Tag Archives: wittgenstein

Clarity, Combative Clarity

December 12, 2011 By in Kierkegaard, Marcel, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Does philosophy have results?  –As I practice it (ahem!), I guess not.  Or at least it has no results that are not internal to philosophical investigation itself.  I am Wittgensteinian enough, or Kierkegaardian enough, or Marcelian enough to believe that what philosophy aims for is clarity.  But one is always becoming clear; one is never finally clear.

Clarity.  Clarity is internal to philosophical investigation:  it is not a separable result, isolable from the activity that realizes it and such that it confers value onto the activity because of a value it has independent of that activity.  If a result is separable, isolable and independent, then it has a career cut off in an important way from the process that realized it.  Indeed, in one sense its history only begins after the process that realizes it is finished.  The result can be seized and put to purposes quite different from anything that those involved in the process of realizing it intended or foresaw.

But clarity is valuable because of the process of philosophical investigation that realizes it.  And there is no clarity in isolation from the philosophical investigation that realizes it.  Philosophical investigation does not realize a clarity that someone could hope to enjoy who is no longer involved in philosophical investigation.  (“I got clear, you see; and now I am enjoying my clarity, although, thank God!, I am no longer involved in the travails of philosophical investigation.”)  –Kierkegaard’s Climacus talks about the true Christian, the subjective Christian, as “combatively certain” of Christianity, as certain in a way that requires that the certainty be daily won anew.  “Eternal certainty” (his contrast-term) is not something that the subjective Christian can enjoy on this side of the blue.  Similarly, the clarity realized by philosophical investigation is combative clarity, not eternal clarity.

It was once fashionable to charge that clarity is not enough. Someone (Austin, I believe) rejoined that we could decide whether clarity was enough once we’d gotten clear about something.  I worry that both the charge and the rejoinder treat clarity too much as if it were a separable result.

Sufficient unto the day is the clarity thereof, I reckon–the combative clarity thereof.

Philosophical Investigations 309: My Redacted Version

November 19, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein Tags: , 1 Comment

What is your aim in teaching philosophy?  –To increase devotion to philosophical questions, to increase promptitude, fervor, inwardness and agility in responding to them.

‘Responding’–so you want to help the students find answers?  –No, I want them to learn how to interrogate philosophical questions.  The questions must answer for themselves–or not.

Teaching The Blue Book

November 7, 2011 By in Frege, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , 3 Comments

I’ve been teaching The Blue Book in my Intro to Philosophy class.  Not an easy sell.  I’ve been trying to get the students to orient on the inceptive question:  “What is the meaning of a word?”  And I am trying to get them to see that when Wittgenstein says he is going to attack that question, that is what he means–attack it.  Not answer it.  Wittgenstein takes the question to be suspect.  Part of his attempt to show that is his attack on what he takes to be the favored answer to the question:  the meaning of a word is a mental image.

Although it required sailing our little skiff onto still deeper water, I worked to get the students to see that the opening sections of the book, from the inceptive question through the red flower example and to the commentary on it, are structured by Frege’s Three Principles (in Foundations).  Frege’s second principle, The Context Principle (Never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation but only in the context of a proposition), is openly transgressed by the inceptive question of The Blue Book.  The favored answer to that question is itself the answer Frege forecasts being given by anyone who violates The Context Principle.  (It is itself an answer that violates Frege’s first principle, Always sharply to separate the logical from the psychological, the objective from the subjective.)  The details of the red flower example capitalize on Frege’s observation that the fact that we cannot form any idea of its content is no reason for denying all meaning to a word.  And so on.

Recognizing the Fregean structure of the opening makes tracking the sometimes nearly trackless discussions of book easier, since the structure extends past the opening deep into the rest of the book.  But that is a topic for another post.

Resolute Reading–New Paper Intro (Draft)

November 2, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Tractatus, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Below is the draft intro of my new paper, “Resolute Reading”.  I will post more as I finish the draft.

The Resolute Reading of TLP exerts a willy-nilly but mesmeric fascination. Its fans try to substantialize it; its opponents try to prevent its substantialization. We all know about food fights. But this is a recipe fight. Before the cake has been baked, indeed before the batter battered, the bakers fall on each other, rending and tearing.

Well, ok, so it is not quite as bad as all that. But it is bad, bad enough. Perhaps the worst of it is the seemingly interminable character of the debate. How is it to end? What are the (are there?) conditions of winning? What kind of debate is it, really?

I want to provide an answer to that last question. I hope that doing so will allow me to shed some light on the previous two. –When I say I want to provide an answer, I do not mean to say that I want to dogmatize about the answer. I want instead to suggest an answer that strikes me as helpful. If it turns out not to be the final answer, that is fine with me, so long as it helps us to the final answer.

Here is how I want to reach my suggestion of a helpful answer: I want to backtrack to a debate about Philosophical Investigations between O. K. Bouwsma and Gilbert Ryle. After reconstructing that debate, I will talk a bit about why it seems hopeless, why it is that Bouwsma and Ryle resemble two blindfolded fencers back-to-back, each lunging to deliver the final blow to his opponent, but each stabbing nothing but air. –Well, ok, so it is not quite as bad as all that. But it is bad, bad enough.

Wittgenstein on Doing Philosophy: Stop or Go?

October 11, 2011 By in Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , 8 Comments

Yesterday, I had a useful conversation with my friend and former student, Andy Bass.  He described how strongly Wittgenstein’s critical remarks about philosophy struck him and how much they worried him.  Given what Wittgenstein says, why persist in philosophy?  Why not find something else to do?

It seems to me that Wittgenstein’s critical remarks generally should be thought of in this way:  (1) Much of what he says is about Philosophy-as-Other, i.e., philosophy not as he does it but as it is all-too-often done.  (2) Wittgenstein deliberately employs a deflationary rhetoric about the way he does philosophy.

(1) When Wittgenstein is talking about Philosophy-as-Other, he wants to highlight especially the false enchantments of traditional philosophy–highlighting such is important, as Auden notes, because it is a mark of a false enchantment that it “can all too easily last a lifetime”.  Austin provides a nice way of characterizing this false enchantment–the self-image of the philosopher as “a specialist in the sui generis”.

(2) Wittgenstein’s deflationary rhetoric about he way he does philosophy is aimed primarily at himself, I believe, at his vanity and his tendency to high hat.  Wittgenstein’s way of being in philosophy, deeply personal, ascetic, purified, made it easy for him to treat his way of doing philosophy as something special, too special.  He needed to constantly warn himself against that.  But the rhetoric is aimed secondarily at others.  Wittgenstein did not want his way of doing philosophy to falsely enchant.  He knew that it could enchant, and he wanted it to enchant truly, where the mark of true enchantment, as Auden notes, is that it “fades in time.”  Wittgenstein’s deflationary rhetoric is a warning to others against false enchantment, and a warning against the future fading of its true enchantment.  He knew that eventually the enchantment would go and that we would need then to “walk alone in faith”, as Auden puts it–walking alone in faith without either denying the promise of Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy, treating its promises as deceptions, or trying to recover its promise by distorting it into something else, something it is not (a form of naturalism, a closeted metaphysics).  No:  we must take up our fly-bottles and follow the path alone.

Say Show Elucidate

October 10, 2011 By in logic, Tractatus, Wittgenstein Tags: , Leave a comment

(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

October 5, 2011 By in logic, Tractatus, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , , 3 Comments

(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?

October 3, 2011 By in logic, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, poetry, Tractatus, Wittgenstein, writing Tags: , Leave a comment

(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.

A Note on Talking Lions And Cavell

October 1, 2011 By in Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy, Wittgenstein Tags: , 11 Comments

A quick thought.  Recall Cavell’s wonderful description of Wittgenstein’s famous line that “if a lion could talk we could not understand him”(II, pg. 223).  He describes the line as “penetrating past assessment ” to “become part of the sensibility from which assessment proceeds”.  If it does less than that, he concludes, the line is “philosophically useless”.  Shouldn’t we describe one of Cavell’s most famous lines, a question, in the same way, mutatis mutandis?

Can philosophy become literature and still know itself?

Why Might Not the Unintelligible Happen? (Royce,Tractatus)

September 30, 2011 By in Kant, Tractatus, Wittgenstein Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

(A class handout.)

In an earlier handout I urged that we cannot distribute Frege’s Three Realms across the Pix Theory.  In particular, I urged that we cannot treat the picture as in the Third Realm while the pictured is in the Outer Realm.  As I said, since the pictured is itself logically formed, it is hard to see how it could be a denizen of the Outer Realm, a thing.  (Rather, it is a fact.)

Picture and pictured are both in logical space.  One reason this may seem hard to accept is that it may seem that the pictured is just the world, and that the world could just as easily (maybe more easily) be bat shit crazy as be logically formed.

Think about this passage from Josiah Royce, in which he is posing the problem to which Immanuel Kant’s transcendental deduction is the response:

Why might not the genuine world simply ignore our categories?  If it did so, and experience failed to conform to our ways of conceiving things, which could we do to enforce our conceptual constructions?  Present experience, in any case, is not mere conceptual construction.  Why might not the unintelligible happen?  Why might not experience break away from the forms of my intellect?  Why might not chaos come at any moment?  That such chaos does not now occur, what is that but itself a merely empirical fact, neither a priori nor necessary?

This is forcefully put, a credit to Royce.  But what is the response to this problem in TLP?  To answer, one passage you should consider is 3.03-3.031.  I will leave that passage to you.  I want to think about something else, but something related.

Royce summarizes Kant’s response to this objection in a fascinating way:  “What experience itself is…you cannot learn through experience.  That you must learn by reflection.  –The concept of experience, strange to say, is itself not an empirical concept.”  This strikes me as something we can “restate” in Tractarian terms.  But to do so, we need to develop some of those terms.

At 4.126 (as we discussed yesterday), Wittgenstein distinguishes proper concepts from formal concepts.  A proper concept can be presented by a function.  So, to use an  example, Silver is a horse, we can say that the proper concept, (  ) is a horse, appears in it.  A proper concept is such that an object saturates it–in our example, Silver.  To say that an object saturates the function is a way of saying that the object, Silver, falls under the proper concept, (  ) is a horse:  symbolically, Hs.  A formal concept, on the other hand, is such that nothing falls under it in the way something falls under a proper concept. When something falls under a formal concept, it is the value of a variable:  a variable is a sign for a formal concept.  The H in Hs falls under the formal concept of function, since it is the value of a function variable; and the s falls under the formal concept of name, since it is the value of a name variable.  A formal concept we might think of as a method of representation; a proper concept as a predicate (cp. PI 104).

When can “restate” Royce’s summary of Kant’s response in these terms.  Experience is a formal concept, not a proper concept.  In its way, Experience as a formal concept is like Picture as a formal concept.  To see something as a picture is to see it as the value of a variable, not to see it as such that it saturates a proper concept, (  ) is a picture.  Similarly, to see something as an experience is to see it as the value of a variable, and not to see it as such that it saturates a proper concept, (  ) is an experience. (If experience was a proper concept, then it would presumably be an empirical concept, one that I would have to learn from experience itself.)  Seen as the value of a variable, an experience has the sort of bi-polarity that propositions do.  Experiences face reality-ward.  (Kant would say they are objectively valid.)  But this means that experiences cannot be understood as the problem posed above would have it.  Experiences, as bi-polar, do not themselves have predicates or enter into relations.  The problem though requires that we conceive of experience as experience all right, but as somehow completely alien to a world that is bat shit crazy (and, odd as it sounds, this would require us to think of experience as taking predicates or entering into relations).  But in such a situation, my experience would not even rise to the level of falsity:  in such a situation, I get nothing right and get nothing wrong.  There is just me, over here, with my orderly but beggarly experience, and the world, over there, in its alien and chiropteric chaos.  Experience no longer is understood as facing reality-ward.  It is really not facing any way at all. It has no face, and so no orientation.

(HT/James Conant:  “The Problem of Error”)