(Published in Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Newsletter 2003-2004.)

Extraordinary ends by ordinary means: a tribute to John Wilson 

Michael Hand

Institute of Education, University of London

In 1956, the year John Wilson published his first book, J.L. Austin observed in his Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society that the philosophical method of examining the concepts embedded in ordinary language ‘scarcely requires justification at present - too evidently, there is gold in them thar hills’ (Austin, 1956, p.181). For almost 50 years Wilson used this method to mine the hills of everyday discourse about education and, in my estimation, deposited more gold in the vaults of educational thought than any other philosopher. For the last 30 or so, as the method fell out of philosophical favour, he simultaneously fought a valiant and tireless campaign to keep the mines open. It is his attempt to do what was scarcely required in 1956 - to provide an explicit justification for the method of ordinary language analysis - upon which I should like to focus in this brief tribute. 

Wilson’s defence of ordinary language analysis, sketched in outline in many of his books and papers but given its most elaborate articulation in What Philosophy Can Do (1986), rests on two claims. The first is that the proper business of philosophy is to tell us ‘what is permanently and universally true and real’ and ‘what is permanently and universally valuable and desirable’ (ibid., p.1) by identifying those features and concerns of human existence that are conceptually necessary. The second is that our best guide to the conceptually necessary features and concerns of human existence is the network of concepts marked by the terms of ordinary language. If these two claims are true, they constitute a compelling argument for the method of analysing ordinary usage.

The sense in which philosophy can tell us what is permanently and universally true, real, valuable and desirable is explained by Wilson as follows:

... there are at least some concepts, and some interests which generate them, that we are landed with - and those not the least important. When I say that we are landed with them, I mean that the collection of concepts marked by ‘person’, ‘rational creature’, ‘space’, ‘time’ and a few others, together with certain other concepts insufficiently attended to, markable perhaps by ‘growing up’, ‘being parented’ and ‘coming to face reality’, have enormous implications of a strictly logical kind for human life. In a word, most of the important furniture of our world - our emotional as well as physical world - is given. If that is so, then most of our important decisions will follow naturally from a careful yet at the same time firm understanding of the relevant concepts... (Wilson, 1981, pp. 12-13)

The point, then, is not that philosophers have some miraculous means of knowing the world prior to experiencing it - Wilson does not invoke the dubious philosophical category of the synthetic a priori truth - but rather that ‘the broad outlines of what the world is like and how we should handle it’ follow necessarily from our being conscious, rational creatures and wishing to remain so. Many of the practical enterprises to which we are committed, including the enterprise of education, are inexpellable from human life, their logical form determined by the very nature of personhood. ‘Philosophy demarcates the skeleton, as it were, of the world and man’s place in it, leaving other disciplines to fill in the fleshly details’ (Wilson, 1986, p.96).

Acceptance of this claim, or something very like it, would appear to be a sine qua non of a serious interest in philosophy. It is difficult to see what point philosophy could have for someone who doubted that any of the important truths about the human condition were conceptual in character. The claim that such important conceptual truths are most readily uncovered by examining ordinary usage, however, is less obviously integral to the discipline. A philosopher might intelligibly hold that the concepts embedded in ordinary language, far from having been generated by inexpellable human interests, actually reflect a particular theoretical perspective on the world and an optional set of practical concerns. And in fact this is just the view that philosophers now sceptical about the value of ordinary language analysis typically do hold. Thus Paul Hirst has recently offered the following explanation for the disenchantment of philosophers of education with ‘conceptual analysis as exemplified in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations’:

It became widely held that such work resulted not only in the removal of confusions in the conceptual schemes of our common discourse, but in strong if tacit support for our most fundamental beliefs within those schemes, concerning, for instance, the nature of persons, language, knowledge, society and moral values... The widely held conceptual framework that was elucidated with care and subtlety in the early years of the discipline is now widely understood as justifying a particular view of the relationship between theory and practice and a particular conception of the educated person as a rationally autonomous individual. (Hirst, 1998, pp.15-17)

What, then, are Wilson’s grounds for supposing there to be a connection between ordinary language and the permanent and universal furniture of our world? The answer lies in the kind of distinction one is making when one distinguishes between ordinary and specialised forms of discourse. Such a distinction only makes sense

... if we think that there are some kinds of discourse which are not ‘specialised’, in the sense that they are (by and large) not avoidable by normal human beings: they are not the special preserve of those with particular and optional interests in (for instance) religion, or ideology, or natural science, or the arts and crafts, or any other activity which a man might or might not take up. (Wilson, 1986, p.38)

To contrast specialised with ordinary language is to contrast forms of discourse that are optional for human beings with those that are more or less obligatory. Ordinary language is discourse developed to describe situations all people encounter and facilitate the achievement of goals all people share. This does not entail that all the features and concerns of human existence picked out by the terms of ordinary language are conceptual necessities, but it does suggest that ordinary language is the sensible place to begin our search for such necessities. ‘In that sense (and in that alone) ‘ordinary language’ may indeed be thought to have, not so much a special authority, but a special (because central) interest’ (ibid., p.39).

In the end, though, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: the onus is on the defender of ordinary language analysis to demonstrate its usefulness in bringing important conceptual truths to light. And this is just what Wilson does in his exemplary analyses of ordinary educational terms in such books as Education in Religion and the Emotions (1971), Philosophy and Practical Education (1977) and Preface to the Philosophy of Education (1979). To illustrate, I shall outline very briefly his argument for the view that the enterprise ordinarily picked out by the word ‘education’ itself is unavoidable for rational creatures.

Hirst is, of course, quite right that the ‘widely held conceptual framework’ articulated by himself and R.S. Peters in the 1960s reflected ‘a particular view of the relationship between theory and practice and a particular conception of the educated person’. But it is an extraordinary miscarriage of justice in the history of our discipline that recognition of the particularity of this framework has brought the method of analysing ordinary usage into disrepute. For Hirst and Peters made it abundantly clear in the classic statement of their position that they were not interested in the concept ordinarily marked by ‘education’, but rather in a ‘more recent and more specific concept’ which they marked by the rather awkward phrase ‘the development of an educated man’ (Hirst & Peters, 1970, p.25). It is difficult to say whether they supposed this narrower concept to be one with which rational creatures are landed, but that it turns out not to be has no bearing at all on the necessity or otherwise of the ordinary concept of education. 

On Wilson’s analysis, the word ‘education’, as it is ordinarily used, picks out an enterprise whereby ‘human learning above the natural level is being deliberately promoted in accordance with some general or overall policy’ (Wilson, 1979, p.33). That there is a conceptual connection between personhood and learning is fairly clear: ‘the connection is not just (though this is important enough) that human infants could not grow up to be rational people unless they did some learning and had been taught some things (most obviously, the use of language); it is also that having a conscious and rational mind implies some degree of willingness and ability to be open to new experiences and to structure such experiences - that is, very roughly, to learn’ (ibid., p.35). What is perhaps less obvious is why learning needs to be promoted in accordance with a general policy. This is necessary, Wilson argues, because of the sheer number of significant human goods that cannot be acquired or enjoyed without serious and sustained learning. If there were but one or two such goods, it might be possible to make arrangements for the requisite learning on a casual or ad hoc basis; but with so many of them to consider, some sort of general policy is essential. Wilson puts it thus:

Even at primitive levels, survival depends on a grasp of technological and social rules which could not be picked up in a casual or fragmentary way... Utilitarian pressures from disease, war, starvation, hostile climates and other sources on the one hand, and the non-utilitarian expansion of awareness in the arts and sciences on the other, both unite to render the enterprise of education more and more obviously necessary... Anyone who reflected about life at all (one is tempted to say) would have some appreciation of the varietyof goods to be gained, directly or indirectly, by learning; and if he is concerned that his children should enjoy these goods, then a general policy is forced upon him just because of that variety. (ibid., p.37)

It is scarcely possible, in a few hundred words, to do justice to the work of a philosopher as diverse in his interests, penetrating in his insights and prolific in his output as John Wilson. I hope only to have said enough to remind the initiated and persuade the uninitiated of the ambition, scope and enduring value of his contribution to philosophy of education. He is one of the giants upon whose shoulders the rest of us stand, and his passing is a great loss to our community.

References

Austin, J.L. (1956) ‘A plea for excuses’. In Austin, J.L. (1979) Philosophical Papers (Third Edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hirst, P. (1998) ‘Philosophy of education: the evolution of a discipline’. In Haydon, G. (ed) 50 Years of Philosophy of Education: Progress and Prospects, London: Institute of Education.

Hirst, P. & Peters, R.S. (1970) The Logic of Education, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Wilson, J. (1986) What Philosophy Can Do, London: Macmillan.

Wilson, J. (1981) ‘Concepts, contestability and the philosophy of education’, Journal of  Philosophy of Education 15 (1). 

Wilson, J. (1979) Preface to the Philosophy of Education, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Wilson, J. (1977) Philosophy and Practical Education, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Wilson, J. (1971) Education in Religion and the Emotions, London: Heinemann.

Wilson, J. (1956) Language and the Pursuit of Truth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.