Michel Meyer: From Logic to Rhetoric

In his book From Logic to Rhetoric (John Benjamins,1986) Meyer attacks analytic philosophy on its home ground. The first eighty pages criticize the theories of language and meaning of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Hintikka (who Mayer says unified the early and the later Wittgenstein.) I only skimmed these chapters, but I would recommend them to someone who's been involved in analytic philosophy but feels dissatisfied with it. Since I am interested in Meyer primarily as a successor of Perelman, I skimmed the beginning and went to the end of the book where Meyer presents his own theory.

To Meyer, meaning is not a relationship between words and things, but emerges in dialogue. Any statement or proposition is an answer to a question, and is dependent on what is in question, which is often implicit. ("Argumentation is the study of the relation between the explicit and the implicit", p. 91). If a proposition adequately answers the question, as the hearer understands the question, then it is an answer. Otherwise, new questions are raised, often by making explicit something which had been implicit. ("The meaning of an answer is its link to a specific question" -- p. 127. "An answer is only so in respect to another person" -- p. 103. "Meaning is precisely the medium through which an answer is taken over by someone other than the one who proposed it". (p. 129).

Since all statements are answers to questions, understanding a statement requires knowing which kind of question it answers, and relative pronouns (which are derived from question words) sometimes tell you that. "The man WHO won the battle of Austerlitz" answers the question "WHO was Napoleon?" (Caveat: this method is not a foolproof one, but just a way of saying. It sometimes works).

Ontology and logic work by fixing both the questions that can be asked, and the way they can be answered. Onto-logical discourse reduces all statements to yes-no questions of the form "Is X Y?" (i.e. truth functions). In its original Platonic version, true answers could only refer to the Platonic Forms, which Plato brought into existence solely for the purpose of providing answers and precluding further questioning. (Meyer does not say this, but Plato's main argument for the existence of the Forms is that, if there were no Forms, we could not know anything -- the very model of wishful thinking. God serves a similar function in many systems of thought).

Scientific discourse standardizes questioning, by allowing answers (and questions) only of certain restricted types and assuming a generic, scientific listener. (Paradigm-enforcement in any kind of scholarship or social science imitates science in this regard, though often without the kind of real success that science has had.) One of Meyer's main points is that the attempt to make language unambiguous by formalization and making-explicit is doomed to failure, since formal languages only are intelligible in terms of natural language, and cannot replace natural language. Standardized onto-logical, scientific, or formalized languages can powerfully serve specific functions, but they cannot replace natural language on the whole. And natural language, which is dialogual, cannot provide the fixed certainties of science, since it is an open system which always generates more questions.

Meyer's criticism, if valid, destroys the entire project of analytic philosophy. Kripkean essentialism tells philosophers that philosophy consists simply of correctly identifying the natural kinds of things and recording the results. While this is not really a good sketch of how science actually works, questions in the hard sciences are not too various, and science is often pretty unambiguous in its results. But as with Platonism, problems arise when attempts are made to attain science-like unanimity about the social world where the possible questions are much more diverse.

Ontology is parasitical on science, and not a helper of science. The ontological dream is to extend certainty from the areas where it can actually be found, into areas such as ethics or social thought where we dearly wish that we had it. While scientific truth certainly is the best and most certain truth that we have, this unfortunately does not mean that if we were more scientific in our understanding of social reality, we would have truths about it as good as those we have about physics. Science is the best way of finding truths if they are there to find, but there's no guarantee that if we use scientific methods we will find the truths we need or want.

If propositions are always answers, you end up with a plural truth which is not necessarily relativistic. The answers you get are dependent on the questions you ask, which in turn are dependent on your own intentions and desires. ("An indefinitely large number of systems can be defined upon any given object", as they say in systems science.) Platonic and Kripkean attempts to attain unanimity essentially consist of attempts to prescribe questions of only one type, and to repress or demote all the others.

To my knowledge Meyer never talks about it, but his theory of meaning makes it possible to build a bridge between Western and Eastern philosophy. Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and the mystical forms of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism often speak of a transcendent Tao, Nothingness, Oneness, Being, Ground of Being, Godhead, etc., about which it is impossible to speak, or about which everything and nothing is true. What this is is just potential reality, or reality in its unquestioned state before anyone has had a motive to define it, dissect it, name it, describe it, or provide any answers of any kind at all. Mysticism pushes people toward this pre-questioning state in order to liberate them from the restrictions of possibility resulting from the implicit heierarchy of questions with which they have lived all their lives. Tao is not a different thing than everything else we know, or another thing besides all the things we already know, or even the collection of everything that there ever is, was, or will be, but simply everything that is or is not, or has been or will be, or not, before we have asked any questions about it.

CAVEAT: This piece is more closely tied to Myers' writing than my earlier one, and I have tried to distinguish my own contribution from Meyer's, but all this is still highly interpretive.

APPENDIX

"For Nagarjuna the pursuit after final answers regarding the nature of Ultimate Reality was sophistry.... For him, these "final answers" were not to be found because there were no essential self-determined questions. Since there were no "one to one" correlations between concepts and their supposed referents, the inquiry into the nature of things is endless."

(Frederick Streng, Emptiness, Abingdon, 1967, p. 87.)

"There can be no distinction without a motive, and there can be no motive unless contents are seen to differ in value.

If a content is of a value, a name can be taken to indicate this value.

Thus the calling of the name can be identified with the value of the content."

George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, Dutton, 1979, p. L

Bibliography of Practical Philosophy

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