Is Natural Language Philosophically Relevant? (J. Stanley)

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.