WITTGENSTEIN VS. THE WOKE: A GENERATION OF ACTIVISTS HAS IMBUED WORDS AND SOUNDS WITH SUPERSTITION.

• Author: Sartwell, Crispin

LAST SUMMER, PROTESTERS from Baltimore to Bristol defaced statues and dumped them into rivers in an iconoclastic spasm, providing a momentary diversion from what the new progressives take to be the real agents of oppression: words. Words matter, they say, plausibly enough. Words have power and consequences, and there must be accountability, they add. These generalities are supposed to settle such matters as whether President Donald Trump calling the coronavirus the "kung flu" caused anti-Asian sentiment, which caused the Atlanta spa shootings, with no factual evidence required. That words have power is a commonplace, but then again so are observations that talk is cheap and that you'd better put your money where your mouth is.

The view that words drive events is the spiritual orientation of youthful leftism. But it's hard to think of a view that would more directly contradict Marxist ideas about history, according to which words are frippery or ideology, concealing the material conditions of production. That sort of realism, which presupposes that we inhabit a physical universe, seems passe. Contemporary social justice movements focus on semiotic injustice, on the alleged violence perpetrated in and by words and images. We appear in this conception to live in a world that we are making with symbols, in a history driven by the production of signs and sentences rather than widgets.

The current censorial atmosphere raises philosophical questions. You start by asking about the effects of somebody's rhetoric and end up trying to figure out whether language reflects reality or reality reflects language. In order to know what sort of power words could possibly have, we'll need to reflect on what they are and how they mean. Fortunately, philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein spent much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries trying to deal with general questions about linguistic meaning in a systematic way. Some of the central insights they developed have come to be foundational in philosophy and may even constitute something of a toolkit: Wittgenstein vs. the woke.

MEANING AND INTENTION

FIRST, WE NEED to distinguish what words mean both from what the speaker intends and from what the hearer or reader understands. After an imbroglio at The New York Times, the practical necessity of doing some philosophical reflecting became obvious. The Daily Beast in January revealed that longtime Times science reporter Donald McNeil, who was conducting teenagers on a trip to Peru sponsored by the paper, had uttered the word nigger in a discussion about whether the use of that term on social media should lead to a child's suspension from school. Editor in Chief Dean Baquet and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger then successfully pressured McNeil into resigning.

Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a column, which the paper spiked (and Stephens subsequently placed with the New York Post), attacking his employer for McNeil's removal. Stephens staked the whole question on McNeil's intentions.

"Intention," he wrote, "is the...