concept?' what are we asking?
If x asks a question, we can ask x to clarify what exactly he is asking. What is a priori about an utterance is the intention of the utterer- even if the utterance is never actually made.
Thus when my boss asked me if I possessed the concept of punctuality, it was not necessary for him to clarify that what he wanted to know was whether I understood I had to come to work at 9 A.M, not 2 P.M.
If we are asking about some individual, or about some group of individuals, whether he or they 'possess the concept of redness', some meanings can well be attached to this expression.
Such an attachment would be arbitrary. I choose to think my boss's question means he thinks I've been working too hard & should take the rest of the week off. Indeed, this is what he is asking me to do. This becomes the basis of my claim of unfair dismissal. However, the court does not uphold my complaint because they decide that what my Boss was asking was for me to come to work on time. This is the reasonable or canonical or 'natural' interpretation of the question. Mine was arbitrary & self-serving.
We may well ask of people from a different culture whether their colour palette coincides with us when it comes to the colour red. The Himba tribe of northern Namibia is widely cited in linguistic and anthropological studies as a culture that does not categorize the colour blue as distinct from green. We may say that they don't have a separate concept of blue.
It might be supposed to mean, for example, 'Does he, or do they, understand the word "red"?' But that again needs further explanation; we shall almost certainly find that it is still ambiguous, and that, at least on many interpretations, no precise answer can be given as to whether the individual does or does not 'understand' the 'word'.
Nonsense! The person who asked the question can clear up any ambiguity. True, we can pretend otherwise. I could say 'punctuality' is ambiguous. It could mean 'punch you actually' which is why I punched my boss. But, no reasonable person would uphold this view.
Does the word 'red' matter? Would it not do if he used 'rouge' and understood that? Or even 'green' if he meant by that what most Englishmen mean by 'red'? And so on.
This is silly. It is psilosophy. Austin thinks
to ask 'whether we possess a certain concept?' is the same as to ask whether a certain word- or rather, sentences in which it occurs- has any meaning.
ask the guy using the word or sentence. He may say 'I was babbling nonsense. I didn't mean anything by it'. But if he intended something else, he can say so. If he is dead or unable to communicate, a Judge or other competent authority may 'read in' a meaning which best suits the case.
whether that is a sensible question to ask, and if so how it is to be answered, I do not know: in any case, it is llkely to be ambiguous.
Only if that is the intention. Austin's philosophical practice was to create ambiguities where none need exist.
True, anyone can arbitrarily deny the existence or meaningfulness or logical compossibility of anything else. But why get our knickers in a twist over what nutters or awkward sods get up to?
Since it is going to be awkward, to say the least, to prove that a certain concept simply is not, it is tempting to try another way. Instead of maintaining that it does not exist, we maintain that it cannot exist. For instance, in certain cases we may hope to show that an 'idea' is 'self-contradictory', as Leibniz thought he could show of the 'infinite number' or Berkeley of 'matter'.
Is 'a priori' a concept? If so, at least one concept is a priori. If not, either it isn't for an a priori reason- in which case it is- or it isn't for a non a priori reason. But such a reason presupposes a concept of a priori- just as 'non-unicorn' presupposes unicorn (even though unicorns don't exist). Of course, one could say x does not exist for no reason at all. But that doesn't mean the concept of it doesn't exist. But what's the difference between saying 'the 'a priori' is a concept' & 'the concept of 'a priori' is a concept?
Austin may be right to say philosophers are confused & thus they should not attempt to answer such questions. Indeed, we may go further. We may say they have shit for brains and should be retrained as pieces of office furniture. But the fact that a class of people are imbeciles doesn't mean anybody else needs to bother with 'linguistic analysis'.
In 'the meaning of a word' Austin writes-
Suppose that in ordinary life I am asked: 'What is the meaning of the word racy?'
You might say 'ordinarily the word means risqué' but what is the context? Who used that word to you- was it a darkie with an accent? If so, he was calling you a racist.
There are two sorts of thing I may do in response: I may reply in words, trying to describe what raciness is and what it is not, to give examples of sentences in which one might use the word racy, and of others in which one should not. Let us call this sort of thing 'explaining the syntactics' of the word 'racy' in the English language.
You'd only do this if you were qualified to teach English.
On the other hand, I might do what we may call 'demonstrating the semantics' of the word, by getting the questioner to imagine, or even actually to experience, situations which we should describe correctly by means of sentences containing the words 'racy' 'raciness', &c., and again other situations where we should not use these words. This is, of course, a simple case: but perhaps the same two sorts of procedure would be gone through in the case of at least most ordinary words. And in the same way, if I wished to find out 'whether he understands the meaning of the word racy', I should test hm at some length in these two ways (which perhaps could not be entirely divorced from each other).
This is true only of a teacher of English or someone who feels a duty to correct people's use of the language according to their own conception of how it ought to be spoken.
Having asked in ths way, and answered, 'What is the meaning of (the word) "rat"?', 'What is the meaning of (the word) "cat"?', 'What is the meaning of (the word) "mat"?', and so on, we then try, being phlosophers, to ask the further general question, 'What is the meaning of a word?'
Its meaning unless a cypher is being used or catachresis has occurred etc.
But there is something spurious about this question.
It sounds like a 'brain-fart' like when a tired teacher asks 'who was the author of James Joyce's Ulysses?'
We do not intend to mean by it a certain question which would be perfectly all right, namely, 'What is the meaning of (the word) "word"?': that would be no more general than is asking the meaning of the word 'rat', and would be answered in a precisely similar way.
Questions of this sort are evidence of ignorance- in the case of foreigners- or intense stupidity. You may say 'they are a step above a 'brain-fart' but not much more than that. A discipline which concerns itself with either is degenerate. Why was this not obvious at the time?
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