Instead, we find a costly hesitation. In part, as early participants in the British analytic movement will say, the question did not arise. They had wandered into new pastures and were too busy culling the uses; there were enough to go around and if anyone stopped short, he could usually be brought to continue by a counter-instance. Where would it end? It might never end.
But this was a symptom. The basic diagnosis lies deeper. Analytic method was given a certain cast by the dogmas it inherited from logical positivism. There was the sharp separation of philosophical analysis from empirical inquiry, the sharp separation of the analytic from the normative, and the sharp separation of the analytic from genetic– causal accounts. (Left on its own in this way, analysis was robbed of all vital criteria for decision; hence the symptom fixed on above.)
Now all these sharp separations were essential to positivism. And they made a certain sense, for positivist analysis was concerned with building large formal systems. System building can go on by itself in some degrees, without asking what factual structure it might apply to, or what purposes it might further, or what sociocultural forces begot it. Analysis here can call its own tune without being brought to account till it is finished.
The risk it runs is having a beautifully elaborate formal system that serves no purpose after it is built! But ordinary language analysis cannot defer payment in this way. It is analyzing linguistic uses that are thoroughly embedded in particular contexts. It has to face promptly non-formal conditions which are material in character, and the context when fully explored is inherently purposive – not only in the general purposes of language, but in the specific goings-on that give meaning to the uses.
It is not surprising that the more J.L. Austin explored the uses of words, the more he was led to abandon the great dichotomies – to see illocutionary elements in the idea of truth and to reject the broad fact–value dichotomy.3 Indeed, all the dogmas would have been rejected in analytic philosophy if the notion of context had been taken with full seriousness and if linguistic change had been as well-tilled a field as linguistic pattern.
If such a diagnosis is correct, the remedy would seem to lie in a fuller integration of the empirical, the normative, and the contextual (especially the socio-cultural) within the analytic method. This is the major point of the present analysis. I shall try to show by selected case study from analytic philosophy of education that there is a growing loss of faith in analysis as a separate self-sufficient process, but that a remedy is being sought only by adding empirical, genetic, or normative elements. The key to an adequate remedy lies in the demonstration that these are not elements to be added to a separately performed analysis but play an internal part in the analytic products themselves. Hence integration, not just addition, is the cure.
Read More : The Theoretical Diagnosis Of Education
