Original Publication:
Quentin Skinner, ‘The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon’, Essays in Criticism 29, no. 3 (1979): 205–24, https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/XXIX.3.205.
Revised version summarised here:
Quentin Skinner, ‘The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon’, in Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, vol. 1, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 158–74.
Google Drive Link
Texts in monotype are notes that might be useful.
The essays concerns the use of and disagreements over what Skinner calls “appraisive terms”, i.e., terms which are socially/morally significant. The attempt is to analyse the manner in which, or more specifically the various levels at which, there can be disagreement over the use of these terms. Additionally, to examine how such disagreements illuminate the connection between the “language” or “words”, Skinner also speaks of “vocabulary”, that we deploy and (our perceptions of or attitudes towards) the “social world” or “reality” which these words describe or appraise.
I
“What can we hope to learn about the processes of social innovation and legitimation by studying the key words we use to construct and appraise the social world itself? This is the question I confront in the course of the present chapter.”
Skinner takes up this “vast and intractable” question by engaging Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Williams’ Keywords was first published in 1976 which Skinner reviewed in his original essay of 1979. Skinner’s revised essay from Visions of Politics, vol. 1 (2002) takes into account the revisions Williams incorporated in his revised and extended second edition of 1983. I cull out all references to this text in this summary not because they are irrelevant but because they would make turn the summary into something much longer.
II
Now, it might be objected straightaway that we are worrying about the wrong unit of analysis. It might be said that the way in which we see, construct or appraise the social world are not mediated by “key words” that we use but by “concepts” we possess.
One might simply reply that to possess a concept is to know the meaning of a word. But this simple answer will not do. For in order for me to possess a concept, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for me to “understand the correct application of a corresponding term”. Firstly, assume that we are interested in knowing if John Milton took the concept of originality to be important for a poet. It seems he did, for he emphasises at the beginning of Paradise Lost (Book 1, lines 15–16) that his composition “pursues/Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”. But note that Milton did not need the term “originality” — i.e., it is not necessary for Milton to understand and use the term “originality” — to convey the concept. Secondly, it is possible that “a whole community of language users may be capable of applying [such highly general terms as being or infinity] with perfect consistency” without there being a corresponding concept.
The relationship between words and concepts is difficult to capture. Nevertheless, we may say at least the following.
The surest sign that a group or society has entered into the self-conscious possession of a new concept is that a corresponding vocabulary will be developed, a vocabulary which can then be used to pick out and discuss the concept in question with consistency.
Of course, this involves generally “to understand the meaning of a corresponding term”. But this, as I have noted, is neither necessary nor sufficient.
III
“What exactly are we debating about a word when we find ourselves debating whether or not it ought to be applied as a description of a particular action or state of affairs?” We could be disagreeing about at least three different things.
First, it “is necessary in the first place to know the nature and range of the criteria in virtue of which the word or expression is standardly applied” (emphasis added). Take the appraisive term courageous. A good explanation of the term would include “the various criteria that serve to mark the word off from similar and contrasting adjectives, so providing it with its distinctive role in our language of social description and appraisal”. These criteria would include the following: “that the word can be used only in the context of voluntary actions; that the actor involved must have faced some danger; that they must have faced it with some consciousness of its nature; and that they must have faced it heedfully, with some sense of the probable consequences of undertaking the action involved”.
Second, it is necessary to know its range of reference. This is to say: to know “the nature of the circumstances in which the word can properly be used to designate particular actions or states of affairs”. Such knowledge will give one the skill to “pick out just those actions which are properly to be called courageous, and to discuss the sorts of circumstance in which we might wish to apply that particular description, or might wonder whether we ought to apply it rather than a different one”. So that if someone describes as courageous the fact of x facing a painful death cheerfully, it might be replied that the circumstance involved no danger and that it x might be said to have faced death with fortitude, not courageously. Indeed, if someone describes x stepping into the circus to deputise for the lion tamer as courageous, one could retort that such an action is heedless and ought rather to be describeed as reckless.
Here, Skinner speaks in passing of the first as sense and the second as reference (p. 162). The terms have an important and interesting history. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), the German mathematician and logician, and among the most significant modern thinkers, made the famous distinction between “sense” (Sinn) and “reference” (Bedeutung) in an article in 1892 (“Über Sinn und Bedeutung”). Given the complexity involved in understanding these two rather technical terms and their connection to the word “meaning”, I avoid using them in the summary. For those interested, there are any number of books on Frege containing the words “sense” and “reference”.
But for appraisive terms, in addition to the set of criteria and the range of reference, we need a further element. One needs to know “what range of attitudes the term can standardly be used to express. For example, no one can be said to have grasped the correct application of the adjective courageous if they remain unaware of its standard use to commend, to express approval, and especially to express (and solicit) admiration for any action it is used to describe. To call an action courageous is not merely to describe it but to place it in a specific moral light. I can praise or rejoice at an action by calling it courageous, but I cannot condemn or sneer at it by describing it in this way.”
Now, we are in a position to answer the question raised at the start of this section. When we are disagreeing and debating about a word concerning whether it may or may not be used as the description of an action or a state of affairs, we might be disagreeing and debating at least one of three different things: (a) about the criteria for applying the word ; (b) about whether the criteria are present in the given circumstances, or; (c) about “what range of speech acts the word can be used to perform”.
When Skinner talks of “speech acts”, he is referring to and drawing upon J. L. Austin’s How to do Things with Words? (1962). Austin showed that “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action — it is not normally thought of as just saying something”. To utter a sentence is also to do something, to act; hence, speech-act. Austin uses the term performative sentence (pp. 6–7). Sentences are not only, that is to say, used to describe or to assert but to do or perform certain things, such as to commend or to condemn (as we shall see in the rest of the summary) and any number of other things (as we shall see in the passage quoted just below). It is this performative aspect that Skinner wants to especially stress. For a great example of how emphasis on this aspect may illuminate a text, consider Skinner’s analysis of a famous passage from Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince.
If you turn to or if you remember Chapter 18 of The Prince, you will find Machiavelli arguing, in what is probably the best known observation in that well-known work, that the political leaders who aspire to fame and glory must learn to imitate la volpe ed il lione [the fox and the lion]. Now, how is that passage best interpreted? The usual answer is that Machiavelli is claiming, that’s to say he is affirming the belief, that success in politics depends on realistically recognising the unavoidibility of force and fraud. That unpacks the metaphor and states the belief. I certainly don’t want to deny that that appears to be what Machiavelli believed. What I want to ask is how adequately you can hope to interpret that passage if you approach it with that as your basic question in mind?
Machiavelli’s contention was afterall not launched into a cultural void; it was part of an extensive Renaissance literature of advice books for rulers in which everybody had agreed that glory is indeed the proper goal of princes and that the means to acquire glory is to cultivate the quality which was called in the Renaissance writing, virtus in the Latin, or la virtu in the Italian. And by the use of that term, they sought to denote not merely the moral and political virtues but also took virtus to be obviously the defining quality of the vir — the Latin for man [Latin of course less sexist than English has two words, does it not?, homo means man or woman, but vir means man by contrast with woman, source of the English word ‘virile’]. So the Rennaisance writers are making it a defining characteristic of successful leaders that they should possess distinctively manly qualities.
Machiavelli, by contrast, is telling that if you want to achieve glory as a ruler, you will have to cultivate beastly qualities; so manly–beastly, we are back in the metaphoricality of the passage. So, he is thus opposing, in the passage I have quoted, the hitherto undoubted humanist piety that qualities of manliness form part of the key to political success. He is thereby questioning the adequacy of humanist accounts of virtue, and he is redefining what it means to speak of virtue as the name of the attribute that brings princely glory.
Furthermore, he launched that critique into a culture in which, unquestionably the most widely known and read treatise on political leadership was Cicero’s De Officiis and there Cicero had laid it down, I quote — I am translating obviously — “There are two ways in which injustice may be done. Either by force or by fraud. Both methods are bestial and unworthy of mankind. Force, because it belongs to the lion. and fraud because it belongs to the cunning fox.” So, Machiavelli, in the passage I cited also turns out to be quoting Cicero; thereby reminding his readers of the most respected authority on the question of political virtue while at the same time, repudiating, and indeed you hear the tone now, ridiculing Cicero’s moral earnestness.
See this blog’s transcript of the lecture “Truth, Belief, and Interpretation”.
https://cluelesspoliticalscientist.wordpress.com/2019/03/08/quentin-skinner-truth-belief-interpretation-lecture-transcript/
IV
In what sense are these linguistic disagreements also disagreements about our social world itself?
As noted, we might be disagreeing about the relevant criteria for applying an appraisive term. This is both a linguistic as well as a social debate. Consider the instance of Marcel Duchamp who used to designate such familiar everyday objects such as coat-pegs and lavatory bowls as works of art and then have them exhibited in galleries. While some have lauded these as significant works of art in that they sharpened our awareness and appreciation of everyday objects, others protested that one cannot simply designate something “readymade” [Duchamp’s word] a work of art.
At the linguistic level, the disagreement is about whether a certain critierion — the exercise of skill — should be considered necessary for the application of a term of appraisal — a work of art. But at the social level, the disagreement is about what kinds of objects ought or ought not to be treated as having a rather elevated status and significance (as works of art are). What is interesting at this level is that “a term such as art gains its meaning from the place it occupies within an entire conceptual scheme”.
“To change the criteria for applying it will thus be to change a great deal else besides. Traditionally, the concept of art has been connected with an ideal of workmanship, has been opposed to the ‘merely useful’, has been employed as an antonym for nature, and so on. If we now endorse the suggestion that an objet trouvé or a manufactured article can count as a work of art, we at once sever all these and many other conceptual links. So an argument over the application of the term art is potentially nothing less than an argument over two rival … ways of approaching and dividing up a large tract of our cultural experience.”
V
Even if we agree about the criteria for applying a term, we might disagree that the circumstances in question do not yield those criteria. Such disagreement will, again, not merely be linguistic but also social. For what is being contended in effect might be that a refusal to apply the term in a certain situation may constitute an act of social insensitivity or a failure of social awareness.
Consider the contention that wives in ordinary middle-class families at the present time can properly be described as suffering exploitation, as being an exploited class. The social argument here would be that it should be obvious to all right thinking persons that the circumstances of contemporary family life are such that this strongly condemnatory term is appropriate term of appraisal. And if a person cannot see this, he is wilfully refusing to perceive the institution of the modern family in its true and baleful light.
This disagreement is not about the criteria relevant for the use of the term exploitation but about whether the circumstances fit those criteria. This is often confused by moral and political philosophers. Consider Stuart Hampshire’s imagined debate between a Marxist and a Liberal which he presents in Thought and Action (1959). Hampshire notes that the liberal will be likely to be ‘startled to find that actions of his, to which he had never thought to attach political significance, in his sense of “political”, are given a political significance’ by his Marxist opponent. That is to say, the disagreement, according to Hampshire, is about the criteria for using the term “political”. The liberal has a different sense of the political than the Marxist.
But this cannot be so. “It is not clear that the Marxist can even be said to be arguing with the liberal if he is simply content to point out that, as Hampshire puts it, he has a different concept of ‘the political’, with the result that he and the liberal are both confined to ‘the largely separated worlds of their thought’. It is even less clear, if this is all that the Marxist wishes to point out, why the liberal should feel in the least discomfited by the argument, given that it amounts to nothing more than a declaration of an intention to use a certain appraisive term in an idiosyncratic way.”
“If the Marxist is genuinely seeking to persuade the liberal to share or at least acknowledge some political insight, he needs in effect to make two points. One is that the term political can appropriately be applied to a range of actions where the liberal has never thought of applying it. But the other — which his application of the term challenges the liberal to admit — is that this is not in the least due to a disagreement about the meaning of the term, but rather to the fact that the liberal is a person of blinkered political sensitivity and awareness.”
This is important to stress because for such arguments (as those of the Marxist) to work, the appraisive words in question — in this case, the concept of the political — should be offered in virtue of their accepted sense as an apt way of describing situations which have not hitherto been described in such terms. If such an argument is successful, the result will be that the range of reference of that term will be expanded. New social perceptions will arise such that the the relevant appraisive terms will then be applied with unchanged meanings to new circumstances”. If such arguments fail, new meanings will arise.
For example, consider the appraisive term religious which emerged in the later sixteenth century as a means of commending merely diligent and punctilious forms of behaviour. The aim of the enterpreneurial/merchant class in advocating such a use was clearly to suggest that the ordinary criteria for applying the strongly commendatory term religious were reflected in such actions, and thus that the actions themselves should be seen essentially as acts of piety and not merely as instances of administrative competence.
For more on the history of the term “religious”, see “Moral Principles and Social Change” in Visions of Politics: Regarding Method, vol. 1, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 145–57, at 153–55. Skinner is drawing upon Max Weber’s Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904–05; firt translated into English in 1930 by Talcott Parsons as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).
“This audacious move was partly successful, but only partly. The extent to which the proponents of commercial society may be said to have overreached themselves was eventually reflected in the emergence of a new meaning for the term religious — the meaning we still invoke when we say things like ‘I attend my departmental meetings religiously.’ It seems clear that the need for this new lexical entry originally arose out of the incapacity of many language users to see that the ordinary criteria for religious (including the notion of piety) were present in all the circumstances in which the term was beginning to be used.”
VI
Even if we agree about the criteria and the range of reference, we might still disagree about the nature and range of the speech acts that the term can be used to perform. Again the dispute will also be social in the sense that a group of language users may be open to the charge of having a mistaken or an undesirable social attitude.
Such disagreement can be of two general kinds. We might dissent from an orthodox social attitude by employing an appraisive term in such away that its standard use to perform a particular range of speech acts is weakened or even abolished. We might do this by dropping the term altogether from our evaluative vocabulary. Consider terms like gentleman (earlier used to commend) or native (increasingly seen as condescending). Or, we might continue to use the term of appraisal but make it contextually clear that the term is being used merely descriptively/neutrally. Consider terms such as black or queer which were earlier used with condescension and cutlure or civilisation which were earlier used to commend.
We can also dissent from orthodox social attitudes by seeking to the direction of the evaluation of the appraisive terms concerned. This can also be achieved in one of two ways. We might use a term normally used to condemn to actually commend. Consider the term myth. In a more confidently rationalist age, to describe an explanation as mythological was to dismiss it. But in recent times, the term has often been used to extol the mythological ‘version of reality’ as ‘truer’ and ‘deeper’ than more mundane accounts. Conversely, we might indicate our disapproval making it contextually clear that, although the term we are using is standardly employed to commend, we are employing it to condemn what is being described. Consider terms such as elite or liberal, erstwhile commendatory terms, which are increasingly used in certain quarters to denigrate.
VII
“I have now tried to furnish at least a preliminary response to the very large question I raised at the outset. I asked what kinds of knowledge and awareness we can hope to acquire about our social world through studying the vocabulary we use to describe and appraise it. I have answered that there are three main types of insight we can hope to achieve: insights into changing social beliefs and theories; into changing social perceptions and awareness; and into changing social values and attitudes.”
Having shown this, we can now face an even more difficult question. Are we now in a position to say anything about the nature of the role played by our appraisive vocabulary in the process (and hence the explanation) of social change? In otherwords, what is the connection between our appraisive vocabulary and social change?
“It must be a mistake to portray the relationship between our social vocabulary and our social world as a purely external and contingent one. It is true that our social practices help to bestow meaning on our social vocabulary. But it is equally true that our social vocabulary helps to constitute the character of those practices. To recognise the role of our evaluative language in helping to legitimate social action is to recognise the point at which our social vocabulary and our social fabric mutually prop each other up.”
Moreover, “to recover the nature of the normative vocabulary available to us for the description and appraisal of our conduct is at the same time to identify one of the constraints on our conduct itself. This in turn suggests that, if we wish to explain why social agents concentrate on certain courses of action while avoiding others, we are bound to make reference to the prevailing moral language of the society in which they are acting. This language, it now appears, will figure not as an epiphenomenon of their projects, but as one of the determinants of their behaviour.”
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