Ian Dearden. Do Philosophers Talk Nonsense?

Carl Humphries

doi:10.35765/forphil.2013.1802.16

Abstract

In his newly reissued and revised book, the philosopher Ian Dearden at- tempts a critical inquiry into a philosophical position he calls “nonsensi- calism,” which he takes to correspond to the view “that it is possible to be mistaken in thinking one means anything by what one says” (9).1 He holds that an unexamined assumption to this effect is implicit in a large swathe of philosophical work dating from a period stretching throughout most of the 20th century (and to some degree extending to the present day), thanks to the widespread tendency of philosophers to accuse each other of talk- ing nonsense. This is, according to the author of the book, most visible in the earlier and later philosophical writings of Wittgenstein, in logical pos- itivism, and in representatives of the Oxford-based “ordinary language” philosophy movement, as well as in the writings of many of those subse- quently writing under the influence of these. Dearden coins a special term to refer to the sort of error that philosophers are accusing each other of having committed: he calls such cases of error “illusions of meaning.”

Highlights

In his newly reissued and revised book, the philosopher Ian Dearden attempts a critical inquiry into a philosophical position he calls “nonsensicalism,” which he takes to correspond to the view “that it is possible to be mistaken in thinking one means anything by what one says” (9).[1]
A er an introductory first chapter dedicated to sketching the overall contours of the problem as he finds it, Dearden gets his investigation underway by means of a consideration of the view put forward in Norman Malcolm’s book Dreaming, according to which claims about dream-events having occurred during sleep are to be dismissed as nonsensical if construed as claims about something supposed to have occurred while the person in question was sleeping, rather than as claims reporting what a person just seems to remember af
E principal concern raised by Dearden throughout is one that has been brought into greater focus by those of the more recent interpreters of Wi genstein—Cora Diamond, for example—who stress that what this philosopher had in mind in both his earlier Tractatus and his later philosophy when talking about “nonsense” was not really some sort of positively meaningful instance of language use that, for reasons to be established through conceptual scrutiny, just happens to misfire in the context of its actual deployment

Summary

Introduction

In his newly reissued and revised book, the philosopher Ian Dearden attempts a critical inquiry into a philosophical position he calls “nonsensicalism,” which he takes to correspond to the view “that it is possible to be mistaken in thinking one means anything by what one says” (9).[1]. E author proposes to investigate, in an ostensibly open-minded but critical way, the issues raised by the assumption that such errors are possible at all— the subtitle of the book.

Results

Conclusion