Monty Python and Philosophy (8 page)

But, what of the other statements in the dialogue? For example, when Mrs. Non-Smoker says, “You can’t eat that
raw!
” she appears to be using it to inform Mrs. Smoker of a simple fact about eating such things as piston engines. Mrs. Smoker replies, “Oohh, I never thought of
that
.” Of course, neither have we, but our never having thought of it is connected to our never having thought of eating piston engines to begin with, let alone cooked! Why has Mrs. Smoker not thought of it? How is Mrs. Non-Smoker using the sentence “You can’t eat that
raw!
”? Is it really being used to
inform
Mrs. Smoker? Why would she need to be informed about that?

To better see how the distinction—between the meanings of sentences and what it makes sense to say—may be of some help here, let me take the analysis in a slightly different direction. Looking at all of this from the audience’s point of view, for
instance, we might speculate that Mrs. Smoker says what she does in order to provoke from us a laugh. Fine. But this doesn’t explain how she takes
herself
to be using the sentence. It only explains how the skit’s writers are using it. Now, if we say that it is really only this use for which we need an account—that is, an account of the writer’s use—I am reminded of a curious remark that Wittgenstein later makes in the
Philosophical Investigations
. He writes:

Here, it appears that he is saying that there are cases in which I may use a sentence to produce a certain effect, but nevertheless my
using
it to produce this effect does not count as the
meaning
of the sentence. And so, he suggests that the meaning of “Milk me sugar” is not the order “Stare and gape at me!” even though my using the former is to get you to stare and gape at me. Of course, in being reminded of this passage, I am also reminded of my time spent in the U.S. Navy, when such sentences as “Milk me sugar” were used from time to time, especially while in port, and were just packed with meaning—though I will not go into this here. I mention it only because it is important to note that he is not saying that “Milk me sugar” is
inherently
meaningless. As my Navy experience has taught me, it is easy to invent contexts in which such a sentence has a life. I think that Wittgenstein would agree. What is important about this passage is that Wittgenstein is telling us that even though the skit’s writers
use
(
via
Mrs. Non-Smoker) the sentence “You can’t eat that
raw!
” to produce laughter in the audience, for all that we should not count the
meaning
of this sentence to be the order “Laugh at what I am saying!” We should emphasize Wittgenstein’s saying that for a
large
class of cases the use determines the meaning. It just so happens that our piston engine skit is not a member of this class.

The difficulty, as I see it, is that neither the earlier Verification Principle nor the later Meaning-as-Use Principle work to explain what is going on in the piston engine skit, though I do think that they hint at an explanation. In what remains of the chapter, I want to explore what I take to be the hint, and offer a very brief sketch of what an explanation might look like.

In
Remarks on Colour
, Wittgenstein writes:

In this passage, the
point
(
Witz
) of the believer’s question can be also translated as the
joke
of his question. That is, his expressing what he does in the form of a certain sort of question is a kind of joke. Here, the
funny
of the joke is akin, if not identical to, the
wonder
of the absurd. In other words, the absurdity one senses when lighting upon the difficulty in contemplating the origin of reality itself is a reaction that is much like the humor one senses when lighting upon the punch line of a joke. A natural reaction to both can be laughter. He continues:

Notice that here he seems to sidestep the very notion of the use of words, as well as sidestepping the notion of the meaning of a
sentence being what one is thinking while using the words, made famous by David Hume.
²²
What he focuses on instead is the idea that the import of words is “the difference they make at various points in life.” Connected to this is his saying that “practices give words their meaning.” The ideas of
making a difference
and
practice
are certainly compatible with both the Verification and Meaning-as-Use Principles, but there seems to be something more here. What that is exactly is admittedly unclear. Even so, I will suggest as I did above that here Wittgenstein is drawing the line between the
meaning
of a sentence on the one hand, and what it makes sense to
say
on the other. I will now take a closer look at this difference before bringing our brief examination to a close.

In
On Certainty
, Wittgenstein considers the following sorts of cases:

By ‘nonsense’ here, Wittgenstein does not appear to have in mind the idea that the sentence is
meaningless
. The sentence “This is my hand” is no doubt meaningful. But suppose, in line with what Wittgenstein says in the above passage, that I walk into a doctor’s office having injured my hand and say, “Hey doc, I’ve injured my hand.” So far, so good. But, now suppose that as I say this, I extend my hand and continue, “Oh, and
this
is my hand.” Such a remark may be followed by the doctor’s asking, “Did you hit your head, too?” As Wittgenstein says, it would be strange to take this as a piece of superfluous information, though one could do that. Rather, it would very likely be taken as a sign of my having something
more seriously wrong with me than an injured hand. The idea here, I think, is that where it makes sense in this context for me to say “Hey doc, I’ve injured my hand,” it does not make sense for me to say “This is my hand.” The sentence just doesn’t have a life in this context. To be sure, I can imagine contexts in which it would make sense to say it (again, I am reminded of my Navy days), but my visit to the doctor’s office here isn’t one of them. What is determining what it makes sense to say? Practice! By this Wittgenstein seems to mean the practice or the way of people in a community. He doesn’t mean it in the sense that we do when we tell a kid to go and practice scales on the piano. As he puts it in
Philosophical Investigations
, he is considering a people’s form of life: “to imagine a language is to imagine a
form of life
” (p. 8e, paragraph 19).

We might think of the ritual of greeting, or the telling of what brings one to the doctor, as language games. This is what Wittgenstein famously called them. “Here,” he says (again, in
Philosophical Investigations
), “the term ‘language-
game
’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the
speaking
of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (p. 11e, paragraph 23). The things people do in communal life, their practices, underwrite what it will make sense to say. That seems to be very different from the conditions that underwrite the meanings of sentences (truth conditions, for example).

A bit later in
On Certainty
, Wittgenstein writes:

And, he even produces a joke about a philosopher (G.E. Moore?):

The statement “That is a tree” in the second passage is akin, I think, to “This is my hand” in the first and to “I know that that’s a tree” in this last passage. That Wittgenstein would feel compelled
to tell the onlooker that his philosopher friend is not insane but only doing philosophy is important—he wouldn’t want the onlooker to react to his friend as the doctor reacts to the patient in the above injured-hand case. These cases, I think, help to illuminate our piston engine case (and show that my initial impulse to borrow René Magritte’s “This is not a pipe” was not far from the mark).

Along the lines of the cases Wittgenstein introduces above, we might say that what strikes us as funny about Mrs. Non-Gorilla’s reply (to the question of why she bought the piston engine) is that it is not really a reason for buying the engine after all, even though it takes the form of one. To be sure, we
could
count it as a
lousy
reason for buying it, but then we shouldn’t be laughing at Mrs. Gorilla, as much as we should be pitying or rebuking her (for being so shallow or so stupid). And, we could take “No, . . . been shopping” as a customary response to the question “Been shopping?” but if we did, again we shouldn’t find this funny, as much as we should find it an interesting custom. But, these aren’t strangers with strange customs! They are working-class women at the park, who live somewhere in England (at least, this is the premise of the skit). Rather, the joke arises in its not being a response at all, even though it takes the form of one. Although we are led to believe (at first) that we are watching the social interaction of women in the park, who express interest in what the others have done, and so on, the joke is that we are not watching anything of the sort. And though the scene at first appears ordinary enough, at the end, along with Mrs. Smoker and Mrs. Non-Smoker, we walk off dazed and confused, reminded of something Hamlet tells Horatio: “There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.” Alas, Monty Python has pulled back the curtain. For, none of the philosophical theories of meaning will do. They have made Wittgenstein’s point! A complete analysis of what these women say in terms of syntax, semantics, truth-conditions, use, and so on, will not capture what it is about their exchange that makes us laugh. There is simply more going on in the park than there is dreamt of in our philosophy. For whatever it is that is left over after we have accounted for meaning, which some will say is all there is to account for here, it is the leftovers that work their magic on us. It is the stuff that Horatio’s philosophy cannot account for that seems to matter here.

HARRY BRIGHOUSE

 

 

M
onty Python’s Flying Circus
drove numerous young people of my generation into philosophy. Having been driven into philosophy and stayed, I’m startled to notice how many references to philosophy in Monty Python have some basis in the reality of philosophy as a profession. The Bruces’ Philosopher’s Song (also known as the Australian Philosophers’ Song), for example, is simultaneously a comment on the incongruity of an Australian accent (regarded by elitist Britons as crass and un-intellectual) combined with something as serious and high-brow as philosophy, and a tribute to the enormous influence that Australian philosophers had over English-speaking philosophy at the time, and still have.

Perhaps most striking of all to a practicing philosopher is the “Argument Clinic” sketch (
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
, Episode 29, “The Money Programme”). The customer enters the Argument Clinic, after a false start with Mr. Barnard in the abuse room:

He then finds Mr. Vibrating in the argument room: