Descriptive fallacy

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The descriptive fallacy refers to reasoning which treats a speech act as a logical proposition, which would be mistaken when the meaning of the statement is not based on its truth condition. [1] It was suggested by the British philosopher of language J. L. Austin in 1955 in the lectures now known as How to Do Things With Words . Austin argued that performative utterances are not meaningfully evaluated as true or false but rather by other measures, which would hold that a statement such as "thank you" is not meant to describe a fact and to interpret it as such would be to commit the descriptive fallacy.

Role of 'descriptive fallacy' in Austin's philosophy

Austin's label of 'descriptive fallacy' was aimed primarily at logical positivism, and his speech act theory was largely a response to logical positivism's view that only statements that are logically or empirically verifiable have cognitive meaning. [2] Logical positivism aimed to approach philosophy on the model of empirical science, seeking to express philosophical statements in ways to render them verifiable by empirical means. Statements that cannot be verified as either true or false are seen as meaningless. This would exclude many statements about religion, metaphysics, aesthetics, or ethics as meaningless and philosophically uninteresting, making merely emotive or evocative claims expressing one's feelings rather than making verifiable claims about reality. [3]

Austin disagreed with the positivist's contention that the only philosophically significant use of language is to describe reality by stating facts, pointing out that speakers do much more with language than merely describe reality. For example, asking questions, making requests or issuing orders, offering invitations, making promises, and many other common statements are not descriptive. Rather, they are performative: in making such statements, speakers do things rather than describe things. [4]

Based on this distinction of what Austin labeled as constative utterances (statements that describe, which were the focus of logical positivism) and performative utterances (statements that perform or do something), Austin developed his speech act theory to investigate how we do things with words. [5]

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Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, was a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle. This theory of knowledge asserted that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful. Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians formed the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle, which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism.

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology. Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge of the speaker and listener but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors. In that respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity since meaning relies on the manner, place, time, etc. of an utterance.

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Rudolf Carnap German philosopher

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J. L. Austin English philosopher

John Langshaw Austin was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts.

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Friedrich Waismann was an Austrian mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. He is best known for being a member of the Vienna Circle and one of the key theorists in logical positivism.

Positivism Philosophy of science based on the view that information derived from scientific observation is the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge

Positivism is a philosophical theory stating that certain ("positive") knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations. Thus, information derived from sensory experience, interpreted through reason and logic, forms the exclusive source of all certain knowledge. Positivism holds that valid knowledge is found only in this a posteriori knowledge.

<i>Language, Truth, and Logic</i> 1936 book by A. J. Ayer

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Inductivism is the traditional model of scientific method attributed to Francis Bacon, who in 1620 vowed to subvert allegedly traditional thinking. In the Baconian model, one observes nature, proposes a modest law to generalize an observed pattern, confirms it by many observations, ventures a modestly broader law, and confirms that, too, by many more observations, while discarding disconfirmed laws. The laws grow ever broader but never much exceed careful, extensive observation. Thus, freed from preconceptions, scientists gradually uncover nature's causal and material structure.

In the philosophy of language, the notion of performance conceptualizes what a spoken or written text can bring about in human interactions.

This is an index of articles in philosophy of language

References

  1. ↑ Bunnin, Nicholas; Yu, Jiyuan, eds. (2004). "Descriptive fallacy". The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy. ISBN   978-1-4051-0679-5.
  2. ↑ Chapman, Siobhan; Routledge, Christopher, eds. (2009). "Speech Act Theory". Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. ISBN   9781849724517.
  3. ↑ Honderich, Ted, ed. (2005). "Logical Positivism". The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. ISBN   9780199264797.
  4. ↑ Chapman, Siobhan (2000). Philosophy for Linguists: An Introduction . New York: Routledge. pp.  106-143. ISBN   9780415206594.
  5. ↑ Hogan, Patrick, ed. (2011). "Performative and Constative". The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences. ISBN   9781139144711.
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