Chapter 25 Quiz: Language, Narrative, and the Stories We Live By
Multiple Choice
1. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus advances the view that:
- A) Language has many uses and is embedded in forms of life
- B) Language is fundamentally a picture of the world, and meaningful propositions mirror facts
- C) All philosophical problems are caused by misuse of language
- D) Narrative is the fundamental structure of meaning
Answer: B
The Tractatus is built around the "picture theory" of meaning: propositions are pictures of possible facts, and language's fundamental job is to mirror the logical structure of the world. Wittgenstein later abandoned this view in the Philosophical Investigations and developed the ideas in (A) and (C). (D) is Ricoeur's view.
2. The late Wittgenstein's principle that "meaning is use" implies:
- A) The meaning of a word is a private mental image associated with it
- B) The meaning of a word is determined by the facts in the world it names
- C) The meaning of a word is its function within the social practices and language games in which it is employed
- D) All words ultimately mean the same thing in different contexts
Answer: C
"Meaning is use" is Wittgenstein's central slogan in the Philosophical Investigations. Words do not mean by virtue of what they name (B) or by virtue of private mental associations (A); they mean by virtue of how they function in the diverse social practices — "language games" — in which they are embedded.
3. The private language argument holds that:
- A) There can be languages that only one person speaks
- B) There cannot be a genuinely private language whose terms refer to inner sensations validated solely by the speaker, because meaning requires public, social criteria
- C) Private languages are possible in principle but unintelligible to others
- D) Language is private whenever the speaker fails to communicate their intentions
Answer: B
Wittgenstein argues that for a term to have meaning, there must be a standard for its correct use — and a purely private "standard" (verified by the speaker alone, with no external check) is not really a standard at all. Meaning requires the shared practices and public criteria of a linguistic community.
4. J.L. Austin's "illocutionary act" refers to:
- A) The physical act of producing sounds in speaking
- B) The effect that an utterance has on the listener
- C) The action performed in and by the saying — the promising, warning, asserting, or commanding that the utterance constitutes
- D) The mental intention behind an utterance
Answer: C
Austin distinguishes three levels of speech acts: the locutionary act (producing meaningful sounds), the illocutionary act (the social action performed — promising, warning, ordering), and the perlocutionary act (the effects produced in the listener — being persuaded, alarmed, or moved). (A) is close to locutionary; (B) is perlocutionary.
5. "Felicity conditions" in Austin's speech act theory are:
- A) The emotional qualities that make a speech act feel sincere
- B) The social and contextual conditions that must hold for a performative utterance to succeed
- C) The grammatical rules governing correct sentence formation
- D) The conditions under which perlocutionary effects are achieved
Answer: B
Felicity conditions are the conditions under which a performative utterance can succeed in doing what it purports to do. For example, for a promise to be a genuine promise: the speaker must sincerely intend to do the thing, must be able to do it, and the procedure must be understood by both parties. When felicity conditions fail, the speech act is "unhappy" — it misfires or is void.
6. Gadamer's "fusion of horizons" describes:
- A) The moment when a reader fully reproduces an author's original intention
- B) The impossibility of understanding across cultural differences
- C) The process by which understanding emerges from the active synthesis of the reader's horizon with the horizon of the text
- D) The linguistic relativist thesis that speakers of different languages cannot understand each other
Answer: C
A "horizon" is the totality of what is visible from a given interpretive standpoint. Gadamer holds that understanding is neither the reader imposing their framework on a text nor the reader erasing themselves to recover the author's intent; it is the creation of a new, enlarged understanding through the encounter between two horizons.
7. Gadamer rehabilitates the concept of "prejudice" (Vorurteil) by arguing that:
- A) Bias and prejudice should be embraced rather than corrected
- B) Pre-judgments are not obstacles to understanding but its necessary conditions — we can only understand new things by relating them to what we already know
- C) All interpretations are equally valid because all interpreters have different prejudices
- D) Understanding requires eliminating all cultural assumptions
Answer: B
Gadamer's crucial move is to reclaim "prejudice" from its purely negative meaning. Pre-judgments (prejudices) are the assumptions, categories, and frameworks a reader necessarily brings to a text. They cannot be eliminated — trying to read without them would be trying to read from nowhere. What can be done is making them explicit and subjecting them to critical examination.
8. Ricoeur's narrative identity thesis holds that:
- A) Personal identity is determined by the continuity of the physical body over time
- B) Personal identity consists in the chain of psychological connections linking past, present, and future states
- C) Who a person is — their ipse identity — is constituted by the narrative they tell about their life, synthesizing past, present, and anticipated future
- D) Personal identity is an illusion; only momentary experiences are real
Answer: C
Ricoeur distinguishes idem identity (numerical sameness — the body, legal record) from ipse identity (who one is — the narrative self). Ipse identity is constituted by narrative: the story that makes a life coherent, that assigns meaning to events and commitments, and that positions the self as the protagonist of an ongoing story.
9. Rae Langton's concept of "silencing" refers to:
- A) Being prevented from speaking by external force
- B) The systematic failure of a person's speech acts due to social arrangements that prevent their illocutionary uptake
- C) Speaking in a voice too quiet for others to hear
- D) Being ignored in a conversation
Answer: B
Langton's silencing is a technical speech-act-theoretic concept: a person is silenced when their speech acts — particularly acts of refusal — fail to achieve their intended illocutionary force because the social context (shaped by, in Langton's analysis, pornographic representation) renders those acts unintelligible. The person speaks; the words do not perform the intended action.
10. Lakoff and Johnson's metaphors we live by are:
- A) Poetic devices used to make language more vivid
- B) Deep conceptual structures embedded in language that organize entire domains of experience and shape how we think and act
- C) Lies that become conventionally accepted
- D) Cultural artifacts that vary entirely across languages with no cross-cultural patterns
Answer: B
Conceptual metaphors, for Lakoff and Johnson, are not decorative — they are the cognitive structures through which we understand abstract domains. "Argument is war," "time is money," "life is a journey" — these are not just ways of talking about argument, time, and life; they are ways of thinking about and experiencing them that have real behavioral consequences.
Short Answer
11. Explain the shift from the early Wittgenstein (the Tractatus) to the late Wittgenstein (the Philosophical Investigations). What did the early Wittgenstein get wrong, and what does the late Wittgenstein propose instead?
Model answer: The early Wittgenstein held that language's fundamental task is to picture facts, and that meaningful propositions correspond to possible states of affairs. This picture theory makes sense of scientific and mathematical language but fails to account for the many uses of language that don't describe facts — commands, promises, greetings, jokes, prayers. The late Wittgenstein replaces the picture theory with the principle that meaning is use: words mean by virtue of their function in the diverse social practices — language games — embedded in forms of life. Philosophy's job shifts from constructing theories of meaning to dissolving pseudo-problems that arise when language goes on holiday — when words are taken out of the practices that give them meaning.
12. What is the hermeneutical circle? Why does Gadamer consider it the structure of understanding rather than a vicious circle to be avoided?
Model answer: The hermeneutical circle is the structure of interpretation: to understand the whole of a text, you must understand its parts; to understand the parts, you must already have some sense of the whole. This might seem to be a vicious circle (since you need to know the whole before you can know the parts, and vice versa). Gadamer considers it the structure of understanding rather than a problem to be solved because understanding is not achieved in a single pass from ignorance to comprehension; it unfolds through iterative engagement, beginning with a provisional understanding of the whole, revising it as the parts complicates it, revising the understanding of the parts in light of the revised whole, and so on. Understanding is not a foundation; it is a process.
13. Explain the distinction between idem identity and ipse identity in Ricoeur's theory of narrative identity. Why does Ricoeur think ipse identity is narrative?
Model answer: Idem identity is sameness over time in the sense of numerical continuity: the legal record, the body, the fingerprints that persist across a life. Ipse identity is the identity of selfhood — who I am, in the sense that gives "I" its sense across time. Ricoeur holds that ipse identity is narrative because the self is not a substantial thing that persists but an ongoing achievement: the synthesis of past experience, present commitments, and anticipated future into a coherent story. That synthesis is the work of narrative. We are not our bodies (idem) plus some additional metaphysical ingredient; we are the stories we tell and live, which integrate what has happened into what is happening and what may happen next.
14. What is a "category mistake" in Ryle's ordinary language philosophy? Give an example and explain why it generates philosophical confusion.
Model answer: A category mistake is an error that arises from applying the logical grammar of one category to a concept that belongs to a different category. Ryle's famous example: someone visits Oxford, sees the colleges, libraries, administrative offices, and faculty buildings, then asks "But where is the University?" The mistake is treating "university" as though it named an additional building of the same kind as the colleges. The university is not an additional thing alongside the colleges; it is the organized whole constituted by them. Similarly, treating "mind" as though it named an entity of the same kind as the brain — a ghost in the machine, a non-physical thing inhabiting a physical body — is a category mistake. "Mind" doesn't name a thing alongside the body; it names a set of capacities, dispositions, and ways of acting.
15. How does the feminist concept of silencing extend Austin's speech act theory? What does it reveal about the relationship between language and power?
Model answer: Austin's speech act theory shows that for illocutionary acts to succeed, felicity conditions must hold — the right social context, the right kinds of participants, the right mutual understanding. Langton's concept of silencing extends this by showing that felicity conditions can be systematically undermined for some speakers in some contexts. When social arrangements — Langton's case is pornography, but the analysis extends more broadly — render certain speech acts unintelligible (treating refusal as performance, treating testimony as unreliable, treating requests for help as weakness), the affected speakers' illocutionary acts fail not because the speakers speak unclearly but because the social context has been constructed to prevent uptake. This reveals that the power to perform speech acts effectively is not equally distributed: it depends on the social recognition of one's standing as a competent speaker, and that recognition can be structurally withheld.