I hope in my writings I haven't given that impression. Although at times it might appear that that's my view.

I understand that you don't. Do you know whether Wittgenstein thought so?

I understand that you don't. Do you know whether Wittgenstein thought so? — Marchesk

I don't believe so.

I don't believe so. — Sam26

It sounds to me like some people's interpretation, even in this very thread, of the later Wittgenstein is that he was trying to cure the philosopher in us from the need to do philosophy.

It sounds to me like some people's interpretation, even in this very thread, of the later Wittgenstein is that he was trying to cure the philosopher in us from the need to do philosophy. — Marchesk

Well, Wittgenstein did believe that much of what passes as philosophy is just misunderstandings of the logic of language. This is seen from the Tractatus to On Certainty. There's disagreement over this, but I think Wittgenstein would say that if you can clear up the linguistic confusions, it will help clear up the philosophical muddle, and that will enable you to stop. I don't think he meant that all philosophizing would stop, I don't see how that would or could be the case.

I am fascinated by the philosophy of language and at an advanced age am in the middle of a Master's where I am covering lots of topics but focused on language. I don't think Wittgenstein claims as much as some here think: 'some' problems can indeed be clarified by attention to the use of language, but not 'all' or 'most'.

I find more depth in Wittgenstein the more I read him. (We shouldn't sanctify him of course, he was in some ways a pretty unpleasant person) I've become interested in 'language games' and in particular how much talk about language assumes that monologue-style statements, as if spoken to oneself or written in papers, are the meaningful stuff of our language where we really really mean things.

There's a movement in sociolinguistics to consider dialogism as more important than we have previously considered - which potentially takes us back to Plato, but also feels present to me in much of Witt's later chunterings to himself, his uses of remarks in quotes by speakers whose identity we don't know.

An odd starting point for me is the sometimes rudeness or abrutpness of Siri and other a.i. assistants. And indeed of humans in call centres trained on systematic scripts. They don't understand 'dialogue' or 'conversation'. To me this means they don't understand 'language games'. They are underpinned by a philosophy that talk is 'speech acts': monologues delivered to audiences. - Whereas actual talk is exchange, conversation, a relation between humans that also involves gesture, mood, scent.

I think there are ways back here into some analytic approaches, e.g. Davidsonian interpretation, but I am trying to get my head round what the routes are.

I've wandered off into vagueness, just explaining where I've got to.

I am fascinated by the philosophy of language and at an advanced age am in the middle of a Master's where I am covering lots of topics but focused on language. I don't think Wittgenstein claims as much as some here think: 'some' problems can indeed be clarified by attention to the use of language, but not 'all' or 'most'. — mcdoodle

Good luck Mcdoodle on your masters. How old are you, if you don't mind me asking? I'm 68, in just a few days. Keep thinking it's good for the brain.

My own thinking is that Wittgenstein's methods can be used across a wide array of philosophical thinking. For example, in answering questions such as - what is reality, what is knowing, what are beliefs, objective and subjective ideas, and the very expansive topic of how meaning is derived, which goes to the logic behind the use of words/concepts.

However, to make the point some have already made, just because you get clear on the use of these words, that doesn't mean the problem vanishes. It does help clarify the problems. Many of the problems that disappear, aren't really problems in the first place. Some or many are just linguistic illusions.

I think the question of the importance of the understanding of language (over and above the mere ability to use it, obviously) to philosophy hinges on the question of intellectual intuition. When philosophers claim that abstruse metaphysics is 'language on holiday' this is grounded on the empiricist assumption that concepts such as, for example, 'infinity' and 'eternity' are not somehow directly intuitive 'graspings' of something 'beyond', but are simply arrived at by negating ordinary empirically derived concepts such as 'space' and 'time', and that they are subsequently reified as transcendent actualities.

So, in this sense philosophy of language, so-called analytic philosophy is firmly underpinned by empiricist assumptions which are themselves based on science and it's exclusion of the non-empirical, of any notion of the transcendent.

The problem for any transcendence talk would seem to be that its very indeterminacy renders intersubjective corroboration impossible; which makes it unsuitable for science and even for philosophy conceived as a search for determinate truth. If philosophy is conceived as being more akin to poetry than to science, then this problem of indeterminacy need not be so fatal to philosophical dialogue.

It all depends on what you think philosophy is, or on what you want it to be.

so-called analytic philosophy is firmly underpinned by empiricist assumptions which are themselves based on science and it's exclusion of the non-empirical

I’m not entirely sure this is true for science. Consider some of the speculative theories in physics, debates involving thought experiments, different interpretations of QM that physicists have come up with, the question of biological determinism vs contingency in evolution, and so on. Also, the widespread use of mathematics.

If science was exclusively empirical, we wouldn’t have theories. Unobservable entities like quarks wouldn’t be posited. There would be no laws or constants.

I don't exclude mathematics from the domain of the empirical. It is something we practice in order to discover determinate results.

Math isn’t perceived. It’s conceptual. We can apply it to the empirical with great results, which raises interesting questions.

The process of doing math is one of working with symbols in accordance with strict logical rules, in order to discover previously unknown results, so I count it as an experimental, and thus empirical, practice. I think the distinction you seem to want to make between conceptual and empirical is itself not free of certain assumptions.

The problem for any transcendence talk would seem to be that its very indeterminacy renders intersubjective corroboration impossible; which makes it unsuitable for science and even for philosophy conceived as a search for determinate truth. — Janus

I can see how applied maths is empirical, but not pure maths.

The process of doing math is an empirical one of working with symbols in accordance with strict rules, in order to discover previously unknown results so I count it as an empirical practice. — Janus

I thought empirical was perceptual. What you're talking about sounds deductive. Doesn't logic work the same way?

But what would Stove have said?

They don't understand 'dialogue' or 'conversation'. To me this means they don't understand 'language games'. — mcdoodle

Which means, they don't understand context, and context is derived from culture, and so on. This is a fatal flaw in so-called AI. Which allows me to quote one of my favourite passages:

Computers [can] outstrip any philosopher or mathematician in marching mechanically through a programmed set of logical maneuvers, but this was only because philosophers and mathematicians — and the smallest child — were too smart for their intelligence to be invested in such maneuvers. The same goes for a dog. “It is much easier,” observed AI pioneer Terry Winograd, “to write a program to carry out abstruse formal operations than to capture the common sense of a dog.”

A dog knows, through its own sort of common sense, that it cannot leap over a house in order to reach its master. It presumably knows this as the directly given meaning of houses and leaps — a meaning it experiences all the way down into its muscles and bones. As for you and me, we know, perhaps without ever having thought about it, that a person cannot be in two places at once. We know (to extract a few examples from the literature of cognitive science) that there is no football stadium on the train to Seattle, that giraffes do not wear hats and underwear, and that a book can aid us in propping up a slide projector but a sirloin steak probably isn’t appropriate.

Logic, DNA and Poetry, Steve Talbott.

They don't understand 'dialogue' or 'conversation'. To me this means they don't understand 'language games'. They are underpinned by a philosophy that talk is 'speech acts': monologues delivered to audiences. - Whereas actual talk is exchange, conversation, a relation between humans that also involves gesture, mood, scent. — mcdoodle

ThIs is spot on.

One of the tantalising characteristics of PI is the use of multiple voices; Wittgenstein writing down the dialogue he is having with himself. It's an unpolished book, and because of that it allows us a peek into the process of philosophising.

Much of the difference between the Tractatus and PI is summed up in saying Wittgenstein realised that there was more to language than monologue.

Which means, they don't understand context, — Wayfarer

Not just context; we do things with words, and they do things to us; and it's a "we" not an "I".

It might better be captured by saying we are embedded in language.

It might better be captured by saying we are embedded in language. — Banno

Landru, is that you?

It sounds to me like some people's interpretation, even in this very thread, of the later Wittgenstein is that he was trying to cure the philosopher in us from the need to do philosophy. — Marchesk

He actively encouraged his students to go and do something else - something useful.

But philosophy is a hard addiction to kick.

The plethora of angst-ridden self-doubt threads warn us of the expense of excess philosophy.

Who was David Stove?



Stove's Discovery of the Worst Argument in the World

A good read.

That's funny.

Stove's Discovery of the Worst Argument in the World — Banno

I hope that it's not impertinent of one of Stove's ex-students to say that I think he utterly failed to comprehend Kant (and Plato). I mean, very sharp guy in many respects, unfailingly courteous and encouraging to me - but he just didn't get it. (Actually I also knew Jim Franklin, who penned that article, whom I used to serve as a customer when I worked in the Campus Computer Store, and who published a very good article, in Aeon, on Aristotelian Realism.)

//ps//Incidentally the Who Was David Stove article says that ‘it will hardly do to dismiss Plato (“that scourge of the human mind”) and Kant (for example) as overrated poseurs’.//

I think the question of the importance of the understanding of language (over and above the mere ability to use it, obviously) to philosophy hinges on the question of intellectual intuition. When philosophers claim that abstruse metaphysics is 'language on holiday' this is grounded on the empiricist assumption that concepts such as, for example, 'infinity' and 'eternity' are not somehow directly intuitive 'graspings' of something 'beyond', but are simply arrived at by negating ordinary empirically derived concepts such as 'space' and 'time', and that they are subsequently reified as transcendent actualities.

So, in this sense philosophy of language, so-called analytic philosophy is firmly underpinned by empiricist assumptions which are themselves based on science and it's exclusion of the non-empirical, of any notion of the transcendent.

The problem for any transcendence talk would seem to be that its very indeterminacy renders intersubjective corroboration impossible; which makes it unsuitable for science and even for philosophy conceived as a search for determinate truth. If philosophy is conceived as being more akin to poetry than to science, then this problem of indeterminacy need not be so fatal to philosophical dialogue.

It all depends on what you think philosophy is, or on what you want it to be. — Janus

Thanks Janus for your thoughts, your post is in keeping with the spirit of this thread. I was looking for both thoughts I agreed with and disagreed with.

Much of my thinking these days is focused on two subjects, epistemology (as it connects with Wittgenstein) and near death experiences. I've been reading a book called Longing to Know by Esther Meek, and her epistemology is very different from my own. The disagreements between Esther Meek's philosophy and my own are profound, as I believe our disagreements are. However, I think there are interesting points of overlap with her epistemology, and some of what you said. In some ways they're similar.

As someone who believes that we do survive death, and (by survive I mean that we survive as who we are, not just as energy, but as the person we are) that there is some connection between the two realities. Moreover, since it's my contention that consciousness is the unifying principle of the universe, and that we're all connected to this consciousness or mind, then there is a connection in some profound way between that mind and ours.

Just to be clear I don't believe in God in the traditional sense, nor are my beliefs connected with a particular religion, but I do believe there are mystical facts of reality (based on my studies of NDEs). Also, I don't believe language goes on a holiday when talking about some of these ideas, although, it probably does in some or many contexts.

As I said above, I think there is a connection between the two realities, viz., a mind-to-mind connection. How this takes place is a mystery, although I do have some speculative ideas. What I mean is that there are nonlinguistic beliefs or ideas that seem to be generated from a place of transcendence (to use your wording); and that these beliefs, ideas, intuitions, whatever you want to call them, are not language based. They seem to be thoughts generated from some kind of mind-to-mind interaction, and I believe there is evidence for this. And although they're not language based, they can be put into language, i.e., the thoughts can be transformed into language. So we're going from a place of metacognition, or as you say, the intersubjective, to a language based epistemological belief system. And I connect the two based on the idea of prelinguistic beliefs, of which many are empirical, but some are not. Some are abstract, and they get translated or transformed into our language-games. Thus, they become public.

The problem I had with Esther Meek's position is that she wants to claim that the metacognitive or intersubjective is a kind of knowledge, and here's where I disagree. I do think there are beliefs that are prelinguistic, but I don't think there is prelinguistic knowledge. I'm not sure we even have words that fit that transcendent reality in some instances. So although there is overlap, it's very difficult to describe because of the nature of language, and the nature of the reality in which we now reside. The tendency is to bring language into the transcendent, which I think can be done, but it doesn't always work. In cases where it doesn't work, I think we can say that language has gone on a holiday. What I mean is that certain words/concepts only make sense within the language-game of their residence, so we have to choose are words carefully. How we describe the transcendent is very difficult, but I do believe there is a flow from the transcendent to our linguistic world.

This is what I meant when I said there is overlap in some of our position, at least it appears so.

I don't see a genuine divide between the deductive and the empirical. How do we deduce, how do we know that a premise entails other things which may not be immediately obvious? I would say that deduction involves observation; it is thus a process of discovery. It involves observation in two senses: first the rules of deduction are observed, and second premises are examined in order to discover what is entailed by them. I think this is how mathematics evolves; it is thus a process of observation and empirical discovery.

I don't actually disagree with anything you say here: I reserve judgement about both an afterlife and about whether there is intellectual intuition. I also believe that there might be "a flow from the transcendent to our linguistic world", and that this may be shown in scriptures, poetry and the writings of mystics; my main point is that it cannot be counted as definitively corroborable knowledge, a point which, unless I have misread you, you also seem to be making.

I don't see a genuine divide between the deductive and the empirical. — Janus

We don't learn about logic or math from observing the world. They developed out of our conceptual reasoning. As such, they are a priori. Empirical knowledge is a posteriori. This has been recognized since at least Plato, even if it was put in different terms.

The distinction has not been universally recognized since at least the advent of pragmatism. It's by no means as uncontroversial as you are painting it. Are you aware that most of the pragmatists would disagree with you; along with C I Lewis, Quine (see The two Dogmas of Empricism), Davidson, Putnam, McDowell, Brandom and others?

We learn about maths from observing mathematical operations, which are part of the world. The separation between the mental and the sensual is useful at times, to be sure, but it is not absolute. For instance, how could we know (as opposed to merely accepting that it's true by definition) that
2+2 =4 if not by observing groups of objects? How would you discover whether 1,236,794,380,857 is prime or not without investigations that obviously involve the senses; seeing the symbols that you are writing on the page or typing on the screen, and so on?

Good rebuttal, but I think it confuses the process with the conceptual apparatus that makes it possible.

We don't get numbers, operations or equations from observing nature. Two, plus and equals don't exist as objects anymore than a perfect circle or PI does.

We create symbols to express the ideas they represent. And we write these down or use tools like calculators because it's difficult for us to do complicated math and logic in our heads.

We also developed concepts like infinity, hyperspace, or counterfactuals. These don't come from sense data.

Mostly we wouldn't, but that's alright.

The cause of what we know, the states which cause a particular experience, are just distinct from the presentation of the experience of knowledge itself. Let's take 2+2=4.

In logical terms, we know that by experiencing the a priori mathematical concepts. If we were without these concepts, we would not have knowledge 2+2=4.

Yet, it is also the case this understanding was generated out of states of the body in an environment. In terms of causality observation might have been involved. My body might have generated my idea of 2+2=4 in response to me seeing a group of objects.