Ordinary Language Analysis

Our time is a time of wonder. With quantum computing right around the corner, global citizens seem to be wondering what’s next. Since Thales of Miletus, Greek philosophers have wondered about what there is. Now, what is possible has a keen following in philosophy as a central topic. One such philosopher, David Lewis, argued that for the sake of ease in logical thinking, we should accept that there is an infinity of possible worlds. There is a possible world wherein I am bald. There are possible worlds where there are neon blue chickens! There are worlds wherein I have money. . . Okay, fanciful reasoning aside, there are technical reasons for him embracing such wild ideas, although I do not want to bore my dear reader. Should we believe Dr. Lewis? I am going to argue that Dr. Lewis needed therapy – philosophical therapy. Not just any old philosophical therapy, Wittgensteinian language therapy!

Lewis’ Multiple Worlds Thesis

How does Lewis know there are a multitude of possible worlds? For ease of logic alone, is it worth embracing this idea? Lewis writes: “the most straightforward way to gain honest title to them is to accept such talk as the literal truth. It is my view that the price is right. . . Modal realism is fruitful; that gives us good reason to believe it is truth”. W.VO. Quine took offence at this view. He claimed that such views are “bloated”:

“Wyman’s slum of possibles is a breeding ground for disorderly elements. Take, for instance, the possible fat man in that doorway; and again, the possible bald man in that doorway. Are they the same possible man, or two possible men? How do we decide? How many possible thin ones more than fat ones? How many of them are alike? Or would their being alike make them one? How many of them are alike? Or would their being alike make them one? Are no two possible things alike? [. . . ] These elements are well-nigh incorrigible. By a Fregean therapy of individual concepts, some effort might be made at rehabilitation; but I feel we’d do better simply to clear Wyman’s slum and be done with it”.

Philosophers have made much use of the notions of possible worlds, however. The turn of phrase was coined by Gottfried Leibniz of Saxony, who claimed that we live in the “best of all possible worlds”. Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil was published in 1710 to reconcile the existence of evil with the notion of a benevolent God. Possibilia have since been developed into a powerful logical device.  For example, a contradiction is something that “cannot occur in any possible world”. On the other hand, Saul Kripke argues in his Naming and Necessity (1980) that water is H20 in all possible worlds.

Modal logic relies on the three concepts: necessity, contingency, and possibility. Talk of possible worlds expedites our thinking in terms of these concepts. But what about the ontic status of these worlds? David Lewis is a concretist. He claims that possible worlds are concrete entities, but not actual. “Actual” is an indexical, like “here” or “now”. Quine has argued that this is simply a “bloated ontology” – it violates Occam’s razor. Once we question the ontic status of these worlds, we lose sight of the more pressing concerns, whether they be epistemically viable and so on.  Possible worlds can help deal with some big problems in philosophy, but do we have to believe they are real?

Counterpart Theory

Believing they are real commits us to maintaining that Pegasus exist in some concrete way. Lewis says the reason this seems odd is because worlds are indexical. Our world is actual. If we were in world ω1, where there are winged horses but no humans, our world ω might seem strange.  Philosophers take one major tack in repudiating Lewis’ account: counterpart theory. On this account, I have a counterpart in which I am bald. However, counterpart theory literally falls apart and Lewis’ rescue of it is so shoddy that it looks as if there is nothing but a gaping hole here on how particulars are supposed to subsist across worlds. This is a glaring problem. Are neon blue chickens the same in ω2 if they are missing heads? How about in ω3 wherein they are composed of grains of sand? Debates like these involve essences. What is it to say that neon blue chickens have essences? Plato’s answer was that the chicken partook in the forms of ‘chickeness’, ‘blueness’, and ‘neoness’. The forms existed on some ethereal realm that we could never reach. This violates Occam’s razor – which states we should keep nonempirical explanatory items to a minimum. Theories should be concise, neat, tidy and simple.

Enter Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953. In this work he argues that, instead of postulating essences and things of this nature, we should look deeply into the meanings of words in actual usage. He uses a type of therapy in order to achieve “complete clarity” of meaning, Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of a word is how it is used in a language game. He uses the example of “slab” on a construction site. Workers can use the word to mean various things:

              (1) “Pass me the slab.”

              (2) “There is a slab”

              (3) “Slab”

The way a word is used determines its meaning. (3) could be a shorthand for (1) or (2) in this language game. We can see the workers on a line, passing the slab, the one handing it over saying “slab”, meaning: “here you go, this is a slab, grab it”. So technically the word could be used as a verb or a noun. One could point and simply say “slab”. Its meaning depends on the “game” or context.

Pegasus & Existence

To revert to our original example, “Pegasus” simply does not seem like “slab”. The rules will be completely different. Wittgenstein anticipates this. The meaning will alter depending on the game. “Pegasus” on most accounts refers to a mythical creature in Greek lore with a horse’s body and wings. On Lewis’ account there is a concrete world in which these things exit, although they are not actual. This is how he will have to respond on whether this mythical creature is real. It had been held in previous philosophies that these questions could not arise in a sensible way without Pegasus existing in some form. Again, Lewis alleges it is instrumental for philosophers to think in this way. Do philosophers need to believe that there are an infinite number of possible worlds in order to do some higher-order logic? The question of Pegasus’ existence can be resolved in the following way.

(4) “Pegasus is attacking me!?” Is uttered by a junior high student in his parent’s basement among friends. They are playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons. In response to (4) his friend pats him on the shoulder and says, “there-there, at least you will get some experience points.” It is important to note the friend’s encouraging remark. Dungeons and Dragons itself is a game with its tailored lexicon of terms such as “hitpoints”, “Dungeon Masters”, and “non-player characters”. In this context “Pegasus” has a different form of life than it does outside of it. Consider:

(5) “Pegasus is attacking me!?” Yelled downtown by a derelict on Nicollet Avenue, crouching by a garbage bin. Instead of an encouraging pat on the shoulder, he gets an angry look from a police officer walking past. The question here is one of propriety, not of existence. Wittgenstein argues that not all words and not all games will follow the same rules, if there are any.  On our analysis, we didn’t have to postulate a possible world in which there is a Pegasus. While the truth of (4) should not be denied outright due to the nature of the game, (5) is the result of some sort of hallucination and is patently false. Yet the two sentences refer to the same entity.  

Talk of possible worlds should be seen in terms of a language game, a device to be used for instrumental purposes. Even something as particular as the term “Pegasus” can have a different connotation depending upon the surroundings in which it is uttered. On the one hand, claiming a Pegasus could be tied to madness, and in a different setting, it is conceivably legitimate to introduce the mythical creature. We did not need to violate Occam’s razor and posit an entire world which we could not verify by the senses, in order to address the question of whether such entities are real. Notoriously, Quine claimed that talk of possibility and necessity did not have to be addressed in such a manner. In order to avoid problems such as a bloated ontology, it might be wiser to stick to ordinary language philosophies in order to clarify meaning in such cases.