Okay. What have we learned so far? We've seen this thought that Philosophy is the
activity of working out the right way of thinking about things. Then, we spent the
next couple of sections investigating the thought that philosophical questions, or
philosophical inquiry, was, in some way, fundamental or important. So, we suggested
that it might be fundamental in the sense that when we're asking philosophical
questions, the questions themselves, are always things that are up for debate. So,
we can always step further back and ask more questions about the presumptions of
the questions that we were asking when we're doing philosophy. Then, we suggested
that philosophical questioning or philosophical inquiry might be important
just because oftentimes, the subject of philosophical inquiry, its topics are
concerns that are particularly important to us and to our lives. So, what I want to
do in this section is to try and illustrate these ideas a bit more about
what Philosophy is, about the sense in which it's fundamental because the
questions themselves are always transforming and up for grabs. And the
sense in which it might be something that we think of as important to us and to our
lives. And we're going to do that by thinking through an example of a specific
question and working out how to think about that question clearly. So, the
question is, what is the meaning of life? Now importantly, I'm not going to try and
answer that question here. So, our job is to just try and get clear on what that
question means and what might be involved in coming to answer it. You might wonder
whether or not that's even a philosophical question in the first place. So, you might
think that the people who are best placed to tell you what the meaning of life is
are, for example, priests or some other kind of religious figure or you might
wonder whether or not it can possibly be a philosophical question because you might
think that it's not the sort of question that you can work out the answer to by
sitting down and pontificating about it in an armchair. You might think that to know
the meaning of life, you actually have to get out there and live your life to find
out what it is. But let's put those issues about whether or not the question itself
is a philosophical one on the back burner and just perform this philosophical
activity of working out the right way of thinking about it. Remember a quote that
we met from Barry Stroud a couple of sections ago. He said that often the worst
thing to do with what looks like a real philosophical question is to answer it.
That can get in the way of a fuller understanding of what the problem really
is and where it comes from. And so perhaps, that's the sort of question that
we've got here. Perhaps, when we're faced with this question, what is the meaning of
life, we've got something that looks like a sensible question that's crying out for
an answer. But is actually in some ways, subtly confused or misguided and one that
we should throw away or replace with a better question rather than trying to
answer it. Now, that's certainly what some philosophers have thought about this
question. So, here's what some people have said about it. They have suggested that
the question is confused and that this is because meanings aren't really the sorts
of things that attach to lives, rather, meaning is a sort of concept or the sort
of a thing that only has its home in relation to language. Some philosophers
might think that the only things that can really have meanings are words, phrases,
sentences, items like that, but not things like lives, okay? That's one place that
this question might lead us. It might lead us to thinking about what this concept of
meaning really means and what we're asking about when we're asking the question, what
is it for something to mean something? You might wonder though, whether or not we've
perhaps given up on this question, what is the meaning of life, a bit too quickly. It
certainly seems like a good and important question to ask. The thought that led some
philosophers to give up on the que stion that we just saw, which is that it relies
on thinking of meaning as being somewhere where it doesn't belong. So, meaning,
belongs with words, it belongs with sentences, it doesn't belong with lives.
One way to try and keep this question on our agenda might be to ask whether or not
that's really the right thought to have about meaning. Doesn't meaning attach to
lots of other things apart from words and sentences? We might think that it attaches
to things like works of art, to films, to pieces of music, to paintings. And so, one
place that this question, what is the meaning of life can lead us in our attempt
to try and think clearly about the question, is to thinking harder about this
notion of meaning. So, here are two broad classes of views of meaning that you might
have. We can call the first one designitive view. On this understanding of
meaning, for something to mean something is it, for it to designate something, is
for it to stand for something or to point to something in the world. So, the word
jumper designates a jumper by standing for this sort of thing or pointing towards,
this sort of thing. So, we specify what a word means by singling out a specific
chunk of the world that it designates. So, that's one way of thinking about meaning
to designative view. Now, I want to contrast that with a second way of
thinking about meaning, the expressive view. So, this one is a bit harder to get
a handle on than the designated view, but we can think of the basic idea of it as
involving the thought that to mean something is to express something where
that means that the item that's doing the expressing actually brings about the
meaning itself. Now, let's try and work out what that means by way of an example.
So, think about the sorts of examples of art that we mentioned earlier on when we
were talking about painting, and music, and, and perhaps films and things like
that. Now, when you've got a really good piece of music, you might think that, that
piece of music expresses something, so it communicates some kin d of feeling, or
mood, or perhaps an idea. And if it's good enough, it might be a feeling or a mood or
idea that you just can't put into words. You can try and do it justice by talking
about it but you'll never be able to capture it quite as well as that piece of
music has. So, if somebody really wants to understand the thought or the feeling or
the mood that the piece of music is communicating, they just have to sit down
and listen to it. In that case, we want to say that the piece of music expresses the
thought or the feeling or the mood. And we can contrast that with the designative
view of meaning according to which if a piece of music meant anything, it would do
it by just picking out some item in the world. On this expressive view, the piece
of music expresses the feeling or the mood by bringing that into being, right, in
such a way that you can't separate what it's expressing from the actual piece of
music itself. Now, that's kind of a sort of fuzzy around the edges thesis about
meaning that I've just given you. But perhaps, it can be made more precise in
some ways, and perhaps if it can, that can give us an alternative way about thinking
about this question of the meaning of life. This question, what is the meaning
of life, we've just seen that it doesn't seem to make much sense if we're thinking
about meaning on the designative view, right? If meaning just involves picking
out a chunk of the world, then that doesn't seem like the sort of thing that a
life does. But if we think we can make sense of this alternative expressive
conception of meaning according to which meaning is something that's brought about
in a particular process, then perhaps the question, what is the meaning of life,
starts to look like it makes a little bit more sense. So perhaps, when we're asking
the question, what is the meaning of life, we're asking about what meaning is brought
forth by this process of living a life. We've just seen two different attitudes
that you could take towards the question, what is the meaning of life. No w, we've
seen how deciding which sort of attitude you want to take up can hinge on deciding
which of these conceptions of meanings you think is more plausible. Now, suppose you
wanted to go with the diagnotive type approach to the question of the meaning of
life and say that it wasn't really a good question, it's the sort of question that
we should reject. Well, then it seems that you've got an obligation to put some other
better question in its place. And you've got an obligation to explain why it does
seem to so many people, like it is a reasonable and good question to ask. One
way of doing this is to try and say that when we're asking about the meaning of
life or the meaning of our lives, we're actually asking about something else
that's, you know, similar or easily confused with meaning, And one thought
that a lot of philosophers have had and a lot of other people have had when thinking
about this question is that what we're actually asking about is something more
like the significance of our lives, or the point, or purpose of our lives. So, when
we're asking about the meaning of life, we're asking whether or not there is
something that life does or perhaps should aim at. You might think that when people
are asking this question, what is the meaning of life, these questions that look
kind of similar, kind of related about the point or purpose of life, is what they're
really getting at. And you might be able to go on to tell a plausible story about
why this issue of, you know, the meaning of something on one hand and it's point or
purpose or significance on the other hand, are sort of similar enough that people can
plausabily get confused about them. You might be able to tell a story that makes
it makes sense, that people felt that they were interested in the meaning in life but
actually interested this other very closely related set of questions about
life. Now, as I notice at the start, not only have I not going to tell you or try
to tell you what the meaning of life is, I'm not going to tell you what I thin k
the right approach to these issues is, right? So, that might be something that
it's interesting for you to go and talk about with your fellow students on the
course, whether or not you think one of these different ways of thinking about the
question, what is the meaning of life, makes more sense and if so, why you think
that is. The job here was just to use this question and the different issues that
come up when we're trying to think through the question, to illustrate some of the
things that we've been saying about Philosophy and the characteristics of
philosophical inquiry. We started off with this question, what is the meaning of
life, we saw that one of the ways that it can take us is to thinking about general
philosophical issues about what meaning is, what it is for something to mean
something. And that illustrates something that we saw right at the start of this
session where we saw the attempted definition of Philosophy is a subject that
attempts to ask questions about the fundamental presuppositions of some domain
of inquiry. Now, I suggest that, that thing about asking questions about the
presuppositions of a domain of inquiry is just what's captured in my shorter slogan
that philosophy is the activity of working out the right way of thinking about
things. And so here, we've seen a specific example of that where, in trying to come
to think clearly about a question and what's involved in answering it, we've
uncovered the fact that thinking clearly about meaning and what meaning is
something that we need to do before we can get a clear conception of what's involved
in answering this question. Here's another thing that we've seen. So remember, the
quote from Stroud about how sometimes, the best thing to do with a philosophical
question is to reject it rather than try and answer it. Well, we've just very
quickly seen an example of an approach to the question of the meaning of life that
would do just that. We've thought about the designativist position that rejects
the meaning of life as a confused quest ion because it tries to look for meaning
where meaning doesn't really belong. And then, we suggested that somebody who
thinks that could then go on to give us an additional story about what question we
should be asking in its place. So, we just sort of thought that perhaps that should
be a question about the point of life, or the purpose of life, or the significance
of life. That sets us up to give one last quote that I think is really important and
really helpful in trying to think about what Philosophy is and it's a quote by
American philosopher, Hilary Putnam, who has acclaimed to be the greatest living
philosopher, I think and here's what he says about Philosophy. Philosophy needs
vision and argument. There is something disappointing about a philosophical work
that contains arguments, however good, which are not inspired by some genuine
vision, and something disappointing about a philosophical work that contains a
vision, however inspiring, which is unsupported by arguments. Speculation
about how things hang together requires the ability to draw out conceptual
distinctions and connections, and the and the ability to argue. But speculative
views, however interesting or well-supported by arguments or insightful,
are not all we need. We also need what the philosopher Myles Burnyeat, called vision
and I take that to mean vision as to how to live our lives, and how to order our
societies. Under argument here, we can include the sort of thing we were doing
earlier on when we trying to adjudacate between these two different connections of
meaning. And we were for example, thinking about the sort of cases that each view of
meaning can handle well and not so well. So, we saw that the designated view might
be especially good at handling instances like the meaning of the word, jumper,
whereas, the expressivist view might be particularly good at handling the meaning
of a work of art, a painting or a piece of music. Now, the reason that I chose the
question, what is the meaning of life, as a good one to think about in th is
particular case is that most people do have some kind of sense of what that
question seems to be getting at, why is seems to be a worthwhile or important
question. In the context of Putnam's quote, when we're speculating about the
different views of meaning and which one we want to prefer in this context, it's
informed by this background vision about what the question of what is the meaning
of life is getting at, right? So, it's informed by this intuitive sense that we
have of what we're being asked or what we're trying to find out about. And I
think Putnam's point that he is borrowing from another philosopher Miles Burnyeat is
a really important and insightful one. The best philosophy does need this crucial
interplay of vision and argument. So, to tie that distinction again into what we've
just been talking about an example of a case of having lots of argument where we
like vision might be, just dismissing the question of the meaning of life on the
basis of a designative understanding of meaning. So, you might think that you've
got a really good argument for the designated theory of meaning, but if you
just dismiss the question what is the meaning of life as a confused sort of
pseudo question, then it seems that you're missing something really important, which
is this background vision of what this question is really asking us about or
perhaps, another example of favoring argument, the expansive vision would be
just dismissing the expressive view of meaning because were weren't able to spell
out very clearly. We just had to sort of wave our hands around and give several
examples. Now, it might be that we weren't able to articulate the expressivist view
very well and we won't be, we weren't able to give a really convincing, compelling
knock-down arguement. But again, when people say something like, you know, this
piece of music means this or expresses this, it seems that we do have a good
sense of what they're saying and that we should care about trying to work out how
we should think about that. So, if you j ust, or to just dismiss the expressivist
view on the basis that you didn't quite understand it, or you hadn't seen a
compelling knock-down argument for it. Again, this is a sort of privileging.
argument over vision whereas, you ideally, you need both of them to work together.
Now, a case of doing the opposite thing in privileging vision over argument might be
bad in a different way. So, a case of doing that might be if, for example, you
really doggedly held onto the belief that this expressivist view meeting was the
right one, but you just really couldn't give any kind of good argument for it,
right, you had real troubles or saying what the view was, or you had real trouble
trying to articulate to anybody else why they should believe you. It seems that
then you've got, you know, this guiding vision of the general sort of theory of
meaning that you want, but you just can't back it up with argument. So, the point
that Putnam is making in this quote is that for philosophy to be good and
successful and worth while, you need both of these things and phiPosophy, when it
lacks either one of them, is unsatisfying. So, if you just have a grand philosophical
vision but you can't back it up with argument, if you can't articulate it
clearly, and show why we should prefer that to an alternative grand philosophical
visions, then there's something unsatisfying about that. Likewise, if
you've got a really, really clearly articulated and worked out philosophical
system but it just doesn't really seem to make any contact with the things that we
care about and the ways that we feel we should be living our lives, then there
seems to be something equally unsatisfying about that, right? It seems that you need
some kind of vision as to how your system of arguments and thoughts fits in with the
stuff that we care about if it's going to count as good and worthwhile philosophy.
So, I want to suggest that this quote from Putnam that we've just been looking at, is
a good way of spelling out what I said at the end of the last section, which was
that, good philosophy is the activity of coming to think clearly about the things
that matter to us.