Reading group of Wittgenstein's Blue Book

Reply to Antony Nickles
Thanks. Looking forward to it.

As mentioned, I am going to put together a reading of the first section that I will post after Nov 5.

Thanks for setting this up. I'm looking forward to it.

Reply to Antony Nickles

That may well be interesting. I'll be sure to read some and give my opinion and/or ask for feedback, etc.

I won't participate, probably, but I will watch the thread like a hawk to ensure it stays textual if you like @Antony Nickles. If you're leading the group and want assistance keeping this on topic, please PM me regarding any poster who isn't being sufficiently textual/exegetical and I'll come in and examine. Any actions I take to keep things on topic wouldn't be seen as formal mod actions or warnings etc, it would just be to keep something that could be very excellent indeed very on topic.

@Banno @Sam26 @Paine @Ludwig V @Jamal @Manuel @Astrophel @Joshs @Kurt Keefner

Since sense data (what Witt takes as “feeling, hearing, seeing” p.1) is not a simple philosophy-101 idea, I feel I should offer a brief overview (outside the text, so without defense, to be taken or left).

The idea and framework come from something very old and fundamental in philosophy: skepticism.

For Descartes it came from doubt; in response he divided everything into reality and ‘representation’. “…the things which are represented to us in sleep are like painted representations which can only have been formed as the counterparts of something real and true…” (1st Med, p.7)

Plato pictured a “shadow” (Republic ln. 515) to save the possibility of something true in comparison.

Ayer’s idea of ‘perception’ is that the world always appears different (we read Austin's response here).

and Kant internalized into each of us the paranoia that ‘appearances’ “to every different eye, in respect of its colour, …may appear different.” (Crit. Of Pure Reason §§4).

‘Sense data’ is an amalgamation of all these constructions.

Quoting Antony Nickles

‘Sense data’ is an amalgamation of all these constructions.

Where would one place the notion of a "concept" with the above about "sense-data" in mind?

Quoting Shawn

Where would one place the notion of a "concept" with the above about "sense-data" in mind?

Well that’s a pretty fuzzy word**, but if we are dealing with “feeling, hearing, seeing”, and so tangential to ‘meaning’, ‘understanding’, ‘thinking’, where ‘thought’ is considered like an object as well, then there is a traditional interpretation of ‘concept’ as an ‘idea’, then an ‘idea’ is in the same placeholder as ‘appearance’ or ‘representation’.

Witt uses the word ‘concept’ but it is an individually-defined term for him, which is just a grouping of activities and practices, like: pointing, or following a rule, or identifying pain, etc. So he will talk about the concept of playing a game, but he does not mean: the ‘idea’ of playing, but the criteria and steps etc. that fall under the umbrella of that activity.

**Idea could also be an image for, or speaking to, yourself.

@Banno @Sam26 @Paine @Ludwig V @Jamal @Manuel @Astrophel @Joshs @Kurt Keefner @Shawn

Section 1 pp. 1-3 Mental objects & Use (cut the first section a little short; and not waiting until after U.S. election).

Wittgenstein starts with claiming that we are incorrectly structuring ‘sense data’ (feelings, visions, thoughts) after an object, as when he says “a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.” (p.1, emphasis added) (“A substantive” is defined as something that has importance to us, is meaningful.) He refers to this desire for correspondence as a “temptation”—which will be a theme—as if we are compelled to turn something that matters, into ‘matter’, compared to insubstantial ‘mind’ or ‘idea’, to avoid it being unstable and ensure its importance to us. (He will draw the skeptical picture of mind and its mechanisms—which have something “queer” about them—at the end of page 3.)

One other point is his discussion of method, which a lot of this book introduces and explains. He says we can be “cured” of the temptation (to need objectivity) by “studying the grammar [ workings ] of the [ an ]expression”. As if, when we saw each things’ different rationality, we would let go of the desire to impose the framework (and standard) of an object.

Now a “verbal” definition sets the terms of our words (“attributing” and “predicating” it, he says (p.2)—where the idea that we ‘agree’ to language comes from), which is why he prefers an “ostensive” definition, which is a demonstration by pointing out examples. (I leave the questions he asks to others; we can’t all be interested in the same things—thus why we may have multiple, non-conflicting readings.)

It would seem he is doing the exact opposite when he says it is the job of the O.D. “to give it a meaning”, but he means giving an expression a context of different relevances (fleshing out the “this-ness” as it were, I will take it, in contrast). “This is a pencil” can be taken, or seen, or said, as: its being “round” in that it is not shaped like a carpenter’s marker; or “wood” in that it is not just charcoal; or “one” in that it is “a pencil” (not two pencils), or “hard” (which ?? maybe you can find the circumstance that fits). A “ostensive definition” here is what in the PI he calls a “description” (PI #496, #665).

These are different possible ‘senses’ of the expression “This is a pencil”; he will also call these the ‘uses’—which is not meant to point out that we ‘use’ words—they reflect our interests, the reason to say it (then), and its possibilities, etc. (what he calls “criterion”) along with the circumstances, and practices, say, of picking out things, like instruments. He calls them here “interpretations”, not meant as ‘perceived’ differently, but taken to apply to a different context, under the associated kinds of facts that matter (to the related criterion) in that circumstance.

The already-established associations (criteria, practices) are the reason why we do not usually make a separate decision (unless and until we do; his example: “interpreting before obeying” (p.3)). The example of getting the red flower is evidence that with “the usual way” we don’t have any reason to deviate from or reflect on our life-long patterns (like searching, and matching colors), as we do in politics, and philosophy.

Reply to Antony Nickles

I'm doing this to show an actual involvement, to not lazy my way out of at least some of this.

1) I am foggy brained right now but will attempt to reply to what I think is interesting.

2) I am assuming that the pages you mentioned are the ones that show up in the document you shared.

First, a comment on a few things you said, then a quote I take form him, to see what I end up with.


Quoting Antony Nickles

One other point is his discussion of method, which a lot of this book introduces and explains. He says we can be “cured” of the temptation (to need objectivity) by “studying the grammar [ workings ] of the [ an ]expression”. As if, when we saw each things’ different rationality, we would let go of the desire to impose the framework (and standard) of an object.

My question is, who is the one who is looking for this "objectivity"? Philosophers? Ordinary people?

Maybe if someone holds on to a variety of a referential doctrine in which a word "flower" literally "means" that thing we see in our garden, then I can see his point of this being a misleading way of thinking about words.

Do ordinary people think this? It's not clear to me.

Quoting Antony Nickles

He calls them here “interpretations”, not meant as ‘perceived’ differently, but taken to apply to a different context, under the associated kinds of facts that matter (to the related criterion) in that circumstance.

The already-established associations (criteria, practices) are the reason why we do not usually make a separate decision (unless and until we do; his example: “interpreting before obeying” (p.3)). The example of getting the red flower is evidence that with “the usual way” we don’t have any reason to deviate from or reflect on our life-long patterns (like searching, and matching colors), as we do in politics, and philosophy.

If you have a different interpretation of what is ostensibly the same thing, say, these words you are reading right now, or maybe the crying tree outside my window, how is this not a different perception?

I don't see a difference between interpretation and perception, in so far as differing interpretations lead to different perceptions.

This is how I am reading you now and is just to see if we are on similar pages of thought or not.

Ok, on to what he says that I find interesting:

[i]" ... he went to look for a red flower carrying a red image in his mind, and comparing it with the flowers to see which of them had the colour of the image. Now there is such a way of searching, and it is not at all essential that the image we use should be a mental one. ...

[an option is] ...We go, look about us, walk up to a flower and pick it, without comparing it to anything. To see that the process of obeying the order can be of this kind, consider the order "imagine a red patch". You are not tempted in this case to think that before obeying you must have imagined a red patch to serve you as a pattern for the red patch which you were ordered to imagine."[/i]

Not essential, the image? Hmmm. Perhaps it is not this way exactly. It's not as if "red flower" produces an extremely intense red image in my mind. It's relatively weak (in terms of intensity at this moment), but if I lacked it, I'm not sure I'd get a "red" flower, rather than some other flower (yellow, blue, etc.).

Yes, we can go in a non-reflexive mode, as we do when we get into a routine in which we do things without explicit thinking, and here you can do all kinds of things. But I think these are moments in which we are already familiar with what we are doing. If I get a red flower without explicitly thinking about the red, then in all likelihood I did it unconsciously, because I am accustomed to getting red flowers all the time.

I can't see removing all mental content being useful here at all, IF that's even what the issue may be.

I'll do better next time.

Reply to Manuel Quoting Manuel

My question is, who is the one who is looking for this "objectivity"? Philosophers? Ordinary people?

Here I think Witt means those who are tempted by a desire for something sure. Definitely traditional philosophy, but I would argue our larger modern culture. But I would point out that there actually is a way to how identifying and naming objects works, and that is word—thing (flower; though yes the word is not the flower), but that is exactly why we want it to work that way in every case. It is so certain and clear and simple and predictable; the evidence of our senses is so immediate and convincing to us that the idea of seeing something with our eyes is our best-case scenario in the face of doubt about our world (as is ‘pain’ about our feelings).

Quoting Manuel

If you have a different interpretation of what is ostensibly the same thing, say, these words you are reading right now, or maybe the crying tree outside my window, how is this not a different perception?

The interpretation is possible because of the criteria and circumstances, not how we see the world (in each of the above pencil cases, they are NOT “ostensibly the same thing”, though the words are). Though, of course, if the circumstances are looser, you still play some part: in identifying a banjo or grouping it as a general string instrument (p.2 (though not in interpreting what identifying is, or how it goes wrong). I can miss the point, can be mistaken, disagree (matters of… responsibility?). But when I say, “THIS is a pencil” after you show me your new mechanical pencil, and as I bring out what I take to be the ultimate pencil, you may take this as condescending or true, but how are the underlying facts and how this situation does what it does here dependent on us?

Quoting Manuel

‘it is not at all essential that the image we use should be a mental one.’ P.3

Not essential, the image? …if I lacked it, I'm not sure I'd get a "red" flower, rather than some other flower (yellow, blue, etc.).

What he is saying is that the image could be mental or physical, like a patch of the color. That the physical patch of color serves the same purpose as the “mental” image of color (that it is mental is inessential). Also, it is this wanting to be “sure” at all times that you express which Witt is saying creates the need for the object (fears its “lack”). But, as he demonstrates, let’s create a scenario where you have to be sure. Then you would absolutely carry a patch and match the colors of red to each other. Or, if there was a field of different flowers and we definitely wanted red, we would take care not to have a mistake happen (as I describe below). But unless we have some special circumstance, usually, I would neither need the image nor the patch. As you say, we are accustomed to it.

Quoting Manuel

If I get a red flower without explicitly thinking about the red, then in all likelihood I did it unconsciously, because I am accustomed to getting red flowers all the time.

He will address “unconscious thinking” later, but doing it “unconsciously” is different than doing it because you are “accustomed”. You could do it without thinking of the consequences (“thoughtlessly”), inadvertently, or by mistake, but the opposite of “explicitly thinking” is not “unconscious”, but, perhaps, unaware.

Quoting Manuel

I can't see removing all mental content being useful here at all, IF that's even what the issue may be.

He is not “removing” mental content; he is beginning to show that we unnecessarily picture it in the framework of an object (as a thing we can be as sure of as seeing a flower), while pointing out there is a larger, pre-existing world out there than us, and also picking at the feeling that we must have it or we “lack” something, which he says later turns into something we feel we “cannot” do.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But I would point out that there actually is a way to how identifying and naming objects works, and that is word—thing (flower; though yes the word is not the flower), but that is exactly why we want it to work that way in every case.

Is this a factual claim?

Quoting Antony Nickles

(in each of the above pencil cases, they are NOT “ostensibly the same thing”, though the words are). Though, of course, if the circumstances are looser, you still play some part: in identifying a banjo or grouping it as a general string instrument (p.2 (though not in interpreting what identifying is, or how it goes wrong).

Yes, in the example he uses, different aspects of a pencil are being examined or looked at.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But when I say, “THIS is a pencil” after you show me your new mechanical pencil, and as I bring out what I take to be the ultimate pencil, you may take this as condescending or true, but how are the underlying facts and how this situation does what it does here dependent on us?

I take it that pencils don't exist in the extra-mental world. So, if I show you a mechanical pencil or you show me an ultimate pencil, the issue remains similar to my mind, we are speaking about pencils.

Quoting Antony Nickles

What he is saying is that the image could be mental or physical, like a patch of the color. That the physical patch of color serves the same purpose as the “mental” image of color (that it is mental is inessential).

I am not seeing the difference in terms of mental or physical terms. If the framework is presented as ostensive vs non-ostensive, then that makes sense.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Also, it is this wanting to be “sure” at all times that you express which Witt is saying creates the need for the object (fears its “lack”).

This is fine. I think he is correct if he is arguing that this "certainty" cannot be attained, which is what I think he is getting at.

Quoting Antony Nickles

He is not “removing” mental content; he is beginning to show that we unnecessarily picture it in the framework of an object (as a thing we can be as sure of as seeing a flower), while pointing out there is a larger, pre-existing world out there than us, and also picking at the feeling that we must have it or we “lack” something, which he says later turns into something we feel we “cannot” do.

I look forward to that part. It sounds like a critique of the given in experience, which I agree with and makes sense.

Quoting Manuel

Is this a factual claim?

Yes, with “this” being: “there actually is a way to how identifying and naming objects works”, though it does not create a “factual” (unassailable) relationship between word and object (good enough though “usually” as Witt says). What I am trying to point out is that here there is a direct reference (or best case), which is what we desire elsewhere, so we transpose the model.

Quoting Manuel

different aspects of a pencil are being examined or looked at.

It is not our “looking” at, nor examining the aspects of, the pencil; different things are important (have greater significance) to us in the different situations. What criteria are used for judgment depends on what matters to us (and the possibilities of the situation; yes, including, the pencil).

Quoting Manuel

I am not seeing the difference in terms of mental or physical terms. If the framework is presented as ostensive vs non-ostensive, then that makes sense.

Yes, the point is that there is no difference; the physical patch serves the same purpose as the mental image; it is our process of checking the object against a standard that matters. The ultimate point being that we want the standard to be an object: ever-present, backing up every interaction, not just picking flowers.

@Banno @Sam26 @Paine @Ludwig V @Jamal @Manuel @Astrophel @Joshs @Kurt Keefner @Shawn

Section 1B pp. 3-5: a “queer” mechanism of the mind

At the bottom of page 3, Witt sketches a picture from what it “seems” like “we ought really to be interested in.” I take this to be the “temptation” for an object-like framework; here, “certain definite mental” processes (perhaps in order to give us something fixed in ourselves). He says we want these mechanisms to associate a word with the world, though he intimates there is something wrong (“queer”, “don’t quite understand”, ”occult”(p.4)) that allows the space for error (to “agree or disagree with reality”), which opens the world to doubt.

Another moment on method as he again discusses transferring an internal mechanism to an analogous external process. This makes the process public, all out in the open, but also not personal, not individual, taking out me (which is also a theme), which feels like a loss I don’t know how to record yet. I take it he is playing off the picture of thought as an “object” and a mechanism that has “properties different from” signs, that makes signs come alive (or be ‘present’ as Derrida might critique it? @Joshs), when he contrasts that to “use”. Here I believe we should not jump to assuming we know what this term means yet, but let it take shape based on the role it plays going forward.

But he says, pulled externally it “ceases to seem to impart any life”, which I take it as less than ‘ceases to live’ but that it does no longer “seem to impart” perhaps the “queer” “association” that “you needed for your purposes”. (P.5) I take this purpose to be the desire for an internal mechanism (as object), and so perhaps the death is of the idea of the self as controlling that mechanism, creating meaning. The looked-for object “co-existing” with the sign was then a special vision of us.

He then flat out claims that what gives life to a sign is not us, but a system of signs. And not just that, but its “part” in that system, its “belong[ing]” in it, which shows the “significance” or meaning. I will also point out that time becomes a factor here—that instead of a mechanism occurring at the same time as the sign, “co-existing” with it, there is a system already, pre-existing.

Reply to Antony Nickles Sorry, but I'm a bit burnt out when it comes to Wittgenstein. Good luck with your thread.

Reply to Antony Nickles

I am not reading it as closely as you are, I am reading, but somewhat more akin to a hard novel than a proper reading of a philosopher due to having to save that mental energy for other material. So, take my comments with a grain of salt, or several of them.

As I read what he is saying, it's that we likely make a mistake when we take a word to necessarily refer or signify necessarily to an object of some kind.

There seems to be a lack of necessity between our using words like "red", "book" and so on, and assuming there has to be something in the world which is "captured" by these words. But we seem to act as if this does happen; that a "book" is necessarily means that thing made of think wooden pulp with letter in it.

If this is part of what he is saying, then I think that's correct.

What's unclear to me is why this would be particularly "queer", to think or use some mental process of some kind. I say this because it's just as queer to think that we need mental content as to say that we don't need it, or that we can see the world without eyes, and rely on echolocation instead.

In short, anything I can think is bound to be "queer" by those standards. And in a sense, it is queer.

Reply to Sam26
I hear ya. I just needed to properly read it at some point, thought this would help. We’ll have to come up with a good (short) one again though some time.

Reply to Manuel

Quoting Manuel

There seems to be a lack of necessity between our using words like "red", "book" and so on, and assuming there has to be something in the world which is "captured" by these words. But we seem to act as if this does happen; that a "book" is necessarily means that thing made of think wooden pulp with letter in it

That there is nothing in the world ‘caputured’ by a word doesn’t mean that the word’s meaning isnt of the world. We could instead say that the use of a word produces a kind of world, or form of life. Rather than thinking of words as inside the head (subjective feeling,etc) and things as in the world (neutral, value-free) and meaning as the fit between them, we can think of words as already of the world, as practices engaging interactively with it.

Reply to Joshs

"doesn't mean that the word's meaning isn't of the world."

Not sure I follow. We construct the word, based on stimuli given by objects. We name it something, "apple". Is our word referring to what that stimulus is in the world (photons, reflection and absorption of light, etc.) or are we referring to the object?

We are referring to the object usually. Is the object part of the world? Parts of it, sure - other parts are constructions. It's not trivial to tease these apart for me.

Quoting Joshs

we can think of words as already of the world, as practices engaging interactively with it.

How does that account for differences in how languages have very different sounding, looking, written words for the same object?

The word varies, the object does not.

Reply to Manuel

Quoting Manuel

The word varies, the object does not.

I’ll just say that the passages Antony had us read offers an alternative to the realist thinking implied by the idea of an object in itself.

Quoting Manuel

There seems to be a lack of necessity between our using words like "red", "book" and so on, and assuming there has to be something in the world which is "captured" by these words. But we seem to act as if this does happen; that a "book" is necessarily means that thing made of think wooden pulp with letter in it.

What makes it hard to parse I think is that he starts at the end first. What we are faced with is that “usually” we just pick flowers, but sometimes we are trying to point out a banjo and our friend takes us to be distinguishing stringed instruments. And in order to avoid that happening again, we catastrophize the situation (always, all cases the same). When we picked the wrong flower, you even skipped to: Quoting Manuel

if I lacked [the mental image], I'm not sure I'd get a "red" flower, rather than some other flower (yellow, blue, etc.).

Instead of just saying ‘whoops’ and correcting our mistakes, we try to account for the error in our explanation to control the outcome (and also make sure somehow we don’t make mistakes ever again.)

Quoting Manuel

As I read what he is saying, it's that we likely make a mistake when we take a word to necessarily refer or signify necessarily to an object of some kind.

I think your instinct is right. I take it that the desire for wanting necessity causes us to reach for an explanation that has certainty, like: in the case of ‘seeing an object’. What I think we miss is that: in order to have an answer that is necessary, certain, we have to create a particular kind of answer. If we take identifying a rock as the pattern for ‘understanding a person’, the explanation becomes “queer” to see them as an object (or to see understanding as a mechanism).

Quoting Manuel

What's unclear to me is why this would be particularly "queer", to think or use some mental process of some kind. I say this because it's just as queer to think that we need mental content as to say that we don't need it, or that we can see the world without eyes, and rely on echolocation instead.

It is not that vision or memory or attention, etc. (processes of the brain) are “queer”. It could be “queer” mechanisms that are not mental: quantification of education, politics turned into “process”, etc. The “queer”-ness is that the nature of the issue has gotten twisted (to have necessity), so the kind of solution (like an object) creates a strange magic that must happen. Imagine “understanding” not as an agreement that allows us to carry on (with someone), but as an epiphany that happens inside your brain when you “know” what they know (the “object” of their understanding), then explaining that seems “queer” (as some modern neuroscience tries to).

Quoting Manuel

I say this because it's just as queer to think that we need mental content as to say that we don't need it,

That's true. It's a common problem with philosophical ideas, because, at least in logical positivism they are (supposed to be) logically analytic, which means to assert or deny them is either trivial or nonsense. But I don't think that's what Wittgenstein is after here. It's not whether we have or don't have something going on in our minds when we pick a flower or obey an order. He's pointing out that whatever is in our minds, it can't do what philosophers have supposed it does. There's a moment of arm-waving and hocus-pocus when we are told that a mental image tells us which flowers are red or an internal map that we follow when we are going to the shops. Whether the image is mental or physical, it has to be read - interpreted. That's his target.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I take it that the desire for wanting necessity causes us to reach for an explanation that has certainty, like: in the case of ‘seeing an object’. What I think we miss is that: in order to have an answer that is necessary, certain, we have to create a particular kind of answer.

I don't disagree with you. But isn't there more to all this than radical certainty? For example, the insistence that it is the system that gives meaning to the word implies moving away from atomism (as in the Tractatus) towards a kind of holism or contextualism. Again, his claim that meaning is use directs us away from the pursuit of an abstract system in an abstract heaven back toward our everyday rule-governed behaviour.

Quoting Antony Nickles

The “queer”-ness is that the nature of the issue has gotten twisted (to have necessity), so the kind of solution (like an object) creates a strange magic that must happen. Imagine “understanding” not as an agreement that allows us to carry on (with someone), but as an epiphany that happens inside your brain when you “know” what they know (the “object” of their understanding), then explaining that seems “queer” (as some modern neuroscience tries to).

It seems like a natural(ish) way of thinking about this, assuming necessity, because in ordinary talk, why would it seem different?

People won't even think of necessity, but as soon as you ask them what is a tree?, or what is a car?, they will insist it's those things they can point to.

But once you think about this a bit more carefully, I think you discover, that no necessity is involved.

Quoting Ludwig V

He's pointing out that whatever is in our minds, it can't do what philosophers have supposed it does. There's a moment of arm-waving and hocus-pocus when we are told that a mental image tells us which flowers are red or an internal map that we follow when we are going to the shops. Whether the image is mental or physical, it has to be read - interpreted. That's his target.

It's hard to parse out, there is a lot of stuff going on when we speak about a "red flower", which includes not only the words, but the word order, any mental associations we may specifically have, assuming that what is asked for is a "real red flower" as opposed to a "plastic red flower", if you don't know the language and someone asks you for a red flower, you could end up buying a brand that is spelled "red flower", and on and on.

In short, there is a lot going on, and it is not evident to me that mental images don't play an important role. Also, what "mental images" specifically covers can be subtle.

Quoting Manuel

It's hard to parse out, there is a lot of stuff going on when we speak about a "red flower", which includes not only the words, but the word order, any mental associations we may specifically have, assuming that what is asked for is a "real red flower" as opposed to a "plastic red flower", if you don't know the language and someone asks you for a red flower, you could end up buying a brand that is spelled "red flower", and on and on.

I'm sorry, I don't see your point. Of course there are a lot of assumptions and background conditions. Of course, things go wrong sometimes. The point is that whatever is in my mind can't prevent those. More than that, there seems to be no guarantee that I have the right mental image or that I do not misinterpret the mental image that I do have. Whatever is going on in my mind, the test is whether I get it right and come up with the red flower I was asked for - and that is not settled in my mind.

Quoting Manuel

In short, there is a lot going on, and it is not evident to me that mental images don't play an important role. Also, what "mental images" specifically covers can be subtle.

Does that mean that it is evident to you that mental images do play an important role? What might that be?

Quoting Ludwig V

More than that, there seems to be no guarantee that I have the right mental image or that I do not misinterpret the mental image that I do have. Whatever is going on in my mind, the test is whether I get it right and come up with the red flower I was asked for - and that is not settled in my mind.

The point is that it is not entirely clear to me what the term "mental image" encapsulates. I don't know if it includes solely pictorial stuff, or if it includes semantic terms as well. I suspect it does play a role.

That last part "and that is not settled in my mind." is tricky. Sure, it's possible that I might bring you a flower that does not match the "red flower" you asked for.

But what actually settles the issue in this case are the criteria you asked for, not the flower itself.

If the flower I give you does not satisfy the conditions you have, then it does not match what you have in mind. The problem is not in the object, but our interpretation of it.

Quoting Antony Nickles

He then flat out claims that what gives life to a sign is not us, but a system of signs.

People using signs are alive. They give life to the signs through their use. Wittgenstein recognizes that a process must be happening organically that makes thinking, speaking, and listening possible but sees his work as something entirely different from investigating that:

Quoting Blue Book, page 6

We may find that such a mind-model would have to be very complicated and intricate in order to explain the observed mental activities; and on this ground we might call the mind a queer kind of medium. But this aspect of the mind does not interest us. The problems which it may set are psychological problems, and the method of their solution is that of natural science.

Now if it is not the causal connections which we are concerned with, then the activities of the mind lie open before us. And when we are worried about the nature of thinking, the puzzlement which we wrongly interpret to be one about the nature of a medium is a puzzlement caused by the mystifying use of our language. This kind of mistake recurs again and again in philosophy; e.g. when we are puzzled about the nature of time, when time seems to us a queer thing. We are most strongly tempted to think that here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can't look into. And yet nothing of the sort is the case. It is not new facts about time which we want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open before us. But it is the use of the substantive "time" which mystifies us. If we look into the grammar of that word, we shall feel that it is no less astounding that man should have conceived of a deity of time than it would be to conceive of a deity of negation or disjunction

That is a bold statement that separates his interests from the skepticism of Hume considered by Kant. Perhaps those different agendas cannot be completely separated as Wittgenstein put forth. It would be a mistake, however, to ignore his efforts to do just that.

Quoting Ludwig V

But isn't there more to all this than radical certainty? …towards contextualism… toward our everyday rule-governed behavior.

Yes, but the position he is sketching out is like the counter-voice of the interlocutor in the PI. It is also his own experience from the Tractatus (claiming all “state of affairs” are objects Tract 4.2211). There is, of course, the other side of the coin, but he is sketching out the negative case of sense data to cast it in relief.

Quoting Manuel

It seems like a natural(ish) way of thinking about this, assuming necessity, because in ordinary talk, why would it seem different?

Well I think wanting necessity is different than just going along with what you’re accustomed to (the “ordinary”) without reflecting. But yes the most necessary relation for anyone is the objects they see (or their own “existence”—or, sense as an object—which we call a “subject”).

Quoting Manuel

But once you think about this a bit more carefully, I think you discover, that no necessity is involved.

Yes, Descartes thought his way through to radical skepticism, but what we are dealing with here is the first part, which is wanting certainty (thinking of the whole world as objects we should be able to “see”, or know, as we do trees, etc.), which is the desire that starts the spinning.

Quoting Manuel

In short, there is a lot going on, and it is not evident to me that mental images don't play an important role. Also, what "mental images" specifically covers can be subtle.

Well, yes, there can be a lot going on, but most of the time we get along fine, which is only to say that the odd example is not evidence of the need to retreat to always having some thing certain in your brain that controls our relation to the world. By “mental image” he just means picturing something in your head, but a lot gets added onto it when we want that to be an object, of certainty, of knowledge, that a “queer mechanism” “associates”—in terms of necessarily equates—it to the world; that there is a mechanism in us that accomplishes that.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Yes, but the position he is sketching out is like the counter-voice of the interlocutor in the PI. It is also his own experience from the Tractatus (claiming all “state of affairs” are objects Tract 4.2211).

Yes, that's why I'm suggesting that scepticism/certainty is not the only issue in play in this text. BTW, I'm a bit puzzled by "all states of affairs" are objects. I thought one of the main planks of the TLP was that the world is all that is the case - facts, states of affairs - and not objects. It follows from the idea that the atoms are propositions, since a word only has meaning in the context of a sentence.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Yes, Descartes thought his way through to radical skepticism, but what we are dealing with here is the first part, which is wanting certainty (thinking of the whole world as objects we should be able to “see”, or know, as we do trees, etc.), which is the desire that starts the spinning.

OK. One can see it that way. But I don't see a lot in the text that suggests that this was explicitly on W's agenda here. Whereas we know that at this time he had found his way out of the TLP and was developing his next steps.

Quoting Antony Nickles

a lot gets added onto it when we want that to be an object, of certainty, of knowledge, that a “queer mechanism” “associates”—in terms of necessarily equates—it to the world; that there is a mechanism in us that accomplishes that.

But he doesn't want to deny that "red" is associated with red things in the world. What he's after is that the meaning is the use. "But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use." (p. 4)

Quoting Manuel

The point is that it is not entirely clear to me what the term "mental image" encapsulates. I don't know if it includes solely pictorial stuff, or if it includes semantic terms as well. I suspect it does play a role.

For me "mental image" is just pictorial stuff. The semantic stuff is not inherent in the image, but is the use we make of it. I don't think he denies that there are such things or that we might make use of them. But he does insist that this is only one way that we might find the red flower.

Quoting Manuel

But what actually settles the issue in this case are the criteria you asked for, not the flower itself.

But I asked you to bring me the flower itself. The criteria are only a means to an end.

Quoting Manuel

If the flower I give you does not satisfy the conditions you have, then it does not match what you have in mind. The problem is not in the object, but our interpretation of it.

"Have in mind" is a problematic phrase in this context. Let's say "it is not what you asked me to bring you." The blue flower that I bring you is not a problem in itself. But there is a problem with it in the context of your request to me. It's true that my interpretation of your request is a misinterpretation. Is that what you mean?

Quoting Ludwig V

Yes, that's why I'm suggesting that scepticism/certainty is not the only issue in play in this text. BTW, I'm a bit puzzled by "all states of affairs" are objects.

I agree but he is taking his time drawing out this side here first. And my recollection of TLP is shoddy but I was trying to draw the parallel of his, as you say Atomism there, and the “queer”-ness of the mechanism here.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I agree but he is taking his time drawing out this side here first. And my recollection of TLP is shoddy but I was trying to draw the parallel of his, as you say Atomism there, and the “queer”-ness of the mechanism here.

I don't quite understand the parallel. But perhaps it's better if I just wait and see how things develop. As you say, it's at a very early stage.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Yes, Descartes thought his way through to radical skepticism, but what we are dealing with here is the first part, which is wanting certainty (thinking of the whole world as objects we should be able to “see”, or know, as we do trees, etc.), which is the desire that starts the spinning.

Very much so - it is a big problem (certainty). And maybe phrasing it a bit harder that Wittgenstein (so far), certainty (100% no doubts at all) is impossible in the empirical world.

Quoting Ludwig V

For me "mental image" is just pictorial stuff. The semantic stuff is not inherent in the image, but is the use we make of it. I don't think he denies that there are such things or that we might make use of them. But he does insist that this is only one way that we might find the red flower.

Well, the most immediate example would be of a blind person asking for a red flower. But then since they can't see, it would be strange for them to ask for a red one, as opposed to just a "flower".

Quoting Ludwig V

But I asked you to bring me the flower itself. The criteria are only a means to an end.

And I did. But if I have poor vision, or confused red with pink then you are the one who needs to correct me, right? So, I give you the pink flower, you see the flower and judge it not to be red. It is your judgment of your perception triggered by the flower that corrects my mistake.

The flower is the stimulus, but without judgments ascertaining if what I gave you is correct, then the flower is quite useless.

Quoting Ludwig V

"Have in mind" is a problematic phrase in this context. Let's say "it is not what you asked me to bring you." The blue flower that I bring you is not a problem in itself. But there is a problem with it in the context of your request to me. It's true that my interpretation of your request is a misinterpretation. Is that what you mean?

To be clear I do believe in mental content and am a quite fanatical innatist and ardent believer in innate ideas. I am quite skeptical of "externalism" in most areas in philosophy.

I was somewhat surprised to be invited to discuss this, but it is welcome.

So, I don't find the phrase "have in mind" to be particularly problematic in the least.

You can interpret what you say in that manner if you wish, no problems at all from my part.

We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.

(1)

A substantive is some thing named:

We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something.

(1)

What is at issue is a critique of the Tractarian metaphysics of mind. The logical necessity of the connection between names and the existence of corresponding objects, and, by extension, propositions and facts.

One difficulty which strikes us is that for many words in our language there do not seem to be ostensive definitions; e.g. for such words as "one", "number", "not", etc.

(1)

This is followed immediately by the question:

Need the ostensive definition itself be understood?--Can't the ostensive definition be misunderstood?

That “tove” can ostensibly mean pencil or round or wood might seem to be veering off on a tangent, but it raises a related question about the logical connection between language and the world. Language lacks the precision assumed in the Tractatus. That 'tove' means ‘this’ (pencil)and not ‘that’ (wood) is something that is clarified in practice by the activity of using language.

This activity may involve mental processes but is not reducible to them.

We are tempted to think that the action of language consists of two parts; an inorganic part, the handling of signs, and an organic part, which we may call understanding these signs, meaning them, interpreting them, thinking. These latter activities seem to take place in a queer kind of medium, the mind; and the mechanism of the mind, the nature of which, it seems, we don't quite understand, can bring about effects which no material mechanism could.

(3)

Why does the mind seem to be a queer kind of medium? This happens when the mind is taken to be a substantive, a thing with its own mechanism, but a mechanism that can bring about effects that no material mechanism could.

But here we are making two mistakes. For what struck us as being queer about thought
and thinking was not at all that it had curious effects which we were not yet able to explain (causally). Our problem, in other words, was not a scientific one; but a muddle felt
as a problem.

(5-6)

Consistent with the Tractatus, Wittgenstein maintains the distinction between philosophy and natural science.

Now if it is not the causal connections which we are concerned with, then the activities of the mind lie open before us.

(6)

Quoting Manuel

The flower is the stimulus, but without judgments ascertaining if what I gave you is correct, then the flower is quite useless.

Yes, but without the flower, judgements about it are meaningless.

Quoting Manuel

Well, the most immediate example would be of a blind person asking for a red flower. But then since they can't see, it would be strange for them to ask for a red one, as opposed to just a "flower".

Some blind people have visual images - it depends whether they have had vision earlier in their lives. People born blind, I'm not so sure. But Wittgenstein's point is that one can bring you a red flower without a visual image.

Quoting Manuel

So, I don't find the phrase "have in mind" to be particularly problematic in the least.

Well, I think you'll find that not everyone interprets that phrase in the same way - especially in philosophy.

@Banno @Paine @Ludwig V @Jamal @Manuel @Astrophel @Joshs @Kurt Keefner @Shawn

Section 2: 5-8 Two Mistakes

Quoting Paine

a process must be happening organically that makes thinking, speaking, and listening possible but sees his work as something entirely different from investigating that:

Unraveling what is “different” here, one point is that, yes, there are things happening in the brain. And vision, hearing, imagining, talking to ourselves, all have objects that we experience. But meaning, understanding, and thinking (like problem solving) are not structured around objects. Now, sure, there are things happening in the brain when those things happen, but they are not actual mechanisms of the brain “that we were not yet able to explain” (p. 6). Another way to put this is that science isn’t going to tell us what thought or meaning or understanding are. Thus, “it is misleading to talk of thinking as of a ‘mental activity’.”

The reason these “queer” mechanisms are imagined is because we want to say: instead of just ordinary error (random, unpredictable, but correctable), we create an issue that must have a solution with certainty (thus an object), and so we create a “problem” (p.6). So instead of a regular goof-up, we now imagine a problem of knowledge (a scientific one), to be solved for as an object (causal) in us, by a “certain, definite mechanism”, or being able to explain that mechanism. But what was “queer” was not something scientifically peculiar, it was just a mistake, a “muddle” because “here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can't look into”. Thus the reason he says trying to find the place of thinking must be rejected “to prevent confusion”. (p.8)

From here he makes a radical statement that only plays out through the rest of the book. “I can give you no agent who thinks.” (p.6) This seems speculative at this point (and needlessly provocative), and I take it to mean so far that if there is no casual scientific mechanism, then it is the (“external”) judgment of thought that matters, not its agent (though this belies responsibility).

Another note on method. In addition to advising we take our ordinary expressions seriously (p.7), in the PI he gives the impression all our problems are caused by what he says here is the “mystifying use of our language” (p.6). But it is clear here that it is not language which fools us, but our temptation to treat words as objects (like “time”), and it is this desire that mystifies us, as, on page 7, he shows how analogy allows us to mistakenly infer there is a place for thought because there is a place for words.

Quoting Ludwig V

Yes, but without the flower, judgements about it are meaningless.

I don't think that's true as a matter of principle.

If we knew enough about the brain, we - the scientists - could stimulate a flower without us - the experimentee - ever having seen one. In this case, the "external object" merely verifies our criteria, the flower itself is not the ground of our judgment (or our asking about it), rather the "red flower" is something which fits our criteria.

I could give you a plastic red flower, indistinguishable from a real red flower, and it would still fit your criteria.

Quoting Ludwig V

But Wittgenstein's point is that one can bring you a red flower without a visual image.

I agree, I think it's possible in some cases.

Quoting Ludwig V

Well, I think you'll find that not everyone interprets that phrase in the same way - especially in philosophy.

Which is why I said I was a bit surprised to be included in this discussion. I'm well aware I'm quite likely in the minority view.

Nevertheless, Wittgenstein's argument here is ok. I think it's on the right track compared to his earlier views.

Quoting Manuel

If we knew enough about the brain, we - the scientists - could stimulate a flower without us - the experimentee - ever having seen one. In this case, the "external object" merely verifies our criteria, the flower itself is not the ground of our judgment (or our asking about it), rather the "red flower" is something which fits our criteria.

But there is no external object, so there is nothing to verify. There is no "flower itself" to be the ground of our judgement, so there is no ground for our judgement and nothing that fits our criteria. There is a temptation to fill the gap, but the fillers are mysterious magical objects and we end up with a philosophical labyrinth that we cannot escape from. Best not to start.

Quoting Manuel

I could give you a plastic red flower, indistinguishable from a real red flower, and it would still fit your criteria.

If it is a plastic red flower, then it is distinguishable from a real red flower. Of course, I might be deceived and treat it as a real red flower, but it isn't one. So my judgement that I'm holding a red flower is false.

Quoting Manuel

Which is why I said I was a bit surprised to be included in this discussion. I'm well aware I'm quite likely in the minority view.

Nothing wrong with being in the minority. What matters is the discussion.

What does Wittgenstein mean when he says?

I can give you no agent that thinks.

(6)

He is not denying that we think, but rather that the mind is the agent that thinks:

It is misleading then to talk of thinking as of a "mental activity". … This activity is performed by the hand, when we think by writing; by the mouth and larynx, when we think by speaking; and if we think by imagining signs or pictures, I can give you no agent that thinks.

(6) [emphasis added]

He continues:

If then you say that in such cases the mind thinks, I would only draw your attention to the fact that you are using a metaphor, that here the mind is an agent in a different sense from that in which the hand can be said to be the agent in writing.

(6-7)

Elsewhere he says:

I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.

(CV 17)

This is, of course, metaphorical. Contrary to the Tractatus, however, metaphors although not propositions of natural science, are no longer regarded as nonsense. The logical structure of language and thought that was fundamental to the Tractatus has been rejected.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Another way to put this is that science isn’t going to tell us what thought or meaning or understanding are. Thus, “it is misleading to talk of thinking as of a ‘mental activity’.”

This is an extra ordinary remark. Thinking is a paradigm of a mental activity. Surely, what he needs to argue is that mental activities, in particular thinking, is not the kind of activity it suggests, because of the contrast with physical activities. Is doing a calculation with pencil and paper a mental or a physical activity?

Quoting Antony Nickles

Thus the reason he says trying to find the place of thinking must be rejected “to prevent confusion”. (p.8)

But on the previous page he says:-

Blue Book p.7:Now does this mean that it is nonsensical to talk of a locality where thought takes place? Certainly not. This phrase has sense' if we give it sense.

His suggestion is a way of giving "the locality of thinking" a sense that many people would find perfectly satisfactory.

Quoting Antony Nickles

“I can give you no agent who thinks.” (p.6) This seems speculative at this point (and needlessly provocative), and I take it to mean so far that if there is no casual scientific mechanism, then it is the (“external”) judgment of thought that matters, not its agent (though this belies responsibility).

His use of "agent" here is unusual. When I think by writing, the agent is my hands. When I think by imagining, there is no agent. I don't know why the obvious agent - me - doesn't count.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But it is clear here that it is not language which fools us, but our temptation to treat words as objects (like “time”), and it is this desire that mystifies us, as, on page 7, he shows how analogy allows us to mistakenly infer there is a place for thought because there is a place for words.

Yes. His concluding remarks about one's visual field nicely demonstrate how that is possible.

Quoting Ludwig V

Is doing a calculation with pencil and paper a mental or a physical activity?

Wittgenstein takes up this question in the PI:

236. Calculating prodigies who arrive at the correct result but can’t say how. Are we to say that they do not calculate? (A family of cases.)

(364) Is calculating in the imagination in some sense less real than calculating on paper? It is real calculating-in-the-head. Is it similar to calculating on paper? I don’t know whether to call it similar. Is a bit of white paper with black lines on it similar to a human body?

Quoting Ludwig V

His use of "agent" here is unusual.When I think by writing, the agent is my hands. When I think by imagining, there is not agent - for some reason the obvious agent - me - doesn't count.

It does count. As he says, "we think by writing", "we think by speaking" (6). But then:

... and if we think by imagining signs or pictures, I can give you no agent that thinks.

(6)

There is no agent here that is analogous to the hand that writes or mouth that speaks. We might say that in this case it is the mind that imagines, but we do not think with the mind in a way that is analogous to thinking with the hand or mouth.

We are misled by language, or, more precisely, the grammar of our language, when we regard 'mind' as we do 'hand' or 'mouth'. Grammatically all are substantives. They are nouns. As such we may be led to assume that they all name particular things.

What we must do is: understand its working, its grammar, e.g. see what relation this grammar has to that of the expression "we think with our mouth", or "we think with a pencil on a piece of paper".

Perhaps the main reason why we are so strongly inclined to talk of the head as the locality of our thoughts is this: the existence of the words "thinking" and "thought" alongside of the words denoting (bodily) activities, such as writing, speaking, etc., makes us look for an activity, different from these but analogous to them, corresponding to the word "thinking". When words in our ordinary language have prima facie analogous grammars we are inclined to try to interpret them analogously; i.e. we try to make the analogy hold throughout.

(7)

Quoting Fooloso4

There is no agent here that is analogous to the hand that writes or mouth that speaks. We might say that in this case it is the mind that imagines, but we do not think with the mind in a way that is analogous to thinking with the hand or mouth.

Yes. I had read all that when I posted. My problem is quite simple, Normally, we would say, when I calculate using pen and paper, that I am calculating, not that my hand is calculating. Why? Because my hand does not understand mathematics and so is incapable of calculating. So I'm interpreting W as saying that when I imagine calculating there appear to be nothing that fills the blank in "I calculated by..." (except possibly imagining that I was calculating). That's why there's a temptation to talk about mental acts or events. You quote PI 364, which amplifies a bit.
I'm also a bit confused by what he means by calculating by imagining I am calculating. Do you think he means what I would call "calculating in my head"?
It isn't a big thing. It's just that he so rarely says things that are not clear (in my opinion), that this paragraph stood out as unusual. It could be a translation glitch - not a problem at all in German..

Quoting Fooloso4

We are misled by language, or, more precisely, the grammar of our language, when we regard 'mind' as we do 'hand' or 'mouth'. Grammatically all are substantives. They are nouns. As such we may be led to assume that they all name particular things.

Yes. But...

Quoting Antony Nickles

But it is clear here that it is not language which fools us, but our temptation to treat words as objects (like “time”), and it is this desire that mystifies us, as, on page 7, he shows how analogy allows us to mistakenly infer there is a place for thought because there is a place for words.

I think this puts it better.

Reply to Ludwig V

Quoting Ludwig V

Another way to put this is that science isn’t going to tell us what thought or meaning or understanding are. Thus, “it is misleading to talk of thinking as of a ‘mental activity’.”
— Antony Nickles
This is an extra ordinary remark. Thinking is a paradigm of a mental activity. Surely, what he needs to argue is that mental activities, in particular thinking, is not the kind of activity it suggests, because of the contrast with physical activities. Is doing a calculation with pencil and paper a mental or a physical activity?

Wittgenstein, like Heidegger, is substituting a practice theory for a cognitivist account. Thinking isn’t in the head, it is in the interactive performances that co-determine both the person and their world via our patterns of engagement with each other.

Quoting Ludwig V

So I'm interpreting W as saying that when I imagine calculating there appear to be nothing that fills the blank in "I calculated by..." (except possibly imagining that I was calculating)

I take him to be saying that the question: "What I am calculating by?" is misleading. There is not this something that is analogous to the hand or mouth. I imagine. I calculate. In some cases this involves the hand or mouth, but in others there is not some other agent or thing to be identified. And, of course, as you point out, it is not the hand that does the calculating.

The temptation is not to treat words as objects, but to assume that there must be some object that corresponds to the word:

But it is the use of the substantive "time" which mystifies us.

(6)

This is worth repeating:

We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.

(1)

When we look for the meaning of the word 'cow', for example, there is no inexplicable temptation to treat the word as an object. But there is an object, an animal that we can point to that explains the meaning of the word 'cow'. We cannot, however, explain the meaning of 'time' by pointing to something. There is no thing that corresponds to it.

Both 'cow' and 'time' are substantives, but grammatically they do not function in the same way. When the grammar is understood we are no longer misled by the language of substantives.

Quoting Antony Nickles

From here he makes a radical statement that only plays out through the rest of the book. “I can give you no agent who thinks.” (p.6) This seems speculative at this point (and needlessly provocative), and I take it to mean so far that if there is no casual scientific mechanism, then it is the (“external”) judgment of thought that matters, not its agent (though this belies responsibility).

I think the key point is that giving to us an 'agent who thinks' is standing on the outside trying to look in:

Quoting Blue Book, page 6

We are most strongly tempted to think that here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can't look into. And yet nothing of the sort is the case.

Science does try to uncover what is hidden but Wittgenstein sees his enterprise differently. The problem of describing the agent while being that agent is prominent in the Tractatus:

Quoting Tractatus, 5.633

The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.
Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found?
You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye.
And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.

In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein abandons the explanatory éclat of Tractatus but there is a bridge between the two. He goes from saying this:

Quoting Tractatus, 5.64

There is no a priori order of things.
Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it.
Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way.
What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’.
The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it.

to talking about the "craving for generality" The fifth example he gives is:

Blue Book, page 18: Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization.
Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions 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'. (Think of such questions as "Are there sense data?" and ask: What method is there of determining this? Introspection?)

This is all in aid of my saying Wittgenstein is inverting the perspective of Kant and Hume in how he talks about what is immediately given as 'internal' versus 'external'. Their versions of solipsism do not lead to sentences like: "The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it."

Quoting Antony Nickles

But it is clear here that it is not language which fools us, but our temptation to treat words as objects (like “time”), and it is this desire that mystifies us, as, on page 7, he shows how analogy allows us to mistakenly infer there is a place for thought because there is a place for words.

Are those the two mistakes in your headline for this section? I mean the temptation to follow the grammar of language (as opposed to philosophical grammar) and the temptation to be fooled by false analogies - or by over-extended analogies.

Quoting Ludwig V

Thinking is a paradigm of a mental activity. Surely, what he needs to argue is that mental activities, in particular thinking, is not the kind of activity it suggests, because of the contrast with physical activities. Is doing a calculation with pencil and paper a mental or a physical activity?

I am trying to get at his separation between what are the general activities of the brain, and what would enlighten us as to what is essential about thinking. I concede that @Paine had something in saying that the brain makes thought “possible” but that Witt Quoting Paine

sees his work as something entirely different from investigating that

. The problem of the mechanics of the brain “does not interest us” (p.6) because thinking is not a “curious effect” which is the result of “casualty”—something science could explain.

Quoting Ludwig V

Thinking is a paradigm of a mental activity. Surely, what he needs to argue is that mental activities, in particular thinking, is not the kind of activity it suggests, because of the contrast with physical activities. Is doing a calculation with pencil and paper a mental or a physical activity?

I take him to be saying that what thinking IS, is what is important about thinking, which is entirely different than physical causality. Sure, you could explain what is happening in the brain, but it would not matter to what we care about with “thought” (as people (culturally), or as philosophers). The reason science gets confused that it will be important here is that it is working under the misplaced analogy that thought is an object, and thinking is the mechanism that creates that object (and here I am not talking about speaking to ourselves). Now is it actually physical or mental? I don’t think those words matter much in the case of thought. As he implies, we CAN make it matter, but in a number of ways. “I’m thinking through this problem on paper.” Is the thinking mental or physical? The locality is clearly”on the paper”, that is where it is happening, and how; so, physical, right? And then mental could just be: without tools to help the process (say, problem solving), so, to yourself and only with your imagination, memory, self-talk, etc.

Reply to Paine @Ludwig V @Joshs @Manuel
“We are most strongly tempted to think that here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can't look into. And yet nothing of the sort is the case.”
— Blue Book, page 6

Quoting Paine

I think the key point is that giving to us an 'agent who thinks' is standing on the outside trying to look in:

This is an important connection than my merely trying to record the aghast commonly felt at what is seen as removing the self (just, as an object), when he is just following through the categorical error of the ‘strong temptation’ of causality. I would only add that we would be “standing on the outside trying to look in” to ourselves as well if we imagine we can “look into” our own casual object (agent, “self”). Not to move further from the text but to place this in company, the PI will treat the other as opaque and talk of boxes with things hidden, etc.

I am curious about @Paine’s thoughts on the relation to Hume/Kant. Obviously there is Hume’s “agent” and Kant removing the object (but not dismantling the framework that held it).

Reply to Antony Nickles

Immediately after your quoted sentence he says:

"It is not new facts about time which we want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open before us."

Let's replace "time" with anything, say a tree or an idea. It is not the case that "all the facts" are open to us, only those facts which we are of aware of at the given time and (crucially) those facts which we may have no access to.

We are limited on our observations about trees relative to the capacity of our senses and the capacity of our cognitive components.

This applies to our mental powers, or mind as well and much else. He is problematizing something like mental mediation here, which is not clear to me what the problem is.

Quoting Antony Nickles

This is an important connection than my merely trying to record the aghast commonly felt at what is seen as removing the self (just, as an object), when he is just following through the categorical error of the ‘strong temptation’ of causality. I would only add that we would be “standing on the outside trying to look in” to ourselves as well if we imagine we can “look into” our own casual object (agent, “self”). Not to move further from the text but to place this in company, the PI will treat the other as opaque and talk of boxes with things hidden, etc.

I see him saying that we are not concerned with the "causal connections" here, not that they are a category error. We can discuss this if we want, rather, we are choosing not to do so now.

I would agree that we can't - despite (some of) us wanting - peer more into the nature of the self than something like what Hume describes. In this part, I do agree with the example and the general outlook.

Quoting Ludwig V

Are those the two mistakes in your headline for this section?

(pp.5-6):we are tempted to say "the mechanism of the mind must be of a most peculiar kind to be able to do what the mind does". But here we are making two mistakes. For what struck us as being queer about thought and thinking was not at all that it had curious effects which we were not yet able to explain (causally). Our problem, in other words, was not a scientific one; but a muddle felt as a problem.

The two mistakes are: 1. What the mind does (thought) is strange; so 2. How the mind works must be a mystery. Thus, we create the “problem” that we just need to get to where we can explain how it causes “thought”. But the “muddle” we got ourselves into was because we pictured thought as an object. Thought is not an object, and so is not “caused”; thinking is not a mechanism to be explained. If I even have that right, there is much to say about: Why? and other fallout I would think.

Quoting Paine

I think the key point is that giving to us an 'agent who thinks' is standing on the outside trying to look in:

Quoting Antony Nickles

This is an important connection than my merely trying to record the aghast commonly felt at what is seen as removing the self (just, as an object), when he is just following through the categorical error of the ‘strong temptation’ of causality.

This reminds me of the reaction to Berkeley's "removal" of matter or the entire physical world. A modern case is the outrage caused by "illusionism". I've never been quite sure whether the authors of those ideas deliberately chose a shocking formulation rather than the mundane version. What's that French phrase about upsetting the bourgeoisie?

Quoting Antony Nickles

I am curious about Paine’s thoughts on the relation to Hume/Kant. Obviously there is Hume’s “agent” and Kant removing the object (but not dismantling the framework that held it).

I have to confess, that I didn't really understand the connection that he identifies. I'm not saying that there isn't one.

Blue Book, page 6:“We are most strongly tempted to think that here are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which we can't look into. And yet nothing of the sort is the case.”

There's a very strong echo of Hume's argument against scholastic "powers" here, isn't there? But Hume's argument has been generally taken to apply to scientific explanations, not to distinguish between philosophical and scientific explanations. (Saving the point that, in Hume's day, what we now call science was called "natural philosophy).

Blue Book p.6:Now if it is not the causal connections which we are concerned with, then the activities of the mind lie open before us. ...... All the facts that concern us lie open before us.

In his immediately preceding argument, W does say that there is further work to do and I can see that. We live in a different intellectual climate now, and the excitement about neurological discoveries is often taken to be philosophically significant. Indeed, if brain studies can indeed supply - not necessarily objects, but physical processes associated with thought - it will make his arguments here considerably less convincing. Or is this another demarcation criterion between philosophy and science.

Coming back to this, I'm finding myself really confused.

Quoting Antony Nickles

The two mistakes are: 1. What the mind does (thought) is strange; so 2. How the mind works must be a mystery. Thus, we create the “problem” that we just need to get to where we can explain how it causes “thought”. But the “muddle” we got ourselves into was because we pictured thought as an object. Thought is not an object, and so is not “caused”; thinking is not a mechanism to be explained.

It seems to me that these mistakes are a different argument from the argument against hidden objects. My problem here is that I'm not sure that W can take for granted that the traditional dualistic conception of thought involves strange or queer objects. Traditional philosophers didn't find them strange, but entirely familiar. His tactic of taking seriously the idea that a thought is an object, and then showing that such objects cannot do what thought does is itself that argument that the traditional conception is wrong. Now, my question is whether that interpretation of the traditional idea counts as a new fact or not.

Quoting Ludwig V

This reminds me of the reaction to Berkeley's "removal" of matter or the entire physical world. A modern case is the outrage caused by "illusionism". I've never been quite sure whether the authors of those ideas deliberately chose a shocking formulation rather than the mundane version. What's that French phrase about upsetting the bourgeoisie?

Berkeley's version of solipsism is precisely what is discussed in the latter portion of the Blue Book. Wittgenstein's effort differs from Kant who worked to counter the arbitrary quality of causality as presented by Hume. Kant put forth that all of our thinking requires the intuitions of space and time. This places the Cogito of Descartes in a particular "set of facts" that is psychological in nature. Wittgenstein, however, argues that solipsism results from misuse of language:

Quoting Blue Book, 59

Now when the solipsist says that only his own experiences are real, it is no use answering him: "Why do you tell us this if you don't believe that we really hear it?" Or anyhow, if we give him this answer, we mustn't believe that we have answered his difficulty. There is no common sense answer to a philosophical problem. One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense; not by restating the views of common sense. A philosopher is not a man out of his senses, a man who doesn't see what everybody sees; nor on the other hand is his disagreement with common sense that of the scientist disagreeing with the coarse views of the man in the street. That is, his disagreement is not founded on a more subtle knowledge of fact. We therefore have to look round for the source of his puzzlement. And we find that there is puzzlement and mental discomfort, not only when our curiosity about certain facts is not satisfied or when we can't find a law of nature fitting in with all our experience, but also when a notation dissatisfies us--perhaps because of various associations which it calls up. Our ordinary language, which of all possible notations is the one which pervades all our life, holds our mind rigidly in one position, as it were, and in this position sometimes it feels cramped, having a desire for other positions as well. Thus we sometimes wish for a notation which stresses a difference more strongly, makes it more obvious, than ordinary language does, or one which in a particular case uses more closely similar forms of expression than our ordinary language. Our mental cramp is loosened when we are shown the notations which fulfil these needs. These needs can be of the greatest variety.

Now the man whom we call a solipsist and who says that only his own experiences are real, does not thereby disagree with us about any practical question of fact, he does not say that we are simulating when we complain of pains, he pities us as much as anyone else, and at the same time he wishes to restrict the use of the epithet "real" to what we should call his experiences; and perhaps he doesn't want to call our experiences "experiences" at all (again without disagreeing with us about any question of fact). For he would say that it was inconceivable that experiences other than his own were real. He ought therefore to use a notation in which such a phrase as "A has real toothache" (where A is not he) is meaningless, a notation whose rules exclude this phrase as the rules of chess exclude a pawn's making a knight's move. The solipsist's suggestion comes to using such a phrase as "there is real toothache" instead of "Smith (the solipsist) has toothache". And why shouldn't we grant him this notation? I needn't say that in order to avoid confusion he had in this case better not use the word "real" as opposed to "simulated" at all; which just means that we shall have to provide for the distinction "real"/"simulated" in some other way. The solipsist who says "only I feel real pain", "only I really see (or hear)" is not stating an opinion; and that's why he is so sure of what he says. He is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression; but we must yet find why he is.

This confirms the observation made by Fooloso4:

Quoting Fooloso4

The temptation is not to treat words as objects, but to assume that there must be some object that corresponds to the word:

"But it is the use of the substantive "time" which mystifies us.

The last two sentences of Blue Book:

ibid. page 79:Let's not imagine the meaning as an occult connection the mind makes between a word and a thing, and that this connection contains the whole usage of a word as the seed might be said to contain the tree.

The kernel of our proposition that that which has pains or sees or thinks is of a mental nature is only, that the word "I" in "I have pains" does not denote a particular body, for we can't substitute for "I" a description of a body.

Quoting Manuel

Let's replace "time" with anything, say a tree or an idea. It is not the case that "all the facts" are open to us, only those facts which we are of aware of at the given time and (crucially) those facts which we may have no access to.

I agree that our access to facts is limited. I don't think "tree" applies in this case because "time" is being compared to other ideas with no body:

Blue Book, page 6:But it is the use of the substantive "time" which mystifies us. If we look into the grammar of that word, we shall feel that it is no less astounding that man should have conceived of a deity of time than it would be to conceive of a deity of negation or disjunction.

Quoting Manuel

I see him saying that we are not concerned with the "causal connections" here, not that they are a category error. We can discuss this if we want, rather, we are choosing not to do so now.

I agree with this view of a choice. Separating the activities brings new interest to why "time" came to be conceived as a deity where 'negation' and 'disjunction' are just ideas.

@Banno @Paine @Ludwig V @Jamal @Manuel @Astrophel @Joshs @Shawn

Section 2B: 8-10 Analogy

Some of these sections are a little bumpy so I don’t think we should feel compelled to go through all of it, but I do find the term “grammatical analogy” interesting as in the PI it plays the role of the ‘language’ that confuses us and makes something “nonsense”, here specifically (pp.8-9) “you have not yet given this question sense; that is, you have been proceeding by a grammatical analogy, without having worked out the analogy in detail.” So ‘nonsense’ is not a derogatory dismissal, but a unspecific, imposed framework.

Thus:

(p.6):It is misleading to talk of thinking as of a ‘mental activity’. We may say that thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs.

So we can “think” “mentally” (to ourselves) with words or numbers (or images). Again, my answer to which “different sense” (p.7) of “agent” we could point, is not to a casual agent, but the sense or use of agent as one who acts on behalf of something, thus, the designated one who is responsible.

Also, another note on method: when he is saying “if we talk about” or “talk of”, he is coming up with the things we might say, the expressions already there we ordinarily use or made up ones, for example, that there are already “senses” (what he also calls “uses”) of “‘locality of thinking’” such that one could be physical location, like on paper. Additionally, those expressions allow us to “examine [our] reasons”, reflect on ourselves in “understand[ing] its working”, or grammar. I also think it’s important to recognize the unintended logical force that compels us to complete a explanatory picture a certain way because of the inertia of thought and the desire to run an analogy “throughout” the explanation, as it were, creating things to fill missing spots (the ‘thing-in-itself’/‘forms’/‘queer mechanisms’).

As we’ve learned (though perhaps not fully accepted), the analogy of an “activity” is wrong because thinking is not a mechanism nor caused (though we can be “observing thought in our brain”, which is simply “corresponding” (p.7)). He also takes apart the analogy that thought is words/sentences while alluding to a yet-to-be-discovered “use” or ‘sense’ of the word thought, not ”criticizing” or judging “inappropriateness”, nor “hold[ing] throughout”. In fact, he appears to be creating an ethical standard for philosophy, or, ‘thought’, to be, at least, “worked out in detail”, not forced, with an individual/particular framework and workings.

Quoting Paine

I don't think "tree" applies in this case because "time" is being compared to other ideas with no body

Then let's speak of an idea of a tree then. Are we going to say that an idea of a tree exhausts what a tree is?

Or let's take his example of time, does our idea of time exhaust itself by being present to our minds? That's doubtful, unless you believe an idea is all there is to the thing you are having an idea about.

.Wittgenstein asks:

Now does this mean that it is nonsensical to talk of a locality where thought takes place? Certainly not. This phrase has sense' if we give it sense.

(7)

The idea of giving a phrase sense marks another departure from the Tractatus. It is a rejection of the idea that:

The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except
what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do
with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.

(6.53)

There are two different senses of the expression “locality of thinking” (7) We give a phrase sense when we use it in the right way, otherwise it is nonsense. Wittgenstein distinguished between two phenomena. The first involves might contain such things as:

... a train of images, organic sensations, or on the other hand of a train of the various visual, tactual and muscular experiences which he has in writing or speaking a sentence. (8)

The second:

The other experience is one of seeing his brain work. Both these phenomena could correctly be called "expressions of thought"; and the question "where is the thought itself?" had better, in order to prevent confusion, be rejected as nonsensical.

(8)

The confusion arises when the distinction between them is not maintained. The distinction is between what is experienced and an explanation of what happens.

If however we do use the expression "the thought takes place in the head", we have given this expression its meaning by describing the experience which would justify the hypothesis that the thought takes places in our heads, by describing the experience which we wish to call "observing thought in our brain".

(8)

Quoting Paine

Berkeley's version of solipsism is precisely what is discussed in the latter portion of the Blue Book. Wittgenstein's effort differs from Kant who worked to counter the arbitrary quality of causality as presented by Hume. Kant put forth that all of our thinking requires the intuitions of space and time. This places the Cogito of Descartes in a particular "set of facts" that is psychological in nature. Wittgenstein, however, argues that solipsism results from misuse of language:

OK. I think I understand that. Thanks.

Quoting Antony Nickles

In fact, he appears to be creating an ethical standard for philosophy, or, ‘thought’, to be, at least, “worked out in detail”, not forced, with an individual/particular framework and workings.

I'm not clear why you call it an ethical standard. It looks to me more like a method - no, an approach - designed to clarify the use(s) of the terms at play and to enable us to see things in a less misleading way.

But we have to start from accepting that the solipsist, for example, is seeing things in a misleading way. How do we do that? It looks to me as if his diagnosis of solipsism is itself the reason for finding solipsism misleading. (Not that I disagree with it.)

The only other possibility is that solipsism contradicts common sense. But common sense is probably not a reliable criterion for misleading or not. Quoting Blue Book, 59

There is no common sense answer to a philosophical problem.

That doesn't necessarily mean that common sense is immune from philosophical problems. Indeed, it may be common sense that gives rise to (some) philosophical problems.

What I'm suggesting is that W here is starting from philosophy as he finds it, and not paying enough attention to what gets philosophy started - which must be muddles that arise from common sense - or perhaps from science's search for causes.

Quoting Blue Book, 59

Thus we sometimes wish for a notation which stresses a difference more strongly, makes it more obvious, than ordinary language does,

If our disagreement with solipsism is just a question of notation, we seem to have no way of persuading solipsist to change their view. There must be more to it than that. (The same applies to the more persuasive analogy of the puzzle pictures, which I see turn up in the Brown Book (p.162).)

For clarity, I ask these question in the spirit of Augustine puzzlement about the nature of time. I do think that W is identifying important truths about philosophy and its practice. But that's not to say that I am not puzzled about them.

@Ludwig V
Quoting Paine

Wittgenstein, however, argues that solipsism results from misuse of language:

I haven’t gotten as far as your quote from the end of the book, but I think I’ve shown sufficient evidence in the text that the vehicle of confusion may be things like: that words can still have meaning imposed on them despite being removed from context, and that analogy can force a conclusion simply because of shared premises, which are both logical errors, but that the cause, more motivation, which “results” in solipsism is the desire for certainty (e.g., wanting everything to have a reference like objects). The common reading that normally we misuse language or get tricked by it is usually followed by the conclusion that philosophy simply needs to impose its own, better, more logical, clearer, more certain, etc., criteria (though distinctions sometimes must be made). I think this argument plays out through the work.

Quoting Ludwig V

I'm not clear why you call it an ethical standard

Well I’m not sure it’s going too far to say being contextual, not forcing conclusions, etc., are virtues. Calling it best practices, or a code of conduct seems fine but it also seems to remove the self-awareness of how those actions reflect on our character, as Socrates was trying to make his students better, not just more knowledgeable. Also, I think the list of these practices could be continued by us, but his “method” is, as it were, proprietary, in that he is revolutionizing philosophy in a specific way (by looking at the kinds of things we would say, as evidence of what has importance, merit) although I realize I’ve been classifying these together so far as well.

Quoting Ludwig V

What I'm suggesting is that W here is starting from philosophy as he finds it, and not paying enough attention to what gets philosophy started - which must be muddles that arise from common sense - or perhaps from science's search for causes.

It does seem like he starts mid-staircase (as with Emerson), and so it is maybe not so much a matter of where the muddle starts but why, and I think he would lay the blame on our desire for philosophy to be like science, to have the same kind of results, or that everything else be judged in that shadow. And this is not so much against common sense, or the results of our ordinary judgments, as removed from all our varied reasons for making judgments at all except scientific certainty.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I haven’t gotten as far as your quote from the end of the book, but I think I’ve shown sufficient evidence in the text that the vehicle of confusion may be things like: that words can still have meaning imposed on them despite being removed from context, and that analogy can force a conclusion simply because of shared premises, which are both logical errors, but that the cause, more motivation, which “results” in solipsism is the desire for certainty (e.g., wanting everything to have a reference like objects). The common reading that normally we misuse language or get tricked by it is usually followed by the conclusion that philosophy simply needs to impose its own, better, more logical, clearer, more certain, etc., criteria (though distinctions sometimes must be made). I think this argument plays out through the work.

Oh, I agree that that argument plays out through the work and beyond!
1. But it seems to me that further clarification is needed about "more logical, clearer, more certain .. criteria". These all have an application as psychological (hence subjective) terms as well as an objective sense - and there's that troublesome concept of self-evidence lurking here. There does seem to be wide agreement, at least amongst analytic philosophers, about their application, but that might be due to acculturation - training.
2. I can agree that the desire for certainty is a plausible motivation for solipsism. But I don't see any reason to suppose that's the motivation in every case. Why could it not be fear of transparent relationships with other people? Or a feeling of isolation from other people? Once one has started looking for psychological motivations, one has to contend with a pandora's box of them. In addition, we might start looking for a motivation for rejecting solipsism as well. At that point, whether we accept or reject, it seems that we are doing psychiatry rather than philosophy. Or could it be classified as phenomenology?

Quoting Antony Nickles

Calling it best practices, or a code of conduct seems fine but it also seems to remove the reflection on how those actions reflect on our character, as Socrates was trying to make his students better, not just more knowledgeable.

There is a difference between a character trait being of particular importance in some activities and it being important in life in general. The virtues required to acquire knowledge may not particularly relevant to those required to do good business or create good art.


Quoting Antony Nickles

It does seem like he starts mid-staircase (as with Emerson), and so it is maybe not so much a matter of where the muddle starts but why, and I think he would lay the blame on our desire for philosophy to be like science, to have the same kind of results, or that everything else be judged in that shadow. And this is not so much against common sense, or the results of our ordinary judgments, as removed from all our varied reasons for making judgments at all except scientific certainty.

I think I agree with this, and yes, if one remembers the context of logical positivism (with its links to the TLP), it seems very likely.
There is an irony here, isn't there? The desire to be scientific is in direct conflict with the desire for certainty - at least in the context of philosophy.

Quoting Ludwig V

further clarification is needed about "more logical, clearer, more certain .. criteria".

I only point it out as the placeholder for the alternative to our ordinary criteria that we uncover by self-reflection rather than impose. By “certain” I just mean the desire for mathematical/scientific answers—that are universal, predictable, generalized, free from context, “objective”, complete, conclusive, etc. I take these as the opposite of the time/place-dependent, partial, categorical, open-ended, etc. ordinary criteria that we uncover in looking at examples of our expressions regarding a practice, which I don’t take as “subjective” or “self-evident” so much as particular to each activity (thinking, pointing, rule-following, apologizing, identifying, etc.)

Quoting Ludwig V

I can agree that the desire for certainty is a plausible motivation for solipsism. But I don't see any reason to suppose that's the motivation in every case.

I agree; I only come back to it because I think here he is focusing on that desire for scientific/certain outcomes. I do think it is the basic reaction that drives other desires. The desire of the solipsist for an “object” inside themselves (perception, appearance, sense-data) could be argued to come from wanting to be special, individual in a way that is fixed and innate rather than accomplished.

Quoting Ludwig V

Once one has started looking for psychological motivations, one has to contend with a pandora's box of them.

“Psychological” to me is a term for individual motivations, and I think he is uncovering traits along a more generalized, human scale—the fear of uncertainty, etc. Cavell points to the fact of our being separate from each other (unknown, hidden) and our fear of not being able to know the world with the completeness that we desire ahead of time. These are conditions of being human, and thus separate I would argue from psychological motivations.

Quoting Ludwig V

The desire to be scientific is in direct conflict with the desire for certainty - at least in the context of philosophy.

As I am using “certainty”, I mean it to be the same as the desire for scientific outcomes; what he calls “logical purity” in the PI.

Quoting Antony Nickles

By “certain” I just mean the desire for mathematical/scientific answers—that are universal, predictable, generalized, free from context, “objective”, complete, conclusive, etc. I take these as the opposite of the time/place-dependent, partial, categorical, open-ended, etc. ordinary criteria that we uncover in looking at examples of our expressions regarding a practice, which I don’t take as “subjective” or “self-evident” so much as particular to each activity (thinking, pointing, rule-following, apologizing, identifying, etc.)

Aren't you are citing the ideals that science tries to achieve? In practice science is always provisional and restricted in its scope, not certain at all.

Quoting Antony Nickles

These are conditions of being human, and thus separate I would argue from psychological motivations.

So solipsism is part of the human condition? Then how can philosophy free us from it? But then, if solipsism is part of the human condition, what does it mean to say that it is only an illusion of language?

Quoting Ludwig V

Aren't you are citing the ideals that science tries to achieve? In practice science is always provisional and restricted in its scope, not certain at all.

Well, to the extent it has done its work, the method of science is based on ensuring repeatable, predictability, and removing our (individual) part in its results. But yes, it is in a sense always open to correction and restricted to what it can apply its method. Philosophy has always used math as its actual ideal for knowledge (Descartes, Socrates, etc.). But here we are focused on the desire for the ideal, and not justifying it or achieving it.

Quoting Ludwig V

So solipsism is part of the human condition? Then how can philosophy free us from it? But then, if solipsism is part of the human condition, what does it mean to say that it is only an illusion of language?

Veering outside the scope of the text, Cavell will say that in the PI Wittgenstein is showing that there is a truth to skepticism (it is not a confusion or problem) in that knowledge is only part of our relation to the world and there is no fact that ensures it so we fill the gap with/in our actions (to each other and in trusting/questioning the world and our culture).

@Banno @Paine @Ludwig V @Jamal @Manuel @Astrophel @Joshs @Shawn

Section 3 (pp. 10-14) Acting without Rules

As an aside, he finds another logical error, mixing contexts, or thinking we understand a word because we have a definition for it in isolation but that offers up no particular rationale for the specific case. So we do not explain meaning generally; only a particular statement has “neither more, nor less, meaning than your explanation has given it.” (p.10) The idea has temporality to it (which becomes a theme); like we cannot be certain of the meaning of language beforehand, and we may not at first understand after an expression (even knowing the words, and other contexts in which it has sense), so it is not a matter of knowledge but being accustomed to (or learning) how to judge by what is important to us in that case. This is the ability of language to extend into new contexts (discussed in the PI as: continuing a series) because at times how it matters is, as yet, to be determined.

Mid-page 9, once we have finally settled there can be a sense of a “place” for thought in the brain (corresponding activity), he brings up water diviners who “feel” a fact, and those who defy even the logic of a described sense we can acknowledge, which I take as a reassertion that skepticism nevertheless can be endless, and to begin to investigate the individual attempting to retain a standard for his ‘own’ thought, as if my “feelings” fall back onto my ‘perception’ which is a claim of an “object” (sense data) in me that is irrefutable, casual (the feeling we need/want a yellow image to find a yellow ball).

(p.11):Now we must examine the relation of the process of learning to estimate with the act of estimating. The importance of this examination lies in this, that it applies to the relation between learning the meaning of a word and making use of the word

Yes, he will be externalizing our “feelings” by looking at how we learn to act, but I wanted to focus on the connection between “learning” and “making use of the word” only to point out that this clarifies the meaning of his term “use” in the PI. Many take it that he is pointing out that we “use” words (that we are the cause of their meaning). But I take the term to mean the externalized possibilities (“uses”) of a word (not that we can’t choose our words though)—here he calls it their (rule’s) “application”. If we are learning how a word works (its criteria and grammar) we are learning the different options for the word. So his point is not that we “use” words, it is which use (option) one would make of them (interpret them to be). He interchangeably will say “sense”, so it would be which sense (or “use”) applies in a given situation.

He breaks down learning into cause and rule. I took the “cause” to show the authority that I take, which can be the trust in the teacher’s authority, or, without reason, based on the authority I have for my own acts (example 4 “‘I don’t know, it just looks like a yard’”), which is to externalize some ‘internal’ cause for speech into taking responsibility for what I say (wanting to be certain beforehand vs. continuing to be resolved to what I say afterwards).

When he differentiates between being “in accordance” with a rule or “involving” a rule (p. 13), I take it to be the basis of the PI’s conclusion that meaning/action is not based on rules. “201. This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” Here he talks of a rule of squaring but comes short of saying the rule causes the conclusion, but that “What I wrote is in accordance with the general rule of squaring; but it obviously is also in accordance with any number of other rules; and amongst these it is not more in accordance with one than with another. In the sense in which before we talked about a rule being involved in a process, no rule was involved in this.” (Emphasis in original) He points out that the exception is when we actually consciously rely on a rule in taking an action, but, of course, the exception is to prove that rules do not dictate (or are the cause of) our actions—it does not “act at a distance” (p.14). Again, we can follow a rule or we can go “the way one has gone oneself”, even though we were taught by rules, the teaching “drops out of our considerations”. We may or may not explain by rules afterwards (“post hoc”).

Quoting Antony Nickles

But here we are focused on the desire for the ideal, and not justifying it or achieving it.

Well, those are indeed different questions, though they are also related.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Cavell will say that in the PI Wittgenstein is showing that there is a truth to skepticism (it is not a confusion or problem) in that knowledge is only part of our relation to the world and there is no fact that ensures it so we fill the gap with/in our actions (to each other and in trusting/questioning the world and our culture).

Yes, I've a lot of time for Cavell. But doesn't he also raise the question of why sceptics cling to their view? Something about being acknowledged (and seeking safety).

Quoting Blue Book, 59

He is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression; but we must yet find why he is.

That's the question that I don't understand. If the whole thing is a conjuring trick, there is no answer to it, or rather, the only answer is to the question how the trick is pulled off.

But I agree that we are veering outside the text, so I'll leave this there.

Quoting Ludwig V

So solipsism is part of the human condition? Then how can philosophy free us from it? But then, if solipsism is part of the human condition, what does it mean to say that it is only an illusion of language?

I don't get the sense that the condition is explained away. The "illusion of language" seems like a complete explanation in a work that questions "general explanations."

If completely general explanations work for establishing human conditions, then Wittgenstein is hoisted by his own petard.

Quoting Paine

I don't get the sense that the condition is explained away. The "illusion of language" seems like a complete explanation in a work that questions "general explanations."

But I don't think anyone is trying to explain the human condition away. The only thing that might be in dispute is what is and what is not a part of it. Remember, the role of the human condition (well, human ways of life) is to be the ground of all our justifications - not that that appears in this text.

Quoting Paine

If completely general explanations work for establishing human conditions, then Wittgenstein is hoisted by his own petard.

"Hoist with this own petard" is always satisfying when it works. But I'm not sure what you are saying here. Explanations of human ways of life are not part of W's arguments. For W, human ways of life are the ultimate ground for all other justifications and explanations. The tricky bit is whether we can go further - or rather whether philosophy can (or needs to) go further (deeper?). There's a temptation there - but is it an illusion (of language, perhaps)?

Reply to Ludwig V
I guess that the "craving for generality" is a condition that we cannot escape. That is a psychological observation along with whatever it is that Wittgenstein sees as going beyond that.

The question I have is to what degree does the Blue Book discussion of solipsism argue with what the Tractatus says. In the latter, the condition is "manifest" but not "said". In the former, it is a problem that is not necessary after considering other means of expression. Is that another way to point to what cannot be said or is it a change of opinion about the grounds of talking about conditions?

Quoting Paine

The question I have is to what degree does the Blue Book discussion of solipsism argue with what the Tractatus says. In the latter, the condition is "manifest" but not "said". In the former, it is a problem that is not necessary after considering other means of expression. Is that another way to point to what cannot be said or is it a change of opinion about the grounds of talking about conditions?

I had not thought about the relationship with TLP. In that context, it is striking that he thinks that solipsism is a matter of "notation" - of how to represent/express the same facts. In neither work is solipsism (or, by extension, any other philosophical doctrine) thought of as a matter of truth vs falsity. There's that much in common.
That said, the TLP doesn't recognize the multifarious uses of language in the way that his later work does. What happened to showing, not saying? I'm not sure.

Quoting Paine

I guess that the "craving for generality" is a condition that we cannot escape. That is a psychological observation along with whatever it is that Wittgenstein sees as going beyond that.

I'm a bit torn about this. Philosophers often generalize beyond what seems appropriate to me. "Everything exists" would be one example (not that I could cite a case) and "A=A" is another. It does seem appropriate to describe the cases like these as the result of a "craving for generality".
However, generalizing is deeply embedded in our thinking. To call it a craving does not distinguish between generalizations that are very helpful - even essential - to our understanding and those that are that cause confusion and misunderstanding.
W often seems to talk/write as if all generalization was wrong (misleading), or at least that all generalization in philosophy is wrong (misleading). If we took him to mean that all scientific laws were wrong or all legislation is wrong, it would not (I think) stand up. We accept or at least take seriously what he says because we understand him to be talking in the context of the generalizations of the philosophies that he seeks to escape from because they are misleading and unhelpful.

Some questions:-
Quoting Antony Nickles

This is the ability of language to extend into new contexts (discussed in the PI as: continuing a series) because at times how it matters is, as yet, to be determined.

I don’t see continuing the series as at all the same thing as extending a word or concept into new contexts. In the former, we say that we are doing the same thing and that is determined by the rule. The latter is a quite different problem, in circumstances when the rule does not determine how it is to be applied. Thus, the rule “+1” means that we do the same thing, but to a different number at each step. You can call each step a new circumstance if you like, but the rule defines it as the same. But when, for example, we define “?” we create a new circumstance and have to decide how to apply “+1”.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I took the “cause” to show the authority that I take, which can be the trust in the teacher’s authority, or, without reason, based on the authority I have for my own acts (example 4 “‘I don’t know, it just looks like a yard’”), which is to externalize some ‘internal’ cause for speech into taking responsibility for what I say (wanting to be certain beforehand vs. continuing to be resolved to what I say afterwards).

Do you mean that citing the fact that I have been taught to identify the depth of the water or to cite the feeling I get is to try to outsource the justification that should rest with me – sticking to my judgement? But what if I’m wrong? Don’t I have to accept responsibility whether I outsource my decision or not?
To put it another way, there’s a big difference between the referee whose decision defines what happened as a goal and the reporter whose story reports what happened as a goal.

I found this rather confusing. It is true that “cause” does not always mean what it means in philosophy, and I can see why W might want to call the teaching process a cause, but if the teaching has authority, it would be clearer to call it a reason, because part of the meaning of reason is justification. But that isn’t altogether satisfactory either.
Compare:-

p.14:Now if one thinks that there could be no understanding and obeying the order without a previous teaching, one thinks of the teaching as supplying a reason for doing what one did; as supplying the road one walks.

Quoting Antony Nickles

no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.

I don’t think that’s quite right. Should it not be “No course of action could be determined by any specific rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with it.”
Given any course of action, one can represent it as in accordance with a rule. But surely it does not follow that given a specific rule, one cannot determine the next step. That is what I learn when I learn to apply a rule.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Again, we can follow a rule or we can go “the way one has gone oneself”, even though we were taught by rules, the teaching “drops out of our considerations”. We may or may not explain by rules afterwards (“post hoc”).

`

p.14:Giving a reason for something one did or said means showing a way which leads to this action. In some cases it means telling the way which one has gone oneself; in others it means describing a way which leads there and is in accordance with certain accepted rules.

That’s true. Yet there is a difference between saying that the action is justified for the following reasons and saying that those reasons were the reasons why one did it.

Quoting Ludwig V

He is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression; but we must yet find why he is.
— Blue Book, 59
That's the question that I don't understand. If the whole thing is a conjuring trick, there is no answer to it, or rather, the only answer is to the question how the trick is pulled off.

The irresistible temptation is not “to use a certain form of expression”. The temptation is for mathematical certainty. That desire forces the expression into a certain form (as forcing the analogy that everything has the framework of an object.)

Quoting Paine

The "illusion of language" seems like a complete explanation in a work that questions "general explanations."

It’s an oversimplification to say that he doesn’t do explanations, just not theoretical ones outside of any particular context and particular criteria and facts. A specific explanation about the human condition can have particular facts (we are separate, you are hidden from me, etc.) with a detailed context of our relation to the other.

Quoting Antony Nickles

The irresistible temptation is not “to use a certain form of expression”. The temptation is for mathematical certainty. That desire forces the expression into a certain form (as forcing the analogy that everything has the framework of an object.)

That looks like an idea that would explain why the temptation exists. No doubt there's more to say, but the desire for certainty would explain why the temptation exists. What I don't understand is why a change of notation would cure the desire. (I realize that the text itself doesn't explicitly get in to that question, but it stares us in the face.)

Quoting Ludwig V

I don’t see continuing the series as at all the same thing as extending a word or concept into new contexts. In the former, we say that we are doing the same thing and thatility is determined by the rule.

I meant to refer generally to the discussion of both, not to just the mathematical section (though, as the text here points out, even mathematically the rule does not “determine” anything; even the judgment (“wrong”) can be suspended, say, with children).

Quoting Ludwig V

Don’t I have to accept responsibility whether I outsource my decision or not?

Yes, but maybe that is exactly the motivation for following a rule based on someone else’s authority, or your own feeling as a “cause”: in order to abdicate not only our authority, but to thus try to sidestep responsibility for our acts and speech. Thus the thought we can say “well that was my perception, so…” to attempt to excuse ourselves.

Quoting Ludwig V

But surely it does not follow that given a specific rule, one cannot determine the next step.

We learn to take next steps, but in some cases that is more indeterminant than others, so one can definitely anticipate the next step, and with that expectation, say, judge with severity perhaps because there couldn’t be less room for interpretation, but we cannot “determine” a course of action, i.e., predict it, make it happen, or do it “correctly”. We do not apply the rule (or next step), until it is applied (taken). Thus why he makes the point of saying it can only be explained after the fact (not by a “cause”).

Quoting Antony Nickles

I meant to refer generally to the discussion of both, not to just the mathematical section (though, as the text here points out, even mathematically the rule does not “determine” anything; even the judgment (“wrong”) can be suspended, say, with children).

I agree it's not just about mathematics. I think W is quite right to point out that a rule has no magic powers and that we determine what it determines - the meaning of the rule is its use, that is, how we apply it.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Yes, but maybe that is exactly the motivation for following a rule based on someone else’s authority, or your own feeling as a “cause”: in order to abdicate not only our authority, but to thus try to sidestep responsibility for our acts and speech. Thus the thought we can say “well that was my perception, so…” to attempt to excuse ourselves.

I think you are over-thinking this. It is true that "I feel that..." is often (mis)used rhetorically to establish one's authority and establish immunity from criticism/disagreement . But I think that the water-diviner's case is different from that. It is comparable to cases in which we know and can assert things confidently without being able to explain why. There's no need to establish authority or frame an excuse, because we very often get these judgements right. The water diviner seems to me more like someone who tells you what the sign says, because they can read or because they speak English.

Quoting Antony Nickles

We do not apply the rule (or next step), until it is applied (taken). Thus why he makes the point of saying it can only be explained after the fact (not by a “cause”).

Yes. I can see that. I think, however, that there is a great deal more to be said about "embedded beliefs" as reasons for action.

Reply to Ludwig V
Saying all generalizations are wrong would be another generalization. I don't read that as what is going on.

But I understand why that is a question that persists through a close reading of the work. If the intention is truly the end of perplexity, Deleuze was right in declaring the "Wittgenstenians" as the assassinators of philosophy.

Quoting Paine

Saying all generalizations are wrong would be another generalization. I don't read that as what is going on.

Quite so. It's a variant of the liar paradox. Most people seem to read it in the context of the analytic philosophy of his time. I think that must be right.
The argument that all philosophy is nonsense is based on a certain view of logic and truth. A true analytic statement is true under all circumstances. Hence it denies nothing. Hence it asserts nothing. A false analytic statement is not a statement at all, but a word salad - nonsense. If you compare him with, for example, Logical Positivism, W is quite moderate. (In the TLP, as I understand it) one of the things that shows as opposed to being said is the truths of logic. It makes sense, I think.
Anyway, that's the best explanation I can think of for the way that he starts on the basis that some statements are "occult" and suggesting a specific problem - that something in the statement is not properly defined.

Quoting Paine

But I understand why that is a question that persists through a close reading of the work. If the intention is truly the end of perplexity, Deleuze was right in declaring the "Wittgenstenians" as the assassinators of philosophy.

I think that the intention was precisely that. It was a revolution after all. So Deleuze's comment doesn't seem inappropriate. One person's assassination is another person's removal of a load of rubbish. Mind you, Heidegger thought the entire history of philosophy needed to be removed of abandoned as well. I wonder if Deleuze thought about that at all. The question "what next?" did get asked after a while, but I'm not sure that anyone has written about it. The only answer I ever heard was that people would go on making the same mistakes, so the cleansing process would go on. It wasn't particularly inspiring. In the end, of course, philosophy did manage to stagger on - though there are people who regard the persistence of analytic philosophy as a mistake.

Whoops

@Banno @Paine @Ludwig V @Jamal @Manuel @Astrophel @Joshs @Shawn

Section 3B (pp.14-15) Causes vs. Reasons

Quoting Ludwig V

Yet there is a difference between saying that the action is justified for the following reasons and saying that those reasons were the reasons why one did it.

Yes but aren’t justifications just one kind of (prepared) reasons, as are principals (beliefs for action), mitigating circumstances, impulses, conformity or “embedded beliefs” and any number of practices for which we express to you (or are told) our interest for having done or said something. But, nevertheless, there are things common to reasoning (here compared to rules or causation or motivation).

In his terms, reasons aren’t prior to an act (a reason is not “for action”, as you word it); our responsibility for answering why we did something (after the fact) is why “actual reasons [have] a beginning” (p.15) Riceour says acts are an event (meaning: in time).

And again, we can have “no reason” (and there can appear none), as the apathetic have none for not acting (perhaps this is ‘privilege’), though we can hold them responsible nevertheless.

As an aside, I note we “are inclined” (p.16) to give an (impersonal) cause when we “come to an end” rather than explain our interests and commitments further, as we are “inclined” to turn the spade (PI #217) on the student rather than keep trying to give justifications for our continuing as we do. The inclination here seems the beginning of the temptation at the heart of the matter, so perhaps our desire for science is tied to our fear of exposing ourselves, relying on ourselves.

“No number of agreeing statements is necessary” because my reasons are my own (or yours given to me). Neither are we hypothesizing as to the mystery of me; we are making a “statement” of what we are standing for.

Also, a note on method. He will often try to get us to see a logical impossibility (thus necessary possibility) by pointing out what can and cannot be the case (usually based on what we say in a given situation). A “grammatical” point shows us the hard edge of a practice, but it is our acceptance of the description that creates the power of the distinction (rather than a logical argument trying to force us to accept it, which is what creates the temptation for an abstract predetermined criteria only to satisfy that goal). The mechanism is self-justification—for a cause to be considered a cause (and not a motive) it must meet its own criteria. (Cavell will draw out this “must” in his essay “Must We Mean what We Say”.)

Quoting Paine

If the intention is truly the end of perplexity…

Quoting Ludwig V

The only answer I ever heard was that people would go on making the same mistakes, so the cleansing process would go on.

The confusions so far appear to be motivated by the desire for a “crystalline purity of logic” (PI #107) like that misapplies the framework of objects to our feelings and sensations, or, most recently, that reasoning is thought to be causality. So there is no “end of perplexity” but there is a truth to our getting perplexed, which I take as the investigation and conclusion of the PI. This book lays the groundwork, not to ‘answer’ the confusion, but to ask what that says about us.

Reply to Antony Nickles

Sorry Anthony I can't participate at the moment. Don't have the capacity to focus too much on W now. But will return soon to this thread hopefully.

Quoting Antony Nickles

This book lays the groundwork, not to ‘answer’ the confusion, but to ask what that says about us.

Where, in that description, is an activity outside of psychology? Wittgenstein was the one who insisted upon an activity beyond that.

Reply to Manuel
Duly noted.

Quoting Paine

Where, in that description, is an activity outside of psychology? Wittgenstein was the one who insisted upon an activity beyond that.

Yes, but his derogatory ideas of “psychology” (“mental processes”, compulsion, etc.) doesn’t eclipse his discussion of our human responses to philosophical issues.

Quoting Antony Nickles

So there is no “end of perplexity” but there is a truth to our getting perplexed,

Yes, that's true (!).
But I think my point is that W seems to start from our perplexity, which may be a good starting-point in one way. But in our actual situation, we are already in the middle of philosophy, and there are people around who think they have resolved them (or some of them). W thinks they are wrong about that, but that is a philosophical position, which needs to be demonstrated. I don't say he is wrong to do that - everybody needs to start from somewhere - but it seems to rely on a wholesale dismissal of the philosophical tradition(s), as in Russell's history of western philosophy. On the other hand, other philosophers have done the same thing. (Heidegger, Husserl, Hume, Descartes etc.)

Quoting Antony Nickles

The confusions so far appear to be motivated by the desire for a “crystalline purity of logic” (PI #107) like that misapplies the framework of objects to our feelings and sensations, or, most recently, that reasoning is thought to be causality. So there is no “end of perplexity” but there is a truth to our getting perplexed, which I take as the investigation and conclusion of the PI. This book lays the groundwork, not to ‘answer’ the confusion, but to ask what that says about us.

And, of course, that desire is, at least partly, based on the desire for certainty.
It occurs to me that there may be a different desire underlying scepticism, which is the desire to undermine baseless certainties. If we see Pyrrhonism in the context of its time, when the ideas that were traditional and conventional at the time were under increasing scrutiny, it may look more like a desire to prick bubbles of superstition and dogmatism. The same applies to Cartesian scepticism. Hume draws a distinction between what he calls judicious scepticism and Pyrrhonism - he ignores Descartes, so far as I can see, in favour of Pyrrho - and it seems to me that this is perfectly correct. However, he doesn't consider that it may be difficult to distinguish between judicious scepticism and Pyrrho.

Quoting Paine

Where, in that description, is an activity outside of psychology? Wittgenstein was the one who insisted upon an activity beyond that.

I agree that he seems to wander in the border country between the two. On the other hand, he may be relying on the common definition of his time - psychology as science and therefore limited to stimulus-response (causal) connections. I would have thought he would be justified in thinking that that methodolgy excludes what he is trying to do. But the failure to distinguish between psychological ("subjective") certainty and clarity and objective certainty and clarity is very common in analytic philosophy.

Quoting Ludwig V

What I don't understand is why a change of notation would cure the desire. (I realize that the text itself doesn't explicitly get in to that question, but it stares us in the face.)

On reflection, I want to add that what a notation can do is make us look at things differently, not in the sense of gathering new facts, but in the sense of interpreting the facts that we have differently. This takes us to "seeing as".

Reply to Ludwig V
Quoting Ludwig V

it seems to rely on a wholesale dismissal of the philosophical tradition(s), as in Russell's history of western philosophy. On the other hand, other philosophers have done the same thing. (Heidegger, Husserl, Hume, Descartes etc.)

Heidegger was keenly attuned to the historical nature of philosophy, as reflected in his appreciation for etymology, but Wittgenstein tended to write at times in an ahistorical way , as though something like a ‘desire for certainty’ could be understood independently of the historical eras within which concepts like desire and certainty were used.

Quoting Ludwig V

But the failure to distinguish between psychological ("subjective") certainty and clarity and objective certainty and clarity is very common in analytic philosophy.

I would have thought that, up till Wittgenstein’s later work, what was common within analytic philosophy was a failure to recognize the interdependence of subjective and objective certainty and clarity.

Quoting Joshs

Heidegger was keenly attuned to the historical nature of philosophy,

Yes. There's a difference between recognizing that one's own philosophy is historically conditioned and not. Much more could be said - the names I cited were off the top of my head.

Quoting Joshs

I would have thought that, up till Wittgenstein’s later work, what was common within analytic philosophy was a failure to recognize the interdependence of subjective and objective certainty and clarity.

That's certainly better put, because they are indeed interdependent.

Quoting Paine

If the intention is truly the end of perplexity, Deleuze was right in declaring the "Wittgenstenians" as the assassinators of philosophy.

Quoting Ludwig V

The only answer I ever heard was that people would go on making the same mistakes, so the cleansing process would go on.

Philosophy has never shown any inclination to roll over and die.

Of course there are two, and maybe three, senses of "philosophy" in Wittgenstein: there is what philosophers do, which is entrench an everyday misunderstanding into a "problem", and then offer "solutions"; and then there is the sort of work Wittgenstein is doing in The Blue Book, showing that the solutions are not solutions and the problem is not a problem but a muddle.

But there may be a third sort of philosophy, which is the more or less deliberate cultivation of perplexity so that it may ? one hopes! ? be resolved. And this is interesting because until you have the resolution, you are rather in the position of the moviegoer who doesn't really believe the main character is going to die but is scared for them anyway. This cannot be a real problem, you say to yourself, but for the moment it sure seems to be.

[quote=p. 3]If I give someone the order "fetch me a red flower from that meadow", how is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as I have only given him a word?[/quote]

Where does this question come from? It's not an ordinary question, not the sort of problem people raise in everyday life.

[quote=Philosophical Grammar, p. 40]If I give anyone an order I feel it to be quite enough to give him signs. And if I am given an order, I should never say: "this is only words, and I have got to get behind the words". And when I have asked someone something and he gives me an answer I am content ? that was just what I expected ? and I don't raise the objection: "but that's a mere answer."[/quote]

Getting behind the words is also in the early pages of The Blue Book:

[quote=p. 4]Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important thing, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's idea could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life.[/quote]

Frege says that we have to get behind the signs to the meaning, precisely what Wittgenstein notes it never occurs to anyone to say about the signs we exchange in everyday life.

So this is where Wittgenstein's odd question in The Blue Book comes from. You might say he shows the folly of Frege's view by taking it seriously and imagining the consequences of it in everyday life ? but that's not quite right. In the philosophy of mathematics, there is debate, there is worry, about the nature of mathematical practice, insofar as it is the handling of mathematical signs; but in everyday life, there is no worry about this, and no complaining that we are just passing signs back and forth.

Wittgenstein's non-everyday question has this point then: why is there worry in the philosophy of mathematics but not in everyday life? To ask that question, he does indeed have to bring Frege's idea into the world of everyday behaviour and see what it would look like. But not as a refutation; to be a refutation, he would have to say we are formalists in our everyday lives and there has been no catastrophe. That is not quite what he says; instead he notes that these sorts of questions, and the concerns they would express, just never arise. They could, as they do in the philosophy of mathematics, but they don't. Why not?

Now we have something a bit like a problem to work on, philosophically. A deliberately induced perplexity. I think there's something characteristically philosophical about this sort of puzzle: "Why don't people ...?" It requires a particular sort of imagination to notice what people do not do and what they do not worry about, and a particular sort of imagination to make it plausible that they would.

Hume convincing you that if you knew nothing about the physical world, you would have no idea that the impact of one billiard ball on another would cause the second to move. The issue here is not why the second ball moves ? that's for physics to say ? but that we never wonder whether it will move, we never worry that it won't as we never worry that tomorrow the sun will not rise. And Hume asks himself, why not?

If that's right, then there are three sorts of perplexity: everyday muddles, many, but not all, of which can be addressed through logic and mathematics; philosophical muddles, which are sometimes based in everyday muddles and are sometimes due to habits characteristic of philosophers (generalizing and such); and then there are the oddball questions which lead either to science (why does the second ball move? is also a very good question) or to philosophy.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Philosophy has never shown any inclination to roll over and die.

Quite.
A history of philosophy as endless mistakes is as much a mistake as a history of philosophy as endless progress.
One might think that, though philosophy never dies, philosophies can, and do, die. But I doubt even that. Can we really say that the philosophy of Plato or Aquinas is dead? There are plenty of people who not only study them as historical documents, but seem quite happy to adopt them.
The New Science developed a way (or ways) of not only asking questions, but finding answers. Almost everybody since then has been hypnotized by its success - which, I grant you, is impressive. But that model does not seem to apply to the arts or more accurately to our thinking about the arts - not even to history itself. I'm pretty sure that, to understand philosophy, we need to look away from science towards other models.
Of course, that way of thinking about it needs to recognize that the new science was originally simply Natural Philosophy. It took a good deal of work to establish it the distinction between philosophy and science and some sort of (uneasy) diplomatic relationship.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

But there may be a third sort of philosophy, which is the more or less deliberate cultivation of perplexity

Yes. That would be a good description of the agenda of any Philosophy 101 course. It seems to me that it is now an essential step in learning about philosophy or, better, how to philosophize. Perhaps we should assess our students' success in such courses by their level of bewilderment. Look at how carefully Descartes instils his doubt at the beginning of the Meditations.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If I give someone the order "fetch me a red flower from that meadow", how is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as I have only given him a word?
— p. 3
Where does this question come from? It's not an ordinary question, not the sort of problem people raise in everyday life. ..... Frege says that we have to get behind the signs to the meaning, precisely what Wittgenstein notes it never occurs to anyone to say about the signs we exchange in everyday life.

That's true, so far as it goes.
But I don't see how philosophy could have got started - in history or in individual consciousness - unless it has roots in ordinary life.

Recognizing the difference between the word as a noise and the word as an order is the critical step. But I would suggest that it does have roots in everyday life, such as encountering people who not only don't understand me when I speak - even when I speak slowly and loudly - but also make odd noises themselves, which seem to function for their friends and neighbours as my language does for me. The Ancient Greeks were very impressed by this phenomenon.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

It requires a particular sort of imagination to notice what people do not do and what they do not worry about, and a particular sort of imagination to make it plausible that they would. ...... Now we have something a bit like a problem to work on, philosophically. A deliberately induced perplexity.

I would put it as a particular perspective, but imagination seems to work as well. Perhaps philosophy arises from a disruption of ordinary life.
But it doesn't follow that finding an answer would necessarily return us to everyday life. Doubts about the existence of the gods started very early in the history of (what we can recognize as) philosophy. Returning the doubters to everyday life would not have been a good idea. On the contrary, those doubts amounted to a new perspective on everyday life. Or, to put it another way, everyday life is a bit of a mess and sometimes a new perspective is what is required. I'm very fond of that quotation from TS Eliot about travelling the world and returning home, and "knowing the place for the first time."

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

there are the oddball questions which lead either to science (why does the second ball move? is also a very good question) or to philosophy.

Yes. Oddball questions are sometimes just muddles or fantasies (nightmares). But sometimes they are more than that.

Quoting Ludwig V

Recognizing the difference between the word as a noise and the word as an order is the critical step.

A critical step of what? Of understanding an order? Does it go "Step 1: recognize the other person is not just making a noise; Step 2: ... "?

What if you forget to do step 1? Or do people just always remember?

When you give an order, do you worry that the other person might forget, and think you were just making a noise? -- Or maybe it will just happen at random: "I understood some of what you said, but there were a couple times you were just making noises."

(As a matter of fact, written exchanges like this differ from spoken conversation by leaving out the noises -- and the gestures -- we habitually make while talking. Those noises are also communicative, but in a different way.)

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

A critical step of what? Of understanding an order? Does it go "Step 1: recognize the other person is not just making a noise; Step 2: ... "?

I meant a critical step in getting perplexed about understanding carrying out an order.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If I give someone the order "fetch me a red flower from that meadow", how is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as I have only given him a word?

If you casually said that in the middle of a battle, I think you would be met by astonishment and bewilderment. W's question needs to be prepared for; it involves abandonment of our ordinary understanding and a peculiar way of thinking about the whole process.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

When you give an order, do you worry that the other person might forget, and think you were just making a noise? -- Or maybe it will just happen at random: "I understood some of what you said, but there were a couple times you were just making noises."

My default position is that the other person will understand me. If things go wrong, I cope in one way or another. I don't worry, because I am confident that I can cope. Normally, if I did worry about those possibilities, I would be already doing philosophy.

[quote=p. 3]If I give someone the order "fetch me a red flower from that meadow", how is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as I have only given him a word?[/quote]

Quoting Ludwig V

W's question needs to be prepared for; it involves abandonment of our ordinary understanding and a peculiar way of thinking about the whole process.

Quoting Ludwig V

Normally, if I did worry about those possibilities, I would be already doing philosophy.

The question here ? how can the word "red" be any help getting a red flower ? is wrong-footed, a question that seems to involve selectively forgetting what words are for. (In that sense, it's a little like what he says later on about the question "How can one think what is not the case?")

Useful for Wittgenstein as an example of philosophy going wrong, but maybe helpful in another way, because if we can see we can see how it goes wrong, we can learn something about language.

Part of what's going on here, I think, is that Wittgenstein wants to say that looking for a psychological explanation for how words work is looking in the wrong place. The wrong place not because psychology (or anthropology or linguistics) doesn't work, but because that kind of explanation is not the business of philosophy.

That is, the problems philosophy worries over arise not because we don't know enough ? about the psychology of language, the nature of reality, whatever ? but because we misunderstand the nature of language or the grammar of particular words.

I don't at all like the phrase "the nature of language" there, but I'm not sure how else to put that. By pointing at use itself, Wittgenstein is offering no theory at all. Even to talk about someone understanding the grammar of a word is just another way of saying they know how the word is used, what it's role in the language is. 'Grammar' is an important word for him, but it's descriptive, not explanatory.

So to come back to the death of philosophy, on the one hand there will be criticism of philosophical positions that derive from misunderstandings of grammar, but there is also room to do this on purpose as a first step in exploring the grammar of our expressions, and you could maybe still call this "philosophy".

[quote=p. 28]One might say that the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called "philosophy."[/quote]

At least that's what I think he's up to.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

the question "How can one think what is not the case?"

Now that is a very good question and distinctively philosophical. I shall look forward to that discussion.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

That is, the problems philosophy worries over arise not because we don't know enough ? about the psychology of language, the nature of reality, whatever ? but because we misunderstand the nature of language or the grammar of particular words.

I think there are problems with this.
In the first place, it is suspiciously tidy, and does not reflect the dialogue that goes on between philosophy and the sciences. I came across an egregious example of this in the psychological approach to empathy through a concept of "theory of mind". (See Wikipedia - Theory of Mind)
In the second place, categorizing the philosophical problem as a problem about language works if one has a certain philosophical background. But many people seem to confuse the philosophical discussions with linguistics or even with logic-chopping. The real issues, they think, are about reality, not just the words that we use to describe it.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

'Grammar' is an important word for him, but it's descriptive, not explanatory.

I see his use of this term as the remnant of the idea that language has a complete logical structure, which is quite clearly distinct from the world that we talk about. There's room for a lot of clarification, though most people (including me) seem to think that it is not difficult to graps his point. We silently ignore the traditional sense of grammar, though it plays its part in creating philosophical perplexity.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

So to come back to the death of philosophy, on the one hand there will be criticism of philosophical positions that derive from misunderstandings of grammar, but there is also room to do this on purpose as a first step in exploring the grammar of our expressions, and you could maybe still call this "philosophy".

It occurred to me that anyone who thinks that a philosophical problem has, or should have, an answer or solution is implicitly committed to the death of philosophy. It may be that this illusion is the same illusion as the idea that a complete and final physics is a desirable aim - i.e. that the point of physics is the death of physics.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

One might say that the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called "philosophy."
— p. 28
At least that's what I think he's up to.

I don't think you are wrong. But I do think that there are some puzzles and confusions in his explanations.

Quoting Ludwig V

W thinks they are wrong about that, but that is a philosophical position, which needs to be demonstrated.

His form of proof is logical, but it takes the acknowledgement of his premises, which are the expressions we have about a practice in a situation, and this may seem arrogant.

Quoting Ludwig V

…W seems to start from our perplexity… everybody needs to start from somewhere - but it seems to rely on a wholesale dismissal of the philosophical tradition(s)

Also, he is not engaging the tradition on its own terms, which does seem dismissive, but the two methods don’t hit at the same points and if he goes in too close, he gets tied up in the same structural issues as the tradition. It does feel like we joined the lecture halfway through the semester. No explanation of sense data, no history, no defense. But the muddles come from the tradition. Sense data is the modern version of age-old responses to skepticism, other minds, the self, etc.

Quoting Ludwig V

there may be a different desire underlying scepticism, the desire to undermine baseless certainties.

Absolutely, the skeptic is right that there is no fact that ensures universality, prediction, righteousness, etc. and so dogmatism is his house of cards. (PI #118) The fear of radical skepticism is that the possibility of overblowing a position leads to the conclusion that it is impossible to hold any position, even in our best case scenario of seeing something right in front of us.

@Banno @Paine @Ludwig V @Jamal @Astrophel @Joshs @Shawn @Srap Tasmaner

(If anyone else does not want to be “notified” when I read another section, just let me know.)

Section 4A (pp.16-17) “language games”

As he puts off until later in the book the actual discussion of whether a machine can think, I will defer until then as well, only to point out the form of argument that he takes here is, again: a fact making a logical exclusion (what “can”, and “cannot”), which is simply that a machine cannot think because it is not human (analogously it can’t have a toothache either). I don’t know that this would be convincing to those that believe that eventually machines will be capable of “being human” or that reduce their interest in “thinking” to replicating an activity, such as problem-solving, but we can take that up later. As well as the brief reference to the desire that thought be “private”.

Another note on method involves the misunderstanding of what “language games” are for him. Many believe these are, say, contexts of rules that underly or justify the meaning of words, but, clearly here, he is “looking closely” at simplified examples that are “particular”, which I take to be distinguishing enough to show facts that matter to the workings of a specific activity (the criteria of its grammar), with thinking with words involving uses of “comparison”, “difference”, “agreement”, etc. (Thus, the PI is not, for instance, arguing that using words is like following rules, but is drawing out the mechanics of rule-following as a case to study; there, to show how the grammar is different than (falls short of) a desire for pure logic.) Here it shows thinking to be more than merely “activity” but not necessarily “mental”. Importantly, so we are not “misled by… linguistic form into a false conception of… grammar” as we might be misled by the expression that “thinking is an activity... of our mind” into thinking that the mind is “the seat of the activity of thinking” (rather than just pointing out, say, that we did it in our head rather than worked it out physically, and not a matter of locality).

Quoting Paine

People using signs are alive. They give life to the signs through their use. Wittgenstein recognizes that a process must be happening organically that makes thinking, speaking, and listening possible but sees his work as something entirely different from investigating that

I'd like to come back to this for a moment. These are important milestones for Wittgenstein.

[quote=p. 4]But if we had to name anything that is the life of the sign, we should have to say it was its use.[/quote]

And on the next page:

[quote=p. 5]The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.[/quote]

The latter passage does have a whiff of what we could call "structuralism" about it: as if to say, the sentences of a language ? however you imagine collecting them all ? form a system, and the meaning of a sentence is the role it plays within this system, its function. (Maybe not inconsistent with the Tractatus's sense of language.)

But this is not quite what Wittgenstein says, because before that we get the point about the life of the sign ? in response to Frege's dismissal of formalism in mathematics. And Wittgenstein's answer is not that mathematical signs form a system, and therefore mathematical propositions are meaningful because they have a specified role or function within that system. What brings those dashes on paper to life is that they are used to do mathematics.

So, what does using a sign consist of?

Speaking or writing it, certainly, or even thinking it, but we know that's not enough, if nothing else because we know the difference between use and mention ? if you're talking about a sign (or doodling mathematical symbols, whatever), you're not using it but mentioning it.

Something else is needed then. What? We know one answer Wittgenstein rejects: the other thing that makes an utterance (or inscription, or thought) a use is something special going on in the speaker's mind.

[quote=p. 5, the very next sentence]As part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign.[/quote]

But one natural test of whether an utterance is a use is whether the speaker means it, or is just quoting or fooling around or something else. This is the sort of thing that context ? another candidate for what's needed ? can't really provide on its own. Wittgenstein does not ignore the issue of intentions.

[quote=Philosophical Grammar, p. 40]Suppose that the question is "what do you mean by that gesture?" and the answer is "I mean that you must leave". The answer would not have been more correctly phrased: "I mean what I mean by the sentence 'you must leave'."[/quote]

[quote=Philosophical Grammar, p. 41]"What did you mean by those words?" "Did you mean those words?" The first question is not a more precise specification of the second. The first is answered by a proposition replacing the proposition which wasn't understood. The second question is like: "Did you mean that seriously or as a joke?"[/quote]

So Wittgenstein is not going to ignore the fact that, generally speaking, to count as use we must mean what we say; but he is going to deny that meaning what we say is a mental phenomenon or a mental activity.

Much to argue about there, but we can be pretty clear that he is not looking for a psychological explanation of what use is, or of what makes an utterance of a sign a use of it.

So what does?

As we head with @Antony Nickles into language-games, we find this:

[quote=p. 17]We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term "game" to the various games; whereas games form a family the members of which have family likenesses.[/quote]

To keep it short, I believe this is our answer regarding use: there is nothing common to all uses of signs that distinguishes them from mere utterances. Use has no essence. I don't happen to know how Wittgenstein got here ? after beginning to doubt that there is such a thing as the "general form of a proposition" ? but it would make sense if use was the very first case of "family resemblance"; language-games come along, after all, to explicate use.

And with that move, the whole world opens up. Now Wittgenstein can say things like this:

[quote=p. 7]Now does this mean that it is nonsensical to talk of a locality where thought takes place? Certainly not. This phrase has sense if we give it sense.[/quote]

That doesn't mean every utterance is some kind of use, but it means that the uses of a sign are open-ended. Whatever 'grammar' describes, it is not a fixed set of rules that must be followed when using a sign; 'language games' illustrate use, but do not exhaust the possibilities of use.

Reply to Antony Nickles

I hope you will not mind if I post a comment on p. 15 - on causes and reasons - before progressing to p. 16.

p. 15:If on the other hand you realize that the chain of actual reasons has a beginning, you will no longer be revolted by the idea of a case in which there is no reason for the way you obey the order. .....

The difference between the grammars of "reason" and "cause" is quite similar to that between the grammars of "motive" and "cause". Of the cause one can say that one can't know it but can only conjecture it. On the other hand one often says: "Surely I must know why I did it" talking of the motive. When I say: "we can only conjecture the cause but we know the motive" this statement will be seen later on to be a grammatical one. The "can" refers to a logical possibility.

The double use of the word "why", asking for the cause and asking for the motive, together with the idea that we can know, and not only conjecture, our motives, gives rise to the confusion that a motive is a cause of which we are immediately aware, a cause 'seen from the inside', or a cause experienced.- Giving a reason is like giving a calculation by which you have arrived at a certain result.

The first bolded passage, it seems to me, turns on the distinction between an action being justified in principle, as it were, that is, whether or not it was performed and, if it was performed, it was performed from quite different reasons. Think of an umpire's correct decision being given, not because it was correct, but for some quite different reason. That is, W is concerned with the agent's reason(s), not whether the action is justifiable in principle. Fair enough.

The second bolded passage is confusing, at least to me. I can only suppose that he means that we may or may not know what the cause of an action is or whether a possible cause actually was the cause. I can see why he classifies the teaching process as a cause, not a reason - because it "drops out of consideration" - or, we don't need to know about it when considering how you responded to the order. But it isn't a cause like gravity or the impact of one billiard ball on another.

However, my problem is with his comparison of reasons with motives. I have to say, I think of a motive as a desire or wish or value - reasons map the path from there to the action. as in the third bolded passage. But set that aside. My question is how does this fit with the justification post hoc? It looks as if I may act for no reason, but then offer a justification post hoc, which suggests that I did act for a reason. But that doesn't fit with our immediate awareness of the motive.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

if you're talking about a sign (or doodling mathematical symbols, whatever), you're not using it but mentioning it.

Yes, but we don’t manipulate language to build what we want; we communicate along “well established usage”(p.3) which we share, demonstrated by any of us contributing to options of the different uses of “This is a pencil” in the phrases which follow it (solved by imagining a context for that “use”, as if a crossword).

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

But one natural test of whether an utterance is a use is whether the speaker means it, or is just quoting

An utterance is not judged as, or as not, a ‘use’ of words; an utterance has a use—it is a plea, or a threat, or points out a difference; as are the examples regarding the pencil—depending on the context. Thus why words are not ‘meant’ by us, other than in contrast to when we jest.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

That doesn't mean every utterance is some kind of use, but it means that the uses of a sign are open-ended. Whatever 'grammar' describes, it is not a fixed set of rules that must be followed when using a sign; 'language games' illustrate use, but do not exhaust the possibilities of use.

I agree. I read the book as confirming your statement when W says:

p. 5:The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.

I think of that as asking why we are so good at doing it. The different models we come up with to explain it are no match for our ability.

The importance of "family resemblances" is not to deny any purpose to seeking general qualities. For example, the comparisons made between 'rules of chess' and what we are doing allow seeing a similarity and a difference. The objection to the 'occult' explanations is that they are too easy. We use them to make bread and frighten children.

Quoting Paine

I think of that as asking why we are so good at doing it.

if you're talking about our ability to improvise and make novel uses of signs, it's good point and one I think Wittgenstein ought to have given more emphasis. [hide="(Over in linguistics.)"](Over in linguistics, there's Christiansen & Chater, The Language Game. They emphasize strongly our capacity to improvise, taking as their central metaphor the game of charades. ? And yes the title is an allusion to Wittgenstein.)[/hide]

On the other hand, I'm having trouble following this, @Antony Nickles:

Quoting Antony Nickles

but it’s not a matter that words are tools we manipulate then of which “well established usage”(p.3) something is like

Wittgenstein gives "this is tove" as an example of an ostensive definition, and then points out that ostensive definitions are, at the very least, ambiguous. It's a point worth making because sometimes people expect that the explanation of what a word means ? and we're only on page 2, so we're still on explanations of the meaning of a word ? will bottom out in ostensive definition. People think that for lots of reasons, but one is the evident role of something like ostension in teaching language, or explaining to someone who already has a language the meaning of a word they don't know. He covers that case as well ("this is a banjo").

Introducing the list with which he will make this point, he says

[quote=p. 2]I will give a few such interpretations and use English words with well-established usage.[/quote]

He then discusses the issue of this approach just being more signs, and goes right into the question of whether we have to attribute an interpretation (of "this is a banjo") to someone based on their behavior, and then into whether this interpretation is a mental act, all that.

But you seem to be suggesting something else I don't quite understand. There would be no point in offering more words that either Wittgenstein's audience or the person being told "this is tove" don't understand; that wouldn't help explain "tove" to anyone. ? There's an issue here about how anyone can learn language from scratch, but the "banjo" discussion points at how we expect that to work: you have to look to behavior to see whether they're getting it. Does the two-year old pick out the red one when asked to, etc.

Do you think he was making some different point when he mentioned that he was using words his audience will understand?

Quoting Antony Nickles

An utterance is not judged as, or as not, a ‘use’ of words; an utterance has a use—it is a plea, or a threat, or points out a difference; as are the examples regarding the pencil—depending on the context.

And this too I'm not following at all. Do you take Wittgenstein to have been saying that "this is tove" might mean any one of

[quote=ibid]"This is a pencil",
"This is round",
"This is wood",
"This is one",
"This is hard", etc. etc.[/quote]

depending on context?

But you're right that Wittgenstein generally asks what "the use" of an expression is, rather than asking how an expression is being used.

[quote=p. 9f.]To the statement "I feel in my hand that the water is three feet under the ground" we should like to answer "I don't know what this means". But the diviner would say: "Surely you know what it means. You know what 'three feet under the ground' means and you know what 'I feel' means!" But I should answer him: I know what a word means in certain contexts. ... But the use of the expression "a feeling of water being three feet under the ground" has yet to be explained to me.[/quote]

He speaks of "the grammar" in a similar way:

[quote=p. 10]The grammar of this phrase has yet to be explained to me.[/quote]

But he doesn't exclusively use "use" as a noun; introducing language games he uses the transitive verb:

[quote=p. 17]These are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language.[/quote]

So first he says, "I don't what this means", and then "The use of this expression has not been explained to me." The latter is, in essence, an explanation of the former. It's worth noting that we could go around again: having received an explanation from the diviner, Wittgenstein might find himself, in a completely different context, talking to someone else who uses the expression "a feeling of water being three feet under the ground", and he would have to say now that he knows the use of that expression by a diviner looking for water, but only in that context, not this one.

Even within a given context, it's plain that an expression can have more than one use, so we don't have to make too much of Wittgenstein's habit of saying "the use" or "the grammar".

What about my distinction between "mere" utterance and "genuine" use? For now, I'll stick by it, though these aren't Wittgenstein's words.

Consider the diviner: the first explanation given, the one quoted above, is not enough, as Wittgenstein points out. He goes on to consider other explanations the diviner might give, about how he learned to associate a feeling of tension in his hands with the presence of water below ground, and so on.

[quote=p. 10]The importance of investigating the diviner's answer lies in the fact that we often think that we have given a meaning to a statement P if only we assert "I feel (or I believe) that P is the case.[/quote]

The implication here is that having given a meaning to a statement is something you can be mistaken about; this is roughly what he will say about many of the examples he draws from philosophy, that there is an assumption of sense where sense has not yet been given.

We could call such uses of signs "infelicitous" or "misfires" or something like that, as Austin does, in a different context. Or we could say, as I did, that when the grammar of what you're saying is all mixed up, it's not quite a use at all. The terminology is not all that important.

Quoting Ludwig V

However, my problem is with his comparison of reasons with motives. I have to say, I think of a motive as a desire or wish or value - reasons map the path from there to the action. as in the third bolded passage. But set that aside. My question is how does this fit with the justification post hoc? It looks as if I may act for no reason, but then offer a justification post hoc, which suggests that I did act for a reason. But that doesn't fit with our immediate awareness of the motive.

I think the comparison of motives with reasons is logical (grammatically similar) both compared to causes, which we may not know. But I can know my motives (though I may not), and I’m the only one that can know, and give, my reasons (“actual reasons” not being mistake for causes). I’m not sure we would act for a reason (seems like a motive, or a principle), but after the fact (post hoc) we could give reasons for acting as I did (which could include causes and motives, as it could include excuses and justifications).

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Do you take Wittgenstein to have been saying that "this is tove" might mean any one of… depending on context?

Yes. Same statement (“This is pencil”), different “uses” (usages, made explicit), or as he also calls them: interpretations. Not that the use is given by me.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

But he doesn't exclusively use "use" as a noun

True. Not sure if sometimes he is just writing “using” regularly or not, but it still bears keeping in mind the point that a usage/interpretation is more than something I do, what with history, context, others’ judgment, multiple uses, etc. (even though I can consider, choose words, plan, hope).

Quoting Antony Nickles

Same statement (“This is pencil”), different “uses” (usages, made explicit), or as he also calls them: interpretations. Not that the use is given by me.

Okay. I still can't tell if this is a minor verbal difference between us.

[quote=p. 2]If he picks what we call a "banjo" we might say "he has given the word 'banjo' the correct interpretation"; if he picks some other instrument ? "he has interpreted 'banjo' to mean 'string instrument'".

We say "he has given the word 'banjo' this or that interpretation", and are inclined to assume a definite act of interpretation besides the act of choosing.[/quote]

So do you read Wittgenstein here as rhetorically casting doubt not only on the assumption noted ? about the separate, mental act of interpretation ? but also on the idea of giving a word an interpretation, or interpreting a word to mean something?

Quoting Antony Nickles

a usage/interpretation is more than something I do, what with history, context, others’ judgment, multiple uses, etc. (even though I can consider, choose words, plan, hope).

I would say that an interpretation is not private to me, certainly, because it is not a special mental act that I perform.

[quote=p. 27]I want you to remember that words have those meanings which we have given them; and we give them meanings by explanations.[/quote]

[quote=p. 33]Whenever we interpret a symbol in one way or another, the interpretation is a new symbol added to the old one.[/quote]

In the early example with the banjo, it is clear that the context does not determine the interpretation, because the person might give "banjo" this one or that one.

But there's something left unclear in the initial discussion of the banjo case, when he shifts from (1) explanations that translate from "banjo" (or "tove") to some other words to (2) the discussion of behavior when told to pick out a banjo. I think we're not asked to say that his behavior is another kind of wordless language; instead, we attribute to him an interpretation in words (such as "string instrument") we utter but he doesn't. We are the ones explaining his interpretation of "banjo", so we are the ones adding a new symbol to the old one.

This is the point where people say that understanding or meaning or interpretation "drop out", because Wittgenstein is insistent that anything you try to grasp as standing behind the words will be just another sign. There is something genuinely radical, or at least strange, going on here.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

So do you read Wittgenstein here as rhetorically casting doubt not only on the assumption noted ? about the separate, mental act of interpretation ? but also on the idea of giving a word an interpretation, or interpreting a word to mean something?

Yes. You pick out the banjo. The picking results in a particular interpretation, or use, as: ‘This is pencil’ can distinguish the material, or the number, etc. depending on the circumstances.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I’m not sure we would act for a reason (seems like a motive, or a principle), but after the fact (post hoc) we could give reasons for acting as I did (which could include causes and motives, as it could include excuses and justifications).

I don't deny that. But I think W leaves a gaping hole in the demonstration that mental objects - in the "occult" sense, drop out of consideration as irrelevant. But what makes the reasons mine, as opposed to justifications after the event? Perhaps the fact that I give them as reasons after the event is what makes them mine. In giving them, I claim them, or perhaps acknowledge them. Either way, they are to be compared to "I am in pain" or "That tastes sweet". There is a complicated hinterland here, which is usually acknowledged only in passing, that one's authority in such cases is defeasible. We may be joking or pretending. But it's time to move on.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

This is the point where people say that understanding or meaning or interpretation "drop out", because Wittgenstein is insistent that anything you try to grasp as standing behind the words will be just another sign. There is something genuinely radical, or at least strange, going on here.

That's right. It seems to me that this is why W ends up (in the PI) with the faintly despairing "But this is what I do!" or "When I have reached bedrock, my spade is turned.

Quoting Antony Nickles

An utterance is not judged as, or as not, a ‘use’ of words; an utterance has a use—it is a plea, or a threat, or points out a difference; as are the examples regarding the pencil—depending on the context. Thus why words are not ‘meant’ by us, other than in contrast to when we jest.

W doesn't give an analysis of his use of "use" in this context, but there is more than one use of words at stake here. Austin identifies some of them when he develops his concept of speech acts - which are, after all, uses of words. (I'm thinking of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts) But he doesn't pay attention to two different ways of thinking about language. One is the approach through the idea that language is a structure and can be thought of as existing independently of speakers - much as a game can be thought of as a structured set of rules as well as in the playing of them. Here, we can say that speakers must conform to the rules, on pain of failing to communicate or saying something we did not mean to say. In this mode, we can speak of the "grammar" of language. But this approach doesn't pay attention to the various events of speakers speaking; here, breaking (or stretching) the rules is possible, because it turns on the intentions of the speaker and the reactions of the audience.
Of course, there is a sense in which the grammar of language only exists insofar as speakers conform to it. But that doesn't mean that anything goes.

Reply to Ludwig V Quoting Ludwig V

This is the point where people say that understanding or meaning or interpretation "drop out", because Wittgenstein is insistent that anything you try to grasp as standing behind the words will be just another sign. There is something genuinely radical, or at least strange, going on here.
— Srap Tasmaner
That's right. It seems to me that this is why W ends up (in the PI) with the faintly despairing "But this is what I do!" or "When I have reached bedrock, my spade is turned

But this having reached bedrock is precisely the way out of despair, or precisely, the way to free ourselves of the meaningless that confusing empirical with grammatical certainty leads to. The language game makes intelligibility possible by taking for granted a founding system of interconnected meanings that it would make no sense to doubt as long as one continued to move within that language game. This built-in normativity of our languaged practices is not a failure to properly ground meaning, but the condition for keeping meaning alive.

Quoting Ludwig V

what makes the reasons mine, as opposed to justifications after the event?

Aren’t justifications just a subset of reasons, like an excuse is a reason, as is acting on principal? Preparing them in advance to decide to act a certain way does not alter their category as a reason because they are given after the fact. And yes I think I am answerable for the reasons I give to you, as I am responsible for my actions.

Quoting Ludwig V

there is more than one use of words at stake here

Agreed, as evidenced by the pencil statement variations.

@Banno @Paine @Ludwig V @Jamal @Astrophel @Joshs @Shawn @Srap Tasmaner

Section 4B (pp.17-18) science vs. philosophy (generalizing)

Obviously, over-generalization leads to logical errors, but what’s interesting is how he ties it to traditional philosophical issues (however obliquely). It also seems clear that in saying “language” causes problems, he is referring to general problems in thinking, like the desire for simplicity, imprecision, mis-categorization, false analogies, etc., and not that we are pitting ordinary language against philosophy.

In (a) he brings up the abstraction of a quality into an independent property (creating an object) such as turning “real” into a thing that something either has or does not (as in his example of the “ideal” of beauty), which slides into the (not only Kant’s) idea of an (objective) “reality”.

In (b) is our main issue so far in a nutshell in that we turn the meaning of a word (leaf, or, say, thinking) into an object and take it to be what is common to particular instances (hello Plato). Not only that, but it is an image that resides “‘in him’”, creating ‘my’ ‘meaning’ for the solipsist (and the “mechanism” problem of (c)). What he sees is that we don’t actually put particulars together, but we learn (and reflect to make explicit) “certain features or properties which they have in common.” (p.18 my emphasis) These are the criteria for judging what is a leaf (say, from a seed that looks like one)—what is essential about it. (PI #371)

In (d) we see the creation of metaphysics (Plato’s forms; Descartes’ mind) as the product of science’s desire for an “explanation”, which is turning a “muddle felt as a problem” (p.6), into the “preoccupation” with ”answers” (not just never explaining anything @Paine), and here he clarifies, reduced to AN answer. This is the root temptation to solve the “problem” of skepticism, which blinds us (in “complete darkness”) from seeing our everyday criteria, which don’t unravel our “muddle” (once and for all) but unravel us so we can continue on.

But this is not to continue in the same manner, much less with the same goal. He doesn’t want to change the answer, he wants to change us, our interests. Our method is to look at “particular cases”, and our goal is to see what “distinguishes” them (our criteria for judgment).

Reply to Antony Nickles
While I recognize that W is taking a stance against the singularity of Plato's use of essence, he is oddly just like Socrates in accepting he has to live with the arguments he makes.

I don't read the issue he has with Plato as equivalent to his complaints about the temptations of modern science. The latter are the people he lives amongst.

I do think W urgently wants to get past the 'problem of skepticism' in regard to phenomena versus reality frames of discussion. He may eschew other explanations but he keeps taking aim at that one throughout his life.

Quoting Joshs

But this having reached bedrock is precisely the way out of despair, or precisely, the way to free ourselves of the meaningless that confusing empirical with grammatical certainty leads to.

In the context of philosophical scepticism or nihilism, that's so. The remark was, in a sense, only a flourish. But I was thinking of the parent trying to deal rationally with a child who has discovered the possibility of an infinite regress of "why". In the end, the authoritative. dogmatic, answer is the only possible one.

Quoting Joshs

The language game makes intelligibility possible by taking for granted a founding system of interconnected meanings that it would make no sense to doubt as long as one continued to move within that language game. This built-in normativity of our languaged practices is not a failure to properly ground meaning, but the condition for keeping meaning alive.

I agree with that, of course. That's the explanation that makes the authoritative answer not merely dogmatic.

Reply to Ludwig V

Quoting Ludwig V

I was thinking of the parent trying to deal rationally with a child who has discovered the possibility of an infinite regress of "why". In the end, the authoritative. dogmatic, answer is the only possible one.

The language game makes intelligibility possible by taking for granted a founding system of interconnected meanings that it would make no sense to doubt as long as one continued to move within that language game. This built-in normativity of our languaged practices is not a failure to properly ground meaning, but the condition for keeping meaning alive.
— Joshs
I agree with that, of course. That's the explanation that makes the authoritative answer not merely dogmatic.

Of course, the flip side of operating within a language game is that its authoritative rules and pronouncements are at the same time normative and non-binding concerning future practices within it. As Joseph Rouse explains:

Wittgenstein's well-known remark that requests for justification of a practice must eventually encounter a stopping point at which one can only say, “This is what we do" is often read as appealing to a social regularity, but his remark can instead be heard with the inflection with which a parent tells a child, "We don't hit other children, do we?"

Such statements or rhetorical questions do not describe regularities in children's actual behavior. On the contrary, parents make such comments precisely because children do hit one another. Parents do so, however, in response to or anticipation of such "deviant" behavior in order to hold it accountable to correction. Children's behavior in turn is only partially accommodating to such correction: sometimes obeying, sometimes challenging or circumventing corrective responses, some-times disobeying and facing further consequences, and so forth. Remember that we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

Reply to Joshs
Brilliant. Thanks very much.

The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule,

It all goes back to this. But doesn't it follow that the authority of a pronouncement within the language is actually conferred on it by the (brute) fact that we accept it as authoritative - and our children accept their version of the practice after they have learnt ours?

@Joshs
Quoting Ludwig V

In the end, the authoritative. dogmatic, answer is the only possible one.

Cavell will point out that the teacher is only “inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’” (PI #217] so of course we can shut the door to further teaching with dogmatism and authority, but we can always continue the conversation in order to reach agreement and compliance, because it’s the relationship—to each other, to society—that’s more important in this case than anything we might take (or force) as foundational.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Cavell will point out that the teacher is only “inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’” (PI #217] so of course we can shut the door to further teaching with dogmatism and authority, but we can always continue the conversation in order to reach agreement and compliance, because it’s the relationship—to each other, to society—that’s more important in this case than anything we might take (or force) as foundational.

I don't know the texts well enough to comment on Cavell's comment. There is sense in what he says, but I'm not sure that it is what W wants to say.

In one way, you are right about what's important. However, the (not, perhaps, very clearly expressed) point of the ideas in the PI is (I think) that at the stage of learning how to argue and/or think, we are not in a position to make decisions about what is important, much less what is correct. We are inducted into the ways of what we do. It's not a question of argument, but of learning. That's the authority of "This is what I do". Paradoxically, my ability to dissent from and to question what I am taught (in any meaningful or relevant way) rests on my having learnt what it is to dissent and to question.

There's a moment in Plato's Laws, when he considers what to do with atheists - and he seems to mean this in the modern sense of not believing that gods exist. (There were such people among the pre-Socratics.) His answer is to corral them in a safe place outside the city and there to persuade them of the error of their ways. He is quite clear that the end of this process is only reached when the atheists recognize the error of their ways. This is not a conversation. A conversation is only meaningful if the conclusion of the conversation is open. Even refusing to end the conversation until agreement is reached is an authoritarian position.

The intertwining of authority and negotiation is very complicated, and I think it is misleading to insist that they are polar opposites.

Quoting Paine

[Witt] is oddly just like Socrates in accepting he has to live with the arguments he makes.

I’ve always thought they both start in the same place: asking what we say in a given situation, but Witt listens in a way where Socrates seems to already have something in mind. But they are very similar. Are you saying they both hold us responsible for what we say? or that they are somehow stuck with the arguments they make?

Quoting Paine

I don't read the issue he has with Plato as equivalent to his complaints about the temptations of modern science. The latter are the people he lives amongst.

I agree; he is specifically taking on ‘sense data’, and the paragraph about science is as vehement as he gets. I only bring Plato into it to say that the issue (of metaphysics) has followed philosophy all along.

Quoting Paine

I do think W urgently wants to get past the 'problem of skepticism' in regard to phenomena versus reality frames of discussion. He may eschew other explanations but he keeps taking aim at that one throughout his life.

Absolutely, that is the target of the times (as with Austin). Given our reading, I think I would phrase it as the “problematizing” of skepticism. That if we take skepticism as a problem, it leads to the desire for an answer, and he wants to show examples of the ordinary working rationality we have, to say that: when that comes to an end (as @Joshs @Ludwig V are discussing), we at least are on open, common ground to differentiate from, rather than fighting in “frames of discussion” of theoretical fantasy. As @Ludwig V says “my ability to dissent from and to question what I am taught (in any meaningful or relevant way) rests on my having learnt what it is to dissent and to question.”

Quoting Ludwig V

It's not a question of argument, but of learning.

And of course, as you say, “we are inducted into what we do”, but in the PI we are constantly brought up by the (seemingly irrational) rogue student. Here, just as we’ve resolved a misunderstanding about the locality of thought between science and philosophy (p.8), we are thrust back into disagreement: “But what if someone said ‘I can assure you I feel the visual image to be two inches behind the bridge of my nose’; what are we to answer him? Should we say that he is not speaking the truth, or that there cannot be such a feeling?” (p.9, emphasis added). And bringing in “feeling” tempts us to say the conversation is now hopelessly irrational, to say we perhaps have to rely on the force of (society’s) authority, but he says we “**don’t say that the [person] is telling a lie or talking nonsense” (p.10, my emphasis), just that it “has yet to be explained to us” (id.) how what they are saying makes sense. It is not the sense (truth) that has any power, but the people, open-endedly (or not “negotiation”, but rebellion), just needing to find our (a rational) way together to go forward (not ‘agree’). It doesn’t surprise me that Plato feels differently (though now I’m intrigued to go read that***).

**As I have taken the position before, I take this “don’t” as an ethical *admonition on Witt’s part (we can but shouldn’t), perhaps even political (as it would not be the first time he seems opposed to dogmatism (PI #426).
***turns out it’s the group who believe in the gods but that believe they don’t hold dominion of over us, as if rationality had no sway. They would be (this translation) “ministered to their souls salvation by [*]admonition” for five years then killed, for their “folly”. Laws, Bk 10, p. 909. (In America, it’s four years.)

The following from the Tractatus still seems to apply in the Blue Book:

Quoting Tractatus, 6.371

The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages.
And in fact both are right and both wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.

The matter of what is right and wrong is not a single problem. Socrates and Witt are similar in looking for the limit to their arguments.

Quoting Antony Nickles

That if we take skepticism as a problem, it leads to the desire for an answer, and he wants to show examples of the ordinary working rationality we have, to say that: when that comes to an end (as Joshs @Ludwig V are discussing), we at least are on open, common ground to differentiate from, rather than fighting in “frames of discussion” of theoretical fantasy.

I do think Wittgenstein is looking for a way to help the solipsist find an answer to a problem:

The solipsist who says "only I feel real pain", "only I really see (or hear)" is not stating an opinion; and that's why he is so sure of what he says. He is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression; but we must yet find why he is.
— Blue Book, 59

Quoting Paine

I do think Wittgenstein is looking for a way to help the solipsist find an answer to a problem:

In a sense, but I’m making a finer distinction between kinds of “problems”. In my discussion of Sec 2 above I claimed he was pointing out how philosophy mixes up a conceptual confusion with the desire the solipsist has for a scientific answer because they want to see it only as an empirical problem.

“He is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression; but we must yet find why he is.” Yes, he is trying to help find an “answer”, but just not a scientific answer to the problem the solipsist has framed. He is trying to find out why the solipsist is “irresistibly tempted”.

Quoting Antony Nickles

He is trying to find out why the solipsist is “irresistibly tempted”.

I'm sorry, but I had the impression that his explanation of the temptattion is the only answer that I found in the text. I must have missed something.

Quoting Paine

The solipsist who says "only I feel real pain", "only I really see (or hear)" is not stating an opinion; and that's why he is so sure of what he says. He is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression; but we must yet find why he is.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I’ve always thought they both start in the same place: asking what we say in a given situation, but Witt listens in a way where Socrates seems to already have something in mind.

Yes, he tries hard to get to the heart of the problem. "A feeling that the water is three feet deep." But he doesn't deviate from his view that the solipsist is mistaken.
It's a side-issue, but Socrates' irony seems to me to be a product of Plato''s writing. I don't think we can conclude that the historical Socrates was always being ironic - that would contradict his claim in the Apology that he was testing the oracle.

Quoting Antony Nickles

***turns out it’s the group who believe in the gods but that believe they don’t hold dominion of over us, as if rationality had no sway. They would be (this translation) “ministered to their souls salvation by [*]admonition” for five years then killed, for their “folly”. Laws, Bk 10, p. 909. (In America, it’s four years.)

Thanks for that. I must have misremembered or misunderstood.

[quote="p.18]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'. [/quote]
I was struck by how confident he is about this. He doesn't seem to take into account that a description can be an explanation and can give us a new view of what we are already looking. Nor does he seem to be thinking of the ideas about interpretation (seeing as) that occur in the Brown Book and the PI. Maybe he only came up with those ideas after writing this.

Reply to Ludwig V
Quoting Ludwig V

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'.
— "p.18
I was struck by how confident he is about this. He doesn't seem to take into account that a description can be an explanation and can give us a new view of what we are already looking. Nor does he seem to be thinking of the ideas about interpretation (seeing as) that occur in the Brown Book and the PI. Maybe he only came up with those ideas after writing this.

I’m reminded of the role of explanation with respect to the language game. There can be a language which is organized in such a way that an explanation can be an intelligible move within it. But one can only describe the language game itself, because to explain it is to do no more than to reproduce it. And , like repeating a word over and over again, explaining a form of life devolves into meaningless. To understand what the diviner means when he says he feels the object behind his forehead is to have him describe the language game, not explain it. Perhaps Wittgenstein is taking the proper subject matter of philosophy to be language games rather than the moves within them.

Quoting Joshs

I’m reminded of the role of explanation with respect to the language game. There can be a language which is organized in such a way that an explanation can be an intelligible move within it. But one can only describe the language game itself, because to explain it is to do no more than to rep

Yes, that's true. I'm not quite sure what to say.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson published the best "argument" for this - "What the tortoise said to Achilles" - Mind, Vol. 4, No. 14 (Apr. 1895), 278-280. The form of the argument is a regress. W's discussion of "aspect blindness" is also relevant. The possibility of this "rule refusal" is always present. On the other hand, maybe in practice, cases as simple as that don't come up in real life, and in the complexities we can find the resources to help the tortoise to see the point.

There are two places we might look to understand this. One is how we actually deal with people (e.g. students) who can't "see" a logical argument. In addition, there are - let us call them - informal resources in language, which often get taken up when the standard forms let us down - notably metaphor and analogy.

Quoting Ludwig V

I had the impression that his explanation of the temptattion is the only answer that I found in the text. I must have missed something.

It’s not a matter of another general answer he gives as much as the “answer” he claims that the solipsist wants to satisfy that desire for their pure, imposed criteria. That desire causes them to see the issue only as a problem/answer dichotomy (rather than a “muddle” and “temptation”). Many readers take him to be solving (answering) that “problem” just in a different way, or dissolving it, or not taking it seriously (it’s just about language).

Quoting Ludwig V

He doesn't seem to take into account that a description can be an explanation and can give us a new view of what we are already looking.

I think people take the idea of not explaining anything a bit too far. He is of course making claims and explaining things all along. The difference between his descriptions of what we say, and the “explaining” that he wants to avoid is tied to the desire for a single criteria and working backwards to ‘explain’ the world in order to fit that goal (thus the creation of a theoretical, metaphysical perfect realm). So in this tight construct, “explanation” is almost a technical term for him, not the loose act of drawing conclusions. An “explanation” for him is driven by the desire for the kind of “answer” we want in looking at skepticism as a “problem” as above.

@Paine @Ludwig V @Joshs @Shawn @Srap Tasmaner

Section 4C (pp. 18-20] Philosophical “Attitude”

To step back just to page 18, he is I believe referring to Socrates when he asks why philosophy is “contemptuous” toward the particular case. On page 20 he says outright “When Socrates asks the question, ‘what is knowledge?’ he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge.” Power (might=right) is someone’s goal of what is good. Is it the most worthy goal? No, but it still exists in the world, and it gets dismissed because it doesn’t meet the standard Socrates wants.

“The contempt for what seems the less general case in logic springs from the idea that it is incomplete.” It wouldn’t seem this equates to the logical necessity Socrates is looking for, but to me “complete” lines up with a solution (answering the “problem” again) that ties up all the loose ends and addresses every contingency before an act. As if we could determine the right thing to do in every angle up front, “completely”.

And this is a matter of method for him. Like Austin, who always investigated how an action failed in order to learn how it worked, Witt implores us to be interested in what distinguishes something rather than search for neat and tidy commonalities. “For after all, there is not one definite class of features which characterize all cases of wishing.” We can draw sharp boundaries to feel we have a complete idea, but “there are many common features overlapping.” as he seemingly first refers to family resemblances, which is important enough to be in the preface of the PI.

Quoting Antony Nickles

An “explanation” for him is driven by the desire for the kind of “answer” we want in looking at skepticism as a “problem” as above.

That would work. I suppose it is (or is like) the difference between those who think that "the present king of France is bald" is false and those who think it is unanswerable. The former have on their side the law of excluded middle, so we end up denying that the question is a question which seems absurd.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Power (might=right) is someone’s goal of what is good. Is it the most worthy goal? No, but it still exists in the world, and it gets dismissed because it doesn’t meet the standard Socrates wants.

I do not read the Republic to say that the equation of Thrasymachus did not exist. The work does not solve the problem but shows how it is surrounded by other problems. Using the individual soul to measure the body politic is not done by Wittgenstein but his self-imposed limits upon the discussion of ethics suggests he was not assigning the problem of the good to being simply another case of craving generality.

Quoting Paine

The work does not solve the problem but shows how it is surrounded by other problems.

True, “dismiss” was strong. It’s not like we don’t learn something along the way. And, in a very real sense, we would not have that knowledge without Socrates’ curiosity, his dissatisfaction with the easy, first impression.

Quoting Paine

he was not assigning the problem of the good to being simply another case of craving generality.

He obviously has a bone to pick with Socrates, and I’m not sure I see what else for other than Socrates moves on from each particular case in search of something universal (generality at its highest form).

Quoting Paine

Using the individual soul to measure the body politic is not done by Wittgenstein

I agree, he only feebly picks up “politics” in terms of our relation to the other individual—the student, the skeptic—or how we relate to our self (as I believe is in the realm of “governing” oneself in Plato’s analogy).

Two comments on pp.18 - 20

Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages.

Don't these remarks invite distracting arguments about whether they are factually correct? Do w need to say more than this approach is a useful way of analyzing language and understanding how it works?

p. 17:Now what makes it difficult for us to take this line of investigation is our craving for generality.This craving for generality is the resultant of a number of tendencies connected with particular philosophical confusions.

So we can add the craving for generality to the craving for certainty as examples of the kind of answer that W is looking for. Again, though, this is not a blanket disapproval of generalization as such - the word "craving" clearly says that it is the inappropriate pursuit of generalization that is the problem, not generalization per se.

p.18:with the confusion between a mental state, meaning a state of a hypothetical mental mechanism, and a mental state meaning a state of consciousness (toothache, etc.).

This is quite right and it is, in a sense, due to the craving for generality. But it is a somewhat different form from the Galtonian photograph in the previous paragraph. It depends on adopting what can be said of some cases, as when we know that some mental event occurs in some circumstances and then trying to apply that model universally. As when "we are looking at words as though they all were proper names, and we then confuse the bearer of a name with the meaning of the name." (p. 18)

p. 18:Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.

Certainly, respect for science is often exaggerated and it may explain some metaphysics. Plato is a particularly clear example. But I think that W may be over-generalizing here.

p.19:And after all, there is not one definite class of features which characterize all cases of wishing (at least not as the word is commonly used). If on the other hand you wish to give a definition of wishing, i.e., to draw a sharp boundary, then you are free to draw it as you like; and this boundary will never entirely coincide with the actual usage, as this usage has no sharp boundary.

We need to show that this is not just a trivial question of notation, where we could simply agree to use our different notations. But I'm not sure how, exactly. W's new philosophy is less decisive, less certain, than the tradition expects. To expect traditional "results" from his investigations is to indulge the cravings for generality and certainty.

Reply to Ludwig V

Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages.

Quoting Ludwig V

Don't these remarks invite distracting arguments about whether they are factually correct? Do w need to say more than this approach is a useful way of analyzing language and understanding how it works?

It seems to me that the limits to analysis being put forward by Wittgenstein are arguing for a particular set of facts over others. In Philosophical Investigations, he challenges the role of elements which various theories could be reaching for:

Quoting PI, 59

“A name signifies only what is an element - of reality a what cannot be destroyed, what remains the same in all changes.” - But what
is that? - Even as we uttered the sentence, that’s what we already had in mind! We already gave expression to a quite specific idea, a particular picture that we wanted to use. For experience certainly does not show us these elements. We see constituent parts of something composite (a chair, for instance). We say that the back is part of the chair, but that it itself is composed of different pieces of wood; whereas a leg is a simple constituent part. We also see a whole which changes (is
destroyed) while its constituent parts remain unchanged. These are the materials from which we construct that picture of reality.

The question of elemental structure is clearly directed toward such as Russell and Whitehead but also to language theorists like Chomsky. Looking for a language underneath the one we use requires employing certain kinds of assumptions. We are being asked to consider an alternative approach to what is "primitive", but it is not being presented as a competing analysis.

Another example of the argument establishing a set of facts is the treatment of solipsism as a mistake. It does not work by offering a competing view of the elements.

Quoting Ludwig V

Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.
— p. 18

Certainly, respect for science is often exaggerated and it may explain some metaphysics. Plato is a particularly clear example. But I think that W may be over-generalizing here.

The scientific method, as we know it, was not a model for Plato. Wittgenstein does not seem interested in Plato's own problems with analysis. There are the many times when the singular essence is sought for and not found. I agree with an observation made by Antonia Soulez:

Soulez, How Wittgenstein Refused to Be ‘The Son Of’: His reading of the ancient text was unrefined, indifferent to authenticity, careless about the historical distance between the ancient and the contemporary. What then did he look for?

Did he look for a better model of the analysis of meaning? As we know from Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein would rather attack ‘Plato’s Betrachtungsweise’, including Russell and himself (as expressed in the Tractatus) with Plato, in order to reshape his method of ‘comparison’ with paradigms. To his eyes, Plato’s problem illustrates a misleading model or picture of logical analysis that he wanted to get rid of. This illustration in turn could be addressed to and against Russell’s conception. His contention in §48 is rather constructing a new language game in order to confute logical atomism than, in the spirit of a critical method, trying to discuss Russell’s distinctions one by one. Wittgenstein was as little interested in critical arguments or analytical sorts of discussions with ancient authors as with modern or contemporary ones.

Quoting Ludwig V

I think W leaves a gaping hole in the demonstration that mental objects - in the "occult" sense, drop out of consideration as irrelevant. But what makes the reasons mine, as opposed to justifications after the event? Perhaps the fact that I give them as reasons after the event is what makes them mine. In giving them, I claim them, or perhaps acknowledge them. Either way, they are to be compared to "I am in pain" or "That tastes sweet". There is a complicated hinterland here, which is usually acknowledged only in passing, that one's authority in such cases is defeasible. We may be joking or pretending. But it's time to move on.

Just reading through the thread (backwards) and wanted to comment on this. Apologies if it is off the current topic and that it probably ignores the context of the preceding discussion.

Mental objects or private sensations are irrelevant to the correct use of language. Whatever private sensations you learned to associate with your uses of the words "pain" or "sweet" are irrelevant to the correct usage of those words because your sensations do no affect or determine the correct usage of those words. To use language correctly, it makes no difference if your private sensations are the same or different to anyone else's. Even if everyone saw the same object as having a different colour, and this applied to all objects, we would still learn to use the same colour language that we do now. We would still call stop signs "red" and grass "green" and the sky "blue", even though we each saw them as having a different colour, because those are the words each of us learned to associate with our private sensations of those coloured objects when we learned the language.

What matters to the correct use of language is how we use those words, not whatever private sensations each of us might associate with those words. That's why our private sensations drop out of consideration as irrelevant. The consideration here relates to correct language use, or grammar.

This has little to do with the one's authority being defeasible (or not). The authority with regards to the correct use of language is not any individual, but the norms and accepted customs/rules of language use within a society.

Reply to Luke
Quoting Luke

The authority with regards to the correct use of language is not any individual, but the norms and accepted customs/rules of language use within a society.

And what does Wittgenstein tell us about the authority of norms, customs and rules of language when it comes to the actual correct USE of language? As Joseph Rouse interests Wittgenstein:

…we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

Quoting Ludwig V

Don't these remarks [about family resemblances] invite distracting arguments about whether they are factually correct?

Quoting Paine

It seems to me that the limits to analysis being put forward by Wittgenstein are arguing for a particular set of facts over others.

I think it is important to revisit page 17 when he discusses language games. “These are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language.” I take these to be examples (here), not focused on an argument, but using “general facts” (as he mentions in PI #128, #143, p.230] that he assumes we agree to in order to show a distinction. It is methodological, not a hypothesis about the world (“we are not doing natural history” id). Thus why he can invent imaginary cases (and facts) to show how things might look if we make assumptions before examining what we say when… (his method). He is not trying to explain rule-following in the PI, but looking at it to see why we get confused about it in our hunt for purity. As @Paine says, these facts are not “competing” (but not for any “elemental structure” either), but simply arrogantly presented as self-evident in service of a greater purpose. If he is wrong, then it is of no consequence (that fact just becomes irrelevant, or could be better described), as the purpose is not to get the grammar correct, but to see what it shows us about the skeptical/metaphysical requirement of certainty (generalizing, etc.).

“His contention in §48 is rather constructing a new language game in order to confute logical atomism than, in the spirit of a critical method, trying to discuss Russell’s distinctions one by one. Wittgenstein was as little interested in critical arguments or analytical sorts of discussions with ancient authors as with modern or contemporary ones.” -Soulez

A “language game” is not a (somehow different) explanation of the world, it is an invented case, not to prove Russell wrong, but to show that the criteria comes before any examination. Yes, Witt is reaching back to a deeper level, but it is not a “primitive” (underlying) language or reality, so much as looking at assumptions, fundamental premises, which couldn’t be more “analytical”.

Quoting Luke

Apologies if it is off the current topic and that it probably ignores the context of the preceding discussion.

It’s fine, but you and @Joshs maybe should take a look at pages 14-15 as it is a discussion of reasons (vs causes), and it also may help straighten out a few things. First, nowhere is he discussing what is the correct or incorrect use of language, nor any explanation of what gives it any normative force. Also, he is not denying that we each have our sense data (aka feelings), only that they are not “objects”, subject to fixed knowledge (or ‘ownership’). Thus, they are not the “cause” of our language use, but we give reasons for their expression (after the fact), as @Ludwig V points out. We are thus responsible for our acts and speech, not whether they are “correct” or not.

Quoting Joshs

And what does Wittgenstein tell us about the authority of norms, customs and rules of language when it comes to the actual correct USE of language? As Joseph Rouse interests Wittgenstein:

…we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

Is Rouse's point that (i) there are no rules (or social regularities or norms within a practice), or that (ii) nothing compels us to follow them?

The assertion that there are no rules or norms within a practice seems obviously false. It is easy to observe that many people do follow the rules more often than not - in driving, chess, sports, language, and much more. Many people have followed the same rules of classical chess for more than a day, at least. Also, any social practice involves norms, so it is redundant to refer to the norms within it. It would not be possible to learn how to play chess unless there was an everyday practice of playing it. The everyday practice is the rule, the custom, the correct application to future instances.

If we assume that there are such rules, then perhaps Rouse is right that there is nothing that compels people to follow them. But so what? People do follow rules. Clearly, you can drive through a red light or move your rook diagonally or say a meaningless string of random words if you so choose, but then you are no longer playing the same game as everyone else; no longer following the custom; no longer following the rule. Nothing forces you to play chess but you aren't playing chess (correctly) unless you follow the established rules/customs/practice of playing chess.

As for the "familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes", I find these to be little more than a (mostly Kripke's) misreading.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations:197. [...] Where is the connection effected between the sense of the words
“Let’s play a game of chess” and all the rules of the game? — Well, in
the list of rules of the game, in the teaching of it, in the everyday practice
of playing.

198. [...] “So is whatever I do compatible with the rule?” — Let me ask this:
what has the expression of a rule — say a signpost — got to do with
my actions? What sort of connection obtains here? — Well, this one,
for example: I have been trained to react in a particular way to this
sign, and now I do so react to it.
But with this you have pointed out only a causal connection; only
explained how it has come about that we now go by the signpost; not
what this following-the-sign really consists in. Not so; I have further
indicated that a person goes by a signpost only in so far as there is an
established usage, a custom.

199. [...] To follow a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of
chess, are customs (usages, institutions).
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand
a language means to have mastered a technique.

201. [...] there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which,
from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and
“going against it”.

202. That’s why ‘following a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is
following a rule is not to follow a rule. And that’s why it’s not possible to
follow a rule ‘privately’; otherwise, thinking one was following a rule
would be the same thing as following it.

Quoting Antony Nickles

It’s fine, but you and Joshs maybe should take a look at pages 14-15 as it is a discussion of reasons (vs causes), and it also may help straighten out a few things. First, nowhere is he discussing what is the correct or incorrect use of language, nor any explanation of what gives it any normative force. Also, he is not denying that we each have our sense data (aka feelings), only that they are not “objects”, subject to fixed knowledge (or ‘ownership’). Thus, they are not the “cause” of our language use, but we give reasons for their expression (after the fact), as @Ludwig V points out. We are thus responsible for our acts and speech, not whether they are “correct” or not.

Yes, apologies for jumping ahead (to PI). I was just trying to shed some light on Ludwig V's accusation that Wittgenstein had a "gaping hole" and a "complicated hinterland" with respect to mental objects dropping out of consideration as irrelevant.

Quoting Luke

many people do follow the rules more often than not

In our discussion, this illustrates Witt’s insight that reasons get mixed up by the skeptic/metaphysician with causes (p. 14). People will do things that people do or have done, but they may only do them because of rules at times (when a practice even has “rules”); but there are other reasons for doing things (or none at all). We can of course judge whether they followed a practice, thus why it is then (after an act) that they would give reasons (including that “I was just following the rules”). We of course don’t usually judge anyone when they are conforming to our practices and norms, as Austin would say we don’t bring up ‘intention’ unless something goes wrong, rather than it being pictured as a cause for every act.

Reply to Luke

Quoting Luke

Is Rouse's point that (i) there are no rules (or social regularities or norms within a practice), or that (ii) nothing compels us to follow them?

The assertion that there are no rules or norms within a practice seems obviously false. It is easy to observe that many people do follow the rules more often than not - in driving, chess, sports, language, and much more. Many people have followed the same rules of classical chess for more than a day, at least. Also, any social practice involves norms, so it is redundant to refer to the norms within it. It would not be possible to learn how to play chess unless there was an everyday practice of playing it. The everyday practice is the rule, the custom, the correct application to future instances.

If we assume that there are such rules, then perhaps Rouse is right that there is nothing that compels people to follow them. But so what? People do follow rules. Clearly, you can drive through a red light or move your rook diagonally or say a meaningless string of random words if you so choose, but then you are no longer playing the same game as everyone else; no longer following the custom; no longer following the rule. Nothing forces you to play chess but you aren't playing chess (correctly) unless you follow the established rules/customs/practice of playing chess.

As Antony pointed out , issues concerning the normativity and correctness of rule following are outside the scope of the reading, but let me just offer that the grammatical distinction Wittgenstein makes between causes and reasons, or causes and motivation, is relevant here in the way it points to his later analysis of the situation when I exhaust my reasons and simply declare that my spade is turned. In this book, he says “When the chain of reasons has come to an end and still the question "why?" is asked, one is inclined to give a cause instead of a reason.” He calls the grammar of causal explanation a kind of hypothesis or conjecture rather than knowing. By the time of P.I., he seems to treat conjecturing of cause in terms of the bedrock of a language game. “ If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."
We may then try to come up with a causal explanation.
With regard to Roise on rule following, as Wittgenstein say, a rule, when followed, is never followed “ at a distance”, but when its symbols can be directly used as a guide. And even here, Rkise’s larger point is that rules and social norms underdetermine how we actually follow them.

Quoting Antony Nickles

And, in a very real sense, we would not have that knowledge without Socrates’ curiosity, his dissatisfaction with the easy, first impression.

Quite so. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it certainly keeps philosophy alive. Perhaps the good side of scepticism?

Quoting Paine

The question of elemental structure is clearly directed toward such as Russell and Whitehead but also to language theorists like Chomsky. Looking for a language underneath the one we use requires employing certain kinds of assumptions. We are being asked to consider an alternative approach to what is "primitive", but it is not being presented as a competing analysis.

I may be misreading this.
The argument (comments on) the idea of elements certainly includes logical atomism but is based on an alternative view - roughly that an atomic view of them is misleading because it tries to think of the elements independently of the overall structure that gives them their meaning. It is very reminiscent of Gestalt theory. The structure which they make up is the context in which they exist as elements. It enables us to define them to. Braver (if I have understood him) calls this "holism". I think that's right.

Quoting Paine

The scientific method, as we know it, was not a model for Plato. Wittgenstein does not seem interested in Plato's own problems with analysis. There are the many times when the singular essence is sought for and not found.

Of course, the method of physics was not a model for Plato. But I was referring to his use of mathematics as a paradigm for his metaphysics. (Aristotle treats biology as his model.) But I wouldn't claim that the same is true of every philosopher since then.
I agree that W is not interested in Plato's problems, except insofar as they can be seen as intersecting with his own.

Soulez, How Wittgenstein Refused to Be ‘The Son Of’:Did he look for a better model of the analysis of meaning? As we know from Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein would rather attack ‘Plato’s Betrachtungsweise’, including Russell and himself (as expressed in the Tractatus) with Plato, in order to reshape his method of ‘comparison’ with paradigms. To his eyes, Plato’s problem illustrates a misleading model or picture of logical analysis that he wanted to get rid of. This illustration in turn could be addressed to and against Russell’s conception. His contention in §48 is rather constructing a new language game in order to confute logical atomism than, in the spirit of a critical method, trying to discuss Russell’s distinctions one by one. Wittgenstein was as little interested in critical arguments or analytical sorts of discussions with ancient authors as with modern or contemporary ones.

Could you explain to me, please, what ‘Plato’s Betrachtungsweise’ is. (Google Translate was foxed as well!)
I agree that for W Plato is just another illustration of the method he wanted to get rid of and that he was not trying to get rid of it by further analysis, and so it is not a mistake to say that he was not offering a competing analysis. He wants to go deeper and so uses very different tactics.

Quoting Luke

To use language correctly, it makes no difference if your private sensations are the same or different to anyone else's. Even if everyone saw the same object as having a different colour, and this applied to all objects, we would still learn to use the same colour language that we do now. We would still call stop signs "red" and grass "green" and the sky "blue", even though we each saw them as having a different colour, because those are the words each of us learned to associate with our private sensations of those coloured objects when we learned the language.

This was of putting it seems to allow that we might experience private sensations even if they are irrelevant to our interpersonal communication. But the argument goes deeper than that - or so it seems to me. The point is that there is no way of comparing private sensations in a way that would allow us to classify a given sensation as either they same or different from another. It is not as if we could learn what label to stick on whatever beetle happens to be in our boxes, since there's no way of identifying the beetle; if there were a box, we could stick the label on that, but the box is only a metaphor.

Quoting Antony Nickles

He is not trying to explain rule-following in the PI, but looking at it to see why we get confused about it in our hunt for purity. As Paine says, these facts are not “competing” (but not for any “elemental structure” either), but simply arrogantly presented as self-evident in service of a greater purpose.

I agree that his style can seem arrogant. But, as he says in the preface to PI, he doesn't want to save hi readers the trouble of thinking for themselves - which again can seem arrogant. But the point of the example (language games) is to get us to see things in a different context and so differently. It's not really an exercise in logic at all.

Quoting Luke

The assertion that there are no rules or norms within a practice seems obviously false.

In one way, of course it is. But surely the point is to get us to see that common ideas about rules are confused- a rule can't reach out into the future and determine all its applications We have to learn how to apply them, and in that exercise we are learning what is right and what is wrong.

Quoting Luke

Nothing forces you to play chess but you aren't playing chess (correctly) unless you follow the established rules/customs/practice of playing chess.

Yes. But there is a penalty for not following the rules as everyone else doesn. If you don't, no-one will want to (or be able to, unless they adopt your rules) play chess with you. What is a game of chess without an opponent? Not a game of chess.

Quoting Luke

Yes, apologies for jumping ahead (to PI). I was just trying to shed some light on Ludwig V's accusation that Wittgenstein had a "gaping hole" and a "complicated hinterland" with respect to mental objects dropping out of consideration as irrelevant.

I think I put my point rather badly. I seem to have conflated two different issues.
One is about notations. If W's version of solipsism is really just a different notation, it leaves the solipsist just where they were. My answer is tht the solipsist's notation is not a notation; it can't be used. There is something they are trying to express, but it is better expressed in another way.
The other is about reasons vs causes, which was the focus at that moment. There, I did offer, tentatively a criterion - me giving reasons after the event is not a report of anything that happened before the event, but a rational reconstruction, which becomes mine when I give it. I probably confused the issue by then admitting that such reports are not criteria, but symptoms - we may find them inadequate or implausible on various grounds.

Reply to Antony Nickles
I think Ludvig V's question about facts is germane. If the beginning of PI and the talk of live versus dead signs in the Blue Book puts a certain understanding of learning language in doubt, that has consequences for attempts to form scientific theories about such activities. I offered Chomsky as an example but there are many other areas of human development which are implicated by the question.

Quoting Ludwig V

I may be misreading this.
The argument (comments on) the idea of elements certainly includes logical atomism but is based on an alternative view - roughly that an atomic view of them is misleading because it tries to think of the elements independently of the overall structure that gives them their meaning.

I read the problem as more about priority than independence from circumstances. W does not care about Aristotle's objections to a separate world of forms. What is being questioned is whether analysis breaking down one set of terms into simpler sets will reveal a more fundamental set of conditions. The matter is directly addressed in Philosophical Investigations:

Quoting ibid.

62. Suppose, for example, that the person who is given the orders in (a) and (b) has to look up a table coordinating names and pictures before bringing what is required. Does he do the same when he carries out an order in (a) and the corresponding one in (b)? - Yes and no. You may say: “The point of the two orders is the same.” I would say so too. - But it is not clear everywhere what should be called the ‘point’ of an order. (Similarly, one may say of certain objects that they have this or that purpose. The essential thing is that this is a lamp, that it serves to give light —– what is not essential is that it is an ornament to the room, fills an empty space, and so on. But there is not always a clear boundary between essential and inessential.)

63. To say, however, that a sentence in (b) is an ‘analysed’ form of one in (a) readily seduces us into thinking that the former is the more fundamental form, that it alone shows what is meant by the other, and so on. We may think: someone who has only the unanalysed form lacks the analysis; but he who knows the analysed form has got it all. - But can’t I say that an aspect of the matter is lost to the latter no less than to the former?

64. Let’s imagine language-game (48) altered so that names signify not monochrome squares but rectangles each consisting of two such squares. Let such a rectangle which is half red, half green, be called “U”; a half green, half white one “V”; and so on. Could we not imagine people who had names for such combinations of colour, but not for the individual colours? Think of cases where we say, “This arrangement of colours (say the French tricolor) has a quite special character”.

In what way do the symbols of this language-game stand in need of analysis? How far is it even possible to replace this game by (48)? - It is just a different language-game; even though it is related to (48).

65. Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations. For someone might object against me: “You make things easy for yourself! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what is essential to a language-game, and so to language: what is common to all these activities, and makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you the most headache, the part about the general form of the proposition and of language.”

And this is true. - Instead of pointing out something common to all that we call language, I’m saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common in virtue of which we use the same word for all - but there are many different kinds of affinity between them. And on
account of this affinity, or these affinities, we call them all “languages”.
I’ll try to explain this

Your comparison with Gestalt psychology is interesting. Will ponder.

Quoting Ludwig V

Could you explain to me, please, what ‘Plato’s Betrachtungsweise’ is. (Google Translate was foxed as well!)

It just means a point of view. In this case, a general assignment of Plato to being the champion of the "ideal" versus whatever is assigned to what that is not. Soulez is not faulting either for that, just putting it into a context of what concerned Wittgenstein.

Quoting Paine

The scientific method, as we know it, was not a model for Plato. Wittgenstein does not seem interested in Plato's own problems with analysis. There are the many times when the singular essence is sought for and not found.

I think this is a confusion of Witt’s making. When he says the “method of science”, he might seem to be talking about comparing methods, but, based on all other evidence in the discussion, he means to be saying the results of the method: predictable, repeatable, and not relying on who is doing it, not compromised of/by the human. And Witt is trying to understand how and why Plato had problems (of his own creation) in that what he wanted could not be found because he started by looking only for a “singular” “essence”. In fact, Witt’s method is based on the start of Socrates’ inquiry into what is commonly said in a situation.

Quoting Ludwig V

But I wouldn't claim that the same is true of every philosopher since then.

Descartes equally has his requirement of inability to doubt within the first paragraph, and he too starts talking math as an ideal for knowledge. Kant seems to take away the issue (the: wanting the thing-in-itself), only to start by looking for imperatives. “Science” is the umbrella term Wittgenstein is using for this desire for logical purity (a math-like order).

Quoting Ludwig V

The point is that there is no way of comparing private sensations in a way that would allow us to classify a given sensation as either they same or different from another.

“A given sensation” is creating the picture of feelings as objects (specific ones). And we do compare our feelings all the time and do classify them as different or the same. “I have a headache.” “Me too!” “No, but mine is throbbing in my neck” “Me too!”

Quoting Ludwig V

. But the point of the example (language games) is to get us to see things in a different context and so differently. It's not really an exercise in logic at all.

We must be in agreement about the facts and context of his examples, but not the conclusion. There is a logical force to the clarity gained by the description. Witt is making a subtle shift but his method is able to show an actual distinction, which cuts across the issue. We’ve seen logical mistakes here exposed by comparison to the evidence of simply what we say when doing a thing.

Quoting Ludwig V

There is something [skeptics] are trying to express, but it is better expressed in another way.

Yes he does sometimes change the way an expression is recorded (“changing the notation”), removing the familiarity that blinds us, maybe adding a larger context of implications which makes certain unseen distinctions now clear. But yes “changing the notation” is merely a tool for perspective, not an argument that there is something wrong with words, nor for a new or better language.

Quoting Paine

If the beginning of PI and the talk of live versus dead signs in the Blue Book puts a certain understanding of learning language in doubt, that has consequences for attempts to form scientific theories about such activities.

You could say that he was changing the subject - dropping the pursuit of language as a abstract structure in favour of language as an activity (or a collection of them). The idea of a game has a similar ambiguity in it; there is a systematic structure defined by the rules, but the structure is only realized in terms of human activities. But the colour-exclusion argument (which I understand W took a particular interest in) does something else; it seems to show that the proposed structure has a flaw - the building won't stand up.

Quoting Paine

I read the problem as more about priority than independence from circumstances. W does not care about Aristotle's objections to a separate world of forms. What is being questioned is whether analysis breaking down one set of terms into simpler sets will reveal a more fundamental set of conditions.

The language is really difficult here. The meanings of "priority" and "indendence" have to be understood in the relevant context. As it happens, I wouldn't want to argue the breaking down one set of terms into simpler sets can never improve our understanding of them. W's point, for me, is that applying that approach to a general understanding of descriptive (true or false) language not only doesn't help, but throws up further problems. Hence the need to change the subject.

Quoting Paine

In this case, a general assignment of Plato to being the champion of the "ideal" versus whatever is assigned to what that is not. Soulez is not faulting either for that, just putting it into a context of what concerned Wittgenstein.

I take the point. There's always a tension between arguing about a particular version of some philosophical doctrine and arguing about something that's fundamental and in common between all versions of that doctrine. (If only there was an essence of idealism or scepticism, so that one could nail it down for good and all")
Sometimes, I think that philosophers should be encourage to think in more nuanced terms about philosophical theories. It should not be a matter of refutation or proof - black and white, win or lose - but in terms of a more judicious system of balanced judgements.

Quoting Antony Nickles

In fact, Witt’s method is based on the start of Socrates’ inquiry into what is commonly said in a situation.

Yes, Socrates does assume that we all understand what courage or piety is. His refutations wouldn't work if that was not the case. But the aporia at the end of the process seems to show that assumption is wrong, and I think Socrates takes those failures to show that he is wiser than any other Athenian because he knows he doesn't know, and they think they do. In the end, he rejects the common understanding and gives Plato the starting-point for his more technical philosophy. Aristotle, on the other hand, treats the common understand with respect, and accepts it unless he has reason not to.

Quoting Antony Nickles

“Science” is the umbrella term Wittgenstein is using for this desire for logical purity (a math-like order).

Yes. My lack of a clear, unified conception of science is based on what has happened since his time. That may be unfair.

Quoting Antony Nickles

“A given sensation” is creating the picture of feelings as objects (specific ones). And we do compare our feelings all the time and do classify them as different or the same. “I have a headache.” “Me too!” “No, but mine is throbbing in my neck” “Me too!”

Yes, you are right. So I should represent Wittgenstein not arguing that we cannot compare feelings and sensations, but that we cannot compare them in the way(s) that we can compare public objects.

Quoting Antony Nickles

We’ve seen logical mistakes here exposed by comparison to the evidence of simply what we say when doing a thing.

Yes, his examples are materpieces. But it looks as if he is just appealing to ordinary language and I'm reluctant to assume that ordinary language is always in order.

Quoting Ludwig V

As it happens, I wouldn't want to argue the breaking down one set of terms into simpler sets can never improve our understanding of them. W's point, for me, is that applying that approach to a general understanding of descriptive (true or false) language not only doesn't help, but throws up further problems. Hence the need to change the subject.

I don't read the Blue Book or PI as saying there is no use for reduction in all cases. The objects of shared experience do not have the same problems as what is experienced by us as persons. The discussion of mental states thrusts us into an unknown. To say that nothing more can be learned would be a kind of nominalism. The following from the PI put a finger on the issue:

Quoting ibid.

383. We do not analyse a phenomenon (for example, thinking) but a concept (for example, that of thinking), and hence the application of a word. So it may look as if what we were doing were nominalism. Nominalists make the mistake of interpreting all words as names, and so of not really describing their use, but only, so to speak, giving a paper draft on such a description.

308. How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviorism arise? —– The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states, and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we’ll know more about them - we think. But that’s just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a certain conception of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that seemed to us quite innocent.) - And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don’t want to deny them.

That "sometime perhaps we'll know more about them" militates against imagining ourselves at the end of explanations.

Quoting ibid.

So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don’t want to deny them.

This is the part that many people find it very difficult to grasp. What's worse, it seems to me that some people who one might expect to have grasped it seem to forget it when it's needed. Hence a long and pointless argument about "illusionism".

Quoting ibid.

The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states, and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we’ll know more about them - we think. But that’s just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a certain conception of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that seemed to us quite innocent.)

Yes. However, I find that many people are inclined to assume that neurophysiology and cognitive psychology between them will supply the deficit - a computer model of the mind. (The latest developments in science/technology imported wholesale into philosophy.) So the traditional language morphs somewhat, but survives.

Reply to Ludwig V

Quoting Paine

I don't read the Blue Book or PI as saying there is no use for reduction in all cases. The objects of shared experience do not have the same problems as what is experienced by us as persons. The discussion of mental states thrusts us into an unknown. To say that nothing more can be learned would be a kind of nominalism… That "sometime perhaps we'll know more about them" militates against imagining ourselves at the end of explanations

Quoting Ludwig V

I find that many people are inclined to assume that neurophysiology and cognitive psychology between them will supply the deficit - a computer model of the mind. (The latest developments in science/technology imported wholesale into philosophy.) So the traditional language morphs somewhat, but survives.

I think it’s a different story when it comes to neurophenomenology and enactive embodied cognitive science. Like Witt, these approaches reject the idea of inner, computational processes in the head in favor of practices of interaction immersed in the world.

Quoting Ludwig V

This is the part that many people find it very difficult to grasp. What's worse, it seems to me that some people who one might expect to have grasped it seem to forget it when it's needed. Hence a long and pointless argument about "illusionism".

Good points. The method Wittgenstein incorporates pitches conflicting points of view of what is the best response. His knack for voicing views different from what he might opine makes him difficult to pin down.

Quoting Joshs

I think it’s a different story when it comes to neurophenomenology and enactive embodied cognitive science. Like Witt, these approaches reject the idea of inner, computational processes in the head in favor of practices of interaction immersed in the world.

Is that the only problem for "elemental" languages, a mistake in what those elements are?

@Paine @Ludwig V @Joshs @Shawn @Srap Tasmaner @Luke

Section 5 (pp. 21-23) Russell and Undiscovered Feelings

Maybe someone can help fill in the Russell here (mine is hearsay). The distinction I take as important is between things like ‘expecting’, which Witt claims need to have an associated subject, and ‘wishing’ (crying, etc.), where those feelings can stand alone (p.21). It appears (only from inference) that Russell is concerned about what we wish for because he gets himself confused how we might “know” what he is only presuming is an essential subject. This seems to be similar to the mistake of picturing feelings (sense data) as an object, thus creating an empirical ‘problem’ rather than accepting there are many ways actual feelings are meaningful to us. Witt points out that expectation not only doesn’t happen one way, but it can happen a number of ways (not along rules), so it is better thought of as an open question (with “endless variations”), rather than an object that cannot then be captured in a name (turning the as yet undetermined into something “undefinable”).

In forcing the picture of a feeling by itself to require an object, it seems to twist what would be the task of explaining our interests in my feelings into needing to be certain about something unique. “‘I am afraid of something, but I don't know of what’. Is there an objection to this terminology? We may say: ‘There isn't, except that we are then using the word 'to know' in a queer way’.” (p.22)

With the example of an “unconscious” toothache he appears to be noting that there is a difference which is legitimately recordable, but that our analogy (our form of notation) may lead us to imagine that the solution is a (scientific) “discovery” rather than simply noting the difference between a potential and recognizable pain. I can’t imagine what the discovery would be, nor do I have a good grasp of the “situation” between philosophy and science here, but he does seem to again want to underline that the philosophical muddle should not be thought about being “solved” (resolved) by an investigation that finds something new, but rather by a philosophy which uncovers “‘What do we call 'getting to know' or, 'finding out'?’” to “break the spell of those [notations] which we are accustomed to.” (p.23) He also points out that what we say is not just a matter of “notation” (just language), but is telling us something about the world, making a distinction that has importance to us; that this is what he means by “grammar”.

Quoting Antony Nickles

...he does seem to again want to underline that the philosophical muddle appears able to be “solved” (resolved) by an investigation that finds something new, rather than a philosophy which asks “‘What do we call 'getting to know' or, 'finding out'?’” to “break the spell of those [notations] which we are accustomed to.”

That's not how I read it.

He says that we should look at the grammar of 'getting to know' in relation to new uses of words/phrases such as "unconscious toothache":

To understand this examine the following example: It might be found practical to call a certain state of decay in a tooth, not accompanied by what we commonly call toothache, "unconscious toothache" and to use in such a case the expression that we have toothache, but don't know it. It is in just this sense that psychoanalysis talks of unconscious thoughts, acts of volition, etc. Now is it wrong in this sense to say that I have toothache but don't know it? There is nothing wrong about it, as it is just a new terminology and can at any time be retranslated into ordinary language. On the other hand it obviously makes use of the word "to know" in a new way. If you wish to examine how this expression is used it is helpful to ask yourself "what in this case is the process of getting to know like?" "What do we call 'getting to know' or, 'finding out'?"

Although he is being as even-handed as possible, I read W as being a little dismissive or derogatory toward the scientific/psychoanalytic idea of unconscious "knowing" and as gently attempting to steer us away from this view. Moreover, I read him as attempting to dislodge the commonly held view that "knowing", "expecting", "toothache", etc., must all exclusively refer to and be defined in terms of (inner) sensations only.

It's worth noting that by the time of the PI (246), Wittgenstein rejects the grammatical possibility of knowing oneself to be in pain, stating that "It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I’m in pain."

@Paine @Ludwig V @Joshs @Shawn @Srap Tasmaner @Luke

I think I have to go back over his investigation of knowledge and the situation between science and philosophy.

(p.23):Now is it wrong in this sense [the sense of having tooth decay without the common accompaniments] to say that I have toothache but don't know it?

I take him to be claiming that it is okay to say I don’t know my toothache (it is “unconscious”) when it is not accompanied by the common qualities of a toothache. But he is also claiming then that it is logically wrong—not how toothaches work for us—to claim, when my toothache does have the common features, that I do not know it.

On the other hand it obviously makes use of the word "to know" in a new way. If you wish to examine how this expression is used it is helpful to ask yourself "what in this case is the process of getting to know like?" "What do we call 'getting to know' or, 'finding out'?"

So: what is the process like of getting to know my unconscious toothache? Well, whatever common accompaniments were missing would become present. Pain could be missing, or the location of pain transmitted elsewhere or too global to be pinpointed to that tooth, or there could be pain but I do not feel it (paralysis, medication). So “getting to know” my unconscious toothache would be to become aware of something, “finding out” what was missing or hidden. This is different than saying I have a toothache and don’t know it, when getting to know my toothache is: to be able to measure it, or identify it, or equate it with yours.

But the new expression misleads us by calling up pictures and analogies which make it difficult for us to go through with our convention.

Now are identifying and equating the: “pictures and analogies” that make it hard to say I have a toothache and don’t know it (in the sense of being aware of it)? And “make it hard” why? Because awareness isn’t measurable? Because we want to be more than just aware?

Thus, by the expression "unconscious toothache" you may […] be misled into thinking that a stupendous discovery has been made, a discovery which in a sense altogether bewilders our understanding…. [T]he scientist will tell you that it is a proved fact that there is such a thing, and he will say it like a man who is destroying a common prejudice. He will say: "Surely it's quite simple; there are other things which you don't know of, and there can also be toothache which you don't know of. It is just a new discovery".

It is a new fact that bewilders the commoner, but not science, which will “discovery” it, in the sense it is unknown, unmeasured, not yet analyzed, our guesses unproven. (A popular view in philosophy is that the philosopher is in a superior position to the common person.)

But philosophy is “extremely puzzled”, unsatisfied and tongue-tied, I think Witt would say: because it pictures this fact as an object with the same analogous relation as the tree I can point to, so it is also “tempted to deny the possibility of unconscious toothache”, as it would a material ‘mind’, or ‘sense data’. This slippery slope is because we only think of the second kind of knowing—blinded to any other use, such as the first sense (becoming aware)—because we are captivated by the outcomes of science.

Quoting Joshs

I think it’s a different story when it comes to neurophenomenology and enactive embodied cognitive science. Like Witt, these approaches reject the idea of inner, computational processes in the head in favor of practices of interaction immersed in the world.

Absolutely. I'm not clear whether (how far) that "neurophenomenology and enactive embodied cognitive science" actually derive from W and how far they developed indedendently. But there is seems to be an important compatibility there. On the other hand, they seem to take conventional cognitive science more seriously than W.

Quoting Paine

His knack for voicing views different from what he might opine makes him difficult to pin down.

Not half! But perhaps part of his project is to undermine the process of "pinning down" as understood in traditional analytic philosophy. There are several quotations critical of that ideal in this passage, though perhaps he stops short of outright rejection.

Quoting Paine

Is that the only problem for "elemental" languages, a mistake in what those elements are?

I don't think that's right. The mistake is not merely identifying the wrong candidates for the role of being elements, but in the project of identifiying atomistic somethings as elements at all. The process of identifying elements (analysis) cannot simply forget the context that is set by the starting-point. That sets up criteria for what could count as an element; the project doesn't make any sense outside its holistic context.

Quoting Luke

I read W as being a little dismissive or derogatory toward the scientific/psychoanalytic idea of unconscious "knowing" and as gently attempting to steer us away from this view. Moreover, I read him as attempting to dislodge the commonly held view that "knowing", "expecting", "toothache", etc., must all exclusively refer to and be defined in terms of (inner) sensations only.

As to the first sentence, you are right, IMO. (Note that he doesn't distinguish between the scientific and the psychoanalytical concepts of the the unconscious. The differences are important - or at least Popper makkes a good case for thinking that they are. He seems to be thinking more of the scientific than the psychoanalytical.
As to the second, I agree also with that. I would be inclinced to think that this is his primary target.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I think I have to go back over his investigation of knowledge and the situation between science and philosophy.

I'm extremely confused about what is said here. On the one hand, there is a clear dividing line between the two, which seems to see science primarily as a matter of empirical discoveries and to reserve the conceptual apparatus involved to philosophy. On the other hand, there is the critique of philosophical views that seek perfect clarity and strict regulation. [quote= p.25"]When we talk of language as a symbolism used in an exact calculus, that which is in our mind can be found in the sciences and in mathematics. Our ordinary use of language conforms to this standard of exactness only in rare cases. Why then do we in philosophizing constantly compare our use of words with one following exact rules?[/quote]
The latter seems to undermine the former.

How far does the analogy between these uses go?

This seems to me to summarize the issue perfectly. But perhaps it is not really a question of fact, but a decision about which we need to agree.

Quoting Antony Nickles

It is a new fact that bewilders the commoner, but not science,

I suppose so, though perhaps it is the traditional philosopher that is bewildered, rather than the commoner. I found the discussion of unconscious toothache very confusing. It strikes me as a big fuss about something not very surprising or exciting. The actual phenomena around pain are a good deal more complicated than this discussion recognizes. How far is that relevant to W's purposes here? I'm not sure.
It may help to see the discussion in context.

He introduces the topic after a discussion of expectation and wishing and the objects of expectations and wishes, making the point that we may not know (exactly) what it is that we expect or wish for, with reference to Russell's account of wishing

p.22:One may characterize the meaning which Russell gives to the word "wishing" by saying that it means to him a kind of hunger.--It is a hypothesis that a particular feeling of hunger will be relieved by eating a particular thing.

My problem is that I don't see pain as a concept of the same kind as expectation or wishing precisely because pain doesn't have an "intentional" object comparable to the food that satisfies our hunger. On the other hand, he is thinking about "meaning-objects", so there ought to be a similarily of some kind.

Quoting Ludwig V

On the other hand, he is thinking about "meaning-objects", so there ought to be a similarity of some kind [between the feeling examples and the toothache].

I think the point of understanding the earlier discussion of feelings in comparing it to the toothache case, is to show that the words we use are not as important as the distinctions, etc. that are made (the “use”, or “grammar”). “Is it correct to describe my first feeling by an intransitive verb, or should I say that my fear had an object although I did not know that it had one? Both these forms of description can be used. To understand this examine the following example: It might be found practical to call a certain state of decay in a tooth, not accompanied by what we commonly call toothache, "unconscious toothache" and to use in such a case the expression that we have toothache, but don't know it.” (pp. 22-23 emphasis added). The toothache example is meant to show that “I don’t know it” (as Russell says about feelings as objects) can be differently used as: “unconscious” in that we are unaware—that the words have (at least) two senses/uses—but that we then might get confused, as Russell does, that “I don’t know it” means that there is an undiscovered object (say, existing in the mind), particularly as science can measure and quantify toothache, which criteria are the models philosophy aspires too. So, though I also am tentative about the science/philosophy claims and confusion, I take this fundamentally as his working out the importance and distinction between words and sense, or “use”; the beginnings of “grammar”.

Reply to Antony Nickles

That's perfectly clear. Thank you.

Come to think of it, it's an example of his recommended tactic of replacing a proposed mental object with an actual object in order to see how the language game would work out.

derp

@Banno @Sam26 @Paine @Ludwig V @Jamal @Manuel @Astrophel @Joshs @Kurt Keefner @Shawn @Luke

I’m tagging those who participated (or had any interest) in this thread previously, though I won’t going forward without further participation. I am going to try to finish going through the Blue Book (even if just for myself). I was daunted by the upcoming investigation of the example of the “owner” of a toothache (which I preliminarily take as examining the desire to identify the self metaphysically). Nevertheless…

Sec 6 Coinciding Criteria (pp. 24-25)

First, another note on his method. When he asks “what do we call ‘getting to know’” (p.24), by “call” he means what “counts as” or matters in determining, in this case, that we “know”. He uses the term “criteria” for what matters and counts in getting to it (for judging we have). Now these judgments are not like decisions, because we normally just employ them (unreflectively) as part of the practices we learn (when not examining them philosophically).

Also, all of this is just trying to draw the text out more, and so stated speculatively and provisionally (strongly held loose opinions)—open to clarification and correction of course.

But when he says our judgments (“A has a toothache”) have “always coincided” with our criteria for them (the “red patch”) it seems to open a can of (skeptical) worms, i.e., like it is a coincidence (that could disconnect at any moment). But I take it to be the sense of “coincide” that they “correspond in nature”; or, “are in accord” (Merriam-Webster) So when the skeptic keeps asking their foundational questions (past even the traditional argument for other minds), there is a point where we are “at a loss” (prescient of PI #217). But what exactly are we at a loss to answer? Even the other’s report that they have a toothache is considered “conventional” (just “saying certain words”), and that is only because it is under the scrutiny of “How do you know…?”, and there are no criteria for knowing (for certain) if the other actually has a toothache (and is not just saying the words). I specifically do not take the point to be that other criteria do justify our claims about toothaches, nor that the correspondence or accord between our criteria and our judgments is “natural” or unbreakable.

The seemingly “arbitrary” (p. 25) nature as to which of our criteria are “defining” is not because of a “deplorable lack of clarity”, but because it is not something that is decided ahead of time for a particular purpose (ad hoc), such as, in this case, with the predetermined desire to know without any doubt. In each case we may highlight one criteria over another depending on our interest (or just arbitrarily), and that gets sorted out after, as we noted previously how reasons do (compared to motives). He will go on to say the biggest ad hoc desire philosophy has, is for “strict rules”, which comes next.

Reply to Antony Nickles

Quoting Antony Nickles

But when he says our judgments (“A has a toothache”) have “always coincided” with our criteria for them (the “red patch”) it seems to open a can of (skeptical) worms, i.e., like it is a coincidence (that could disconnect at any moment). But I take it to be the sense of “coincide” that they “correspond in nature”; or, “are in accord” (Merriam-Webster)

But the specter of skepticism remains, because a referential relation is implied between judgement and criteria. And this implication is deliberate on Wittgenstein’s part. As he elaborates later, what grounds the meaning of a phrase, its use, is not determined by a comparison between judgment and criteria.

Reply to Antony Nickles
Thanks for this. I can see the difficulty. You adopt a possible interpretation of "coincide", but I'm not convinced that it is valid in this context.

pp. 24/25:Now one may go on and ask: "How do you know that he has got toothache when he holds his cheek?" The answer to this might be, "I say, he has toothache when he holds his cheek because I hold my cheek when I have toothache". But what if we went on asking:--"And why do you suppose that toothache corresponds to his holding his cheek just because your toothache corresponds to your holding your cheek?" You will be at a loss to answer this question, and find that here we strike rock bottom, that is we have come down to conventions. (If you suggest as an answer to the last question that, whenever we've seen people holding their cheeks and asked them what's the matter, they have answered, "I have toothache",-remember that this experience only co-ordinates holding your cheek with saying certain words.)

I don't see how anyone who has not undergone even an introductory course in philosophy could not see this as a rehearsal of the sceptical attack on, in this case, other minds.
There is an opportunity, I would have said, for Wittgenstein to respond by saying that the conventions he refers to are definitions of meaning. But, for many people, this is a behaviourist/verificationist solution, which arbitrarily changes the meaning of a term that refers to inner experience. So he does well to avoid it. But the problem remains. With our knowledge of the future, we can see that this is where the private language argument is required. But I can see no hint of it. He seems to be offering only his discussion of criteria and symptoms in response. I don't think this really resolves the problem.

Wittgenstein seldom or never directly addresses orthodox philosophy, so it may be that he is simply thinking outside the box. But that won't help us here now. The only "solution" I have is to say that this is a work in progress and we need to swallow our doubts and allow Wittgenstein to pursue the argument further, as he does in the Phil. Inv.

PS. As and when you continue your reading, I would welcome the opportunity to see your thoughts and discuss them. Naturally, I shall base that on reading the text.

Quoting Joshs

But the specter of skepticism remains, because a referential relation is implied between judgement and criteria. And this implication is deliberate on Wittgenstein’s part. As he elaborates later, what grounds the meaning of a phrase, its use, is not determined by a comparison between judgment and criteria.

I don't understand your diagnosis here. I thought that criteria are what guides judgement in the application of linguistic rules. The "criteria vs symptoms" argument complicates that, but I can't see that it negates it. There is also the argument about rules, and this is what is recalled by the reference to "rock bottom", but I don't see any reference here to the discussion of rules that we find in the Phil. Inv.. Could you elaborate a bit?

Quoting Joshs

the specter of skepticism remains,

Yes, though not that it is always about grounding, and here just not determined somehow. In this toothache example there is a desire for knowledge (certainty) in a situation where it has no place (I would say driven by our fear of the other, in our limitation to judge them). The comparison shows that our shared interests (criteria) are overlooked, rejected, and replaced because we want to define the relation (to deny our human fallibility).

Quoting Ludwig V

You adopt a possible interpretation of "coincide", but I'm not convinced that it is valid in this context.

I thought it was interesting (clever?) because philosophers see “always coinciding” and think either: here is a “form of life” that justifies the knowledge! or think: it is uncertain because the “always” could have until now been a coincidence! My point perhaps not being “validity” but just to shed light on the unrelenting nature of the desire for this to be a matter of knowledge (that mere accord wouldn’t stop anyway).

Quoting Ludwig V

this as a rehearsal of the sceptical attack on, in this case, other minds.

Yes, and clearly he is not where he gets to in the PI—that the issue is not a matter of knowledge (but treating the other as a person in pain, or not)—but he is honest enough at this point to leave it that: if we wanted a bottom of “rock”-like justification, we are only left with “this is how things are usually done” (a sense of convention).

And, seemingly in response to this, you say “The problem remains... [unresolved]” But, as he discussed previously, “Our problem [what is difficult to understand about thinking]… was… a muddle felt as a [scientific] problem.” P. 6, which I get into here. We formulate someone’s pain as a “problem” because we want it to be an object, so that it will have an “answer” we can know (here, so we don’t have to address the person). But, as you say, my main concern here is just to follow the process of his thought.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I thought it was interesting (clever?) because philosophers see “always coinciding” and think either: here is a “form of life” that justifies the knowledge! or think: it is uncertain because the “always” could have until now been a coincidence!

I thought it was interesting and clever because, with a dictionary and a flick of the wrist, you turn the conventional trope (conventions as arbitrary) upside-down.

Quoting Antony Nickles

My point perhaps not being “validity” but just to shed light on the unrelenting nature of the desire for this to be a matter of knowledge (that mere accord wouldn’t stop anyway).

Yes. It is still floating about - and likely always will be. I thought when I read "You will be at a loss to answer this question, and find that here we strike rock bottom, that is we have come down to conventions." that Wittgenstein turns this conventional rock bottom into something real, almost foundational.

Quoting Antony Nickles

if we wanted a bottom of “rock”-like justification, we are only left with “this is how things are usually done” (a sense of convention).

There is a sense of being abandoned.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But, as you say, my main concern here is just to follow the process of his thought.

There is a good deal to be learnt from doing that.

Quoting Ludwig V

I thought… that Wittgenstein turns this conventional rock bottom into something real, almost foundational.

But this doesn’t square with framing it as distinctly not foundational (“loose”, “conventional”, “only co-ordinates… with”, being “unable to answer” what is the defining criteria), despite the desire to know (for sure); and so the (philosophical) point is about the (inappropriate, out-of-context, ad hoc) desire, “particular purpose” (next, for strict rules).

Quoting Antony Nickles

But this doesn’t square with framing it as distinctly not foundational (“loose”, “conventional”, “only co-ordinates… with”, being “unable to answer” what is the defining criteria), despite the desire to know (for sure); and so the (philosophical) point is about the (inappropriate, out-of-context, ad hoc) desire, “particular purpose” (next, for strict rules).

OK. I see what you are saying. The discussion of the toothache is set in the context of practical use, and Wittgenstein's point is that the doubt is created by shifting (silently, unconsciously) to the context of strict use. It is not that either is wrong, but that the silent change is inappropriate. It looks as if the decision which context to adopt is pragmatic.
So we have another philosophical tactic to set alongside the discussion of the "meaning object".
As you say - on to strict rules.

@Ludwig V @Joshs

Sec 7 Puzzling Rules (pp. 25-28)

Witt.:“…the puzzles which [philosophers] try to remove always spring from this attitude towards language [compar[ing] our use of words with one following exact rules]”. (p. 26)

If philosophy’s puzzles “spring” from this desire for exactness, that makes its own expectation the creator of the issues it thinks it sees in the world and wants to solve. I don’t think we yet have a good sense of why it has this desire, but perhaps it helps to listen when he says “We are unable to circumscribe… concepts….” (p. 25), as if we wanted to, but cannot, draw a limit around them that is complete enough, covering or predicting all possible outcomes (and here “concept” is a practice, like identifying or following a rule).

If we are starting from “unclarity” and “mental discomfort”, perhaps we thought (assumed) we knew a thing, and then there was something that happened which made us stop and say “Hmmmm, what is time?” And if we then want to define it in a way to have something definite that will circumscribe all cases, perhaps the “something that happened” was unexpected, unpredictable, surprising, e.g., turns out we were wrong when we thought we were right (where Descartes starts in the 1st Meditations). So then we will want the (form of) answer to be able to never be wrong again.

Now it is ironic that he wants to clear up the puzzle created by trying to define what is measuring time by first wanting to apparently define “measure”, but his method is to look closer at how measuring works, and in multiple different cases, because he realizes that our concepts have “different usages”, as in options and possibilities (that cannot be circumscribed, and may even be “contradictions”).

Previously we saw the framework for objects was forced onto trying to understand feelings because of the desire for a similar direct connection (like when we see/know objects). He called this an “analogy” and here says that “forms of expression” exert a force that “fascinates” us (“the analogy between two similar forms of expression in our language”). I take this as the germ of how people think the PI is just about “language” creating problems. But it is the instinctive need for “consisten[cy]” (p. 27], generality, that forces us to apply something analogously across multiple or all cases. We choose a framework of sense that fits our desire for strictness, but we analogize it because that leverages our craving for simplicity to fill in the blanks of the disparate parts between the two cases with the likes of “sense data”, “appearance”, “reality”, “mind”, “forms”, or telling time using a tape measure.

Quoting Antony Nickles

We choose a framework of sense that fits our desire for strictness, but we analogize it because that leverages our craving for simplicity to fill in the blanks of the disparate parts between the two cases with the likes of “sense data”, “appearance”, “reality”, “mind”, “forms”, or telling time using a tape measure.

That's about right. Though what counts as simplicity can be complicated. I mean that once you have learnt to drive a car it seems quite simple. But when you first sat in the driving seat, it was a different story.
It seems a pity, though, that we get so addicted to our analogies that we find them very hard to shake off. That's why we stick to our sense data etc. even though they create hideous complications. No-one, surely, can think that a table as the sum of all its possible appearances is simple. Can they?
I think that there is another motive at work here - the desire to find something surprising and interesting to say, the need to emerge from one's library with a trophy from all those explorations.

p. 28:But let's not forget that a word hasn't got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of scientific investigation into what the word really means. A word has the meaning someone has given to it.

This is one of my hobby-horses. It is a well-established figure of speech, and everyone knows it. Perhaps it does not harm. But we learn to speak a language that already exists, from people who did not invent it. There is a sense in which there is a kind of scientific investigation into what the word really means - how people actually use it. Whether that information is likely to help with any philosophical question is not clear - empirical philosophy does, apparently, exist. (Did Austin invent it?) On the other hand, it is perfectly clear that language is maintained in existence by people who use it, and those users do change the language by introducing new uses. But what does not happen is a confabulation and decision. Except in countries like France and Sweden, introductions - even when they are invented by a known individual, as sometimes happens, - are taken up and spread almost unawares by the anonymous mass of users. "A word has the meaning someone has given it." is a misleading way of putting this.

p. 28:... ordinary language is all right. Whenever we make up 'ideal languages' it is not in order to replace our ordinary language by them; but just to remove some trouble caused in someone's mind by thinking that he has got hold of the exact use of a common word. That is also why our method is not merely to enumerate actual usages of words, but rather deliberately to invent new ones, some of them because of their absurd appearance.

All true. The difference between enumerating actual usages and Wittgenstein's therapy is I think at least close to getting at what it means to understand the meaning of a word.

Reply to Antony Nickles

Quoting Antony Nickles

If philosophy’s puzzles “spring” from this desire for exactness, that makes its own expectation the creator of the issues it thinks it sees in the world and wants to solve. I don’t think we yet have a good sense of why it has this desire, but perhaps it helps to listen when he says “We are unable to circumscribe… concepts….” (p. 25), as if we wanted to, but cannot, draw a limit around them that is complete enough, covering or predicting all possible outcomes (and here “concept” is a practice, like identifying or following a rule

If we ask Wittgenstein where linguistic meaning comes from, he directs us to a focus on WHAT we do with it in the context of ongoing social practices. We must immerse ourselves in actual historical processes to gain clarity and avoid confusion concerning the use of language. But if we ask him where desire for exactness, certainty, generality, consistency and completeness come from, he seems to depart from his emphasis on historical embeddedness , and instead attributes this desire to some trans-historical ‘instinct’. Why the difference in description of the use of words vs the desire to use them in certain ways? This just speculation only part, but I’m inclined to link his departure from history with regard to desire to his own craving for ethical transcendence.

In the Investigations, “forms of life” are the background practices that make language intelligible. Witt insists they are not grounded in theory, but in “what we do.”
At first glance this sounds close to historicism or relativism (since forms of life can differ). But Wittgenstein doesn’t historicize them in Nietzsche’s or Foucault’s sense (as contingent, power-saturated events in a genealogy).
He doesn’t valorize becoming.

In ethics, this restraint coexists with a longing for the absolute. From the Tractatus through the 1929 Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein consistently implies that ethical seriousness involves a transcendent demand, even if it cannot be stated in propositions. There remains a hope that what ethics gestures toward is not merely contingent, but somehow absolute and non-relative, even though it can never be said in language. Wittgenstein refuses to explain the ground of ethics or truth in terms of history, power, or metaphysics. Unlike the post-Nietzscheans, he seems haunted by transcendence. Ethics, for him, is not just a historical formation but a necessity of the human spirit.
Where Nietzsche embraces difference as the essence of truth, Wittgenstein says: ethics is what lies beyond the limits of language, a demand we cannot shake.This is why some readers (e.g. Cavell, Diamond) see Wittgenstein as still religious, in contrast to the radical immanence of Nietzsche or Deleuze.

Wittgenstein’s admiration for Kierkegaard testifies to this religious longing. Wittgenstein’s biographer Ray Monk said this about him:
“Wittgenstein did not wish to see God or to find reasons for His existence. He thought that if he could overcome himself - if a day came when his whole nature 'bowed down in humble resignation in the dust' - then God would, as it were, come to him; he would then be saved.”

It is clear from remarks he wrote elsewhere, that he thought that if he could come to believe in God and the Resurrection - if he could even come to attach some meaning to the expression of those beliefs - then it would not be because he had found any evidence, but rather because he had been redeemed.”

If ethical desire can transcend historical contingency, then perhaps this is why for Witt other kinds of desires as well (desire for certainty, generality, completeness) are not simply ‘what we do’ in the historical sense of
contingent discursive practices, but confused expressions of a transcendent feeling.

@Joshs

Quoting Ludwig V

I think that there is another motive at work here - the desire to find something surprising and interesting to say, the need to emerge from one's library with a trophy from all those explorations.

Fair point; after “problematizing” discrepancies (as described early on), we want to find the answer, and not just come to people and say, “Look, it’s more nuanced than we thought”, even if the “answer” is way more complicated, maybe even because it is, and then philosophers can know better than everyone else, be clever.

Quoting Ludwig V

But we learn to speak a language that already exists, from people who did not invent it…. "A word has the meaning someone has given it." is a misleading way of putting this.

Absolutely agree; it is very hard to slip out of the picture of “the meaning that I have” that I then (each time) “give” in language, that you then “interpret”, and then your “understanding” may (or may not) equate with “my meaning”—all pictured as “objects”. And, when I saw this part, I immediately thought the “someone” in this situation should be our culture, or the whole of human history, which would be the “us” or “we” like, humanity, from which meaning is not given independently. And an investigation I think can be rigorous like science, but just careful not to assume that, if a tidy definition does not fit, the process is to find what it “really” means—the “exact” use—as when we postulate “appearance” so we can look behind it for a solution, in “unheard-of ways” PI #113.

I did snag on the thought that, basically, we may not be “ready” to give an explanation, which I take to mean we can but we are not always prepared (without reflection, looking at cases), or it is not always necessary (as when we rely on habit when picking flowers), and not that there are things we can’t get into, draw out, intelligibly discuss, such as…

Quoting Joshs

If ethical desire can transcend historical contingency, then perhaps this is why for Witt other kinds of desires as well (desire for certainty, generality, completeness) are not simply ‘what we do’ in the historical sense of contingent discursive practices, but confused expressions of a transcendent feeling.

Yes I think he is claiming the confused (metaphysical, theoretical) expressions (driven by a forced analogy) come from a desire, but maybe the desire to transcend is the same as or comes from the desire for, let’s call it, exactness, so it would be to take an ethical situation and abstract from it (transcend it) in order to “solve” it as a (theoretical) “problem” to try to, for example, ensure (justify) agreement rather then accepting that rational disagreement is part of the way ethics works/can end up.

All that to say, we have a sense of what the desire is for, but maybe not yet why we have it, but I think leaving it as a “feeling” is to jump to a conclusion for which we are, as yet, not “ready” (as stated above), and not that we can’t dig into it (that we are only left with the irrational, unintelligible, but not as opposed to, or included in, the theoretical). Based on my story above of how we get to where we want an exact definition (in framing it as “what really is…?), perhaps it is a matter of control, and so anxiety (of being wrong, being judged).

I do believe we have as yet scratched the surface, but that he may not (does not) here explicitly ever get past how we do it and what it is for (its goal)—not that extrapolation is not possible—but I think that next step of why, and the conclusions from that, is leftover and the driving force of the second half of the Investigations, so I will try to keep my comments to the matter (text) at hand, as that is handful enough.

Quoting Joshs

In the Investigations, “forms of life” are the background practices that make language intelligible. Witt insists they are not grounded in theory, but in “what we do.”
At first glance this sounds close to historicism or relativism (since forms of life can differ). But Wittgenstein doesn’t historicize them in Nietzsche’s or Foucault’s sense (as contingent, power-saturated events in a genealogy).

I've always been a bit puzzled why he didn't take the obvious step from forms or life to historicism, relativism, or even perhaps naturalism. It's always been obvious to me that this was aching to be explored and developed. I just assumed that it was just where he stopped, leaving further development to the next generation. It sorted of fitted with how he does philosophy and he would have been justified in feeling that he had achieved his aims. There could have been plans that were never fulfilled.

Quoting Joshs

It is clear from remarks he wrote elsewhere, that he thought that if he could come to believe in God and the Resurrection - if he could even come to attach some meaning to the expression of those beliefs - then it would not be because he had found any evidence, but rather because he had been redeemed.”

I don't know if we are allowed to feel sorry for him. It seems somehow impertinent. Now I'm even more puzzled about his "wonderful life".

Quoting Joshs

If ethical desire can transcend historical contingency, then perhaps this is why for Witt other kinds of desires as well (desire for certainty, generality, completeness) are not simply ‘what we do’ in the historical sense of contingent discursive practices, but confused expressions of a transcendent feeling.

If he stuck with ethics as transcendent, is it possible that his ahistorical "form of life" was actually some sort of transcendent idea? One might feel that he doesn't seem to regard language as defined in the TLP as transcendent, but if the truths of logic cannot be said, but only shown, then it looks as if logic is also transcendent.

Quoting Antony Nickles

And, when I saw this part, I immediately thought the “someone” in this situation should be our culture, or the whole of human history, which would be the “us” or “we” like, humanity, from which meaning is not given independently.

In my book, culture and history come back to people, so, while I wouldn't disagree with you, I don't feel that there's a significant difference between us.

Quoting Ludwig V

I've always been a bit puzzled why he didn't take the obvious step from forms or life to historicism, relativism, or even perhaps naturalism.

This seems to assume this is about justification, and not an investigation of other examples to see why we insist on certain prerequisites (and what we miss in requiring them), instead of just taking them as just different answers to the same issue.

Quoting Ludwig V

In my book, culture and history come back to people, so, while I wouldn't disagree with you, I don't feel that there's a significant difference between us.

I only wanted to head off the presumption that this was about individuals, and not a matter, as you say, of our (people’s) culture (our language) coming before us.

@Joshs @Ludwig V

Sec 8 Purpose of Possibilities and Grammar (pp. 28-30)

His hope in pointing out multiple variations of “know” or “longing” (p. 29) is that being aware of “[an]other possibility of expression” (p. 28) would break the hold of projecting the expectations from an analogy.

In their being different possibilities in an expression, we may pick a form of expression to “stress” one part, to bring attention to looking at it a certain way, but he also says we may not even care (don’t always decide, pick), and that mostly we express ourselves along “deeply-rooted tendencies” (p. 30). I wouldn’t say these are necessarily personal tendencies, so much as habitual, conforming to culture, our common phrasings (for a context). I do find it interesting that our form of expression “betrays” us, as if it reveals more than we might want, that others can see more of us in what we express (not meant as just non-verbally).

He spends a minute talking about the nature of a “grammatical” statement. In doing so he says questioning our certainty about what we wish makes “no sense”. I think it is important that this is not in the sense of foolish or absurd, but that there is no context in which we would ask about knowledge because of the way we judge wishing, i.e., what is important to us about wishing is not justification for it, say, against doubt (of course there are the senses of “Are you sure that it is this you wish?” where we are asking for clarity about “this” or whether they have considered the consequences).

I think the importance of the grammatical statement for Wittgenstein will need more work (and text) to draw out, nevertheless, I think saying he is just trying to find a substitute for rules (to enforce), or is simply justifying how our practices work, is to miss the point, which I would preliminarily take, here, as something like being “aware” of our desire to overlay a framework (like knowledge) where it does not belong. In this sense we should think of their claim to be grammatical (provisionally, for us to concur with of course) as just the fact of the matter, e.g. rooms have length (as he looks at “facts of nature” p. 230), and moving on to it being evidence for other purposes, such as highlighting what is important to us (and not) about a practice (PI #143).

I am tempted to skip the discussion “what is not the case” and shadows, etc., and move to the mention of “intention” on p. 32, but if anyone else wants to take up or comment on that section, please do (as anyone can lead the charge at any time).

Quoting Antony Nickles

This seems to assume this is about justification, and not an investigation of other examples to see why we insist on certain prerequisites (and what we miss in requiring them), instead of just taking them as just different answers to the same issue.

I'm not at all sure that historicism etc. are about justification, though I suppose it might be. That is, sosmeone might take a historical account of our form of life to be a justification. But if what Wittgenstein is interested in clarifying what our justification practices are, how we justify ourselves, then, in this context that is inappropriate. The attempt to justify our justification practices inevitably begs the question. Just as, in the end, there can't be an argument to the conclusion that logic justifies our arguments. That sets up an infinite regress or a circle of arguments. In the end, one simply has to "get" the point - a bit like a joke.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I only wanted to head off the presumption that this was about individuals, and not a matter, as you say, of our (people’s) culture (our language) coming before us.

No, no, I wasn't going there. Though, as individuals, we are deeply embedded in our culture and history. We are, in a sense, our culture and history -- to the point where our sense of our individuality is itself the product of them.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I am tempted to skip the discussion “what is not the case” and shadows, etc., and move to the mention of “intention” on p. 32, but if anyone else wants to take up or comment on that section, please do (as anyone can lead the charge at any time).

|I'll do something on that.

Reply to JoshsReply to Antony Nickles

The topic opens on p. 30. “How can one think what it is not the case?” The discussion of this will go on for the next 9 pages. This is too big a chunk for us, now. I shall cover what might be seen as the first phase, and identify the main stages in the argument after that.

There is “nothing easier” than to think what is not the case. In a sense, Wittgenstein needs not merely to announce his problem, but also to get us to see it as a problem He reminds of the the problem about measuring time, which he discussed earlier. (Ref. needed)

Wittgenstein comments that this is a “beautiful” example of a philosophical question. It is also a beautiful example of his method. It wanders through allied topics as it goes along and ends up with a different view of our starting-point, rather than unveiling a Solution.

His first diagnosis (p.31) is that we are misled by "object of thought", "fact", “and by the different meanings of the word "exist". His response is a discussion of imagining something and a critique of the idea that one can only reconstitute existing elements in a new configuration. I think this is because we can think something that doesn’t exist (such as a ‘false fact’) by imagining it. His critique of this is not fully developed, as he admits. He promises to return to it, but announces, in a sense, his first target. - “it is not the fact which we think". He points out that this depends on how one uses the word “fact”. I think he means that one could use the word fact in such a way that what I wish for is the fact of Mr. Smith arriving. That would evade, rather than resolve, the problem.

His next step (p. 32) introduces the familiar notion of propositions – “the sense of a the sentence” but presents them as “shadows” of facts. This presents the concept in an entirely new context, in which they can be treated as problems in a way that orthodox philosophy doesn’t. So a wholly new critique of the concept can be developed. It is not as if the concept of a proposition is not problematic, but this approach takes us out of the box.

Two transformations of the issue follow rapidly (still p. 32). "How can we know what the shadow is a shadow of?"-- "What makes a portrait a portrait of Mr. N?" and there’s a first answer "The similarity between the portrait and Mr. N". He rejects this answer “for it is in the essence of this idea that it should make sense to talk of a good or a bad portrait” The shadow cannot be treated in this way because, to put it this way, there is no Mr. N to compare it to. This is the essence of the problem, not a solution.

And he wanders off into a discussion of meaning, returning on p. 35, where we find a helpful diagnosis. Hie identifies two different uses of “I think x”. We have "I think that so-and-so will happen" or "that so-and-so is the case", but also "I think just the same thing as he". He also cites "I expect him", and "I expect that he will come" and compares "I shoot him".

This is followed by a discussion of shadows, pictures, and similarity. He is seeking to establish the paradoxical idea that a correct picture of something need have no similarity with its object. (I’m reminded of the picture theory of meaning.) On that basis, positing a shadow between “the sentence and reality” loses all point. The sentence itself can play the required role. (p. 37).

The topic seems to be finally closed when, on p. 38, he reminds us that the connection between thinking about a man and the man himself is established by an ordinary ostensive definition.

@Joshs

Sec 9 Non-existence and Statements without Facts (pp. 30-32)

Quoting Ludwig V

I shall cover what might be seen as the first phase,

Thanks for cracking this, well done; I was at a loss (and maybe still am) as to why we imagine a difficulty in picturing what is not. Obviously he points out that part of the difficulty is because of the forced analogy of thought as an object, but I take the confusion that follows to be that: if we are thinking of the absence of something, then how can there be an object that is (not) the thought.

I wanted to offer that Wittgenstein says that imagining it is "easy" perhaps because of the form of the question (not that the answering of it is). Asking "How can one...?" (p. 30, 1965 Harper's Ed.) “beautifully” plays right into his method of drawing out the means for doing a practice—its workings, how we can…. i.e., the “grammar” of thinking, facts, and "existing", etc. He looks at different cases to see that there is not only one way these each work (there are different usages/options/senses, with different possibilities, also qualified by the situation and interest).

If a watch is seen to "exist" because, say, it is completely put together, or functioning, then we might let go of identification by correspondence with an internal object, like an “idea” or visual “sense-data”, and realize it is just meeting the criteria of what is important to us (society) about a watch (tells time; is small, portable, operates by a vibrating mainspring compared to a clock, etc.)

The feeling of “difficulty” in first identifying red I would think comes from the desire to identify color by equating that color, as a “quality”, with an internal “object” of our vision, say, an “appearance” as part of “perception”, from which philosophy would ask: “how could we have that object of red before encountering it?” But I take it the way color works (it’s grammar) is like a pain (PI #235]; it is the “same” for us to the extent we align in a particular case, e.g., “What color would you say that is?” “Red”. “Well, isn’t it more of a rose color.” “Maybe, but all the client cares about is that it’s not blue.” “Yeah right, okay.”

In saying “it is not the fact we think”, I would offer that he is showing that, though something is a fact, like a house is on fire, its “fact-ness” is not an object (of thought, always there), because its expression may not be used as a fact; we are not (necessarily) making the point that, “it is a fact that the house is on fire” (unless of course there is the need for confirmation, some doubt, etc.). The statement might just be to raise alarm, as an expression of realization, shock, etc.

I am at a bit of a loss on the “shadow fact”, but I imagine it plays the same role as “appearance” or “impression”; inserted in between the ordinary process of vision and identification, etc. in order to mitigate all our statements in order to explain (and control) the possibility of error.

Reply to Antony Nickles
I'm sorry I shan't have time to respond to this until tomorrow. :sad:

Quoting Antony Nickles

Thanks for cracking this, well done;

Quoting Antony Nickles

I was at a loss (and maybe still am) as to why we imagine a difficulty in picturing what is not. ….I take the confusion that follows to be that: if we are thinking of the absence of something, than how can there then be an object that is the thought.

I think you are right. I think that Wittgenstein must have recognized this. That’s why I emphasized the way the problem is presented. It seems to me to be quite carefully set up so as to make the problem clear.
There’s room here for a discussion of how philosophical problems arise. We don’t just stumble onto or into them. So Descartes initial reflections in the Meditations are not just an ancillary to the project. Nor, to be fair, does he present them as such. The difference is that Descartes thinks that he is recognizing the problem. We (or at least I) think that he is creating it.)

Quoting Antony Nickles

Asking "How can one...?" (p. 30, 1965 Harper's Ed.) “beautifully” plays right into his method of drawing out the means for doing a practice—its workings (grammar), how we can…. i.e., the “grammar” of thinking, facts, and "existing", etc.

Yes. That’s not an accident, of course. It’s part of the project.

Quoting Antony Nickles

If a watch is seen to "exist" because, say, it is completely put together, or functioning, then we might let go of identification by correspondence with an internal object.

Yes. Or rather, it should. It does rather raise questions about what it means to say that something exists, since the broken or toy watch does, nonetheless, exist - it's just that the description "watch" doesn't apply.
I’m always a bit saddened by the persistence of mental or internal objects in philosophical discourse. Many people don’t seem to be impressed by or don’t understand the private language argument. It’s not easy.

Quoting Antony Nickles

The feeling of difficulty in first identifying red I would think comes from the desire to identify color by equating that color, as a “quality”, with an internal “object” of our vision, say, an “appearance” as part of “perception”, which philosophy would ask: “how could we have that object of red before encountering it?” But I take it the way color works (it’s grammar) is like a pain (PI #235) In saying “it is not the fact we think”, I would offer that he is showing that, though something is a fact, like a house is on fire, its “fact-ness” is not an object (of thought, always there), because its expression may not be used as a fact.

Yes, I found this part very difficult. I’m not sure I really understand what he was getting at. The business about seeing redness when one presses one’s own eyeball didn’t impress me. The need to learn from others what redness is makes this possibility dubiously relevant – unless everyone has the same experience, which is, I suppose, possible.
But the idea that one could somehow abolish redness, I think, is based on a misunderstanding of how colour works. Colour words are a system; they segment the colour spectrum, so abolishing redness sounds as if it would leave a gap in the spectrum, which is hard to understand, or just restrict the spectrum. That is possible. Dogs, for example, can’t see red. As I understand it, they see red objects as black, so the abolition is a substitution. But the ability to see red is, for us, a physiological capacity – are we to imagine some feat of genetic engineering?
I think you may be right in comparing colour with pain – in the sense that W is thinking of redness as (grammatically) like pain. Perhaps this is possible if one doesn’t understand the colour spectrum, but we do. That makes a huge difference, because if there is a spectrum of pain, it is a spectrum of intensity, not of quality. We do have qualities of pain – stabbing, aching, throbbing etc. – but they are not on a spectrum.
The question is “what do you mean by ‘redness exists’? I’m wondering whether this may not be about the limits of thought as compared with the limits of the imagination and the distinction between meaningful and meaningless sentences/thoughts. After all, one of the classic tests of meaningfulness is whether one can imagine – the sun not rising tomorrow morning, for example, or a round square. I’m not all sure that the non-existence of redness, as opposed to red things, is conceivable, whereas the non-existence of red things is. The reason is that colours are a system, and the space for redness is guaranteed by the system.
If that’s what he’s getting at, thinking what is not is not necessarily imagining what is not.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I am at a bit of a loss on the “shadow fact”, but I imagine it plays the same role as “appearance” or “impression”; inserted in between the ordinary process of vision and identification, etc. in order to mitigate all our statements in order to explain (and control) the possibility of error.

You are right about the role of the shadow fact. It does indeed fit with “proposition” and sense of a sentence”. Appearances and impressions are tangled up with experiences, so he may have wished to set them aside.
In a sense these terms do explain the possibility of error. But in another sense, they do less and more than that. They articulate the possibility of error. The essence of a hallucination is that Macbeth is acting as if there was a dagger before him, but there isn’t. To describe the situation in that way (Macbeth is acting as if ... but there isn't) has a sharp edge of paradox about it. The concept of a hallucination enables us to get through that. Perhaps it includes the idea of a visual image. That may seem to help, but doesn’t really add anything.

@Ludwig V

Sec 10 Intending and Meaning (pp. 32-34)

“To intend a picture to be the portrait of so-and-so (on the part of the painter, e.g.) is neither a particular state of mind nor a particular mental process.” (P.32)

This harkens back to looking at understanding or thinking as a “queer mechanism” (p.3) that happens in the brain. We decided this was an “answer” to what was turned into a “problem” in trying to head off misunderstanding, instead of seeing it as an ongoing situation to understand someone. To imagine intention as a mechanism of the brain seems to mean it is always present, as if it would serve a purpose, such as causality (for action perhaps). But if we use the method, as before, of making the process external, public, as in the case of copying, it turns out the judgment of whether we are copying is based on a number of possible criteria, and we may be judged to have copied something even when we set out [intended] not to, as in “It looks like you copied that.” “Oh, I wasn’t trying [intending] to.” So he concludes that a process, i.e., an action, “can never be the intention itself.” (P.33) Thus we can conclude there is no agent (needed) that intends, as there was not one for thinking.

“…consider what it is that really happens when we say a thing and mean what we say.” (P.34)

He says he wants to take apart the picture of a process accompanying or “run[ning] alongside these words”, as if there is a mechanism to “mean the arrow one way or another”; as if “We mean (our internal object)”. But he points out that to mean what we say is actually a matter of tone and feeling, “expression”. I would also offer that when we claim we mean what we say, we are committed to it, to the consequences; we are making a promise not to go back on having said it.

I take the purpose of the examples to be to show that we don’t “mean” or “intend” what we say “as a rule”, i.e., with everything we say, so it is not a mechanism or process, and so not a part of speaking or the way language works or the determination of what matters in something being said.

Quoting Ludwig V

It does rather raise questions about what it means to say that something exists, since the broken or toy watch does, nonetheless, exist - it's just that the description "watch" doesn't apply.

Yes it doesn’t mean metaphysical “existence”, but I don’t think we should trivialize what it does mean, even in the sense of not being here. Before a watch is put together, it is just watch parts. But it is, decidedly, not a watch. Broken, it is not a watch, it is a broken watch. Now if, in this example, we are simply applying a description (which I don’t know how to take other than as pointing something out), as if labeling it broken is ancillary to it still being a watch, then perhaps we are referring to it as a watch for another reason, perhaps in differentiating it from a clock.

I take it as a re-figuring, but still about what is fundamental, essential, without being metaphysical—what we find essential—for example, about, say, a chair. If it doesn’t have a back, it is not a chair; it does not exist as a chair, which has the meaning, or affect that, if you call it a chair, I am right to correct you in pointing out it is a stool (however didactic that is; however lazy we allow ourselves to be). As well, if you don’t know to (know how to) differentiate sleet from snow, sleet does not exist for you in the world.

The reason I think the private language argument (as with the argument here) is hard to accept is when it is only seen as the negation of mental objects (which here we realize is the analogizing of the framework of “objects”) as it will seem to ignore (he says “deny”): me, thought, meaning, experience; instead of ending with something positive, about what it says about me thinking (through something), me meaning (having a point in saying something), me as someone who can experience something (of note, even unique). This is why he is seen as a negative philosopher. He went straight at tearing done the house of cards and is never seen as building it back up from the rubble that still remained, I would say because he turns to why we (he did) fight so hard against it.

Again, good work; I’ll wait for your continuation of the reading.

Quoting Antony Nickles

He went straight at tearing done the house of cards and is never seen as building it back up from the rubble that still remained, I would say because he turns to why we (he did) fight so hard against it.

Yes. It seems to me that Descartes and Hume both receive similar treatment - they are known as sceptical philosophers, when actually, the point of their work was to deal with scepticism.

I've got a bit confused about where we are. It doesn't help that the page numbering in my copy (from Gutenberg Press) seems not to have a page 33!

I shall go from p. 32/33

Then if this scheme is to serve our purpose at all, it must show us which of the three levels is the level of meaning. I can, e.g., make a scheme with three levels, the bottom level always being the level of meaning. But adopt whatever model or scheme you may, it will have a bottom level, and there will be no such thing as an interpretation of that. To say in this case that every arrow can still be interpreted would only mean that I could always make a different model of saying and meaning which had one more level than the one I am using.

to p.36/35

Another source of the idea of a shadow being the object of our thought is this: We imagine the shadow to be a picture the intention of which cannot be questioned, that is, a picture which we don't interpret in order to understand it, but which we understand without interpreting it.

Tomorrow.

Reply to Ludwig V

Quoting Ludwig V

The business about seeing redness when one presses one’s own eyeball didn’t impress me. The need to learn from others what redness is makes this possibility dubiously relevant – unless everyone has the same experience, which is, I suppose, possible.
But the idea that one could somehow abolish redness, I think, is based on a misunderstanding of how colour works. Colour words are a system; they segment the colour spectrum, so abolishing redness sounds as if it would leave a gap in the spectrum, which is hard to understand, or just restrict the spectrum. That is possible. Dogs, for example, can’t see red. As I understand it, they see red objects as black, so the abolition is a substitution. But the ability to see red is, for us, a physiological capacity – are we to imagine some feat of genetic engineering?
I think you may be right in comparing colour with pain – in the sense that W is thinking of redness as (grammatically) like pain. Perhaps this is possible if one doesn’t understand the colour spectrum, but we do. That makes a huge difference, because if there is a spectrum of pain, it is a spectrum of intensity, not of quality. We do have qualities of pain – stabbing, aching, throbbing etc. – but they are not on a spectrum.

You suggest Wittgenstein’s “pressing the eyeball” example is irrelevant because color concepts are socially learned.
Then you shift the discussion toward physiology (dogs can’t see red; genetic engineering). Wittgenstein would say this is sliding back into an explanatory, scientific register (physiology, genetics), which is not the issue. He isn’t denying the biological basis of vision; he’s showing that philosophy generates pseudo-problems by treating “redness” as if it were an inner object. The “pressing the eyeball” example is a reminder that even when we report “seeing red,” the grammar of “red” is not that of an inner sensation, but part of a learned practice. Dismissing the example as irrelevant misses Wittgenstein’s therapeutic poin. He’s not offering data but undermining a picture, the picture of color as an inner object. You also treat “abolishing redness” as a problem of spectrum physics, but Wittgenstein might say “abolishing redness” looks nonsensical not because of biology but because of how the grammar of color words works in our language.


On comparing color with pain, you say that pain has a spectrum of intensity, while color has a spectrum of quality. I think Wittgenstein’s point isn’t that colors and pains are the same kind of phenomenon but that the grammar of the words is comparable. With both, the temptation is to treat them as inner objects we directly access. But Wittgenstein shows that meaning is in the use. “I have a toothache” works like “This is red” not by pointing to a private inner object but by participating in a practice with public criteria. You speak as if “the color system” guarantees a metaphysical space for redness, as though the system enforces an ontological necessity. But the necessity is grammatical, not metaphysical. It comes from how we use color words, not from a hidden structure of reality.

Quoting Ludwig V

I've got a bit confused about where we are

I had already written something up on the section about intention and meaning (which I posted above). I had assumed you were going to pick up the question again on what I have as page 35 with “let us revert to our question” which looks like it goes to page 40.

But, feel free to offer a reading of page 32 to 35 of course as well.

Reply to Antony Nickles
Thanks. That's clear enough. I'll pick up from where you left off and go to p. 40.

I don't think I have much to say about pp 32 - 35.

The page numbering problem is a nuisance. But I'll work out what's going on quite soon.

Quoting Joshs

You suggest Wittgenstein’s “pressing the eyeball” example is irrelevant because color concepts are socially learned.

Well, yes. Pressing one's eyeball and noticing a new colour is not enough. We have to see how other people describe the phenomenon. So I'm very puzzled, except that, perhaps, he hasn't yet constructed the private language argument. BTW, I pressed my own eyeball to see what would happen. Nothing - only darkness and the usual display from my retina. As I pressed harder, I experienced pain. Not that it matters.

Quoting Joshs

He isn’t denying the biological basis of vision; he’s showing that philosophy generates pseudo-problems by treating “redness” as if it were an inner object.

Yes, that's the general context. The specific context is the question how we can think of something that does not exist, and he is considering the answer that we just imagine it. But if imagination is just combining elements that do exist in new ways, imagination cannot play the role of shadow facts. Yet he presses the argument further, and seems to want to find a way of saying that we can imagine something that does not exist.

Quoting Joshs

Wittgenstein might say “abolishing redness” looks nonsensical not because of biology but because of how the grammar of color words works in our language.

What puzzles me is that he seems to conclude that abolishing redness is not nonsensical. He seems to be grasping for a sense in which it can make sense.

Suppose I said "Exerting a pressure on your eye-ball produces a red image". Couldn't the way by which you first became acquainted with red have been this?
And why shouldn't it have been just imagining a red patch?

I think he also acknowledges that this does not resolve the problem, because he promises to deal with the "reservations" we "may be feeling here at a later occasion."

I'm finding this point very confusing.

Reply to Joshs Reply to Antony Nickles

Wittgenstein returns to the question. "What is the object of a thought?" (e.g. when we say, "I think that King's College is on fire"). (Page 34)
This is, he says, typically metaphysical, because “an unclarity about the grammar of words” is expressed “in the form of a scientific (he has physics in mind) question”.

He identifies four “origins” of the question, which I think are intended to be confusions expressed in it. (Page 35)

1.. ‘One of the origins of our question is the use of "I think/expect" and “I think/expect” in two distinct ways. “I expect him” and “I expect that he will come”. We then compare “I expect him” to “I shoot him”.
He turns his attention to the shadows:-
2 a) Two different sentences can have the same sense, which becomes a shadowy being (unless perhaps it is a material object).
2 b) Shadowy sense to “be a picture” that “cannot be questioned”; it doesn’t need any interpretation.
3) Sometimes a sentence brings images before our mind's eye. These images are “translations” into pictorial language. But they must be similar to, copies of, what they are pictures of.

i) A map of all or part of our planet, he says, is not a picture by similarity or a copy in this sense. (Page 36)
ii) A picture of someone’s face projected it “in such a way that no one would normally call the projection ‘a good portrait of so-and-so’ because it would not look a bit like him”. This is, let us say, a bit complicated.

This gets him to where he wants to be. The sentence itself can do the work of the shadow, and so no shadow is needed. We can explain what the sentence means, perhaps, by an ostensive definition. That’s how words and things can be connected.

He can now go back and correct the path that he started down. (Page 37) The idea of the shadow is deeply rooted, but it is not what we really want to say. What we want to say is that “the fact which we wish for must be present in our wish”. Well, the answer just above cited ostensive definition to explain what “King’s College is on fire”. That works for expectation and wishing, too – after the event. But I could have given a similar explanation before it, as well.

At this point, a summary. How do our thoughts “connect” with the things they are about? The connection is made by means of ostensive definition. Ordinary language makes it seem that the connection must have been made during the act of thinking. But that’s not the case.
He gives us examples that could be taken to mean that thinking or meaning can be regarded as a mental activity, and so leading us to feel that something has been explained and no further questions are appropriate.

Now he returns to imagining and King’s College (Page 38) and subjects this to a cross-examination. I take it that links back to the rather unsatisfactory discussion of imagining earlier. But here, he concludes that our mistake is to think that images and experiences of all sorts, must be present in our mind at the same time.

Finally, a metaphor (Page 39) , - pulling a string of beads being pulled out of a box through a hole in the lid, to persuade us that “We easily overlook the distinction between stating a conscious mental event, and making a hypothesis about what one might call the mechanism of the mind.”

Quoting Joshs

You speak as if “the color system” guarantees a metaphysical space for redness, as though the system enforces an ontological necessity. But the necessity is grammatical, not metaphysical. It comes from how we use color words, not from a hidden structure of reality.

I get your point. But eventually realized that the peculiarity of this discussion is precisely that it is conducted, to put it this way, de re and not de dicto. If he asked whether we could abolish the concept of redness, that would have been one question. But he doesn't. He asks whether we could abolish redness, and compares it to destroying a watch. That comparison is a nonsense, to start with.

I keeping reaching for a key that will make all this fall in to place. But it still elude me. The discussion later on page 38 is all very well, but I don't see it clarifies this passage.

@Joshs

Sec 11 Our words’ connection to the world (p. 35-39)

Quoting Ludwig V

The sentence itself can do the work of the shadow, and so no shadow is needed. We can explain what the sentence means, perhaps, by an ostensive definition. That’s how words and things can be connected.

Nice work; my thoughts are along the same lines. He is showing us examples** of how we can correct the connection of word and world, as you say, by ostensive definition, or, alternatively, by explanation, demonstration, being an example, by force, etc., but words and the world don’t (usually) need to be (re-)connected because, by default, they just are connected (as you say, “no shadow is needed”). “…the interpolation of a shadow between the sentence and “reality” loses all point” (p.37) [my quote marks]. In the PI he will talk of this as there being no space “to get between pain and its expression”. (#245)

Philosophy imagines we make that connection every time (say, to “our understanding”). But there are events (in time, place) where “language” and the world actually do have a disconnect (along our criteria for judgment), but philosophy interprets the sheer possibility of disconnection, and the difficulty of reconnecting, as if the “problem” is in the activity of (always) connecting which is then just a puzzle to “know”, like a “a queer mechanism” (cue some neuroscience).

But in practice we fall back on the many separate ways we have for straightening things out. Philosophy needs to be shown any of these examples of means of reconnection—shown that language and the world “can be” reconnected—to realize the exception means that the word and world are not always mitigated by some object like “perception” or data, or other “shadow” But it then also follows that there is no “object” for there to be a “fact” of it to communicate. There are not certain, fixed, ever-present objects, as if part of “me”, like, “my understanding”, that I simply put into words.

The best juxtaposition is the difference between “…a thing I am thinking about, not 'that [thing] which I am thinking'.” (P.38) In the first, we are perhaps in a discussion (with ourselves even) considering, remarking on, analyzing, etc. a thing/object. Thinking in the second case is just the description of a thing/object which I have, “my thought”, which I take as a fact (as complete and without any need for context). But, like with the Napoleon example, there is no singular fact that is a certain, unique criteria (there, for identification).

Most importantly, understanding is not “present” during communication. Understanding happens after expression, in coming back to it, e.g., when you have demonstrated that you haven’t understood how to do something, or how to continue a series as expected, or that your expression makes it clear that you do not understand what I was trying to say (apart from disagreeing, etc.). We mostly say things that have already been said in situations similar enough to ours that it doesn’t need more elaboration (mostly). This public nature of language is because it is a record of our history, that “The connection between these words and [the world] was, perhaps, made at another time.” (P. 39)


**Sometimes I feel like his examples here are just terrible. I mean is it just me or waaaaay too unnecessarily esoteric for the point he is trying to make, except that he seems to feel he needs to chase the rabbit all the way down the hole to cover as many senses/analogies in which philosophy might frame our thinking as objects, etc.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Sometimes I feel like his examples here are just terrible. I mean is it just me or waaaaay too unnecessarily esoteric for the point he is trying to make, except that he seems to feel he needs to chase the rabbit all the way down the hole to cover as many senses/analogies in which philosophy might frame our thinking as objects, etc.

I'm glad you mention that. I agree with you, and there should not be a problem about recognizing that Homer sometimes nods. I still have no way of shifting my feeling that something has gone wrong in the discussion of imagination and the question whether we can imagine the abolition of redness.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Most importantly, understanding is not “present” during communication. Understanding happens after expression, in coming back to it, ....

Yes. I think that W is right to point to the importance of explanations after the event. But it seems odd to say that understanding is not "present" during communication. Surely understanding is expressed in communication and in even in non-communicative action. In any normal action, there is a huge amount of complexity and we may be unable to resolve various ambiguities simply of the basis of a single action. Then we need to clarify after the event. But a great deal of that complexity can be expressed in the processes of planning and preparation, before the action.

Quoting Antony Nickles

philosophy interprets the sheer possibility of disconnection, and the difficulty of reconnecting, as if the “problem” is in the activity of (always) connecting which is then just a puzzle to “know”, like a “a queer mechanism” (cue some neuroscience).

Philosophy wants to construct a logical structure of the action and then turn it into an actual structure "in the mind". It's like insisting that all arguments be expressed in formal logical format, even when we actually utter a short version, trading on shared assumptions and attitudes.

Reply to Ludwig V

Quoting Ludwig V

. I think that W is right to point to the importance of explanations after the event. But it seems odd to say that understanding is not "present" during communication. Surely understanding is expressed in communication and in even in non-communicative action. In any normal action, there is a huge amount of complexity and we may be unable to resolve various ambiguities simply of the basis of a single action. Then we need to clarify after the event. But a great deal of that complexity can be expressed in the processes of planning and preparation, before the action.

I read W as making a distinction between what phenomenologists call the mode of givenness of an object and the object taken in a theoretical sense. It’s not that a mode of givenness doesn’t give us to understand a thing, but that what we are given to understand is a contextual sense of an object that cannot be swallowed up within a more general categorical definition on it. The particular givenness doesn’t imply the more general concept. On the contrary, the general meaning is secondary to and derivative of the particular sense.

Quoting Ludwig V

But it seems odd to say that understanding is not "present" during communication.

I believe he would say that understanding is not a quality or thing—that is present or not; it is that picture/analogy which leads to the feeling of oddness. I think understanding is more appropriately thought of as a process (not a mental mechanism, but: clarification, explication, distinction, etc.) I only mentioned the “after” version, but of course there is the “before” process as well; e.g., “Tell me your understanding?” or: trying to understand.

Yes, there can be a multiplicity of meaning and complexity “in” communication (the wording here is also misleading), but we are only aware of the need to explain or clarify before or after the expression. Sometimes there is no “understanding”; we don’t speak of it when I ask you to pass the salt, as you say, “trading on shared assumptions and attitudes.”

Quoting Joshs

what we are given to understand is a contextual sense of an object that cannot be swallowed up within a more general categorical definition on it.

Broadly, that's ok with me.
Quoting Joshs

The particular givenness doesn’t imply the more general concept. On the contrary, the general meaning is secondary to and derivative of the particular sense.

I'm a bit puzzled about what "swallowed up" means here. We only ever encounter particular houses and particular people. Even though they are particular, they can be described in terms of generalities.

Quoting Antony Nickles

we are only aware of the need to explain or clarify before or after the expression. Sometimes there is no “understanding”; we don’t speak of it when I ask you to pass the salt, as you say, “trading on shared assumptions and attitudes.”

Yes. There's an interplay between what we are aware of, what W calls a mechanism of the mind - I think of it as the unconscious. Understanding seems to occur in both ways. But perhaps we need a third category - our ability to explain ourselves, to answer questions. A disposition is odd. It manifests in certain circumstances and not in others. In between manifestations, there's nothing - except counter-factuals about what I would do or what might manifest itself in a different context.

Quoting Ludwig V

There's an interplay between what we are aware of, what W calls a mechanism of the mind - I think of it as the unconscious.

I take his point to be that we create the idea of a mechanism. We try to internalize the processes of thinking, understanding, and meaning to imagine we control what the words that we say do (or do not) mean, as if we could avoid the responsibility to make ourselves understood, or not have to answer for what we say.

And the “unconscious” aspect of meaning I would offer is that words have a history and are subject to circumstances, which are either so pedestrian that they operate without our doing (being conscious of) anything, or that at times their possibilities of meaning outstrip our ability to encompass and/or control (be conscious of) how they will come off in a particular (even novel) context.

@Joshs @Ludwig V

Sec. 12 Expression and its accompaniments—memory, judgment, thinking (p. 40-43)

After “Let us sum up”, p. 43:the experience of thinking may just be the experience of saying, or may consist of this experience plus others which accompany it.

And so we are adding layers back in, and I think we’re left to contemplate rather than being told, what “others”? Obviously we do many things along with saying things (Austin would even say “in” saying them), and it is just a matter of not getting caught in the old traps while looking into them.

At p. 40 I take him to be differentiating my “expression”, in the sense of “by me”, from me describing a mental object that I have. The analogous “tune”, which he divorces from the mechanism of the phonograph, is from the world (before us) and is not “kept, stored, before we express it”. We perform the tune, as we go. Now beforehand, or when that retelling is interrupted, we may search our memory, but not necessarily, as we may just start off (or continue).

We might exhibit pain or describe a vision because these are actual—though not necessarily unique—physical states. But I would venture that expecting is just the label for a judgment we make from the evidence of our response to anticipation (fear of the past, in the case of a gunshot). The answer to: “Why are you tense, steadying yourself, holding your breath?” is not: “I have an expectation.”

As well, I see “groping for a word” not as putting a word to something “already expressed” internally (p. 41), but as an activity (though perhaps just passive waiting). In this sense, the expression is only in having found the word, in the saying of it (to you or myself).

I see his use of “expression” as meant to capture the event of that initial introduction of a thought, hope, or wish to the world, to, as he says, “existence” (p. 40), without the need for any “independent” process or thing in a “peculiar medium” (p. 43). The “sentence” is “reality”. (p. 37, 41)

p. 42:This, of course, doesn't mean that we have shown that peculiar acts of consciousness do not accompany the expressions of our thoughts! Only we no longer say that they must accompany them.

(The power of this “must” I take as very important to why all the forced analogies and “fixed standards” (p.43), but so far he only goes so far as to blame our forms of speech—not yet seeing the need driving it).

I think it is worth noting that he wants to add back in a sense of “private” thinking and experiences, as I take all this here (and in the PI) to be for much more than just a conclusion about “private language”. Here he acknowledges certain senses of privacy, such as being hidden from others, like a secret we tell to ourselves in an aside; as we could reveal (and thus hide) the “muscular, visual, tactile sensations” of my body, in the sense of bringing attention to (like admitting) the fact that I have them.

His method allows us perspective on thinking as the assumption that we just speak our “thoughts” (not in the sense of voicing our inner dialogue), by asking “what do we say if we have no thought?” and then pointing out the sense of speaking thoughtlessly as simply not considering beforehand the consequences of saying something in a particular context.

Next, personal experiences, I think.

Reply to Ludwig V

Quoting Ludwig V

The particular givenness doesn’t imply the more general concept. On the contrary, the general meaning is secondary to and derivative of the particular sense.
— Joshs
I'm a bit puzzled about what "swallowed up" means here. We only ever encounter particular houses and particular people. Even though they are particular, they can be described in terms of generalities

Yes, but each time we invoke the same generality we mean a particular sense that wasn’t already present in the generality. So it’s never the ‘same’ generality being used each time.

Quoting Antony Nickles

The answer to: “Why are you tense, steadying yourself, holding your breath?” is not: “I have an expectation.”

The answer to idealism, in a nutshell.

Quoting Antony Nickles

As well, I see “groping for a word” not as putting a word to something “already expressed” internally (p. 41), but as an activity (though perhaps just passive waiting). In this sense, the expression is only in having found the word, in the saying of it (to you or myself).

I think of it, not as a repetition of something stored, but as a recreation, in which each element is added because it "fits" with the previous one. Or, the metaphor of the pearls being drawn out of a box, but are not stored in the box, but (re-)created at the moment that it is needed.

Quoting Antony Nickles

(The power of this “must” I take as very important to why all the forced analogies and “fixed standards” (p.43), but so far he only goes so far as to blame our forms of speech—not yet seeing the need driving it).

That's a nice example of how a new position can generate the next question.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I think it is worth noting that he wants to add back in a sense of “private” thinking and experiences,

Perhaps this passage should be quoted more often in debates about the PLA.

p. 41:I have been trying in all this to remove the temptation to think that there 'must be' what is called a mental process of thinking, hoping, wishing, believing, etc., independent of the process of expressing a thought, a hope, a wish, etc.

It is striking, at least to me, that what he means by a mental process is a conscious process, which we can become aware of if we pay attention what we are conscious of from moment to moment. It's an effective tactic, even if it smacks more of phenomenology than logic. But I am puzzled about the mental processes posited by congitive science. I have the impression that these writing do not pay attention to the difference between conscious and unconscious processes. That allows the argument that the must be certain processes going on that we are not aware of - i.e. unconscious processes. (No doubt this is not intended in a dualistic sense, but is based on the assumption that a physical substrate will be identified in due course.

Quoting Joshs

Yes, but each time we invoke the same generality we mean a particular sense that wasn’t already present in the generality. So it’s never the ‘same’ generality being used each time.

Yes, you get that result if you think of same in the light of the logical axiom that A=A is the paradigm of sameness. Actually, for me, it is the limiting case of sameness and is the point at which it is deprived of all real meaniing. Obviously, any generalization must be applicable to a range of particular cases, which may will likely not be identical in all respects, as required by our paradigm. But the concept of a paradigm allows for differences. In short, your argument suggests that generality is, strictly speaking, impossible. That may not be a reductio ad absurdum but it is certainly a reduction to pointlessness.

Reply to Ludwig V

Quoting Ludwig V

Yes, but each time we invoke the same generality we mean a particular sense that wasn’t already present in the generality. So it’s never the ‘same’ generality being used each time.
— Joshs
Yes, you get that result if you think of same in the light of the logical axiom that A=A is the paradigm of sameness. Actually, for me, it is the limiting case of sameness and is the point at which it is deprived of all real meaniing. Obviously, any generalization must be applicable to a range of particular cases, which may will likely not be identical in all respects, as required by our paradigm. But the concept of a paradigm allows for differences. In short, your argument suggests that generality is, strictly speaking, impossible. That may not be a reductio ad absurdum but it is certainly a reduction to pointlessness

Generality is possible whenever we use that word. But what is the difference in what we are doing when we think the endless possibilities of grammatical use of a word like paradigm, general or game, and the uses of a word like particular? Is Wittgenstein invoking a theory of generality (“the concept of a paradigm allows for differences”), or would he eschew the search for the essence of generality and instead look at the various ways we use words like “same,” “general,” and “particular”? Would you agree that if there is no essence of meaning of any word , then there is no essence of meaning of ‘particular’, and likewise no essence of meaning of ‘general’, paradigm, game, category, etc?

Quoting Joshs

Would you agree that if there is no essence of meaning of any word , then there is no essence of meaning of ‘particular’, and likewise no essence of meaning of ‘general’, paradigm, game, category, etc?

Yes. But you seem to me to be laying down an essence of "same" and using that as a rule which outlaws the ways in which we actually use "general" and "generality".

Reply to Ludwig V

Quoting Ludwig V

Yes. But you seem to me to be laying down an essence of "same" and using that as a rule which outlaws the ways in which we actually use "general" and "generality".

Do you mean that I am using “same” as a rule which outlaws beforehand certain ways among others that we may use general and generality, or that general and generality are exclusively associated with specific ways of use (“the” ways we actually use them, versus a potential infinity of possible uses)?

What I was trying to do was not outlaw any particular use of “same” , but to point to a use of same which relies on the consultation of a picture. If we say that two photos of an object depict the same object, or we stare repeatedly at an object and report that our perception continues to be of the same object, should we say that the sense of ‘object’ here is unique to the specific context and instant of use, or that what we mean by object here is something (i.e. general category) whose sense transcends the instant and context of its use? If the latter, then it would seem to tie ‘same’ to the consultation of a categorical picture.

Quoting Ludwig V

I have the impression that these writing do not pay attention to the difference between conscious and unconscious processes. That allows the argument that there must be certain processes going on that we are not aware of - i.e. unconscious processes.

I don’t take this work as an argument for a conclusion, such as that there are no processes of the brain of which we are not conscious. He implicitly acknowledges (p.6) that our brain is, of course, unconsciously doing all the things it does do (remembering, focusing, deciding, using language) while we are thinking or understanding. But I take him to be examining thinking, understanding, and meaning because these are examples that are just not independent mental mechanisms of the brain (but activities we work through; judgments we come to). The point of drawing out how they work is not to prove that (or prove that there are no unconscious brain processes), but to learn why we nevertheless want to force that framework on them, why we want to require the issue be a problem.

Similarly, his consideration of the possibility of a private language in the PI is superficially taken as just an argument against it (that the point, elsewhere, is that there are simply no “beetles” in us). As here, I take that section as an investigation of why we would want a private language (and that he finds reasons).

@Joshs@Ludwig V

Sec. 13 Personal experience and skepticism (p. 45-48]

At a certain point in the next section (“It seems to us… p. 47 ), he lands on the question of whether it is possible for a machine to think, and he submits that it is “not really that we don’t yet know”, because the question is mistakenly framed from our desire for personal experience to be “the very basis of all that we say with any sense about [being a human]” (p. 48). He also says we are “tempted to say that these personal experiences are the material of which reality consists.” (p. 45)

Of course Descartes will want to rely on our certainty in ourselves to justify the world, but, with Wittgenstein’s ordering, we seem to put ourselves first, perhaps out of self-preservation; that if anything needs to be certain, it’s “me”, even as a product of our doubt about others. “There is a temptation for me to say that only my own experience is real: ‘I know that I see, hear, feel pains, etc., but not that anyone else does. I can't know this, because I am I and they are they.’” (p. 46)

Ironically, our confidence in our personal experience leaves us without a shared world, only “a lot of separate personal experiences of different individuals”, which gives us a sense of “general uncertainty” (radical skepticism), and a belief that we need a “firm hold”, e.g., “How could I even have come by the idea of another's experience if there is no possibility of any evidence for it?” (My emphasis) I take this desire for “reliability, and solidity” to be the motivation for a (certain) solution to this “problem”, analogous to an object or biological mechanism.

If we are right to say we have been looking for a why to our forcing the analogy of objects, this seems to be the start of an answer.

Quoting Joshs

Do you mean that I am using “same” as a rule which outlaws beforehand certain ways among others that we may use general and generality,

That is what I was suggesting.

Quoting Joshs

or that general and generality are exclusively associated with specific ways of use (“the” ways we actually use them, versus a potential infinity of possible uses)?

Not quite that. It would be incautious of me to deny the possibiity of non-standard uses of "general" and "generality". All I was saying was the standard logical definition of "same" (A=A) makes standard uses of "general" and "generality" pointless or reduces standard uses to sloppy versions of the strict or pure use that logicians prefer. For me, it is A=A that is non-standard - not wrong, exactly, but a limiting case.

Quoting Joshs

What I was trying to do was not outlaw any particular use of “same” , but to point to a use of same which relies on the consultation of a picture.

That is very helpful.

Quoting Joshs

If we say that two photos of an object depict the same object, or we stare repeatedly at an object and report that our perception continues to be of the same object, should we say that the sense of ‘object’ here is unique to the specific context and instant of use, or that what we mean by object here is something (i.e. general category) whose sense transcends the instant and context of its use? If the latter, then it would seem to tie ‘same’ to the consultation of a categorical picture.

Two pictures of my car - one in London and one in Edinburgh, say - are two pictures of the same object. Clearly that object transcends the instant and context of each picture - in some sense of "transcend". (Actually, the idea of an object that exists only at an instant or in a specific context is - let's say - a bit odd, or perhaps specialized. I mean that part of the point of the concept of an object is that it persists through a variety of contexts.)

Quoting Joshs

If the latter, (sc. "what we mean by object here is something (i.e. general category) whose sense transcends the instant and context of its use?") then it would seem to tie ‘same’ to the consultation of a categorical picture.

I'm not sure whether you are talking about the picture as a shadow-object (the illusion that W is trying to show is superfluous), or about the relevant sentence (which he compares to a picture). I think that, in your example of the two photographs, the photographs are doing the job of the sentence, and that this is consonant with what he is trying to say.

Quoting Ludwig V

I mean that part of the point of the concept of an object is that it persists through a variety of contexts.

If that's right, then, what is happening with the two photographs is a question of how we interpret the photographs, rather than of the photographs themselves.
A side-note - a important curiosity here is that some differences between the two images may be crucial in our deciding that it is the same car in both pictures. The car will have aged and maybe undergone events that leave traces in the photographs - a dent, a patch of rust, a sticker. When we say it is the same car, we take that in to account and actually rely on those changes as evidence that it is the same car.

Reply to Antony Nickles
I haven't much to say about these pages. They are splendid examples of his method and I think they are very clear and work well. Hi remarks about method are also very helpful. But I do have some comments.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Ironically, our confidence in our personal experience leaves us without a shared world, only “a lot of separate personal experiences of different individuals”,

It is ironic that the search for certainty ends up by removing, or making problematic, so much of what we want to be certain of. The supreme irony here is that W's account of "I have a pain" as an "expression" as opposed to a description, trades on the absolute certainty of our experiences, but turns it into a problem, rather than a secure foundation. The price of certainty is the inability to say anything.
(There's a similarity here with the parallel issue about analytic statements, which cannot tell us anything just because they are so "secure")

p.43:Our investigation tried to remove this bias, which forces us to think that the facts must conform to certain pictures embedded in our language.

This expresses an ambivalence about our (ordinary) language which is perhaps rather glossed over, not only in some of W's own remarks, but also in "ordinary language philosophy. Ordinary language is sometimes "all right as it is", but sometimes it is not. The trick is to tell the difference.

p.48:But the trouble with the realist is always that he does not solve but skip the difficulties which his adversaries see, though they too don't succeed in solving them.

It is very hard to persuade people to accept W's stance, for example, that neither realism not ant-realism are correct or incorrect and that what is necessary is to understand both in order, one might say, to transcend them.

I added this example as an after-though:-

p. 42:the expression of belief, thought, etc., is just a sentence;--and the sentence has sense only as a member of a system of language; as one expression within a calculus. Now we are tempted to imagine this calculus, as it were, as a permanent background to every sentence which we say, and to think that, although the sentence as written on a piece of paper or spoken stands isolated, in the mental act of thinking the calculus is there--all in a lump. The mental act seems to perform in a miraculous way what could not be performed by any act of manipulating symbols. Now when the temptation to think that in some sense the whole calculus must be present at the same time vanishes, there is no more point in postulating the existence of a peculiar kind of mental act alongside of our expression.

W makes clear, admittedly without saying so, that, in a sense, the calculus is present whenever we speak or write. But in a lump, and not in the sense required by the idea of a mental act of thinking - not that that idea could contain the whole of language "in a lump" without magical properties.

Quoting Antony Nickles

His method allows us perspective on thinking as the assumption that we just speak our “thoughts” (not in the sense of voicing our inner dialogue), by asking “what do we say if we have no thought?” and then pointing out the sense of speaking thoughtlessly as simply not considering beforehand the consequences of saying something in a particular context.

Now here's a difficulty. The trick here is to juxtapose a sense in which one can speak thoughtlessly with the philosophical doctrine, in such a way that the emptiness of the doctrine stands out. But much depends here on the reaction of the audience, who, I find, are a bit liable to object that they did not mean that, so that the two sides are speaking past each other.

@Joshs

Quoting Ludwig V

W's account of "I have a pain" as an "expression" as opposed to a description

This is the most-succinct, elucidating summary I’ve come across (of course needing to know what he is getting at with “expression”, and what the description would be presumed to be of, but still, well put).

Quoting Ludwig V

Ordinary language is sometimes "all right as it is", but sometimes it is not. The trick is to tell the difference.

I would offer that the method of “Ordinary Language Philosophy” does not give privilege to our common sayings, nor is the point that they are true (“common sense”). What we say in a situation is merely evidence of the criteria for a particular practice (our interests in it) to compare to the imposed, generalized, metaphysical criteria of objectivity, certainty, universality, completeness, etc. “Ordinary” criteria allow us to see the workings of a practice. That method of insight also allows us to create “imagined” cases (and simplified ones), and to clarify a common phrase in showing its sense/usage despite its not being worded well, forcing analogies, etc. Conversely, Cavell will work very hard creating fantastical scenarios (as Witt does with beetles and private language) to give as much sense to the skeptic’s words in order to understand what they want them to do.

Quoting Ludwig V

The trick here is to juxtapose a sense in which one can speak thoughtlessly with the philosophical doctrine, in such a way that the emptiness of the doctrine stands out. But much depends here on the reaction of the audience, who, I find, are a bit liable to object that they did not mean that, so that the two sides are speaking past each other.

Well you’ve hit the nail on the head again. The initial relevance of bringing up examples seems to just be to point out how our practices (feelings, etc.) work differently than in a metaphysical framework. But the examples of our ordinary criteria also show us that philosophy’s imposed criteria are not required, “that it is not necessary”(p.12). But not “not necessary in order to still have certainty” like philosophy wanted (which is a classic misunderstanding of his project), but just not needed to have an option to proceed at all, which is what skepticism seems to take away (in not getting the justification it requires).

He is showing what is important, even essential, to our practices, without resorting to certainty. “When I say: ‘we can only conjecture the cause but we know the motive’ this statement will be seen later on to be a grammatical one. The "can" refers to a logical possibility.” (P.15) The “logic”, however, is unfortunately not undeniable; if one does not see the distinction for oneself (the “cannot” of knowing causes), there is no force to it. Even worse, it does not satisfy philosophy’s desire for power from truth, but unravels it (here, the picture of causality).

But the goal is not to prove the skeptic wrong (to be right about the grammar of a practice), but to find out why we wanted to impose the criteria for certainty, universality, etc. in the first place. He calls it a “temptation” (p. 1). Thus we constantly remain able to supplant our ordinary criteria, tempted only to see the world the way we want, to try to make it answer to our desires. I agree that part of what needs answering is the question of how and why to fight against this temptation.

I would say that, so far, I don’t see it as an argument meant to convince us of a conclusion (say, sense data don’t exist, or, there is no such thing as a private language), but as ethical suggestions of methods to combat the desire to impose ourselves on the world, in order to discover our “real need” (PI #108). Thus the abundance of his examples is to see how we are “interested in a phenomenon in a variety of ways” id.

Quoting Antony Nickles

This is the most-succinct, elucidating summary I’ve come across (of course needing to know what he is getting at with “expression”, and what the description would be presumed to be of, but still, well put).

I'm glad you think so. I'm acutely aware that further explanation is needed. One issue is to sort out the difference between his use of "expression" in the context of propositions and sentences to mean something like a way of putting something or articulating something. (There might be a translation issue there.) The other is to say a little more about the relationship between "Ouch" and "I am in pain". I feel that Wittgenstein stops short at saying that "I am in pain" replaces "Ouch" and does not describe it, or the cause of it. However, "I am in pain" is actually part of language and one needs to see how "I am in pain" relates to "S/he is in pain", given that the latter follows from the former.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I would offer that the method of “Ordinary Language Philosophy” does not give privilege to our common sayings, nor is the point that they are true (“common sense”).

Well, it shouldn't, but is often discussed as if that is the idea. Wittgenstein doesn't involve himself in those issues, but seems rather to just take ordinary language for granted; I'm not at all sure what he would have said about the Oxford School. Ryle has a good account of this in "Dilemmas", in which he maintains that the importance of our untechnical discourse is that it is where important concepts that underpin all technical discourses are found. I think his argument with conventional philosophy would be that those theories distort and bowdlerize them, depriving them of the proper sense. But he (and Austin) do rather give the impression of thinking they can be some sort of conceptual police.

Quoting Antony Nickles

The initial relevance of bringing up examples seems to just be to point out how our practices (feelings, etc.) work differently than in a metaphysical framework.

Yes. I often feel that his primary concern is to open our eyes to differences, and this does make his writing very different from many other philosophers, who seem primarily concerned to sweep differences away, or at least under the carpet. He seems quite happy to make his points and leave us to draw our own conclusions. One thinks of that remark in his preface that he would not like his work to save others the trouble of thinking for themselves. But it does make him rather more elusive that most commentators seem able to cope with. Everything gets formulated into arguments and conclusions. But without that, perhaps we feel we can't "find our way about", as he puts it.

Quoting Ludwig V

Wittgenstein stops short at saying that "I am in pain" replaces "Ouch" and does not describe it

They are the same, as my expressions, and of me. This is partly that it sets me apart, as the individual that is doing it, who is thus responsible for it, and to it. And that it reveals me—is telling about me—that I am a person in pain. If I call you a liar, I am putting myself out there as judge. In parallel, when I say “I am in pain”, I am making a claim on your compassion in the sense it is (in its usage of) expressing my need to you. “They are in pain” is either: just an observation, or me acknowledging them, as a person who is in pain, who may need help. This is one place where he and Austin almost touch, in that such a statement does something, even more than being a proposition (to be true or not), or a description (to be understood or measured), or just the way (as if style) something is said.

Quoting Ludwig V

he (and Austin) do rather give the impression of thinking they can be some sort of conceptual police.

Part of that I think comes from the feeling of arrogance; that his insights from what we say and do in a situation must be correct. But it is both less and more. The common misconception is that we are just talking about what we say, or the way we say something, which is not only missing their use as evidence, but also imagines that what we say and the world are not connected. They are made as provisional claims to “trouble” us to think through and approve for ourselves; and also presumed to be so obvious no one would disagree. But they are not about being right. They are drawn from examples to bring to awareness something we had not considered. If we don’t agree, it would not be important that he is wrong, but that his description does not capture a distinction, or have the importance he claims, or some other rational difference which may be accounted for. They are not meaningful in themselves, but for their contrast to something, or as evidence for a further claim. So finding our way is always beyond his investigating examples, building to an as yet unrecognized insight that is left to us, for us to see.

@Joshs @Ludwig V

Section 14 - Variety of criteria and the place of pain (p. 49-52)

The problem of (knowing) someone else’s “mind” is an age-old issue in philosophy. Here he diagnoses it as a “grammatical difficulty” (p.49, after p.48, “Now the answer…”) because we take a picture, like not seeing something because it is hidden (in another’s mouth), as the framework by analogy for understanding another person (the pain in their tooth). So we have to look past thinking of the other as hidden and “get familiar with the idea” of pain to answer “What does it mean to know that the pains are there?” (p.50)

This takes us back to p.1, where the method to know what length is, comes from asking how to measure length. Pun aside, what he is looking for is what counts in judging length. In this case, “one must examine what sort of facts we call criteria for a pain being in a certain place.” (p.49) In other words, what kind of facts do we take into consideration as relevant in making a judgment about where pain is. In the case of an object, the factual criteria would be that I see it (it is not hidden). If it were a place, it would be necessary for me to be familiar with the ways around. He decides that these are cases where we must be aware of something before we could judge what is the case, as in needing to understand an order before being able to obey it.

A peripheral case that does not appear to fit the above “beforehand” necessity is “I must know where a thing is before I can see it” (p.50) perhaps because I would be told what it is, not where, and then I would search for it and know where it is in the seeing of it. After seeing how these cases work completely differently, he makes the leap to postulating that “What I wish to say is that the act of pointing determines a place of pain.”

In the pages after this he wants us to realize that our easiest or most sure evidence, i.e., means of judgment (in this case, touch, movement, etc.), may not be the only evidence in play (here, also sight). “what we regard as evidence for this latter proposition is, as we all know, by no means only tactile and kinesthetic.” (P.51) The type of evidence is contingent on the criteria that need to be met, with the point being that we are only imagining that the criteria for pain (for, say, location) has the same structure as those for physical objects. He says our language obscures the variety of evidence. We also may be confused about the world because criteria have been overlooked; or evidence is wrongly gathered or attributed just because they meet criteria we want/have imposed (like an “object”; empirical, certain).

And so to say “pointing determines the place of pain”, makes me think of two things. It is my pain, to hide or reveal; and, what also matters about pain is bringing your attention to it (the fact of my desire for attention), so that you respond to it (or not). So the exact, empirical location is not important in the case of pain (until it is). As with knowing where something is only in recognizing it while looking, where our pain is, is secondary to the act of pointing it out, to you.

p. 48/49:Now the answer of the common-sense philosopher--and that, n.b., is not the commonsense man, who is as far from realism as from idealism--the answer of the common-sense philosopher is that surely there is no difficulty in the idea of supposing, thinking, imagining that someone else has what I have. But the trouble with the realist is always that he does not solve but skip the difficulties which his adversaries see, though they too don't succeed in solving them. The realist answer, for us, just brings out the difficulty; for who argues like this overlooks the difference between different usages of the words "to have", "to imagine". "A has a gold tooth" means that the tooth is in A's mouth.

It's fascinating to see how W moves from distinguishing between the "common-sense philosopher" and the "common-sense man" to discussing the argument between realism and idealism and back again. There's a web of distinctions and differences here which is extremely difficult for philosophy or philosophers to negotiate. But getting caught up in it seems completely pointless. The last sentence is what's important.
I'm wondering, though, whether there is a reference here to the Oxford philosophy.

p. 50:Suppose I feel a pain which on the evidence of the pain alone, e.g., with closed eyes, I should call a pain in my left hand. Someone asks me to touch the painful spot with my right hand. I do so and looking round perceive that I am touching my neighbour's hand (meaning the hand connected to my neighbour's torso).

I had a lot of difficulty about this. Perhaps it's an example of what you talked about earlier - Wittgenstein considers some very extreme examples, because he wants to give his opponent all possible rope - explore the remotest possibilities.
So he concludes with:-
[quotep.53]I said that the man who contended that it was impossible to feel the other person's pain did not thereby wish to deny that one person could feel pain in another person's body. In fact, he would have said: "I may have toothache in another man's tooth, but not his toothache".[/quote]
This was very helpful. But, for me, there is a connection between where I feel the pain (what I point to as the location of the pain) and it being my pain. The difference between my pain and his pain is a difference in my pointing when I point to the seat of the pain. Very roughly, if it is not based on criteria, it is my pain. If there are criteria (reasons, justifications) in play, it is not my pain. Then there are exceptional cases - psychosomatic pain, referred pain, phantom pains. Then we also need to take note of the differences between the various senses.

Quoting Antony Nickles

He decides that these are cases where we must be aware of something before we could judge what is the case, as in needing to understand an order before being able to obey it.
A peripheral case that does not appear to fit the above “beforehand” necessity is “I must know where a thing is before I can see it” (p.50) perhaps because I would be told what it is, not where, and then I would search for it and know where it is in the seeing of it. After seeing how these cases work completely differently, he makes the leap to postulating that “What I wish to say is that the act of pointing determines a place of pain.”

His conclusion is all right. But I'm not at all sure that the path to it is secure. It is all very well to say that one needs to understand an order before being able to obey it, but "before" here is not a temporal "before". (You are quite right to put "beforehand" in scare quotes.) The understanding and the ability to obey are one and the same thing - inseparable. Obeying the order correctly is one of the criteria for understanding it.

@Joshs

Quoting Ludwig V

if it is not based on criteria, it is my pain. If there are criteria (reasons, justifications) in play, it is not my pain.

I agree there is an important difference that my pain is in my body, as in: not your body, but also that it is “mine”. I do think that the importance that pain has, for us as a society, gathers certain kinds or types of facts to it (pain works in certain ways).

“…one person could feel pain in another person's body.” (P.53)

Initially I thought this was like empathetically feeling another’s pain. Eventually I gave up trying to exactly sort it out because I think the point is there are different types of criteria to, and for, say, for example, “pointing out” something (and so, different senses, or usages of it), because there are different reasons for (interests in) doing so. Plus, he seems to believe that it is true (we could), only to better understand what the skeptic wants to deny.

(p.53):I said that the man who contended that it was impossible to feel the other person's pain did not thereby wish to deny that one person could feel pain in another person's body. In fact, he would have said: "I may have toothache in another man's tooth, but not his toothache".

But to say “I know your pain” is not to try to equate ours, but to identify with you; to say “I feel your pain” is to console you. So then the context of saying it is “impossible” might be in the sense of giving them the space to be alone in their pain, to have their dignity to be pained (as if going through it for the first time, even as if, ever in human history), say, rather than saying [ I know what that pain is, and ] “You’re over exaggerating” or that they desire to be unknowable to pity themselves (to make their pain so unique and important as to be above anything else).

But perhaps this does not “fulfill” what he wants, which is to “try to find the form of expression which fulfills a certain craving of the metaphysician which our ordinary language does not fulfill and which, as long as it isn't fulfilled, produces the metaphysical puzzlement.” (p.55) He has discussed previously the way we create a “problem” of knowing the other, and some reasons for why (false analogy as an object), but there remains the “certain craving” to fully flush out.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I agree there is an important difference that my pain is in my body, as in: not your body, but also that it is “mine”.

Yes, we are agreed about that. But now, what is my body, and what yours? How do we tell the difference> I think that it is implicit in what W says that my body is what I feel pain in and your body is what you feel pain in. Where I feel pain becomes a criterion for distinguishing my body from the rest of the world. (Not the only criterion - there's the possibility of a criterion along the lines of my body being what I am in control of, or what I directly control. But it is more complicated that the pain criterion.)

Quoting Antony Nickles

Plus, he seems to believe that it is true (we could), only to better understand what the skeptic wants to deny.

I think that's exactly right.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But to say “I know your pain” is not to try to equate ours, but to identify with you; to say “I feel your pain” is to console you. So then the context of saying it is “impossible” might be in the sense of giving them the space to be alone in their pain,

Yes. It gets confusing, doesn't it? At one moment we are saying "I know your pain" because we've had an injury like that. The next we are saying "You can't know my pain" because you can't feel it. It may be that there is no truth of the matter, that the illocutionary force attached to each is the real point.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But perhaps this does not “fulfill” what he wants, which is to “try to find the form of expression which fulfills a certain craving of the metaphysician which our ordinary language does not fulfill and which, as long as it isn't fulfilled, produces the metaphysical puzzlement.”

This is the puzzle he leaves us with. I wish I could work out what a philosophical, as opposed to a psychological, approach to it might be.

@Joshs

Section 15 - Why couldn’t I know your pain? (p. 53-55)

Quoting Ludwig V

At one moment we are saying "I know your pain" because we've had an injury like that. The next we are saying "You can't know my pain" because you can't feel it. It may be that there is no truth of the matter, that the illocutionary force attached to each is the real point.

Well my understanding is that an illocutionary act is a very specific thing, but it is used by Austin as an example (to show there is validity other than just true or false, and not in some gray area). I take the example of pain here as used in the same vein, but to show there is a practice not framed as an object of knowledge, like a black eye, which is compared to its original object for “correctness” (p.53).

My reading is that the point of the example of the conjoined people is to get to a situation where the skeptic would actually accept that their “pain is exactly like mine” (p.54)—where they would grant that there is nothing different in the feeling or anything else about our pains—which then paves the way to see a different reason why anyone would still say “My pain is my pain and his pain is his pain”, and thus come to a “truth” that still exists when the “experiential” (call it scientifically-proveable) truth is granted. The conclusion I would think is they are different, not because each of ours are unique, but that: when I am in pain, it is me (my person) that is in pain, like each instance of a color on different objects, even when it is the exact same shade of color. This additional “truth” is another version of how ‘different pain’ works (its practice), another sense (usage), which he is labeling “grammatical”.

And he qualifies any “can’t” [know the other’s pain] as not in the sense that we “could not reach” knowledge and are thus relegated to only assume by analogy or “conjecture” (p.54) (as “belief” is sometimes framed). The point of showing that we are separated by instance and not different in kind (necessarily), I think is that we may** realize the way we relate to someone in pain is different than through knowledge. The grammatical truth (“taught by experience”) is the way pain works, such as: that I do or don’t “suffer when you” feel pain. It is not an object we “have” (p.53) like a gold tooth that is just hidden in us, like “private” (unique) data (p.55) that we could (scientifically) identify, but, I would offer for example, something that I ‘have’ happening to me.

He says our not knowing another’s pain is not an inability, a “human frailty” (p.54); which I take to mean that knowledge is just not the logic of pain: he says, I do not know that I have pain; I just have pain. (p.55) But, interestingly, the practical logic is “hidden” but interpreted as an “insurmountable barrier”. In connection with the concern @Ludwig V and I had of how any of this must (not ‘may’**) convince the skeptic, the question changes from not how it would be persuasive, but why someone would avoid it, skip over it in the first place. Choosing to say “I can’t know your pain” buffers us from suffering your pain, such as above: that it can hurt me to think of you as cold. Another way to think of it might be that, if there was an impossibility (of knowledge), then I would not be responsible for ignoring your pain. I would not have to address you as a suffering human (PI p. 223].

@Joshs @Ludwig V

Section 16 - Physical vs logical impossibility (p. 56-57)

As above, here (with color) we have a situation mistakenly analogized as a physical problem. With pain, it was a barrier (to knowledge) that we imagined, instead of the fact that we are just two separate people, and the (logical) way that works is that any claim of your pain involves me (taking steps towards or away from) recognizing it, for it to be “known”. The “impossibility” (p.56) of your pain was my desire to be outside the bounds of humanity; to see it, as it were: intellectually, apart from accepting you, thus the impact of it (seeing you suffer with a cold (p.54). Alternatively, the logical (grammatical) “cannot” is that I can’t know your pain without accepting it, identifying with you.

We come to this conclusion, as he says, “when we meet the word ‘can’ [or cannot] in a metaphysical proposition… We show that this proposition hides a grammatical rule. That is to say, we destroy the outward similarity between a metaphysical proposition and an experiential one…” (p.55). This seems to say that the grammatical rule is the “experiential one”, taken from human experience, which is hidden because so similar (in phrasing, conceptually) to the metaphysical proposition.

I think it’s necessary to point out that the importance here (to “destroy” the similarity/what hides the grammatical necessity) does not come from the grammatical logic being more “correct” than the metaphysical framework, nor that it satisfies, only differently, the same goal desired by the metaphysical/scientific “answer” or explanation (its “objectivity”). These are examples we all agree to, only described enough to show an alternative possibility (usage) for the “difficulty” (p.48) wanting to be addressed by a metaphysical framework, just without the forced criteria like timelessness, generalizability, etc. Thus the physical “can’t” of knowing pains is not alleviated by the realist saying “Yes, we can!”, but in finding the logical “can’t” of our having separate bodies, but, in doing so (not as an argument for), we also see a different relationship to another’s pain than knowledge.

This brings up the problems of language, in that we can make some sense of words on their own and together out of any context so we can impose a framework on them without getting into particulars, not seeing something more subtlety than an analogous, imposed framework. He says we have to turn our familiar forms of expression “out by force” (p.46), which I take as similar to looking past a snap judgment.

There is also something methodological to his saying that we “can’t apply” a metaphysical picture; like we should bring up certain contexts and show that the picture, created to solve a difficulty, can’t be applied there. And, also, that we would have to stand on our head and create a situation (say, with conjoined twins) to have the picture “apply” (to that situation).

The philosopher has “discontentment” (p.57) with our ordinary criteria (they are not generalizable, object-based, abstract, etc.), and they “rebel against” them, and supposedly would not if they were “aware he is objecting to a convention”. But I’m not sure if pointing out just any alternative criteria would be convincing, nor do I think he means to say the argument would be over if they were aware of the nature of what they were objecting to, as if convention is more justified or powerful or certain, because the trick is to capture the “difficulty” seen by the metaphysician (and philosophy in general), which I take as real and actual and not something he is dismissing.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Alternatively, the logical (grammatical) “cannot” is that I can’t know your pain without accepting it, identifying with you.

The difference between empathy and sympathy comes up here. I've never been very clear about it. "Identifying with you" is a whole language game in it's own right. One might object to the phrase, because in that process, I do not for a moment imagine that I am you. What I imagine is myself in that situation.

Quoting Antony Nickles

but, in doing so (not as an argument for), we also see a different relationship to another’s pain than knowledge.

Yes. Doesn't he say, somewhere in the PI, that we naturally respond to another's pain by trying to relieve it. I'm inclined to say that anyone who doesn't understand that, and why, it is an appropriate response, doesn't understand what pain is.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But I’m not sure if pointing out just any alternative criteria would be convincing, nor do I think he means to say the argument would be over if they were aware of the nature of what they were objecting to, as if convention is more justified or powerful or certain, because the trick is to capture the “difficulty” seen by the metaphysician (and philosophy in general), which I take as real and actual and not something he is dismissing.

I see your point.

p. 57`:He feels tempted, say, to use the name "Devonshire" not for the county with its conventional boundary, but for a region differently bounded. He could express this by saying: "Isn't it absurd to make this a county, to draw the boundaries here?" But what he says is: "The real Devonshire is this". We could answer: "What you want is only a new notation, and by a new notation no facts of geography are changed".

That's all very well. Then I thought of the Ukraine's argument with Russia. It wouldn't fly, for either side. Both sides would object that W has missed the point of the argument - doesn't understand it. It isn't about geography. That's the thing. There's no neutral ground on which one can resolve disagreements.

p. 57`:(It is true, however, that we may be irresistibly attracted or repelled by a notation. We easily forget how much a notation, a form of expression, may mean to us, and that changing it isn't always as easy as it often is in mathematics or in the sciences. A change of clothes or of names may mean very little and it may mean a great deal.)

The fact that he puts this as a qualification, an after-thought, in brackets, tells me that he does think that his geographical point of view is better. But I'm not at all sure that there is any privileged notation that is better or worse than any other from a theoretical point of view.

@Ludwig V

Section 17 - The solipsist’s reality (p.58-61)

(p.60):[ The solipsist ] is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression [ ‘Only I really see, or hear, or feel (real pain)” ]; but we must yet find why he is.

We may not get this “why” yet, but it is not an issue with language—not just notation. The method is to look at/into the “form of expression” to see that it dictates a certain usage, limits the possible “schema” (p.58). He points out the variability of a discussion of ‘what is the usage?’ with his example of the hammer. It is more than just a matter of the situation and the possibilities (the answer to all the questions is ‘yes’), but also what we are interested in (in a particular case—between banjos and string instruments again). The solipsist’s interests force the possibilities and remove the situation, like “the man who… has already decided… and what he said expressed this decision.”

Many take the issue to be just to cure the solipsist, to either solve or untangle the “puzzle”. But it is not a matter of right; we look at the form of expression of the solipsist, in comparison to other usages, and we see our interests in them, in order to get at why the solipsist proposes what they do. We want to understand “the source of his puzzlement”(p.59), in order to “have answered his difficulty” (p.58).

He proposes that one source is “when a notation dissatisfies us”. (p.59) This does seem to just be a superficial issue of words, but, if we take it that our words matter, then what he is saying is that how they matter, and what they matter for, have disappointed us. Another way to say this is that our ordinary criteria about judging a thing have dissatisfied us. We either want other facts, distinctions, perspectives, to matter more, or less, or the judgment to lead to “other associations”. We might want our (culture’s) interest in a thing to loosen, adjust, perhaps respond to general changes in the associated circumstances, perhaps for the recognition of a different “position” (“attitude” he says in the PI).

In any case, it is what interests the solipsist has that are under investigation, and it is through the method of looking at their form of expression that we find them. Witt says they can’t conceive that experiences other than their own are real. Now we know this is misunderstood as a physical impossibility, but Witt also grants that it is not in the sense they lack pity. It is perhaps a logical impossibility given the form of expression, but then what do they want in claiming the only “real” feelings? (As it is “not an opinion”, i.e., something they could be wrong about.) Perhaps their criteria (for “real”) are that their feelings are certain (not possibly manufactured), measurable (not over-exaggerated as someone else could), complete (contained in feeling them; not having to be responded to, as another’s).

He wants to show “the tendency which guided” the solipsist in limiting and simplifying the usage of “I see” (the way it works and its implications) as something only I have. As an analogous tendency, he has the solipsist ask "How can we wish that this paper were red if it isn't red?” and then they provide an answer that there is a variation that we just (agree to) call “red”. This allows them to have their cake (what “they see”) and eat it too (still have “seeing” be a functioning part of our world). But he says that does not tell us a “new truth” nor show us that “Doesn't this mean that I wish that which doesn't exist at all?” is false. What might show that: no, that expression does not lead to that conclusion, is to show something true about color that is newer than picturing it as trying to occupy the same seat on a bench, and pointing out that “wishing” is closer to imagining a replacement color than physically having it (exist) to put in the other’s place.

Thus, in the case of the claim that “only I really see”, we should “examine the grammatical difference between the statements ‘I don't know what he sees’ and ‘I don't know what he looks at’, as they are actually used in our language.” The second is a recognition of (a “new truth” of) grammatical logic: at times we are not able to guess where another’s visual attention is focused. An option (usage) of the first would be “I don’t know what he sees (in her, in that art)” where, grammatically (logically), “see” is in the sense of “value”, and “know” is in the sense of: relate to at all, acknowledge as justifiable. But the solipsist takes the first as the lack of knowledge, by equation, of my vision and yours, which they picture as comparing two objects, made impossible because we each keep them only to ourselves. Perhaps this desire (for “our precious”) is the solipsist’s dissatisfaction and temptation, which ultimately leads to their difficulty.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Many take the issue to be just to cure the solipsist, to either solve or untangle the “puzzle”. ..... We want to understand “the source of his puzzlement”(p.59), in order to “have answered his difficulty” (p.58).

I think that the reference to the "source of the puzzle" here is a bit misleading. Because it suggests that the source is something different from the puzzle. Untangling the puzzle is more like the rearrangement, the ordering, of the pieces and works better. But still, the metaphor of the cure reinforces the idea that the solipsist is suffering in some way. But perhaps it is we who are unhappy, who feel the cognitive dissonance. Pyrrho's scepticism was, for him, a resolution of his problem. The first issue is to get him puzzled, to get him to see that his resolution is not a solution. Or, it is we who feel unhappy with his conclusion. So, in a way, all we are doing - all we can ever do - is to develop an untangling - an alternative view, and then, perhaps, persuade him of it. (Of course, if we have a partner in dialogue who shares our problem, at least, then the story is completely different.)

Quoting Antony Nickles

This does seem to just be a superficial issue of words, but, if we take it that our words matter, then what he is saying is that how they matter, and what they matter for, have disappointed us.

I'm interested here in the difference between a psychological explanation and a philosophical one. I have, from time to time, encountered people who get wedded to some philosophical doctrine, say solipsism, who seem to me to be principally attracted to the doctrine because they like the disagreement, the contention, or perhaps the attention. W here seems to be making it clear that he has in mind a cognitive dissonance that is a matter of logic - in a broad sense of the term. At least, that idea seems to resolve my difficulty.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Perhaps their criteria (for “real”) are that their feelings are certain (not possibly manufactured), measurable (not over-exaggerated as someone else could), complete (contained in feeling them; not having to be responded to, as another’s).

I've come to the conclusion that what is stake here is Nagel's curiosity about what it is like to be a bat.

Quoting Antony Nickles

As an analogous tendency, he has the solipsist ask "How can we wish that this paper were red if it isn't red?” and then they provide an answer that there is a variation that we just (agree to) call “red”.

This puzzled me a lot, because if we have access to the difference between my perception and your perception of a colour, there would be no problem, if both perceptions were just shades of red. But, again, I think the issue here is the impossibility of me being you. But I'm not sure. Why would the solipsist ask that question?

Quoting Antony Nickles

Perhaps this desire (for “our precious”) is the solipsist’s dissatisfaction and temptation, which ultimately leads to their difficulty.

I may have missed something. But if the precious is my unique experience vis-a-vis yours, then I think that's right.

Some points in the text that attracted my attention.

p. 58:But is it not right to say that in any case the person who talks both of conscious and unconscious thoughts thereby uses the word "thoughts" in two different ways?

Sometimes one comes across something in this text that abruptly reminds one that much water has passed under bridges since W wrote this. I don't think there is an issue any more about whether it is legitimate to talk of conscious and unconscious thoughts. Not that he's wrong here - it's just that the debate seems to have been settled now.

p. 58:Now when the solipsist says that only his own experiences are real, it is no use answering him: "Why do you tell us this if you don't believe that we really hear it?" Or anyhow, if we give him this answer, we mustn't believe that we have answered his difficulty. There is no common sense answer to a philosophical problem.

To me, this reads as his response to the Oxford ordinary language philosophers. I'm assuming that their ideas would have been under discussion even thought their publications didn't emerge until after the war. If not, why does he bother?

p, 59:Our ordinary language, which of all possible notations is the one which pervades all our life, holds our mind rigidly in one position, as it were, and in this position sometimes it feels cramped, having a desire for other positions as well. Thus we sometimes wish for a notation which stresses a difference more strongly, makes it more obvious, than ordinary language does, or one which in a particular case uses more closely similar forms of expression than our ordinary language. Our mental cramp is loosened when we are shown the notations which fulfil these needs. These needs can be of the greatest variety.

On the other hand, he does seem to recognize the importance of ordinary language even if he doesn't go quite the same way as the Oxford lot.

. (All this connects our present problem with the problem of negation.

I have no idea what this is referring to. It must refer back to something, but is it something in the book?

p. 61:Our actual use of the phrase "the same person" and of the name of a person is based on the fact that many characteristics which we use as the criteria for identity coincide in the vast majority of cases. I am as a rule recognized by the appearance of my body. My body changes its appearance only gradually and comparatively little, and likewise my voice, characteristic habits, etc. only change slowly and within a narrow range. We are inclined to use personal names in the way we do, only as a consequence of these facts.

I read on a bit further because it seemed to be still about solipsism. But it's a very powerful passage. It looks to me as if it is a seed for the later work on certainty - hinge propositions, etc.

Reply to Ludwig V
When W says that solipsism is not an opinion, the view is connected to the Tractatus saying it is present but cannot be said. There is something to be overcome but is not like overturning a proposition.

Quoting Paine

When W says that solipsism is not an opinion, the view is connected to the Tractatus saying it is present but cannot be said. There is something to be overcome but is not like overturning a proposition.

Yes, of course there must be a connection. That's very tricky. One might have expected W to announce that he had changed his mind, or not, and here's why. But, as usual, there's no explicit reference to the Tractatus. I suppose one question is whether W has overcome the solipsism of the TLP or is just expressing it in a different way. I think the orthodox view is that he has overcome it, in the sense that he does not even pick up the TLP discussion - not would it make much sense, I think, without the framework of logical atomism. To be honest, I don't know what I think. Thank you for that.
A possible preliminary question is whether W stands by solipsism “strictly carried out coincides with pure realism” (5.64). I can't see an analogy with that remark in what he says here. Nor does he even mention the limits of the world.

Reply to Ludwig V
It is very tricky. I am inclined to think that it is not overcome but I won't try to argue for that as a thesis but just give some impressions on a field of uncertainty.

The solipsism of TLP appears as a natural consequence of the previous statements but accepting that result is not a speaking of it. It sounds like a speaking of it. We need a point of comparison to approach this negative.

The reference to the condition of being "realist" is connected in my mind to 6.431:

So too the world doesn't change when we die, it just ends.

This suggests that Berkeley not "carrying out" the thought allowed him to have opinions about what is objective that is a misunderstanding of his transcendental place, to employ a Kantian term. Wittgenstein insists that we are constrained in this regard. That restraint is also evident in his later work. For example:

Philosophical Investigations: 240. Disputes do not break out (among mathematicians, say) over the question whether a rule has been obeyed or not. People don't come to blows over it, for example. That is part of the framework on which the working of our language is based (for example, in giving descriptions).

241. "So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?"—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is no agreement in opinions but in form of life.

There is also all the emphasis on what is private or not in the context of language. I will leave it there.

Quoting Ludwig V

The first issue is to get him puzzled, to get him to see that his resolution is not a solution. Or, it is we who feel unhappy with his conclusion. So, in a way, all we are doing - all we can ever do - is to develop an untangling - an alternative view, and then, perhaps, persuade him of it.

But if you remember on p.6, the solipsist/skeptic were already in a “muddle” that they turned into a problem so that they could have it be something to solve (to find an “answer”). “How do I know you are in pain?” So it is not just untangling the solution, but reversing the framing of it as a problem/puzzle in the first place. I would offer that the “source” of their puzzlement is in a sense themselves. Witt starts by saying they mistakenly picture thoughts as objects, and that they are forced into befuddlement by the analogy, but it’s from a “temptation” to chose “objects” as analogous, and I offer it’s because they want the same things from thoughts that they have with objects, like a direct relationship, something verifiable, measurable, predictable, generalizable, independent, etc., i.e. “object”-tive.

If that is the case, then his method, of showing other senses of the same expressions/propositions, is not to show them they are “wrong” or are being obtuse, but for them to see that their solution simply can’t do what they want it to—to know/or not know the other for certain, objectively (at least not without circumstances like conjoined twins)—it can’t satisfy their desire, their intellectual requirement. And perhaps it’s not just a desire for objectivity, but also a fear, a truth they are unwilling to accept: that you and I just have separate bodies, and we are thus responsible for the work (back and forth) to bridge that gap. The reluctance to give up claiming impossibility is the fear of being known, possibly entirely, because we may not have the depth (or difference) they wanted to hold on to as inherent (as different from you as a bat).

Now I know @Ludwig V might worry the difference between the “psychological” and logical, or others might say I’ve changed the issue to feelings, but Witt talks about the mindset of the skeptic (tempted, dissatisfied, puzzled). I am not attributing motives as necessary, but from the categorical error (anthropomorphizing the logical mistake) because we are not just talking about a “philosophical” issue, but our basic human response to others. The skeptic claims the same dominion, only limiting it to the intellectual, which is (though unaware) by design, and the whole problem.

Quoting Ludwig V

Why would the solipsist ask that question?

I think it is similar to getting sucked into asking how we could destroy red (p.31) or what the absence of thought would look like (or maybe a thought about nothing; can’t remember where that was) because we got stuck on a framework with color as a quality and thought as an object (then how: an object of nothing?). But I could barely get there.

Quoting Ludwig V

To me, this reads as his response to the Oxford ordinary language philosophers.

Wisdom, yes, and Hume; to say “of course that’s a table, duh”, not trying to understand the “difficulty”, not seeing there is perhaps something to learn from/by the skeptic.

Quoting Ludwig V

I have no idea what this [negation discussion] is referring to.

No idea. There is mention of imagining a substantive (object) for time would make it understandable how there might be a deity of negation (p.6). But I know more understand that, then the reference here, nor negation itself really.

Quoting Paine

The solipsism of TLP appears as a natural consequence of the previous statements but accepting that result is not a speaking of it. It sounds like a speaking of it. We need a point of comparison to approach this negative.

Not sure I understand the last sentence. There is a very tricky problem, though, in working out how one can state a philosophical thesis without relapsing into nonsense - because, in the standard account - one is working on the borderline between sense and nonsense. The latter is not an assertion and therefore cannot be denied, or contradicted. For example, strictly speaking, it is performatively self-contradictory to assert solipsism as an assertion addressed to someone else.
The stuff about my world vs the real world tracks back to Berkeley's realization that he doesn't have an idea of himself, because his perceiving self is not among the things (ideas) that he perceives. (So he postulates that he has a "notion" of himself instead.) Lichtenberg, I believe, a little later comes up with the objection to Descartes' cogito that it goes further than it should because it includes the doubter in what is immediately known, but the doubter is not an element of the thinking - and indeed is not subject to doubt.
In the TLP, the world is everything that is the case - facts or states of affairs, not objects. The world is described by the totality of states of affairs that can be described in a language., My world, presumably, is all the states of affairs that I am aware of. Common-sensically, then, my world is a subset of the world. But if solipsism is true, the distinction between my world and the real world collapses - my world and the world overlap completely. The list of propositions that describe my world is identical with the list of propositions that describe the world. So where one might describe a state of affairs in the real world with "The cat is on the mat" and in my world as "I know that the cat is on the mat", in a solipsistic world there is no difference between the two states of affairs. "I know ..." adds nothing to the report - and indeed is not meaningful in real-world-speak (because "I" doesn't designate an object in the world). One needs multiple "I"'s to articulate the concept of one's own self.

I hope that makes some sense. The relevant point I'm after is that one cannot give a clear sense to solipsism in an ordinary language.

Quoting Paine

This suggests that Berkeley not "carrying out" the thought allowed him to have opinions about what is objective that is a misunderstanding of his transcendental place, to employ a Kantian term. Wittgenstein insists that we are constrained in this regard. That restraint is also evident in his later work.

Well, I can see that Berkeley did not understand the point he was making when he introduced the concept of the perceiver as essential to the perception but additional to it. It is true, I think, that the connection between the TLP and the Blue Book is the continuing struggle to clarify just what it is that the solipsist is trying to assert.

Philosophical Investigations 240:Disputes do not break out (among mathematicians, say) over the question whether a rule has been obeyed or not. People don't come to blows over it, for example. That is part of the framework on which the working of our language is based (for example, in giving descriptions).

Few people would quarrel with that. I am, let us say, a bit queasy about the first sentence. Disputes like that break out quite often - his own argument with (about) Godel is an example. But that doctrine is indeed a lynch-pin in orthodox philosophy. Yet, later on, the distinction between grammatical statements and others gets serious eroded and transformed into different uses of particular grammatical (linguistic) forms.

Philosophical Investigations 241:"So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?" —It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is no agreement in opinions but in form of life.

An excellent quotation. People make that mistake a lot. I must remember that for future use.

Privacy is indeed another issue.

Reply to Ludwig V
Your summary of Berkeley and his reception is helpful and germane.

I would only add that the "world ending" in 6.431 is a recognition of the solitary that reveals the Berkeleyan move to be a giving oneself a world before retreating from it. When not permitted the move, one cannot judge objectivity from a separate space. That is an echo of PI 251:

These words are a defence against something whose form makes it look like an empirical proposition but which is really a grammatical one.

Quoting Paine

When not permitted the move, one cannot judge objectivity from a separate space.

That's complicated. This argument is not like others - the length of a rod, say. It's about the limits of language. We have to explore them in devious ways. I can envisage an argument that solipsism might provide opportunities for understanding those limits that are not available without playing with nonsense.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Wisdom, yes, and Hume; to say “of course that’s a table, duh”, not trying to understand the “difficulty”, not seeing there is perhaps something to learn from/by the skeptic.

Hume is very explicit about the difference between radical scepticism, which he identifies as Pyrrhonism or academic scepticism. That, he thinks, cannot be refuted, but must be cured by immersion in real life. On the other hand, he thinks that "judicious" scepticism and "necessary for the conduct of affairs".

Quoting Antony Nickles

So it is not just untangling the solution, but reversing the framing of it as a problem/puzzle in the first place.

It's very hard to produce a concise statement of exactly what is going on. Seeing the puzzle as a puzzle is an interpretation. Seeing it as not a puzzle is another. The duck-rabbit again.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Witt starts by saying they mistakenly picture thoughts as objects, and that they are forced into befuddlement by the analogy, but it’s from a “temptation” to chose “objects” as analogous, and I offer it’s because they want the same things from thoughts that they have with objects, like a direct relationship, something verifiable, measurable, predictable, generalizable, independent, etc., i.e. “object”-tive.

I agree that reification is endemic in philosophy and likely the commonest example of the mistake of applying one's model in inappropriate circumstances. Here's another example of what I consider to be the same thought.

Nicomachean Ethics Book I, 1094b.24:It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

Quoting Antony Nickles

we are not just talking about a “philosophical” issue, but our basic human response to others. The skeptic claims the same dominion, only limiting it to the intellectual, which is (though unaware) by design, and the whole problem.

On the other hand, the field of philosophy is often described as logic - and that makes sense to me in the extended sense of logic that applies to Wittgenstein's work. Basic human responses does not exclude logic, I suppose, but does call up a field that is, perhaps, more closely related to psychology or even biology - instincts, for example, could count as basic human responses. I don't want to be caught out trying to imprison philosophy within any very specific boundaries. But there's a certain vagueness here that, as you put it, I'm uneasy with.
I do agree that one effect of W's work is to make us aware of the limitations, for philosophy, of a purely theoretical perspective - especially when it becomes dogmatic about what it and isn't philosophy.

Quoting Paine

When not permitted the move, one cannot judge objectivity from a separate space.

Quoting Ludwig V

I can envisage an argument that solipsism might provide opportunities for understanding those limits that are not available without playing with nonsense.

I was giving a reading of what the "ending of the world" might mean in Wittgenstein's argument. not arguing for it on my own behalf.

@Ludwig V @Paine

Section 18 - the unidentifiable individual (p.61-65)

At first, I take his “considering the criteria for the identity of a person” (p.61) as more about ‘essence’ and grammar (criteria). He says that we could and might identify someone entirely differently if circumstances changed making certain characteristics more prevalent or useful, implying there is not an underlying, determinate identity. “We can say whichever we like [that Jekyll and Hyde are one or two people]. We are not forced to talk of a double personality.” (p.62) He even throws away that there is a “right” or “wrong” about identity. The “inheritance” and “preservation” of what is meaningful is “at liberty” and without one “legitimacy”, as, by analogy, circumstances shift under our (say, math) terms over time, becoming meaningful for entirely different reasons.

I take the point as: how society ended up with the criteria for judgments that we have is not only contingent on how our world rolls (our history of circumstances). The fact that we do, or could, have multiple ways of judging something shows that we also have an interest (or multiple) in doing it the way we do. The “usage” is connected to those (cultural) interests in something, reflected in the criteria to identify that use.

He next considers the idea that ‘seeing’ is a continuous part of who ‘we’ are; that it is essential and ever-present (as people take Descartes to want from thinking). Logically, this would mean that every instance of seeing would have something in common, which he narrows down to “the experience of seeing itself” (p.63), which I read as distinguishing nothing (“pointing… not at anything in [ the visual field ]” (p.64)), and thus wishful rather than meaningful to point out.

The difference between a physical object and what we ‘see’ are not different types of objects, as a railroad law is not a railroad track (one is an idea). I take this to mean that what we are trying to do, in ‘seeing’ something, is not in the same category (“kind”) as our relationship with physical objects (equated with knowledge). Our interests differ for each. Some examples would be that we are pointing something out to you when we ‘see’ something; or we are evaluating it, say, seeing it’s potential; or interpreting it as… (PI #74), say, a box to step on or a container.

So he finally gets to our interest in only wanting what I see to be ‘real’, which is to keep part of me for myself, in reserve, impossible to be fully known or limited, read, characterized, labeled. To hold “what I mean” (p.65) as unable to be fully understood is to wish for the implications and connotations of our expressions to be ultimately under my control, judged as met or meant by me, to always allow me the last word, as if there was an essence of what I say that is “information” that the other lacks because it is mysterious, hidden, private… me.

Quoting Paine

I would only add that the "world ending" in 6.431 is a recognition of the solitary that reveals the Berkeleyan move to be a giving oneself a world before retreating from it. When not permitted the move, one cannot judge objectivity from a separate space. That is an echo of PI 251:

I don't really understand 6.431. I can see that death is the limit (end) of life and consequently not an even in life (he says that somewhere in the book, doesn't he?). Consequently death is not the destruction of my world because that destruction would be part of my life. But he seems to be saying that my death is the end of the world. That would be true of the solipsist's world, But not of anybody else's.
But what is the Berkeleyan move, exactly? The move that insists that it is only our own minds that we perceive and that consequently exists? in what way does he retreat from that? Or do you mean that he posits the world as the ideas of God, but allows God to remain hidden behind those ideas? (I could make sense of the idea that Kant does this, by giving himself the phenomena, but then positing the hidden reality of the noumena or being-in-itself.)

Quoting Antony Nickles

a “temptation” to chose “objects” as analogous, and I offer it’s because they want the same things from thoughts that they have with objects, like a direct relationship, something verifiable, measurable, predictable, generalizable, independent, etc., i.e. “object”-tive.

Yes, I notice that you are also suggesting quite a wide range of possible needs in the next paragraph as well. All good grist for the mill of reflection. Thanks.
A small contribution from me. Scepticism is often explained as a desire for certainty, but if certainty is an unattainable ideal, perhaps we should think of it as being, not the desire for certainty, but the fear of it, as some inflexible that hems us in.

I'll come back later when I've read your latest carefully and the relevant extract.

Reply to Ludwig V

Quoting Ludwig V

A small contribution from me. Scepticism is often explained as a desire for certainty, but if certainty is an unattainable ideal, perhaps we should think of it as being, not the desire for certainty, but the fear of it, as some inflexible that hems us in.

If we may equate skepticism with doubt, then…

“A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt” “The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”
(On Certainty)

@Paine

Quoting Ludwig V

Scepticism is often explained as a desire for certainty, but if certainty is an unattainable ideal, perhaps we should think of it as being, not the desire for certainty, but the fear of it, as some inflexible that hems us in.

Obviously I’d like to stay on topic (understanding this text), or at least until we get to the end (only 10 pages left), after which we will of course open it up to discuss these themes in larger contexts. But I think we can address this in the ballpark of the topics of the book. In understanding ‘certainty’ as a term we could apply here, it would be the framework imposed by the analogy of our relation to objects. In the PI it is the ideal of a pure logic, like math, and On Certainty is its own beast, but @Ludwig V has a point, which is the flip-side of what Witt takes up in the last section (being unknowable). If we have/are something ‘certain’, we keep something, but if language is ‘certain’, like equating ‘meaning’, as an object, with the world as something static (meaning as only labels), then we might object (fear) that I am trapped by my ‘self’, not only for me, but that I am completely ‘knowable’ to others in my entirety, as unguarded myself and through what I say—not just wedded to it, but only to it, constrained within it. Thank you for your patience with the reading.

Reply to Antony Nickles
Are you asking me to not comment with references to earlier and later work by W until you finish going through the text?

My focus has been on the discussion of solipsism in the Blue Book and why W says it is not an opinion. I don't see the issue of certainty as germane to my observations.

But I will refrain if that is your preference.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Thank you for your patience with the reading.

It's a question of balance. I didn't think that my observation would be a distraction in the sense of getting in the way of the reading.

Quoting Joshs

If we may equate skepticism with doubt, then…

Yes, that's a good reply. One might want to argue about whether it is conclusive on its own. But that wasn't quite what I was talking about. It was, rather, Wittgenstein's comments about "our real need" or the what motivates, for example, the sceptic. Why would anyone say that they were the only person in existence? I think we need to tease out what, exactly, that means.

Quoting Antony Nickles

In understanding ‘certainty’ as a term we could apply here, it would be the framework imposed by the analogy of our relation to objects.

Yes, that's the context. I was just a bit concerned that sometimes people seem to think that the only problem is reification, and I think that could become a source of cramp.

Quoting Antony Nickles

we might object (fear) that I am trapped by my ‘self’,

I have seen people refer to being caged in the self, in the context of solipsism.

Reply to Ludwig V

Quoting Ludwig V

If we may equate skepticism with doubt, then…
— Joshs
Yes, that's a good reply. One might want to argue about whether it is conclusive on its own. But that wasn't quite what I was talking about. It was, rather, Wittgenstein's comments about "our real need" or the what motivates, for example, the sceptic. Why would anyone say that they were the only person in existence? I think we need to tease out what, exactly, that means?

You were right to point out that in the context of the reading, the kind of certainty that scepticism is a response to is that associated with knowledge of a picture. And yet the sceptic isnt able to dissolve the confusion arising from the separation of meaning from expression. For the sceptic , the idealist cant know what they claim to know. But an examination of the grammar of a solipsist statement like ‘it is only I who see’ reveals not whether something can or cannot be meant, but HOW it is meant, thereby avoiding both idealist certainty and scepticism.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Logically, this would mean that every instance of seeing would have something in common, which he narrows down to “the experience of seeing itself” (p.63), which I read as distinguishing nothing (“pointing… not at anything in [ the visual field ]” (p.64)), and thus wishful rather than meaningful to point out.

Well, he is quite right. There is a territory that, so far as I know, he does not explore. I point at a bus, and say (in grammatical mode) “That’s a bus”. The self-same gesture, in a different context could count as a definition of “red”. It’s not really a question of my intention being different. It’s that my audience needs to understand what kind of object a bus or a colour is, before they can interpret my definition.
In one way, one cannot point to one’s visual field – only to objects in it. To understand the gesture that W is talking about, we have to think about how we realize that we have a visual field, that is, we have to understand what kind of thing a visual field is. Whether that understanding would coincide with what the solipsist is trying to say is another question.

Quoting Antony Nickles

To hold “what I mean” (p.65) as unable to be fully understood is to wish for the implications and connotations of our expressions to be ultimately under my control, judged as met or meant by me,

Yes. But it could also be that I do not wish to be caged in the implicatons and connotations of our expressions.
I would be happy to say that we never “fully understand” things, even if we can understand them sufficiently for the purposes in hand. That is, that the phrase “fully understand” (which, presumably, contrasts with “partly understand) has not been given a coherent meaning.

p.60:What he said really recommended his notation, in the sense in which a notation can be recommended.

I can think of cases where a notation might recommend itself - for the most part on pragmatic grounds. Whether they are relevant to philosophy is not clear to me. I think we think that because any notation must conform to the same logic, the difference between notations will not be significant.

p.61:We are inclined to use personal names in the way we do, only as a consequence of these facts.

This, of course, radically changes how we need to think of analytic vs synthetic. The consequences are not at all clear to me. I think we need some distinction along those lines. (My next quotation suggests that W agrees).

p.65:But I wish it to be logically impossible that he should understand me, that is to say, it should be meaningless, not false, to say that he understands me. Thus my expression is one of the many which is used on various occasions by philosophers and supposed to convey something to the person who says it, though essentially incapable of conveying anything to anyone else.

But when W talks of understanding the solipsist, rather than merely refuting him, he suggests that we should be asking what they are trying to convey. His discussion in these pages illustrates how that might go, and be reduced to a difference of notation.

p.66:It would be wrong to say that when someone points to the sun with his hand, he is pointing both to the sun and himself because it is he who points; on the other hand, he may by pointing attract attention both to the sun and to himself.

This goes back to the question how we can point to a visual field.

Quoting Joshs

But an examination of the grammar of a solipsist statement like ‘it is only I who see’ reveals not whether something can or cannot be meant, but HOW it is meant, thereby avoiding both idealist certainty and scepticism.

But doesn't he also claim that what the solipsist want to say, or mean, is incoherent or perhaps just a question of notation. You make me realize that I'm actually quite confused about exactly what is going on here.

@Ludwig V

Quoting Paine

My focus has been on the discussion of solipsism in the Blue Book and why W says it is not an opinion. I don't see the issue of certainty as germane to my observations.

Ah, my mistake; I lost the trail (from p.60). The “opinion” reference is obviously germane. I take it up here (though, of course, there is no obligation to address that). And to answer your question on the discussion: yes, we are pointing to/contrasting, etc. any corresponding mention of terms/discussions in other texts. I only mentioned it as we are of course primarily trying to understand how this text considers them. All that is just to say that I’m having a hard time understanding even what this text is saying (internally).

(p.60):The solipsist who says ‘only I feel real pain’, ‘only I really see (or hear)’ is not stating an opinion; and that's why he is so sure of what he says.

For example, the text of the quote and its place in the surrounding train of thought seems to beg some questions (all of which I state rhetorically, simply to show the depth of his esotericism, and not to dismiss anyone else’s interests in the matter). Foremost, if not an “opinion”, what? or is it that the solipsist is not “stating” an opinion? (Or both) and then what is the alternative act? and form? Does their “being so sure” have anything to do with their being “irresistibly tempted”? (just below) or, if “so sure” is not being ‘certain’—like knowledge of a fact as if a math-like equation—what constitutes this surety? i.e., why/how “so” sure?

In that vein, the act they are doing (besides “stating an opinion”) is described by negation (in the paragraph above) in that “[ in not stating an opinion, they do ] not thereby disagree with us about any practical question of fact” i.e., we agree on the facts, so their claim is not that what they are saying is actually the correct fact of the matter. Thus, logically, what they are saying is not a factual claim in opposition to: ‘I am not the only one to feel (real) pain’; or, ‘others feel pain, and theirs is as “real” as mine’. If what they are saying is not opinion nor fact, then what are they doing (in what they are saying)? and how is not being a claim to knowledge “why” they are “so sure”? (a compulsion? a conviction?)

Another part any answers I would think have to include is that, even though “not stating an opinion”, they still want to “restrict” what is referred to as “‘real’” (and so how, if not restricted factually?). Methodologically Witt would take the fact to which he claims we both agree—about only my pain being “real”—and give examples of usages of “real” other than what gives the solipsist what they want (what I read, in Sec 18, as the desire to be unknowable). As I said in my reading of this quote above, these could be “real” as in: not possibly manufactured; not (necessarily) over-exaggerated as someone could; contained, in feeling the pain but not having to be responded to, as another’s are by me.

Quoting Paine

When W says that solipsism is not an opinion, the view is connected to the Tractatus saying it is present but cannot be said. There is something to be overcome but it is not like overturning a proposition.

Quoting Paine

I do think [ responding to the quote, that ] Wittgenstein is looking for a way to help the solipsist find an answer to a problem

Not an opinion: present, not proposed; problematic though not to be overturned, but answered by overcoming. I would guess this is referring to the “irresistible temptation”, but I am not familiar enough with the Tractatus to be sure in relation to the reference to that and the subsequent discussion. Any chance any of what I said is close? or at least the text here is related in some way?

Quoting Antony Nickles

We want to understand “the source of his puzzlement”(p.59), in order to “have answered his difficulty” (p.58).

In considering the solipsist, I think it is important to keep the "realist" and
"idealist" within shooting range.

Quoting Blue Book, page 74, internet edition

Does a realist pity me more than an idealist or a solipsist? – In fact the solipsist asks: “How can we believe that the other has pain; what does it mean to believe this? How can the expression of such a supposition make sense?

They each are found to "draw some misleading analogy" of the kind discussed on page 73. The discussion down through page 75 has the realists lacking what solipsist does not have. They hold up opposite ends of the same "grammatical difficulty."

The same group is assembled again a few pages later:

Quoting ibid 86

I shall try to elucidate the problem discussed by realists, idealists, and solipsists by showing you a problem closely related to it.

Reply to Ludwig V The point of the example is to demonstrate:

Quoting ibid 87

To say that a word is used in two (or more) different ways does in itself not yet give us any idea about its use. It only specifies a way of looking at this usage.

A condensed version of the above can be found at PI 402.

The problems of talking about "the world as resting upon personal experience" at page 73 began this comparison of theories, but the problems go back to the beginning of how to understand thinking as being in a location. The solipsist "not stating an opinion" goes back to different ways a reason is given:

Quoting ibid. page 26

Let us go back to the statement that thinking essentially consists in operating with signs. My point was that it is liable to mislead us if we say thinking is a mental activity. The question what kind of an activity thinking is is analogous to this: “Where does thinking take place?” We can answer: on paper, in our head, in the mind. None of these statements of locality gives the locality of thinking. The use of all these specifications is correct but we must not be misled by the similarity of their linguistic forms into a false conception of their grammar. As, e.g., when you say: “Surely, the real place of thought is in our head”. The same applies to the idea of thinking as an activity. It is correct to say that thinking is an activity of our writing hand, of our larynx, of our head, and of our mind, so long as we understand the grammar of these statements. And it is, furthermore, extremely important to realize how by misunderstanding the grammar of our expressions, we are led to think of one in particular of these statements as giving the real seat of the activity of thinking.

If the solipsist was stating an opinion, the other views would be conceivable, which he denies.

I will make my comments about TLP in a reply to Reply to Ludwig V

@Antony Nickles

Quoting Paine

In considering the solipsist, I think it is important to keep the "realist" and
"idealist" within shooting range.

I agree with that. They can all be seen as alternative views of the same issues - temptations.
Given that we (sort of) understand the difference between solispsist and realist, what are we to make of the distinction between solipsist and idealist?
Berkeley is clear that he believes in the existence of people other than himself. He believes that on the grounds of their effects - presumable on his ideas, the objects of immediate perception - where there is no such thing as mediated perception. He needs this premiss because he wants to argue that the world as we perceive it is caused by God. I can't see that there is any hope of consistency here, except in solipsism. So I think that idealism collapses into solipsism.

The distinctive contribution of Wittgenstein is the question of limits of the world.

Quoting ibid. page 26

And it is, furthermore, extremely important to realize how by misunderstanding the grammar of our expressions, we are led to think of one in particular of these statements as giving the real seat of the activity of thinking.

Quoting Paine

If the solipist was stating an opinion, the other views would be conceivable, which he denies.

We don't necessarily have to agree with him. Ryle has a good deal to say about thinking; in the end, as I remember it, he seems to give up. He slaps a label ("polymorphous") on it and leaves it at that. But I'm led to think that the range and confusion of the possible seats of thinking may be meant to get us to see that the debate about experience simply can't be tidied up into a structure of alternatives. (As well as understanding that the question where thinking is, or (better) what it consists of is not sufficiently articulated to be answerable.) Then we might be able to talk about holding one view (opinion) or another. But the solipsist's view of experience is part of the range of thinking and the solipsist's view is not special, except that we are tempted to hang on to it because it seems to be somehow above the fray.

Does any of that make sense?

I don't want to lose the momentum of making progress through the text. In any case, it seems to me that these last pages are germane to our discussion. Am I right to think that we have got to p. 65?

Quoting Ludwig V

I didn't think that my observation would be a distraction

I think I just didn’t see the original connection @Paine was making to the “opinion” issue, so I took the rest as just an unrelated discussion of the TLP.

Quoting Ludwig V

that destruction would be part of my life

Perhaps in claiming that only what the solipsist sees/feels, etc. is real (as if “alive”), they are thus “destroying” the world (by cutting it off/“killing” it), before it disappoints them.

Quoting Paine

the Berkeleyan move… [of] giving oneself a world before retreating from it.

Where @Ludwig V’s mind goes to the world we create in lieu of the thing-in-itself, my thought went to the related but opposite side where we imagine (“give” ourselves, as I take @Paine to put it) a ‘real’ world, but then we manufacture the idea of a (“peculiar” Witt says) mechanism, say, of ‘perception’, that only allows us an ‘appearance’ of that world, letting us “retreat” to arms length behind knowledge (or a lack of it), to avoid risking our hands getting dirty (to account for the mistakes we would make in a way that gives us a feeling of control).

These words [ ‘I can't imagine the opposite’ ] are a defence against something whose form makes it look like an empirical proposition but which is really a grammatical one. PI #251

Not to try to sort all of this out, but, for our purposes, it is interesting that he is claiming that the grammatical sense is ‘real’, and that the same proposition just looks like an empirical one. There is something to that in trying to persuade the skeptic, like: revealing the illusion of its empirical sense, but we know it can’t be a factual dispute, as the skeptic already acknowledges that their “fact”, say, of “me” as an object, is unverifiable, and the rest they grant as common sense, which they then just demote in its entirety as not in the class (of certainty) that philosophy sees or provides. Perhaps it is the logical impossibility (the “can’t”). Here, of not being able to imagine an opposite, or some other exercise, that defends against the temptation to see a claim as empirical.

@Paine

Quoting Ludwig V

But I'm led to think that the range and confusion of the possible seats of thinking may be meant to get us to see that the debate about experience simply can't be tidied up into a structure of alternatives.

In saying that thinking can be in all those “locations” I take it just to say there is associated logic to thinking in each case. The confusion is from imagining thinking as a mechanism and not an activity (conducted by the hand, our speech, our ‘mind’). If we aren’t fixated on a mechanism of thought, then there is no ‘seat” or ‘location” of thinking (nor where a thought as an object would be). It dawned on me the other day that thought does not consist of a substance, but a judgment. “They are thinking (it through)”, “They are not thinking (but just reacting impulsively), “See that squirrel thinking about how to get the seeds out of that bird feeder.” It consists of acts (writing, speaking, internal monologue, problem solving, brain storming, just mulling it over) that meet certain criteria (not about the result, but compared to parroting, expressing, performing, etc.).

And if we are not picturing ‘experience’ also as a mechanism or “structure”, but, logically, I would offer that it is the description of a distinction, an event out of the ordinary, and not in some sense of: everything all the time that is “my experience”. As I may have said, sometimes going to the grocery store is not an experience.

And yes, p. 65, paragraph starting: “The meaning of a phrase for us is characterized…”

Reply to Antony Nickles

Quoting Antony Nickles

Perhaps in claiming that only what the solipsist sees/feels, etc. is real (as if “alive”), they are thus “destroying” the world (by cutting it off/“killing” it), before it disappoints them.

the Berkeleyan move… [of] giving oneself a world before retreating from it.
— Paine

Where Ludwig V’s mind goes to the world we create in lieu of the thing-in-itself, my thought went to the related but opposite side where we imagine (“give” ourselves, as I take @Paine to put it) a ‘real’ world, but then we manufacture the idea of a (“peculiar” Witt says) mechanism, say, of ‘perception’, that only allows us an ‘appearance’ of that world, letting us “retreat” to arms length behind knowledge (or a lack of it), to avoid risking our hands getting dirty (to account for the mistakes we would make in a way that gives us a feeling of control).

When I ask myself how Wittgenstein understands the motivation associated with seeing the world as a solipsist, realist or idealist, I’m led to the terms he often uses; being ‘captivated’or ‘tempted’ by a picture. The impression I get is that it is the bewitching grammar of language itself that motivates our confusions, not something that could be misread as an inner psychological motive, like a desire to avoid disappointment, a desire for control or to avoid getting our hands dirty. Solipsism is the result of an intellectual cramp, not a psychological flaw

Quoting Ludwig V

I can't see that there is any hope of consistency here, except in solipsism. So I think that idealism collapses into solipsism.

I think W is looking at Kant as the champion of idealism rather than Berkeley. The erosion of Kant's foundation is the work of the Blue Book from its beginning. While introducing the life of signs as use, the following mistake is made:

Quoting BB, 9, internet edition

The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of the reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a “thing corresponding to a substantive.”)

That establishes how W uses "occult" but also points to how objects co-exist with their representations in Kant.

While seeking how the rules for signs emerge, two scenarios are depicted:

Quoting ibid. page 21

In so far as the teaching brings about the association, feeling of recognition, etc. etc., it is the cause of the phenomena of understanding, obeying, etc.; and it is a hypothesis that the process of teaching should be needed in order to bring about these effects. It is conceivable, in this sense, that all the processes of understanding, obeying, etc. should have happened without the person ever having been taught the language. (This, just now, seems extremely paradoxical).

B. The teaching may have supplied us with a rule which is itself involved in the processes of understanding, obeying, etc.; “involved”, however, meaning that the expression of this rule forms
part of these processes.
We must distinguish between what one might call a “process being in accordance with a rule”, and, “a process involving a rule” (in the above sense).

The language of "possibility of experience" cannot be cleanly divided between sensibility and understanding in this scenario. The way we speak of reason as our capacity is a model rather than an experience itself.

Quoting ibid. 25

The proposition, that your action has such-and-such a cause, is a hypothesis. The hypothesis is well-founded if one has had a number of experiences which, roughly speaking, agree in showing that your action is the regular sequel of certain conditions which we then call causes of the action. In order to know the reason which you had for making a certain statement, for acting in a particular way, etc., no number of agreeing experiences is necessary, and the statement of your reason is not a hypothesis. The difference between the grammars of “reason” and “cause” is quite similar to that between the grammars of “motive” and “cause”. Of the cause one can say that one can’t know it but one can only conjecture it. On the other hand one often says: “Surely I must know why I did it” talking of the motive. When I say: “we can only conjecture the cause but we know the motive” this statement will be seen later on to be a grammatical one. The “can” refers to a logical possibility.

The double use of the word “why”, asking for the cause and asking for the motive, together with the idea that we can know, and not only conjecture, our motives, gives rise to the confusion that a motive is a cause of which we are immediately aware, a cause “seen from the inside”, or a cause experienced. Giving a reason is like giving a calculation by which you have arrived at a certain result.

This is a real thumb in the eye to Kant's Refutation of Idealism:

Quoting CPR, B275

The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me.

The difference between private experience and shared experience is not a demarcation of outer and inner. Since the Refutation is an argument against solipsism, it maintains its status as a particular model adjacent to the others.

Whoops

@Ludwig V @Paine

Quoting Joshs

The impression I get is that it is the tricky grammar of language itself that motivates our confusions, not something that could be misread as an inner psychological motive,

I’ve seen the term “psychological” used a few times now, and, since it does not appear to be used in reference to actual subconscious psychological forces (reenactment or displacement of trauma, insecurity, etc.), I can only assume it is being used as Witt does elsewhere, but I think that technical use is not appropriate to apply here. In this case, I’ll have to piece together the situation that is imagined and the implications that are imagined should follow, that it is not relevant.

One confusion I’ve seen is that it is seen as just personal, or just a belief only able to be defended by strong feelings, unable to be considered intellectually, logically. Related is the claim that philosophy does not or should not involve the “emotional”, but not actual feelings, because it’s just as a catch-all denigration to dismiss everything that does not meet a certain, predetermined requirement of rationality or logic.

But that flies in the face of Witt’s broadening the variable types of criteria we recognize for judgment which shows us that our human interests are reflected in (and part of) the logic of our practices. It is finding out why we predetermine and/or limit what criteria (interests) are valid and important that we have realized is at the heart of what we are investigating here. Also, as I mentioned to @Ludwig V here, I see the motivations and responses as also creating actual logical errors leading to philosophical misunderstandings, able to be resolved through philosophy.

And, yes!, the confusion inherent in the structure of language—not realizing that the things we say have multiple usages, partly because of the fact that words do have individual definitions outside of any context—and the leverage of analogy is how we impose and can get fixated on a certain picture. But that is the mechanism. Basically, we have still not answered (and I'd think you'd have to provide a reading different of) this: “He is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression; but we must yet find why he is.”

It might help to acknowledge that, in their being a “why”, logically, there is a reason or motive, as: we chose our relation to objects as the analogy to impose, and there are reasons why we picked that--perhaps not all of them are intellectual, not all are apart from reasons of interest, even originating in instinctive responses to the basic logic of our situation to each other and the world.

You might say I’m projecting this, but there is evidence and references throughout the text. He does discuss disappointment (well actually, “dissatisfaction”**, but same enough) on p.58-59 (in my book, starting with “Now when the solipsist says that only his own experiences are real”). And he refers to what the skeptic “wants” (desires) “Thinking, one wants to say, is part of our 'private experience'.” (p.16) Or wishes for: “…describing the experience which we wish to call "observing thought in our brain"” (p.8) or “when we wish to give meaning to substantives to which no material objects correspond.” (p.36)

**I discuss the dissatisfaction with notation here in the 3rd paragraph.

Quoting Antony Nickles

t our human interests are reflected in (and part of) the logic of our practices. It is finding out why we predetermine and/or limit what criteria (interests) are valid and important that we have realized is at the heart of what we are investigating here. Also, as I mentioned to Ludwig V here, I see the motivations and responses as also creating actual logical errors leading to philosophical misunderstandings, able to be resolved through philosophy.

I think Witt understands motives as he understands meaning in general, as neither emanating from the subjective nor from the objective side , but as arising out of the interaction. Our interests are enacted in situations, out of which things strike us as funny , sad, boring or interesting in any unlimited variety of ways . When Wittgenstein uses terms like "dissatisfaction," "wants," and "wishes’ with respect to grammatical illusions, the want or wish is an expression of the intellectual disquiet caused by the grammatical picture. The picture's power is what causes the desire, rather than a pre-existing desire creating or contributing to the tendency to create grammatical illusions. In this sense, Wittgenstein treats motive similarly to the way Heidegger understands motivation.

One cannot construct being-in-the-world from willing, wishing, urge, and propensity as psychical acts. The desire for this conversation is determined by the task I have before me. This is the motive, the "for the sake of which". The determining factor is not an urge or a drive, driving and urging me from behind, but something standing before me, a task I am involved in, something I am charged with.”(Heidegger, Zollikon)

Quoting Antony Nickles

He proposes that one source is “when a notation dissatisfies us”. (p.59) .....We might want our (culture’s) interest in a thing to loosen, adjust, perhaps respond to general changes in the associated circumstances, perhaps for the recognition of a different “position” (“attitude” he says in the PI).

Yes, I think that's right. When it comes to notations, we're inclined to think that one notation should take care of every position/attitude or perspective. But actually, horses for courses suits us, in the world in which we live, will suit us better. But if the solipsist's doctrine is just another perspective (or interpretation), all we can do is to point out that it is inconvenient in some way. What we want (!) is a wy to dismiss, set aside, reject the doctrine - isn't it?

Quoting Antony Nickles

Perhaps in claiming that only what the solipsist sees/feels, etc. is real (as if “alive”), they are thus “destroying” the world (by cutting it off/“killing” it), before it disappoints them.

I've come to the conclusion that the solipsist has a point, but is making far too much of it. We should not just brush the whole thing under the philosphical carpet. For example, I like "alive" as a description of the difference between my experience and yours - from my perspective, and allowing that from your perspective, it is vice versa.

Quoting Antony Nickles

it is interesting that he is claiming that the grammatical sense is ‘real’, and that the same proposition just looks like an empirical one.

Well, a distinction between appearance and reality is one way of acknowledging something that the solipsist has got right, which enables us to focus on what they have got wrong.

Quoting Antony Nickles

If we aren’t fixated on a mechanism of thought, then there is no ‘seat” or ‘location” of thinking (nor where a thought as an object would be). It dawned on me the other day that thought does not consist of a substance, but a judgment.

Yes. The "what is...." question pushes us in the direction of looking for something that things consist of. But there isn't always anything. (Not just judgment, though, but a whole range of intellectual activities.) W doesn't note that there are some activities that count as thinking, such as calculating or writing or planning and preparing and other cases where the thinking is actually a construction to rationalize activities that do not count as thinking, but which only make sense if there is thought behind it, so to speak. I think we have to treat these as different, but related, language games.

Quoting Antony Nickles

And if we are not picturing ‘experience’ also as a mechanism or “structure”, but, logically, I would offer that it is the description of a distinction, an event out of the ordinary, and not in some sense of: everything all the time that is “my experience”.

Well, yes. But I'm not sure that those mundane activities which we barely notice could not be picked out as experiences under some circumstances. Do I notice picking up my keys as I leave the house or putting one foot in front of the other as I walk to the shops? Usually, I don't notice, but I can bring them to my attention if I need to. Sometimes, of course, the experience "forces" itself on us, as when I reach for my keys in my pocket and they are not there.

Quoting Antony Nickles

One confusion I’ve seen is that it is seen as just personal, or just a belief only able to be defended by strong feelings, unable to be considered intellectually, logically. Related is the claim that philosophy does not or should not involve the “emotional”, but not actual feelings, because it’s just as a catch-all denigration to dismiss everything that does not meet a certain, predetermined requirement of rationality or logic.

Yes. It's an illusion that philosophy is without passion.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But that flies in the face of Witt’s broadening the variable types of criteria we recognize for judgment which shows us that our human interests are reflected in (and part of) the logic of our practices. ...... I see the motivations and responses as also creating actual logical errors leading to philosophical misunderstandings, able to be resolved through philosophy.

"Finding out" sounds like something empirical. I think "making sense of" is more appropriate to philosophy. There's no problem about motivations and responses creating logical errors.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Basically, we have still not answered (and I'd think you'd have to provide a reading different of) this: “He is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression; but we must yet find why he is.”

Yes. But this finding out is not the kind of finding out you are doing when you ask people why they are adopting a philosophical position. In philosophy, we are looking for arguments, not expressions of personal preference.

Quoting Antony Nickles

we chose our relation to objects as the analogy to impose, and there are reasons why we picked that--perhaps not all of them are intellectual, not all are apart from reasons of interest, even originating in instinctive responses

"Chose" may not be quite the right word in some cases.

Quoting Paine

I think W is looking at Kant as the champion of idealism rather than Berkeley. The erosion of Kant's foundation is the work of the Blue Book from its beginning. While introducing the life of signs as use, the following mistake is made:
"The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. (One of the reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a “thing corresponding to a substantive.”) — BB, 9, internet edition
That establishes how W uses "occult" but also points to how objects co-exist with their representations in Kant.

Forgive me, I'm a bit confused. Is the mistake that you say is made in the following quotation. That is, do you agree with W that it is a mistake to look for the use of a sign as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. Again, since the word "occult" doesn't occur in the quoted passage, I'm not clear how it establishes how W uses it.
Again, I don't know enough to see how W is eroding Kant's foundation. A bit more explanation would help.

Quoting Paine

This is a real thumb in the eye to Kant's Refutation of Idealism:
The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me.
— CPR, B275
The difference between private experience and shared experience is not a demarcation of outer and inner. Since the Refutation is an argument against solipsism, it maintains its status as a particular model adjacent to the others.

There must be something wrong with me. Is the thumb in the eye in the previous quotation from BB? That quotation is all very well, but I don't see the relevance to the refutation of idealism. I take your point about outer and inner (which are pretty clearly metaphorical anyway. I can see an argument that my recognition of my own transcendental, geometrical POV proves the existence of space and time, since a POV (in our world) necessarily implies a viewer to view the view.

Quoting Joshs

Solipsism is the result of an intellectual cramp, not a psychological flaw

I wouldn't deny that psychological flaws might be part of the explanation why people make some intellectual choices. What I'm fishing for is a distinction between what explanations we can expect from philosophy and what belongs to a different, less intellectual, mode of explanation. If I say that Descartes' demon is a paranoid fantasy, is that a philosophical explanation or something else - and there's a danger here of straying into something perilously close to personal abuse. One distinction I'm looking at is precisely that difference between something we can attribute to anyone who holds that view and something that may vary from one person to another. I once got myself called a psychopath by someone in a debate about ethics. It was "only philosophy", not a serious rejection of ordinary morality. But my interlocutor seemed unable to make the distinction - or perhaps had just rung out of arguments. The point is, the distinction matters.

Quoting Joshs

I think Witt understands motives as he understands meaning in general, as neither emanating from the subjective nor from the objective side , but as arising out of the interaction. Our interests are enacted in situations, out of which things strike us as funny , sad, boring or interesting in any unlimited variety of ways . When Wittgenstein uses terms like "dissatisfaction," "wants," and "wishes’ with respect to grammatical illusions, the want or wish is an expression of the intellectual disquiet caused by the grammatical picture. The picture's power is what causes the desire, rather than a pre-existing desire creating or contributing to the tendency to create grammatical illusions.

Yes. This is very helpful - especially the emphasis on interaction and the picture as itselt a factor in what goes on.

Quoting Ludwig V

That is, do you agree with W that it is a mistake to look for the use of a sign as though it were an object co-existing with the sign. Again, since the word "occult" doesn't occur in the quoted passage, I'm not clear how it establishes how W uses it.

I am not sure that I agree but accept that such a judgement is critical to Wittgenstein's enterprise.

"Occult" appears in the preceding paragraph:

Quoting BB, page 9

But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use.

If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by seeing some sort of outward object, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? – In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceases to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)

The comment: (One of the reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a “thing corresponding to a substantive.”) is developed further at page 11, 48, and 72.

The "occult" is what Wittgenstein is militating against. Note the use of "us" in the following:

Quoting ibid. page 9

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.

As a part of the system of language, one may say “the sentence has life”. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever would accompany it would for us just be another sign.

In the penultimate paragraph of the book there is the following:

Quoting ibid. page 110

Let’s not imagine the meaning as an occult connection the mind makes between a word and a thing, and that this connection contains the whole usage of a word as the seed might be said to contain the tree.

I will ponder how to express my comments regarding Kant more cogently.

@Ludwig V

Quoting Paine

In considering the solipsist, I think it is important to keep the "realist" and "idealist" within shooting range.

Interesting point. I did class them all to be reactions to skepticism, but each are different, so, worth a look. And I’m trying to wrap my head around Kant as the one looking for something stable, which is not us, thus the “object” but then which cannot be the “real” object, and the gymnastics start.

Quoting Joshs

I think Wittgenstein understands motives as he understands meaning in general

But motives have their own logic (p.15), here compared to causes vs reasons.

Quoting Joshs

Our interests are enacted in situations,

I am talking about the interests/desires (and feelings, as reasons) of the skeptic, but that is also a possibility in every one of us (including Witt), and so the “situation” is our situation as humans (the human condition). (I also refer to the interests of our culture, imbedded in the criteria for judgment that hold what matters to a certain practice.)

You seem to want to argue that the picture causes the “disquiet”, which is not what I am talking about. Anyway, the skeptic is “cramped” by the forced analogy (the two senses), from which he creates the picture, but this doesn’t explain why first choose “objects” to analogize, which is the matter at hand. And you’ve given no textual evidence for putting things back to front as you have done—I need more to see the logic. I take Heidegger to be dismissing urges as a cause “a push”; but what I am discussing is exactly the “motive” of the skeptic, what they want/desire (to stand before them), which is the object, the objectivity. Yes, I am conjecturing/hypothesizing fear, but as a “reason”, which is not a cause or catalyst. The force that they can’t avoid is that of the analogy once they choose objects as a framework. As I said Witt deals with these terms in the passage on p.15, quoted above by @Paine.

@Paine

Quoting Ludwig V

What I'm fishing for is a distinction between what explanations we can expect from philosophy and what belongs to a different, less intellectual, mode of explanation.

And don't we see here the possibility of the characterization and placement of philosophy (reason) in relation to “emotion” as mentioned here? And if we/philosophy is to decide why the skeptic does what he does, isn’t that philosophical? it is, categorically, looking for a “reason” (see above), must it be a certain form of “rationale” to be intellectually, logically valid? Can we not say/hypothesize that Descartes is "worried" by his being wrong? and ask why he pictures it as sleep? what it is that he wants in answering that worry the way he does?

Quoting Ludwig V

One distinction I'm looking at is precisely that difference between something we can attribute to anyone who holds that view and something that may vary from one person to another

Me too, as I also mention to @Joshs, but the categorization that it is personal (individual or has to do with the two people arguing) is one of the imposed rationale for forcibly distinguishing “reason” (as defined/defended) from what is lumped together as “emotion” (left to persuasion). Also the charge that this is meant to point out a “flaw” as if one were judging philosophy only by “good” or “bad”, and not anything specific, rigorous, detailed, in-depth, accountable, intelligible.

Quoting Ludwig V

What we want (!) is a way to dismiss, set aside, reject the doctrine - isn't it?

I would think we would agree that part of Witt's method or aim here is to get at why in a way that is still analytical/logical (I think I will claim that that is the start and goal of the PI). Circling back, I think we may have to admit that in showing other options/logic, there is no force to Witt's "argument", particularly given the skeptic's "opinion", which I might tentatively posit as the force of conviction (though not of a "belief", but perhaps a decision or choice they nevertheless hold strongly), though I would take this up later after a think.

And my response here is meant as elucidation of the historical mistake I am pointing out and not by way of accusation or that I see us as in argument.

@Joshs @Paine @Ludwig V

Although we may have responses yet to Sec 18, and I do see the subsequent conversations as relevant and interesting and necessary, particularly the discussion of "why" (and "opinion") in Sec 17--which appears to be our driving theme here and which more than likely will continue in the next sections (which may shed some light)--I’m afraid I've hoisted myself on my own petard (in digressing into "reason v. emotion", though that may be relevant in concluding--lo! the hypocrisy), so I'm going to pause in responding to get through the last couple parts. Not to suppress discussion but just to explain I'll be stepping out for the time being. Again, anyone else is free to lead the charge as it may take me some time.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I am talking about the interests/desires (and feelings, as reasons) of the skeptic, but that is also a possibility in every one of us (including Witt), and so the “situation” is our situation as humans (the human condition).

I understand that you are concentrating on your writing now so I will wait as long as you like to respond or not, but I am compelled to say this now:

I don't follow your framing of Wittgenstein primarily intending to quell the qualms of the skeptic. What W is putting forth is provocative and has pissed a lot of people off.

The primary reason W puts forth for the "mistakes" he has outlined is the "craving for generality." He plasters the wall with Plato as the poster child for this desire. That is not to say that he "refutes" Plato.

The 'human condition' is the only game in town but is difficult to locate. As Wittgenstein has said elsewhere, he does not want to make that easier for anyone.

Reply to Antony Nickles

Quoting Antony Nickles

the skeptic is “cramped” by the forced analogy (the two senses), from which he creates the picture, but this doesn’t explain why first choose “objects” to analogize, which is the matter at hand. And you’ve given no textual evidence for putting things back to front as you have done—I need more to see the logic.

While Wittgenstein does use "wants" and "dissatisfaction," the therapeutic effect of his philosophy, the complete dissolution of the problem once the grammar is clarified, shows that the confusion is linguistic. If the cause were a deep-seated fear, simply showing the proper use of 'know' wouldn't eliminate the fear. It eliminates the problem, thus proving the problem was linguistic, not psychological.
It is as the sense-making of grammatical use that meaning shows up as how things matter to us. This mattering can be described as a logic of sense or a logic of affect-feeling-emotion. What is important is that we not try to fix such terms categorically. Anything that we might be tempted to place within the category of ‘affect’ , such as mood, feeling, desire, emotion or motive, has its existence only in how it works within the mattering of word use.

Shared interests and desires that give rise to reasons are the raw material of sense-making, and it is when the grammar becomes misleading that our interests become the fuel for illusion and intellectual disquiet. For instance, it’s not the interest in securing certainty which produces illusion, it’s when their interest is capture by a misleading picture that ‘desire for certainty ‘ miscarries.

Quoting Joshs

If the cause were a deep-seated fear, simply showing the proper use of 'know' wouldn't eliminate the fear. It eliminates the problem, thus proving the problem was linguistic, not psychological.

This is confusing. I understand why someone would not be satisfied by a correction of speech.

In the context of this book, however, the problems of the "linguistic" are taken to be separate and logically prior to the problems of psychology.

That seems to me to be a push against explanation. The different bits keep getting further apart.

Alright $#$%!!, I am a hypocrite (apologies again to @Paine); just one more (hit off the pipe) and then back to the grindstone (and by that I mean the book, not my job; obviously).

Quoting Ludwig V

"Chose" may not be quite the right word in some cases.

Touche. "Chose" is a mis-categorization. I think I'm only pointing out that there is something leading up to an "object" being the analogy (that something comes before that, as I argue to @Joshs above)

Quoting Ludwig V

I've come to the conclusion that the solipsist has a point

I agree that there is something there as well, and maybe even addressed here, but if not, definitely in the PI; here I take it as obvious he is continuing to try to learn about/investigate the skeptic. I would claim the aim is this "why?" rather than refuting or dismissing the skeptic, or not just those, but at least not before.

Quoting Ludwig V

But this finding out is not the kind of finding out you are doing when you ask people why they are adopting a philosophical position. In philosophy, we are looking for arguments, not expressions of personal preference.

But isn't this: "looking for arguments" connected/related to the skeptic turning a "muddle" into a "problem" (that they can "answer", perhaps with a certain knowledge)? and isn't this part of why "arguing" with the skeptic doesn't seem as if it would be effective? and why we are still searching for a fulcrum that changes their mind? It interests me to think of the skeptic's expressions as a "preference", as in a desire. And then: how "personal"? (not individual, but not a "position"--an "opinion"? @Paine).

Quoting Ludwig V

But I'm not sure that those mundane activities which we barely notice could not be picked out as experiences under some circumstances.

My descriptions (of thought and experience) are of course not in the text nor meant "empirically", but merely--in attempting Witt's method--as simplified examples of another version/usage (of experience) to proffer a logic/grammar that would be another option to the skeptic's "logic" (but not "the" logic), i.e., this discussion of "experience" is not to "argue" with the skeptic (or anyone) in order to decide on the "right" version--as if only one, requiring that we resolve all versions with each other.

Accordingly, in this example of "experience", I am admittedly pointing out perhaps only one among other senses or usages (than the skeptic's) that would have other logic. I brought up this example to highlight (make explicit) what I see as what follows from the skeptic's picture of experience as a mental mechanism; that it is: ever-present, and that it is: of everything.

Your point is well taken that there is a sense of "experiencing" as awareness of, or attention to, something (even that awareness and attention are regular mental processes). Maybe it’s: being alive to the little things, even, just nothing (no "thing"?) But even that version would I think accede that one can't be mindful/attentive/aware all the time (which @T Clark might speak to) which I take is the logic that follows from the skeptic's picture of experience as a "mental mechanism".

So to say there is a logic to experience that is outside the norm of occurrences (like an uneventful shopping trip), might be just another version/sense/usage of "experience" that doesn't preclude (contradict/relate to) the logic that experience is an event (not always there, as we appear to agree on). And we might even agree that if you are "experiencing" the mundane/an everyday occurrence, you are doing so "outside" of a norm (of being distracted), maybe even being outside your (normal) self (the ego).

So maybe mine is just another usage on the same branch, just: coming from the "external" ("forced" upon us, as we might put it); an "experience" as a thing in response to which we would say "Well! that was quite an experience!". And that is not to say that it cannot still depend on the individual (their "internal"; their “experience” as their history, exposure, etc.); for instance: a white person may judge an event of racism as an "experience", to which a person of color might say "Welcome to my world [of everyday occurrences that I don't even notice anymore (or try to suppress)]".

And maybe this is what the (start of the) work philosophy can do looks like, when back on rough ground.

(**Digression: I take fighting over exactly what is, or how we justify, rule following or pointing or experience (Witt will talk about this as what leads to it being seen as a "scientific" disagreement) to be the single biggest misunderstanding of Witt that stops people from even getting started.

I think we would all agree at this point that these are examples to show there are alternatives to the skeptic's singular, forced "logic". They are meant to be premises so simple that everyone would agree to them, but in the sense of "accept" them as (see them as): having a logic at all. But even getting to where we have described criteria (for one usage in a particular situation) that we accept as "logical", is not the "conclusion", say, the "right" logic in response to the skeptic's "wrong" one, and, particularly, not to satisfy what the skeptic wants (still an open question). I take Witt's investigation (further than Austin's--here I seek confirmation @Banno) to become aware of the unexamined (by reflection, explication) in order to know/see one's self (here, one's skeptic), etc., to be able, finally, to ask: why am I (the skeptic) doing this? and then: what do we really, freely, want? (what is my "real need"?) (PI #108) -- a discussion for later I think.)

@Joshs @Paine @Ludwig V

Section 19 - p. 66-69 uhhhh… what?

Reply to Antony Nickles
@Joshs, @Paine,

I agree with you. But I have some ideas about how to approach this.

The bad news is that I shall be busy today, so I won't be able to get to it until this evening.

That means for about 12 hours.

@Joshs @Paine @Ludwig V

Section 18B - “use” (oh boy, here we go…) p.65 (I can’t face 66-69 yet.)

One of the I think most misunderstood technical terms that Witt—ahem—uses. In the paragraph starting “The meaning of a phrase…”(p.65), we can all probably (hopefully) agree at this point that “The meaning is not a mental accompaniment to the expression”, mirrored off our relation to an object. More specifically, above on that page, not a thing that has “information” that is “what I really mean”. As if “I mean something” was that I make meaning happen—control its implications, connotation, repercussions, etc.

But “the meaning of a phrase for us is characterized by the use we make of it.” (Timeout. I believe a distinction is necessary between the sense of “use” here as “a purpose for or way in which something can be used” (Oxford-1) which is “use” as a noun, as "the herb has various culinary uses" or “habitual or customary usages” Webster’s 6(a)1, and the—I would say more common, and ironically philosophically more popular—sense of “use”, as a verb, where I would employ (use) words, like tools to make what I want**.)

Now above, when he says “the use we make of it”, it might seem like the second version (the verb), because I am making something, maybe the meaning? But “make of” is in the sense of an assessment, like “what ya make of this?” and the “we” is anyone, not (just) the speaker of the phrase. We are assessing the custom, or way, or purpose of this phrase, in this situation, to “show me that there is a use for the [phrase] in the kind of calculus…”. As above, there is a calculus in/of the culinary world, which allows for various uses of herbs “in practice” (p.69), and these are its logic or grammar—the distinctions, criteria, etc.—which are “characterized” by the usage (described by, reflected in). These are also interchangeably termed “senses” by him, like options, possibilities. Of course, we may put what herbs we like in the pot, however, given there is a customary logic to these matters, there will be a discussion to be had (that can be had, re: outliers). And in evaluating the use, he is looking for the grammar, the logic, as to whether, e.g., there are any distinctions pointed out that are possible in this practice/situation, or other criteria met, o,r in contrast, that the phrase does not hit any of those marks and is just spinning its wheels, simply wanting and appearing to do something, but based only on what I want it to be.

**Now, of course, I can choose what I say, but, even then, I do not control meaning, the logic of a usage, what matters in a circumstance or practice. Unfortunately, this might start another confusion, with “intend”, as if intention were an every-present causal mechanism, when it is a logic, and only at times, for example: as a hope (I’m trying to) or an excuse (I was trying to), but “my intention” is not an equivalent of the skeptic’s “my meaning”.

Reply to Antony Nickles
The role of "use" is underlined in the previous paragraph beginning where W is playing a role with: "Then I can still express my solipsism by saying,"

Quoting BB, page 65 (or 97 internet edition)

I could also express my claim by saying: “I am the vessel of life”; but mark, it is essential that everyone to whom I say this should be unable to understand me. It is essential that the other should not be able to understand “what I really mean”, though in practice he might do what I wish by conceding to me an exceptional position in his notation. But I wish it to be logically impossible that he should understand me, that is to say, it should be meaningless, not false, to say that he understands me. Thus my expression is one of the many which is used on various occasions by philosophers and supposed to convey something to the person who says it, though essentially incapable of conveying anything to anyone else

The intention to not be understood is an interesting charge to make against the solipsist and other philosophers. This shows that what troubles the solipsist is a condition other thinkers share. This encounter with a more general problem leads to a more general response:

Quoting ibid. page 65 (or 98 internet edition)

The meaning of a phrase for us is characterised by the use we make of it. The meaning is not a mental accompaniment to the expression. Therefore the phrase “I think I mean something by it”, or “I’m sure I mean something by it”, which we so often hear in philosophical discussions to justify the use of an expression is for us no justification at all. We ask: “What do you mean?”, i.e., “How do you use this expression?”

Reply to Ludwig V Note the "us" and "We" being used here.

@Ludwig V @Joshs

Quoting Paine

Note the "us" and "We" being used here.

This is a good distinction to point out. The "us" and "we" being both in contrast to the skeptic ("them"), but also plural, which, as @Paine says below, logically implies something shared and not individual, for example, more than individual reasons with implications only in a disagreement between you and I.

Witt is not explaining how language is used by individuals—claiming, say, that we are always “using” language. Alternatively, we are not, as part of normal conversation, deliberately choosing between the senses of an expression, nor considering their criteria, even when speaking deliberately (choosing what to say) nor even when figuring out what each other (you and I) mean. Those are simply his philosophical methods to see what usage, and what according logic, we and the skeptic make of a phrase.

Now Witt does slip in and out of the sense of “we” as: the philosophers investigating these issues, and “we” for: everyone, as when he frequently claims “when we say…”, for evidence of the grammar of a case. “All this will become clearer if we [philosophers] consider what it is that really happens when we [anyone] say a thing and mean what we say.--Let us ask ourselves: If we say to someone…” (p.34) Everyone can attest to how (by what measures) anyone (our culture) would ordinarily judge that someone successfully “meant what they said”, such as they were genuine, moved, serious, etc.

Quoting Paine

The intention to not be understood is an interesting charge to make against the solipsist and other philosophers. This shows that what troubles the solipsist [has] is a condition other thinkers share. This encounter with a more general problem leads to a more general response:

Calling the trouble the skeptic gets into a "condition" is interesting because, in its sense as a situation, we would, grammatically, "respond". But the skeptic interprets their issue as if it were a “problem”, so they are logically driven to: an "answer" (see p. 6, 17, and below), a response in the form of knowledge, as information--certain, specific, empirical, etc.

(p.46):The very word "problem", one might say, is misapplied when used for our philosophical troubles. These difficulties, as long as they are seen as problems, are tantalizing, and appear insoluble.

That is just to say that trying to fight the skeptic as if their answer were not correct, and ours is, is to get in too close; to get sucked into their confusion. Showing examples of other senses (usages) for a phrase than the skeptic claims, is not in order to be right, but to make a point by basically saying, “see?” to show the conditions which would allow the skeptic's phrase to try do what they want (to give it the necessary context, expectations, implications, logic, etc.)

**Consider the fact that we are also involving our shared "interests" (our shared culture), our "shared judgments" (thus our shared "ordinary" criteria, as in not the skeptic's singular criteria), and our shared practices (thus the "logic" of human history). This commonality is why anyone could offer what the meaning (import) is of what we say (a phrase) in a particular situation (My gun misfires and I shoot your cow--how (in what way) is this a mistake and not an accident?).

And also, this is philosophers doing philosophy addressing philosophical issues--but is there no way in which Witt’s response (or at least the fallout, the rubble of the house of cards) is relevant to everyone? is the “why” of the skeptic relegated to an ivory tower?

Quoting Paine

The "occult" is what Wittgenstein is militating against.

Yes. It was/is a common complaint by analytic philosophers against their opponents. They were often identifying a problem with some philosophical idea. But there's a strong rhetorical component to this use - no doubt inherited from the 18th century empiricists. The actual content is something like "empty". I prefer not to use it.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Showing examples of other senses (usages) for a phrase than the skeptic claims, is not in order to be right, but to make a point by basically saying, “see?” to show the conditions which would allow the skeptic's phrase to do what they want (to give it the necessary context, expectations, implications, logic, etc.)

Yes. That's relieving the cramp. Though we need to think of someone suffering from cramp who doesn't want to be released from it. The cramp is our diagnosis. But movement can become restricted because it is never used. Perhaps that's better.

Quoting Paine

The intention to not be understood is an interesting charge to make against the solipsist and other philosophers. This shows that what troubles the solipsist is a condition other thinkers share. This encounter with a more general problem leads to a more general response:

I think that's a misunderstanding. The requirement that the solipsist's claim cannot be understood by anyone else follows from the solipsist's doctrine. The solipsist misunderstands their own doctrine if they do not understand that it is logically impossible for anyone else to understand it. IMO.

p. 65:I want to play chess, and a man gives the white king a paper crown, leaving the use of the piece unaltered, but telling me that the crown has a meaning to him in the game, which he can't express by rules. I say: "as long as it doesn't alter the use of the piece, it hasn't what I call a meaning".

This is an argument. But it depends on a restricting the interpretation of both "use" and "meaning" to what is laid down and permitted by the rules. Other kinds of significance are excluded. Perhaps the paper crown distracts opponents, for example.

[quote"p. 65"]Think of the law of identity, "a = a", and of how we sometimes try hard to get hold of its sense, to visualize it, by looking at an object and repeating to ourselves such a sentence as "This tree is the same thing as this tree". The gestures and images by which I apparently give this sentence sense are very similar to those which I use in the case of "Only this is really seen".[/quote]
I love this. I've never been able to work out what "a=a" means. Nor does it help me to tell me that this is a "limiting case" of identity. What does that mean. It may be necessary in logic, but I don't think it helps at all in philosophy.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Note the "us" and "We" being used here.
— Paine
This is a good distinction to point out.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Now Witt does slip in and out of the sense of “we” as: the philosophers investigating these issues, and “we” for: everyone,

It is interesting, though, that this use is often intended to identify some ground common to all human beings. (Hume and Berkeley do the same thing with their appeals to universal agreement. It is odd, though, that their philosophical opponents clearly do not belong to that agreement; so, who are they? We, now, can see that what they meant by "we" was "people like us". Not a particularly convincing reference group to establish what they are supposed to establish.) (I use "we" and "us" quite freely myself, because it seems to work.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But “the meaning of a phrase for us is characterized by the use we make of it.” .... which is “use” as a noun, .... , and the ..... sense of “use”, as a verb, where I would employ (use) words, like tools to make what I want**.)

Yes. I make a similar distinction, which may map on to yours. Mine has use in an "objective" sense as meaning something like the role of a sign as defined by the system in which it exists as against what I do with it. (The difference can be seen in the wonderful way that language allows us to misuse it, to stretch it, bend it, turn it round.)

Quoting ibid. page 9

The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.

Wittgenstein frequently refers to language as a calculus. I have a feeling that his paradigms here come from formal logic - propositional and predicate calculus.

p.65:One sometimes hears that such a phrase as "This is here", when while I say it I point to a part of my visual field, has a kind of primitive meaning to me, although it can't impart information to anybody else.

.. and, of course, if your paradigm of pointing is what a sign-post does, there is no way that you can point to a part of your visual field - or even the whole of it. So "pointing" here has been moved into another language game or practice. And we know what is meant, don't we?

Quoting Antony Nickles

what do we really, freely, want? (what is my "real need"?) (PI #108) -- a discussion for later I think.)

I think this is why W's talk of practices and ways of life needs to be more articulated before it becomes more than a gesture - a promise.

Quoting Joshs

Shared interests and desires that give rise to reasons are the raw material of sense-making,

Yes. But identifying what those are. There seem to be precious few of them. It's a bit like the concept of "ius gentium" that the Roman lawyers invented - the idea that any human society needs certain laws in order to function at all. (I'm not saying that's false - just that it is very difficult to cash out.)

Quoting Paine

The 'human condition' is the only game in town but is difficult to locate. As Wittgenstein has said elsewhere, he does not want to make that easier for anyone.

That's another good concept for focusing what W seems to be getting at.

Quoting Ludwig V

I think that's a misunderstanding. The requirement that the solipsist's claim cannot be understood by anyone else follows from the solipsist's doctrine. The solipsist misunderstands their own doctrine if they do not understand that it is logically impossible for anyone else to understand it. IMO.

The bit I quoted leaves out where the solipsist just moments before was attempting to speak meaningfully of his condition. It is the conflict of motives that seems to make W impatient rather than him judging all who explain themselves a certain way to be deliberately obscure.

The use of "occult" is pejorative. In view of the consistency with which Wittgenstein employs the term, a replacement would have to name what is thinking that "signs co-exist with their objects."

Reply to Antony Nickles
By pointing out when W speaks of "us" versus "them" in the above quotes, I did not mean to say he is always doing that. On the contrary, he explicitly draws such a line in the sand only in specific places over specific practices. The constant appeal to common sense and ordinary language gives the background of how perplexity appears. When W draws the line in the sand, it is over the method of philosophy. The scrum is happening on a shared field of discourse.

I read through the OP from the beginning last night and see that I have challenged your view of "the skeptic" many times. I will stop arguing in that vein. I will only point out that the opposition regarding the use of signs in this book's discussion of the real versus the empirical is applied to Augustine just as heartily in the Philosophical Investigations.

Reply to Ludwig V
Quoting Ludwig V

Showing examples of other senses (usages) for a phrase than the skeptic claims, is not in order to be right, but to make a point by basically saying, “see?” to show the conditions which would allow the skeptic's phrase to do what they want (to give it the necessary context, expectations, implications, logic, etc.)
— Antony Nickles
Yes. That's relieving the cramp. Though we need to think of someone suffering from cramp who doesn't want to be released from it. The cramp is our diagnosis. But movement can become restricted because it is never used. Perhaps that's better.

This gets to the question of the relation between feeling-affect-desire and the ‘intellectual’ for Wittgenstein. There are a wide variety of interpretations to choose from among Wittgenstein scholars. My preference is to claim that the desire to stay on the path of illusion is not knowingly to do so. Desire only makes sense the way that true and false makes sense , within a form of life that gives both a desire and the criterion of truth their intelligibility. If what can be intelligibly desired takes place within a form of life that rests on a grammatical illusion, it is not as though desire first recognizes the illusion and then decides to ignore this knowledge. Rather , the desire can’t make it intelligible in the first place. It is not a s though desire knows the illusion as illusion and then decides to stay with the illusion, as though desire has a choice.

The philosophical problem is not a moral failing or an act of bad faith where the skeptic willfully chooses illusion over truth. Instead, the deep-seated desire for certainty or for a complete explanation is captured by a misleading grammatical picture.

Quoting Paine

a replacement would have to name what is thinking that "signs co-exist with their objects."

I think you are missing Wittgenstein's point. Of course signs co-exist with their objects. The image of the man with a shovel is ahead of the roadworks and the man with the shovel is at the roadworks. The board and arrow pointing straight ahead are deliberately place well before you get to your destination. There's nothing occult going on there.

Quoting BB, page 9

If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by seeing some sort of outward object, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead?

That's quite different, isn't it? It "inserts" ("posits", if you want to be polite) an object between the sign and what it is a sign of. Wittgenstein's point is that the posited/inserted object doesn't do anything.

The classic arguments are these:-

Locke, Essay, II, 23, xxix:From whence it seems probable to me, that the simple ideas we receive from sensation and reflection are the boundaries of our thoughts; beyond which the mind, whatever efforts it would make, is not able to advance one jot; nor can it make any discoveries, when it would pry into the nature and hidden causes of those ideas.

Berkeley, Principles, 102:One great inducement to our pronouncing ourselves ignorant of the nature of things is the current opinion that everything includes within itself the cause of its properties; or that there is in each object an inward essence which is the source whence its discernible qualities flow, and whereon they depend. Some have pretended to account for appearances by occult qualities, but of late they are mostly resolved into mechanical causes, to wit, the figure, motion, weight, and suchlike qualities, of insensible particles;

Quoting Joshs

that the desire to stay on the path of illusion is not knowingly to do so.

That's true. Though we can cling on to ideas because we want them to be true and/or can't bear the truth.

Quoting Joshs

It is not as though desire knows the illusion as illusion and then decides to stay with the illusion, as though desire has a choice.

Well, yes. To know the illusion for what it is is already to be cured.

I keep hammering on about this because it seems to me that Wittgenstein under-rates the difficulty and complexity of the task, and I worry that he does not seem to allow me to come to realize that what I thought was an illusion, isn't. Or, to put it another way, he doesn't seem to recognize the give and take that you can sometimes find in philosophical argument, where both sides have allowed their own view to be at stake in the argument. Not always, of course.

There are, however, some awkward phenomena. Akrasia (weakness of will) is one, and another is the phenomenon of protesting too much - where vehement denial of a truth betrays the denier's uneasy awareness the they are wrong.

Quoting Ludwig V

Of course signs co-exist with their objects.

That works for highway signs but does not explain why Wittgenstein calls it a mistake (without qualification) when reflecting upon learning language and the experience of meaning.

Reply to Ludwig V
Quoting Ludwig V

There are, however, some awkward phenomena. Akrasia (weakness of will) is one, and another is the phenomenon of protesting too much - where vehement denial of a truth betrays the denier's uneasy awareness the they are wrong.

Psychologist George Kelly defined hostility as “the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favor of a type of social prediction which has already proved itself a failure.” Put simply, in hostility, events turn out differently than one had expected, and instead of revising one’s thinking, one tries to ‘force a round peg into a square hole.’

Quoting Ludwig V

it depends on restricting the interpretation of both "use" and "meaning" to what is laid down and permitted by the rules. Other kinds of significance are excluded. Perhaps the paper crown distracts opponents, for example.

I think we might say that “use”, in terms of that concept, is not interpreted, but maybe this is just to say: what do we consider (interpret) as a use here? Is this a use, i.e., is this move appropriate here? How do we decide, i.e., on what criteria/logic? Does it mean anything here, i.e., does it matter or make a difference?

Though there might be an interpretation (disagreement) of what is the form of logic of the usage of pieces in the game of chess, as we could point out that the usage of the pawn can be logically discussed, not just as rules, but in terms of the piece’s part in the game’s larger strategy (not just what is allowed and restricted).

But, again, the whole thing is just an example (a logical parable), which was chosen (and limited and simplified) to point out, not that a paper hat on a chess piece is entirely meaningless, or even that it has no way to have an effect on the situation, but that it does not matter within the logic (of rules) for a pawn in its usage in the calculus of chess. The hat has no usage (sense) because it has no leverage or importance or criteria for judgment of when it would, related to the piece, in its part in chess.

Quoting Ludwig V

we need to think of someone suffering from cramp who doesn't want to be released from it.

Their intransigence is I believe linked to the heart of many facets we are exploring. I wanted to follow up on the last section on use, but I’m going to hold off responding to this and the rest until I can get through 70-73 if you can take a crack at 65-69.

Quoting Paine

the opposition regarding the use of signs in this book's discussion of the real versus the empirical is applied to Augustine just as heartily in the Philosophical Investigations.

Your point that all philosophers, in some way or other, do, or may, not want to be understood is well taken. Cavell claims the realist, idealist, and solipsist are all responding to skepticism, just in different ways. But I’ll have to circle back.

Quoting Paine

I have challenged your view of "the skeptic" many times.

Having read too much Cavell, I am using it very loosely as a catch-all, so I wouldn’t die on that hill.

Quoting Paine

That works for highway signs but does not explain why Wittgenstein calls it a mistake (without qualification) when reflecting upon learning language and the experience of meaning.

There are two mistakes here. One is thinking that because those signs fit the model of "signifier" and "signified", the same model has to fit all signs. The other is thinking that there is some problem with the examples I gave which requires positing something between the two which enables the relationship to function - i.e. "meaning", or an "image". It is the way we behave around signs and signifiers that enables the relationship to function. Nothing else is needed. "There must be a meaning as well as the sign and the signifier" is an illusion.

p. 9:But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use.
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we just described of replacing this mental image by seeing some sort of outward object, e.g. a painted or modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? – In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceases to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)

The talk of "life" and "death" is a bit peculiar. But, so far as I can see, W is trying to express the experience of meaning. To understand this, compare a word - a street name, perhaps - written in our "roman" script and the same name written in, say, Greek script. If you can't read Greek, the latter is dead (meaningless). But you know the meaning of the roman version immediately and without any thought. You experience it differently.
Does that help?

Quoting Paine

the opposition regarding the use of signs in this book's discussion of the real versus the empirical is applied to Augustine just as heartily in the Philosophical Investigations.

Certainly, it is. But he works very hard at explaining exactly what it is that he is opposed to - or so it seems to me.

p. 83:Reflections such as the preceding will show us the infinite variety of the functions of words in propositions, and it is curious to compare what we see in our examples with the simple and rigid rules which logicians give for the construction of propositions. If we group words together according to the similarity of their functions, thus distinguishing parts of speech, it is easy to see that many different ways of classification can be adopted. We could indeed easily imagine a reason for not classing the word "one" together with "two", "three", etc., as follows:

Quoting Joshs

Put simply, in hostility, events turn out differently than one had expected, and instead of revising one’s thinking, one tries to ‘force a round peg into a square hole.’

Well yes. It certainly describes the cases I was thinking of. (Putin in Ukraine) But I don't think it applies to all cases of hostility. (Zelensky in Ukraine?)

Quoting Antony Nickles

How do we decide, i.e., on what criteria/logic?

Well, when we have a problem, we have to speak of criteria and logic. But most of the time, we don't articulate our criteria or our logic - we just decide and move on. This relates to his discussion of rules and rule-following.

Quoting Antony Nickles

not just as rules, but in terms of the piece’s part in the game’s larger strategy (not just what is allowed and restricted).

Yes. All I'm saying is that W is assuming the narrower, "strict" context. On the other hand, I think his more relaxed (flexible?) treatment of "grammatical" vs "empirical" later seems like an acknowledgment of the fact that the rules are not necessarily all developed in advance of the game being played. There's no problem about introducing a new rule to ensure that that the game is fair or to modulate play so that it remains interesting to spectators.

Quoting Antony Nickles

The hat has no usage (sense) because it has no leverage or importance or criteria for judgment of when it would, related to the piece, in its part in chess.

Yes. That's certainly the case that W has in mind, and it illustrates how he is thinking about philosophy. I'm just picking at the edges, really. At the back of my mind, however, I'm a little uncertain that, in the case of some philosophical paper hats, there might be a case of recognizing a variant of the game in which it does have a role. We might, or might not, want to play that game - or we might think that the resulting game is unplayable.

Quoting Antony Nickles

if you can take a crack at 65-69.

OK. That'll keep me out of mischief for a while!
I'll stop at "Philosophers say it as a philosophical opinion or conviction that there are sense data." which in my copy is the beginning of p. 70.

@Paine

Quoting Ludwig V

The talk of "life" and "death" is a bit peculiar.

p. 9:Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? …the mental image… [does not] impart any life to the sentence at all.

Still working on the finale, but procrastinating.

The mental image does not impart life to the sign, but the sign is still “dead”, i.e., basically meaningless (Witt will say, “without sense”). The skeptic wants an accompaniment to handle the meaning (ahead of time), and as an object of knowledge, which would leave us out of it. But even by and in itself, the sign is not alive (meaningful—forget definitions) because it has to come alive.

It is made meaningful in our consenting to, and thus reinvigorating, our shared interests (which are now in play and up for grabs/amendment), by and through the application of criteria (logic) of a certain sense in a certain situation (now). The application is also a living “expression” because it reflects on me (expresses me), as my response to, or within, a situation as an event, with specific circumstances, certain implications, and my ongoing responsibility to make intelligible, to answer for, how this is important (meaningful).

Quoting Ludwig V

All I'm saying is that W is assuming the narrower, "strict" context.

Yes, but he is not assuming this context; he is creating a simplified and limited context and logic on purpose (as he was with picking flowers or the builders) because the point is not about chess or rules (as logic is not always rules), but, maybe, that our ordinary criteria make a difference, where the skeptic’s criteria don’t (or something like I mention above). It is an example to make a logical point, not to claim the example is right or illustrative.

Quoting Ludwig V

in the case of some philosophical paper hats, there might be a case of recognizing a variant of the game in which it does have a role. We might, or might not, want to play that game - or we might think that the resulting game is unplayable.

Absolutely, as Witt does when he imagines these crazy situations (let’s try on this hat/circumstance).But also recognizing that our ordinary criteria might be missing something, not valuing it properly, not making a distinction it should. And also that, as I mention above, in each case of the application of a use (its criteria), we may step outside the criteria, be wrong, mistaken, inappropriate, humorous, or thought insane.

I had already picked my start were you suggested leaving off. Uhh.. good luck.

I believe we are in for an anticlimax so perhaps we can each write an overall analysis for discussion.

Section 19 pp. 65 - 69 More about solipsism, meaning as use, and pain

After the tricky discussion of "it is always I who see when anything is seen", (pp. 63, 64) in order to understand who it is that always sees whatever is seen, W modulates quite quickly through four variants to his conclusion (P. 65) that there are many expressions that seem to “convey” something to the speaker, but are “essentially incapable” of conveying anything to anyone else.

His diagnosis is that we wrongly compare our case with one in which the other person can't understand what we say because he lacks a certain information.” He reminds us that meaning is not a matter of what we experience, but of the use we are putting our words to. Two examples of meaninglessness – a varian of the word “bench” and a decoration for the white king in chess.

Now he considers whether people could accept the solipsist’s “Only I really see” and organize their language around this hinge, as we might call it now. It would be a new notation. But how could that change be justified? And now he returns to the self, to “I” starting with the distinction (p. 67) between “I” as object and “I“ as subject. He distinguishes the first by the fact that it requires identifying a particular person, where the second does not. In the latter case, there is no possibility of error and it is this that really interests him. He ends up distinguishing between “I” (sc. uttered by L.W.) and “L.W.” They do not, he says, mean the same thing. Not the orthodox conclusion, I think, But we are encouraged to think of them as different instruments, tools in the same language game.

There’s a brief excursus through the use of “I” when I say “I have a pain” and point to my own body, that use models “I” on “this person” or “he”. This is an interesting point, but not the main relevant issue, which returns with Compare the two cases: 1. "How do you know that he has pains?"--"Because I hear him moan". 2. "How do you know that you have pains?"--"Because I feel them".” (p. 68) We meet Mr. Nobody and revisit the shopping list with “five apples” and naming things. There’s a summary of “cases in which “I” is used as subject” (p. 69). Then he draws a line and moves on from mental activities to sense-data (p, 70).

Quoting Antony Nickles

I believe we are in for an anticlimax so perhaps we can each write an overall analysis for discussion.

Thanks for the replies. I can't respond until tomorrow, I'm afraid. I would like to wait (procrastinate) thinking about an overall analysis to see what emerges about these final pages. But looking back would be well worth while. W is very difficult to summarize or analyze.

@Paine @Ludwig V thanks for making it seem possible.

Quoting Ludwig V

But how could that change [a new notation of ‘Only I really see’] be justified?

I take him to be saying that we could agree to symbolically hold an “exceptional place” (p.66) for the solipsist, but also the antithesis, that they could be justified to be noted as exceptional, if judged so or known to be by us. But the solipsist really wants to be “inhabited” by the exceptional, in a way that “others can’t see”. Thus the creation of the object, that is a 'mind' or 'subject', is to make me inherently important and unique; as if within me would be “that which really lives”. I take Witt as ultimately claiming that there is nothing inherent in humans that makes us exceptional (from each other), unless we, say, make ourselves exceptional. Your basic human experience is not something you know that no one else can. If you do not live a life, you are not really alive; it is not a given.

He is also claiming there is no 'I' in my body. 'Mind' and 'subject' are not in the same framework but opposite of physical; they are logical. Logically I (or you) can identify and individuate my particular body from yours (others), which is the ‘object’ version. But in the subject usage, “To say, ‘I have pain’ is no more a statement about a particular person than moaning is.” (p.67) The statement does not “point to anything” (as the “object” sense does); the ‘subject’ version does not refer to a 'me', as if an object in me, say internally. What I am doing is not knowing my pain (which is not innately unique), not pointing to ‘me’, but, logically, pointing me out, in the sense of ‘Hey! It's me, I have [am in] pain’ (thus modeled “on the demonstrative”(p.68)—‘This person is the one in pain’.) It is not as if I “might as well only have raised [my] hand.” (emphasis added) In this case (and sense), that is exactly it. What I am doing in saying “I have pain” is (logically) trying to “attract attention”, get someone to respond to me. The error that is possible is not identifying someone else, rather than me, it’s that no one may recognize me as a person in pain. “I feel pain” is not a descriptor of “my pain”; this usage (logically) is meaningful because it is a cry (a moan) for help.

The point of all this I think is that we impose the logic of the object version, which identifies a particular body from others (‘Them; no, that one’) onto the subject version, which is not to identify a “bodiless” object. My feeling is not particular (as my body is among a crowd). I am not a “subject”, existing in and of myself alone, as object or cause, but in the sense: "about which something is stated" (Webster’s 4, grammatically). I put myself out there as the one who has (as in "is") feeling; to, in a sense, identify my self, announce myself as something. It is me that is asserting that I am: the one that sees and hears something of the world, tries to do an act, thinks what I say. I am standing up and differentiating myself, not by ownership of an object, but in the sense: 'It is I! the one who is owning (up to) what I am' (this is the sense of ‘have’).

Of course this sense of “subject” logically means that something can be judged (stated) about me by others. I am “subject to” scrutiny, description, accusation, etc., which is perhaps what the solipsist is trying to avoid, or at least is avoiding, in claiming or picturing the self as an object which would thus be unknowable. Thus the claim: “ 'But surely the word ‘I’ in ‘I have pains’ serves to distinguish me from other people...' " That your pain is not special also makes your feeling pain universal.

Reply to Antony Nickles
Your description does capture a number of ways the solipsist may be operating. The solipsist could be me, after all, and my M.O. could be one of those listed.

The peculiar way that W lays out the options does support a reading that an "imposition of logic" can make sense of what is happening. But W does not say it is the only sense possible. That recurrent theme is the soundtrack of this book if it were a movie.

thhhttht

Reply to Antony Nickles
That difference is interesting to me as well. Will ponder.

I think there are other ways to look at the table of possibilities being presented here. I will be more cautious about talking about it in the future.

Reply to Paine @Ludwig V

Quoting Paine

W does not say it is the only sense possible

Agreed; getting fixated on the topic of the example is a big problem, and of course at a certain point it gets to be a matter of what implications are of interest/focus, but I would hope I am not misreading the logical necessities of these "uses" of I. I found most interesting the difference between the logic of the self as object and subject, which I found echoed in the literal grammar.

Quoting Paine

The solipsist could be me, after all,

I think the idea is that we play each of these roles at different times; that it isn't a matter of knowledge as information. But then the question is of course, when do we play the skeptic? and, then, why?

Reply to Antony Nickles
I guess I agree with Kant that the "skeptic" is not opinion but an energy that keeps us alive.
Otherwise, thinking merely mirrors a reflecting of thinking.

Bbbb

Quoting Antony Nickles

It is an example to make a logical point, not to claim the example is right or illustrative.

Yes, that's true. Perhaps I'm overdoing it, but I find myself thinking that examples are not fully described and so the proposed response is not entirely determinate in view of the unspecified circumstances.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Absolutely, as Witt does when he imagines these crazy situations (let’s try on this hat/circumstance).

Trying things on. Not a bad idea.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But the solipsist really wants to be “inhabited” by the exceptional, in a way that “others can’t see”.

Lord of all he surveys. Or abandoned in a howling wilderness. Depends on your temperament, really.

Quoting Antony Nickles

What I am doing is not knowing my pain (which is not innately unique), not pointing to ‘me’, but, logically, pointing me out, in the sense of ‘Hey! It's me, I have [am in] pain’ (thus modeled “on the demonstrative”(p.68)—‘This person is the one in pain’.)

Holding up one's hand. Calling out "here!". Sending out distress signals. Drawing attention to myself. In a way, it's the opposite of referring to something. I think there's a case, though, to think of uttering "I am in pain" as rather different from expressions - just because it fits alongside "You are in pain" or "She is in pain". I am thinking of myself in a different way, putting myself in the shoes of other people, in something of the way that one might say of oneself "this person is in pain" or "The driver of the car is in pain".

Quoting Paine

But W does not say it is the only sense possible. That recurrent theme is the soundtrack of this book if it were a movie.

As he says in the preface to the PI, he does not save his readers the trouble of thinking for themselves. But it's a tricky balance, because I think, along with most people, that he does expect his readers to draw certain conclusions. It's a bit like giving someone a book about the wild west in order to discourage them from emigrating there. But we do know that he gave up on the TLP in 1929, and it seems unlikely that he could have hung on to the solipsism much beyond that.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I think the idea is that we play each of these roles at different times; that it isn't a matter of knowledge as information. But then the question is of course, when do we play the skeptic? and, then, why?

It may be a question of tactics or a question of the circumstances one is in.

Quoting Paine

I guess I agree with Kant that the "skeptic" is not opinion but an energy that keeps us alive.
Otherwise, thinking merely mirrors a reflecting of thinking.

I hadn't thought of it like that. On the other hand, once scepticism has become a dogma, it smothers everything in its path. It's a balance.

Quoting Ludwig V

I hadn't thought of it like that. On the other hand, once scepticism has become a dogma, it smothers everything in its path. It's a balance.

As the Professor says:

Quoting CPR, B451

This method of watching or even occasioning a contest between assertions, not in order to decide it to the advantage of one party or the other, but to investigate whether the object of the dispute is not perhaps a mere mirage at which each would snatch in vain without being able to gain anything even if he met with no resistance - this procedure, I say, can be called the skeptical method. It is entirely different from skepticism, a principle of artful and scientific ignorance that undermines the foundations of all cognition, in order, if possible, to leave no reliability or certainty anywhere. For the skeptical method aims at certainty, seeking to discover the point of misunderstanding in disputes that are honestly intended and conducted with intelligence by both sides, in order to do as wise legislators do when from the embarrassment of judges in cases of litigation they draw instruction concerning that which is defective and imprecisely determined in their laws.

@Paine

Quoting Ludwig V

I find myself thinking that examples are not fully described and so the proposed response is not entirely determinate in view of the unspecified circumstances.

This is absolutely how it should be, and Witt does say that we can always layer on more complexity, and he himself regularly adds on or changes a situation or facts (tries on hats) to consider what it is about the context that matters (what criteria), and what is affected (or not) by the judgments that are made. But, of course, no situation is "fully" described, but it can be fun to play around with because we may be surprised what we learn, as I think you are doing in thinking beyond the sense of "They are in pain" as describing them (as Witt is using it), to the fact that we can feel another's pain (in our body Witt says), as "They are in (some serious) pain", in the sense of a recognition. I would say this is some of the (even if peripheral) benefit of Witt's method; Cavell talks about it as becoming aware of our commitments I think.

The most prevalent confusion I see is not seeing that this is a philosophical method, not an empirical/sociological argument. Now of course we do need to agree on the logic, i.e., the implications of what we say in this particular situation (as a judgment from the criteria that apply here), thus we could and should say things like: "We wouldn't say that", or "If we said that it wouldn't mean we'd have to...", or, as you mention as to context, "When we say that, it's only in a situation where...", or "We would first need to know... if we were going to say (judge whether)..."

But that is just the start, with the end being to see a further, philosophical, point (there is a reason for the example). It's not about how we follow rules, but the import of the example (basically: does the logic of this sense show us anything interesting). Other examples (different contexts) might be important to take into consideration. But sometimes we get stuck on the starting line, worrying over a tree and never getting to the forest (and Austin frankly seems to assume we'll understand when we get there).

One mistake I've seen is that two people are thinking of two different senses/usages, such as the different senses of "seeing", so we are basically talking apples and oranges. We are not fighting with the skeptic about a practice, because we are trying to differentiate two senses of a practice, not bring in every possible criteria (thus every context) from every sense--such as: being aware of, focusing on, identifying, assessing--as if to make one judgment about "what I see" (or how I make a mistake). This brings back the question of how we get any traction with the skeptic.

Quoting Ludwig V

I think, along with most people, that he does expect his readers to draw certain conclusions.

I think in answering that question with your thought: if the skeptic is (and we are) to draw a (any) conclusion, they are only going to do it by themselves, see it for themselves.

Quoting Antony Nickles

The most prevalent confusion I see is not seeing that this is a philosophical method, not an empirical/sociological argument.

Yes. But the way we frame the method, it looks very like an empirical/sociological argument. "We say.." "We wouldn't say..." Gellner got very hung up on this. The problem is that you have to buy in to certain ideas, ways of talking and thinking, if you want to have a debate with people - and that can look very like a clique.

Quoting Antony Nickles

This brings back the question of how we get any traction with the skeptic.

Well, you wouldn't expect to get traction with an unreasonable doubt, would you? It's curious how reason, which ought to encourage us to be open to new ideas, so often becomes a fortress built to preserve what we believe.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Cavell talks about it as becoming aware of our commitments I think.

I don't know him well enough to be sure about that. I think he hit the nail on the head when he insisted that we need to get behind philosophical doctrines - particularly the perennial ones like scepticism - in order to work out what the sceptic (in that case) needs. He seems to treat the doctrine as a symptom, rather than something that's important in its own right. You may have read too much, but I think I've read too little.

Quoting Paine

But W does not say it is the only sense possible. That recurrent theme is the soundtrack of this book if it were a movie.

Yes, For someone who is trying to map the limits of language, he does have a remarkably elastic idea of what the possibilities are.

Quoting Paine

As the Professor says:

Yes. There are times when he comes over as, perhaps, a bit verbose, but perfectly capable of hitting a nail smack on the head.

Reply to Paine

Great quote; boring ol’ Kant can zing ya. "This method… to investigate whether the object of the dispute is not perhaps a mere mirage at which each would snatch in vain without being able to gain anything even if he met with no resistance"

And I think we could say that Witt is investigating skepticism's "object" as a mirage, and finds himself met with no resistance, at least nothing to push against, but it is an open question here whether and what there has been to gain. I would offer the contrasting logic of other senses has provided a way to step out of the ring and see the how and perhaps why of their framework. Obviously Kant’s skeptic, and Montaigne’s, and Hume’s at times, are a necessary part of reflecting on and examining the unspoken, assumed, implicit parts of our thinking and acts.

Reply to Antony Nickles
As promised before, I will leave off from challenging the role you have assigned the skeptic. But I will point out that Wittgenstein is unambiguously "stepping into the ring" when advancing a method that does not accept many of the premises Kant was working with:

Quoting BB, page 27

If we say thinking is essentially operating with signs, the first question you might ask is: “What are signs?” – Instead of giving any kind of general answer to this question, I shall propose to you to look closely at particular cases which we should call “operating with signs”. Let us look at a simple example of operating with words. I give someone the order: “fetch me six apples from the grocer”, and I will describe a way of making use of such an order: The words “six apples” are written on a bit of paper, the paper is handed to the grocer, the grocer compares the word “apple” with labels on different shelves. He finds it to agree with one of the labels, counts from 1 to the number written on the slip of paper, and for every number counted takes a fruit off the shelf and puts it in a bag. – And here you have one use of words. I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. These are processes of using signs simpler than those which usually occur in the use of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language-games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages. If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at such simple forms of language, the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions, which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive ones by gradually adding new forms.

Now what makes it difficult for us to take this line of investigation is our craving for generality.

This has Wittgenstein looking like the skeptic, dissolving the verities of his opponents. That he separates his method from the scientific at page 29 demonstrates that he intends to maintain the distance from the "psychological" he established in the Tractatus. To go forward with his method, he has chosen to walk on a narrow tightrope.

@Ludwig V @Joshs @Paine

Section 20 - Finale! (p. 70-74)

(P.70):Philosophers say it as a philosophical opinion or conviction that there are sense data.

This mention of “opinion” brings us back to where “The solipsist… is not stating an opinion; and that's why he is so sure of what he says.” (p.60) I take “opinion” here as what is thought of as a lesser version of knowledge; as “merely subjective, a matter of taste.” (p.48), as if it were unjustified, or isolated to just me.

But the solipsist “is so sure of what he says” that you can bring all the knowledge you have to bear, and tell them their position has no rationality, but they are “not stating an opinion”; they “say it as a…conviction”(p.60). But this is not as in a firmly held belief, i.e., that wants to be knowledge, but doesn’t quite meet the grade based on justification. It is in the sense of saying something with conviction. The solipsist is “so sure” about what they are saying because they have already been convinced, not of something (an opinion) that they are trying to justify to you, but by something, so they don’t care what you say.

Witt says they believe in something as possible but not here. I take the mirage to be created by the projection of the “mental” as imagined objects (by analogy), and I’ll grant to @Joshs that they are “gripped” by the picture, and are “inclined” (“tempted”) to say certain things as natural given their position once they have intellectually fortified it. But there is a why we have been chasing and I take it as the reason for picking (gravitating to) objects as the analogy.

Their conviction comes by a secret they see that we don’t, like they “had discovered… new elements of the structure of the world”. But what makes them excited are the possibilities of an object, which are generalizable, complete, concrete, verifiable, substantial, etc. They become so compelled because there is nothing in the way of them projecting/imagining what they want: knowledge; an answer, a justification, a foundation, something of which they can be certain. Any more beyond that I will let go as it is taken up in the PI, but listen to Descartes set his mind:

Descartes, 1st Med., p.1:It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis; and from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences.

Thank you to @Ludwig V for hanging in there throughout this reading, and to all the others for your input. I hope to review, summarize, and draw lessons from all we have worked on separately.

Reply to Paine

Agreed; he is not throwing in the towel. All I wanted to point out is that he is showing another option to compare to the skeptic’s, rather than engaging them within their framework.

Quoting Ludwig V

But the way we frame the method, it looks very like an empirical/sociological argument. "We say.." "We wouldn't say..." Gellner got very hung up on this. The problem is that you have to buy in to certain ideas, ways of talking and thinking, if you want to have a debate with people - and that can look very like a clique.

This would require much more explanation; Cavell takes this up better than I could a number of times in the essays in “Must We Mean What We Say”. It is not an empirical claim requiring observation and verification. They are claims about the logic (what it means) that “we” all can make as masters of our practices which he takes as reflected in the things anyone might say in doing them. This process in itself isn’t anything esoteric, but I understand seeing them as evidence in a debate about the implications and how that is philosophically relevant, would require some further explanation, agreement.

Reply to Antony Nickles Reply to Ludwig V

Quoting Antony Nickles

Witt says they believe in something as possible but not here. I take the mirage to be created by the projection of the “mental” as imagined objects (by analogy), and I’ll grant to Joshs that they are “gripped” by the picture, and are “inclined” to say certain things as natural given their position once they have intellectually fortified it. But there is a why we have been chasing and I take it as the reason for picking objects as the analogy.

Their conviction comes by a secret they see that we don’t, like they “had discovered… new elements of the structure of the world”. But what makes them excited are the possibilities of an object, which are generalizable, complete, concrete, verifiable, substantial, etc. They become so compelled because there is nothing in the way of them projecting/imagining what they want: knowledge; an answer, a justification, a foundation, something of which they can be certain

If we are to associate desire, seen as ‘what we want’, with the ‘why’ which motivates our reasons, then what we desire isnt the same thing as this ‘why’ Rather, like our reasons, what we desire gets its intelligibility from within the why. If we think of this ’why’ as an overarching system expressing how reasons hang together, what Wittgenstein later calls a form of life, and which he is perhaps depicting incipiently here as a firmly held conviction, or that which ties tighter a wide range of convictions ( ‘this is what we do’), then why we desire what we desire cannot be located within the space of reasons, but prior (not in a chronological sense) to them.

If knowledge, an answer, a justification, a foundation, is what we want, then the larger system of intelligiblity is what makes these concepts intelligible. If knowledge-as-picture and foundations are grammatical illusions, the source of our being captivated by this illusion is not to be found in what we want but as this larger ‘why’ organizing the sense of our motives and reasons. It then would make no sense to trace the genesis of something like a form of life to what we desire and what our reasons are. We don’t want to be a solipsist or skeptic; we want what we want, and how we want it, WITHIN these illusory grammars. Is this consistent with your thinking here?

Quoting Joshs

what we desire isnt the same thing as this ‘why’

At this point (as it is taken up in the PI) I’m putting a pin in asking the greater ramifications or other reasons why the properties of an object (call it “objectivity”) give the skeptic such conviction—as it were, one step back. I think Witt does not here address the skeptic as explicitly arguing for objectivity, but just examines their (subsequent) claims as a function of the picture created by the analogy, but which does ultimately allow him to speculate on their attitude (position) towards their claims (their “conviction”).

Quoting Joshs

why we desire what we desire cannot be located within the space of reasons,

Quoting Joshs

It then would make no sense to trace the genesis of something like a form of life to what we desire and what our reasons are

I think Witt would say the criteria we (society) uses to judge within a practice (form of life) reflect our culture’s interests (desires) in that practice; thus why the skeptic’s singular interest in criteria for objectivity appears empty when made to apply to a particular sense and specific case.

Quoting Antony Nickles

This process in itself isn’t anything esoteric, but I understand seeing them as evidence in a debate about the implications and how that is philosophically relevant, would require some further explanation, agreement.

Just to be clear. I'm not disagreeing with what you say about this. I'm observing that "what we would say.." needs explaining - and, to be honest - I'm not sure that I could convince a sceptic. So I'll look forward to your/Cavell's explanation. I suspect, in the end, it is a matter of being initiated into a practice, rather than a procedure that could be set out in an algorithm. Sometimes I even wonder whether, in the end, that's true of all philosophy.

Quoting Joshs

If we think of this ’why’ as an overarching system expressing how reasons hang together, what Wittgenstein later calls a form of life, and which he is perhaps depicting incipiently here as a firmly held conviction, or that which ties tighter a wide range of convictions ( ‘this is what we do’), then why we desire what we desire cannot be located within the space of reasons, but prior (not in a chronological sense) to them.

That's very true. But my puzzle is what Wittgenstein means by "our real need" - the hinge, whatever it is, around which thinking needs to arrange itself. The outline is clear enough - what we need (or what he needs) is a resolution of the cognitive dissonances from which philosophy springs - something that brings the peace that enables him to stop doing philosophy when he wants to. Toughly.. So, in principle, what he is talking about can be spotted or revealed within our general practices and desires.

Quoting Antony Nickles

The solipsist is “so sure” about what they are saying because they have already been convinced, not of something (an opinion) that they are trying to justify to you, but by something,

I think that Wittgenstein later discussion of "seeing an aspect" (interpretation) as in a puzzle picture. The solipsist is not wrong, exactly, but is gripped by an interpretation in a way that does not allow him to see another interpretation. (That can happen with a puzzle picture, too.) I've come to think that there is a point buried in solipsism, just not quite the point they see.

Descartes, 1st Med., p.1:I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation,

"Once for all" is just as much a mirage here as when politicians say it. What would he have done with his life if he had succeeded? What would the next generation of philosophers done? My philosophical life was bedevilled by the question of bringing philosophy to an end. I could never get anyone to take the problem seriously. As it turned out, they were right not to worry, wrong about the prospect of bringing philosophy to an end.

Quoting BB, page 27

shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. These are processes of using signs simpler than those which usually occur in the use of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language-games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages.

I see three different uses of language games here. One is their use as an analytical tool; the paradigm example is the builders at the beginning of PI. I think of these are invented rather than discovered - it could go either way. But the point of the exercise is to understand the logical structure of some concept or another. The second is their role in language-learning, working up from simple games to more complicated ones. How far the idea has taken off in empirical psychology, I could not say. But it seems a not implausible idea to me. The third is ambiguous between a historical story about how language develops over time and a structural analysis. But we are not led to expect just one history or one structure for all language, so it looks as if this concept marks a decisive rejection of the classical project of formal logic.

Quoting Paine

This has Wittgenstein looking like the skeptic, dissolving the verities of his opponents.

That's odd. The sceptic is sceptical about ordinary language or common sense, and is right in that philosophy (as the beginning of all science) cannot get off the ground unless it can put ordinary beliefs to the test. So philosophy develops some ideas, some of which spin off into separate projects and develop results which become, in their turn, common sense. Wittgenstein then turns the sceptical moment against those philosophical ideas that have not developed into sciences - and, perhaps, reassures us that there is no need to panic. Life goes on despite the sceptic's pressure. I guess the sceptic can retort to Wittgenstein that he should not be complacent. Philosophy will continue despite the pressure he is putting it under.
But perhaps we should regard W as special, not because he seeks to bring philosophy to an end, but because of the way in which he seeks to do so. How many philosophers have set out to deal with those annoying questions "once and for all"? None have succeeded.

@Ludwig V @Joshs @Paine

If there must be a further explanation that all of us can give examples of what anyone would say when X, and the logic of that, then I’ll leave it to someone else:

Must We Mean What We Say, Cavell p.3:There are statements which produce instances of what is said in a language ("We do say . . . but we don't say-"; "We ask whether . . . but we do not ask whether-"). (2) Sometimes these instances are accompanied by explications-statements which make explicit what is implied when we say what statements of the first type instance us as saying ("When we say . . . we imply (suggest, say)-": "We don't say ... unless we mean-")…. Speakers of English… do not, in general, need evidence for what is said in the language; they are the source of such evidence.

Id, p.9:We do not accept a question like "Did you do that voluntarily?" as appropriate about any and every action. If a person asks you whether you dress the way you do voluntarily, you will not understand him to be curious merely about your psychological processes (whether you’re wearing them "proceeds from free choice . . . "); …"He wouldn't say that unless he . . ." then in the described situation we will complete it with something like ". . . unless he thought that my way of dressing is peculiar."… the fact remains that he wouldn't (couldn't) say what he did without implying what he did: he MUST MEAN that my clothes are peculiar. I am less interested now in the "mean" than I am in the "must." (After all, there is bound to be some reason why a number of philosophers are tempted to call a relation logical; "must" is logical.)

Now of course this MUST does not convince the skeptic (these senses are not conflicting; this is not a fight with “common sense”), but it allows us the philosophical data/facts to compare and shed light on their “MUST” reasons.

Quoting Ludwig V

I've come to think that there is a point buried in solipsism, just not quite the point they see.

I take it as the topic under investigation in the PI—why do we/they want this logical purity?

PI, Witt. #101:We want to say that there can't be any vagueness in logic. The idea now absorbs us, that the ideal 'must' be found in reality. Meanwhile we do not as yet see how it occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this "must". We think it must be in reality; for we think we already see it there.

And, not to discuss it here, but he does mention “conviction” again.

Philosophical Investigations, Witt p.223 (my underlined emphasis):If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me…. "I cannot know what is going on in him" is above all a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not readily accessible.

Quoting Ludwig V

I see three different uses of language games here.

I take all three instances as used in the sense of the first. The teacher/student examples to work out the logic of our relation to others, not the social process of learning; and the histories are also imagined to point out our relationship to our culture, not as factual. Even the facts he brings up (say, about animals) are not factual “claims”.

Redo

Quoting Ludwig V

But my puzzle is what Wittgenstein means by "our real need"… So, in principle, what he is talking about can be spotted or revealed within our general practices and desires.

The skeptic has a singular need (for certainty). Witt’s method shows society’s various interests (“desires”) in our “general practices”, thus allowing the question whether our personal needs and desires align with (conform to) society’s (“real” in contrast). If the skeptic’s desperation is for a foundation, are we really simply providing a better “answer”?

Quoting Ludwig V

I think that Wittgenstein later discussion of "seeing an aspect" (interpretation) as in a puzzle picture

But seeing the other as a puzzle seems to again want the issue to have an “answer”. But I do agree that seeing an aspect is related but in the sense of an “attitude” (PI, p. 178) or relation to another, rather than an “opinion” as contrasted to the sense of “conviction”, as we are not of the opinion the other has a soul (id), because the logic of it is that we relate to them, we treat them, as if they have a soul (or not). Perhaps the “conviction” in the Blue Book is the skeptic’s “attitude”, as it is used in the PI, not as a feeling towards, but in its sense of taking a position (not as an intellectual stance, believing in it) but our orientation in relation to something, our inclination to act in a certain way, as the skeptic has their inclinations.

Reply to Antony Nickles
Is the writing, Must We Mean What We Say, where Cavell introduces the central role of the skeptic in his reading of Wittgenstein? Or is that asserted somewhere else? I am getting curious about the man behind the curtain here.

Quoting Antony Nickles

If there must be a further explanation that all of us can give examples of what anyone would say when X, and the logic of that, then I’ll leave it to someone else:

Is that to say it is a sort of last word for you even if it does not satisfy others?

Quoting Ludwig V

The second is their role in language-learning, working up from simple games to more complicated ones. How far the idea has taken off in empirical psychology, I could not say. But it seems a not implausible idea to me.

I think Josh has been trying to talk about that. There are psychological models that develop some of those ideas about learning language. But the sharp put down of the scientific method as a part of what W is doing is an unconformity with adjacent layers, to borrow a phrase from geology.

I remember Chomsky saying something like, if W stays away from science, then science will have to return the favor.

@Ludwig V

Quoting Paine

Is the writing, Must We Mean What We Say, where Cavell introduces the central role of the skeptic in his reading of Wittgenstein?

“Claim of Reason” really but that’s a tomb. “Availability of the Later Wittgenstein” I think. There’s the example of method and evaluation of the skeptic in “Knowing and Acknowledging”, which offers the “truth of skepticism”. These essays are in the book MWMWWSay.

Quoting Paine

Is that to say it is a sort of last word for you even if it does not satisfy others?

Well I’m not sure I could explain better, but I’m willing to add more words, though I also think we would want to tie it into the language of his method here in the Blue Book, as he appears to be developing it as he goes along.

That being said, from PI: “599. In philosophy we do not draw conclusions. "But it must be like this!" is not a philosophical proposition. Philosophy only states what everyone admits.”

Quoting Ludwig V

How many philosophers have set out to deal with those annoying questions "once and for all"? None have succeeded.

That is a fair question. The odd thing about Wittgenstein is that his "skeptical method" does not lead to a "once and for all" claim prominent in other theses. W's restrictions upon generalization do not permit saying things such as "causes are only a narrative provided by the imagination" or "I think therefore I am." He frequently describes what philosophy is like as an image of its limitation, but he keeps on doing his version of it anyway. Descartes takes one bath and surpasses the quandaries of past generations.

Whatever is the best way to read this work, what sticks out for me is when Wittgenstein complained that Socrates was being too complacent in his job of midwifery in the Theaetetus. Let's make finding out if an idea is alive harder....

Oops! Sorry!

Quoting Antony Nickles

If there must be a further explanation that all of us can give examples of what anyone would say when X, and the logic of that, then I’ll leave it to someone else:

On thinking about this, I've come to the conclusion that perhaps all we need to say is that the study of the logic of our language and the study of how people actually use their language are different practices. That means they have different criteria for truth and falsity, what counts as an explanation and how disagreements are resolved. In order to take part in the former, people need to be initiated into the practice, not only of the language, but of logic. In order to take part in the latter, they need to understand data collection,, linguistic explanations and so forth. If people get confused between the two, we just need to point out the differences in the contexts.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Now of course this MUST does not convince the skeptic (these senses are not conflicting; this is not a fight with “common sense”), but it allows us the philosophical data/facts to compare and shed light on their “MUST” reasons.

There's no problem about that. The meaning of "must" is specified by the context.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I take it as the topic under investigation in the PI—why do we/they want this logical purity?

Is there anything obviously wrong with the answer that we want/need to resolve the cognitive dissonance?

Quoting Antony Nickles

I take all three instances as used in the sense of the first.

Well, I wasn't denying that "language-game" has the same meaning in all three contexts, just that the three contexts are different - they are putting different questions to the phenomena.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But seeing the other as a puzzle seems to again want the issue to have an “answer”.

I didn't quite mean what you seem to think I meant. The puzzle picture is a puzzle if only if you insist that there must be an answer to the question whether the picture is "really" a picture of a duck or a picture of a rabbit. It is both and neither, depending how you choose to interpret "really". It can be described as an answer or a refusal of the question. Either way, there is no more to be said. Whether one chooses to identify something as a foundation here, to deny the applicability of the metaphor, I am not sure.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But I do agree that seeing an aspect is related but in the sense of an “attitude” (PI, p. 178) or relation to another, rather than an “opinion” as contrasted to the sense of “conviction”,

Quite so.

Quoting Paine

But the sharp put down of the scientific method as a part of what W is doing is an unconformity with adjacent layers, to borrow a phrase from geology.

He doesn't strike me as "anti-science" in an objectionable way, but as anti-"scientism" - the over-enthusiastic idea that a practice that works well where it is applicable - as it is designed to. Mind you, there is a problem that systemic, objective study of anything can be called science whatever its methodology and that's not unreasonable. What is unreasonable is defining science by its method and the calling the systematic and object study of anything a science. Is linguistics a science?

Quoting Paine

I remember Chomsky saying something like, if W stays away from science, then science will have to return the favor.

Well, one sharp put-down deserves another. But the map of academia is contested - what map isn't, particularly when it comes to border territory, where both sides have relevant expertise? We need both sides to recognize where territory is contested, not pretend that everything can be decisively settled.

Quoting Paine

The odd thing about Wittgenstein is that his "skeptical method" does not lead to a "once and for all" claim prominent in other theses.

I found myself unable to reply to coherently to this. I suspect it needs a book.

I don't know the best way to evaluate his work. I think he will have a place in the on-going pantheon of philosophy. The mainstream is not changing as much as he and many of his, and my generation hoped.

Reply to Ludwig V Reply to Paine

Quoting Ludwig V

I remember Chomsky saying something like, if W stays away from science, then science will have to return the favor.
— Paine
Well, one sharp put-down deserves another. But the map of academia is contested - what map isn't, particularly when it comes to border territory, where both sides have relevant expertise? We need both sides to recognize where territory is contested, not pretend that everything can be decisively settled.

Yes, I think Wittgenstein (as well as Husserl, Heidegger and others employing phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches) would respond that it is only by keeping a distance from and bracketing the facts of science that one can see the sense of those facts differently. The fact that science has stayed away from the kind of philosophical clarification that Witt’s work represents is the reason for what Evan Thompson calls its ‘blind spot’ concerning its relation to the Lifeworld that generates it and makes it intelligible.

Reply to Ludwig V
I agree that the different directions in academia do not seem to be gravitating towards a center.

I don't think Wittgenstein would have objected to Linguistics as Chomsky pursues it. I wonder if Wittgenstein talked about that somewhere.

Reply to Joshs
Mention of Thompson reminds me of the interest in "forms of life" amongst "cybernetic" epistemologists.
Here is a passage from G Bateson that touches upon the Blue Book:

Quoting Gregory Bateson, afterword to John Brockman

I have the use of the information that that which I see, the images, or that which I feel as pain, the prick of a pin, or the ache of a tired muscle—for these, too, are images created in their respective modes—that all this is neither objective truth nor is it all hallucination. There is a combining or marriage between an objectivity that is passive to the outside world and a creative subjectivity, neither pure solipsism nor its opposite.

Consider for a moment the phrase, the opposite of solipsism. In solipsism, you are ultimately isolated and alone, isolated by the premise "I make it all up." But at the other extreme, the opposite of solipsism, you would cease to exist, becoming nothing but a metaphoric feather blown by the winds of external "reality." (But in that region there are no metaphors!) Somewhere between these two is a region where you are partly blown by the winds of reality and partly an artist creating a composite out of the inner and outer events.

@Ludwig V

Quoting Paine

…what sticks out for me is when Wittgenstein complained that Socrates was being too complacent in his job of midwifery in the Theaetetus. Let's make finding out if an idea is alive harder....

First instance of man-listening. I just couldn’t with the off-the-wall examples. I mean I know it’s hard to create a situation that matches the logic of the desire of the skeptic, but another’s pain in my body? And what’s “me” and “A.N.”? I can’t tell if it had to be genius or the guy’s imagination was wack.

On a serious note, I think Witt is coming to conclusions, making judgments, and even casting dispersions all over his work. I think people get confused about Witt not claiming “theories” (bad choice of words on his part), which I believe is because a) he is not responding in “answer” to the skeptic’s problematizing; and b) it just relates to the method, in that “what we mean when we say…” is only relevant if it is something we all accept. If we can’t accept the premise of what the logical difference is between an accident and mistake, we won’t see what Austin is trying to tell us about intentional acts.

And as far as bringing philosophy to a close, I don’t think philosophy is relegated to just responding to radical skepticism. And now we can investigate assumptions and connotations, and we learn what the commitments and ramifications are of what we do, and whether we are messing it up by putting ourselves in the middle of it. Sounds like solid thinking when something comes up we aren’t sure how to deal with—when “right” or “ought” are up for grabs.

Quoting Antony Nickles

First instance of man-listening.

Are you referring to Socrates or Wittgenstein? I am familiar with the phrase "man-splaining" but don't know how to hear "man-listening."

Quoting Antony Nickles

I don’t think philosophy is relegated to just responding to radical skepticism.

Neither do I. But I am not the one claiming that such is the primary goal of this or any other writing from Wittgenstein. Your map has no place for the arguments against Russel and Frege. They seem more like the adversaries to Wittgenstein's language game model than frightened skeptics asking for what will never be given.

Your reading is clearly a response to reading Cavell and Austin. Translating everything that is said by Wittgenstein into those terms is a reduction of the original text into another. For me on the outside, it sounds like a private language.

Quoting Paine

I don't think Wittgenstein would have objected to Linguistics as Chomsky pursues it. I wonder if Wittgenstein talked about that somewhere.

Perhaps not. Sadly Chomsky was just three years too late. He didn't develop the theory of transformational grammar until 1955.

Quoting Gregory Bateson, afterword to John Brockman

I have the use of the information that that which I see, the images, or that which I feel as pain, the prick of a pin, or the ache of a tired muscle

The argument that there is a difference between what our senses tell us and how the world "really" is is not wrong; it is grossly over-stated and reduces itself to absurdity, imo. From the differences that we can detect, we should conclude that some of the information is good. If all the information was bad, we could never detect the fact.

Quoting Gregory Bateson, afterword to John Brockman

There is a combining or marriage between an objectivity that is passive to the outside world and a creative subjectivity, neither pure solipsism nor its opposite.

I think the word he is looking for is interaction. A pure solipsist would be like someone floating in space. But pure objectivity would be like being fossilized into rock. Either way, you suffocate in seconds. Wittgenstein was right to favour the rough ground.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I can’t tell if it had to be genius or the guy’s imagination was wack.

Some of the argument lacks his usual elegance. It's not surprising that it didn't make it to the PI. But he was trying hard to cover all the angles. If nothing else, it shows how hard that is.
I think, however, that the approach that argues that what the sceptic/solipsist/whoever wants to say cannot be said sometimes comes over as denying even the space to state a view.

Quoting Antony Nickles

If we can’t accept the premise of what the logical difference is between an accident and mistake, we won’t see what Austin is trying to tell us about intentional acts.

Austin makes it look so easy, doesn't he? That's why he is not just a good philosopher, but a master, even though he makes jewels and not monuments. But I think it is dangerous to take widespread agreement about logical differences for granted - it leads to complacency and dogmatism. I recommend C.L, Dodgson's "What the Tortoise said to Achilles" as a corrective.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Sounds like solid thinking when something comes up we aren’t sure how to deal with—when “right” or “ought” are up for grabs.

Yes. It can be hard to cope with the bewilderment.

Quoting Joshs

The fact that science has stayed away from the kind of philosophical clarification that Witt’s work represents is the reason for what Evan Thompson calls its ‘blind spot’ concerning its relation to the Lifeworld that generates it and makes it intelligible.

Yes. The problem no-one likes to talk about - the moment that we have to face the ouroboros. The existence of the blind spot in the eye is a splendid source of metaphors. So let's remember that it is not a flaw - it is the inevitable consequence of sending information to the brain for processing.

Reply to Ludwig V
To be clear, Bateson falls on the "psychology" side of what Wittgenstein is considering. And so does Chomsky. I don't mean to imply that their ideas are adequate responses to what Wittgenstein is trying to do.

Quoting Paine

To be clear, Bateson falls on the "psychology" side of what Wittgenstein is considering. And so does Chomsky. I don't mean to imply that their ideas are adequate responses to what Wittgenstein is trying to do.

No, I wasn't going there. There's nothing wrong with having different approaches around the same subject/object. I would need to do quite a lot more work before I could begin to really understand how all these projects relate to each other.

Reply to Ludwig V
That is and will be a lot of work for all or any who attempt it.

I am trying to understand how Wittgenstein thought of his work as outside of the other projects. Not so much a solving of a puzzle but looking at how the pieces of it are laid out.

From that point of view, Bateson wants to establish a generality that Wittgenstein wants to interrogate.

Reply to Paine

Quoting Paine

?Ludwig V
To be clear, Bateson falls on the "psychology" side of what Wittgenstein is considering. And so does Chomsky. I don't mean to imply that their ideas are adequate responses to what Wittgenstein is trying to do.

George Lakoff’s embodied alternative to Chomsky’s innatism comes a bit closer to Wittgenstein.

@Paine

Quoting Ludwig V

the study of the logic of our language and the study of how people actually use their language are different practices.

I get that there is a difference between what Witt is doing and (cognitive) linguistics or the scientific study of our ability to communicate. I take his idea to be that learning language involves learning our shared judgments (lives), so the sense and meaning of language, its logic, is wrapped up in our practices. But yes, there is the confusion of turning this into a scientific/sociological enterprise, which I think comes from what Witt points out is the desire for an “answer”.

Quoting Ludwig V

There's no problem about that. The meaning of "must" is specified by the context.

Yes, but the logic of ordinary criteria provides a context-based sense of what is appropriate, etc., where the skeptic’s “must” is dictated beforehand by imposing the criteria of certainty.

Quoting Ludwig V

Is there anything obviously wrong with the answer [to why the skeptic wants certainty] that we want/need to resolve the cognitive dissonance?

Well I think there is more to learn from the skeptic in the PI than just a resolution. We know how they do it now in the Blue Book, but the question of why, I would think, calls for further investigation.

Quoting Paine

Are you referring to Socrates or Wittgenstein? I am familiar with the phrase "man-splaining" but don't know how to hear "man-listening."

Just that Socrates doesn’t hear anything as important unless it meets his criteria. Obviously a poor joke.

Quoting Paine

Your map has no place for the arguments against Russel and Frege.

True, there is more going on than just looking at how the interlocutor (the skeptic) imagines their claims, and thus why they are making them, but I would argue that it is the primary thrust of the investigation, starting here in the Blue Book, but of course we all have different things that catch our eye/interests. As far as Cavell and Austin, I tried to limit it to just cross-over instances of the same method, but I imagine my studies leaked into understanding this text.

Quoting Ludwig V

I think, however, that the approach that argues that what the sceptic/solipsist/whoever wants to say cannot be said sometimes comes over as denying even the space to state a view.

True, true. His method is to make the most sense of what they say even if that entails imagining a whole new world to do it.

Quoting Ludwig V

But I think it is dangerous to take widespread agreement about logical differences for granted - it leads to complacency and dogmatism.

Ah but allowing for the possibility of, even assuming, the agreement, is to necessarily allow for the outlier cases/possibility of aversion to conforming to society, even in every instance.

Quoting Antony Nickles

But yes, there is the confusion of turning this into a scientific/sociological enterprise, which I think comes from what Witt points out is the desire for an “answer”.

I think we should look to the question to see whether the empirical projects are framed by the same question(s) as Wittgenstein's.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Yes, but the logic of ordinary criteria provides a context-based sense of what is appropriate, etc., where the skeptic’s “must” is dictated beforehand by imposing the criteria of certainty.

I would go a step further and argue that the sceptic's certainty is muddled and/or makes the sceptical conclusion inevitable - i.e. begs that apparent question. The mere logical possibility that the sun won't rise tomorrow is confused with the actuality that it will. Roughly.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Just that Socrates doesn’t hear anything as important unless it meets his criteria.

Yes,, he does have a restricted range. But his interlocutors seem to accept his criteria and, in the end, own themselves not to know what they thought they knew.

Quoting Antony Nickles

As far as Cavell and Austin, I tried to limit it to just cross-over instances of the same method, but I imagine my studies leaked into understanding this text.

There something a bit odd about the mutual silence between Wittgenstein and the Oxford people. There must have been some sort of communication or awareness. Anscombe alone ensures that.

Quoting Antony Nickles

True, true. His method is to make the most sense of what they say even if that entails imagining a whole new world to do it.

Yes. The principle of charitable interpretation. Our first reaction to apparent nonsense is to look for an interpretation that makes sense. Quite different from what we usually find in philosophical debate. Yet Wittgenstein seems to have made up his mind - there's no hint of oscillation about his critical stance.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Ah but allowing for the possibility of, even assuming, the agreement, is to necessarily allow for the outlier cases/possibility of aversion to conforming to society, even in every instance.

True - especially when we start using words - stretching the normal rules - in non-standard contexts and limiting cases.

Quoting Ludwig V

There something a bit odd about the mutual silence between Wittgenstein and the Oxford people. There must have been some sort of communication or awareness.

Well now we’re just agreeing too much for this to be fun. But to this, I did read that Austin and Wittgenstein bristled at the mention of the other, taking some minor distinction and making it seem like a big deal, which is ironic that apparent ego trumped their mutual, vast ability to imagine the position of another, and a bit sad as Wittgenstein always thought no one would understand him.

Reply to Antony Nickles
Is there are reason why we haven't mentioned Ryle?

Quoting Antony Nickles

True, there is more going on than just looking at how the interlocutor (the skeptic) imagines their claims, and thus why they are making them, but I would argue that it is the primary thrust of the investigation, starting here in the Blue Book, but of course we all have different things that catch our eye/interests.

So far, you have not made that argument but taken for granted that it is true. You have provided a description of the text as meaning to say X but the singular purpose you assign it is not an argument for it over against any countervailing view.

If your thesis is correct, it would mean that all the apparent concern with other topics are rhetorical ploys put in place to distract the reader. The introduction of "language games" is not the challenge it seems to be given to his contemporaries but is really just a diagnosis of a particular set of personal problems.

Quoting Antony Nickles

Just that Socrates doesn’t hear anything as important unless it meets his criteria. Obviously a poor joke.

Are you saying that Wittgenstein was not bringing in that reference as an important background to think about generality?

Quoting Paine

You have provided a description of the text as meaning to say X but the singular purpose you assign it is not an argument for it over against any countervailing view.

Well if I haven’t provided the evidence in the text (or examples) for what I read in it, then I haven’t been doing my job, but I tried to make that my priority (though, as I look back at it, there are a few transposed terms and perspectives from PI). And, as I say, there may be parts of the text that are of separate interest. I actually did even mention other readings that I would either count as too surface—too literal in a sense—(to have it about identifying color or equating pain*) or entire misinterpretations, that would take him to be providing an “answer” to the skeptic’s “problem” (for example, forms of life as justification**).

But I will grant you that I would be a better thinker if I could more easily put myself in the shoes of others, a la Witt himself, or Mill ( though he makes “On Liberty” three times longer than it needs to be fighting windmills). Actually, if Witt were just convincing us of something, it would be 20 pages, but he is trying to investigate to get to the bottom of “why” the skeptic looks at the situation as they do.

With the response here (“it would mean that all the apparent concern with other topics are rhetorical ploys put in place to distract the reader”*), I don’t mean to suppress discussion of color, pain, etc. in themselves, e.g., how feelings (the brain) actually do work. Witt even grants the line of inquiry into the “casual connections” of the brain. “Supposing we tried to construct a mind-model as a result of psychological investigations, a model which, as we should say, would explain the action of the mind…. We may find that such a mind-model would have to be very complicated and intricate in order to explain the observed mental activities….” (p.6)

But he does say that “the method of their solution is that of natural science” and that “this aspect of the mind does not interest us” which is related to one of two aspects of this lecture that I think is the hardest to wrap our heads around. This is just before saying that “For what struck us as being queer about thought and thinking was not at all that it had curious effects which we were not yet able to explain (causally). Our problem, in other words, was not a scientific one; but a muddle felt as a problem.” (Emphasis in original). I will try to address this problematizing in a summary, as it is tied to the projection of an object onto understanding thought, etc.

*And I do think the examples are important in actually showing how thinking, understanding, meaning, experiencing, “seeing”, are logical (not internal) practices, which I do see as more traditional philosophical topics, though, again, he gets into these with more breadth in the PI.

Also, as soon as I started talking about fear and desire (of the skeptic), that seemed to ruffle some feathers. As much as I do think that is relevant and evidenced here, it is more a matter of the PI, so I tried to back off that discussion as that is three steps deeper in this text (past where he ends at “conviction”). I would offer though that the resistance to seeing the skeptic as more than intellectual—that “want” is more than logical here—is to want (desire) reasons to just be of a certain type (only a certain “logic”), and to rule everything else out as “psychological”, which traditionally is termed “belief” or “irrational” (“emotional”), or, as you put it, “personal problems”, as if all of us do not have the skeptic within us. But that could, and it appears should, be an entirely different discussion.

Quoting Paine

Are you saying that Wittgenstein was not bringing in that reference as an important background to think about generality?

No, sorry to trivialize that. It does seem important, and interesting.

Quoting Paine

The introduction of "language games" is not the challenge it seems to be given to his contemporaries but is really just a diagnosis of a particular set of personal problems.

**I take it that ‘language games’ is just a way of referring to the imagined examples that he creates, but I don’t think they are just “rhetorical” though (there is a point). And, as I say above, ‘forms of life’ is just a way of pointing to our practices—which he more specifically terms ‘concepts’, like pointing, or following rules, etc.—but the reasons being their varied logic, and so about judgment, criteria and our interests in them reflected in our language (though I see this as one of my premature impositions of the PI here). And, yes, it’s just taken up by others as a challenge because they misinterpret it as a proposed solution to (or dissolution of) the skeptic’s problem (re: foundation, justification), which comes from applying the method of science to philosophy (p.6). I would suggest though, again, that the first part is more appropriately a separate topic of a discussion of the PI.

Reply to Antony Nickles

Quoting Antony Nickles

Witt even grants the line of inquiry into the “casual connections” of the brain. “Supposing we tried to construct a mind-model as a result of psychological investigations, a model which, as we should say, would explain the action of the mind…. We may find that such a mind-model would have to be very complicated and intricate in order to explain the observed mental activities….” (p.6)

But he does say that “the method of their solution is that of natural science” and that “this aspect of the mind does not interest us” which is related to one of two aspects of this lecture that I think is the hardest to wrap our heads around. This is just before saying that “For what struck us as being queer about thought and thinking was not at all that it had curious effects which we were not yet able to explain (causally). Our problem, in other words, was not a scientific one; but a muddle felt as a problem

My reading of this is the following: Witt isnt simply allowing for a peaceful division of labor, where science does its empirical work and philosophy diagnoses conceptual confusion. Instead, he’s diagnosing the impulse to construct “mind-models” as a grammatical temptation. Our very desire to “explain” thought as if it were a causal process is already the problem. Is this your interpretation too?

err

Quoting Joshs

he’s diagnosing the impulse to construct “mind-models” as a grammatical temptation. Our very desire to “explain” thought as if it were a causal process is already the problem. Is this your interpretation too?

Yes, roughly. I do agree with framing it as a discussion about logic, and thus, yes, grammatical in that sense**, but not to prove the logic of, for example, rule-following, or that the logic of rule-following explains how language is used, and particularly that rule-following takes the place of a "causal process" (foundational/justification). Though I don't take you as necessarily making those points.

I still take all of the discussions as examples primarily for the greater (philosophical) purpose of showing that our practices have entirely different "logic" (internal to them) than the skeptic's, and, most importantly, if we understand how the "why" of those ordinary criteria work--that they reflect our shared interests in our practices--then maybe we can find a way to understand the "why" that the interlocutor/skeptic has.

And I take this "why" as partly being railroaded by the analogy of the object (as a means), but, more to the point, to be them wanting a particular version of logic (generalized, imposed criteria) and that it is their interpreting the matter as an (empirical) "problem" (thus seeing the only response as an "answer") which propels them down their rabbit hole. I take this as similar to your point that "thought" is not something that is to be explained (as a cause), rather than, say, a logical judgment we make about an expression.

**I do think framing it as a "grammatical temptation" runs the risk of implying it only concerns language, thus the mischaracterization as the "linguistic turn", which I take as a confusion of his method of looking at the expressions we (all) say in certain situations as a means to facilitate understanding the logic of our practices, rather than just an explanation of the way language works (thus the misunderstanding of "use") or that it is just a matter that it runs us into trouble (that this is just untwisting the sense of words), although he does a bit of both of those too.

I appreciate your careful reply and need to think about it in detail.

For now, I will only point out that Wittgenstein is claiming more for his method than:

Quoting Antony Nickles

I take it that ‘language games’ is just a way of referring to the imagined examples that he creates, but I don’t think they are just “rhetorical” though (there is a point). And, as I say above, ‘forms of life’ is just a way of pointing to our practices

The language of the Blue Book pits his view of how "meaning' happens against how others do it. I read that as him seeing himself in an actual conflict over how to understand the world as we experience it.

@Ludwig V @Paine

Quoting Paine

The language of the Blue Book pits his view of how "meaning' happens against how others do it. I read that as him seeing himself in an actual conflict over how to understand the world as we experience it.

I'm going to formally rescind my claim that Witt is not discussing thinking, meaning (understanding, seeing, experiencing, using language, etc.) in and of themselves, because he obviously is, and getting the correct sense of these things is part of what philosophy is about (but sadly where a lot of the conflict comes in). I guess I was only trying to fight the stream of opinion that I have encountered elsewhere that that is primarily what he is doing, or, more of a loss, that that is only what he is doing.

I welcome any discussion of these topics, because his conclusion that these are misunderstood as objects or mechanisms is important and changes the assumptions of philosophy for centuries.

That certainly puts what you have been saying in a different light. I need to think about it.

I appreciate you meeting my response so forthrightly.

Quoting Antony Nickles

I guess I was only trying to fight the stream of opinion that I have encountered elsewhere that that is primarily what he is doing, or, more of a loss, that that is only what he is doing.

Well, one of the less happy consequences of high-lighting issues of language in philosophy is that it can all too easily seem as if that's all that philosophy is about. So other philosophers seem much more exciting. Dissolving problems seems an anti-climax compared to a theory about the broad sweep of eternity or whatever.

Mary Midgeley embraced the problem by insisting that philosophy is about plumbing. It doesn't seem inappropriate that some philosophers, at least, should be insisting on the fundamental importance of plumbing. A breakdown in plumbing is the beginning of a breakdown of civilization.

Surely, the point about Wittgenstein is that he understood the inter-connection of philosophical problems. Analytic philosophers seem to believe that the answer is to focus on one problem, but Wittgenstein is trying to keep several plates (including a close focus on a problem) spinning and he is right to do so, IMO. Close focus without attention to context (setting aside, or possibly bracketing) doesn't cut it. But that doesn't mean that context is everything.

I find it extremely hard to grasp the overall structure of the Blue Book because of the interconnected discussions that he keeps going. But broadly, I think it is very simple. The discussion is framed by "what is the meaning of a word?" This is at the forefront at first, and a method, or an approach to a method, is outlined. In the later parts of the book, that method is applied to a grand philosophical problem - scepticism together with its terminus, solipsism. But it's hard to see that because he has three plates spinning at the same time - various philosophical issues, such as the meaning of meaning, to which his detailed discussions are directed, a critique of orthodox philosophy, and his own view of how philosophy should be done. These are interwoven throughout. Nevertheless, the conclusion of the book is an analysis of "I", which looks like the close focus of pure linguistic analytic philosophy. Am I reading too much into a detail if I guess that he's suggesting that the concept of the self is at or near the centre of the network?

It would be interesting to display the text using different colours or fonts to clarify the different threads as they weave through the text, and appear or disappear as his discussion develops. But it would take an awful long time and I suspect would be less helpful that I would hope. The human brain - or my brain, at least - has limited bandwidth and tracking what is going on in this text seriously stretches my ability to keep track of several issues or projects at the same time. On the other hand, I find that the constant switching keeps me going - my attention span is limited as well.

Quoting Ludwig V

Is there a reason why we haven't mentioned Ryle?

And of course as I am a terrible thinker that can’t imagine other arguments (nod to @Paine), this has blown my mind. The difference between Witt and Austin comes to mind first, in that the farthest that Austin gets in trying to figure out why Ryle is making his argument is logically, and even then he is pitying him either to explain what he believes Ryle is trying to say, or what Ryle wants his argument to do and then why it doesn’t or can’t. Witt alternatively knows that the skeptic is also him (from the Tractatus), but, since he hates that he got sucked into it, he wants to cut himself open and do a living autopsy to figure out how and why.

I do think a look back at “Sense and Sensabilia” (which we read here) would be interesting and helpful. Ryle is purportedly the same as Witt’s skeptic.

Quoting Antony Nickles

And of course as I am a terrible thinker that can’t imagine other arguments (nod to Paine), this has blown my mind. The difference between Witt and Austin comes to mind first, in that the farthest that Austin gets in trying to figure out why Ryle is making his argument is logically, and even then he is pitying him either to explain what he believes Ryle is trying to say, or what Ryle wants his argument to do and then why it doesn’t or can’t. Witt alternatively knows that the skeptic is also him (from the Tractatus), but, since he hates that he got drawn sucked into it, he wants to cut himself open and do a living autopsy to figure out how and why.

It is complicated. I was hinting at the criticism of Ryle, not on philosophical grounds, but on political (small "p") grounds. He acquired a great deal of influence and used it and many people (especially supporters of Collingwood) resented that. I don't have an opinion about the rights and wrongs of that, but, to my eye, it looks as if that has led to a certain turning away from him. But perhaps it's something about his style that people don't like - Ryle is, perhaps, rather more emotional and less coolly analytic than Austin.

I like the image of W doing a "living autopsy". It catches, what his writing doesn't really reveal, now tormented he often was.

Quoting Ludwig V

Am I reading too much into a detail if I guess that he's suggesting that the concept of the self is at or near the centre of the network?

What often strikes me in reading Blue Book is how different terms collide in ways that seem outside the progression of an ongoing explanation. I do think a concept of self is the concern but deliberately inverted at the same time. This example stands out in that regard:

Quoting BB, lpage 94

For the ordinary use of the word “person” is what one might call a composite use suitable under the ordinary circumstances. If I assume, as I do, that these circumstances are changed, the application of the term “person” or “personality” has thereby changed, and if I wish to preserve this term and give it a use analogous to its former use, I am at liberty to choose between many uses, that is, between many different kinds of analogy. One might say in such a case that the term “personality” hasn’t got one legitimate heir only. (This kind of consideration is of importance in the philosophy of mathematics. Consider the use of the words “proof”, “formula”, and others. Consider the question: “Why should what we do here be called ‘philosophy’? Why should it be regarded as the only legitimate heir of the different activities which had this name in former times?”)

The use of "philosophy" in this is almost an appeal to a commonly understood matter of fact like the others being used. Maybe this speaks to the reluctance of Reply to Antony Nickles to endorse the thematic language here.

There is also something provocative to have all these discussions about how to recognize oneself and others just to end with:

Quoting ibid. page 110

The kernel of our proposition, that that which has pains or sees or thinks is of a mental nature, is only, that the word “I” in “I have pains” does not denote a particular body, for we can’t substitute for it a description of a body.

All that other stuff is implied to be properly located in this single sentence. Welcome to a particular notation party. BYOB.

Quoting BB, lpage 94

Consider the question: “Why should what we do here be called ‘philosophy’? Why should it be regarded as the only legitimate heir of the different activities which had this name in former times?”)

I've been wondering whether to go on and read the Brown Book. This is astonishing, because he is putting in to question what elsewhere - especially in the Blue Book - he is in no doubt at all. He does not doubt that knows what philosophy is and seems in no self-doubt about what he is trying to do in his consideration of orthodox philosophy questions.
I'm afraid I'm a bit blase about the idea of philosophy. The tradition seems to perpetually be calling itself into question, remaking itself (but not unmaking its own tradition). That's all standard fare. Wittgenstein is, I think, unusual in asking whether his approach to philosophy should be counted as philosophy at all. For my money, since he engages with the tradition, after a fashion, I have no hesitation in shelving him alongside Russell and Moore, though perhaps at the other end of the shelf.

Quoting ibid. page 110

The kernel of our proposition, that that which has pains or sees or thinks is of a mental nature, is only, that the word “I” in “I have pains” does not denote a particular body, for we can’t substitute for it a description of a body.

Yes. With some writers, I would take that as trailing his coat, keeping us on edge for the next episode. Or, more likely, he doesn't know what will happen next himself and so is unable to make an end. In a way, I like the conclusion even though I don't understand it. After all, if I am not this body (you know which one, don't you?) what am I? On the other hand, that's a different question from "Who am I?" Is W trying to persuade us to drop the former question, perhaps in favour of the latter?

Quoting Paine

The use of "philosophy" in this is almost an appeal to a commonly understood matter of fact like the others being used.

When he asks us to consider the question, the inflection of “Why should what we do here be called ‘philosophy’?” can change either between “I don’t care how you judge what is philosophy; I will do what I want” and “We can make philosophy what we will, so let’s find out what is distinctive, important, and what is the place for what we do here”. We can even simply go with the common understanding.

Quoting Paine

I do think a concept of self is the concern but deliberately inverted at the same time.

Quoting Ludwig V

[Is he] suggesting that the concept of the self is at or near the centre of the network?

It appears to me, thematically, that every mention of the self is in the same vein as saying there is no object that is the subject. The self is “suitable” under a number of parts of uses in various circumstances. So there does not seem to be much to call ‘the self’ as a fixed thing at all, even as a concept, though there is a sense of the self as conceptual, as in: a (logical) construct, rather than essential. This sense could fit the impermanence of being subject to “circumstances”, along with the reliance on society’s power to “give” or take of its “preservation” as it sees fit, or simply “wishes”. He waives off legitimacy because there is no preset, valid self, so we can be free of conformity (as an heir would not be), to decide what matters (what will be the criteria) for a self, to my self, in the creation and judgment of the self.

Thus, as implied in the last line, I take it that part of what he means is that: what we are going to call “mental” (as what is common among seeing, thinking, and pain) is not modeled after an opposite object from “physical”, in the sense that “I have pain” does not indicate (denote) a pain in a body, it is requesting help; “I have a thought” is not the sign of a referent, but is to get attention for something to add; and “I see a nightingale” does not indicate my point of view, it is to identify the bird.

Quoting Ludwig V

On the other hand, that's a different question from "Who am I?" Is W trying to persuade us to drop the former question, perhaps in favour of the latter?

Perhaps, on whose terms will I be judged? Do I have (own) a self?