Comments Elsewhere

More to come later when I have a bit more time. For now:

Paul,

Yes, I know that our methodological differences spring from the fact of you (and Roderick) being followers of Wittgenstein in this matter and my being a follower of Popperian critical rationalism and his view that “nothing of substance depends on words”.

Doesn’t Wittgenstein rather famously also suggest that “nothing of substance depends on words”? (Cf. for example TLP 4.003, TLP 6.53, etc.)

Maybe the differences that you (and Popper) have with Wittgenstein — and with me and Roderick — actually have to do with something other than this methodological dictum?

I would suggest that our intellect is more fruitfully employed in criticizing and refuting their erroneous theories rather than in designing a more consistent scheme of words with which they can continue to articulate their errors.

The aim of the linguistic criticism isn’t to furnish them with new language for articulating their errors, but rather to furnish us with new language for criticizing and refuting their erroneous theories. You might think that we could save time by just doing so with the old language we already had at hand, but if Roderick’s right about the conceptual misdirections embedded in that old language, then it simply is not useful as a means to that end.

You could say, “common usage can go hang; stipulate meanings for your own terms to get any questions of meaning out of the way as quickly as possible, and then devote your energy to making your case, rather than punching at the tarbaby of other people’s conceptual confusions.” But as a practical matter, common usage really is harder to divorce yourself from than this suggests: even when you make explicit stipulative definitions it can be hard to divorce yourself from the conventional paradigm cases and the connotations you’re familiar with (I think this often actually happens when many libertarians start talking about “market processes,” but that’s another long discussion for another time). And, perhaps more importantly, what Roderick’s doing in the passages you cite is part of a different intellectual task than formulating your own theory: the task that he’s engaged in is in fact criticizing someone else’s false theory (statist political economy), so part of what he needs to do is to engage with what they are actually claiming and how they are supporting it. Otherwise, he is just punching at a strawman. So engaging with the way in which package-dealing language is commonly in framing the theory he’s criticizing, and the way in which that language insulates the theory from criticism (by concealing where, and with whom, the dispute actually lies) is part and parcel of the task you are trying to urge him to devote himself to. Specifically, it involves knocking out one of the supports used to hold up the false theory — e.g. by taking away the state socialist’s ability to rely on the admitted evils of neomercantilism in order to make a case against free enterprise. And by making clearer where the dispute lies, it also makes clearer the sorts of evidence that need to be adduced in order to criticize whatever supports remain.

On the other hand, you could always argue that Roderick’s just saying something false about how the already existing language in the debate is commonly used, and that it is (as Frank claims) really much less ambiguous or incoherent than Roderick is claiming. But then you’re punching at that tarbaby no less than Roderick is, since determining that that’s the case just does involve doing linguistic analysis.