I regularly encounter philosophers who are puzzled about how
language could be relevant in shedding light on philosophical problems that are
not primarily about language. But I have genuine problems understanding their
befuddlement. I don’t think of appealing to facts about language as a special
kind of methodology. Rather, I think of it as a source of evidence that is not subject
to many of the familiar worries that arise with (say) the methodology of
intuitions. Language allows us insight into distinctions to which our explicit
theories may blind us. As Austin writes in Sense and Sensibilia, “…the distinctions embodied in our vast
and, for the most part, relatively ancient stock of ordinary words are neither
few or always very obvious, and almost never just arbitrary.” Hannah Arendt
begins her argument that there is a distinction between labor and work in The
Human Condition by appeal to the fact that “every European language,
ancient and modern, contains two etymologically unrelated words for what we
have to come to think of as the same activity, and retains them in the face of
their persistent synonymous usage.” And later in the same chapter, she writes “It
is language, and the fundamental human experiences underlying it, rather than
theory, that teaches us that the things of the world, among which the vita activa spends itself, are of a very
different nature and produced by quite different kinds of activities.” I don’t
see anything objectionable about these sorts of appeals to language; they can
provide legitimate sources of evidence. Furthermore, though philosophers
nowadays are more likely to appeal to grammar than to etymology, I also don’t
see anything in contemporary philosophy that appeals in language in anything
other than this kind of way.