ABSTRACT
Iris Murdoch’s ‘philosophy of language’ is one of the more neglected aspects of her thinking. It is, of course, natural that one focuses on Murdoch’s thoughts about love, vision, and attention, which obviously are central to her philosophy. In this chapter, however, I argue that a correct understanding and appropriation of the more discussed aspects of Murdoch’s thinking hinges in a correct understanding and appropriation of her thoughts about language. In particular, I will show that Murdoch’s emphasis on vision over choice cannot be fully understood without an acknowledgement of the fact that moral differences, as differences in vision, are conceptual differences, and that the work of attention, then, for Murdoch, primarily targets what she calls ‘the concept-forming words we utter to ourselves and to others’—since this is where our visions, the vulnerable background to our reasoning and our actions, take shape. Moral clarity, as clarity in vision, is, thus, for Murdoch a form of conceptual clarity.
