Wittgenstein and How it Elicits Asshole Tendencies.
What is it about SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein that it elicits the worst forms of elitism and gatekeeping in this forum?
Is it that Wittgenstein tends to bring out these personality-types that like to gatekeep when discussing on a forum setting?
Is Wittgenstein liable to group-think whereby the only way one can read Wittgenstein is an adherent who must use ONLY a BETTER interpretation of Wittgenstein to refute Wittgenstein?
I say this too because I notice a tendency whereby when you question Wittgenstein's ideas, the only answer that seems to be legitimate to the majority who jump on these threads is to quote another line from Wittgenstein.. As if you cannot refute Wittgenstein, you can only have varying levels of understanding of Wittgenstein.
Help me understand why it is SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein where I see this??
Thanks.
Is it that Wittgenstein tends to bring out these personality-types that like to gatekeep when discussing on a forum setting?
Is Wittgenstein liable to group-think whereby the only way one can read Wittgenstein is an adherent who must use ONLY a BETTER interpretation of Wittgenstein to refute Wittgenstein?
I say this too because I notice a tendency whereby when you question Wittgenstein's ideas, the only answer that seems to be legitimate to the majority who jump on these threads is to quote another line from Wittgenstein.. As if you cannot refute Wittgenstein, you can only have varying levels of understanding of Wittgenstein.
Help me understand why it is SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein where I see this??
Thanks.
Comments (372)
:lol: You're not wrong.
Did you see my post <here>? Specifically the paper, "Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object."
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't know that much about Wittgenstein, but I have noticed a lot of strange intransigence among those who rely heavily upon him. 'Thing is, historically speaking Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy is very weird and idiosyncratic, and when this is combined with gatekeeping what results is something that is comically absurd. There is something guru-ish about the whole phenomenon.
(Maybe this should be in the Lounge.)
That is painting with a broad brush. Are you assigning all who evince interest in the writings as gatekeepers?
For my part, the work is an interesting kind of argument and not a Prolegomena for any future Metaphysics. If I resist that latter conclusion, am I, too, a gatekeeper?
Quoting schopenhauer1
For what its worth, Wittgenstein was a complex philosopher. His methodology was methodological nominalism, and when you apply methodological nominalism towards philosophy as therapy, you get a complex relationship between examples elucidating/clarifying a way out of the bottle for the fly.
Compound the fact that the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus was meant as a preface to the Philosophical Investigations, then you might have a lot of questions about what the TLP and then the PI meant. In my opinion, if people started with the Blue and Brown Books, which were presented in a university setting where Wittgenstein taught for a brief while, you might find it easier to understand Wittgenstein.
:up:
No not at all, I am in a thread on Schopenhauer right now, for example.. I don't think I am "gatekeeping" it. Gatekeeping is deciding who gets to participate.. And it seems a certain kind of engager-with-Wittgenstein is seen as legitimate.. And this engagement takes the form of only refuting Wittgenstein with varying levels of better or worse or informed or uninformed interpretations of Wittgenstein. There is an implicit idea that whatever it is, you can't directly refute Wittgenstein, because you see, you simply don't "understand" him.. And this gets compounded because since you don't "understand" him, they will ignore you, or sideline you for the ones who they agree with who are informed.
I mean... :yikes:
There's a lot of complex philosophers...
Are you suggesting that I am 'gatekeeping' that thread? I didn't have much to say about Wittgenstein anyway.
Sorry if it seemed like it.
Ok. I just don't understand why Wittgenstein seems peculiarly treated like a prophet who one must just "read better" rather than one can have a critique of.. If someone critiques Schopenhauer, many take that as a matter of course.. Or Aristotle, or Plato.. But Wittgenstein.. woe woe wait a minute. Did you not read his blue and brown books IN ORDER???
And the same I must say happens when it comes to Nietzsche and his great mustache.
:smirk:
Usually thinkers have successors, but it seems like Wittgenstein doesn't have any clear-cut successors, perhaps because the meaning of his thought is not determinable. At that time in history there was a revolutionary attitude that swept through many disciplines, and also reached beyond academia. Wittgenstein strikes me as someone who was trying to be original, to such an extent that he becomes opaque and even somewhat mystical (again, almost like a guru).
I think you are getting closer to it.. The aphoristic style lends itself to people reading it like a prophet.. holy writ almost. And again, Nietzsche's style does the same.. Clever. Clever.
For what its worth, Wittgenstein wasn't a system builder like most of the other greats in the history of philosophy. He simply had a personality and charisma like none other philosopher.
So, since this matters so much to the individual, then I suppose there's some aura always around the appeal of Wittgenstein, as with other perplexing characters of philosophy (like Socrates or Kant)...
Yep. But there's also the strange juxtaposition with the analytic context, which is different from Nietzsche.
I would question whether this is a particularly helpful or good faith way to pose the question.
Second, clearly Nietzsche is the king when it comes to devotees citing his words as Scripture. Thomists do this too, but they at least tend to only do it to other Thomists. Marxists are infamous for this as well.
Certainly, there is a tendency for hardcore Wittgensteinans to denigrate the value of many areas of philosophy. This stems from the idea that they can't meaningfully be spoken about.
You might find Rorty's typology of Wittgenstein's descendents interesting here. In general, it's going to be the "therapeutic Wittgensteinians," who see a good deal of philosophy as simply time wasting incoherence, which he sort of gets at.
But because of his early work Wittgenstein also attracts people who find a natural home in analytic philosophy, and analytic philosophy has its own problems with labeling whole huge swaths of philosophy as "incoherent," and thus not worthy of discussion. Also, you get the problem of people mistaking complexity for good argumentpointing to the characteristics of formal systems when the question at hand has to do with metaphysics, epistemology, etc. I have attorneys in my family and they do this all the time in political conversations , pointing to what the current law is, special legal terminology, etc., when the issue being discussed is really "what is just in this case" (i.e., what the law [I]ought to[/I] be).
This is hardly unique though. Eliminitivists very often seem to confuse presenting an avalanche of facts and the complexity of neuroscience with good argumentation, and this can lead to the tendency to fall into a pernicious habit of equating mastery of complex terminology with sound reasoning or even intelligence (you can see this with Continental philosophy at times too).
Since I find Russell to be particularly uncharitable, I don't mind calling him out as an exemplar of someone who used to point to cutting edge mathematics that few people understood in his day to try to put his arguments over the top by simply making them impossible to understand and then only time and the dispersion of knowledge in these areas has allowed people to point out that some of his appeals to mathematics are simply not very good arguments.
I think it might be fair to say that a bit of hubris overflows into the audience too. I mean, this is a guy who claimed to have "solved philosophy," and IIRC from some biographical thing I read he never bothered to read Aristotle in his lifetime.
There are a lot of philosophers who are "in-house baseball," such that they are only accessible to those who have read them at some length (and this is particularly true of much of the continental tradition). There are others who are not enigmatic, and can be read profitably even by those who are unfamiliar with them. This latter group are most conducive to public philosophy forums.
Wittgenstein is a strange animal in that he appears to be publicly accessible, and his adherents genuinely believe that his thought will be easy to access. But then when someone less familiar with Wittgenstein starts reading him and asking obvious questions, the weather suddenly changes and Wittgenstein becomes this enigmatic figure whose thought one must be initiated into by special rituals. It seems to me that this is just a defense mechanism that intervenes whenever Wittgenstein looks to be wrong. To consider a real objection to Wittgenstein would require accepting the possibility that Wittgenstein's paradigm and presuppositions might be incomplete. It would require a mental distance where Wittgenstein and, say, Schopenhauer are placed on equal footing, and such things cannot be tolerated by those who are truly loyal to Wittgenstein!
Let's say X is decidedly not acting in good faith. How should we engage with X? With good faith or bad faith? Forget morality we don't think about how to bring about the greatest amount of welfare when we discuss with someone, let's not pretend otherwise , what is strategically more sound?
Antonia Soulez (sorry, I cannot find a public link to it) makes interesting observations that Wittgenstein's references to Plato, Kant, Russell, etcetera are not designed to solve their problems but as instances of what concerns his views and development. That suggests a conscious departure from the "philosophy of history" discussion.
Some have made that departure to be a parting shot, an assassination in Deleuze's view or a trip to the couch for various expressions of "therapy."
As an opponent of the means of 'natural sciences" to explain everything, I think it is helpful to compare Wittgenstein to others who did something seemingly similar but chose to wear the ermine of The Philosopher of History.
Heidegger is the true antipode to Wittgenstein.
He's frustrated and he's posting out of frustration, but in this case I think there is a legitimate reason for the frustration. Perhaps it's okay to exorcise the Wittgenstenianism of the forum, if it truly is getting out of control. I want to say that whenever excessive gatekeeping occurs on a public forum it should be checked, and unfortunately the checks that occur naturally are also somewhat infelicitous. Maybe that's okay.
Maybe because no one understands (or accepts)
[quote=Ludwig Wittgenstein](1) Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
(2) I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.
(3) The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.
(4) A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
(5) The classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are like trying to classify clouds by their shape.
(6) Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.
(7) What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle [/quote]
Wow, this is an excellent response and analysis with specific examples. Good job! :up:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
:smirk:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Oh god, how many times is this going to be dragged out as the definitive, conversation killer :roll: :lol:. In a way, it was perfectly designed for the smug personality types :lol:. I mean, the fact that you can misconstrue "non-sense" with "nonsense" and the play with words there alone is rife for dbaggery when it comes to engaging with others who might have a different notion of metaphysics and its place in philosophy.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Oh, I have to get acquainted with his reading there- he even has "types" of Wittgenstein descendants :). Someone was paying attention...
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Ugh.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yep.. I can see that.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
For sure.. I think this can pervade any type of academic or abstract thinking.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
:up: Good observations there.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yeah, hubris appeals to those with a similar hubris?
I think as another commenter was saying, the style of Wittgenstein, might have a lot to do with this as well. Nietzsche does a similar thing.
Thanks, very interesting. :up:
This all makes sense to me.
THIS I agree with. But when one tries to treat philosophy as an activity and engages with people who treat it as rather static doctrine that can only have levels of understanding... Activity becomes dismissed, because it is not adherent-like (accepted) hermeneutics over the sacred text...
Wayfarer and I were talking about how Schopenhauer can be taken as phenomenology, although Schop himself didn't seem to think of it that way. We know Witt read Schopenhauer. The Tractatus contains language that's very reminiscent of Schopenhauer, and it can be taken as a warning about stepping beyond phenomenology into theory. You read the assholedness into that. There wasn't any intended.
Spot on. But, I see the point here as with the person Wittgenstein, not his writings, no?
You know, the guy who wrote what you said during World War I, actually on the front lines, and baffled Bertrand Russell with his intelligence, and gave away all his money to his family, and designed a house and built it, and was always in his conception a logician (more so than a philosopher), and yada yada...
Interesting..Care to elaborate?
eg. Debater A believes when Wittgenstein claims/makes reference to X it alludes to Y, while I believe X is actually a case against Y in favor of Z... etc, etc.
You can't convince everyone of your view. If it's not well-received, one might consider that ought be the end of it. If you're right or have something to offer the discussion those involved are choosing to ignore, their loss, no? You can lead a horse to water. No need to beat it to the death if it's not particularly thirsty. :chin:
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical when he has used them as steps to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.54
That sounds deep, and there is wisdom in it - words really do get in the way of what they are trying to do, sometimes - but I sum up Wittgenstein as saying "Let me explain to you how there is no such thing as an explanation."
It is also well-known that he never bothered to read his fellow contemporary philosophers, and that he had a tendency to use past philosophers simply as leverage for his own thought. Maybe all of these pieces of the puzzle fit together in an obvious way. Maybe he was self-absorbed.
:wink:
Quoting Outlander
Notice here, there is a sort of asymmetry which is good, but not assumed by the Witt fan:
Debater A believes when Wittgenstein claims/makes reference to X it alludes to Y
While
Debater B says: I believe X is actually a case against Y in favor of Z... etc, etc.
Rather, what the Witt debater seems to want is this:
Debater A believes when Wittgenstein claims/makes reference to X it alludes to Y
While
Debater B believes: Wittgenstein actually means to say, that Wittgenstein X is actually a case against Y in favor of Z... etc, etc.
Wittgenstein can only refute Wittgenstein (with a better interpretation).
Now we are ACTUALLY debating Wittgenstein.. This is more of a meta-thread on HOW PEOPLE debate Wittgenstein.. We can debate Wittgenstein, but I fear doing so for exactly the REASON I created this thread :wink: :razz:
Wittgenstein refers to many of his contemporaries in his writings. He does not mention studying others. I think the Count's point about the depth of 'classical education' is germane. But it is a matter impossible to settle from text alone.
We have all read stuff we are not going to bring into arguments we wish to make.
You are right. I guess I was eluding to my debate tactic, that Wittgenstein himself provided for us: even Wittgenstein understood arguing Wittgenstein was nonsense. So no kidding no one understands Wittgenstein, neither did he.
:lol: :smile:
Heidegger tells a long story about how the concerns of philosophy were corrupted by some elements of its practice. He wrote (and lectured) at length upon how Nietzsche was the last practitioner of the mistake.
There are a lot of other points of contrast and conflict between their views but let me start with simply observing that Wittgenstein has negative interest in the romance and nostalgia expressed thereby.
:smirk::up:
I would not call it 'gatekeeping' but you have often offered an undialectical version of the works.
In many cases, you seem to ride two horses at the same time:
The work intends to establish a thesis and fails at it.
The work does not intend to establish a thesis, so it is mental floss.
To which statement are you directing your question?
Yeah, I don't like Heidegger as a person.. so hard for me to "defend" anything here with his political affiliations.. a POS in that regard, but it seems that Heidegger wanted to discuss exactly that which Wittgenstein was against (being, da sein, metaphysics). Heidegger seemed someone who was very aware of the history, and it was precisely this knowledge that he was saying he thought he had a better (more primitive) way that went back to the pre-socratics.. Matters of being itself rather than "beings" as he put it.
For example, in the "Was Schopenhauer Right" thread or whatever the full name is, people are using Schopenhauer quotes to clarify Schopenhauer's position... Even @schopenhauer1 is guilty of clarifying Schopenhauer with Schopenhauer, which seemingly makes him the butt of his own criticism? It's okay for him to do but not others. This whole thread seems like a pointless argument to establish "Superiority."
I have no problem with this or that approach to philosophy. That is not my problem. It is HOW specifically Wittgenstein is often employed.
The "mental floss" made me chuckle :smile:.
Indeed I tend to think the first about Tractatus and the second about PI. I think this gets into tricky territory, and adds to the dbaggery here..
People will often say that Witt has to be "elusive" in a way, because he is "showing" and cannot just "say", thus giving him exempt status from explanation.
But other times, I see that he has an actual argument which I then go to refute, but then am gatekept from thus refuting without the special pass of using Wittgenstein to unrefute myself.
There is aspect to this that I agree with. He says very little about the history of philosophy. Some claim he had little knowledge of it. Plato is an interesting exception. He did, however, converse with a group of friends, many of them students, and addressed some of their philosophical concerns in his writings.
:up:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Have you tried to make a poll on how many here actually understands the writings of Wittgenstein?
Eek.. I don't even want to know, honestly.. That in itself will devolve into who can show off how much Wittgenstein is beyond really "knowing"...
Would you be willing to recognize that you are offering me a "tails you lose, heads I win" set of alternatives?
What can either of us be talking about in this context?
Exqueeze me?
I thought you were characterizing me views here:
Quoting Paine
And I thus elaborated on it here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
And now you are saying you have no idea what I am saying? Then I guess I misinterpreted you.
Whoops, I forgot the link to Rorty: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://humstatic.uchicago.edu/philosophy/conant/rorty%2520-%2520wittgenstein%2520and%2520the%2520linguistic%2520turn.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi8xdGBzpqGAxWYk4kEHfdCBXoQFnoECBEQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1mHLd9e2qEKfhqYnR7V4rE
Yeah, I think the style might be part of it. I do think the substance does come into it though, and this is true for much of contemporary philosophy. If you think Goodness is a mirage, or else a standard you develop pragmatically, then obviously this has implications for discourse.
Whereas, for the Platonist, ultimately the ascent towards "being like God," and "giving birth in beauty," is marked by a universal sense of beneficence for all. If you don't feel that way, the problem is with you. For the Christian Platonists, added to this are the theological virtues of faith, hope, love, charity, temperance, prudence, and humility. For the Aristotlean, excellence is always going to tend towards the mean. And then, there is the idea that no one ever truly wants to act like an asshole, that bad action is the result of ignorance, a sort of disease that all people have the potential to overcome, and that anyone who acts poorly is to be pitied. Likewise, there is the idea, most powerfully formed by Boethius, that being wicked or lacking in virtue is always its own sort of punishment, and that those who do evil never truly "win," since they receive in themselves the punishment for their acts in lack of freedom and actuality.
Obviously, people aren't always successful at internalizing these ideas. I am sure there have been Platonists who fail to look anything like these goals. Indeed, sometimes philosophers in this tradition's attacks on modernity have an air of condescension. But I do think the goals and ideals one has for behavior matters. For Nietzsche, humility is a vice. He leads the way on bashing past thinkers. In the classical tradition by contrast, the ideal philosopher is pretty much always a saint and ascetic (e.g., Saint Athanasius' St. Anthony, Appolonius, Porphyry's treatment of Pythagoras, etc.). And this did seem to affect behavior. Even if we take the hagiography surrounding some figures with a grain of salt, certain acts like abandoning vast wealth and social status are clearly genuine.
This gets to one of my confusions with contemporary "philosophy as therapy," and therapy in general. The goal seems to be "to feel good," rather than "to be good." There is a very interesting article in the New Yorker about philosophers actually doing therapy actually and addressing this issue.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/when-philosophers-become-therapists
...which I believe is exactly the sort of insight Plato, St. Augustine, and Hegel are looking to get across, including in political and vocational contextsfreedom defined in terms of actuality (the ability to do the Good) verses freedom defined as potency (the potential to choose anything).
I confess to not knowing or caring much about Wittgenstein's work. It's too arcane for me. I read the Monk biography when it came out and assumed W was an exceptionally gifted and interesting individual with autism.
If you read into it, there's really no norm to it. Again, I treat this as methodological nominalism, which Rorty was getting at in his The Linguistic Turn.
I did not say I had no idea what you are saying.
You repeat the terms of your objections as if I was not following along with your comments.
I hazard the guess that your answer to me is no.
That was excellent. Wittgenstein answers the question. The rest of us are too busy embarassed by or ignoring the answer.
No, it is THIS mentality (in the background of explaining Wittgenstein's ideas) that is the source of much of this...
Then I guess I did not understand what you meant by the coin flip comment. Can you elaborate?
If both sides of the coin are different kinds of irrelevance, then the discussion is meaningless.
Thanks for the link!
As for the other comments- fascinating!
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Can you explain more how this idea of Goodness relates to the Wittgenstein thing? I just need that tie-in and I can perhaps make a comment or two.
How would the discussion be meaningless?
No one understands Witty because he makes extremely little sense. It takes a certain level of gatekeeping to maintain a character that think it understands something that makes no sense. Its akin to conspiracy theorists saying "you just don't get it" when its blatant nonsense.
I just ignore it, mostly, because its so laughably dumb.
If nothing is at stake in considering differing points of view. If Wittgenstein is truly a valueless cipher, then he should be ignored. By you and me.
I know little about W's life; you are likely right he was self absorbed. To produce so much from inner reflection would create a fixation.
Could also be a legitimate way to produce more novel ideas. Since ultimately philosophy is in the activity, it must never conclude. I recognize the advantages of advancing within the restrictions of conventionally accepted pathways. The "problem" with everyone doing that is that it obviously restricts philosophy, an art which must remain active, even its audience must become artists.
Given that (if you accept it generally) if once in a while a philosopher, rather than logically following ideas and expanding upon them, is simply inspired to pursue certain unforseen paths, that might be a blessing to philosophy unattainable in the conventional
ways.
I think it is a good idea that if you are opposed to an idea to be able to explain what it is you are opposed to. This can be instructive as much as explaining why it is you support a philosopher. Should we just engage with philosophies that we agree with or that seem "right" to us only? I don't believe in everything Hegel said let's say, but doesn't mean I should ignore his ideas. Sometimes engaging with ideas bring about more ideas, etc. It opens up one's own thoughts on things and perhaps solidifies or makes one have to reason more about an issue when grappling with it. Or it provides a jumping off point to view the historical and contemporaneous views that led to this particular view.
Agree that the OP title could have been worded more tactfully. But I see the point.
I've often noticed that philosophical ideas I want to discuss are smothered by Wittgenstein's admonition the last line of the TLP, 'that of which we cannot speak'. I've been accused in the last day of 'saying things that shouldn't be said', in my (probably clumsy) attempts at understanding classical metaphysics.
Quoting Fire Ologist
There has been quite a bit written on the theme of Wittgenstein and Zen Buddhism often citing this passage. The comparison from the Buddhist texts is the 'parable of the raft', in which the Buddha compares his teaching to a raft 'of twigs and branches', bound together to aid one's crossing of the 'river of suffering', but not carried about or extolled after 'the river is crossed'. It's an exact parallel. But then, Buddhism is explicitly a religious philosophy not only studied and read in philosophy departments, although it might also be that.
I've casually perused the Tractatus, but much of the formal logical notation is over my head and I don't have sufficient interest to make the effort to learn it. But the mystical aphorisms towards the end of the work always resonated with me, although they're generally regarded as things one ought not to speak of.
Maybe I misinterpreted you, but the mentality that "Witt had it right and we now have to dance around figuring out the right interpretation of the great Prophet" seems to be what's being criticized here.. Or part of it is that...
Again you said:
Quoting ENOAH
Did I interpret that wrong?
Do you know if W was being deliberate; as a matter of fact? As "homage"? As a deliberately confusing inside joke?
:razz:
Quoting Wayfarer
And I find it interesting that "Facts" and "State of Affairs" are just taken as givens, thus stated.. As if you make your sentences stark enough, you can make statements of metaphysics that can be the exception... Because it is just a skeleton "showing" you.. duh! Unlike YOU, Wayfarer, with your overrought metaphysical constructs. Go kick rocks bud! Come back when you want to discuss the FACTS.
Right. No I was honestly admiring W.s statements, but would never go so far as to stop at W. I was being ironic.
Having said that, ironically, am now inspired to look further into W. I don't know why I very quickly bypassed him in my recent pursuit.
Oh god.. please, don't (ironically unironically) turn into the thing we are discussing.. You too will become the borg/zombie/fanboy....
Nah go ahead..
I'm reading the link you provided on Rorty's take on philosophy as therapy, and am interested in your take on these two passages (if you care to split this off into another thread please feel free to do so):
pg. 168-169
I'm pretty much on board with Conant in how, at least personally, Wittgenstein had an effect on philosophers through the Tractatus. What are your thoughts about what Rorty said about the Tractatus seeming like a self-transformative book?
From what I understand, Wittgenstein did not want to participate in that conservation the same way others did.
The diffuse quality you object to is different from the broad reflection upon what is happening in view of what has happened. History, by any other name.
The broad difference in our reading is whether a consideration is being opened up or closed off.
As you can probably guess, my approach is very much shaped by 'history of ideas' as much as philosophy per se. I'm interested in the dialectics of modernity and how the modern worldview emerged. That's more characteristic of comparative religion and continental philosophy than English-speaking philosophy. (My first degree was in comparative religion, after one of my philosophy lecturers took me aside and kindly advised me that I wouldn't find what I was looking for in his department.)
I think @Tom Storm's mention of the Ray Monk bio of Wittgenstein is probably a good starting point for the casual reader. Also a magazine article by him, Wittgenstein's Forgotten Lesson.
Well, this thread is how people use Wittgenstein.. And one part of that "arsenal" is exactly the idea that Wittgenstein "didn't want to participate" like the others.. This reminds of the "othering" of Jesus- to make him sui generis from the context of the thought and history from which it is supposed to be a part of.
Well, that is proof of my charge that there is nothing there to challenge you as a philosopher.
Heads you win, tails you lose.
Damn, I don't know how it is I can agree and disagree with someone so much, as I do in that Rorty passage you quoted. I agree with his assessment on Wittgenstein's affect/intended affect on the reader, but I disagree on his own notion of what philosophy is for at the same time. Either way, just that passage alone engenders me to Rorty's good faith in explaining his views, rather than trying to elicit in the reader the gnosis through "showing". I just don't buy the schtick from Witt, just as Rorty doesn't buy it from him, nor from Kierkegaard's similar attempt to "explode illusions".. or whatnot.
Is there a part where it talks about Wittgenstein admonishing Wittgenstein's adherents? This comes to mind:
Sure, I'll just provide what Rorty says about Conant.
pg. 174
And, with that, @Wayfarer might look at this differently:
pg. 175
Ok, I can see that in his "misuse" of the koan.
Absolutely!
pg.169
Dang, this Rorty essay is the gift that keeps on giving...
Well, based on what you quoted, and given that Wittgenstein was tired of calling the same thing by different words and definitions, you can see how he moved away from Schop's vision of representation being the matrix where meaning is derived from, in the TLP.
But, it gets even more strange in the Investigations to say that meaning is use.
I'll leave you with this for now.. (I'll be back though).. Is there any other philosopher, who you can quite do this sort of "You cannot refuteth thus, without using the Prophets own methods/ideas!".. I don't think so, I don't think you can get away with doing that without being called a dogmatist.. But oddly, because Witt is seen as an "anti-dogmatist par excellance" one can thus hide behind this notion to actually become a Wittgensteinian dogmatist.. I don't know, just an idea.
It's also the notion that if one just really parses out Wittgenstein's Koans (aphorisms or propositions), one will "get it".. One just has to interpret Wittgenstein to the best ability..
One can always chastise oneself for not knowing enough, and by not knowing enough, one is not "getting it fully".. But why wouldn't that same thing be for any other philosopher? And that's why the style also makes people carried away that if they JUST READ a bit more of his biography, JUST READ his notes a bit better, they can understand his main works better, and thus gain the gnosis that they seek in the anti-dogmatic "enlightenment" of the great Witt... If you just knew that he was against certainty, and that language was use, and that language is about facts, and that all else is nonsense....
Science tells us facts about the world and metaphysics is nonsense, or that language meaning is how you use it, just seems like therapy to me for something that wasn't a problem..
It reminds me of people who want to be seen as supremely moderate, so say things like, "It's all about the economy", or something like that.. Yeah, who isn't going to get on board with that?
I think you have a point. Hence my previous post about (if one gives a shit) reading the Blue and Brown books. But, seemingly the appeal of Witt is so strong that it really directed the minds of many philosophers to decode what he meant.
Even Bertrand Russell (one of his closest friends, apart from Frank Ramsey) got him wrong in his foreword to the Tractatus, according to Wittgenstein.
You could look to @Banno as an example. Banno has argued an interpretation of Wittgenstein, supporting that interpretation with an appeal to authority, Wikipedia. Later, in a completely different context, Banno bragged, I wrote that Wikipedia page. Hahaha, good one, Banno.
And, I might add, that I don't think such shenanigans are exclusive to Banno, or discussions of Wittgenstein in general.
Some claim hes the greatest philosopher ever for his linguistic trickery but all he did was look at philosophy from a different angle, the linguistic one and whilst he enabled some new insight in this regard I believe his whole contribution to philosophy to be a minor one.
For example, you have the three uses of "is." The "is of predication," the "is of identity," and the "is of existence." But in the history of philosophy, there is plenty of debate that might make one question how discrete these really are. Yet, if things just [I]are[/I] their properties, a not unpopular view in metaphysics, then the sum total of what can be predicated of a thing [I]is[/I] its identity, or at least something very close to it. Likewise, if existence (or actuality) is simply another predicate, then the "is of existence" collapses into the "is of predication" which in turn is (lol) the "is of identity." I'm not going to argue that this collapse is warranted, but certainly various theories in this history of philosophy would seem to support something like it.
The claim of people focusing on language is that this all flows from language itself. But it does not seem implausible to me that might flow from the very nature of the world and our experience of itthat "how being is" accounts for why people to think these various uses of "is" are either identical or bear a very close relationship to one another. This would indeed explain how one word came to stand in for these different concepts.
Edit: if such a collapse seems completely implausible, I'd invite you to ponder Leibniz' Law for a moment?F(Fx ? Fy) ? x=y and consider what it says about what identity [I]is[/I].
Yours is a fair representation of what Heidegger was about.
Where does an opposing view start? A rebuttal of a narrative? A different frame of reference?
Gate-keeping rebuttals to disagreement.
I think a big part of it is that Wittgenstein gutted metaphysics (the gutting starting with Hume, and Kant, then Nietzsche and Wittgenstein). So if you display disagreement with Wittgenstein, you are thought to be some kind of primitive thinking essentialist, metaphysician, who is totally missing Wittgensteins point. And therefore you should go read or read again
But someone pointed out this sort of gate-keeping happens with Nietzsche too.
Which I agree.
We all need to show our Wittgenstein or Nietzsche bona fides these days, certainly before any proponent of either of them would entertain a disagreement with them.
Ironically (and why he admitted the nonsense) what I see happens when people gatekeep arguments against Wittgenstein or Nietzsche, in a raw simplified sense, they turn Wittgensteins or Nietzsches position into a sort of gospel truth - where the meaning objectively is - which is the opposite of what either was purporting to demonstrate. (They forget to throw away the ladder when they point to the words, which points to maybe a reason the words need more investigation.)
Doing philosophy shouldnt be about defining terms alone. A dictionary is a good starting point in this regard. Wittengstteins philosophy appears to be to dissect the question at its linguistic composition rather addressing it. In this regard he falls short of a true understanding of what is being asked and what is at stake for philosophy by side stepping the big questions entirely.
We have valid philosophical questions and lines of enquiry which remain almost impenetrable such as the big question of does God exist or what is truth, what is reality etc?
These are questions WORTH pondering without the linguistic sidestepping that Wittgenstein seems to offer.
What examples of this sidestepping attract your notice?
Quoting Paine
My source here was a review by Gregory Sadler that I watched after I joined TPF and desired to learn more about Wittgenstein. See, for example, 26:44. But maybe I conflated a lack of engagement with contemporaries with a lack of engagement with the wider philosophical tradition. My point is that perhaps it is no accident that Wittgenstenians struggle to interact with other kinds of philosophy, if Wittgenstein's work was not intended to interact with other philosophy.
---
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I am also thinking about the thread on quantification, and the way that the Wittgenstenian view in that thread is self-referential and largely incapable of interacting with the large number of alternative views.
---
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't think it can be said for any philosopher but I think it can be said for some. I think Plato is the epitome, for meditation on Plato's dialogues shows them to be fecund beyond belief. I don't see any of that in Wittgenstein, and as I have learned more about his methodology I think I have begun to understand why it isn't there. But maybe I should try reading him again.
Imo his whole philosophy is a linguistic sidetrack. But calling it a sidetrack I dont mean to devalue his contribution at all. His focus on philosophy was purely at a linguistic angle which looked at its problems differently to traditional ways of answering philosophical questions.
If all that is a side track, what is the main path? What is supposed to be studied?
Well Wittgenstein claimed that the things that could be talked about could be talked about clearly and things which couldnt we couldnt talk about at all like Values. He also believed early on that any philosophy that wasnt linguistic analysis to be a criminal waste of effort but here he was wrong as he later softened his position.
I dont know what the main path is when it comes to philosophy and whilst the progress from antiquity to enlightenment has been slow it has sown plenty for fruitful discussion yet elementary questions of philosophy and metaphysics remain.
Eg why is there something rather than nothing ?
Do we have free will
Does God exist etc.
I think this restates my point quite succinctly.. Thanks for sharing it!
Head nod.... :smile:
Either, both. Schopenhauer, Hegel, the proceeding Existentialists, the absurdists, the Platonists, the realists, all might have a different view than Heidegger's approach of da sein..
That is one interpretation. There are others. The statement "purely linguistic" indicates a particular point of view.
Are you proposing that is a self evident component of the text?
I think it might be fair to say of the "anti-metaphysical movement," more broadly that it was the most dogmatic since late scholasticism, or at least that it had the greatest combination of ability and desire to enforce its dogma. People weren't put on trial for heresy, but people in the natural sciences were hounded out of their careers or threatened with this fate for violating the established orthodoxy. You see this in the history of quantum foundations up through the late 1990s and you still see it today with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis controversy in biology. In "Our Mathematical Universe," Tegmark recounts publishing his first more speculative paper and getting a long email from a senior physicist warning him that his career would be doomed if he kept writing about those sorts of issues. Adam Becker's "What is Real?" has stories of some serious harassment on the grounds that papers were "incoherent metaphysics," and not "science," (interestingly, papers that have since become very influential).
But more to your point, when Hegel was more dominant, this was a common charge against Hegelians. They would say "your critique against Hegel is not truly presuppositionless! Hegel's philosophy has no presuppositions and so is immune to all these critiques."
I have to imagine people really did go on like this, because it's a common complaint. Houlgate talks about this at length in his commentary on the Logic, and there actually is a valid form of this sort of defense of Hegel that is a good response to [I]some[/I] of the critiques that have misunderstood Hegel's project, but it was deployed in a sort of blanket way.
Edit: Scholasticism might also show how movements can change. Neoscholastics do not strike me as very dogmatic. The Catholic philosophy space makes very active use of both continental and analytic philosophy. Just off the top of my head, someone like Sokolowski will engage very seriously with Husserl and analytic philosophy of language, while working in Aquinas and Aristotle. Ulrich makes considerable use of Heidegger and Hegel next to Aquinas. Did they learn from their mistakes? Is it just such a small school that it cannot afford to be dogmatic? It is decidedly NOT that they made peace with modernity though lol.
Partly, what made scholasticism calcify into dogmatism is that it felt it needed to guide how the world worked. The Church was the most important institution in its society and scholasticism was essential to the Church (or liked to think itself so). It got itself into trouble precisely because of the role it saw for itself in guiding and defending that institution.
Well, today arguably science is the most influential institution and scientism the leading "religion-like" world view (in terms of broadly telling people "the way the world is"). The anti-metaphysical movement likewise saw itself as in charge of defending their society's most important institution, and so maybe this is where the similarity lies.
That is an interesting observation.
Will think about.
:up:
If you can't be useful to technology and science, best be dogmatic about philosophies that only focus on the bits and pieces, and not the whole I guess... As I indicated in another post, it's easier to be taken seriously when you say something anyone can get on board with... "What I can verify is what is all that can be discussed", "The economy is paramount in policy".. You say something quite commonsensical, then philosophy starts becoming the handmaiden of common sense rather than a way anything else. That isn't necessarily appropriate or good, just convenient to be relevant or pragmatic-sounding, and thus gain a sort of cache.. "I'm not a scientist or engineer, but I play one in philosophy" :cool:.
Language evolved to be efficient for the purpose of mundane communication, that's why it's vague and ambiguous. We learn the minimum number of words required to make ourselves understood in a maximum number of different circumstances. Accordingly, it's not well suited for metaphysical and epistemological problems, and it's confusing when applied in this way.
Im unclear on what you mean. What other interpretations of Wittgensteins philosophy are there apart from language, linguistics and language games? I think thats the sum of his contribution to philosophy.
In most cases, yes where whatever is being formulated is done in a concise and meaningful way. Otherwise it would need clarification.
Well, I was being cheeky there.. I was not in favor of the bits and pieces, science thing :smile:.
What do you make of the following?
Quoting ibid.
That view is distant from visions of discourse defined solely by use or general purpose.
Do you mean "evolved" in terms of man's ability to use language overall, or in terms of how individual languages evolve?
I agree with what you're saying to some degree, but it's also the case that various metaphysical traditions: Platonism, atomism, Aristotleanism, etc. are all significantly older than any of the languages people on this forum are likely to speak as their native language. So there has been plenty of time to "work out the kinks," if it was easy to do so.
Probably more relevant to the linguistic turn's hopes is that, for over a millennia, philosophers and theologians actually did use a dead language whose function was [I]primarily [/I] to discuss these sorts of issues (outside of the liturgy obviously). You have a thousand year stretch of philosophers using a language that had been denuded of its "everyday" implications, supported by vast and elaborate lexicon of technical terminology worked out within that time period. Yet this clearly didn't resolve all the issues vis-á-vis metaphysical questionsquestions that appear to be at least as old as the written word itself, and which will seemingly always fascinate us.
The Latin era sort of seems like a gigantic natural experiment to see if the problems of philosophy can be fixed by moving away from everyday language. There is an irony in the fact that the medieval period is often singled as an exemplar period "bad philosophy" vis-á-vis the linguistic turn given the language philosophy was done in at the time.
I think it wrong on the face of it, as the world can't exist without a knower/known (pace Schopenhauer).
If value is imputed by the knower, the knower is always in the equation.. as per Schopenhauerian metaphysics.
Hes talking about certain things being transcendal, namely value.
I cant make much of it but it appears to be an exception to his obsession with language and appears mystical in his formulation.
Interesting. The text does not follow you to your conclusion.
I will ponder upon it.
What does the opposite of an obsession with language look like?
It simply took that long to discover what he meant.
I disagree. I need time to frame my rebuttal.
Seems a bit of an irrelevant question. What are you getting at ?
'Yes, but...' will come the reply.
[quote=Kenneth Taylor, Why I am Not a Wittgensteinian; https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/why-i-am-not-wittgensteinian] Wittgenstein, especially the later Wittgenstein, viewed philosophy as it had been practiced more or less up his own arrival as mostly a budget of confusions. Philosophical problems and "theories" one and all arise, he says at one point in the Philosophical Investigations, from language gone on a holiday. The rough idea is that a whole lot of philosophy gets going by taking terms like say "knowledge" or "mind" or "idea" or -- take your pick -- and raising questions that have nothing to do with our sort of everyday use of such terms in the context of the "language games" in which they are at home.
Take the so-called problem of other minds. How does this problem get started? Well, Descartes convinced many philosophers that we have immediate and incorrigible access to the contents of our own minds, as if the mind were somehow completely open to itself. It's clear we don't in the same way know the contents of the minds of others. Starting with that observation, it really wouldn't take much argument to get yourself into the frame of thinking that one can reasonably and intelligibly wonder whether we have anyway of knowing about the minds of others. And once you got yourself into that state of wonder, it wouldn't take a whole lot of further argument to convince yourself to be an utter sceptic about our knowledge of other minds. Of course, at least some other philosophers will be unmoved by your scepticism. They may take themselves to be the guardians of common sense. But as soon as they admit that your arguments at least deserve answering, that there really is a problem about our knowledge of other minds, then we're off and running on a race to see which set of philosophical arguments will carry the day. Sceptical arguments will war with anti-sceptical arguments. the debate will go on -- probably interminably, with no real resolution ever being achieved.
We philosophers tend to think of our problems as "enduring." But the Wittgensteinian thought is that that may just be another way of saying intractable, however. And Wittgenstein can be seen as offering us an explanation of why we find the problems so intractable. That's the point of his saying that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. This is not for him a sign that the problems of philosophy are deep. It is rather a sign that they are grounded in utter confusion and abuse of language.
Now I won't try to reconstruct the arguments that might lead one down the primrose path of worrying about our knowledge of other minds. I'll leave that as exercise to the reader for now. What Wittgenstein wants to do for philosophy is to give us a way of avoiding taking even the very first step down such paths in the first place. The secret, he thinks, is simply to look at how we actually use such terms as 'knowledge' 'self' 'others' etc in the real life language games and "forms of life" in which those terms are at home. Philosophy should simply stick to describing use. It should abandon the grand hope of building philosophical theories of things like mind, knowledge and self. It has no particular resources for enabling it to construct such theories in the first place. And all of its past attempts to do so have led to intractable confusion.
Once we abandon the urge to build grand philosophical theories designed to get at, as it were, hidden philosophical essences, and simply look at how language is actually used, it's not so much that we thereby solve the traditional philosophical problems, It's rather that we dissolve them. If we simply look at our actual practices, we will see that the idea that we know the contents of our own minds in some immediate, incorrigible fashion that is different from the way in which we we know the minds of others cannot be sustained. The very problem that gets the whole intractable debate about our knowledge of self vs. our knowledge of other minds is based again on "language gone on a holiday." And once you see this, the problem immediately dissolves itself.
There's something profound about Wittgenstein's approach. Not without reason did generations of later philosophers find it a potent rallying cry. It's certainly true that we want to pay attention to how our language is actually used and we don't want, through mere inattention to the facts of use, to generate pseudo problems. But I have to say that I think it is a serious mistake to think that all the so-called traditional problems of philosophy are mere pseudo-problems borne of insufficient attention to how we actually use certain quite ordinary terms, that, in their everyday use, are completely unproblematic.[/quote]
As for the 'intractable confusion' that this post refers to, I'm not sure that this accurately describes every advocate for the various schools of philosophy being referred to. They might believe that their school of thought is crystal clear.
'Yes, but....'
But, since the topic of being divorced from the history of philosophy has already come up, I figured I'd share this short article on the similarities between Augustine and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein kicks off PI with a quote from Augustine's Confessions, but in turn he seems to attribute a quite misleading, simplistic theory of language to Augustine. As the article points out, Augustine's understanding of language actually shares a lot with PI, including the focus on "use." Unfortunately, the article only looks at Augustine's early works. His theory of signs develops quite a bit (IMO in a good way), but the revisions are buried in theological texts so they tend to get ignored. Stoyanoff sees Augustine as "centuries ahead of his time," for this. Fair enough, he also does Descartes' cogito and arguably part of Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectical centuries earlier. But this is maybe a bit off. Augustine was one of the very most widely read philosophers for a long period and people did not fail to pick up on his ideas on language and make use of them. Rather, it's only how philosophy changed later in the modern period, a sort of "forgetting," that seems to make the ideas "new" again.
There is this weird myth that pre-modern philosophers were naive realists, or even a backwards projection of positivist notions of "objectivity," on to them. I don't think this could be further from the truth. How the nature of the knowing subject affects knowledge is an area of considerable focus in medieval thought. So, IDK, Wittgenstein's version of Augustine might be one of the contributors to this misconception. Ironically, Pierce's semiotic triad, which is quite popular in continental philosophy, is pretty much the same as Augustine's in De Dialecta, and signs are a major focus in scholasticism, yet this view of past thought shows up in plenty of continental philosophy.
Is there another way to study and critique metaphysical and epistemological issues, or is language indispensable for the task?
:100: :clap:
It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood.
I'd be interested if you could cite some references for earlier philosophers works which treat of "how the knowing subject affects knowledge". I'm not contesting your statement or claiming there are no such philosophical works or passages of work; I just can't think of any, and it seems like it should be interesting to see what such philosophers had to say about it.
So it seems that no one in the forum is retaining anything at all. Have no one discussed the presocratics? They were the first to point out the "stuff" which makes up reality. Not the trees, not the animals, not the planets -- but "stuff".
Peirce studied and benefitted from Latin thinkers like Aquinas and Scotus, and his theory of signs is especially indebted to the Latins:
But the basis of traditional metaphysics was 'the identity of thinking and being' (per Eric D. Perl, Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition.) And that in turn relied on Parmenides' metaphysics inherited and transformed by Plato and Aristotle. It was still apparent in Aquinas, whereby the intellect receives the forms whilst the senses perceive the material body. Thereby particulars are perceived as beings which are the expressions of an idea or form or principle. There is no way that can be equated with naive realism.
But if things are made of "stuff", that suggests materialism, and if not materialism, then realism at least. You can be a naive realist and hold that things are made of some kind of stuff.
If the things of the world are understood to be independent of the human mind, then that would be compatible with naive realism, regardless of what kind of stuff they were thought to be composed. Can you cite any passages from Aristotle, Plato, or Parmenides or the scholastics that explicitly equate thinking with being?
I provided a link to the .pdf of that book (which incidentally is out of print and was very expensive when available.) As the title of the book is Thinking Being, then one might surmise that it explores the very question you're asking, so I will refer you to it, as it is practically impossible to present a synopsis in a forum post, especially as it is tangential to the thread topic.
[quote=abstract; https://brill.com/display/title/24946]In Thinking Being, Eric Perl articulates central ideas and arguments regarding the nature of reality in Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas. He shows that, throughout this tradition, these ideas proceed from and return to the indissoluble togetherness of thought and being, first clearly expressed by Parmenides. The emphasis throughout is on continuity rather than opposition: Aristotle appears as a follower of Plato in identifying being as intelligible form, and Aquinas as a follower of Plotinus in locating the first principle beyond being. Hence Neoplatonism, itself a coherent development of Platonic thought, comes to be seen as the mainstream of classical philosophy. Perls book thus contributes to a revisionist understanding of the fundamental outlines of the western tradition in metaphysics.[/quote]
The historical ignorance here is off the charts. :yikes: Maybe start with Plato, a large part of whose philosophy is concerned with the unreliability of sense knowledge:
If you take that passage to be explicitly equating thinking with being, then I would say your lack of reading comprehension skills is "off the charts".
And how does that fix the view of realism? Or naive realism? They could be realists who don't believe in the tangible quality of ultimate reality.
Yes, I agree they could be realists who don't believe in the ultimate tangible quality of real existents. That was pretty much implicit when I wrote "whatever that material might have been thought to fundamentally be".
I was addressing your "thesis" that everyone who lived before modern optics must have been a naive realist. That's why I quoted your "thesis." (I am trying to be generous with the word 'thesis')
Again, you show your poor reading skills. I said:
Quoting Janus
That is very far from saying "that everyone who lived before modern optics must have been a naive realist".
In any case realism, whether naive or not, about external objects is really the point: I was questioning the assertion that any of the ancients or the medievals explicitly equated thinking with being. I wasn't denying that there have been such but asking those who claim there have to provide textual evidence to support their contention.
The whole premise of your argument is that those who lived prior to modern optics were naive realists. Drop that premise and the whole argument disappears. Here it is again:
Quoting Janus
We haven't even gotten into how unintelligent this argument really is. One does not require modern optics to recognize the possibility of visual distortion. Eye disease, perspective, differing visual capabilities, and the fact that far-away objects are difficult to see all demonstrate such a thing. The ironic thing here is that the presuppositions of those who think the ancients were dumb, are dumb. "They didn't have modern optics therefore they couldn't understand visual distortion." That's a bad, bad argument.
I recently read an article that has the following quote (translated):
I do think this is a thing, for a number of reasons. One is that he can come off as arrogant (Austin even more so). His basic claims are: what the implications are when we say or do a particular thing in a particular setting, such as, that I believe (it is raining) works as a hypothesis. Now, he is asserting them for all of us (Kant will call this speaking in a universal voice) but we could disagree by bringing up other examples, further contexts., etc. Now some take these claims as certainty (argued), and echo the claims righteously. But he is only relying on claims he takes as obvious and uncontroversial. What I mean is that we would all have to agree on those claims in order for them to be philosophically relevant. These (grammatical) claims are not everything he states however, and so his conclusions (in the same tone) are taken to be self-evident as well, or in need of no further explanation or possibility of refutation.
But he is not talking about language, as Rorty and @Wayfarers Kenneth Taylor take it, he is looking at how we talk, in certain examples (calling out, rule following, pointing, continuing a series, seeing, understanding, and, even, meaning/language, but only as another example), because it is a window, a method, in order to see how different things do what they do differently (our criteria for judging can be seen in the ways we talk).
His goal is not to tell us the way the world works, e.g., by way of rules, or that this is how rules work. Initially he is trying to figure out why he got stuck on one solution (in the Tract), when the world works in so many different ways. What he learns first is that our desire for certainty narrows our vision (dictates the form of answer), and so, yes, it is a book about self-knowledge. It aims to show us how our interests affect our thinking.
And although he does not directly address other philosophers (as brought up by @Shawn @Leontiskos @kindred), the big issues are in there; skepticism, essence, knowledge, other minds, determinism, the human condition, ethics, etc. He does not shy from those or dissolve them, nor is he tangential to the analytic tradition. I would put it that some people have particular interests in philosophy, and so take Wittgenstein as pointless or trivial, and some use Wittgenstein to attempt to dictate others interests, which is not the point either.
Maybe inadvertently, I think this helps make the point, as that is the reciprocal of how their interests are regarded by him.
I see what you did there :smirk:. Why does Nickles post seem exactly like an example of what Im talking about (like using more Wittgenstein to prove or disprove Wittgenstein)? Or is the irony not as glaring as it seems to be showcasing? Hell even using other philosophers to prove or disprove Wittgenstein seems like it is bordering on eliciting as the said title of this thread states. I. Dont. Get. It. Its like Wittgenstein has almost a brand of unique elitism and self-referential back-patting smugness that only that brand does best.
Consider the ubiquitous maxim: quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur, "whatever is received is received according to the manner of the receiver." This is pretty much an axiom in scholasticism and amounts to "people only understand in the mode they are capable of understanding." This is used to apply to both the universal structure of human understanding as well as learned/social constraints on the reception of ideas.
Another way this is put is "cogitum est in cognoscente secundum modum cognoscentis", which means "a thing known exists in a knower according to the mode of the knower."
Both these phrases are popularized by St. Thomas but you can find very similar ideas in Boethius centuries earlier, e.g. the contrast between the human understanding of Providence and the Divine in the Consolation, and plenty of other places aside.
Just off the top of my head, this sort of investigation shows up in Thomas' commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate, with the differentiation between processual, discursive human ways of knowing and the divine simplicity (this plays off Boethius' conception of eternity, that everything is present to God as a unity). The idea that truth is inheritly bound up with minds and is not simply reducible to being in a straightforward manner is addressed in the Disputed Questions on Truth. A view at odds with naive realism would be Thomas' theory of "intentions in the media," and the related concept of virtual signs worked out in Poinsot and Cusa. There are parallels between intertextuality and Al Farabi and Avicenna too. And then Thomas addressed if we know things or simply our ideas of things (indirect realism) in Question 84 of the Summa, as well as some other places, anticipating Locke, Hume, and Berkeley to some degree. Such a view wasn't unimaginable, rather it is rejected on the grounds that ideas and signs are "that through which we know," rather than "that which we know;" a position contemporary philosophy largely has wandered its way back to.
Edit: one source of this misconception might be that some scholastics do maintain that the "senses do not error," which can be read out of context in a way different from what is intended. The point being made is generally that errors are in judgements. It's asynthea, Aristotle's category for propositional knowledge, where falsity crops up. So the point is that we cannot have a sort of "false awareness." If you see or hear something, you are definitely seeing or hearing. Judgements about what you see and hear are where error come in.
In my book it's less about Wittgenstein and more about totalising. You see the same from devout Heideggerians, Derrideans etc. Pretty much anyone aligned with vaguely poststructuralist (yes, including Wittgenstein) philosophers can exhibit that specific form of totalising discourse. Which is obviously not totalising because how can it be totalising if you're undermining the concept of totalities and reifications and ancient metaphysical superstitions which exist everywhere except in your own thoughts blah blah blah...
There's another form with less pomo-ish peeps. You just get drawn into their system and every issue is treated as explicitly subordinate to that system's articulated terms. In the pomoish form of totalising, the chat in thread superficially resembles the OP's topic but is in fact a contest of merely implicit worldviews. In the architectonic form, the thread is entirely derailed into the poster's fairly rigid system.
If you're reading academic philosophy, there are forms of this. When reading postructuralist inspired literature I play a game I call "reciprocal co-constitution bingo". In which the author adopts phrases like "affect and be affected by", "in and through", "unable to imagine without", "always already". I get a point for every phrase like that. They're used in order to stifle thought that anything could exist before everything analysed became inextricably subsumed in everything else and impossible to analyse on its own terms. If the author explicitly endorses the co-constitution of discourse and being, I win.
In all cases, these worldviews monopolise the connections between ideas and the conditions under which ideas are generated. They're ways of thinking about thinking, and about how thoughts arise. The pomoish form monopolises those connections by picking a specific way of undermining one flavour of connection (binarised, dual, antipodal) while asserting another (pluralised or continuous, multiply connected, mutually presupposing), the architectonic form instead severs connections of all types which are irrelevant or contrary to the articulated system, or otherwise interprets them as terms of it.
Ultimately both tendencies are refusals to stay on topic. In both the academic and Philosophy Forum forms, they produce a lot of redundant and derivative content. Everything becomes an application of the infinitely rehashed.
I would say both, as the one seems to just be a more specific example of the other, which is more general.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't see the point. The evolutionary force of change, brought about by the common usage of billions of people is much stronger than the force of a few metaphysicians. This makes it impossible for metaphysicians to "work out the kinks", because the kinks are being created at a rate much faster than anyone could have a hope of working them out.
Furthermore, the evidence of history shows, that controls over language use are not well received by the common people, and attempts at this will backfire. Look at the Catholic Church's attempt to control heresy, by controlling language use, The Inquisition.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't see where you derive this idea. There was never a language whose primary function was to discuss theology and metaphysics. Latin's primary use was never simply theology and metaphysics. Now its use in religion is simply ceremonial, symbolic. In its late stage of actual usage, it was the language of all science and higher education. It had that role because the institutions of educational material were constructed with that language. Such institutions maintain tradition and are late to be affected by evolutionary change.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is not at all true. It implies that higher education has no "everyday" implications. That of course is false, as higher education is a major driving force of evolutionary change. Changes at the higher levels of education trickle down to the less well educated, and the word usage gets altered on the way, because of the difference in understanding.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Of course all the metaphysical questions have not been resolved. If that were the case, knowledge would be absolutely complete. The problems of quantum physics, wave-particle duality, entanglement, etc., and the problems of cosmology, dark energy, dark matter, etc., demonstrate that knowledge is far from complete, and many metaphysical questions remain unsolved.
I don't understand what you are arguing. Language does not resolve metaphysical problems, it is simply a tool used by the human beings who work to do this. When human beings are uninspired toward addressing such problems, directing their attention in other ways instead, and using language toward those other endeavours, it is incorrect to blame the failure of solving those metaphysical problems on the language. Clearly, when human beings have no interest in solving metaphysical problems, the failure of solving these problems is not to be blamed on the available tools.
Human beings are quite innovative, and are very capable of formulating, adapting, and shaping tools to suit there purposes. So if the human population was inclined toward solving specific metaphysical problems, they would adapted the tools necessary for this task, as they have done in science. The reality is that very few are inclined in this way, so the tools do not get produced.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You've got this backward. You are not looking at the proper chronological order, looking backward from now instead of from the ancient times toward now. What is the case is that "everyday language" moved away from Latin, not vise versa. There was, historically, a very close relationship between everyday language and Latin, and even further back in time, Latin was everyday language for many. However, as the written language, replacing Greek, Latin always held a place of authority, being "the memory" of the people. When people started questioning the authority (and this was deemed heresy), and those acting in the position of having authority responded with enforcement rather than allowing freedom, then everyday language rapidly moved away from Latin.
Quoting Janus
I don't think there is any other way. But the issue is as I mentioned above. Language changes and evolves according to usage, and the usage is determined by the aims (intentions) of the users. Primary usage is the billions of mundane communicative everyday expressions. Secondary usage is business, legal and political. Tertiary is higher education. Metaphysics and epistemology are far down on the list of importance. Therefore language in its natural form, is fundamentally not well suited for these purposes.
Since natural language is not well suited to these purposes, yet language is the tool which must be used, then we can conclude that a special form of language needs to be designed for this purpose. And, there is nothing absurd about designing a special form of language for a specific purpose, mathematics is an example of such a specialized form of language. It's formulated for the endeavours of empirical science. Also we commonly create languages for purposes, in computer science.
Quoting Paine
Rortys analysis of Wittgensteins peculiar use of the word philosophy may go some way toward appreciating the basis of his lack of interest in its history.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I would like to use a specific example to clarify what gatekeeping means to you( forgive me, Antony).
I consider Antony Nickles discussions of Wittgensteins ideas on this forum to be some of the most rigorous and informative contributions to this site, not only because it jibes with my understanding of Witt, but because he is able to bring Witts way of looking at the whole ( as seen by Antony) alive by careful use of the authors vocabulary. I have noticed the frustration and exasperation of many of Antonys interlocutors as they try and fail to make their way into that world that Antony is painting, and I cant help but suspect that a few of them blame Antonys elitism for their being shut out of that world. Im curious as to whether you consider Antonys approach as a type of gatekeeping.
I think he is good-intestioned, not malicious but if my critiques of a philosopher could never get beyond the philosopher in question, I dont know what to call that. As if, the only reason Wittgenstein is (can be or is) wrong is because we dont know enough Wittgenstein just knowing his philosophy obviously shows Wittgenstein is right, right? Let me present to you more Wittgenstein so we can see how right Wittgenstein is.
Le me tactful suggest you have a chip on your shoulder and its causing you to blame the messenger rather than your difficulty in deciphering the message. You have the advantage here. 90% of the contributors to this forum do not ally themselves with postmodern , poststructuralist or deconstructive philosophy, and Im including within those groups the later Wittgenstein, at least as people like Antony and myself read him. Let me make it clear: when I talk about deciphering the message, I dont mean agreeing with it, swallowing the koolaid, joining the cult. I mean having the capability of summarizing its content effectively so that one understands what one is disagreeing with. I dont agree entirely with Antonys take on Wittgenstein , and I am critical of many aspects of Wittgensteins ideas, but I have no problem in thinking from within the world that Antony spins out so as to have lively engagements with him. Some others who have engaged with him remain outsiders to that world and resent him for it. To them, he is indeed an elite gatekeeper.
Wittgenstein was not responsible for the linguistic turn in philosophy.
Recent scholarship has begun to pay more attention to his discussion of seeing. In his later work the saying/showing distinction is not as clear as it may appear to have been in the Tractatus. We do, however, find in the Tractatus a comment about two ways of seeing a cube. (5.5423)
I had a long response, but after reading over @Antony Nickles post again, I can see that he isn't being overly forceful with the fandom (taking the author as right, and thus whatever the author says is beyond reproach), as I totally agree with his sentiments here:
Quoting Antony Nickles
That is to say, instead of believing Wittgenstein thought his works dissolved the problems, his works actually dissolves the problems... And in this view, there is no fight because Wittgenstein already had the checkmate. So in this point of view, having an objection is simply not reading him correctly.
I dont mind being ignorant. I know nothing. But hate/gate keeping and elitism are often part of the Wittgenstein social landscape, and thats unacceptable to me as a teacher/learner. Its also bad faith to never accept criticism of ones favorite philosopher and make the move that You just dont have a good or the correct understanding. Do you believe that Wittgenstein can only be refuted by better readings of Wittgenstein or could Wittgenstein just be wrong and refuted thus?
Philosophies are all just modes of thinking that other people tend to adopt. Especially when a certain mode resonates with their own experiences and prejudices.
Quoting fdrake
A simpler game of Bingo is to just observe how much language an author uses in a technical sense, and how willing they are to drop the technical connotation. Aristotle almost always begins a discussion by looking at the common opinions and the common ways that words are used. Aquinas is famous for using very simple Latin with a minimum of technical terms (except those inherited from his context). It's fairly common to hear people mock Aristotle for the way he considers common opinion and common language use, but I believe it to be a sign of a good philosopher, one who is not pulling the wool over his eyes with the verbiage of a specialized system. I suppose we are just talking about ideology and ideologues.
In encountering Wittgenstenians, I have noticed a paradox in that there is an attempt to focus on common usage (perhaps to a fault), but then the utterances of these people are not to be interpreted according to common usage, but rather in accord with the technical color of a Wittgenstenian interpretation. How can it be that an approach which claims to privilege the common use of language does not use language in a common way?
Wittgenstein, of course, should not be faulted for what Wittgensteinians say and do. This happens to every thinker who has a large following.
The reliance on technical language is a wide spread problem. Many think that this is what academic writers should do, and is copied by others who talk about these things.
Rorty supplies additions to what was written that are sharply at odds with other ways to read those words. I don't understand Wittgenstein to be denigrating the role of the philosopher in PI 194. It is an expression of humility toward what has been created around the philosopher. If all the problems of philosophy are without value, then one should stop. And yet Wittgenstein is out there digging in ancient grounds.
Quoting Joshs
Wittgenstein does not place himself in the narrative of the philosophy of history by means of talking about it. Concluding that means he had no interest in it is prejudicial. That suggests the absence of word on the matter was not intended but a condition of his times, or something.
Yes. Especially with regard to feeling and concept talk.
What do you take that to indicate?
I think Lee Braver has a point when he characterizes this quote by Wittgenstein as:
The ordinariness or commonness of the words contained in Wittgensteins later work isnt to be determined by seeing how often they have been used by the wider culture, but in how Wittgenstein employs them to connect with and carry forward what is immediately relevant to the reader. It is these concerns that are common, and where the meaning of language finds purchase.
This, too, fills in a space left empty by Wittgenstein. It mischaracterizes the role of "forms of life." The work does not mark out what a "legitimate role" is.
Quoting Paine
I have a feeling a quote from any of my favorite interpreters of Wittgenstien will likely deemed by you as a mischaracterization of his views. Ironic term to use in a thread on gatekeeping. Dont you think a more humble stance to take toward a thinker who has spawned communities of readers with sharply divergent views of what he meant might be to simply say that you prefer so and sos reading of him to my sources?
Shouldn't he? The OP seems to presuppose that he can be faulted for this. Or at the very least, that it can be traced back to his writings.
:lol:
I think you hit the nail on the head in that post. But this is a tough one for me because I see a lot in favor of systematic philosophy, of having everything hang together such that ethics and aesthetics flow from metaphysics and epistemology, etc. This is what makes Platonism and Aristotle so appealing. But the more systematic (or "anti-systematic") your philosophy is, the more you're going to want to bring it everywhere.
The co-creation thing doesn't belong to any particular system. It shows up in a lot of the cool ones, though
If one takes your approach, no person is speaking for themselves in response to the text but are parroting "so and so's" who speak for others. That means I am not speaking for myself but advancing someone else's view.
So, the humility you are asking from me is a keeping of a gate. And you have shopped out the work to a contractor.
I would agree with you that it can be very difficult to debate the ideas of later Wittgenstein. But this is likely due to the approach to philosophy he takes where he wants to emphasize description and use of words rather than provide explanation and the theorize. What is there to debate when he is just describing how we commonly employ are language in everyday life. But the next step is where one has to decide if peace can be found in this analysis of words, or continue to be tormented by problems traditional philosophy has presented to us. I think most would agree that most modern philosophers either ignore Wittgenstein and continue on theorizing, or give him respectful nod and continue theorizing.
That said, can one criticize Wittgenstein? Of course, even Wittgenstein heavily criticized his early work, the Tractatus, that is pretty much how Philosophical Investigations is set up. And as for Philosophical Investigations itself, I believe even Wittgenstein viewed this work as an incomplete and that it still needed to be improved upon, see Preface to Investigations. As for other philosophers, there have been many interesting attempts, for example:
1. Word and Things, Ernest Gellner
2. The Metaphysics of Meaning, Jerrold Katz
3. The Concept of a Person, essays: "Philosophy and Language" and "Can there by a Private Language", A.J. Ayer
To name of few. But my favorite criticism and one that has stuck with me the most and is very simple and to the point, from Quine's Word and Object:
"There are, however, philosophers who overdo this line of thought, treating ordinary language as sacrosanct. They exalt ordinary language to the exclusion of one of its traits: its disposition to keep on evolving."
Oddly, it's like reading a bunch of reasons for a premise that isn't there. I can make that into whatever I want.. And that is indeed a problem. And I can always sidestep getting pinned down because I can shovel around the same key phrases to obfuscate it- "It's about use, damn it!".. "It's about showing! Explanation is off the table, you see, and this is the philosophy that shows! Thus de facto, no explanation needed!". Clever, and bad faith it seems to me, in philosophical discourse when used as the only punchline, because there is no real punchline other than these moves.
Quoting Richard B
As someone else said, perhaps Wittgenstein would admonish his own adherents... He admonished himself.. But then the double-bad faith move is taken that, the Prophet knew himself well enough to know what the real errors were... Thus, he caught himself in time, and one can then claim (pick your bad faith move here..).. That Wittgenstein simply had both ideas right, you see, if you read him right to left, and through the looking glass, you will notice that PI is simply commentary on Tractatus... Such as the New Testament really is the completion of the Old Testament. Didn't you know..
OR
You can make the move that he simply caught his own errors just in time to have the truth of the matter, thus completing the foundation of the linguistic turn, and apparently dissolving problems by pointing out the common notion that language communities use words in different contexts, and that people often confuse the meaning of words and sentences so it can be hard to communicate stable ideas.. Yet by me trivializing such a trivial idea, I am just not enlightened enough, and I must read this or that passage in the PI to really inform me that he is more than this and everything else and all that and the TAO and the universe, and 42 and the end of philosophy and the end of discussion, and the end of debate. And didn't you know... The PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT>> What about the fuckn god damn PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT!!! :scream: You see? You see? CHeckmate checkmate, mate!
OF COURSE, all of this relies on even thinking his Old or New Testament matters or is the right approach.. Something that seems completely off the table to the adherents. You see, you can't directly attack Wittgenstein, only provide either primary sources (from the GURU himself), or from one of his approved sooth-sayers.. Like the Oracle at Delphi was able to communicate the great Apollo's insightful messages...
This point is interesting. Might it not be argued that until one has a robust reading of any writer it is not really possible to refute or acclaim them? This endlessly fecund, perhaps even Rabbinical reinterpretation of W does suggest that critique almost seems superfluous.
:lol:
The Talmud of Wittgenstein. Damn, I got the title of my new book deal. But your point oddly "shows" Wittgenstein's point that the usage of the language community (this instance around Wittgenstein himself), creates the meaning... Oh dear...
But to get out of the vicious circle of meaning in context of a community, and the layers of meanings it creates over time through its own usage..
You asked
Quoting Tom Storm
It can become a game of dismissing the critic to not engage the critique...
Complete understanding itself is unfalsifiable in the context of a philosophical work...
It inherently assumes that the philosopher is right if you only knew him better...
It invites tactics like using the author's words as the only basis for accepting a valid argument to refute the author, thus becoming a kind of circular reasoning...
Often outside understanding can inform, even the best of specialists because they offer a different perspective...
Any refutation gets bogged down in hermeneutics, leaving no room for substantive critiques. Instead, it simply engages in endless layers of analysis and context refinement, similar to the Rabbinical idea you mention.
It undermines the principle of academic and philosophical dialogue, which relies on the exchange of ideas and critiques at various levels of understanding.
It can create an environment where philosophical works are revered rather than critically examined, which is contrary to the spirit of philosophical inquiry.
This tactic can prevent the identification of specific errors or weaknesses in an argument, which are valuable for the growth of understanding.
It can be a defensive mechanism to protect one's own interpretations from scrutiny by discrediting critics preemptively.
The argument often establishes a false sense of authority where only a select few are deemed capable of truly understanding the philosopher, which can lead to dogmatism.
This argument fosters echo chambers where only those who already agree with a particular interpretation are allowed to speak, reinforcing biases and preventing growth.
Understanding can evolve over time through critique and discussion. Insisting on complete understanding upfront denies this dynamic process.
It can obscure real flaws in the philosophers arguments by shifting the focus to the critics knowledge rather than the arguments content.
Philosophy is about ideas and their implications, not just textual mastery. Reducing it to the latter by requiring exhaustive reading misses the broader purpose.
Some philosophical ideas, while complex, can be critiqued based on their core tenets without delving into every nuance, making the insistence on complete understanding unnecessary.
Valuable critiques often come from interdisciplinary perspectives. Dismissing these on the grounds of incomplete understanding of the philosophical text itself undermines interdisciplinary dialogue.
This tactic deflects from holding the philosopher accountable for the clarity and coherence of their arguments, which should stand up to critique regardless of the critic's breadth of reading.
And a bunch more stuff in the key of elitism and dogmatism..
And for soft-core pessimist like me, it inherently assumes we'll never know if the philosopher is right or wrong because we can't demonstrate that we've arrived at a correct reading. :wink:
Quoting schopenhauer1
That's a fair perspective. I suspect however that postmodern thinking would consider this an anachronism. Clarity is so early 20th century.
Personally, one of the reasons I have never privileged philosophy (apart from the inherent dullness of the work) is the unlikelihood of gaining a robust reading of a given text unless one studies it with discipline and probably, with professional instruction. I have other things to be getting on with.
Quoting schopenhauer1
There may well be those who think philosophy is an enquiry dedicated to reasonableness and ongoing discourse. I suspect that much philosophy is faddish tribalism, dedicated to onanism, amongst other things. :grin:
:clap: :up: More or less this summarizes how I also read Witty's later thinking (re: recursively generated plurality of non-discrete discourses) which I interpret as contextualizing, not refuting or discarding, his early thinking (re: implicit nonsense of meta-discourses). In other words, implied by the PI, Witty's TLP exemplifies just one language-game (i.e. discursive way of making sense/meanings) among countless others; however, IMHO, this is also 'meta-discursive nonsense' too (i.e. a language-game of 'examples of language-games') and therefore (PI) internally critiques, or refutes, itself implicitly in the manner of the more explicit proposition 7 of the TLP. Witty doesn't propose a 'theory of language' so there aren't any 'claims' to argue against, only this reflective activity to perform ("red pill" ~ how to stop philosophizing) or not to perform ("blue pill" ~ to never stop philosophizing), and this groundless 'choice' is what, I suspect, aggravates many (scientistic or analytical or dogmatic) philosophers with its ordinariness ...
e.g. one hand clapping :fire:
@schopenhauer1
:lol:
See here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/905680
:smirk:
What happens if its just a sugar pill painted red?
Quoting Wayfarer
Witt can be very dismissive (calling things nonsense) and high-handed (unceremoniously judgey), but what hes interested in is the motivation of the skeptic, not showing them to be wrong or silly, nor merely lost. He takes skepticism seriously, but in seeing its discoveries, not by accepting or refuting its conclusions. Changing someones mind, in the sense of an opinion or knowledgeand so a matter of proofis different than turning their head (to look a different way). Goals are not always shared; why isnt that acceptable?
Interestingly, perhaps, though for another time, as we do in the PI (#139).
One more thing I think is happening sometimes is people take everything Witt writes as if it was a statement, like a claim to knowledge or an argument for the purpose of having a conclusion admitted. But I hear them like conjecture, or even more, like characterizations of remarks, that only lead to asking: why would we say that? Or: look at it in this way. But the only way to treat a picture like a conclusion is to accept it whole hog, without justification and without means of refuting it, when the picture is just meant to say: do you see what I see in this (by/for yourself)?
This is off-topic, but yours is a common and understandable question. Witt isnt privileging common usage, he is looking at examples of a time and a place when we say something, to see what would be the implied means of deciding about it, like connotations; in order to find the ordinary standards (and situations) for judging that sort of thing (rather than just T/F or justified, etc.). He himself has a bunch of terms, like: concept, criteria, grammar, etc.
But if youre not doing a thorough reading of a philosopher (pointing to textual evidence, taking into account their terms, etc.), how can you be sure you are refuting them and not just how you superficially take them (isolated, on your terms)? If you misinterpret the premise, what point is saying the conclusion is wrong?
How many times can one philosopher have the glory of being saved by Appeal to Misunderstanding? Is that academic philosophy now? Is that this debate forums way of handling Witt specifically? Doesnt seem to be as big a problem from devotees of other philosophers in quite the same way. Holy shit, this guy gets religious levels of obfuscation as a smokescreen.
Which is why I asked, can Witt be wrong, even just in principle? Because the way you describe it, he cant be wrong, because hes not making claims..
Quoting Paine
You are not a solipsistic island dropped into the midst of society. Whether you know it or not, your reading of Wittgenstein will have enough overlaps and resonances with a particular community of Wittgenstein scholars that it will be useful to say , as shorthand, that you identify with the new Wittgensteinians or the old Wittgensteinians, with the therapeutic approach or the non-therapeutic approach, with the Oxford reading or the American reading. This doesnt mean you think in lock step with any particular reading of Wittgenstein. To speak for oneself is already to speak in relation to a cultural perspective, Whether one feels in tune with it or in opposition to it, one is in both cases tied to it. Explicitly communicating this awareness when discussing philosophical ideas is not the same thing as advancing someone elses view, but giving others a better sense of where youre coming from.
I imagine that I can demonstrate that your objection to the quotes from my sources is the result of your opposition to a therapeutic reading of Witt. Whether or not that is the case, instead of wasting time telling me that so and so is misunderstanding him, lets reveal the difference in underlying metaphysical commitments that separate your reading from mine. Once we locate the general region of scholarship that situates your approach, and differentiates it from mine, we can get into the nitty gritty of your thinking in its uniqueness. I think an approach to reading a philosopher that respects the value of what different communities of thinkers say about him is more productive, and less prone to the risk of gatekeeping, than one that is mainly interested in determining what is the correct view of him , while ignoring the way any reading is ensconced within a community of practices.
Of course I prefer my approach, and you prefer yours , but there will never be just one Wittgenstein.
Did you just reciprocal co-constitution Wittgenstein scholarship?
Was this an attempt to parody pomo? Ill be back a bit later with my parody of your parody. For now, Ill just suggest that an effective parody requires that one has first mastered the material one is parodying.
But this is part my frustration with him/reading him perhaps. If he is providing, not definitive claims but a methodology, one can always claim about him, that he really isn't "saying" this or that definitive thing, and thus we must tacitly just accept the implications of his methodology because it's just some innocuous observations of how we think and do philosophy. It is another side-step whereby let's take for the sake of example:
"Kant claims that synthetic a priori truths provide the groundwork for the cognitive conditions that make the possibility of experience possible."
This is literally a claim that one can try to do three things:
1) Refine the statement to be more accurate retelling of the philosopher/thinker.
2a) Say the claim Kant is making (not the interpreter of Kant) is true (to whatever extent), offering one's own insights or a synthesis from what others have said...
2b) Say the claim Kant is making (not the interpreter of Kant) is false (to whatever extent), offering one's own insights or a synthesis from what others have said...
What happens in Wittgenstein's debate seems to be a WHOLE lot of 1 only.. It stays on 1.. big droning, sylloquies of 1, without any room to move to 2a/b.
But to add even more frustration, if it does move to steps 2, it always seems that 2b seems an option that is off the table, because 2a will always refer back to 1, to tacitly refute that 2b is even an option. And this is helped along by way of saying that Wittgenstein is just a methodology and a demonstration, and thus is immune from 2b. This becomes at this point futile to debate anything but more 1 and 2a, otherwise one is ground down or dismissed. This can happen to any thinker, but it seems viciously pernicious in Wittgenstein's case, being the style, the ambiguity of the text, and the demand to believe that this is a sui generis type of philosophical discourse that cannot be dealt with in the same manner as other philosophers...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/905765
While framed as a denunciation, this amounts to an endorsement of the resounding success of a man who said
You would enjoy Gellners Word and Things, he has very similar points throughout his book.
But you are right, Wittgenstein can give one mental whiplash, from solving all of the problems of philosophy to looking at philosophy as a mental disease needing a cure.
Thanks for your comments in the thread. I find them helpful.
I think 's thesis is in the process of being refined, so that it does not fall into 's heads I win, tails you lose.
What is the more precise problem at stake? I would say that it is a kind of double standard, where Wittgenstein can never be wrong but everyone else can. Everyone believes that their favorite philosophers are better than other people's favorite philosophers, but because this is not a shared premise it cannot be brought to bear in public dialogue. Wittgenstenians have a tendency to impose this premise on others, resulting in a double standard that is a form of unethical discourse.
What you say here is one way of getting at this idea:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Frank Ramsey's reply to Wittgenstein is on point, "What can't be said can't be said, and it can't be whistled either." Wittgenstein is either saying something or else he is not. It can't be had both ways. If he is saying something then he can be contradicted and he can be wrong; if he is not saying anything then he cannot. But obviously he is saying something, and along with Ramsey I'd say it is a farce to claim that he is not. (I have noticed that Wittgenstenians tend to miss the fact that conjectures and indirect locutions are also ways of saying something.)
There is something fundamental about this double standard in Wittgenstenian philosophy. "All philosophy is just language gone on holiday (except for mine, of course)." Even the very notions of subjecthood, linguistic intention, and opposing viewpoints seem to get subtly eclipsed in Wittgenstein:
Quoting Peter Simpson, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object
Wittgenstein provides himself with no way to account for the knowing subject along with their intentions and locutions. Language becomes a fact, a given, which must be parsed according to "common use" and cannot be parsed vis-a-vis the intentions of individual subjects. What this means is that to disagree with Wittgenstein is a non-starter. Disagreement presupposes knowing subjects in the world, and Wittgenstein's theory provides no room for the existence of such a thing. To think that Wittgenstein is saying something or making a statement would be to fall into the trap of thinking that knowing subjects are part of the world. The effect is that Wittgenstein gets to say things without saying things. He gets to have his cake and eat it too. Perhaps this is part of the reason why the Wittgenstenian is so awkward when it comes to disagreement. They are imposing their own system and that system cannot even theoretically account for disagreement.
(Note that the problem is already implicit in my question, "How can it be that an approach which claims to privilege the common use of language does not use language in a common way?" If, as you say, we are not to interpret Wittgenstein's language according to common use, then how are we to interpret it without recourse to the categories of intention and knowing subjects? If solipsism were true and there were only one mirror of the world, none of this would be a problem for Wittgenstein.)
:up:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
All great points along the lines I was thinking.. I think it actually informs and is informed by my articulation of the (same) problem you are discussing. See here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/905765
It is precisely this kind of self-referential back-patting that I am refuting. That his adherents make it frustrating to disagree with doesn't to me, make the measure of the philosopher, even if that was something they desired..
However, if you are judging "success" in that people are doing what one would like, (even if what one would like is what is being deemed as questionable), then I guess, good job Witt??
In my opinion he should not. An author does not maintain control over how his words are understood or used by others. In order to counteract this we can examine what the author is saying and discuss how he is to be understood. Some, however, object to this. Here specifically with regard to Wittgenstein while others are spared.
Not quite.. But rather this would be a better formulation of the objectionable argumentation:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/905765
I think the beliefs of someone who is an adherent of a philosopher will be indebted to that philosopher, and therefore the philosopher will be to some extent responsible for those beliefs. This seems straightforwardly true. I don't see how a philosopher can be said to bear no responsibility for the beliefs of their adherents.
The same holds for methodology, for philosophers should understand that their methodology will be absorbed by those who read them. If, as some have argued, Wittgenstein is methodology-heavy, then the methodology of his adherents is all the more attributable to him.
So "Should Wittgenstein be faulted for what Wittgenstenians say and do?" Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
If the intent is to understand an author, then we should not impose rules and expectations on how they are to be read. Different authors write differently and should not all be read in the same way.
To what extent? I do not think that Plato, for example, is responsible for the varied and contradictory ways is which he has been read over the centuries.
Wittgenstein too has been read and understood in different ways. Looking at the trends in interpreting him one thing that becomes evident is how much the education and concerns of the interpreter are read into their interpretation.
For instance, if you've read and accepted works like St. Maximus or the modern liturgical movement on prayer, then Wittgenstein's assessment of religious speech is going to seem very hard to swallow. Likewise, if you've imbibed Wittgenstein's view, it's going to be hard to get a good perspective on the aforementioned or perhaps to justify bothering to try.
Well, is this like optical illusions, where the rabbit and duck are both there for us to see? It depends. I have no problem saying some positions have some rather glaring flaws in some respects. There can be multiple good ways of photographing something, but this doesn't preclude that leaving your finger over the lens is a bad way.
This is a shame. I do not find as important what he is telling us (nor what he might be showing us), but more the example he sets during his investigation. People tend to use Wittgenstein as if he solved skeptical doubt, or otherwise closed the issue, and thus as a normative tool to dictate behavior, which I think is the most egregious of what @schopenhauer1 is getting at.
I dont know if this would be helpful to you, but lets compare two approaches to intentionality and language within cognitive psychology, Cogntivism and 4EA (embodied, embedded, extended and affective). The latter is also referred to as enactivism. One of the founders of enactivism described cognitivism as:
There are more recent adumbrarions of cogntivism that move away from the idea of the mind as mirror of nature, but they retain the idea of cognition and language as something that takes place inside of a brain via representational , symbolic processing. Enactivism rejects this inside-outside representational model in favor of an approach that draws from pragmatists like James and Dewey, hermeneutic philosophers like Gadamer and phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, who was also a child psychologist and wrote much on the psychology of perception. What enactivism learned from these thinkers is that mind, body and world are not separable
entities, but are inextricable aspects of an ecological
system that is based on dynamic sensory-motor coupling between the organism and its environment.
When we perceive a feature of our environment, we are not producing an internal representation of an outside, we are enacting a mode of interaction with our world oriented toward normative goals and purposes shaped on the basis of previous interactions. Perceptually, we construct the meaning of what our world is on the basis of what we intend to do with it. These normative expectations and intentions are not just subjectively but equally intersubjectively formed. Language use, like perceptual and cognitive processes, is not just in the head,not the product of Chomsky-like grammatical modules, but emerges and has its meaning refreshed through actual contexts of social engagement. Enactivists are not denying that there is a certain autonomy to individual cognitive functioning, but it is never a compete autonomy. Enactivists like Shaun Gallagher incorporate notions of the good from Aristotelian phronesis in revealing the ethical nature of social interaction, such as in striking a balance between the needs of individual autonomy and group autonomy in concrete situations.
What enactivists find valuable about Wittgenstein is his recognition that linguistic meaning and intentionality cannot be fully understood via models that begin from the idea thatmentation is a matter of rational representation of a world performed inside a brain.
None of the supporters of Wittgensteins later work I follow would be comfortable with the label of analytic philosopher. The ones whose work I resonate with ( Cavell, Rorty, Rouse, Lyotard) incorporate language games into thinking which tends to be hostile toward analytic concerns. And they also tend to either dismiss or reinterpret those words from the Tractatus on the basis of what they see as his radically different later approach.
In theory a philosopher could be reinterpreted almost endlessly. Whether this be considered 'saved' by an appeal to misunderstanding may depend on one's point of view
It's clear that Wittgenstein is a writer of complex ideas, expressed in an obscure style, with many potential meanings and uses. But I think the same holds for others, Nietzsche, Derrida, etc. People are often talking about someone having an inadequate reading of those thinkers too. I always imagined that the point of philosophy for many was to dismiss or pillory another's reading and then go on to demonstrate why one's own reading is superior. Is't that inherent in the activity?
Eh, for some it seems to be solely about the author's perspective. Perhaps this comes from how I approach most philosophy, which is jumping off points for how one's own thinking relates, contends, or aligns with the author. Analysis is necessary and a good didactic exercise, but I see it as the starting point for later doing synthesis, comparison, and ultimately, evaluation. I guess that butts up against other, more static approaches to the primary text (or secondary literature that often is employed with those like Witt, Nietzsche, Derrida, Heidegger, and the like...).
How is Tractatus not composed of "pseudo-technical vocabularies"?? I mean, yeah, maybe not like Russell, but he invented/reused some for his own purposes, no? States of Affairs, propositions, facts, objects and all the rest...And yeah, if those aren't "technical", then we wouldn't still be discussing them...
And yeah, I realize he could be talking about the "Later Wittgenstein.." but it wasn't stated like that there...
And granted, the author might have a point about overbloated academic disciplines filled with drivel... but why is Wittgenstein thus exempt? Again, odd hero-worshipping, sui generis, etc.
No, this seems just wrong too. This makes Wittgenstein sound like a neutral figure regarding how to use language, but it is clear he favored (in Tractatus) empirical claims to "Facts of the world" over language that he thought could (SHOULD) not be expressed (nonsense).. This just obfuscates his more critical aspects of his philosophy.. that he was criticizing not scientists for scientism per se, but other philosophers. It doesn't matter whether he thought playing the flute or reading a koan was "real" expression, what matters is he thought various metaphysicians as not "really" expressing anything of sense.. they were expressing (in his/early analytic use of the vocabulary) "nonsense".
All kidding aside, I've read much of this thread, and as usual, I agree with some of it and disagree with other parts. For me, Wittgenstein is extremely important in terms of what we can learn, not so much from the Tractatus, but from his method of linguistic analysis in his later philosophy, starting around 1933. I've always admired his thinking, not only in philosophy but in other areas of his life. The two areas of his philosophy that interested me, were his method of analysis as presented in the PI, and his thoughts on epistemology in his final notes (On Certainty). Epistemology is such an important part of philosophy that to ignore On Certainty is to miss an important advance in epistemological thinking.
That said, I disagree with much that was written in the Tractatus (as do many other philosophers, including Wittgenstein), and I disagree with Wittgenstein's views on metaphysics, which he carried into his later philosophy.
In terms of gatekeeping, I hope that my views have not slammed the door on others. I certainly don't consider myself a gatekeeper. I'm still learning and have found myself wrong when interpreting this or that passage. We often can't interpret correctly what we say to one another, let alone interpret Wittgenstein's passages correctly.
I don't have much patience for people who pretend to know what they don't know. What I mean is this, if you haven't seriously studied a subject, then you shouldn't be dogmatic about your views on the subject. If you are, then that seems to be more about one's ego than getting at the truth. I don't know about the rest of you, but my observation has been that most people in here are more interested in winning their argument, at any cost, than trying to ascertain what's true.
So, do I have "asshole tendencies?" Maybe here and there, but I try.
Sincerely,
Sam
But (and forgive my fragmentary knowledge of the text) I had rather thought that the final sections of the Tractatus (from about 6.371 on) were conclusions of the work as a whole. The Vienna Circle positivists interpreted them to support their contention that metaphysics is nonsensical, but Wittgenstein never attended their meetings or expressed support for them. As another review mentions - and this one was originally published by the British Wittgenstein Association, so is bona fide:
The phrases I've often pointed to in that concluding section were these:
And that is metaphysics as a matter of definition, as is the nearby (6.4312) 'The solution to the riddle of life in space and time lies outside of space and time.'
Of course, this leads directly to section 7, which are the famous last words: Whereof one can not speak, thereof one must be silent. And that is the phrase which is often invoked to dismiss what is considered to be metaphysically speculative.
This is Wittgenstein's mystical side ('However, there are unspeakable things. This shows itself, it is the mystical.') I see it as a form of apophaticism, the via negativa, albeit expressed in a non-religious idiom, unlike the traditional form, which was expressed in the idiom of pre-modern theology. in 6.53 he says:
Presumably, this is the section the logical positivists seized on to support their scientism. But they overlook the significance of what cannot be said. It's beyond reason, not irrational, and there's a world of difference. The point of this whole section, seems to me, is to arrive at a kind of apophatic silence, to realise what is beyond words. I thoroughly appreciate that, but it is easily misunderstood, seems to me.
Ok, I will say, you have been a good sport, and even gracious in this reply, being the title of this thread.... I think you have some valid points.. In effect, it this is not the gatekeeping and curtness I appeared to see in the other thread...
However I do want to examine this crucial last paragraph:
Quoting Sam26
Why is it that Wittgenstein can have a pass to riff off his own thoughts, but others cannot in relation to Wittgenstein? Odd. Being how ahistorical Wittgenstein was, I would think even the reading of Wittgenstein would invite more caprice than that of a more systemic philosopher.. But I digress..
As for most people on here just want to win an argument, absolutely agree! That is a lot of how people operate on here. Point scoring. But to turn this around a bit.. Can showing off how much of a devotee you are to the writings of a particular philosopher also turn into a pissing contest?
I tend to agree. Of course there is some interpretation involved in what counts as 'serious study' of a subject. It seems to me that most members here are autodidacts and hobbyist philosophers.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, interesting you raise this. I have sat at tables where there was furious, indeed acrimonious disagreement about Plato's meaning in exactly the kinds of terms has been deriding. There has often been an elitist dimension to academic philosophy, a reverence for one's own interpretive credentials, often as part of a cognoscenti, who are closer to truth than the rest of the academic riffraff. I imagine this a common in many fields.
Where do you think Wittgenstein has gotten a pass? Because, again, mostly we're just trying to understand what he's saying. Some of us who have studied W. for many years do have more hardened ideas about what he's saying, but that doesn't mean that he gets a pass. Maybe if you could give an e.g.
It's not as though we don't know anything about what he's saying, and where there is general agreement there tends to be more hardened views.
Quoting Tom Storm
When I speak of "serious study" I'm referring to reading and studying his many writings (primary source material), and writing about it yourself, including reading other interpretations. I don't consider myself an expert, but I do think I've seriously studied Wittgenstein's early and later thinking.
A lot to unpack there.. nice post.. but looking at the quotes there, I see a subtle shift of focus from Wittgenstein's argument which is not about philosophy as the target (it is more the consequence of his target), but about language:
That is to say, this is admonishing folks like Schopenhauer and others for trying to write what he thinks cannot be written about in any linguistic attempts.. Sensical language only deals with propositions about true states of affairs (which presumably is understood by scientific/empirical means).
So I get that at the end of it, he kind of says.."Look I deem these metaphysicans nonsensical, but you can understand them as poets!".. But this is more critical than at first blush..
It is his, at least seemingly insidious way he uses nonsense, that is not as all-embracing as he sounds at the end.. in TLP, he seems an elitist on what "sense" MUST MEAN.. He drew his line in the sand.. but on what authority?
No, you can answer if you'd like, but it was quoting @Wayfarer but the way the quoting works, I quoted from a quote he quoted, and so it only referenced the reference of the quote, and not the person quoting the reference of the quote :smile:
In my various disagreements, they have mostly been made as understanding the text differently than what was offered by others.
Your approach of placing x in a context before discussing x is itself a proposition. And open to challenge, like other propositions.
I readily admit my view is the confluence of education, experience, and personal preferences.
It was, and its precisely under this climate that Wittgenstein grew up. The second wave of positivism as characterized by Ernst Mach would eventually influence the Vienna circle and the logical positivists/empiricists, with Russell adopting Mach's position coined as neutral monism.
But, there was a tension between Mach and his contemporary Ludwig Boltzmann, who defended the use of the atomic model within science, despite it being a metaphysical claim. Boltzmann appealed to another thinker, Heinrich Hertz that articulated what was called a "picture theory", which essentially said that science can provide understanding, and furnish a cohesive picture of the world, despite being speculative, or metaphysical. Boltzmann ultimately committed suicide, in a climate wholly hostile to his explaining the expansion of gases by appealing to an atomic model. It's unfortunate, because not long after the atomic principle would ultimately be adopted.
Wittgenstein knew of Boltzmann and Hertz from their work on mechanics (They wrote the books on mechanics) which Witt studied when he was an engineering student, before he met Frege and Russell. He is quoted as saying his work was highly derived from Hertz, Boltzmann, and Frege (and a few others...i'll have to find the quote).
So, I find it interesting that Witt's own writings involve a picture theory in the same spirit of Hertz and Boltzmann, but borrows heavily from Frege's work to develop the logic.
In the Principles of Mechanics, Hertz says very little saying pretty much that a picture in the manner he is thinking is a permissible only insofar as it is logically possible. I get the sense that Witt was defending this view, and therefore is against this antimetaphysical movement. Hence, why he admonished Russell's and the LP camp's interpretation of the work.
Im not sure if this is meant to mean my description (then, where) but I would not say he is not making claims, just claims about the implications of what we say in a situation, such as that with: I believe it is raining, that it is in the sense of a hypothesis. Now of course he could be wrong. As Austin could be wrong about the functioning of an excuse in connection with an action. But, given the acceptance of those claims, his conclusions (more, the import he draws from the example) are meant to have you realize something, see something in a new way, so claiming it is wrong might be missing the point. You might already admit it without seeing any importance, not be moved to change your attitude (perspective), deny that you (must) see it that way (despite the evidence, and even without providing any countering evidence), but wrong would imply hes claiming he is right, when what he is doing is, Hey, did you notice this?
I guess the question needing answered here is: where does he say something that is wrong? (Perhaps you are right.)
Sure, and I agree, but my concern is that Wittgenstein is falling off the other side of the mean, and that this has implications for the topic of the OP. Although I should note that, according to Simpson, Wittgenstein began rectifying these problems in his later work.
This was a cartoon of Thomas Nagel post publication of Mind and Cosmos and its critique of neo-Darwinist orthodoxy
Well, and apropos of the comparisons of Wittgenstein and Buddhism, consider this example of an apophatic teaching from the Pali texts. 'The wanderer Vacchagotta' is a figure in these texts who customarily raises philosophical questions. Here the Buddha maintains 'a noble silence' to a question to which neither 'yes' or 'no' hits the mark.
Think also of the many instances of aporia in the dialogues of Plato. There, the participants are wrestling with difficult, and often insoluble questions, which frequently don't come to a conclusion. There are hints, maybes, 'could be's' and so on. Maybe Wittgenstein is saying 'now go off and wrestle with them. Don't try and wrap them up in nice neat syllogisms and repeating dogmas that you really don't understand.'
The limits, or rather limitations, of discursive thinking are likewise well understood in esoteric traditions. e.g. The Twilight Language, by Rod Bucknell, 'the notion of "twilight language" is a supposed polysemic language and communication system associated with tantric traditions. It includes visual communication, verbal communication and nonverbal communication.'
More to all this than meets the I.
;) :D
Honestly I think it comes with the territory of reading "the greats" -- they are great because they inspire thought, and you don't really have much of a choice on how much charity or skepticism you want to apply to the greats on a first reading, especially when their idiom isn't easy to comprehend. It's enough of a feat to make it explicitly coherent that criticism of the idea becomes less interesting than what the writing can inspire or which interpretation is better.
Quoting sime
Wittgensteins standards for himself were so high that he refused to publish any work in his lifetime except the Tractatus. There is a tendency among those who struggle to understand his ideas to attribute the disarray in Wittgenstein scholarship to the supposed incompleteness of the work. But I believe that even if Wittgenstein had been thrilled with PI and declared it to be exactly as he intended to write it , this would make no difference to the disagreement in the field of Wittgenstein interpreters. Every great philosopher produces camps of readers fighting tooth and nail against each others interpretations of the master. The so-called gatekeeping associated with Wittgenstein scholars is far from unique to him. Just look at the battles within Nietzsche (Leiter vs Deleuze) or Heidegger (Sheehan vs Capobianco) scholarship. If Heidegger is correct, perhaps none of todays readers fully understand Wittgenstein.
Even when a significant body of published writing is available from a philosopher , many prefer their sloppy unpublished scribblings. Heidegger recommended we ignore Nietzsches published writing in favor of his unpublished notes. Many consider Merleau-Pontys greatest work to be his unpublished , unedited and incomplete Visible and Invisible.
I do think we are circling the gist of the grievance, but you frame it as: Wittgenstein is either saying something or else he is not. First, wanting him to just say something misses the reason that about half of PI is questions; as I said, questions for you to work out, to change you. But your dichotomy also overlooks the crucial part of who he might be saying it to. Do you mean to say that he is either saying something to you, or he is not saying anything? (Nietzsche felt his audience hadnt been born yet.) But I do hear the desire to want Witt to, in a sense: just stand still already so one can punch him in the face. Why cant Witt just take a stand?
Witt isnt being coy when he confronts us with a riddle like My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. P. 178 (emphasis in the original). He is definitely making a claim about the way my position to others works (confronting the classical problem of other minds, for @Shawn and @kindred and @schopenhauer1 to see he actually is addressing history). But he is also forcing you through the wringer because (for some) it must be like an epiphany to see that although we, obviously, can not know (be certain) about another, we do not, because of that fact, fall back onto opinion, or other well-worn lessor ideas of knowledge, like: belief, or emotion, or subjectivity, or, with respect @Joshs, theoretical interpersonal gymnastics (perhaps including knowing subjects with intentions). We cannot know other minds because our relation to others is not knowledge, but how we treat them, our attitude in relation to them, in its sense of: position towards. I treat you as if you have a soul. His claim is that is how our relation to others works; that is the categorical transcendental mechanics of it.
Now thats saying more than something; its a revolution in terms, perspective, and frameworks, going back to Plato. And of course he could be wrong. But the disagreement is between two (or more) totally different ways of picturing philosophy and the human condition. Someone just saying (stating, telling) something of that nature is going to sound incomprehensible to the other. So, if you want to fight from your own turf, you will feel like he isnt playing fair. But with any philosopher (worth their salt), if you dont try to understand them on their terms, your disagreement will just be a dismissal without hitting the actual target (thus perhaps the feeling of frustration).
The same way we interpret other philosophical terms: context, distinction, implication, comparison to other senses of the words, and all our other time-tested practices.
Edit: I think the subject is important in the sense that I am the person that can be held responsible for explaining further (or may try to duck out).
Well, we have a disagreement then on legitimate forms of discourse. If I give you a premise with little reasoning or evidence to back it up, you can rightfully accuse me of a poorly constructed, or bad argument.
However, if I provid numerous details for a premise I do not make, that is not so much a bad argument, as a bad faith argument. For the adherent to demand then, that you really don't "know" what he's doing, it's "radically different" and "playing on a different turf", then we are already not playing the game.. Ironic, because Wittgenstein's very point in PI is that we must understand the language of the game in order to understand how to use language.. Yet here we are abusing language to let Wittgenstein have a free pass to not play the game.. because he's playing with different rules and it is somehow UP TO US, to understand his rules. Why? And if that's the case, why can't I make the rules, and you go to me? Does merely fandom qualify as making someone worth paying attention to in some kids-glove special way, where only THEY cannot play by the rules?
Quoting schopenhauer1 emphasis added
His conclusion would be for you to see what is being pointed out, which in this case involves a shift in perspective, seeing something we may be blind to, avoiding. The difference in outcome though does not excuse Witt from being responsible for evidence (what we imply when we say what, when), in claiming premises that must be acknowledged (the mechanics of an activity), and coming to conclusions (as I discussed above, even about the human condition).
To move us forward, I think the actual problem here is not his lack of saying something but more his style of saying it, which, I grant you, comes off as not saying anything: being cryptic, cagey, etc. And, worse, that some nevertheless take the text as self-evident anyway, and then cannot provide, as you point out, anything else but the (impotent) words themselves (as if they were patently clear), rather than further elucidation. I would go so far as to grant that anyone is copping-out who refuses to answer (continue) any call for further intelligibility, though, importantly, not only in a required form, even an answer** (as if philosophy were only about problems to be solved).
I can only say that he is writing to a particular audience (certain philosophers), as embodied by the Tractatus (his previous) rigid, imposed requirement for judging whether we are saying anything. Given this fixated intransigence, he is now (in the PI) resorting to any means necessary to break that death-grip hold for knowledge (certainty) to take our place (the picture that holds us captive PI, #115). Thus the questions without answers, the foil of the interlocutor, the riddles, the indirectness. He is doing this because he feels that philosophy needs to be radically revolutionized, and so his style, as Cavell puts it, wishes to prevent understanding which is unaccompanied by inner change, i.e., change from the position we are in (philosophy has been in), our attitude (see above), how we judge (our method).
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, I would argue he is not asking for, nor does he avoid, the rules (evidence, premise, conclusion), but, yes, it is up to us, as it is with any philosopher, to work to get through our assumptions, first impressions, etc., in order to understand the other from within, as, in other cases: the place of forms to the Good; what God is to Descartes; what imperative, categorical, and on-and-on are for Kant. These are not rules but grounds for understanding, agreement, shared vision and criteria for judgment. The import of philosophical expressions are much, much less self-evident than I think most take them to be, and, yes, I absolutely think it is up to US to do that work (you would grant that we are not asking to be spoon-fed); more, I would argue this intellectual empathy is the point of philosophy: to better ourselves in seeing the world as a larger place.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I see here how you maybe take him to be dictating the terms of argument ( why can't I make the rules, and you go to me?). I would reframe your paraphrase that he is looking at the language of an activity (game), not for us to be allowed to use language (or to bar grounds for disagreement) but to understand an activities specific rationale. The point being not to normatively police our activities (though some use him this way) but to take the que first from our history (not our desires for knowledge). Thus why Wittgenstein is not outside the tradition as much as cutting across it in a new but rational way.
Which makes this critique so fascinating because the main realization of his investigation is that imposing a standard (the requirement for crystalline purity, PI #27), before looking at what matters to a particular activity, limits our ability to see the different yet rational (truth value) ways in which the world worksto our issue, including philosophical discourse.
**And, anyway, isnt a claim to what is or is not a legitimate form of discourse to (ironically) guard the gate?
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/551
Permalink
Do you realize why both the Tractatus and the PI come off as infinitely arrogant?
And if you cannot answer, then I ask you to
Quoting Antony Nickles
So I am not going to explain anything to you from now on.. I want you to interpret my indirectness, as otherwise you will not be transformed :roll:
And mind you much of philosophy is arrogant-adjacent.. like the asshole, is the arrogance the product of the person, the context, or the activity?
Look at me with my questions! I must be a zetetic skeptic practicing maieutics.
Plato's dialogues don't just "say something," they provide questions for you to work out, to change you. Wittgenstein's monologues are comparatively banal and flat, a shallow study of the shadows on the wall of the cave, perhaps helpful to those who are mired very deep in the cave. They don't show evidence of philosophical insight, and I see no reason to conjure up fancy reasons to make up for this fact. Wittgenstein possesses no authority to try to change us, and submitting to his tutelage is harmful. The fact that our age thinks Wittgenstein is above average is a problem with our age. Wittgenstein is nothing like Socrates.
His writings are not monologues. There is often if not always an interlocutor, even when the interlocutor is silent.
Quoting Leontiskos
Authority? The fact is that many have acknowledged that Wittgenstein has changed them.
Having been deeply influenced by Plato, my first impression of Wittgenstein was similar to yours. It took me years of struggling to interpret him to change my mind. As with Plato it is a matter of participation, of engagement with the texts, of questioning and challenging, of sorting things one way or another.
I'm going to not go out on a limb here and defend .. Where as Socrates directly addressed pertinent issues of ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, Wittgenstein was hampered by his own need to appeal to the linguistic turn, thus relating everything to either "sense" vs. "nonsense" as to how language was employed or "use" and "forms of life", and the inherent breakdown of various usages of words in different contexts. This already draws from a more shallow pool, or at least tethers one to a more shallow pool, and it leads to pedantic pointing out of how language can lead to confusion, which I am not sure was not pointing out what was obvious for the common reader.. It seems more transformative if you drank the analytic kool-aid beforehand, but then that also makes the readership more shallow, and less relevant.. And then the conclusions become again, not interesting beyond the exercise in watching various ways he attempts to show language working or not working.
And my basic premise stands here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/906391
I think that might be where Leontiskos is coming from.. And again, I would tend to agree.
And I get it, the big canard is "YoU JuST DoNT GeT HiM!!" But that is the point.
I can employ his method of indirectness.. I can implicitly demand that you need to read into my writing, and that I have a methodology, and once you get it, you will be transformed.. And if you are not, you just don't understand enough yet.. but that is Appeal to Prophecy... And at that point, it becomes an Appeal to Popularity as to how legitimate your Appeal to Prophecy should be deemed.. which I also don't think is legitimate.
I was hooked immediately, from the moment I opened the Blue and Brown Books:
It's tempting just to quote the whole first page.
I thought then and still think now that this is brilliant. Here is someone I could learn something about thinking from.
I did not read this passage and think, "Ah. Wittgenstein is grounding the meaning of concepts in our customary practices." I've never gone to him for "doctrines".
There's so much to like here, but the main thing is to give your mind a little shake, get out of the sort of rut that we tend to get in thinking not just about philosophical problems but about anything. When the front door is shut tight, do you just look for bigger and bigger things to hit it with? That might work eventually or it might not. But why not have a look around? Maybe there's back door or a window open.
One aspect of Wittgenstein's philosophy was a response to prevailing assumptions, but there is more to the saying/showing distinction. In the Tractatus he follows what others said regarding facts and propositions, but by doing so he left open and guarded rather then forced closed the problems of life, beauty, and what is higher.
Although commentator's attention continued to focus on propositions, this reflects their own training and assumptions. As a result little attention was paid until recently on seeing and experiential aspects of his work.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Forms of life have more to do with might be called his anthropological turn than with linguistics.
At the risk of raising the ire of Schopenhauer1 I will once again quote Wittgenstein:
(Culture and Value)
Yeah, and so I look to anthropology for those answers.. I'll give credit to pointing there though.. if not explicitly..
What does this even "mean"? And I'm being serious. Can you explain, and not cutsey-koan "show" me.. I indeed ask you to just tell me what you meant there. What does language need protecting from? Because the use of "nonsense" itself seems to imply various things that HE created/expounded upon from others...
Edit: In other words, it seems like a problem (nonsense) that didn't even need protecting...
For example, questions about God, questions about the good and beauty,
Quoting schopenhauer1
It is not a matter of what language needing protection from but of what is off limits when language is restricted to facts. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein holds to this restriction, but this means that ethics and aesthetics are not propositional problems. They are experiential not linguistic.
Answers to what questions?
Ha! I almost did "Did anyone check to see if it's unlocked?" (Culture & Value contains many gems.)
(I have actually had such a comical experience. I once found several other managers standing around a dead terminal, trying the power buttons and talking about who to call, etc. I looked under the counter and plugged it back in. For real.)
As a further side note, there's a lovely little self-published book called "Are Your Lights On?" The title comes from a story about a highway tunnel through a mountain, in Canada I think. There's sign as you enter that says "Turn on lights" so the highway department people helpfully put a sign at the other end that says "Turn off lights." But that's obviously terrible, because it might be night-time, so round 2 of the sign was more complicated. But then what if it's raining? Whoops. Finally someone said you only need a sign that says "Are Your Lights On?" and people will do the right thing. --- The book was written by an IT guy who got tired of people coming to him wanting a particular solution (more bandwidth, more storage, whatever) to a problem they had not actually identified clearly. (Maybe we're copying too much data around. Maybe we're saving stuff we could dump.)
Lots of philosophy involves this "looking where the light is best" (or "hammer entails nail") sort of behavior, or solutions in search of problems.
Stuff relating to language
Contra whom? Not Hume.. ha.. but really.
You know where this is going...
By what authority can you limit sense versus nonsense? What standards...
Who is he explicitly against here? Other philosophers (like the German Idealists, Dutch and French and German Rationalists, certain Empiricists, the Platonists, Medieval philosophers of various sorts).. would that be correct?
"What" would count as propositional anyways without being self-referential? States of Affairs (what counts as states of affairs) are not self-evident.. without simply defining so by one's particular fiat "so I proclaim!".
That is to say, if I defined states of affairs as X, Y, Z, certainly my conclusion would thus come out a certain way.. That is only if I define states of affairs as X, Y, and Z, which besides personal prejudice/preference, doesn't seem to have a reason to be defined such and such way and not another way, one which might lead to a different conclusion.
And so on...
The concept of forms of life extends beyond language. That is the point.
Propositions, as he uses the term, are about the facts of the world, the facts of natural science. They are either true or false. If something cannot be determined to be either true or false, as he thinks is the case with ethics/aesthetics, then it does no good and potentially much harm to treat it as if it were a linguistic or propositional problem.
The other day, in one of these threads, I had a disagreement with @Leontiskos about an author's responsibility for how they might be misunderstood. This is a great example.
I think my point holds. A preacher also has an interlocutor, for instance.
Quoting Fooloso4
Well, I admit that I was being a bit hyperbolic in the face of Nickles' persistence, but I think Wittgenstein is deeply time-bound in a way that Plato is not. In my estimation no one will read Wittgenstein 50 years hence. Part of it is that Plato's method is better at pulling people in and appealing to a broad audience, but that is part of his magic.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Agreed.
Quoting Fooloso4
I am by no means an expert on Wittgenstein, but given the attitude of his adherents this strikes me as doubtful.
Good. Compare that to Plato's Cave. I think it falls short, though it does have its limited use.
In general his thought strikes me as cramped and artificial, although I recognize that in relation to what he was surrounded by it was just the opposite. Perhaps he was a corrective more than a lasting figure. Of course I could be wrong.
Sure, and I can use the term a different way..
Quoting Fooloso4
Exactly! You start with a premise you get a conclusion. What is to say you cannot use a different premise as what "facts about the world" are and thus a different conclusion? It's a preference for discussing reality in terms of empirical findings using a certain institutionally defined method...Of course if I started with those fiat assumptions I would come up quickly not only with the conclusion of Tractatus, but with quite the opposite notion (that it's basically how you use the words in a language community) in Investations.. It seems like a big conversation he is having with his own views...
Quoting Fooloso4
Why would it do "much harm"? But the bigger question, and the one that's more important is why non-scientific/empirical kinds of questions cannot be true or false.. Different criteria can be used, for example, as to what counts as "evidence". But this to me seems so strikingly apparent, I am not sure why it isn't brought up more against his case and thus I ponder what the big deal is... If your sentiments on things are (haughtily) in line with his ideas to begin with, then it's just a big "Yeah I think that too!" echo chamber, but no real justification for why science/empiricism. In fact, if he spent any/more time on that and not simply the assumption of that, perhaps we would be having a different discussion!
There have now been several generations of Wittgenstein scholars and several different ways in which he has been read and understood. In addition, he has gained the attention of artists and poets.
I don't know if you miss the point or are just being argumentative. If a term is used in more than one way then if we are to understand an author we must understand how they are using particular terms. This is not something unique to Wittgenstein. That is why some editions and discussions of a philosopher's work includes a glossary.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It can lead to confusion or nihilism.
Quoting schopenhauer1
You might argue that it is either true or false that God or the Good exists. Are you able to determine and demonstrate to the satisfaction of others whether it is true or false?
No I am not being argumentative, but I am saying it is precisely justification for "why science/empirical" as the definition that is not explained. Thus why should I take the conclusions as relevant, if I don't have a clear understanding of why he chose those premises that lead to those conclusions?
Quoting Fooloso4
I don't think people who discuss, defend, or engage in those theories think that. Seems like a strawman, or a solution to a problem that does not exist except for certain people who deem it so (Russell, Mach, Vienna Circle, etc.).
Quoting Fooloso4
That is really subjective. Someone might find it convincing, another person may not. The key here is "the satisfaction of others".. What "others" are we to say must count as having to be satisfied?
The bigger point from this is, much of philosophy relies on the basis of thought, which goes beyond what can be proven empirical.. There is no reason or sense in limiting philosophy to only one aspect of the outcome of how our senses evaluate the world. Rather, we can also examine the conditions behind the outcomes (experiments/observations), the conditions for truth itself (mathematical, empirical, logical, or otherwise), what "free will" is, what "subjectivity" is, etc. etc.
There is nothing in the definition of "philosophy" or "language" that demands that they preclude non-scientific topics that are to be analyzed and evaluated in various stringent, and rigorous ways...
Those are the people he is addressing, the people he is engaged with.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Right. Unlike the facts of natural science.
Quoting schopenhauer1
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein distinguishes between philosophy and natural science. Philosophy is not about the facts of the world.
The sciences too. The whole hot debate in evolutionary theory today, the focus on genes to the exclusion of all else, seems to be somewhat a case where people would like to focus "just on genes," precisely because they are easy to measure. On the face of it though, obviously developmental biology and behavior affect selection.
Likewise, regardless of the merits of the computational theory of mind, it seems less and less plausible that brains' functioning can be explained just in terms of neurons firing or not firing. There is a whole lot more complexity there, yet you see the same focus on "what is easy to model and frame."
But, as good as this sort of insight [I]can[/I] be:
I think complaints about Wittgenstein's descendents often tend to center on this sort of thinking itself becoming totalizing. That is, [I]everything[/I] becomes a pseudo problem, or in need of some sort of dissolution. But, taken far enough, this just falls back into the same sort of mistake. Something akin to "always focusing on how the door might already be unlocked instead of looking for keys, because it is assumed keys are unnecessary."
I don't really see this in Wittgenstein, although I can see an argument that he distances philosophy too much from human life as a whole. I think it is actually something he warns against, which makes the evolution of his thought in other hands pretty ironic.
Maybe here is where the lack of attention to history comes back to bite him. The article I posted early goes into how similar St. Augustine's ideas on language are to Wittgenstein's in many respects. But Wittgenstein himself only uses Augustine to put forth a very simplistic image of language (and I don't think he is being unfair to Augustine here, he is just not using very much of him). So, his ideas then aren't connected to past thought in a way they might have been.
Why does this matter? Well, in terms of dissolution and the hunt for "pseudo problems" becoming totalizing itself, I think it would have been helpful for Wittgenstein's descendents to see where some predecessors had quite similar thoughts, and how they had already tied into the history of philosophy and various problems. That way, you don't get a totalizing vision of "wiping the slate," entirely clean of the sort that makes the world look entirely like nails for the hammer of dissolution. Maybe. I'm not sure about that lol. I tend to find the historical comparisons useful though.
I would think a philosophical position would be more than simply having the acceptance of one's social circle..
Quoting Fooloso4
What makes them then have "sense" in language? That is my contention.. That he thinks if it doesn't have empirically valid outcomes it is "nonsense".. He is arbitrarily delineating language that way, and for his friends apparently...
Quoting Fooloso4
He clearly thinks that philosophy entails a lot of "nonsense"..
Does he think a philosopher like Kant is a valid form of thinking about reality or not, is the question.. We can go around in circles..that it's useful nonsense or protected nonsense.. but there is something he is trying to say about philosophy that is not centered around the empirical.. I wonder what that is.. can't be disparaging at all...
The philosophers write for those who already have faith in philosophy. Peer reviews, , publications in books, journals and pamphlets (the old-fashioned ways). The one that could be in a position to critique another's theory or hypothesis is no other than the philosopher himself.
Remember the BROADSHEET? It was purported that Descartes plastered one on the door of the apartment of one of his academic colleagues. (I'm not sure if I'm remembering it correctly that it was Descartes).
So yeah, I mean, thankfully for sites like this, we can participate in this philosophy circle if we have the interest strong enough to do justice to the writings of the masters.
No, what I meant was he was writing for a very specific set of philosophers, who more-or-less held views regarding "nonsense" and things outside the scientific purview in regards to language use.
Though later on, when they tried to make his work as a great work advocating for the abolishment of various philosophical schools of thought... Wittgenstein, whilst agreeing in one sense, did not want to diminish poetry, religion, etc..
The fact still remains that as far as WRITING about PHILOSOPHICAL topics, he thought that various things that were not talking about empirical statements, were not to be taken seriously as philosophy proper.. I see it as evaluative of other philosophical types of thinking that weren't empirical-based.. discussing scientific observations, etc.
A part is not the whole. I think you know this. In any case, this put him at odds with his "social circle".
Quoting schopenhauer1
The contention is that they don't. When people talk about God there is no one thing that they are all referring to. No one thing they all mean.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think he might be following Kant with regard to making room for metaphysics as a matter of practice, of how you live.
That's fine.. It's up to the writer to then explain the historical context and use of the concept...
Quoting Fooloso4
But Kant TALKED about (at the least) epistemology, and Noumena as metaphysics.. and things that cannot be empirically proved or disproved.. Don't play coy here.. Kant is WROUGHT throughout with non-empirical ideas that can't be "proven" scientifically but are the FOUNDATIONS for thought itself!
Does the irony of all this escape you? Wittgenstein is not to blame for your asshole tendencies. Across multiple threads I have attempted to discuss Wittgenstein with you as I understand him. In response you have called me a "fanboy" and other things including now accusing me of playing coy.
In regards to the problem of 'totalizing' propositions, there is an interesting historical comment made in the Tractatus:
Quoting ibid.
This supports my previous contention that choosing not to couch his arguments in the context of other writings does not mean he was unaware of them. The discussion of solipsism, for example, surely sounds like a debate with Kant, even though it is not presented that way.
Sure. I've said as much myself.
There's a couple things going on here.
On the one hand, all models are wrong, but the process of modeling is iterative. You account for some factors, see what's left over, and then you can start looking where there's less light.
On the other hand, we want to be open to switching from Ptolemy to Copernicus.
The choice between complicating an existing model and replacing it with another isn't always simple. The new model will also be wrong, maybe at first more than the one you've got. Even figuring out whether you should refine an existing model is tricky: as you get closer, the signal to noise ratio is falling, by definition, so you have to beware of over-fitting.
I think all of this applies not just to institutional knowledge production but to us in general and to each of us as individuals.
Two points now about Wittgenstein.
First, since all models are wrong, often what's at stake when he says something like "A picture holds us captive" is not whether the model is right or wrong, but whether it applies to all cases or only some, whether it's mostly right about those cases, or only a little. It might not be a matter of abandoning a model, so much as there being other models that are more useful for some of the cases your existing model doesn't handle very well.
And in general, I think he's very interested in the sorts of things we do willy-nilly, oversimplifying, overgeneralizing, and not just to say "don't do that". It's here I think there is something deep about Wittgenstein, this feeling that there are things we might legitimately call "mistakes" we cannot really avoid. You could say we'll dialectic or iterate our way out of that, but I'm not so sure, and I'm not sure he was.
I'm not sure if it's the philosopher or the adherents but Wittgenstein's whole Tractatus is to prove that some philosophical writing is nonsense.. so you can say that I'm an asshole or whatever, but relegating whole swaths of philosophy as "nonsense" is a pretty damn asshole move.. And then you deny that it applies to pretty famous "nonsense" philosophies (ACCORDING TO HIS IDEA OF NONSENSE)>...
And yeah, denying that his NONSENSE idea applies to various philosophers of metaphysics (like Kant), is playing coy.. so yeah.......
Well you hit the nail on the head with this. Unapologetically arrogant. And, on the face of it, inexplicably so. It comes off as personality, but there is something to be said. In the Tract he had a desire and an imposed standard for every statement. He would only say what he could be sure of, certain about (a la Descartes)so it has a dictatorial ring. What he learns through the PI is that this singular requirement (before starting; an imposed pre-requisite) of what he would allow himself to state, narrowed his topics and what he would see/could say. In the PI, instead of imposing a requirement, he is looking first (investigating) for the requirements (criteria) that already exist, each different, for each individual example (their grammar/transcendental conditions, e.g., of: following a rule, seeing, playing a game, guessing at thoughts, continuing a series ).
As Ive said, in first starting with the workings of a practice, he is making claims about them (premises of a sort) that everyone is in a position to judge, and so he, in a sense, speaks for all of us (in Kants universal aesthetic voice from the 3rd critique of judgment), as if to say, before each, We would all accept that , e.g., When someone whom I am afraid of orders me to continue the series, I act quickly, with perfect certainty, and the lack of reasons does not trouble me. (PI # 212) If they are controversial, they are not taken as evidence (PI #128). If you look past the pompous, didactic tone, you can see that you would be able to disagree in each case if you wanted, provide your own scenarios, etc.
Quoting Leontiskos
And here Leontiskos is absolutely right. The goal at this point is acknowledgement. Thus why these claims are sometimes called obvious. The insight is the comparison between these claims and the traditional claims made by philosophy. Not that the ordinary grammar is right, or solves (or dismisses)
the philosophers problems, but the contrast brings to light traditional philosophys hidden desires (for purity).
Quoting Leontiskos
Again, yes. Despite the look of it, his grammatical claims (premises) do not have any authority except that which you would grant them (accept in them). And these claims in and of themselves change nothing (PI #124).
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, Socrates requirements put him in the category of the author of the Tractatus, but the method of the PI is basically the same; thus all the questions by Wittgenstein, the interlocutor, the examination of what anyone might say that we bump into on the street, etc. And Socrates does also ultimately want us to better ourselves through the process of philosophy (its not all about true knowledge).
I agree that Platos writing is better and more engaging. Witt is abrasive and speaking only really to hardcore analytic philosophers. My hope is that philosophy learns what it should from Witt and can move forward, though I dont see that happening for the most part currently, probably because the desire he finds, for certain generalized answers, has always (timelessly) been unavoidably seductive to philosophy (e.g., Platos abstraction).
"Had there been more [engagement with the tradition] he wouldn't have spent as much time in perplexity and reinventing wheels" (Gregory Sadler).
The way Wittgenstein leads with Augustine in PI rubs me the wrong way. It feels like he is setting up a caricature, both with respect to Augustine's thought and with respect to the tradition which went on to develop Augustine's thought. It looks like Wittgenstein read a few sentences of Augustine's most popular work (The Confessions) and then used this (caricature) as a point of departure or foil for his own approach. There is no attempt to wrestle with or understand either Augustine or that broader tradition, and for this reason the start of the PI seems to be a lesson in how to not do philosophy. This is also a good example of the self-referential posture that is so common with him.
---
- Fair points. :up:
The idea that there could be an objective moral truth or authority might serve to blunt peoples' moral senses, undermine their trust in their own moral intuitions. There are many examples of this in history, where the moral injunctions in the Bible have led to horrible abuses. Consider, for example, the biblical injunction to kill men found to be having sexual relations together; such proscriptions are introjected and even as they may eventually be historically softened still come to fuel bigotry.
Quoting schopenhauer1
It's not so much a matter of the answers to such questions not being able to be true or false, but about our ability to establish definitely the truth or falsity of them, as we can when it comes to (at least some) empirical, logical and mathematical questions.
The point is that we know what evidence looks like in those last-mentioned domains but have no idea what could constitute definitive evidence for the truth of aesthetic, ethical, moral or religious assertions.
That doesn't make it "nonsense" though. It doesn't make it any less legitimate to "philosophize" about. It is arbitrarily marking out what philosophy is allowed to be called "sense" and "nonsense". As I said earlier, you stack the premise a certain way and of course your conclusion comes out that way, but not justifying why that premise makes something "legitimate" or more specifically, "sense", and another not, is simply asserting your own preference for the premise.. and wouldn't you know it, there was a whole movement starting with Frege that was a ripe audience for such views.. gee whiz.
Yes I understand, but nice summary of thinking of Tractatus and the move to PI...
The former understandings which are consistent and coherent with those sense-based modalities and the massively complex and mostly coherent web of understanding that has evolved by virtue of those ways of making sense, are readily distinguishable from the other kinds of undetermined speculations based on aesthetic, moral or religious intuitions or desires or fears or anxieties, with the former appropriately being named 'sensical' and the latter non-sensical.
The implication there is that the latter are not clearly related to the world of the senses, or the causal, logical and mathematical understandings which have evolved from the experience of that world. And I take 'non-sensical' in this context to indicate that difference in distinction to 'sensical', and not to be a declaration that such speculations are utter nonsense, or worthless, which they clearly are not, any more than poetry is or moral attitudes or aesthetic judgments are.
But we all know this distinction. We didn't need Tractatus to tell us this.. in fact, Kant did an excellent job spelling out the differences in possible justifications for "truth" conditions.... To focus on synthetic a posteriori truth as somehow the only one that one "meaningfully" discuss, is the very point that needs to be contested..
It's a sleight of hand to say that "there is a distinction between synthetic a posteriori truths and other types of truths (which everyone can probably agree to some extent)", and somehow use this obvious point to posit, "ONLY synthetic a posteriori truth is meaningful in linguistic terms".. That there is a distinction doesn't mean THUS it is meaningful.
Also, your use of "sense" here I believe, is playing around with the term "nonsense".. Nonsense does not necessarily mean "non-sensed by the five senses", but more in the Frege "sense" of "sense" and "reference". That there is a cat on the mat has a reference, because it can have some empirical element of verification (not simply that you can sense with your five senses.. that is something more along the lines of Mach perhaps, which @013zen can elucidate more on.. that you literally need some direct empirical verification from observational evidence and not just a model from that evidence)..
But anyways, there is nothing he is proving such that language cannot be meaningful if it is discussing something that has no direct reference by way of empirical a posteriori means.. That is to say, there can be truth to "reality" that is beyond this, and it can be discussed, and discussed without leading to confusion.. Rather, terms have to be more clearly defined, etc.
Now, Wittgenstein does come around to this conclusion in the PI, that it depends on the use of the word in a language community, but that beyond public use, the word can get misunderstood, and it would be hard to discern if anyone is really "getting it" other than the public use of it.. This seems like an obvious reality to me, though I guess his exhausting examples of language breakdown just hammer the point home.. But that being said, no one is contesting that human communication is almost impossible to be 100% clear or meaningful, because it is impossible to get in someone's head and go, "OH YOU REALLY GET IT!". .Rather, you can never truly know beyond public displays that someone's inner understanding corresponds with their public use.
I'll add
This is not however how Wittgenstein regarded Augustine at all. One witness reports that Witt thought the Confessions 'the most serious book ever written'.
It's also an unusual starting point in a work of 20th century philosophy.
I also have a list of irks with how Witt is taken/used/interpreted.
I have claimed the primary focus in the PI is to examine why philosophy wants certainty (purity), and, even more, to learn something about ourselves in the process. Traditionally, this is the issue of skepticism (moral relativism, doubt, justified knowledge, belief, etc.) which I would say is aif not thefounding issue of philosophy (the generation of, or affecting, all others: knowledge, metaphysics, mind, the problem of other minds, morality, etc.) With the PI, we are at a deeply analytic, pre-constructive level, mostly tearing down and looking beneath what philosophers have said, but in order to learn why we end up saying it, and what we can learn from that (seemingly, but greater than, a lesson in how to not do philosophy as @Leontiskos has said)
The most popular ways to miss the import here (or take certain things too ferventlytotalizing Id.) are to take Witt as either solving skepticism or dismissing it as an issue, such as: people who talk about use in language games or forms of life as if they were foundational; that philosophical issues are just confusions (say, of language); that this is just a therapy to cure us; that we are only discussing linguistics (turning from the actual world and our larger issues); that he is policing what can or cannot be said or what does or does not make sense.
A lot of this is caused by people not getting past looking at PI as simply a set of statements of facts/opinions/arguments about language, meaning, rules, etc. rather than these topics being just case studies (examples) in the service of a new method of looking at language, but in its sense of: our expressions, as in, the things people say in each case (and not a theory of meaning or explanation of how language works).
This distinction is clearest in the almost uniformly misinterpreted PI #109. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. It is not that language is the means of our bewitchment, so we just need to get clear about language in order not to be bewitched. Language is the means of battling; looking at our expressions is the method by which we battle.
What this amounts to is either trivializing or reifying Witt, but in each case, simply grasping at the surface of the text rather than engaging with the process, to identify with the authors, and interlocutors, confusions and desires, as he works through why we end up unsatisfied with philosophy as it stands (classically) andwhat I take to be the ultimate pointwhat that says about the human condition.
True, Kant doesn't tell us that the only truth is synthetic a posteriori, but then neither does Wittgenstein. I mean he doesn't talk in those terms, and neither is it implicit in his philosophy as far as am aware. So, it's not clear what you think you are taking aim at here. The distinction I referred to was not confined to synthetic a posteriori propositions.
I agree that there are parallels between what Kant's and Wittgenstein's philosophies, but the foci are quite different, the former being epistemological and the latter semantic, and even in the latter's later philosophy, phenomenological. Both do treat traditional metaphysics as being impossible as sciences of the determinable because both reject the idea of intellectual intution being able to provide knowledge or testable porpositions.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The idea of sense and reference incompletely in line with how I was treating the ideas of sensicality and non-sensicality. When we refer to logical or mathematical terms or empirical objects, then we have determinable referents. when we refer to God or Will or Karma or the Absolute, we do not have determinable referents.
So those terms are without sense in that they are speaking about "something" completely removed from determinably shareable human experience. They are "poetic" terms that signify certain kinds of feelings, certain kinds of affective experiences that are mutually comparable only in the sense that people within particular cultures use traditionally embedded terms to attempt to communicate those "ineffable" experiences.
It doesn't follow however that such non-sensical terms are nonsensical in the sense of being utterly meaningless, to repeat, they are non-sensical only in the sense that they lack determinable referents. Wittgenstein did not reject the ineffable, in fact he accorded it the greatest importance in human life, and that was precisely where he diverged from the Logical Positivists.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, this seems to be a strawman.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This doesn't seem to me to be the point at all. We clearly can know well enough what we are talking about when it comes to empirical, logical and mathematical matters; with religion, aesthetics and ethics, not so much, because the latter are groundless. We can get each other in aesthetic, ethical and religious discourse, but we do so in terms of canonicity, tradition and feeling, and the subjects we discuss are really ineffable when it all boils down. That's my general take on the human situation, and I think it accords fairly well with both Kant and Wittgenstein, insofar as I am familiar with their philosophies.
Thanks Anthony, your nicely articulated explanation seems apropos to me insofar as my familiarity with Wittgenstein's work goes, which is obviously not nearly as far as yours.
However, as others have said, this is not Wittgenstein's problem, but merely some who follow him in this manner. Many treat him respectfully without worship.
Lastly, there are others who have what I think are significantly worse "schools": Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze. But these are aberrations.
Anthony Nickels as many point out here, is fun to interact with and is quite interesting.
Thank you Manuel. Now let me explain how youve framed that incorrectly.
That is a predominantly psychological observation. Where does the philosophy start? Or not?
Please "do" so. But "show", don't "tell". Using words, not "words". :wink:
Is it?
Is that also predominantly psychological? No philosophy?
Yep.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That's a claim about human nature. This is not only different but, arguably, diametrically opposed to a predominantly psychological claim.
The critique of psychological, as I understand it, is not to say: affected by the unconscious (neurosis or insecurity, etc.), but on par with emotive or subjective or otherwise irrational. Part of what Witt is doing is showing that we are not divorced from our rationality; that even objectivity is a product of our (subjective) desire.
Looking at what we would say when doing for example: (following) rules, meaning (what we say), understanding (a series), seeing (an aspect), knowing (as being certain), etc., reveals the criteria (standards) of a practice (its grammar), because what we say expresses us. Our expressions show how and why we are interested in our practices. And these criteria are not individual (psychological, or self) interests (or feelings, being persuaded), but all our history of human lives of distinguishing and identifying and judging, i.e., what is essential to us about a practice, the various reasons that count with/to it.
Quoting Paine
For one thing, Cavell follows Witt at the end to be drawing a different kind of limit for knowledge (than say Kants). As with others souls (p. 178) or the pain causing another to writhe in front of us (p. 235), we do not know it, because that is not how knowledge works. We respond to them (or ignore them). That is how humanity and pain are treated, the way in which they matter to us, their grammar. A philosophical implication of this is that we are responsible for our actions and words, rather than the only alternatives being knowledge and certainty or doubt and interpretation. The alternative to privacy is not publicness but personally answering for what we say. Where our knowledge (beforehand) ends, we carry (on) the weight of our acts.
This may not be the appropriate place to make this comment, but Wittgenstein says otherwise. At PI 246, he says that: other people very often know if Im in pain.
As you like.
I think the question is interesting: what does philosophy want? Not: what do philosophers want? Not: what do people hope to achieve by doing philosophy? But what does philosophy "itself", as we might say, want? And should we understand "philosophy" here to mean a particular tradition? A practice? A discipline?
@Antony Nickles says philosophy wants certainly, which he glosses (or does he?) as "purity". Is that a good answer? Is it the right kind of answer? What does it mean to say that philosophy wants certainly?
Do you have an answer straight off to what philosophy wants? I have a feeling you do, but are you sure it's the answer to this question?
Quoting Luke
I walked into that. But at the start of the sentence he says If we are using the word to know as it is normally used (emphasis added) which is to say not with certainty (as the interlocutor wants for the standard for knowledge) but as: say, for example, in its role as recognition, like I know they are in pain because I saw their pain on their face or when we can confirm without signs, as I know they are in pain because I learned their best friend died and they are hiding it to be strong for the kids. These other versions (uses) have different standards and means of determining when they can be said than the (philosophical) sense of knowledge as identical or constant or unmistakable (certainty), which would make our inner lives indistinguishable.
But the question isn't why you or I do, or don't do, what philosophy does, but why does philosophy do what it does? According to @Antony Nickles, philosophy does what it does because it wants certainty. If you then ask, "Why does philosophy want certainty?" that's still not a question about what you or I or Antony want. You can, of course, just deny that it makes sense to talk about "what philosophy wants" or even "what philosophy does." Would like to do that?
Well now the walls are truly up and the gate is closed, and without any explanation of what they are and why. As I pointed out here, this claim doesnt even mean actual psychology, nor is looking at what we might say in a situation really anthology, and so it is unclear what the actual critique consists in other than name-calling at this point. What even is the thing that philosophy does?
But yes, Witt is revolutionizing philosophy by seeing the human within ithistory, interest, our limits, and, ultimately, how and when we make a stand rather than hoping knowledge will solve everything. His first claim being that our desires and interests were already involved in the very act of trying to eradicate them. Plato wanted something specific in only accepting a certain criteria for knowledge, in his fear of the sophists, who he characterizes as only persuading people. After relegating away the world, Kant still sought a standard that would be complete without our involvement. Descartes no longer wanted to be surprised by (the possibility of) being wrong, and so imposed a criteria that sets the standard for what he will accept before he even begins (the same for the author of the Tract). We are falible, limited, but, instead of aiming to be reasonable, maybe reconciliable, we turn our human condition with the world into an intellectual problem.
Isn't this an example of "totalizing"?
Certainty and the crystalline purity of logic are two different but related things.
Quoting Antony Nickles
It is our understanding (Verstandes) not our intelligence that is bewitched. The Revised 4th Edition makes this correction.
At the root of that misunderstanding is the relation of names and objects.
(PI 1)
Language lacks the precision and exactness that the philosopher expects and demands of it. It is not language itself but this misunderstanding of how language works, this particular picture of language, that is what has bewitched philosophers, including the early Wittgenstein.
(PI 38)
When Socrates asks: "What is 'x'" he is looking for what everything that is 'x' has in common that distinguishes it from all else. It is in response to such demands and expectations of language that Wittgenstein introduces the concept of language-games.
(PI 23)
Added:
The bewitchment of language runs deep. It is found in the search for universals and essences. Language is both the means of bewitchment and the means by which it can be overcome. Simply looking at our expressions is not sufficient. We often find expressions, as we often do here, that ask for the essence of religion or morality or the self or consciousness.
I see that as a broad-reaching strawman for all philosophers in general. For example, how could Schopenhauer not be aware of the ineptness of language to capture something like Nirvana, or that the world is both unified and individuated? These are inherently contradictory concepts. That didn't "bewitch" him, but rather he just sought out various ways to explain it in both Western notions and (newly published) Eastern notions.
Witt is solving a problem for many philosophers, that simply wasn't there to begin with, EXCEPT for certain ones demanding various forms of rigorous world-to-word standards.. And those seem to be squarely aimed at the analytics, if anyone at all.
I am pointing out the fact that, according to their own intentional frame, the one who asks this question is no longer doing philosophy.
Because it's a question about philosophy?
Yes, and this is particularly true in the case where one is distancing themselves from philosophy. One could raise the question without leaving the philosophical frame, but it seems clear that that is not what is happening here. This would be the difference between the question, "What is it that we are doing as philosophers?" and the question, "What is it that those philosophers are doing?"
(And the reification of "philosophy" does not change this point, nor does asking about the motivation behind philosophy as opposed to asking about the activity of philosophy.)
I agree, and an interesting subtopic regards the distinction between the kind of philosophy which constructively builds on what has come before, versus the kind of philosophy which is a rupture with all that came before. I want to say that the latter kind is a weak in various ways. It also tends to walk hand in hand with hubris. And I am willing to concede that Wittgenstein is following this trend, not inaugurating it all by himself.
Well, I took a class on Wittgenstein years ago in undergrad from very much a Wittgensteinian asshole. Early Wittgenstein (Tractatus-era) is very different from the later Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein. Basically a 180. We studied later Wittgenstein.
I think it partly stems from the fact that Wittgenstein's followers consider his work as brilliant yet underappreciated by mainstream philosophers & academics. Anyway, Wittgenstein challenges an Augustinian approach to language which undergirds or is presupposed by not only by much modern philosophers but in other fields as well.
But it was an interesting class. I remember one day one of the topics we discussed wasn't "did Moses exist" but "what would it mean for Moses to exist?" and this still resonates with me. The biblical Moses does A, B, C, D etc. -- according to the Bible -- that is the "biblical moses." But if he only did e.g. A & C would he still be "Moses?" Or what if his name wasn't even Moses but something else but maybe he did "A"? I think this to myself everytime someone says Moses wasn't a "real."
Wittgenstein quotes Augustine:
quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio. (PI 89)
"What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asksme; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.
This is a question philosophers and scientists still grapple with today.
You responded before I could add:
Quoting Fooloso4
Cool, but I just dont see the demand for certainty with these concepts as a problem to begin with. They are jumping off points for critical thinking. If one sets up a straw man against all philosophers, one can set oneself up as doing the real deconstruction, humbly offering oneself as just showing the way (out of the bottle that wasnt there).
Edit: for example, Schopenhauers WWR isnt because he is frightfully uncertain about reality (perhaps Descartes used this thought experiment but I can probably defend that as well simply as a tool), but rather using ideas from Kant and eastern philosophy to answer various questions, presumably knowing words are mere words but can still convey ideas that can elucidate the subject without being stated of affairs thus empirically verified.
Well, the form in which the question is posed, "What does philosophy want?", has neither a first nor a third person pronoun, so it is a matter of interpretation, of context, of intention.
--- Perhaps here it's worth mentioning that @Antony Nickles offered a statement; I take responsibility for the question his statement would serve as an answer to. ---
Why do you think it was clear the question was not asked within the "philosophical frame"?
What would persuade you it was a philosophical question? Can you clarify what does and what does not belong within the philosophical frame?
Yes, I edited my post to include this idea. I don't think it changes my point.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
A statement about a question, "I have claimed the primary focus in the PI is to examine why philosophy wants certainty (purity)..." ().
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
When someone engages in the psychoanalysis of philosophy they are surely not in a self-consciously philosophical frame. I'm not sure how you could think that someone who claims to be examining the motives of philosophy tout court is at the same time thinking of themselves as a philosopher. In Wittgenstein's case he will reject those motives after analyzing them, and then profess to be doing something different from what philosophy had previously been doing, which makes my point all the more plausible.
Quoting Leontiskos
I agree that Wittgenstein presumes to step outside of philosophy, as he characterizes it, in order to critique it. But what if he had instead claimed that a desire for certainty was made possible by the emergence of the very conception of certainty as a peculiarly modern philosophical invention, a development which formed the basis of the modern sciences? In this case he would be making neither a psychological claim, nor a metaphysical claim (desire for certainty somehow being a universal a priori, as Heidegger claimed that falling prey to the world is an a priori), but rather an assertion concerning a movement within history of philosophy.
Is this not a reformulation of the Ship of Theseus? Yes, the analytics were/are indeed caught up on the definition of "is". The Morning Star is the Evening Star right? Or is it?
Identity and essence are the stuff of Plato and Aristotle, the "modern" spin is putting in the linguistic context I guess, and using "possible worlds" for necessity and contingency.
Were you not using the word know as it is normally used when you said that we do not know the pain causing another to writhe in front of us (because thats not how knowledge works)?
When does one step outside of philosophy into psychology? What in earlier editions of the PI was called "Part II" is in the revised 4th edition called "Philosophy of Psychology". Is he here no longer doing philosophy? Or is he not doing psychology?
Plato made no such distinction.
I think the questions of what philosophy wants and why it wants this or that are misguided. Philosophy is an activity. These questions are analogous to asking what baseball wants and why.
Distinctions between disciplines are not hard and fast. Rather than maintain these distinctions there has been a move toward cross-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary practices - philosophy of science, neurophilosophy, and so on.
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein says:
Psychology is no more closely related to philosophy than any other natural science.
Theory of knowledge is the philosophy of psychology (4.1121)
Is there anywhere in the later works where he makes such a distinction?
In any case, one need not step outside philosophy to ask about philosophy. When Wittgenstein reflections on what we do and want and expect when we are doing philosophy he is asking this from within his philosophical practice.
That's a wonderful quote. And adaptable to a range of matters.
He doesn't talk in those terms (which to me is a problem if you don't acknowledge what came before), but I don't agree that it is not implicit in his philosophy. Empirical observation is basically the kind of "justification" or "truth condition" or "judgement" that equates to synthetic a posteriori in Kant. Tractatus seems to really take the distinction that matters (THIS kind of judgements is SENSE!), whereas other judgements are either nonsense or simply how language syntax must operate. But there is no explanation of how other truths cannot be philosophically valuable (not just POETRY or whatever dismissive thing you give other forms of philosophical writing)..
Quoting Janus
Indeed, I am at a loss why, when working in academic philosophy, you wouldn't do a much more thorough look at Kant who wrote about this, and is re-writing as if Kant's ideas don't readily address this. In other words, making the turn to linguistics without any EPISTEMOLOGICAL or METAPHYSICAL underpinnings is a bereft endeavor because it is precisely how it is that language can map onto reality, the mind of the observer, and such that is at question, not simply making fiat distinctions between this kind of epistemological justification and that kind of epistemological justification, making pronouncements that those that aren't empirical are nonsense and should be relegated to poetic status or some such nonsense. And again, I know he drops the pretense in PI, but we were talking Tractatus.
Quoting Janus
"incompletely in line".. not sure what you meant there. You are repeating what I said, but I was saying that you seemed to indicate it was about what can be "sensed" which is not what he meant by "sense" and thus I was correcting that to my understanding of what he meant.
Quoting Janus
Then Schopenhauer, Kant, Plato, the German Idealists, the French Rationalists, The Berkeleyan Empiricists, even the classic empiricists, should all be considered as valid forms of philosophical writing.. and not relegated as anything else.. My issue isn't simply that he called things nonsense, but the implication that certain things SHOULDN'T be said, because they can only be felt or shown, or revealed or whatnot.. Which of course, flies against much of philosophical writing which does try to EXPLAIN various "non-empirical" ideas.
And then here you are contradicting that Wittgenstein is discounting philosophical DISCOURSE and relegating it to something else.. thus doubling down on his point:
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
Well, I would think because Kant is WRITING in WORDS in explanatory language, his ideas on non-empirical types of philosophical topics, that it would fall under the critique you and Wittgenstein had on such type of philosophical writing.
You assume that other "truths" can be established to be so, presumably in some way other than emprically, logically, mathematically. Can you give an example of such a truth, show how it is established to be such, and show its philosophical value?
For me, to say something is poetry is the furthest thing from being dismissive. You are doing some excellent misreading!
Quoting schopenhauer1
Typo...should have been "is completely".
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think all that is your own projection.
The insight is based on the fact that certain philosophy has a special requirement for knowing (identity), while ordinarily we would just say we know in that we see they are in pain, recognize it (or ignore it). Anothers pain is not known, it is responded to, which might shift our thought on the position we are in with each other, and the role certainty plays in it.
The point that I have been making over and over again is that the one making the criticism of philosophy is intending to step outside philosophy. This seems obvious, unless someone wishes to claim that when Wittgenstein criticizes philosophy he is at the same time criticizing himself? It is neither here nor there whether someone who intends to step outside philosophy is still unknowingly and unintentionally doing philosophy.
Philosophy has always been about making explicit, or reflecting on, what is normally not considered or examined (the unconscious in a sense). Witt couldnt be more of an analytical philosopher in that regard because he is looking at what we normally say and drawing out the criteria that are contained in those expressions. He only sees that logic and interest are tied together. But Cicero argued that a good speaker had to be a good man. Plato just didnt trust individuals to be up to the task.
Quoting Leontiskos
Philosophy is in the business of asking why we want something. What benefit is the good? Why is the categorical imperative superior to Humean naturalism? Perhaps this is just icky because it is imagined to involve feelings or some such, or does not remove us from what we say.
Quoting Leontiskos
But Witt was one of the philosophers he is examining. The history of philosophy is rife with one camp picking apart another and calling into question what philosophy actually is. What do you imagine is being lost here that cant be without destroying philosophy? I am not claiming Witt is calling for the end of philosophy, nor an abandonment of its issues (in keeping open the threat of skepticism).
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, the history of philosophy is one attempt after another of trying to remove the human, though it is easy enough to restate the claim without motivation: that it is a logical error to create a standard before investigating a topic and impose it as a requirement because it will narrow and limit the form of answer you are going to get.
And drawing a limit around knowledge is exactly what Plato and Kant did, except Plato created the metaphorical perfection of the forms, and Kant simply denied that solution while retaining a similar standard. Witt just reaches a new conclusion (claiming knowledge is not our only relation to the world), while showing the reason philosophy wants to reject it (the need for certainty).
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes, analytical philosophy is the ground, for sure. But world-to-word being only one form (one example) of rigorous, demanded standard, and those certain ones including not just correspondence theory, but Plato, Descartes, Kant, the positivists, Hegel, metaphysics, neuroscience, and any other philosophy/field that believes it can solve our human condition through knowledge and explanatory theory. I would argue a large swath of modern philosophy is still either thinking it has or can solve skepticism or is working on the premise that it doesnt matter.
Quoting Leontiskos
I would argue Witt is saving the true nature of philosophy from itself. But yes, he is not denigrating all philosophy, nor even all of the philosophers efforts that fall prey to the error he did.
Anything can be used as a tool. Philosophy is no exception.
Quoting Antony Nickles
It is also rife with those who pretend that what they represent is more than a camp.
Quoting Antony Nickles
@schopenhauer1 has already addressed this strawman.
Quoting Antony Nickles
On the contrary, the boundary excludes certain forms of skepticism, and the one who is skeptical of philosophy has ceased doing philosophy. This is particularly true in this case where his skepticism attempts to undercut the discipline itself.
Quoting Antony Nickles
...by creating something new, something incommensurable with philosophy. This is yet another attempt to have it both ways.
Me, I do. In a sense he is recognizing that everyone (and not just philosophers) wishes to side-step our part in our lives and our lives together. All philosophers including him (and not just because of who he was in the Tract) are tempted to do things like simplify things, create dichotomies, not examine premises, and, in this case, want to have knowledge (truth) take the place of our ongoing responsibility to answer for our speech and actions.
...And now I will disappear for a time.
There are two different senses of know here at p. (246), one being: with certainty, the other being knowing as acknowledging, recognizing. The part of the sentence you are quoting is the second kind. Im in pain. I know or Hes in pain! I know, but hes so dramatic, hell be fine. There is an assumption in thinking we understand how to know works; that it is just the same for pain as it is for other things, indeed, that it works the same in all instances.
This contradicts Wittgenstein, who tells us at PI 246 that: other people very often know if Im in pain.
There are a few points I'd like to address further.
One is this business of psychoanalyzing. Of course in debate one philosopher not uncommonly accuses another of relying on a suppressed premise, of being in thrall to a myth (Sellars), or of consciously adopting an assumption they needn't, and also not uncommonly with the suggestion that this move is not made entirely knowingly.
That bears a vague resemblance to psychoanalysis and I think it's apt in one sense but not in another: the sense in which it fits -- and which philosophers are very likely to bristle at -- is the idea of speaking for the person you're having a discussion with; the sense in which it differs is that in popular usage "psychoanalyzing" specifically connotes delving into a person's motives, and that's not really what's going on in the standard philosophical exchange. Around here, we have a norm -- not always observed -- against that sort of questioning.
And that's the thing -- no matter how you do it, it comes off as questioning someone's motives. Just so, @Leontiskos gradually transitioned from a point about framing, to psychoanalyzing, to criticism (meant I think in the everyday negative sense), to skepticism, to undermining. Next would be "attacking" I suppose.
Which brings me to my second point.
Quoting Leontiskos
Oddly, I had raised exactly this possibility earlier:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
If that were true, then indeed Wittgenstein would also be criticizing himself. There is a certain amount of "we" and "us" in the Investigations, even some famous ones:
(On the facing page, by the way, is this:
for what that's worth.)
I don't think Wittgenstein holds himself apart from philosophy, above it, immune to the errors of those benighted souls who came before him. He no more stands outside philosophy than he stands outside language when he talks about that.
(Now maybe there is something going on here, underground, as it were. Maybe this is all a bit like his own Confessions: he too once lived in error as we do, but he's here to tell you salvation is possible -- and he was the worst of all, more committed to logical purity than any man who ever lived -- why, if he can be saved, then so can you -- just pass the hat along there, and give whatever you can.
I don't think so, but it's not crazy. I think he's more like a man talking about the human condition; that man is talking about himself and his own life too. That's the spirit of the philosophy/orthography remark anyway.)
Which leads to my final point, which is that I'm still inclined to treat the question "What does philosophy want?" differently from the question "What do philosophers want?" and so also the questions about why that's wanted.
We sometimes, on this forum, talk about science a little like this, as an institution or worldview with a sort of mind of its own. Right there, in the two remarks I quoted, Wittgenstein reaches for just this sort of personification: language does this, philosophy speaks of that.
I can't, off the top of my head, call to mind Wittgenstein attributing a motive to one of these personified entities, but it's not unheard of. The ersatz motives of science, of business, of government, of academia, all have been called into question on this forum, more or less daily. Maybe all that is evidence that this is not a great idea, I can't say.
(Questioning motives was more or less central to Nietzsche's genealogical critique and to Marx's materialist critique. Together with Freud, already alluded to, Ricoeur's fathers of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Does Wittgenstein belong in their company? Not to my mind, but I'm sure some would think so. @Antony Nickles speaks of Wittgenstein reforming philosophy by putting humanity back in it, and some would say either Marx or Nietzsche got there first.)
With all that out of the way, I still like the question "What does philosophy want?" It doesn't really matter to me that it arose in the context of Antony's interpretation of Wittgenstein; I intended to strip that context away entirely, but I was unsuccessful.
I think it's a good question, but maybe it isn't, I don't know. Does philosophy want something? Does it want something it can get? If it gets it, what then? Would philosophy be over, or would it carry on, protecting its prize? And of course the point of it all is that if philosophy does want something, how does that affect it? How does that color the practice of philosophy? How does philosophy deal with not having what it wants?
In the preface to the PI Wittgenstein says:
So, yes. He is at the same time criticizing himself.
Which of these senses of "know" is the way the word "is normally used", as W says at PI 246?
If there is a sense of "know" that means "acknowledging, recognizing", then you are saying that we do know another's pain (at least, sometimes). I agree, but this is contrary to your earlier statements that we do not know another's pain.
The problem is, it makes philosophy impersonal. Some think this is as it should be, but I don't think Wittgenstein is one of them. In a letter to Rush Rhees he says:
In the Tractatus he says:
When in the Tractatus he talks about "my world" he is not talking about the problem of other minds. The world as it is for me is the world as I experience it. My life. As he says:
(6.43)
Sorry, I didnt make it clear in that post that know has more than one sense. The point I was getting at is that we do not know pain in the way the philosopher that Witt is critiquing wants, with certainty, identity, etc.
I never liked how Socrates got people to accept premises but then forced a conclusion on them. Witt allowed me to finally realize that he had rigged the question to only accept one answer. But Wittgenstein follows the same method of speaking for all of us (including the interlocutor). He comes up with examples of what we say when we talk about, say: belief when it is raining, and then proposes (on behalf of everyone) that it is in the sense of a hypothesis (that this is how it works). Now it is up to us to see its mechanics and accept that, but he certainly doesnt make it seem like an option is to deny it, to add varied mechanics based on the situation, etc. I would say this is not a case of lack of claiming greater authority (as everyone has the same) and lack of possibility (we can all explicate this grammar), and more a case of being impolitea poor philosophical bedside manner.
I agree with @Shawn that it is better to start with the Blue and Brown books, as, I imagine because he is in person with those whom he must bring along to have the validity he desires (the uncontroversial acceptance of us all), he has more of a speculative openness then the flat statement-like seeming conclusions his proposals have come to be once they reach the PI. As if he can skip the As we all would agree nature of his conjectures, and he states them as if they have already been worked through and wouldnt possibly be readily accepted; thus his arrogance.
Austin suffers from the same affliction, but he is even more ruthless as he directly addresses a real person and uses them as a punching bag in showing the unanticipated implications and missteps of imposing a requirement before first looking at a practice, but he is so good at completely and reasonably drawing out our ordinary criteria that there is almost a begrudging forgiveness in the respect of acceding to him.
But I think @Srap Tasmaner is correct in that it feels invasive to be told the motivation you have in saying something, as if our reasons were not our own. But a lot of the times here people say things as if the reasoning is self-evident, so I find myself putting words in their mouth to try to politely move the conversation along (rather than saying I simply dont understand). I attempt to be generous, as Socrates admonishes us in the Theatetus, to imagine the strongest argument they could be making, and also to phrase it that I take you to mean to show that it is provisional, but I am not trying to tell someone the reasons they have for saying something, but trying to show them the implications and fallout of saying those words here and now. Part of what Witt is pointing out is that our expressions always have these connotations, except when they are abstracted from any context and forced to adhere to manufactured criteria.
The difference between psychology and philosophy is expressed this way in Philosophy of Psychology:
Quoting Philosophy of Psychology - a Fragment
That places the two activities in closer contact than the sharp lines drawn in Tractatus.
Quoting ibid.
But the remark about causes in PoP 114 does show a continuity with the limits of induction laid out in Tractatus:
Quoting ibid.
These approaches to experience are an exploration of "the world is my world". I don't understand what you mean by "our history of human lives" in the context of the distinction made by Wittgenstein.
Noticing or seeing aspects is an aspect of Wittgenstein's philosophy that often goes unnoticed. This is related to "concepts of experience".
He goes on to say at 116:
The idea of seeing something according to an interpretation blurs the line between seeing and thinking. "Now I see it" can mean, "Now I understand". Seeing is not limited to passive reception, it involves both perception and conception.
The focus on propositions can occlude the importance of seeing for both the early and latter Wittgenstein. Seeing connections involves making connections and seeing things from the right perspective. This is what Wittgenstein calls an übersichtliche Darstellung. a surveyable representation, (alternatively translated as perspicuous representation):
(PI 122)
For Wittgenstein philosophy is not the "view from nowhere":
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsense, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly (6.54).
He also says:
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of philosophical propositions, but to make propositions clear (4.112).
Elucidations comes to us from Frege and serve a pragmatic role:
Definitions proper must be distinguished from elucidations. In the first stages of any discipline we cannot avoid the use of ordinary words. But these words are, for the most part, not really appropriate for scientific purposes, because they are not precise enough and flucuate in their use. Science needs technical terms that have precise and fixed meanings and in order to come to and understanding about these meanings and exclude possible misunderstandings, we give elucidations of their use
Frege admits:
Theoretically, one might never achieve ones goal this way. In practice, however, we do manage to come to and understanding about the meanings of words. Of course we have to be able to count on a meeting of minds, on others guessing what we have in mind. But, all this precedes construction of a system and does not belong within the system.
Witt never says that Philosophy is meaningless; he says philosophy is elucidatory...it attempts to clarify thoughts and ideas, in order to mitigate misunderstanding.
Which is why he says:
The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said [clearly], i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions (6.53).
Notice how he says that the propositions of natural science have nothing to do with philosophy, simply that the proper way to engage in the problems philosophy is concerned with, is by using the propositions of science.
This isnt to say much more than when engaging in metaphysics, use only expressions that can be tied back to reality (even as possibilities).
This is why Witt says:
Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is purely descriptive.
Philosophy doesnt tell us what there is out there in the world, but it can help us understand what must be the case given a certain set of assumptions.
An example, I think, of what Witt has in mind can perhaps be seen in Einsteins work on general relativity. In analyzing the concept of space and time, E gives several thought experiments, sometimes of impossible situations like trains going the speed of light. At the end of his work, he doesnt accomplish anything scientific, so to speak nothing was proven. But, he used the propositions of science, and descriptions we can all understand and agree to, in order to paint a new picture of space and time that made sense, and explained more than previous vague notions like absolute space and absolute time . Only later did the theory get scientifically confirmed, and explained thereby changing our whole picture of reality.
When I said: Looking at what we would say when doing for example: (following) rules, meaning (what we say), understanding (a series), seeing (an aspect), knowing (as being certain), etc., reveals the criteria (standards) of a practice (its grammar), because what we say expresses us. Our expressions show how and why we are interested in our practices. And these criteria are not individual (psychological, or self) interests (our feelings, being persuaded), but all our history of human lives of distinguishing and identifying and judging, i.e., what is essential to us about a practice, the various reasons that count with/to it. (Emphasis added)
What I meant by the history of our human lives is that the way we judge a practice is based on our interest as a society in our practices, such as excuses, or apologies, or vengeance. What is a mistake and what is an accident is judged by criteria that have been developed and distinguished (or forgotten by our culture) as part of why we care about blame and responsibility (what matters to us about them) over the history of human life. This gives our actions and the response to them a shared context of judgment so that they are not individual or personal (though of course we can fly in the face of tradition). Most will argue that human interests should not be taken into account and will talk of subjective or individual (whimsical, relative, self-interested) or feelings or psychological, which I take as something like not conscious or not ours, ourself. Part of what I see Witt doing is making explicit our unexamined shared criteria, which is the same thing Platos interlocutors do.
Is there a difference between knowing someone's pain and knowing that someone is in pain?
Because there's certainly a difference between knowing someone's mother and knowing that someone has a mother.
I recognize an archeological perspective in Wittgenstein, using language to uncover experiences we do not have a clear view of. That element seems to make the boundary between the personal and the social more arbitrary. The distinction serves some purposes but conceals others.
I don't offer that as a rebuttal to your description of the work as a moment of philosophical history. But it does leave out what I find most interesting. We do not know what we are doing.
Its an interesting question, but I think it makes little difference given @Antony Nickles earlier non-epistemic view of (edit: other peoples) pain; that we do not stand in a knowledge relation to (edit: other peoples) pain:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Quoting Antony Nickles
But, as I noted, this contradicts Wittgensteins comments.
Quoting Luke
So what I am not a fan of, is when something that is pretty common understanding of things is presented as if its profoundly innovative wisdom.
Excellent observation. What Witt would do is create a situation and give examples of what wed say. Im in pain Me too But I have a headache. Me too! Mines a shooting zing behind my ear Right! Boy, I know your pain. Thus why he will conclude that, as a matter of identity, to the extent we agree, we have the same pain (PI # 235).
But when I say I know that they are in pain I am acknowledging that the other is in pain. One instance would be someone writhing in pain and I am doing nothing. You say Theyre in pain. To which I might say Yes, I know. I like to see my enemies suffer. This is not the only sense of know than that of certainty, and it is a rare occurrence, but it is knowledge of another person (as @Luke correctly clarifies).
Quoting Luke
P. 246 does not force this realization, but it is an occurrence of the two senses colliding. He is showing that the philosopher would like to know anothers pain, as in be certain (identical), and that in regular use, we know anothers pain, as in acknowledging (as better addressed on p. 223).
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well, if this is meant to say that our regular use is not profound, I agree, as it is meant to be obvious. The wisdom we gain is in the contrast to the philosophical criteria that we now see that we are manufacturing and imposing in approaching the matter in abstraction. The philosopher imagines knowing anothers mind as being (requiring) an identical equation, thus the impression you could never know my pain, have the same pain, and why the philosopher comes up with a carrier, an object, for this imagined uniqueness, as a pain sensation, pain perception.
Which philosopher(s)? There is identity theories I guess that propose certain neuronal firings indicate a certain brain state, but I am not sure Witt knew about those. No one presumably thinks that we actually can feel the same exact thoughts as through ESP. And surely, the whole point of empathy is that we imagine others pain is similar to our own.
This is making a caricature of common notions.. Yeah, almost everyone agrees that they can't see inside what another person is feeling, and you take it on habit and as a matter of course that people feel similarly when they are in pain or other sensations. And that it is impossible if their pain is exactly the same. But I am not sure pointing out that obvious point is making some grand philosophical point.
For example, a much more interesting philosophical point is that of "p-zombies", a thought experiment proposed by David Chalmers. But that is more interesting because it imagines that people don't have any inner sensation. But the point of it is to prove the weirdness of subjectivity and why it exists at all and that if materialists are correct, you can have a completely behavioral based model, that shouldn't account for internal states. But you see why this actually is meant to elicit various questions related to the mind-body problem.
The fact that we use the same word "pain" to refer to your sensations and to my sensations isn't that your sensations are the same as my sensations.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The idea of the automaton (Descartes originally I believe) is the same thing (identity) except inverse and to the absurd: the panic that we cant know (with certainty) what is in the others mind, which is the possibility there is nothing; the doubt of the other as created by the desire for certainty (not just, I cant read them).
Quoting schopenhauer1
The desire for certainty also creates the fantasy that Imy subjectivity or consciousnessam unknowable to others. The need to be special, that I am always inexpressible and innately unique, creates the picture of internal states.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I see that before I was falling into the trap of saying same and a matter of identity which was confusing (thus why Witt says In so far as it makes sense (#253), because we would only equate our pain (even in similarity) for specific circumstances, like commiseration**.
We express our pain to call attention to it (the same as a cry of pain #244). I identify it so a doctor can treat it. I identify myself with it perhaps to gain sympathy. I differentiate it because it needs attention compared to yours. I have a hangover, and mine is bigger and so I need the last four Ibuprofen. And, even under the ordinary criteria of pain, I can deny that you, or anyone, feels my pain. And it is possible this is not just a desire to be unknown (say Im the man at the start of Alien, but it feels weird in my stomach. No, I dont have an upset tummy Ripley!)
Quoting Michael
Again, sorry for the confusion, but saying our pain is the same is not the business of equating (or comparing); this is not an agreement on the meaning of the word pain, nor is it really an agreement or as @schopenhauer1 puts it tak[ing] it on habit and as a matter of courseand thus the importance that we look at specific cases**. We may compare and equate certain occurrences and facets when we talk about the pain of a breakup. Here we say our pain is the same, that we know the others pain, as a matter of connection and to identify with the other personas commiseration. A more philosophical way to say this is that what matters to us about pain, its criteria for identity and its importance to us, is that a person has it, not the sensation itself, though that may play a part, as in location, intensity, etc. This is the criterion of identity that we have to be reminded of in #253.
Again, Witts point is not to be right about our ordinary criteria and mechanics of pain, but to draw them out to see why we looked at it the way we did in doing philosophy, and how that refocuses our philosophical concerns, improves our thinking. The skeptic is not wrong or confused. It is true that we may be wrong about the other, and that I might have something all my own to express, but without the pictures created by the desire for certainty, we may see the need for our relation to others (across our doubt) and our obligation of continued intelligibility for ourselves.
Not really though. My point is that it is a pretty asshole move by the philosopher in question to point out things as if they are novel when they are pretty readily held by the majority. In this case, the idea that we can never have perfect "certainty" of what others are feeling, so must rely on outward observations and public displays, and then take action from there and believe them. None of this is an uncommon view.
I ask you, have you ever had someone say some pretty commonsense advice as if you never thought of it? Has that ever irked you that they are providing advice as if they hit on something profound which you and everyone else knows? I gave an example of moderate politicians who say, "It's the economy stupid! That's what matters most to families!".. Well, yeah, so does that mean no other politician cares about the economy? :lol:
That we say it isn't that it's true.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Then I will simply say that Wittgenstein is wrong and so we shouldn't listen to what he has to say.
But this is not a matter of competing views, or explanations, or that we want to know the same thing but we just have to get at it a different way. And he is not contrasting the philosopher to the majority as if we were just doing anthropology, a census of opinion. In fact, even our culture pictures some things exactly based on the framework of philosophy (think objective/subjective), and even some here imagine ordinary is just what they first think of.
He is drawing out (making explicit) the type of criteria in individual cases to contrast them with the philosophical fixation with knowledge as certainty, or that we have to settle for some lesser version in contrast because we never have perfect knowledge.
The point is not the answer, nor to say philosophy is stupid or useless, but to allow for self-reflection, to see our projection into our thinking. The obviousness of our ordinary criteria, once we see them, is uncanny (Cavells term) for me exactly because I have been trained so long to think in the frameworks of philosophy.
Right, but my contention is that this thing he is setting up of "perfect knowledge" and "making due" is a false narrative, and thus a strawman that doesn't need addressing really.
Quoting Antony Nickles
So I am just focusing on this idea of not knowing what someone is really thinking internally, this doesn't seem like something that needs deconstruction because it never was constructed. It's a straw man.
One thing I do not like is obtuse bantering against a belief that doesn't exist.. Someone mentioned for example, cherry picking as a foil Augustine, so one can take that as the view that the "ordinary or majority X (philosopher/person) holds. I just think this is bad faith arguing to make a point that one doesn't need. Perhaps again, this is just him talking to himself about his previous views, but then, why should I care about his previous views or his current views?
Right, but this might be because one is feigning agreement because they are pitying the other, or being stoic, and maybe not some way for our pain to be truly the same, which philosophy perhaps simple creates in order to impose the requirement we wanted all along.
Quoting Michael
He is not denying that we talk about how our pain feels, and, when we do, that there is not a feeling which we are describing. Its just the framework of a certain correspondence between words and the world (as always objects) needs to be taken apart to show it is made from our own philosophical desires.
Or it's because the sensation I have when I stab myself in the arm is unlike the sensation you have when you stab yourself in the arm, and so our pains are not the same and we don't know one another's pain.
That it is a false narrative does not explain why Plato, Descartes, Kant, Positivism, etc. got sucked into it (belief or opinion vs knowledge; appearance vs reality; the thing-in-itself; only either true or false). That is what Witt is investigating.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting Descartes, 2nd Meditation
This is a tough one, because its easy to dismiss Descartes as delusional or paranoid. The particular instance is not as important as the fabrications that create it, which is not the automaton, but turning our human limitations into a problem, here, only seeing appearance because we want to have the certainty of reality, when the desire is in reaction to the fear that, in fact, sometimes we dont know whether someone is lying; that their judgments, their decisions, etc. can exist but be unexpressed; that we may be wrong about them, to trust them, to give our love to them.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Finding yourself in the grip of skepticism is also tricky (even accepting its truth) because we dont see that: imagining we live without it (as part of the human condition) or have solved it, is to still be in its snare.
The way I see those, is they are all different and often self-referential and contained frameworks that don't all have to do with exactly "certainty" in the same way say, that a scientific experiment or a math problem is "certain". These are metaphysical and epistemological frameworks, many of which are architectonic, building upon themselves.
What they have in common is a construction or positive idea about reality. If he is getting at that they think they "solved" something rather than being permanently skeptical, I think that is a bias against constructive theories, and not acknowledging that they can work as hypothesis that can later be changed by other ways of thinking.. I don't see the problem.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm not sure what you (or Witt?) is saying here. Descartes is taking a pretty common sense position that I cannot LITERALLY know what the other person is thinking inside, but I can judge them to be feeling similar to me. So I don't see the big deal about certainty you (Witt?) is making there.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm not sure what this is saying either. Indeed it is good to be skeptical and try to figure out the world or not I suppose.
Maybe the way to put this is that equating our pains is not how pain is important to us. If this situation actually did happen, what would matter to us about comparing pains would be attending to one or other of us. Philosophy abstracts this discussion to a place of equating pains, and then creates sensation as a kind of object, rather than just me expressing how I feel (which is too vague), so that knowledge might stand in the place of our having to react to someone in pain. What it wants is to be sure of the other person (and what to do), and not have to make the leap of faith of treating them as a person in pain.
They share the desire and thus create and impose a criteria or standard that is like the idea they have of science or math. Thus why Plato discusses math first in the Theatetus, and Descartes wants to be beyond doubt, and Kant requires the imperative.
Quoting schopenhauer1
One point I think Witt is making is that taking our world as, say, mitigated by appearance or belief is to exactly take a negative view of our ordinary means of seeing and communicating and judging. As if we are never connected to the world, instead of only sometimes not knowing our way about. They in a sense kill the world to save it in the vision they want: the thing-in-itself (which we cant know directly), or the forms (which we only remember), or Gods knowledge, or only true/false propositions.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Im referring to the radical skepticism that is generalized and creates a gap between us and the world that philosophy turns into an intellectual problem. Not just questioning the status quo.
They are analyzing our ways of understanding of the world... For example what is the nature of arithmetic and geometrical notions or scientific discoveries. Call it various "judgements" about the world rather than truths if you want. Kant had the categorical imperative indeed, but that was faulty from the outset, not because he wanted certainty, but because (in my opinion) it assumes various things and ignores others to get what it wants regarding ethical dilemmas. But none of this seems to be the reasons Wittgenstein gives.. just a blanket "they all want to be certain!" rather than they are investigating avenues for human epistemology and metaphysics..
When we're discussing something like the hard problem of consciousness and the ontology of sensations then it very much matters to us if our pains are the same or not.
All you seem to be arguing is that when we're hungover after a night of heavy drinking then we should care more about whether or not there is some aspirin. I doubt anyone disagrees. But I fail to see the relevance of this on a philosophy forum.
As I mentioned to @Michael above yes, the other is ultimately hidden from us (despite our being able to guess at thoughts or anticipating, etc), but the framework Descartes is using treats them as inhuman, as it were, unless we can judge they are people, as if it is a matter of proof rather than taking them to be human, accepting them, acting towards them as if they were.
Actually, the Thing-In-Itself is precisely what we know most according to Schopenhauer, so not all philosophers think like that. His idea of Will is immanent, and personal, not theoretical construct. And even Kant, is simply explaining theory of cognition, early cognitive psychology, if you will.. It isn't replacing the feeling of everyday, it is answering questions of what it means for us to construct the world.. You need space and time for example, you need qualities, and quantities, etc. etc.
I think this idea of turning into an "intellectual problem" is a non-problem. There are philosophers that have various ideas on the matter. Kant has his CI, but Schopenhauer has his compassion.. Plato had his notion of The Good, Aristotle the virtues, hedonism, cynicism, and all of it. These are just various ways of looking at the human condition and the world and how the human relates with the world. I am at a loss for why this is no good.
I took that quote to simply mean, we judge them to have internal sensations like we do.. not that we need proof. But I do know that Descartes had a horrible understanding that animals didn't have inner sensations like people do. But then, that would be the opposite view of proof because of external signs and such. Rather, it seems like an irrational belief in only people having inner sensations, and that means no proof was needed, just an unjustified belief in a hierarchy.
Witt would be showing how this problem and ontology are manufactured by our human desires. Im not sure this thread is the place to discuss that controversial a subject. I did address it in this Hard Problem post.
So because we only care about aspirin when we have a headache then it follows that first person private sensations don't exist, or that if they do exist then they are the same for all people?
That's obviously a non sequitur.
I dont mean to harp on about certainty as if that is the only desire philosophy has. Its just Witts example, which Cavell characterizes as the removal of the human (voice). Philosophy also desires generalization, abstraction, universality, predetermination, etc. The means of imposing these criteria, is, as you say, that it assumes various things and ignores others to get what it wants.