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Abstract
In this paper I propose a series of arguments in order to show that it is preferable for analytic philosophy to be practiced in different languages. In the first section, I show that the analytic tradition includes people developing their philosophical work in different natural languages. In the second section, I will address the question of the role of language in thought, and more specifically in philosophical thought, concluding that it is preferable to allow for the use of different languages as a vehicle for philosophical ideas. Finally, I make some suggestions regarding changes that could be made in academic practices to better allow a plurality of languages and voices within the analytic tradition.
Notes
1 I belong to multiple minorities within philosophy: I am from Latin America, a part of the world where the analytic tradition is not part of the mainstream tradition, I am a Spanish native-speaker, and I am a woman. My area of expertise is philosophy of mind.
2 It is important to note that some of these authors wrote their works in English while others wrote in German. English is not the ‘natural’ language for analytic philosophy (if there is such a thing as a natural language for any human activity: see Pérez Citation2013a).
3 See Ezcurdia Citation2015.
4 See Glock Citation1997.
5 See also Gracia Citation2010.
6 English or German!
7 Hofstadter and Dennett’s book, The Mind’s I. Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul is an exception, but the aim of the authors is to make a language game. It was translated into Spanish as El ojo de la mente. Fantasías y reflexiones sobre el yo y el alma. Notice that ‘ojo’ means ‘eye’ and the translator chose to make explicit the language game that the authors made in the title. And also note how ‘Self’ was translated into ‘yo’.
8 ‘Self’ is a prefix or suffix that is added to other English terms, in order to form words that indicate self-reference, as in Self-knowledge, or myself. In Spanish we have different suffixes and prefixes doing the same job, such as ‘auto’ (in ‘autoconocimiento’, the Spanish translation for ‘Self-Knowledge’), or ‘mismo’ (in ‘mí mismo’, the translation for ‘myself’), but ‘auto’ and ‘mismo’ cannot be used as nouns, and do not play the role that ‘Self’ has in philosophical contexts. The Cartesian cogito is a case of Self-consciousness, and so ‘Ego’ is usually translated into ‘Self’ whereas in Spanish the translation for ‘Ego’ is ‘Yo’, which, as I said, does not involve a second-order stance.
9 ‘Folk Psychology’ or ‘Theory of Mind’ or ‘Mindreading’ are the labels used to refer to the ordinary ways in which we explain, predict and understand other people’s behavior attributing mental states such as desires, beliefs, hopes, fears, etc.
10 See also Siegel Citation2014.
11 There are different formulations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. According to this hypothesis language is not a transparent medium with which we express our thoughts; on the contrary, language influences the way we see the world, and/or augments our cognitive capacities, and/or influences the way in which we make category distinctions: in a nutshell it makes a cognitive difference. This is still a matter of philosophical and empirical concern: for discussion see Gentner & Goldin-Meadow Citation2003; Gomila Citation2011.
12 See also Gracia Citation2014.
13 As a philosophical example we can consider the case of the verb ‘to mean’ and its translation into Spanish, ‘significar’. In English ‘to mean’ is etymologically tied to individual intentions, and hence it is used with human agents as subjects. In Spanish, ‘significar’ is etymologically tied to the idea of ‘fixing a sign’ which is not something that a person alone can do. Hence, in Spanish the verb ‘significar’ is not used with humans as subjects; objects mean, but subjects do not mean (I thank Eleonora Orlando for calling my attention to this case). For an example of the way in which philosophers take advantage of the sonority of the words, playing with the words to develop a philosophically interesting idea, consider this passage from Bar-On (Citation2013: 362): ‘As suggested elsewhere, we should perhaps recognize a category of prepositional attitudes––fear of x, anger at y, attending to z––as precursors of full-blown propositional attitudes. That is to say, creatures who are not yet (phylogenetically speaking) capable of having attitudes with complete propositional content may well be capable of having attitudes with intentional objects.’ See more on this in footnote 15.
14 Robot is a word of Czech origin. Its origin is the Czech noun ‘robota’, meaning ‘forced labor slavery’. That is, a robot is a mechanical slave working at our command.
15 Analytic philosophers are less prone to word games than philosophers of other traditions, but these facts about language are still relevant whether the author is aware of the psychological associations involved or not. As a philosopher of mind, I am concerned with the different linguistic categories we use in order to express our mental states and subjective feelings, and these categories vary immensely from one natural language to another. The closer an expression is to our more basic experiences, the more difficult it becomes to translate it into other languages. To give a simple example, the word ‘feeling’ has no good translation into Spanish. We will probably translate it as ‘sensación’ o ‘sentimiento’ but English also possesses the words ‘sensation’ and ‘sentiment’, and Spanish does not have a third word with a non-Latin root in order to talk about feelings. Translating all the recent literature on the ‘feeling’ theory of emotions is not an easy task. Not to mention the famous Nagelian expression ‘what is it like’ Nagel (Citation1974): Spanish does not have a good translation of this expression involving the idea of similarity/likeness. See also footnote 13.
16 This is why checking a philosophical paper with a ‘native speaker’ does not guarantee that the paper is better as an expression of the author’s ideas, if the ‘native speaker’ is not a philosopher with whom the author can discuss the philosophical points she makes. For the ‘Myth of the Native Speaker’ see Pérez Citation2013a.
17 Sometimes we do have trouble trying to guess which of the two authors we are reading, the author of the novel or his translator (at least this was my experience while reading Borges’s translation of Woolf’s Orlando). In any case this translation was better than any other translation I have read of Woolf’s works. See also Borges Citation2000.
18 In French there are also two verbs, ‘savoir’ and ‘connaître’, which work in the same way as their Spanish counterparts.
19 This linguistic fact is at the core of Rumfitt’s (Citation2003) objection to Stanley and Williamson’s (Citation2001) reading of ‘knowing how’. If, as in Stanley and Williamson (Citation2001), you defend a philosophical point based on the grammar of an expression, you had better check the universality of that kind of linguistic phenomena. Otherwise the universality of the philosophical thesis does not follow.
20 The translation into Spanish of Russell’s idea could be ‘conocimiento directo’––in order to remark that it is opposed to knowledge by description, which is indirect––or ‘conocimiento por familiaridad’ (as Villoro Citation1982 translates it)––in order to remark the idea of something being familiar to us, belonging to our everyday life. But of course the idea of ‘familiarity’ has many connotations that ‘acquaintance’ seems not to have. And ‘directo’ is in no way connected to the everyday notion of acquaintance in English.
21 Note the difference with a technical paper in chemistry or biology, where one only needs technical chemical or biological lexicon plus basic English grammar. The point is that technical words in philosophy are not clearly separated from ordinary language, and hence a deeper understanding of everyday language is needed in order to understand and write philosophical papers.
22 As Gracia (Citation2014) remarks, this is a central difference between the role of Latin as a lingua franca in the Middle Ages, and English nowadays. In the majority of non-English-speaking countries people are not trained in philosophy in English, but in their national languages.
23 See Siegel Citation2014.
24 I am not naïve and I know that there are economic interests behind publishing companies, which are not academic institutions. But I will not address this problem here.
25 I know that there are many philosophers in English-speaking countries who are competent in more than one language, and could do the job. Also, there are many philosophers in non-English speaking countries who are also competent in more than one language: if we are asked to do an evaluation of an English paper for a given journal, we could be also asked to do the same job in our first language for that same journal. There are many people nowadays who publish in English but whose first language is different.
26 Some European journals already accept contributions in French, German, Italian and English. In Latin America many journal accept papers in Spanish, Portuguese and English.