English is not the lingua franca of the universe

Twitter Tuesday #39

I’ve just got a short post (for me, anyway) this week. I have a lot of work to do this week, but I want to keep on top of my constant stream of criticism of the way people discuss metaethics online. This week there was a survey posing the following question popped up on Twitter last week:

Is moral realism or moral antirealism more convincing?

These were the final results:

Moral realism won by a small margin, at 46.7% to antirealism’s 40%. Unfortunately, there were only 30 respondents, and it was likely more skewed in favor of antirealists than it’d otherwise be since I’d commented on the link, and the people I talk to are more likely to be antirealists. I don’t think we can glean much from this survey, either way, since the responses are likely to be self-selected in ways that inhibit meaningful generalization.

What I want to focus on, instead, is one of the responses to the poll. I have made the points I will make many times, but I will continue to make them until the tide shifts. Consider this remark, which elaborates on why they favored realism:

Indisputably realism. Every single argument for anti-realism falls apart. Many of them literally have to rephrase the language of ethics/morality just to get themselves off the ground. Anti-realism is a deeply silly metaethical position.

Antirealists do not have to rephrase the language of ethics. Such a claim relies on the presumption that conventional moral discourse is presumptively realist. It is common among philosophers to concede that ordinary moral discourse “looks realist,” at least at first glance, and often even on reflection. Antirealists need not, and should not, grant such a presumption.

Antirealists give this ground then argue that antirealism is nevertheless true. This gives realists significant footing to operate with a presumption of realism. But this is merely a presumption of a presumption. There is no good case for a presumption in favor of realism. This alleged presumption is based on superficial and mostly weak armchair considerations from philosophers analyzing toy sentences in English. That is, instead of actually empirically examining how nonphilosophers speak, think, or act by conducting actual empirical research, using the tools of psychology, history, neuroscience, anthropology, linguistics, and so on, philosophers imagine English sentences and then analyze the way these appear to them to be used.

Philosophers then make inferences about how it appears to them that people speak, think, and act like realists based on what amounts to either (a) highly dubious a priori reasoning or (b) what amounts to speculative empirical hypotheses that they don’t bother to go out and test. Almost all of this is predicated on their armchair recollections of everyday English sentences. Not actual data they’ve acquired systematically. Simply put, the standard methods used to establish an alleged presumption in favor of realism rely on contestable methodological assumptions (e.g., that the questions are non-empirical) or very bad psychology (e.g., psychology based largely on anecdote, speculation, and the analysis of contemporary English speakers).

What’s especially remarkable about these presumptions is that they are predicated almost exclusively on evaluation of English speakers. There are significant cultural, religious, and historically contingent features of each language that are idiosyncratic to the way the typical native speaker of that language happens to speak. If I learned a language entirely from textbooks or dictionaries that told me nothing about the cultures of those who spoke the language, idioms would make little sense, and many aspects of the everyday spoken and written word would be missing. Languages and cultures are deeply intertwined. And this means that the English language and the cultures of its speakers are deeply intertwined. As such, when analyzing sentences in English, those with the knowledge, experience, and background to do so will often be highly immersed in the dominant cultures of the speakers. As such, we have a pairing of those from within a particular set of cultural paradigms evaluating what they take to be that language’s standard uses…by members who share those cultural associations.

Languages are not transcendent mathematical formulas that perfectly map the universe around us. They are highly social, highly cultural, highly context-dependent, ever-evolving, amorphous constructs that invariably reflect aspects of the culture, history, and religious beliefs of their speakers.

It is absurd to think that one can put on their native-English-speaker cap, evaluate English sentences, and then suppose that one can generalize from how the speakers of this language speak to how everyone, everywhere speaks, in all 7000+ languages in the world, without considering or engaging at all with the massive amount of sociocultural, religious, and other confounds that may (and, I think, almost certainly do) impinge on the plausibility of such generalizations.

Imagine we gathered our assumptions about how nonphilosophers thought or spoke exclusively by examining Basque, Ainu, or ǃXóõ. Imagine the only people we regarded as qualified to do so were native speakers of these languages, and the only people whose sentences they considered were native speakers of these languages. Are native speakers of these languages psychologically representative of everyone, everywhere else, with respect to the relevant considerations? Who knows! Nobody has empirically examined such a question! Why should we suppose it’s any different for English?

English is not the lingua franca of the universe, and analytic philosophers need to stop treating it as if it is.