Wittgenstein, falseness vs nonsense

Reply to frank
I took the point of the observation to be that we can deliberately use what is not experienced (for the most part) to imagine a scene that is neither false nor meaningless.

The sword cuts in two ways. Separating truth from falsehood belongs to some activities but not to others. There is something about this constraint that invites other ways of making sense.

Quoting Paine

I took the point of the observation to be that we can deliberately use what is not experienced (for the most part) to imagine a scene that is neither false nor meaningless.

The sword cuts in two ways. Separating truth from falsehood belongs to some activities but not to others. There is something about this constraint that invites other ways of making sense.

:up:
There are two primary ways to interpret the PI:

1. Pyrrhonism: that Witt believed that all philosophy is nonsense because it can't be about anything of this world.
2. Non-pyrrhonism: that Witt believed that philosophy can point out the cases where philosophers fall into nonsense, but that he was also offering positive philosophical views (which often have to be reconstructed from the text).

Then there's the third way: Witt wanted to abandon philosophy because he knew that it's all nonsense, but he couldn't stop, so the PI is confusing because he was stuck in this struggle when he wrote it.

According to this scheme, there are three ways to take the private language argument:

1. That he believed the question is nonsense.
2. That he believed it is truly impossible to have a private language.
3. That the argument carries the dynamic tension of the struggle all philosophers face when they realize that philosophy has no answers, but we can't stop looking for them.

Quoting Paine

I took the point of the observation to be that we can deliberately use what is not experienced (for the most part) to imagine a scene that is neither false nor meaningless.

This is what we tell ourselves when we set out again asking philosophical questions, right?

Quoting Paine

The sword cuts in two ways. Separating truth from falsehood belongs to some activities but not to others. There is something about this constraint that invites other ways of making sense.

What are the other ways of making sense?

Quoting frank

The question is: in the story in which the pot is conscious, is it that the author is telling falsehoods? Or is it nonsense?

You can unask the question. The author is not telling falsehoods about the pot in the story, if the author were speaking about a talking pot, in the same manner, out in the street, it could be falsehood or nonsense. There won't be a context independent criterion for falsehood, truth, sense or nonsense. Variations in the rules binding contexts of expression undermines forming a univocal criterion for making sense. "Is the author telling falsehoods?" "Or is it nonsense?", to those questions you must ask: "in what game?".

§281 and §282 are part of a discussion regarding sensation language. The pot's sensations, and the child's game involving them, are analogies to provide insight on the boundaries of senseful sensation language. Specifically how the ascription of sensations should be understood in normal contexts, so that we can understand how we might err in the uncritical use of that language in other contexts. So the pot story is a signpost that says: "Look! Here's somewhere outside the normal use of sensation ascription language! How could this work?"

The broader context of the entire discussion regards what conditions need to be in place for sensation ascribing phrases to make sense. Like "I'm in pain". And what illusions paying insufficient attention to those conditions creates. Like the illusion that when someone says "I'm in pain", they're evidencing the presence of a pain entity or process somehow "inside themselves".

Quoting frank

"It amounts to this: that only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’ (§281). :

How very anthropocentric!

As to whether a story about a talking pot is nonsense, it all depends on what is meant by 'nonsense'. If I told someone "I saw a talking pot" it would not be out of the ordinary for them to say "don't talk nonsense".

But then imagining seeing something that logically. even if not actually, could be a manifest phenomenon would not be talking outside the possible context of sense; that is of the senses, so in that sense it is not nonsense.

If I said "I saw God" then that might be thought to be outside the possible context of sense, so in that sense saying I saw God would be truly nonsense.

Quoting frank

1. Pyrrhonism: that Witt believed that all philosophy is nonsense because it can't be about anything of this world.

This view is odd since the Tractatus keeps referring to "what is the case." The Philosophical Investigations did not abandon this idea but accepted that more consideration was needed than what he included in his initial assertion.

Quoting frank

Witt wanted to abandon philosophy because he knew that it's all nonsense, but he couldn't stop, so the PI is confusing because he was stuck in this struggle when he wrote it.

There is an effort there to move beyond certain problems, or at a minimum, to ask how we are stuck with particular articulations. But that approach is different from blowing them off as a class of accounts. And thus all the wondering about what distinguishes 'universals' from similarity. If the issue was not important, why draw so much attention to it?

Quoting Paine

This view is odd since the Tractatus keeps referring to "what is the case."

One interpretation of the Tractatus is that it concludes that we can only talk about what is the case in the world in which we find ourselves. Statements about the world itself are beyond the limits of language. Some say the PI should be understood in that light.

By the way, I'm mainly trying to understand how Kripke's take on the private language argument fits into the larger zodiac of interpretations. To that end I'm collecting a flow chart of the different avenues. I'm not really looking for a deep dive on any particular one, although I'm always interested in people explaining what a particular philosopher meant to them personally.

I don't know what to make of this place where you are collecting evidence for a particular purpose.

Quoting Paine

I don't know what to make of this place where you are collecting evidence for a particular purpose.

I'm not collecting evidence for a particular purpose.

Quoting frank

To that end I'm collecting a flow chart of the different avenues. I'm not really looking for a deep dive on any particular one

Quoting frank

I'm mainly trying to understand how Kripke's take on the private language argument fits into the larger zodiac of interpretations.

:brow:

Reply to frank
Okay. How would you put that view in your own words?

Quoting Paine

Okay. How would you put that view in your own words?

Kripke's view? He says the private language argument indicates that there is no rule following. There was no rule you followed. There is no rule now.

Open scalp. Brain explodes.

So, how to measure that against all the observations that games were played within rules that Wittgenstein described?

Reply to Paine

It's in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language by Kripke.

Yes, I have read it. I was thinking you could represent the argument since it is at the bottom of your OP.

Quoting Paine

Yes, I have read it.

Great. What did you think of it?

Reply to frank
I will let you go first.

Quoting Paine

I will let you go first.

I already did. It's in my recent thread: Kripke's skeptical challenge. I won't be responding further.

Reply to frank
Understood.

Might be best to keep Kripkenstien to his own thread.

Reply to frank Consider:

464. What I want to teach is: to pass from unobvious nonsense to obvious nonsense.

And around §500, as well as §522ff.

When we muse about talking pots, we are playing a game that is somewhat different to the game we play when talking about a person who is mute. But what counts as false and what counts as nonsense will depend on the game being played.

So what is the outcome if you say that talking pots are nonsense, as opposed to saying that it is false? It depends on how the games are set up.

That might be what Reply to Paine and Reply to fdrake said.

Quoting Paine

I took the point of the observation to be that we can deliberately use what is not experienced (for the most part) to imagine a scene that is neither false nor meaningless.

The sword cuts in two ways. Separating truth from falsehood belongs to some activities but not to others. There is something about this constraint that invites other ways of making sense.

Succinct. The fairy tale is a context that we all understand to be something that is fantastic and imaginative. So within this context, we can't assign lies or nonsense -- or at least, it's not an appropriate critique.

Quoting Banno

But what counts as false and what counts as nonsense will depend on the game being played.

So what is the outcome if you say that talking pots are nonsense, as opposed to saying that it is false? It depends on how the games are set up.

That's cool. There's another way to interpret it though.

Quoting SEP

Along these lines, two overlapping distinctions concerning how to read Philosophical Investigations have arisen: the resolute–substantial distinction, and the Pyrrhonian–non-Pyrrhonian distinction. In general, the resolute and Pyrrhonian readings make Wittgenstein out to be an anti-philosopher, one who is not offering positive philosophical theses to replace false ones; rather, his goal is to show the nonsensical nature of traditional philosophical theorizing. It is this goal that is partly responsible for the unique style of Philosophical Investigations (its dialogical and, at least at times, anti-dogmatic, therapeutic character). On the substantial and non-Pyrrhonian readings, Wittgenstein is not only presenting a method for exposing the errors of traditional philosophers, but also showing how philosophy should rightly be done and thereby offering positive philosophical views, views which must often be inferred or reconstructed from an elusive text.

There is neither a single resolute/Pyrrhonian nor a single substantial/non-Pyrrhonian reading of Wittgenstein. Moreover, there is an important difference between the resolute–substantial and Pyrrhonian–non-Pyrrhonian distinctions. The former distinction arises from a continuing debate on how to read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, both on its own and in relation to Philosophical Investigations (see, e.g., Conant 2004 and Mulhall 2007), and is associated with the so-called New Wittgensteinians (see, e.g., Crary and Read 2000). The Pyrrhonian and non-Pyrrhonian discussion is to be found, for example, in Fogelin (1994), Sluga (2004), and Stern (2004, 2007), and concerns the ways in which Wittgenstein might be considered as writing in the tradition of the ancient Pyrrhonian sceptics, who were philosophically sceptical about the very possibility of philosophy (see Fogelin 1994, pp. 3ff and 205ff). These distinctions cut across the distinction between Orthodox and Kripkean non-orthodox readings of the text: both Orthodox and Kripkean non-orthodox interpreters have tended to offer substantial or non-Pyrrhonian readings of Wittgenstein—though the line may not always be clear and some (e.g., Hacker, 1990) move from a resolute/Pyrrhonian to a substantial/non-Pyrrhonian reading without remarking the fact.

Some (Fogelin, Stern, and Mulhall, for example) have come to question whether it makes sense to suppose that either one or the other, resolute/Pyrrhonian or substantial/non-Pyrrhonian, must be the correct way to read Wittgenstein. Fogelin and Stern see the tension in the text of Philosophical Investigations as the expression of a tension, indeed a struggle, within its author, between his wanting to uncover the ‘disguised nonsense’ of philosophical theses and his being tempted and drawn into still other philosophical positions on the nature of language, reference, private experience, and philosophy itself.

The interpretation you gave is non-Pyrrhonian, that is, you're saying Wittgenstein was offering a philosophical approach for all the follow. The alternative interpretations would be

1. Pyrrhonian, which would take this passage as pointing to why all philosophy is nonsense: talk of a conscious pot is beyond the limits of language because there's no context for such talk. This means the words of the story are pulled out of regular language use.

2. It could be that this passage highlights a struggle in Wittgenstein that lies behind PI. When he asks whether it's nonsense or false, he's actually asking about the PI itself. Of all the ways to interpret that passage, this is the most mind-blowing.

Quoting Banno

Might be best to keep Kripkenstien to his own thread.

I was just explaining why I'm not looking for immersion in any particular method of interpretation. Kripke's interpretive anchor was the community view, but he draws some astounding conclusions out of it. I was just trying to fit Kripke into the rest of the history of Wittgenstein interpretation. Thanks for helping me flesh it out!

Reply to frank Yeah, sure. As time goes on the interpretations of Witti become increasingly distorted. I think the Pyrrhonian reading misses much of what he had to say. Those who worked with him do not adopt it.

Quoting Banno

Yeah, sure. As time goes on the interpretations of Witti become increasingly distorted. I think the Pyrrhonian reading misses much of what he had to say. Those who worked with him do not adopt it.

There aren't any interpretations that aren't controversial though. It's interesting that in this case you emphasize age as the guide. You usually poo poo older philosophy and favor newer.

Quoting frank

You usually poo poo older philosophy and favor newer.

Pretty much.

My first stop would be Anthony Kenny, mostly because it is approachable and complete. Then to Anscombe and Malcolm for corrections. Of the newer stuff Monk seems to have the best balance. The rest is such a vast literature that one will quickly become lost.

So roughly, nonsense is the stuff that happens between language games, or when terms from one are inexplicably applied to another, or when grammar is stretched beyond recognition.

Quoting Banno

So roughly, nonsense is the stuff that happens between language games, or when terms from one are inexplicably applied to another, or when grammar is stretched beyond recognition.

And that makes sense. In fact, it makes more sense than the PI itself. Non-Pyrrhonian interpretations fill in blanks with ideas that aren't there explicitly.

Reply to frank Ok, then in contrast, true and false are moves within some language games.

And there's the answer to your puzzle.

Quoting Banno

Ok, then in contrast, true and false are moves within some language games.

Exactly!

The looming issue is this: when the ancient Greeks wondered whether the world is made of fire or water, were they engaged in a language game? Or were they beyond the limits of language? It appears that the context for their discussion is somewhere outside the world, outside of time, in short, outside of everything. So was it nonsense?

And with this question in mind, we come back to PI itself. What of the concept of a language game? What's the context for this discussion? Where are we when we have a vantage point on language use? Is it nonsense?

Reply to frank Some folk seem to think language games involve only language. They don't. Have a look at the example in §1. The language game is an activity involving matching apples with swatches and numbers, a physical activity in the world. §2 involves the movement of blocks, pillars and slabs. Language games are embedded in the world.

Language games are about doing things. We get more done by talking of chemicals rather than fire and water. And from the language game of chemistry, wood is not solidified fire. That'd be false.

But the articulation between language games is a topic of some considerable complexity. It's all that incommensurability stuff and the very idea of a conceptual scheme I keep ranting on about. IS that where you are headed with your thread?

Quoting Banno

But the articulation between language games is a topic of some considerable complexity. It's all that incommensurability stuff and the very idea of a conceptual scheme I keep ranting on about. IS that where you are headed with your thread?

Not really. I was just pondering Kripke's skeptical challenge. It's had me reaching around to get my bearings. :razz: Thanks for your help!

Reply to frank The hard part is getting other folk to see the import of Kripke's joke. Your respondents don't appear to get the argument. Kudos to you for working on it.

It's difficult.

Reply to Banno
:smile: :up:

Quoting Banno

That might be what ?Paine and ?fdrake said.

It was!