Regulative Political Theory: Language, Norms and Ideology
| Date | 01 March 1985 |
| Published date | 01 March 1985 |
| Author | Keith Graham |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1985.tb01559.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Political Studies
(1985),
XXXIII,
19-37
Regulative Political Theory: Language,
Norms and Ideology
KEITH
GRAHAM*
University
of
Bristol
Some of the features of the ordinary language method in philosophy have survived in
recent political theory. The method’s drawback is its conceptual conservatism, which
may go unnoticed when it is employed rather than discussed. Pennock’s recent
arguments about liberty are shown to rely on the method at crucial points, in such a
way as to give unjustified support to the concept of negative liberty. More surpris-
ingly, there is common ground between the ordinary language method and empirical
democratic theory. Recent attempts to show the ideological nature of such theory are
criticized in the light
of
further considerations about the illocutionary force attaching
to
the concept
of
democracy. Finally, an alternative to the ordinary language method
of enquiry is sketched.
It is a curious and interesting fact about philosophical theories that they can
lead a subterranean life-unacknowledged, and perhaps unnoticed, but still
effective-after they have been explicitly and consciously disowned. Such is
believed
to
have been the case with positivism, which continued to influence the
patterns of argument and dialectical moves in which philosophers engaged (at
least in the Anglophone tradition) long after any of them would have been
prepared to embrace positivism as an acceptable theory of meaning. In more
recent times, and more pertinently for this paper, it seems that a similar
transformation has occurred in the case of ordinary language philosophy:
it
may have been discredited, but it lives on in the assumptions behind particular
theorizing, including political theorizing, and indeed its effects may be all the
more considerable for the fact that it is not recognized for what it is.
As
will be
shown,
this matter
is
worth investigating for the light it sheds on the nature of
the regulative aspect of political theory. In Section
I,
there is a continuation of a
project begun in
J.
L. Austin: A Critique
of
Ordinary Language Philosophy’
by trying to diagnose further some of the regulative mechanism underlying the
practice of ordinary language philosophy. In Section
11,
some parallels are
drawn with the methodological assumptions implicit in Pennock’s recent
discussion in
Democratic Political Theory.2
In Section
111,
the discussion is
*
I
am grateful
to
an anonymous reader and the Editor of
PoliticalStudies
for helpful comments
K.
Graham,
J.
L.
Auslin: A Critique
of
Ordinary Language Philosophy
(Sussex, Harvester
J.
R.
Pennock,
Democratic Political Theory
(Princeton,
N.J.,
Princeton University Press,
on an earlier draft.
Press,
1977).
1
979).
0032-321 7/85/01 /0019- 19/$03.00
0
1985
Polilical Studies
20 Regulative Political Theory: Language,
Norms
and Ideology
extended to the methodology of empirical (or, as it is sometimes called, Clitist)
democratic theory and in Section
IV,
some tentative conclusions are drawn.
I
To begin with a brief characterization
of
ordinary language philosophy. Under
this general heading is included philosophy
of
the type originally practised by,
for example, Ryle, Austin and the later Wittgenstein, and subsequently
practised by their many followers. It is, above all, a
method,
a way
of
approaching philosophical questions. At the centre
of
that method is
a
comparison of language
or
particular linguistic expressions, with situations
appropriate to them. In Austin’s words, we proceed ‘by examining
what we
should
say
when,
and
so
why and what we should mean by We imagine
particular states of affairs and try to match these to particular ways
of
speaking. We conduct thought-experiments, as it were, in which the situations
constitute the data and the results are embodied in conclusions in which a key
phrase is related to one of those situations. In this way we learn something
about the meaning of the key phrases: we reach a clearer understanding of what
is present in a case
of
knowledge
or
of
deliberate action,
for example.
To
describe the method in this way
is
already to make clear that it is a
linguistic method; but it is also specifically the method
of
ordinary
language.
The significance
of
this is brought out when Wittgenstein says, for example,
When philosophers use a word--‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’,
‘I’,
‘proposition’, ‘name’-and try
to
grasp the
essence
of
the thing, one
must
always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-
game which is its original home?
.
. . Philosophy
may
in no way interfere
with the actual use
of
language; it can in the end only describe it.4
Implicit in these claims is an endorsement of ordinary everyday language, its
use as a yardstick against which to measure any other uses
to
which
philosophers might wish to put language.
In
Austin’s case the endorsement is
explicit, and is made on the neo-Darwinian grounds that the usage of ordinary
life has proven its fitness by its survival:
.
. . our common
stock
of words embodies all the distinctions men have
found worth drawing, and the connections
they
have found worth marking,
in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more
numerous, more sound, since they have stood
up
to the long test
of
the
survival
of
the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and
reasonably practical matters, than any that you or
I
are likely to think
up
in
our arm-chairs of an afternoon-the most favoured alternative meth~d.~
Now such an approach to philosophical questions may be thought to
function in a fairly obvious regulative manner, and in a fairly obviously objec-
J.
0.
Urmson and
0.
.I.
Warnock (eds),
J.
L.
Austin: Philosophical Papers
(second edition)
4
L.
Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Invesetigations
(second edition) (Oxford,
Blackwell,
1967),
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1970). p. 181.
paras
116,
124.
Urrnson
and Warnock,
Ausfin:
Philosophical Papers,
p.
182.
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