I'm not quite sure what you mean by this post. Are you implying that because Wittgenstein had a high IQ we should presume he was right and any misunderstanding is probably ours? That does seem a little idolatrous. Christopher Langan had an IQ of around 200 but produced nothing of any philosophical interest, and was, by all accounts a brash self-publicist. I have had my IQ measured, would you be prepared to treat what I say with more reverence if it turns out to be higher than yours?

I think your argument is post hoc. You like what Wittgenstein has to say (as you understand it), you'd like others to agree with it too, but want to bolster the chances of that by adding some kind of "... and if you don't agree it's probably you that's wrong" device, and I don't think that's helpful.

I'm a huge Wittgenstein fan, I think, along with Frank Ramsey, he's a mile above any other philosopher, but I'm not going to pretend that's not in the most part because they say things which simply sit well with my gut feeling on the matter. Even if I thought otherwise at first, I buy what they have to say because of its persuasive power to me. My initial world-view, and my own disposition is what makes this more or less likely, Wittgenstein's evident intellect is not the key factor.

Wittgenstein's method for restricting doubt does not fulfil its purpose.
— Metaphysician Undercover

What method? — Luke

Now that is perhaps revealing. If we say that doubt and certainty are psychological, states of mind, and that Wittgenstein is describing, not prescribing, then perhaps it becomes clear to anyone that when Mrs un says "wait here while I go to the toilet", it is inappropriate for me to look for exactitude, and inappropriate for her to mean it. As a matter of fact, descriptively, I have no doubt she means something like 'well with eyesight and earshot'. It's not that I cannot doubt, but that I do not.

And if you want a reason, it is that doubt is expensive. If you doubt the reality of every experience, the meaning of every word, it paralyses, it prevents any understanding, any actual thinking and any reasoned action. Mrs un needs the toilet, and not a philosophical debate. There is no boundary between here and there, because we find it more useful for there not to be. Sometimes here is the whole UK, and sometimes here is this armchair. When we want a boundary, we make one just as precisely as we need it to be. we devise a method, and doubt may have a part in it - Is this tree Dutch or Belgian? And this blade of grass?

You know they weren't even using IQ tests back then, don't you?

What method? — Luke

There is definitely a method which is being described here. That's what learning is, a method for restricting doubt, and this is what Wittgenstein is focused on, that method. He started off the book with simple descriptions of ostensive definition, and showed how these description were deficient. Now he has progressed to the point of addressing doubt in the same context, the context of learning. If we learn rules, the rules are like sign-posts, and we must learn how to restrict the doubt we have in relation to what the sign-post is telling us, to have confidence in understanding, in order to proceed.

What I am pointing to, at this place in the text, is that he is reversing the perspective. At 87 he speaks from the perspective of the person learning, or attempting to read the sign-post. This person, to restrict one's own doubt in one's own understanding of the sign-post, asks for explanation. But by the end of 87 he has reversed the perspective to the third person observer, to say "The sign-post is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose." This third person perspective does not assist the person at the beginning of 87 who is asking for explanation, so it does not suffice as a principle to remove the threat of infinite regress implied at 87. He does a similar thing at 88 with the concept of "exact".

We can see the root of this procedure, of reversing the perspective, well exposed at 85.

85. A rule stands there like a sign-post.—Does the sign-post leave
no doubt open about the way I have to go? Does it shew which
direction I am to take when I have passed it; whether along the road
or the footpath or cross-country? But where is it said which way I
am to follow it; whether in the direction of its ringer or (e.g.) in the
opposite one?—And if there were, not a single sign-post, but a chain
of adjacent ones or of chalk marks on the ground—is there only one
way of interpreting them?—So I can say, the sign-post does after all
leave no room for doubt. Or rather: it sometimes leaves room for
doubt and sometimes not. And now this is no longer a philosophical
proposition, but an empirical one. — PI 85

If we take "the sign-post sometimes leaves room for doubt, and sometimes does not leave room for doubt" as an empirical proposition (third person perspective of the observer), it cannot be justified. That the person proceeds from the sign-post does not justify "the sign-post has left no room for doubt". The person reading the sign-post may or may not proceed with doubt, so the observer cannot conclude that the one who proceeds has no doubt.

So the point is that Wittgenstein is describing a method for limiting doubt, a description of learning. And, his description of how doubt is limited, and certainty is produced is inaccurate. There is exposed here, a relationship between the first person perspective (my experience of learning), and the third person perspective (me as the observer), which is not properly drawn out. It is a very important relationship because it is how we move from our own experience of possibility, toward making inductive conclusions about the way things are, as an observer. We first approach the sign-post with doubt, 'what is it telling me, I need an explanation'. With experience, we approach the sign-post with confidence, 'under normal circumstance its purpose is this'. What happens in between is the means by which doubt is restricted.

We can proceed in our reading of the text, to switch perspectives, from the perspective of the learner, the reader of the sign-post attempting to reduce doubt through the process of learning, to the perspective of an observer, if that's the way that the text goes. But the perspective of the observer has not yet been supported with any firm principles, and we ought not proceed with any false premises, such as, that inductive conclusions which are the basis of the third person perspective (observer) have removed doubt. And the distinction between learner (one who doubts) and knower (one with confidence), if there even is such a division, has not yet been laid out.

Another neat example here is The aboutness of language.

Here is a thread that is based on the surprise felt by @Purple Pond. It seems to me to serve as an example of the sort of thing mentioned in §110.

That's it.

Would that @Metaphysician Undercover would reply to you.

§111

A bit more on depth.

I had thought that the depth to which he was referring was the structure hidden in ordinary language; but then there is the reference to a deep grammatical joke.

I have in mind something like Antigonish, a poem that I read as a commentary on many things philosophical, including the arguments for the existence of god. The broken grammar brings the little man into the conversation, even thought he wasn't there. Philosophy often does the very same.

§112

The most prominent example of a simile producing a false appearance is for me the Mashed Potato thread. "There's the potato, and then there's the mashing of it". this is like "There's the meaning, and then there's the expressing of it".

But this isn't how it is! But @S says yet this is how it has to be!

There will be other examples on the forums. And examples of other errors. I suggest one way to proceed wit this thread is in identifying such examples.

But this isn't how it is! — Banno

That's not the way it is!

See: two expressions, one meaning.

This isn't how it is! This is how it is!

113 & 114: we feel it must be like this, but we are only looking at the frame.

and the resolution: 115: A picture held us captive.

IS this what @Metaphysician Undercover is doing - seeing the frame rather than the picture?

I think it is something like that. His points always seem off-target.

This isn't how it is! This is how it is!

113 & 114: we feel it must be like this, but we are only looking at the frame.

and the resolution: 115: A picture held us captive. — Banno

And you've been emancipated from the picture. That's great.

Have I? Cool! How did I do that?

Sorry, you're still held captive by the picture. :grimace:

So can you to show me the picture, if you can see that it is a picture. Perhaps it is a picture we cannot do without...

Davidson, On the very idea...

I don't know if Wittgenstein thought pictures and language games incommensurable, but I think Davidson has shown that they can't be, that if there is a contradiction between them, then one is wrong; or more likely, one is talking past the other.

Sorry, I am intruding on the thread in a state of ignorance.

Is the picture Cartesian?

You tell me.

IS this what Metaphysician Undercover is doing - seeing the frame rather than the picture?

I think it is something like that. His points always seem off-target — Banno

Luke sees boundaries, I just see the picture. Targets might be what creates boundaries within the picture, but there is no such thing as "the target", because that's an ideal. The only targets are individual goals.

"Inexact" is really a reproach, and "exact" is praise. And that is to
say that what is inexact attains its goal less perfectly than what is more
exact. Thus the point here is what we call "the goal". Am I inexact
when I do not give our distance from the sun to the nearest foot, or
tell a joiner the width of a table to the nearest thousandth of an inch?
No single ideal of exactness has been laid down; we do not know
what we should be supposed to imagine under this head—unless you
yourself lay down what is to be so called. But you will find it difficult
to hit upon such a convention; at least any that satisfies you. — PI..88

There's no such thing as off-target or on-target, except in relation to a goal. So consider this:

98. On the one hand it is clear that every sentence in our language
'is in order as it is'. That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal,
as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable
sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us.—On the
other hand it seems clear that where there is sense there must be perfect
order.——So there must be perfect order even in the vaguest sentence. — P.I.98

Every sentence, every statement, exists in relation to its own individual purpose. That's how it has meaning, it has purpose, and in the sense that it has its own purpose, a purpose which is proper to itself and nothing else, it has its own perfection in that existence. It is perfect. So it doesn't make sense to say that someone's remarks are "off-target", because each remark has its own target, proper to itself. It is the notion that there is an ideal "the target", which is not in line with what Wittgenstein is saying.

I don't know if Wittgenstein thought pictures and language games incommensurable, but I think Davidson has shown that they can't be, that if there is a contradiction between them, then one is wrong; or more likely, one is talking past the other. — Banno

76. If someone were to draw a sharp boundary I could not acknowledge
it as the one that I too always wanted to draw, or had drawn in
my mind. For I did not want to draw one at all. His concept can then
be said to be not the same as mine, but akin to it. The kinship is
that of two pictures, one of which consists of colour patches with
vague contours, and the other of patches similarly shaped and distributed,
but with clear contours. The kinship is just as undeniable as
the difference.
77. And if we carry this comparison still further it is clear that the
degree to which the sharp picture can resemble the blurred one depends
on the latter's degree of vagueness. For imagine having to sketch a
sharply defined picture 'corresponding' to a blurred one. In the latter
there is a blurred red rectangle: for it you put down a sharply defined
one. Of course—several such sharply defined rectangles can be drawn
to correspond to the indefinite one.—But if the colours in the original
merge without a hint of any outline won't it become a hopeless task
to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won't
you then have to say: "Here I might just as well draw a circle or heart
as a rectangle, for all the colours merge. Anything—and nothing—is
right."——And this is the position you are in if you look for definitions
corresponding to our concepts in aesthetics or ethics.
In such a difficulty always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning
of tliis word ("good" for instance)? From what sort of examples?
in what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the
word must have a family of meanings. — P.I.

The blurred picture is incommensurable with the one that has sharp boundaries, at least it is a "hopeless task" to try to make them commensurate.

Even your focus on the word "target" seems off-target...

Have a look at §99.

This is the other voice, answering §98.

Then look at §100. Perfection does to belong here.

The blurred picture is incommensurable with the one that has sharp boundaries, — Metaphysician Undercover

Are they incommensurate? Or are they doing different things? Talking past each other. They do not contradict each other.

You tell me. — Banno

By consulting with a know-it-all on reddit, I can officially say that Wittgenstein was talking about how the logical structure of language and the logical structure of the world are the same.

How do we know this, though? The statement implies a transcendental vantage point. Or maybe Wittgenstein was an anti-realist.

Have a look at §99.

This is the other voice, answering §98.

Then look at §100. Perfection does to belong here. — Banno

Of course there is room for perfection here, that's what 98 says, even the vaguest sentence is in its own way perfect. There is no room for "ideal" though. What he has done at 98 is separate "perfect" from "ideal", such that we can have perfection without "ideal". The notion of "ideal" is distorting the way we see things, we are dazzled by it. But notice at 103, he implies that we might take off these glasses (the ideal).

Are they incommensurate? Or are they doing different things? Talking past each other. They do not contradict each other. — Banno

Two things don't need to contradict each other to be incommensurable, it just means that the two cannot be measured by the same standard. I would say that if they are doing different things, then they are incommensurable, because the standard for measurement here is the goal, or purpose.

that's what 98 says, — Metaphysician Undercover

In a voice countermanded in the surrounding sections.

How do we know this, though? — frank

Well, we might start by working through the books...

That's not true, in this section 95-105 he is telling us that the notion of "ideal" is distorting the way that we see things. Go back and read what he says about logic at 81. Then at 107, the ideal is a "requirement" which we hold for logic, it is not derived from a description of what logic really is. That's what he's leading into here, the separation between what we think of logic, based on what we want to get from it, that it is somehow "ideal", or "sublime", and what it really is, by description.

Actually he is setting up a critique of the notion of a perfect analysis of language, and then turns that into a critique of his own work in the Tractates.

Didn't you already say that you were having trouble with 109? Try reading it from my perspective, 109 makes perfect sense.

I was having difficulty summarising it. That was done by @Fooloso4 at https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/261849.

Yes, notice Fooloso4's reference to 108. "The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination round." That's what I'm talking about, removing the ideal.

Notice the bracketed remark "(One might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.)" We must remove the ideal, which is the requirement we place on logic, the burden that we place on logic is that it be ideal. Once we have done this, we can examine it in the light of our real needs, our real goals, to get a true description of logic, because this is how we really use it, not to obtain ideals.

The most prominent example of a simile producing a false appearance is for me the Mashed Potato thread. "There's the potato, and then there's the mashing of it". this is like "There's the meaning, and then there's the expressing of it".

But this isn't how it is! But S says yet this is how it has to be!

There will be other examples on the forums. And examples of other errors. I suggest one way to proceed wit this thread is in identifying such examples. — Banno

Well merely saying that it's wrong isn't interesting at all. You've linked me in on a post which doesn't contain any support of your assertions.

Clearly I agree with early Wittgenstein on this, even if the later Wittgenstein himself disagreed. Also, I doubt your understanding of the later Wittgenstein. Was he really so unreasonable as to deny that there's the meaning, and then there's the expressing of it? Or is this just your misunderstanding? I'm heavily leaning towards the latter, but perhaps you'll surprise me.

@Luke, @Sam26, help us out here, please.