Language and Bewitchment (Part One)

The Meaning of Words

Wittgenstein

This is the first of about five instalments I will be publishing concerning language. I studied the Sociology of Language and the Philosophy of Language in Cardiff University but learned more about the latter when I started teaching it - or in preparation for teaching it. I have to say that I found Wittgenstein impenetrable, just like Hegel and many of the postmodernists. Such people could have learned much about clarity from Bertrand Russel. Anyway, I have received a sufficient positive response from previous philosophical shorts to provide the motivation to publish some more. This is a mixture of more formal philosophising alongside some biographical illustrations of the main points. I hope you will enjoy them and maybe learn something from them.

Language and Bewitchment

‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’ (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part 1, para 109)

In my pub philosophy sessions and when teaching courses in philosophising I relied heavily on a book by ER Emmet entitled Learning to Philosophise (Emmet, ER, 1968, Penguin Books). I used many other books, but this one employed categories that I found useful and was written very clearly. Emmet has a chapter entitled ‘Language and Bewitchment’, which I found fascinating and very relevant to our own era of political correctness or Wokeness.¹ The chapter title is clearly inspired by Wittgenstein’s assertion above.

Emmett made Language and Bewitchment the first chapter because unless we appreciate certain things about language, which is the medium through which we philosophise, we are likely to make mistakes. Philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell realised this and therefore focused their philosophical attention on language. On the subject of bewitchment, Emmet says that language may be used by an ‘orator or politician...to persuade people to think or act in a way in which they otherwise would not. This persuasion will often be rational and directed towards good ends, but it may sometimes contain an element of deception; the language may be used to dull the intelligence and appeal to the emotions’ (Learning to Philosophise, p. 35). I think Emmet was a little naive with regard to politicians who have changed very little since this was written and language designed to appeal to the emotions is currently in widespread use. But the contemporary political weaponisation of language probably surpasses anything that either Emmett or Wittgenstein could have imagined; though George Orwell would not have been surprised at all.

Emmet’s book and the way he writes appear to belong to another age (do belong to another age); a more gentle age; a more naive age; a more honest age and an age when life was more simple. But of course I am looking back through rose tinted glasses. It has to be said, however, that issues around the use of language are definitely more complicated now than they were in the 1950s when I was growing up. After complaining to my mother that someone in school had called me names, she would reassure me with the well used phrase: ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’. We were hardier beings back then, because in this age names can hurt; names can be as hateful and harmful as actions and in some countries, including the one I live in, people can be fined and imprisoned for name calling, or one could lose one’s job and career for something one said ten years ago on ‘Twitter’.

As obnoxious as racist or homophobic comments are, they should not belong in the same category as actions that cause physical harm – especially since the extent to which words cause harm is debatable. Yes, such statements should be condemned morally, if appropriate, but to send people to prison for something they said on Facebook is the modern equivalent of hanging people for stealing sheep.

In our modern linguistic dystopia, even the title of this chapter is open to criticism for being misogynistic, since witches, in the distant past, were actually female healers persecuted by men.

I first encountered the ‘language police’ while at Cardiff University in the early 1990s. Then, I was studying, among other things, the philosophy and sociology of language and the Sociology of Culture, which was similar to a media studies course. Through these subjects, especially the latter, I became familiar with various theories relating to language. One thing that became very clear to me is that the meaning of language; of words or concepts; depends on context. Words and concepts do not have a fixed meaning or a meaning that remains unchanged regardless of context. Furthermore, individuals have a great deal of flexibility in the way they use language; they do not feel obliged to conform to the dictionary definitions. My own experience of life and language appears to confirm this.

At that time, free speech was highly valued, if not sacrosanct, among radicals, even among those on the ‘far left’. Political correctness had started to appear, but it was greeted with caution. I can remember attending a number of Socialist Workers’ Party meetings which discussed the extremes of political correctness and whether or not exceptions should be made to the notion of free speech so as to accommodate what were perceived to be injustices in the use of language. Some concessions were made in that certain words were frowned upon, but there was no sense that these linguistic errors should amount to hate speech or that they should be punished by social banishment, yet alone attract fines or imprisonment. This was an ambivalent phase where most radicals were wary of stepping on the feet of free speech. At least, that’s how it appeared to me.

The language police had not even finished their training at this stage and many of the concepts we now associate with them had not yet been articulated. Maybe they hadn’t yet been invented. Yet assumptions about a still existing patriarchy and the influence of language on attitudes associated with gender, race and sexuality were already in place. For some students and lecturers, it was no longer acceptable to employ the term ‘man’ in a generic sense to apply to humanity generally. This problem could be overcome by using ‘woman’ in this context or by alternating between use of the term ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or using the combination he/she. I used them all while trying to avoid the issue by using a plural such as ‘they’ when I could. Feminisms of different kinds had a very strong presence in Universities during the 90s and one could not avoid feeling this presence, especially as a male radical. There was strong moral pressure from peers – especially female peers – to conform to certain beliefs. At one point, I even considered myself to be a male feminist – until I began to realise that feminism, just like Marxism, is a form of dogma.

I don’t suppose many of us appreciated where this would lead.

I can remember having a debate with some feminist friends on the University campus somewhere around 1993, I think. The subject was the term ‘girl’. My female friends believed that women should not, under any circumstances, employ the term ‘girl’ to describe adult females, because it is demeaning for women.² I suggested two things. First, whether or not the term could be regarded as demeaning depended on the context in which it was used and second, that it could not be regarded as demeaning if the women who used it did not regard it as demeaning. My female friends appeared to want to take all agency away from women, as if they were mere puppets of language. This was, in effect, a form of linguistic determinism³ and I would not accept it.

In this debate with my friends, I provided an example to illustrate my point. In the South Wales valleys, from which I hailed, far from the ‘bubble’ of University life, working class women often referred to themselves as ‘girls’ and thought nothing of it. If they were going out for an evening with female friends, they would say that they were going out with the ‘girls’. The fact that they employed the term ‘girls’ was not demeaning for them and had nothing to do with gender politics (of which they knew little). This was a simple example of girls growing up, but retaining a term employed in their childhood. In precisely the same way, a group of males anticipating a night out would say that they were having a night out with the boys (rather than men).

But my argument fell on deaf ears and I received the retort that the term ‘girl’ is still demeaning. This unwillingness to accept rational argument among Wokists was to become widespread indeed.

Fast forward about ten years and political correctness was getting even more ridiculous – among lefties, at least. In 2003, I was a tenor in the Bristol Socialist Choir (Red Notes), alongside my wife who sang alto. In February 2003, I attended the great London march against the Iraq war and was inspired to write a song about it. The musical director of the choir was impressed with the song and wrote an arrangement with four part harmonies so that the choir could perform it. But while we were rehearsing it a female lesbian member of the choir objected to the term ‘wife’ which featured in the song. In writing it, I wanted to highlight the difference in media attitudes towards our own people, on the one hand, and Iraqis on the other. So I wrote of the media: ‘They recall the soldier’s life, show his grieving widowed wife; but Iraqis are nameless, their conquerors blameless’. This woman from the choir pointed out that the term ‘wife’ was part of the patriarchal marriage system that oppressed women and that women should therefore never use the term. I objected to this on two main counts.

First, I suggested that I was merely repeating the media coverage and the terms employed by the media. Neither the media, nor the vast majority of people, employed anything but the term ‘wife’ to describe a female who is married to a man. The song would have sounded ridiculous if I had employed the term ‘partner’ rather than wife. Second, I disputed the claim that marriage was an unequivocally oppressive institution and pointed out that I was married and had a wife. I could not help but take this attack personally, not only because I had written the song, but also because my very existence as a husband was being condemned. It was being suggested that the way I chose to live, i.e. in some sort of matrimony,⁴ was somehow oppressive to others.

This caused myself and my wife to leave the choir. I was told later that the choir was divided 50-50 on the issue and almost disbanded. But the choir agreed that the song should not be performed and it stayed together as one unit. No one else resigned.

We kept in touch with the choir, because some members were friends, and we even sang with them on occasions. The woman who had made the complaint actually left the choir not long afterwards.

This experience is hugely informative and part of the salutary tale that is the failure of the left to resist the nonsense that gave rise to the Woke monster we know so well today. In my view, it is so disappointing that only 50% of people in the choir believed that the criticism of the song was not justified. I will probably never know how many more actually believed the criticism to be unjustified but did not have the courage to speak out. I will never know the extent to which this woman’s self portrayal as a lesbian victim encouraged people to stand by her. Did such people lack courage or were they simply trying to be polite? Why did they not used their Reason. The same questions could be asked of the left generally in connection with the whole Woke debacle.

I have no idea whether Wittgenstein had any of the above in mind when he spoke of the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. But political correctness and its theoretical foundations certainly appear to be prime candidates for accusations of this sort of deceit.

This discussion highlights some of the most important issues in the philosophy of language. Do words have an essential meaning? Can they mean different things depending on the context? To what extent does the use of words impact on our behaviour? The latter is a question of psychology as well as philosophy.

In the linguistic examination that follows, I will concentrate on those aspects of the philosophy of language that I feel are most relevant to our lives in contemporary society, and will link these observations, where appropriate, to Wokeness (political correctness). I will first consider the claim that words have an ‘essential meaning’.

Essential meaning

The idea that words can have an essential meaning was popular in the past but is not generally accepted today. Herbert Spencer⁵ once said: ‘By comparing its meanings in different connections and observing what they have in common we learn the essential meaning of a word’.⁶ But this is a mistake, according to Emmett, because when we do what Spencer suggests we are actually providing an account of what a word can mean in different contexts. No common denominator can be extracted through this procedure that could provide an essential meaning.⁷ If we use a dictionary to ascertain the meaning of a word, we are informed of different meanings but no essential meaning. But even dictionary meanings of words do not exhaust the range of meanings that can be employed by the general public.

Of course, this raises the question of legitimacy; or legitimate meaning. If the meaning of a word employed by the general public does not appear in any dictionary, is this meaning legitimate or not? This is not an easy question to answer. Clearly, the women in the South Wales valleys I have referred to above, were employing the term ‘girl’ inappropriately; ‘girl’ does not mean ‘adult female’. But the women employing this term know that their female friends are not really ‘girls’.⁸ This illustrates the fact that those who use language have a degree of flexibility in its use and don’t always feel obliged to use it appropriately. Football commentators still employ the term ‘woodwork’ – as in ‘the ball hit the woodwork’, when they know full well that goal posts and crossbars no longer contain wood.

In both of these examples, human individuals are demonstrating the fact that human agency is a factor in determining the meaning of words and concepts. The women from the valleys added to the meaning of ‘girl’, which now also means ‘one of my adult female pals’. The football commentators are also adding to the meaning of ‘woodwork’ which can now be used to describe metal goal posts and crossbars. There is no problem of meaning here because everyone involved knows what they are talking about. But this involvement of human agency in constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing meaning suggests that the notion of an essential meaning is problematic.

The existence of an essential meaning is also placed in question due to the fact that the meanings of words and concepts change over time. Raymond Williams demonstrates this very effectively in his study of ‘keywords’.⁹ The meanings of some words he examines have changed dramatically over the years and one or two now have opposite meanings to those they have had in the past. For example, ‘individual’ used to mean something indivisible, whereas it now means something separate.¹⁰

I think it has already become clear from the above that the meanings of words will depend on context, place, people and time and that there is no essential meaning of a word.

1 The term Woke is black US slang for being alert to social injustice and discrimination (being Woke to these things). But the term was later used by the right as a derogatory one to describe political correctness.

2 I believe this notion may have arisen out of the habit of some male sports presenters to differentiate between the ‘men’s team’ and the ‘girl’s team’ – or simply ‘the men’ and ‘the girls’. But here the context is completely different and I would agree that possibly there is some discrimination going on here, but not necessarily to the extent that the reporter could be accused of misogyny.

3 A theory that suggests that our thinking and world views are determined by the language we employ.

4 We are not married in a conventional sense and have signed no documents to make our marriage ‘legal’. Rather, we wrote our own ceremony, which included promises made directly to each other without an intermediary (such as a priest). Instead, we circulated our rings so that everyone attending touched them in order to legitimise our Union. The ceremony was inspired more by paganism than Christianity. But we still regard our relationship as a marriage. Following the ceremony, Belinda kept her own surname. A marriage could not be less patriarchal than ours.

5 Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, sociologist, biologist and anthropologist who died in 1903.

6 Quoted in Learning to Philosophise, p. 24

7 Ibid., p. 25

8 A different version of girl – i.e. gull; is used by women of any age in the valleys including the elderly.

9 See R. Williams Keywords

10 Ibid pp 161-165. ‘Individuall, not to be parted, as man and wife’ – from the 15^th century.