Because Psychology studies mental processes, it is very liable to behave as if Logic…were one of its subdivisions. But in fact Psychology, like every other science, must presuppose the autonomy of Logic; otherwise the writings of psychologists could be no more than their own autobiographies–not nearly so interesting or important as the autobiographies of statesmen, soldiers or artists. The interest which a psychologist claims for his theory is not that he happens to hold it, but that it is a true account of your experience and mine as well as of his own. But in this case he must have something to say in support of his theory over and above its psychological history. For every theory ever held has a psychological history.
Category Archives: logic
Say Show Elucidate
(Another class handout. Last one for a while, I promise.)
Let’s think more about saying and showing—and about elucidating. To do so, I want to use an example of Edmund Dain’s but to situate it in a little more detail.
Imagine that you have been thinking about metaphysics. After a long, brow-knit silence, you intone: “There are objects.” I have been sitting next to you, drinking coffee and losing to myself at tic-tac-toe. I close my notebook full of x’s and o’s and look at you, puzzled. “Huh?”
Again you intone, with increased metaphysical drama: “There are objects.”
I can tell that you regard what you are saying as urgent, so I try to understand: “Huh?”
You sigh, shaking your head at the hardness of mine, and you explain: “Descartes, you know doubt recall, quested heartily for something that was clear and distinct, indubitable. He hit upon ‘I think, therefore I am’. But I have hit upon something at least as good, likely better: ‘There are objects.’ That, my good man, is a true metaphysical principle. It survives even the furies of the evil genius. After all, if the evil genius fools me, then HE fools ME. There are objects, you see, him and me. I cannot be mistaken if I believe that there are objects. And notice how cleverly I have escaped Cartesian subjectivity. No need to talk of thinking at all. No need to find a path from in here to out there. I start out there. Me, the good genius, and him, the evil genius. Just objects, only objects; there are objects. There are objects.”
I say that I do not understand. “What do you mean, ‘objects’? I don’t get it. If you tell me that ‘There are objects that fell’ in answer to my question, ‘What made that noise?’ I would understand. I would know how to symbolize it even, after taking my logic class: ‘(Vx) (Fx)’. Or if you said, pointing to the fruit on the table here, ‘There are apples’, I would understand that, too: ‘(Vx) (Gx)’. But you don’t seem to be telling me anything about objects—like, they fell—or telling me that there are certain sorts of objects—like, apples—you are telling me what?”
You look disappointed. As usual, I have failed to match the seriousness of your thinking.
“I wish you had never taken that logic class. It has ruined you for thinking. You now just monger symbols. –Anyway, when I say ‘There are objects’, I mean that there are objects. And if I must resort to symbols to explain this to you, then I symbolize my indubitable thus: ‘(Vx) (Ox)’.”
“Huh. So you mean ‘There are objects’ to be like ‘There are apples’. But then what is the variable in your symbolization doing? In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein says something about how ‘object’ talk, when used rightly, is expressed symbolically by variable names. So, if I want to say ‘There are two objects which…’ I say it by ‘(Vx, y)…’ I can thus predicate something of the ‘objects’. For example, when I symbolize ‘There are apples’ as ‘(Vx) (Gx)’ I can elucidate that by saying ‘There’s an x such that x is an apple’. So your symbolizing of your indubitable could be elucidated in a parallel way: ‘There is an x such that x is an object.’ But notice that your use of ‘object’ there is predicative, as my use of ‘apple’ is. Is that what you want, to predicate ‘( ) is an object’ of some x?’
You look puzzled. “Well, I am not quite sure. That seems like what I want and it does not seem like what I want. I am unsure that I want a predicative use of ‘object’. That seems to make the objects I am talking about too robust, too spatio-temporal, too ordinary. When I say that there are objects, although I am glad to be right because there are apples or because there are alligators, I take it that such objects as apples and alligators are not the best examples of my objects. I want objects that are less robust, less spatio-temporal, less ordinary. The more I think about it, I am not sure that I really mean to be using ‘object’ predicatively. I am using ‘object’, not to predicate, but rather to indicate that which is the subject of predications. I want to symbolize it in a way that resembles the symbolization of ‘There are objects that fell’, ‘(Vx) (Fx)’.”
“Oh. Huh. But what do you want to predicate of your ‘objects’? The sentence you mean to be analogous to your indubitable predicates ‘fell’ of the ‘object’. But your indubitable lacks any such predicate. I don’t understand what you want.”
“Well,” you say, now becoming exasperated, “this is what happens when you mix logic and metaphysics. Philosophy consists of two parts, metaphysics and logic—and the metaphysics is the basis of philosophy. How do I want to symbolize my indubitable? Like this: ‘(Vx) ([ ]x)’. There. That. Says. It.”
“It does?” I ask. “I don’t think that says it. I don’t think that says anything at all. I understand that you want it to say something, in fact, to somehow say your indubitable. But, as it stands, with the ‘[ ]’, it is a propositional variable, not a proposition. We need a predicate. I also understand that, as it stands, it seems indubitable, but that is because, since it fails to be a proposition, no one can take a propositional attitude toward it. Cheap indubitability, as it were.”
“Ok. I suppose I concede that. I must want something else: maybe ‘(Vx)’, just that. But that looks weird.”
“Yeah. Frege would’ve regarded that as a monstrosity. But I see, in a way, what is happening to you. But there isn’t really anything you are saying when you say ‘There are objects’. You are drawn both to what Wittgenstein calls the ‘pseudo-concept’ use of ‘object’—the one replaced by the variable—and to some other use of ‘object’, a use on which it means something like ‘anything that can be carried’. But the problem is that neither of those is really what you want. The first won’t let you say anything, and so won’t let you say enough; the second lets you say something, but it says too much. An isolated quantifier is a monstrosity; it says nothing. A propositional variable says nothing; but it at least provides a kind of stencil for saying something. But the predicative use of ‘object’ seems wrong too. I wonder if part of the reason why your indubitable seems indubitable to you is that is not only seems to say something, it seems to say more than one something and, oddly enough, more than one nothing, all at once. Depth, indeed.”
You meet this with a profound frown. “Huh!”
Comment: I do not take the argumentative movements in this little conversation to be obligatory. The point is not to establish anything seriously about ‘There are objects’ but rather to provide an incarnated example of elucidation.
Much that is said in the conversation is what I call “ladder-language” (borrowing a term from Sellars). It is language that is meant to help to show (transitively) what shows (intransitively) or does not show (intransitively) in some sentence or sentence-like structure. Thus the language is didactically useful, but is not meant to stand—constatively—on its own. The language is unformalizable but nonetheless tied to formalization, tied to (intransitive) showing or its failure. (Remember, in nonsense, nothing (intransitively) shows.) When someone comes to see clearly the symbols in a genuine sentence or when someone comes to see that there is nothing that he means by some sentence-like structure, then what was said to get him to see that has no further role to play. All that matters is the person’s clear recognition of the sense or the nonsense.
Chump Change: a Thought on TLP 1
(Handout.)
What should we say of TLP 1, what should we do with it? We could note, I guess, that it plays an interesting role in a song by New Pornographers, Chump Change. But that’s scarce help.
One odd feature of 1 is its Eliotic dual-aspect as Bang-Whimper (of course this at the beginning, not, as Eliot’s was, at the end).
Bang: The world is everything that is the case! Whoa! Who woulda thunk it? Everything, everydamnthing! The world, man, the whole frickin’ world! This must be the near end of a gargantuan Metaphysical Buffet! Upcoming dishes: God, The Soul, …Who Knows? I can’t stand the suspense. What next?
Whimper: The world is everything that is the case… Well, yeah. What else would it be? “Everything that is the case.” Less exciting even than the Times’ “All the news that is fit to print”. The world is–the world. Whoopee… Wake me at 1.1.
Why begin with a proposition that is somehow both thunderclap and cricket’s chirp, new news and old hat?
It is incredibly tempting to read TLP as follows: The 1’s tell us What There Is. The 2’s and 3’s tell us How Language Hooks onto What There Is. The Bang aspect rules on this reading. But is there another reading, one that perhaps allows the Whimper aspect to rule? And if there is, what would we make of it, and of the 1’s, 2’s and 3’s?
How to Read TLP?
(Class Handout.)
(1) How to read TLP? –One proposition at a time, like a logiholic.
(2) TLP is a prose poem of logic–it complicatedly inherits a literary tradition inaugurated by Parmenides.
(3) Wittgenstein (from Culture and Value) around 1930, but apropos of TLP (and, mutatis mutandis, of PI):
Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all views of one object seen from different angles.
(4) Wittgenstein considered titling TLP something else–Der Satz, The Proposition. The book isolates the look, the physiognomy, the sound, the structure of the proposition–a literary and a logical task. It prioritizes the proposition stylistically and philosophically.
(5) Ronald Gregor Smith wrote of Martin Buber’s I and Thou:
To the reader who finds the meaning obscure at the first reading we may say that I and Thou is indeed a poem. Hence it must be read more than once, and its total effect allowed to work on the mind; the obscurities of one part…will then be illumined by the brightness of another part. For the argument is not as it were horizontal, but spiral; it mounts, and gathers within itself the aphoristic and pregnant utterances of the earlier part.
Just so, exactly just so, of TLP too. I have been stressing the necessity of allowing the total effect of TLP to work on your mind.
Frege and Wittgenstein on the Difficulty of Audience
Please excuse this letter as springing from my unsatisfied need for communication. I find myself in a vicious circle: before people pay attention to my Begriffsschrift, they want to see what it can do, and I in turn cannot show this without presupposing familiarity with it. So it seems I can hardly count on any readers for the book I mentioned… (Letter to Marty)
This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it–or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. (Preface to TLP)
Topsy-Turvy Frege
Davidson’s Truth and Predication–at least parts of it–have been in front of me this weekend. Good stuff, although I am out of sympathy with many of the details of the stories he tells, both about the history of the problem of predication and about the solution of the problem.
But I guess my fundamental disagreement with Davidson centers on the reality of the problematic he investigates. For Davidson, the unity of the proposition must be explained; explaining it requires solving the problem of predication. Seeing things this way, when Davidson turns to Frege he understands objects and concepts as constituents of propositions, constituents fashioned, as it were, so as to constitute a propositional unity. Predictably, Davidson is most fascinated with concepts, since they are–even more than objects–fearfully and wonderfully made: they are incomplete. Objects of course are complete–as are propositions (although in a different sense (Frege got confused about this, unfortunately)). The beginning of wisdom in reading Frege is recognizing the varieties of incompleteness and completeness he thematizes in his thinking–but that is a topic for another post. What I want to consider here is the way that Davidson turns Frege upside-down. I believe Frege understands objects and concepts as abstractions from propositions, not constituents of propositions. Objects and concepts are, shifting descriptions, made from propositions, not made for them. The proposition, the propositional unity, is prior to objects and concepts. There is no explaining the unity; and there is no problem of predication to solve. Davidson’s problematic is unreal.
Of course there is a problematic looming here, but it is more metaphilosophical than metaphysical. Namely, how do we philosophize without this problem? What would it be to philosophize constrained by the unity of propositions, recognizing that ultimately our only grip on anything as an object of thought is as what we are thinking instead of as what we are thinking about? Or, to put this in a more Fregean way, what would it be to philosophize constrained by The Context Principle–and its two companion Principles from Foundations? Frege’s Principles, as I believe (and have argued elsewhere), are the methodological counterpart to the unity of the proposition. Taken seriously–kept is Frege’s word–the Principles reorient philosophy itself. Wittgenstein’s work, both in TLP and in PI, strives to keep Frege’s Principles. Arguably, Davidson senses this. Although he shies away from Wittgenstein (saying a bit about why in a long footnote) he does at one point talk of a “deep truth” in a “Wittgensteinian thought”–but he seems unable to see how really to entertain the thought. That is unsurprising, since the thought impugns the problematic that provides the very structure of Davidson’s thinking.
Kant and Frege and Objectivity and Objects
I’ve been thinking actively again about Frege. I was puzzling through his apparent Platonism, wondering about Tom Ricketts’ way of responding to that (in his masterful paper, “Objectivity and Objecthood”), and I recalled this passage of Karl Jaspers. It strikes me as useful on Kant (as it was intended to be) but also as useful about Frege–and as marking a deep similarity in the problematic each faces.
The fundamental difficulty is that Kant, in striving to disclose the conditions of all objectivity, is compelled to operate within objective thinking itself, hence in a realm of objects which must not be treated as objects. He tries to understand the subject-object relationship in which we live as though it were possible to be outside it. He strives toward the limits of the existence of all being for us; standing at the limit, he endeavors to perceive the origin of the whole, but he must always remain within the limit. With the transcendental method he strives to transcend while remaining within the world. He thinks about thought. Yet he cannot do so from outside thought, but only by thinking.
Frege does not use Kant’s transcendental method. But his symbolism can be understood as striving to transcend thought while remaining within it, to disclose the conditions of all objectivity while operating within objective thinking itself.
Quotable and Unquotable Signs (Peter Long)
As Frege was perhaps the first clearly to recognise, the sign for a property or relation…is not a quotable sign: it is not an isolable piece of language. Of course, it is not incorrect to call ‘(is) white’ a predicative expression or ‘north of’ a relational expression, but what is here being called a predicative or relational expression is logically peripheral to what we should call the sign proper for a property or relation. For the sign that is proper to a property must, of course, have a different form from that which is proper to a relation. We give expression to this difference when we say ‘It is of the essence of a property to be of something’ and ‘It is of the essence of a (dyadic) relation to be between one thing and another’. What these propositions convey could be expressed at the level of language by saying ‘The sign for a property contains the form of a sign for a possible subject of the property’ and ‘The sign for a relation contains the form of signs for possible terms of the relation’. These formulations are not Frege’s, but they express what he meant by calling such signs ‘incomplete’, as opposed to those signs whose form is such that they do not contain the form of other signs, which he calls ‘complete’. –Peter Long, “Universals: Logic and Metaphor”, p. 97
Essence and Grammar (and Definition)
Reshef Agam-Segal has asked about the difference between Socrates’ desire for a definition and Wittgenstein’s for grammar. The two desires meet or can seem to meet in the word ‘essence’. Socrates wants to know, say, the essence of piety. Wittgenstein wants to know the grammar of piety (“theology as grammar”); and, according to Wittgenstein, “essence is expressed by grammar”. So each chases essence.
What Socrates chases is familiar enough (at least as standardly interpreted). What Wittgenstein chases is not so familiar. To succeed in construing the grammar of piety would be to express the essence of piety. The grammar of piety would be construed in an a series of grammatical remarks. But the series of grammatical remarks does not tell us the essence of piety. Rather, the series of remarks expresses the essence of piety. ‘Express’ in “essence is expressed by grammar” works intransitively. That is, what grammar expresses is not something that we can tell, can say. If you like, what grammar expresses is inexpressible. (Moving, in that sentence, from the intransitive to transitive.)
We are here at one of those anti-type spots in PI–of which, of course, TLP contains the type. We are in the ambit of showing/saying, as indeed in Wittgenstein we always already are. But, as my typological talk is meant to suggest, what we have in PI is something foreshadowed in TLP; but what we have in PI is not what we have in TLP. Getting the differences straight is more than I can do; I will though do what I can. Perhaps the best place to start is with a glaring absence in PI: the absence of the symbolism. The symbolism glyphs the pages of TLP. It wards those pages. Without a real, active and sympathetic inwardness with the symbolism, TLP is a closed book. (Anyone who has attempted to teach the book to undergraduates will know this.) But the symbolism is almost nowhere to be seen in PI. What does that mean? And what does it mean for showing/saying in PI? [Pause here to light pipe.]
One thing it means, I reckon, is that showing or expressing is now something done by means of ordinary sentences, by means of the spatio-temporal phenomena of language. The crucial issue in PI is the issue of our relationship to those sentences, to those phenomena. A sentence is a grammatical remark not in and of itself–noumenally, as it were–but rather because of our orientation upon it. The possibility of the orientation that makes a sentence a grammatical remark, and so one that expresses or contributes to the expression of essence, results from our being in the grip of a philosophical problem. The problems provide the light, we might say, in which a sentence can shine forth as grammatical, as essence-expression. Without the problem, the sentence is, well, just a sentence. Philosophy is a battle against the-bewitchment-of-our-intelligence by means of language, by means of the spatio-temporal phenomena of language. But the language is only a weapon in that battle–a weapon of peace, ultimately, to be sure–if we orient on it in a way made possible by a philosophical problem.
This makes philosophizing in Wittgenstein’s way both easier and harder. It is easier in that we need no special magical weapon, no Excalibur, no symbolism, to do what needs doing in philosophy. It is harder because the weapons we have can always appear to be no weapons at all, to be valueless in the fight. (“So? That’s just more words.”) Being in the grip of a philosophical problem makes the necessary orientation possible, but it does not make it automatic. Being in the grip of a philosophical problem can also make the necessary orientation look only like so much rigmarole, like a willful way of losing track of what really matters in responding to the problem. Losing our way among words can lead us further afield, but it can also allow words to lead us home in a way that they ordinarily do not. “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” [Pipe dies; re-light.]
Having written all this, I am aware that I have still not answered Reshef’s question. But I hope this opens the way to answering his question. And I hope to get back to his question again soon. (Thanks to D. for a recent useful conversation about these topics.)
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 