REALITY AND CULTURE

VIBS

Volume 270

Robert Ginsberg
Founding Editor

Leonidas Donskis
Executive Editor

Associate Editors
G. John M. Abbarno Richard T. Hull
George Allan Michael Krausz
Gerhold K. Becker Olli Loukola
Raymond Angelo Belliotti Mark Letteri
Kenneth A. Bryson Vincent L. Luizzi
C. Stephen Byrum Hugh P. McDonald
Robert A. Delfino Adrianne McEvoy
Rem B. Edwards J.D. Mininger
Malcolm D. Evans Danielle Poe
Roland Faber Peter A. Redpath
Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Arleen L. F. Salles
Francesc Forn i Argimon John R. Shook
Daniel B. Gallagher Eddy Souffrant
William C. Gay Tuija Takala
Dane R. Gordon Emil Višňovský
J. Everet Green Anne Waters
Heta Aleksandra Gylling James R. Watson
Matti Häyry John R. Welch
Brian G. Henning Thomas Woods
Steven V. Hicks
a volume in
Interpretation and Translation
IT
Edited by Michael Krausz
 REALITY AND CULTURE
Essays on the Philosophy of Bernard Harrison

Edited by Patricia Hanna

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover illustration: “Emanation I,” painting by Michael Krausz. 2013.
30” x 40”

Cover design: Studio Pollmann

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.

ISBN: 978-90-420-3819-6
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1066-9
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014
Printed in the Netherlands
 Interpretation and Translation
(IT)

Michael Krausz
Editor

Other Titles in IT

Michael Krausz. Oneness and the Displacement of Self: Dialogues on Self-

Realization. 2013. VIBS 258

Michael Krausz. Interpretation and Transformation: Explorations in Art and

the Self. 2007. VIBS 187
Not empiricism and yet realism in philosophy, that is the hardest thing.
- - Ludwig Wittgenstein
 CONTENTS
EDITORIAL FOREWORD xi
MICHAEL KRAUSZ

FOREWORD xiii
PATRICIA HANNA AND DOROTHY HARRISON

PREFACE xvii

PROLOGUE: Reality and Culture 1

BERNARD HARRISON

Part One:
LITERATURE AND REALITY 31

ONE What Do Humanists Want? 33

JOHN GIBSON

TWO Reading Dickens: Pleasure and the Play of Bernard

Harrison’s “Social Practices” 49
MURRAY BAUMGARTEN

THREE Harrison, Wittgenstein, Donne, and the Powers of

Literary Art 65
RICHARD ELDRIDGE

Part Two:
THE CONSTITUTION OF THE MORAL LIFE 79

FOUR Bernard Harrison on the English Novel 81

LEONA TOKER

FIVE From Meaning to Morality in Kovesi and Harrison 97

ALAN TAPPER

SIX Paying a Debt: Bernard Harrison versus the Old-New

Antisemitism 113
EDWARD ALEXANDER
x REALITY AND CULTURE

Part Three:
LANGUAGE AND PRACTICE 129

SEVEN Bernard Harrison, Literature, and the Stream of Life 131

DANIÈL MOYAL-SHARROCK

EIGHT Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 147

PATRICIA HANNA

NINE Bernard Harrison’s “World” 171

MICHAEL KRAUSZ

TEN Meaning, Truth, and Practices: A Conundrum 181

DENNIS PATTERSON

ELEVEN Language, Fiction, and the Later Wittgenstein 185

MICHAEL MORRIS

EPILOGUE: Replies and Reflections 203

BERNARD HARRISON

WORKS CITED 249

APPENDIX: Selected Publications of Bernard Harrison 265

ABOUT THE AUTHORS 271

NAME INDEX 275

SUBJECT INDEX 281

 EDITORIAL FOREWORD
This splendid collection of essays dedicated to Bernard Harrison’s philosophical
achievements pays tribute to a major figure in the Anglo-American philosophi-
cal world. Patricia Hanna, longtime associate and collaborator of Harrison, has
brought together a group of notable commentators. They continue philosophical
conversations in which Harrison has played a leading role.
One might be tempted to classify Harrison as a major voice in many di-
verse discussions—philosophy of literature, philosophy of language, philoso-
phy of mind, color studies, epistemology, metaphysics, moral philosophy,
philosophy of culture, Wittgenstein, antisemitism, and more—without recog-
nizing a unifying strand that ties them together. In his own contributions to
this volume, however, Harrison elucidates that unifying strand. He contests
and destabilizes a persistent and misleading alignment of culture with subjec-
tivity—whether found in unexamined distinctions between nature and culture
or appearance and reality. The result is an important contribution to an al-
ready distinguished career.
Insofar as so much of Bernard Harrison’s life’s work has been dedicated
to philosophical issues of interpretation and varieties of its cultural objects,
the appearance of this book in the present series is most fitting.

Michael Krausz
Interpretation and Translation Special Series Editor
Rodopi/VIBS
 FOREWORD

Patricia Hanna and Dorothy Harrison

In “Reality and Culture,” the first chapter of this volume, Bernard gives a
clear account of the intellectual links between the diverse studies that go to
make up the corpus of his work. But before he and the other contributors to
this fine volume get on with the more academic discussion of his philosophy,
we thought it would be interesting to give readers some sense of how the very
disparate threads that make up his work grew out of events in his life.
From the age of fifteen, Bernard’s closest friend in school was Jewish.
That friend’s house quickly became a second home for Bernard. The relaxed
atmosphere and warm acceptance he found there were a relief from the nar-
row, dogmatic Catholicism of his own background. His subsequent interest in
Judaism had its roots in the discussions and open-minded reasoning he so
enjoyed at his friend’s home. Through its very unfamiliarity it opened a door
into a more welcoming world, and allowed him to develop his own ideas and
independence of mind.
After completing secondary school, Bernard went to the University of
Birmingham to read Biology and Chemistry. As a student in the natural sci-
ences, he expected to find a way of making sense of life. Instead, he found the
methodology of science too narrow; he became an unenthusiastic student,
meeting requirements but without passion. Fortunately, in his third year, one
of his professors suggested that he might try reading philosophy. Thereafter,
he had the good fortune to take philosophy courses with Peter Geach, Austin
Duncan-Jones, Bernard Mayo, and Charles Whiteley. That first year as a stu-
dent of philosophy, he won the John Henry Muirhead Prize, named in honor
of the first professor of philosophy at the University of Birmingham. His high
marks were unheard-of for a non-philosophy student, and he was admitted to
the Honors School. The following year, he again won the Muirhead Prize and
finished his BA in Philosophy in a further year, graduating in 1956. He im-
mediately entered the masters program in philosophy at Birmingham, where
C. H. Whiteley supervised his thesis. He completed the MA in 1957, a year
early, and was then faced with the question of what to do next.
Unlike many students at that stage of their careers, for Bernard, the
choice was not a simple one between this or that school, but a very real
choice about how to proceed with his life in the world. During his last year of
the BA program, Bernard met Dorothy White; they were married in 1956, and
their first child, a daughter, Eva, was born in 1957. He decided that he could
continue in philosophy only if it afforded him the opportunity to support his
family. He applied for two teaching jobs, one in Dublin, the other in Singa-
pore, and for admission to the PhD program at the University of Michigan. He
wasn’t offered the job in Singapore and hadn’t yet heard from Dublin when the
xiv PATRICIA HANNA AND DOROTHY HARRISON

University of Michigan accepted him to the PhD program and offered him a
teaching fellowship, which he accepted. So, he and “Dot” moved to Ann Arbor
with their six-month-old daughter. (He still hasn’t heard from Dublin.)
At the end of his first year in Michigan, with the responsibility of a
young family, Bernard decided to turn part of his MA thesis into a paper for
Mind, with the thought that if he could not place a paper in a leading journal,
he should find another career. The paper was written and submitted; the die
was cast. The editor, Professor Gilbert Ryle, liked the paper and asked him to
develop its central argument more clearly. Bernard did that, and Ryle’s se-
cond letter was an enthusiastic acceptance. In their excitement, Dot and Ber-
nard managed to tear the letter in half while opening it!
Those early days in Michigan were financially constrained, and Bernard
was determined to complete his degree as quickly as possible. During that
time, he worked with Charles Leslie Stevenson, who supervised his disserta-
tion, William Klaas Frankena, Richard Cartwright, William Payne Alston,
Julius Emil Moravcsik, Walter Arnold Kaufman, and Paul Henle. He com-
pleted his doctorate in 1960. Although he had a job offer in the States, his
student visa would not allow him to accept it, so, with the help of Paul Henle,
Bernard secured a position as a junior instructor at the University of Toronto
in Canada. Three months after moving to Toronto, he and Dot had their se-
cond child, Katherine.
The letter from Ryle in 1958 had cemented Bernard’s decision to be a
professional philosopher; but where should he pursue this career next? While
he was quite comfortable in the United States and again considered looking for
a position there after having satisfied the various requirements of US visas,
neither he nor Dot wanted to sever all ties to England. A letter from Duncan-
Jones offering Bernard an assistant lectureship at the University of Birming-
ham determined their choice: they returned to the United Kingdom in 1962.
The following year, Bernard was offered a position at the University of
Sussex, where he remained until 1992. During this period, as well as having a
son, David, Bernard held visiting positions at the University of Cincinnati in
Ohio, United States, the University of Canterbury, Christ Church, New Zea-
land, the University of Western Australia, Perth, and the University of Utah,
in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. The University of Utah appointed him
in 1990 to the E. E. Ericksen Chair of Philosophy, a post that he continued to
hold, at first jointly with his Sussex appointment, until 2000.
At Sussex, Bernard found new ways to combine his interests in philoso-
phy and literature, and to blur the boundaries between logic, literature, moral-
ity and the moral life, and science, all of which has resulted in the body of
work discussed in the essays found in this volume. One of his most signifi-
cant experiences at Sussex was his participation in inter-disciplinary teaching
with members of the English Department, including A. D. Nuttall, Stephen
Medcalf, Stephen Prickett, A. A. H. Inglis, Jeremy Tambling, and Gabriel
Josipovici (British novelist, playwright, and critic).
 Foreword xv

This experience resulted in a major shift in Bernard’s work, from phi-

losophy of language and epistemology toward philosophy and literature,
eventually resulting in his first major book in this area, Inconvenient Fictions:
Literature and the Limits of Theory, which is dedicated to Josipovici in
recognition of the influence of Gabriel’s powerful sense that, in the words of
T. S. Eliot, writing is always “a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate”
(Four Quartets, “East Coker,” V).
All these elements have come together and borne fruit in Bernard’s writ-
ing. His lifelong interest in philosophy, and particularly in Wittgenstein and
the philosophy of language, has enriched and fed into his work on literature.
His early engagement with Judaism has resulted, among other things, in his
concern with the persistence and growth of antisemitism in the post-War pe-
riod, and particularly since 2001. For Bernard, philosophical problems have a
direct bearing on real life. Hence his answers to them generally have some
practical bearing, and tend to develop in ways that set him at a tangent to ac-
cepted ways of looking at things.
In the Introduction to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein
writes, “I should not want my writing to spare other people the trouble of
thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.” This
passage perfectly characterizes Bernard’s own approach to philosophy. In it,
one can see that it is no accident that Wittgenstein is the philosopher who has
most influenced Bernard’s thinking.
 PREFACE
It is fitting that this Preface is being written in the Harrisons’ garden in
Ringmer, in the Lewes District of East Sussex, England, a garden the Harri-
sons have planned and planted over the past eleven years. This is the place
where the idea for this volume came to fruition. In 2007, I had started think-
ing about the possibility of putting together a collection of papers addressing
the amazing body of work Bernard Harrison had produced over his (then)
forty-eight year career. In 2007, I mulled the idea around, but never did any-
thing about it.
Then, in early 2008, when I was visiting the Harrisons, as we were fix-
ing dinner, Bernard’s wife Dot shooed him out of the kitchen and asked me
whether I thought it would be possible to put together a Festschrift celebrat-
ing his philosophical writings. I was happy to hear that we were thinking
along the same lines, but I did not want a traditional Festschrift that merely
published personal celebratory contributions by close friends and colleagues.
Instead, I envisioned a volume that would make a genuine contribution to the
various philosophical discussions in which Bernard has engaged over the
course of his long and productive career. In order to do this, I needed his full
cooperation and participation, and I needed to assemble a group of contribu-
tors not only professionally familiar with his work, but academics who had
published materials directly related to it.
The third section, that on philosophy of language, “Language and Prac-
tice,” was the easiest to complete, since it deals with my particular area of
expertise. It is also the area of philosophy that provided the basis for my
meeting Bernard in the late 1960s, when I took my first course on Wittgen-
stein from him at the University of Cincinnati. So, this section is, in some
sense, my home. From the outset, I knew that Michael Krausz would contrib-
ute a paper that picked up on discussions in which he, Bernard, and I had been
engaged since 2000. The next contributor was Dennis Patterson, with whom
Bernard and I had exchanged e-mails regarding the appearance of Word and
World; Dennis represents the viewpoint of someone finding implications for
Bernard’s work in a field outside philosophy. I knew that Michael Morris was
deeply skeptical about Bernard’s and my work in philosophy of language, and
I anticipated that his paper would lay out challenges not only to the theory of
meaning but also to Bernard’s interpretation of Wittgenstein. In the summer of
2010, I was able to attend the meeting of the British Wittgenstein Society, held
in South Hampton, UK. Bernard was one of the speakers, and I had the oppor-
tunity to hear Danièle Moyal-Sharrock participate in the discussion of Ber-
nard’s paper. She is familiar with his work and sees it as part of an on-going
discussion of issues that cross the boundaries between philosophy of language
and philosophy and literature. Including my own contribution, I then had five
papers dealing with Bernard’s work on philosophy of language.
At the meeting in South Hampton, I also had a chance to meet Richard
Eldridge and observe him apply the sort of rigorous analytic techniques that
xviii REALITY AND CULTURE

Bernard brings to bear on philosophy of literature. I was not familiar with

Murray Baumgarten’s work until Bernard called it to my attention as he pre-
pared an address for a major conference on Charles Dickens held at the He-
brew University in Jerusalem in 2009. With the paper from John Gibson, I
then had the second section, that on philosophy and literature, “Literature and
Reality” well in hand.
The section on Bernard’s work on moral philosophy, “The Constitution
of the Moral Life” proved to be the most difficult to plan. I was familiar with
Leona Toker from her book Return from the Archipelago, which Bernard had
recommended to me when I was working on a project on memory and the
construction of personal identity. I also knew that she and Bernard corre-
sponded about Dickens and that she used his writings in both these contexts.
Edward Alexander’s work, especially on The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism, is
relevant to Bernard’s work on contemporary manifestations of antisemitism.
These two seemed to me to be a good start on this section. However, I was
concerned to find someone who could represent the theoretical aspects of
Bernard’s work on moral philosophy. When Alan Tapper asked Bernard to
contribute a paper to a volume Tapper co-edited on the work of Julius
Kovesi, the problem was solved. With his agreement to write, I had the line-
up I wanted.
Of course, this brief synopsis makes my planning look much more orga-
nized than it actually was: it would be more accurate to say that I just started
looking for people who were actively pursuing research programs that used
Bernard’s writings. Since his work covers at least the three areas represented
in this volume, I looked to provide a good balance among the contributions.
But, however one looks at it, without the support and encouragement of Mi-
chael Krausz and John Gibson, along with the sage advice of Bernard him-
self, I’m not sure I could have persevered to see this to its completion. I know
that without their encouragement, I could not have worked up the courage to
make the cold-calls to people whose writing I knew of, but whom I did not
know personally. So, five years after my talk with Dot Harrison, and with the
help of the fine contributors found in this volume and Bernard himself, the
volume is finally ready for the public.
I would like to acknowledge the support of the Department of Linguis-
tics at the University of Utah in bringing this volume to publication. I am in-
debted to my colleagues in Linguistics, especially Edward Rubin and Aniko
Csirmaz, for reading and commenting on my contribution. Finally, I would
like to thank my husband, Dudley Irish, for putting up with my preoccupation
with this project and keeping me reasonably centered in the world.

Patricia Hanna, Professor

Department of Philosophy
Department of Linguistics
University of Utah
 Prologue

REALITY AND CULTURE

Bernard Harrison
I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s
-- Blake, Jerusalem 10.20

1. What Was All That About?

Anyone who makes a profession of writing about ideas needs to look back
from time to time, and ask, “What was all that work in aid of? What have its
results, if any, amounted to?”
In my case the question is made more pressing by the apparently arbi-
trary mishmash of topics on which I have chosen to write. Over the past half-
century, among much else, I have published work on: the language of color;
the development of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy; morality and
self-interest; Jacques Derrida and deconstruction; the book of Leviticus; the
shortcomings of Bertrand Russell’s early Realism; George Orwell’s response
to Jonathan Swift’s depiction of the Houyhnhnms; the Holocaust fiction of
Aharon Appelfeld; and the phenomenon of antisemitism at the turn of the
twenty-first century.
One would hardly expect to find any strong unifying strand of thought
and argument running through a body of work seemingly as bizarrely hetero-
geneous as this, let alone one capable of uniting it into a single enterprise.
Nevertheless, there has been one, and I will try, in this opening chapter, as
briefly and baldly as I can, to say what it is. I will start by characterizing it in
very general terms, to which, as the chapter continues, I shall try to add, by
stages, more in the way of detail and sharpness of focus.

2. A Pervasive Alignment of Contrasts

Among the things that define a civilization are, on the one hand, the funda-
mental conceptual contrasts in terms of which it chooses to understand its
world, and on the other the ways in which these guiding contrasts are, at one
time or another, generally understood to align with one another. We, for in-
stance—meaning by “we” the civilization of the West—have, since the
Greeks, understood our world and ourselves in terms, inter alia, of the con-
trast between what the Greeks called phusis (nature) and nomos (culture).
Culture, roughly speaking, covers all that responds to, or is the creation of,
2 BERNARD HARRISON

human will and desire. Nature, on the other hand, covers what is neither re-
sponsive to human desire, nor created at its behest.
A second contrast, as pervasive in Western thought as the first, and as
protean in its transformations, is that between appearance (or illusion) and
reality. What is real—or “really there”—is what contributes to, augments, the
description of the contents of the universe. What merely appears, on the other
hand—what is, or turns out to be, in the end, mere dream work or illusion—in
no way augments the tally of really existing things.
Earlier ages saw these two contrasts as independent of one another. Cul-
ture might deal in realities—the city, or justice, or friendship, say—as robust-
ly as nature, for its part, might trade in illusions or (mere) appearances, in the
shape of mirages, say, or dreams, or phantoms, or the rainbow.
As a result of the intellectual revolutions of the past four centuries, how-
ever, and for complex reasons, our culture has tended increasingly to see the-
se two contrasts as strictly and systematically aligned, thus:

Nature Culture
Reality Illusion
Objectivity Subjectivity

I will call this, for convenience of later reference, the alignment of cul-
ture with subjectivity. Insofar as we accept its fundamental justice, we move
towards seeing reality as exclusively the province of nature, and culture as
exclusively a realm of appearance, or illusion, in which arbitrary convention,
feeling, taste, subjective preference, replace, or usurp, the thrones occupied,
in all studies concerned with Nature, by computation, empirical verification
and objective judgment.
All my work, for the past fifty-odd years, regardless of its apparent di-
versity of topic and argument, has been devoted to a single purpose: that of
discovering arguments capable of contesting, and if possible destabilizing, the
common perception of the above alignment as both rigorously exclusive and
intellectually inescapable.

3. Culture, Illusion, and the Meaning of Life

Why should that enterprise be considered an important, or even an interesting

one? One reason is that the putatively exclusive alignment of reality with na-
ture, and of culture with illusion, works to promote certain kinds of peculiarly
Western, and peculiarly modern, kinds of pessimism about the possibility of
finding, as people say, “meaning” in human life. One well-known locus
classicus for pessimism of the kind I have in mind is Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel
La Nausée ([1938] 1995). Anny, a former mistress of Sartre’s anti-hero
Roquentin, has lost her belief in the existence of the “perfect moments” that,
for her, provided a reason for living, which she has lost because such mo-
 Reality and Culture 3

ments have come to seem to her, one and all, to be illusory and unreal: things
in which one can continue to believe, if one does manage to believe, only by
a continual, willed, suspension of disbelief:

“I . . . I am outliving myself,” she repeats dully. What can I say to her?

Do I know any reasons for living? . . . “Well, what about the theatre? . . .
You used to say that you wanted to act because on the stage it must be
possible to obtain perfect moments!” . . . “A little, now and then: never
very strongly. The main thing, for all of us, was the black hole in front
of us, at the bottom of which there were people we couldn’t see; to them
we were obviously presenting a perfect moment. But, they didn’t live it;
it unfolded in front of them. And do you think that we, the actors, lived
inside it? In the end it wasn’t anywhere, either on one side of the foot-
lights or the other, it didn’t exist; and yet everyone was thinking about
it. So you see, my dear,” she says in a drawling, almost vulgar tone of
voice, “I dropped the whole thing.” (Sartre, 1995, pp. 216–217)

Weltschmerz (world weariness) of this general kind has become something

of a cliché of modern French literature. Muriel Barbery’s 2006 bestselling novel
L’élégance du Hérisson (The Elegance of the Hedgehog), for instance, contains
a comic version of Sartre’s Anny in the shape of the frighteningly self-
conscious twelve year old fille à Papa (little rich girl) Paloma. For her, the Big
Question, the one that must be answered, if she is not to conclude her life on her
thirteenth birthday by setting her parents’ apartment on fire and committing
suicide, is: “Vous croyez que la vie a un sens? (Do you believe that life has
meaning?)” (p. 338).
But such feelings of emptiness, of unreality, of the viciously “invented”
or “make-believe” character of everything we imagine makes a human life
worth living are peculiar neither to France nor to the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries. They have a philosophical history stretching back at least to
the seventeenth (it is no accident that Sartre was, and Barbéry is, among other
things, a philosopher).

4. Reductionism and the Felt Absence of Meaning

A powerful impetus is contributed to Anny’s way of looking at things, for

instance, by the philosophical enterprise of reductionism (originating in phi-
losophy, but widespread across the entire map of contemporary culture). At
the most basic level, reductionism is the enterprise or project of purging hu-
man thought of any idea, or concept, not solidly based in sensory experience.
It came into European thought originally by way of the anglicized Cartesian-
ism of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1690),
with its insistence that “complex ideas,” if they are not to be dismissed as
4 BERNARD HARRISON

phantoms of the mind, must be capable of analysis into terms of “simple

ideas” originating in experience.
Locke calls ideas once traced, in this way, to their origins in experience,
“determined.” His ideal is that “when any man uses a term he may have in his
mind a determined idea which he makes it the sign of” (Epistle to the Reader,
ibid.). Where a man cannot do this, he says:

He in vain pretends to clear and distinct ideas; it is plain his are not so;
and therefore there can be expected nothing but obscurity and confusion
where such terms are made use of which have not such a precise deter-
mination. (Ibid.)

This strand in Locke’s thought proved to have enormous staying power.

It was taken up and impressively developed by David Hume, Jeremy Ben-
tham, William James, C. S. Peirce, and others in the empiricist tradition in the
two following centuries. It received a further enormous boost in the last cen-
tury from the Vienna Circle positivism of Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick and
others, popularized in the English-speaking world in the 1930s by A. J. Ayer
in Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), and today furnishes the groundwork
of a great many ongoing philosophical enterprises. Nor is this influence sur-
prising or undeserved. There is indeed nothing but “obscurity and confusion,”
or worse, to be expected from taking seriously many ideas that have at times
powerfully dominated this or that landscape of human culture: the ideas of
“witch,” or “demonic possession,” or “Aryan race,” or “law of history,” for
instance. No doubt, one way of seeing why they denote nothing real is to ask,
with William James, for the “cash value in experiential terms” (1907, Lecture
2) of alleged truths employing them.

5. The Real as the Extra-Human

The trouble with this otherwise unexceptionable proposition lies in what it

seems to imply about the relationship of our ideas, or concepts, to reality.
Sensory experience, when it is not erroneous or hallucinatory, is, by defini-
tion, free from any element of interpretation or wish fulfillment on the part of
the observer. It reveals to observers what would continue to exist even if they
themselves were to cease to exist. In that sense, it reveals to them the content
of “extra-human” reality. The burden of the long tradition of empiricist reduc-
tionism summarized by James’s graphic metaphor of cash value is thus that a
content can be supposed to designate something real only if it designates
some aspect of the extra-human.
The exclusiveness of the alignment, respectively, of reality with extra-
human nature, and of culture with mere appearance, or illusion, seems to fol-
low as an immediate consequence. If reality can only be encountered in the
content of sensory experience, then the activity of the mind in the invention
 Reality and Culture 5

and constitution of concepts can serve, in itself, to generate only the concep-
tual equivalent of smoke and mirrors: That is to say, the mind is impotent in
itself to add a single item to the tally of real things.
Of course, the creative impotence of the mind is a main point of agree-
ment between Locke and Sartre, which is no doubt one reason why Sartre,
alone among twentieth century French and German authors in the tradition of
existential phenomenology, succeeded in reaching a wide and sympathetic
English readership in “mainstream” academic philosophy. For Locke, the
impotence of the mind consists in its inability to imagine for itself a new
“simple idea,” its conceptual activity consisting solely in combining and re-
combining those derived from experience. For Sartre, the impotence of the
mind to create anything real, anything possessed of Being, as he would put it,
is a consequence of its own lack of Being. The mind, or Dasein, to use the
terminology Sartre borrows from Martin Heidegger, distorting it in the pro-
cess, is no more than a vagrant, floating power of denial. Its power is limited
to contrasting some arbitrarily selected this with some equally arbitrarily cho-
sen that, to give, by means of these essentially factitious contrasts, essentially
fictive, factitious kinds of structure and meaning to human life.
In light of these thoughts, I can perhaps now cross another bridge in the
process of clarifying what I take myself to have been up to, philosophically,
for the past half-century. Indeed, I have been trying to disturb the common-
place alignments widely understood to hold between reality and nature, cul-
ture and illusion. But beyond that, I have been attempting to do so in specific
ways: by finding arguments capable of subverting the widespread belief in
the impotence of human ingenuity as expressed in the constitution of culture
to create anything that can reasonably be regarded as “really existing,” and by
making a contribution of its own to the roster of what Bertrand Russell liked
to call the constituents of reality.

6. Descartes’s Project and the Privileging of the Individual Mind

One might wonder why, in developing these initial distinctions, I have chosen
to contrast nature with culture, rather than, as most post-Renaissance philoso-
phy has tended to do, with “mind,” meaning by that the actual minds, of
consciousnesses, of individual persons taken collectively. The reason is that
cutting the cards that way encourages the conviction that everything capable
of giving meaning to human life both exists and originates within the bounda-
ries of the individual mind. That conviction—according to me—far from con-
tributing to the solution of the problem I have been outlining, contributes
largely to its perceived intractability. The persuasive power of the conviction
that everything that can give meaning to life is internal to the internal mind is
mainly a consequence of the determining role played by the philosophy of
René Descartes in directing the future course of European philosophy.
6 BERNARD HARRISON

Descartes introduced into European philosophy two principles that con-

tinue to dominate it. The first is that the central task of philosophy is the criti-
cal examination of the grounds and validity of claims to possess knowledge
of the truth of propositions. I will label this the Principle of Grounding.
The second, in effect, encapsulates the displacement, in post-Renais-
sance European thought, of the power to validate from collective intellectual
or religious authority to independent inquiry. It condenses that impulse into
the thought that whatever it is that confers validity on claims to knowledge
must be something in principle internal to the mind of the individual knower,
in a sense that entails its independence from that individual’s relationships to
others, and from any conventional or institutional arrangements or practices
that such relationships might involve. Let us call this the Principle of Inter-
nality. It says, in effect, that whatever processes can satisfy the Principle of
Grounding must, in order to do so, proceed internally to the individual mind.
These two principles place rather narrow limits on the kinds of solace
that could intelligibly be sought by someone such as Sartre’s Anny or Bar-
béry’s Paloma, who were tragically haunted by a sense of the factitious, the
arbitrary, the ungrounded, and the “merely conventional” character of every-
thing that sets off human life as potentially valuable in human terms against
the blankly inhuman flux of natural necessity presented by the extra-human
world. Take, for example, the consoling belief that there exists such a thing as
“duty.” In L’élégance du hérisson, the philosophically astute infant Paloma has
this to say of her father: “[Papa] still believes that something exists called Du-
ty, and although in my opinion his belief is chimerical, it protects him from the
debility of cynicism” (Barbery, 2006, p. 62; my translation).
The issue here is exactly the one upon which I have been attempting to
focus: is duty real? Do duties in some sense really exist, or is the notion as
“chimerical,” as much a fantasy of human self-delusion, as those of “Aryan
race” or “demonic possession”?
How are we to address this question? The Principle of Grounding tells
us that the problem is one of validating a claim to knowledge: specifically, to
knowledge of the real existence of duties. What is required to settle the mat-
ter, therefore, is some means of definitively establishing the truth, either of
the statement S, that duties “really exist,” or the truth of some other statement
 whose truth entails the truth of S.
However, the Principle of Internality imposes the further requirement
that any process capable of grounding the truth of S or  must proceed in-
ternally to the minds of the individual inquirers, in a sense of “internal” that
excludes any consideration rooted in the nature of the social order to which
the individuals belong.
Finally, the general empiricist argument that a concept can only be held
to designate something real if it can be shown to possess James’s cash value
in experiential terms places a further constraint upon inquiry.
 Reality and Culture 7

These three requirements working together entail that a concept like

“duty,” which is evidently a creation of the human mind, can be held to des-
ignate something real only if it can be shown to possess a descriptive content
capable of being encountered by the individual mind in its sensory experi-
ence: that is to say, in its experience of the extra-human.
This is not merely a difficult challenge to meet. It is, clearly, a challenge
that cannot in principle be met, because the terms in which it is formulated
are mutually contradictory. It is because this series of Cartesian and post-
Cartesian requirements that I just canvassed broadly define what Western
culture understands by the term “critical reflection” that Bernard Williams—
though I air elsewhere some serious doubts about the ultimate soundness of
his argument (2012, pp. 37–40)—was right to argue, in Ethics and the Limits
of Philosophy, that the merely assumed moral certainties of “traditional socie-
ties,” such as Paloma’s Papa’s touching belief that “something exists called
Duty,” cannot survive the corrosive power of philosophical criticism. As Wil-
liams puts it, “critical reflection can destroy knowledge” (1985, p. 167).
To sum up, one of the main supports of the alignment of reality with Na-
ture, and of culture with mere appearance has long been the Cartesian doc-
trine that the central problems of philosophy concern the possibility of vali-
dating propositionally formulable claims to knowledge from a standpoint
interior to the individual mind.
Among other things, that doctrine automatically serves to devalue the
claim of any collective body, institution, or collection of social practices as
being either in itself a source of knowledge or, in itself, creative of “reali-
ties” in any serious, literal sense of that term. It is this more than anything
else, I think, that has made modern philosophy, as the Cambridge critic F.
R. Leavis believed, profoundly anti-literary. Writing recently, Stefan
Collini has this to say about the influence exerted by Leavis’s ideas be-
tween the 1920s and the end of the 1960s:

Ultimately, the measure of Leavis’s impact had less to do with whether

his pupils and readers shared his (emphatically positive) judgments
about Shakespeare or George Eliot, or even his (relentlessly negative)
judgments about the New Statesman and J. B. Priestley. Rather, it had to
do with whether they thought that literary criticism mattered because it,
uniquely, involved disciplined judgments about what makes for “life,”
for a fully human existence. (2012, p. 4)

Leavis, in fact, was not only of the opinion that major literary work
deals in something worth calling knowledge—that it has things to teach us
about the nature of a fully human life. He argues also (1975) that it is one of
the major forces operating to create “the human world”—to constitute, that is,
a certain department of reality itself: human reality.
8 BERNARD HARRISON

Of course, the Cartesian doctrines that have occupied us for the past few
paragraphs entail the absurdity of both these claims. If the reality of things
can be encountered only through attention to the content of sensory experi-
ence, it follows that it can neither be encountered nor created through the
elaboration of literary fictions, whose function, therefore, can only ever be to
amuse, console or mislead. It was Leavis’s powerful sense of the centrality of
those doctrines to the English-speaking philosophy of his day that led him to
regard the critic as necessarily an “anti-philosopher.”
Part of my work has been devoted to disarming the pessimism of this
judgment. My aim has been to show that—and how—there can be a philoso-
phy that, while maintaining the standards of rigor and clarity in argument that
have distinguished the English-speaking intellectual tradition since Hume,
nevertheless allows rational breathing space to the convictions, concerning
the power of literary art both to illuminate, and in part and at times actually
to constitute, human reality, so tenaciously defended in general terms by
Leavis. Some of Leavis’s more specific views are in turn defended (in the
ways sketched in a subsequent essay in the current volume by Danièle
Moyal-Sharrock) in two chapters of my What is Fiction For? (forthcoming
2014, chap. 4, 5).

7. Why Not the Continentals?

The Western philosophical tradition might be thought to offer, despite what I

have just said concerning the pervasiveness of the Cartesian standpoint and
its various glories and miseries, a number of ways of representing, on the one
hand, the mind as a source of knowledge, and on the other, mental operations
as capable in principle of constituting reality. They include, for instance, Pla-
tonism and many forms of post-Renaissance rationalism, including the Ger-
man transcendental idealism that reaches its pinnacle in G. W. F. Hegel. In
the twentieth century, they include the transcendental phenomenology of Ed-
mund Husserl, some types of existential phenomenology, including those of
Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and even, in certain ways, such
“post-Modernist” writers as Derrida or Michel Foucault. Some of these recent
writers—Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida, for instance—are pro-
foundly anti-Cartesian in their thinking. Others, such as Husserl, are, on the
contrary, deeply committed to the Cartesian project.
The relationship of this entire field of Continental philosophical debate
to the English-speaking tradition—running from Descartes and Locke by way
of the classical British empiricists to the analytic philosophy initiated by Rus-
sell, Gottlob Frege, G. E. Moore, and Wittgenstein, and today dominant in
most philosophy departments in the English-speaking world—has historically
been, with the possible exception of Platonism, an uneasy one. There have
been occasional attempts to domesticate, as it were, individual Continental
writers into the English-speaking tradition. These have been visible, for in-
 Reality and Culture 9

stance in the influence of Immanuel Kant on the work of Peter Strawson, of

Husserl on Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind ([1949] 1959), or of Hegel on
the work of John McDowell or Robert Brandom. Regardless, the suspicions
of profoundly Empiricist minds with regard to the a priori in any of its forms,
however ingenious, has, on the whole, sufficed to keep the gates closed.
The judgment implicit in that rejection is one with which, in broad out-
line at least and despite many specific caveats and local indulgences, includ-
ing admiration for Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, I would not quarrel. To that
extent, I am a child of the English-speaking tradition. I have not found my
main inspiration as a philosopher, however, in that tradition’s most characteris-
tic recent representatives—Carnap, say, or W. V. O. Quine, Nelson Goodman,
Donald Davidson, or Michael Dummett. Rather, I have found it in the work of
the one great continental outsider whom it has been compelled by the history
of its twentieth century development to embrace as its own: Wittgenstein.

8. Reading Wittgenstein for Arguments

Wittgenstein’s work is, notoriously, aphoristic and arcane to an extent that

encourages exegetical disagreement on a grand scale. Though Wittgenstein
worried incessantly that his work was misunderstood, his cavalier disregard
for the usual means of preventing misunderstanding is brandished with cheer-
ful insouciance in the opening sentence of his Cambridge lectures for the
Michaelmas Term of 1934, “What we say will be easy, but to know why we
say it will be very difficult” (1979, p. 77).
At the moment, the fashion in Wittgenstein exegesis—pioneered three
decades ago by Richard Rorty’s celebration of Wittgenstein as an “edifying”
rather than a “systematic” philosopher (1980, pp. 367–368 and passim), and
now represented by James Conant, Alice Crary, Cora Diamond, and others of
the “new Wittgensteinians” (Crary and Read, 2000)—is to read Wittgenstein
as a principled opponent of anything in the nature of philosophical “argu-
ment.” My approach has been the contrary one, which I share with some oth-
er recent interpreters, including Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (2007). Its founding
impulse is to take it for granted that Wittgenstein’s work, like that of any oth-
er major philosopher, is rich in arguments and to try to articulate them by a
reading that, eschewing pleasing but premature generalities, stays obstinately
close enough to the detail of his admittedly difficult texts to stand some
chance of exposing their workings.
I learned this approach from a member of Wittgenstein’s original Cam-
bridge circle, Peter Geach, whose student I was fortunate enough to be at
Birmingham University during the mid-1950s. I was attracted from the outset
by Wittgenstein’s anti-Cartesianism, which is of a profoundly original type,
entirely distinct from any of the Continental writers I mentioned earlier. But I
was never tempted to suppose—an illusion popular at the time, though never
shared by Wittgenstein himself—that Wittgenstein’s texts offer the final word
10 BERNARD HARRISON

on any philosophical issue. “My” Wittgenstein is the man who writes glumly
in the Preface to those parts of the Philosophical Investigations (1958) that
issued whole from his hands, as distinct from being posthumously assembled,
“After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into . . . a
whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write
would never be more than philosophical remarks,” and who adds, “I should
not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possi-
ble, to stimulate someone to thought of his own” (Preface, pp. ixe–xe).
In my work, I have tried to remain faithful to this last request of Witt-
genstein. That is to say, I have tried to arrive at some “thoughts of my own”
that build on and extend the insights I take myself to have gained from his
work. At the same time, wherever I take myself to have discovered in him an
argument of serious moment neglected by the exegetical tradition, I have tried
to make clear in print, by close textual exegesis, both where—and how—it is
to be found in his work, and what role it plays there.

9. Wittgenstein’s Anti-Cartesianism

Quite early in reading Wittgenstein I was struck, like many others, by two
aspects of his thought in the Philosophical Investigations that directly conflict
with the two Cartesian principles, the Principle of Grounding and the Princi-
ple of Internality, identified earlier in the present chapter (§ 6).
The first is its anti-reductionism. Descartes’s philosophy rests, in effect,
on the idea that sentences expressing doubt, including skeptical, or “philo-
sophical” doubt, always express genuine propositions, and hence can be an-
swered by appeal to equally genuine propositions, of contrary content, which
happen, for some reason, to be not merely true, but indubitably so. This sets
in train the philosophical project, characteristic of the empiricist tradition, of
determining what proportion of our everyday beliefs can be rescued from the
corrosive operations of skeptical doubt by “reductively” redefining them in
terms of some class of putatively indubitable statements: characteristically
those of sensory experience. That in turn leads very rapidly to the conclusion
that, since very little of what we ordinary take as “real” in human terms can
be reductively saved in this way, the bulk of it must be consigned to the cate-
gory of smoke and mirrors: of consoling illusion.
Wittgenstein’s response to this entire project is to deny the fundamental
claim on which it rests; namely, the claim that sentences expressing skeptical
doubt express genuine propositions. This move is announced from the outset of
his philosophical career. At Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.51:

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to

raise doubts where no questions can be asked. . . . For doubt can exist
 Reality and Culture 11

only where a question exists, and an answer only where something can
be said. (1961, p. 149)

This becomes a leitmotiv of his later work. Much argument in Wittgenstein’s

later work is devoted to the precise identification of the point at which further
reductive debunking of this or that aspect of human life becomes otiose—the
point at which, as he sometimes puts it, “the spade turns”—because the
doubts that supposedly motivate it concerning its interpersonal objectivity (its
reality) become, at that point, empty, vacuous (Harrison, 1991b; Moyal-
Sharrock, 2007).
At such points, our attempts to describe the human condition reach bed-
rock. A range of fundamental beliefs turns out to be, in principle, unchal-
lengeable, not because all challenges to them can be seen off by appeal to
some chimerical deus ex machina of propositionally formulable certainty, but
because all supposed challenges to them turn out to be internally incoherent
ways that subvert intelligible propositional formulation on their part. If the
“bedrock” beliefs that remain standing at this point include some, such as the
belief in the reality of the conscious experiences of others, that the Cartesian
tradition in philosophy tempts us to regard as “naïve” or “uncritical,” then so
much the worse for the Cartesian tradition.
The second aspect of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy that I found attrac-
tive is its attack on what philosophical shorthand calls “privacy.” Two doc-
trines of Descartes are central both to the Principle of Internality and to the
Cartesian tradition in Western philosophy, including such recent manifesta-
tions of that as Husserl’s version of phenomenology. The first is that the ex-
perienced content of the conscious life of the individual subject is “private” in
the sense of being directly cognitively accessible only to its possessor. The
other is that access by the individual subject both to knowledge and to the
resources of conceptual thought, is logically independent of the actual exist-
ence either of the material world or of other persons. For the Cartesian,
knowledge and meaning themselves are “private” possessions, in the sense
that they originate in, and are creatures of, the timeless inner life of the know-
ing subject, rather than “public” possessions of an historically developing
human community.
Wittgenstein, in his later work, attacks this entire complex of ideas in a
way that had been wholly unfamiliar to the Western philosophical tradition
up to that point. He does so by arguing, in effect, that to form a concept—in
effect, to bestow a meaning upon a general name in a language—is not a mat-
ter of using it to label a recurrent feature of experience, but rather of assign-
ing it a role in some socially devised practice, or “language game”
(Sprachspiele). If that is so, then, pace Descartes, access to conceptual
thought, and hence to propositionally formulable knowledge, is not, after all,
logically independent of membership of a human community. There can be
12 BERNARD HARRISON

no such thing as a “private language,” in the sense of “private” introduced to

philosophy by Descartes.

10. The Basic Structure of the Enterprise

A. Color Qualia

The project of contesting the alignment of culture with subjectivity has, as I

admitted at the outset, involved me in a degree of disrespect, at every level,
for the conventional boundaries of disciplines. That in no way thrills me,
since I am only too well aware of the reason why such boundaries exist, and
why they are commonly regarded as permeable only to charlatanry. My project,
whatever one makes of it, divided from the outset, more or less independently of
my will, into a pair of projects, one in epistemology and philosophy, the other,
this time interdisciplinary from the outset, bringing together literary studies and
moral philosophy. The first produced my Form and Content (1973), with
supplementary argument in a later essay, “Identity, Predication, and Color”
(1986). These works concern the vexed philosophical question of whether
what are sometimes called color qualia—the sensations of color that we actu-
ally experience, as distinct from the physical properties of light in terms of
which physical optics accounts for them—possess any objective reality, and if
so, of what kind. The importance of the issue lies in part in the fact that, since
color qualia appear on the face of it to be conscious states, the question of
their place in an objective description of reality invokes the larger issue of the
ultimate reality of consciousness itself.
Negative answers follow several well-trodden routes. It has been sug-
gested that statements about color qualia are reducible without loss of mean-
ing to statements about wavelength. Others suggest that such statements are
topic-neutral, in the sense that the only objectively verifiable statements we
can make concerning qualitative color concern, in fact, the relative similari-
ties or dissimilarities of color samples. Still others say that the conscious ex-
perience of color has roughly the same relationship to objective reality as do
hallucinations, or other errors of sense.
Ordinary people, uninitiated into the complexities of philosophical
doubt, tend to assume that the reason why discussions about color qualia (for
instance, whether the insipid pale blue of the curtains clashes with the peculi-
arly acid yellow of the carpet) can proceed on a more or less rational basis is
that color qualia are objectively accessible in common to different observers.
One main object of Form and Content was to defend this un-
philosophical belief by showing how, and why, it is possible for objective
judgments to exist, not just about (the relative similarities and dissimilarities
of) color samples, but about colors.
The argument hinges on two obvious facts about the functioning of color
names, such as “red” or “green.” The first is that basic color names such as
 Reality and Culture 13

these plainly do not name single discriminable recurrent qualia. They name an
indefinitely large range of such qualia (specific color presentations, each exhib-
iting a different combination of hue, saturation, and tonality), some of which
may be unknown to any given competent user of the name. The second is that
speakers of a given language L somehow learn to apply each basic color name
Nc of L in a way that matches the practice of other speakers. They achieve this
capability even though they can only have been taught expressly to associate Nc
with a given quale (color presentation) P in the case of a very small proportion
of the total number composing the extension of Nc, and even though the given
presentation about which a given speaker is called upon to exercise this talent
may, on occasion, be previously unfamiliar to that speaker.
The problem is to account for these capabilities. The answer that I pro-
pose is of a new type, though obvious enough once encountered. Learning to
use color names must involve each speaker learning a practice that matches
color presentations to color names. That will suffice to make available an
explanation of the ability of different speakers to independently match one
another’s assignments of color names, even in the case of new or unfamiliar
color presentations. The explanation will simply be that all speakers of a given
language L make use of the same practice for matching presentations to basic
color names. I argue that such a practice can only work in one way: by select-
ing a range of sets of “focal” color presentations, Sblue, Syellow, Sred, Sgreen, each
set correlated with a single basic color name, and applying the rule, “if
presentation P is relatively more similar to the focal set associated with Nn
than it is to any of the other named focal sets, then P takes the color name Nn.”
The possibility of operating such a practice implies, evidently, that color
language is not “topic-neutral,” since a precondition for its operation is that
color qualia exhibit properties of relative similarity and dissimilarity to one
another, and hence are not, after all, devoid of properties. Hence, also, the
fact that different speakers obtain comparable results from operating the prac-
tice, in terms of conformity of judgment in color naming, gives each speaker
good reason to conclude that other speakers see the same colors as the speak-
er sees. It does so because the practice operates on the entire field of dis-
criminable color presentations, a field that turns out in practice to have a very
complex internal geometry of relationships of relative similarity. (This can be
verified by inspecting a Munsell color chart of surface colors displaying any-
thing approaching the full range of hues in all their variations of saturation
and tonality). In consequence, the types of skeptical hypothesis normally sup-
posed by philosophers to create problems for the everyday assumption that
colors are objects of perception as publicly accessible as physical objects fail
to yield the desired result. What the skeptic requires, to yield his preferred
result where the operation of the color naming practice is concerned, is a sys-
tematic reversal of all or some part of the total array of surface colors that
would come out neutral with respect to the practice. But, as I argue in Form
and Content, the actual geometry of the total color array makes that impossi-
14 BERNARD HARRISON

ble. If the geometry of the array did make that possible, the possibility would
be apparent to any observer. The consequence would be, not that our supposed
ability to refer in common to colors would be illusory, but that, since the col-
or naming practice would in that case be inoperable, the language of color,
and with it the possibility of reference to color, would never have arisen in
the first place.
Let me now try to tie this argument back to the basic project, of contest-
ing the plausibility of alignment of culture with subjectivity, of which it consti-
tuted an initial phase. The thesis of the alignment of culture with subjectivity
inclines us to think that objectivity and the social construction of concepts are
intrinsically incompatible notions. What the argument of Form and Content
inclines one to think is that, on the contrary, objectivity is logically dependent
on certain kinds of conceptual construction, in the sense of being unobtaina-
ble without it. The evidence that we actually employ to determine whether
others see colors as we do is what they say, in determinate contexts, concern-
ing the colors of objects present to us both. What gives their remarks eviden-
tial status is the fact that our common language requires each of us to operate
in common with the same set of procedures (as Wittgenstein would say, a
common language game) for matching color presentations to color names.
Those procedures work in terms of properties that can only belong to con-
scious states (the relative blueness of two shades of mauve, for instance).
Hence they also have the effect of precipitating into the common world of the
objectively specifiable, as it were, phenomena that the Cartesian tradition in
philosophy must, by its own logic, treat as “private,” that is to say as in prin-
ciple cognitively inaccessible to any mind save that of their possessor. The
threat the argument presents to the alignment of culture with subjectivity is
that it makes so-called mental states, in the shape of color qualia, as objective-
ly accessible in common to different speakers as more obviously “physical”
ones. It does so through the operation of something—the practices underlying
the part of our language that deals with color—quite obviously a “cultural
construct.” It rides roughshod over the Principle of Internality: the Cartesian
principle that anything capable of conferring validity on a claim to knowledge
on the part of an individual knower must be something in principle independ-
ent of that individual’s relationships to others, and independent also of any
conventional or institutional arrangements or practices that such relationships
might involve.

B. Duty and Interest

I found myself, at around the same period, exploring an exactly parallel case
of interplay between interpersonal objectivity and its culturally constructed
basis, in a study of the eighteenth century novelist Henry Fielding. This time
the philosophical issue concerned the ontological status—“chimerical” (in
Paloma’s words), or real, and if the latter, in what sense “real”?—of duties.
 Reality and Culture 15

The modern conviction that duty is a chimerical notion originates with

Hume. Famously, in A Treatise of Human Nature, he asks whether “Moral
Distinctions are deriv’d from Reason” ([1739] 1978, p. 455) and answers that
question in the negative. His argument is that the only way of showing moral
distinctions to be rational in origin would be to demonstrate that they capture
relationships that really exist in nature. If they did mark such differences, then
they would apply wherever, in nature, such relationships recur. But with mor-
al distinctions this is not the case. When an oak sapling overtops its parent
tree and kills it “[there is] wanting,” as Hume puts it, “[no] relation, which is
discoverable in parricide or ingratitude” (ibid., p. 467). Yet no user of these
moral terms would suppose that this set of circumstances constitutes a case
either of parricide or ingratitude. It follows, Hume argues in effect, that such
moral distinctions merely record the fact that a given set of relationships
between human actors excites in us, for reasons connected, on the one hand
with natural feelings of benevolence and on the other with the schooling in
the demands of society inflicted by our upbringing, sentiments of approval
or disapproval.
Hume’s strategy here, it seems to me, both furthers and enshrines what I
have called the alignment of culture with subjectivity. He takes it for granted
that unless moral distinctions can be grounded in (extra-human) Nature, they
can capture no more than a set of essentially subjective emotional commit-
ments on the part of individual minds.
Of course, a further presupposition of Hume’s thought here is the
Lockeian one that culture—the realm of interpersonal interaction and concep-
tual constitution—can possess neither ontological nor epistemic significance:
is impotent either to yield knowledge or to create realities. Hume, along with
the rest of the post-Cartesian tradition in Western philosophy, up to and in-
cluding Kant, treats an inquiry into the nature of moral concepts as one com-
ponent, or phase, of the Cartesian project of self-scrutiny. That project invites
each of us, so far as we pretend to rational independence of mind, to examine
not only our factual beliefs, but also our moral beliefs, to determine what, if
anything, warrants the uncritical confidence we repose in them.
Once one takes up such a stance, its possible outcomes appear to be re-
stricted to only two: either our beliefs, and the conceptual distinctions in
terms of which we frame them, are forced upon us by the content of experi-
ence or, they are instilled in us, without the experiential warrant that they
plainly lack, by essentially social processes of education and acculturation.
Hume’s argument is that all moral beliefs and distinctions—all those, at least
going beyond such “natural virtues” as the instinctive tendency to feel discom-
fort in the presence of pain suffered by others—fall into the latter category.
We are thus confronted with a further refinement of the contrast be-
tween Nature and culture that, because of the apparent impossibility of
grounding the latter in the former, causes Sartre’s Anny such existential an-
guish. Morality tout court, it seems, has no basis in natural reality. It is merely
16 BERNARD HARRISON

an artifact of training and acculturation, a trick of the cultural light: a power-

ful illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. Academic philosophers, being for the
most part respectable family men, have shown themselves, on the whole, re-
luctant to draw these shocking conclusions from the Humean arguments
whose apparent force they demonstrate to their students every day of the
teaching year. But another, darker tradition of European letters, including
Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nie-
tzsche, among others, has not been averse to doing so.
Hobbes and Mandeville, indeed, originated a further variation on the
skepticism about the reality of moral distinctions that continues to dominate
academic discourse on the subject. Both Leviathan (Hobbes, [1651] 1996)
and The Fable of the Bees (Mandeville, [1714] 1962) inculcate the idea that
interest, per se is, intrinsically and necessarily, opposed to morality per se.
Some such contrast seems to follow from the obvious fact that morality per se
involves restraint. Whereas it is surely conceptually broken-backed—so the
argument goes—to imagine that individual agents could conceivably be con-
strained by their interests. For the notion of interest is, surely, we tell our-
selves, as conceptually tied to the notion of freedom as that of morality is
conceptually tied to the notion of constraint. The notion of interest is, surely,
simply the notion of what an individual agent would prefer to have or to do,
and would have or do if not for the range of constraints—of intelligence,
charm, money, social position—under which individuals labor, constraints
including, among others, all those imposed by morality.
Another way of framing the same supposed insight would be to say that
interests seek, as a matter of conceptual necessary, solely the advantage of the
agent whose interests they are; whereas morality seeks to advance, not the
interests of this or that particular agent, but those of “society,” or of individu-
als in general. That, in turn, promotes an idea, which rose to dominance
among secular intellectuals in the Enlightenment and remains largely domi-
nant today: the idea that that morality, or sometimes “the highest morality,”
involves relationships, not between individual persons, but between each in-
dividual person taken singly and some supra-personal entity. Candidates for
the supra-personal source of duty have included, down the centuries, the
(Kantian) community of all rational wills, the totality of beings capable of
experiencing pleasure or pain, society in general, the human race, the Aryan
race, the nation, the proletariat, the party, and so on.
What I found in Fielding was a mind of contrary purpose to this entire
complex of views and a body of work articulating a coherent alternative to it.
Wittgenstein described the job of philosophy as “assembling reminders” of
how our conceptual system actually works. Nowadays, with that in mind, I
would describe Fielding as articulating, within the terms of a fiction, cogent
reminders of why the tradition of abstract moral philosophy, coming to birth
in his day and dominant in the universities of English-speaking countries
 Reality and Culture 17

down to the present, fails to describe the moral life as it is actually lived and
experienced by real people.
In Fielding’s great novel Tom Jones (1749), for example, the free play
of interest, far from being conceptually opposed to the constraints of duty, is
liable itself to mutate, at this or that turn of what Coleridge called “one of the
three most perfect plots ever planned” (1935, vol. 2, p. 171) into those very
constraints. A good instance of this unavoidable duality of freedom and moral
constraint, one among many in Tom Jones, is provided by the central crisis
that precipitates the eventual gathering up of the various strands of the plot.
Tom has been expelled from Paradise Hall, and faces the question of whether
to take Sophia with him and marry her in defiance of Squire Western. There
is no question that Sophia will go with him if he asks. A man un-plagued by a
Good Heart, as Fielding calls the propensity to attach a non–instrumental val-
ue to the needs of others, would doubtless take the chance offered him. Tom,
however, asks the obvious questions: “Could he support her?” No. “Would
the experience of being dragged through muddy roads and bare lodgings by a
penniless lover destroy her?” Very likely. He makes the obvious decision: to
leave alone, without her.
To minds impressed by the Enlightenment partitioning-off of interest
with freedom and morality with constraint, the obvious question to put to
Fielding is: “What could make it believable, outside a literary fiction, that a
rational agent either should, or could, allow the needs of another to override
the claims of his own interests and desires?”
Fielding’s answer to that question, I argued, is to be found in his early
novel (moral fable), Jonathan Wild ([1743] 2008). Wild was a real person, a
famous “thief-taker” of the previous century, who was able, for a fee, to “recov-
er” stolen goods only because they had been stolen in the first place by the gang
he headed, whose members, when they became troublesome, he got rid of by
turning them over to the justices and the hangman. In Wild, in other words,
Fielding has provided himself with a character for whom no other human being
possesses non-instrumental value. For him, no one is anything more than a tool
to be used while it serves and when it no longer serves, to be destroyed for
whatever further convenience its destruction may provide. The character of
Wild situates him, of course, in a philosophical controversy as old as Plato’s
Republic, concerning the relationship, if any, between self-interest and moral
virtue. One side of this dispute, Wild’s side, is represented in the Republic by
Thrasymachus, who argues that virtue is merely a web of artificial restraints
devised by the majority of weaklings in society to prevent the strong man doing
as he pleases, restraints to be kicked aside with just contempt by anyone strong
enough to ignore them. Morality and self-interest, so understood, are opposed so
radically as to make compromise impossible.
Philosophers in Fielding’s day, notably Bishop Joseph Butler, were apt
to argue, against this Thrasymachean deliverance, that self-interest is not
18 BERNARD HARRISON

merely compatible with, but actually advanced by, the practice of moral vir-
tue. Fielding makes short shrift of moral complacency of this type:

There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue
is the certain road to happiness and vice to misery, in this world. A very
wholesome and conformable doctrine, and to which we have but one ob-
jection, namely, that it is not true. (Fielding, 1749, bk. 15, chap. 1)

But this is by no means the piece of febrile cynicism that some critics have
wished to make of it. Jonathan Wild has provided Fielding with a very much
sharper and more damaging answer to Thrasymachus than Butler’s. Field-
ing’s treatment of Wild in the novel focuses on, among other things, the gains
and losses intrinsic to Wild’s Thrasymachean stance.
To grasp the force of Fielding’s answer to Thrasymachus, we need to
notice that all interests that cannot be enjoyed except at the cost of allowing
others to take on, for one, a more than instrumental significance are, ex
hypothesi, closed to Wild. The list includes not only all the interests of family
life, domestic and paternal affection, but also all those wider interests in
community affairs, ranging all the way from patriotic or political solidarity to
passionate involvement in stamp collecting, the local gardening club, or the
discussion of philosophical puzzles. Wild has, in short, gained the radical
Thrasymachean freedom (which Fielding sardonically describes as GREAT-
NESS) that leaves him entirely at liberty to pursue his own interests, but only
at the cost of being left with a strikingly reduced range of interests to pursue.
In effect, the reduction of all others to the status of mere tools reduces the
ends to which these tools are to be employed to the very small set that belong
intrinsically to the individual in abstraction from the human world: gluttony,
lust, and the exercise of power.
The problem Fielding sees, for the Thrasymacheans among us, is that
any attempt to acquire a less parsimonious array of interests, and with them
access to a less parsimonious array of potential rewards in life, must neces-
sarily involve one in relationships to others of the sort that Wild’s radical
instrumentalism debars one in principle from enjoying. Such relationships
essentially require one, as a conceptual condition of enjoying the potential
rewards of the relationship, not merely to admit intellectually the non-
instrumental value, in principle, of the abstract Other, but actually to experi-
ence entirely concrete and specific Others as non-instrumentally valuable.
Hence, equally necessarily, they expose one to the discomforts of finding
oneself no longer able to avoid taking seriously certain correlative and equal-
ly specific moral demands.
The difference between Bishop Butler’s answer to Thrasymachus and
Fielding’s should now be evident. Butler holds, comfortably enough, that
moral virtue is a means to the satisfaction of interest. Fielding takes the very
much bleaker line that the discomfort of feeling ourselves open to moral de-
 Reality and Culture 19

mands is the price we must pay, not for any increased likelihood that we shall
succeed in satisfying our interests, but merely for having the bulk of them.
That thought, a thought that, so far as I am aware, has escaped the notice
of the philosophical moralists not only of Fielding’s day but our own, never-
theless seems to me a profound one. What Fielding has noticed is that, in real
life, most of our interests are rooted in relationships with others. Such rela-
tionships must be maintained, irrespective of our success in satisfying the
correlative interests arising from them, if we are to go on merely possessing
those interests. It is the maintenance of relationships implied by the continued
possession of the bulk of our interests rather than, as Butler and others have
supposed, some notional increase in the likelihood of satisfying interests, that
renders us subject to moral constraints.
Hume bequeathed to modern philosophy the idea that a moral concept is
formed by attaching to a purely descriptive notion a certain emotional tone or
response—of approval or disapproval—and that no rational ground can be
assigned for refusing to assign to any given descriptive content one of these
emotional responses rather than the other. There is nothing, for instance, in
the brute factual nature of mass extermination (from an earthquake, say) that
makes it any more rational to deplore it for the pain it causes than to applaud
it for reducing the excess population.
It would follow, pari passu, that there is nothing in the brute nature of
Tom’s Sophia that could make it any more rational for him to bridle his desire
for her than to use her and discard her. The answer to this suggested by Field-
ing’s narrative is that what motivates the former choice for Tom is not So-
phia’s nature, but the nature of the relationship between them, given that he
wishes to preserve that relationship; naturally enough, since it, and not bare
lust, is the source of his interest in her.
In looking to “natural relationships,” then, as the sole means of provid-
ing a rational basis for moral notions such as “parricide,” Hume, pursuing the
logic of the empiricist version of Cartesianism he has imbibed from Locke
and George Berkeley, is simply looking in the wrong direction. For insight
into the logical character of moral notions, Hume should be looking not to
natural relations but to moral ones. He should be looking, that is to say, not
out and away from the human towards non-human reality, but rather towards
the possibilities created, through the structures and conventions current in
specific societies, for human individuals to acquire interests whose possession
depends on the maintenance of relationships. Only by looking in that direc-
tion can one begin to grasp the specific requirements of moral restraint ren-
dered necessary to the maintenance of this or that relationship by its specific
nature. The peculiar horror of parricide as a crime derives, after all, not from
the natural, genetic relation between parent and child, but from the annihila-
tion that it visits upon the moral relationship between parent and child: its
destruction, at one blow, of all the possibilities of human personal growth and
exchange of goods implicit in that relationship.
20 BERNARD HARRISON

It takes a good deal of formal philosophical training before people begin

to find the so-called fact-value distinction too obvious to be seriously ques-
tioned. Less apt pupils continue to feel, obscurely, that something in Hume’s
argument must be wrong, even if they cannot quite see what it could be. Such
notions as duty, trust, betrayal, mendacity, and responsibility (or to take ex-
amples from Fielding, prudence, love, meanness, “goodness of heart”), they
feel, bind together description and evaluation more closely than Hume can
allow. Williams calls them, for his reason, “thick moral concepts” (1985, p.
129). The suggestion I found myself encountering in Fielding suggests a way
of accounting for the mysterious “thickness” of such notions. They are
“thick” because they capture what must, in the nature of things, be done, or
avoided, if relationships, and the patterns of interest and satisfaction bound up
with them, are to be maintained.
But what the phrase “in the nature of things,” in this way of putting it,
gestures toward, is not brute, inhuman nature. Rather, it gestures toward the
“second nature” that collective human ingenuity, operating over long histori-
cal periods, has brought into being through the devising of complicatedly
interlocking systems of collective practice. These, in turn, form the founda-
tion of still more complex arrays of interests and courses of life that once pos-
sessed and pursued, their possessors wish to go on possessing and pursuing.
These ideas raise doubts over the plausibility of alignment of culture
with subjectivity that exactly parallel those raised by the arguments of Form
and Content. If what it is to be an objective reality, rather than a subjective
fantasy, is to be a matter of common, interpersonal experience, something
capable of being discussed and examined in a common, interpersonally un-
derstandable language, then the phenomena captured by such terms as “duty,”
“trust,” “betrayal,” “mendacity,” “prudence,” “love,” “mean-spiritedness,” are
objective realities. But their status as objective realities is not solely a func-
tion of the inhuman, extra-cultural Realities studied by the natural sciences.
Rather, it is a function of the interaction between two sorts of thing: (1) hu-
man potentialities that are indeed “natural” in that sense, including physical
and emotional needs and proclivities shared with other primate species and
indeed with other animals, and (2) the interpersonally devised practices and
institutional structures that constitute the world of culture. Culture, in short,
contrary to what Locke argued and most subsequent empiricists have sup-
posed, is not ontically passive any more than it is epistemically passive. It
operates upon the materials of brute nature in ways that introduce new types
of entity into the world.

11. Securing the Foundations

My Form and Content (1973) and Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” (1975), as
bizarrely different in ostensible topics as they must seem, given the underlying
identity of their philosophical concerns, laid down the foundations upon which
 Reality and Culture 21

all my subsequent work has been built. They provide a foundation traversed,
however, by two very substantial cracks, or fissures. The first concerns the
relationship between literature and philosophy, or more generally, “ideas.”
Academic philosophers are apt to assume that their conclusions regarding
literature face no threat from the work even of major literary figures, since in
philosophy, or “theory” in general, positions stand or fall by argument, and—
as a young British colleague once put it to me,—“there are no arguments in a
novel.” Even in literary studies, the term “novel of ideas” is held fairly general-
ly to connote a novel that employs, ironically or otherwise, ideas gleaned from
this or that strand of the European intellectual tradition, rather than one that
actually intervenes in that tradition to the point of offering serious grounds for
disputing the solidity of any of its characteristic contentions.
Such assumptions mark one of those disciplinary boundaries that, in ac-
ademic life, one transgresses at one’s peril. It can hardly be denied that the
early work of mine on Fielding that I have just summarized transgresses it,
indeed, goes whooping across it waving its hat. But, as I noted earlier, such
boundaries do not erect themselves for no good reason, and successful trans-
gressions come at a price.
In the present case, my disregard for the proprieties commits me to say-
ing, in effect, “It may be true—or largely true—that there are ‘no arguments
in literature’ in the sense of formally presented structures linking premises to
conclusions; but that does not entail that there is nothing in literature having
effectively the force of an argument.” But, that move, of course, leaves my
opponent with a counter-move. “All very well; but what in general is it in
literature, that, according to you, allows a writer to contest arguments without
actually arguing? And I mean in general: do not just give me another bunch
of examples, however persuasive. (Remember Samuel Johnson’s verdict on
Bishop Berkeley: “Sir, he perswades without convincing.”)”
The first fissure that I felt to traverse the foundations of my work in the
late 1970s consisted in my lack, at that point, of a convincing answer to this
style of attack. The second, similar in some ways, concerned the point and the
potential explanatory power of Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game.
Form and Content (Harrison 1973) sets that notion to work, in an unexpected
and possibly fruitful way, in the context of a specific philosophical problem
involving a specific segment of our conceptual vocabulary. But why should it
be supposed, necessarily, to have a role in connections with other segments of
that vocabulary. It may be true that a basic color term like “red” could not be
given a meaning “by ostensive definition”—that is to say, simply by pointing
at red samples and uttering the name. But that, surely, gives us no reason to
suppose that there are not many—perhaps indefinitely many—terms in our
language that could, and no doubt do, acquire their meaning in that way? But
then, surely, in their case, the alignment of culture with subjectivity would
retain its force undiminished, since in that case, over a vast tract of our con-
ceptual scheme, culture would serve neither to add to the roster of realities
22 BERNARD HARRISON

nor to establish the possibility of objective reference to those provided by

extra-human nature. While Wittgenstein’s posthumous Philosophical Investi-
gations certainly contains a well-known and much discussed argument (1958,
I.28–I.33) purporting—or, at any rate, generally supposed to purport—to
show that ostensive definition could not suffice to establish the meaning of
any term whatsoever, there has never been philosophical agreement over the
intended structure of that argument, let alone over its validity.
During the 1980s, I continued to pursue the relationships between phi-
losophy and literary studies opened up by my work on Fielding. On the one
hand, I set about investigating new cases of similarly interesting interaction.
On the other, I made what seemed to me at least, marginal progress in clear-
ing up some of the theoretical puzzles and difficulties attending it—the latter
particularly in connection with Derrida, in whose work I have found both
pleasure and stimulus and whose project seemed to me to be, in rather inter-
esting ways, both deeply opposed to and deeply complicit with my own. The
bulk of this new work appeared between covers in Inconvenient Fictions:
Literature and the Limits of Theory (Harrison, 1991a).
At the same time, in “Identity, Predication, and Color” (1986), I extend-
ed the arguments of Form and Content about color a little further, while still
later, I tried to develop further, in terms of current philosophical debate, the
ideas on the nature of moral restraint and moral commitment that I had dis-
covered in Fielding (1979; 1981; 1984; 1989).
However, it was really not until the 1990s, when I had left Sussex for
the University of Utah, that I finally found a way of removing, rather than
papering over, the two fissures that I mentioned a paragraph or two ago, in
the foundations of my work. The breakthrough as, rightly or wrongly, I have
ever since supposed it to be, once again concerned Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein’s work had two phases, the first culminating in the publica-
tion in 1921 of the first, German-language version of the Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus, the second, beginning in around 1929, culminating in the
posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations (1958) and the
immense body of work unpublished in Wittgenstein’s lifetime, which has
since followed it into print. The two phases are, notoriously, very different in
their philosophical content. It has been widely believed that what is funda-
mental about this shift is this: In his early work, Wittgenstein accepted
Frege’s doctrine—still dominant in analytic philosophy today—that the con-
cept of meaning is to be understood in terms of that of the truth conditions of
a statement. But in his later, post-1929 work, he abandoned this Fregean sug-
gestion in favor of a new and darkly obscure doctrine of his own, which holds
to the effect that meaning is to be understood in terms of the notion of “use.”
However, the intended meaning if the term “use” has not proved to be an easy
question for interpreters sailing on this tack to settle textually.
I had long suspected this to be a badly mistaken account of Wittgen-
stein’s philosophical development. In the early 1990s, as a result of re-
 Reality and Culture 23

reading such traditional manuscripts as the Philosophical Remarks and the

Philosophical Grammar, I thought I could begin to see why. The later Witt-
genstein, who came into view in the course of these re-readings, has not by
any means given up the commitment to the thought of Frege that led him, in
his preface to the Tractatus, to record his debt to “Frege’s great works” (den
groartigen Werken Freges). He continues in the later work to hold that the
primary locus of meaning in language is the statement, and that the meaning
of a sentence is to be identified with the truth conditions of the statement or
statements it expresses.
The role of the notion of “use” in Wittgenstein’s later work, I had begun
to see, is not at all to dislodge and replace these Fregean commitments, but
the better to serve and articulate them. The notion of “use” is first introduced
at I.30–31, in the context of the supposed argument against ostensive defini-
tion that begins at Investigations I.28. It began to seem to me that these pas-
sages are not really about “ostensive definition” at all, at least, not in the
sense in which that term is ordinarily understood by philosophers. We are
really talking here about the conditions that have to be met so that the truth
conditions of a statement can be effectively specified. The underlying as-
sumption of I.28–31—typically, for Wittgenstein, unstated here, but easily
derivable from other passages—is that the problem of defining a general
name, such as “red,” comes essentially to the same thing as that of specifying
truth conditions for a certain class of English statements: namely, statements
of the form “x is called N in English.”
Wittgenstein’s point in I.28 is that the truth conditions for such a state-
ment S cannot be specified simply by gesturing towards a sample, , of
which S happens to be true, because such gesturing is incapable of singling
out which aspects of  are truth-relevant to S. Those aspects would, of course
be singled out if we knew what was relevant to the falsity of S, but once
again, and for the same reason, we cannot specify that simply by indicating a
sample, ’. We need access to something that will serve to specify simulta-
neously both the truth conditions and the falsity conditions of S. That some-
thing can only be the use of S: the role we have specified for it in the operation
of some socially devised and maintained practice: such as, for instance, linear
measurement, or the practice of matching and comparing color presentations
relative to a chosen set of focal colors for each given basic color name sug-
gested in Form and Content.
Thus, if we know, in virtue of understanding the role assigned to it in
one or other practice, that S is a statement of color, or length, say, then we
know, and know automatically, because we can generate equally, through the
operation of the practice, both its truth conditions and its falsity conditions.
We know, for example, for “x is red,” that it is true just in case x the opera-
tion of the color naming practice (Sprachspiele) results in the ascription of the
name “red” to x, and false if it results in the ascription of any other color
name. For “x is 3 inches long” we know that it is true just in case the careful
24 BERNARD HARRISON

operation of the practice of linear measurement ascribes that length to x, and

false if it ascribes any other length.
I explore the exegetical grounds for holding such a reformulation of the
argument to capture Wittgenstein’s intentions, in my “Truth, Yardsticks and
Language-Games” (1996) and “Criteria and Truth” (1999). In addition, dur-
ing the late 1990s, Patricia Hanna—whose ideas concerning the meaning
skepticism of writers such as Quine and Saul Kripke coincided well with
mine on Wittgenstein—and I produced Word and World: Practice and the
Foundations of Language (2004). This work explored the numerous implica-
tions of the argument, considered, for these purposes, independently of its
Wittgensteinian provenance, for twentieth-century philosophy. This body of
new work had, it seemed to me, advanced the project of questioning the intel-
lectual credentials of the alignment of culture and subjectivity, at least to the
extent of effectively closing the second of the two fissures, mentioned above,
in my earlier work.
A long philosophical tradition, since Gottfried Leibniz, has imagined
that we might gain a better grasp of reality by setting aside the culture-soaked
language of everyday life in favor of an “ideal” or “logically perfect” lan-
guage, the basic terms of which are defined not by way of the devices and
sleights of culture, but by direct reference to the structure of reality itself. On
that account, culture, in the shape of the web of practical and institutional
arrangements on which any human society is built, functions merely as a sort
of dust haze, obstructing us from gaining a clear view of reality.
But suppose Wittgenstein’s argument at I.28–31, as I have reinterpreted
it, goes through. Then, as the argument of Word and World demonstrates,
there can be no such thing as a logically perfect language in the above sense.
It follows that culture cannot be seen as a realm of vicious subjectivity, in
contrast to the austere objectivity of such a language. On the contrary, our
access, not just to the bare concepts of objectivity and subjectivity, and for
that matter those of truth and falsity, but to the possibility of distinguishing in
practical contexts between one and the other, is secured only through the role
played by the despised devices of culture in the interpersonal establishment of
the truth and falsity conditions of statements.

12. Extending the Building: Literature and Human Worlds

When its implications are still further explored, however, Wittgenstein’s ar-
gument turns out also to offer a way of closing the first of the two fissures in
the foundations of my thinking mentioned in the preceding section. It does
that, however, in a way that goes beyond that modest goal. It suggests, in
addition, answers of a new kind to two additional questions whose supposed
intractability has been central to the rise of postmodernist forms of “theory”
in literary studies, and to a lesser extent in the humanities in general, and with
 Reality and Culture 25

that to the consequent and corresponding collapse in critical humanism that

has occurred over the past half-century.
My own, more limited problem was that of giving a general answer to
the question, “How can a work of literature confute conclusions established
by argument without itself (at least in any ordinary sense) arguing?” If I am
correct, the revised reading of Wittgenstein, to which I found myself being
led in the mid-1990s, offers the key to seeing what that something might be.
Philosophy has always taken one of its more central tasks to be that of
examining the nature and credentials of the concepts in which we attempt to
understand the world. From Plato onwards, a leading mode of philosophical
inquiry has been to ask, “What do we mean by ‘N’?” or “What does ‘N’ real-
ly mean?” One of the major themes of Wittgenstein’s thought is that the
“analyses” that result from such inquiries are invariably tendentious, because
fundamentally theory-driven; and for that reason, interminably disputatious.
Wittgenstein suggests that what accounts for the intractable character of
philosophical disagreement—a diagnosis shared, though developed in very
different ways, by his Oxford contemporary J. L. Austin—is a general human
tendency, one that professional philosophers share with ordinary people, to
understand complex concepts in terms of over simple models: “pictures” as
he called them. Thus, he says, “A picture held us captive. And we could not
get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed to repeat it to
us inexorably” (Investigations, I.115). It would not be wrong to see my own
prolonged attempt to “get outside” what I have been calling the alignment of
culture and subjectivity, as in essence, a Wittgensteinian enterprise of precise-
ly the kind gestured towards in I.115: an attempt to break the power of “a
picture” over the mind.
In short, the frustrating inconclusiveness of much philosophical debate
has its roots, Wittgenstein thinks, in the gulf between the actual logic of con-
cepts and that projected upon them by this or that philosophical ideal of clari-
ty. Because the “ideal” picture of how our language works is so remote from
its actual mode of engagement with reality, discourse conducted in terms of
its assumptions becomes weightless: or as Wittgenstein puts it, frictionless.

The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes

the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of
logic was, of course, not a result of investigation; it was a requirement.)
The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of be-
coming empty.—We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction
and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of
that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back
to the rough ground! (1958, 46e)

Wittgenstein’s route “back to the rough ground” is bound up with his

argument to the effect that giving a meaning to a statement or other expres-
26 BERNARD HARRISON

sion, setting it up as a working element of language, is always a matter of

stipulating a role for it in some practice (Sprachspiele) that in turn, engages in
concrete ways with extra-linguistic reality. The main task of philosophy as
Wittgenstein understands it—of a philosophy characterized by determination
to fight its way back to the rough ground, is to “assemble reminders” of the
concrete roles played by words in our everyday lives.
But that, of course, is something that writers also do. A novel or a poem
is a thing made, not only of imagined events and persons, but also, and far
more fundamentally, of words. Wittgenstein tells us, by means of argument
concerning complex examples, what the difference is between using words
with some sense of their concrete functions in our lives, and just spinning a
line of theoretically-buttressed talk. A writer does something similar, to use
another Wittgensteinian turn of phrase, by showing it: by creating a scene so
well and concretely imagined that the difference between words used with
some sense of their concrete weight and measure, and words tossed about in
the service of a theory, or of wishful thinking, becomes palpable.
Thus, at a crucial turn of the plot in Tom Jones, Sophia must defend her
right to “hate” Mr. Blifil against her aunt’s politic reply, conned out of Bai-
ley’s Dictionary, that one can only hate someone from whom one has re-
ceived an injury. Her aunt’s case is that her niece is simply confusing hatred
with dislike, which her aunt considers no obstacle to marriage, provided that,
in material terms, it is a marriage of convenience. Fielding has no argument
(no passage from premises to conclusion) to offer against Mrs. Western’s
plainly tendentious reconstruction of the concept of hatred, quasi-
philosophical and buttressed by the authority of a lexicographer though it is—
except what we have learned, from observing Mr. Blifil in preceding chapters
of the novel, of the hatefulness of his ingrained egotism, hypocrisy, and tak-
ing pleasure in others’ suffering. But that is surely enough, not only to
“show”—to “remind” us—of how the terms “hate” and “hateful” actually
function in the concrete circumstances of our lives; but to show it to us in a
way that shows up the “politic” metropolitan sophistication of Mrs. Western
as the shabby thing it is.
These thoughts seem to be driving us towards a conclusion that, on the
face of it, it might seem, we ought to be doing our best to avoid: that the
business of a work of literature lies not with the examination of any reality
external to the work, but rather with the examination of language. “Doesn’t
the move you’re making now,” my former opponent might protest, “reveal
the bankruptcy of your whole project of contesting the reign of the alignment
of culture with subjectivity, and the essential solidity of the alignment itself?
For what could be more emblematic of the subjectivity of culture; more her-
metic, more cut off from reality (from real reality, at least), than a cultural
enterprise—and a major one at that—essentially occupied not with things but
only with words?”
 Reality and Culture 27

If we are to accept the assumption that to be occupied with words is a

fortiori not to be occupied with (real) things, then the objector clearly has a
point. For clearly, if that assumption goes through, then the only way in
which language can be connected with reality is though the correct descrip-
tion of what actually exists or takes place.
Since literature—even of supposedly high cultural value—makes no pre-
tence of describing what exists in the real world, as distinct from the “world” of
the fiction, that seems to entail, definitively, that literature can have nothing to
teach us about reality. In addition (as my objectors would doubtless wish to
continue), to say, as I want to do, that, all the same, it may have something to
teach us about language, is surely merely to trifle impudently with a question
that the trifling itself demonstrates to be effectively unanswerable.
That question is, “What can literature have to do with reality, given that,
having abandoned the scientific and commonsense goal of simply describing
the world as it is, its resources can amount to no more than the shuffling of
words?” The belief that it is indeed effectively unanswerable, is the first of the
two mentioned at the start of this section: as having played a major part in en-
throning postmodernism and displacing humanism in literary studies.
However, the idea that a language that has abandoned the ideal of exact
factual description must be reduced to shuffling words, relies for its plausibil-
ity on a certain assumption. That assumption, present in the marketplace of
ideas and increasingly dominant within it since the mid-seventeenth century,
is that a language is no more than a large set of spoken or written tokens. The
function of each token, so far as meaning goes, is merely to represent, or “go
proxy for” the aspect or item of extra-linguistic reality with which it has been
conventionally “associated.” It is this “picture,” as Wittgenstein would say, of
how words acquire meaning that, in turn, justifies the assumption that to be
“occupied with words” is a fortiori not to be “occupied with reality.”
As we have seen, it is one of the main thrusts of Wittgenstein’s later
work, not merely to question that familiar post-Renaissance model, or “pic-
ture,” of how meaning is specified in language, but to offer an alternative
model. According to the latter, giving meaning to the sentences of a language
is a matter of assigning roles to linguistic expressions in the operations of
practices. And it is practices—rather than the linguistic expressions them-
selves—that in turn engage with the concrete detail of extra-linguistic reality.
We move in short from explaining meaning in terms of two basic interacting
elements (words/things), to an account in terms of three basic elements
(words/practices/things).
Hanna and I draw out the consequences of this shift for philosophy—
and they are considerable—in Word and World. Its consequences for literary
studies are, however, no less considerable. Meaning, Wittgenstein tells us,
comes into being when words are assigned roles in socially devised and main-
tained practices. But it is equally true that a human culture, with all the possi-
bilities of character, personality and moral choice that it offers to its partici-
28 BERNARD HARRISON

pants, comes into being when people—individual men and women, begin to
shape their lives around a specific set of such practices. Think of the changes
produced, both in the structure of society and in the options and responses of
its individual members, by the development of such institutions as the joint
stock company, monogamous marriage, parliamentary democracy or monastic
life. In all of these cases and many others, it is easy to see that what one might
term “human reality,” the “realities of life” that a given age or culture regards
as natural or inevitable are neither natural nor inevitable. Instead, they are the
result of the existence of a specific structure of institutions and practices that,
because they belong to culture rather than nature, might be otherwise.
Such practices can be seen as possessing two poles. At one pole, they
form the armature upon which the meanings of words are defined, the con-
cepts making up a certain conceptual vocabulary formulated. At the other
pole, they form the armature upon which a certain human world—a certain
version of human reality—forms and constitutes itself. Human reality is a
reality internal to culture, but it is a reality nonetheless: its contents are a con-
tribution to Being, to the roster of   (the being), of what is.
The connection between language and human reality, as distinct from the
connection between language and natural reality is not mediated, then, solely by
true factual descriptions. Since the meanings of words in some conceptual vo-
cabularies and the structure of a given human world are linked by the systems of
practices and institutions in terms of which both are constituted, reflection con-
cerning the praxial basis of meaning is, necessarily, also reflection concerning
the nature of a given system of human reality. Hence, it is not true that to be
“occupied with words” is a fortiori not to be “occupied with reality.” Literature
is saved from that particular charge, even if we grant that its aim is not factual
description of the kind offered by the natural and social sciences.
Now for the second anti-literary charge that has assisted the rise of what
Paul Ricoeur called “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” namely, the charge that
a work of literature is “subjective” in the sense of reflecting only arbitrary
choices of an author. The surprising answer suggested by the late Wittgen-
stein’s reflections on the relationship between meaning and practice is that
what saves writers from subjectivity is not their knowledge of the world, but,
on the contrary, their sensitivity to the connotations and possible meanings of
words. The fictional, virtual “world” a writer invents, with all its “characters”
and events may indeed be just that: an invention. But the language in which
he or she does it, which is also the language his or her characters must speak,
is not an invention, but a public possession, whose history long preceded the
writer’s brief life, and will long outlast it. That language links literary fiction
to reality—the reality of the human world whose language it is—not by way
of true description but by way of meaning. So it is of no consequence that all
the descriptions in fiction are true only of an invented reality. The chiming of
meaning in the public language that writers must use if they are to write at all,
against the walls and furniture of their private, invented world, may still reveal
 Reality and Culture 29

(as, for example, the invented Sophia’s resistance to the sophistical blandish-
ments of the equally invented Mrs. Western does) much of value concerning
the real—the entirely non-fictional—world that writers and their readers actu-
ally inhabit and in which that language was forged.
These ideas form the basis of all the work in philosophy of literature I
have published since 1991, and receive a much fuller and more elaborated
treatment in my latest book, What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Re-
stored (forthcoming 2014).
That brings to an end this brief attempt to say—I hope usefully—how
my work over the past half-century hangs together, despite appearances, as a
single, developing enterprise.

 Part One

LITERATURE AND REALITY

 One

WHAT DO HUMANISTS WANT?

John Gibson

1. Introduction

Here is a difficult philosophical trick, to be performed in the following order:

First, deny that literature in any interesting way refers to, or represents—is
about—anything real. Next, turn to language itself and endorse many of the
linguistic idealist’s claims about the objects of reference and the nature of
representation. Then, go on to insist, with the stoutest of relativists, on the
irreducible social grounding of concepts, indeed that human cultural practices,
and not any sort of commerce with extra-cultural “reality,” account for how
thought and language gain a purchase on the world, such as they can. Next,
insist in some intelligible way that you are, nonetheless, a realist and a literary
humanist. Last, assert wholeheartedly that language, especially in the context
of works of literary fiction, is saturated with the real and worldly, so much so
in fact that looking at words in the context of literature is among the best routes
available for exploring and coming to understand our world: our real world.
At first glance, this may strike us as equal parts ill advised and mad. Yet,
the above is a fair statement of Bernard Harrison’s standing philosophical
project. Over the course of his career, he has managed to make it appear not
only sensible but a marked improvement over the competition (Harrison,
1975; 1991; 1993; 2006; 2007; Hanna and Harrison, 2004). His work is, at
heart, motivated by a desire to re-enfranchise reality in the realms of art and
language, and he has struggled to do so in those areas of contemporary
thought that would prefer it remain banished. He has never carried out his
project as a reactionary or contrarian, pointing us, as some philosophers do,
back to Greece and away from France. He is inspired by much of the philoso-
phy and literary theory that is most conspicuously at odds with his project—
Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, for example. He has devised powerful
ways of enlisting the philosophy of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein to show
how even a poststructuralist can speak like a kind of realist and humanist
without betraying her basic principles (Harrison, 2009). His is a philosophy of
rapprochement, forward-looking rather than conservative. It has the welcome
consequence of showing us that much of the space that currently separates
philosophy and literary studies, even analytic and continental philosophy, can
be overcome without destroying what is distinctive to each.
34 JOHN GIBSON

I will not attempt to do justice to the grandness of Harrison’s project

here. But I do hope to give a sense of its seriousness. I will concentrate on his
philosophy of literature, though to understand Harrison’s thought in this area
of philosophy is to understand it in virtually every area. In particular, I want
to consider his anti-representationalist view of how literary language engages
with reality. As done on such occasions, I will also air a few worries and raise
a few questions. But my basic goal here is to highlight what is novel about
Harrison’s work.

2. Harrison’s Humanism

Since the mid-1970s, Harrison has been struggling to defend a broadly hu-
manistic view of the value of works of literary fiction and of the powers of
human culture more generally. The timing has been right, since, of course,
these years have been the hardest on the humanist. Humanism has become
anathema, in fact a whipping boy, in much of the work that now goes by the
name of “theory.” In academic areas that embrace Theory—English and
Comparative Literature, most notably—humanism is associated with a kind of
bad faith, a yearning to keep near myths about the human and its place in the
world we know to be bunk.
Harrison does not take issue with many of the worries that underwrite
contemporary anti-humanism. This is why he has been one of humanism’s
most able defenders. He is with anti-humanists in respect to much of what
they decry, yet he shows that their complaints lead us not to abandon human-
ism but just those unfortunate habits of thought that humanists can easily
shake. To get the obvious out of the way, Harrison is not a humanist in any of
the following senses: He does not gush about the sovereignty of reason or the
harmony of human mind and natural world. He does not wonder whether the
poet or the scientist is more godlike. He is aware of the inherent limitations of
our “epistemic situation.” He can openly and fully acknowledge the horrors of
the twentieth century and the extent to which entirely human failings under-
wrote them. Apart from the last of these senses (see Harrison, 2006), he does
not go on about these things, but he does offer an alternative to those charac-
teristic sages of late modernity who take “humanism” to mean something
midway between “imbecilic” and “evil.” Harrison has helped philosophers to
see how to divorce a defense of humanism from a retreat to Enlightenment
and Romantic exaggerations about the human and its place in the world. In his
hands, humanism cannot be reduced to any of the facile, straw man positions
it is currently rumored to champion.
So what is humanism for Harrison? I will put it baldly here, adding de-
tail in the following sections. Humanism, in respect to both literature and life,
is at root what we have if we find that we can tell a certain kind of story. The
story can be told in a number of ways, but that what interests Harrison will
conclude with a vindication of the role of art in human life and begin with an
 What Do Humanists Want? 35

account of those aspects of language and culture that make the production of
this art possible. The story will insist that coming to understand how art
makes meaning possible is a condensed and purified version of the story of
how human culture more generally does. In other words, it will be a story of
how certain of our cultural practices are capable of conjuring out of our vari-
ous sayings and doings a sense of a shared world: a site of not uniform but at
least shared, public paths of thinking, feeling, valuing, and living.
Now a humanist need not give pride of place to art when telling this sto-
ry. But humanists, Harrison included, tend to find the work of art to be the
best image we have of how our human practices can conspire to make a par-
ticular achievement possible. Explaining what this achievement consists in is
where the philosophical work begins. But the achievement, whatever else it
does, reveals that human language and culture can on occasion give us ac-
cess to something worldly enough: a realm that is both human in origin yet
sufficiently deserving of the name “real” to dispel the sense that it is a mere
projection of human thought and speech. Somewhat like Wallace Stevens’s
supreme fiction (1942), the achievement will consist in the yoking together,
in the case of art, of the world and the imagination, or, in the case of our
“everyday” practices, of the practical and the real (more on this below). At
times, this achievement will strike us as successful enough as to justify our
sense that there is something of substance, something more than just made-up,
fictive, or chimerical, in this shared world made available to us through the
gift of acculturation.
This is humanism and not, or not just, realism because it emphasizes
from beginning to end, and with a reasonable amount of optimism, the ability
of human practices to create what the traditional realist thinks we in some
way only find or discover. This is not to say that humanists of this sort take
reality to be completely “constructed,” whatever this would exactly mean. It
is rather to say that certain of our creations open up, as a Heideggerian would
put it, avenues through which reality can disclose itself.
Consider the practice of measurement—one of Harrison’s favorite
tropes—by virtue of which thoroughly human inventions such as pounds,
kilos, and stones allow the world to reveal to us something about how it is.
The world is not, of course, itself made of pounds or kilos or stones (at least
of the sort relevant here), and it would be silliness to argue about which of
these units of measurement is “right” or gets closer to reality as it “really” is.
But the ability to talk about ways in which things in the real world are can
only get afoot on account of the creation of tools such as these. Likewise,
many of our cultural practices employ human creations that set the stage for a
kind of revelation, not in any splendid metaphysical sense, but to the extent that
these practices render intelligible questions about how the world is and is not.
This is what sets the stage for the whole cultural enterprise of articulating a
sense of our world. Without the ability to ask the worldly questions these hu-
36 JOHN GIBSON

man creations make possible, thought and talk about reality are impoverished to
the point of incommunicability (see Hanna and Harrison, 2004).
Like the idealist or anti-realist, the humanist acknowledges that the
world we are bound to have is a thoroughly human world. But the humanist
refuses to see this as a kind of barrier or congenital deficiency in our worldly
condition, as something merely human or merely cultural or merely conven-
tional. It is human in origin but—or so the idea goes—this does not preclude
but grounds the possibility of inheriting something “real,” a world of the sort
orthodox realists think only an act of cognitive or linguistic transcendence
will bring to us. This is a thought that Hilary Putnam captures well:

What I am saying, then, is that elements of what we call “language” or

“mind” penetrate so deeply into what we call “reality” that the very pro-
ject of representing ourselves as being mappers of something “language
independent” is fatally compromised from the very start. (1990, p. 28)

Stanley Cavell is also worth mentioning here, in a passage I suspect Har-

rison admires:

For Wittgenstein, philosophy comes to grief not in denying what we all

know to be true, but in its effort to escape those human forms of life
which alone provide the coherence of our expressions. He wishes an ac-
knowledgment of human limitation which does not leave us chafed by
our skin, by a sense of powerlessness to penetrate beyond the human
conditions of knowledge. The limitations of knowledge are no longer
barriers to a more perfect apprehension, but the conditions of
knowledge, überhaupt [anyway], of anything we should call knowledge.
(1969, pp. 61–62)

Like Putnam, Harrison urges that the connection between the human and
the real is more direct, more immediate, than can be captured by talk of lan-
guage or thought as reaching out to a fully independent world. The connection
to the world that most matters must in some sense be internal to our practices,
woven into the fabric of thought and language, at least on occasion and to
some not insignificant degree. To regard reality as utterly “language inde-
pendent” is to relegate the very thing we wish to possess to a place wholly
beyond us and so beyond the realm in which we speak, think, and create
works that, frequently and fundamentally, struggle to be expressive of the
world in which we find ourselves. As a few millennia of Western philosophy
have shown us, inseparable from this picture is the skeptical idea that, “as far
as we know,” we never succeed in accessing this realm in our attempts at rep-
resenting and knowing it. This thought will lead most reasonable minds to
conclude that we therefore have little business invoking the notion of “reali-
ty,” except, perhaps, as a kind of regulatory ideal or fiction of convenience.
 What Do Humanists Want? 37

For Harrison, as for Cavell, the trick here is to find a way of thinking about
human practices and conventions that does not make them appear bound to
always fall on the unflattering side of the line that divides the real from every-
thing else. Combining the two ideas, Harrison’s humanism wishes to see what
we call reality not as existing in an elsewhere that we can, at best, represent
from afar—giving it then a connection nearly as tenuous as one gets from a
solitary act of reference—but as something we can find within those very
practices that give us a purchase on the world. It urges that, if we can see it as
such, we will find that our experience of human culture and its most exempla-
ry products will be an experience of something sufficiently real to satisfy the
wish for worldliness that animates humanism.
It will not be a surprise that what contrasts with humanism in Harrison’s
work is what he calls the “prison-house” view of language and, one might
add, of mind and culture more generally. Much of his work shows how a great
amount of the philosophy of language we have inherited from last century
(though with roots in Plato and Locke; see Harrison, 1993) leads to such a
view, unawares or not. It is a view that fashions a sense that what keeps us
trapped here is, despairingly, much of what makes up the human world: all
the practices and conventions we stand upon whenever we direct our mouths
or minds toward the world. Of course, if we have a view of this sort, in all
sorts of obvious ways, it will wreak havoc on our sense of the value of prac-
tices that are content to retreat into human language and thought, exploring
the words, feelings, and perspectives that constitute our human way in the
world. In short, it is very bad business for our understanding of both language
and art. Humanism, for Harrison, is what we have not when we find a way out
of this prison-house but when we discover that there never was one at all. If
talk of “projecting,” “constructing,” and “fictionalizing” are intelligible here,
it is not in respect to what we call reality but to the sense of human minds,
languages, and cultures as prison-houses that keep it from us.
I have said little here about how our practices and pursuits might be seen
as grounding this more internal, immediate commerce with the real. I will
discuss it in the next section, when I turn explicitly to literature. But to give a
sense of the possibilities this kind of humanism opens up, I conclude this sec-
tion with the following challenging but intriguing passage. Here Harrison is
commenting on the philosophical significance of Virginia Woolf’s To The
Lighthouse (1927):

Mr. Ramsey is a creature of pure textuality. He is an insubstantial pag-

eant. His tissues are the tissues of words which have conjured him up.
Must we then treat him as having nothing at all to do with reality? Well,
not necessarily. For the tissue of words which constitute him are not just
tissues of words. Behind the words are the system of practices which
give life and meaning to the words. Those practices interact with reality
in multifarious ways. They link us each to the complex, commonplace
38 JOHN GIBSON

world to which we all share common access. . . . The textuality which

constitutes Mr. Ramsey’s personality is, then, not a textuality of words
alone, but a textuality of practices. And since we share those practices,
and are also in part constituted as individuals by them, the practices out
of which Mr. Ramsey is constructed link him not merely to the reality of
the world present to all of us as the condition of our speaking a common
language, but to the reality which we constitute: to us, as readers. (Harri-
son, 1993, p. 42)

This is how a humanist of the sort just described wishes to speak. Now
on to seeing what it means to speak like this, and precisely how one can get
away with it.

3. Practice, Literature, Life

As should be clear, a defense of literary humanism turns out to be a defense of

humanism tout court, since on this particular battleground, all of what con-
spires to put literature in need of such a defense is precisely what puts so
much of human culture in need of it. In this respect, the literary work of art
turns out to function as what Wittgenstein calls a “perspicuous representation”
of culture itself and the challenges we face when we attempt to offer a philo-
sophical justification of it. All that makes the literary work of art seem power-
less to touch the real is in effect what has all along made the basic manner in
which the human confronts the world appear essentially the same. The argu-
ments that lead one to doubt that literature could ever successfully represent,
yield knowledge of, or state truths about reality are of a piece with the very
arguments that lead one to wonder whether any human practice can. What phi-
losophy needs is a perspective that allows one to escape the circle of argumen-
tation that makes both literature and human practice more generally look so
degraded from the standpoint of reality. This is what Harrison gives us.
Before outlining how Harrison tries to pull this off, let me state more
clearly just what is at stake in respect to a defense of literary humanism.
When called upon on to defend literary humanism, one is asked to justify the
cultural role literature has served in virtually every corner of the world, and
since stories were first told. The reason all this talk about truth, knowledge,
and reality is thought to be so important here is that these are the terms we
have traditionally employed when attempting to vindicate the cognitive, mor-
al, and educative power of literary works of art. A theory of literature that
implies, as many do, that literature can have no direct, intentional, or signifi-
cant commerce with the real appears to pull from underneath us the very
ground on which we have always made sense of the value of literature.
Literary humanism, as an aesthetic expression of the humanist’s general
wish for worldliness, is the struggle to find philosophical grounds for attrib-
uting to literature the kind of cultural power it has habitually been thought to
 What Do Humanists Want? 39

enjoy. True, modernity is reputed to be less reliant on the arts of any form as
viable instruments of knowledge or tools of communication (all that business
about the ascendency of science, technology, and capitalism’s “culture indus-
try”). But even if one accepts this, there is room to desire, with the literary
humanist, to show that the old stories are still worth telling and new ones
worth devising.
But precisely why does one face a serious philosophical challenge when
defending literary humanism? As Harrison has shown, there is a powerful
tension between our commitment to this deceptively innocent thesis of literary
humanism and our understanding of language itself. So the attempt to defend
literary humanism takes the form of a genuine philosophical puzzle in his
work. Thus, what one finds in Harrison is something that the philosophy of
literature always searches for in its struggle to get a bit of respect from phi-
losophy at large: a set of hard problems to be solved, a good paradox, and a
clear point of continuity with the work that has guided the great traditions of
the twentieth-century. Harrison’s contribution has been to show that overcom-
ing these problems requires a radical refashioning not only of our understand-
ing of how literature works but of how language (and those aspects of human
practice that sponsor it) itself does. His strategy is, in effect, the Humean one
of offering a skeptical solution to a skeptical paradox. Unlike traditional de-
fenses of literary humanism, Harrison does not struggle to find a way to assert
what the skeptic denies, namely, that literature can represent reality or state
truths about it. Rather, he embraces the very skeptical claims that threaten
literary humanism, and he reveals that a vindication of it never required af-
firming these claims in the first place.
It is worth saying a bit more about these skeptical arguments. I outline
one of the many one could choose from, since it the one with which Harrison
has been most concerned and which is arguably most challenging to literary
humanism. Since I will be dispensing with it rather quickly, I will not attempt
to make it as compelling as the skeptic would wish. What I ask the reader to
consider is not quite the soundness of the argument but the frame of philo-
sophical mind to which it would appeal. It should be a familiar frame of mind,
and, while misguided, natural enough, given entrenched philosophical views
about what must be the case for language or thought of any sort to be in-
formative of reality.
Call it the problem of “representationalism.” To see the problem, begin
by asking what so much as infuses a sentence with aboutness, what manages
to tether it to something beyond itself? An altogether common, and intuitive,
answer is: reference. When one asks what it means to refer to the world in
speech, the standard response is, simply put, that one attempts to represent it,
as I do when I say, “my friends laugh at me even when I am not telling a
joke.” In this case, I use my words to bring before you a picture of how things
(often) stand in the world, at least in my corner of it.
40 JOHN GIBSON

Generally, representation explains—and an enormous range of compet-

ing accounts exists—how language can describe the world. Namely, language
can hold up a mirror to the world, for example, by conveying a proposition
that pictures or otherwise configures a sense of the sorts of relations we take
to obtain in the world (my friends laughing on occasions I would prefer they
would not). It is here that questions of truth and falsity become intelligible and
hence that the unceasing debates about realism, anti-realism, relativism, and
idealism gain traction. For once we say that language claims its worldliness
through the act of representing reality, then one must ask under which condi-
tions these representations are successful and how we can ever know this.
It is commonly on this foundation of what we can call “representation-
alism” that questions of our access to (or occlusion from) truth and reality are
fashioned, indeed, rendered intelligible. Here is the rub: literary humanism
wishes to see literature as about reality. The problem is not that we have little
reason to believe that its representations are ever successful or that we can
never quite know whether literature gets reality right. Against the backdrop of
representationalism, literary humanism appears to fail the test of worldliness
before these questions can even be intelligibly raised. For literature, it turns
out, does not even attempt to represent reality and so it refuses to engage in
the very activity that would permit us to raise the question of its worldliness
in the first place.
As Harrison argues, much philosophy of language leads to the view that
it is:

not that the statements which figure in works of fiction are false, but
something rather worse, that the statements which figure in works of fic-
tion are, as it were, dummy statements, incapable of being assigned any
truth-value, either true or false. (2009, pp. 226–227)

Works of imaginative literature—the sort obviously at issue here—are works

of fiction. Note: even if we think that literary language is in some way repre-
sentational and truth-bearing, the directionality will still be all wrong for liter-
ary humanism. Literature represents, if anything, and as Harrison would put
it, imagined worlds and not the real one, and so, at best, it can articulate fic-
tional rather than worldly truths. When John Milton writes, “So stretched out
huge in length the Arch-Fiend lay/Chained on the burning lake,” (2005, ll.
209–210) something is surely pictured, but one won’t find it in the real world.
And even if one could find it there, it wouldn’t show that Paradise Lost (ibid.)
was referring to or otherwise representing it. The great poem, presumably, is
here representing a link in a narrative chain, a happening in the fictional story
it tells, and we wouldn’t call for corrections to Paradise Lost if the real Satan
confessed that Hell had actually treated him better than this. The point is, lit-
erary humanism appears to run painfully afoul of both how philosophy of
 What Do Humanists Want? 41

language tells us words become worldly and what so much philosophy of

literature tells us fictional stories are about in a basic “metaphysical” sense.
Harrison’s solution to these puzzles seems altogether obvious, once put,
though I am unaware of any philosopher of literature before him who hit upon
anything resembling it. It is at this point in the defense of literary humanism
that one plugs in all the talk about cultural practices I discussed above. There
is no use denying that there are such things as representational and referential
uses of language. But the crucial question is often overlooked: what sorts of
prior connections between language and the world must already be in place
for linguistic reference or representation to be possible? It is here that one
explores the role of cultural practices, described above, in creating the condi-
tions that make it possible to speak about the world, practices that bestow us
with the very tools, standards, and criteria that render questions about the real-
ity intelligible. What this opens up is an awareness that there are two ways in
which language encounters reality, one on the level of reference and the other
on the level of cultural practice.
What we will find when exploring the cultural mode of encounter would
appear to be much more interesting for the humanist, for it is here that one
sees at the most fundamental level all that goes into what we call the human
world. That is, an insight into the structure of our cultural practices can show
us how these practices are disclosive of human reality by revealing:

the ways in which our practices have devised for us a specific kind of
world, the human world, whose nature determines the scope and bound-
aries of what for us counts as a human life. (Harrison, 2009, p. 221)

Among much else, we find how our culture and its conventions are expressive
of human interests, our interests, and so exploring these conventions will help
cast light on the array of shared concepts, values, and meanings that act as the
raw material with which we articulate a sense of our world and, of course,
ourselves. We can now see that this conception of culture and its significance
for philosophy is what is at stake in the passage on To the Lighthouse quoted
in the previous section. It explains how Harrison can get away with the bold
claims he makes on behalf of humanism, even as he embraces some of the
convictions about language and literature that would appear at odds with it.
In Inconvenient Fictions, his earliest statement of this view, Harrison de-
scribes this insight into the basic intermingling of culture and language in
terms of an insight into constitutive language:

It is time to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. Literary language,
the language of narrative fiction and poetry, is, root and branch, consti-
tutive language. As such it is non-referential and it makes no statements.
. . . It is a language occupied solely with itself, in a sense. The mistake
42 JOHN GIBSON

promoted by the Positivistic vision of language is to suppose that this

sense can be absolute. Language is everywhere hopelessly infected by
the extra-linguistic: the relationship between its signs runs ineluctably
by way of the world. So there is, just as the critical humanist has always
maintained, a strong connection between language and Reality; only it
does not run by way of reference and truth. Rather, it permeates the
thickness of the language we speak. (1991, p. 51)

This passage strikes me as decisive a rejection of representationalism—and

the traditional formulations of humanism that are premised on it—as one
could hope for. When we find ourselves in the presence of exemplary literary
achievements, we come into contact with constitutive language in the sense
that in these works we see language showing us its structure, casting in relief
the particular coming together of words, deeds, and values that constitute our
practices and so our basic alignment with our world. Works of imaginative
literature may not represent anything real or actual. But the forms of cultural
activity in which both we and creatures of literary fiction engage are as a rule
common, and this is what supports the humanist’s conviction that in one way
or another literature nearly always concerns itself with life. Even in a work of
dazzling satire or modernist experimentation that has humans doing very un-
human things, the light it casts can have a powerful ability to highlight, even
if associatively and negatively, what we do and how we are. Harrison’s vari-
ous readings of King Lear (Shakespeare, [1603] 1947), Measure for Measure
(Shakespeare, [1603] 1954), To the Lighthouse (Woolf, 1927), and the holo-
caust fiction of Aharon Appelfeld show compellingly that this idea can be
fleshed out both philosophically and critically.
What we find is that the dramatic core of literature, when successful, is
nothing but the dramatic core of life: of those forms of activity and interaction
we call culture (see Gibson, 2006; 2007). In this respect, the dramatic and not
the mimetic would seem the more appropriate category for literary humanism.
This is one way of putting the insight embodied in still fashionable narrative
accounts of the self. If we are, in some way, made of stories, then stories and the
dramatic encounter with life they explore, function as a common currency of
communication when we attempt to call attention to the sorts of doings, suffer-
ing, and happenings that constitute the human world. (Keep in mind that even
Anton Chekhov’s explorations of all that is mundane and tedious in domestic
life are the stuff of drama, so this argument casts the net sufficiently wide.)
A fictional story may not represent any actual truth, but, if Sigmund
Freud was correct, the stories we offer of ourselves rarely do either. At any
rate, what matters is not the representational but the dramatic quality of the
story and its ability to confess something of significance about the shared cul-
tural stage upon which human lives, fictional and real, are carried out. Harrison
captures this idea nicely when he tells us that the value of literature resides:
 What Do Humanists Want? 43

in the power of its medium, language, to summon up and display . . .

through its deployment in the medium of a fiction, the nature of the hu-
man practices and choices which found the conceptual distinctions it en-
shrines, and which simultaneously found, along with them, a world; a
world which is not only the world in which we live, but that world—and
its founding words—made flesh in us: the world which exists only in us,
the world of whose values and assumptions we are the living bearers;—
and which is not, moreover, a static world, but a world constantly in a
slow, glacier-like flux of change, one of the motivating forces of which,
of course, is great literature. That is why great literature is, or should be,
important to us. (2009, p. 224)

From this vantage-point, traditional, representationalist brands of literary hu-

manism seem hopelessly conservative, even paradoxical, implying as they do
that the reality we want is external to us and hence to the world we constitute,
which can seem more a plea to escape the human realm than to find a way to
exult in our acceptance of it. In this respect, traditional humanism leaves us
feeling, as Cavell would put it, “chafed by our skin,” failing to see that the
reality that matters to a humanist is not extra-literary or even extra-linguistic
at all and so that reaching it does not require any act of transcendence. The
world the humanist should want is given expression in the very culture with
which literary works are so intimately bound.
The only form of skepticism that could pose a threat to this brand of
humanism would be the kind that denies that literature is ever about anything
at all. This would be the stripe of linguistic and literary skepticism that urges
that all meaning is impossible, that the very idea of content is a myth, and that
texts themselves do not really exist. While this form of skepticism still has a
few practitioners, even those in Theory will acknowledge that it smacks of the
1980s and so, of a moment past. Harrison’s humanism offers powerful re-
sources for attacking this form of skepticism, but I shall stop the story here. I
hope that what I have said gives a fair sense of how viable Harrison’s human-
ism is for the contemporary scene, a scene in which concerns with ethical
criticism, selfhood, aesthetics, and the seriousness (and not, or not just, play-
fulness) of literature are happily on the horizon again, in both philosophy and
literary studies.

4. Representation without Representationalism?

I find all of this convincing and a massive step forward in how we conceive
the project of humanism. This in large part, I believe, because I agree with
Harrison that representationalism has acted as kind of undetected virus in tra-
ditional humanism, which, once identified, explains why humanism seems to
be in an ever more risible position the more philosophers and literary theorists
44 JOHN GIBSON

pay serious attention to the nature of literary language. So I agree with Harri-
son wholeheartedly that we would do best simply to lose it and rebuild on
new ground. I also agree that Harrison’s practice-based humanism is the
foundation on which to build. In fact, I think the power of the insight into the
workings of cultural practice that Harrison uncovers accounts for the lion’s
share of literature’s most meaningful ways of engaging with reality.
What I find myself less comfortable with is relinquishing all talk of rep-
resentation. It strikes me that we have two ways to respond to Harrison’s
powerful critique of representationalism. One, Harrison’s, is to show that we
can move forward without any significant notion of literary representation.
The other is to devise a properly literary notion of representation that deci-
sively cuts all ties with representationalism. I make no claim that the latter can
actually be done—it is possible that we shall find that we cannot have repre-
sentation without representationalism—but it is worth briefly exploring the
prospects for a reformed notion of representation.
It is important to recall that the term “representation” has always had an
independent aesthetic usage, though in fairness to Harrison, one of those cen-
tral usages, Plato’s theory of mimêsis, in all sorts of obvious ways plays direct-
ly into representationalism. Unfortunately, in the contemporary philosophy of
literature, we are trained to think of representation not only in mimetic terms
but in terms even more suspicious: we conceive of representation as an essen-
tially linguistic affair, as a mimetic employment of words. Of course, this
would have been alien to Plato, whose theory of mimesis takes images and
not descriptions as its point of departure. So from whence comes this tether-
ing of the mimetic sense of representation to the linguistic?
The story is complex, but it is easy enough to indicate what it will be a
story of. For anyone working on this side of twentieth-century Anglophone
philosophy, our concept of representation is filtered through the work of
“high” analytic philosophy of language. Consider, just for one example, the
overwhelming preoccupation with the nature of the proposition, itself perhaps
the best image we have of a mimetically charged employment of words
(hence the positivistic flirtation with the “picture theory” of the proposition).
As philosophy of literature worked its way back into mainstream philosophy
after a good half-century in the woods, it did so largely on the coattails of
analytic philosophy of language, devising very sophisticated theories of fic-
tional truth and reference by borrowing the resources of philosophy of lan-
guage. This was in many respects for the good, but it also helps us to see why
the philosophy of literature now finds itself with such an explicitly linguistic,
mimetic notion of representation (Gibson, 2007).
Even in theory the story is not so different, enlisting as theory has the
kind of post-war Continental philosophy that, along with analytic philosophy,
represents the great “linguistic turn” of twentieth-century philosophy. One
cannot help but wonder what our notion of representation in contemporary
 What Do Humanists Want? 45

philosophy of literature would look like had it been devised in continuity

with, say, the philosophy of fine art and not the philosophy of language. At
any rate, one does have the feeling that it is a contingent fact of recent history
that we philosophers of literature cannot help but talk like representationalists,
in the sense given above, whenever we talk about representation. This clearly
is not the place to launch a new theory of representation, and in fact I do not
have one to offer. But let me say a few things that, with hope, will motivate
an interest in reviving at least some talk of representation.
Here is one reason I think we might wish to be able to speak of literature
as having an essential representational power: if we give up all talk of repre-
sentation, we will have a very difficult time telling a compelling account of
what it means for a novel to succeed or, perhaps more importantly, fail in its
attempt to offer a cognitively significant encounter with the world. The
representationalist has always had an easy time with this: if a novel strives to
be a mirror of the world, it can either succeed or fail to offer an accurate rep-
resentation of the world—failure and success here are just modes of represen-
tational failures and successes. But if we turn in the other direction and banish
all talk of representation, I fear we will find ourselves with a poverty of re-
sources for speaking meaningfully about success and failure here. To motivate
this criticism, consider Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Preface to Notes from Under-
ground, where he makes the sort of authorial promise to illuminate reality that
the humanist believes we should takes so seriously:

It goes without saying that both these Notes and their author are fictitious.
Nevertheless, people like the author of these notes may, indeed must, ex-
ist in our society, if we think of the circumstances under which that soci-
ety has been formed. It has been my wish to show the public a character
of the recent past more clearly than is usually shown. (2001, p. 95)

Assume Dostoyevsky delivered what he promised: he succeeded in showing

us something about this “public character of the recent past.” Something in-
side of us is bound to speak up and ask what, exactly, can this mean, if not
that he represented, in some way, this past accurately? Exactly what does he
get right, and just how does he get it right, if not by representing it?
Harrison’s humanism offers us enough to see how he might build his re-
sponse to this. He is clever enough to try to accommodate the sensible intui-
tions representationalism harnesses without accepting its ugly bits. He can
say, for example, that this success will consist in the way literary characters:

invoke features of a human world we share with them, which link our
situation to theirs, allowing the emotions associated with the pressures
46 JOHN GIBSON

of that common situation to flood from us into them, in such a way, that,
viewed in them as in a glass (for the specular metaphor has always pos-
sessed a certain intuitive force, which it retains in this connection and to
this extent), our own situation as inhabitants of, and as the bearers of na-
tures formed by the pressures of, a certain human world becomes in cer-
tain respects clearer to us, because surveyable as a whole. (Harrison,
2009, p. 222)

This is intriguing, but I would like to press Harrison on this notion of litera-
ture’s invocation of a common world that we find in fictions. How, precisely,
do we see a work as invoking our world if not for our ability to see, in some
way, the work as representing our world? What so much as inclines us to es-
tablish this link between our world and the fictional world of a text, if not that
we already see in its fictions, somehow, a representation of our world? The
trick here is to refuse to allow representationalism, or any image of mirroring,
to creep in when hearing these questions. I agree that no mirroring is going on
here, certainly not in a linguistic sense. But it seems incautious, even a little
perverse, therefore to conclude that no representing is going on, either.
Perhaps the possibility of failure is more interesting than that of success
here. Assume that Dostoyevsky failed—however hard it may be to imagine
this—to show us the “character of the recent past”; assume that he did not
deliver on his promise. In this case, what did he fail at, exactly? Harrison’s
solution turns on his idea of language, and hence of literary language, as in-
fused with reality: reality, at least of the human variety, is “internal” to it. But
this cannot mean that any literary work, because built of natural language, is
by that very fact revelatory of this human reality.
Harrison is surely aware of this problem. But I find it difficult to under-
stand how his theory can help us overcome it. We need to leave room for this
possibility of failure, and doing so would seem to require that we be able to
say of certain novels, “that is not how we are” or that “human reality is not
like that.” Further, it seems to require that we be able to say this in respect to
its representation of life and not, or not just, of how its language reveals or
fails to reveal something about the relationship between our practices, our
words, and our world. Harrison’s theory strikes me as perhaps too general and
too abstract to be able to capture the uniqueness and specificity of a particular
novel’s manner of getting us and our world right or wrong.
Again, if these failures do not consist in representational failures, then in
what, exactly? One response at Harrison’s disposal would be to say that they
consist in failures of language: novelists who fail to engage with reality have
misused language. Novels that are humanistic failures are, say, extended
strings of nonsense (of the Wittgensteinian, if not everyday, variety of “non-
 What Do Humanists Want? 47

sense”). But I very much doubt that Harrison would encourage such an inter-
pretation of his theory of humanism. For if Dostoyevsky failed, certainly we
would not want to say of an author with his mastery over words that he was
misusing language, that he was, in his way, speaking nonsense? Again, we
can see the allure of recourse to some conception of representation. It seems
much easier simply to claim that he failed to represent reality aright. The lan-
guage of his work is, as it were, in order; the representation he offered is not.
One way of developing this plea for a literary-humanistic conception of
representation might be the following: We might bite the bullet and concede
that the language of literature represents nothing but fictions and fictions
alone. But this is only to speak of a literary work viewed in utter isolation
from the culture that has received it and done something with it. We can see
the claim that a literary works represents reality as a kind of right a work has
won and not as specifying something its language does. It would be the right,
or privilege, to stand for us in a certain way, as a narrative that we put forth as
embodying, even as announcing, what we take our way in the world to be, or
at least one such way.
If we view Dostoyevsky’s story as a mere piece of language and look
nowhere beyond it, the very question of whether it represents modern aliena-
tion might well be unanswerable, even unintelligible. But it is not, if viewed
in terms of his masterpiece’s place in a modern culture, certain members of
which have embraced it and come to link it in all sorts of manifest and implic-
it ways to its self-conception. Indeed, it seems to me that the practice of criti-
cism itself is one example of how these links are established. Moreover, all
the various aspects of our culture, from classrooms to cafe conversations, help
fill out this story of how a culture breathes into a certain literary work these
points of connection to “reality” such that it becomes intelligible to speak of it
as a representation of our world (Gibson, 2006).
This is not to say that culture, rather than literary works, does all of the
worldly work in creating a representation of life. It is rather to say that we
should see the two as working in tandem if we wish to understand how a liter-
ary work can come to acquire all the forms of worldly significance we attribute
to it. This seems to me to indicate one possible route for embracing representa-
tion without representationalism, since it promises to allow us to abandon all
of the mimetic-linguistic baggage of the latter when explaining how fictions
can represent the real.
I’ll stop here, before my point becomes a rant. But I hope my point, if
necessarily inchoate, suffices to make one think that we might do well to re-
claim for philosophy of literature a workable conception of representation. All
of this has been more an expression of wonderment than a criticism of Harri-
son’s work. It does not strike me that it would be inconsistent with his theory.
But I do wonder whether he would accept this call for a reformed theory of
48 JOHN GIBSON

representation. The question is just how Harrison would accommodate, if at

all, this plea for a properly literary-humanistic theory of representation.

5. Conclusion

Harrison’s brand of humanism shows us that we have all we need to be hu-

manists if we have access only to the kinds of cultural practice that relativists
and anti-realists earn their bread arguing are all we have access to. His work
helps us see that what humanists should want are modest but effective terms
for justifying at least some of the culture we create and for praising at least
some its products, literary works of art chief among them. It is a humanism
one does not need to be ashamed of in public, not even in the presence of
one’s colleagues in English. It is sufficiently modest in its claims on behalf of
the real that it should be acceptable even to those recalcitrant sorts who can-
not tolerate talk about the real and worldly: apart from their native dislike of a
kind of vocabulary, there really isn’t much for them to take issue with. For
those of us who suffer from a serious case of late-romantic longing for world-
liness, it shows us how we can satisfy our desire without forgetting that we
are modern or demanding that we ignore the better part of reason. To be sure,
there are still many skeptics out there, and I’ve said nothing here about the
recent, meteoric rise of post-humanism in literary studies, which, despite its
bad press in philosophy, is not as silly as we would like to believe. But this is
just to say that there is still work to be done, and I hope to have shown here
that Harrison offers us very powerful tools for getting started on this work.
 Two

READING DICKENS: PLEASURE AND

THE PLAY OF BERNARD HARRISON’S
“SOCIAL PRACTICES”

Murray Baumgarten

1. Introduction

Literary critics, new and old, tend to begin with the texts crafted by fiction
writers, without much bothering about the epistemological status of language.
They often deploy implicit notions deriving from “the pervasive Cartesian
notion of knowledge, mind, subject and nature” (Wagenaar and Cook, 2011,
pp. 193–212), as they range through an artistic production mining for nuggets
of meaning, be they referential discoveries about society or intrinsic to narra-
tive habits of a given discourse. Critical theory has made us attend to the im-
plications of our work, though it has not situated art within one side or the
other of the Cartesian divide, but, rather, tended to seek alternative ways of
understanding what writers are up to in their writing, which apparently plays
both sides of the street.
At stake here is the status not only of the art-work but the experience
generated by art: is it a pointer to a wider understanding of social experience,
or a deeper analysis of the self-referentiality of artistic discourse and literary
language. To take a specific example, are the novels of Charles Dickens
dressed up sociological inquiries, or fantastic imaginings of, say, coincidence
relating only to their own linguistic play? And if either, or both, why bother
with them, when other less ambiguous inquiries are available? The practice of
English social history has yielded micro-histories of parish life as well as gen-
eral studies of the family; and the pleasures of English fantasy literature range
from utopian writing to Dr. Who. While Dickens’s torrent of language capti-
vates, can we enjoy the narrative pleasures Dickens provides just as linguistic
play, without knowing to what extent we can trust his knowledge of English
society or the deep psychic processes critics have located in his work?
The representation of Jews in Dickens’s fiction is a test case. Teasing
out the meanings involved in his depiction of two Jewish characters that he
imagined in relation to each other—to Fagin, in Oliver Twist (Dickens, [1838]
1982) and Riah, in Our Mutual Friend (Dickens [1864–1865] 1952)—brings
us directly to the issue of the experiences provided by art and the epistemo-
logical status of the language that generates them. I submit that we will dis-
cover we need not just a critique of Cartesian views of language but an alter-
50 MURRAY BAUMGARTEN

native perspective. Here Bernard Harrison’s concept of “social practices”

enables us to respect the integrity of Dickens’s text. Working with “social
practices,” we can grasp the range of meanings generated by Dickens’s narra-
tive habits, his sociological acuity, and the linguistic choices that produce the
characters that people his fiction. As we situate his art in the context provided
by Harrison’s reconceptualization of language, we gain a fuller understanding
of Dickens’s achievement.

2. The Poor, the Downtrodden, the Irish—But Not the Jews

Dickens’s signature is his engagement of the feelings of his readers to empa-

thize with and to enter into the living experience of the poor and the down-
trodden. His sympathies surpass even great modern novelists such as Nikolai
Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, the later Leo Tolstoy, engaged modernist Isaac
Babel, or the Yiddish writers such as Sholem Aleichem, Israel Rabon, and
Yosef Haim Brenner. In England closer to our day, think of Edmund Gosse,
or in America, Michael Gold. He engages us in the social nexus of the eco-
nomic and class status of his impoverished and humiliated fictional charac-
ters. With them, his readers discover the merciless power and strangling strat-
egies of the social system that defines the lives of his characters. Think of Jo
in William Powell Frith’s painting, The Crossing Sweeper (1858), arrayed
against the reverend Chadband of Dickens’s Little Dorrit ([1855–1857] 1953)
and the red-tape Barnacles of Betty Higden and the Veneerings in Our Mutu-
al Friend, to name some notable examples that come readily to mind and can
stand for many others.
It is notably the place of the poor in the caste system of Victorian Eng-
land that Dickens’s readers come to know. But more than the sociological
exploration, his narratives reveal how these characters, without access to the
means of production in the society that launched the hope of modernity,
struggle to live within and even perhaps escape from the procrustean horizon
of expectations to which they have been ascribed—and the narrow circum-
stances in which they have been inscribed. Unlike the upwardly bound middle
classes, the poor have no hope of gaining a new, achieved status. Yet even
more than the range of Dickens’s sympathy, his ability to engage his readers,
and to give them entry into the subjectivities of the poor, the oppressed, and
the downtrodden, the orphan child especially marks his writing. But Jews are
an anomaly in Dickens’s wide-ranging sympathies.
Not just self-referential, not just journalistic polemic, Dickens writes
with knowledge of what Harrison has articulated as the social practices of
communities and the individuals they engender. Dickens’s understanding of
the network of these practices owes much to his friend Thomas Carlyle’s in-
sights, but goes beyond them. He deploys the social practices of his day, elic-
ited by, in part, society’s formulas—and that would lead in modern sociology
 Reading Dickens: Pleasure and the Play of Harrison’s Social Practices 51

to Robert Merton’s fundamental analysis of the manifest and latent functions

of social experience.
In Dickens’s writing, these Carlylean formulas and Mertonian manifest
and latent functions function as literary matrices—they give birth to character
and situation, they are—to deploy a different range of reference—algorithms
that generate the literary conditions out of which the reader experiences the
social location as well as the interiority—the subjectivity—of his characters.
For Dickens, that also includes the emotional tone of places and things. What
Dickens makes us know is that what is at stake is the struggle of the silenced
to make their lives meaningful.
Pam Morris (1991) and Sally Ledger (2010) have alerted us to the ways
in which Dickens evokes the cultural worlds of these folk outside the middle-
class print culture of Victorian England. What Henry Mayhew catalogues in
his lists of the social practices of the economically marginal and impover-
ished, Dickens brings to life: the scavengers of Our Mutual Friend, for exam-
ple, are not statistical presences but living fictional characters. We witness
their interactions as we hear their spoken exchanges and observe them in their
work of fishing the resources for their lives out of the Thames, including the
corpses whose portable property they commandeer. As Gaffer Hexam says to
his daughter, Lizzie, who shudders at the corpse they have just found in
sweeping through the Thames:

As if it wasn’t your living! As if it wasn’t meat and drink to you! . . .

How can you be so thankless to your best friend, Lizzie? The very fire
that warmed you when you were a babby, was picked out of the river
alongside the coal barges. The very basket that you slept in, the tide
washed ashore. The very rockers that I put it upon to make a cradle of it,
I cut out of a piece of wood that drifted from some ship or another.
([1864] 1899, vol. 1, p. 4).

The mention of the basket in which she slept, joined with the tide that washed
it ashore, evokes the folk motif of the Moses story and its mythic aura, there-
by reinforcing the cultural world in which these characters live—and its dis-
tance from middle-class lives.
Not just the poor and downtrodden, not just Major Bagstock’s dark-
skinned “native” servant in Dickens’s Dombey and Son ([1847–1848] 1950),
not just Quilp and Sally Brass in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop ([1840]
1943), not just the Irish—Dickens’s sympathy is capacious, his ability to en-
gage their interiority for his readers is astonishing. Yet alas, it does not extend
to the Jews. We know that he did not want to offend his Jewish readers, nor
did he want to scapegoat them for the oppressions of a grinding social system.
Nevertheless, the limits of his sympathies are suggested by the nearly non-
existent representations of Jews in his fictions, limited to Fagin in Oliver
Twist, and Riah in Our Mutual Friend. What is it about Dickens’s range as a
52 MURRAY BAUMGARTEN

writer, of his narrative habits, of his social experience that allows him access
to the poor, the downtrodden, the Irish, the colonized, and yet keeps him from
fully imagining the lives of the Jews of Victorian England?
We need to acknowledge the difficulties of this literary and cultural sit-
uation. It is not just a biographical issue but a problem of narration, for Jew-
ish lives were unfolding simultaneously with hegemonic English ones; next to
each other, they were also at times in alternative universes. One way to elicit
the situation is to imagine them as layers of a palimpsest, a view of history
and society Carlyle spoke for and Dickens often elaborated, a metaphor I’ve
elaborated in a previous essay (2011, pp. 219–232). Dickens understood what
it meant to think of English culture and society as a palimpsest—and while he
plumbed its layers, he did not have access, given his personal and cultural
location at this point, to the situation of its Jewish inhabitants. As we read
Dickens today, we have to ask whether Victorian Jews for all the improve-
ments of that modernizing society yet remained in the world of what Wolf-
gang Iser has called “the unsayable” (1987, p. xi)—and what D. A. Miller has
characterized as “the unnarratable” (1989).
Sander Gilman has taught us to read the way in which foreground and
background reflect the larger context, so evident here: the psychic geography
of Dickens’s fictional world excludes Jew and thus casts them out as availa-
ble prey. Where Fagin is the manifest racialist caricature, Riah is its latent
obverse, the feminized, unmanned Jew. Despite their apparent differences,
what is abundantly clear is that in this Dickensian universe, Jews have no
address, no location from which to speak in their own voice and person. How
is it then possible for Dickens to narrate Jewish lives?

3. Language, Narration, and Social Practices

To see how Harrison can help us understand the parameters of the narrative
difficulties, how to tell or at least evoke, then and now, the lives of English
Jews, we need to understand what he means by “social practices.”
Harrison focuses the narrative problem by asking how language con-
nects us to reality, which is a hidden subtext of much of the continuing socio-
logical turn in Dickens criticism. He cuts through the competing either-or
conventional views of language. He holds that the connection forged between
language and reality is not a direct link between linguistic expression and an
aspect of reality. He tells us that language is neither in a one-to-one relation
with reality nor is it merely self-referential, but directs us to the ways in
which “meaning arises as a result of the roles assigned to linguistic expres-
sion in the conduct of practices” (Harrison, 2011a).
Evading the binaries of conventional (and Cartesian) conceptualizations
of the relation of language and reality, and thus of narrative’s relation to the
external world, Harrison asks us to attend to the “multifarious ways in which
 Reading Dickens: Pleasure and the Play of Harrison’s Social Practices 53

practices engage with the complex realities revealed to us by experience”

(2011b, p. 412). Later Harrison continues:

Practices, after all, make us, as human beings of one sort or another,
what we are: parliamentary democrats or Bolsheviks; Jazz-lovers or fans
of Early Music; Jews, Muslims, or Christians; scientists or laymen. And
if, on the one hand, our nature as human beings, and on the other the
meanings of the words in which we express and articulate that nature,
are both, equally, born out of a common relationship to the multifarious
practices which give shape to our lives, it follows that the kaleidoscope
of language must stand in permanent and inextricable relationship with
the shifting reality of the multiple worlds of human being and commit-
ment. (Ibid., p. 413)

Meaning, then, is generated by the interplay of the social practices into which
we are inscribed by parents and society, and the choices we make of how and
what to express and imagine.
When Fagin leaps off the page, we are engaged by Dickens’s represen-
tation of criminals. Dickens knew those social practices more thoroughly per-
haps than any writer of his era. The criminal underworld was part of his at-
traction of repulsion, the joining of the Gothic and the realistic in his writing.
Irving Howe tells us that Dickens, in a letter to a Jewish woman who had
protested his stereotypical treatment of Fagin in Oliver Twist, wrote that
Fagin “is a Jew because it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the
story refers, that the class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.” Howe
says that the term “invariably” could be questioned, but “that some fences
were Jewish is certainly true” ([1838] 1982, p. xix). Nonetheless, despite Dick-
ens’s use the Yiddish word for thief, gonoph, in an essay about the Metropoli-
tan police (1851), his representation did not go beyond the deployment of a
stereotype of his day.
In this melodramatic universe, Fagin is the stage Jew; ushered out of Ol-
iver Twist, the novel, he emerges as a cultural icon of profound criminality in
the larger arena of English society. He is a figure of the devil and, as such, of
rebellion, anger, hate, resistance—of the refusal to acquiesce in an oppressive
social order in which he is the despised other. Yet unlike William Blake’s
positive judgment of John Milton’s Devil in his illustrations for Paradise Lost
([1667] 1996; for a discussion of Blake’s illustrations, see Dunbar, 1980),
Dickens reinforces the antisemitic stereotype of the Jew of hegemonic Eng-
lish Victorian society.
There are moments in Oliver Twist when the reader enjoys the games
Fagin plays with his boys, perhaps the only time in the novel when these
young gang members can actually play and be boys. But there are no mo-
ments when the reader enters Fagin’s consciousness. He remains an external-
ized metonymy—a stand-in and front man for the criminal conspiracy he and
54 MURRAY BAUMGARTEN

Monks have hatched. He is defined against the middle-class world he preys

on. Why Fagin can continue to play this role for contemporary readers in our
own supposedly enlightened day deserves exploration. Here another of Harri-
son’s insights can shed light on the situation involved.

4. Literary Experience and Social Practices

Much contemporary discussion of imaginative writing, Harrison notes:

allows for two possible ways in which words can acquire meaning: ei-
ther (1) through the relationships in which they stand, by conventional
association, with real things or features; or (2) through the relationships
in which they stand to other words. [Critics] assume that this pair of op-
tions exhausts the possibilities. . . . Its exhaustiveness is presumed, not
only by most contemporary writings on literature, culture, and ideology,
including virtually all of those generally comprehended under the label
“Critical Theory.” [The binary view generates the] admittedly very pop-
ular and very culturally embedded, way of dividing up the options . . .
makes it very difficult indeed to understand our relationship to imagina-
tive literature, not least by making it impossible to attach any non-
pejorative meaning to the term “imagination.” . . . the idea of a language
whose most basic signs function merely as associative markers for pre-
existing features of reality is conceptually incoherent. (Ibid., p. 84)

Harrison’s complex argument, elaborated notably in Inconvenient Fic-

tions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (1991), seeks to reinstate the mean-
ing-making function of the literary imagination by noting, “it is only through
explaining the mode of engagement of a word in a practice, a practice which in
turn engages in determinate ways with the world offered to us in sensation and
bodily interaction” (2006, p. 84). There is a difference between “factual and
fictional discourse,” he notes, and he suggests “new ways alternative to . . . the
long philosophical tradition” on which the conventional view depends (ibid.,
p. 85). Meaning, which is central to the work of the literary imagination:

is equally the creature of human practices, which in turn engage with the
realities, of extra-human origin, offered to us in sensation and in bodily
interaction with the physical world. . . . Thus there are “two standpoints”
from which to regard the practices which found meaning. From one of
these standpoints they constitute a bridge, the bridge, between the hu-
man mind and the inhuman, extra-human world of physical reality.
From the other standpoint, our continual invention of new practices
amounts to the continual invention of a new world, the human world, or
rather, the invention of numerous, interpenetrating and interacting, hu-
man worlds. (Ibid.)
 Reading Dickens: Pleasure and the Play of Harrison’s Social Practices 55

Choosing to imagine meaning through the articulation of social practic-

es, writers and their writings have an ethical function. In this work of the im-
agination, the human world is continually invented—devised through the
social practices of a given language use and narrative intentionality. As well:

the difference between factual, scientific language, and the language of

poets, dramatists, and novelists, is not that the one engages with the only
reality there is, physical reality, while the other engages with nothing
but ideological smoke and mirrors. Rather, they look in different direc-
tions. (Ibid.)

Harrison continues in this essay to elaborate the directionality of factual sci-

entific discourse. But what especially interests me here is his characterization
of literary discourse:

The discourse of poets and novelists [literary discourse] turns . . . lan-

guage back upon itself. It uses the language born of the practices
through which we make, not only language, but ourselves, not to illumi-
nate the inhuman, physical world, but to illuminate its own founding
practices, and thus the human worlds which those practices originate
and constitute. (Ibid., pp. 84–85)

Harrison thus asks us to attend to Dickens’s language and to the ways in

which it is a speaking because it emanates from social practices. In his analy-
sis of Dickens’s language, Garrett Stewart (1974) presumes this social prac-
tice, as does John Jordan in his deft studies of his voicing of character and
situation, notably in his recent book, Supposing Bleak House (2011).

5. Literary Networks as Matrices of Meaning-Making

One way of working with this powerful formulation is to look at the human
worlds constituted by these language practices, by particular narratives. Follow-
ing this line of thought the character Fagin leads to the suggestion that Dick-
ens has articulated a world in which this Jew, modeled as is often thought
after a notable English criminal of the early nineteenth century, Ikey
Solomons (cf. Sackville O’Donnell, 2002), stands for networks of the medie-
val Christian accusation of the blood libel. On the connection between blood
libel myths and Oliver Twist, see Joseph Litvak’s “Bad Scene: Oliver Twist
and the Pathology of Entertainment (1998) and Frank Felsenstein’s Anti-
Semitic Stereotypes (1995).
After Dickens’s Jewish friend Eliza Davis objected to his emphasis of
Fagin’s Jewishness in Oliver Twist (Lebrecht, 2005), he removed all stereo-
typical caricature of Fagin from later editions, changing the epithet “the Jew”
with its connotation of the devil and replacing it with the name, Fagin (see
56 MURRAY BAUMGARTEN

Nunberg, 2001, p. 126). In doing so, he was, in effect, seeking to revise the
“human world” that his prior characterization had constituted. He also invent-
ed Riah, a Jewish character central to Our Mutual Friend, who changes his
apparent allegiances to reveal a kinder world. Evil Fagin, called a “Jew bo-
gey-man” in the first edition, who evokes the specter of the “old clothesman”
in Our Mutual Friend, that medieval Christianity willed into being, stands in
contrast to the helpful, benevolent Riah.
Against the network of social practices that Dickens evokes in Oliver
Twist, Riah in Our Mutual Friend articulates a different set of networks and
practices. Our Mutual Friend stages a theatrical and dramatic set of revela-
tions that in part make up for—that remediate to a large extent —Fagin’s evil.
The ironies of the acknowledgment direct us to the limits of Dickens’s repre-
sentations of Jews. How can we acknowledge the ironies of Dickens’s effort
to make amends for Fagin with his philosemitic portrayal of Riah in Our Mu-
tual Friend ? For, as Fred Kaplan notes, Dickens uses the “powerful Jewish-
Christian motif of redemption in Our Mutual Friend ” (1998, p. 410) but re-
verses the stereotypes by depicting:

Christianity as responsible for the fiction of the materialistic perversion

of the Jew in Christian culture. Under economic pressure, oppressed by
racial and cultural stereotypes, Riah, the good Jew, is forced to become
the front man for the Christian moneylender and slum landlord Fascina-
tion Fledgby. Without a sense of otherness, Dickens conceives of the
Jew in stereotypical Christian terms and the Christian in stereotypical
Jewish terms. As fiction, it is brilliant. . . . As racial apologetics, it is
limited. (Ibid., p. 472)

When he received the gift of a Hebrew-English Bible after the publica-

tion of Our Mutual Friend from Eliza Davis, Dickens stressed that he would
not “willfully” have done an injustice to the Jewish people “for any worldly
consideration . . . he could not get beyond the cultural evasion inherent in the
word ‘willfully’ nor escape subtly associating material terms with those to
whom he was supposedly apologizing” (ibid., p. 473). In effect, then, Riah
and the question of his human world, of the limited social practices, which he
exemplifies and in which he is embedded, becomes a key index by which we
might assess the history of English literary antisemitism.

6. Reading and the Plots of Social Practices

Dickens begins Our Mutual Friend with a sequence of negations. Rather than
the expected birth scene of the Romantic foundling story with which Oliver
Twist begins, Dickens starts Our Mutual Friend with a series of observations
 Reading Dickens: Pleasure and the Play of Harrison’s Social Practices 57

that call into question which convention, which kind of story, this Victorian
novel offers. The opening chapter, “On the Look Out,” toggles between the
point of view of the characters, who, we learn four pages along in the chapter,
are looking out for bodies in the water, and the reader, whom the narrator en-
gages in looking out and about to assess the as yet undefined situation in which
the characters are engaged. “In these times of ours” Dickens begins, “though
concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise” ([1864] 1899, vol. 1,
p. 1), thus plunging us into the present tense of our and their looking.
The narrator continues his description by locating “a boat of dirty and
disreputable appearance, with two figures in it” that “floated on the Thames,
between Southwark Bridge, which is of iron, and London Bridge, which is of
stone, as autumn evening was closing in” (ibid.) The narrator takes us from
the equivalent of an establishing shot of a film to focus on:

the figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled
hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, suf-
ficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed,
pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack
in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look
out. (Ibid.)

Family likeness set, the narrator’s account notes that they are working
together in what must be the family business but does not here name or speci-
fy it. At just the point where the reader expects to learn the what and why of
these characters’ activity, the narrator launches into a series of negatives:

He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat
had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond
a rusty boathook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his
boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he
could not be a lighter-man or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he
looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and search-
ing gaze. (Ibid.)

Still deferring the definition of the action we are observing, the narrator tells us:

Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of the
slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this boat
and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they often
did, and were seeking what they often sought. (Ibid, p. 2)

The narrative deferral continues, displacing the meaning of the observed

action into the description of the two figures:
58 MURRAY BAUMGARTEN

Half savage as the man showed, with no covering on his matted head,
with his brown arms bare to between the elbow and the shoulder, with
the loose knot of a looser kerchief lying low on his bare breast in a wil-
derness of beard and whisker, with such dress as he wore seeming to be
made out of the mud that begrimed his boat, still there was a business-
like usage in his steady gaze. So with every lithe action of the girl, with
every turn of her wrist, perhaps most of all with her look of dread or
horror; they were things of usage. (Ibid., p. 2)

We learn of the skill involved in responding to the ebb and flow of tides.
We become aware that these figures “on the lookout” are not only on the bot-
tom of the English social classes, but perhaps even outside that social system,
allied instead to the mud in which they work, and from which they emerge
like strange amphibians who fish out, the reader discovers, abandoned corps-
es. The girl shivers but cannot evade the proximity of the corpse lying in the
bottom of the boat, and her father reminds her that though she may “hate the
sight of the very river,” it is the source of their living: “As if it wasn’t meat
and drink to you!”
Dickens continues showing how their lives depend on—emerge from—
the mud of the Thames:

How can you be so thankless to your best friend, Lizzie? The very fire
that warmed you when you were a babby, was picked out of the river
alongside the coal barges. The very basket that you slept in, the tide
washed ashore. The very rockers that I put it upon to make a cradle of it,
I cut out of a piece of wood that drifted from some ship or another.
(Ibid., p. 4)

There is a fleeting suggestive reference to the biblical Moses floating on the

Nile in his bulrush basket about to be rescued by Pharoah’s daughter, but that
is quickly elided by the imagery of the material help offered by the debris the
tide washes ashore. Mythology gives way to an exchange about money and
value between Gaffer Hexam and his former scavenging partner, Rogue
Riderhood, to whom Lizzie listens, and Gaffer’s daughter, with whom the
chapter ends.
The second chapter, a satiric account, immediately takes us to a banquet
hosted by the newly minted Veneerings, who strive to participate in the upper
reaches of middle-class society, and its aristocratically connected guest,
Twemlow, “first cousin to Lord Snigsworth.” The table talk turns to the “man
from nowhere,” who has now become the “man from somewhere,” heir to a
fortune made from Dust collection, which brings with it a requirement of
marriage. With the note that announces the heir apparent is in fact the corpse
retrieved by Gaffer and Lizzie and now at the bottom of their boat, the detec-
tive story is launched that will connect top and bottom of this society.
 Reading Dickens: Pleasure and the Play of Harrison’s Social Practices 59

This is not to be a tale of a Romantic foundling who will, after many es-
capes and adventures, come into his inheritance—the staple of so many oper-
as generated from this class of fiction. Rather, it is a Victorian tale that asks
how the Victorian society of extremes, of rich and poor, holds together. In
addition, that brilliant first chapter, that chapter of surprises with which Our
Mutual Friend begins, will take us from the scavenging class, perhaps the
poorest of the poor, into the drawing room and dining elegance of the
Veneerings, which includes the aristocratically connected Twemlow.
We move from the social practices of the impoverished and the margin-
al, even criminal class, to the heights of wealth and power. The social practic-
es of the rich and the well-connected are juxtaposed to their opposites, and
both come together through a plot that will inform us how social situations
work. This is not the limited writing of a novelist, whom Lionel Trilling
claimed “had a simple mind” (1978, p. 32), but a sophisticated interrogation
of the human worlds constituted by his society. It is an inquiry that will turn
on the question central to English culture: Who and what is a gentleman?
Riah, the benevolent Jew, breaks out of those practices and networks
that deny the possibility of a Jew becoming a gentleman. But how can he be a
gentleman? In the discourse of Our Mutual Friend, Dickens locates the ques-
tion more generally. It hovers throughout the Lizzie/Eugene plot—a theme
and motif Dickens, in David Copperfield ([1850] 1943), with its Emi-
ly/Steerforth strand had begun to explore. In Our Mutual Friend, Twemlow,
is designated from the beginning as a gentleman, while Boffin, the putative
miser, has the qualities ascribed to Jews scripted by the plot for him to play
until he, like Riah, reveals himself as the benevolent man. Is this the panto-
mime world so finely analyzed by Edwin Eigner (1989)—the world of the
commedia—the theatre world of hoped-for wish fulfillment—that gives the
reader a glimpse of possible redemption? Boffin emerges from the novel at its
conclusion as the gentleman who has played the miser’s role to teach a lesson
about the qualities that define the gentleman.
The question remains: Can a Jew who has been stereotyped as the old
clothesman or a Jew bogey-man, as a blood-sucking usurer, as a practitioner
of the blood-libel, as, in a word, a Fagin, possibly become a gentleman in the
Victorian world? Why does Dickens, for example, not make use of, refer to,
or even narrate some of Moses Montefiore’s life as a model for Riah’s, paral-
lel to his use of Solomons’s for Fagin? Is it because he does not understand
Montefiore’s commitment to Klal Yisrael, to the community of practice of his
people, which he served and his commitment to seeking justice for his peo-
ple? Is it that the Jew for Dickens is a member of an alien species, beamed in
from the middle ages which so many Victorians, Carlyle included, thought of
as the immediate predecessor to their own era? Is he a time-traveler plunked
down in Victorian England and acting in it but not part of it? The stereotype
that Fagin performs persists in the English literary imagination, calling into
60 MURRAY BAUMGARTEN

question the very possibility that a Jew, even through good deeds, can be a
gentleman. For it is the voice of society alone that can grant him that status.

7. The Social Practices of Gentlemen and Jews

Late in his life, Dickens had pretensions to aristocratic status. He managed to

get a coat of arms to go with his cultural prominence as the most important
man of letters of his day. His later novels dwell on the idea of the gentleman,
as he proceeds to subvert the conventional view. In Great Expectations
([1860–1861] 1942), Magwitch thinks Pip has reached aristocratic heights
with learning to read and write, but as thoughtful readers know, Great Expec-
tations does not extend that status to him but to Joe, the benevolent Black-
smith, and even his benefactor, Magwitch. So doing Dickens makes us aware
of the conditions defining aristocratic status, a narrative move he could have
learned from Shakespeare’s Henriad (second historical tetralogy, comprising
Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V), among other
exemplars. What is at stake here is what in the Renaissance was known as
“condescension”—the contractual obligation of the aristocrat to care for those
his status charged him to care for.
In Harrison’s terms, the language of Great Expectations “turns . . . back
upon itself. It uses the language born of the practices through which we make,
not only language, but ourselves, not to illuminate the inhuman, physical
world, but to illuminate its own founding practices, and thus the human
worlds which those practices originate and constitute” (2006, pp. 84–85).
Pip’s own words reveal his inability to care for others, for he is so blinded by
his own sense of self as to make him unable to reach out and understand their
concerns. His narcissism keeps him from taking actions that are benevolent.
Our Mutual Friend has a parallel concern with the gentleman and con-
cludes with a chapter, “The Voice of Society” in Volume Two. In this last
dinner at the Veneerings, the narrator stages the table talk as a mock Parlia-
mentary proceeding. The dinner guests—the usual cast of suspects we have
come to know from the second chapter of the novel forward—play at consti-
tuting themselves as if they were a Committee of the Whole gathered to de-
cide if Lizzie and Eugene can be included in society. Mortimer speaks for
Eugene and Lizzie. But his firm and quiet voice is mocked by Lady Tippins
and the other guests, until Twemlow is questioned.
For the first time in the novel, Twemlow speaks out, naming Eugene a
gentleman and Lizzie a Lady, and then stands his ground:

I say . . . if such feelings on the part of this gentleman, induced this gen-
tleman to marry this lady, I think he is the greater gentleman for the ac-
tion, and makes her the greater lady. I beg to say, that when I use the
word, gentleman, I use it in the sense in which the degree may be at-
tained by any man. The feelings of a gentleman I hold sacred, and I con-
 Reading Dickens: Pleasure and the Play of Harrison’s Social Practices 61

fess I am not comfortable when they are made the subject of sport or
general discussion. ([1865] 1908, vol. 2, p. 854)

The strong views of Twemlow carry the reader, if not the assembled company,
and the novel ends with Mortimer seeing Twemlow home: He “shakes hands
with him cordially at parting, and fares to the Temple, gaily” (ibid., p. 855).
The reader joins in Twemlow’s and Mortimer’s assessment—that cru-
cial category, gentlemen and lady, are democratized, as Twemlow judges
them a matter of feeling rather than inherited or financial status. Rather than
social status, Twemlow—and the novel—lead us into assessing the question
of sincerity through the experience of authentic feeling in opposition to the
inauthenticity of the characters like Lady Tippins who have aggrandized
themselves with the self-appointed role of the voice of society.
Once attained through the discussion of sincerity, the gentleman’s role is
implicitly extended to Riah.
The reader acknowledges the impact of Riah’s benevolence, in helping
Lizzie and Jenny. That course of action by Riah leads to his joining the ranks
of the true aristocrats of Our Mutual Friend. What a turn-about, to have a Jew
be one of the gentlemen of this world.
That revolutionary outcome is central to George Eliot’s novel, Daniel
Deronda([1876] 1984), which begins with Daniel acting the benevolent aristo-
crat when he returns Gwendolyn Harleth’s necklace. Her novel draws on the
image Disraeli would have liked to project but was not able to because of the
taint associated with his Jewish origins that, society, felt drew him down on
the social scale and branded him an upstart and parvenu. It is noteworthy that
Deronda, whose Jewishness does not come out for most of the novel, is ech-
oed by Israel Zangwill in his popular play, The Melting Pot (1914), which
also features a hero of Sephardic origin. It is worth noting that where Dickens
ends in Our Mutual Friend, these other writers in one sense at least begin.
Dickens did not, however, have much to do with Jews—and in his day
no Jews had yet been raised to the Peerage. Is it possible that his father was
sent to debtors’ prison because of the actions of a Jewish moneylender—and
even arrested by a Jew and turned over to the bailiff at the Marshalsea, an
action that Dickens would have known and resented? We do know that as
Dickens negotiated the sale of Tavistock House in 1860 to James Eliza Davis,
he did make some casual antisemitic remarks about Jewish money-lenders to
his friend Forster, that were in keeping with what was expected of the creator
of Fagin. Until the extended correspondence with Eliza Davis that began in
1863, Dickens had little personal experience of the social practices of Jews. It
is noteworthy that references to Moses Montefiore are absent in his work,
even though Riah, in his generosity and reaching out to the poor, friendless,
and disabled echoes some of Montefiore’s signal virtues (see Kaplan, 1998).
A key result of the correspondence with Eliza Davis and the subsequent
effort Dickens made to understand Jewish experience was the figure of Riah.
62 MURRAY BAUMGARTEN

In Our Mutual Friend, Riah goes from devilish money-lender to benevolent

friend of Jenny Wren and Lizzie Hexam. With them, the reader discovers that
he was the reluctant front-man for Fascination Fledgby, and acted under du-
ress. His disguise thrown over, Riah helps Lizzie hide among Jewish friends
who own a paper-mill some distance from London, and joins Jenny and Lizzie
in a key scene in the novel on the roof—“Come up and be dead,” Jenny calls to
him, acknowledging his unlocatable situation in contemporary England (ibid.).
Lizzie provides a glimpse of Jewish benevolence in a brief comment she
makes about Riah’s friends, the paper-mill owners, when she notes their
kindness: As Harry Stone notes, “Dickens uses Riah to underline Jewish loy-
alty, kindness, humility, patience, and charity—the supposedly Jewish vir-
tues,” which Riah exhibits time and again. “He hides Lizzie Hexam among
his co-religionists and keeps her secret in the face of humiliation and con-
tempt. Lizzie herself vouches for Jewish kindness (1959, p. 247). “‘The gen-
tleman certainly is a Jew,’ said Lizzie, ‘and the lady, his wife, is a Jewess,
and I was first brought to their notice by a Jew. But I think there cannot be
kinder people in the world’” ([1864] 1899), p. 114). Lizzie attests to the
goodness of these Jews. It is a judgment Lizzie dwells on and the reader
hears—or, rather, with her, utters. For the novel invites the reader to partici-
pate in the voicing of its conclusions: this feature of the novel is foregrounded
in the soliloquies that evoke the thinking speech of John Harmon, perhaps
most notably in Volume 1, Chapter 13, “A Solo and a Duett” which defines a
theatrical space within the narrative matrix of the novel.
Confronted by the implications of the different identities he has estab-
lished for himself, John Harmon must decide which one to play through. In
this scene John Harmon thinks “it out to the end” (ibid., p. 465). This solilo-
quy as Carol Hanbery Mackay has observed transforms the novel and makes
possible the pious fraud on which the plot turns (Soliloquy in Nineteenth-
Century Fiction, 1987, cited in Eigner, 1989). Coming at the hinge of the
serial parts of the novel, this episode does not as some critics have argued
destroy the suspense the novel has built, but, instead, displaces it into the
question of performance: will John Harmon be able to carry through his
choice of new identity as John Rokesmith?
The soliloquy gives voice to the performative issue: after a page and a
half of narration, there are six pages of soliloquy. Soliloquy is then succeeded
by two and a half pages of dialogue when Rokesmith meets Bella, and the
chapter concludes with a clinching question: “And John Rokesmith, what did
he?, what did he?” ([1864] 1899), p. 471). The subjectivity of John Harmon
so brilliantly represented here and insinuated into the readers’ consciousness
as if they were speaking and thinking it, is unavailable to Riah. Dickens has
no access to Jewish interiority. Was it closed off to him resentment he har-
bored after his father was sent to debtors’ prison? Whatever the personal or
social motivations, in the Dickens theatre it is not possible to have a character
 Reading Dickens: Pleasure and the Play of Harrison’s Social Practices 63

step to the front of the stage and express his Jewish identity by talking about
his situation as a Jew.
By contrast, we have Harrison’s nuanced essay, “Talking like a Jew: Re-
flections on Identity and the Holocaust” (1996, pp. 3–28). Like John Harmon,
Harrison here thinks through the problem of multiple identities, now in the
modern post-Holocaust context. Harrison also must sort out some of the con-
sequences of his having enjoyed the hospitality of a childhood friend’s Jewish
home and family. This complex essay turns on what it means to “talk like.”
As Harrison tells his story, he takes on through his talking what it is to be
Jewish. It is not that he acts the part, but that he becomes, through talking—
through the voicing, the breathing of speech—that of which he is speaking.
What is at stake is the difference between playing at acting a part and the
pleasure in the play of talking—of becoming that which is being performed.
Harrison’s articulation of “social practices” makes such a distinction
possible. Performing the role, the speaker takes on not only the costume but
the subjectivity of the figure in question. The social practices which constitute
identity also constitute the self’s insideness—and it is just that interior state,
which comes forward so clearly and is so thoughtfully nuanced in Harrison’s
essay, that is missing in Dickens’s representation of Riah.
 Three

HARRISON, WITTGENSTEIN, DONNE,

AND THE POWERS OF LITERARY ART

Richard Eldridge

No philosopher of literature has elaborated an understanding of the cognitive

powers of art, especially of literature, to enable us to acknowledge our modes
of conceptualization and to bring us into clearer, more apt attention to human
life with more care, power, and persuasiveness, or with fuller accounts of the
differences between science and art, than has Bernard Harrison. Central to
Harrison’s accounting is a distinction he draws between “knowledge whose
acquisition does not require personal change as a condition of coming to pos-
sess it, and knowledge which does” (Harrison, 1991, p. 3). The former kind of
knowledge, typically achieved in the sciences, is, Harrison goes on to remark,
“a passive amenity, ready to be deployed in the service of whatever ends and
strategies happen at the moment to be mine” (ibid.). The latter kind of
knowledge, in contrast, is knowledge from a particular point of view of “how
things stand in the world,” that is, of how something matters to someone. This
latter knowledge—should it turn out that I have failed to see from my prior
standpoint something about mattering that others genuinely see from theirs—
“has the potential to set the established structures of my self in motion to-
wards change: it is, in short, dangerous knowledge” (ibid.).
One might object initially here that literary knowledge is not in fact so
different from other forms of cognition. Could I not learn just as well that
something x matters to another person A simply by A’s telling me so? Might I
not then equally well come to see that x does matter in that way? For exam-
ple, my neighbor tells me that he is delighted that his pear tree, hitherto a
scrawny and unproductive thing that has disappointed us both, has at last pro-
duced large and luscious fruits this year. Not only do I believe him, but I taste
one for myself, and I agree that it is good. Here there is nothing centrally lit-
erary about my change in point of view and attitude. Hence, it cannot be that
only literary art can yield transformational knowledge. What, then, is so spe-
cial about literature?
To answer this question, it is important to see that works of literature
achieve their cognitive powers, in contrast with works of science or simple
information-bearing statements, by instancing what Harrison calls “a strong
connection between language and reality [that] does not run [only] by way of
referentiality and truth”; instead, the “thickness” of literary language matters
(ibid., p. 51). Here the specific thickness of literary language is a matter cen-
66 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

trally of its use of forms of figuration—Harrison mentions metaphor, parable,

irony, and stylistic innovation (presumably including diction and patterns of
emplotment that reveal connections) (ibid., p. 7)—as devices of attention to
phenomena for the sake of more than simple classification and the conveying of
information. As a result, Harrison argues, “the textuality of the text . . . appears
not as something isolating the text from any power to influence our relationship
to the extra-textual, but as something which gives it that power” (ibid.).
If one is able “to trust and move with the text” and to “allow [one’s] im-
agination to be led by it,” then one may be brought to see things in a new light
of significance and feeling (ibid., pp. 6, 8). (Here one might usefully compare
Harrison’s work with recent work on the powers of literary art by Ted Cohen
[2008] and Rita Felski [2008]. Both these writers also dwell on the powers of
figuration to lead us into insights and feelings that we experience in and
through the course of moving with the text.)
Patterns of words that function to structure and guide participatory, im-
aginative attention are crucial. As Harrison puts it in commenting on Shake-
speare’s Sonnet 73:

[the] point is to restructure the reader’s feelings by opening, between

commonplace words, channels of analogy through which feelings at-
tached to one set of words and what they mean may flow and embrace
other words, and what they mean. The effect of the whole nest of inter-
locking analogies is to open a certain way of feeling [about what is pre-
sented]. (Ibid., p. 274)

In work subsequent to his 1991 Inconvenient Fictions, Harrison has de-

veloped his account of the cognitive powers of literary art by drawing on a
specifically Wittgensteinian understanding of language and meaning. Accord-
ing to this understanding, neither reference to a particular item nor causal rela-
tions running from things to words is alone sufficient to establish the application
of a general term to an open-ended set of items. In addition, or instead (for the
case of solely practice-generated terms such as “inch” or “sonata”), there must
be a practice of applying general terms based on relevant similarities, where
the standard of relevant similarity is laid down in the practice (see Harrison
and Hanna, 2003).
In general, only “the involvement of words in practices . . . gives us ac-
cess to the linked notions of truth, falsity, and the assertoric” (Harrison, 2009,
p. 236). No comprehensive anti-realism follows from this: cats and acorns and
pi-mesons can be among the genuinely existing, mind-independent things in
which we take an interest. But what does follow is that in creating linguistic
practices a human world is also created, a world involving such things as
practices of measurement and prediction, but then also a world of “patterns of
feeling, interest, and self-description” that are not available pre-linguistically
(ibid.). In any such human world, “certain rather specific sorts of character
 Harrison, Wittgenstein, Donne, and the Powers of Literary Art 67

will predominate and certain rather specific sorts of tension and dilemma be
felt and experienced” (ibid., p. 237). One reason for this is that—however
much our linguistic practice and the broader practices of our human world are
responsive to already existing, mind-independent things—our practices also
evolve. Any human world is “a world in a slow, glacier-like flux of change”
(ibid., p. 243), as human beings develop new powers, interests, resistances,
affections, and aversions that both reflect and are reflected in practice. Hence,
there are always occasions for surprise, puzzlement, perplexity, interest, long-
ing, delight, distaste, and so on, as human beings produce, reproduce, and
alter the conditions of their joint cognitive and practical lives.
Literary texts, with their imagination- and emotion-inviting and involv-
ing devices of attention, are able to dwell on the phenomena of a world that
occasion such attitudes, work these attitudes through and clarify them, and so
show us what is surprising, puzzling, perplexing, attractive, or distasteful,
with infinite shades of specificity. They can present things of a human world
(mind-independent and otherwise) in relation to emotional and attitudinal
stances, thus possessing a disclosive power that it seems apt to call not simply
expressive or aesthetic, but also cognitive, and cognitive through being ex-
pressive and aesthetic.
In MS 162B from 1939–40, printed in Culture and Value, Ludwig Witt-
genstein writes, “People today think that scientists are there to instruct them,
poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. That the latter have something to
teach them; that never occurs to them” (1980, p. 42). The thought that Witt-
genstein here rejects—that art teaches us nothing, but is instead a thing of
pleasure or entertainment alone—is common enough in modernity. Francis
Bacon, for example, claims that poetry is but “Feigned History” that submits
“the shews of things to the desires of the mind,” in contrast with experimental
inquiry that “doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things” ([1852]
1879, pp. 343–344).
My own students, some of whom nowadays double-major in such things
as Biology and Studio Arts or Economics and English Literature, sometimes
refer to their majors as their objective and subjective majors, “my major for
my parents” and “my major for me.” Some form of a distinction between
what is objective (mathematics, anything with a credible claim to being a sci-
ence) and what is subjective (the arts of all kinds, religious commitments,
ethical stances, etc.) is all but omnipresent in modern informal culture. There
is, moreover, surely some basis for a distinction of this kind. Art and literature
help us neither to discover new planets or chemical elements nor, more broad-
ly, to confirm new claims about objects taken as wholly mind-independent.
Nonetheless, Wittgenstein upholds the cognitive significance of art. As
he puts it in MS 109 from 1930:

Only the artist can represent the individual thing [das Einzelne] so that it
appears to us as a work of art. . . . The work of art compels us—one
68 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

might say—to see it in the right perspective, whereas without art the ob-
ject [der Gegenstand] is a piece of nature like any other. (1995, pp. 17–
18; my translation)

It is worth noting that the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

(1961) period maintained this view in relation to a conception of both the sub-
ject and the sense of the world as lying entirely outside the world, which itself
consists only of objects disposed in space. Only art and religious attitudes
could present things of the world as somehow having a sense or meaning.

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good
life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection be-
tween art and ethics. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as
it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from
outside. (Wittgenstein, 1984, p. 156)

While Wittgenstein came to abandon this transcendentalism and to locate the

emergence of a subject with a point of view as itself a phenomenon within
the world, his sense of the powers of art to disclose significances did not
shift, and it informs his interest in seeing—as in Part II of Philosophical In-
vestigations (1958).
But how, exactly, are we to understand the cognitive power of art to pre-
sent something to us not as a piece of nature like any other, but as somehow in
relation to us? How can a painting, a poem, or a novel have cognitive value, or
tell us something about ourselves and some things of our world, if it lacks the
confirmation procedures that are available in the cases of more obvious in-
stances of knowledge, and if it traffics often enough in the fictively imaginary?
If the cognitive powers of art, especially literary art, are not a matter of
presenting and justifying new truths about a mind-, interest-, and feeling-
independent reality, but are instead a matter of disclosure of how things mat-
ter or may matter to and for us, then the structure of cognitively significant art
must be essentially dramatic. It must not simply report how things are, but
must instead embody and express the development of simultaneously cogni-
tive, emotional, and valuational attitudes toward its objects. The literary text
must itself embody and express the temporally developing work of the
achievement of an attentive cognitive-emotional-valuational attitudinal
stance. Only in this way will it avoid being the communication of an attitude
that is already pre-formed in the mind of the writer—something that is more
or less a matter of fact that might simply be asserted.
If the cognitive work of literary art is not simply assertational, it must be
essentially both dramatic and expressive in presenting an arc of development
of cognitive, emotional, valuational attitudes. If this arc is to embody genuine-
ly cognitive advances, then it must embody not simply brute shifts in such
complexes of attitude. Rather it must embody shifts from complexes of atti-
 Harrison, Wittgenstein, Donne, and the Powers of Literary Art 69

tude that are initially merely felt, unstable, confused, and inchoate into com-
plexes of attitude that are clearer, more stable, and more attentive, and for
which the subject is coming to take active responsibility in and through the
writing of the literary text.
Always, from the most primitive forms of awareness to the more sophis-
ticated cases of conceptualization and controlled attention, feeling is present
as an element of experience. We read or talk or reflect or act or calculate or
barter or play, all with some element from any of a wide range of emotions:
dullness, interest, absorption, awe, fear, annoyance, compassion, and so on, in
all but infinite shades of specificity. Often enough these feelings are merely
had or passively suffered. When caught up in a complex task—solving a math
problem or repairing a carburetor or playing tennis—we often do not and of-
ten enough should not stop to attend to such feelings.
But the reasonable press on us of the demands of attention to complex
tasks rather than to our emotional lives carries with it the risk that we may fail
to take seriously our own feelings, so that they come to dominate us, in any of
a number of ways. We may come to do what we do dully, or in irritation, out
of annoyance, or in a mood of pervasive boredom. Such present but
unacknowledged emotional states can then in turn issue in violent, vengeful
reactions against irritations and annoyances or in thrill-seeking or in an addic-
tive pursuit of distractions. Likely enough, significant stretches of the modern
organization of work, family life, and political life (and their complex interac-
tions) will have to be changed, if more people are to become more able to live
and act in these spheres with a genuinely felt and expressed sense of the worth
of what they do.
But how are such changes to be motivated, and how is the shape they are
to assume to be understood, if we are unable first to come to terms with the
cognitive-emotional-valuational complexities and difficulties of our current
situations? In its embodying and expressing a dramatic arc of the development
of attention, all at once cognitive, emotional, and valuational, to how things
now matter for us, fail to matter for us, or might matter for us, literary art may
help us to come to terms with our situations in a way that very little else can.
To see in detail how this is so, it will prove useful to look at one short
example: arguably the poem that has figured more prominently in twentieth
and twenty-first century debates about the nature, cognitive significance, and
value of poetry than any other: John Donne’s “The Canonization.” Not only
has it been taken by a range of theoretically sophisticated critical readers—
Cleanth Brooks and John Guillory, among others—to exemplify the powers
and possibilities of poetry as such, it is also, among other things, a poem
about the nature of poetic value. Here it is in its entirety:

FOR Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love,

Or chide my palsie, or my gout,
70 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

My five gray haires, or ruin’d fortune flout,

With wealth your state, your minde with arts
improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honour, or his grace,
Or the Kings reall, or his stamped face
Contemplate, what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.
Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?
What merchant’s ships have my sighs
drown’d?
Who saies my teares have overflow’d his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veines fill
Adde one more to the plaguie Bill?
Soldiers find warres, and Lawyers finde out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.
Call us what you will, wee are made such by love;
Call her one, mee another fly,
We ‘are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die,
And wee in us find the’ Eagle and the Dove.
The phoenix ridle hath more wit
By us, we two being one, are it;
So, to one neutrall thing both sexes fit,
Wee die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombes and hearse
Our legend bee, it will be fit for verse;
And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes;
As well a well wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes,
And by these hymnes, all shall approve
Us Canoniz’d for love:
And thus invoke us; You, whom reverend love
Made one another’s hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole worlds soule contract, and
drove
Into the glasses of your eyes;
 Harrison, Wittgenstein, Donne, and the Powers of Literary Art 71

(So made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize,)
Countries, Townes, Courts: Beg from above
A patterne of your love! (2000, pp. 13–14)

“The Canonization” is one of several songs and sonnets, published only

as a collection in 1633, after his death in 1631. Prior to that time, his poems
circulated only individually in manuscript copies shared among a small circle
of friends. From internal evidence, however, they were composed sometime
between the late 1590s and his Anglican ordination and subsequent royal ap-
pointment in 1615. The reference in “The Canonization” to the “Kings reall”
(regalia) places it as having been written some time after the accession of
James I to the throne of England in 1603. More pointedly, in raising the issue
of the value of erotic love in relation to preferment within the ways of the
world, “The Canonization” responds to particular pressing circumstances of
Donne’s life during the early 1600s.
Donne had married, in secret and without her father’s permission, the
then seventeen-year-old Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Chancel-
lor of the Garter, in 1601. As a result of his outraged father-in-law’s interven-
tion, Donne lost his post as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of
the Great Seal, along with any chances for future appointments. With James
I’s accession in 1603, Donne then found himself living in comparative pov-
erty and without prospects, with a wife and a growing array of children
(twelve, of whom five died during childhood). Meanwhile, friends within his
Catholic intellectual circle received important court appointments from
James, who had been raised in the Church of Scotland but had also been bap-
tized Catholic, as the son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots and Henry
Stuart, Lord Darnley. (For more details of Donne’s life during this period in
relation to court politics, see Marotti [1986, pp. 152–155]).
The overt plot of “The Canonization” is fairly straightforward in re-
sponse to this background situation. In five stanzas, each ending with the
word “love,” the speaker first rebukes someone who has, apparently, charged
him with folly in love according to the standards of the world and then goes
on to develop figures to characterize the value of that love. Taking this plot
initially at face value, Cleanth Brooks characterizes “the basic metaphor
which underlies the poem (and one which is reflected in the title)” as one that:

involves a sort of paradox. For the poet daringly treats profane love as if
it were divine love. The canonization is not that of a pair of holy ancho-
rites who have renounced the world and the flesh. The hermitage of each
is the other’s body; but they do renounce the world, and so their title to
sainthood is cunningly argued. The poem then is a parody of Christian
sainthood; but it is an intensely serious parody of a sort that modern
72 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

man, habituated as he is to an easy yes or no, can hardly understand.

(1947, p. 11)

According to Brooks, in presenting this governing figure of the lovers as can-

onized not by the church, but by the very character of their love, the poem
displays: “the character of paradox with its twin concomitants of irony and
wonder” (ibid., p. 18), so that it further exemplifies the distinctive powers of
poetry as such, where “there is a sense in which paradox is the language ap-
propriate and inevitable to poetry” (ibid., p. 3). That is to say, it is an astonish-
ing fact—an appropriate object of “awed wonder” —that erotic love can be
redemptive, while in using religious language to describe this redemptive
character, the poet also displays a distinct form of self-conscious “irony”
(ibid., p. 8). The value of this love is a stupefying fact that Donne knows that
the world at large is ill-prepared to accept.
Focusing on the figure in stanza four, according to which the sonnets we
build may serve as “pretty roomes” that stand to heroic legends and chronicles
as “a well wrought urne” stands to “halfe-acre tombes”—each member of the
first set roomes/sonnets/urne is as fit to memorialize the greatest and most
holy as are the members of the second set legend/chronicle/halfe-acre
tombes—Brooks goes on to argue:

The poem is an instance of the doctrine which it asserts; it is both the as-
sertion and the realization of the assertion. The poet has actually before
our eyes built within the song the ‘pretty room’ with which he says the
lovers can be content. The poem itself is the well-wrought urn which can
hold the lovers’ ashes and which will not suffer in comparison with the
prince’s “halfe-acre tomb.” . . . [The well-wrought urn] is the poem it-
self. (1947, pp. 17, 21)

Hence, the wonder and irony that redemptive erotic love calls forth is called
forth, too, by the exemplary lyric poem, which itself is the vehicle that is
uniquely fitted both to present and itself to be a sensibility-transforming ob-
ject of these states of feeling and awareness.
Both building on and qualifying Brooks’ reading, Clay Hunt argues, “the
whole poem . . . seems designed to put the reader through the experience of
gradual awakening to the serious purpose at work beneath a surface texture of
lively, flashy cleverness” (1954, p. 75). In the rush of the conceits in stanza
three—we are flies, tapers, Eagle-Dove, and phoenix—there is, Hunt finds, an
air of “perverse wit without any serious philosophic significance” (ibid., p.
78)—a standard charge against Metaphysical Poetry. But stanza four then
displays “a broad even flow [that produces] a counter effect of calm and sober
meditation” (ibid., p. 79), so that the overall effect is serious:
 Harrison, Wittgenstein, Donne, and the Powers of Literary Art 73

Donne is not a man to use a major theological concept loosely. . . . In

“we die and rise the same” I think he is implying an exact parallel be-
tween the rationally inexplicable phenomenon of the fleshly spirituality
of this love and the specific theological mystery inherent in the doctrine
of the resurrection. (Ibid., p. 85)

Like Brooks, Hunt too finds the idea of the memorialization of the redemptive
to apply both to the urn and to the poem itself (ibid., p. 80) so that a central
task that is proper to poetry is the memorialization and conveyance of possi-
bilities of redemptive experience. Though it remains qualified by “some loose
ends of wit” that function to undo what might otherwise be “a hard self-
righteousness” on Donne’s part about his apparent martyrdom in marriage in
fact amounting to a sanctification, “The Canonization” nonetheless remains a
serious assertion and embodiment of value: “John Donne, as in some sense
truly a martyr, is certainly there” in the poem (ibid., p. 174).
More suspicious of any figures of redemption—erotic, religious, or poet-
ic—a second, strong reading of “The Canonization” focuses more on the poem
as a performance against a social background and on its diction, specifically on
the wit of its multiplying conceits, than on any single image, figure, or mes-
sage within the poem. Arthur F. Marotti argues:

“The Canonization” served interrelated emotional and social functions.

It was a witty recreation intended to make [Donne’s] painful and deject-
ed state more tolerable as well as a means of maintaining his habitual so-
cial intercourse with friends who were actively involved in the social and
political world of London and the Court. In ironically denying his own
needs and ambitions he gained a kind of emotional control over them as
he compensated for his socially inferior position by exercising intellectu-
al and rhetorical mastery over his coterie readers. (1986, p. 158)

Donne’s readers—the members of his male, Catholic, intellectual circle

within which his manuscripts circulated, one or more of whom may be imag-
ined as the accusation-leveling addressee of the poem—might be expected to
notice the rush of conceits in stanza three (flies, tapers, Eagle-Dove, and
phoenix), and they might well take “wee die and rise the same, and prove
/mysterious by this love” as invoking not Donne’s relation to his wife, but
rather his continuing identification, perhaps homoerotic, with the other, now
more successful, members of this circle. Hence, the poem functions, once we
take its actual and intended audience into account, as:

a gesture of wit that psychologically relieved his pain, . . . [where] in-

tense wittiness signals . . . that things are at the emotional breaking point.
Comic irony is an instrument for avoiding their patronizing pity and for
reversing the positions of moral superior and inferior. (Marotti, 1986, p. 3)
74 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

This second line of reading then has consequences for the work “The
Canonization” may be taken to do in exemplifying the powers of poetry in the
world, a work that now emerges as less redemptive and more political than in
the first line of reading. Echoing Marotti, John Guillory focuses on Donne’s
presumed address to his accuser/coterie audience:

Donne’s readers knew he was expressing his personal longing for the
public world he pretended to scorn in this lyric and they would have
read the poem as a more ironic, hence more aesthetically complex, work
than the one the formalist critics and scholars utilizing literary and intel-
lectual history have interpreted. (1993, p. 163)

Guillory also accepts Brooks’ claim that, as Guillory puts it, “‘The Canoniza-
tion’ somehow inscribes the essential condition of the poetic or the literary”
(Guillory, 1993, p. 164). But where Brooks finds successful figures of redemp-
tive experience in the interrelated images of urn, poem, hermitage, withdrawal,
canonization, and the sacred, Guillory finds a strategic, political use of these
figures to establish an esoteric circle of privileged, male readers of “difficult”
poems as the space of the appearance of literature as such. This is a consolatory
move for Donne, but not clearly accurate to everyone’s literary experience.
Against Brooks, Guillory then argues that (just as Donne wrote for a
privileged circle) Brooks’s praise of “The Canonization” and his taking it
unproblematically to exemplify the powers of poetry as such amount to a con-
temporary political move to establish the literary and its values as inscribed
within a privileged circle of the university-educated. In the context of post-
war literary studies in the United States, Brooks’s “valorization of difficulty”
(1947), as in the metaphysicals and his preferred moderns (William Words-
worth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, John Keats, William Butler Yeats, and always
in the background, T. S. Eliot) is an argument against the widely anthologized
“optimistic,” affirmative, democratic, non-difficult moderns. These include
“Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg,” po-
ets whose non-difficult work was by contrast also chauvinistic, kitschy, and
complicitous with the mass culture industry (Guillory, 1993, pp. 170–171).
By presenting the poem as paradox, Guillory argues, Brooks both fet-
ishizes difficulty and installs newly professionalizing new critical readers qua
university professors as the guardian-priests of the literary. Instead, then, of
conveying any message or doctrine about how some form of redemptive ex-
perience is available, both Donne and Brooks are appealing to and establish-
ing a class of minority, professional readers as the keepers of the flame—the
male Catholic, intellectual coterie for Donne; the mostly male circle of post-
war, New Critic university professors for Brooks—but doing so more by mys-
tification than by forwarding any plausible argument about redemption.
 Harrison, Wittgenstein, Donne, and the Powers of Literary Art 75

Every [successful poem as paradox] becomes an image of the very insti-

tutional space in which it is read, a perfect mirror in the imaginary of
that space, alerting the company of professional readers that the retreat
of literary culture into the university can be understood as a kind of tran-
scendence of the cultural conditions of modernity. . . . Insofar as every
successful poem achieves the condition of paradox, it annuls the specific
statements which may appear to be asserted in the poem, and becomes a
kind of hologrammic image of literature as a whole. (Guillory, 1993, pp.
165, 160)

What is one to make of these two lines of strong reading: the Brooks-
Hunt line focusing on “The Canonization” as description and vehicle of mul-
tiple forms of redemptive experience (erotic, religious, poetic) and the
Marotti-Guillory line, focusing suspiciously, skeptically, and knowingly on
the political instrumentalities of both the text itself and contemporary uses of
it? A crucial point is that it would be foolishly presumptive to suppose that
Donne himself was unaware of his diction, his multiple audiences, and his
own ambivalences. While we should perhaps agree to some extent with Stan-
ley Fish that we should not regard Donne as altogether “in possession of his
poetry and therefore of himself” (1990, p. 250), it is equally a mistake to sup-
pose that he has little or no awareness of his own ambivalences and of the
likely effects of his figures and diction on multiple audiences, as if someone
who failed to control every moment and aspect of possible reception could be
aware of next to nothing about what he is doing.
As William Empson usefully notes, Donne’s furthering of his “mystical
doctrine” of redemption by love “was always a tightrope walk” (1995, p. 93),
thus suggesting that Donne may be understood to have been undertaking to
balance his sense of the redemptive powers of love against the standing
claims of the world and force of his own worldly ambitions. Brooks himself
concedes that “The Canonization” “involves mixed metaphors and rapidly
shifted figures,” so that its unity is more “imaginative” in showing an ambiva-
lent mind in movement than it is doctrinal-assertational (1947, p. 245). Hunt
picks up this point in noting that “the personal reality behind the imaginary
debate of ‘The Canonization’ was certainly in part at least, Donne’s debate with
himself” (1954, p. 89), precisely about the significance of the values and expe-
riences of erotic love versus the values and experiences of worldly success.
It is the presence of this debate, dramatized in the jostling between the
individual figures of erotic-religious-poetic redemption and the wit of their
rushed succession, that sets up what Kenneth Gross calls “the troubled, oddly
disenchanted notions of mastery that haunt these lyrics” (2004, p. 385) of
Songs and Sonnets in general and that haunt “The Canonization” in particular.
This haunted mastery, or this ambivalence dramatized, is a function of the fact
that, as Gross continues:
76 RICHARD ELDRIDGE

Donne’s intricate conceits are not simply brilliant, static paradoxes fitted
to some established metaphysical belief, but working figures of desire,
tests of desire, complexly motivated wishes. They are wishes that not
only express a fixed desire but serve to isolate and defend desires that
might otherwise come to grief in the face of the real, if not in the face of
their own incoherence. (Ibid., p. 384)

In “The Canonization” in particular, Gross finds:

there is an overdetermined . . . sense of threat . . . some judgmental, accu-

satory, or slanderous agency beyond his control [coupled with] . . . a sense
that the danger reflects equally the poet’s doubt of his own powers, and
the very conflicted shape of his own desire. . . . [The poem itself]
emerges out of the speaker’s desire to master the situation of threat pure-
ly by his words. He deploys his lyric tropes to answer the intrusion, to
shape some figure of reparation or possession that might control or ra-
tionalize the threat. This struggle for mastery is at once emotional, con-
ceptual, and metaphysical. . . . The attempt at mastery is liable, in any
given poem to fail or show an inescapable flaw. Whether directly or in-
directly, some shadow of the initial menace will remain, or some new
threat will suddenly arise to take it s place. . . . Each failure [then] begets
additional and often more desperate attempts at mastery; each produces
further sequences of increasingly baroque and wire-drawn conceits, con-
ceits that will on the one hand acknowledge the fact of failure itself and
on the other hand attempt to overcome that fact and its implications.
(Ibid., pp. 375–376)

This is all surely right. But here we may and should also ask: Is the overall
effect of “The Canonization” one of failure? Or is it rather an effect of the
successfully enacted or expressed presence of an ambivalent mind that has
housed its own ambivalences within a dramatic structure? Here it is a crucial
point that “The Canonization” ends not simply with an assertion, but also with
an injunction. Assertational material forms the bulk of the last two stanzas.
Our story (legend) will be fit for verse, which will itself be as suitable to me-
morializing our love as a well wrought urn is to contain the ashes of the great-
est—as suitable or more suitable than are Chronicles and “halfe-acre tombes”
to memorialize the rich and powerful.
As a result of these verses, all shall approve of us and our love, and they
shall invoke us—call on us and address us—as a pattern of the incarnation of
significance. And then come the last two lines of the poem:

Countries, Townes, Courts: Beg from above

A patterne of your love!
 Harrison, Wittgenstein, Donne, and the Powers of Literary Art 77

What are the sense and force of these last two lines? Surely the verb
“beg” is partly to be understood as implicitly prefixed by the “shall”—that is,
“will” —in “shall approve” that also governs “invoke,” so that the immediate
reading is:

Countries, Townes, and Courts will beg (for)

A patterne of your love

that is, will beg to have it available as a pattern and to be equally successful
themselves in living according to it. But it is also the case that the force of this
shall/will is muted by the word shall being located ten lines earlier, in the
next-to-last line of stanza four. Given this distance and given the strong
endstop after “epitomize,” it seems equally natural to read “Countries,
Townes, Courts” as an object of apostrophizing address and then to take “Beg
from above a patterne of your love” as an injunction directed to them rather
than as a prediction about what will happen:

Countries, Townes, and Courts—let it be that you beg for a pattern for
your love (perhaps taking our love as that pattern), for otherwise your
lives may be pale, unredeemed, and no match for ours in embodied val-
ue, and otherwise, moreover, my life with my love will not have been
confirmed as significant; that confirmation waits upon your approval.

But if this more injunctive, almost pleading, sense is also present along with
the assertational sense, then these concluding lines also carry the thought that
this taking of the lovers as a pattern has not yet come to pass and may not
come to pass at all. The ways of the world may simply be too strong for that.
To the extent, then, that both the assertational reading (Countries,
Townes, and Courts will in fact beg) and the injunctive reading (let it be the
case that Countries, Townes, and Courts beg, even if they may not) are both
present, the speaker has managed to condense in a single formulation an ambiv-
alent desire that has been expressed both in individual figures of redemption
(phoenix/urn/verse) and in a rush of showoff conceits that solicit the approval of
a coterie readership. Hence, the ambivalence of the desire that structures the
poem as a whole has been resolved not by dismissing the claims of one side—
desire for further erotic-religious-poetic redemptive experience versus desire
for worldly success and approval—and simply asserting the superior claims of
the other, but rather by condensing both sides of the desire into a single ex-
pressive trope. The resolution is dramatic, not assertational, and it involves an
invitation to us—the readers of “The Canonization”—to see ourselves and to
acknowledge our own lives as richly structured by ambivalent desire as is the
life of the speaker of these words.
To see and acknowledge this about oneself might well require a certain
transformation of the self away from tendencies to stand on too simple formu-
 Part Two

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE MORAL LIFE

 Four

BERNARD HARRISON ON
THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Leona Toker

1. Introduction

In close connection to his work in philosophy, Bernard Harrison has made an

important contribution to literary studies, with books and articles that are both
self-contained works of literary criticism and parts in strands of thinking. I shall
here enter into a dialogue with three such interconnected strands of ideas—
those pertaining to British moral philosophy, to reader-response criticism, and
to the philosophy of language.

2. Literature and Moral Philosophy

In the early 1980s, while preparing to teach a course on the eighteen-century

English novel, I chanced on a relatively thin book, Harrison’s Henry Field-
ing’s “Tom Jones”: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher, published by Sussex
University Press in 1975. This book turned me into a part of Harrison’s faith-
ful audience ever since.
Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” showed how useful the study of British
moral philosophy could be for narratology, both in providing a system of
concepts that could be traced in the thematic matrices of each work and in
helping to reveal the textual reasons, beyond the reach of purely structural
analysis, for our vaguer intuitions. Indeed, one of the first challenges which
Harrison’s book meets is accounting for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s remark
that we know that Blifil is a villain as early as in the episode where he does an
ostensibly kind deed—setting a captive bird free. Harrison’s analysis of this
episode reveals what it is in the text that suggests to us the difference between
a generous impulse and its hypocritical mimicry; what it is, also, that makes
narrative technique double as an instrument of ethical inquiry, in particular into
the problem of how generous impulse can be “educated into virtue without
becoming corrupted by the very prudence which it must learn” (ibid., p. 69).
The book demonstrates that through the ironic narrator, in many ways his
spokesman, Fielding combines the theory of the Good Heart with a consist-
ently honed construction of the “phenomenology of the moral life,” his char-
acters and plot showing how the vocabulary of morals (“generosity,” “hate,”
“friendship,” “courage,” “prudence”) functions in ordinary life. Apparent
clashes or incommensurabilities between such concepts staged by the plot
82 LEONA TOKER

draw the reader into an active exercise of ethical judgment. This quest for
conceptual discrimination becomes a way of doing moral philosophy while
also retaining receptiveness to the aesthetic effect of the text.
Harrison discusses Fielding’s philosophical contribution as filling a gap
in his contemporary spectrum of ideas by strengthening the intellectual forces
opposed to the Hobbes-Mandeville type of philosophical egoism. The latter
tends to reduce individual human motivation to the strongest of the present
desires and hence to deny moral credit to the good actions on the grounds that
they are performed to please oneself. This moral skepticism was to a large
extent a closed system (it resurged in the vocabulary of the “sober” view of
human motivation in the post-modern metapolitical media discourse). In the
eighteenth century, given the influence of the Protestant emphasis on faith
rather than good works as a measure of righteousness, it was mainly opposed
by “a rather depressing bundle of half insights and not quite avowed conces-
sions” that Harrison calls “standard benevolism” (ibid., p. 70). Fielding’s
novel, in Harrison’s reading, reinforces the anti-egoist school of thought; it
refuses, pace Kant, to divorce ethical principles from networks of human re-
lationships and from the recognition of the needs of others; it also refuses,
pace anti-egoist Bishop Joseph Butler, to regard moral conscience as tending
to the same results as rational self-interest.
Harrison demonstrates that Fielding’s moral vision is not limited to the
unhedged valorization of para-Shaftesburian good-heartedness. The novel’s
protagonist starts as a youngster of strong impulses which lead him, and oth-
ers, into a great deal of trouble; as a result, his “Good Heart” runs the risk of
“turning sour” (ibid., p. 93). Through narrative peripeteia, the novel registers
the point at which this crisis is overcome and the clash of appetite with auto-
matic benevolence is replaced by a conscious commitment to the good of
others. Through the complexities of the plot and a cross section of characters
Fielding leads the readers to draw the conclusion that the precondition for a
full understanding of and identification with moral concepts and claims is the
volitional step to treating others’ good as an ultimate end (ibid., p. 101). Yet
this commitment has to be held within bounds by “prudence”—not as a uni-
versal formula for translating the “do” into the “don’t” but as a continuous
acquisition of the knowledge of the world and of oneself.
Here the analysis of Fielding’s place in the history of ideas converges
with thematic analysis. The deployment of themes and motifs in the novel is
where the form and the content meet. In terms of Louis Hjelmslev’s net (the
substance of content versus the form of content; the substance of expression
versus the form of expression [Hjelmslev, 1969]), this analysis reveals the
form in addition to the substance of the novel’s content (Toker, 2010, pp. 2–3,
35–48). Perhaps if one were to find moral subversiveness in Fielding, this is
where one should look for it, rather than in his tendency to exonerate the nov-
el’s ethically improvising protagonist who learns prudence when it is almost
too late.
 Bernard Harrison on the English Novel 83

For whatever reasons, Fielding’s book was banned from Jane Austen’s
father’s household; his moral vision could be felt as endangering her own
comic utopia in which personal integrity is ultimately at peace with rational
self-interest (Polhemus, 1982, p. 39). In Tom Jones (Fielding, 1974), the logic
of events propelled by the protagonist’s initially undisciplined vitality and
responsiveness is presented as inevitably leading to catastrophe, and it is only
the author’s elaborate and self-conscious manipulation of the plot, the “comic
dramatist’s trick of wedding bells in the last scene” (Harrison, 1975, p. 110),
that averts one. True, something like this is evident in Austen’s novels as
well: her happy endings are usually made possible by the author’s wit rather
than the characters’ acquired wisdom. Yet in comparison with the Bildungs-
roman ethics that she foregrounds, the touch-and-go interventions of her nar-
rative providence are rendered almost incidental, almost lip-service to the
comic convention in which a happy marriage doubles as a cum laude matricu-
lation certificate.
If Harrison reads Fielding’s work as a response to Thomas Hobbes,
Bernard Mandeville, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, and
Joseph Butler, he reads Laurence Sterne as swerving away from John Locke
and David Hume. Sterne’s response to Locke is discussed in “The Defense of
Wit,” a chapter in Harrison’s 1991 Inconvenient Fictions, placing Sterne
within his philosophical Zeitgeist, “without making him merely its representa-
tive” (1991, p. 76). Harrison sees the common ground between Sterne and
Locke in nominalism, which Sterne translates into a version of particularism
and a call for humility toward another as other—humility not so much in re-
spect to the inwardness of another, which remains unknowable, but in respect
to the other’s “concrete particularity” made visible by his or her words, acts,
and hobby-horses (ibid., p. 78).
Where Sterne, as heteroclite in his declensions as his Parson Yorick,
parts ways with Locke is in Locke’s insistence on the epistemological priority
of judgment (seeing the different in the similar) over wit (seeing the similar in
the different, as in a metaphor). Wit is the leaping of minds that, to adapt the
words of Locke’s other deviant disciple, Alexander Pope, can “snatch a Grace
beyond the Reach of Art” ([1709] 1956, pt. I, l. 155) or beyond the reach of
logic. When Mrs. Shandy’s green nightgown swims into the mind of her maid
Susannah after the announcement of Master Bobby’s death, this does not
mean that Susannah fails to understand the news. On the contrary, she under-
stands it very well: it is not her mind but her emotion that is, at the moment,
stunted. Instead of sympathizing with her mistress’s loss, she lets her thoughts
leap to the perks she herself will receive as a result of Mrs. Shandy’s going
into mourning.
The green nightgown becomes a metaphor for moral attentiveness going
into a trance. This metaphor is not Susannah’s—there is no Momus glass in
her chest. Rather, it is Sterne’s own enthymematic wit (cf. Toker, 2010, pp.
59–62) that captures an egoistic impulse in an image that yokes together pro-
84 LEONA TOKER

perty and (im)propriety, in tune with Locke’s propertarianist view of the

mind’s products (cf. Harrison, 1991, pp. 82–83). Susannah’s feelings are re-
vived when Trim literalizes another metaphor by throwing his cap on the
floor (at the drop of a hat) when talking about the suddenness of Bobby’s
death as part of the human condition.
Whereas Locke aims to establish a right “to own property or to lay claim
to knowledge,” Sterne’s tale seeks to improve our understanding of what “the
words in which it is told mean to the teller.” Wit is a help in grasping “the
alien congruities which have impressed another as important.” Sterne criticizes
Locke, Harrison believes, for the Procrustean way in which his epistemology
and theory of language accommodate the crooked timber of humanity, de-
spite their streamlined adaptability to the study of the natural world (ibid.,
pp. 89, 93).
One of Harrison’s targets is “psychological egoism,” an account of hu-
man motivation according to which our main goal is a gratifying condition of
our consciousness, with altruism and benevolence factored in only insofar as
they contribute to the production and maintenance of pleasant states of mind.
Psychological egoism would re-describe philanthropy, for instance, in terms
of the pleasure of eating with a hundred mouths rather than one, and maternal
self-sacrifice in terms of the mother’s delight in the satisfaction of her child’s
appetite as exceeding her own craving for food. Hume, who subscribed to this
theory, explained the role of benevolent action in creating moral pleasure by
the tendency toward sympathy with others: other things being equal (and bar-
ring pathological enjoyment of another’s suffering), we would rather see oth-
ers contented than distressed.
Psychological egoism, another closed system, tends to short-shrift val-
ues, scorn our dreams of idealistic commitment, and reduce motivation to the
lowest common denominator. In his work on Sterne, and in league with this
novelist, Bernard Harrison places himself in opposition to this description of
moral life. He presents Sterne not as Hume’s meek disciple but as an innova-
tive thinker whose sentimentalism is parody rather than an earnest attitude,
and whose moral philosophy is not to be identified with “Deliberative Indi-
vidualism,” that is, “the doctrine that all voluntary acts spring from a process
of prudential deliberation aimed at optimizing the harmonious satisfaction of
appetites” (1994, p. 83).
With the help of Sterne’s Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1904), in particular the
“Vindication of Human Nature” (“For none of us liveth to himself” [Romans
17:7; King James, Cambridge ed.]), Harrison watches deliberative individualism
clash with examples of warm-hearted impulsiveness and onerous uncomfort-
able service of interpersonal commitments (1994, p. 196). Though by circular
argument, typical of closed systems such counterexamples could be explained
away, Harrison’s reader finds them much more convincingly accounted for by
the principle of valorizing human relationships for their own sake rather than
by treating them as subservient to the optimal satisfaction of appetites.
 Bernard Harrison on the English Novel 85

Though deliberative individualism can hardly be defeated on its own turf, it

may be counterbalanced if, stepping outside that enclosure, one reinterprets
human goals—if, that is:

in place of the Hobbesian individual, the content of whose appetites is

determined externally by society, we put an individual for whom the ac-
ceptance of social relationships is a condition of formulating his desires,
not merely a condition for satisfying them. (Ibid., p. 80; emphasis added)

Relationships are a bulwark against accident and adverse contingency. They

depend on:

the subjection of individual human hearts, in correlative and coordinate

ways, to ‘instinctive’ feelings and impulses which do not originate in
self-interest and whose commands are not always consonant with self-
interest. (Ibid., p. 95)

Uncle Toby, for whom relationships are a dominant value, provides a better
moat for young Tristram’s sense of identity than do his agonistic parents.
This shift from the instrumentality of relationships to their intrinsic val-
ue continues the point made in Harrison’s “Morality and Interest” (1989): the
pleasurable state of mind that we derive from having helped others may well
be seen not as our main motive but as a contingent bonus, our aim being the
good of others for their own sake.
Personal relationships are discussed as an end in themselves in two more
of Bernard Harrison’s essays on English fiction. One is his chapter on E. M.
Forster and G. E. Moore in Inconvenient Fictions (1991, pp. 98–122). The
other is “Houyhnhnm Virtue” (2003). In “Houyhnhnm Virtue,” the main ar-
gument is that the foundational principle of the dystopia of the Houyhnhnms
in Book 4 of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels ([1725/1735] 1985) is “ra-
tional universalism,” defined in a three-fold way as “a theory of morals, as a
philosophical psychology, and as an account of the constitution of the ideal
state” (2003, p. 47). Rational universalism is the principle of loyalty to the
broadest of the frameworks to which one perceives oneself as belonging: this
essentially prescriptive theory:

holds that the most important moral demands, those to which a morally
reflective person ought to feel the strongest obligation to respond, are
those determined by the needs of the most extensive community to
which he or she can reasonably be held to belong. (Ibid., p. 47)

The term “rational universalism” is short-hand for a complex of “clichés of

thought” (ibid., p. 48) going back to Plato and associated with the intrinsical-
ly admirable principles of honor, civic virtue, and freedom from nepotism.
86 LEONA TOKER

Harrison demonstrates that these received ideas are evoked in Book 4 and
then their universal applicability is put to an acid test.
Swift’s masterful narrative conjures up various epiphenomena of ration-
al universalism, suggesting, in particular, that the Houyhnhnms’s all too ready
sacrifice of emotion-fraught personal relationships for the Good of All is not
necessarily a matter of laudable stoicism. It has become a mere quietist habit:
there is, in fact, no sacrifice because passion-based emotional private life
seems to have faded out. Whereas “the state, family and personal relation-
ships make moral claims” (ibid., p. 52) on human beings and, even when they
conflict with one another, are regarded as “prima facie morally valid” (ibid.)
Gulliver’s white horses:

have been freed by nature from the problems of conflict between differ-
ent types of moral demand, because for them there is only one mode of
relationship capable of initiating moral demands: the relationship be-
tween each individual Houyhnhnm and the total Houyhnhnm polity.
(Ibid., pp. 52–53).

Gulliver, moreover, does not realize that the terms with which he operates—
“affection,” “home,” “family”— have been voided of their meaning:

Two and a half centuries before [Jacques] Derrida . . . Swift has equipped
Gulliver with a self-deconstructing discourse: one which depends, not
merely for its plausibility but for its very intelligibility, on the very con-
cepts which it endeavours to displace and marginalize. (Ibid., p. 53)

Not accidentally, Harrison points out, is the Houyhnhnm’s treatment of Gul-

liver parallel to what he gets at the hand of the mutineers on his ship: the pi-
rates-in-the-making maroon him whereas the Houyhnhnms send him out to sea
in a small boat, never to return (ibid., p. 57). Harrison’s discussions of the Eng-
lish novel frequently provide such innovative local observations, things that
once seen can no longer be unseen and that constitute both reinforcement and
reward for the philosophical thesis brought to bear on the text.
In the polity of the Houyhnhnms, Swift anticipates modern totalitarian
states, he does so “not on the basis of the politics of his day, but on the basis
of the thought of his day” (ibid., p. 59), in a prophetic grasp of the possible
consequences of the Enlightenment valorization of reason as opposed to the
turgid ways of “the vulgar multitude” with their “crass passions and petty
desires, their vulgar private friendships and little family affections” (ibid.).
Human life, complete with the irrationality that keeps it human, is what ra-
tional universalism would, at best, despise. Since any Utopia is ultimately
exclusive, the narrative watches it turn into a nightmare when its ideology is
translated into legislature and executive action.
 Bernard Harrison on the English Novel 87

Gulliver’s Travels is a Menippean satire (Frye, 1957, pp. 309–312), yet

it shares what Harrison (like Wolfgang Iser) sees as the novel’s ability to
“chart the pitfalls which confront the intellectually confident holder of a philo-
sophical position when he or she moves from argument to commitment and
from commitment to action” (1991, p. 102). Backtracking from 2003 to 1991,
we can see this strand of thought unfolding in the chapter “Forster and Moore”
in Inconvenient Fictions. G. E. Moore’s views, eventually deployed in Princip-
ia ethica (1903), were influential among the Cambridge Apostles during For-
ster’s years of study at King’s College. In an innovative move, Harrison dis-
cusses the fate of these views not on the basis of Forster’s The Longest Jour-
ney ([1907] 1922), a novel set in Cambridge and featuring a budding philoso-
pher among its characters, but on the basis of his earlier Where Angels Fear to
Tread ([1905] 1920–1922), written relatively shortly after Forster’s gradua-
tion, when the discourse of the Apostles was still fresh in his mind.
The supreme good that gives the direction for G. E. Moore’s version of
consequentialism is constituted by friendship and the contemplation of beau-
ty—that is, by personal relationship and aesthetic practice. Consequentialism,
the doctrine according to which the moral right or wrong of an action depends
on its results, clashes with deontological intuitions. Yet it forces its adherents
to be constantly on the alert about the merit, meaning, and value of their acts
and the maxims on which these acts are based. Indeed, in Where Angels Fear
to Tread, Philip Herriton and Caroline Abbott are repeatedly engaged in at-
tempts to decide among conflicting goals. Yet Harrison’s reading also points
out that the novel represents friendship, the most valued form of personal
relationships, not as “an amenity, a refined gratification” (1991, p. 116) simi-
lar to artistic connoisseurship, but as a formative experience, often painful:

redeeming impulses do not come from conscious moralizing, which is as

often as not self-interested, but from concretely and directly encounter-
ing others in ways which bring into play aspects of ourselves which our
reflective consciousness can neither wholly grasp not wholly control.
(Ibid., p. 118)

This observation suggests the sense in which fictional narrative can double as
moral philosophy (on the partial overlap of Harrison’s views with those of
Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, and Martha C. Nussbaum, see ibid., pp. 9–18).
Literature stimulates further work of ethical theory by staging confrontations
between its available achievements and the incommensurable otherness that
subverts its temporary triumphs.

3. Issues of Reader Response

Harrison’s analysis of the novelists’ critical responses to philosophers like

Locke and Mandeville, responses made through narrative rather than through
88 LEONA TOKER

formal philosophical counterpoints, is consonant with one of the central ten-

ets of Iser’s theorization of reader response: a narrative does not promulgate
ideas but tests them. The ideas Harrison discusses are the intellectual options
available to the novelists, the period options that they shared with their im-
mediate target audiences. But the novel as a test of ideas may also critique the
mental sets of the general reader, or at least the reader removed from the tar-
get audience in space and time. The novel brings up and examines the read-
ers’ expectations, presuppositions, strong opinions, and ethical, aesthetic, and
political preferences. It is, for this reason, an “inconvenient” kind of reading,
fascinating despite—or because of—the discomforts it puts us through. On the
dust jacket of Inconvenient Fictions, we see the 1879 Degas portrait of Ed-
mond Duranty seated in a roomful of books, thoughtful, ill at ease, looking
away from the page that has just been the object of his attention.
In the Introduction to Inconvenient Fictions, Harrison distinguishes be-
tween knowledge as “amenity” and “dangerous knowledge,” the reading ex-
perience that destabilizes our certainties. Whereas the function of knowledge
as amenity, from scientific information to awareness of the day’s weather,
and what to wear, is “not to change us but to enable us to master and change
the world” (1991, p. 4), dangerous knowledge is the kind that requires modi-
fications in our personalities or habits of thought, whether as a condition or a
consequence of acquiring it. It sets the “established structures” of our selves
“in motion towards change” (ibid., p. 3).
Dangerous knowledge is the kind that makes us move toward recogni-
tion and perhaps even transcendence of the limits of our perspective (ibid., p.
5). Harrison describes the purpose of his literary analysis as restoring “the
power of . . . textual mechanisms to contest the presuppositions with which
one or another reader might approach [the text] and to produce bouleversements
(shake-ups) of a more than merely formal or textual nature” (ibid., p. 7). Here,
“more than merely formal or textual” refers to changes not only in what we
think about the text or how we update our mental picture of it (cf. Wright,
2005) but also in what we think about ourselves, in our vision of the world
and perhaps in our awareness of the world beyond our vision.
The sense in which fictions are “dangerous” emerges also indirectly
from Harrison’s remarks on Sterne’s Walter Shandy, who represents re-
sistance to such changes:

He believes implicitly in the Lockeian ideal of language as a neutral re-

cording device by means of which all knowledge and all understanding
may be conveyed to a man without his ever needing to change the
standpoint from which he looks at things; a view of language which . . .
comes to be sharply at odds both with Locke’s empiricism and his nom-
inalist respect for the particular. (1991, p. 91)
 Bernard Harrison on the English Novel 89

Literary art is, among other things, the art of illuminating the difference in the
loads that words carry for different speakers, and understanding that differ-
ence—instead of galloping away from it on one’s own verbal hobby-horse—
necessarily affects our standpoint. Whether or not we know with what vision
of the world we dive into a narrative, we certainly cannot know in advance
with what alterations to that vision we shall surface.
The chapter on Forster and Moore is an en-abyme condensation of this
agenda. Shortly after quoting the remark about Philip Herriton’s entering into
an “almost alarming intimacy” with Gino, Harrison comments that “friendship
is not an amenity . . . because it is not ultimately controllable in its effects upon
them by those who enter into it” (ibid., p. 116; emphasis added). Laying one-
self open to the impact of a novel is likewise a relinquishment of control, a
readiness to face the unpredictable and to be changed by the encounter.
This line of thought is continued in the chapters on Jane Austen and
Muriel Spark (Harrison, 1991, pp. 144–165 and 166–187). Austen’s master-
ful handling of plot and character to disempower unwelcome thoughts on the
receiving end is here juxtaposed with Spark’s emphasis on active choice of
intellectual commitments. I do not entirely agree with the presentation of Aus-
ten’s moral universe as static and holistic: her later novels, in particular
Mansfield Park ([1814] 1992) and Persuasion ([1816] 1992), do suggest, for
instance, that there is life after losing one’s membership in the leisure class.
Yet whatever ideological shift takes place in the world of Austen’s novels, it
is a matter of slow evolution rather than radical change.
By contrast, as Harrison demonstrates, Muriel Spark’s characters move
among sharply contrasting moral settings and undergo drastic conversions. It
is, accordingly, appropriate that Spark’s narrative principles and techniques
should be puzzling and disconcerting. It may take a reorientation to see
Spark’s novels as intellectually and artistically significant, and this reorienta-
tion can be seen as a miniature model of the changes of mind undergone by
Spark’s protagonists. One could make a case for Spark’s leaving her audience
its intellectual freedom—here Harrison would find an ally in Roger Sell
(2012) for whom good literature opens a synergetic dialogue that respects the
reader’s freedom of thought. One might, perhaps, have to work harder mak-
ing a similar case about Jane Austen, but the challenge would do justice to the
extraordinary sophistication of Austen’s narrative.
The seriousness of the issues addressed in the novels of Muriel Spark is
exemplified on the material of The Only Problem (1984), a novel that pits a
version of modern experience against the book of Job and Georges de La
Tour’s painting that represents Job’s dialogue with his wife. This chapter
(Harrison, 1991, pp. 166–187) relates the problem of “just deserts” with the
counter-essentialist view of personality, while it also presents its own midrash
on Job 38–41. God’s wrathful reply to Job’s protests, followed by Job’s un-
expected submission (which so troubled Elie Wiesel [1976/1977, pp. 247–
90 LEONA TOKER

248]), is here read as “God’s hymn of praise . . . to his magnificent and amor-
al Creation” (Harrison, 1991, p. 182). This is an eruption, one might say, of
the aesthetic into the moral/theological through “the peculiar delight that the
God of the poet of Job takes in His creation,” despite and beyond all the suf-
fering (ibid., p. 171). Muriel Spark’s novel, writes Harrison, “invites and
nudges” individual readers to navigate on their own “through the complex
pathways” of the protagonist’s experience, and through the connection of
issues raised in the novel with those of Job (ibid., p. 187). The Book of Job,
indeed, is one of the most mysterious and provocative poems in the Old Tes-
tament. Its uses for hermeneutics are inexhaustible (“Whenever the Midrash
runs short of examples, it quotes Job, no matter what the topic—and it is al-
ways pertinent”; Wiesel, [1976] 1977, p. 227), as is its power of commenting
on modern human condition.
Harrison’s philosophical contribution to the issues of reader response
includes his part in the debate on Iser’s blanks and gaps that unfolded on the
pages of the journal Connotations (1993/1994), triggered by Lothar erný’s
1992 article on Fielding (see also Toker, 1994/1995; Iser 1997). This debate
was an aftermath of the earlier clash between Iser (1981) and Stanley Fish
(1981), when Fish, author of one of the most influential earlier statements on
reader response (1970), took the stance of an uncompromising denial of facts
existing beyond conceptual or interpretive systems. This post-Nietzschean
position, argued in Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), is a salutary
jolt to many a mental set, yet it too becomes a closed system and loses a great
deal of its power when it claims universal applicability.
In a nutshell, if Iser notes that temporary gaps (temporary because even-
tually closed) in the plot of Fielding’s Tom Jones activate and guide the read-
er’s interpretation, Fish counters that the gaps themselves are not a given but
are constituted by individual readers. Harrison explains the disagreement be-
tween the two scholars by taking recourse to one of the main sources of Iser’s
The Act of Reading (1978), viz. Husserlian phenomenology.
Iser’s tracing of the way the reading concretizes the text and constitutes
an “aesthetic object” in the reader’s mind is analogous to Edmund Husserl’s
“noetic-noematic constitutions” as “a matter of the continuous adjustment of
anticipations in the light of their fulfillment” (Harrison, 1993/1994, p. 150).
One may attempt to reconcile Iser and Fish by saying that the “gaps” are not
in the text itself so much as “between the text and the noema undergoing con-
stitution in the reader’s mind” (ibid.). But narratology would raise the follow-
ing question: “Barring plain idiosyncrasy of an individual reader’s mind,
what feature of the text is a condition for the opening up of this gap?”
Husserl’s help on this matter is rooted in his agenda of describing the
constitution of our common (intersubjective) perceptual world, yet a:

transfer of Husserlian assumptions from the phenomenology of percep-

tion to that of reading must beg the question of how far the noemata cor-
 Bernard Harrison on the English Novel 91

responding to a given text can be expected to vary from reader to reader.

(Harrison, 1993/1994, p. 151)

According to Harrison, it is into this “gap between Husserl’s and Iser’s

phenomenologies” that Fish “inserts his knife” (ibid.). He concedes to Fish
the possibility that Iser’s reading of Squire Allworthy’s portrait in Tom Jones
is dependent on the specificity of Iser’s own vision. Perhaps, indeed, Iser’s
own idiosyncrasy is betrayed by his use of the epithet “perfect”: “Allworthy
is introduced to us as the perfect man” (Harrison, ibid., p. 149; cf. Fish, 1981,
p. 7; reference to Iser, 1978, p. 65). Fielding does not characterize him that
way but marks his “solid Understanding and benevolent Heart” (Harrison,
ibid. 153; reference to Fielding, 1974, p. 32).
Thus, the reader postulated by Iser is one who sees perfection in the
combination of these two qualities. Such a reader eventually faces the gap be-
tween the expectation of infallibility thus created and the errors of judgment
that Allworthy is repeatedly shown making. However, the episodes in which
Allworthy succumbs to manipulation and, in obedience to his own deontologi-
cal principles, draws practical conclusions tantamount to consequentialist dis-
asters are, for Harrison, not gaps but hermeneutic “stumbling blocks.”
This is not merely a difference in the choice of metaphors—concave
versus convex, for example, trapping the readers versus tripping them up; it
is a difference in emphasis on the nature of the text-reader interaction. For
Iser, what the novel critiques and changes is the reader’s beliefs and expecta-
tions that have been created by the text itself, its details functioning as in-
structions to our imagination, its gaps created by the insufficiency of these
instructions or apparent contradictions between them. For Harrison, on the
other hand, the “stumbling blocks” mark the places where the text jolts the
presuppositions that the audience has brought along from outside the text.
The text destabilizes the meanings that the readers habitually assign to key
lexical items, the binaries in terms of which the readers have been trained,
prior to opening this particular book, to organize moral realities, “the vast
substratum of casual assumptions about the meanings and implications en-
coded in the language to whose community of speakers [the target audience]
belongs” (Toker, 1994–1995, p. 161).
The difference between the two scholars here is not radical, since Iser
would agree that fictional narratives not only manipulate expectations created
by the text itself but also test ideas that readers bring along from outside the
text (see, in particular, 1989: 37–39). Iser sees this as the more cumulative
effect of the text. The aggregating experience of trial-and-error gap-filling
and thwarted expectations eventually tends to this global effect, usually asso-
ciated with ideas that are less language-dependent than in Harrison’s reading.
He creates a narratological framework for what, in a recent study, Garrett
Stewart (2009; 2010, p. 126) has called “narratography” (as analogous to
92 LEONA TOKER

seismography): the text is a sequence of consciously or subliminally regis-

tered factors that create the conditions for an unfolding response, complete
with backtracking, changes of mind, suspense, surmises, frustrations.
Under the influence of Wayne C. Booth (1961) and Stanley Fish (1970),
I prefer to describe the study of such factors through a comparison with
watching an athlete’s movement in slow motion: What is the position of her
well-trained limbs that makes for a perfect jump? The answer to this question
is to be sought in a close analysis of narrative techniques and their local and
cumulative effects (see Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Toker 1993).
According to Fish (1970, p. 125), each narrative detail is an event that
happens to the reader, a change in the state of the reader’s consciousness. On
the first reading such factors of change, gaps and stumbling blocks included,
form a sequence; on a repeated reading they arrange themselves into a net-
work—the audience response is then dependent on the interrelationship be-
tween them rather than on their temporal deployment. However, Harrison’s
“stumbling blocks” may remain an operative cause of hermeneutic perplexity
even on repeated readings after the “gaps” have been closed at the end of our
first reading of the text.
In the confrontation between Iser and Fish, Harrison takes the side of
Iser, not so much against Fish as against Fish’s hypothetical reader who, con-
trary to Iser, may regard Allworthy’s naïve trust in human goodness as part of
his perfection as a human being rather than a character flaw; such a reader
will find no gap where Iser sees one. Harrison points to the partial similarity
that the novel draws between Allworthy and the Man of the Hill, who is em-
bittered by having once been naïve, and deliberately uninvolved in the life of
the people around him.
Indeed, by virtue of his position as a magistrate and his philanthropic
ideology Allworthy is enmeshed in human affairs, yet owing to his reclusive
leanings, he tends to remain emotionally and intellectually distant from the
people around him and therefore fails to place himself in the way of gaining a
more accurate understanding of their motives. As soon as examples of this
tendency reach a certain critical mass in the novel and are indirectly com-
mented on by the inset of the Man of the Hill, the ethical assumptions of
Fish’s hypothetical reader will be called into question, along with the as-
sumption that rationality and benevolence suffice for the formation of a per-
fect character.
One way or another, the novel provides a testing ground for moral and
ideological attitudes, both those brought along to it from outside, whether by
the author or by the reader, and those which the novel elicits, brings up to the
surface of thought. A great novel is an inconvenient text, one that, in a sense,
reads its reader.
 Bernard Harrison on the English Novel 93

4. Literature and the Philosophy of Language

Adapting J. L. Austin’s paradigm (1962, pp. 108ff; see also Felman, 1983,
pp. 17–18), one can say that Harrison’s discussion of Fielding’s, Sterne’s, and
Swift’s philosophical innovativeness in respect to period ideas pertains to the
illocutionary aspect of literary speech acts, whereas his discussion of the text-
reader dialogue pertains to perlocutionary aspects of the narrative. His more
recent work on the English novel, particularly, his essay on Charles Dickens,
“Always Fiction?: The Limits of Authorial License in Our Mutual Friend”
(2011) shifts attention to the locutionary aspect of the text’s components—to
the meaning of sentences and collocations. It comes in the wake of Word and
World (Hanna and Harrison, 2004), on the philosophy of language.
The view of language developed in Word and World mediates between
and complements two seemingly contradictory accounts. The first, associated
with the traditions of British empiricism:

presents language as, essentially, a device for describing the nature of

empirical reality. Basic sentences acquire their meaning by association
with the natural conditions whose occurrence renders them true or false;
more complex sentences are truth-functions of basic ones. On this ac-
count the function of language is to record, not to create. Experience is
the only test of reality, and the only “germs of being” are to be found in
the natural world, not in the writer’s ingenious putting together of words
and phrases. (Harrison, 2011, p. 411)

The competing account of language, associated with “the post-

phenomenological strands in Continental philosophy” (ibid., p. 410), views
meaning as determined “internally to language, through the relation of words
to one another” (ibid., p. 411) rather than in relation to extra-linguistic reality:

influential writers, including Derrida, [Ferdinand de] Saussure, [Claude]

Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, among many others, have
argued that the constitution of meaning within a language is neither con-
strained nor validated by anything external to language. (Hanna and
Harrison, 2004, p. 1)

The two views of language are horns of a dilemma: “Meaning, it seems,

must be determined either internally or externally to language, yet in either
case absurd consequences appear to follow. If meaning is determined inter-
nally to language, discourse cannot be “referential.” If meaning is determined
externally to language, no room remains for human spontaneity in the devis-
ing of concepts” (Harrison, 2011, p. 411).
In the language of Harrison’s 2011 explanation of their view of mean-
ing, what Patricia Hanna and Harrison propose is that we should:
94 LEONA TOKER

think of meaning not as a two-term (dyadic) relation between linguistic

expressions and items or aspects of reality but as a three-term (triadic)
relationship, between linguistic expressions, items or aspects of reality,
and socially devised and maintained practices: meaning arises as a result
of the roles assigned to linguistic expressions in the conduct of practic-
es. The connection between language and reality, on the other hand, is
forged not by a direct link between linguistic expression and item or as-
pect of reality, but by the multifarious ways in which practices engage
with the complex realities revealed to us by experience. (2004, p. 412)

Harrison’s first literary example of the role of practices in determining the

meaning of words is taken, with the help of Cynthia Ozick’s article “Sholem
Aleichem’s Revolution” (1996, pp. 160–185), from Sholem Aleikhem’s Tevye
der milkhiker (Tevye the milkman) (1973). The miscommunication between
Tevye and his daughter is based on the different practices that each associates
with the same vocabulary.
Harrison then turns to the representation of Bradley Headstone and
Charley Hexam in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend ([1864–1865] 1952). These
are characters of lower-class origin engaged in attempts to “better them-
selves” and “go up in the world” but who sink morally while pursuing these
goals. The article protests against the facile interpretation of Headstone and
young Hexam as victims of the misprisions of the British mass education. It
reminds us that the concept of “bettering oneself” belongs to different prac-
tices: on the one hand, the tradition of moral self-perfection and, on the other
hand, the principle of self help and the instrumental use of education to im-
prove one’s social position. Harrison demonstrates how Bradley Headstone,
obsessed with the latter goal, infects Charley with the same attitude, manipu-
lating his pupil’s mind and thus profaning the expected practice of an educa-
tor’s moral responsibility.
The dependence of the meaning of words and sentences on the practices
within which they are used is closely associated with the issues of fictionality
versus referentiality and realism versus romance. As Harrison points out, the
plot and character portrayal in Our Mutual Friend contain fairy-tale topoi.
This is a legitimate narrative practice of poetic license, often suggesting that it
takes art and witty artifice, rather than the deterministic logic of ordinary
events, to extricate characters from the tough spots into which their propensi-
ties lead them under the existing social conditions. What the “limits of the
license” in the title of the article pertain to is the accuracy of the linguistic
expression of the practices with which the characters are affiliated: this is
where the fairy-tale freedom of imagination stops and is replaced by
semiological insight.
In a realistic novel, characters and events are usually non-referential, but
the regularities that govern events and relationships do tend to refer, with
considerable authority in Dickens’s case, to the conditions, rituals, and logis-
 Bernard Harrison on the English Novel 95

tics of actual life in society. These regularities include a vast variety of actual
human practices, which get reflected in and shape the very language that
builds the novel’s characters and plot events. As Harrison writes in his forth-
coming What Is Fiction For?, the cognitive contribution of literary works lies
in their exploring the praxial basis of their own language.
At first glance, Hanna and Harrison’s tri-partite account of language
may be reminiscent of the semiological triad of semantics, syntactics, and
pragmatics (see Morris, 1946, pp. 217–220). In literary analysis (see Sell
1991, pp. xiv–xv; Sternberg, 1991; Toker, 2011), “semantics” stands for the
relationship of the constituents of the text with referents, specific or general-
ized, outside the text—the dictionary meanings of words and expressions, the
import of historical and geographical references, and the link of textual de-
tails with “external fields of reference” (Harshav, 1984).
“Syntactics” (not to be confused with “syntax”) is a matter of the inter-
relationship among textual details within the text itself—their interconnec-
tions in what Benjamin Harshav calls “internal fields of reference.” These
interconnections often modify the meanings that words or narrative details
trail in from the external fields of reference. If the knowledge of the external
fields of reference can enrich our understanding of internal fields of refer-
ence, internal fields of reference can affect our ideas about the extra-textual
reality in unexpected ways.
“Pragmatics” is a matter of the interface between the author and his/her
audiences, as well as of the interface between the text and the different “inter-
pretive communities” (Fish, 1980). This semiological triad can serve as a bal-
ancing tool in combining the study of literature within broader cultural contexts.
The two tripartite models of meaning do not coincide yet may comment
on each other. The practices discussed by Harrison and Hanna pertain to the
semantic part of the semiological triad more massively than to the author-
audience interface. It is actually Harrison’s work on Fielding and Sterne as
moral philosophers, and his work on issues of reader response, that pertain to
literary pragmatics, to the writers’ self-positioning vis-á-vis their imaginary
interlocutors, be it precursor philosophers or their present and future audience.
Moreover, the way Harrison discusses the reflection of social practices
in a literary work also integrates them into the syntactics of the internal pat-
terns of motifs and images. For example, into the overarching theme of con-
cern with social standing in Our Mutual Friend, the recurrent motif of the
uses of wealth, the deployment of the metaphor of warming others by the
lights inside one (or failing to do so), and the subtle modulations of dialogues,
registered with narratographic precision.
Harrison’s comments on recurrent motifs amount to tracing modifica-
tions that items from the External Fields of Reference undergo within the
novel’s internal thematic networks. This procedure is one of the features of
the genuine interdisciplinarity of Harrison’s literary studies. Its other feature
96 LEONA TOKER

is the rootedness of these studies not only in the history of philosophy but
also in thought-provoking literary scholarship on each work.
Most important, whatever strand of philosophical ideas is pursued, the
literary examples, whether from Tristram Shandy (Sterne, [1759] 1940),
Tevye der milkhiker, or Our Mutual Friend, are never reduced to conceptual
schemes. Their discussion dwells appreciatively on detail, traces the game of
implications, situates episodes within the context of the work as a whole,
points to the ramifications of recurrencies.
In keeping with his critique of Dickens’s misguided characters’ instru-
mental attitude to education, Harrison never slips into treating literary material
in a purely instrumental way, to exemplify philosophical points. His literary
analysis always brings into relief the artistic merit of the works discussed, cel-
ebrating them for their own sake as well as for their philosophical import. For
readers, this combination of vigorous thinking about the text with appreciation
of their art acts as an injection of intellectual energy, sometimes leading Har-
rison’s literary-studies audience to continue his enquiries and sometimes
sending it off on new quests.

Acknowledgment
I thank the Israel Science Foundation for a grant (1465/10) that supported my
work on this paper.
 Five

FROM MEANING TO MORALITY

IN KOVESI AND HARRISON

Alan Tapper

1. Introduction

It is stating the obvious to say that Ludwig Wittgenstein looms large in Ber-
nard Harrison’s philosophical world. A little less obvious is the influence of
Peter Geach’s attack on an abstractionist account of concept-formation in his
Mental Acts (1957). Two Australian philosophers also play a part in Harrison’s
thinking. One, Len Goddard, contributes a discussion of the practice of count-
ing (1961) that, in Harrison’s hands, is extended to become an account of the
practical role of concepts in thought and action. The other, Julius Kovesi, is the
subject of this essay. I will elucidate the connection between Harrison and
Kovesi, a connection that for various reasons might easily be missed.
Today, even readers who know Harrison’s writings well may not know
much about Kovesi. His name and work have slipped off the radar. A Hun-
garian who escaped across the Soviet-controlled border and migrated to Aus-
tralia at age eighteen, he studied at Oxford in 1956–1958 under J. L. Austin.
Most of his academic career was spent at the University of Western Australia
in Perth. His only book, Moral Notions, was published in 1967 (reprint,
2004b). He died in 1989, at age fifty-nine. His interests were as much in the
history of ideas as in philosophy. A collection of his essays was published
posthumously under the title Values and Evaluations: Essays on Ethics and
Ideology (1989).
Moral Notions is as much a study in the nature of concepts as a book on
moral philosophy. In a short space, it argues from an account of concepts to
an account of the role of concepts in moral thought and reasoning, and then to
a discussion of the relations between facts, descriptions, evaluations, and
moral judgment. In 1969, Bernard Mayo wrote an enthusiastic Critical Notice
of Moral Notions in Mind, and Harrison had been a student of Mayo’s. But
from initial high fame, Kovesi’s book soon sank to relative obscurity. At that
time, English-language philosophy turned rapidly away from conceptual
analysis and toward metaphysics and epistemology. Harrison has written of:

the relatively sudden turn in philosophy, in the late 60s and early 70s,
away from the generally anti-metaphysical outlook promoted
by Wittgenstein and Austin to the renewed interest in metaphysics—in
98 ALAN TAPPER

very various forms, including [W. V. O.] Quine’s semantic holism, [Pe-
ter] Strawson’s neo-Kantianism, [John] McDowell’s neo-Hegelianism,
[Michael] Dummett’s anti-realism, [Hilary] Putnam and [Saul] Kripke’s
essentialism, and so on and so forth—which has dominated the scene
more or less ever since. (Personal communication, 6 November 2009)

Not all philosophers forgot Kovesi when this turn was taken, and Harrison
was one for whom Kovesi remained a source of ideas and inspiration. Their
connection became a personal one. In 1978, Harrison spent a year at the Uni-
versity of Western Australia, where he could talk philosophy with Kovesi on
a regular basis. He describes Kovesi as “a delightful, sublimely intelligent
man” and says he regards Moral Notions as “a major contribution to moral
philosophy” (personal communication, 24 September 2008). In a 1978 essay
he remarks, “The only book on ethics written since the war which is wholly
free from the influence of positivism is, so far as I am aware, Julius Kovesi’s
Moral Notions” (pp. 260–261).
I will show that Harrison and Kovesi are complementary thinkers, inter-
ested in similar questions, and arriving at closely comparable answers.
Kovesi’s philosophical world consisted, in the near view, of Austin, Wittgen-
stein, R. M. Hare, and, in the longer view, of David Hume, John Locke, Aris-
totle, Plato, and Socrates. (Karl Marx and Marxism were also important,
though in a different way, and Kovesi’s interests were broad ones.) Harrison’s
work is inspired by the conceptual themes of Wittgenstein, Geach, Goddard,
and Kovesi, but his thought developed in a context dominated by the revival
of metaphysical questions after 1970. In this essay, I will summarize the theo-
ry of concepts and meaning that they shared and the way they have used this
theory to make sense of morality.

2. The Theory of Concepts

For much of his career, Harrison has been steadily constructing a theory of
concepts, one grounded in a naturalistic account of human abilities. Philoso-
phers of a Wittgensteinian bent have sometimes adopted an anti-theoretical
and anti-empirical stance, while defending the importance of conceptual
analysis as the primary method of doing philosophy. Though thoroughly
Wittgensteinian, Harrison, by contrast, has sought an account of concepts that
is theoretically coherent, empirically sound, and philosophically productive. It
is a large enterprise.
I suggest Harrison’s theory of concepts can be summarized—too crude-
ly, no doubt—in four main points, based on the complex argument in Word
and World, the monumental work he wrote with Patricia Hanna (Hanna and
Harrison, 2004). First, concepts are to be explained in terms of practices. The
practices of counting and measuring are his standard examples; carpentry is
another example he uses. The example of counting is derived from Goddard,
 From Meaning to Morality in Kovesi and Harrison 99

though the basic idea of concepts being grounded in practices comes from
Wittgenstein (ibid., pp. 179–190). Second, concepts come in families or
fields. Concepts do not stand alone, but are interconnected. Interconnected
concepts form a “logical space.” Third, he denies that concepts are formed by
abstraction from experience—this was Geach’s main point in Mental Acts:
“the mind makes concepts, and this concept-formation and subsequent use of
the concepts formed is never a mere recognition or finding” (1957, p. 40).
But Harrison shows how concepts are nevertheless related to experience.
The relationship involves two steps, not one. Philosophers have commonly
tried to reduce the relationship to a single word-to-world relation, typically
some variation on the idea of “referring,” which is usually construed as a kind
of one-to-one “naming.” He argues that it is a two-stage relation, involving
both relevance and application.
Concepts play the role of allowing us to pick out facts in the world that
are relevant to a certain description. One who understands the concept of X
(length, for example) thereby knows what sorts of facts are relevant to deter-
mining the Xness (length) of a certain object. Thus, he can operate with the
concept, in pursuit of the practice (measuring, for example) that defines the
concept (see especially Hanna and Harrison 2004, pp. 48–51).
Fourth, the world itself has no conceptual character:

There is nothing in the world to which a concept corresponds: concepts

are creatures of the fertility of the mind in devising practices. As linguis-
tic creatures we confront a world that offers itself, mutely and
preconceptually, as the foundation on which we erect our practices.
(Ibid., p. 352)

The world has, as he puts it, no “assertoric content”; it does not impose its
character on us, compelling us to form the concepts we do form, because it
has no such (linguistic) character. Rather, we form concepts as part of our
practical involvement with the world. Philosophers have mistakenly sought to
ground metaphysical realism in the “content” of the world, whereas realism
can and should be grounded in our practical engagement with the world.
Harrison has shown how his second and third features of concepts are
logically connected. When we understand a concept, we not only know what
facts are relevant to affirming the truth of that concept as a descriptor, but we
also know that other facts are inconsistent with that description. We also
know that other descriptions are entailed by denials of the first description.
Some predicates are quite unrelated to each other; others are related, and un-
derstanding those predicates involves understanding them as related. Interre-
lated concepts “form a set whose members are intrinsically alternative to one
another, and they do so precisely in the sense that what is asserted in denying
any one of them of an object is the applicability to that object of one or other
100 ALAN TAPPER

of the remaining ones” (ibid., pp. 211–212). If I deny that it is sunny, I imply
that it is cloudy or that it is nighttime or some other of a limited set of alterna-
tive cognate descriptions. But in denying that it is sunny, I do not imply that it
is Thursday, or that the price of platinum is about to plummet, or any other of
an unlimited set of unrelated alternatives.
Harrison’s first and fourth points together allow him to construct a dis-
tinctive metaphysical standpoint. Those Wittgensteinians and pragmatists
who emphasize the practice-based function of concepts have tended to see
themselves as, metaphysically speaking, committed to anti-realism, or (as it
was once dubbed) “Wittgensteinian fideism.” Those who emphasize the empir-
ical derivation of concepts at the expense of the social construction aspect have
tended to argue for metaphysical realism. Harrison seeks to avoid both of these
competing orthodoxies in favor of what he has come to call “relative realism.”
This doctrine holds:

concepts are relative to practices; that what concepts a natural language

honours is determined not by the nature of things, but by the specific
range of practices that enter into the constitution of that particular natu-
ral language. (Ibid., p. 58)

But, although “relative” in this sense, concepts are not detached from reality,
since practices engage with reality.

Contact between thought and the world is established, not at the level of
the conceptual or the assertoric, but lower down, at the level of the prac-
tices, through which the concepts of the conceptual and the assertoric
become accessible to us. At that level we confront phenomena directly,
through the medium of practice, not through that of propositional
thought. (Ibid., p. 367)

Language is therefore not a “prison house.”

Kovesi’s account of concepts, as set out in the first two chapters of
Moral Notions, can be summarized in six points. First, concepts are rational,
in that they serve our needs and interests. Concepts can be understood as rule-
governed, but they are better understood as reason-governed. Wittgensteinian
talk of rule-following should be reconstructed as a point about reason-giving.
Second, concepts are public and social, in that they are formed from the point
of view of anyone.
In establishing a concept X, we must also establish ways of recognizing
the presence of X, which Kovesi terms “recognitors,” and:

the process of establishing the recognitors and their significance must be

public. This must be so not only because other people have to be able to
 From Meaning to Morality in Kovesi and Harrison 101

use our terms but because not even one single person, not even the in-
ventor of the notion, could use the new word in a consistent way without
sharing its use with others. Furthermore, the possibility of anyone being
able to use a term in the same way is the guarantee for the fact that the
recognitors and their significance have been properly selected and estab-
lished. (1967, p. 55; 2004b, pp. 41–42)

For a discussion of Kovesi’s idea of recognitors and its relevance to how we

think of personhood, see the Afterword in the reprint of Moral Notions (Ewin
and Tapper, 2004, pp. 147–155).
Third, concepts are multifunctional, in that they serve diverse needs and
interests, including our moral, prudential, scientific, and technological needs
and interests (Kovesi, 1967, p. 146; 2004b, p. 105). Fourth, concepts are pol-
ymorphic, in that any given concept might subsume other concepts and also
be subsumed under another concept. This terminology—polymorphism and
subsumption—is not Kovesi’s but it corresponds to his thinking. He talks of
“higher order notions” as having a variety of “lower order notions” as “in-
stances” (1967, p. 156; 2004b, p. 112).
Fifth, concepts are “open-textured.” New ways of instantiating any giv-
en concept are always possible:

We cannot give a complete enumeration of the conditions that must be

fulfilled for the proper use of a term. Not because of the indefinite num-
ber of these conditions, but because these conditions have an open tex-
ture. Nor can it be stated how many of these conditions must be present
and how many may be absent. (1967, pp. 7–8; 2004b, p. 9)

Finally, concepts are “free-standing” (my term), in that they are not
governed by the way they are instantiated in the world. Rather, how a concept
is instantiated is governed by its point or purpose, which in turn arises from
the needs and interests it serves (1967, pp. 15–23; 2004b, pp. 15–20).
Kovesi takes as given the idea that concepts are practical—Harrison’s
first (Wittgensteinian) point. “Language games are not word games; they are
activities of which language is a part,” he says (1967, p. 42; 2004b, p. 33).
Like Harrison, he accepts Geach’s thesis that concepts are not the product of
abstraction or induction from sets of similar-seeming observable features. Like
Harrison also, he does not think that the world is conceptually structured.
There is a real world of “raw data,” but we can say nothing about that world:

Whatever might be the advantages of constructing a language that

would mirror the world of data, our language functions differently from
such a language. In our language, to be able to understand the signifi-
cance or the meaning of a term, we have to be able to follow a rule in
102 ALAN TAPPER

using that term, not to be able to perceive an entity of which our term is
a name. (1967, p. 20; 2004b, p. 18)

I have given this summary without using the key terms that Kovesi tried
to introduce into the philosophy of language: “formal element” and “material
element.” The formal element of a concept is its point or purpose or the rea-
son for its formation. The material elements of a concept are the ways in
which instances or kinds of the concepts may vary while remaining instances
or kinds of that concept. They are the variables of the concept. The material
elements never determine the nature of the concept:

The reasons why we cannot define what a thing or act is in terms of their
material elements, or why we cannot make valid deductive arguments
where the premisses contain only material elements and the conclusion
tells what the thing or act is . . . has to do with the fact that the sort of
things that can constitute a thing or act, their material elements, cannot
be enumerated in a final list. (1967, p. 8; 2004b, p. 10)

The formal element of a concept determines the material elements. A certain

set of elements in a particular case will count as an instance of the concept
only if the elements amount to that concept and it is the presence or absence
of the formal element—that is, the point or purpose of the concept—that de-
cides this.
Kovesi’s terminology did not catch on, even amongst some of those who
saw the point he was making and regarded it as important and sound. Roger A.
Shiner and Jerome E. Bickenbach (1976) and R. E. Ewin (1981; 2002, pp. 27–
47) found no difficulty with the terminology, and Ewin (2002) and Brian Mor-
rison (2002) are helpful on the relation between reason, naturalistically under-
stood, and concept-formation. But J. M. Brennan (1977) developed a Kovesian
argument without the terminology, as did Peter A. French (1979).
One likely reason for the terminology’s failure is that it had metaphysi-
cal overtones. Yet Kovesi twice denied that he was making any metaphysical
claims: “By introducing these terms I am not going to introduce any meta-
physical entities” (1967, p. 3; 2004b, p. 7), and “I am not arguing over the
inventory of the universe” (1967, p. 19; 2004b, p. 17). His argument was
about semantics, not metaphysics.
Others may have seen Kovesi as having Platonic tendencies and been
put off by that. But his enthusiasm for Plato was non-metaphysical. He read
Plato as doing the sort of semantics he himself was trying to formulate. Pla-
to’s Forms are Kovesi’s formal elements. Plato contrasts the Forms with the
“dispersed plurality” of the world before we bring it under some Form, and
this is what Kovesi means by his “material elements” (1967, pp. 136–139;
2004b, pp. 98–99). Note also, Kovesi’s non-metaphysical version of Plato is
 From Meaning to Morality in Kovesi and Harrison 103

developed in “Did Plato Turn Himself Upside Down?” (2004a, pp. 119–126).
He was not trying to eliminate or in any way downgrade the material world:

Since what a thing or act is is not something extra over and above what
its material elements amount to, if we want to change anything, or any
act, then we have to change the material elements. If we want to turn a
particular ugly object into a beautiful object we have to do something to it,
and the nature of the universe is such that doing something to a thing al-
ways has a quantitative aspect in some sense. (1967, p. 68; 2004b, p. 51)

His point is, rather, that to give any description of the material world is to
engage in a rational conceptual activity. To describe correctly involves having
reasons, and these reasons are embodied in our concepts, which are them-
selves a function of our human needs and interests.
Kovesi was not attempting to construct a metaphysics; he touches only
briefly on the relation between semantics and metaphysics. Harrison, however,
has had to face the full challenge of analytical philosophy’s turn away from
conceptual analysis and toward metaphysics in the work of Quine, Strawson,
McDowell, Dummett, Putnam, and Kripke, amongst many others. His theory
of concepts takes on this challenge (1991a). A key step in his analysis is to
identify the metaphysical positions to which he is opposed—the philosophies
that subscribe to what Hanna and Harrison call “referential realism”—as
themselves at least partly based on a theory of concepts:

[Referential realism] enshrines, in many of its forms, the doctrine that

unless a proper name or general term corresponds to some entity whose
existence owes nothing to language, no thought articulated in terms of it
can have any bearing on any reality external to the mind. (2004, p. 53)

Word and World seeks to demonstrate that referential realism underpins

much recent philosophy, to show its failings as a theory of concepts, and to
offer relative realism as an alternative, which is traced back to (a certain read-
ing of) Wittgenstein but also to Kovesi. The Kovesian element in this is, ex-
plicitly, the anti-reductionism implicit in Kovesi’s account of concepts (ibid.,
pp. 53–56, 384; see also, on artifact concepts, pp. 286, 393), and I suspect
there is an even broader “Kovesi factor” in the development of these ideas.

3. Morality and Moral Concepts

In this section, I will expound Kovesi’s argument first and then discuss its
connections with Harrison’s work. The aim of Moral Notions was to explain
the role of concepts in moral thought. It was not his aim, Kovesi says, to give
an account of “the foundation of morality” or to explain “the moral point of
104 ALAN TAPPER

view” (1967, p. 145; 2004b, pp. 104–105). His focus is on the logical features
of moral concepts, the misconstrual of which has led moral philosophy down
a number of blind alleys such as positivism, intuitionism, prescriptivism, sen-
timentalism, and existentialism. In that way, his work does imply something
about how moral philosophy should be done.
Moral philosophy must start from the fact that we already possess a
complex array of moral concepts. To do moral philosophy we must first ex-
amine the ways in which we classify the moral domain and distinguish be-
tween those concepts that are and those that are not moral concepts—though
not too sharply, allowing for partial overlaps with politics, law, etiquette, re-
ligion, etc.
The concepts that define the field of morality have three key features. In
Kovesi’s view: “we find moral notions among those that we form about our-
selves in so far as we are rule-following rational beings” (1967, pp. 147–
148). It follows that:

(a) moral notions have to be public twice over: they not only have to be
formed from the point of view of anyone, but they also have to be about
those features of our lives that can be the feature of anyone’s life; (b)
they provide not only the rules for our thinking about the world but also
the rules for our behaviour, while other notions are not at the same time
rules for the behaviour of their subject matter; (c) partly as a conse-
quence of (b), if other notions did not exist those events that are their
subject matter would still go on happening, but without moral notions
there would be nothing left of their subject matter. (2004b, p. 106)

Moral concepts are constitutive of our social lives as well as descriptive of

them; without such concepts we could have no social life. In the case of these
concepts, the “direction of fit” runs both from word to world and from world
to word because, in the moral domain, the “world” is the human social world.
The blind alleys of moral philosophy arise from two mistakes. First,
moral philosophy has failed to recognize that moral concepts already take into
account our wants and desires and decisions:

Our interests, wants and needs enter our social and moral notions twice.
As in the case of scientific notions, they initiate and guide the selection
of the recognitors—though these interests are not that of wanting to pre-
dict or manipulate but of wanting to promote or avoid certain things—
and second, the recognitors themselves are selected from our wants,
needs, likes and dislikes. (1967, p. 54; 2004b, p. 41)
 From Meaning to Morality in Kovesi and Harrison 105

We may differ in our wants and desires and decisions, but these differences
take place within a shared conceptual environment, in which the moral con-
cepts have been formed from the point of view of anyone.
Second, we make moral judgments in just the same way—logically
speaking—as we make other judgments:

I am simply saying that knowing is different from perceiving, and we do

not perceive something called murder; we know that certain acts are acts
of murder in the same way as we know that certain objects are tables.
(1967, p. 19; 2004b, p. 17)

This runs counter to the perennial desire of some philosophers to reduce

knowing to perceiving. Kovesi allows that the two are barely distinguishable
in the case of color judgments, but he contends that this case is the exceptional
case, and in all other cases the gap between perceiving and knowing is readily
observed (on color terms, cf. Harrison, 1973). That gap is explained in terms of
Kovesi’s distinction between material and formal elements. Perception may
pick out a collection of material elements, but only knowledge of the meaning
of a concept enables us to bring that collection under some description.
This is not idealism or anti-realism. The material facts are required as
part of our judgments:

There must be some differences in the field of material elements be-

tween x and y if we want to judge them differently, but we would not
know what differences would entitle us to do so without the formal ele-
ment. . . . it is pointless to ask how we move from the material elements
to what we say the thing or action is once we realize that we select the
material elements because they constitute that thing or act. (1967, p. 31;
2004b, p. 26)

Judgments of sameness are governed by the formal element, not by the mate-
rial elements. Two things or actions or events are the same or similar only if
their formal elements are the same or similar. This point applies to all con-
cepts, to moral concepts as much as to scientific or prudential or technologi-
cal concepts. It is simply a basic feature of the logic of concepts.
Kovesi’s general point might be summed up as: there is nothing logical-
ly special about moral concepts; they are special only in that they operate in
the moral domain. The moral concepts of goodness and rightness must follow
the same logic as applies to any other concepts:

we cannot say that two objects are exactly the same in every respect ex-
cept that one is good while the other is not: that they differ only in their
goodness. . . . Similarly, . . . two acts cannot be the same in every re-
106 ALAN TAPPER

spect except in this, that one of them is right and the other is wrong; nor
can we say that two situations are exactly the same except that in one I
am under an obligation to do something, but not in the other. There must
be some further difference between the two if one is right but the other
is wrong, or if in one I am under an obligation but in the other I am not.
(1967, p. 28; 2004b, p. 23)

Kovesi does introduce one novelty into his discussion of moral con-
cepts. He distinguishes between “complete” and “incomplete” moral con-
cepts. (To be fully consistent he would need to show how there might be
complete and incomplete scientific, prudential, and technological concepts,
but he does not go down that path.) His idea is that some concepts are formed
completely from the moral point of view, while others are formed only partly
from that point of view. Examples of complete moral concepts he lists are:
murder, prejudice, cruelty, stealing. In those cases, the wrongness of what
they describe is built into the description. Someone who did not understand
that murder is wrong would not understand the concept of murder.

If someone understands the notion of murder or stealing, to say that they

are wrong does not give him any more information. . . . we have a spe-
cial word that we use to remind ourselves of the point of forming no-
tions like murder, prejudice, cruelty, stealing: we use the word “wrong.”
(1967, p. 26; 2004b, p. 22)

As further examples we might add: rape, arson, bullying, negligence, black-

mail, perjury, malfeasance, embezzlement, plagiarism, snobbery, hypocrisy,
prudishness, and self-righteousness. A small number of complete moral con-
cepts operate at a more general level: justice, injustice, kindness, unkindness,
altruism, selfishness, etc. (Edmund L. Pincoffs put forward a useful taxonomy
of moral concepts in Quandaries and Virtues [1986, pp. 73–100].)
Incomplete moral concepts are those that are not wrong or right by defi-
nition, but can be made right or wrong by “further specifications from the
moral point of view” (Kovesi, 1967, p. 124; 2004b, p. 90). Kovesi gives the
concept of lying as an example of an incomplete moral concept. Lying is
morally wrong, except when a suitable justificatory explanation can be given,
and such an explanation needs to be given whenever lying is suspected. A
justification might be that the lying was required to save an innocent life. We
could turn the concept of lying into a complete moral concept if we invented
the idea of “saving deceit” to carve out the case of justifiable lying, thereby
leaving the modified concept of lying to cover those cases when it is always
wrong, just as murder is always wrong (1967, pp. 104–110; 2004b, pp. 76–79).
Kovesi also discusses love as an incomplete moral concept (1967, pp.
137–138; 2004b, pp. 98–99, 122, 132). Other possible examples might be:
 From Meaning to Morality in Kovesi and Harrison 107

homicide, abortion, assassination, civil disobedience, torture, and capital pun-

ishment. For a discussion of lying in Kovesi, see “MacIntyre and Kovesi on
the Nature of Moral Concept” (Ewin and Tapper, 2012, pp. 123–138). The
example of lying illustrates the point that, for Kovesi, moral concepts—like
any other kinds of concepts—are open to rational revision. “Lying” can be
revised by the invention of “saving deceit.” That is an example of the revision
of an incomplete concept by means of applying complete concepts to it. “Re-
venge” may be revised by the instituting of policing and legal practices that
replace the point of revenge (Kovesi, 1970, pp. 63–64; 1998, p. 23).
Complete moral concepts—concepts formed wholly from the moral
point of view—constitute the core of morality and the basis of moral judg-
ments. Faced with a complex situation, we bring its messy features under the
array of concepts at our disposal. The applicability of a complete moral con-
cept such as murder will settle the morality of the case. If no complete moral
concept is straightforwardly applicable, we reason analogically: Are there
features of the situation that resemble the features of some complete moral
concept? The features we look for are features relevant to our moral concepts.
In other kinds of situation we would want to pick out features relevant to our
scientific interests or our prudential or technological interests.
Each of these categories describes a domain within which are numerous
and innumerable “facts” specific to that domain. The facts can be represented
as descriptions, but description enters into all of our categories, including the
moral domain. But we never reason from facts in one domain to values in an-
other. We do reason from facts in one domain to values in the same domain:

Our different sorts of notions do not cross the floor of the house: in or-
der to get to the other side they have to go back to their constituencies
and be elected for the other side. If certain material elements have been
elected to serve a purpose then they serve that purpose. In order for
them to serve another purpose they have to go through the same process
again that enables them to serve a particular purpose, they have to be
elected again. (Kovesi, 1967, pp. 64–65; 2004b, pp. 48–49)

In discussing Harrison’s moral thought, I will draw on two discussions: his

“Moral Judgment, Action, and Emotion” (1984, pp. 295–321), which deals
with themes closely connected with the moral theory of Moral Notions, and
the Epilogue of Word and World, which sets morality in the context of the
philosophy of language (Hanna and Harrison, 2004, 347–382; see also Harri-
son, 1975, especially chap. 4; 1978; 1991a; and 2012, where he deals directly
with Kovesi as a moral philosopher). For both Kovesi and Harrison, David
Hume is the philosopher who most requires an answer.
In “Moral Judgment, Action, and Emotion,” Harrison seeks to answer
Hume’s account of moral motivation. Hume divides morality into two parts:
108 ALAN TAPPER

benevolence and justice. He seeks to ground benevolence in our capacity for

sympathy, and justice in our rational self-interest. Sympathy arises naturally
whenever we observe distress in others. Just social institutions serve the in-
terests of each of us, and we value them for the advantages they afford each
of us individually. Thus, sympathy and rational self-interest together give
morality its grounding. Without such grounding, Hume thinks, we would be
at a loss to explain how morality is even possible.
The problem of finding a satisfactory account of moral motivation is a
key topic in recent moral philosophy, and Hume’s account of the problem is
now widely regarded as classical. Harrison and Kovesi are united in finding
Hume’s account misconceived, while accepting the need for some natural-
istic explanation of our moral capacities. Harrison’s reply to Hume involves
an analysis of the concepts of friendship and trust. He is arguing for this
general claim:

Moral emotion and moral commitment on the one hand, moral rules and
moral concepts on the other, are simply different aspects, inextricably
because conceptually connected, of moral relationship. (1984, p. 313)

A long quotation is required here:

Morality is social, but not on that account societal. It is what connects

individual to individual, not what connects individuals taken one by one
to a notional individual representing the abstract collectivity of the com-
mon life which is founded upon and made possible by moral relationship:
the distinction is one which social theorists and social engineers neglect
at their, and our, peril. Nor, on the other hand is the interest we take in
morality a matter of each bosom resonating in harmony with the winds
of feeling which agitate its fellows. If that were the case it would be
hard to see why morality should generate a conceptual scheme at all, or
lend itself to the irritatingly fine distinctions, between heroism and hero-
ics, friendship and flattery, sympathy and a sense of desert [distinctions
discussed earlier in the essay], which obstruct the free passage of the
more grandiose and schematic kinds of theorizing about morality. Mo-
rality is rooted more deeply in us than either social conditioning or
nervous sensibility could root it, because its imperatives spring from the
formal conditions for the existence of types of relationship into which
human beings must enter with one another, because such relationships
provide an essential framework around which the personalities and goals
of individuals organize themselves. (Ibid., pp. 313–314)

The stress here on the importance of actual moral concepts and distinctions—
as opposed to schematic theorizing, on the one hand, and pre-conceptual raw
 From Meaning to Morality in Kovesi and Harrison 109

emotion, on the other—is Kovesian (regardless whether it is derived from

Kovesi). Harrison is not simply explicating these concepts; he is also describ-
ing how trust and friendship actually work in everyday life. He is showing
how, in Kovesi’s terms, the concepts of trust and friendship “provide not only
the rules for our thinking about the world but also the rules for our behavior”
(1967, p. 148; 2004b, p. 106).
Harrison is going a long step beyond just analyzing the “logical features
of moral concepts.” He is presenting a substantive moral position. Morality is
both “social” and “individual” in the special senses he intends. “Friendship”
and “trust” are intrinsic elements of morality. (These themes of trust, friend-
ship, moral relationship, personhood, and social identity are developed more
fully in Harrison, 1989.)
Our motivation to be moral:

[to] sometimes own up, [to] refrain from stealing a march on friends,
and so on, even when [we] could by doing otherwise reap advantages
far outweighing, in the scales of ordinary prudential rationality, any
consequent disadvantage (Harrison, 1984, p. 295)

arises from our aptitude for these sorts of social relationships. It is only a par-
tial and incomplete aptitude, of course. But it is sufficient to provide an an-
swer to Hume’s problem of motivation. This is how we are, much of the time.
Harrison’s argument requires that we recognize this picture as well as accept
his conceptual analysis. “Moral Judgment, Action, and Emotion” (Harrison,
1984) includes a footnote credit to Kovesi. Harrison puts forward an account
of trust that, as he puts it, “brings out the way in which the concept of trust,
like other moral con- cepts, is rooted in certain specific kinds of convention.
(ibid., p. 309)
It is perhaps not at first sight a Kovesian point, but further reflection
shows what he has in mind. Kovesi contended that all concepts, whether
“murder” or “table” or “pain” (or whatever), require agreement not only on
the point of the concept in our lives—the “formal element”—but also on the
sorts of facts that we take as indicators—or “recognitors,” to use his term—
of the presence of the act or thing or sensation (or whatever) to which the
terms refers.
What counts as an X is a public matter, signified by certain conven-
tions by means of which we can recognize the presence of X. In the case of
trust, Harrison contends, A trusts B only if “A is willing to rely on B’s un-
willingness to allow a justified convention-backed claim of A’s to be ne-
glected or overridden” (ibid., p. 309). In the case of friendship, trust of this
sort must be the normal condition of A’s relation to B and of B’s relation to
110 ALAN TAPPER

A. Friends are not friends if they do not care spontaneously for each others’
rights and interests.
Kovesi also discusses the way in which the concept of friendship enters
into its practice:

We can work out . . . as a theoretical exercise, what is implied in the no-

tion of a friend. In analysing the concept we work out what is entailed in
being a friend, what behaviour we expect from friends, with what inten-
tions they do what they do, and so on. And when I am a friend, I have to
act out in my life the implications of the concept. When someone re-
proaches me by saying ‘I do not mind you doing that but do not call
yourself a friend’ he is pointing to the logical incompatibility of my ac-
tion and my describing myself as a friend. Of course if I have reason to
take on a different description I can cease to regard myself as a friend.
But my description of myself needs justification just as much as the de-
scription of anything else. Moreover, changing it is itself an action, just
as much as resigning, marrying or divorcing or joining the resistance
movement are actions. (1979, p. 110; 1998, pp. 51–52)

The practice of friendship revolves around the concept of friendship, which

itself is collectively created and publicly understood.
We now jump forward twenty years to Hanna and Harrison’s Word and
World, specifically to the last section—“The Human and the Subjective”—of
that book’s longish “Epilogue.”
Books on the metaphysics of realism and anti-realism do not usually end
with talk about novels, literary criticism, theology, and ethics, and it is not
obvious that the argument of Word and World required a discussion of the
objectivity of the humanities. The connection here is that, unlike the natural
sciences, these do not seem like objective disciplines. Students of human cul-
ture, it seems, do not “arrive at a common moral vocabulary in terms of which
to pursue their enquiries” and therefore seem to be “occupied with nothing
real, but rather with figments of discourse, fancies of the mind” (Hanna and
Harrison, 2004, p. 368). Ethics, especially, seems vulnerable to this sort of
attack, the influence of which “lurks everywhere in our intellectual and cultural
life” (Hanna and Harrison, 2004, pp. 368–369; the connection between philos-
ophy of language, especially the theory of concepts, and literary theory is dis-
cussed in Harrison’s “Wittgenstein and Scepticism,” 1991b).
Nevertheless, the theory of concepts developed in the book as a whole
does suggest that “objectivity and the culturally artifactual are not the polar
opposites they are commonly supposed to be, but rather part and parcel of one
another” (Hanna and Harrison, 2004, p. 376). They are not sharply opposed,
because moral concepts are not sharply opposed to their referents.
 From Meaning to Morality in Kovesi and Harrison 111

Harrison and Hanna take the concept of justice as their example:

Justice is, as we say, “a reality” in a society in which it is a reality, be-

cause in those societies the institutions for establishment and application
of justice are (to a great extent) scrupulously maintained and conducted,
and are respected by the vast majority of the citizens. Justice exists in
such a society, no doubt, only because it is, in this sort of way, continu-
ously willed into existence by the citizens, acting both individually and
collectively. If they ceased to will in that way it would cease to exist.
But as long as it is, in this way, borne up on a continuously flowing tide
of settled wills, it exists, as a perfectly real, perfectly “objective” feature
of the society it characterises. (Ibid.)

We might doubt whether any social life is possible without a concept of

justice (on the grounds that, as Augustine of Hippo suggested, “states without
justice are but robber bands enlarged” [1972, p. 139], and that all that would
remain is a war of each against each), but that is a point for another discussion.
Social life can function adequately without many of the concepts that
populate the discourse of the humanities. On the other hand, as Hanna and
Harrison argue, moral and aesthetic concepts are not “conceptual phantoms” or
“arbitrary counters,” but the product of our rational cultural practices. These
practices are not simply “descriptive” but rather “constitutive” of our lives.
Kovesi, I think, went a little further than this. He contended that our
moral and social concepts, far from being less objective than our scientific
concepts, are even more rational than them. Moral and social concepts are
both guides to our actions and guides for our response to the actions of oth-
ers. When we form such concepts we form them with regard to the needs and
interests of anyone, ourselves included, so all relevant parties get to influence
the structure of the concept. This, however, does not mean that such concepts
are transparent to us. On the contrary:

in studying [our moral and social life] we have to chart out and explore
intricate structures of conceptual relationships. But knowing this is not
like knowledge of our intentions and in fact it is even more difficult to
know than the physical world. The embodiments of our intentional en-
deavours in our language and culture are not the making of an individual
agent, and yet only individuals can know, so however much that world
is in a sense our creation, the maker and the knower are not the same.
(Kovesi, 1979, p. 107; 1998, pp. 48–49)

Our moral and social concepts, though more objective, are, paradoxically
perhaps, less readily knowable than our scientific concepts.
112 ALAN TAPPER

4. Conclusion
This essay does not attempt much in the way of argument. My purpose has
been documentary and descriptive, on the assumption that the commonalities
and connections between Kovesi and Harrison are not well known and are
worth tracing. If there is a sketchy conclusion it is fourfold. First, Harrison
and Kovesi belong to a tradition of thought, now somewhat disparagingly
referred to as “conceptual analysis,” that goes back to Wittgenstein and Aus-
tin, and to which Goddard, Geach, and others contributed. Second, that tradi-
tion did develop a robust theory of concepts, and Kovesi and Harrison have
been key contributors to the formation of that theory. Third, if Hanna and
Harrison’s account of referential realism is sound, then those many philoso-
phers who turned away from conceptual analysis and toward (various kinds
of) metaphysics may have done so on the basis of a theory of concepts that is
far less robust than has been assumed. Fourth, if the theory of concepts shared
by Harrison and Kovesi is sound, then we have available to us a philosophy
of moral and cultural life that is not vulnerable to attacks based on assump-
tions about the exclusive objectivity of science. They have shown how we
need not be held captive by that picture. But, as I say, here I have only ges-
tured at these claims.
 Six

PAYING A DEBT: BERNARD HARRISON

VERSUS THE OLD-NEW ANTISEMITISM

Edward Alexander
I feel a huge debt of gratitude to the Jews, going back many, many
years, so it’s a pleasure that somebody feels I’m doing something to
work it off.
Bernard Harrison, personal correspondence
to Edward Alexander, 10 October 2009

1. The Antisemitism of Liberals

According to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910)

“Antisemitism is a passing phase in the history of culture.” Since that san-
guine declaration, antisemitism has had several very good rolls of the dice,
culminating in the destruction of European Jewry. So horrendous was this
event that a Jesuit priest once lamented, with touching simple-minded nostal-
gia, that the Holocaust had given antisemitism a bad name.
Does the tenacity of antisemitism through the ages prove that, as their
enemies claim, the Jews are indeed a very bad lot, or that, as England’s chief
rabbi Jonathan Sacks says:

Anti-Semitism exists . . . whenever two contradictory factors appear in

combination: the belief that Jews are so powerful that they are responsi-
ble for the evils of the world, and the knowledge that they are so power-
less that they can be attacked with impunity. (2003, p. 40)

This combination of an enormous image (Christ-killer, conspiratorial Elder of

Zion, Communist plotter, bloated capitalist plutocrat, Zionist imperialist, to
name but a few examples) with ridiculously small numbers has proved irre-
sistible to predators. The “new” antisemitism (flourishing in the “new” and
“anti-racist” Europe) is by now the subject of at least a dozen books and
scores, perhaps hundreds, of essays, published in America, England, France,
Italy, Germany, and Israel. Their shared conclusion, set forth from a variety of
perspectives, is that the physical violence of the new Jew-hatred, centered on
Israel, is largely the work of young Muslims, but that the ideological violence
114 EDWARD ALEXANDER

is the work primarily of leftists, “progressives,” battlers against racism, pro-

fessed humanitarians, and liberals (including Jewish ones).
Bernard Harrison’s book, The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Isra-
el, and Liberal Opinion (2006) was his first major foray into the seething
cauldron of controversy over the very existence of the state of Israel, and dealt
almost entirely with the drift of British liberals and leftists into fascist
antisemitism. He brought to the subject a new authorial identity, a different
academic background from that of his predecessors, a distinctive and (despite
the topic) even exhilarating voice, at once rational and passionate. It was also
a courageous voice: coming to the defense of Israel, especially in Britain’s
nasty climate of opinion, is not an exercise for the faint-hearted. This was not
the first book on contemporary antisemitism by a gentile; it was preceded, in
2002, by Pierre-Andre Taguieff’s excellent La Nouvelle judeophobie (oddly
titled in its English translation Rising from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism
in Europe [2004]). But Harrison made shrewd rhetorical use of his “gentile”
perspective, which not only contradicted a major premise of the new
antisemitism, i.e., that only Jews support Israel, but had made him privy to the
expression of antisemitic prejudice, political as well as social, by apparently
respectable academic people, “when Jews are absent” (2006, p. 80).
But Harrison’s self-identification as a non-Jew is more than a rhetorical
device. Rather, it expresses the extent to which he undertook both this book
and his other writings, both before and after it, on Judaism and the Jewish
people as payment of a debt that he believed he owed to Jewish religion and
peoplehood. This was expressed as early as 1996 in “Talking Like a Jew: Re-
flections on Identity and the Holocaust.” When an Israeli travel guide told
him that “you talk like a Jew,” it dawned on him that “If Jewish ways of look-
ing at and putting things have become recognizably a strand in my identity,
have I not received parts of myself as a gift from Jews?” The essay recounts
his own family background (“mixed” Catholic/Anglican) and especially his
friendship in childhood with a classmate and his family, for whom he became
a kind of ger toshav, a version of the stranger in Leviticus who dwells among
the Hebrew people, and is the occasion for the enunciation, often repeated in
the Hebrew Bible:

And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him.
But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born
among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in
the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 19:33–34; King James, Cambridge ed.)

Harrison describes himself, early in The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism, as

“a writer with little or no previous presence in the field or history of writing
about public affairs” (2006, p. xiv), but only a philosopher trained in “habitual
skepticism, bitterly close reading, and aggressive contentiousness contributed
 Paying a Debt: Bernard Harrison versus the Old-New Antisemitism 115

by forty years in the amiable sharkpool of analytic philosophy” (ibid., p. 37).

But he is also, he reminds readers, a philosopher:

with a foothold in literary studies [and] the close analysis of texts, the
unraveling of words and sentences, their implications, their entailment,
their suggestions, as well as those less apparent meanings inscribed . . .
in ‘the margins’ of discourse: its silences, its evasions, its carefully con-
cealed founding incoherences. (Ibid., p. 11)

His relentless deconstruction of anti-Israel invective and smug cliché coming

from the New Statesman, Guardian, Independent, BBC, and other bastions of
Israelophobia (and what Taguieff calls “Palestinophilia”) in England reminds
one of the kind of literary scrutiny that in America was pioneered by the New
Critics (Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Heilman) who arose in
the thirties and dominated English studies until the seventies. He demolishes
bad reasoning as they demolished bad poems.
Typically Harrison scrutinizes the statements of Israel-haters for internal
contradictions, inconsistencies, specious logic, misstatements of fact, and
outright lies. To read the fulminations of such people as John Pilger, Robert
Fisk, or Jacqueline Rose concerning Israel ordinarily requires the mental
equivalent of hip-boots. Harrison, however, approaches in his Sunday best,
moves in briskly with a scalpel, and dissects their vituperations with surgical
precision. He devotes all of Chapter Two, for example, to a single infamous
issue of the New Statesman of 14 January 2002. Its cover showed a tiny Un-
ion Jack, placed horizontally, being pierced by the sharp apex of a large Star
of David, made of gold; below, in large black letters, was the question, posed
with characteristic English understatement: “A Kosher Conspiracy?” It was
right out of Der Sturmer; and the articles that followed it had at first suggest-
ed to Harrison that he entitle his analysis “In the Footsteps of Dr. Goebbels”;
but then he decided that would be “inadequate to the gravity of the case.
(ibid., p. 49).
This issue of the New Statesman, at first glance merely a concrete, local
English controversy, became for Harrison, in the course of writing his book,
the existential realization of the “Messianic left’s” obsession with demonizing
Israel. It held that only by championing the “Palestinian cause” and its fascist
methods and antisemitic rhetoric could it rescue a socialist worldview that
seemed to have been shattered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and to have
ruined every other country, to say nothing of several generations that had
adopted the socialist vision of redemption. How, Harrison asks in the ninth
and final chapter of the book, did it come to pass that “a respected mainstream
organ of the British Left” should have published a cover redolent of Der
Sturmer and contents to match? What can explain the extraordinary morass of
confusion, moral incoherence, and aporia to which we found it possible, by
the application of really quite modest resources of textual analysis, to reduce
116 EDWARD ALEXANDER

the considered statements of serious, leading, left-wing journalists? His an-

swer, fully developed in the course of the book, is:

the possibility that there might be anything . . . to be said in favor, either

of the right of Israel to exist or of Israeli institutions, the conduct of its
legal system, its press, its armed forces, for that matter the conduct of
the Israeli Left, or of Diaspora Jews, becomes a threatening one; one,
that is, capable of disturbing the black-and-white absoluteness of a sec-
tarian morality which is now all that stands between the worldview of
messianic socialism and its final dissolution. (Ibid., p. 190)

Among the many left-liberal canards, slanders, slogans, and clichés that
Harrison dismembers are the following: “Israel is a colonialist state”; “Israel
is a Nazi state, and the Jews who support it are as guilty as Nazi collaborators
were”; “Anybody who criticizes Israel is called an antisemite”; and “Jews do
not express grief except for political or financial ends.” Some will say that, in
response to these vicious or insane allegations, the best response would be:
“Why did you kill your grandmother?” In other words, merely to go on the
defensive is already to concede defeat. Harrison thinks otherwise, and those
who do wish to engage the current and, among “the learned classes,” multitu-
dinous enemies of the Jews and of Israel would do well to attend carefully to
what he says. Take, for example, the way in which he draws out the implica-
tions of the Israeli-Nazi equation, without which critics of Israel would be
rendered almost speechless. The first is that to demonize Israel or Zionism is
to demonize the Jews as well. The second is:

To attach the label “Nazi” to Israel, or to couple the Star of David with
the swastika is thus not just to express opposition, even “robust” opposi-
tion, to the policies of one or another Israeli government. It is to defame
Israel by association with the most powerful symbol of evil, of that
which must be utterly rejected and uprooted from the face of the earth.
(Ibid., p. 68)

This Manichean tendency of contemporary left-liberal critics of Israel is

for Harrison its defining trait. An old literary accusation against liberals is that
they cannot comprehend tragedy, the literary genre in which a hero is divided
against himself, or two rights contend against each other; they prefer melo-
drama, the simplistic struggle of innocents against villains (ibid., p. 73). That
is why Harrison repeatedly uses such terms as “moral drama” and “political
dramaturgy” to describe the Left “in its current redaction” (ibid., p. 191),
which compels it, on a daily basis, to depict Israel as:

a nation incapable of acting otherwise than abominably, and as the na-

tion uniquely and entirely responsible for the existence of conflict in the
 Paying a Debt: Bernard Harrison versus the Old-New Antisemitism 117

Middle East. The Palestinians, by contrast, are represented as a people

wholly without responsibility for the situation in which they find them-
selves, and therefore as a people whose leaders can, literally, do no
wrong. (Ibid., p. 152)

Thus the central claim of the new antisemitism is that, from a humanitar-
ian’s perspective, the State of Israel is evil incarnate, to a degree that trans-
cends the wickedness of any other state that now exists or ever existed. But
the overriding question of Harrison’s remarkable book is why liberals, more
than any other political group, have been drawn to this moral absolutism and
mistaken their antisemitism for a moral virtue. The much-trumpeted (and
largely self-induced) plight of the Palestinians, when compared to the killing
fields of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime might seem barely in the
Top Twenty list of the world’s current misfortunes. Contemporary liberals
may be keen to address the endless list of grievances of Islam—now Europe’s
Religion of Perpetual Outrage—but even here the Palestinian issue is not at
the top of the list. Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to be tried for the
massacres that occurred on 11 September 2001, gave a fifty-minute oration in
court calling for the return of parts of the world to Muslim rule (including
Spain, Kashmir, and Chechnya). Then he prayed for the destruction of the
Jewish people and state, and the liberation of Palestine (Brooke A. Masters,
“Suspect: I Pray for the Destruction of the US,” The Washington Post, 23
April 2002). Perhaps liberals sense that only the last two of these prayers
stand a good chance of being answered; and they surely know, “the one Mus-
lim grievance which [the Left in Europe and America] can make its own, with
some hope of securing substantial domestic support and propaganda gains, is
the existence of Israel (ibid., pp. 184–185). That helps to explain the centrality
of Israel-hatred in the Leftist worldview since the collapse of communism.
Harrison consistently criticizes contemporary liberals who have allowed
their moral indignation on behalf of Palestinians to pass into something “very
hard to distinguish from anti-Semitism of the most traditional kind”; yet he
just as consistently refrains from calling them antisemites—even as he won-
ders whether, in their dreams, they call themselves antisemites. Thus Peter
Wilby, the New Statesman editor who approved that cover worthy of Julius
Streicher, is, according to Harrison, “an entirely honest, decent man,” Dennis
Sewell, whose essay on the Anglo-Jewish “Kosher Conspiracy” is worse than
Goebbels, and others like him belong to the rank of “sincere humanitarians”
(ibid., p. 74). Two factors seem to lead Harrison into implying that one can
have antisemitism without antisemites. One is his assumption, oft-repeated,
that liberals and leftists in the past were almost always opposed to
antisemitism. But surely this is open to question. Tracing the history of
antisemitism, Hannah Arendt stated:
118 EDWARD ALEXANDER

French antisemitism, moreover, is as much older than its European

counterparts as is French emancipation of the Jews, which dates back to
the end of the eighteenth century. The representatives of the Age of En-
lightenment who prepared the French Revolution despised the Jews as a
matter of course; they saw in them the backward remnant of the Dark
Ages, and they hated them as the financial agents of the aristocracy. The
only articulate friends of the Jews in France were conservative writers
who denounced anti-Jewish attitudes as one of the favorite theses of the
eighteenth century. (1951, p. 46)

Nineteenth-century French leftist movements had been outspoken in

their antipathy toward Jews until the Dreyfus Affair forced them to decide
whether they hated the Jews or the Catholic Church more, and so many of
them become Dreyfusards. In England, the famously liberal Dr. Thomas Ar-
nold called English Jews “lodgers” and wanted them barred from universities
and citizenship. William Gladstone would refer to Benjamin Disraeli as “that
alien” who “was going to annex England to his native East and make it the
appanage of an Asian empire”; Ernest Bevin, Labor Foreign Minister from
1945–1951, was notoriously short of sympathy in the Jewish direction. It is,
therefore, unclear that a liberal political heritage exempts one from the charge
of being antisemitic.
Some readers of the book identified a more positive, if naïve, motive at
work in Harrison’s delicate epithets for his adversaries: a trait of character as
much as a principle of argument. He seemed to write as a believer in the hu-
manist ideal of self-correction, according to which a man vacillates between
his ordinary self and his best self, and can be wooed by reason into embracing
the latter. Skeptics, me included, took the darker view that ultimately, philos-
ophy is no more than character. As well, if Harrison believed that one can
reason into decency people like his fellow philosopher Ted Honderich, who
espouses “violence for equality” and sings the praises of Palestinian suicide
bombers, one could only wish him joy in his efforts because deductions have
little power of persuasion—even over philosophers.
To these critics, Harrison replied that he did not hold the naïve, indeed
“fatuous” belief in the power of reason to sway minds or change people’s
character. In 2007, I published a review of Harrison’s The Resurgence of Anti-
Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion in Contentions. Harrison, in a
running debate that ensued in Contentions, replied:

there is a manifest difference between what one might call consistent, or

straightforward, anti-Semitism—the anti-Semitism of a Hitler or a Julius
Streicher, say—and the related, but only partially related, phenomenon
which, I suggest, we are seeing at the moment: namely, a half-truculent,
half-shamefaced toying, for purposes of political polemic, with some of
the leading themes of historic anti-Semitism, by people who for the most
 Paying a Debt: Bernard Harrison versus the Old-New Antisemitism 119

part wish at the same time to present themselves as sincere anti-racists.

The second reason is that what worries me about the present situation is
not that we are witnessing a sudden growth in the numbers of con-
sistent, uncomplicated Jew-haters. So far as I can see, that strand of
opinion remains confined, in Europe and in the United States—leaving
out of account of course, a substantial body of Muslim opinion—to the
extremes of Right and Left. What worries me is, rather, the formation
of a general climate of opinion in liberal circles, in which large num-
bers of “nice, liberal, progressive” people “buy into” what would not all
that long ago have been regarded on the liberal left as flagrantly anti-
Semitic stances, without, apparently, having the slightest idea that that
is what they are in fact buying into. (Harrison personal communication,
8 August 2013)

Thus, it was not only the faulty reasoning of the new liberal friends of fascism
that impelled him to write the book but their unstable, incoherent self-image.
Perhaps the real potential audience for Harrison’s book is not the smug, self-
satisfied Israel-hater who finds kindred spirits in the pages of the New States-
man or the London Review of Books but the disinterested bystander. In either
case, The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism is now one of the most powerful utter-
ances on the subject of the new, liberal anti-Semites.

2. Liberals, Progressives, and Antisemitism

Not long after he published his book on the antisemitism of liberals Harrison
was drawn into the debate over whether liberals or “progressives” should
themselves be exempt from criticism when they “criticize” Israel (and its sup-
porters). As long ago as 1950, in The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling had
called attention to the “conformity of dissent” among liberals, bolstered by the
quaint premise that liberals should not only have the right to go their own
way, but to do so without any questions ever being asked of them.
In December 2006, Alvin Rosenfeld published “Progressive” Jewish
Thought and the New Anti-Semitism, t to free speech nor a strategy fo which
recounted the infinitely varied attempts, mostly by Jewish progressives, to
depict Israel as the devil’s own experiment station, the epitome of apartheid,
and the one genuine inheritor of Nazism. The essay was a classic elucidation
of Charles Peguy’s observation, “It will never be known what acts of coward-
ice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive”
(attributed to Notre Patrie, 1905). It also called to mind the famous Hebrew
short story by Haim Hazaz, “Hadrashah” (The Sermon) ([1942/1943] 1975, p.
283), in which a very articulate kibbutznik says, “When a man can no longer
be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist.” Rosenfeld’s essay showed that, for a very
large number of Jewish progressives, this was no longer true; what his exam-
ples showed was in fact the opposite.
120 EDWARD ALEXANDER

The new reality in 2006 seemed to be that “when a man can no longer be
a Jew, he becomes an anti-Zionist.” For Jews no longer bound by religion or
tradition or peoplehood, there was nothing left of Jewish “identity” except to
attack the Jewish state.
This had not been Harrison’s preferred issue. We have seen how, in his
book and the subsequent controversy it stirred, he tried to steer clear of the
Jewish role in the new antisemitism and even continued to insist that it was
mainly a gentile phenomenon. Nevertheless, in 2007 he undertook a defense
of Rosenfeld in “Israel, Antisemitism, and Free Speech” (2007). Rosenfeld
had been widely and furiously attacked, by Jews and gentiles for trying to
“silence critics of Israel by calling them antisemitic.” Harrison’s aim was:

to provide a philosophical framework for a distinction that has lately

come to play a leading role in discussions of the Middle East conflict:
the distinction between fair criticism of Israel and anti-Semitic defama-
tion. (Ibid., p. 1)

He proposed to develop a simple but rigorous set of criteria for distinguishing

one of these from the other.
Rosenfeld’s critics—defamers would be a better word—were soon repeat-
ing, as if by rote, the charge that he was trying to “silence” them by pointing out
that their licentious equations between Israel and apartheid South Africa or Nazi
Germany were false and vicious. On the contrary, his criticisms were neither a
threat to free speech nor a strategy for closing down debate on the Middle East
conflict. So pervasive was the bizarre notion (Rosenfeld and Harrison both
called it a “scam”) that entering a debate is equivalent to trying to shut it
down that I, offering to reply to a Jerusalem Post broadside against Rosen-
feld by Columbia University Journalism Professor Samuel Freedman, was
scolded by the paper’s opinion editor, who asked why I would want to argue
in favor of censorship.
Harrison directed his efforts to establishing just what it is that makes an
utterance antisemitic; without such “objective” criteria, he argued, it is not
possible to decide whether criticism of the self-styled “critics of Israel” for
wallowing in antisemitism is justified. The first criterion, he argues, is fair-
ness. Telling lies, slandering a people, treating them according to standards
applied to no other people, characterizes all antisemitic utterance. The second
criterion is what Harrison calls “continuity”:

to be construed as anti-Semitic in content, an utterance must be in some

way continuous with the long historic tradition of anti-Semitic discourse
and action. The continuity involved need not take the form of simple
repetition—there are . . . many ways in which old grudges may be refur-
bished to match new discontents. (2007, p. 13)
 Paying a Debt: Bernard Harrison versus the Old-New Antisemitism 121

But political antisemitism always builds upon two convictions: The first
is that Jews are evil incarnate and their presence is dangerous to the people
among whom they live. The second is that Jews have organized a vast con-
spiracy to pursue their nefarious goals, and the agents of this conspiracy are
everywhere. A typical example of the genre is the claim that Israel practices a
form of apartheid.
Harrison is not bashful about citing (and painstakingly refuting) particu-
lar instances of the slander and of their continuity with ancient antisemitic
canards. There is the liberal-left’s favorite analogy between Israel and South
African apartheid, which—lest it be forgotten:

means the attempt to keep two races from mingling, sexually or socially,
through the erection of legally enforceable prohibitions: white-only
beaches, separate housing, separate seats on buses. (2007, p. 21)

There are no apartheid laws in Israel, a country in which Jews and Arabs trav-
el on the same buses and rail lines, use the same soccer pitches and beaches,
visit the same health clinics, attend the same universities. Then there is the by
now cliché analogy, still more slanderous—between Israel and Nazi Germa-
ny—an analogy which, it might be noted, is never used by the same dispens-
ers of progressive venom for the regime in Sudan (ibid., p. 25).
Both accusations (that Israel is an apartheid state and that it is a Nazi
state), argues Harrison, are anti-Semitic: they single out the one Jewish polity
in the world and accuse it of a form of evil widely accepted in the Western
world as, if not absolute evil, something very close to it. It shows continuity
with one of the major obsessions of antisemitism since the late twentieth cen-
tury: the movement to boycott Israel. The movement has been quite popular
among British and Irish academics and trade unions; if effected, it would iso-
late Israel, thus transforming the pariah people of Europe into the pariah state
of the world.
Much of left-liberal commentary on Israel:

plant[s] in the minds of its readers the conviction that Israel is actually
worse—and not only worse, but very much worse—than any regime or
society with which it might relevantly be compared; that, in short, Israel
is more deeply sunk in political-moral enormity than any other existing
in the world today. (Ibid., p. 20)

This is what makes it difficult to find rhetorical flourishes sufficiently hyper-

bolic to convey the extremism of the accusations. One can try saying that
“progressives” now blame Israel for every evil in the world except global
warming, only to find that an English cabinet minister under Tony Blair,
Clare Short, has already done that: at a United Nations-sponsored conference
in August 2007, she claimed that Israel “undermines the international com-
122 EDWARD ALEXANDER

munity’s response to global warming (Daniel Schwammenthal, The Wall

Street Journal, 3 September 2007, quoted in Julius, 2010, p. 751n379). One
could substitute “swine flu” for “global warming” to find that Holland’s larg-
est daily paper, De Telegraaf, has already done that as well, by featuring an
interview with Désirée Röver, who said the ongoing global flu pandemic was
part of an international Jewish conspiracy to reduce the world’s population
(Gross, 2009).
In The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism, Harrison asks how, exactly, “does
the forensic sophism, the dialectical scam” (2007, p. 37 quoted in Alexander,
2012, p. 126), “scandalous in its impudence, whereby people such as John
Judis, Stephen M. Walt, John J. Mearsheimer, former President Jimmy Carter,
Tony Judt, George Soros, and whole legions of Israel-haters turn a debate
about Israel into one about free speech, operate?” (Alexander, 2012, p. 126)
He replies:

One advances some “anti-Zionist” thesis out of the “Nazi analogy”

box—some defamatory thesis, call it Td, which would be hard to make
stick by normal processes of argument—while at the same time suggest-
ing in an undertone that more people would be prepared to say “these
things” if they were not so afraid of the Israel Lobby. Up pops some
Jew, preferably a distinguished one, right on schedule, to point out . . .
that Td is defamatory and stinks of anti-Semitism. This gives the author
of the proposition exactly what he was after in the first place: namely,
empirical evidence that there is indeed a Jewish Conspiracy to suppress
“the truth” about Israel. The press raises a hue and cry and, like a pack
of hounds diverted from the scent by a trailed sack of aniseed, hares off
on this new tack. The debate is turned from one about Israel into one
about free speech, and Td, the original bit of defamation that started it
all, doesn’t have to be defended after all. Game, set, and match to the
“anti-Zionist. (Harrison, 2007, p. 37 quoted in Alexander, 2012, p. 126)

Walt, Mearsheimer, and the rest complain about being embraced by David
Duke and others who, in March 2006, signed the New Orleans Protocol,
which, some have opined as particularly emphasizing the Jewish role in
deliberately encouraging miscegenation to weaken the white race. In other
words, miscegenation was viewed not only as bad in itself, but also as a
weapon of the international Jewish conspiracy (Dienel, 2010, p. 12). But, re-
plies Harrison, “in their haste to abolish all limits to the rancor and hyperbole
of political discourse where Israel is concerned, [they] have left themselves
with no means of separating themselves from him” (ibid., p. 43).
They have not yet complained about being embraced by others with
even stronger political opinions than those of Duke. According to Sharon
Otterman and Robert Mackey (2009), the SITE Intelligence Group, which
monitors jihadist websites, reported that Osama bin Laden, in an audio taped
 Paying a Debt: Bernard Harrison versus the Old-New Antisemitism 123

address entitled “An Address to the American People,” urged Americans to

read The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (Walt and Mearsheimer, 2007)
and Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (Carter, 2006). A bit earlier, bin Laden
had endorsed Michael Scheuer, formerly of the CIA, where he headed the unit
in charge of tracking down bin Laden, who later insisted that both the Demo-
cratic and Republican parties are “owned” by the America Israel Public Affairs
Committee, that Israeli spies are all over America, and that Israel is engaged in
“one of the most successful covert-action programs in the history of man”
(Schoenfeld, 2007).
Not surprisingly, Scheuer has lauded Bin Laden as “the most respected,
loved, romantic, charismatic and perhaps able figure in the last 150 years of
Islamic history,” as well as being “gentle, generous, talented and personally
courageous (2004, p. 19).
In a bit of comic relief from these melodramatic horrors, Harrison asks
just how the “silencing,” if it existed at all, would work. Would the London
Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, CNN, National Public Ra-
dio, Farrar, Straus and Giroux suddenly fold their hitherto welcoming arms to
Israel’s manifold accusers? The question has only to be asked for the absurdi-
ty of its premise to be revealed.
Harrison admits to some surprise that versions of this dialectical scam
are now propagated “in some Jewish quarters,” but argues that this fact should
not mislead people into thinking that the core problem here is the supposed
psychological strains that have, over centuries, pulled the Jewish psyche apart
and produced the sickness known as “Jewish self-hatred.” No—

the present tendency for the outcry over Israel on the left, including the
Jewish left, to spill over at times into something indistinguishable from
anti-Semitism has, in other words, far more to do with the historic
strains currently pulling the left apart than with any supposed psycholog-
ical strains pulling the Jewish psyche apart. (2007, p. 40)

Not that he is particularly interested in undermining left-wing ideas either;

after all, leftists are already doing that very adequately without any help from
outsiders. All of which brings us back to Harrison’s personal motive in under-
taking this crucial bit of pamphleteering, his repayment of a lifelong debt:

As a gentile with some interest in Jewish religion, history, and culture,

and some consequent understanding of the importance of the Jewish
contribution to Western civilization, I have been encountering this sort
of thing on and off for sixty years, though not usually, I have to say,
from Jews, and I find it wearisome and contemptible in the extreme.
(Ibid., p. 36)
124 EDWARD ALEXANDER

3. The Jewish Role in the New Antisemitism

In the opening chapter of The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism (2006), Harrison
considered, as a prime example of the nightmarish quality of allegations of
Jewish depravity, the Blood Libel. This is a false allegation according to
which the Jewish community allegedly abducts and kills non-Jewish children
in order to mix their blood with the meal from which they make the Passover
matzo. He demonstrated, with impeccable logic that the Libel is:

internally incoherent, in short, falls apart in one’s hands, because it ac-

cuses observant Jews of doing, for religious reasons, something precise-
ly forbidden by the terms of Jewish religious observance. (Ibid., p. 17)

The Torah stigmatizes all blood as unclean and forbids its consumption.
Early in 2007, a few months after Harrison’s book appeared, an Italian-
Israeli professor of history at Bar Ilan University named Ariel Toaff pub-
lished, in Italian, a book entitled Pasque di Sangue (Passovers of Blood),
which claimed that Jews in the Middle Ages (especially the fifteenth century)
engaged in ritual murder and also used Christian blood for religious rites. His
claims, based largely on confessions made by “German” Jews being tortured
in 1475, alluded to rabbinic certification of “Kosher Blood” products. Toaff,
the son of a rabbi, apparently did not know (what Harrison certainly did) that
blood of any sort cannot be “kosher.” Had Toaff’s book been written by a
Syrian (it was in Damascus in 1840 that the Blood Libel had its most success-
ful modern revival prior to its return in Nazi Germany) it would have received
little or no attention. Coming from an Israeli, however, it of course got
worldwide publicity. To be sure, serious scholars shredded it in the Times
Literary Supplement, for example. As well, in a lengthy piece, Church histori-
an Massimo Introvigne pointed out:

an agency independent from the Jewish community had repeatedly in-

vestigated the blood libel accusations against the Jews between 1247 and
1759 and issued several reports denouncing the accusations as both stu-
pid and false, including in the very cases studied by Toaff. That agency
was the Vatican. (2007)

Undaunted, Toaff said that he would not repudiate his claims even if his (Jew-
ish) critics “crucified” him.
By January 2008, Harrison had revised his estimate of the role played by
Jews (including Israeli Jews) themselves in promotion of the new
antisemitism. In a review of The Jewish Divide over Israel: Accusers and
Defenders (Alexander and Bogdanor, 2006), about Jews who demonize Israel,
he framed his discussion as a critique of the baneful influence of the Enlight-
enment conception of ideal or universal mean, an ideal that—or so its inven-
 Paying a Debt: Bernard Harrison versus the Old-New Antisemitism 125

tors and propagators had hoped—would create a society based upon reason
that would command the assent of all rational people and supplant the nation-
al and religious identities that divide the allegiances of men and bring endless
war. He began by quoting Julien Benda’s address of 1932 that urged all intel-
lectuals to repudiate their national allegiances: “Tell your nations that they are
always in the wrong by the single fact that they are nations . . . Plotinus
blushed at having a body. You should blush at having a nation” (quoted in
Harrison, 2008, p. 135) But what The Jewish Divide over Israel showed,
wrote Harrison, was:

while plenty of intellectuals . . . have blushed at the crimes or inadequa-

cies of their respective nations, very few French, English, German, Rus-
sian or Irish intellectuals, or even American ones (who blush easily)
have proved ready to blush merely at having a nation. In practice, the
one people whose very national identity has been widely held to consti-
tute, in its objectionable “particularism,” a standing offence against the
ideal of Universal Man, is the Jews. (Ibid., p. 135)

The tone of this particular attack on Jewish nationhood was set by the
celebrated speech made to the French Assembly in 1789 by Count Stanislas
de Clermont-Tonnerre, ostensibly advocating Jewish emancipation: “To the
Jew as a citizen, everything: to the Jews as a people, nothing.” Harrison re-
torts that, given the link in Judaism between religion and national identity,
“this is a condition which no Jew can meet without cutting himself off from
everything which marks him out as a Jew” (ibid.). It is this condition that, in
varying degrees, is in Harrison’s view what unites such Jewish advocates of
Israel’s dissolution as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Judt, Judith But-
ler, George Steiner, and other “accusers” in the book under review. Their ob-
jection to Israel is not that it is culpable in this or that particular, “but that a
state enshrining Jewish national autonomy should never have come into exist-
ence in the first place and should not exist now. They blush, not for Israel’s
perceived wrongs, but because Israel exists at all” (ibid., p. 137).
According to many of its accusers, Israel is guilty not merely of crimes
against Arabs or of being the main obstacle to world peace but of ruining the
very mission of Judaism, to be “a light unto the nations.” Thus, Steiner insists
that the true “mission” of the Jews is to be found precisely in exile: “only
when they are outside of their homeland have the Jews served as the cultural
vanguard and moral conscience of the nation, prophets of lofty and profound
human ideals” (ibid., p. 139). This appears to be a role to which Citizen of the
World Steiner has aspired.
Unfortunately, observes Harrison:

virtually all the “lofty and profound human ideals” with which we are
acquainted possess national origins and depend partly on their continued
126 EDWARD ALEXANDER

strength in the nations which gave rise to them for their continued life
among us. We owe our conception of equality largely to France, of Ha-
beas Corpus and representative democracy mainly to England, of eco-
nomic freedom mainly to America. (Ibid., p. 140)

Moreover, responsibility for the worst horrors and debacles of the twentieth
century, the century par excellence of blood and shame, “belongs to the over-
riding ambitions of the two great supranational ideologies of Nazism and
communism, one founded on race, the other on class, both held to transcend
national belonging” (ibid.). Harrison recently reiterated his view that the func-
tion of being a “light unto the nations” that Steiner assigns to the Jews is not
(contra Steiner) a function that can only be pursued in the Diaspora, and that
there are contributions to general human consciousness—such as British par-
liamentarianism or the French commitment to Reason in the conduct of public
affairs—that could only have been made by nation states (personal communi-
cation, August 2013). Surveying the licentious, defamatory, often deranged
allegations brought by its Jewish intellectual accusers against the state of Isra-
el fills Harrison with despair:

Bad and dishonest argument works, sad to say; especially when it is end-
lessly repeated by individuals and journals whose academic prowess or
cultural standing gives them an apparent authority (2008, p. 144)

and a sense of “the perennial tendency of bad intellectual currency to drive

out the good.” But it also makes him more determined than ever “to take up
the tedious job of patiently teasing out, in details, sense from nonsense, truth
from lies” (ibid.). Hard as this is in dealing with “progressive” antisemitism,
it becomes even harder, and more anguished when the progressives under
scrutiny are themselves Jews who prompt the maddening question: Can Jews
be anti-Semites?

4. The Prejudice of Panic

In June of 2009, Harrison delivered a lecture at Haifa University entitled

“Supping with a Short Spoon: The ‘New’ Antisemitism and Its Defenders,” in
which he set out to distinguish between social prejudice, from which Jews
now rarely suffer in Western countries, and “the prejudice of panic,” of which
they are the chief victims. He said that the more lethal prejudice springs from
belief in three propositions:

(1) The Jews are a mysteriously but absolutely depraved people, whose
aim is world domination, and who pursue that aim by incessant de-
structive activity aimed at the control of non-Jewish societies and at
the destabilization of the world order.
 Paying a Debt: Bernard Harrison versus the Old-New Antisemitism 127

(2) Membership of the Jewish people differs from membership of any

other human society, in that it is essentially membership of a conspira-
cy to dominate and exploit non-Jews.
(3) Jews, because of the inimical and conspiratorial nature of Jewish cul-
ture, and its power to extend sinister tentacles of Jewish influence
throughout the institutional fabric of non-Jewish society, constitute a
permanent threat both to the well-being and to the autonomy of any
society which harbours them. (Ibid., p. 4)

This prejudice of panic and fear differs from social prejudice because nobody
matches its stereotypes:

The “Jewish Conspiracy” has no members. The idea that a widely scat-
tered nation of approximately eleven million people could conceivably,
by elaborate and secret machinations, “control” vast and powerful alien
nations, let alone destabilize a world order perfectly capable, in any case,
of bloodily destabilizing itself at frequent intervals without the slightest
help from “the Jews,” is an absurd and paranoid fantasy. The actual con-
tent of the prejudice of fear belongs in the same box as belief in UFO’s,
or ley-lines, or the real existence of the Aesir Gods. (Ibid.)

All of this makes the prejudice of panic not less but more dangerous than so-
cial prejudice, for its sense of the omnipresence and omnipotence of Jews
makes the Jewish collectivity its target, the Jewish Problem urgently in need
of a “final solution,” namely, its erasure from the family of nations.
Antisemitism as a social prejudice, Harrison argues, is a transient phe-
nomenon; but the older form, which targets Jews as a collectivity, appears to
be a permanent political phenomenon, which Jean-Paul Sartre correctly la-
beled “Manichaean antisemitism” (1946) because it calls up the long-lasting
and widespread Christian heresy that derived from irrational panic in the face
of evil. It permeated the Nazi worldview, and, speaking of Mahmoud
Ahmedinejad, Iranian President from 2008–2013, Harrison continues:

What is far more worrying than Ahmedinejad’s attachment to rhetoric

indistinguishable from that pre-war Nazi propaganda, however, is that,
since 2001, there has begun to flow, in ever greater quantities and with
ever more passionate intensity, from certain sections—by no means
all—of the European and American Left, a strain of rhetoric essentially
indistinguishable from Ahmedinejad’s. (Ibid., p. 6)

These are the very people who have most compulsively embraced the Is-
raeli-Nazis equation. Not because it levels some damaging criticism of the
Jewish state: Where, in Israel, is the equivalent of the National Socialist Par-
128 EDWARD ALEXANDER

ty? Where is the Israeli master-plan to invade and dominate its neighbors?
Where is the Israeli equivalent of Kristallnacht? Where is the burning of
books? Where is the expulsion of Arabs from Israeli universities? Where are
the death camps? None of these questions needs an answer; the whole point of
the Nazi analogy comes from the fact that the Nazi regime still constitutes, in
the minds of the majority of sentient people, absolute evil, not to be reformed
or relieved, but to be destroyed utterly.
Thus, argues Harrison, we have the propagation by Walt and Mear-
sheimer, or Judt, or Scottish politician Tam Dalyell, or the New Statesman of
the myth of an all-powerful Zionist conspiracy extending its tentacles into
every (ostensibly) independent western government. Even the Blood Libel has
returned, courtesy of the left-wing British playwright Caryl Churchill in her
ten-minute play, Seven Jewish Children (2009), which depicts IDF soldiers as
going into Gaza for the express purpose of killing babies. The “new”
antisemitism, it turns out, is actually the oldest, indeed the original version.
What is new is its provenance: it now comes not from the nationalist Right,
but from the internationalist Left, who are shocked, simply shocked, when
accused of antisemitism. Still more are they outraged, as noted above, when
they are embraced and cosseted by Nazis, who welcome these newcomers to
the ranks of uncomplicated Jew-haters. Ironically, they even serve as slightly
embarrassed and (perhaps) unintentional recruiting officers for all kinds of
political movements feeding off Jew-hatred, no matter how desperately they
invoke the verbal smokescreen that identifies the target of their fulminations
not as “Jews” but as “Zionists.”
Have the David Dukes and other rightwing Jew-haters really mistaken
the Judts and Caryl Churchills and Roses for comrades in the struggle against
the Jewish conspiracy? Harrison asks:

So where is the “terrible mistake”? What, in fact, distinguishes the ethos

of the play from, let us say, the ethos of the Protocols? . . . Those who
think they can make Manichaean anti-Semitism serve humanitarian ends
are supping with the devil. They must not be surprised if later, when
they protest the moral purity of their motives, the lips of that amiable,
vulpine gentleman curve into a smile. (2009, p. 11)

If the 1910 Britannica description of antisemitism as a passing phenom-

enon should ever turn out, over a century later, to be true, then Harrison’s
writings that define the meaning of Judaism (for gentiles as much as for Jews)
will prove of more enduring importance than his attempt to throw back the
current antisemitic tide. But in the process of paying his debt to the Jews, he
saw all too clearly that, for the Jews themselves, survival precedes definition.
 Part Three

LANGUAGE AND PRACTICE

 Seven

BERNARD HARRISON, LITERATURE,

AND THE STREAM OF LIFE
DANIÈLE MOYAL-SHARROCK

Words have meaning only in the stream of life.

-- Wittgenstein (1982, p. 913)

1. Introduction

Bernard Harrison, unwittingly of course, nearly put a stop to my doing philoso-

phy. I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation—aiming to show that
the nonepistemic concept of certainty in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1977)
was a more suitable concept than truth to describe the kind of indubitable, yet
nonratiocinative, certitudes we get from literature—when I came across In-
convenient Fictions (Harrison, 1991). I was immediately humbled not only by
the book (even if somewhat baffled by its sympathies with Deconstruction),
but also because Harrison had preceded me: he had not only disqualified truth
as literature’s offering but found endorsement for it in On Certainty. Harrison
argues against views such as Nelson Goodman’s, Paul Ricoeur’s, and Peter
McCormick’s, who hold that there is such a thing as “literary truth”:

truth of the kind possessed by those Great Truths—“the best that has
been known and thought in the world”—often supposed to constitute the
reward of the serious study of literature. (1991, pp. 9–10)

He does not, however, believe that this approach succeeded, holding instead:

so far as I am concerned, there is no such thing as “literary truth.” Liter-

ature is just a collection of old and new stories about people who never
existed and things that never happened. The place to look for Great
Truths is not in a novel but in a physics text. (1991, p. 11)

The notions of reference and truth have no coherent application in litera-

ture. (Ibid., p. 47)

The limits of sense are set by the involvement of words, via the practices
in terms of which their meanings and relationships to one another are es-
tablished, with the common conditions of human existence. There is, as
[Ludwig] Wittgenstein says, something deeper than truth and falsity,
132 DANIÈLE MOYAL-SHARROCK

and that deeper something is the possibility, granted by the common re-
ality we inhabit, of acting in certain ways. (Ibid., pp. 11–12)

So I abandoned my thesis. But On Certainty was not that easy to give

up; I came back to it a few months later, having decided to drop the literary
component of my endeavor and focus on understanding On Certainty for its
own sake. The fruit of this was my doctoral dissertation, published as Under-
standing Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (2007).
From this more informed perspective, I may now be able to put a bit
more flesh to the substance of Bernard Harrison’s insight about On Certainty.
But this chapter’s main ambition is to further investigate the nature of that
“something deeper than truth and falsity” that nourishes literature and thereby
retrace Harrison’s philosophical elucidation of how literature takes its force in
the stream of life.

2. Certainty and Action

If the notions of reference and truth have no coherent application in literature,

asks Harrison, how can we retain any grip on the idea that literary fictions
stand in any cognitively significant relationship to reality? His answer is that
there is more than one route by which language can relate to reality and thus
offer us cognitive gain. Cognitive gain is not just a matter of augmenting the
list of true statements known to us, but of grasping new possibilities and new
visions of things (1991, pp. 47; 50–51). So that in spite of being non-
referential and making no statements, literary language can and does bring us
significant cognitive gain.
But before retracing the second route by which Harrison sees language
connecting to reality, I want to pause at his use of “cognitive” here. Harrison
speaks of a “cognitively” significant relationship that can do without truth,
yet on the standard definition of knowledge (as justified true belief), there can
be no such relationship. Indeed, it is the very absence of a relationship to truth
and justification that led Wittgenstein to realize that there is a categorial dif-
ference between knowledge and the kind of certainty he was interested in: a
certainty that is not the product of reference or justification but rather their
unquestioned ground. There is, however, a broader sense of “cognitive,”
which need not be associated with knowledge strictly speaking. It is in that
broad sense that we should take Harrison’s claim that literature affords us
cognitive gains. And so with this caveat, we can move on.
In his rightly rejecting truth(s) as what literature brings us and replacing
it with something deeper, something he senses as “the possibility . . . of acting
in certain ways” (ibid., pp. 11–12), Harrison puts his finger on the essential
nature of Wittgensteinian certainty—its being a way of acting.
In On Certainty, Wittgenstein drives a categorial wedge between
knowledge and basic certainty. More precisely, his ground-breaking insight is
 Bernard Harrison, Literature, and the Stream of Life 133

that our basic certainties underpin knowledge and hence are themselves
nonepistemic. So, such basic certainties as that I have a body, or that I am
sitting here, or that the world exists are nonepistemic, noninferential, and
immediate: they do not result from an epistemic or an empirical process. For
although some certainties may require sensory perception, they are not due to
it: I am not certain of having a body because I see or feel it; I am not certain
that I am sitting here because I perceive myself. The “that” in “I am certain
that . . .” does not introduce the object of a propositional attitude, but of a
nonpropositional one. Yet although all our certainties are immediate (non-
inferential), the immediacy of some was acquired through training or repeat-
ed exposure. This is the case of what I have elsewhere called “linguistic” and
“local certainties” (2007, pp. 117–156); for example, “Red is darker than
pink”; “Trains arrive in train stations.” But these certainties that have become
“second nature”—to use a phrase favored by Harrison—are no less certainties
than our instinctive certainties. They include basic moral certainties.
As we shall see, Harrison speaks of “the praxial foundations of mean-
ing” (forthcoming, 2014, p. 17), thereby suggesting that the meaning of our
words is to be found in the role or roles assigned to them in our practices.
Meaning is rooted in practice; Wittgenstein would say, “in action.” For Witt-
genstein, too, the foundation or ground of the language-game is to be found in
our ways of acting, for our basic certainties are in fact nothing but ways of
acting (my certainty that I have a body shows itself in my using it and in my
speaking about it; for example, “My back hurts”). So, we may well speak
here of a “praxial certainty.” For, although basic certainties can be formulated
(as I have just been doing), their formulation is only ever heuristic (used for
philosophical elucidation or linguistic instruction), and never an occurrence
or manifestation of certainty; the only occurrence of certainty qua certainty is
in action:

Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end;—

but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true,
i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the
bottom of the language-game. (Wittgenstein, 1977, p. 204)

However, the difference between Wittgenstein’s “acting” and Harrison’s

“practices” is that the latter are only socially devised and maintained practic-
es, whereas Wittgenstein’s acting also includes our natural or instinctive ways
of acting. Harrison’s “human worlds are praxial constructs” (forthcoming,
2014, p. 19; emphasis added) and though, of course, these practices engage
with the natural world; they are not themselves “first nature” or “instinctive.”
For both Wittgenstein and Harrison, however, there is no rational connection,
but a praxial one, between the world and language. For Wittgenstein, our
language, our concepts are conditioned by—not inferred from—our ways of
living (1997, p. 230).
134 DANIÈLE MOYAL-SHARROCK

As I said, my interest in Wittgenstein’s certainty at the time was that it

looked to provide the kind of nonratiocinative and yet indubitable assurance
that I thought literature—great literature—gave us. There is no reasoned
demonstration that love or jealousy or ambition looks like this or that, but
reading Shakespeare shows us that here is what love, jealousy, or ambition
look like—crucially and indubitably. There are no truths to be had here, in the
sense of assertions that correspond to facts, and yet there is something one
cannot question, although correspondence to reality is not the key to that cer-
tainty, nor is that certainty unattached to reality. Reality is crucially involved in
literature, only it is not empirically or epistemically involved in it, but infused
in it. It is from, as Harrison calls it, a “reality-soaked” language (1991, p. 58)
from which literature draws its breath, its life, and its meaning—and therefore,
ours. This, I had also learned from F. R. Leavis; but in Inconvenient Fictions, I
found a philosophically “perspicuous presentation” (Wittgenstein, 1997,
§ 122) of what Leavis had communicated through his conception of a “Third
Realm” (I shall return to this).
In the conclusion of his review of Inconvenient Fictions, Richard Gas-
kin wrote that the great value of the book for him is:

that it creates a yearning for another book, one which would provide us
with something we have too long lacked—a philosophically sophisticat-
ed defence of the humanistic tradition of literary criticism. (1993, p. 179;
emphasis added)

Well, I think Bernard Harrison has risen to the challenge, and provided us
with just that, both in Word and World (Hanna and Harrison, 2004) and in
What is Fiction For? Restoring Literary Humanism (forthcoming, 2014).
That and more: he has provided us with a philosophically sophisticated de-
fense of the value of literature in our lives. As Leavis writes, “The signifi-
cance we look for in creative literature is a matter of the sense of life, the
sense of the potentialities of human experience, it conveys” (1982, p. 118).
As Wittgenstein showed, significance or meaning is to be found in
use—the use of language—and what greater use of language than literature?
But in order to get to that, Harrison begins by elucidating Wittgenstein’s in-
sight about the way language simpliciter gets its meaning.

3. Meaning in Practice

Language does connect up with my own life. And what is called “lan-
guage” is something made up of heterogeneous elements and the way it
meshes with life is infinitely various.
- -Wittgenstein (1974, p. 66)

In Word and World (2004), Hanna and Harrison describe the two competing
accounts of the relationship between language and reality, and the constitu-
 Bernard Harrison, Literature, and the Stream of Life 135

tion of linguistic meaning. On the first view, language is essentially a mere

tool for recording and describing the nature of empirical reality; it places us
in touch with reality by way of truth. Here, meaning is external to language; it
is merely read off from reality. Language does not create anything: the germs
of being exist only in the natural world, not in the writer’s ingenious putting
together of words and phrases.
On the second account, the source of linguistic meaning is not the natu-
ral world. Rather, meaning is constituted by conventional stipulation; it is
determined internally to language, through the relation of words to one anoth-
er. The world described by means of language is a mere linguistic construct.
Here too, language cannot be one of the “germs of being,” but that is because it
has no connection with anything external to itself. We can speak here, as Har-
rison does, of a “linguistic idealism . . . the thesis that the mind never passes
beyond the circuit of its own, linguistically forged, conceptions to encounter a
reality that existed before language, and is independent of it” (ibid., p. 70).
These alternative accounts present us with a dilemma: if meaning can
only be determined internally to language, discourse loses touch with the
world. If meaning can only be determined externally to language, no room
remains for human spontaneity in the devising of concepts.
The source of the dilemma, say Hanna and Harrison, is to be found in
the overly narrow conception of what a language is, and arising from that, too
narrow an understanding of its connections with reality. So they propose a
third way that requires, in a Wittgensteinian vein, that a third explanatory
notion be added to the two already present in those accounts. The third notion
is practices. We should, they urge, stop trying to represent the relationship
between language and the world as a relationship between meaning-bearing
elements of language and some class of entities envisaged as corresponding
elements of the world. Instead, we should think of it as a two-stage relation-
ship, in which world and meaning-bearing elements of language are related to
one another not directly, but only via their relationship to socially devised and
maintained practices (ibid., pp. 2–3). Meaning, therefore, arises from the roles
assigned to linguistic expressions in the conduct of practices. Therefore, the
connection of language with a reality external to it is secured, not by our con-
cepts mirroring conceptual structures already present in the world—not by a
direct link between linguistic expression and an item or aspect of reality—but
by the multifarious ways in which practices engage with the complex realities
revealed to us by experience (Harrison, 2011).
Thus, to say that our meanings have praxial foundations comes to this:
the living origins of meaning are to be found in our conventions, practices,
social arrangements and associated beliefs (forthcoming, 2014, p. 14). Alt-
hough the practices from which words acquire meaning are multifarious, Har-
rison divides them into two broad categories: those practices concerned with
the manipulation of physical (or inhuman) reality, and those, such as legal,
political, religious, or social practices, concerned with the conduct and regu-
136 DANIÈLE MOYAL-SHARROCK

lation of human affairs. Practices in the first category, for example, biological
taxonomy and linear measurement, have as their object the placing of lan-
guage into relationship with the natural world. The natural world, however, is
merely placed in relationship with language by those means: it is in no sense
constituted by them. But when it comes to the practices that relate language to
the human world, for example, parliamentary procedure, baptism, and the
subsequent use and systematic recording of proper names, and religious dis-
putation, matters stand quite differently. It is not only that some linguistic
expressions acquire meaning from these practices; the practices in question
also in part serve to constitute the “human worlds”—the worlds, say, of par-
liamentary democracy, civil society, or religion—to which the linguistic ex-
pressions refer (if names) or which they describe (if non-literary propositions
in the constative mood):

the practices within which words find a role, and thereby a meaning, al-
so function in part to compose a real, existing human world, [say,] the
world of traditional, observant, Eastern European Jewry. (2011, p. 417)

And so practices both engage with the natural world and constitute human
worlds. Human worlds thus constructed are, Harrison insists, an ineliminable
part of human reality:

It seems unarguable that human worlds, in this sense, constitute a de-

partment of reality. One might like, or dislike the world of orthodox
Jews in Mea Shearim, or that of an Islamicist madrasseh in Islamabad;
but as we all know, not merely as students of scientific method, but to
our cost as living human beings, our likes and dislikes are indifferent to
the question of what is or is not real. . . . these human worlds (and in-
numerable others), and all the freight of human character and longing
they carry with them, are realities as hard as, say, the atomic number of
cadmium or the behaviour of black holes. (Forthcoming, 2014, p. 17)

Such practices largely make us what we are. And if some words acquire their
meaning from practices that make us what we are, then some of our language
is inextricably bound up with making us what we are:

if, on the one hand, our nature as human beings, and on the other the
meanings of the words in which we express and articulate that nature,
are both, equally, born out of a common relationship to the multifarious
practices which give shape to our lives, it follows that the kaleidoscope
of language must stand in permanent and inextricable relationship with
the shifting reality of the multiple worlds of human being and commit-
ment. (Harrison, 2011, p. 413)
 Bernard Harrison, Literature, and the Stream of Life 137

The connection of words with practices, with use, implies their connection
with reality:

Language is everywhere hopelessly infected by the extra-linguistic: the

relationships between its signs run ineluctably by way of the world. So
there is, just as the critical humanist has always maintained, a strong
connection between language and Reality; only it does not run by way
of referentiality and truth. (Harrison, 1991, p. 51)

It is through our practices, then, that language (noninferentially) con-

nects with reality and that meaning arises. There is much ammunition here to
be used in the fight against relativism and linguistic idealism, but I shall use it
only inasmuch as it pertains to the connection between reality and literature.

4. Literature and the Stream of Life

Language, the writer’s tool, is in its essence infected with, permeated

by, a certain order of reality; namely, the reality of human worlds.
--Bernard Harrison (Forthcoming, 2014, pp. 18–19)

Because our words are rooted in our practices—and thereby in the cultural
worlds and the whole richness of human reality constituted by those practic-
es—because they are the signs and tools of these practices, investigating them
is also to investigate our practices, our human realities. Such an investigation
runs by way of a use of language designed to evoke—or “show” (to echo
Wittgenstein) or “enact” (to echo Leavis)—its own praxial foundations: the
literary use. What does this mean?

in interrogating words, and beyond them the multifarious practices

which words articulate and serve, writer and reader alike interrogate
things central and foundational to the concrete humanity of each of
them. (Harrison, 2011, p. 414)

Interrogating words, investigating their meaning, is not done by looking

in the dictionary. The dictionary serves as a quick reference tool for the gen-
eral uses of a word, whereas interrogating words and investigating their
praxial foundations require trying them, testing them against one another, and
in so doing testing the concepts they express. Whereas science is in the busi-
ness of formulating true statements concerning reality and the presentation of
evidence for the truth or falsity of such statements, the distinguishing feature
of literature is that it does not use language to refer to reality or describe reali-
ty—not even our “human condition”—but to evoke meaning in use. Indeed,
literary language is “praxially evocative” language (ibid.). Creative language
138 DANIÈLE MOYAL-SHARROCK

(that Harrison, after Merleau-Ponty, calls “constitutive language”) does not

use words to illuminate reality by referring to it, by representing it, by offer-
ing us general and transcendental truths; it uses words to illuminate words,
and through illuminating words, illuminate our practices, us. It does this “by
operating upon words with words”:

What constitutive language does for us is to make the workings of our

own language visible to us. It does this by setting it against an alterna-
tive language, another way of talking about the same things. It shows us
our familiar ways of talking, that is, as arbitrary . . .; as . . . rest[ing] up-
on ways of construing the world linguistically which could in principle
give place to other, though equally provisional, ways of construing the
same world linguistically. (1991, p. 50)

This is how William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure investigates

what we mean by “measure” in all the various ways in which the concept
enters our lives as members of the historic culture we inhabit; or how Charles
Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend investigates some of the moral ambiguities sur-
rounding such phrases as “bettering oneself” or “getting on in the world”
(2011, p. 420). In a literary work, the limits of our ordinary conceptual vocabu-
lary are pushed; we are made to grasp the revitalized sense—or indeed a new
sense—in which a human being may be said to have measure, dignity or honor.
But literature is not a mere battle of words; words have meaning only in
context and literature provides these:

Meaning, especially in a work of literature, is not merely a matter of

how words might be made to play against one another, but of how words
taken in specific praxial contexts, do in fact play against one another.
And the praxial contexts in question, of course, must be ones offered by
the text itself. (Forthcoming, 2014, p. 36)

The praxial contexts are those imagined worlds that, through the words that
evoke them, shed light on our world. Of course, a vast amount of common-
place knowledge of the world is built into the relationships between the signs
of our language. As those relationships are made to shift, through fictional
reality, new possibilities come into view whose existence we would otherwise
never have suspected (1991, p. 50). This encapsulates Harrison’s view of the
cognitive gains afforded us by literature: gains in self-knowledge in the hum-
bling realization of the limits of our own perspective along with a reordering
of our perception of human possibilities:

serious imaginative literature . . . sets language in motion, in the context

of imagined situations . . . in ways which bring before the reader’s con-
sciousness the nature and implications of the practices which both give
 Bernard Harrison, Literature, and the Stream of Life 139

sense to the words which compose it, and at the same time contribute to
the constitution of the cultural world, the human reality, in which the
reader is immersed, and from which he or she derives a great part of his
or her own individual being. (Forthcoming, 2014, p. 14)

This interrogation and revitalization of words, and beyond them the multifari-
ous practices with which they are associated, brings to mind what F. R.
Leavis calls “the Third Realm.”

5. F. R. Leavis and the Third Realm

Leavis’s Third Realm is not an easy concept to grasp. It sounds like some-
thing transcendent—from a Platonic or Fregean realm:

I coined the phrase the “third realm” to designate the order of being—I
say naturally, “the order of reality”—to which the poem belongs. A po-
em is nothing apart from its meaning, and meanings belong to the “third
realm.” (1975, p. 62)

But Leavis’s aim is to describe the culture carried by language; it is a third

realm because its contents (for example, the meanings of poems) are neither
private, nor public (in the sense that they might be objectively analyzable):

[A poem] is neither merely private, nor public in the sense that it can be
brought in to a laboratory, quantified, tripped over or even pointed to—the
only way of pointing to particulars in it is to put one’s finger on given
spots in the assemblage of black marks on the page—and that assem-
blage is not the poem. The poem is a product, and, in any experienced
actual existence, a phenomenon, of human creativity, the essentially col-
laborative nature of which it exemplifies in diverse distinguishable
modes. And yet it is real. To use a formulation I threw out years ago in the
course of defining the nature of the discipline I am concerned to vindicate
[English], it belongs to the “Third Realm”—the realm of that which is nei-
ther public in the ordinary sense nor merely private. (1975, p. 36).

Although the Third Realm sometimes includes language conceived as

the product of an immemorial collaboration on the part of its speakers and
writers, in the following passage Leavis talks about the Third Realm as being
that language:

the Third Realm (neither private nor, for science, public), which both
my purpose and my firm certitude represent by language, in which hav-
ing created it, individuals meet, and in meeting (they meet in meaning)
140 DANIÈLE MOYAL-SHARROCK

carry on the creative collaboration that maintains and renews what we

think of as a life—i.e. the language. (1976, p. 24; emphasis added)

Without the English language waiting quick and ready for him, Law-
rence couldn’t have communicated his thought: that is obvious enough.
But it is also the case that he couldn’t have thought it. English as he
found it was a product of an immemorial sui generis collaboration on
the part of its speakers and writers. It is alive with promptings and po-
tentialities, and the great creative writer shows his genius in the way he
responds. (Ibid., p. 26; emphasis added)

A work of art belongs in the Third Realm, which means that it is both a
product and a mover of language: language conceived as more than a means
of description and more than a means of expression; language as invested
with, and carrying human culture; that is, values, meanings, promptings, and
potentialities. The poem is a place where “minds meet.” It thus models the
collaborative endeavor of making and finding meaning: “that collaboratively
created and sustained reality, the human world, without which there could
have been no significance” (Leavis, 1975, p. 179; emphasis added).
Where Leavis speaks of “the human world” as that reality constituted by
our collectively-achieved meanings, Harrison speaks of human worlds as de-
partments of reality (such as the world of orthodox Jews in Mea Shearim, or
that of an Islamicist madrasseh in Islamabad) constituted by our practices and
the words assigned to those practices. These human worlds and meanings are
therefore evocable and moveable by literature. So Leavis and Harrison concur
in their conception of meaning as originating in a reality-soaked language
produced by collaborative effort. Harrison says:

the living origins of meaning in the conventions, practices, social ar-

rangements and associated beliefs, which define and give shape to oth-
erwise inchoate human passions and potentialities in the process of
continuously creating and maintaining, from day to day, one or another
form of human life. (Forthcoming, 2014, p. 16)

This is where Harrison gives philosophical flesh to the best humanistic

tradition of literary criticism, and with it to the way in which life suffuses
literature. That tradition is best represented by F. R. Leavis:

Where language is concerned, “life” is human life—is man. . . . a lan-

guage is more than a means of expression; it is the heuristic conquest
won out of representative experience, the upshot or precipitate of imme-
morial human living, and embodies values, distinctions, identifications,
 Bernard Harrison, Literature, and the Stream of Life 141

conclusions, promptings, cartographical hints and tested potentialities.

(1975, pp. 42–44)
For Leavis, too, language is the bearer of experience and the vehicle of culture.
It “represents a long continuity of appraised human experience” (ibid., p. 66).
The eponymous “living principle” is “an apprehended totality of what, as
registered in the language, has been won or established in immemorial human
living” (ibid., p. 68). For Leavis, as for Harrison, “the fullest use of language
is found in creative writing” (ibid., p. 44); it is “in major literary works [that]
we have the fullest use of language” (ibid., p. 105).
Though the representatively human quality of genius is distinctive and
intensely individual, Leavis stresses, “every great writer in the language be-
longs to the one collaboratively creative continuity” (ibid., p. 49). Language,
as the writer uses it, is “a product of collaborative creativity; it makes contin-
ued and advancing collaborative thought possible” (ibid.). This is why the
poem does not belong to its maker; the language from which it comes, its
meaning, belongs to the Third Realm—that source of spontaneity, uncon-
trolled by the ego—from which the profoundly creative individual can draw.
So that every significant artist, writes Leavis, can make “the claim that is
genuinely a disclaimer”; he can say, with Blake, of the creative works he pro-
duces: “Though I call them mine, I know that they are not mine” (ibid., p. 44;
1976, p. 86). As for Harrison, he says: “The writer’s occasional power to en-
lighten us comes, not from a special cognitive faculty, but rather from his
power to ride the reality-gorged tiger of language” (forthcoming, 2014, p. 8).
Indeed, the living principle manifests itself in the interplay between the
living language and the creativity of individual genius. That “interplay,”
which is manifested in the language as the writer uses it, also signals the im-
posing presence of the language and, with it, that of reality—something Har-
rison superbly shows in a paper about the limits of authorial license:

the need to put down some words on a blank page, marks not the point
at which the writer enters into the full play of authorial licence, but, par-
adoxically, the point at which authorial licence begins to encounter lim-
its. Neither language nor the vast web of practices which supply roles,
and hence meanings, to its words are, after all, either the property or the
inventions of the author. They are public property: the framework of a
culture and a world—or, better, system of worlds—which he found
ready-made when he entered it at birth, and which will long outlast him.
Plot, genre, local colour, choice of characters and relationships, all these
are in the unimpeded gift of the author. But ultimately characters must
be made to speak, words must be deployed upon a page. It is then that
the going begins to get sticky; then that human reality begins to reclaim
her own. (2011, p. 418)
142 DANIÈLE MOYAL-SHARROCK

authorial licence is not entirely unconstrained by something worth call-

ing reality. . . . in Dickens, as in any other serious writer, the points at
which the unfettered power of authorial licence encounters its limits,
and engagement with something worth calling reality supervenes, are to
be located . . . in his employment of language; to put it bluntly, his
choice of words. (Ibid., p. 13)

It is because words are reality-soaked that they are not the property of a
writer. They have a life independent of the writer. They can be “interrogated”
rather than merely manipulated. Words offer more resistance than pliancy; it
is in this reality-impregnated resistance that they, in context, reveal the limits
and possibilities of their meanings and ours:

the communication of a new sense, though enacted merely through the

demonstration of a new way of ordering words so that they compose
such a meaning, has (because words are not, pace Hobbes, merely coun-
ters, but, given the genesis of meaning in action, reflect natural possibility
in their possibilities of relationship to one another) the power to disturb
our customary sense of what meaning/meanings are possible, and with it
our sense of the limits of natural possibility: of how things in the world
can stand to one another. (Harrison, 1991, p. 12)

Reflecting, via literary language, on the nature of the practices that give
meaning to the terms in which we describe ourselves offers a way of reflect-
ing on reality itself (and not just some humanly-devised smoke-and-mirrors
“fiction”), because the practices in question importantly constitute human
reality, in the shape of one or another “human world.” With this, Harrison has
given exceptional clarity to how literature engages life.

6. Ousting Jacques Derrida

We are playing with elastic, indeed even flexible concepts. But this does
not mean that they can be deformed at will and without offering re-
sistance, and are therefore unusable. For if trust and distrust had no ba-
sis in objective reality, they would only be of pathological interest.
--Wittgenstein (1992, p. 24)

It is, I take it, because meaning is not directly beholden to the natural world,
and essentially depends on language, that Harrison maintains that “the posi-
tion established in Word and World agrees entirely with Derrida . . . that, so
far as the determination, the tying-down of meaning is concerned, “il n’y a
pas d’hors-texte” (there is no “outside the text”) (forthcoming, 2014, p. 35).
But although Harrison agrees with Derrida that meaning is a phenomenon of
 Bernard Harrison, Literature, and the Stream of Life 143

the interior of language, he differs on what the furniture of that interior is.
Whereas, for Derrida, language is merely an array of “signs”—words,
phrases, sentences—together with the diacritical relationships that obtain be-
tween them, for Harrison, the interior of language contains beyond these lin-
guistic elements, the entire web of socially devised and maintained practices
in which they find their roles, and thus their meanings (ibid.).
But then, I want to say, “Here is your ‘hors-texte’!”—precisely in those
practices in which words find their roles or uses and thus their meanings.
Why insist that meaning is wholly confined to or dependent on language if
meaning has praxial foundations? It seems to me that this insistence plays
into the hands of linguistic idealism, whereas we want to be celebrating the
vibrant, nonpropositional, connection of meaning to life. The same goes for
literature; for although the particular praxial contexts in which words interact
in a work of literature are given by the work itself, there is a larger, extra-
textual context from which those words have been drawn—the context of our
living practices: the stream of life.
Let us end where we began: with certainty. On Harrison’s view, one of
the cognitive gains that we get from literature is that it makes us aware that
our ways of construing the world linguistically can, in principle, give place to
other, though equally provisional, ways of construing the same world linguis-
tically. He says, “literature works upon us, ceaselessly shifting and redefining
. . . our conception of what, and who, we are” (1991, pp. 50, 58; emphasis
added). This smacks of Derridean différance. There is a sense here that the
spade never turns; we can never be certain; we can never settle in meaning.
And yet, after all these years, what I believed great literature gave us was
certainty—not Great Truths, but precisely not “ceaseless shifting” either.
Of course, there is no end to literature’s shifting and shaping our con-
ception of who we are. This is what Leavis means by the necessarily explora-
tory nature of creative literature (1967, p. 12). But the difference between
post-Modernist ceaseless shifting and redefining and the Leavisian refusal to
settle into an answer is in the former’s unending postponement of signifi-
cance, whereas Leavis sees significance as the result of a cumulative, ongoing
collaborative effort which continually embraces and clarifies significance.
This, then, in keeping with Immanuel Kant’s notion of the finality without
end is what characterizes both our aesthetic and ethical pursuits. The play of
imagination and understanding being essential here, the play which Kant re-
minded us did not consist in attaining an end but in making it sharper.
Albeit in textured and creative form, literature—great literature—
rehearses, explores, informs, enriches, interrogates, and even unsettles the
norms and possibilities that pervade our lives. But the unsettling is not uncon-
strained for being handled by the creative imagination: We would not call a
play that would portray Macbeth and his wife living happily ever after an
ethical play. Nor would we hesitate to say that Emma Bovary suffers from
144 DANIÈLE MOYAL-SHARROCK

boredom. Yet having read Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Gustav Flaubert’s

Madame Bovary, we have enriched, more textured conceptions of ambition
and boredom.
Great literary works give us no definitions and often leave us perplexed
and unsettled as to what, say, passion is. For, of course, passion has many
faces. But having read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, we are certain that this
is one of the most perspicuous presentations of it, or perhaps as Charles
Altieri would put it, one of the most “exemplary” (2010, p. 493). It is, I be-
lieve, thanks to its enacted transmission of indubitable, bedrock, certainties
that literature is exceptionally concept-formative. But that is to put crudely
the exceptional capacity of literature to transmit to us basic human values in
such a way that we can be certain of what they are. Something Leavis some-
times called “truth” (1967, p. 23) and sometimes “certainty”:

the nearest the perceptively thinking individual gets to the certainty that
he is grasping in direct possession significance itself, unmediated, is in
the certitude that he has taken possession of the basic major perceptions,
intuitions and realizations communicated with consummate delicacy to
the reader in the mastering of the creative work of a great writer. Such
certitude of possession is an ultimate; what could a proof, if proof were
possible, add to it? (1982, p. 192)

Literature enhances our understanding of ourselves. It can do so by dis-

turbing some elements of the picture we came to it with, but not, I believe, by
destabilizing or radically questioning that understanding, or providing us with
provisional understanding that will be ceaselessly shifted. Rather, literature
deepens and stabilizes our basic certainties, and it does so by refining them.
Harrison, it seems to me, fundamentally concurs:

though there is no way in which [Laurence] Sterne can be reduced to a

purveyor of “Great Truths,” the experience of reading him has, I want
to say, cognitive value; mediates a cognitive gain: it reveals to us the
limitations of a commonplace language which we might have contin-
ued to speak in all innocence of those limitations had we not read him.
(1991, p. 17)

So having read Sterne, we stand enriched; our certainties refined—not

by proof or justification, but by a more “direct possession.” One of the ways
such a refinement is effected is through what Leavis calls “creative present-
ment” or “enactment” (1967, p. 28; 1955, p. 143). Harrison gives an example
of it drawn from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. This struck me particularly
because it is an enactment mise en abîme, as it were: it enacts (the eloquence
of) enactment.
 Bernard Harrison, Literature, and the Stream of Life 145

The passage shows the young Charlie Hexam in his first encounter with
Mr Bradley Headstone, his self-righteous schoolmaster:

“So you want to go and see your sister, Hexam?”

“If you please, Mr Headstone.”
“I have half a mind to go with you. Where does your sister live?”
“Why, she is not settled yet, Mr Headstone. I’d rather you didn’t see her
till she is settled, if it was all the same to you.”
“Look, here, Hexam.” Mr Bradley Headstone, highly certificated stipen-
diary schoolmaster, drew his right forefinger through one of the button-
holes of the boy’s coat, and looked at it attentively. “I hope your sister
may be good company for you.”
“Why do you doubt it, Mr Headstone?”
“I didn’t say I doubted it.”
“No, sir; you didn’t say so.”
(Dickens, vol. 1, Book the Second, “Birds of a Feather,” chap. 1, “An
Educational Character,” quoted in Harrison, 2011, p. 420)

This is meaning in use, in practice, in action—a fine example of how works of

art do not state, but only “enact their moral valuations” (Leavis 1982, p. 110).
No paraphrase could transmit the meaning “presented” or “enacted” here, or
could convince us more deeply and intimately that this is what is meant here: it
is, indeed, “in an immediate way that one is convinced” (Leavis, 1976, p.
125). It is through such sensitive and creative arrangements and contextual-
izations of our words that literature provides us with the most perspicuous
presentations of ourselves:

Literature does possess the power to extend our understanding of human

reality, by using imagined worlds to cast light on the common praxial
foundations of meaning and human reality in the world that we actually
inhabit. (Forthcoming, 2014, p. 27)

By deepening our understanding of reality to something that is, in one of

its vital senses, necessarily language-laden, Bernard Harrison shows us how
literature has, not only a connection, but—because of its exceptional deploy-
ment of language—a privileged connection with reality. And by deepening
our understanding of how language is reality-soaked, he shows us how litera-
ture uniquely impacts us to help us refine our conception of who we are.
There is to my mind no greater task for the philosophy of literature, and no
greater philosopher of literature today.
 Eight

LANGUAGE WITHOUT MEANING:

THE LIMITS OF BIOLINGUISTICS

Patricia Hanna

1. Introduction

Intuitively, human life seems to be the product of interactions between biolo-

gy and culture, and language, in particular, to be very much more a cultural
than a biological phenomenon. Biolinguistics, however, rests on contrary
assumptions. Noam Chomsky is a leading proponent of the biolinguistic ap-
proach. Rather than starting his investigation of language by asking about the
connection between language and convention, Chomsky focuses on the bio-
logical features that distinguish linguistic from non-linguistic creatures:

Biolinguistic inquiry investigates the human language faculty as an inter-

nal biological property. …The growth of language in the individual, it is
suggested, depends on (i) genetic factors, (ii) experience, and (iii) princi-
ples that are not specific to the language faculty. (2007, p. 1)

According to this approach the proper object of linguistic study is, to an

overwhelming extent, a natural rather than a cultural object. It might seem
proper, therefore, to describe Chomsky’s theory as “naturalistic” in a sense
close to the one espoused by a philosophers like the late W. V. O. Quine:

Philosophically I am bound to Dewey by the naturalism that dominated

his last three decades. With Dewey I hold that knowledge, minds, and
meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and are to
be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science.
(1969, p. 26)

That, though would gloss over sharp differences between Chomsky’s

views and the philosophical naturalism of writers such as Quine. When Quine
discusses the role of language in the context of what he calls a “naturalized
epistemology,” he does so in terms of a conceptual vocabulary owing more to
logic than to biology; one in which the “semantic” terms “truth” and “refer-
ence” are central. The same is true of most writing on philosophy of language
since Gottlob Frege. Chomsky rejects this tradition wholesale, as lacking rel-
evance to the scientific study of language. The list of philosophers Chomsky
dismisses in this connection is impressive: “there is no notion of reference in
148 PATRICIA HANNA

the technical sense of Frege, [Charles Sanders] Peirce, [Alfred] Tarski, [Ru-
dolf] Carnap, and others, or contemporary philosophical externalists such as
[Hilary] Putnam and [Saul] Kripke” (2007, p. 9).
Biolinguistics in Chomsky’s version, in short, demands the replacement
of the conceptual vocabulary of logical semantics with that of “biology.”
Thus it would be more adequate to the case to describe Chomsky’s program
not as “naturalistic” tout court, but rather as biologically reductionist, or at
best as biologically reductive naturalism.
In this essay I argue for two conclusions. First, that biological reduction-
ism of Chomsky’s type can offer no theoretically enlightening account of
meaning in natural languages. Second, that even leaving the question of
meaning aside, Chomsky’s program for biolinguistics is internally incoherent,
and incapable of meeting its own criteria of theoretical adequacy. Both of
these failures arise from its reductionism: a reductionism exhibiting the same
structure, and the same failings, as the behavioral reductionism of B. F. Skin-
ner, of which Chomsky was himself a trenchant critic.

2. Meaning: The Structure of Chomsky’s Account

A. Criteria of Adequacy for a Theory of Meaning

Chomsky neither can, nor does, avoid the discussion of meaning in natural
language. But his work sets at least the following conditions for any adequate
account of meaning:

C1: It must form part of a complete explanation of language.

C2: It should not include any socially determined component as a
part of language as understood according to the tenets of the
biological approach.
C3: It should not, unlike the so-called “externalist” theories of
meaning developed by Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and others,
treat meaning in a language L as determined externally to the
mind of a competent speaker of L.

B. The Place of Language in Nature

As there is some disagreement among adherents to the biolinguistic approach,

for the purposes of this essay, I limit its essential tenets to the following two,
which Chomsky accepts:

(1) The study of language is part of the natural sciences, and the results
obtained from this research are accountable to the standards of the
natural sciences.
 Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 149

(2) A full explanation of language requires that we recognize that lan-

guage is a natural object and a part of the natural world, as contrast-
ed with world as made and shaped by human beings.

Any holder of these two tenets must be prepared to give some account
of the place of language in nature. Chomsky holds, reasonably enough, that
language is a mental phenomenon. In his early writings this conviction is cen-
tral to his attack on B. F. Skinner (1959), in which he argues that a behavior-
ist account of human language fails because it omits all consideration of what
the speaker brings to the acquisition and use of language.
A cursory reading might lead one to conclude that, for Chomsky, the
speaker’s contribution is “mental” in the usual Cartesian sense of the term. As
we shall see, however, this is not so. For him, what the behaviorist omits is
“independent neurophysiological” evidence. Behaviorism only considers “the
record of inputs to the organism and the organism’s present response,” with-
out ever asking about the “specific contribution of the organism to learning
and performance” (ibid., p. 27).
The reason neurophysiology is, for Chomsky, the key to the nature of
the mental, is that, in line with much recent philosophy of mind, he holds that
the mental emerges from the physical, making the mind an aspect of the
brain. While other creatures may have a brain, only language users have a
mind/brain. Thus, Chomsky writes:

The biolinguistic perspective views a person’s language in all its aspects

. . . as a state of some component of the mind, understanding “mind” in
the sense of eighteenth century scientists who recognized that after
Newton’s demolition of the “mechanical philosophy.” . . . no coherent
mind–body problem remains, and we can only regard aspects of the
world termed “mental,” as the result of “such an organical structure as
that of the brain.” . . . Thought is a “little agitation of the brain,” David
Hume remarked . . . (Chomsky, 2006, p. 173).

C. Competence and Performance

The terms “competence” and “performance” have technical meanings in

Chomskyan linguistics: it is important that they not be confused with more
ordinary uses of the terms. As understood in this context, competence is “the
speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language” (Chomsky, 1965, p. 4), where
the speaker-hearer is understood as being:

an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-

community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such
grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitation, distractions,
150 PATRICIA HANNA

shifts of attention and interest, and errors . . . in applying his knowledge

of the language. . . . (Ibid., p. 3)

Performance is “the actual use of language in concrete situations”; to

study it:

we must consider the interaction of a variety of factors [including all

grammatically irrelevant conditions omitted from competence] of which
the underlying competence of the speaker-hearer is only one. (Ibid., p. 4)

D. I-Language, E-Language, and the Lexicon

In accordance with the above distinctions between competence and perfor-

mance, Chomsky draws a sharp line between the knowledge of language en-
coded in the mind-brain of the competent speaker, what he calls “internal
language” (I-language), and the actual deployment of language in contexts of
social interaction, what he calls “external language” (E-language). I-language
he says is:

a state of the computational system of the mind/brain that generates

structured expressions, each of which can be taken to be a set of instruc-
tions for the [mental and sensory-motor] interface systems within which
the faculty of language is embedded. (2007, p. 1)

I-language consists of computational procedures and a lexicon. . . .

There is reason to believe that the computational system is invariant, vir-
tually. There is some variation at points closely related to perception and
articulation . . . that aside, language variation appears to reside in the
lexicon. (2000, p. 120)

E-language is independent of the properties of the mind/brain (Chom-

sky, 1986, pp. 19–21). It is quite close to Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of
langue, a socially constructed and maintained set of rules governing a specific
natural language.
The “lexicon” is a component of the I-language. It contains a collection
of semantic “features” corresponding roughly to the notions of “concept” and
“property” as commonly understood by philosophers of language. The mean-
ing of an expression E in a language is:

a collection of items, each a complex of properties (called “features”),

such as the property “bilabial stop” and “artifact” . . . The computational
procedure selects items from the lexicon and forms an expression, a
more complex array of such features. (2000, p. 120)
 Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 151

He continues to say that the “semantic features S of an expression E [are] its

meaning (ibid., p. 125).
The lexicon is where I-language and E-language come into contact. For
Chomsky, a “grammar” is a set of rules that “generates” structural descrip-
tions for all the sentences and phrases of the language under consideration.
Chomsky uses the term “generate” to mean “assigns a structural description”;
it should not be confused with the use of the term that is synonymous with “to
produce.” The function of the lexicon is to assign meanings to the sentences
and phrases thus generated.

E. Chomsky on Semantics

Chomsky’s commitment to biolinguistics—the biological approach to the

study of language—has remained consistent. His attitude toward semantics
and its place in what he considers, at one stage or another of the development
of his thought, to be a scientifically reputable account of the nature of lan-
guage, however, has not:

At the crudest level of description, we may say that a language associates

sound and meaning in a particular way; to have command of a language is
to be able, in principle, to understand what is said and to produce a signal
with an intended semantic interpretation. . . . The grammar of a language,
as a model of idealized competence, establishes a certain relation between
sound and meaning. . . . The general theory of linguistic structure . . .
will be concerned with conditions of three kinds: conditions on the class
of admissible phonetic representations, the class of admissible semantic
representations, and systems of rules that generate paired phonetic and
semantic representations. ([1967] 2006, pp. 102–103)

At this stage of his thinking, semantics has a central place in a theory of

language or competence. Syntax may be more fundamental than phonology
and semantics, but all three are part of language proper. Later this changes,
and the role of semantics in the analysis of language is called into question.
Semantics emerges as a part of the theory of “performance.” Thus, unlike
syntax, it belongs to E-language, not to “naturalized language.”
It is possible that natural language has only syntax and pragmatics; it has:

semantics only in the sense of the study of how this instrument, whose
formal structure and potentialities of expression are the subject of syn-
tactic investigation, is actually put to use in a speech community. . . .
There will be no provision for what Scott Soames calls “the central se-
mantic fact about language, . . . that it is used to represent the world,”
152 PATRICIA HANNA

because it is not assumed that language is used to represent the world in

the intended sense. (Chomsky, 2000, p. 132)

Here Chomsky is not suggesting that, while the understanding of seman-

tics is not as advanced as might have been hoped, nevertheless in the future
biolinguistics will produce a full explanation of meaning. Chomsky’s sugges-
tion is, rather, that no such account ever need be offered because language
does not “represent the world,” and, by extension, is not a vehicle for making
true/false claims and semantics is not a part of it.
This claim may strike one as extraordinary, but an explanation for it is
found in Chomsky’s view of communication.

F. Chomsky on Communication

Communication, as ordinarily understood, is the transmission of information

from one individual to another; in linguistic communication, this information
is given in a form that allows assessment for content and truth. Many philos-
ophers, including Frege and Wittgenstein, hold that this is a (if not the) central
feature of language. Chomsky does not agree. On his account, communication
is one of the things we do with language, but it is not the only thing. More
significantly, according to Chomsky, language did not develop as a mecha-
nism for expressing truths about the world:

language is not properly regarded as a system of communication. . . . It

can of course be used for communication, as can anything people do—
manner of walking or style of clothes or hair, for example. But in any
useful sense of the term, communication is not the function of language,
and may even be of no unique significance for understanding the func-
tions and nature of language. (2002, p. 76; emphasis added)

The use of language for communication might turn out to be a kind of

epiphenomenon. . . . It might turn out that [language] is not optimal for
some of the ways in which we want to use it. (Ibid., 107)

In other words, as Chomsky sees things, concerns about meaning as the

bearer of content, let alone the connection between meaning and truth, might
just be beside the point in the scientific study of language.

G. Meaning, Experience, and I-Language

Chomsky, however, stops short of that radical position. Even if communica-

tion is not the central feature of language, language is used for communica-
tion. In order for this to be possible, it is necessary to explain how linguistic
expressions acquire meanings.
 Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 153

Philosophy and linguistics traditionally offer two main ways of envisag-

ing how that might happen. On one view, meanings are assigned to expres-
sions “by convention,” or in Wittgenstein terms, by the stipulation of “uses”
for expressions within the context of “practices,” or “language games.” Call
these “social” or “praxial theories of meaning.”
Chomsky, like many others, holds that praxial theories of meaning entail
what is variously called conventionalism, or semantic relativism, or linguistic
idealism. The thought is that if meaning, in a natural language L, is defined
exclusively, relative to sets of social conventions in force among users of L,
then it will be impossible using L to refer to anything outside the system of
convention that holds in L. L will, in short, be as hermetically self-referential
as the language of chess, or any other self-enclosed game, or uninterpreted
formal system.
To avoid this, most mainstream philosophical theories turn to some no-
tion of reference as the ultimate source of meaning, the idea being that at least
some expressions of a natural language can be sufficiently established merely
by conventionally associating them with some aspect or element of experi-
ence. Such theories maintain that the world itself provides stable connections
between linguistic expressions and their meanings, thus ensuring that speaker
and listener can assign the same interpretations to the linguistic expressions.
Chomsky refers to these theories under the general rubric, “reference-
based semantics.” He agrees with the referentialist that praxial accounts of
meaning do not succeed; he does not, however, believe that a reference-based
alternative either avoids relativism or explains semantic content. His argu-
ment recalls the fascination with seventeenth-century arguments for the exist-
ence of innate ideas that has haunted his work throughout his career.
The function of language for communication must rest upon the “inter-
nal resources” that language brings to it: viz. the innate ideas which Chomsky
holds direct the exercise of computational procedures. Chomsky writes:

even the most elementary concepts of human language do not relate to

mind-independent objects by means of some reference-like relation be-
tween symbols and identifiable physical features of the external world. . . .
Rather, they are creations of the “cognoscitive powers” that provide us
with rich means to refer to the outside world from certain perspectives,
but are individuated by mental operations that cannot be reduced to a
“peculiar nature belonging” to the thing we are talking about, as [David]
Hume summarized a century of inquiry. (Chomsky, 2006, pp. 177–178)

But, why, more than 200 years after René Descartes gave his defense of
innate ideas, should we hold that communication requires inborn resources,
innate ideas? Chomsky’s reason is nothing more than a modernized version
of the original Cartesian argument for innate ideas. The content of sensory
experience alone, without the aid of “hard-wired,” innate principles of classi-
154 PATRICIA HANNA

fication, cannot suffice to impose semantic order on events external to the

mind, and hence must be regarded as insufficiently rich to account for the
complexities of content honored in a natural language. The world as offered
to speakers in sensory experience cannot, in other words, be the source of
semantic content. On this account, communication cannot be:

a matter of producing some mind-external entity that the hearer picks

out of the world, the way a natural scientist could. Rather, communica-
tion is a more-or-less affair, in which the speaker produces external
events and hearers seek to match them as best they can to their own in-
ternal resources. . . . Communication relies on largely shared
cognoscitive powers, and succeeds insofar as similar mental constructs,
background, concerns, and presuppositions allow for similar perspec-
tives to be reached. (Chomsky, 2007, p. 10)

It is natural to look for the source of this commonality. According to

Chomsky, it lies in the internal, the shared, the invariant component of lan-
guage that is provided by I-language. In “Linguistics and Philosophy,” deliv-
ered at the Symposium on Linguistics and Philosophy at New York Universi-
ty in April 1968, Chomsky says, “surface structures give little indication of
the semantic interpretation, whereas the deep structures are quite revealing in
this respect” (Chomsky, [1968] 2006, p. 145).
Experience can enhance communicable content and help us decide on
semantic interpretations only if it is guided by “innate” semantic content. We
should not “assume that expressions pick out things, intrinsically,” nor need
we supplement language’s production of meaning “to include relations that
hold between certain expressions and external things” (Chomsky, 2000, p.
129). Despite the importance of experience and social practices to a full ac-
count of meaning, in the end, it is the essentially “biolinguistic” concept of
the I-language that explains semantic content.
The nature of Chomsky’s account of meaning comes out clearly in the
following passage, in which he follows Locke in distinguishing between con-
cepts such as “tree” or “cat,” which could plausibly be regarded as provided
by sensory experience alone, and a concept like “person,” which cannot.
Speaking of John Locke’s 1690 Essay Concerning Humane Understanding
(bk. 2, chap. 27, § 26), Chomsky wrote:

Locke recognized that persons are individuated in part by psychic conti-

nuity . . . properties of the common notion or innate idea of person.
Locke argued further that “person,” unlike “tree,” or “cat” is a “forensic
term, appropriating actions and their merit” belonging only to “intelligent
agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery,” and hence even
more remote from mind-independent physical investigation, and at the
heart of our moral faculty and intuitions. (2007, p. 9)
 Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 155

Hence, when the lexicon receives the entry for person, this comes with a
core of semantic features that provide its basic semantic content. This is part
of the I-language, supplied by the innate or inborn structure. The language
user may expand this content through experiential inputs, but it is the inborn
semantic features that ultimately determine semantic content. Chomsky refers
to the contribution of language understood from the biolinguistic standpoint as
the “common notion or innate idea,” of in the present case, person.

H. Chomsky’s Account Summarized

We are now in a position to outline the main components of Chomsky’s bio-

logically reductive account of semantics. Individual semantic competence is
ultimately a function of (inborn, biologically determined) I-language. I-
language consists of two components, semantic features and the computational
rules of language. The rules are part of naturalized language in their entirety:
they are invariant.
There are two kinds of semantic features. Universal semantic features
are part of our inborn/innate structure, part of naturalized language: these are
invariant. E-semantic features are based on experience: these are variable,
differing according to the particular experiences.
Meanings are constructed in the lexicon by combining semantic features
according to the computational rules of language. Semantic content is what
transforms mere sounds or marks into expressions, or bearers of content. It is
ultimately determined and controlled by universal semantic features. E-
semantic features can contribute to semantic content only in virtue of having
been shaped by the inborn/innate universal semantic features.
Two points are worth emphasizing:

(1) Semantic content, according to Chomsky, cannot be supplied by

the world or our experiences of it; it can only be the product of in-
born/innate semantic universals.

(2) It is precisely language’s being inborn/innate and species univer-

sal that, for Chomsky, handles the threat of relativism, or linguistic ide-
alism, supposedly courted by praxial theories of meaning.

3. The Social/Praxial Account Strikes Back

Bernard Harrison has developed a theory of meaning in natural language

(Hanna and Harrison, 2004; 2011), based on a new interpretation of Wittgen-
stein (Harrison, 1996; 1999), which breathes new life into the social, or
praxial account. Harrison’s arguments are, as I shall now show, fatal both to
reference-based accounts of how linguistic expressions acquire meaning, and
to the biological reductionism pursued by Chomsky’s version of biolin-
156 PATRICIA HANNA

guistics. Since this argument depends on an interpretation of late Wittgenstein

unique, so far as I am aware, to Harrison (1996; 1999), he has worked closely
with on me on §§ 3A and B of the present essay.

A. Word-Meaning and Sentence-Meaning

Philosophers prior to the twentieth century took it for granted that meaning
enters language at the level of the word: the (general or proper) name. That is
certainly true of the Cartesian tradition from which Chomsky has taken many
of his most central ideas and themes (for instance his defense of innate
knowledge, which bulks large, as we have seen above, in his efforts to pro-
vide a plausible biolinguistic account of meaning.) For René Descartes, and
for that matter for Locke and the British Empiricists generally, the unit of
thought is the “idea,” and the corresponding linguistic token a word, or name.
Locke, for example, speaks indifferently of “names” or “words” as the “sen-
sible signs of his ideas who uses them” (Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing, III. ii. 2). A little later, he introduces the conception of the meaning
of a word as a collection of properties or features:

A child having taken notice of nothing in the metal he hears called

“gold,” but the bright shining yellow colour, he applies the word “gold”
only to his own idea of that colour, and to nothing else; and therefore
calls the same colour in a peacock’s tail “gold.” Another, that hath better
observed, adds to shining colour great weight: and then the sound
“gold,” when he uses it, stands for a complex idea of a shining yellow
and very weighty substance. Another adds to these qualities fusibility:
and then the word “gold” to him signifies a body bright yellow, fusible,
and very heavy. Another adds malleability. (Essay, III. ii. 3)

This ultimately Cartesian conception of meaning as fundamentally a

property of words, or names, persists in the notion of the “lexicon” current in
Chomskyan biolinguistics. A lexicon is a list of individual words (Greek,
lexeis) or names. Chomsky’s account of the lexicon adds to this the Lockean
thought that the meaning of a name is essentially a list of (semantic) “fea-
tures,” some innate, some the product of experience.
The Chomskyan lexicon, however, runs afoul of Frege’s work. In the
early twentieth century, Frege introduced philosophers to the idea that mean-
ing might enter language not, or not primarily, at the level of the word or
name, but rather at the level of the sentence. Frege believed a grasp of the
meanings of individual words, together with their mode of combination in
sentences to be primary when it is a matter of elucidating the sense of an un-
familiar sentence. As Michael Dummett puts it, “any theory which is unable
to incorporate that point will be impotent to account for the obvious and es-
 Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 157

sential fact that we can understand new sentences.” But, as Dummett pro-
ceeds to add:

when we come to give any general explanation of what it is for sentenc-

es and words to have a sense, that is, of what it is for us to grasp their
sense, then the order of priority is reversed. For Frege, the sense of a
word, or of any expression not a sentence can be understood only as
consisting in the contribution which it makes to determining the sense of
any sentence in which it may occur. Since it is only by means of a sen-
tence that we may perform a linguistic act—that we can say anything—
the possession of a sense by a word or complex expression short of a
sentence cannot consist in anything else but its being governed by a
general rule which partially specifies the sense of sentences containing
it. If this is so, then, on pain of circularity, the general notion of the
sense possessed by a sentence must be capable of being explained with-
out reference to the notion of the senses of constituent words or expres-
sions. This is possible via the conception of truth conditions: to grasp
the sense of a sentence is, in general, to know the conditions under
which that sentence is true and the conditions under which it is false.
(1981, pp. 4–5)

In speaking of the sense of a sentence it is often convenient to use, as

Harrison and I do throughout our work, the expression “assertoric force.” The
assertoric force of a sentence is its cognitive content, what it asserts: what is
the case if it is true and not the case if it is false. In the passage just quoted,
Dummett, following Frege, claims that it must be possible to acquire a grasp
of the assertoric force of a sentence independently of grasping the meanings
of its component words, and that grasping the assertoric force of a sentence is
essentially a matter of grasping its truth conditions
That pair of Fregean dicta has been, and remains, widely accepted by
philosophers of language. At the same time, these Fregean thoughts have not
displaced the idea that it is, often, at any rate, possible to specify the meaning
of names in ways that make no reference to their role in sentences. Frege’s
dicta entail no general objection, it is widely supposed, to specifying the
meaning of a name by indicating the property (“feature”) or object the name
picks out, provided we have an account of the general nature of the contribu-
tion a given type of name makes to the truth conditions of sentences in which
it occurs. Consider, for example, the case of a proper name like “Dummett,”
the philosopher, or the case of a general name like “red,” the color.

B. The Later Wittgenstein on Meaning and Truth Conditions

Harrison has argued, however, that the implications of Frege’s dicta, at least
as reinterpreted by the later Wittgenstein, are considerably more exigent than
158 PATRICIA HANNA

this. The introduction of Wittgenstein at this point, may occasion puzzlement,

since he has been widely interpreted as having departed, in his later work,
from Frege’s dicta, in favor of the notion that grasping the sense of a sentence
is to be understood in terms of a variety of notions—use, practice, the lan-
guage game—all widely regarded as too opaque and ill-defined to offer much
in the way of enlightenment.
Harrison argues (1996; 1999) that such an interpretation is incorrect,
and that in his later work, including the Philosophical Investigations, Witt-
genstein remains as faithful to Frege’s dicta, as to much else in “Frege’s great
works” (Wittgenstein, 1922, p. 2), as in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Part of Harrison’s case is that the later Wittgenstein introduces a crucial ad-
justment to Frege’s suggestion that grasp of sense at the level of the sentence
equates with grasp of truth conditions.
Dummett, for instance, takes it as axiomatic that “When the truth condi-
tions of sentences are explained, this has to be done inductively. . .”
(Dummett, 1981, p. 16). There is, that is to say, no piece of knowledge char-
acterizable as knowledge of the meaning of a sentence S, from which the truth
conditions of S could be deduced. On the contrary, knowledge of the truth
and falsity conditions of a sentence S can be communicated only by listing
them; by listing sets of conditions under which it is empirically the case that
competent speakers of the language understand S as asserting a truth, and sets
of conditions under which it is empirically the case that they understand it as
asserting a falsehood.
The thesis that knowledge of truth conditions is essentially inductive is
not unique to Dummett. It is widely shared by philosophers of language. It
constitutes, for instance, one of the basic assumptions of Quine’s account of
meaning in terms of “the subject’s evolving dispositions to assent to or dis-
sent from a sentence” (1960, p. 36) in given conditions of stimulation. This,
in turn, entails that it is impossible to arrive at any final assessment of mean-
ing, either in a foreign language or one’s own; a radical form of meaning
skepticism shared by Donald Davidson.
For Harrison, this is the crucial point at which the later Wittgenstein’s
philosophy of language diverges from the mainstream consensus (both at the
time and today). He argues that the critique of “ostensive definition” that oc-
cupies Wittgenstein (1953) at Investigations § 28 and adjacent paragraphs can
equally well be understood as a demonstration of the impossibility of explain-
ing truth conditions, as Dummett puts it, “inductively.”
§ 28, like so many in the Philosophical Investigations, is a dramatic ex-
change. It opens with one of Wittgenstein’s imaginary interlocutors confident-
ly declaring, “Now one can ostensively define a proper name, the name of a
color, of a material, a numeral, the name of a point of the compass, and so on.”
Another voice (Wittgenstein’s, perhaps?) responds in apparent agreement. “The
definition of the number two, ‘That is called “two”’—pointing to two nuts—is
perfectly exact.—But how can two be defined like that?”
 Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 159

What is not generally noticed is that this sentence does more than intro-
duce a note of dubiety. It changes the nature of the problem before us, from
that of defining a name, “two,” to that of establishing the sense of a sentence
S: “That is called ‘two.’” The problem thus becomes that of specifying the
truth conditions of S: of specifying, in other words, of what states of affairs,
Ft1–Ftn , “That is called ‘two’” is to be considered to assert a truth, and of
what states of affairs, Ff1–Ffn , it is to be held to assert a falsehood.
Construed in this light, the thrust of Wittgenstein’s argument is toward
showing that, if we make the assumption that the specification of truth condi-
tions for “That is called ‘two’” can only “be done inductively” (as not only
Dummett but the vast majority of philosophers of language at present do), then
the project of specifying them in principle becomes impossible to complete.
The nature of the problem Wittgenstein has identified becomes apparent
when one sees that the capacities to be explained, in explaining what it is to
possess a grasp of the truth conditions of a sentence, are generative, in a sense
made familiar by Chomsky himself. Someone, A, who grasps the truth condi-
tions of a sentence S is, in virtue of that, able to say whether a given state of
affairs F is truth-warranting for S, falsity-warranting for S, or indifferent to
the issue of the truth or falsity of S, and, A can do this even though A may nev-
er before have encountered F. A grasp of the truth conditions of S confers
upon A the ability to continue the series of truth-warranting, falsity-warranting
and truth-indifference-warranting Fs beyond the point reached in any possible
process of explicit training. There is, of course, a partial convergence between
Wittgenstein’s arguments here, and Chomsky’s arguments for innate ideas;
though, as we shall see, Wittgenstein’s argument diverges from Chomsky’s
beyond this point, to reach not merely different but opposite conclusions.
Wittgenstein’s argument is, in effect, that appeals to “inductive” proce-
dures in the specification of truth values fail to explain the capacity that such
procedures supposedly confer, because they fail to offer any explanation of
the generative character of that capacity. § 28 continues:

The definition of the number two, “That is called ‘two’”—pointing to

two nuts—is perfectly exact.—But how can two be defined like that?
The person one gives the definition to doesn’t know what one wants to
call “two”; he will suppose that “two” is the name given to this group of
nuts!—He may suppose this, but perhaps he does not. He might make
the opposite mistake; when I want to assign a name to this group of nuts,
he might understand it as a numeral. And he might equally well take the
name of a person, of which I give an ostensive definition, as that of a
color, a race, or even of a point of the compass. That is to say: an osten-
sive definition can be variously interpreted in every case.

It might be objected that Wittgenstein is here talking, not about what we

are to suppose to be communicated in communicating a grasp of the truth
160 PATRICIA HANNA

conditions of a sentence, but rather about what we are to suppose to be com-

municated in communicating a grasp of the referent of a name. But that is, as
we have seen, for present purposes at least, a distinction without a difference.
It matters little, in other words, whether we think of the teacher in § 28 as
attempting to explain the meaning of a name, “two,” or as attempting to ex-
plain the truth conditions of a sentence, “That is called ‘two.’” Grasping
name-meaning and grasping sentence-meaning are both equally generative
capacities; the question “what further Fs are truth-warranting (falsity-
warranting) for S?” being matched, for names, by the question “What further
items are correctly describable as Ns?”
The same problem arises in either case: namely, the problem of explain-
ing how an essentially generative ability can be founded upon the acquisition
of an essentially non-generative body of information. In learning that “That is
called ‘two’” is true of a group of two nuts, the learner has acquired a perfect-
ly sound cognitive acquisition—as far as it goes. The trouble is that it does
not go far enough. It does not allow him to identify anything other than the
designated group of nuts as truth-warranting for “That is called ‘two.’” He
can formulate, by guesswork, various hypotheses. For example, the “proper-
name hypothesis”: that “That is called ‘two.’” is true only of this group of
nuts, or the “general name” hypothesis, that is true of any group of nuts. But
what he cannot do—what the mere knowledge that “That is called ‘two’” is
true of a group of two nuts—is to adjudicate between these hypotheses. Un-
less he can adjudicate between these and other such hypotheses, he has no
means of determining the assertoric force of “That is called ‘two.’”
Nor can matters be mended, either by providing further instances of Fs
truth-warranting for S, or by providing instances of Fs falsity-warranting for
S. Adding new instances of truth-warranting Fs continues to leave the contin-
uation of the series a matter for guesswork, while expanding the scope for
guesswork to lead one further astray.
Indicating Fs as falsity-warranting for S will be similarly useless, unless
some means can be found of enabling the learner to determine which aspects
of the states of affairs indicated make those states of affairs falsity-warranting
for S. But to know that, the learner would need already to have grasped the
assertoric force of S, since grasping the assertoric force of a sentence S re-
quires knowing, among other things, why, and not merely that, certain natural
conditions are truth-warranting, and others falsity-warranting, for S. This, in
turn, involves grasping some internal connection between the set of truth-
warranting and the set of falsity-warranting conditions: a connection, that is,
in virtue of which it becomes deducible from the fact that the truth-warranting
conditions are what they are that the falsity-warranting conditions must be
what they are, and vice versa.
The whole thrust of the widely-accepted view that, in Dummett’s words,
the explanation of truth conditions “can only be done inductively” is that no
such internal connection is available, and that, consequently, no such induc-
 Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 161

tive relationship can be established. But, according to the argument Harrison

derives from Wittgenstein, in the absence of such a connection, and such a
relationship, mere guesswork must supervene, and the multiplication of des-
ignated instances will, once again, only serve to expand the scope for
guesswork, with the consequence that the goal of determining assertoric
force recedes indefinitely.
We seem at this point, as many readers of Wittgenstein have com-
plained, to have reached a skeptical impasse: language can neither be taught
nor learned. That is not Wittgenstein’s conclusion; it is merely the conclusion
we reach if we preserve the assumption that, in Dummett’s words, “When the
truth conditions of sentences are explained, this has to be done inductively. . .”
(1973, p. 16).
But what alternative, if any, does Wittgenstein offer to the inductive ex-
planation of truth- or falsity-warranting circumstances? An answer can be
found by looking more closely at the continuation of the argument in §§ 29–
31. § 29 opens with a suggestion from one of the imaginary interlocutors who
haunt Wittgenstein’s later writing:

Perhaps you say: two can only be ostensively defined in this way: “This
number is called ‘two.’” For the word “number” here shews what place
in language, in grammar, we assign to the word.

But this suggestion at first merely unleashes a further problem: the pos-
sibility that words like “two” or “red,” which philosophers since Locke have
been inclined to take as among those naming simple notions in terms of
which more complex concepts are to be logically constructed, can only be
explained if putatively more complex notions are already understood.
But this means that the word “number” must be explained before the os-
tensive definition can be understood. That in turn raises the question of how
such explanations are to proceed:

we can prevent misunderstandings by saying, “This colour is called so-

and-so,” “This length is called so-and-so,” and so on . . . But is there on-
ly one way of taking the word “colour,” or “length”?—Well, they just
need defining.—Defining, then, by means of other words! And what
about the last definition in this chain? (Do not say there is not a “last”
definition. That is just as if you chose to say: “There isn’t a last house in
this road; one can always build an additional one.”) (Ibid.)

Verbal definition of such categorical terms as “number,” “color,”

“length” can’t work, since if any such definition is to work, it can only
be because it proceeds in terms which need no further definition them-
selves: and what terms could those be? (Ibid.)
162 PATRICIA HANNA

The impasse of § 28, in other words, has taken a turn for the worse. But
§ 30 begins to suggest a way out of it:

So one might say: the ostensive definition explains the use—the mean-
ing—of the word when the overall role of the word in language is clear.
One has already to know, or be able to do something in order to be ca-
pable of asking a thing’s name. But what does one have to know? (em-
phasis added).

The shift from “to know” to “or be able to do something” raises the possibil-
ity that acquiring a grasp of meaning might not be a matter of acquiring a
piece of knowledge requiring verbal formulation at all, but rather a matter of
acquiring a skill. § 31 develops this suggestion:

When one shews someone the king and says “This is the king,” this does
not tell him the use of this piece—unless he already knows the rules of
the game up to this last point: the shape of the king. . . . One can also
imagine someone’s having learnt the game without ever learning or fol-
lowing rules. He might have learnt quite simple board-games first, by
watching, and have progressed to more and more complicated ones. He
too might be given the explanation “This is the king,”—if, for instance,
he were being shewn chessmen of a shape he was not used to. Or even:
we shall only say that it tells him the use, if the place is already pre-
pared. And in this case it is so, not because the person to whom we give
the explanation already knows rules [my italics], but because he is in
another sense master of a game. . . . We may say: only someone who
knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name.

Wittgenstein is here suggesting that “grasping the meaning” of a sen-

tence such as “This is [called] the king,” is a matter, not of knowing some—
putatively linguistic—“rules” for “using” it, or “deploying it in discourse.”
Instead, it is a matter of seeing how the sentence fits into some “game,” or
more generally, some “practice,” which need not, and indeed most usually
will not, be usefully regarded as a part of “language”—any more than chess is
a part of language.
Harrison’s contribution has been to point out the consequences of this
move for the problem of determining assertoric force. The problem was that
the mere exhibition of truth-warranting instances left the learner with no
means of assessing what assertoric content these instances were supposed to
be truth-warranting for. A further twist to the problem was that help in as-
sessing assertoric content could be derived from the exhibition of falsity-
warranting instances only if learners could somehow be shown some internal
connection between truth-warranting and falsity-warranting instances, which
 Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 163

would allow them to grasp why, if the truth-warranting instances are such-
and-such, the falsity-warranting instances necessarily have to be such-and-
such, and vice versa.
Harrison suggests that Wittgenstein’s move of shifting the centre of
gravity of the discussion, from knowledge of rules to mastery of practices,
has the consequence of revealing to the learner just such an internal connec-
tion between truth-warranting and falsity-warranting circumstances. Once the
learner has mastered chess, his mastery of the game is enough to establish why,
given that the circumstances warranting the assertion of “This is the king” are
such-and-such, those warranting its denial must necessarily be such-and-such,
and vice versa. Knowing the use of each type of piece in the game is, after all,
a matter of knowing its privileges of movement. Each such set of such privi-
leges defines, indeed defines exhaustively, a type of piece: the physical shape
adopted to represent the piece in a given chess set is indifferent.
Labeling these types of piece verbally—“king,” “pawn,” “bishop,” or
“knight”—automatically and simultaneously establishes both the truth condi-
tions and the falsity conditions for a range of sentences: “This is the king,” or
“This is a pawn.” The truth conditions of “This is the king” are simply that
the object in question if conventionally used in some version of the game as a
piece having certain specific privileges of movement: its falsity conditions are
that the object in question is conventionally used as a piece having other priv-
ileges of movement, or that it is not in fact used as a chess piece.
Harrison argues that the role of social practice in establishing an internal
connection between truth conditions and falsity conditions is an entirely gen-
eral and necessary one. The reason is that if truth and falsity, affirmation and
denial, are to be related to one another, not as separate, isolated aspects or
features of things, but rather as the poles of a relationship of some sort, then
the relationship in question cannot be a natural, or causal, relationship. Truth
and falsity, after all, are properties that attach to assertions; to something—a
sentence, a statement, a proposition—possessing assertoric force; and nothing
in nature possesses assertoric force. Truth and falsity, if they are to be inter-
nally connected, therefore, must be connected in terms of some humanly de-
vised and maintained practice.
It is not difficult to suggest further instances of connections of this type.
To return to Wittgenstein’s examples at §§ 28–29, the key to introducing a
sentence like “That is called two” is to do so in the context of teaching learn-
ers to count. Learning to count consists in mastering a technical skill. Among
other things, this will make clear the nature of the internal connection be-
tween the truth conditions and the falsity conditions of “That is called two” in
a way that will allow them to rule out—without the need for explicit instruc-
tion—such possibilities as that “‘two’ is the name given to this group of
nuts!” (for a detailed discussion, see Goddard, 1961). In other words, Witt-
genstein’s account of the logical genesis in social practice of assertoric force
both explicitly acknowledges, as I noted earlier, that grasp of truth conditions
164 PATRICIA HANNA

is an essentially generative capacity, in a sense of the term “generative” made

familiar by the early work of Chomsky, and explains how that can be possible.

C. Consequences of Harrison’s Version of the Social/Praxial

Account for Chomsky’s Biological Reductionism

So much for Harrison’s reconstrual of the later Wittgenstein’s account of

meaning in natural language as (in a sense) truth-theoretic. Where does it
leave Chomsky’s account, as summarized in Section 2G above?
For a start, absent some convincing refutation of the arguments that Har-
rison distills out of late Wittgenstein, the connection between meaning and
social practice is not merely the artifact of an easily dismissed philosophical
“theory,” a theory that linguists may, if they choose, disregard. Rather, the
connection between meaning and social practice is essential and indispensable
both to the understanding of how language arises as a means of communica-
tion between individuals and to the understanding of the links between indi-
viduality and social order. Both sets of issues enter the equation because, ac-
cording to Harrison’s Wittgensteinian reworking of the social/praxial account,
to give meaning to a linguistic expression just is to enmesh it in—to give it a
functional role in—one of a vast, continually and indefinitely extending range
of socially devised and maintained practices. Chomskyans could, of course,
retort that such a vision of meaning effectively expels it from language, and
thus from the methodological concerns of a scientific linguistics. It would be
odd to regard knowing how to count as knowledge of language. Consequent-
ly, if knowing the meaning of sentences about number comes to the same
thing as knowing how to count, then it would seem to follow that knowledge
of meaning is not a part of linguistic knowledge It is not difficult to see that
following the lines of Harrison’s reading of late Wittgenstein, the same holds
for other cases of meaning
Such a conclusion echoes views that Chomsky has at times expressed,
and which in turn reflect the difficulty Chomsky has always encountered in
accounting for meaning within the bounds of what has always been, basically,
a theory of syntax. But it cannot be a wholly satisfying one, if only because
accounting for linguistic capacity is such a central goal of Chomsky’s linguis-
tics, and because understanding meaning is, at least intuitively, central to un-
derstanding linguistic capacity in general. If understanding meaning is a matter
of grasping the roles assigned to expressions in an indefinite multiplicity of
social practices, then large questions open up concerning the relationship of
semantic knowledge on the one hand, and syntax and morphology on the oth-
er, if the latter are to be understood in Chomskyan terms.
The indispensability of the social/praxial to any adequate account of
meaning is not however the only, or even the most damaging, of the conse-
quences for Chomsky’s version of biological reductionism of the ideas dis-
cussed above in §§ 3.A–3.B.
 Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 165

Those ideas also offer a critique of the ancient idea, fundamental to

many theories of meaning, including Chomsky’s, that a concept is essentially
a recognitional capacity (see Price, 1953, pp. 276–280, and passim). If Harri-
son’s Wittgenstein-based reconstruction of the social/praxial account is cor-
rect, then although the ability on the part of a speaker  to recognize Fs will
very often accompany ’s grasp of the meaning of “F,” this ability is not nec-
essary to understanding this meaning. In other words, to decide, in specific
contexts, the truth or falsity of the sentence “This is an F” is not a condition
of understanding the meaning of “F.”
Hanna and Harrison (2011) exemplify this point in terms of the general
name “potto.” Potto is a name used for members of three closely resembling
species of West African Lemur. Few users of the name, absent a few highly
specialized zoologists, are able to recognize an individual of any of these spe-
cies. But it would be odd, we argue, to suggest that only those able to recog-
nize a potto when they see one can be said to know the meaning of “potto.” 
“knows the meaning” of “potto” in a sense sufficient for most normal purpos-
es, we suggest, when  knows the use of the word in English: specifically,
that it is a name employed in the language-game, or practice, of sorting ani-
mals into named populations consisting of individuals of broadly similar
anatomy and general appearance. If  happens to know also that “potto” is
not a species-name, that it is not used in the more exacting language game of
sorting animals into named populations of anatomically similar and (actually
or potentially) interbreeding populations, then, we argue,  knows all there is
to know about the meaning of “potto.”
Knowledge of meaning, in short, is to be sharply distinguished, pace
Quine, from, empirically derived general knowledge, including zoological
knowledge. Knowledge of the meaning of names is a part of linguistic
knowledge. Hence knowledge of the meaning of names cannot, pace not only
Quine, but a long prior tradition in philosophy, be held to include a fund of
empirical knowledge concerning the referents of names. Otherwise, one
would have to conclude, absurdly, that no special zoological training or expe-
rience of the animals in question on the part of  is necessary to justify faith
in ’s capacity to recognize a potto when  sees one, since  would have,
necessarily, to be in possession of such capacities merely in virtue of know-
ing the meaning of the word.
But if knowledge of meaning and recognitional capacities are as sharply
distinguished as this, then the very idea of a “lexicon” in the sense dear to
Chomskyan semantics, viz., a list of “semantic features” encoded in the I-
language, lapses into irrelevance. “Features,” understood as properties capa-
ble of being exhibited by actual candidates for the application of a name have,
on the account Harrison has developed, much to do with recognition, but, for
that very reason, nothing whatsoever to do with meaning.
Chomskyans have one argument still open to them: the familiar blocking
claim that any form of social/praxial account must entail something variously
166 PATRICIA HANNA

termed “relativism,” “conventionalism,” or “linguistic idealism.” The thought

is that if all meanings in language were specified, not in terms of relationships
between words and “real things” (“real,” in the sense of “extralinguistic”)
such as colors, or shapes, or types of physical object, but rather in terms of
relationships between words and human conventions, then, absurdly, it would
be impossible to refer by means of language to anything not a construction of
the human mind.
Unfortunately, Harrison’s reconstruction of the social/praxial account
transforms this apparently sound inference into a non sequitur. In terms of
Harrison’s account, the meaning of a sentence is determined relative to the
role assigned to it by a practice—that is to say, relative to something that is
indeed a construction of the human mind; however, the truth values of sen-
tences are determined according to the manner in which the practice engages
the (mind-independent) world. Thus, while the meaning of the sentence “This
is four inches long” is determined by the roles assigned to the component
expressions of the sentence in the nested practices of counting and linear
measurement, the truth value of the sentence is determined by the actual ex-
tent of the object being measured.

4. Chomsky’s Attempted Critique of “Externalism”

That concludes my argument for the first of my two conclusions offered in

the opening section of this essay, namely, that biological reductionism of
Chomsky’s type can offer no theoretically enlightening account of meaning in
natural languages.
I now turn to my second general objection to Chomsky’s version of bio-
logical reductionism; namely, that, even leaving the question of meaning
aside, Chomsky’s program for biolinguistics is internally incoherent, and in-
capable of meeting its own criteria of theoretical adequacy. Essentially, the
claim I shall defend here is that Chomsky’s current account of meaning is
inconsistent with C3 (see sec. 1 above).
Recent philosophy of language has tended to enshrine a general distinc-
tion between “internalist” and “externalist” theories of meaning.
“Internalism” is associated with description theories of John Rogers Searle
and others. It holds that the meaning of a name, N, is a collection of criteria
internal to the mind of the speaker, which determines the correct application
of N. “Externalism” associated with the direct reference accounts of Kripke,
Putnam, and others. It holds that the issue of whether N is correctly applied to
a given object On depends not on criteria internal to the minds of speakers,
but on whether On is, objectively speaking, of the same nature as the object,
call it O0, through an original, or baptismal, association with which N initially
acquired its meaning.
Chomsky, as we saw earlier, rejects a reference-based (externalist) ac-
count of meaning. “There is no notion of reference in the technical sense of
 Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 167

Frege, Pierce, Tarski, Carnap, and others, or contemporary philosophical ex-

ternalists such as Putnam and Kripke (2007, p. 9).
Consistently with that rejection, (on the assumption—a questionable
one, as we shall see in a moment—that the choice between internalism and
externalism is an exhaustive one), he takes himself to be offering, as an alter-
native to such accounts, a wholly internalist theory, which identifies mean-
ings with mental states of individual speakers.
To see what is incoherent about this commitment, we need to understand
a little more clearly his reasons for rejecting reference-based accounts. Why,
after all, should Chomsky prefer innate ideas to tables and chairs, for the job
of providing a stable basis for assertoric content?
Partly, as the following passage shows, what is objectionable for Chomsky
about externalist accounts of meaning is that they participate, along with so-
cial/praxial theories, in what, for him, is the fundamental error concerning lan-
guage. This is the error that the biolinguistic approach exists to root out: namely,
that of supposing that language is in any sense a common, social possession, as
distinct from one rooted in the constitution of the individual mind-brain:

we may ask where the concept of meaning under investigation belongs.

It is plainly not part of some scientific inquiry into language and its use.
. . . Whatever the inquiry may be about, it crucially relies on a notion of
“common, public language” that remains mysterious. . . . Communities,
cultures, patterns of deference, and so on, are established in human life
in all sorts of ways, with no particular relation to anything we call “lan-
guages” in informal discourse. (2000, p. 155)

There is simply no way of making sense of this prong of the externalist

theory of meaning and language, as far as I can see—or of any of the
work in theory of meaning and philosophy of language that relies on
such notions [as common language]. (Ibid., pp. 155–156)

One might still wonder why the notion of a “common public language”
should be quite this uncongenial to Chomsky. His criticisms of Skinner
(Chomsky, 1959) help explain this. Chomsky argues that behaviorist accounts
of language fail because they ignore what the language user brings to the ta-
ble: viz., their neurophysiological structure. Chomsky’s concern is to reintro-
duce the contribution of the language user into the analysis of language,
something the behaviorist misses in his concern with the external behavioral
manifestations associated with language use; that concern, of course, is also
the key to his resistance to any form of social/praxial account of meaning.
Both are to be rejected, allegedly, because they locate the genesis of meaning
in the world external to the mind.
Chomsky’s account of meaning is thus, in intention at least, radically
internalist. Given that according to Chomsky the mental is a part of the natu-
168 PATRICIA HANNA

ral world, behaviorism’s failure is in failing to take account of a certain aspect

of that world. Biological reductionism does not fall victim to this because it
locates the source of meaning as internal to language users: specifically as
internal to their neurophysiological structure.
However, Chomsky’s version of “internalism” is in no sense ideational:
it has no truck with any non-physical account of mental states and processes.
Therefore Chomsky cannot claim that reference-based semantics fails because
it looks to the world for assertoric content. Rather, he must hold that it fails
because it looks to a part of the world that is external to the language user. In
other words, reference-based semantics fails because it looks to the wrong
things in the natural world. It follows that both biological reductionism, in
Chomsky’s version, and reference-based semantics are versions of what we
might call real world semantics, or mind-independent semantics.
Chomsky, however, continues to use a vocabulary that seems to make
meaning dependent upon the mental, understood in a more ordinary sense.
According to him, reference-based semantics only works when the language
user has access to the world, and this can only occur via beliefs about the
world. These beliefs can be and often are false, thus undercutting meaning’s
stability and its relationship to the natural world. Biological reductionism, by
contrast, grounds meaning in things that lie within our bodies and that, he
claims, have a mental aspect: viz., our brains and genetic endowments. Lan-
guage users have direct access to these, and are thus able to access assertoric
content without having to believe anything at all about the world, including
their own brains and genetic endowments. Chomsky does not cite him, but
Jerry Fodor’s arguments in favor of a private language (Fodor, 1975) give us
some insight into Chomsky’s biologically reductionist account of semantics.
Fodor argues that the “language of thought” is the ultimate source of meaning,
a view, in effect, also advanced by Chomsky’s biological reductionism.
For both Fodor and Chomsky, to make the relationship between them
more precise, there are sharp limitations to the role experience plays in se-
mantics. Specifically, it cannot add to, or alter, the assertoric content of the
basic semantic units. Moreover without the inborn/innate semantic content
provided by biological reductionism, there could be no assertoric content.
Since it arises from the neurologically encoded I-language, assertoric
content is part of the natural world: as such, it is independent of human deci-
sions and beliefs. This move, Chomsky thinks, allows him to avoid relativ-
ism. Any “new” content is introduced to the lexicon by adding experiential
inputs to the innate semantic features. These additions are variable and differ
between language users and language groups. Hence experience cannot serve
as the basis for assertoric content. For this, we require something invariant, of
the sort provided by biological reductionism. It is only because speakers share
access to the same, neurologically-encoded I-language, that it is unsurprising
that they tend to arrive at similar interpretations, and that the assignments of
 Language without Meaning: The Limits of Biolinguistics 169

meaning are sufficiently stable to allow for communication. Universal seman-

tic features are the source of assertoric content.
This might, absent the arguments of § 3 above, seem plausible. Howev-
er, there is something Chomsky overlooks. While he eliminates reference as
the source of assertoric content, his own account of semantics while it might
look internalist in character, is in reality nothing of the sort. The inborn fea-
tures and innate ideas that play a central role in his account of meaning are,
ex hypothesi (the hypothesis in question being Chomsky’s) part of the same
world that contains the tables and chairs in which reference-based semantics
grounds assertoric content. If the former can explain assertoric content and
stability of reference across language users, it must follow for Chomsky’s
view, just as it follows for reference-based theories of meaning, that the natu-
ral world is the source of assertoric content. In this regard, Chomsky’s ver-
sion of biological reductionism is no different from the several versions of
reference-based semantics, which, at present, collectively dominate main-
stream thinking in the philosophy of language. Chomsky’s theory is thus in-
ternally inconsistent in the sense that it fails to meet the requirements of C3.

5. Conclusion: Language and the Human World

While agreeing that assertoric content does not arise from the “external”
world, Chomsky’s proposal to find it in “inborn structures,” “brains,” and
“genetic endowments” does not move meaning out of the natural world.
Brains et al. are every bit as mind-independent as tables, chairs and the Grand
Canyon. It seems, then, that Chomsky is forced to agree with Putnam that
“meanings just ain’t in the head” ([1975] 1985), whether you call what is “in
the head” a “brain” or a “mind/brain.”
But in any case, as we have seen, the problem with reference-based se-
mantics, for Chomsky, is not just that it is externalist. Chomsky’s own theory
is externalist. The root problem with reference-based semantics, for Chom-
sky, is that it ignores the mental, and tries to find meaning outside the mind.
The question is whether a theory of meaning can rely on something that is
mind-independent. Chomsky says it cannot: meanings are mind-dependent.
Consequently, assertoric content must arise from some mind-dependent
source. Chomsky assumes implicitly that theories of meaning are either
internalist or externalist, full stop: that the internalism/externalism distinction
exhausts the possibilities.
The problem we have just located is that, thus understood, “naturalized
semantics” turns out to be a version of externalism. How does Chomsky miss
this? The reason may be that he focuses on the idea that the innate structures
that allow for the development and use of language are “mental.” Hence, any-
thing that arises from them is also mental. Unfortunately for the project of
biological reductionism, as he conceives it, he fails to give the term “mental”
any content that would provide a principled way to divide the contents of the
170 PATRICIA HANNA

natural world between the “mental” and the “non-mental.” Absent this, he
cannot counter his own criticisms of externalism.
But is the internalism/externalism distinction as watertight, as exclusive,
as Chomsky implicitly assumes it to be? As we have seen in Section 3 of this
essay, Harrison’s version of the social/praxial account offers a way of passing
between the horns of the dilemma it poses to the theorist of meaning. The
account Harrison extracts from his re-reading of Wittgenstein is externalist in
the sense that it does not regard the individual mind as the source of meaning;
but at the same time it does not move meaning into the natural world. Further,
it is internalist in the sense that it does not ignore the human contribution to
meaning. It represents meanings as deeply dependent on human decisions and
actions; but at the same time it sees these decisions and actions as belonging,
not to the private theatre of the mind, but to the public theatre in which social
practices of all kinds originate and evolve. Meaning is, in other words, part of
what Harrison, like the Cambridge critic F. R Leavis, calls “the Human
World” (Harrison, forthcoming 2014).
So where does that leave us? It leaves us with the immemorial common-
sense assumptions from which Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics proposed
to separate us. Language, at its core, is a social phenomenon. It is, of course,
in part, a product and lucky accident of our biology. However, simply being
gifted with the appropriate physiological form, and a brain and central nerv-
ous system capable of doing certain things cannot, by themselves, explain
how language—that thing we speak, write and use to negotiate our way
around the world with—is capable of doing all the things we do with it.
To understand this, we need something else: we need the tools of con-
ceptual analysis. On this front, Wittgenstein has more to tell us than any biol-
ogist, neurophysiologist, or any philosophical referentialist could ever offer.
This is, among other things, what Harrison has been helping us to see over
the course of his long and fruitful career.
 Nine

BERNARD HARRISON’S “WORLD”

Michael Krausz

1. Introduction

Bernard Harrison and I first met in 1987, in Sussex, UK, where we became
fast friends. Since then, we have pursued on-going philosophical conversa-
tions, largely about interpretation and its ontological entanglements. In differ-
ent venues, we have been joined by Patricia Hanna, Bernard’s philosophical
collaborator. I have treasured conversations with them and have benefitted
greatly from them. This chapter is an update and further installment of those
ongoing discussions.
Much of what I will say about Harrison’s view is backgrounded by Pa-
tricia Hanna and Harrison’s impressive Word and World (2004). I shall also
refer to remarks in Harrison and Hanna’s, “Interpretation and Ontology: Two
Queries for Krausz” (2003), and to private correspondence and conversations
as best as I can reconstruct them, especially on the occasion of the 2006
Western Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, which
was held in Portland, Oregon, as well as walks that followed. Along the way,
I shall indicate an interesting point of departure between Harrison and Hanna
that emerged in correspondence and conversation with each.
It may seem unorthodox to include a discussion of joint efforts by Harri-
son and Hanna in this volume, dedicated specifically to Harrison’s philosoph-
ical work. Yet it would be unnatural for me to ignore the discussion of a topic
so central in the philosophical space that Harrison and I have shared over
many years.

2. World, Practices, Sentences

Consider the question, “What is the direct relation between logical forms of
sentences and the world?” This question arises from a “specular conception,”
according to which “the logical form of the sentences by means of which we
describe reality must mirror the form of the realities those sentences describe”
(ibid., p. 94). Both Harrison and Hanna reject this question as ill-formed be-
cause they believe that it is motivated by a misleading two-term metaphor: a
mirror. A mirror reflects that which is mirrored. Instead, they argue that we
have three, not two terms: the world, practices, and sentences. Since the
world is undifferentiated, there can be no direct correspondence between our
172 MICHAEL KRAUSZ

true sentences and the world. Here are extended quotes that provide the
framework for their trichotomy:

No direct relationship holds between claims (statements, propositions,

whatever) and the reality that they concern. We see a pair of relation-
ships, the first between words and some practice, the second between
that practice and the realities on which it operates. (Ibid., pp. 101)

Harrison and Hanna do not distinguish “reality” or “realities” from the

“world.” They maintain further:

we can admit the world to be conceptually unstructured prior to the

elaboration of language, while continuing to hold with perfect justice
that, on occasion, what we say about the world correctly characterizes
it—correctly characterizes, that is, something external to the symbol-
system—because of the (preconceptual) praxial structure of the world,
the conceptually structured claims that the introduction of appropriate
linguistic practices will in due course put us in a position to assert of it
will ultimately turn out to be true or false. (Ibid., p. 103)

In a distinctive sense, the world is conceptually unstructured. They say:

Our practices mediate between a conceptually unstructured world and

the conceptually structured truths we assert of it. The notion of truth has
no bearing on the world prior to the invention of such practices as linear
measurement. The whole point of such practices is to equip us with ma-
chinery of truth-determination, including yardsticks and other measuring
devices…The notion of objective truth-determination is part and parcel
of the notion of truth itself. Both are conjured into existence through the
institution of such practices as that of linear measurement. (Ibid.)

I concur with the “three-terms” view, according to which truth depends upon
statements and that which is yielded in contexts of linguistic practices. Where
truth obtains, it does so in virtue of the relation between practices and sentenc-
es. At the same time, that to which practices relate is the world, the conceptual-
ly undifferentiated world, the world of which we can have direct experiences.
They continue:

In a sense, the world prior to the institution of linguistic practices is “in-

effable,” but only in the sense that, as yet, nothing can be said about it.
That world is not “ineffable” in the sense of “unknowable,” for it is al-
ready richly knowable as a realm of outcomes, and its characteristics
qua realm of outcomes are precisely what will determine what proposi-
tions we will find to be true or false of it when we are sufficiently
 Bernard Harrison’s “World” 173

equipped with linguistic practices to have a use for such notions as

proposition, truth, and falsity. (Ibid., p. 102)

Harrison and Hanna hold that structured experiences are possible for be-
ings who do not already possess concepts. While we cannot characterize the
pre-praxial world in detail without employing concepts, they hold that the
pre-praxial world is responsive to “sensory-bodily investigation.” This means
that the pre-praxial world is structured insofar as it is able to respond to sen-
sory-bodily investigation. The knowledge of what water feels like when we
wade into it at the beach, for example, and the knowledge of how it sustains
our bodies when swimming, is not knowledge mediated by concepts—
concepts, that is, in Harrison and Hanna’s distinctive sense.

3. Ideals of Interpretation and Their Ontological Entanglements

So, with all that said, on what points do we disagree? How does Harrison’s
concept of the world relate to my preoccupations with objects of interpreta-
tion? How does it bear on such questions as to whether, for objects in pertinent
domains, there must be one or more than one ideally admissible interpretation?
How does it relate to the individuation of objects of interpretation?
Answers to such questions require a sketch of my views on ideals of in-
terpretation and their ontological entanglements. Here, then, without extended
argument, is a tally of my salient claims (for extended arguments see Krausz,
1993; 2000).
(1) I distinguish between two opposed ideals of interpretation:
singularism and multiplism. Singularism asserts that all objects of interpreta-
tion answer to one and only one ideally admissible interpretation. In contrast,
multiplism asserts that some objects of interpretation answer to more than one
opposed ideally admissible interpretation. I speak of a given object of inter-
pretation that answers to one and only one admissible interpretation as ful-
filling a “singularist condition.” I speak of a given object of interpretation that
answers to more than one admissible interpretation as fulfilling a “multiplist
condition.” Where different interpretations address different objects of inter-
pretations—where they address different things—an innocuous pluralism
exists. Where objects of interpretation cannot be delineated as to number,
neither a singularist nor a multiplist condition exists. Whether a given object
of interpretation answers to a singularist or multiplist condition depends in
part upon its numerical identity, as set within the context of the practice in
which it is nested.
(2) Singularism and multiplism are each compatible with either realism
or constructivism. Singularism does not uniquely entail realism (and vice ver-
sa) and multiplism does not uniquely entail constructivism (and vice versa).
Put otherwise, the contest between singularism and multiplism is logically
detachable from the contest between realism and constructivism. This is what
174 MICHAEL KRAUSZ

I have called the “detachability thesis.” This thesis concerns the non-
entailment between ideals of interpretation and specific ontologies. The de-
tachability thesis does not deny the pertinence of ontological considerations
to interpretation theory broadly construed. Such considerations include a con-
strual of the world.
Besides realism and constructivism, the contest between singularism
and multiplism is also detachable from a range of other ontologies that fall
under the irenic heading of “constructive realism.” These include ontologies
that marry features of both realism and constructivism, including that articu-
lated by Harrison and Hanna in “Interpretation and Ontology: Two Queries
for Krausz” (2003, p. 93). Harrison and Hanna agree, saying:

Krausz argues (1) that realism and constructivism are not exclusive al-
ternatives, but admit combination in several versions of “constructive
realism”; and (2) that neither realism nor constructivism, nor any ver-
sion of the two, entails either singularism or multiplism. We are in broad
agreement with these claims. (Ibid.)

(3) I reject an essentialism that holds that one should seek ultimate ex-
planations in terms of inherent essences. Accordingly, there is no most basic
level of description to which all others are reducible. For any level of descrip-
tion, a yet further level may be unearthed. I label this claim “polymorphism.”
Further, there is no fact of the matter as to whether, among all levels of de-
scription, a numerically self-identical object of interpretation is to be found.
We cannot settle upon the would-be common object that would inherently
subsist through all levels of description. When regarding a table, say, as a
middle-sized object or as a collection of electrons in space, we need not be
talking about the inherently same object of interpretation.
While realists may self-consistently deny the essentialist thesis of an ul-
timate reality, they may speak of so-called natural kinds in non-essentialist
ways. Rocks may fall under a constructed category called “natural,” and ta-
bles may fall under another constructed category called “cultural.” So the
supposed “joint” between them is an invention of taxonomy. In this way,
“made” and “found” are made compatible, and the “made” may be as “real”
as the “found.” There need be no exclusive disjunction between the con-
structed and the real, or between the made and the found.
(4) The distinction between nature and culture cannot be made to fit the
distinction between realism and constructivism. The two distinctions are not
coextensive. The natural domain does not uniquely answer to realism, and the
cultural domain does not uniquely answer to constructivism. Accordingly, we
can find both singularist and multiplist cases in both the cultural and the natu-
ral realms. The natural realm has no monopoly on singularist conditions, and
the cultural realm has no monopoly on multiplist conditions. Therefore,
 Bernard Harrison’s “World” 175

singularism cannot serve as a criterion for the natural and multiplism cannot
serve as a criterion for the cultural. Such is my tally.

4. Moduli, Techniques of Measurement, Numerical Identity

So, with so many points of agreement among us, from where does my disa-
greement with Harrison and Hanna arise? In my tally, my first claim assumes
that singularism and multiplism are mutually exclusive ideals of interpretation.
No numerically self-identical object of interpretation may simultaneously an-
swer to a singularist and a multiplist condition. Given the definitions of perti-
nent terms, I take this claim to be self-evident. But Harrison and Hanna disa-
gree. They make two distinct points that I have indicated by inserting “[a]” and
“[b]” in the following. They say:

[a] One and the same object of interpretation may answer to singularism
or to multiplism, because (roughly speaking) [b] the choice depends not
on the type of object whose nature we are concerned to interpret, but on
the structure of the linguistic practice through which our interrogation of
the object under interpretation is conducted, (Ibid., p. 94)

I agree with [b] but disagree with [a]. Regarding [b], while the choice whether
a possible object of interpretation answers to a singularist or multiplist condi-
tion does depend upon pertinent linguistic practices, such a choice does not
license—as suggested by [a]—that, as between different practices, it is “one
and the same object of interpretation” that would be in play. In other words,
while [b] is correct, it does not explain [a]. Neither does [b] entail [a].
Thus, as opposed to the position taken by Harrison and Hanna in this re-
gard, I hold that a numerically distinct object of interpretation cannot simul-
taneously answer to a singularist and a multiplist condition.
More fully, I join Harrison and Hanna when they hold that whether per-
tinent objects of interpretation are to be counted as one or more depends not
upon the nature of the object in question but upon how they are construed in
pertinent linguistic practices. No simple inspection of the object of interpreta-
tion will determine such a matter. But their praxial approach to counting does
not countenance their implication that one and the same object of interpreta-
tion may simultaneously answer to a singularist and a multiplist condition.
Once fixed within the context of a pertinent practice, a given object of inter-
pretation can answer to one or (exclusively) to more than one interpretation—
but not to one and more than one at the same time. Harrison and Hanna coun-
ter with an intriguing example. They affirm that there can be no appeal to the
length of a physical object independent of some method of measurement or
“modulus” as they call it. Indeed, you cannot even make sense of the notion
of the length of an object independent of a pertinent modulus. They say, “ab-
sent a modulus in terms of which O is to be measured, the question [of its
176 MICHAEL KRAUSZ

length] cannot be answered” (ibid., p. 99). I agree. Yet they go on to argue

that one’s ability to measure in inches or in microns (note the inclusive “or”)
shows that more than one admissible interpretation of the length of a physical
object exists. They say:

In the present example, such terms as “length,” “modulus” take on

meaning not from their relationship to any feature of the world that pre-
dates the institution of the practice of linear measurement, but from the
roles assigned to them within the structure of that practice. The practice
of linear measurement in turn relates to reality or the world through the
practical operation of measuring techniques of all kinds. (Ibid., p. 101)

The above passage restates their view that [b] the numerical identity of an
object of interpretation is practice-relative. So far so good. Yet, in addition to
their claim that a given object of interpretation may answer to more than one
opposed interpretation in virtue of the opposition between moduli (hence
multiplism), Harrison and Hanna hold that, within the terms of a given modu-
lus, there can be one and only one admissible result regarding the length of a
physical object (hence singularism). Hence, both multiplism and singularism.
But how can this be? The final conclusion drawn by Harrison and Han-
na ignores the possibility that the object of interpretation in both moduli may
not be numerically identical. That which is measured in inches may not be the
same as that which is measured in microns. The movement from one modulus
to another may involve a shift in the numerical identity of the object of inter-
pretation. Since a shift in numerical identity may result in an innocuous plural-
ist rather than a multiplist condition, the plurality of moduli does not entail a
multiplist condition. Polymorphism does not entail multiplism. The possibility
of non-identity of an object of interpretation as between moduli undermines
Harrison and Hanna’s dual claim that a given object of interpretation can sim-
ultaneously answer to a singularist condition as well as a multiplist condition.
I have argued that, to make good on their dual claim, Harrison and Han-
na would at least need to substantiate their assumption that their example
does instantiate more than one opposed modulus. That is, if pertinent moduli
were inter-translatable without remainder, they would not instantiate a
multiplist condition. Moreover, inches and microns indeed are mutually
translatable without remainder. A formula exists that translates between inches
and microns without the remainder of any irrational numbers. An inch is de-
fined as 2.54 centimeters exactly, and a micron is 1/10,000 of a centimeter
exactly. An inch is 25,400 microns exactly. No irrational numbers are involved.
So, a measurement in terms of inches and microns respectively would amount to
a singularist condition but not at the same time to a multiplist condition.
In reply to this argument Hanna has suggested that the translatability be-
tween inches and microns is irrelevant (personal correspondence, 5, 10, and
12 April 2002). What is crucial is the propriety of invoking one or another
 Bernard Harrison’s “World” 177

modulus on different occasions. On some occasions, to invoke inches is ap-

propriate and to invoke microns is inappropriate. On other occasions, to in-
voke microns is appropriate and to invoke inches is inappropriate. It would be
inappropriate to measure a picture frame (my example) in terms of microns,
even if inches were fully translatable into microns. Also, it would be inappro-
priate to measure electrons in terms of inches, again, even if electrons were
fully translatable into inches. Incongruence of moduli obtains in regard to
propriety rather than translatability. When incongruence of moduli obtains, a
multiplist condition obtains. Hence multiplism. At the same time a single
right measurement in inches exists, and a single right measurement in microns
also exists. Hence singularism. Hence, multiplism and singularism.
In regard to Hanna’s propriety argument, my question arises again about
the numerical identity of the object of interpretation when measured in inches
or microns. Is there a shift in the referent of that which is being measured as
between inches and microns? Is that which is described in inches and microns
numerically identical? A shift in the numerical identity of the object of inter-
pretation could result in the failure of a multiplist condition. The object of
interpretation could have been pluralized. Under this condition, for a pair of
objects of interpretation, a one-to-one relation (rather than a many-to-one
relation) could obtain between interpretation and object of interpretation—
thus fulfilling the singularist requirement. Accordingly, the putative conjunc-
tion of a multiplist and a singularist condition could fail. The diversity of
moduli does not entail a multiplist condition. Accordingly, a numerically self-
identical object of interpretation would not have been shown to answer to
both a singularist and a multiplist condition. The dual claim would not have
been validated.
Interestingly, Harrison does not agree with Hanna’s reply about proprie-
ty. As best as I can reconstruct our exchanges in Portland, in March 2006, for
Harrison, the claim of simultaneous instantiation of a singularist and a
multiplist condition does not hinge upon my question of whether the two
moduli are inter-translatable. Nor does it hinge upon Hanna’s question of
whether, in different circumstances, one or another modulus is appropriate.
Rather, it hinges upon techniques of measurement associated with different
moduli. Consider his example, which follows.
Here is one technique of measuring a medium-sized object, say a table.
It employs a twelve-inch ruler: lay the ruler along the table’s edge and read
off the gradation marks on the ruler. Here is a second more exact technique of
measurement, which employs a sophisticated optical instrument: align its
cross hairs with the edge of the table. This instrument measures the time it
takes for light to travel between the points thus identified. This exact tech-
nique of measurement uses microns. Now suppose the “ruler” technique
yields the result in inches, namely 3.0 inches. Suppose the “optical-instru-
ment” technique yields the result in microns, which when converted into
inches, is 3.0000284 inches.
178 MICHAEL KRAUSZ

The two different results in inches arise from the application of two dif-
ferent techniques of measurement. Harrison concludes that we cannot say that
either of these is more correct than the other. Hence, multiplism. Admittedly,
Harrison’s putative multiplist case—in accord with different techniques of
measurement rather than propriety of usage—is convincing. Yet, still the
question remains: “Do the results yielded by those different techniques of
measurement allow for different objects of interpretation?” If so, an innocu-
ous pluralist rather than a multiplist condition would result.
Further, Harrison assumes that the edges of the table as measured by the
designated techniques are the same. But with sufficiently powerful magnifica-
tion, the would-be edges will be seen to be bounded by no clearly identifiable
fixed points at all. It will be seen to be loosely bounded by clusters of elec-
trons (and with still further amplification, their constituents) in motion.

5. Emergent Identity

The question of whether the same object of interpretation answers to opposed

results of the techniques of measurement remains open. Where the object of
interpretation is correctly measured, and results oppose one another, numeri-
cally different objects of interpretation may be measured. This is not a simple
question. Its answer bears on Harrison and Hanna’s trichotomy of world,
practices, and sentences. Here we come full circle, as we confront the refor-
mulated question, “What is the non-direct relation between measurement
techniques and the world?” To answer this question let us turn our attention
back to Harrison and Hanna’s remarks about the world as a realm of out-
comes. They say:

the world as it exists prior to the introduction of . . . practice, is indeed,

in one sense, undifferentiated: conceptually undifferentiated. But that is
not to say that the schema of concepts is undifferentiated with respect to
the practical techniques and manipulations that connect the practice to
that scheme. On the contrary, the world as it exists prior to the institution
of the practice is replete with the sort of structure that reveals itself to op-
tical, manual, auditory manipulation. The world is not praxially undiffer-
entiated. We may think of the world relative to practical techniques, in-
cluding techniques of measurement, as a realm of outcomes. . . . Such a
realm will deliver the same outcome in response to a given manipulation
in wholly reliable ways, ways reliable, that is, from observer to observ-
er, given equal accuracy in the conduct of the manipulation in question.
If the world were not, in this sense, a realm of outcomes, it would be
impossible to invent the complex practices that bestow sense and con-
ceptual content on the terms that acquire a use in connection with them.
(2003, pp. 101–102)
 Bernard Harrison’s “World” 179

I have suggested to Harrison that the expression, “realm of outcomes”

does not capture the import of his and Hanna’s view. Instead of speaking of
the world as a realm of outcomes, they would better have spoken of the world
as a realm for outcomes. The phrase, “realm of outcomes,” misleadingly sug-
gests the thought that the world follows, or is a product of praxial activity.
But their view actually holds that the world precedes such activity. Harrison
has responded by conceding that the phrase “realm of outcomes” is indeed
unfortunate and should be adjusted so as to signal his intent, which is to sig-
nal his understanding that the world is pre-praxial.
I was initially assuaged by Harrison’s concession. But I now think that
even such an adjustment would not be quite right, for an underlying question
lurks: “Is the world really a realm that must predate or postdate praxial activi-
ty?” “Can it not both predate and postdate praxial activity?”
Here is my tentative hypothesis. As Harrison and Hanna hold, the world
is conceptually indeterminate. I add that indeterminacy is a degree concept
and the world is made more determinate in its praxial manipulations. By ma-
nipulating the world, we make it more, but never fully, determinate. Accord-
ingly, the numerical identity of the world emerges in the course of its praxial
applications. We discover new realms of outcome, having already subjected
prior realms of outcome to praxial applications. This process is open-ended.
In this sense, the world is emergent. Accordingly, in good Harrison-Hanna
fashion, we cannot ask, “What is the world as such really like?” if, by that
question, we mean, “What is it like before the exercise of practical techniques
and manipulations?”
I offer the idea of emergent identity as a supplement to Harrison’s idea
of a “realm of outcomes.” Yet it does not answer the question whether a
change from one technique to another will result in a shift in the numerical
identity of the object of interpretation. While “a realm of outcomes will deliv-
er the same outcomes in response to a given manipulation in wholly reliable
ways” as Harrison and Hanna say, it remains an open question whether such
manipulation will allow that both a singularist and a multiplist condition will
be simultaneously instantiated.
Further, under the conditions that Harrison and Hanna specify, a realm
of outcomes may indeed deliver the same outcome in wholly reliable ways.
This observation qualifies their view as a kind of realism (a “relative real-
ism” as Harrison and Hanna call it). But, as I have indicated, realism is com-
patible with both singularism and multiplism. Realism uniquely entails nei-
ther singularism nor multiplism. Nor does singularism or multiplism unique-
ly entail realism.
Where does that leave us? While the question of the numerical identity
of an object of interpretation between pertinent practices remains open, I hope
my idea of emergent identify will provide an added resource for the develop-
ment of Harrison and Hanna’s idea of realms of outcomes. However, I do not
180 MICHAEL KRAUSZ

think it will provide a ground for affirming the simultaneous instantiation of a

singularist and multiplist condition. I could be wrong about that. If I have
missed something in that regard, I expect Harrison will find it.
 Ten

MEANING, TRUTH, AND

PRACTICES: A CONUNDRUM

Dennis Patterson

1. Meaning and Truth

In Word and World, Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison argue against what
they term the referential realist view of meaning. As they describe it, the cen-
tral tenet of referential realism is the view that “meaning is introduced into a
language by the association of some class of real-world entities whose exist-
ence and nature owe nothing to linguistic convention” (Hanna and Harrison,
p. 2). The motivation for referential realism is avoidance of a view of lan-
guage as a “prison house.” That is, if language is not tethered to something in
the world, then the articulation of thoughts is an empty gesture because ver-
balization will never make contact with “a mind-independent reality” (ibid.).
They advance the view that not only is referential realism wrong about mean-
ing, it gets the entire relationship backwards:

The case for referential realism . . . rests essentially with the thought that
unless the members of some class of elements of language derive their
meaning simply from association with the members of some class of el-
ements of “the world,” language becomes hermetically self-referential, a
prison made for itself by the mind, rather than the means of articulating
thoughts concerning a mind-independent reality.” (Ibid.)

The central claim of Word and World is that referential realism leads to an
untenable relationship between meaning and truth. The strategy Hanna and
Harrison use to refute referential realism is, in essence, a reductio argument.
In other words, what they set out to demonstrate is that an unacceptable con-
clusion follows from the central premises of referential realism. For if refer-
ential realism were right, they maintain, we could not make sense of the truth
of any proposition. As they put it:

[W]e cannot set about assessing the truth of any proposition until we
know what it asserts, as until we know that, to put it bluntly, there is
nothing to submit to such an assessment. It follows that all questions
concerning the assertoric content of propositions must be settled in ad-
vance of raising the question whether any proposition is true or not be-
182 DENNIS PATTERSON

cause in advance of those questions being settled, there is nothing about

which to raise the question. And from that it follows that Referential
Realism, as it entails the contrary, must be false. (Ibid. pp. 2–3)

Truths arise out of practices, the weaving together of word and world.
To know the meaning of a term is to know how that term is used in a lan-
guage-game. The meaning of a term, T, is established in a practice for the
use(s) of T. There is no meaning of T outside the contexts and practices in
which T has a use. We know what T means when we are able to employ the
term correctly in the variety of contexts that give T its meaning. In short, the
meaning of T is its use(s) in language-games.
On this account of meaning, we are entitled to ask about the relationship
of meaning to truth. Clearly, Hanna and Harrison make the case against truth
as primordial. In fact, they seem to be saying that meaning is in some sense
prior to truth. If anything, meaning is primordial for we cannot assess the
truth of any claim prior to discerning the meaning of the terms that comprise
the proposition under scrutiny. But in what sense is meaning prior to truth?
And do Hanna and Harrison want to say that there are not truths outside lan-
guage-games? Put differently, is their claim that truth follows meaning?

2. Is Truth Prior to or Independent of Meaning?

The questions I want to ask is this: Are there not truths prior to meaning? Put
differently, do we not want to deny that truth is in some way “dependent” on
meaning? Can there not be truths about which we are unaware? Can there not
be truths for which we have no language-game? If truth is “independent” of
meaning then, it seems (contra Hanna and Harrison) that truth really is pri-
mordial (in the sense of being “prior” to meaning).
I want to pursue this line of thought with a hypothetical example. Con-
sider the case of Jones. Jones died in 1982. The coroner’s report listed the
cause of death as “Infection of unknown origin. Cellular anomalies noted.”
By 1990, we could say with some certainty that Jones’s death was caused by
the HIV virus. Before we had a medical language in which to express this
propositionally, it was true that “Jones’s death was caused by HIV.” The co-
nundrum is this: How can Hanna and Harrison’s account of the relationship of
meaning to truth be correct when, as in the case of Jones, there is a truth of the
matter for which we have yet to develop a vocabulary or language-game? Pri-
ma facie, the case of Jones seems to put the lie to the idea that truth is anything
but primordial. There is a truth of the matter about what killed Jones. The fact
that we needed to discover this truth in no way diminishes its character.
What is of interest here is the way in which word and world are woven
together. Hanna and Harrison reject verificationism, the idea that the meaning
of our concepts is a function of the ways in which we verify or confirm cor-
 Meaning, Truth, and Practices: A Conundrum 183

rect uses of them. But how do we account for the fact that the world of inert
stuff makes contact with our language-games in ways that produce meaning?
Back to the HIV hypothetical. One thing we could surely say is that had
we known in 1982 what we know now, we could have said with certainty that
“Jones died of HIV.” Again, it is the proposition “Jones died of HIV” that is
under scrutiny. What does it mean to say “This proposition was true in 1982.
Just as true then as now.”? It means at least (1) there was a fact of the matter
about the cause of Jones’s death, and (2) that fact eluded us in 1982 because
we lacked the epistemic and linguistic tools to identify and express this truth.
Let me try a different approach to the matter. In 1982, it was thought
that Jones’s death was caused by “a cellular anomaly.” In time, we discovered
a specific viral cause of Jones’s death. We now know what we did not know
in 1982: the virus that killed Jones was HIV. We discovered the true cause of
Jones’s death. Of course, we needed a language—a set of concepts—to ex-
press this truth. But the truth of the matter (Jones’s death) was there, waiting
to be discovered. The truth was not created, it was found.
I am reminded of Richard Rorty’s approach to truth, one that seems to
me to be useful in this discussion. About truth, Rorty said the following:

For the pragmatist, the notion of “truth” as something “objective” is just

a confusion between
(I) Most of the world is as it is whatever we think about it (that is, our
beliefs have only limited causal efficacy)
and
(II) There is something out there in addition to the world called “the
truth about the world” (what [William] James sarcastically called
“this tertium quid intermediate between the facts per se, on the one
hand, and all knowledge of them, actual or potential, on the other”).
The Pragmatist wholeheartedly assents to (I)—not as an article of
metaphysical faith but simply as a belief we have never had any reason
to doubt—and cannot make sense of (II). When the realist tries to ex-
plain (II) with
(III) The truth about the world consists in a relation of “correspondence”
between certain sentences (many of which, no doubt, have yet to be
formulated) and the world itself
the pragmatist can only fall back on saying, once again, that many cen-
turies of attempts to explain what “correspondence” is have failed . . . .
(1982, p. xxvi)

Hanna and Harrison surely agree with Rorty that the world is as it is
quite apart from anyone’s beliefs about it. That’s not the problem. As Rorty
consistently emphasized, one cannot get from the world as it is to the truth of
184 DENNIS PATTERSON

sentences. In other words, we cannot step outside of language to show that

our practices cut reality at its joints. Facts, Rorty reminded us, are composites.
He put it this way: “Facts are hybrid entities; that is, the causes of the
assertibility of sentences include both physical stimuli and our antecedent
choice of response to such stimuli.” (1991, p. 81).
Now, one may quibble that Rorty talks about “facts” and I have been fo-
cusing on “truth.” This is a quibble I shall ignore, taking it to be uncontrover-
sial that truths are statements of fact. Rorty’s point is that the stimuli presented
to us can be addressed by myriad language-games. Sure, the world is as it is,
but the things we say about it are “true” by reference to the language-game
we play, not in virtue of the way the world is. The point is that word and
world are woven together in the course of producing truths. Neither the word
nor the world is “primary.”

3. Conclusion

I do not think Hanna and Harrison are idealists about meaning or about the
role of the external world in shaping our practices. Clearly, the outcomes of
our practices depend upon the way the world is and not our techniques for
interacting with it. Our practices are the bridge between word and world. All
of this seems right. And yet, I cannot shake off the sense that there are truths
about the world that escape our practices. That is, truth is primordial. Hence,
the conundrum.
 Eleven

LANGUAGE, FICTION, AND

THE LATER WITTGENSTEIN

Michael Morris

1. Introduction

A fundamental change in his approach to language occurred in Ludwig Witt-

genstein’s thought between the time of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
and the time of the later philosophy, in particular the Philosophical Investiga-
tions. Of that there is no doubt. What there may be some dispute about is the
precise nature of that change. It is also widely held that this fundamental
change—whatever precisely it is—makes room for a proper understanding of
literature, which the earlier view made impossible. It is natural to think that
this change of view makes fiction, in particular, intelligible in a way that the
earlier view did not.
Bernard Harrison is a subtle reader of Wittgenstein—particularly the
later Wittgenstein—and a philosopher of literature who has a genuinely liter-
ary feel for his subject. His own philosophy of language can be seen as a de-
velopment of a way of reading the later Wittgenstein that brings with it a way
of making literature, as such, intelligible. Unfortunately, I am not convinced.
The change in the approach to language that this interpretation attributes to
Wittgenstein does not seem to me enough to make sense of literature; and it
actually makes it difficult to accommodate fiction in particular. This leads me
to wonder whether the key change between the earlier and the later Wittgen-
stein is the one that Harrison, in common with many others, takes it to be.
In what follows, I will first of all characterize a general conception of
the change in approach between the earlier and the later philosophy—a con-
ception that I think Harrison shares with many others. I will then consider one
way of exploiting the change in approach, as so conceived, to deal with prob-
lems raised by literature, before turning to the way adopted by Harrison him-
self. I will argue that Harrison’s way is unacceptable, before considering an
alternative interpretation of the change in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. The
version of Harrison’s view upon which I will focus is that expressed in his
stimulating paper, “Imagined Worlds and the Real One: Plato, Wittgenstein,
and Mimesis” (2004), which also provides the germ for the alternative interpre-
tation of the change in Wittgenstein’s philosophy that I will tentatively suggest.
This paper fundamentally disagrees with Bernard Harrison’s views—of
course. But it is written with gratitude, respect, and affection for a mentor,
186 MICHAEL MORRIS

colleague, and friend from whom I have learned a great deal, and whose ex-
ample has shaped my own approach to philosophy.

2. The Use-Gives-It-Life Interpretation

What is the key feature of the change between Wittgenstein’s earlier and his
later philosophy? According to a prevailing orthodoxy, the decisive move is
from a “referential” approach to language, adopted in the Tractatus (1922), to
a “use” approach, to be found in the Philosophical Investigations (2009; note
that I am using the new, revised translation). The key text for this view is
found in the first paragraph of the Investigations: “For a large class of cases
of the employment of the word ‘meaning’—though not for all—this word can
be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language”
(ibid., §43). If we take this passage to be an expression of a decisive change
in Wittgenstein’s general approach to language, we will understand it in
something like the following way: what is important about the meaning of a
word is not that to which an object refers—or even whether it refers to an
object—but how it is used. It is use, not correlation with an object, that de-
termines meaning.
A hint about what use does can be found in this passage in the Blue
Book: “But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we
should have to say that it was its use” (Wittgenstein, 1969, p. 4). This sugges-
tion is recalled in the following famous passage: “Every sign by itself seems
dead. What gives it life?—In use it lives. Is it there that it has living breath
within it? Or is the use its breath?” (Wittgenstein, 2009, § 432).
But there is no immediate incompatibility between an appeal to use and
the idea that the meaning of a word depends upon its correlation with an ob-
ject. After all, one might think that it was the use that caused some correlation
to be made, and use that determined which correlation was made (Wittgen-
stein, 1922, 3.326, 6.211). We only get incompatibility, and hence a genuine
change in Wittgenstein’s position, if the “referential” theory and the “use”
theory are both understood in particular ways. A natural way of understand-
ing the two theories to reveal a genuine incompatibility is this:
According to the referential theory, the objects with which words may
be correlated exist independently of language. The key feature of a referential
theory on this interpretation is that it supposes that these objects impose a
constraint on language from outside language: no language can be meaningful
except in virtue of its words being correlated with these objects and these
objects restrict what can be meant by words. Given that, nothing is needed for
a word to be meaningful other than that it be correlated with one of these ob-
jects, and there is no more to its meaning than its being correlated with the
particular object with which it is correlated.
This general account of the foundations of language is only intelligible
if language is taken to have a certain function and certain types of sentence
 Language, Fiction, and the Later Wittgenstein 187

are given a special status. We can only hold that there is no more to the mean-
ing of a word than its being correlated with the particular object with which it
is correlated if we suppose that the function of words is to represent objects,
and their task is fulfilled once it is clear which objects they represent. We can
only hold that it is the function of words to represent objects if it is the func-
tion of language in general to represent the world. This means that the most
fundamental sentences will be those that can be understood to represent the
world—those that can be true or false. Sentences that appear to differ from
these will either have to be reconstrued as really representing the world or
seen as derivative from, or parasitic upon, the basic kind of sentence in some
way. They may perhaps be seen as invitations to provide a sentence of the
basic kind or as devices to so re-arrange the world as to make a sentence of
the basic kind appropriate.
According to a use theory, by contrast, there is no such external con-
straint on language. All that matters is that words should have a use—and this
no longer means their being correlated with some object. In effect, what mat-
ters is that words should have some role in our lives—that they should fit into
patterns of activity that make a difference to what we do. These activities can
be of many kinds. Accordingly, no single basic function for language exists,
and no particular kind of sentence is fundamental. Someone presenting this
interpretation will point in particular to Wittgenstein’s famous list of different
kinds of “language-games” (2009, p. 23). The idea is that it is in having a role
in a pattern of activities that a word has meaning, and it can have such a role
without there being an object with which it is correlated.
I will call this account of the key difference between Wittgenstein’s ear-
lier and later philosophy the “use-gives-it-life” interpretation.

3. The Use-Gives-it-Life Interpretation

and Fiction: An Initial Response

To see how the change of view found by the use-gives-it-life interpretation

might make a difference to the treatment of literature, and fiction in particu-
lar, we need to have some idea of what the problem with fiction might be.
The two features of fiction that philosophers characteristically find it hard to
accommodate are these:

(F1) Fiction is literary (that is, it is art-writing);

(F2) In fiction, events are related that did not really happen and
that concern people and things that do not really exist.

Why might these features be particularly difficult for a referential theory to

accommodate? Well, on the use-gives-it-life interpretation, a referential theo-
ry takes language to have a peculiarly simple function: to represent the world.
One might express the view using the words of Bertrand Russell, in his intro-
188 MICHAEL MORRIS

duction to the Tractatus: “The essential business of language is to assert or deny

facts” (Wittgenstein, 1922, p. 8). The stubborn flat-footedness of this view
makes (F1) hard to make sense of: it allows no space for any contemplative
dwelling on a scene or phrase—and certainly none for any kind of whimsy.
There is at least a prima facie problem with (F2) also. It is hard to see
how a fictional name can be meaningful in virtue of being correlated with an
object, if there is no object there. We may then be led to adopt a descriptive
account of fictional names, combined with a Russellian account of descrip-
tions. But then every fictional work will be understood to assert the existence
of objects with certain properties—and every fictional work will be a lie.
What difference might a use theory make? On the face of it, such a theo-
ry seems to have a simple way of accommodating the apparently problematic
features of fiction. This way of using a use-gives-it-life interpretation to deal
with the problems is presented with admirable economy by Wolfgang
Huemer in his introduction to The Literary Wittgenstein (2004). He seems to
have two things to say about (F1). First, because there is no insistence that
language has a single basic function, there is no reason why literary uses of
language should be even prima facie problematic. Literary uses are just uses
among others, and the use-gives-it-life theorist will note with some satisfac-
tion that the list of language-games in the Philosophical Investigations in-
cludes: making up a story and reading one, acting in a play, and singing
rounds (2009, p. 23). Second, because there is no external constraint on lan-
guage of the kind upon which the referential theory insists, there is no reason
why literary uses of language should not be included among the various lin-
guistic activities that might determine a word’s meaning. If literary uses of
language are included here, then we can allow that the meaning of a word at
least includes whatever we need to suppose it to include in order to make
sense of literary uses.
There are also two things the use-gives-it-life interpretation can say to
accommodate feature (F2). First, because the use theory gives no special pri-
ority to sentences that can be true or false, which can be said to represent the
world, we are not forced to treat fiction as making a series of statements about
the world (which are likely to be false). Second, because words do not in
general need to be correlated with objects to be meaningful, there is no spe-
cial problem arising from the fact that there is nothing real for fictional names
to be correlated with.
These initial suggestions for using the use-gives-it-life interpretation to ac-
commodate the apparently problematic features of fiction seem attractive at first
sight. However, a second, more careful look reveals quite serious blemishes.
The problem with this treatment of (F1) is that, as it stands, it is com-
pletely unexplanatory. There is no sense at all that there might be any prob-
lem with literary uses of language, because literary uses of language are in-
cluded among the range of uses that are treated as unproblematic from the
outset, and taken for granted. But just as this approach finds no problem with
 Language, Fiction, and the Later Wittgenstein 189

literary uses of language, it finds nothing interesting about such uses either.
The loss of the sense of anything problematic goes with a loss of any sense of
wonder. With the loss of the sense of wonder, we also lose our sense of the
literary as literary. To have a sense of what is interesting and special about
literary language, we need to be able to make a contrast with more mundane
and flat-footed uses—with the asserting and denying of facts, for example.
Many versions of the use-gives-it-life interpretation avoid this problem,
but only by rediscovering the difficulty of accommodating (F1). There is a
widespread quasi-positivistic version of the use-gives-it-life interpretation, a
version quite closely allied to the ordinary-language school of philosophy. On
this version of the view, what gives words life is a particular kind of use: the
use of words in the practical business of everyday life—for communication,
we might say.
The meaning of words will not be grounded in correlations with objects,
as on the referential view, but it will be grounded in a restricted range of ac-
tivities, which satisfy antecedently determinate desires: that get things done,
we might say. We might think of getting blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams
assembled for some construction project (Wittgenstein, 2009, § 2), or buying
a certain number of red apples (ibid., § 1), or getting someone to stay roughly
in a certain place (ibid., § 71). Now we have a genuine sense of constraint,
and we can understand how an involvement in activities of this kind really
could give a word its meaning. But by the same token, we have left literary
language mysterious again, since literary language is not in general concerned
with getting things done, and it can only plausibly be counted as communica-
tive on an extended conception of communication (one involving several
people sharing something in common, rather than one person transmitting a
message to another).
The first attempt to solve the problem of fiction by means of the use-
gives-it-life interpretation faces difficulties with feature (F2) as well. The
problem this time is that it fails to acknowledge the similarity between the
language of fiction and uses of language to represent the real world. Although
authors of fiction commonly allow themselves time and space for certain lit-
erary flourishes, the form of sentences in fiction is not fundamentally differ-
ent from the form of sentences used to describe and otherwise engage with
the real world. Fictional names, in particular, whatever else they are, are at
least names: that is, they look like words that stand for people and things. We
cannot simply extend to the case of fictional names Wittgenstein’s general
thought that not every word needs to be understood as being meaningful in
virtue of being correlated with an object. Wittgenstein’s concern is with the
oddity of applying this simple account of meaning to certain kinds of words—
words like “five,” and “red,” for example (the logical connectives were spe-
cifically excluded from this kind of treatment even in the Tractatus). But fic-
tional names are certainly names—names for people, and cities, and coun-
tries. It is hard to make sense of any activity that might give meaning to
190 MICHAEL MORRIS

names for people, cities, and countries, without those who engage in that ac-
tivity somehow supposing that there are such people, cities, and countries.
The use-gives-it-life interpretation sees the later Wittgenstein as liberat-
ing us from the shackles that the restrictive constraints of the referential theo-
ry had imposed upon us, and in the heady first moments of freedom, it is
tempting to think that we have been released from every philosophical prob-
lem. Unfortunately, reality soon returns to lower our spirits.

4. A Second Response: Harrison and Stevens

It is natural to understand Harrison as offering a different, and deeper, way of

using the use-gives-it-life interpretation to make sense of fiction. It differs
from the initial suggestion we have just considered perhaps most obviously in
relation to feature (F1), but also ultimately in relation to (F2). (Harrison does
not actually address (F2) directly in his text, but the title of “Imagined Worlds
and the Real One: Plato, Wittgenstein and Literary Mimesis” (2004) suggests
the direct application of his general line of thought that I consider.) He brings
to play a serious positive view of what it is for language to be literary. His
view suggests a natural way of allowing that sentences in fiction have the
same form as sentences outside fiction and that fictional names are genuinely
names, while apparently avoiding some of the problems the referential theory
has over (F2).
Harrison follows the general line of the use-gives-it-life view in taking
the distinctive move of the later Wittgenstein to be to reject a referential ap-
proach to language, as it is understood by the use-gives-it-life interpretation.
Such a referential approach takes our use of words to be constrained by “real-
ity,” as Harrison puts it (ibid., pp. 92–93). This is not only vulnerable to the
arguments presented in the opening sections of the Philosophical Investiga-
tions, on Harrison’s view, but also undermined by careful attention to works
of literature. Harrison takes as his example a passage at the end of Virginia
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), in which Lily Briscoe makes the final
mark on the canvas she has been painting: what constrains her in use of paint
is compared with what constrains Virginia Woolf in her use of words. But,
Harrison says:

Lily is not looking at the garden; she is looking, with an “intensity” suf-
ficient to exclude all else, at the painting. So, one is inclined to say,
whatever constrains her in placing the stroke must be internal to the
painting. (2004, p. 92)

In taking the later Wittgenstein to be making a point like this, Harrison sees
Wittgenstein as an ally of a certain movement in literary theory and some
associated French philosophy—although without endorsing the most extreme
of the views to be found there. In particular, Harrison says:
 Language, Fiction, and the Later Wittgenstein 191

What the argument establishes is merely the appositeness of Maurice

Merleau-Ponty’s observation, “In a sense language never has anything
to do with anything but itself,” as a remark about literary language. Lit-
erary language has in a sense, like language in general, nothing to do
with anything but itself. (2004, p. 93)

But Harrison claims that it does not follow from this that literature is not con-
cerned with reality. This can only be possible if the reality with which litera-
ture is concerned is in some sense “internal” to language—something to be
contrasted with the “extralinguistic reality” (2004, p. 95) to which
“referentialism” is committed. Harrison says:

We are creatures of language—in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “men made

out of words.” Insofar as it is a mode of self-examination undertaken
through the examination of the language which, through its underlying
practices, constitutes us, literature is necessarily taken up with the dou-
ble investigation . . . of its own inherited language and of reality (our
reality; human reality) through the investigation of the modes of en-
gagement with the world involved in the founding practices of that lan-
guage. (Ibid., p.103)

What does this mean? If we are creatures of language, we—the entities re-
ferred to by the word “we” as we now use it—are things that are not visible,
even in principle, to someone who does not understand language. Instead, the
word “we”—as we now use it—refers to entities that are in some sense de-
pendent on the language to which the word belongs, with all its characteristic
and constituent activities.
How does this address the problems that referentialism has with fiction?
The problems were these:

(F1) Fiction is literary (that is, it is art-writing);

(F2) In fiction events are related that did not really happen and that
concern people and things that do not really exist.

It looks as if the key to Harrison’s solution is provided by a phrase in a sen-

tence I have already quoted: “Literary language has in a sense, like language in
general, nothing to do with anything but itself (Harrison, 2004, p. 93; emphasis
added). Harrison’s treatment of the problem of fiction depends on reducing the
contrast between literary language and language in general. If language were in
general concerned with extralinguistic reality, with literary language being con-
cerned, by contrast, just with “our reality; human reality,” then the claim to
have shown that literary language, while being concerned with nothing but
itself, is still concerned with reality, would seem rather empty.
192 MICHAEL MORRIS

That being so, we can sketch the outline of Harrison’s response to (F1),
and a Harrisonian response to (F2), as follows: First, Harrison has a distinc-
tive and plausible characterization of what it is that makes fiction literary.
Literary language is concerned with nothing but itself. This makes sense of
dwelling on language—on the particular details of ways of writing, of ques-
tions of the choice of words and word-order, of the whole issue of style. This
kind of focus is indeed distinctively literary; it cannot be understood unless
language itself is the concern of literary language.
Once we have what is distinctive of the literary, there is no special prob-
lem provided by the very existence of literary language or by fiction being
literary—(F1)—, since, on Harrison’s account, the distinctive feature of liter-
ary language, the fact that literary language concerns nothing but itself, is
already provided for in the “founding practices” of language. It is provided
for by the fact that language in general is only able to investigate reality by
being concerned with nothing but itself, because the reality in question—our
reality; human reality—is internal to language.
Similarly, there can be no special or deep problem with (F2), because
the things that make up reality—our reality; human reality, not extralinguistic
reality—are themselves, like us, made out of words. The key to this version
of the use-gives-it-life interpretation is not just that use is involved: it is, ra-
ther, that use—the whole network of practices with which we are involved in
virtue of speaking a language—is so multifarious and all-embracing that it
shapes our reality, and provides us with a world to inhabit.

5. The Problem

The problem is that real people are not made out of words. Harrison’s solu-
tion to the problems of fiction is bought at the cost of giving up the reality of
real people and real events. Of course, in saying this, I am declaring allegiance
to a realism much stronger than anything Harrison would countenance. It
strikes me as just not credible that the things we see around us—the things that
we can routinely describe—are creatures of language. The very phrase “our
reality” strikes me as involving a kind of hubris, a form of blasphemy.
But more than a brute metaphysical disagreement exists between us. I
believe that Harrison’s approach fails just as a solution to the problems of
fiction. I also think the general metaphysical picture to which he is committed
is at least close to incoherence.
The problem for Harrison’s approach as a solution to the problems of
fiction is that, insofar as it works at all, it works by reducing the contrast be-
tween literary and non-literary language. As we have already seen in the use
of this tactic by other holders of the use-gives-it-life interpretation, this ends
up removing the problem of the literary only by removing its special interest.
We only have reason to think that literary language is concerned with nothing
 Language, Fiction, and the Later Wittgenstein 193

but itself, because, on Harrison’s view, language in general is concerned with

nothing but itself. But now we have lost the sense of what it is that makes the
language in which literary fiction is written itself something of special con-
cern. We have lost all explanation of the particular way in which literary lan-
guage calls attention to itself and permits time to be spent on itself without
that being a distraction from the purposes of literature. If it were no distrac-
tion to be concerned with nothing but the language only because it is in being
concerned with the language that we are concerned with reality, that would
apply equally to all discourse—even to the most flat-footed fact-stating or
fact-denying discourse.
Similarly, if even we—the readers and writers of fiction—are made out
of words, what space is there left for the creatures of fiction—the characters,
places, and events in novels—to be less real than us? Here we seem to have
lost that freedom from simple constraint by reality that is at the heart of what-
ever it is that lets fiction do what it does.
Furthermore, in saying that language in general is concerned with noth-
ing but itself, in the sense he has in mind, Harrison seems to be committed to
an awkward form of Kantianism—a kind of idealism that not only dares not,
but strictly cannot, speak its name. The problem is one to which Wittgenstein
seems to have been alert in the Tractatus: “For what solipsism means, is quite
correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself” (1922, 5.62). If our lan-
guage concerns only our reality, a reality made out of words, then it cannot be
used to refer to any more real reality. This creates a double problem for Harri-
son. First, his own term “extralinguistic reality” cannot refer to the reality to
which it is meant to refer: it is meant to refer to the reality a realist believes
in, but if our language is only concerned with a reality made out of words, it
cannot do that. So it is hard to see how Harrison can so much as identify the
mistaken position with which he contrasts the better-informed late-
Wittgensteinian view. Even capital letters are not large enough to stride
across that gap.
Second, this means that the apparently better-informed view itself can-
not be stated either. First, the view seems only intelligible by contrast with the
more realist view, and our reality is only clearly ours in virtue of a contrast
with that extralinguistic reality that is absolutely not ours. Further, the terms
in which the less real reality is characterized depend on the reality of the more
real reality to have any bite. If we are made out of words, in the relevant
sense, the words must be more real than we are, and the making has to be an
operation that takes place in extralinguistic reality. Similarly, for us to be
creatures of language, our language must be more real than us, and the pro-
cess of creation more original than anything that we can talk about, if lan-
guage in general is concerned with nothing but itself.
194 MICHAEL MORRIS

6. Another Interpretation

There are two ways of reacting to this. Either we can say that the change in
Wittgenstein’s philosophy between the Tractatus and the Philosophical In-
vestigations provides no special help with understanding the problem of fic-
tion, or we can suggest that the characterization of that change provided by
the use-gives-it-life interpretation does not get to the heart of the difference. I
want to suggest that the second way is the better one.
There are, in fact, independent reasons for being suspicious of the char-
acterization of the change in Wittgenstein’s philosophy provided by the use-
gives-it-life interpretation. Recall that to get a clear difference between a ref-
erential view on the one hand and one that makes crucial use of the notion of
use on the other, we had to understand the referential view in a certain way.
We had to suppose that the world, quite independently of language, imposes
constraints on what can be meant in any language. All that has to be done is
for words to be correlated in some way with a network of possible meanings
that is fixed entirely independently of language. This picture involves two
distinct claims:

(R1) The meaning of words is established by correlation;

(R2) What words may be correlated with is fixed entirely independently
of language.

On Harrison’s account, the fundamental change in Wittgenstein’s view rests

on the fact that the early Wittgenstein accepted (R2) and the later Wittgen-
stein rejected it. This is in line with a broad strand of Wittgenstein interpreta-
tion that takes the early Wittgenstein to be in some way strongly realist (see,
for example, Pears, 1987–1988), while the later Wittgenstein is taken to be
some form of idealist (see, for example, Williams, 1981).
Unfortunately, it seems clear that at least half of this picture is wrong: I
think it is clear that the early Wittgenstein was some kind of idealist. Recall
again that famous line in the Tractatus, which I quoted earlier: “For what
solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself”
(1922, 5.62). Earlier, I was concerned with the second half of this remark—
the part that claims that the relevant form of idealism (here called solipsism)
cannot be said. But we should not forget the first half: Wittgenstein’s confi-
dent, if ultimately self-refuting, claim that what the solipsist means “is quite
correct.” There is really no credible reading of that that allows the Wittgen-
stein of the Tractatus to be the kind of transcendental realist that the use-
gives-it-life takes him to be.
If this is right, then the change between the early and the late Wittgen-
stein cannot be that the early accepted, while the late rejected (R2). But notice
that the “referentialist” view is committed to two distinctive claims, not one:
to (R1) as well as (R2). I suggest that the real difference between the early
 Language, Fiction, and the Later Wittgenstein 195

and the late Wittgenstein is that the early Wittgenstein accepted, while the
late Wittgenstein rejected (R1).
We should note, first, that (R1) is compatible with idealism: (R1) can be
maintained while denying (R2). The idealism in question would take the
world of meanings with which words are correlated to be itself no more than
a shadow of language—a kind of projection of language. This would give us
a form of linguistic Kantianism—or perhaps, if we are concerned with the
tendency of such a Kantianism to undermine itself, a form of linguistic Hege-
lianism. Not only is such a combination of views—acceptance of (R1) with
the denial of (R2)—possible: it is plausible that it is just such a combination
that Wittgenstein held at the time of the Tractatus.
What is it that forces us to think that the meaning of words—in general,
not just for special cases—is established by correlation? (Why should we
think (R1) is true?) We might recall here one of the founding texts of the use-
gives-it-life interpretation: “Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it
life?—In use it lives. Is it there that it has living breath within it? Or is the use
its breath?” (Wittgenstein, 2009, p. 432) Let me contrast two different inter-
pretations of this passage. I will call one a “framework-endorsing” interpreta-
tion, (FE), and the other a “framework-rejecting” interpretation, (FR). The
framework-endorsing interpretation accepts at face-value the appearances
reported in the first sentence in this quote from Wittengenstein:

(FE) Every sign (every word) by itself is dead; it is given life

(meaning) by use.

The framework-rejecting interpretation rejects the appearance reported in the

first sentence; it might then be elaborated as follows:

(FR) Words themselves are not dead; by the time you have a word,
you have a living, meaningful, thing that has a place in a
practice and a tradition.

The use-gives-it-life interpretation adopts (FE): it takes use to be something

that gives a meaning to something that is, in itself, dead, which in itself is
nothing but a blank token.
What would it be for use to give meaning to something that in itself is
nothing but a blank token? It is almost impossible to understand this in any
other way than as effecting some kind of correlation between a word and
something external to language—or at least, that language. We may extend
our conception of the character of the external thing: we may no longer think
it is merely a matter of correlating words with objects, for example. We may
include roles perhaps: in being given a use, a blank token is assigned a role.
But here the role is exactly as independent of any particular language as an
object might be: it stands there, in some sense, already ready to be assigned as
196 MICHAEL MORRIS

the role for some word to play. We can take an idealist view of roles, just as
we can of objects: we can suppose that the role is something that is in some
sense a projection of a linguistic possibility.
It looks, then, as if what really commits us to (R1) is the thesis that
words by themselves are dead signs: the view expressed by the framework-
endorsing interpretation of Wittgenstein’s statement (ibid.). There are two
reasons for thinking that this Wittgenstein rejected this whole picture at the
time of the Philosophical Investigations. The first is in the language of the
quote under examination itself. As the new translation makes especially clear,
this whole section deals with a conception of the relationship between word
and use that is modeled on a traditional, broadly Cartesian, conception of the
relation between body and soul. Just as, on such a Cartesian conception, the
body is understood as something that is not itself animate, but needs the addi-
tion of a soul, so here the sign is conceived of as something that is dead on its
own, and needs life breathed into it. Given the general stance of Wittgen-
stein’s later philosophy toward Cartesianism, it is not credible that in pictur-
ing like this the conception of language that is taken for granted on the
framework-endorsing interpretation, he is himself endorsing that conception.
Furthermore, if we look back at the early sections of the Philosophical
Investigations, we find a special preoccupation with a picture of language that
tends to assimilate all words to names. Note that the objection is not merely
that the picture in question is a simplification: that would apply whatever the
simplification was. The objection is that all language is understood on the
model of this one very particular kind of word—names. Nor does this seem to
be a syntactical point: Wittgenstein is happy to allow that there can be names,
in the relevant sense, for all sorts of different kinds of thing. The person with
whom he is concerned, he supposes, will be thinking “primarily of nouns like
‘table,’ ‘chair,’ ‘bread,’ and of people’s names, and only secondarily of the
names of certain actions and properties” (Wittgenstein, 2009, § 1).
Well, what is it that makes all these words names—or at least makes
them all seem like names? Here is a natural suggestion: they all seem like
names because it is tempting to think that their meaning can be given to them
by correlation. We suppose that we have, independently of any particular
language, a clear conception of the kind of thing to which these words are
assigned. If we treat all words as conforming to this model, we will think that
all that needs to be done in learning a language is to work out to which of the
independently clear things we might find around us the words of that lan-
guage are, in fact, assigned. (It is therefore no accident that exactly this is
what Augustine of Hippo is assuming in Confessions 1.8, quoted by Wittgen-
stein at the beginning of Philosophical Investigations.) That means that it is
natural to treat words for which this kind of account seems plausible as noth-
ing but blank tokens—as signs that by themselves are dead, which only get to
be meaningful by being given a use.
 Language, Fiction, and the Later Wittgenstein 197

I think it is clear, then, that Wittgenstein rejects (FE) and (R1). Unfortu-
nately, what is not quite so clear is whether he accepts (FR)—the positive
alternative view of the relation between word and use that prevents the kind
of problem found with the Augustinian view from even arising. The reason why
this is not so clear is that it looks as if we cannot think that words are signs at all
without accepting something like the conception that the framework-endorsing
interpretation takes for granted. If we think that words are signs, we think that at
bottom we are dealing with things that are blank tokens only given meaning by
some kind of additional activity. It is not clear that Wittgenstein ever distanced
himself enough from the view that words are signs.

7. Harrison and Signs

At this point, an attentive reader of Harrison’s “Imagined Worlds and the

Real One” (2004) may think that I have done him an injustice. The second
section of that paper begins with these words:

Our gut feeling as a culture is that a language occupied solely with lan-
guage cannot be occupied with reality because language itself is empty
of reality, is a mere notation, a flatus vocis [literally, the breath of voice;
a sound without correlated objective reality], or a game of marks on pa-
per. It is this conviction, and others parallel to it, which renders our atti-
tude to literature, as to all the arts, so profoundly ambiguous, and makes
us perennially uncertain whether art in general is one of the glories of
our civilization, or something debilitating: a confidence-trick, a delusion
or secret vice. (Ibid., p. 94).

Is this not precisely a rejection of the view that words are merely blank to-
kens—a rejection, indeed, of the view that words are signs?
It is precisely that; precisely, in fact, what it should be. It is one of the
great achievements of the paper that it sees through to this key point. My
complaint is merely that Harrison, having once gained the crucial insight, is
not able to hold it consistently in view.
Harrison is concerned to contrast the view he opposes with a position,
that, with studied looseness, I will describe as the view that reality is internal
to language. But having introduced the view loosely, let me now quickly
tighten it up. If I say that reality is internal to language, I may be saying either
something about language, or something about reality. Let us characterize the
view about language like this:

(LR) There is only language once reality is involved.

And we can characterize the view about reality like this:

198 MICHAEL MORRIS

(RL) There is only reality (our reality) once language is involved.

What Harrison needs is (LR). What he wants is for a concern with lan-
guage to be already inevitably a concern with reality. That is how literature,
in which language is concerned with itself, can nevertheless be concerned
with reality. For that we need (LR): (RL) is simply irrelevant. Again, if we
are to deny that language is “a mere notation, a flatus vocis,” it is (LR) that
we need—not (RL). But as we have seen, Harrison ends up claiming that
we—the writers and readers of literature—are creatures of language—in Wal-
lace Stevens’s phrase ‘men made out of words”’ (2004, p. 103). This is (RL),
not (LR).
What has happened here? An uncharitable view would be that Harrison
has simply made a slip: he has simply inadvertently shifted from one reading
of the loose formulation “reality is internal to language” to the other. I think
this uncharitable view is not plausible. For one thing, the formulation that
reality is internal to language is my own and corresponds to nothing in Harri-
son’s text. Furthermore, there is no obvious place in his text where we can see
the slip being made—the arrow’s direction being switched, as it were.
I think that what has happened is that Harrison has underestimated the
extent of the upheaval involved in fully endorsing (LR) and fully rejecting the
view that language is a mere notation, a flatus vocis. There is evidence of this
within his text; there is also independent reason to make such an underestima-
tion both unsurprising and forgivable.
If we give up the view that words are at bottom blank tokens—if we
give up the view that words get their meaning by some kind of correlation or
assignment—we have to give up almost everything that anyone has ever
thought about language when is has been considered theoretically. We cannot
think that words hook onto the world. We cannot think that words express
thoughts, as expression is ordinarily understood. We cannot think that words
are words for things, or for anything else: that for-relation is just a relation of
correlation or assignment. Moving closer to philosophical theory, we cannot
think that the meaning of words is a matter of their having reference, however
abstractly that is conceived. This is not to say that words do not have refer-
ence, just that that fact is not a fundamental fact about their being meaningful.
A crucial section of Harrison’s paper suggests that he has not distanced
himself enough from the picture he officially rejects. He expresses what he
takes to be a key feature of Wittgenstein’s later view as follows:

What makes it possible to formulate sentences that correctly describe re-

ality is the multifarious range of ways in which reality is engaged by the
web of practices that determine the sense and reference of the terms em-
ployed by those sentences. A natural language does not, that is, encoun-
ter reality only by way of the relationship between a referring expression
 Language, Fiction, and the Later Wittgenstein 199

and its referendum: it is already multifariously connected to reality at

the level of the practices which are what alone enable us to make the re-
lationship between referring expression and referendum, proposition and
truth-value, determinate in the first place. (Ibid., p. 102)

Notice, first, the conventional endorsement here of the Fregean notions of

sense and reference. We should recall that Fregean sense only needs to be
introduced in the first place because of the implausible consequences of re-
stricting the resources of a semantic theory to Fregean reference: sense is said
to be “expressed” by words and sentences, and is used to explain how there
can be some difference in meaning between co-referential expressions. But
this is a resource we only need to bring in against the background of a pre-
sumption that the key thing in an expression’s meaningfulness is its having a
reference. That presumption belongs with the view that words are signs,
blank tokens that get meaning by association or assignment. If we allow that
words are things with a life of their own in the traditions to which they be-
long, it is unclear why it should ever occur to us that two words might have
the same meaning.
I think it is clear in both the uses of the notion of reference in this pas-
sage that Harrison continues to think of the determination of reference as the
decisive stage in a word’s having meaning. What has changed is not the cen-
trality of reference—the link between a word and its object (or even, in an
austerely traditionalist Fregean moment, between a sentence and its truth-
value)—but the way in which reference is determined. It is now understood to
be determined not by the force of a constraint from extralinguistic reality,
which presents itself with joints bared to the knife, all ready for reference, but
by a web of practices that determines a reality to be referred to at the same
time as it creates a language to refer to it.
This has, I think, just one natural diagnosis. Having begun by attempting
to hold (LR) in opposition to the view of language as a mere notation, a flatus
vocis, Harrison has found himself re-inscribing the core commitments of the
very view he is officially opposing. (It is a delicate question whether this ex-
planation also holds for the parallel idealism to be found in Word and World
[Hanna and Harrison, 2004], according to which everything we talk about is a
“linguistic construct.” In that work, Patricia Hanna and Harrison are also con-
tending with various forms of skepticism about meaning; and anti-realism is a
not uncommon response to skepticism.)
Harrison finds a way of preserving something like (LR), by, in effect,
counting language twice. Language is first—in line with the traditional con-
ception of sense and reference that has not been abandoned—understood
once again as a system of signs (in effect, blank tokens). Here we have some-
thing that can still be conceived in terms of correlation and assignment. But we
now need some way of understanding how language might only be language
once reality is involved, so we need another way of thinking of language: this
200 MICHAEL MORRIS

time language is the network of practices that underpins the correlation and
assignment in virtue of which the system of signs is meaningful. In order now
to re-establish the contrast with the view that is being rejected, the rejected
view is interpreted as involving a commitment to a form of transcendental
realism. That, in turn, only provides the contrast it is meant to if Harrison’s
own view embraces a form of idealism—(RL).
If I am right in this, Harrison does indeed embrace a form of the use-
gives-it-life interpretation, as I have been suggesting all along. The problem is
that he has not really abandoned the traditional ways of thinking about lan-
guage—in terms of sense and reference, for example—that are only really in-
telligible if one thinks of language precisely as a mere notation, a flatus vocis.
I said that in addition to the internal evidence in the text, that this is
what has happened. There is external evidence that suggests that this is both
unsurprising and forgivable. The external evidence is the example of Wittgen-
stein himself. As I said in the last section, Wittgenstein seems never to have
distanced himself from the view that words are signs in the way that his diag-
nosis of the faults in the Augustinian picture would seem to require him to.

8. Literary Language and Persons Made Out of Words

One of the unfortunate effects of the re-inscription of the traditional view of

words is that we lose what is special about literature in general and fiction in
particular. But let us re-consider Harrison’s suggestion that literary language
is concerned with itself. This time, let us insist that this is distinctive of liter-
ary language, and is not true of language in general. If we think that language
is a mere notation, a flatus vocis, we will find it hard to make good the idea
that literary language is concerned with itself. What would it be for any form
of language to be concerned with itself, if this view were right? It could only
be for it to be concerned, for example, with the sound of words when they are
spoken, or with their shape when they are written. We are given the following
strange picture of the contrast between literary and non-literary language. In
non-literary language—flat-footed fact-stating discourse, for example—we
will not be concerned at all with the shape or sound of words. We will just be
concerned with whatever is assigned to words as their meaning: their refer-
ence, perhaps, or the concepts that they are supposed to express. And then,
when we deal with literary language, our gaze will have to swivel round, to
consider just the shape and sound of the words themselves. But, of course, this
is absurdly little on which to spend our time. Once we have gotten beyond
some superficial patterns on the page (such as we might notice in some Sté-
phane Mallarmé poems, for example), or some trivial points of assonance or
rhythm when texts are spoken, there is nothing more for us to dwell on. More-
over, these effects of the surface of the words have nothing to do with their
 Language, Fiction, and the Later Wittgenstein 201

meaning, so we can only attend to them by forgetting the meaning, or else pair
them up with meaning by way of some simple relation such as resemblance.
I think this shows how useful Harrison’s suggestion that literary language
is concerned with itself really is—at least if we allow that literary language is
distinctive in being concerned with itself. Suppose Harrison is right in this.
Then think what there would have to be in words—there already in them, not
added to them by association or assignment—for us to be able to spend any
time concerned with the words themselves, and more generally, with the
manner of writing, rather than just with what is said. What must there be there
for us to dwell on? What must it be capable of doing for the exercise of read-
ing literature, and returning to it, to have any value?
This is not the place to offer any significant development of the theme,
but we can see here how we might begin the task of understanding what
words might be, if they are not mere blank tokens, mere signs whose meaning
is allocated to them. We will ultimately have to reverse the usual conception
of the contrast between literary and non-literary language. In all language,
what has meaning will always be the word—the full living thing, with its
meaning and tradition already part of it. That this is always there in the word
allows the word itself to be the object of our concern when we attend to lit-
erature. That much is unproblematic—we no longer need to motivate a com-
plete re-orientation, or a focus on superficial features of sound or shape. The
problem now will not be literary language, but non-literary language. We will
need to explain how we can ignore all that when we engage in the flat-footed
business of stating the facts.
None of this requires any relaxation of the most robust realism about the
reality that we are able to describe. Once we abandon (R1)—the thesis that
words get their meaning by correlation—we do not need to think that reality
must come jointed exactly as some language is articulated. So realism need
not be absurd: we do not need to believe that the world itself is miraculously
so arranged as to make grammar possible. Moreover, because we are aban-
doning (R1), we do not need to think that we can only describe a world that is
as it would have to be if language were meaningful through correlation with
it. Working this out in detail would take more time than we have to spend
here. But there is no obstacle in principle to understanding how literary writ-
ing, by calling attention to itself, can enable us to understand a reality that is
radically independent of it, just as the painter is able to reveal something
about a radically independent world by using paint whose texture and brush-
work cannot be ignored.
At no point do we need to suppose that we, the writers and readers of
literature, are creatures of language, persons made out of words. If there is
anything for which these descriptions are appropriate, it is surely just the
people in fiction—the people made up by authors, who are the direct objects
202 MICHAEL MORRIS

of our concern when we read fiction, just as the woman in a painting is the
direct object of our gaze when we look at the painting. But these people are
not real: real people are not made out of words.
 Epilogue

REFLECTIONS AND REPLIES

Bernard Harrison
1. Introduction

The eleven papers assembled here offer, at times, suggestions that tend in
valuable ways to illuminate or extend one or another aspect of my work. At
others, they suggest telling objections to the entire project, or at least to my
way of conducting it.
My job in this concluding chapter is to examine and to relate to one an-
other suggestions of the first sort, and to reply to the second sort as best I can.
Two of the latter, by Dennis Patterson and Michael Morris are sufficiently
fundamental to threaten, or appear to threaten, the entire enterprise. There-
fore, they need to be answered right away, at the outset of the discussion.
Because of that, this chapter will invert the order of the Table of Contents. I
shall begin, that is to say, by discussing the five papers on questions of mean-
ing, ontology, realism, and relativism collected under the heading “Language
and Practice,” move on to those occupied mainly with issues in moral philos-
ophy, and end with those mainly on the philosophy of literature, grouped un-
der the heading “Literature and Reality.”

2. Language and Practice

The distinguishing feature of my work, I have suggested here, is its commit-

ment to showing that culture, as well as extra-human nature, deals in realities:
is not just a realm of smoke and mirrors, wishful thinking, or “dreamwork”
(Donald Davidson’s phrase; 1978, p. 31). In some sense, then, it is committed
to realism.
Since the choice between realism and idealism (or anti-realism) enters
into a number of philosophical debates, “realism” in philosophy can mean
various things in various contexts. As I shall argue here, Patricia Hanna and I
are committed in a number of contexts of debate to a realism that is robust
enough to satisfy even a realist of Michael Morris’s stamp. On the other hand,
in Word and World (2004), we certainly commit ourselves to one major ver-
sion of anti-realism: anti-realism about concepts. We argue that concepts, or
“meanings,” are entirely creatures of language and that the natural world, the
world outside language, is conceptually unstructured.
Any such view is commonly supposed to entail absurd consequences. If
concepts were in no sense transcribed, or “read off,” from the natural world,
204 BERNARD HARRISON

but were simply “linguistic constructs,” then how, conceptual realists ask,
could they serve to describe the natural world? What bearing could they have
on anything outside language itself?
Patterson and Morris both level objections of this general type. I shall
try to answer them in that order.
To begin with, we need to recognize that if it is problematic to regard
concepts as linguistic constructs, it is also problematic to regard them as tran-
scriptions from nature. The difficult philosophical question, recognized by
Immanuel Kant and recently brought back into the philosophical mainstream
by John McDowell (1994), is to say how, exactly, human “spontaneity” in the
constitution of concepts can result in the creation of a conceptual scheme ca-
pable of describing a world whose nature owes nothing whatsoever to human
creative activity.
Our aim in Word and World was also to answer this question, though in
a way quite different from McDowell’s. Part of our answer is that a language
is not primarily a system of linguistic elements (words, phrases, sentences)
but a system of practices. The meanings of linguistic expressions are a func-
tion of the roles assigned to them in practices. The relationship between lan-
guage and extra-linguistic reality, on the other hand is not forged at the level
of linguistic expressions, but is a function of the innumerable ways in which
practices engage and interact with the natural world. Concepts are, therefore,
not read off from the natural world, but are creatures of that species of human
ingenuity that displays itself in the devising of practices, including the roles in
their conduct assigned to linguistic expressions. The concepts thus invented
are plainly then, linguistic constructs. But that in no way prevents them con-
necting us, as thinkers, with the extra-linguistic world that for the most part
provides the topic of our thoughts; for they are primarily practical constructs
rather than purely intellectual ones.
Patterson sees the force of this move and sees also that one of its conse-
quences is, in effect, to reverse the order of dependencies normally presumed
to hold between the concepts of truth and meaning.
Philosophers since Gottlob Frege have commonly held that the concept
of meaning is to be explicated in terms of that of truth. On the contrary, in
Word and World, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hanna and I contend that
the notion of meaning is logically prior to that of truth, and that the concept of
practice logically prior to both.
Patterson takes this move to entail the absurd consequence that the ex-
istence (or better perhaps, the obtaining) of a “truth” p, must be regarded as
conditional upon the prior existence of the practices in terms of which the
component expressions of p acquire meaning. Thus, he suggests, reversing
the conventional relative logical dependence of the notions of truth and mean-
ing must require us to hold, absurdly, that prior to the point at which it be-
came possible to formulate the proposition, “X’s death was caused by the HIV
virus” no truth so formulable can have existed (or obtained).
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 205

To see that nothing of the sort need follow from the reversal of the logi-
cal priorities conventionally supposed to relate truth and meaning, at least in
the form proposed, one need only look more closely at the reasons offered for
it in Word and World: since these are what determine the nature of the specif-
ic type of reversal at stake.
The argument, stated at length elsewhere (Harrison 1996, 1999a; Hanna
and Harrison 2004), but here (I hope) reduced to telegraphic brevity, goes
like this: One cannot possess the concept of truth without also possessing that
of falsity. To possess either, it is necessary to possess the concept of some-
thing to which either the predicate “true” or the predicate “false” must belong.
That something can only be an assertion; that is, something that possesses
“assertoric force.” Evidently, nothing “in nature” or “in experience“ possess-
es assertoric force. The world offered to experience contains many interesting
objects: trees, waterfalls, stars, tigers, human beings, and so on. What it does
not contain is anything in the nature of assertions, “facts,” or Fregean
“thoughts” (Frege, 1956). Anything that does possess assertoric force, and
therefore the capacity to take either the predicate true or the predicate false
must be, therefore, a product of human ingenuity.
How is that ingenuity to be exercised? What sort of thing does possess as-
sertoric force, and what, given its nature, must be involved in its constitution?
Manifestly, the only entities that possess assertoric force are statements, or
propositions. But that identification merely pushes the question one stage back,
since the notion of a statement, or a proposition, is merely the notion of what is
asserted by (the assertoric force of) a sentence in some context of utterance.
In itself, a sentence is merely a string of signs, written or spoken, and a
string of signs, even if the signs in question are names, for instance, need not
be a bearer of assertoric force.
Thus, the question before us resolves itself into the question, “What
converts a string of signs S into a bearer of assertoric force?” A long tradition
stemming from Frege teaches that the key to doing that is to specify truth
conditions for S.
But how is that to be done? Suppose we take the obvious step of listing
conditions under which the statement putatively made by S would come out
true. For any such set of conditions, a number of competing interpretations of
the meaning (the assertoric force) of S will offer themselves, with each such
proposal corresponding, in effect, to a different hypothesis concerning the
falsity conditions of S. We cannot resolve this uncertainty by presenting (any
finite list of) examples of circumstances under which S would come out false.
For what one needs to know, in order to resolve the ambiguity and pin down
the meaning of S to a single interpretation, is not what does, as a matter of
empirical fact, from time to time, serve as a falsity condition for S. What we
need to know is, rather, the limits of what could possibly, in principle, given
the meaning of S, count as a falsity condition for S.
206 BERNARD HARRISON

We need, in short, a way of specifying the truth conditions of S that au-

tomatically and by the same token, specifies its falsity conditions. An obvious
solution lies ready to hand. It consists in the suggestion, which, as I have ar-
gued extensively elsewhere (Harrison 1996, 1999a), I take to be Wittgen-
stein’s, that the truth (and falsity) conditions of a sentence S are so specified
in the act of assigning S a role in a practice (Sprachspiel). Thus, if the prac-
tice is linear measurement and S is the sentence, “X is four inches long,” then
explaining, in the context of the practice, what it is for such a sentence to be
true (that accurate measurement shows X to be that length in inches), auto-
matically determines what is for such a sentence to be false (for the accurate
measurement of X to return a different answer in inches).
This argument does indeed carry with it some startling consequences,
which, if not perhaps counter-intuitive, do at any rate run very sharply coun-
ter to some exceedingly deeply rooted philosophical dogmas. For a start, it
does indeed entail, as Patterson rightly notes, the consequence that the no-
tions of meaning and truth can only be explained relative to that of a practice.
The meaning (the assertoric content) of a sentence S is, on this account, only
to be established by assigning it a role in some practice. Since that process
involves specifying the truth and falsity conditions of S in terms of the results
returned by operating the practice in question, it appears to follow not only
that the notion of the meaning of a sentence is introduced via that of a prac-
tice, but also the notions of truth and falsity themselves. It seems to me that
none of these three notions—meaning, truth, falsity—are explicable inde-
pendently, but only relative to the logically primordial notion of a linguistic
practice, or, in Wittgenstein’s terminology, language-game.
Equally certainly the argument entails, contrary to a very long philo-
sophical tradition, that it is impossible to bestow meaning upon a linguistic
sign by “correlating” it or “associating” it, with some extra-linguistic constit-
uent or aspect of the real world (to give “red” say, a meaning by correlating it
with tomatoes or—British—mailboxes). One reason for that is that what we
define, in defining a name N, is always, in fact, a sentence, “This is called
‘N’”: a sentence for which, like any other, if we are to understand it, truth and
falsity conditions must be established, subject, of course, to the caveats en-
shrined in the above argument! This, I take it, catches part of what Wittgen-
stein intended by the remark, “One has already to know (or be able to do)
something in order to be capable of asking a thing’s name” (1997, I.31).
Though I think it can reasonably be contended that both of these conse-
quences are harmless, both of them can look, at least to a cursory glance, pretty
much mired in relativism, if they do not actually pass over the edge into an
outright—and unbelievable—linguistic idealism to the effect that all the things
of this world, persons, trees and the rest, are merely linguistic constructs.
This is exactly the kind of linguistic idealism of which my friend and
former Sussex colleague Michael Morris wishes to convict me. He says:
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 207

It strikes me as just not credible that the things we see around us—the
things that we can routinely describe—are creatures of language. The
very phrase “our reality” strikes me as involving a kind of hubris, a form
of blasphemy. (This volume, chap. 11, p. 192)

A little later on, in the course of proposing his alternative to my—and Witt-
genstein’s—wicked and blasphemous nonsense, he takes his stand firmly on
the truth of what I have been calling meaning-realism:

What would it be for use to give meaning to something that in itself is

nothing but a blank token? It is almost impossible to understand this in
any other way than as effecting some kind of correlation between a
word and something external to language—or at least, that language.
(Ibid., p. 195)

Unfortunately, the Wittgenstein-derived argument that I have just sketched

not only provides the alternative to the word-world correlation story that
Morris considers non-existent or—perhaps—inconceivable, but also shows
decisively that, and why, word-world correlation would not, and could not, do
the trick anyway! If that argument goes through, the idea of meaning con-
ceived as a relationship of correlation between a word and “something exter-
nal to language” is empty: a philosophical chimaera. There is just no such
thing as “meaning” in that sense; a sense, indeed, beloved of philosophers,
but one with little bearing on what we ordinarily understand by the word.
What constitutes meaning in the ordinary, everyday sense of the term
(the sense according to which knowing the meaning of N is a matter of know-
ing how to put N to work in discourse) are relationships holding between
words and the practices in whose conduct we have assigned them roles. The
relationship between language and reality, by contrast, is established—
according to us—not at the level of words or any other class of linguistic ex-
pressions, but at the level of practices. It consists in the relationships in which
practices, in virtue of what is involved in operating them, stand to the real,
worldly contexts in relation to which their operation proceeds. In short, the
relation between language and world is, as we argue in Word and World, not
a simple binary relationship between words and things. Rather, it is a triadic
relationship between words, practices, and things.
Must we, then, grit our teeth and relapse into linguistic idealism? No,
because nothing of the sort follows from the above argument. Its consequenc-
es are, on the contrary, in at least two ways, as we shall see, reassuringly real-
istic. First, it allows us to opt with a good intellectual conscience for a deeply
old-fashioned version of the correspondence theory of truth, of exactly the
type that Morris, unless I misread him, wishes to defend. To see why that is
so, we need only reflect on the fact that what commits us, via the above ar-
gument, to treating meaning, and more generally concepts as definable rela-
208 BERNARD HARRISON

tive only to practices is merely the need to specify truth conditions in a way
that simultaneously determines falsity conditions. Once both are specified,
they operate in the ordinary way to determine the truth or falsity of specific
statements in real contexts. In other words, what makes statements about trees
or persons true or false are the answers returned by whatever investigations of
trees or persons happen to be certified as relevant to the issue of truth or falsi-
ty by whatever practices determine the meanings, the assertoric contents, of
sentences capable of expressing the statements in question.
There is, then, no bar whatsoever, as far as the account we are advanc-
ing is concerned, to representing this state of affairs by saying that true state-
ments about trees (or whatever) correspond to (or correctly represent), the way
trees are, while false statements fail to do so. In other words, trees, along with
the rest of “the things we can routinely describe,” retain the independence of
language we intuitively ascribe to them. Treating concepts as linguistic con-
structs, that is to say, in no way involves treating as linguistic constructs the
items or aspects of natural reality that furnish the extensions of concepts.
Second, the argument summarized above opens the way to a refresh-
ingly robust realism concerning truth itself. My tone so far might suggest than
I am less sympathetic than in fact I am to Morris’s choice of the word “blas-
phemy” to characterize the kind of free-wheeling linguistic relativism he and I
both wish to resist. It is indeed a response that I share toward one in particular
of a number of currently popular versions of anti-realism about truth. Most
versions of the latter view are motivated by Michael Dummett’s arguments in
favor of what has come to be called the manifestation principle (1993, p.
37ff). The manifestation principle says that if attaching a meaning to a sen-
tence is a matter of knowing under what conditions statements made by it
come out true or false, then those conditions must be publicly manifestable:
that is, capable of being shown, or demonstrated, by one speaker to another.
Dummett argued that the manifestation principle is inconsistent with a realis-
tic conception of truth, according to which knowledge of the truth or falsity
of a statement may be inaccessible in principle to any observer. It can support
only a weaker, more epistemically modest conception of truth as “warranted
assertability.” The sting in the tail of this argument is that, for the latter con-
ception of truth, bivalence, the presumption that every statement must possess
a truth value, either true or false, is not preserved.
If all we mean by saying that a statement is true or false is merely that
its assertion or denial is warranted, then some statements, including many
statements concerning the past, will have to be dismissed as possessing no
truth value, either true or false, and hence no meaning. I share, in the case of
this doctrine, Morris’s sense that what goes on in philosophy seminars, while
possibly not “blasphemous,” may nonetheless carry with it some disturbing
implications. In the present case for example, while it might seem harmless to
suggest that a statement such as “Queen Elizabeth I consumed fresh figs for
breakfast on August 15, 1582” lacks a truth value, and hence, a meaning, it
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 209

seems altogether less harmless to say that statements about what may have
happened to particular persons in Treblinka or in the Gulag of the Kolyma
Tales (Shalamov, 1980), because unwarrantable either way, are therefore,
meaningless: obtain no purchase upon reality.
I share with Morris the sense that there is a kind of rock-bottom realism
on which one needs to keep a grip at such points in philosophical debate. In-
tuitively, one wants to say that, irrespective of the subtle reasoning of philos-
ophers, and even though the events in question have passed now beyond the
possibility of our ever, even in principle, coming to know the truth about
them, there is still a real truth about them to be known: that the people con-
cerned met, or failed to meet, this or that fate, in reality. One wants to say
also, again intuitively, that to abandon that belief is to abandon the belief in
reality itself.
Unless I am very much mistaken, this is also the burden of Dennis Patter-
son’s “conundrum.” He argues, in effect, that to treat truth not as a “primordi-
al” predicate, but as one that can be introduced intelligibly into discourse only
via the prior notion of a linguistic practice, entails, in effect, an anti-realism
about truth differing from Dummett’s in its origins, but not in its consequenc-
es. Patterson suggests that to treat truth as relative in that way would entail,
absurdly, that until we have the means of formulating, conceptually speaking,
statements of the form “X’s death was caused by HIV,” no such statement
could be true. Whereas, on the contrary, it is manifest that there can be, in na-
ture, “a truth of the matter for which we have yet to develop a vocabulary or
language game” (this volume, chap. 10, p. 182). He concludes:

I do not think Hanna and Harrison are idealists about meaning or about
the role of the external world in shaping our practices. Clearly, the out-
comes of our practices depend upon the way the world is and not our
techniques for interacting with it. Our practices are the bridge between
word and world. All of this seems right. And yet, I cannot shake off the
sense that there are truths about the world that escape our practices. That
is, truth is primordial. Hence, the conundrum. (Ibid., p. 184)

What is going wrong here, I suggest, is that, while Patterson sees, as he

puts it, that “Hanna and Harrison reject verificationism, the idea that the mean-
ing of our concepts is a function of the ways in which we verify or confirm
correct uses of them” (ibid., p. 183), he does quite see how radical a rejection
is involved. What we put in the place of verificationism is, as I suggested earli-
er in this section, the thought that what is essential to a grasp of the meaning
(the assertoric content) of a sentence S is not that we should actually be in a
position to warrant the assertion or denial of any statement of the form S. In-
stead, we need only be in a position to select out with certainty, from the flood
of natural conditions, those relevant to the truth of statements made by means
210 BERNARD HARRISON

of S, and also, by the same token (the token in question being the role of S in
some practice or other) those relevant to their falsity.
This shift in the foundations of logic is radical in its implications be-
cause it transforms the concepts of meaning, truth, and falsity from epistemic
concepts into purely (or perhaps better, merely) “logical” (or, as Wittgenstein
would have put it, “grammatical”) ones. One immediate consequence of the
shift is, of course, full-blooded realism concerning truth. If all that is involved
in grasping the meaning of a sentence is knowing how it fits into the practice
from which it derives its meaning, and in consequence being in a position to
determine at a stroke, and simultaneously, what natural conditions are rele-
vant, respectively, to its truth and to its falsity, and why, then knowledge of
meaning necessarily becomes timeless and context-free. Not only that; biva-
lence itself loses its supposed epistemic connections, to become a trivially
logical, or grammatical property in its turn. The principle of the bivalence of
truth, according to us, says merely, and trivially, that if no conditions capable
of establishing the truth of S happen to be fulfilled in nature, then S is false,
and vice-versa. It follows that, even if the device of linear measurement in
inches, with all its conceptual apparatus, was only invented this morning, the
piece of wood that I tossed on the fire before going to bed last night either
was or was not four inches long. There is “a fact of the matter,” in short, even
though that fact is now passed beyond epistemic recovery, because (according
to Hanna and me) neither meaning, nor truth, nor falsity, nor bivalence, are
epistemic concepts. For the same reason, we are under no theoretical obliga-
tion to deny that, even though the concept of HIV and all its accompanying
conceptual vocabulary are recent additions to our picture of the world, long
postdating Jones’s death, there is, nevertheless a fact of the matter concerning
whether or not Jones died of HIV.
Morris’s sense that what I am offering is at best a pretend sort of real-
ism, mainly expresses itself in his sense that I wish somehow to reduce per-
sons to linguistic constructs. One difficulty I find with this part of his paper is
that his sense of what I am saying does not seem to be motivated by any de-
veloped argument of mine in favor of the thesis he attributes to me (which in
any case is one against which, in fact, I have argued strenuously in print
[1995]). Rather, his argument focuses on: first, what he considers must be the
implications for my overall position of two approving remarks that I made
elsewhere (1993, 2004) that he discusses, concerning the French phenome-
nologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the American poet Wallace Stevens;
second, on an account of Wittgenstein that he takes, for some unexplained
reason, to be mine, despite its being one against which I have argued, not
only elsewhere, but in the very paper that serves as the basis for his remarks.
Here, then, I am going to plead systematic misreading. But at the same
time, I want to suggest that these misreadings are neither mere errors nor un-
important. On the contrary, since they offer instances of kinds of misunder-
standing, between different fields and between entrenched positions in the
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 211

same field that are not easy to avoid and that constantly bedevil communica-
tion in the humanities, I think they are important enough to be worth examin-
ing at some length.
I will begin at the beginning. In proposing a view that happens, for the
time being, to be somewhat outside the parameters of any recognized “main-
stream,” one is inclined to gesture, at times, toward known cultural markers.
Thus, in “Imagined Worlds and the Real One,” which Morris takes as the
basis for his account of my views, I gesture in that way toward Wallace Ste-
vens’s poem, “Men Made Out of Words”:

Where should we be without the sexual myth,

The human revery or poem of death?
Castratos of moon-mash—Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude in which

We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,
By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.
The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate. ([1954] 2011, p. 355)

I lash my frail craft to the buoy of Stevens’s poem in the following words, of
which Morris cites, as damning evidence of a preposterous linguistic anti-
realism, the closing sentence.

We are creatures of language—in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “men made

out of words.” Insofar as it is a mode of self-examination undertaken
through the examination of the language which, through its underlying
practices, constitutes us, literature is necessarily taken up with the dou-
ble investigation . . . of its own inherited language and of reality (our
reality; human reality) through the investigation of the modes of en-
gagement with the world involved in the founding practices of that lan-
guage. (2004, p.103)

Elsewhere in the same paper (ibid., p. 93), once again, no doubt, partly
in the attempt to roughly fix the cultural bearings of my position for those
newly acquainted with it, I speak favorably of Merleau-Ponty’s observation
(early in The Prose of the World) that “In a sense language never has to do
with anything but itself” (1973, p. 115) as a remark about literary language.
Morris takes these two remarks of mine to entail a commitment on my
part, on the one hand to linguistic reductionism about persons, and on the
other, to a related denial that anything that one might call “human reality”
212 BERNARD HARRISON

(and perhaps—I am not quite sure how his view goes here—that anything
worthy the name “reality” per se) exists external to language.
Linguistic reductionism, where persons are concerned, is certainly a liv-
ing presence on the cultural scene. But I have argued as stoutly as Morris
could wish, in an article that came out shortly after the original appearance of
the offending essay on Wittgenstein, Plato, and Virginia Woolf, against the
viability of that kind of reductionism in its commonest, narratological form
(1995). Like Morris, I think that people are people, narratives are narratives,
words are words, and, insofar as I can see, nothing in the view I hold commits
me to the contrary. I certainly hold that people build personalities, values, and
the sense they have of the meaning of their lives and of human life in general
on the armature provided by a vast range of social practices—marriage, mon-
ey, class, political parties, organized religion, organized scientific enquiry—
that simultaneously serve to confer (linguistic) meaning on the semantic ele-
ments of large segments of our language. But that view, though it does catch, it
seems to me, much of what is captured by the suggestive power of Stevens’s
poem, certainly does not commit me to the view—the one Morris rightly finds
objectionable—with which one would be landed if one took Stevens to be say-
ing that men are literally “made out of words.” Poets don’t do literal.
So what has gone wrong? Morris’s essay follows a familiar strategy of
philosophical disputation. He wants to demonstrate that I am illegitimately
helping myself to notions that my own position debars me from invoking.
Matters here come to a head over the question whether I have any right, given
my views, to help myself to the term “extra-linguistic reality.” Here is the
argument Morris takes to clinch matters.

If our language concerns only our reality, a reality made out of words,
then it cannot be used to refer to any more real reality. This creates a
double problem for Harrison. First, his own term “extralinguistic reali-
ty” cannot refer to the reality to which it is meant to refer: it is meant to
refer to the reality a realist believes in, but if our language is only con-
cerned with a reality made out of words, it cannot do that. (This volume,
chap. 11, p. 193)

My view, stated at length elsewhere, and rehashed, I fear, at tedious

length in my two contributions to this volume, is that meaning—not reality—
is constituted internally to language. I hold that view in a form, explained at
length in Word and World (which contains the general-case theory of concept
formation left wanting by the special-case theory of Form and Content, 1973)
that does, certainly, commit me to the view that the referents of expressions
in a language are always linguistic constructs. But that fails to commit me to
any form of linguistic idealism, because I also hold, for reasons that seem to
me sound, that reference is not, and could not be, what “connects language
with reality.” What connects language to reality is the mode of operation of
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 213

the practices with respect to which the reference of terms must, logically, be
specified. Thus the color red, taken as the referent of “red” is a linguistic con-
struct. But that does not mean that the color presentations that compose the
extension of red are linguistic constructs. All it means is that the process of
assembling the presentations concerned to form the extension of a basic col-
or-name in English is a linguistic process. Color presentations, as the ele-
ments out of which a linguistic practice operates, in this case, to construct a
referent for a linguistic expression, remain obstinately outside the linguistic
enterprise to which we subject them: constituents, not of language, but of the
phenomenology of color.
Matters are slightly more complicated where people are concerned, but
only slightly more. On my view, the same linguistic practices that bestow
meaning on much of the language in terms of which we describe human reali-
ty also serve to constitute human reality. But it is not the words (according to
me) but the practices, which constitute human reality, and they do that by
being engaged in by people who are anything but “made out of words” in the
sense Morris thinks I—or maybe Stevens—have in mind. When we say, for
example, that George is an Ulster Protestant, we mean, evidently, that his
character and affections have been shaped by participation in a multitude of
collectively devised and maintained practices that have a certain specific his-
tory, and which are not necessitated by “nature” in the sense of the biology
or psychology of the human person per se.
This is what I take Stevens to be saying in the concluding couplet of his
poem—“The whole race is a poet that writes down/The eccentric propositions
of its fate”—and that is why I wished to awaken memories of that poem in the
minds of readers. But saying that about George does not involve contending,
absurdly, that this entirely solid Ulsterman is a linguistic construct. Language
comes into the picture, in the story I want to tell, because the very same his-
torically rooted patterns of practice, participation in which has made George
the sort of person he is, have also served to bestow meaning on a range of
expressions making an important segment of the English language, especially
that version of it spoken in Ireland. In short, I argue that human practices are
doubly constitutive: in language, where what they serve to constitute is mean-
ing, and in reality, where what they serve to constitute is personality and char-
acter. I also argue that it is this double role of practice that gives language, in
turn, a double relationship to reality; on the one hand via the elaboration of
true statements, and on the other via the examination of its own praxial founda-
tions in the context of a literary fiction or poem.
It is for this reason (and also, of course, for deeper reasons having to do
with parallels between Merleau-Ponty’s arguments and mine) that I men-
tioned Merleau-Ponty’s remark about language in literature having nothing to
do with anything but itself. The point is, of course, that in literature, language
does not need to “have to do with anything but itself” to throw light on one
kind of reality, namely, the human reality that includes George, Ulster Protes-
214 BERNARD HARRISON

tantism, and much else. This is a body of phenomena as real as trees and
mountains, even though their constitution owes much to a range of historical-
ly rooted practices and institutions. On my view, the reason for that is that it
is with those practices and institutions, manifesting themselves now as the
praxial basis of (linguistic) meaning, that literary language “has to do.”
Merleau-Ponty’s remark that in literature language is concerned only with
itself need not, therefore, be interpreted as saying that it has only to do with
“words.” And certainly he need not be interpreted as holding that it has to do
only with “words” considered as the bare referential counters (“blank tokens”
in Morris’s phrase) that Morris, in common with a long tradition of empiricist
philosophy rooted ultimately in Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, takes
them, in functional terms, to be.
In other words, unless I am missing something, nothing important to my
position poses any threat to the basic, common-sense realism concerning hu-
man beings that I share with Morris. What, then, has led him to construe it as
committing me to kinds of anti-realism than I not only find as preposterous as
he does, but have actively argued against in print?
Part of the reason, I think, is that he mistakenly believes me to share a
depressingly common account of the development of Wittgetstein’s thought;
an account against which, in fact, I have actively argued over many years,
through a number of articles and books. That is the commonplace view that,
whereas the early, Tractarian Wittgenstein held that meaning is to be under-
stood in terms of the notions of truth and reference, the later Wittgenstein
abandoned that, essentially Fregean, view in favor of an enigmatic and ob-
scurely presented doctrine to the effect that meaning is a function of “use.”
Morris, after citing Philosophical Investigations I.43, which introduces
the term “use,” summarizes as follows the view that he supposes me to share:

If we take this passage to be an expression of a decisive change in Witt-

genstein’s general approach to language, we will understand it in some-
thing like the following way: what is important about the meaning of a
word is not that to which an object refers—or even whether it refers to
an object—but how it is used. It is use, not correlation with an object,
which determines meaning. (This volume, chap. 11, p. 186)

Morris dubs this antiquated interpretation of Wittgenstein the “use-

gives-it-life” interpretation. He assumes, so far as I can see, on no textual
evidence whatsoever, that I subscribe to it. This is an omission that, given his
usual care and honesty in philosophical debate, strongly suggests to me that
he considers textual evidence to be needless, on the ground that, as he sup-
poses, there is no other possible interpretation to which anyone could con-
ceivably be imagined to subscribe. He then proceeds to attack me for, as he
sees it, imagining, absurdly, both that the functions of literature could useful-
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 215

ly be understood in terms of it, and that our experience of literature in turn

offers some support for it.
In fact, the account of the development of Wittgenstein’s thought that I
actually hold is pretty much the opposite of the familiar nonsense that Morris
ascribes to me. I hold that the later Wittgenstein remained true to “the great
works of Frege” (Wittgenstein, 1961, p. 3) and that the notions of “use” and
Sprachspiele are introduced, not to displace the relationship postulated by
Frege between meaning, truth, and reference, but to further elucidate, and in
the process confirm, that relationship. The arguments can be found in two of
the exegetical papers on Wittgenstein I published during the second half of
the 1990s (1996; 1999a) and in Word and World. That would be neither here
nor there, of course, if, in the paper Morris happened to select as the basis of
his objection, I had failed to make mention of them, as I do, in some detail in
§§1–5 of the paper. Thus, I am at something of a loss to understand why Mor-
ris should have opened his essay by ascribing to me precisely the view of
Wittgenstein that I have been at pains, over many years, to refute, and which,
moreover, I attack at length in the very paper he is discussing. Maybe the
view I actually hold is also rubbish. But that, if it can be shown, does need to
be shown.
At the same time, I think Morris’s argument shows very clearly why it
is not only important, but crucial to my position, that I do not subscribe to
the use-gives-it-life interpretation of the later Wittgenstein. What I am argu-
ing, among other things, is that, given the present state of impasse in both
literary studies and literary theory, we badly need to go back and take a clos-
er look at Wittgenstein. What Morris’s essay shows is that, if all that the se-
cond look were to reveal were the tired old use-gives-it-life story, that would
be a very limp proposal indeed. One major reason, among others, for that, is
that, as Morris justly argues, the use-gives-it-life story leaves the later Witt-
genstein, implausibly, with no means whatsoever of answering the obvious
question how the meanings of words manage to connect speakers to any-
thing really extra-linguistic.
That is an important question that must be answered if Wittgenstein is to
retain the central place in twentieth century philosophy still widely accorded
him. It is, of course, one that the entirety of Word and World is devoted to
answering, on behalf of a very different Wittgenstein from the trifler with
words envisaged by Morris and the use-gives-it-life theory. But that takes us
further than we need go here.
I turn now to Michael Krausz, with whom I find myself largely in
agreement. His views on relativism and interpretation are, of course, deeply
congenial to those developed in Word and Word. Krausz introduces the term
“singularism” for the case in which there is only one admissible interpretation
of a given object of interpretation, and “multiplism” for the case in which a
given object of interpretation has more than one admissible interpretation. It
is commonly held that for natural objects, singularism rules, while multiplism
216 BERNARD HARRISON

applies to cultural objects. That view, in turn, connects with the notion, at-
tacked at length in my Prologue to this volume and elsewhere in my work that
the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity lines up neatly with the
distinction between the natural and the cultural. Krausz is also an enemy of
that notion:

Much of my work is meant to give pause to those who uncritically hold

that singularism is required of all interpretation, and to those who hold
that multiplism is required for the interpretation of all cultural objects.
(2003, p. 11)

Much of Krausz’s argument turns on his defense of what he calls the de-
tachability thesis, which denies any necessary association of singularism with
the ontology of realism, or of multiplism with the ontology of constructivism.
This is helpful to my and Hanna’s views, since Word and World in effect
argues for a form of what Krausz would call constructive realism: a position
whose “motto,” as Krausz puts it, is, “the real is constructed and the con-
structed is real” (ibid., p. 18). Word and World argues, in effect, that the ob-
jects picked out by all referring expressions are constructed objects. But that,
we argue, does not mean that language is hermetically cut off from extra-
linguistic reality. According to us, the connection between language and extra-
linguistic reality does not run by way of the link between a referring expression
and its referent, but by way of the relationship between a practice and the natu-
ral world upon whose contents, as presented to sensation and manipulation, it
operates. According to our kind of constructive realism, the natural world is,
prior to the human invention of the practices that bestow meaning upon the
linguistic expressions assigned roles in their conduct, conceptually unstruc-
tured. But that does not mean that the natural world is unstructured tout court.
It is richly structured, extra-linguistically, in terms of the aspects and possibil-
ities of manipulation and sensory investigation that it presents to human in-
vestigation. In Word and World, we attempted to capture this in a phrase by
describing the pre-linguistic world as a “realm of outcomes.” Krausz here
suggests, for reasons I am inclined to think sound, that “realm for outcomes”
would have been a better choice.
In short, there are, for someone who accepts the main claims of Word
and World, no natural objects of reference. All objects of reference are con-
structed objects. This does not, of course, mean—pace the meaning-realist—
that they are unreal or “merely subjective.” A ghost may indeed be no more
than a subjective impression, but the existence, or lack of it, of trust, say, is a
fact against which subjective preference and wishful thinking may bark their
shins as effectively and painfully as against a physical constant.
Nor does it mean that multiplism rules while singularism is ruled out. As
Krausz argues, whether an object responds to singularism or multiplism de-
pends on the nature of the object in question, but not on its ontological status
vis-à-vis the distinction between realism and constructivism.
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 217

The only current, or at any rate recent, disagreement between Krausz

and me concerns a problem Hanna and I raised for him in “Interpretation and
Ontology: Two Queries for Krausz” (Harrison and Hanna, 2003). Krausz
holds that whether an object of interpretation admits of a unique interpreta-
tion (singularism) or multiple interpretations (multiplism) depends on “the
type of object we are concerned to interpret.”
Contrarily, we suggested that, in fact, one and the same object of inter-
pretation may simultaneously answer to multiplism and singularism. We took
measurement as an instance, arguing that the same object (a table) say, may
have only one length as measured in terms of a given modulus associated
with a given practice of measurement (singularism) but two different, and
incompatible, lengths when measured in accordance with different practices
of measurement associated with different moduli. Thus, the different levels of
precision associated with two different practices of measurement (say,
measurement with a measuring tape calibrated in inches, and measurement
in microns by means of a laser device) may result in incompatible results,
even though the two moduli may be fully interconvertible.
In his essay in the present volume, Krausz’s strategy is to deny that the
two techniques are occupied with a single object of interpretation. I think this
reply is sound, and entirely disposes of my supposed “problem.” I had been
thinking of the object of interpretation addressed by both techniques simply
as the table: the visible, wooden object in the room given to sight and touch.
But this, I now think, thanks to Krausz, to be false to my own position. That
table is (as in consistency I have to hold) enigmatic in terms of description
until we begin to apply to it procedures of sensory or practical investigation
that in turn evoke responses on its part that begin to equip it with descrip-
tions. In each such case—I take it that this is Krausz’s point—the object of
interpretation is not the table tout court, but rather the table under whatever
aspect it presents to the mode of investigation in question. As he says, the
aspect the brute, pre-descriptive table presents to my invented laser device
may be different from the aspect it presents to measurement by means of a
measuring tape. So my miscegenation of multiplism with singularism collaps-
es, as he says, into an “innocuous pluralism.”
Danièle Moyal-Sharrock raises a group of interesting questions con-
cerning the relationship(s) between Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, F. R.
Leavis, and me. Her engagement with Wittgenstein on centers in his late
work On Certainty ([1969] 1977), of which her work (2007) offers a pene-
trating and subtle analysis. Perhaps the most central claim that Wittgenstein
makes in On Certainty is that it is in our acting, or rather in the interplay
between acting and meaning, that we reach “bedrock” in the sense of a cer-
tainty immune to philosophic doubt, not because its claims can be shown to
be deducible from irrefragable evidence, but because, at such points, there
turns out to be no doubt that can survive formulation without lapsing into
incoherence and vacuity.
218 BERNARD HARRISON

Moyal-Sharrock sees my work as in some sense transferring these ideas

of Wittgenstein’s to the literary sphere: of showing us, in a way that links up
with the later work of Leavis, another hero of hers, how to make intellectual
sense of “the exceptional capacity of literature to transmit to us basic human
values in such a way that we can be certain of what they are” (this volume,
chap. 7, p. 144). She offers an example of such a transfer in an essay of mine
on Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (Harrison, 2011). For that matter Leona
Toker, early in her essay, notes a similar passage of analysis, in my Henry
Fielding’s “Tom Jones” (1975), in which I offer an account of what it is in
Fielding’s text that might have led Coleridge to say of young Mr. Blifil, “We
know he is a villain.”
Attracted as Moyal-Sharrock is by this aspect of my position, however,
she is less sure about the validity of my suggestion that, as I put it in Incon-
venient Fictions, “literature works upon us, ceaselessly shifting and redefin-
ing . . . our conception of who and what we are” (1991a, pp. 50, 58; emphasis
in original).
I would think of this, I suppose, merely as the opposite face of the coin
both of us wish to strike from the mold of On Certainty. But she finds some-
thing in it both opposed to her views, and sinister in its implications. As she
puts it: “There is a sense here that the spade never turns; we can never be
certain; we can never settle in meaning” (this volume, chap. 7, p. 143). She
connects that with my regard for the work of Derrida that she finds inexplica-
ble, because inconsistent (she thinks) with central elements of my position.
Why on earth, she asks, given my account of the connection between mean-
ing and the extra-linguistic that runs by way of the multifarious involvement
of words in practices, should I applaud Derrida’s celebrated aphorism “il n’y a
pas d’hors-texte” (there is nothing outside the text)? If one holds, as I do, that
the interior of language contains, beyond such linguistic elements as word or
sentence, the entire web of socially devised and maintained practices, then, as
she puts it, “I want to say, ‘here is your “hors-texte”!’—precisely in those prac-
tices in which words find their roles or uses and thus their meanings” (ibid.).
Moyal-Sharrock’s argument at this point, it seems to me, echoes those
of Patterson and Morris. Like them, she wants a philosophical “story” that
allows reality, or “the real world” to determine, in some simple and direct
way, not only the truth or falsity of what we say about it, but the content and
structure of the very concepts in terms of which we say it. I think that this is a
desire that, by its nature, cannot be satisfied. But I am very far from thinking
it an unimportant or arbitrary one. It is the contemporary expression of a
yearning that runs very deep in Western philosophy from Plato onwards: the
desire to see nature and human thought as structurally linked in ways capable
of guaranteeing the ultimate success of our attempts to reach some adequate
intellectual understanding of the human situation. I do not regard that desire
as one that all human beings must necessarily share. It is largely absent, for
example, from the more traditional versions of the Jewish tradition, to which I
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 219

shall return in a moment. But it is central to the Western tradition in ways that
make entirely understandable, it seems to me, both the intensity of Anglo-
phone philosophical resistance to Derrida and Morris’s sense that there is a
kind of “blasphemy” about what I am saying.
In any event, Moyal-Sharrock’s move, it seems to me, will not quite do
what she needs it to. What Derrida means by an hors-texte is, I take it, some-
thing altogether extra-linguistic in character (as practices, of course, in the
story I want to tell, are not) that completely and finally determines the mean-
ing of a linguistic expression. An example drawn from the analytic tradition
would be the determinate property “meant,” according to Bertrand Russell
and many others, by a color name (see, for example, Russell, [1917] 1951).
The thought is that one utters the name “red” while gesturing toward a pillar-
box or a tomato, and that is enough. Mere acquaintance with the color of ei-
ther is enough not only to establish, but to establish with complete finality, the
meaning of “red.” In a sense, the color each displays is “the meaning of
‘red.’” To put it another way, the very distinction between what a word
means and the referent it picks out in virtue of possessing that meaning col-
lapses at this point into identity.
Meaning-realists of the stamp of Michael Morris, for whose views, as I
have indicated, I have a degree of sympathy that transcends our disagree-
ments, are apt to find in the denial of the possibility of an hors-texte, so de-
fined, as he puts it, a kind of blasphemy. It seems to him, and to many others,
to pitch us headlong into the post-modernism the main characteristic of which
is, as Moyal-Sharrock puts it, an “unending postponement of significance”
(this volume, chap. 7, p. 143).
Moyal-Sharrock, too, shares the view, widespread among English-
speaking philosophers, that the much-advertised Derridean postponement of
meaning (in Derrida’s terms, deferral, différance) entails an absurdity, name-
ly, the impossibility of attaching any determinate meaning to any utterance in
any context whatsoever. It is that belief, indeed, that largely accounts for Der-
rida’s unhappy reputation in large parts of the English-speaking philosophical
world as a charlatan and poseur.
I am certainly as committed as Derrida to the denial of an hors-texte in
the above sense. I have argued at length, if it comes to that, for the centrality
of just such a denial in the later Wittgenstein. But I have also argued that
while such a denial does entail what Derrida calls the deferral of meaning,
and Moyal-Sharrock its postponement, it entails neither in any sense that
could in turn entail the radical nihilism about meaning commonly supposed to
follow from it. Derrida assumes, like any sane person, that in the vast majori-
ty of cases, it is possible to say of a grammatically well-formed sentence de-
ployed in an unproblematic context, what, in that context, the sentence in
question means. His question concerns not the possibility of such a judgment,
but rather what determines it. It is presumably determined by the meanings of
its component expressions. If there is an hors-texte, then, since the meanings
220 BERNARD HARRISON

of those expressions in turn are determined by natural circumstances lying

outside human power to alter, their meaning also is fixed unalterably to eter-
nity (like the “infinitely long rails” that symbolize the “unlimited application
of a rule” [Wittgenstein, 1997, I.218]).
But suppose there is no hors-texte. Then, Derrida argues (following,
among other influences, Ferdinand de Saussure) the meanings of the compo-
nent expressions of any given sentence are determined by diacritical relation-
ships of contrast between concepts. Since these relationships are internal to
language (rather than being held rigid by an hors-texte), they can drift in ways
that entail that it is never going to be possible to say finally what any compo-
nent sign of the language means, even though it may be clear what it means in
a given context. In other words, Derridean différance rules, but its rule does
not entail the absurd consequence that we never know what anyone is talking
about when he utters the simplest sentence.
In short, the path of argument that Derrida has hacked out here must be
taken by anyone who holds that meaning is determined internally to language.
That includes Wittgenstein and, bringing up the rear, me. It may be worth
adding a few words here to the discussion, discussed also in the opening pag-
es of Inconvenient Fictions, about the difficulties raised by Shakespeare’s
depiction of Cordelia in King Lear ([ca. 1603–1606] 1986) for a traditional
Renaissance notion of what is meant by such terms as “filial piety,” “daugh-
terliness,” and so on. We know of course, what these terms mean, in the sense
that we know how they fit into the practices that introduce them into the lan-
guage (see Hanna and Harrison, 2011). They belong to the vocabulary of
family relationships. The life of the family, as we understand it, is constructed
around an array of interlocking roles: wife/husband, child/parent, sib-
ling/sibling. The duties associated with such roles can be discharged well or
ill, intelligently or stupidly. “Daughterly” is the encomium we bestow on
someone who discharges those duties incumbent upon a daughter well and
intelligently. That, in one sense of “meaning,” is what it means.
In another sense of “means,” one closer to Fregean Bedeuting, what the
word “means” is what actual, concrete modes of behavior it assembles, in use,
to form its extension. The question posed for us by Shakespeare’s portrayal of
Cordelia ([ca. 1603–1606] 1986, act 1, sc.1) is: “Are we to count this as con-
stituting filial piety, daughterliness?” The fact that we “know the meaning of
the word” in the first of the senses I have just distinguished, while it is
enough to allow Shakespeare to set the problem, is not enough to solve it for
us. We have simply to decide whether Lear is right or wrong to conclude that
Cordelia’s rude departures from Renaissance norms of filial piety, which
surely included reverent obedience to a father’s every wish, are enough in
themselves to brand her an ungrateful child. But suppose we decide against
Lear, as any intelligent auditor of the play must inevitably do? Then we shall,
in effect, be “shifting and redefining” what we understand by the terms
“daughterliness” or “filial piety” in ways that must, given the impossibility of
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 221

excluding further shifts brought about by similar means, “defer” or “post-

pone” any final determination of our understanding of their meaning: now
taking “meaning” in the sense of what elements they assemble to form their
extension. We shall, in short, have lost our grip on the unchanging, “eternal”
meaning that that would be bestowed on a word, if that were possible, by
hitching its meaning to the inhuman, timeless clarity of an hors-texte.
To conclude this part of the discussion, so far as the issue of postpone-
ment goes, there is little to choose between Derrida and Wittgenstein. It mat-
ters little whether one thinks of meaning as originating in the relationship of
linguistic elements to practices, or in diacritical relationships of contrast be-
tween such elements. In the case of filial piety, one can regard Shakespeare’s
representation of Cordelia, in the manner of Derrida or Saussure, as shifting
the meaning of the term by introducing a new set of diacritical contrasts (set-
ting off Cordelia’s conduct against that of Regan and Goneril rather than
against that of the kind of type-instance of the Renaissance concept of daugh-
terliness represented, say, by Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew [(1593)
1986]). Or, in the manner of Wittgenstein, one can take Shakespeare to be
testing the limits of accepted notions of filial piety by imagining a case that
puts pressure on conventional Renaissance assumptions concerning the con-
tent and nature of the considerations, relative to the fruitful conduct of family
relationships, which introduce the term “filial piety” into the language in the
first place. Whichever of the two theoretical descriptions one opts for, the
postponement of meaning—albeit in a sense that falls short of the meaning-
nihilism envisaged by meaning-realists as the price of abandoning what Der-
rida calls an hors-texte—emerges as a consequence.
Furthermore, insofar as Wittgenstein is concerned, the possibility of the
kinds of non-epistemic certainty that first attracted Moyal-Sharrock to his
work, is not easily to be disentangled from a version of the “ceaseless shifting
and redefining” of meaning that she finds disturbingly redolent of post-
Modernism. Both equally, so far as I can see, are consequences of the funda-
mental move, in his later work, of making meaning relative to the roles assigned
to linguistic expressions in the conduct of practices. What that move does is,
on the one hand, to remove the possibility of insulating the meaning of words
from alteration and development, as time and change alter our conduct of the
practices upon which they depend for meaning. On the other hand, it sets lim-
its to the possibility of using words with a clear meaning; limits that coincide
with the limits of operability, in concrete practical circumstances, of the prac-
tices in connection with which the words in question have been assigned
meaning in the first place. The first of these shifts—in effect, the transfer of
meaning from the timeless eternity of a Platonic heaven, to a human world in
thrall to time and contingency (which, in effect, is what much of Derrida’s
work is also all about)—is what allows Shakespeare, for instance, to play fast
and loose with the Renaissance concept of filial piety. The second is what
allows Wittgenstein, in his later work (see Harrison, 1991b, pp. 57–60 and
222 BERNARD HARRISON

passim) to develop in such detail the thought already expressed in the

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously
nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts about which no questions can be
asked” (Wittgenstein, [1921] 1961, § 6.51).
At the same time, and having said all that by way of self-exculpation,
there still seem to me to be two points at which Moyal-Sharrock retains the
upper hand in this discussion. I think she is right, for a start, to think that lit-
erature, although it often functions to threaten and undermine our habitual
confidence in the cultural and conceptual presumptions that rule our lives and
determine our image of ourselves, also, and as often, functions as a vehicle of
reassurance. Literature acts as a bulwark against the more febrile, “philosoph-
ical” kinds of skepticism concerning certain founding certainties of human
life. There are indeed places in my work at which I try to show that, and how,
major creative writing can offer readers non-epistemic certainties of the kinds
that interest her. But Moyal-Sharrock has persuaded me that there is a good
deal more to be done in this direction.
The second point in connection with which I remain persuaded that
Moyal-Sharrock is on to something occurs a page or so into the section enti-
tled “Ousting Derrida,” where she suggests that Wittgenstein and Leavis are,
in some sense, on the same side. It is a side against which Derrida and post-
Modernism are, again in some sense perhaps yet to be established, joined in
opposition. Here again, I think, her instinct is entirely sound. My own feeling
would be, though, that what lies at the heart of this particular pattern of intel-
lectual opposition is not the postponement of meaning issue (even more of a
red herring in this context), but that of the relationship of meaning to individu-
al consciousness.
In terms of French philosophical debate, Derrida’s account of meaning
stands primarily opposed to the phenomenological account, according to
which the meaning of an expression, as a complex of intentional acts, is a
function of what Edmund Husserl called “the pure present of consciousness.”
Derrida’s reaction to this is as profoundly anti-Cartesian as Husserl’s is the
opposite. Husserl sites the genesis of meaning as pure intentionality in the
timeless present of consciousness. Derrida sites it in language, considered as
something external to the consciousness of any individual speaker, and hence,
something altogether divorced from intentionality per se. Following Saussure
among others, Derrida views meaning as an aspect of language considered as
a system of diacritical relationships held stable by nothing outside itself and
hence evolving over time, not even in accordance with “laws.” Rather, it is in
response to the kinds of pure contingency captured by such Derridean “con-
cepts” (more strictly, as Derrideans insist, non- or anti-concepts) as
différence, itération, trace, and so on. This is what, from the 1970s onward,
made Derridean deconstruction a standard-bearer for the influential “anti-
humanism” of the time. It seemed to justify the conclusion that there is no
link between a book and the consciousness or intentions of its author; and that
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 223

books are hence infinitely and enigmatically reinterpretable objects, whose

“real meaning” is an absurd New Critical fantasy. That, in turn, seemed to
support a view, still common today, that literature is not to be viewed as a
body of communications from the dead to the living, but rather as a tool of
social manipulation from which whatever of cognitive value it has to offer is
to be extracted, not by delighted participation in the illusions it fosters, but
only by the most suspicious and disenchanted critical scrutiny
The later Wittgenstein’s analysis of meaning, on the other hand, while
just as anti-Cartesian as Derrida’s is, in ways, far more congenial to tradition-
al kinds of critical humanism that certainly include that of Leavis. It is here,
and not in connection with the postponement of meaning issue, I believe, that
one can begin to see the implications for literary studies of Wittgenstein’s
account of meaning as consisting in the roles assigned to linguistic expres-
sions in the conduct of practices. It is a move that in one respect parallels
Derrida’s; namely, it expels meaning from the realm of consciousness and
intentionality. But what it expels it into is not an endless dance of diacritical
relationships between signs, a dance ruled purely by time and contingency,
but rather the multifarious systems of institutional practice that not only con-
stitute the public world of a community, but connect that world back in turn
to the consciousness and self-understandings of its individual participants. It
is at this latter point, it seems to me, that Wittgenstein’s insight restores the
link between meaning and individual consciousness broken by deconstruction
(see Harrison, 1999b). Derrida’s analysis of meaning, by the manner in which
it (rightly) severs the supposed link between meaning and intentionality, also
severs the connection between a work and the mind of its author and with
that, the possibility of literature offering a door into the minds of others and
into the past. Wittgenstein’s account breaks the first connection while leaving
the second and third intact. Properly developed, as I have tried to show, it
allows us to continue thinking of literature, as un-theoretically-inclined peo-
ple have always done, and continue to do, as one of the main remedies we
possess against the provincialism of the present.
The contrast between Derrida’s and Wittgenstein’s anti-Cartesianism
brings me in turn to the currently influential Cartesianism of Noam Chomsky,
trenchantly attacked by Hanna in her contribution to this volume. Some of
Chomsky’s earlier ideas greatly appealed to me half a century ago, particular-
ly his insistence on the generative nature of linguistic capacities and the con-
sequent resistance to causal and behavioral theories of meaning that received
devastating expression in his famous 1959 review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal
Behavior (1957). However, I must confess to not having kept up with Chom-
sky’s more recent work in linguistics and philosophy of science. So far as I
have come across it, I find it unsympathetic, mainly because of the lack of his
willingness, one essentially bound up with the neo-Cartesianism about innate
ideas that has always played a central part in the development of his position, to
allow any role to practice and social convention in the constitution of meaning.
224 BERNARD HARRISON

Hanna shows persuasively, in her paper for this collection, the severity
of the threat posed to Chomsky’s position by the radically new type of so-
cial/praxial theory of meaning developed in Word and World and elsewhere
in our work. As she points out, it is not merely that our account is a good deal
more informative concerning the relationship of meaning to syntax, as well as
to such “semantic” notions as truth and reference, than the other, more vague-
ly formulated accounts of the kind originating in philosophy that Chomsky is
accustomed to dismiss with a wave of the hand. The real problem for Chom-
sky is that the arguments on which it rests are such as to suggest that only a
social/praxial account could in principle be capable of advancing our under-
standing of these relationships.

3. The Constitution of the Moral Life

Mention of René Descartes in connection with Hanna’s attack on Chomsky’s

intensely Cartesian biological reductionism about meaning leads naturally to
the three papers in this collection that concern themselves mainly with issues in
moral philosophy. The philosophy of Descartes left the modern mind, among
other unfulfilled—mostly because in principle unfulfillable—yearnings, with a
longing to have it demonstrated that morality is, somehow or other, rooted in
the objective nature of things, and not simply “made up by us.”
David Hume set this particular post-Cartesian hare running with argu-
ments that have seemed, to many since, to show that moral distinctions, such
as that between right and wrong, mark not differences between things outside
the mind, but differences of emotional response to things outside the mind.
Right actions are, roughly speaking, those of whose motives or causal
tendencies we approve, wrong ones the reverse.
Two things that I suggested in the Prologue of this volume mark
Hume’s moral skepticism as Cartesian in character. The first is its underlying
assumption that the main business of philosophy is to purify the individual
mind of spurious claims to knowledge. The second is that only two kinds of
genuine knowledge exist: as Hume puts it, knowledge of matters of fact and
knowledge of what Hume called “relations of ideas,” meaning by that essen-
tially mathematics and logic.
These two assumptions compel one to ask of statements, or apparent
statements, involving moral notions, such as duty or trust, whether they con-
cern matters of fact or relations of ideas. And once we are committed to that
question, there seems no way of avoiding the conclusion that, since they man-
ifestly concern neither, they express merely sentiments of approval or disap-
proval toward acts that uphold or threaten states of affairs that purely causal,
non-rational, factors, including interest or social conditioning, have led us to
regard as morally sacrosanct.
The characteristically modern anguish people often feel concerning the
supposed lack of “objectivity” of “moral values” appears to follow inelucta-
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 225

bly from critical “reflection” of this type: from a style of reasoning the roots
of which remain essentially Humean (see Williams, 1985, pp. 166–167 and
passim). My difficulty with doubts of this variety concerns in part the notion
of objectivity deployed in formulating them. When one speaks of something,
X —an observation, a state of affairs, a claim to knowledge—as “objective”
or “objectively the case,” one can mean either of two things. One can mean
that X exists in a way that makes no reference to the human mind: that it is
not a hallucination or an error of sense, that it really happened, that it is a real
constituent of that natural world that would go on existing if there were no
one to observe it, and so on. Or, one can simply mean that statements con-
cerning X have clearly specified conditions of adequacy, whose obtaining or
failure to obtain can be independently established by different observers.
I hold that moral questions, while they are not objective in the first of
these senses, are objective in a sense closely analogous to the second. Moral
terms take their meanings from the roles assigned to them in systems of
common practice designed either to protect the interests of actual or potential
participants—either pre-existing interests, or interests arising in connection
with the practice itself—in ways acceptable to all participating parties. Private
property and promising offer simple and fundamental examples. Such ar-
rangements create demands—that John do as he appears to have promised,
that James return what he appears to have stolen—that may, relative to the
circumstances surrounding them, prove to be warranted or unwarranted. (The
promise may turn out to have been conditional; the supposedly stolen goods
may turn out to have been planted on James.) Very often, such questions of
moral warrant may turn out to be capable of definitive settlement one way or
the other. The existence of moral warrant, or the lack of it, relative to given
circumstances and to a given system of moral practice, is, in short, something
capable of objective, because independent and interpersonal, determination.
All this leads me to conclude, of course, that Hume was wrong about the
relationship between moral judgment and emotion. Moral statements are not,
as the long tradition of “emotivism” has maintained, expressions of approval
or disapproval masquerading as statements. On the contrary, if the condition
of something’s being a genuine statement resides in the possibility of as-
sessing it for accuracy or inaccuracy by the light of common standards of
assessment accessible to all speakers, irrespective of whatever differences of
“sentiment” or personal commitment may divide individuals among them,
then moral statements qualify as genuine statements. The only difference be-
tween moral and factual statements is that what, for moral statements, fills the
space marked by the terms “accuracy” and “inaccuracy” in the preceding
statement, is not truth, but rather warrant.
Of course, warrant may lapse, in coordination with changes or develop-
ments in the moral practices that render it assessable in the first place. The
nature of marriage as formerly understood was such as to warrant the demand
by husbands and by society in general that a wife, upon marriage, should re-
226 BERNARD HARRISON

sign paid employment outside the home. Marriage—by which I mean not “our
idea of marriage,” but the relationship itself, as lived—has changed, for all
sorts of reasons and under all sorts of pressures, in ways that make that de-
mand no longer morally warrantable. But the fact that warrant may occasional-
ly lapse in no way shows that a well-founded belief in the existence of moral
warrant, in cases where it has by no means lapsed, is merely qua moral belief,
“subjective,” or “merely evaluative,” or “merely an emotional commitment.”
The philosopher whose work has most influenced my ideas in this area,
and with whom they have most in common is Julius Kovesi, whose work,
after half a century of neglect, is now happily enjoying a renewal of interest
(Kovesi, 1967; 1998; Tapper and Mooney, 2012). I owe a considerable debt
of gratitude to Alan Tapper for the thorough and searching investigation of
the relationship between Kovesi’s thought and mine that he has contributed to
this volume. There is hardly need for a “reply” here, since there is no point in
his essay at which I find myself seriously dissenting from his readings, either
of my work or of Kovesi’s. On the other hand, there are many things in this
complex and insightful essay to promote reflection, and I would like to dwell
further on a few of these: sometimes to further underline relationships that
Tapper has already sketched in, sometimes to suggest a new one.
Tapper notes that while the account of the nature of concepts that I
evolved with Hanna in Word and World is deeply complicit with the one
Kovesi offered in Moral Notions, the intellectual origins of the two accounts
appear on the face of it to differ profoundly. Kovesi’s ostensible intellectual
roots were in Plato and Aristotle; mine are in Wittgenstein. It is curious,
therefore, that we should both have been led to make such a sharp distinction
between—in effect—what Kovesi called the “formal element” of a concept X,
and what he termed “recognitors,” or, as Tapper puts it, “ways of recognizing
the presence of X.” It is a distinction that alienates both of us sharply from the
long held and still dominant “mainstream” view in philosophy that holds that
to possess a concept X is, in essence, to be in a position to recognize things
that fall or fail to fall under it, or, as H. H. Price put it long ago, that a concept
is a recognitional capacity (1953, p. 35).
Ostensibly, Kovesi’s contrast between the “material” and the “formal el-
ements” of a concept (1967, pp. 1–7) recalls Aristotle’s distinction between
form and matter. But, examined more closely, the arguments on the back of
which Kovesi introduces these terms turn out to have strong similarities with
those I discovered in Wittgenstein when it occurred to me to stop treating the
argument of Philosophical Investigations (1997, I.28–31) as an argument
about ostensive definition and start treating it instead as an argument about
what is required for the specification of truth conditions. Kovesi argues that it
is the formal element of the concept “table,” not the physical features by ref-
erence to which we recognize particular things to be tables, that “makes a
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 227

[table] to be what it is” (1967, p. 15). In other words, the formal element of
the concept is what determines the meaning of the word “table.” Why should
listing recognitors not serve to determine the meaning of the term?
In effect, Kovesi offers two reasons:

(1) The list of potential recognitors is indefinitely extensible (“the con-

cept of a table has an open texture not because tables can shade into
other pieces of furniture, but because even the unmistakable table
can be made in a variety of ways and manners” [ibid., p. 10]).
(2) Some further principle or criterion is, therefore, required to select
out, from the welter of phenomena presented to the senses, those
qualified to serve as recognitors for the concept.

This second function is the one served by Kovesi’s formal elements. In the
case of the concept table, the formal element of the concept is explained in
explaining the purposes for which tables are produced:

Owing to the construction of our body, and due to some social conven-
tions, we find it convenient to sit by bending our knees at something like
a right angle. So sitting, our bodies are at a certain height. If we want to
write or place cups and other objects within our reach, we need to have
flat surfaces at a convenient height relative to our position when sitting.
So we manufacture pieces of furniture that meet those needs. (Ibid., p. 3)

Kovesi’s points about the indefiniteness of the array of recognitors asso-

ciated with most concepts, and the resulting need for some principle of selec-
tion, resonate in obvious ways with the Wittgensteinian arguments I adduce
for the thesis that words acquire meaning through our specifying roles for
them in socially devised and maintained practices. But they leave Kovesi
open to two lines of objection. The first is that the argument will not work for
concepts whose recognitors happen to compose a small finite set. The second
is that much more needs to be shown if the scope of the argument, so stated,
is to be extended much beyond artifact terms. Kovesi, in effect, grants the
first of these objections for the case of color words such as “yellow”:

In order for us to judge something to be yellow, that very quality has to

be present that we agreed to call by the word “yellow.” But for us to
judge something to be a table an unspecified group of properties and
qualities have to be present, none of which is that property or quality
that we have agreed to call “table.” (Ibid., p. 6)

The force of the second criticism is much reduced by the examples

Kovesi offers of the behavior of moral concepts. But a critic could still com-
plain not only that the discussion of such concepts offered in Moral Notions
is insufficiently extensive to do the job required of it, but that the most telling
228 BERNARD HARRISON

examples offered therein concern artificial moral notions. (I have in mind

here, particularly, Kovesi’s discussion of the invented notion “misticket” in
Chapter 2, which I have discussed elsewhere in detail [2012].)
Both of these objections are met, it seems to me, and Kovesi’s general
approach vindicated, by what Wittgenstein has to say concerning “ostensive
definition” onward from Investigations I.28, when the argument propounded
there is reinterpreted, in ways I have suggested elsewhere, as an argument
concerning the conditions required for the specification of truth conditions
(1996; 1999a).
Price, along with many others, held, “whatever else a concept may be, to
possess a concept is at least to have the capacity of recognizing instances
when and if they are observed” (1953, p. 35). But from the standpoint of this
entirely general argument, it appears that the capacity to recognize instances
is not, after all, a necessary condition for possession of a concept, where that
is taken as equivalent to knowledge of the meaning of a word (see Hanna and
Harrison, 2011). There is no exception for color words (Harrison, 1973), and
no need for the case for a Kovesian treatment of moral notions to repose on
examples, artificial or otherwise. Grasping the meaning is always a matter of
grasping a formal element, never a matter of knowledge of recognitors.
If my work has something to offer Kovesi, though, it also displays, as
Tapper notes, an extensive array of debts to his work. For example, the dis-
tinction between the natural and the human world that has played such a
prominent part in my recent thinking, and that I connect up in a new book
(forthcoming 2014) with some late work of Leavis’s that runs in the same
general direction. This is foreshadowed in Kovesi’s Moral Notions (1967) by
his attack on “Hume’s systematic confusion between perceiving and know-
ing.” The crucial passage is the following:

We do not perceive something called “table” over and above the materi-
al elements that have to be present in order that something should be a
table. In an important sense, in the world there is no value and there are
no murders, tables, houses, accidents, or inadvertent acts. But our lan-
guage is not about that world in which there is no value or no tables,
houses or inadvertent acts. That world, the world of raw data, cannot be
described for the sense of that world also lies outside it and the very de-
scription of it, likewise, lies outside it. Thereof one really cannot speak.
In our language the nearest analogy to the words that would mirror the
world of data are colour words, so I am not really criticizing Hume
alone here, but also those moral philosophers who do not use the word
“descriptive” itself descriptively, but as a standard to which some terms
or statement are expected to conform, and who regard colour words as
the nearest examples of this ideal standard. (Ibid., pp. 19–20)
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 229

Guided by the confusion between meaning and recognition, which in

turn commits one to confusing knowledge and perception, Kovesi says,
Hume’s solution to finding a referent for value terms in the world of “raw
data” (in which “in an important sense . . . there is no value”):

was to turn somewhere else (into his own breast) where he could per-
ceive or introspect something, because he thought that this was the sort
of thing knowledge was or ought to be. (Ibid., p. 19)

By doing so with the wit and vigor characteristic of his work, and with
such a range of persuasive, easily communicated arguments, Kovesi suggests
that Hume became the guiding spirit of that:

large number and surprising variety of moral philosophers [who] seem

to talk about our moral life and language as if each of us spoke a private
language and yet paradoxically lived in society, as if our moral notions
were private notions that we try to make universal. (Ibid., p. 57)

Implicit here is a general line of attack, of similar purport to the one I

have found myself pursuing, of the entire Cartesian project of purifying the
individual mind of ill-formed concepts. Descartes and his successors con-
ceived that project on the implicit assumption that concept formation is an
individual and purely intellectual enterprise rather than a collective and large-
ly practical one. That assumption, whatever it effects elsewhere in our think-
ing, becomes disastrous, as Kovesi shows, when we attempt to understand, in
compliance with its terms, the nature and formation of our moral concepts.
There is a further insight of Kovesi’s that builds on this sense of the ir-
reducibly collective nature of the enterprise of organizing experience by the
light of concepts. It is the one—characteristically expressed with a modesty
and simplicity that entirely belie the vastness of its implications—contained
in the following marvelous passage from his “Descriptions and Reasons” cit-
ed toward the end of Tapper’s essay in this volume:

In studying [our moral and social life] we have to chart out and explore
intricate structures of conceptual relationships. But knowing this is not
like knowledge of our intentions, and in fact it is even more difficult
than knowledge of the physical world. The embodiments of our inten-
tional endeavours in our language and culture are not the making of an
individual agent, and yet only individuals can know, so however much
that world is in a sense our creation, the maker and the knower are not
the same. (1979, p. 107; 1998, pp. 48–49; emphasis added)

This thought of Kovesi’s brings into focus several of the relationships—

between individual character and cultural practice, between philosophy and
230 BERNARD HARRISON

literature, and between both and the cultural change and renewal of which
each has the potential to serve, from time to time, as the engine—that I have
attempted to explore in my own work. Individual personality tends to be the
result of a complex interplay between the situation in which we find ourselves
from birth onward, the systems of cultural practice that constitute the back-
ground of socially determined meanings against and in terms of which we
must attempt to give sense to our own lives, and whatever resources of inge-
nuity and inventiveness we happen to be able to bring to the latter task.
One of the problems we face in this situation is that, as Kovesi notes, the
institutional practices of a given culture, while they are in a sense the fruit of
“intentional endeavors,” owe for the most part little or nothing to intentional
activity on the part of any of the individuals enmeshed in them. Thus, the cultur-
al framework in which individuals find themselves enmeshed tends to appear to
those individuals, because it is something that they alone can do nothing to al-
ter, as simply part of “the natural order of things”: as part of that nature about
whose more fundamental features it is also true, though for different reasons,
that “nothing can be done.”
In some ways, Western philosophy has tended to exacerbate this situa-
tion, by representing as eternal truths, justifiable as such by a priori argument,
visions of how things stand with us that are at best tendentious and over-
general abstractions from a human reality far more complex and friable than
they acknowledge. The entire methodology of Wittgenstein’s later work con-
sists in the attempt to dislodge the hold on our mind of over-schematic philo-
sophical “pictures” of this kind, through reflections designed to remind us of
the actual complexity of the “intricate structures of conceptual relationships,”
in Kovesi’s phrase, condensed into this or that persuasive philosophical defi-
nition. Kovesi, in Moral Notions and elsewhere, was engaged in just this kind
of attempt to free the mind to contemplate the full complexity of the founding
relationships between reality and culture.
As Leona Toker shows at length in her contribution to this volume,
something like this has also been the goal of much of my work in literature
and philosophy. What I have often been trying to illuminate, through detailed
analysis of specific literary texts, are the ways in which major creative litera-
ture, just as Leavis thought (1975, p. 49 and passim.), liberates us from, rather
than reinforces, the grip of received opinion on our minds. In Wittgenstein’s
phrase, great literature leads the mind away from the frictionless dance of
abstract categories “back to the rough ground” of concrete, fully imagined,
circumstance. In the passage from abstract thought to concrete imagination a
receptive mind can be led to entertain the possibility that categories misper-
ceived as “natural,” may in reality be the fruit of collective “intentional en-
deavours,” as Kovesi would put it (1998, pp. 48–49); and beyond that, per-
haps, the possibility of exchanging them for other and perhaps better ones.
Toker’s paper, to which, as with Tapper’s, my response is one more of
gratitude than dissent, offers a better introduction than I could have hoped for
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 231

to that part of my work. Its first half brings out better than I could have hoped
its connections with the concerns in moral philosophy that unite my work
with Kovesi’s. If there is anything further I can usefully add to Toker’s analy-
sis, that must concern her equally perceptive examination, in the second half
of the paper, of the relationships she sees as connecting my work on the novel
to that of various reader-response theorists, including Stanley Fish (1981) and
Wolfgang Iser (1972). Returning to these issues twenty years on, I would be
inclined to push the discussion in a slightly different direction from the one I
take in the paper (“Gaps and Stumbling-Blocks in Fielding: A Response to
erný, Hammond, and Hudson” (1993/1994)) that Toker cites.
Fish’s general view of the relationship between reader and text nowa-
days seems to me, post-Word and World, of a piece with the meaning skepti-
cism characteristic of the then-mainstream of American philosophy represent-
ed, admittedly in very different ways, by such figures as W. V. O. Quine,
Davidson, Saul Kripke, or Richard Rorty. What is common to meaning skep-
tics of this stripe is the idea that the conventions governing meaning are
“conventions” in, roughly speaking, the same sense as, say, the conventions
governing the conduct of marriages or the ceremonial order of a coronation.
That is to say, they comprise a list of conventional provisions known to and
observed, by and large, by the members of a given community.
According to that view, just as it is “the accepted thing,” as we say, (rel-
ative to a given community), that the bride enters the church on the arm of her
father or some other male visitor whose task it is to “give her away,” so it is,
in much the same sort of sense, “the accepted thing” (relative to a given
community) that the term “mammal” is correctly used of a range of animals
including whales and other cetaceans. Equally, of course, relative to another
linguistic community, it may be “the accepted thing” that cetaceans count as
fish! On such a view there is nothing that can tell one in advance of experi-
ence with which community one is dealing. Moreover, there is certainly no
set of a priori considerations that could allow one to characterize the semantic
conventions of either community as incorrect or mistaken. In short, judg-
ments about the meanings of linguistic expressions are, on this view (a popu-
lar one among philosophers), just as much judgments of empirical fact as
judgments concerning any other body of discrete social conventions.
In recent years and in certain quarters, such an account of meaning has
functioned as a central pillar of what I earlier called the alignment of culture and
subjectivity: the idea that whereas the natural, non-human world deals in “hard”
or “brute” realities, human culture in general, because it is no more than a col-
lection of arbitrary conventions, deals at best in illusion and wishful thinking.
It is the prevalence of such an account of meaning that also allowed Fish,
in his dispute with Iser, to postulate, with every color of plausibility, a reader
for whom the term “moral perfection” would apply correctly to the saintly buf-
foonery of Mr. Allworthy in Fielding’s great novel Tom Jones (1749). Only if
what we mean by words were relative to arbitrary community decision “all the
232 BERNARD HARRISON

way down” could Fish be justified in arguing that Iserian critics who find Mr.
Allworthy’s character and conduct to fall short of moral perfection are merely
deferring to the equally arbitrary decision of their own linguistic communities
as to what “moral perfection” means and what exemplifies it.
The account of meaning I derive from Wittgenstein puts me on the side
of Iser in this dispute. That account certainly represents meaning as socially or
communally constituted. But it does so in a way that allows one to deny that
the determination of meaning is relative to community decision. In short, it
treats meaning determination as relative not to conventions but to practices.
On a practice-based account of meaning, as Hanna and I develop it,
there just are no “conventions” or “rules” that govern meaning. Linguistic
expressions acquire meaning by being assigned roles in practices; for exam-
ple, linear measurement (inch, or n inches long) or monetary exchange (price,
profit). But although the practices in question have points, or purposes (the
exact, numerically expressible comparison of objects in terms of dimension,
for instance or the facilitation of the exchange of goods), those purposes nev-
er include the determination of meaning. That is merely the incidental result
of the practical involvement of linguistic types and tokens in such practices.
Arbitrary choice on the part of linguistic communities enters only at the
point of setting up of each such practice and its general acceptance in the
practical life of the community. Once that point is passed, most questions
concerning the meaning of a linguistic sign S will be settled by the nature of
the practice(s) in which S has been assigned a role. Arbitrary decision re-
enters the picture only at points at which, for some reason, the practice(s) in
question yield no clear determination. In terms of this basically late-
Wittgensteinian model of meaning, it is possible to judge words to be incor-
rectly used, where “incorrectly” means not “in disaccord with the usage of
some other linguistic community,” but rather “in disaccord with the normal
function of the word in the practice(s) from which it derives its meaning.”
Allworthy’s social position imposes upon him among other things, ac-
cording to the social conventions of the age, the duties of a magistrate, a post
that Fielding filled with distinction. The nature of the duties in question are
determined, evidently enough, not by the arbitrary decision of a “linguistic
community” concerning the meanings of the terms “magistrate” and “duty,”
but by the legal functions assigned to the holder of such a post itself. These
include that of ensuring, by suitable enquiry, that the penalties of the law fall
upon the guilty and not upon the innocent. Thus, a magistrate in Allworthy’s
position has a duty to sift, as effectively as possible, truth from lies. The en-
tire fabric of Fielding’s plot hinges on Allworthy’s demonstrated incapability
to discharge this duty in the case of Partridge and Jenny Jones. Further devel-
opment of the novel demonstrates that this incapability is deeply rooted in
Allworthy’s reclusive character—given as the latter is to a credulity morally
culpable because ultimately self-protective—in ways that play a central role
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 233

in Fielding’s attempt to reanimate his reader’s sense of prudence as a serious

moral concept.
The reader invoked by Fish, to whom all of this is simply further evi-
dence of Allworthy’s moral perfection, is no doubt a possible reader. The
trouble is not that Fish’s postulated reader could not exist, but that such read-
ers would be not be reading by the light of any clear sense of the interplay of
moral concept and social practice in founding the moral vocabulary of the
novel (which is also, of course, the common, moral vocabulary we all share—
not some private invention of Fielding’s). Rather, they would be reading by
the flickering light of whatever private sentimental or ideological theories
might have led them to see no incompatibility between moral perfection and
the failings that make Allworthy an incompetent magistrate.
I turn now to Edward Alexander, who writes warmly and kindly of my
The Resurgence of Antisemitism (2006) and other occasional writings on
some contemporary manifestations of antisemitism. Alexander entitles his
typically combative essay, “Paying a Debt.” As his epigraph makes clear, it
was I who introduced that phrase, in correspondence between us; so I can
perhaps add something useful here about what sort of debt I take it to be. On
one level, it is personal: a matter of a sense of solidarity arising from many
friendships and much enjoyment of Jewish company from mid-adolescence
onwards. But there is a good deal more to it than that: specifically, a connec-
tion between practical concern and ideas.
Philosophy is no longer quite the ivory-tower pursuit it used to be.
There is even something called practical philosophy. So it no longer comes as
a surprise to find philosophers involving themselves, in at least a semi-
professional way, in current debate on public affairs. But one wants, natural-
ly, to know how the descent to terra firma is accomplished in each case. How
and why, in particular, has someone who thinks the way I do, come to find
himself writing about contemporary antisemitism?
My interest in the topic developed partly, I suppose, out of a growing
sense that antisemitism, as I have argued recently (2013), is not just another
form of racism. It is something special, sui generis. What makes it special has
to do on the one hand, with a deep cleavage between the ways in which the
Western tradition has, for the past two millennia, set about the business of
finding meaning in human life, and, on the other hand, the way that Jewish
tradition has, for rather longer than that, addressed itself to that task.
Let me be more specific. Western Culture has, since Plato, assumed that
human life has meaning only if certain beliefs about the nature of reality hap-
pen to be correct. Large movements of thought and feeling, in successive
ages, have conditioned their participants to suppose life to “make sense” only:
if God exists; if history necessarily tends toward progress; if there exists a
common reason by the light of which monarchical and aristocratic rule will
inevitably end and be replaced by the rule of reason and virtue; if the laws of
dialectical materialism assure the eventual victory of the proletariat; if the
234 BERNARD HARRISON

commonplace self-interest of individuals is subordinated to the higher destiny

of the nation; and so on.
Each such system of beliefs has abundantly demonstrated its power to
attract vast numbers of adherents and motivate equally vast political convul-
sions, from the crusades to the French Revolution to the rise of Soviet com-
munism. As we know, most recently from the tormented political history of
the twentieth century, idols are apt to turn out to have feet of clay. But the
twentieth century has merely confirmed an abiding tendency in Western cul-
ture, throughout its history, to swing, philosophically speaking, between the
opposing poles of realism and conventionalism.
First, in such movements, there is a phase of realism, in the shape of
mass emotional commitment to some belief to the effect that meaning is con-
ferred upon human life by something external to it—by some deus ex
machina in the shape of reason, or the laws of history, or of the nation. Then,
when history deals in its customary unfeeling way with such commitments,
there follows the despairing conviction that since whatever clay-footed idol
that lost its power to mesmerize was merely the creature of ad hoc human
decisions, and since nothing can be given meaning by ad hoc decision, either
individual or collective, human life can possess no meaning whatsoever.
In Judaism, on the other hand, while belief in the truth of certain propo-
sitions, including that of the existence of God, plays a part, it plays a much
less central part than in Christianity. The Hebrew term “emunah,” meaning
faith, is more often, in religious contexts, construed as meaning trust, or belief
in rather than belief that (Kellner, 2006, pp. 11–24). In particular, belief-that
plays very little part either in establishing or in securing the sense, in tradi-
tional Jewish culture, that life is meaningful. That job is done by two other
concepts, those of action and observance.
What is important in Judaism is observance of the Divine commands
laid down in the Torah and later codified by complex processes of rabbinic
argument into Halakhah (law). Those parts of Torah and Talmud that consist,
not of halakhic disputation but of narrative or putatively factual assertion are
known as Aggada. But while individual Jews may find this or that portion of
aggada spiritually or poetically uplifting, there is no general obligation on
Jews to actually believe (in the sense of believe-that) any of it (Maccoby,
1982, pp. 92–93).
That, in turn, implies that, for the observant Jew, the meaning of life
tends to crystallize, not out of belief-that, but rather out of relationship:

In Hebrew Scripture, in rabbinic literature, and for most Jewish thinkers,

truth is a characteristic of personal relationships. Truth is fidelity to
one’s word, keeping promises, saying with the lips what one says with
one’s heart, bearing witness to what one has seen. Truth is the bond of
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 235

trust between persons and between God and humanity. In the Western
philosophical tradition, truth is a characteristic of the claims people
make about the world they experience: the correspondence between a
statement and the object it describes, or the coherence of a statement
with what we already know about the world. (Ochs, 1987, p. 1018)

Menachem Kellner says acutely of this:

I am enough of a Maimonidean (i.e., a follower of the “Western philo-

sophical tradition”) to think that the Torah is concerned with truth in
both senses of the term isolated by Ochs (senses, by the way, that paral-
lel the distinction used above between “belief in” and “belief that”). My
claim throughout has been that the Torah teaches truth in both senses,
but that Judaism had, until Maimonides, emphasised truth as “a charac-
teristic of personal relationships” over “truth as a characteristic of the
claims people make about the world they experience,” and that we
would all be better off were we to revert to that approach, at least until
we have reached the days of the Messiah. (2006, p. 124)

These differences in structure and emphasis distinguish Judaism both

from Christianity and from the Western intellectual tradition, focused as that
has been since the Greeks on truth in the propositional sense. One conse-
quence of them has been that at no stage of the development of Western socie-
ty have the bulk of Jews normally felt tempted to join whatever tide of belief
might happen at that point to be sweeping the Western world up into some new
convulsion of fevered hope, and eventual despair, of “finding meaning” in life.
Some individual Jews might join a crusade, or swell the ranks of French
revolutionary Jacobins or other crusaders for Enlightenment, or serve among
the founding intellects or the foot soldiers of Soviet Communism. Very occa-
sionally the trickle becomes a little flood, as witness the mobilization of large
numbers of American Jews, from the 1930s onward, in support of a broadly
liberal and Democratic range of causes. But in Europe, throughout its history,
the bulk of Jews have always tended, in the face of popular convulsions of be-
lief, religious or political, to keep quiet and, as far as possible, get on with their
own lives. They have provided no very ready market for the great meaning-
bestowing ideals, of republican revolution, of communism, or of fascism that
were making life meaningful to millions, since for them, the meaning of life was
secured in other, quite different, more “Jewish,” and less epistemic ways.
It seems to me that the situation of Jews, as minority inheritors of a non-
belief-centered culture implanted within a far larger and hence dominant be-
lief-centered one may well account for some of the stranger aspects of
antisemitism. They have constituted, from the standpoint of the matrix cul-
ture, a presence rendered Other by a mysterious quiescence suggestive of
spiritual isolation, by its repeated failure ever to be caught up, wholeheartedly
and en masse, by whatever Great Affair might happen at the moment to be
236 BERNARD HARRISON

animating the age. As one would expect, to the hotter and more rancorous
spirits among those so caught up, that isolation, that failure to engage en
masse, has tended to mean only one thing: that “the Jews,” plainly not being
“with us,” must therefore be in some way “against us.” The fact that they are
not in any obvious or open way against us, such people tend to suppose, can
only mean that they are against us in secret, devious, and underhanded ones:
that there is a “Jewish conspiracy” of some kind afoot. The fear of conspira-
cy, of an unguarded flank that cannot be protected because the threat to it is
secret and unknown, is apt to prey on the mind in ways that swiftly lead to
paranoia. Thus, a tiny, relatively helpless, and certainly, by contrast with the
recurrent epic violence of European politics, harmless people comes to be
regarded as threatening an evil that is perceived as unlimited because no ra-
tional limit can be set to it. They are seen also as working conspiratorially in
the service of that evil in ways that cannot be traced because they, too, are in
no way open to inspection, but are buried in a hidden world of political and
financial manipulation. “Enlightenment,” as that has been understood since
the eighteenth century, is no necessary bulwark against the recrudescence of
anti-Jewish paranoia. Indeed, as Alexander notes, many of the main figures of
the eighteenth century movement felt precisely this sense of Jewish alienation
and apartness from the characteristic Enlightenment ideals and projects.
What led me to begin writing about this topic, as Alexander explains in
his paper, was a growing sense that after 2001, these ancient antisemitic mo-
tifs had begun to creep into political and media attacks on Israel, mostly writ-
ten from a liberal-left perspective.
Talk of a “new” antisemitism faces the problem, which Alexander in
part addresses, that the people concerned are not antisemites in the unprob-
lematic, downright sense in which Adolf Hitler, Julius Streicher, or Reinhardt
Heydrich were antisemites. On the contrary, they tend to be deeply committed
opponents of “racism.” Their response to any suggestion that what they write
might on occasion be interpreted as antisemitic is normally, therefore, to reply
that any such response is false to their intentions.
My response to that is that we cannot make words mean anything we
please. We speak a language that has a history, and with it depths of ingrained
implication and connotation, extending far beyond the momentary purposes
or intentions of the individual user. Because of that, unless we are very care-
ful to qualify our words, we are apt to end up saying, by means of them,
more, and sometimes quite different things, than we imagine ourselves to be
saying. My object, in The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism and in all my subse-
quent writings in this area has been, as Alexander makes clear, to elucidate,
by familiar philosophical methods of exact definition and painstaking textual
analysis, the extent to which large sections of the liberal left have fallen into
habits of sloppy writing and thinking, where Israel and “the Jews” are con-
cerned, that belie their stated “anti-racist” intentions.
Qualification is generally alien to political discourse, where inflation
and hyperbole are all too apt to creep up upon the incautious thinker without
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 237

his realizing it. A leading example is to be found in the often-repeated claim

that opposition to Zionism is not to be confused with antisemitism. On the
face of it, this is quite correct. Zionism is a form of Jewish nationalism. Just
as one can be opposed to Irish or Scottish nationalism without that implying
hostility to Scots or to the Irish per se, disapproval of Zionism need not imply
hostility to Jews.
However, with serious political engagement comes the need to explain
why Zionism should be resisted as politically reprehensible. At this point, the
exigencies of forensic debate enter the picture. If the objection is that Zionism
is a form of nationalism, one encounters the difficulty that many of those hos-
tile to Zionism are sympathetic to other forms of nationalism—Irish national-
ism, for instance—or indifferent to yet others, such as Chinese nationalism. If
it is said that the objection to Zionism is that its territorial gains were in the
first instance the fruit of armed force, and that it oppresses the Palestinian
minority, we face the objection that the same can be said of Republican Ire-
land vis-à-vis the Protestant minority, or of the Chinese vis-à-vis the Tibetans.
The reply to that can only be that the crimes of Zionist nationalism exceed
those of other forms, and now a process of inflation begins. At times, this
leads to claims that the crimes of Israel dwarf those of the twentieth century,
and not infrequently to the abandonment of any attempt to distinguish be-
tween Israel and the Jews. The result is the confection, no doubt with the best
intentions, of a literature that, in the end, effectively reanimates most of the
traditional claims of European antisemitism: absolute wickedness, conspiracy,
and so on. What I have tried to do in my work on contemporary antisemitism,
using the prosaic methods of exact definition and close textual analysis habit-
ual in academic philosophy, is simply to flag up points at which such distor-
tions intervene.
Alexander’s paper provides a useful summary of the main directions my
efforts in that respect have taken so far. He advances one criticism, however,
which involves such a central misconstrual of my intentions that I must reply
to it here. He objects, as he has done in several reviews of my work, that I
seem not to want to accuse anybody—Chomsky, John J. Mearsheimer, Ste-
phen M. Walt, or whoever it might be, of actually being an antisemite; that I
seem to be writing about “an antisemitism without antisemites.” He suggests
various explanations for this ranging from an implausibly well-meaning belief
in the power of reason to make bad men good, to a desire to influence the
uncommitted bystander.
None of his suggestions quite catch my intentions. The fact of the matter
is that I do not find the question whether anyone in particular is an antisemite
to be an interesting one. I am not, after all, these people’s nurse or their spiritu-
al advisor, and in any case, I can see no rational means of settling the question.
Besides, the individuals concerned are mostly intellectuals or writers, often in
the universities or in the media, and such people, taken as individuals, have no
power. It is a politically interesting question whether the leader of some post-
238 BERNARD HARRISON

Soviet Eastern European state is an antisemite, but it is of no political interest

whatsoever whether Mr. So-and-So who teaches politics at (Blank) State Uni-
versity is one. One of the peculiarities of the new antisemitism is that, unlike
that of the German National Socialist Party, it operates not through individuals,
but through climates of opinion. That is a point that I make at length in the
opening chapter of The Resurgence of Antisemitism.
Climates of opinion have effects however. That is why it is important to
do what one can to ensure that they are formed upon the basis of established
fact and sound reasoning. That is mainly what I have been attempting to
achieve in my work on antisemitism, and from that point of view, it pleases
me to learn, through feedback and through my publisher’s statements, that the
book has begun to find a role as a text in university courses here and there.
But in this case, the seriousness of the issues involved transcend mere intel-
lectual housekeeping. Given what Jews have endured over the past century, it
is unsurprising that they should find disturbing and personally threatening the
unending torrent of ill-informed and badly reasoned hostility to Israel to be
met with in the media, particularly in European countries. It is unsurprising,
too, that they should find in that much publicized hostility an explanation of
the steady increase in attacks on Jewish life and property that has been taking
place since 2001.
In the last analysis, in short, I share with Alexander his sense that the
Jews, and not just Israel, or Zionism, are once again under fire. The alarm and
disgust I feel at this revival of old delusions, however, is only partly motivat-
ed by the manifest lethal power exercised by such delusions in the recent past.
The above brief sketch of some salient aspects of Judaism should suffice, I
think, to indicate the extent to which my own views, and for that matter those
of writers like Wittgenstein or Kovesi, to whose influence my position owes
much, display a certain “Hebraism” in their content and flavor. The more I
learn of Judaism, that is to say, the more I find myself regarding it as an intel-
lectual and moral resource to which “the Western intellectual tradition”
would do well to pay greater attention. The Nazis spoke of creating a Jew-
free (Judenfrei) world. To me, a world free of Jews and Jewish culture would
much resemble a world free of forests or a world free of water. We need all
three a good deal more, that is to say, than we need the sound of our own ran-
corous and declamatory voices prophesying New World Orders on the basis
of whatever infinitely friable system of belief has come, for the moment, to
embody for us the triumph of hope over experience.

4. Literature and Reality

I now turn to the opening set of papers, by John Gibson, Murray Baumgarten,
and Richard Eldridge, which are concerned mainly with my work in literary
studies and the philosophy of literature. However, the transition marks no
very sharp gap in the discussion that has developed so far, since what these
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 239

papers do, to a very great extent, is to uncover further aspects of the debate
between realism and constructivism that was introduced in connection with
Morris and Patterson and has continued, in various forms, to occupy us
throughout this essay.
John Gibson sets the tone at the outset. He notes that all my work is, in
some sense, intended as an extended defense of a certain kind of realism: re-
alism about the contents of the human world. He sees that project—I agree
with him—as essential to any defense of humanism against current attacks:

But humanists, Harrison included, tend to find the work of art to be the
best image we have of how our human practices can conspire to make a
particular achievement possible. Explaining what this achievement con-
sists in is where the philosophical work begins. But the achievement,
whatever else it does, reveals that human language and culture can on oc-
casion give us access to something worldly enough: a realm that is both
human in origin yet sufficiently deserving of the name “real” to dispel the
sense that it is a mere projection of human thought and speech. (This
volume, chap. 1, p. 35)

At the same time, Gibson formulates a doubt, one deserving an extended

reply, concerning the way I set about fulfilling this particular demand. It con-
cerns the story I tell about the nature of the connection between creative liter-
ature and reality. That story is that the connection runs not by way of descrip-
tion—by way of the attempt to represent, in the fiction, how things stand in the
world—but rather by way of a certain sort of exploration of meaning: one that
operates by “setting language to work,” as it were, against the background of
richly imagined fictional circumstances. He likes the anti-representationalism
of this account, but wonders, reasonably, whether any plausible view of litera-
ture can divorce it, as mine seems to do, from any notion of representation
whatsoever. He argues:

if we give up all talk of representation, we will have a very difficult time

telling a compelling account of what it means for a novel to succeed or,
perhaps more importantly, fail in its attempt to offer a cognitively sig-
nificant encounter with the world. (Ibid., p. 45)

Without such a notion, have we any means, for instance, of formulating the
thought that Fyodor Dostoyevsky may not be talking nonsense when he
speaks, in the Preface to Notes from Underground, of “showing the public a
character of the recent past more clearly than is usually shown”? Gibson tells
us: “The question is just how Harrison would accommodate, if it all, this plea
for a properly literary-humanistic theory of representation” (ibid., p. 48). This
is not only a fair but an important question, and I will now do my best to an-
240 BERNARD HARRISON

swer it, taking as my text the snippet Gibson offers from Dostoyevsky’s Pref-
ace to Notes from Underground, where he makes the sort of authorial promise
to illuminate reality that the humanist believes we should take so seriously:

It goes without saying that both these Notes and their author are fictitious.
Nevertheless, people like the author of these notes may, indeed must, exist
in our society, if we think of the circumstances under which that society
has been formed. It has been my wish to show the public a character of the
recent past more clearly than is usually shown. (2001, p. 95)

What Dostoyevsky claims to be representing here is a character. What I

would want to say by way of at least a preliminary answer to Gibson’s chal-
lenge to me to articulate a properly humanistic theory of representation is
that Dostoyevsky has right on his side. What literature can, and does, repre-
sent, is character.
A string of obvious questions arises at this point. “Why is the literary
representation of character not just one more form of representationalism?”
“Anyway, if the writer cannot be trusted to give us an accurate representation
of the world in general, why should his representations of character be trust-
ed?” “Should we not be turning to the psychologist rather than the writer for
accurate “representations” of character?” “How can we hope, anyway, to elu-
cidate character merely by manipulating language, and in the context of a
fiction at that?”
If I were starting out to articulate Gibson’s humanistic theory of repre-
sentations, the last of these questions is the one I would set about answering
first. The answer I would give is this: Language can operate to manifest char-
acter in literature because language is central to the manifestation of character
in real life. We are not, after all, telepathic. We manifest our character as per-
sons by what we say and do in this or that set of circumstances: by the play of
words against meaning and circumstance in the context of some given back-
ground of conceptual and institutional presuppositions. Writers, when they
mimic this kind of play of word against circumstance and conceptual back-
ground, are not trying to produce a theory, or a description of character. In
other words, they are not in competition with the psychologist or the sociolo-
gist. They are showing us, rather, what it sounds like, what it says about
someone, that they talk in a certain way in certain circumstances. What they
show us, despite the fact that it is shown only in the context of a fiction, is
important to us because talk of that kind would sound just the same way,
would mean just the same things, in such a context in real life. According to
my way of thinking, that is what accounts for the curious fact, which often
puzzles philosophers, that we can, and do, respond to characters in fiction as
if they were real people. We are not (always) guilty of escapism, or of “losing
our grip on reality” when we do this: sometimes, in fact, we are, precisely,
gaining a grip on reality.
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 241

I come now to Murray Baumgarten’s essay, which in certain respects ad-

vances a very similar account of the interplay between language, character, and
institutional background as the one I have sketched in reply to Gibson, but with
a deeper sense of the role of institutional diversity and institutional exclusion.
Rebecca West is reputed to have said, reacting, like Gibson, against literary
representationalism: “A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one
of the damned things is ample.”
One of the damned things would be ample, I find myself wanting to re-
ply, if the “universe” with which literary art is occupied were singular. But
while the natural universe may be singular, the human universe is not. It is a
universe created by human ingenuity in the devising of common practices and
institutions, and the interlocking towers of language, character, conflict, and
resolution that they in turn inflict upon the startled world.
Such a universe is a place of many mansions, whose connections with
one another are mostly subterranean. It constantly divides and fulgurates into
new forms, moral, social, political, religious, bringing with them new human
realities distressing to those of us who had supposed ourselves up to speed on
the supposedly eternal verities of Human Nature.
When dealing with the human world, in short, we cannot rely on the
postulate of the unity of nature that has served us so well in the natural sci-
ences. The human world is Jorge Luis Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths”
(1998, pp. 119–128), and literature is our best guide to it.
Baumgarten’s essay throws much light on the role played by the literary
representation of character in the exploration of such a world. It addresses a
central question of Dickens studies: “Are the novels of Dickens dressed up
sociological inquiries, or fantastic imaginings of, say, coincidence relating
only to their own linguistic play?” This is a question that connects closely
with Gibson’s worries about representation and representationalism, and ad-
dresses them in ways that bring into play Gibson’s sense, about which I have
not so far had much to say, that the former notion has much to do with “what
it means for a novel to succeed or, perhaps more importantly, fail in its at-
tempt to offer a cognitively significant account of the world” (this volume,
chap. 1, p. 45; emphasis added).
Baumgarten justly connects the narrative pleasures we enjoy from
“Dickens’s torrent of language” with the “with knowledge of what Harrison
has articulated as the social practices of communities and the individuals they
engender” (this volume, chap. 2, p. 50) that Dickens gained from Thomas
Carlyle, Henry Mayhew, Robert Merton and others. He shows how they func-
tion as “algorithms that generate the literary conditions out of which the read-
er experiences the social location as well as the interiority—the subjectivity—
of his characters” (ibid., p. 51). He admirably demonstrates how Dickens
“brings to life” what “Henry Mayhew catalogues,” so that, through the play
of speech against circumstance, “the scavengers of Our Mutual Friend” make
242 BERNARD HARRISON

Lizzie and Gaf become “not statistical presences but living fictional charac-
ters” (ibid.).
The Jews, however—in the persons, for Dickens, of Fagin in Oliver
Twist ([1838] 1982) and Riah in Our Mutual Friend—are, as Baumgarten
sees it, the exception: the point of failure, as Gibson would put it, of Dick-
ens’s powers of literary representation. What makes them the exception,
Baumgarten suggests acutely, is:

Victorian Jews for all the improvements of that modernizing society yet
remained in the world of what Wolfgang Iser has called “the unsayable”
(1987, p. xvii)—and what D. A. Miller has characterized as “the
unnarratable“ (1989). (This volume, chap. 2, p. 52)

The difficulty Dickens faces here—what brings it about that, while he

can make Lizzie and Gaffer Hexam speak (plausibly, shockingly, affectingly)
as Thames scavengers, he cannot make either Fagin or Riah speak as Jews —
is, Baumgarten suggests, that although “Jewish lives were unfolding simulta-
neously with hegemonic English ones; . . . they were also at times in alterna-
tive universes” (ibid.). While:

Dickens understood what it meant to think of English culture and socie-

ty as a palimpsest—and while he plumbed its layers, he did not have ac-
cess, given his personal and cultural location at this point, to the situa-
tion of its Jewish inhabitants. (Ibid.)

The result is, “in this Dickensian universe, Jews have no address, no location
from which to speak in their own voice and person” (ibid., emphasis added).
Consequently, Dickens has no choice, as Baumgarten sees it, but to fab-
ricate his Jews on the basis of the non-Jewish systems of practice, meaning,
and identity to which he did have access. Thus, he manufactures Fagin out of
what he knew—and it was a good deal—of the London criminal underworld
of his day. “When Fagin leaps off the page, we are engaged by Dickens’s
representation of criminals. Dickens knew those social practices more thor-
oughly perhaps than any writer of his era” (ibid., p. 53). But Fagin as a per-
son, as a character, remains “dead.”

There are moments in Oliver Twist when the reader enjoys the games
Fagin plays with his boys, perhaps the only time in the novel when these
young gang members can actually play and be boys. But there are no
moments when the reader enters Fagin’s consciousness. He remains an
externalized metonymy—a stand-in and front man for the criminal con-
spiracy he and Monks have hatched. He is defined against the middle-
class world he preys on. (Ibid.)
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 243

How might Dickens have remedied this? How does one make the leap,
across, as it were, a tract of semantically, because praxially, empty space,
from one “alternative [human] universe” to another? Baumgarten’s sugges-
tion, which seems to me deeply sound, is that one might well set about it by
investigating the fabric of common practices, along with the simultaneously
generated and sustaining systems of meanings and assumptions to which they
give rise, that furnish that other universe with living inhabitants speaking a
living language. He points out that Dickens has constituted Riah, in Our Mu-
tual Friend, simply by turning upside down the conventional stereotype of the
Jew as a money grubbing machine interested in nothing and nobody but him-
self (that stereotype having been assigned to the Christian side of the firm, in
the person of Fascination Fledgeby in Our Mutual Friend).
The inversion having been duly performed, Riah ought to emerge, in a
novel obsessed with the question of who is and who is not a gentleman, as a
member of the former group; but does not. He cannot, because, like Fagin, he
is lifeless, an “externalized metonymy” as Baumgarten felicitously puts it.
Faced with the problem of plausibly gentrifying Riah, Baumgarten asks:

Why does Dickens, for example, not make use of, refer to, or even nar-
rate some of Moses Montefiore’s life as a model for Riah’s, parallel to
his use of Solomons’s for Fagin? Is it because he does not understand
Montefiore’s commitment to Klal Yisrael, to the community of practice
of his people, which he served and his commitment to seeking justice
for his people? (Ibid., p. 59)

No doubt; and much else besides, of that sort, that goes to make up the
praxial, moral, and psychological universe of the observant Jew.
If Gibson’s distinction between literary representation and
representationalism stands, more certainly needs to be said about why the
former should interest us. What do we learn from it, and why could it not be
learned equally well in other, non-literary ways? This is the question much of
my own work has attempted to address, and it is the one Richard Eldridge
addresses. He takes the idea, introduced in Inconvenient Fictions, that the
knowledge offered by literature is “dangerous knowledge,” knowledge with
the implicit power to unseat the possessors’ sense of what they are, and uses
it to direct a rereading of Donne’s “The Canonization” and some influential
recent academic readings of that poem from various theoretical standpoints.
The latter crystallize, for him, into two basic lines of approach that face each
other across the trenches of the culture wars that have divided the academy,
and in particular the American academy, for the past half century.
On one side stand the new critical readings of Cleanth Brooks ([1947]
1956) or Clay Hunt (1954); on the other, more recent, “historicizing” read-
ings, such as those of Arthur F. Marotti (1986) or John Guillory (1993).
Brooks and Hunt read the poem as both the record and the vehicle of a re-
244 BERNARD HARRISON

demptive experience, in which the poet—Donne himself—finds a way to a

reconciliation of religious spirituality and carnal love. This is a reconciliation
of which the poem is both the expression and—as the original of Brooks’s
The Well-Wrought Urn ([1947] 1956)—the realization. The Marotti and Guil-
lory focus on the covert political references and uses of the text, both in its
own time, and in present-day politics as those are understood in the academy.
I suspect that the impression left with Eldridge, by both of his “lines of
strong reading,” as it is on me, is that their authors are using literature to fo-
cus on matters that are, in the end, non-literary. This is perhaps most obvious-
ly the case with “the Marotti-Guillory line,” which, as Eldridge puts it, “fo-
cus[es] suspiciously, skeptically, and knowingly on the political instrumental-
ities of both the text itself and contemporary uses of it” (this volume, chap. 3,
p. 75). Put bluntly, the reason for spending time with Donne’s poem in the
first place is—or was—supposed to have been its value as literature. But what
has literary value to do with political instrumentalities?
The same question can be raised with respect to the putatively more
“humane” or “humanistic” readings of Brooks or Hunt. They implicitly treat
the ironies and paradoxes of the poem as both the expression and the vehicle
of a movement toward reconciliation taking place within the conscious life of
the poet. But one does not need to have read Derrida on the divorce between
the timeless living present of consciousness and the time-ridden, shifting
sands of écriture (writing) (though it helps), to see the possibilities of circu-
larity looming here (see Derrida, 1973).
Why should Donne’s half-apprehended predicaments, their bringing to
consciousness, and a kind of resolution through the agency of a poem replete
with irony and paradox interest me? The only obvious answer seems to be
because Donne was a great poet, and “The Canonization” was a major in-
stance of his work. But that in turn raises the question, “Why should ‘The
Canonization’ be regarded as a great poem?” If we answer, “Because it so
beautifully and with such a mastery of irony and paradox explores Donne’s
half-apprehended predicaments,” the circle closes, and the futility of the “ex-
planations” its various moments offer become evident.
My way of breaking out of that and other such circles has been to turn
and make a stand on language: on the language of the poem and on the nature
of language in general, both as a human invention and—as Wallace Stevens,
for example, saw it—as a vehicle for the invention of the human and of what
it is to be human in one or another mode. Poems, “books,” in the literary
sense, in general, though they are no doubt, as I. A. Richards put it, “ma-
chines for thinking” (1925) are evidently enough machines made of words.
Words in turn, if I am right, possess the meanings, and the powers of reveal-
ing new meaning, that they possess, only because of the roles assigned to
them in practices that in turn serve to raise, upon the biological foundations of
our nature, the personalities and predicaments that populate and define one or
another human world.
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 245

The readings of both the New Critics and the historicists in Eldridge’s
critical menagerie begin from a sense of “The Canonization” as wrestling
with a predicament, though, as Eldridge notes, they differ as to its nature. For
the New Critics, the predicament is that of a man who needs to find some way
of reconciling profane and divine love. For the historicists, the predicament is
the far more down-to-earth one of how a courtier who has ruined himself by
an unwise love match, and who happens also to be a Catholic, can re-
establish his standing within a homoerotic aristocratic intellectual circle in
ways that might restore him to the public world.
Where these readings coincide, however, as Eldridge’s instructive juxta-
positions and allusions reveal, is in a common sense of the dangers of the path
Donne is treading (“the poet daringly treats profane love as if it were divine
love” [Brooks, 1947, p. 11]; “always a tightrope walk” [Empson, 1995, p. 93];
“things are at the emotional breaking point” [Marotti, 1986, p. 3).
Donne’s age was no blinder to these tensions than ours is, and far less
ready to take them in its stride. Samuel Johnson, in coining the term “meta-
physical poets” also coined the hackneyed sentence concerning them that
every schoolchild once knew: “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by
violence together.” ([1779] 1868, p. 9). The phrase itself is a violent one, the
image one of things by nature intrinsically opposed being perversely and
willfully forced together in an act that, precisely, denies nature. One is re-
minded of a similarly anxiety ridden passage of invective against Fielding on
the part of another member of Johnson’s circle, Sir John Hawkins:

[Fielding’s] morality, in respect that it resolves virtue into good affec-

tions, in contradistinction to moral obligation and a sense of duty, is that
of Lord Shaftesbury vulgarized, and of excellent use in palliating the
vices most injurious to society.” (1787, vol. 1, pp. 214–215)

As with Johnson’s phrase, one is surprised by the level of anxiety that vi-
brates in these words. It is as if Hawkins, also, feels his sense of the order
of nature to be under threat from Fielding, who, like Johnson on the
metaphysicals, he, also, sees as yoking together by violence things, in
Hawkins’s case affection and duty, by nature not merely different, but in-
trinsically opposed.
But, of course, “nature” in the extra-human sense is not involved. Such
distinctions as that between duty and affection, or for that matter between
carnal and Divine love, are cultural constructs. They entered our conceptual
vocabulary not because we needed them to describe or explain the results of
scientific investigations into the order of the natural world, but because we
needed them, or thought we needed them, to describe our relations with one
another. What is under threat in art, whether in Fielding’s work or in Donne’s
“The Canonization,” is never the integrity of distinctions necessary to our
understanding of the natural world, but rather the integrity of distinctions
246 BERNARD HARRISON

necessary to the intellectual credentials, and so to the maintenance, of one or

another cultural order.
Keeping a culture alive is, among other things, a matter of maintaining a
living sense of the inevitability, the naturalness, of certain founding concep-
tual oppositions. Art can serve to sustain that sense; but equally it can serve to
disrupt it: and when it does it produces the kinds of anxiety, the sense of
threat to the natural order, or to an order perceived as natural, that vibrates in
Johnson’s judgment on the metaphysical poets, or Hawkins’s on Fielding.
What Donne does in “The Canonization” is to reveal, by reflecting, pro-
gressively, step by step, on what thin partitions divide the “natures” of carnal
and Divine love, as ordinarily understood. The distance between them is
eroded in the poem not, of course, by argument, but simply by allowing the
common meanings of the hallowed or unhallowed words associated with each
to flower in the context of the other. Thus carnal love, in its hermitage, by
seeking peace and turning its back on rage, on worldly power and on the
pomp of overbearing tombs, allows divine love to flower unexpectedly in the
bedchamber. There is nothing (such is the power of Donne’s art) that some-
one who feels, with Johnson, that radically opposed notions are being yoked
together by violence, can do to stop the misalliance Donne is contriving. It is
the meanings of the very terms in the common language that one uses to make
clear the notions of carnal and divine love in the first place that open, in the
poem, the gates in the walls that supposedly divide them, allowing the emo-
tions generated by each to flow into union. Eldridge and I share the view that
plain, literal description is not the only point at which language intersects
with cognition. From this point of view, the literary merit of the poem can
thus be seen as residing where common sense and the common reader would
wish to place it, in its language; or more precisely in the skill with which
Donne manipulates language to create a machine with the properties that El-
dridge explores.
That experience of transgressive union that Donne’s machine-for-
thinking offers is one that it stands eternally ready to provide for any reader
who understands fully the meanings, connotations, and implications of the
words Donne employs in its construction (an understanding that literary
scholarship, including that of the four critics Eldridge discusses, stands, of
course, helpfully ready to provide). It is an experience that continues to inter-
est and reward readers, even though the poem’s author, along with his per-
sonal, social and financial predicaments is, as Derrideans constantly remind
us, long since dust, because the distinction between sacred and profane love
remains active in the common culture. The poem is not, in short, merely a
private reflection by Donne upon his personal predicaments, but a public ob-
ject that continues to reflect publicly on ours. It is public because it is a ma-
chine made of language, and language, as Wittgenstein taught some of us to
see, is necessarily public.
Thus, I end in entire agreement with Eldridge:
 Epilogue: Reflections and Replies 247

here we may and should also ask: Is the overall effect of “The Canoniza-
tion” one of failure? Or is it rather an effect of the successfully enacted
or expressed presence of an ambivalent mind that has housed its own
ambivalences within a dramatic structure? (This volume, chap. 3, p. 76)

I also agree with his suggestion:

The resolution is dramatic, not assertational, and it involves an invitation

to us—the readers of “The Canonization“—to see ourselves and to
acknowledge our own lives as richly structured by ambivalent desire as
is the life of the speaker of these words. (Ibid., p. 77)

Acknowledgment

Now it remains for me to express my gratitude to all the contributors to this

volume, both for what I have learned from their contributions and for the at-
tention, time, and toil they have been kind enough to bestow on my work. I
would also like to thank our editor, Patricia Hanna, not only for her hard
work, but also for some telling criticisms of earlier drafts that resulted in con-
siderable improvements to the two chapters I have contributed. Whatever
errors and inadequacies remain in them are, I fear, my own.
 WORKS CITED
Prologue
Bernard Harrison

Ayer, A. J. (1936) Language, Truth, and Logic. London: Golancz.

Barbery, Muriel. (2006) L’élégance du hérisson. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
Crary, Alice, and Rupert Read, eds. (2000) The New Wittgenstein. New York: Routledge.
Coleridge, S. T. (1935) Table Talk. New York: Harper Bros.
Collini, Stefan. (2012) “As a Vocation: Scrutineers and Leavisites: Respect and Abuse for
the Literary Criticism of F. R. Leavis,” Times Literary Supplement, 5721.
Fielding, Henry. ([1743] 2008) Jonathan Wild. Edited by Claude Rawson, Linda Bree,
and Hugh Amory. Oxford: Oxford World Classics.
———. (1749) The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling. London: Andrew Millar.
Hanna, Patricia, and Bernard Harrison. (2004) Word and World: Practice and the Foun-
dations of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harrison, Bernard. (1973) Form and Content. New York: Barnes & Noble.
———. (1975) Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones”: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher.
London: Chatto & Windus, for Sussex University Press
———. (1979) “Kant and the Sincere Fanatic.” In Philosophers of the Enlightenment:
Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, 1975–1976, edited by S. C. Brown, pp.
226–261. Brighton, N.Y.: Harvester Press.
———. (1981) Moral Sentiments.” In Ethik-Grundlagen, Probleme und Anwendung:
Akten des 5. Internationalen Wittgensteins-Symposiums [The Foundations of Eth-
ics: Problems and Applications], edited by Edgar Morscher and Rudolf Stranziger,
pp. 77–78. Wien: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky.
———. (1984) “Moral Judgment, Action, and Emotion,” Philosophy, 59:229, pp. 295–
321. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100069904.
———. (1986) “Identity, Predication, and Color,” American Philosophical Quarterly,
23:1, pp. 105–114. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20014129.
———. (1989) “Morality and Interest,” Philosophy, 64:249, pp. 303–322. Stable URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100044685.
———. (1991a) Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
———. (1991b) “Wittgenstein and Scepticism.” In Meaning Scepticism, edited by Klaus
Puhl, pp. 34–69. New York: Walter de Gruyter.
———. (1996) “Truth, Yardsticks and Language-Games,” Philosophical Investigations,
19:2, pp. 105–130. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9205.1996.
tb00414.x.
———. (1999) “Criteria and Truth.” In volume 23 issue 1 of Midwest Studies in Philoso-
phy, edited by Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein, pp. 207–235. Blackwell
Publishers. DOI: 10.1111/1475-4975.00012.
———. (2012) “Kovesi’s Refutation of Hume.” In Meaning and Morality: Essays on the
Philosophy of Julius Kovesi, edited by Alan Tapper and T. Brian Mooney, pp. 19–
42. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers.
———. (forthcoming 2014) What is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
250 REALITY AND CULTURE

Hobbes, Thomas. ([1651] 1996) Leviathan. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.
Hume, David. ([1738] 1978) A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. Selby-Bigge and
P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
James, William (1907) Pragmatism A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking; Popu-
lar Lectures on Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green.
Leavis, F. R. (1975) The Living Principle: “English” as a Discipline of Thought. London:
Chatto & Windus.
Locke, John. (1690) An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. London: Printed by
Eliz. Holt for Thomas Basset.
Mandeville, Bernard. ([1714] 1962) The Fable of the Bees. Edited by Irwin Primer. New
York: Capricorn Books.
Moyal-Sharrock, Daniele. (2007) Understanding Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty.” London:
Palgrave/Macmillan.
Rorty, Richard. (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Ryle, Gilbert. ([1949] 1959) The Concept of Mind. New York: Barnes & Noble.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1938) La nausée. Paris: Gallimard. (For an English translation, see
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1995) Nausea. Translated from the French by Robert Baldick.
London: Penguin Books.)
Williams, Bernard. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana/Collins.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1958) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. ([1921] 1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B.
F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
———. (1979) Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1932–1935: From the Notes of
Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald. Edited by Alice Ambrose. Oxford:
Blackwell.

Chapter One
John Gibson

Cavell, Stanley. (1969) Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. New York:
Scribner.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. (2001) Notes From Underground : An Authoritative Translation,
Backgrounds and Sources, Responses, Criticism. 2nd ed. Translated by Michael R.
Katz. New York: Norton.
Gibson, John. (2006) “Interpreting Words, Interpreting Worlds,” Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, 64:4, pp. 439–450. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/
stable/4622189.
———. (2007) Fiction and the Weave of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hanna, Patricia, and Bernard Harrison. (2004) Word and World: Practice and the Foun-
dations of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harrison, Bernard. (1975) Henry Fielding’s“ Tom Jones”: The Novelist as Moral Philos-
opher. London: Chatto and Windus.
———. (1991) Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
 Works Cited 251

———. (1993) “Imagined Worlds and the Real One: Plato, Wittgenstein, and Literary
Mimesis,” Philosophy and Literature, 17:1, pp. 26–46. Stable URL: http://
dx.doi.org/10.1353/phl.1993.0051.
———. (2006) The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion.
Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
———. (2007) “Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction.” In A Sense of
the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge, edited by John Gibson,
Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca. Pocci, pp. 67–88. London: Routledge.
———. (2009) “Realism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, edited
by Richard Eldridge, pp. 223–246. New York: Oxford University Press.
Milton, John. (2005) Paradise Lost. New York: W.W. Norton.
Putnam, Hilary. (1990) Realism With a Human Face. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Stevens, Wallace. (1942) Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. Cummington, Mass.: The
Cummington Press.
Woolf, Virginia. (1927) To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Chapter Two
Murray Baumgarten

Baumgarten, Murray. (2011) “Reading Dickens Writing London,” Partial Answers, 9:2
(June), pp. 219–232. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pan.2011.0020.
Dickens, Charles. (1851) “On Duty with Inspector Field,” Household Words (June 14).
———. ([1865] 1908) Our Mutual Friend, Vol. 2. New York: The University Society.
———. ([1860–1861] 1942) Great Expectations. New York: Dodd, Mead. (Originally
published in 3 vol.)
———. ([1840] 1943) The Old Curiosity Shop. New York: Dodd, Mead.
———. ([1850] 1943) David Copperfield. New York: Dodd, Mead. (Original title: The
Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield
the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery [Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any
Account])
———. ([1847–1848] 1950) Dombey and Son. New York: Dodd, Mead.
———. ([1864] 1899) Our Mutual Friend, Volume One. Vol. 23 of The Works of Charles
Dickens. Gadshill Edition. Edited by Andrew Lang. New York: Scribner’s Sons.
———. ([1855–1857] 1953) Little Dorrit. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. ([1838] 1982) Oliver Twist. New York: Dodd, Mead. Introduction by Irving
Howe. New York: Bantam Dell, a division of Random House.
Dunbar, Pamela. (1980) William Blake’s Illustrations to the Poetry of Milton. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Eigner, Edwin. (1989) The Dickens Pantomime. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Eliot, George. ([1876] 1984) Daniel Deronda. New York : Oxford University Press.
Felsenstein, Frank. (1995) Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English
Popular Culture, 1660–1830. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Harrison, Bernard. (1991) Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory.
Princeton: Yale University Press.
———. (1996) “Talking Like a Jew: Reflections on Identity and the Holocaust,” Juda-
ism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought published by the American
Jewish Congress,45:177 (Winter), pp. 3–29.
252 REALITY AND CULTURE

———. (2006) “Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction,” Partial An-
swers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 4:1 (January), pp. 79–106.
Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pan.0.0098.
———. (2011a) “Always Fiction? The Limits of Authorial License in ‘Our Mutual
Friend,’” Partial Answers, 9:2 (June), pp. 405–430.
———. (2011b) 7th British Wittgenstein Society Lecture: Bernard Harrison on “Witt-
genstin, Reality, and the Novel.” University of Hertfordshire, 18 October. Abstract
accessed July 24, 2013. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&
source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.editor.net%2
FBWS%2Fdocs%2FHarrison%2520abstract.docx&ei=CH7wUfbZHtKJrQGTlYD
oCA&usg=AFQjCNG6KXFL2lAxxrGklzJ-vo6_0FQWfw.
Howe, Irving. ([1838] 1982) Introduction. In Dickens, Oliver Twist, pp. xi–xxii.
Iser, Wolfgang. (1987) Introduction. In Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Nega-
tivity in Literature and Literary Theory. Edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang
Iser, pp. xi–xxi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Jordan, John. (2011) Supposing Bleak House. Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press.
Kaplan, Fred. (1998) Dickens: A Biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Lebrecht, Norman (2005). “How Racist is Oliver Twist?.” The Lebrecht Report. La Scena
Musicale (September 29). Accessed July 31, 2013. http://www.scena.org/columns/
lebrecht/050929-NL-twist.html.
Ledger, Sally. (2010) Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination. Cambridge Studies
in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. New York: Cambridge University
Press 2010.
Litvak, Joseph. (1998) “Bad Scene: Oliver Twist and the Pathology of Entertainment,”
Dickens Studies Annual 26. New York: AMS.
Miller, D. A. (1989) Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Tradition-
al Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Milton, John. ([1667] 1996) Paradise Lost. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Li-
brary.
Morris, Pam. (1991) Dickens’s Class Consciousness. New York: Macmillan.
Nunberg, Geoffrey. (2001) The Way We Talk Now: Commentaries on Language and
Culture. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Sackville O’Donnell, Judith (2002). The First Fagin: The True Story of Ikey Solomon.
Acland. Melbourne: Acland.
Shakespeare, William. ([1603] 1947) The Tragedy of King Lear. New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
———. ([1603] 1954) Measure for Measure. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Stewart, Garrett. (1974) Dickens and the Trial of Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Stone, Harry. (1959) “Dickens and the Jews,” Victorian Studies, 2:3 (March), pp. 223–
253.
Trilling, Lionel. (1978) “The Changing Myth of the Jew,” Commentary, 66:2 (August),
pp. 24–34.
Wagenaar, Hendrik, and S. D. Noam Cook. (2011) “The Push and Pull of the World:
How Experience Animates Practice,” Evidence and Policy, 7: 2 (May), pp. 193–
212. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/174426411X579225.
 Works Cited 253

Zangwill, Israel. (1914) The Melting Pot; Drama in Four Acts. New York: Macmillan.

Chapter Three
Richard Eldridge

Bacon, Sir Francis. ([1852] 1879–1890) Two Books of the Proficience and Advancement
of Leaerning, Human and Divine. In Volume 1 of Works. 7 vol, collected and edit-
ed by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. London:
Longmans.
Brooks, Cleanth. (1947) The Well Wrought Urn. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Cohen, Ted. (2008) Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Donne, John. (2000) The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne. Edited by
Charles M. Coffin. New York: Modern Library.
Empson, William. (1995) Essays on Renaissance Literature: Vol. 1. Donne and the New
Philosophy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Felski, Rita. (2008) Uses of Literature. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
Fish, Stanley. (1990) “Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power.” In Solicit-
ing Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, edited
by Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eisaman Maus, pp. 223–252. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Gross, Kenneth. (2004) “John Donne’s Lyric Skepticism: In Strange Way,” Modern
Philology, 101:3, pp. 371–399. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/423455.
Guillory, John. (1993) Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Harrison, Bernard. (1991) Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
———. (2009) “Realism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, edited
by Richard Eldridge, pp. 223–246. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———, and Patricia Hanna. (2003) “Interpretation and Ontology: Two Queries for
Krausz.” In Interpretation and Its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael
Krausz, edited by Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, pp. 93–107. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Hunt, Clay. (1954) Donne’s Poetry: Essays in Literary Analysis. New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Marotti, Arthur F. (1986) John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1958) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. ([ 1921] 1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B.
F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
———. (1980) Culture and Value. Translated by Peter Winch. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
———. (1984) Notebooks 1914–1916. 2d. ed. Edited by G. H. Von Wright and G. E.
M. Anscombe. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
———. (1995) Bd. 3. Bemerkungen, philosophische Bemerkungen [Volume 3. Remarks,
Philosophical Remarks]. Vienna Edition. Edited by Michael Nedo. Vienna:
Springer.
254 REALITY AND CULTURE

Chapter Four
Leona Toker

Aleikhem, Sholem. (1973) Tevye der milkhiker [Tevye the Milkman]. Melbourne:
Bachrach.
Austen, Jane ([1914] 1992) Mansfield Park. New York: A. A. Knopf.
———. ([1816] 1992) Persuasion. New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House.
Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon.
Booth, Wayne C. (1961) The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
erný, Lothar. (1992) “Reader Participation and Rationalism in Fielding’s Tom Jones,”
Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate, 2:2, pp. 137–162.
Dickens, Charles. ([1864–1865] 1952) Our Mutual Friend. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Felman, Shoshana. (1983) The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduc-
tion in Two Languages. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Fielding, Henry. (1974) The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. Edited by Fredson Bow-
ers. Oxford: Clarendon.
Fish, Stanley. (1970) “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” New Literary Histo-
ry, 2, pp.123–162. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468593.
———. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
———. (1981) “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser,” Diacritics, 11, pp. 2–13.
Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/464889.
Forster, E. M. ([1905] 1920–1922) Where Angels Fear to Tread. New York: Vintage
Books.
———. ([1907] 1922) The Longest Journey. New York: A. A. Knopf.
Frye, Northrop. (1957) The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Hjelmslev, Lewis. (1969) Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Iser, Wolfgang. (1978) The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore,
Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. (1981) “Talk Like Whales: A Reply to Stanley Fish,” Diacritics, 11, pp. 82–87.
Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/464516.
———. (1989) Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Balti-
more, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. (1997) “Eureka: The Interpretation of Tom Jones. Some Remarks Concerning
Interpretation. A Reply to Lothar erný.” The Wellec Library Lectures. University
of California Irvine. Accessed 3 July 2013. http://www.lib.uci.edu/about/publi
cations/wellek/iser/eureka.html.
Hanna, Patricia, and Bernard Harrison. (2004) Word and World: Practice and the Foun-
dations of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harrison, Bernard. (1975) Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones”: The Novelist as Moral Philos-
opher. London: Chatto and Windus for Sussex University Press.
———. (1989) “Morality and Interest,” Philosophy, 64, pp. 303–322. Stable URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100044685.
———. (1991) Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
 Works Cited 255

———. (1993/1994) “Gaps and Stumbling-Blocks in Fielding: A Response to erný,

Hammond, and Hudson,” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate, 3:2, pp.
147–172.
———. (1994) “Sterne and Sentimentalism.” In Commitment in Reflection: Essays in
Literature and Moral Philosophy, edited by Leona Toker, pp. 63–100. New York:
Garland.
———. (2003) “Houyhnhnm Virtue,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the
History of Ideas, 1:1, pp. 35–64. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pan.0.0095.
———. (2011) “Always Fiction?: The Limits of Authorial License in Our Mutual
Friend,” Partial Answers, 9:2, pp. 405–430.
———. (forthcoming) What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored. Indiana
University Press.
Harshav (Hrushovski), Benjamin. (1984) “Fictionality and Fields of Reference: Remarks
on the Theoretical Framework,” Poetics Today, 5, pp. 227–251. Stable URL: http://
dx.doi.org/10.2307/1771931.
Moore, G. E. (1903) Principia ethica. Cambridge, UK: At the University Press.
Morris, Charles. (1946) Signs, Language, and Behavior. New York: Prentice-Hall.
Ozick, Cynthia. (1996) Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character and Other Essays on
Writing. London: Pimlico/Random House.
Polhemus, Robert M. (1982) Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen to Joyce.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pope, Alexander. ([1709] 1956) “An Essay on Criticism” Pts. I, II, III. In Eighteenth
Century Poetry & Prose. 2nd ed. Edited by Louis I. Bredvold, pp. 604–617. New
York: Ronald Press.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. (1983) Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London:
Methuen.
Sell, Roger D. (1991) “Literary Pragmatics: An Introduction.” In Literary Pragmatics,
edited by Roger D. Sell, pp. xi–xxiii. London: Routledge.
———. (2012) Communicational Criticism: Literature as Dialogue. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Spark, Muriel. (1984) The Only Problem. New York: Putnam.
Sternberg, Meir. 1991. “How Indirect Discourse Means: Syntax, Semantics, Poetics,
Pragmatics.” In Literary Pragmatics, ed. Roger D. Sell. London: Routledge, 1991,
pp. 62–93.
Sterne, Laurence. (1904) The Sermons of Mr. Yorick. With an Introduction by Wilbur L.
Cross. New York: J. F. Taylor.
———. ([1759] 1940) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. New York:
Odyssey Press.
Stewart, Garrett. (2009) Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
———. (2010) “The Ethical Tempo of Narrative Syntax: Sylleptic Recognitions in Our
Mutual Friend,” Partial Answers, 8:1 (January), pp. 119–145.
Swift, Jonathan. ([1725/1735] 1985) Gulliver’s Travels. New York: Avenel Books:
Crown Publishers.
Toker, Leona. (1993) Eloquent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narra-
tive. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
256 REALITY AND CULTURE

———. (1994–1995) “If Everything Else Fails, Read the Instructions: Further Echoes of
the Reception-Theory Debate,” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate, 4, pp.
151–164.
———. (2010) Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
———. (2011) “Syntactics—Semantics—Pragmatics (Still Having One’s Cake?).” In
Teaching Theory, edited by Richard Bradford, pp. 63–77. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Wiesel, Elie. ([1976] 1977). Messengers of God. Translated by Marion Wiesel. New
York: Pocket Books.
Wright, Edmond. (2005) “Faith and Narrative: A Reading of The Franklin’s Tale,” Par-
tial Answers, 3:1, pp. 19–42.

Chapter Five
Alan Tapper

Augustine of Hippo. (1972) Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans. Edited by
David Knowles. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Brennan, J. M. (1977) The Open-Texture of Moral Concepts. London and Basingstoke:
Macmillan Press.
Ewin, R. E. (1981) Cooperation and Human Values: A Study of Moral Reasoning. New
York: St Martin’s Press.
———. (2002) Reasons and the Fear of Death. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
———, and Tapper, Alan. (2004) “Afterword.” In Kovesi, Moral Notions, pp. 147–155.
———. (2012) “MacIntyre and Kovesi on the Nature of Moral Concept.” In Meaning
and Morality: Essays on the Philosophy of Julius Kovesi, edited by Brian T.
Mooney and Tapper, pp. 123–138. Leiden: Brill.
French, Peter A. (1979), The Scope of Morality, Minneapolis: The University of Minneso-
ta Press.
Geach, Peter (1957), Mental Acts, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Goddard, Len (1961), “Counting,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 39, 223–40.
Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048406112341191.
Hanna, Patricia, and Harrison, Bernard (2004), Word and World: Practice and the Foun-
dations of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harrison, Bernard (1975), Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones”: The Novelist as Moral Philos-
opher, London and Toronto: Sussex University Press.
———. (1978), “Kant and the Sincere Fanatic,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures,
12, pp. 226–261. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0080443600002661.
———. (1984), “Moral Judgment, Action, and Emotion,” Philosophy, 59:229, pp. 295–
321. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100069904.
———. (1989), “Morality and Interest,” Philosophy, 64:249, pp. 303–322. Stable URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100044685.
———. (1991a) “Heidegger and the Analytic Tradition on Truth,” Topoi, 10, 121–136.
———. (1991b), Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory, New Haven
and London: Yale University Press.
———. (2012) “Kovesi’s Refutation of Hume.” In Mooney and Tapper, Meaning and
Morality, pp.19–42.
Kovesi, Julius. (1967) Moral Notions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
 Works Cited 257

———. (1970) “Values and Evaluating.” In Jowett Papers 1968–1969, edited by B. Y.

Khanbhai and R. S. Katz, and R. A. Pineau, pp. 53–64 . Oxford: Blackwell.
———. (1979) “Descriptions and Reasons,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
New Series, 80, 101–114. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544953.
———. (1998) Values and Evaluations: Essays on Ethics and Ideology. Edited by Alan
Tapper. New York: Peter Lang.
———. (2004a) “Did Plato Turn Himself Upside Down?.” In Moral Notions, with Three
Papers on Plato, 119–126.
———. (2004b)Moral Notions, with Three Papers on Plato. Edited by R. E. Ewin and
Alan Tapper, with a foreword by Philippa Foot6. Christchurch: Cybereditions. (Re-
publication of Kovesi, 1967)
Mayo, Bernard. (1969) Critical Notice, Mind, 78:310, pp. 285–292. DOI: 10.1093/mind/
LXXVIII.310.285.
Morrison, Brian (2002), “Mind, World, and Language: McDowell and Kovesi,” Ratio, 15,
pp. 293–308. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9329.00192.
Pincoffs, Edmund L. (1986) Quandaries and Virtues: Against Reductivism in Ethics.
Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.
Shiner, Roger A., and Jerome E. Bickenbach. (1976) “Misconceptions about Moral No-
tions,” Analysis, 36, pp. 55–67. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/analys/
36.2.55.
Chapter Six
Edward Alexander

Alexander, Edward. (2007) Review of The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism by Bernard Harri-

son. Commentary Magazine. Accessed August 6, 2013. http://www.commentary
magazine.com/2007/03/30/the-resurgence-of-anti-semitism/.
———. (2012) The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal. New Brunswick, NJ: Trans-
action :Publishers.
———, and Paul Bogdanor, eds. (2006) The Jewish Divide over Israel: Accusers and
Defenders. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.
Arendt, Hannah. (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World.
Cambridge University Press. (1910) The Encyclopædia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts,
Sciences, Literature, and General Information. Cambridge, England: University
Press.
Carter, Jimmy. (2006) Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Churchhill, Caryl. (2009) Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza. First perforned at
London’s Royal Court Theatre on 6 February. Full text and video available online.
Accessed July 29, 2013. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/feb/26/caryl-
churchill-seven-jewish-children-play-gaza.
Dienel, Hans-Liudger. (2010) Terrorism and the Internet Threats, Target Groups,
Deradicalisation Strategies. Washington, DC: IOS Press.
Gross, Tom. “Dutch Journalist: Flu Pandemics Are a Jewish Conspiracy.” (Summary
notes). Mideast Media Analysis. Accessed August 6, 2013. http://www.tomgross
media.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001048.html.
Harrison, Bernard. (1996) “Talking Like a Jew: Reflections on Identity and the Holo-
caust,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought published by the
American Jewish Congress, 45:177 (Winter), pp. 3–29.
258 REALITY AND CULTURE

———. (2006) The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion.
Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.
———. (2007) Israel, Antisemitism, and Free Speech. New York: American Jewish
Committee. OCLC: 261134076. Accessed August 6, 2013. http://www.ajc.org/atf/
cf/{42d75369-d582-4380-8395-d25925b85eaf}/ISRAEL_ANTI-SEMITISM_
AND_FREE_SPEECH.PDF
———. (2008) “Review Essay: Blushing Intellectuals,” Israel Affairs, 14:1, pp. 135–149.
Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13537120701705833. Accessed August 6,
2013. www.paulbogdanor.com/jewishdivide/israelaffairs.pdf.
———. (2009) “Supping with a Short Spoon: The ‘New’ Antisemitism and Its Defend-
ers.” Lecture delivered at one-day conference on antisemitism at University of Hai-
fa (June 22). Accessed July 23, 2013. http://www.edu.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/
antisemitism_conference/files/Bernard_Harrison. pdf. Reprinted as “Anti-Zionism,
Antisemitism, and the Rhetorical Manipulation of Reality.” In Resur-
gent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives, edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, pp. 8–41.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Hazaz, Haim. ([1942] 1975) “Hadrashah” (The Sermon). In Modern Hebrew Literature.
Translated by Ben Halpern. Edited by Robert Alter, pp. 271–288. New York: Beh-
rman House.
Introvigne, Massimo. (2007) “The Catholic Church and the Blood Libel Myth: A Com-
plicated Story,” Covenant, 1:2 (April). Accessed July 29, 2013. http://www. cove-
nant.idc.ac.il/en/vol1/issue2/introvigne.html
Julius, Anthony. (2010) Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Otterman, Sharon, and Robert Mackey. (2009) “Bin Laden’s Reading List for Ameri-
cans,” The Lede: Blogging the News with Robert Mackey. The New York Times
(14 September 2009). Accessed July 29, 2013. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.
com/2009/09/14/bin-ladens-reading-list-for-americans/.
Rosenfeld, Alvin H. (2006) “Progressive” Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism.
New York: American Jewish Committee.
Sacks, Jonathan. (2003) “Foreword: A New Antisemitism?.” In A New Antisemitism?
Debating Judeophobia in the 21st Century, edited by Paul Iganski and Barry
Kosmin. London: Profile Books. Accessed August 7, 2013. http://www.axt.org.
uk/essays/sacks1.htm.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1946) Réflexions sur la question juive [Anti-Semite and Jew]. Paris :
Paul Morihien.
Scheuer, Michael. (2004) Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror.
Dulles, VA: Potomac Books.
Schoenfeld, Gabriel. (2007) “Contentions. Michael Scheuer Watch #1: The Jewish Con-
spiracy.” Commentary. Accessed 19 September 2013. http://www.commentary
magazine.com/2007/06/07/michael-scheuer%E2%80%94a-pro-nazi-anti-semite/.
Taguieff, Pierre-Andre . (2002) La Nouvelle judeophobie [The New Judeophobia]. Paris:
Mille et une Nuits.
Toaff, Ariel. (2007) Pasque di sangue: ebrei d’Europa e omicidi rittuali [Passovers of
Blood: European Jews and Ritual Murder]. Bologna: Il mulino.
Trilling, Leonard. (1950) The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society.
New York: Viking Press.
 Works Cited 259

Walt, Stephen M., and John J. Mearsheimer. (2007) The Israel Lobby and US Foreign
Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chapter Seven
Danièle Moyal-Sharrock

Altieri, Charles (2010) “Exemplification and Expression,” In A Companion to the Philos-

ophy of Literature, edited by G. Hagberg and W. Jost, pp. 491–506. Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Gaskin, R. (1993) “The Truth in Fiction.” Review of Inconvenient Fictions: Literature
and the Limits of Theory, British Journal of Aesthetics, 33:2, pp. 177–179. Stable
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/33.2.177.
Hanna, Patricia, and Bernard Harrison. (2004) Word and World: Practice and the Foun-
dations of Language. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harrison, Bernard. (1991) Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
———. (2011) “Always Fiction? The Limits of Authorial Licence in Our Mutual Friend.
———. (Forthcoming 2014) What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored. Indiana
University Press.
Leavis, F. R. (1967) Anna Karenina and Other Essays. London: Chatto and Windus.
———. (1975) The Living Principle: “English” as a Discipline of Thought. London:
Chatto and Windus.
———. (1976) Thought, Words, and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence. London:
Chatto and Windus.
———. (1982) The Critic as Anti-Philosopher. Edited by G. Singh. London: Chatto &
Windus.
Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle. (2007) Understanding Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty.” Basing-
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1974) Philosophical Grammar. Edited by R. Rhees. Translated
by A. Kenny. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. (1977) On Certainty. Amended 1st ed. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H.
von Wright. Translated by D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. (1982) Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. 1. Edited by G. H.
von Wright and H. Nyman. Translated by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Ox-
ford, Blackwell.
———. (1992) Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. 2. Edited by G. H.
von Wright and H. Nyman. Translated by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Ox-
ford: Blackwell.
———. (1997) Philosophical Investigations. 2nd ed. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe.
Oxford: Blackwell.

Chapter Eight
Patricia Hanna

Chomsky, Noam. (1959) “A Review of B. F. Skinner Verbal Behavior,” Language, 35,

pp. 26–58. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/411334.
———. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
———. ([1967] 2006) “The Formal Nature of Language.” In Language and Mind.
260 REALITY AND CULTURE

———. ([1968] 2006) “Linguistics and Philosophy.” In Language and Mind, pp. 143–
172.
———. (1986) Knowledge of Language, New York: Praeger.
———. (2000) New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
———. (2002) On Nature and Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. (2006) Language and Mind. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. (2007) “Biolinguistic Explorations: Design, Development, Evolution,” Interna-
tional Journal of Philosophical Studies, 15:1, p. 121. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/
10.1080/09672550601143078.
Dummett, Michael. (1973) Frege: Philosophy of Language. New York: Harper & Row.
———. (1981) Frege. London: Duckworth.
Fodor, Jerry. (1975) The Language of Thought. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
Goddard, Len (1961), “Counting,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 39, 223–40.
Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048406112341191.
Hanna, Patricia, and Bernard Harrison ( 2004) Word and World: Practice and the Foun-
dations of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. (2011) “The Limits of Relativism in the Late Wittgenstein.” In The Blackwell
Companion to Relativism, edited by Steven Hales, pp. 179–197. New York:
Blackwell-Wiley.
Harrison, Bernard. (1996) “Truth, Yardsticks and Language-Games,” Philosophical
Investigations, 19:2, pp. 105–130. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-
9205.1996.tb00414.x.
———. (1999) “Criteria and Truth.” In volume 23 issue 1 of Midwest Studies in Philoso-
phy, edited by Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein, pp. 207–235. Blackwell
Publishers. DOI: 10.1111/1475-4975.00012.
———. (Forthcoming 2014) What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored. Indiana
University Press.
Price, H. H. (1953) Thinking and Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Putnam, H. ([1975] 1985) “The Meaning of ‘Meaning.’” In vol. 2 of Philosophical Pa-
pers: Mind, Language, and Reality. Cambridge, UK: University Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1969) (1960) Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
———. Ontological Relativity, and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
———. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Chapter Nine
Michael Krausz

Hanna, Patricia, and Bernard Harrison. (2004) Word and World: Practices and the Foun-
dation of Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Harrison, Bernard, and Patricia Hanna. (2003) “Interpretation and Ontology: Two Queries
for Krausz.” In Interpretation and Its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael
Krausz, edited by Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, pp. 93–107. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Michael Krausz. (1993) Rightness and Reasons. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press
 Works Cited 261

———. (2000) Limits of Rightness. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Chapter Ten
Dennis Patterson

Hanna, Patricia, and Bernard Harrison. (2004) Word and World: Practices and the Foun-
dation of Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. (1982) Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
———. (1991) “Texts and Lumps.” In Philosophical Papers: Objectivity, Relativism,
and Truth, edited by Richard Rorty, pp. 78–92. New York: Cambridge University
Press.

Chapter Eleven
Michael Morris

Gibson, John, and Wolfgang Huemer, eds. (2004) The Literary Wittgenstein. London and
New York: Routledge.
Hanna, Patricia, and Bernard Harrison. (2004) Word and World: Practices and the Foun-
dation of Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Harrison, Bernard. (2004) “Imagined Worlds and the Real One: Plato, Wittgenstein and
Literary Mimesis.” In Gibson and Huemer, pp. 92–108. The Literary Wittgenstein.
Huemer, Wolfgang. (2004) Introduction. In Gibson and Huemer, pp. 1–13, The Literary
Wittgenstein.
Pears, D (1987–1988) The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s
Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, Bernard. (1981) “Wittgenstein and Idealism.” In his Moral Luck: Philosophical
Papers, 1973–1980, pp. 144–163. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K.
Ogden. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
———. (1969) The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. (2009) Philosophical Investigations. 4th ed. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe,
P. M. S. Hacker, and J. Schulte. Edited by P. M.S. Hackerand and J.Schulte. Ox-
ford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Woolf, Virginia. (1927) To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Epilogue: Reflections and Replies

Bernard Harrison

Borges, Jorge Luis. (1998) Collected Fictions, New York: Penguin Books.
Brooks, Cleanth. ([1947] 1956) The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry.
New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Chomsky, Noam. (1959) “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior,” Language,
35:1, pp. 26–58.
Davidson, Donald. (1978) “What Metaphors Mean,” Critical Inquiry, 5:1 (Special Issue
on Metaphor, Autumn), pp. 31–47. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/
134297610.2307/1342976.
262 REALITY AND CULTURE

Derrida, Jacques. (1973) Speech and Phenomana: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory
of Signs. Evanston, IL:: Northwestern University Press
Dickens, Charles. ([1838] 1982) Oliver Twist. New York: Dodd, Mead. Introduction by
Irving Howe. New York: Bantam Dell, a division of Random House.
———.([1864–1865] 1952) Our Mutual Friend. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Dummett, Michael. (1993)The Seas of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Empson, William (1995) Essays on Renaissance Literature. Vol. 1, Donne and the New
Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fielding, Henry. (1749) The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling. London: Andrew Millar.
Fish, Stanley. (1981) “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser,” Diactitics, no. 11, pp.2–13.
Frege, Gottlob. (1956) “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry,” Mind, New Series, 65:259
(July), pp. 289–311). Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-4423%
28195607%292%3A65%3A259%3C289%3ATTALI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-X.
Guillory, John. (1993) Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Foundation.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hanna, Patricia, and Bernard Harrison. (2003) “Interpretation and Ontology: Two Queries
for Krausz.” In Ritivoi, Interpretation and its Objects, pp. 93–107. Amsterdam,
New York: Rodopi.
———. (2004) Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
———. (2011) “The Limits of Relativism in Late Wittgenstein.” InA Companion to
Relativism. Edited by Stephen D. Hales, pp. 179–197. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harrison, Bernard (1973) Form and Content. Library of Philosophy and Logic. Edited by
P. T. Geach, P. F. Strawson, David Wiggins, and Peter Winch. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell/New York: Barnes & Noble.
———. (1975) Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones”: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher. Text
and Context Series. Edited by A. K. Thorlby and Arnold Kettle. London: Chatto
and Windus/Sussex University Press.
———. (1991a) Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
———. (1991b) “Wittgenstein and Scepticism.” In Meaning Scepticism, edited by Klaus
Puhl, pp. 34–69. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.
———. (1993) “Imagined Worlds and the Real One: Plato, Wittgenstein, and Literary
Mimesis,” Philosophy and Literature, 17:1, pp. 26–46. Stable URL: http://
dx.doi.org/10.1353/phl.1993.0051.
———. (1993/1994) “Gaps and Stumbling-Blocks in Fielding: A Response to erný,
Hammond, and Hudson,” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate, 3:2, pp.
147–172.
———. (1995) “Signs and the Self,” (review article), Semiotica, 104:3/4, pp. 287–310.
———. (1996) “Truth, Yardsticks and Language-Games,” Philosophical Investigations,
19:2, pp. 105–130. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9205.1996.
tb00414.x.
———. (1999a) “Criteria and Truth.” In volume 23 issue 1 of Midwest Studies in Philos-
ophy. Edited by Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein, pp. 207–235. Blackwell
Publishers. DOI: 10.1111/1475-4975.00012.
 Works Cited 263

———. (1999b) “‘White Mythology’ Revisited: Derrida and his Critics on Reason and
Rhetoric,” Critical Inquiry, 25:3, pp. 505–534. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/
10.1086/448932.
———. (2004) “Imagined Worlds and the Real One: Plato, Wittgenstein and Literary
Mimesis.” In The Literary Wittgenstein. Edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang
Huemer, pp. 92–108. London and New York: Routledge.
———. (2006) The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion.
Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.
———. (2011) “Always Fiction? The Limits of Authorial License in ‘Our Mutual
Friend,’” Partial Answers, 9:2 (June), pp. 405–430.
———. (2012) “Kovesi’s Refutation of Hume.” In Meaning and Morality: Essays on the
Philosophy of Julius Kovesi, edited by Alan Tapper and T. Brian Mooney, pp. 19–
42. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers.
———. (2013) “Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Rhetorical Manipulation of Reali-
ty.” In Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives. Edited by Alvin H. Rosen-
feld, pp. 8–41. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. (forthcoming 2014) What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored. Indiana
University Press.
Hawkins, Sir John. (1787) The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. 2nd ed. rev. corrected.
London: Printed for Printed for J. Buckland , J. Rivington and Sons, T. Payne and
Sons, L. Davis, B. White and Son, and 43 others in London.
Hunt, Clay. (1954) Donne’s Poetry: Essays in Literary Analysis, New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Iser, Wolfgang. (1972) The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. (1987) Introduction. In Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in
Literature and Literary Theory. Edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, pp.
xi–xxi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Johnson, Samuel. ([1779] 1868), “Cowley.” In Vol. 1 of Lives of the Most Eminent Eng-
lish Poets: With Observations on Their Works, pp. 1–32. London: Alfred Thomas
Crocker.
Kovesi, Julius. (1967) Moral Notions. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
———. (1979) “Descriptions and Reasons,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
New Series, 80, 101–114. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544953.
———. (1998) Values and Evaluations: Essays on Ethics and Ideology. Edited by Alan
Tapper. New York: Peter Lang.
———. (1979) “Descriptions and Reasons,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
New Series, 80, 101–114. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544953.
Kellner, Menachem. (2006) Must A Jew Believe Anything?. Portland Oregon: Littman
Library of Jewish Civilization.
Krausz, Michael, (2003) “Interpretation and its Objects: A Synoptic View.” In Ritivoi,
Interpretation and its Objects, pp. 11–22. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.
Leavis, F. R. (1975) The Living Principle: “English” as a Discipline of Thought. London:
Chatto & Windus.
Maccoby, Hyam. (1982) Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle
Ages. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilizarion.
Marotti, Arthur F. (1986) John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
264 REALITY AND CULTURE

McDowell, John. (1994) Mind and World. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1973) The Prose of the World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
Miller, D. A. (1989) Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Tradition-
al Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle. (2007) Understanding Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty.” New
York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Ochs, Peter. (1987) “Truth.” In Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought. Edited by A. A.
Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, pp. 1017–1023. New York: Scribner’s.
Price, H. H.(1953) Thinking and Experience, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Richards, I. A. (1925) Principles of Literary Criticism, New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Ritivoi, Andreea, ed. (2003) Interpretation and its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of
Michael Krausz. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Russell, Bertrand. ([1917] 1951) “The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics.” In Mysticism
and Logic, pp. 108–131. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble.
Shakespeare, William. [(1593) 1986]) The Taming of the Shrew. In Wells and Taylor,
William Shakespeare, the Complete Works.
———. ([ca. 1603–1606] 1986) King Lear. In Wells and Taylor, William Shakespeare,
the Complete Works.
Shalamov, Varlam Tikhonovich. (1980) Kolyma Tales. New York: W.W. Norton.
Skinner, B. F. (1957) Verbal Behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Stevens, Wallace. ([1954] 2011) “Men Made Out of Words.” In The Collected Poems of
Wallace Stevens, p. 355. New York, Random House.
Tapper, Alan, and T. Brian Mooney, eds. (2012) Meaning and Morality:Essays on the
Philosophy of Julius Kovesi. Boston: Brill.
Wells, Stanley, and Gary Taylor, eds. (1986) William Shakespeare, the Complete Works.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, Bernard. (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana/Collins.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. ([1921] 1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.
F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
———. ([1969] 1977) On Certainty. Amended 1st ed. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and
G. H. von Wright. Translated by D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Black-
well.
———. (1997) Philosophical Investigations. 2nd ed. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe.
Oxford: Blackwell.
 APPENDIX
Selected Bibliography
of Bernard Harrison

Books

1972. Meaning and Structure: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Studies in Lan-
guage Series. Edited by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle. New York: Harper and
Row.
1973. Form and Content. Library of Philosophy and Logic. Edited by P. T. Geach, P. F.
Strawson, David Wiggins, and Peter Winch. Oxford: Basil Blackwell/New York:
Barnes & Noble.
1975. Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones”: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher. Text and
Context Series. Edited by A. K. Thorlby and Arnold Kettle. London: Chatto and
Windus/Sussex University Press.
1979. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. Modern Introductions to Philoso-
phy Series. General editor D. J. O’Connor. London: Macmillan.
1991. Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory. New Haven and Lon-
don: Yale University Press.
2004. Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language. With Patricia Hanna.
New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2006. The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion. Lanham, Md.:
Rowman and Littlefield.
2007. Israel, Antisemitism, and Free Speech. New York: American Jewish Committee.
OCLC: 261134076. http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/{42d75369-d582-4380-8395-d2502
5b85eaf}/ISRAEL_ANTI-SEMITISM_AND_FREE_SPEECH.PDF
Forthcoming 2014. What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.

Chapters in Compiled Volumes

1968. “Some Uses of ‘Good’ in Criticism.” In Contemporary Studies in Aesthetics, edited

by Francis J. Coleman, pp. 130–145. New York: McGraw-Hill.
1970. “Violence and the Rule of Law.” In Violence, edited by Jerome Shaffer, pp. 139–
176. New York: David McKay Co.
1976. “Muriel Spark and Jane Austen.” In The Modern English Novel, edited by G.
Josipovici, pp. 225–251. London: Open Books.
1977. “On Understanding a General Name.” In Communication and Understanding:
Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, 1975–76, edited by G.Vesey, pp. 116–139.
Brighton, N.Y.: Harvester Press.
1979a. “Epistemological Relativism and Meaning Invariance.” In Sémantique, Codes,
Traductions, edited by Noël Mouloud, pp. 167–205. Lille: Presses Universitaires
de Lille.
266 REALITY AND CULTURE

1979b. “Kant and the Sincere Fanatic.” In Philosophers of the Enlightenment: Royal
Institute of Philosophy Lectures, 1975–76, edited by S. C. Brown, pp. 226–261.
Brighton, N.Y.: Harvester Press.
1981a. “Moral Sentiments.” In Ethik-Grundlagen, Probleme und Anwendung: Akten des
5. Internationalen Wittgensteins-Symposiums, edited by Edgar Morscher and Ru-
dolf Stranziger, pp. 77–81. Wien: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky.
1981b. “Parable and Transcendence.” In Ways of Reading the Bible, edited by Michael
Wadsworth, pp. 190–202. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press/Totowa, NJ:
Barnes and Noble.
1982. “Sens, Vérité, et Négation” [Meaning, Truth, and Negation]. In Langages,
Connaissance, et Pratique [Languages, Knowledge, and Practice], edited by Noël
Mouloud and Jean-Michel Vienne, pp. 185–205. Lille: Presses Universitaires de
Lille.
1985. “Deconstructing Derrida.” In vol. 7 of Comparative Criticism, edited by E. S.
Shaffer, pp. 3–24. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
1987. “Identity, Predication, and Color.” In Philosophy and the Visual Arts. Vol. 4 of
Royal Institute of Philosophy Conferences, edited by Andrew Harrison, pp. 169–
189.
1988. “The Defence of Wit: Sterne, Locke and the Particular.” In vol. 10 of Comparative
Criticism, edited by E. S. Shaffer, pp. 93–120. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
1991a. “Wittgenstein and Scepticism.” In Meaning Scepticism, edited by Klaus Puhl, pp.
34–69. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.
1991b. “Secrets and Surfaces.” In Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and
Interpretation. Warwick Studies in the European Humanities, General Editor, Tom
Winnifrith, edited by Martin Warner and Margaret Trudeau-Clayton, pp. 38–57.
London: Macmillan.
1994b. “Sterne and Sentimentalism.” In Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature
and Moral Philosophy, edited by Leona Toker, pp. 63–100. New York: Garland.
1997a. “Derrida.” In The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy. Edited by T. Mautner, pp.
132–133. New York: Penguin Books.
1997b. “Wittgenstein.” In Encyclopedia of Empiricism, edited by Don Garrett and Ed-
ward Barbanell, pp. 442–448. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press.
1998. “Literature and Cognition.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, edited by Michael
Kelly, pp. 158–160. New York: Oxford University Press.
2003. With Patricia Hanna. “Interpretation and Ontology: Two Queries for Katz.” In
Interpretation and its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz, edited
by Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, pp. 93–107. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
2004. “Imagined Worlds and the Real One: Plato, Wittgenstein and Literary Mimesis.” In
The Literary Wittgenstein, edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer, pp. 92–
108. London and New York: Routledge.
2006. “Vorgestellte Welten und die wirkliche Welt. Platon, Wittgenstein und Mimesis”
[Imagined Worlds and the Real World: Plato, Wittgenstein, and Mimesis]. In Witt-
genstein und die Literatur [Wittgenstein and Literature], edited by John Gibson
und Wolfgang Huemer, pp. 134–157. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
2007a. “Aharon Appelfeld und das Problem der fiktionalen Darstellung des Holocaust”
[Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction]. In Kunst und Denken
 Appendix: Selected Bibliography of Bernard Harrison 267

[Art and Thought], edited by Alex Burri and Wolfgang Huemer, pp. 173–200. Pa-
derborn: Mentis Verlag.
2007b. “Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction.” In A Sense of the
World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative and Knowledge, edited by John Gibson and
Wofgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci, pp. 67–88. New York: Routledge.
2009. “Realism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, edited by Rich-
ard Eldridge, pp. 223–246. New York: Oxford University Press.
2011. With Patricia Hanna. “The Limits of Relativism in Late Wittgenstein.” In A Com-
panion to Relativism, edited by Stephen D. Hales, pp. 179–197. Blackwell-Wiley.
2012. “Julius Kovesi’s Refutation of Hume.” In Meaning and Morality: Essays on the
Philosophy of Julius Kovesi, edited by Alan Tapper and T. Brian Mooney, pp. 19–
42. Boston: Brill.
2013. “Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Rhetorical Manipulation of Reality.” In
Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives, edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, pp.
8–41. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Scholarly Articles

1960. “Some Uses of ‘Good’ in Criticism,” Mind, 69:274, pp. 206–222. Stable URL:
10.1093/mind/LXIX.274.206.
1962. “Meaning and Mental Images,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 63, pp.
237–250. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544680.
1965. “Category-Mistakes and Rules of Language,” Mind, 74:295 (July), pp. 309–325.
Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mind/LXXIV.295.309.
1967. “On Describing Colours,” Inquiry, 10:1, pp. 38–52. DOI: 10.1080/00201746
708601481.
1970. “Translations and Taxonomies,” Journal of Philosophical Linguistics, 1:1, pp. 1–
28. (Journal no longer in print.)
1971. “Sign-Theory and Linguistic Structure,” Journal of Philosophical Linguistics, v.1,
no.3, pp. 1–31. (Journal no longer in print.)
1973. “Fielding and the Moralists,” Radical Philosophy, 6 (Winter), pp. 7–16.
1974. “Critical Notice of J. J. Katz, Semantic Theory,” Mind, New Series, 83:332, p.
599–606.
1977. “Critical Notice of Jonathan Bennett, Linguistic Behaviour,” Mind, New Series,
86:344, pp. 600–605.
1978. “Kant and the Sincere Fanatic,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, 12, pp.
226–261. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0080443600002661.
1983. “Meaning, Truth, and Negation,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supple-
mentary Volumes, 57, pp. 179–205. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/
4106892.
1984. “Moral Judgment, Action, and Emotion,” Philosophy, 59:229, pp. 295–321. Stable
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100069904.
1986a. “Identity, Predication, and Color,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 23:1, pp.
105–114. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20014129.
1986b. “Frege and the Picture Theory: a Reply to Guy Stock,” Philosophical Investiga-
tions, 9:2, pp. 134–139. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9205.
1986.tb00166.x.
268 REALITY AND CULTURE

1986c. “The Truth about Metaphor,” Philosophy and Literature, 10:1, pp. 38–55. Stable
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/phl.1986.0033.
1988b. “Forster and Moore,” Philosophy and Literature, 12:1, pp. 1–26., Stable URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/phl.1988.0030.
1989. “Morality and Interest,” Philosophy, 64:249, pp. 303–322. Stable URL: http://
dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100044685.
1991. “Heidegger and the Analytic Tradition on Truth,” Topoi, 10:2 (September), pp.
121–136. DOI: 10.1007/BF00141333.
1993. “Imagined Worlds and the Real One: Plato, Wittgenstein, and Literary Mimesis,”
Philosophy and Literature, 17:1, pp. 26–46. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.
1353/phl.1993.0051.
1993–1994. “Gaps and Stumbling-Blocks in Fielding: A Rely to erný, Hammond, and
Hudson,” Connotations, 3:2, pp. 147–172.
1994. “Truth, Meaning and Literature,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 34:4, 376–381.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/34.4.376.
1995. “Signs and the Self,” (review article), Semiotica, 104:3/4, pp. 287–310.
1996a. “Truth, Yardsticks and Language-Games,” Philosophical Investigations, 19:2, pp.
105–130. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9205.1996.tb00414.x.
1996b. “Talking Like a Jew: Reflections on Identity and the Holocaust,” Judaism: A
Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought published by the American Jewish
Congress, 45:177 (Winter), pp. 3–29.
1996c. “Virginia Woolf and ‘the True Reality,’” Western Humanities Review, 50:2, pp.
100–122.
1997a. “Readings and Rereadings,” Poetics Today, 18:3, pp. 413–427. Stable URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1773133.
1997b. “Ragione e Retorica. La Mitologia Bianca’ di Jacques Derrida” [Reason and
Rhetoric. The White Mythology of Jacques Derrida], Iride: Filosofia e
Discussione Publica, 10:20. DOI: 10.1414/11248.
1999a. “Criteria and Truth.” In volume 23 issue 1 of Midwest Studies in Philosophy.
Edited by Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein, pp. 207–235. Blackwell Pub-
lishers. DOI: 10.1111/1475-4975.00012.
1999b. “Logical Possibility and the Isomorphism Constraint,” Behavioural and Brain
Studies, 22:6, pp. 954–955. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X
99332210.
1999c. “The Strangeness of Leviticus,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and
Thought published by the American Jewish Congress, 48:2, pp. 208–228.
1999d. “‘White Mythology’ Revisited: Derrida and his Critics on Reason and Rhetoric,”
Critical Inquiry, 25:3, pp. 505–534. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/
448932.
2001. “What Are Fictions For?” In vol. 25, issue 1 of Midwest Studies in Philosophy.
Eds. Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein, pp. 12–35. Blackwell Publishers.
DOI: 10.1111/1475-4975.00038
2003. “Houyhnhnm Virtue,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of
Ideas, 1:1, pp. 35–64. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pan.0.0095.
2004. “Imagined Worlds and the Real One: Plato, Wittgenstein and Literary Mimesis.” In
The Literary Wittgenstein, edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer, pp. 92–
108. London and New York: Routledge.
 Appendix: Selected Bibliography of Bernard Harrison 269

2006. “Aharon Appelfeld and the Problem of Holocaust Fiction,” Partial Answers: Jour-
nal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 4:1 (January), pp. 79–106. Stable URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pan.0.0098.
2008. “Review Essay: Blushing Intellectuals,” Israel Affairs, 14:1, pp. 135–149. Stable
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13537120701705833. Accessed August 6, 2013.
www.paulbogdanor.com/jewishdivide/israelaffairs.pdf
2011a. “Always Fiction?: The Limits of Authorial License in Our Mutual Friend,” Par-
tial Answers, 9:2, pp. 405–430.
2011b. “Appropriating the Holocaust,” Israel Affairs, 17:4, pp.. 644–650. Stable URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13537121.2011.603526.
2011c. “Life against Death,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 29:4,
pp. 148–152. Stable URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sho.2011.0094.

Unpublished

2009. “Supping with a Short Spoon: the ‘New’ Anti-Semitism and its Defenders,” paper
presented to a one-day conference on anti-Semitism, University of Haifa, June 23,
2009. Accessed 06 July 2013. http://www.edu.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/antisemitism_
conference/files/Bernard_Harrison.pdf.
 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

EDWARD ALEXANDER is emeritus professor of English at University of Wash-

ington. He also taught at Hebrew University and Tel-Aviv University in Isra-
el. Among his numerous books are Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill
(1965); The Resonance of Dust: Essays on Holocaust Literature and Jewish
Fate (1974); Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (1998); The Jewish Wars:
Reflections by One of the Belligerents (1996); Lionel Trilling and Irving
Howe: A Literary Friendship (2009); Robert B. Heilman: His Life in Letters
(2009); and The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal (2012).

MURRAY BAUMGARTEN teaches urban Jewish writing and Dickens at the

University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is a Distinguished Professor of
English and Comparative Literature, and Founding Director of the Dickens
Project. He also studies modern Jewish writing, and is currently working on
an anthology of urban Jewish fiction with his colleague, Lee D. Jaffe, entitled,
The Jewish Street. His books include City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing
(1982) and Understanding Philip Roth (1990). With H. M. Daleski, Baum-
garten has edited Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination
(1998), and written many essays on Victorian culture and modern Jewish
writing. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of The Norman and Charlotte Strouse
Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle: five volumes have appeared thus
far. Baumgarten is the Emeritus Editor of Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of
Jewish Life and Thought, published by the American Jewish Congress. Re-
cently Baumgarten has been working on the Venice Ghetto, and has pub-
lished, “On Seeing the Venice Ghetto through the Eyes of Thomas Coryat,” in
Jews and the City (2008). Baumgarten is also a founder of the Venice Center
for International Jewish Studies.

RICHARD ELDRIDGE is Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Phi-

losophy at Swarthmore College. He has held visiting appointments in Frei-
burg, Erfurt, and Bremen, Germany; Essex, UK; and Stanford, California. He
is the author of On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and
Self-Understanding (1989); Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionali-
ty, and Romanticism (1997); The Persistence of Romanticism (2003); and
Literature, Life, and Modernity (2008). He is the editor of The Oxford Hand-
book of Philosophy and Literature (2009) and Stanley Cavell and Literary
Studies: Consequences of Skepticism (with Bernard Rhie, 2011).

JOHN GIBSON is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Louis-

ville, in Kentucky. He is the author of Fiction and the Weave of Life (2007),
and co-editor A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and
272 REALITY AND CULTURE

Knowledge (with Wolfgang Huemer, 2007); and Narrative, Emotion, and

Insight (with Noël Carroll, 2011). He is currently editing The Philosophy of
Poetry, and co-editing, with Noël Carroll, the Routledge Companion to Phi-
losophy of Literature.

PATRICIA HANNA is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Linguistics at

the University of Utah. With Bernard Harrison, she is the author of Word and
World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (2004), and two articles
exploring and elaborating interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later writings. She
has published on philosophy of language, metaphysics, Wittgenstein, and
Chomsky. Her current work focuses on the effects of the biological approach
on the study of cognition and language.

BERNARD HARRISON is E. E. Erickson Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at

the University of Utah, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Sussex Uni-
versity, UK. He is the author of Meaning and Structure: An Essay in the Phi-
losophy of Language (1972); Form and Content (1973); Henry Fielding’s
Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (1975); An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Language (1979); Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the
Limits of Theory (1991); World and World: Practice and the Foundations of
Language (with Patricia Hanna, 2004); The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism:
Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion (2006); Israel, Antisemitism and Free
Speech (2007); and What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored
(forthcoming, 2014). In addition, he has contributed to several compiled vol-
umes, published many scholarly papers, and been the plenary speaker at a
number of international conferences.

MICHAEL KRAUSZ is Milton C. Nahm Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr

College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Rightness and Reasons (1993);
Varieties of Relativism (with Rom Harré, 1995); Limits of Rightness (2000);
Interpretation and Transformation (2007); Dialogues on Relativism, Absolut-
ism, and Beyond (2011); and Oneness and the Displacement of Self (2013).
Krausz is editor and contributor to eleven volumes on relativism, rationality,
interpretation, cultural identity, metaphysics of culture, creativity, interpreta-
tion of music, and the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood. He is also co-
founder of the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium. Interpretation
and Its Objects: Studies in the Philosophy of Michael Krausz, edited by
Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, was published in 2003.

MICHAEL MORRIS is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, UK.

He is the author of The Good and the True (1992); An Introduction to the
Philosophy of Language (2007); and The Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to
Wittgenstein and the Tractatus (2008). His academic interests include ques-
 About the Authors 273

tions of realism in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of art, top-
ics upon which he has published a number of scholarly articles.

DANIÈLE MOYAL-SHARROCK is Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertford-

shire, UK. Her publications focus on what she calls “the third Wittgenstein”
(the post-Investigations corpus) and particularly on On Certainty, which she
considers to be Wittgenstein’s third masterpiece. Her publications include
Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (2004); The Third Wittgenstein:
The Post Investigations Works (2004); Readings of Wittgenstein’s On Cer-
tainty (with William Brenner, 2005); and Perspicuous Presentations: Essays
on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Psychology (2007). She is presently working
on a collection of essays in the philosophy of literature, provisionally entitled:
The Enactment of Thought.

DENNIS PATTERSON holds the Chair in Legal Theory and Legal Philosophy at
the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He is also Board of Gov-
ernors Professor of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University School of Law,
Camden, New Jersey, and he holds a Chair in Jurisprudence and International
Trade at Swansea University, Wales, UK. Patterson is the author of Law and
Truth (1996) and Minds, Brains, and Law: The Philosophical Foundations of
Law and Neuroscience (forthcoming, 2013).

ALAN TAPPER is Research Fellow at the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy
at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He was a student of Julius Kovesi at
the University of Western Australia. He has taught philosophy for twenty
years in various Perth universities. His academic interests include the Enlight-
enment in Britain, philosophy in schools, professional ethics, and Australian
family policy matters. His current work deals mainly with the Australian wel-
fare state.

LEONA TOKER is Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

She is the author of Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989); Elo-
quent Reticence: Withholding Information in Fictional Narrative (1993); Re-
turn from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (2000); Towards
the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission (2010); and
articles on English, American, and Russian literature. She is the editor of
Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (1994)
and co-editor of Rereading Texts, Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays
in Honour of H.M. Daleski (with Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, 1996) as well as
the journal Knowledge and Pain (with Esther Cohen and Manuela Consonni).
She has also founded and is editing Partial Answers: A Journal of Literature
and the History of Ideas, a semiannual periodical published by Johns Hopkins
University Press.
 NAME INDEX
Aleichem, Sholem, 50 Collini, Stefan, 7
Tevye der milkhiker, 94, 96 The Concept of Mind (Ryle), 9
Alexander, Edward, 233, 236–238 The Crossing Sweeper (Frith), 50
Altieri, Charles, 144
Appelfeld, Aharon, 42 Dalyell, Tam, 128
Arendt, Hannah, 117 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 61
Aristotle, 98 Davidson, Donald, 9, 203, 231
Arnold, Thomas, 118 Davis, Eliza, 55
Augustine of Hippo, 111 de Clermont-Tonnerre, Count Stanislas,
Austin, J. L., 25, 93 125
Austen, Jane, 83 Derrida, Jacques, 1, 8, 9, 22, 33, 86, 94,
Mansfield Park, 89 142, 217–221, 223, 244
Persuasion, 89 Descartes, René, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 153,
156, 224, 229
Bacon, Francis, 67 Dickens, Charles, 93, 94, 96
Barbéry, Muriel, 6 David Copperfield, 59
L’élégance du Hérisson, 3 Dombey and Son, 51
Barthes, Roland, 33, 93 Great Expectations, 60
Baumgarten, Murray, 238, 241–243 Little Dorrit, 50
Bentham, Jeremy, 4 The Old Curiosity Shop, 51
Berkeley, George, 19, 21 Oliver Twist, 49, 52, 53, 55, 242
Bevin, Ernest, 118 Our Mutual Friend, 49, 50–52, 56–63,
Bickenbach, Jerome E., 102 93–96, 138, 144, 241, 243
bin Laden, Osama, 123 Disraeli, Benjamin, 118
Blair, Tony, 121 Donne, John, 65, 72–76, 243–246
Blake, William, 53 “The Canonization,” 69, 71, 73–78,
Booth, Wayne C., 92 243–247
Brandom, Robert, 9 Songs and Sonnets, 71
Brennan, J. M., 102 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 46, 47, 50
Brooks, Cleanth, 69, 71–75, 115, 244, Notes from Underground, 45, 239,
245 240
The Well-Wrought Urn, 243 Duke, David, 122
Butler, Bishop Joseph, 17–19, 82, 83 Dummett, Michael, 9, 98, 103, 156–161,
Butler, Judith, 125 208, 209

Carlyle, Thomas, 50, 52, 59, 241 Earl of Shaftesbury, 83

Carnap, Rudolf, 4, 9
Carter, Pres. Jimmy, 122
“Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” 123
Cavell, Stanley, 36, 37, 43, 87
erný, Lothar, 90
Chekhov, Anton, 42
Chomsky, Noam, 116, 125, 147–156,
159, 164–170, 223, 224, 237
“Linguistics and Philosophy,” 154
Cohen, Ted, 66
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 81
Eigner, Edwin, 59, 62
Eldridge, Richard, 238, 243–246
Eliot, T. S., 74
Empson, William, 75
Ewin, R. E., 102, 107
Felski, Rita, 66
Fielding, Henry, 14, 16, 19, 21, 22, 81–
83, 91, 93, 95
Jonathan Wild, 17, 18
Tom Jones, 17, 20, 26, 83, 90
276 REALITY AND CULTURE
Finkelstein, Norman, 125
Fish, Stanley, 75, 91, 92, 231
Is There a Test in This Class?, 90
Fisk, Robert, 115
Fodor, Jerry, 168
Forster, E. M., 85, 89
Where Angels Fear to Tread, 87
Foucault, Michel, 8
Freedman, Samuel, 120
Frege, Gottlob, 8, 22, 23, 147, 148, 152,
156–158, 167, 204, 205, 214,
215
French, Peter A., 102
Freud, Sigmund, 42
“Garden of Forking Paths” (Borges), 241
Gaskin, Richard, 134
Geach, Peter, 9, 98, 101, 112
Mental Acts, 97, 99
Gibson, John, 238–243
Gilman, Sander, 52
Gladstone, William, 118
Goddard, Len, 97, 98, 112
Goebbels, Joseph, 115, 117
Gogol, Nikolai, 50
Gold, Michael, 50
Goodman, Nelson, 9, 131
Gosse, Edmund, 50
Gross, Kenneth, 75, 76
Guillory, John, 69, 74, 75, 243, 244
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 85–87
Haim Brenner, Yosef, 50
Hanna, Patricia, 95, 99, 111, 112, 182–
184, 199, 209, 210, 220, 224,
228, 232, 247
“Interpretation and Ontology” (with
Harrrison), 171, 174
Word and World (with Harrison), 24,
27, 93, 98, 103, 107, 110, 134,
142, 171, 181, 203–205, 207,
212, 215, 216, 223, 226, 231
Hare, R. M., 98
Harrison, Bernard, passim
“Always Fiction?,” 93
Form and Content, 12–14, 20–23
Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones,” 81,
217, 218
“Houyhnhnm Virtue,” 85
“Identity, Predication, and Colour,”
12, 22
Inconvenient Fictions, 22, 41, 54, 66,
83, 85, 87, 88, 131, 134, 220, 243
“Interpretation and Ontology” (with
Hanna), 171, 174, 217
“Israel, Anti-Semitism, and Free
Speech,” 120
“Morality and Interest,” 85
“Moral Judgment, Action, and
Emotion,” 107
The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism,
114, 119, 124, 236, 238
“Supping with a Short Spoon,” 126
“Talking like a Jew,” 63, 114
Truth, Yardsticks, and Language-
Games, 24
What is Fiction For?, 95, 134
Word and World (with Hanna), 24, 27,
93, 98, 103, 107, 110, 134, 142,
171, 181, 203–205, 207, 212,
215, 216, 223, 226, 231
Harshav, Benjamin, 95
Hawkins, Sir John, 245, 246
Hegel, G. W. F., 8, 9
Heidegger, Martin, 5, 8
Heilman, Robert, 115
Heydrich, Reinhardt, 236
Hitler, Adolf, 236
Hjelmslev, Louis, 82
Hobbes, Thomas, 16, 82, 83
Honderich, Ted, 118
Howe, Irving, 53
Hume, David, 4, 8, 15, 19, 20, 83, 84, 98,
107–109, 149, 153, 224, 225, 228
A Treatise of Human Nature, 14
Hunt, Clay, 72, 73, 75, 243
Husserl, Edmund, 8, 9, 11, 90, 91
Introvigne, Massimo, 124
Iser, Wolfgang, 52, 87, 88, 91, 92, 231,
232, 242
The Act of Reading, 90
James, William, 4, 6, 9, 183
Johnson, Samuel, 21, 245, 246
Judis, John, 122
Judt, Tony, 122, 125, 128
Kant, Immanuel, 9, 15, 143, 204
 Subject Index 277

Kaplan, Fred, 56 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8, 9, 138, 191,

Keats, John, 74 210, 211, 213, 214
Kellner, Menachem, 234, 235 Merton, Robert, 51, 241
Kolyma Tales (Shalamov), 209 Miller, D. A., 52, 242
Kovesi, Julius, 102, 104–106, 109–112, Montefiore, Moses, 59, 24361
226, 228, 238 Moore, G. E., 8, 85, 89
“Descriptions and Reasons,” 229 Principia ethica, 87
“Did Plato Turn Himself Upside
Morris, Michael, 203, 204, 206c215,
Down?,” 103
218, 219, 239
Moral Notions, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103,
107, 226–228, 230 Morris, Pam, 51
Values and Evaluations, 97 Morrison, Brian, 102
Krausz, Michael, 215–217 Moussaoui, Zacarias, 117
Kripke, Saul, 24, 98, 103, 148, 166, 167, Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle, 8, 9, 11, 217–
231 219, 221, 222
Kristeva, Julia, 93
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 16
Language, Truth, and Logic (Ayer), 4 Nussbaum, Martha C., 87
Leavis, F. R., 7, 8, 134, 137, 139, 140,
141, 143–145, 170, 217, 218, Ochs, Peter, 235
222, 223, 228, 230 The Only Problem (Spark), 89
Ledger, Sally, 51 Otterman, Sharon, 122
Leibniz, Gottfried, 24
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 93 Paradise Lost (Milton), 40, 53
Lindsay, Vachel, 74 Passovers of Blood (Toaff), 124
The Literary Wittgenstein (Huemer), 188 Patterson, Denis, 203, 204, 206, 209,
Litvak, Joseph, 55 218, 239
Locke, John, 4, 8, 15, 19, 20, 83, 84, 87, Peguy, Charles, 119
88, 98 Peirce, C. S., 4
An Essay Concerning Humane Pilger, John, 115
Understanding, 3, 154 Plato, 37, 85, 98, 102, 212, 233
Lowell, Amy, 74 The Republic, 17
Pope, Alexander, 83
Mackey, Robert, 122 Price, H. H., 226 228
Mallarmé’s, Stéphane, 200 Putnam, Hilary, 36, 98, 103, 148, 166,
Mandeville, Bernard, 82, 83, 87 167, 169
The Fable of the Bees, 16
Marotti, Arthur F., 73 Marotti 75, 243, Quandaries and Virtues (Pincoffs), 106
244 Quine, W. V. O., 9, 24, 147, 158, 165, 231
Marquis de Sade, 16
Marx, Karl, 98 Rabon, Israel, 50
Masters, Edgar Lee, 74 Richards, I. A., 244
Mayhew, Henry, 51, 241 Ricoeur, Paul, 28, 131
Mayo, Bernard, 97 Rising from the Muck (Taguieff), 114
McCormick, Peter, 131 Rorty, Richard, 9, 87, 183, 184, 231
McDowell, John, 9, 98, 103, 204 Rose, Jacqueline, 115
Mearsheimer, John J., 122, 128 Rosenfeld, Alvin, 120
“The Israel Lobby,” (with Walt), 123 “‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and
The Melting Pot (Zangwill), the New Anti-Semitism,” 119
Russell, Bertrand, 1, 5, 8, 219
278 REALITY AND CULTURE
Sacks, Jonathan, 113
Sandburg, Carl, 74
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 5, 6, 15, 127
La Nausée, 2
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 93, 221
Scheuer, Michael, 123
Schlick, Moritz, 4
Searle, John Rogers, 166
Sell, Roger, 89
“Seven Jewish Children” (Caryl), 128
Sewell, Dennis, 117
Shakespearean plays:
Henriad, 60
King Lear, 42, 220
Macbeth, 143
Measure for Measure, 42, 138
The Taming of the Shrew, 221
“Sholem Aleichem’s Revolution”
(Ozick), 94
Short, Clare, 121
Shiner, Roger A., 102
Skinner, B. F., 148, 149, 167
Verbal Behavior, 223
Socrates, 98
Soros, George, 122
Steiner, George, 125, 126
Sterne, Laurence, 93, 95, 144
Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 84
Tristram Shandy, 83, 88, 96
“Vindication of Human Nature,” 84
Stevens, Wallace, 35, 190, 191, 198, 210,
213, 244
“Men Made Out of Words,” 211, 212
Stewart, Garrett, 55, 91
Stone, Harry, 62
Strawson, Peter, 98, 103
Streicher, Julius, 117, 236
Supposing Bleak House (Jordan), 55
Tapper, Alan, 226, 228, 229
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 74
Tolstoy, Leo, 50
Anna Karenina, 144
Toker, Leona, 218, 230, 231
Torah, 234, 235
Trilling, Lionel, 59
The Liberal Imagination, 119
Walt, Stephen M., 122, 128
“The Israel Lobby,” (with
Mearsheimer), 123
Warren, Robert Penn, 115
Wiesel, Elie, 89
Wilby, Peter, 117
Williams, Bernard, 7, 20
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 8, 9, 11, 14, 16,
21, 24, 26–28, 33, 36, 38, 97–99,
103, 110, 112, 131–134, 137,
142, 152, 153, 155–157, 159,
161–165, 170, 187, 196–198,
200, 204, 206, 207, 210, 212,
215, 220, 221, 223, 228, 230,
238, 246
On Certainty, 131, 132, 217
Culture and Value, 67
Philosophical Grammar, 23
Philosophical Investigations, 10, 22,
23, 25, 68, 158, 185, 186, 188–
190, 194, 196, 214, 226
Philosophical Remarks, 22
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 10,
22, 23, 68, 158, 185, 186, 188,
193–195
Woolf, Virginia, 212
To The Lighthouse, 37, 42, 190
Wordsworth, William, 74
Yeats, William Butler, 74
 SUBJECT INDEX
aboutness, 39
academic disciplines, 21
aesthetics, 43
America Israel Public Affairs
Committee, 123
antirealism. See idealism
antisemitism, 113, 114, 117, 119, 124,
126, 233, 235–238
English literary, 56
Jewish role in, 120
Manichaean, 127
new, 128
political, 121
a. rhetoric, 115
as social prejudice, 127
apartheid, 119, 120, 121
appearance vs. reality, 2
art, 33–35, 37, 45, 48
cognitive power of, 65, 67, 68
experience generated by, 49
as instruments of communi-
cation/knowledge, 39
assertoric, the, 66
a. content, 99, 100, 162, 167–169,
206, 209
a. force, 157, 160–163, 205
attitude, propositional, 133
authors:
a.-audience interface, 95
a. license, 141
beliefs, 168, 233
b.-that, 234
benevolism, standard, 82
Blood Libel, 124
body-soul relation, 196
Cambridge lectures, Michaelmas Term
of 1934, 9
Carlylean formulas, 51
Cartesianism:
empiricist version, 19
Locke’s, 3
Wittgenstein’s anti-, 9, 10
cash value, 4, 6
caste system of Victorian England, 50
Catholic Church, 118
character:
linguistic elucidation of, 240
power of reason to change, 118
Chinese nationalism, 237
Christianisty, 234
civilization: defining characteristics, 1
cognition, 153, 154
color, 12, 14, 227, 228
topic-neutrality of c. language, 13
communication, 154, 164, 169
Chomskyan view of, 152
language and, 153
community: public meaning in, 11
competence:
Chomskyan meaning of, 149
semantics in theory of, 151
concepts. See also lexicon
abstract, 19, 97
aesthetic, 111
experience and, 99
Harrison’s theory of, 98, 110
Kovesi’s account of, 100, 101
linguistic constructs, 204, 208
logic of, 105
moral, 104–110
praxial foundation of, 99, 100
rational character of, 100
relation to reality, 4, 6
consciousness, 5, 222, 223, 244
reality of, 12
construct(ing)(ivism), 37, 173, 174
content, substance vs. form of, 82
conventionalism, 234
criminals in Dickens, 242
culture, 7, 28
alignment with subjectivity, 2, 12, 14,
15, 20, 21, 24–26
appearance and, 2, 5
belief-centered, 235
280 REALITY AND CULTURE

culture, con’t. use-gives-it-life approach, 189

human interests expressed by, 41 “world” of, 27
Jewish, 234, 238 flatus vocis, 197–200
vs. nature, 1 freedom, 17, 18
reality and, 203
c. traditions, 231 generative (c)ability, 159, 160
Western, 233 genius, 141
gentile perspective, 114
deceit, 106, 107 good-heartedness, 82
decisions, 168, 170 grammar, 151, 161
definition, ostensive, 23, 226, 228 Grounding, Principle of, 6, 10
description, 99, 174
Detachability Thesis, 174 Hegelianism, neo-, 98
dialogue, 95 hermeneutics:
difference, Derridean, 219 h. perplexity, 92
doubt, 10, 12 of suspicion, 28
dreamwork, 203 Holocaust, 113, 114
duty, 6, 7, 14, 16, 17, 20 hors-texte, 142, 143, 218–221
human limitation, 36
egoism, 82, 84 humanism, 35, 37, 41, 45, 47
emotions vs. complex tasks, 69 Harrison’s brand of, 34, 48
empiricism, 4, 10 literary, 38–40, 42
British, 8, 93 post-, 48
European intellectual tradition, 21 practice-based, 44
expectations manipulated by fictional traditional, 43
narrative, 91 humility, 83
experience, 152
asserteric force in, 205 idealism (anti-realism), 40, 98, 100, 105,
common, interpersonal, 20 110, 203, 206–209, 211, 212,
emotive, 69 214
redemptive, 243 linguistic, 33, 153, 155, 166
semantic content and, 154 ideals, meaning-bestowing, 235
I-language. 154, 168. See also language
fact-value distinction, 19, 107 illusion. See appearance
fairy-tale topoi, 94 imagination, 54, 55, 59
falsity, 66, 205, 209, 210, 218 i. literature; see fiction
f. conditions, 23, 24, 206, 208 insight, semiological, 94
fiction(ality)(alizing), 33, 37, 49, 50, 56, intentionality, 223
59, 68 interest vs. morality, 16
about in metaphysical sense, 41 internalism, 167, 170
common world found in, 35, 46 Chomskyan version, 168
fictionality vs. referentiality, 94 vs. externalism, 169
humanistic view of, 34 Internality, Principle of, 6, 10, 11, 14
philosophical problems with, 187 interpretation, 214–216
reality and, 42 countability of objects of, 175
truth-value of f. statements, 40 ideals of, 173–175
 Subject Index
interpretation, con’t.
objects of, 173, 177, 178
practice-relativity of, 176
singularist vs. multiplist conditions,
173–177, 179
investigation, logic requirement of, 25
Islam’s grievances, 117
Israel:
vs. aparteid South Africa, 120, 121
defamation of, 116
Harrison’s deconstruction of anti-I.
invective, 115
I.-haters, 115, 122
I.- Nazi Germany analogy, 116, 121,
127
Israelophobia, 115
Jews, 234, 237, 238, 241
American vs. European, 235
antipathy toward, 118
J. conspiracy, 127, 236
Dickens’s treatment of, 49, 51–53
J. emancipation, 125
J. identity, 120
J. stereotypes, 59
Victorian, 52, 53, 242
vs. Zionists, 128
Judaism, 114, 125, 128, 234, 235, 238
justification, 132
Kantianism, 193, 195
neo-, 98
Kosher Conspiracy, 117
know(ing)(ledge):
Cartesian concept of private, 11
certainties underpinning, 133
k. claims, 6, 14, 84
dangerous, 88, 243
“to know “ vs. “to be able to,” 162
literary, 65
perceiving and, 105
transformational, 65, 78
language, 33, 35, 36, 38, 43–47, 239
biolinguistic perspective of, 149
British empiricist account of, 93
281
common public, 167
constitutive, 41, 42
creative, 137
descriptive potential of, 40
epistemological status of, 49
extra-linguistic reality and, 137, 204,
216
factual description in, 27
l. games (Sprachspiele), 11, 14, 21,
153, 182, 183, 184, 206, 209
Harrison’s l. theory, 39
human invention, 244
internal vs. external, 150
ideal or logically perfect, 24
literary, 28, 34, 40, 142, 189, 191–
193, 200, 201
mental phenomenon, 149
natural world and, 148
philosophy of, 81, 83, 102, 105, 107,
110
prison-house view of, 37
reality and, 33, 41, 65, 67, 135, 181,
197, 198
scientific vs. literary, 55
semantics in theory of, 151
social phenomenon, 170
Wittgensteinian view of, 66, 185
world-l. connections, 41, 101
leftists, 114, 116, 117
antisemitism among, 119
commentary on Israel, 121
Harrison’s criticism of, 117
nineteenth-century French, 118
lexicon, 150, 155, 165, 168
Chomskyan vs. Fregean, 156
E- and I-language contact, 151
linguistics, 147
biol., 147, 148, 151, 152, 156, 166
l. expressions, 204, 207, 216, 221,
223, 231
meaning of l. expressions, 152, 153
natural vs. cultural study, 147
literature, 34, 37, 39, 41–44, 46, 47, 89
l. analysis, Harrison’s, 96
attitude captured by, 68
certainties and, 144
282 REALITY AND CULTURE

literature, con’t. recognition and, 228

cognitive, educative, moral power of,
38, 65
creative, 134, 143
l. critics, 49
cultural power of, 38
disclosive power of, 67, 68, 78
Harrison’s l. theory, 33
imaginative, 42
l. language, 213
major l. works, 7
modernist l. theory, 24
philosophy of, 44
potential to represent reality, 38
reality, language, and, 8, 26, 27, 134
representational power of, 40, 45
seriousness of, 43
l. studies, 48, 81, 95
transformational knowledge and, 65
value of, 134
worldliness test, 40
logical space, 99
love:
carnal, 243, 246
Divine, 245
profane vs. sacred, 246
lying, 106, 107
Marxism, 98
meaning, 184, 203–206, 208–210, 212–
214, 217, 219, 223, 224, 226,
227, 231, 233, 234, 237, 239,
240, 242
from art and religious attitudes, 68
Cartesian account of, 11, 156
conditions for adequate account of,
148
grasping m. vs. knowing rules for use,
162
in human life, 2
linguistic, 93, 135, 142, 152
in natural language, 148
m.-nihilism, 221
praxial foundation of, 27, 54, 94, 133,
145, 153, 155, 167, 195, 207,
216, 232
reference and, 153, 167
Renaissance notions of, 220
skepticism about, 199
truth and, 181, 182
Wittgensteinian understanding of, 66
of words vs. sentences, 156, 244
measurement, 35, 175, 206, 210, 217,
232
moduli-contingent techniques of, 177,
178
translatability of units of, 176
Mertonian functions, 51
Messianic left, 115
Middle East conflict, 120
mind:
creative impotence of, 5
propertarianist view of, 84
modernism, post-, 219
modul(i)(us), 175–177
moral(ity)(s), 1, 16
constraint and, 17
m. drama, 116
emotivist view of m. statements, 225
Fielding’s m. vision, 82
key features of, 104, 105
logical character of m. notions, 19,
109
meaning of m. terms, 225
m. motivation, 82, 107, 108
m. philosophy, 104
reality and, 15
movements, phases of, 234
multiplism, 173–179, 215, 216
Munsell color chart, 13
names:
fictional, 189
meaning of, 157
of things vs. actions/properties, 196
narrat(ive)(ography)(ology), 81, 90, 212
Dickens’s, 49, 50
of English Jews, 52
fictional, 91
reader and, 92
the unnarratable, 52, 242
 Subject Index 283

naturalism, philosophical vs. linguistic practice(s), 66, 131, 133, 135, 137–143,
approach, 147 175, 178, 179, 204, 206, 209,
nature, 2, 4–6, 9, 15, 19, 20, 22, 28 210, 216, 217, 223, 225, 229,
vs. culture, 1 230, 242
Nazism, 119, 126, 127 abitrary choice in, 232
neurophysiology, 149 creative potential of, 35
noetic-noematic constitutions, 90 cultural, 33, 35, 41
novels: doubly constitutive, 213
humanistic failures, 46 ineliminable part of human reality,
practices underpinning n.’s language, 136
95 language and, 14, 39, 55, 137, 172
realistic, 94 reality and, 37, 38
testing ground for moral/ideological social, 27, 50–53, 55, 56, 59, 61, 63,
attitudes, 92 95, 163, 241, 242
numerical identity, 175–177 truth and, 182
Wittgenstein’s “acting” vs. Harrison’s,
objectivity, 215, 224 133
ontology, 203, 216 world, sentences, and, 171
outcomes, 172, 178, 179, 216 pragmatics, 95
praxial contexts, 138
Palestinian minority, 237 privacy, Wittgensteinian, 11
Palestinophilia, 115 progressives. See also leftists
particularism, 83 p. criticism of Israel, 121
performance: Chomskyan notion, 149 Jewish, 119
phenomenology, 5, 8, 11 projecting, 37
Husserl’s vs. Iser’s, 90, 91 properties as feature of lexicon, 150
philosophy, 118 propositions, assorteric, 6, 181
abstract moral, 16 psychic continuity, 154
Anglophone, 44
British moral, 81 qualification, 236
central task to examine nature, 25
Continental, 8, 9, 44, 93 racism, 233, 236
of language, 102, 105, 107, 110 anti-r. Europe, 113
of rapprochement, 33 realism, 173, 174, 179, 192, 199, 200,
Western, 8, 11, 230 201, 203, 208–211, 214, 234,
phonetic representations, 151 238, 239
phrases, 204 anti-; see idealism
pluralism, 173 constructive, 216
poe(ms)(try): humanism and, 35
as paradox, 74, 75 meaning-r., 207, 216, 219
assertational vs. injunctive reading, 77 metaphysical, 99, 100
p. license, 94 referential, 181
relative, 100
metaphysical, 245, 246
vs. romanticism, 94
polymorphism, 174
reality, 171, 172, 174, 176
positivism: Vienna Circle, 4
vs. appearance, 2
284 REALITY AND CULTURE

reality, con’t. semantics, 95

concepts and, 4
empirical, 135
extra-cultural, 33
extra-human physical, 4, 54
extra-linguistic, 27, 36, 43, 93, 191–
193, 199, 204, 212, 216
human r. internal to culture, 28
language and, 36, 52, 65, 94, 181, 198
nature and, 2, 5
objective, 12, 20
praxial foundation of, 37
sensory experience and, 8
words and, 193, 201
recognit(ion)(ors), 100, 101, 104, 109,
226–228
reductionism, 3, 211, 224
anti-, 10
biological, 148, 155, 164, 166–169
reference, 39, 132
Fregean notion of, 199
Harrison’s conception of, 199
internal vs. external fields of, 95
meaning and, 153
objects of, 33, 216
referentialism, 191, 194
r. theory, 186– 188, 190
relationships, 82, 85–87, 94
vs. belief-that, 234
social, 109
valorizing human r., 84
relativism, 40, 203, 206, 208, 215
representation(alism), 33, 39–42, 45, 46
anti-, 239
Harrison’s critique of, 44
humanistic theory of, 240
literary-humanistic conception of, 43,
44, 47, 240–243
perspicuous, 38
satire, 42, 87
science:
art vs., 65
s. discourse, 55
self-correction, 118
selfhood, 43
Chomsky’s biologically reductive
account of, 155
experience and, 154
Kovesi’s/Platonic, 102
metaphysics and, 103
universal s. features, 169
semiological triad, 95
sense, Fregean notion of, 199
sensory experience/investigation, 154,
216
sentences, 204, 208
assorteric content of, 209
assertoric force of, 160, 205
logical forms of, 171
meaning of, 164
structrual descriptions of, 151
truth conditions/values of, 158, 161
truth values of, 166
sentiment, 225
significance, 134, 140, 144
Leavis’s view, 143
singularism, 173–177, 179, 180, 215,
216
signs, praxial basis of, 54
singularism, 173–177, 179
skepticism (skepticism), 10, 222
literary, 43
moral, 82, 224
spirituality, 243
spontaneity, 204
statements, topic-neutral, 12
story, dramatic vs. representational, 42
stranger (ger toshav) in Leviticus, 114
subject(ivity), 2, 12, 24, 28, 215, 241
alignment with culture, 14, 15, 20, 21,
24–26
with point of view, 68
syntax, 151, 164
vs. syntactics, 95
Talmud, 234
text(uality), 66
extra-textual reality, 95
of practices and words, 38
t.-reader interaction, 91
 Subject Index
Third Realm (Leavis’s), 139–141
thought, propositional, 100
tokens, representative function of, 27
tragedy (literary genre), 116
transcend(ence)(entialism), 68
cognitive/linguistic, 36, 43
truth, 65, 66, 184, 204, 207, 209, 210,
214, 218, 224, 225, 232, 234,
235
t. conditions, 22, 23, 157–161, 163,
205, 206, 208, 226, 228
general and transcendental, 138
language and, 40, 183
literary, 131
meaning and, 181, 182
pragmatist view of, 183
of sentences, 166, 172
t.-warranting instances, 162
universalism, rational, 85, 86
use:
in Philosophical Investigations, 23
u. theory, 187, 188
u.-gives-it-life interpretation, 186–
190, 192, 194, 195, 200, 214,
215
values, 107
Victorian England, 51, 52, 59
antisemitic stereotype of Jew in, 53
violence for equality, 118
warrant, experiential, 15, 209, 225
285
will, Kantian community of rational, 16
wit, 83
Wittgensteinianism, 193, 194
words, 204, 208, 211–215, 218, 220,
221, 226–228, 231, 232, 236,
240, 245–247
concrete functions of, 26
creative power of, 244
dead sign thesis of, 196
imaginative attention and, 66
interrogating, 137
meaning acquisition of, 54
praxially-based, 66
referential use, 4, 189, 198
vs. reality, 27, 142
w.-world correlation, 207
world:
assorteric content of, 99
concepts and, 99, 101, 172
human, 36, 37, 41, 42, 45, 46, 54–56,
66, 67, 239, 241, 244
intersubjective perceptual, 90
language and, 135
Leavis’s vs. Harrison’s, 140
praxial contact with, 100
pre-praxial, 173, 178
undifferentiated, 171
writ(er)(ing), ethical function of, 55
Zionism, 116, 236–238
anti-, 120
 VIBS
The Value Inquiry Book Series is co-sponsored by:
Adler School of Professional Psychology
American Indian Philosophy Association
American Maritain Association
American Society for Value Inquiry
Association for Process Philosophy of Education
Canadian Society for Philosophical Practice
Center for Bioethics, University of Turku
Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Central European Pragmatist Forum
Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University
Centre for Cultural Research, Aarhus University
Centre for Professional Ethics, University of Central Lancashire
Centre for the Study of Philosophy and Religion, University College of Cape Breton
Centro de Estudos em Filosofia Americana, Brazil
College of Education and Allied Professions, Bowling Green State University
College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology
Concerned Philosophers for Peace
Conference of Philosophical Societies
Department of Moral and Social Philosophy, University of Helsinki
Gannon University
Gilson Society
Haitian Studies Association
Ikeda University
Institute of Philosophy of the High Council of Scientific Research, Spain
International Academy of Philosophy of the Principality of Liechtenstein
International Association of Bioethics
International Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Value Inquiry
International Society for Universal Dialogue
Natural Law Society
Philosophical Society of Finland
Philosophy Born of Struggle Association
Philosophy Seminar, University of Mainz
Pragmatism Archive at The Oklahoma State University
R.S. Hartman Institute for Formal and Applied Axiology
Research Institute, Lakeridge Health Corporation
Russian Philosophical Society
Society for Existential Analysis
Society for Iberian and Latin-American Thought
Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust
Unit for Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Whitehead Research Project
Yves R. Simon Institute
 Titles Published

Volumes 1 - 234 see www.rodopi.nl

235. Hakam H. Al-Shawi, Reconstructing Subjects: A Philosophical

Critique of Psychotherapy. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology

236. Maurice Hauriou, Tradition in Social Science. Translation from

French with an Introduction by Christopher Berry Gray. A volume in
Studies in Jurisprudence

237. Camila Loew, The Memory of Pain: Women’s Testimonies of the

Holocaust.. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

238. Stefano Franchi and Francesco Bianchini, Editors, The Search for
a Theory of Cognition: Early Mechanisms and New Ideas. A volume in
Cognitive Science

239. Michael H. Mitias, Friendship: A Central Moral Value. A volume in

Ethical Theory and Practice

240. John Ryder and Radim Šíp, Editors, Identity and Social
Transformation, Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Five. A
volume in Central European Value Studies

241. William Sweet and Hendrik Hart, Responses to the Enlightenment: An

Exchange on Foundations, Faith, and Community. A volume in Philosophy
and Religion

242. Leonidas Donskis and J.D. Mininger, Editors, Politics Otherwise:

Shakespeare as Social and Political Critique. A volume in Philosophy,
Literature, and Politics

243. Hugh P. McDonald, Speculative Evaluations: Essays on a Pluralistic

Universe. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values.

244. Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Małecki, Editors, Shusterman’s

Pragmatism: Between Literature and Somaesthetics. A volume in Central
European Value Studies

245. Harry Lesser, Editor, Justice for Older People, A volume in Values in
Bioethics
246. John G. McGraw, Personality Disorders and States of Aloneness
(Intimacy and Aloneness: A Multi-Volume Study in Philosophical Psychology,
Volume Two), A volume in Philosophy and Psychology

247. André Mineau, SS Thinking and the Holocaust. A volume in

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

248. Yuval Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit. A volume in

Philosophy, Literature, and Politics

249. Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Love as a Guide to Morals. A volume in Ethical

Theory and Practice

250. Ronny Miron, Karl Jaspers: From Selfhood to Being. A volume in

Studies in Existentialism

251. Necip Fikri Alican, Rethinking Plato: A Cartesian Quest for the Real
Plato. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics

252. Leonidas Donskis, Editor, Yet Another Europe after 1984: Rethinking
Milan Kundera and the Idea of Central Europe. A volume in Philosophy,
Literature, and Politics

253. Michael Candelaria, The Revolt of Unreason: Miguel de Unamuno and

Antonio Caso on the Crisis of Modernity. A volume in Philosophy in Spain

254. Paul Richard Blum, Giordano Bruno: An Introduction. A volume in

Values in Italian Philosophy

255. Raja Halwani, Carol V. A. Quinn, and Andy Wible, Editors, Queer
Philosophy: Presentations of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy,
1998-2008. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical
Societies

256. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Shakespeare and Philosophy: Lust, Love,

and Law. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics

257. Jim Kanaris, Editor, Polyphonic Thinking and the Divine. A volume in
Philosophy and Religion

258. Michael Krausz, Oneness and the Displacement of Self: Dialogues on

Self-Realization. A volume in Interpretation and Translation
259. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Jesus or Nietzsche: How Should We Live
Our Lives? A volume in Ethical Theory and Practice

260. Giorgio A. Pinton, The Conspiracy of the Prince of Macchia & G. B.

Vico. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics

261. Mechthild E. Nagel and Anthony J. Nocella II, Editors, The End of
Prisons: Reflections from the Decarceration Movement. A volume in Social
Philosophy

262. Dorota Koczanowicz, Leszek Koczanowicz, and David Schauffler,

Editors, Discussing Modernity: A Dialogue with Martin Jay. A volume in
Central European Value Studies

263. Pekka Mäkelä and Cynthia Townley, Editors, Trust: Analytic and
Applied Perspectives. A volume in Nordic Value Studies

264. Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, Beyond Aesthetics and Politics:

Philosophical and Axiological Studies on the Avant-Garde, Pragmatism, and
Postmodernism. A volume in Central European Value Studies

265. David C. Bellusci, Amor Dei in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth

Centuries. A volume in Philosophy and Religion

266. Vasil Gluchman, Editor, Morality: Reasoning on Different

Approaches. A volume in Ethical Theory and Practice

267. Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn, Editors, Narrative Ethics. A

volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics

268. Greg Moses and Gail Presbey, Editors, Peace Philosophy and Public
Life: Commitments, Crises, and Concepts for Engaged Thinking. A volume in
Philosophy of Peace

269. Bartholomew Ryan, Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: Interludes

with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno. A volume in Philosophy,
Literature, and Politics

270. Patricia Hanna, Editor, Reality and Culture: Essays on the Philosophy
of Bernard Harrison. A volume in Interpretation and Translation