I seem to have caught a philosophy of language bug recently. The motivation is this: many very puzzling things that people say seem to serve a definite purpose. What initially seems to be incoherent ideological cant, arising from mere confusion, turns out to be superficially incoherent ideological cant that serves a clear purpose in signaling status, alliances, and so on. This blog already has a few examples here and there, tomorrow I’ll have more when I look at John F. Haught’s handling of the word “faith.” Until then, I recommend Robin Hanson’s Politics isn’t about Policy post, as well as his Are Beliefs Like Clothes? Or, reflect on Daniel Dennett’s comments in _Breaking the Spell_ about how the doctrine of the Trinity may be more useful when people don’t understand it too well.

Anyway, these reflections give a new glimmer to something I’ve often heard attributed to Wittgenstein: that much or all of our linguistic practice isn’t about expressing truths, but expressing commitment to a way of life. I don’t claim to have studied Wittgenstein in any detail, but lots of people who know about him seemed thrilled at the prospect that this approach to, say, religious language could save its respectability. While I’m all for taking more seriously utterances that philosophers might want to dismiss as confused, these utterances don’t necessarily come out respectable in the end. In talking about his experiences in fundamentalism, Robert M. Price has said that one thing that got him out was noticing that the change in life associated with having faith in Christ wasn’t all it was cracked up to be: it ends up being about “habits of church attendance” and “the dogmatic party line of an institution.” Worse, nonsense ideologies seem to be most effective in their hidden roles when the roles remain hidden: no one wants to admit that in buying into this or that party line, they’re not doing anything much different than becoming a fan of a sports team.

This is deeply puzzling: how can we engage in sophisticated, goal-directed behavior without having any real idea what we’re doing? Is there some Freudian unconscious doing all this work? Probably not. The best explanation seems to be Darwinian. The psychological tendencies underlying these linguistic practices, things like tribalism and egotism, run deep enough to be probably innate. They have apparent adaptive significance, in terms of helping us form alliances and present ourselves to the world as the “good guy.” Most importantly, an evolutionary explanation accounts for how something can appear goal-directed in absence of conscious thought. Evolution preserves whatever enhances fitness, and it can preserve things without our understanding them, or without their having a “purpose” in any deeper sense than having tended to produce certain kinds of effects in the past.

Abstracting away from evolutionary theory specifically, this suggests that we don’t really understand language until we understand historical processes far deeper than the history of any given word or grammatical construction. I find this surprising, do you?