106 The Nature of Political Theory
extra category in Part One. However, my reason for separating this latter discussion out
into Part Two is because I wish to establish the sequence of arguments which leads through
from logical positivist debates to Rawlsian justice-based theory.
- In Carnap’s case, for example, at Chicago University, his courses were also of great interest
to the new generation of political scientists.
- The English translation appeared in 1922 with a preface by Bertrand Russell.
- Which was largely an attempt to say what reality would be like if it were describable in
language derived from Russell’s and Whitehead’sPrincipia Mathematica.
- Words like ‘if’ ‘for’, and ‘not’ do not picture the world.
- Alfred Ayer in his retrospective interview in the 1970s, with Bryan Magee, on being asked
about the defects of logical positivism, remarked, ‘Well, I suppose that the most serious of
the defects of positivism was that nearly all of it was false’, see Magee (1978: 131).
- The tense is important here. Thus ‘I promised’ is no longer performative.
- Further, Austin argued that we should also take note of what he called the locutionary
force of utterances—namely, the grammatical and literal meaning; the illocutionary force
of what is performed in uttering something; and, finally, the perlocutionary force which
embodies the effect of uttering something. Locutionary and illocutionary acts depend
upon appropriate conventions, which enable the utterance to do what the speaker wants it
to do. Conventions need to be known. Speech acts have to be faithful to conventions to be
successful.
- As G. J. Warnock commented in 1969 ‘there are no doubt in “our climate of thought”
many factors...that are in some way unfriendly to the metaphysical temperament’. For
Warnock, one key reason for this unfriendliness is that ‘metaphysical speculation has often
arisen from, and often too been a substitute for, religious or theological doctrine’, see
Warnock (1969: 96).
- ‘Weldon is at least as much of a positivist as he is a Wittgensteinian analyst, that is, one
who is committed to the thesis that “meaning is use”’, see Blackstone (1973: 24).
- The term ‘ejaculation’ was Alfred Ayer’s whimsical addition.
- The most well known would be Steven Lukes’Power: A Radical View(1975) and
W. E. Connolly’sTerms of Political Discourse(1983).
- He has been adapted to the conservative thought by some writers, although this has always
been vigorously denied by others (Wertheimer 1976: 19). Others have adapted essential
contestability argument with an emphasis on its philosophical neutrality in relation to
forms of life. The neutrality is so strongly stressed that it miraculously reappears as a
species of neutralist liberalism. The ‘standing over language games’ becomes ‘the standing
over theories of the good’. A philosophy of language thus becomes theory of formal liberal
equality.
- The latter view is adaptable to the more traditional concerns of perennial problems and
some recent normative political theory.
- ‘It seems hard to draw limits to the capacity of essential contestability to infect moral con-
cepts’. Thus, for the authors, every debate would be subject to fruitless reduction. Thus,
they continue ‘Exactly how political arguments are to be conducted...in the face of nag-
ging essential contestability is a problem that Gallie does not explore’, Lesser, Plant, and
Taylor-Gooby (1980: 9–10).
- Further, he maintains that not all concepts have or could be contested at all times.
- There are direct parallels here with Karl Popper’s response to ordinary language philosophy,
see Popper (1976).
