Monty Python and Philosophy

by Gary L. Hardcastle

  The distinction that Rhees is making, I think, is what I want to bring out: there is a difference between the meaning of a sentence (its sense) and what it makes sense to say. According to Rhees, this is the sort of shift that Wittgenstein makes when moving from his earlier to his later work. He is less interested in asking “What is the meaning of a sentence?” and more interested in asking “What is it to say something?” In uttering, “This is my hand,” you might think that I was simply offering a bit of trivial information. However, the more likely reaction to my behavior would be to quickly fish around for a context in which it would make sense for me to say, “This is my hand,” and say it so that it wouldn’t count as a piece of trivial information. For example, you might think to yourself: this idiot thinks that I think that he doesn’t have a hand. The point to stress here is that although the Verification Principle might work to account for the meaning of the sentence “This is my hand,” it does nothing to help us understand why uttering it in this context is so creepy.

  Even when given reasons for the purchase of the piston engines, the reasons are strange. The strangeness, I think, stems from the fact that Mrs. Smoker’s answer to the question “Why did you buy that?” is connected in all the right ways to this question, though it cannot be accepted (by us) as an answer. For, given the cost of living, and the fact that these ladies are of the working-class (and so must spend their money wisely—this is why being working-class is significant here), one buys a piston engine only if one is in need of one. To be sure, that it would be on sale at the time one needed to purchase such a thing would be a matter of good fortune—one worthy of note. But, one doesn’t buy such a thing simply because it is a bargain! That the engines are gift-wrapped makes things even stranger. For, though one might buy a piston engine on sale knowing that one will most certainly need one in the near future, one wouldn’t normally go the extra step and have the thing gift-wrapped. And so, even granting that reason is at work, the assumption doesn’t go very far in making the exchange between these women intelligible.

  Wittgenstein in his later work seems to have abandoned the Verification Principle, which he claims to have never held in the first place. Now, why he would abandon something that he never held is itself a bit curious, but be that as it may, he appears to abandon it and introduces another: the Meaning-as-Use Principle.20 This principle says: “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” This could go far in helping explain away the worry about Mrs. Gorilla’s and Mrs. Smoker’s contradictory statements. For instance, we might say that it has become customary among these women to use a phrase of the form ‘No, . . . P’ when asked whether one has been P-ing. So, when Mrs. Non-Gorilla asks, “Been shopping?” the appropriate response (if one has in fact been shopping) is “No, . . . been shopping.” If this is the accepted form of response, then we might say that the sentence ‘No, . . . been shopping’ means “Yes, I’ve been shopping” or something like this. The phrase gets its meaning here by its being used to confirm that one has been shopping.

  But, what of the other statements in the dialogue? For example, when Mrs. Non-Smoker says, “You can’t eat that raw!” she appears to be using it to inform Mrs. Smoker of a simple fact about eating such things as piston engines. Mrs. Smoker replies, “Oohh, I never thought of that.” Of course, neither have we, but our never having thought of it is connected to our never having thought of eating piston engines to begin with, let alone cooked! Why has Mrs. Smoker not thought of it? How is Mrs. Non-Smoker using the sentence “You can’t eat that raw!”? Is it really being used to inform Mrs. Smoker? Why would she need to be informed about that?

  To better see how the distinction—between the meanings of sentences and what it makes sense to say—may be of some help here, let me take the analysis in a slightly different direction. Looking at all of this from the audience’s point of view, for instance, we might speculate that Mrs. Smoker says what she does in order to provoke from us a laugh. Fine. But this doesn’t explain how she takes herself to be using the sentence. It only explains how the skit’s writers are using it. Now, if we say that it is really only this use for which we need an account—that is, an account of the writer’s use—I am reminded of a curious remark that Wittgenstein later makes in the Philosophical Investigations. He writes:When I say that the orders “Bring me sugar” and “Bring me milk” make sense, but not the combination “Milk me sugar,” that does not mean that the utterance of this combination of words has no effect. And if its effect is that the other person stares at me and gapes, I don’t on that account call it the order to stare and gape, even if that was precisely the effect that I wanted to produce. (498)

  Here, it appears that he is saying that there are cases in which I may use a sentence to produce a certain effect, but nevertheless my using it to produce this effect does not count as the meaning of the sentence. And so, he suggests that the meaning of “Milk me sugar” is not the order “Stare and gape at me!” even though my using the former is to get you to stare and gape at me. Of course, in being reminded of this passage, I am also reminded of my time spent in the U.S. Navy, when such sentences as “Milk me sugar” were used from time to time, especially while in port, and were just packed with meaning—though I will not go into this here. I mention it only because it is important to note that he is not saying that “Milk me sugar” is inherently meaningless. As my Navy experience has taught me, it is easy to invent contexts in which such a sentence has a life. I think that Wittgenstein would agree. What is important about this passage is that Wittgenstein is telling us that even though the skit’s writers use (via Mrs. Non-Smoker) the sentence “You can’t eat that raw! ” to produce laughter in the audience, for all that we should not count the meaning of this sentence to be the order “Laugh at what I am saying!” We should emphasize Wittgenstein’s saying that for a large class of cases the use determines the meaning. It just so happens that our piston engine skit is not a member of this class.

  The difficulty, as I see it, is that neither the earlier Verification Principle nor the later Meaning-as-Use Principle work to explain what is going on in the piston engine skit, though I do think that they hint at an explanation. In what remains of the chapter, I want to explore what I take to be the hint, and offer a very brief sketch of what an explanation might look like.

  Meaning and Practice

  In Remarks on Colour, Wittgenstein writes:When someone who believes in God looks around him and asks “Where did everything that I see come from?” “Where did everything come from?” he is not asking for a (causal) explanation; and the point (Witz) of his question is that it is the expression of such a request. Thus, he is expressing an attitude toward all explanations.21

  In this passage, the point (Witz) of the believer’s question can be also translated as the joke of his question. That is, his expressing what he does in the form of a certain sort of question is a kind of joke. Here, the funny of the joke is akin, if not identical to, the wonder of the absurd. In other words, the absurdity one senses when lighting upon the difficulty in contemplating the origin of reality itself is a reaction that is much like the humor one senses when lighting upon the punch line of a joke. A natural reaction to both can be laughter. He continues:What I actually want to say is that here too it is not a matter of the words one uses or of what one is thinking when using them, but rather of the difference they make at various points in life. . . . Practices give words their meaning. (58e, paragraph 317)

  Notice that here he seems to sidestep the very notion of the use of words, as well as sidestepping the notion of the meaning of a sentence being what one is thinking while using the words, made famous by David Hume.22 What he focuses on instead is the idea that the import of words is “the difference they make at various points in life.” Connected to this is his saying that “practices give words their meaning.” The ideas of making a difference and practice are cer
tainly compatible with both the Verification and Meaning-as-Use Principles, but there seems to be something more here. What that is exactly is admittedly unclear. Even so, I will suggest as I did above that here Wittgenstein is drawing the line between the meaning of a sentence on the one hand, and what it makes sense to say on the other. I will now take a closer look at this difference before bringing our brief examination to a close.

  In On Certainty, Wittgenstein considers the following sorts of cases:Suppose that I were the doctor and a patient came to me, showed me his hand and said: “This thing that looks like a hand isn’t just a superb imitation—it really is a hand” and went on to talk about his injury—should I really take this as a piece of information, even though a superfluous one? Shouldn’t I be more likely to consider it nonsense, which admittedly did have the form of a piece of information?23

  By ‘nonsense’ here, Wittgenstein does not appear to have in mind the idea that the sentence is meaningless. The sentence “This is my hand” is no doubt meaningful. But suppose, in line with what Wittgenstein says in the above passage, that I walk into a doctor’s office having injured my hand and say, “Hey doc, I’ve injured my hand.” So far, so good. But, now suppose that as I say this, I extend my hand and continue, “Oh, and this is my hand.” Such a remark may be followed by the doctor’s asking, “Did you hit your head, too?” As Wittgenstein says, it would be strange to take this as a piece of superfluous information, though one could do that. Rather, it would very likely be taken as a sign of my having something more seriously wrong with me than an injured hand. The idea here, I think, is that where it makes sense in this context for me to say “Hey doc, I’ve injured my hand,” it does not make sense for me to say “This is my hand.” The sentence just doesn’t have a life in this context. To be sure, I can imagine contexts in which it would make sense to say it (again, I am reminded of my Navy days), but my visit to the doctor’s office here isn’t one of them. What is determining what it makes sense to say? Practice! By this Wittgenstein seems to mean the practice or the way of people in a community. He doesn’t mean it in the sense that we do when we tell a kid to go and practice scales on the piano. As he puts it in Philosophical Investigations, he is considering a people’s form of life: “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” (p. 8e, paragraph 19).

  We might think of the ritual of greeting, or the telling of what brings one to the doctor, as language games. This is what Wittgenstein famously called them. “Here,” he says (again, in Philosophical Investigations), “the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (p. 11e, paragraph 23). The things people do in communal life, their practices, underwrite what it will make sense to say. That seems to be very different from the conditions that underwrite the meanings of sentences (truth conditions, for example).

  A bit later in On Certainty, Wittgenstein writes:This is certainly true, that the information “That is a tree”, when no one could doubt it, might be a kind of joke and as such have meaning. A joke of this kind was in fact made once by Renan. (p. 61e)

  And, he even produces a joke about a philosopher (G.E. Moore?):I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again “I know that that’s a tree,” pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.” (p. 61e)

  The statement “That is a tree” in the second passage is akin, I think, to “This is my hand” in the first and to “I know that that’s a tree” in this last passage. That Wittgenstein would feel compelled to tell the onlooker that his philosopher friend is not insane but only doing philosophy is important—he wouldn’t want the onlooker to react to his friend as the doctor reacts to the patient in the above injured-hand case. These cases, I think, help to illuminate our piston engine case (and show that my initial impulse to borrow René Magritte’s “This is not a pipe” was not far from the mark).

  Along the lines of the cases Wittgenstein introduces above, we might say that what strikes us as funny about Mrs. Non-Gorilla’s reply (to the question of why she bought the piston engine) is that it is not really a reason for buying the engine after all, even though it takes the form of one. To be sure, we could count it as a lousy reason for buying it, but then we shouldn’t be laughing at Mrs. Gorilla, as much as we should be pitying or rebuking her (for being so shallow or so stupid). And, we could take “No, . . . been shopping” as a customary response to the question “Been shopping?” but if we did, again we shouldn’t find this funny, as much as we should find it an interesting custom. But, these aren’t strangers with strange customs! They are working-class women at the park, who live somewhere in England (at least, this is the premise of the skit). Rather, the joke arises in its not being a response at all, even though it takes the form of one. Although we are led to believe (at first) that we are watching the social interaction of women in the park, who express interest in what the others have done, and so on, the joke is that we are not watching anything of the sort. And though the scene at first appears ordinary enough, at the end, along with Mrs. Smoker and Mrs. Non-Smoker, we walk off dazed and confused, reminded of something Hamlet tells Horatio: “There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.” Alas, Monty Python has pulled back the curtain. For, none of the philosophical theories of meaning will do. They have made Wittgenstein’s point! A complete analysis of what these women say in terms of syntax, semantics, truth-conditions, use, and so on, will not capture what it is about their exchange that makes us laugh. There is simply more going on in the park than there is dreamt of in our philosophy. For whatever it is that is left over after we have accounted for meaning, which some will say is all there is to account for here, it is the leftovers that work their magic on us. It is the stuff that Horatio’s philosophy cannot account for that seems to matter here.

  5

  Why Is an Argument Clinic Less Silly than an Abuse Clinic or a Contradiction Clinic?

  HARRY BRIGHOUSE

  Monty Python’s Flying Circus drove numerous young people of my generation into philosophy. Having been driven into philosophy and stayed, I’m startled to notice how many references to philosophy in Monty Python have some basis in the reality of philosophy as a profession. The Bruces’ Philosopher’s Song (also known as the Australian Philosophers’ Song), for example, is simultaneously a comment on the incongruity of an Australian accent (regarded by elitist Britons as crass and un-intellectual) combined with something as serious and high-brow as philosophy, and a tribute to the enormous influence that Australian philosophers had over English-speaking philosophy at the time, and still have.

  Perhaps most striking of all to a practicing philosopher is the “Argument Clinic” sketch (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 29, “The Money Programme”). The customer enters the Argument Clinic, after a false start with Mr. Barnard in the abuse room:MR. BARNARD: What do you want?

  CUSTOMER: Well, I was just . . .

  MR. BARNARD: Don’t give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings!

  CUSTOMER: What?

  MR. BARNARD: Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous, pervert!!!

  CUSTOMER: Look, I CAME HERE FOR AN ARGUMENT, I’m not going to just stand . . . !!

  MR. BARNARD: OH! Oh I’m sorry, but this is Abuse.

  He then finds Mr. Vibrating in the argument room:CUSTOMER: Ah, is this the right room for an argument?

  MR. VIBRATING: I told you once.

  CUSTOMER: No you haven’t.

  MR. VIBRATING: Yes I have.

  CUSTOMER: When?

  MR. VIBRATING: Just now.

  CUSTOMER: No you didn’t.

  MR. VIBRATING: Yes I did.

  CUSTOMER: You didn’t.

  MR. VIBRATING: I did!

  CUSTOMER: You didn’t!

  MR. VIBRATING: I’m te
lling you I did!

  CUSTOMER: You did not!!

  Slyly evoking the English pantomime tradition, the professional arguer simply contradicts every statement that the man seeking the argument makes.24 The customer objects thatCUSTOMER: I came here for a good argument.

  MR. VIBRATING: No you didn’t; no, you came here for an argument .

  CUSTOMER: An argument isn’t just contradiction.

  MR. VIBRATING: It can be.

  CUSTOMER: No it can’t. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.

  MR. VIBRATING: No it isn’t.

  The customer goes on to draw the distinction as follows: “Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.”

  What Kind of Argument Would You Like?

  The sketch works for numerous reasons. It seems absurd to “try out” an argument clinic, especially when, as any British viewer at that time knew, any normal person could get abuse and contradiction for free, just by calling a tradesperson or trying to buy something out of the ordinary at a department store (most older Britons of the time would have found the cheese shop sketch only a slight exaggeration of their experience). The idea that someone is able to turn on and off the habit of irritated contradiction at will is also funny. One of the things that makes the sketch work is that the professional’s understanding of what an argument is fits well with a certain ordinary-language understanding of “argument.” But in that sense of argument it is so easy to have one that it is hard to imagine anyone paying for one. The customer who wants to engage in something akin to a verbal game of chess wants his ideas to be taken on, thought through, and refuted, in an intellectually stimulating process. He wants, in other words, something like a philosophical argument, but, unphilosophically, has failed to specify what he wants.