@Count Timothy von Icarus

Dang, this Rorty essay is the gift that keeps on giving...

I have been describing a three-cornered debate. In one corner are the natu-ralists, who want to get past the linguistic turn. In another are the prag-matic Wittgensteinians, who think that replacing Kantian talk about ex-perience, thought, and consciousness with Wittgensteinian talk about the uses of linguistic expressions helps us replace worse philosophical theories with better ones. In a third are the Wittgensteinian therapists, for whom the importance of the linguistic turn lies in helping us realize that philosophers have failed to give meaning to the words they utter. The people in the first 6 Minar 1995, 413.
7corner do not read Wittgenstein at all, and those in the other two read him very differently. I want now to describe the differences between these two readings in more detail. The two camps disagree about the relation between early and later Wittgenstein. The therapists take the last pages of the Tractatus very seri-ously indeed. They do their best to tie them in with the metaphilosophical portions of Philosophical Investigations. In sharp contrast, the pragmatists tacitly dismiss the final passages of the Tractatus as an undigested residue of Schopenhauer. They regard sections 89-133 of the Investigations as an unfortunate left-over from Wittgenstein’s early, positivistic period—the period in which he thought that “The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science” (4.11). They have no more use for the claim that “The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense” (PI 129) than for the earlier claim that “Most of the propo-sitions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical” (4.003). — Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn- Richard Rorty

Dang, this Rorty essay is the gift that keeps on giving... — schopenhauer1

Well, based on what you quoted, and given that Wittgenstein was tired of calling the same thing by different words and definitions, you can see how he moved away from Schop's vision of representation being the matrix where meaning is derived from, in the TLP.

But, it gets even more strange in the Investigations to say that meaning is use.

@Wayfarer@Count Timothy von Icarus

I'll leave you with this for now.. (I'll be back though).. Is there any other philosopher, who you can quite do this sort of "You cannot refuteth thus, without using the Prophets own methods/ideas!".. I don't think so, I don't think you can get away with doing that without being called a dogmatist.. But oddly, because Witt is seen as an "anti-dogmatist par excellance" one can thus hide behind this notion to actually become a Wittgensteinian dogmatist.. I don't know, just an idea.

It's also the notion that if one just really parses out Wittgenstein's Koans (aphorisms or propositions), one will "get it".. One just has to interpret Wittgenstein to the best ability..

One can always chastise oneself for not knowing enough, and by not knowing enough, one is not "getting it fully".. But why wouldn't that same thing be for any other philosopher? And that's why the style also makes people carried away that if they JUST READ a bit more of his biography, JUST READ his notes a bit better, they can understand his main works better, and thus gain the gnosis that they seek in the anti-dogmatic "enlightenment" of the great Witt... If you just knew that he was against certainty, and that language was use, and that language is about facts, and that all else is nonsense....

Science tells us facts about the world and metaphysics is nonsense, or that language meaning is how you use it, just seems like therapy to me for something that wasn't a problem..

It reminds me of people who want to be seen as supremely moderate, so say things like, "It's all about the economy", or something like that.. Yeah, who isn't going to get on board with that?

I think you have a point. Hence my previous post about (if one gives a shit) reading the Blue and Brown books. But, seemingly the appeal of Witt is so strong that it really directed the minds of many philosophers to decode what he meant.

Even Bertrand Russell (one of his closest friends, apart from Frank Ramsey) got him wrong in his foreword to the Tractatus, according to Wittgenstein.

This is more of a meta-thread on HOW PEOPLE debate Wittgenstein.. — schopenhauer1

You could look to @Banno as an example. Banno has argued an interpretation of Wittgenstein, supporting that interpretation with an appeal to authority, Wikipedia. Later, in a completely different context, Banno bragged, I wrote that Wikipedia page. Hahaha, good one, Banno.

And, I might add, that I don't think such shenanigans are exclusive to Banno, or discussions of Wittgenstein in general.

Maybe Wittgenstein dodged the big philosophical questions by implying that we’re all taking part in philosophical games rather than addressing the questions of antiquity starting with Plato and Aristotle. Maybe he was a fraud in this regard maybe he was a genius.

Some claim he’s the greatest philosopher ever for his linguistic trickery but all he did was look at philosophy from a different angle, the linguistic one and whilst he enabled some new insight in this regard I believe his whole contribution to philosophy to be a minor one.

One thought I've had on "philosophy is largely problems of language," is if this might be more of a "which came first, the chicken or the egg," issue. The supposition in this view is that we are confused by metaphysical issues, the Ship of Theseus, Eddington's Two Tables, the One and the Many, etc. because our language is imprecise and confused. But it seems just as plausible that language evolved in such a way as to be vague and confusing precisely because it's being generated by people facing a world full of vague and confusing metaphysical and epistemological conundrums.

For example, you have the three uses of "is." The "is of predication," the "is of identity," and the "is of existence." But in the history of philosophy, there is plenty of debate that might make one question how discrete these really are. Yet, if things just are their properties, a not unpopular view in metaphysics, then the sum total of what can be predicated of a thing is its identity, or at least something very close to it. Likewise, if existence (or actuality) is simply another predicate, then the "is of existence" collapses into the "is of predication" which in turn is (lol) the "is of identity." I'm not going to argue that this collapse is warranted, but certainly various theories in this history of philosophy would seem to support something like it.

The claim of people focusing on language is that this all flows from language itself. But it does not seem implausible to me that might flow from the very nature of the world and our experience of it—that "how being is" accounts for why people to think these various uses of "is" are either identical or bear a very close relationship to one another. This would indeed explain how one word came to stand in for these different concepts.


Edit: if such a collapse seems completely implausible, I'd invite you to ponder Leibniz' Law for a moment—∀F(Fx ↔ Fy) → x=y — and consider what it says about what identity is.

Yours is a fair representation of what Heidegger was about.

Where does an opposing view start? A rebuttal of a narrative? A different frame of reference?

Gate-keeping rebuttals to disagreement.

I think a big part of it is that Wittgenstein gutted metaphysics (the gutting starting with Hume, and Kant, then Nietzsche and Wittgenstein). So if you display disagreement with Wittgenstein, you are thought to be some kind of primitive thinking essentialist, metaphysician, who is totally missing Wittgenstein’s point. And therefore you should go read or read again

But someone pointed out this sort of gate-keeping happens with Nietzsche too.

Which I agree.

We all need to show our Wittgenstein or Nietzsche bona fides these days, certainly before any proponent of either of them would entertain a disagreement with them.

Ironically (and why he admitted the nonsense) what I see happens when people gatekeep arguments against Wittgenstein or Nietzsche, in a raw simplified sense, they turn Wittgenstein’s or Nietzsche’s position into a sort of gospel truth - where the meaning objectively is - which is the opposite of what either was purporting to demonstrate. (They forget to throw away the ladder when they point to the words, which points to maybe a reason the words need more investigation.)

Doing philosophy shouldn’t be about defining terms alone. A dictionary is a good starting point in this regard. Wittengstteins philosophy appears to be to dissect the question at its linguistic composition rather addressing it. In this regard he falls short of a true understanding of what is being asked and what is at stake for philosophy by side stepping the big questions entirely.

We have valid philosophical questions and lines of enquiry which remain almost impenetrable such as the big question of does God exist or what is truth, what is reality etc?

These are questions WORTH pondering without the linguistic sidestepping that Wittgenstein seems to offer.

What examples of this sidestepping attract your notice?

- :up:

Wittgenstein refers to many of his contemporaries in his writings. He does not mention studying others. I think the Count's point about the depth of 'classical education' is germane. But it is a matter impossible to settle from text alone. — Paine

My source here was a review by Gregory Sadler that I watched after I joined TPF and desired to learn more about Wittgenstein. See, for example, 26:44. But maybe I conflated a lack of engagement with contemporaries with a lack of engagement with the wider philosophical tradition. My point is that perhaps it is no accident that Wittgenstenians struggle to interact with other kinds of philosophy, if Wittgenstein's work was not intended to interact with other philosophy.

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For example, you have the three uses of "is." The "is of predication," the "is of identity," and the "is of existence." But in the history of philosophy, there is plenty of debate that might make one question how discrete these really are. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am also thinking about the thread on quantification, and the way that the Wittgenstenian view in that thread is self-referential and largely incapable of interacting with the large number of alternative views.

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It's also the notion that if one just really parses out Wittgenstein's Koans (aphorisms or propositions), one will "get it".. One just has to interpret Wittgenstein to the best ability..

One can always chastise oneself for not knowing enough, and by not knowing enough, one is not "getting it fully".. But why wouldn't that same thing be for any other philosopher? — schopenhauer1

I don't think it can be said for any philosopher but I think it can be said for some. I think Plato is the epitome, for meditation on Plato's dialogues shows them to be fecund beyond belief. I don't see any of that in Wittgenstein, and as I have learned more about his methodology I think I have begun to understand why it isn't there. But maybe I should try reading him again.

Imo his whole philosophy is a linguistic sidetrack. But calling it a sidetrack I don’t mean to devalue his contribution at all. His focus on philosophy was purely at a linguistic angle which looked at its problems differently to traditional ways of answering philosophical questions.

If all that is a side track, what is the main path? What is supposed to be studied?

Well Wittgenstein claimed that the things that could be talked about could be talked about clearly and things which couldn’t we couldn’t talk about at all like Values. He also believed early on that any philosophy that wasn’t linguistic analysis to be a criminal waste of effort but here he was wrong as he later softened his position.

I don’t know what the main path is when it comes to philosophy and whilst the progress from antiquity to enlightenment has been slow it has sown plenty for fruitful discussion yet elementary questions of philosophy and metaphysics remain.

Eg why is there something rather than nothing ?
Do we have free will
Does God exist etc.

Ironically (and why he admitted the nonsense) what I see happens when people gatekeep arguments against Wittgenstein or Nietzsche, in a raw simplified sense, they turn Wittgenstein’s or Nietzsche’s position into a sort of gospel truth - where the meaning objectively is - which is the opposite of what either was purporting to demonstrate. (They forget to throw away the ladder when they point to the words, which points to maybe a reason the words need more investigation.) — Fire Ologist

I think this restates my point quite succinctly.. Thanks for sharing it!

self-referential and largely incapable of interacting with the large number of alternative views. — Leontiskos

Head nod.... :smile:

Where does an opposing view start? A rebuttal of a narrative? A different frame of reference? — Paine

Either, both. Schopenhauer, Hegel, the proceeding Existentialists, the absurdists, the Platonists, the realists, all might have a different view than Heidegger's approach of da sein..

He also believed early on that any philosophy that wasn’t linguistic analysis to be a criminal waste of effort but here he was wrong as he later softened his position. — kindred

That is one interpretation. There are others. The statement "purely linguistic" indicates a particular point of view.

Are you proposing that is a self evident component of the text?

I'll leave you with this for now.. (I'll be back though).. Is there any other philosopher, who you can quite do this sort of "You cannot refuteth thus, without using the Prophets own methods/ideas!".. I don't think so, I don't think you can get away with doing that without being called a dogmatist.. But oddly, because Witt is seen as an "anti-dogmatist par excellance" one can thus hide behind this notion to actually become a Wittgensteinian dogmatist.. I don't know, just an idea.

I think it might be fair to say of the "anti-metaphysical movement," more broadly that it was the most dogmatic since late scholasticism, or at least that it had the greatest combination of ability and desire to enforce its dogma. People weren't put on trial for heresy, but people in the natural sciences were hounded out of their careers or threatened with this fate for violating the established orthodoxy. You see this in the history of quantum foundations up through the late 1990s and you still see it today with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis controversy in biology. In "Our Mathematical Universe," Tegmark recounts publishing his first more speculative paper and getting a long email from a senior physicist warning him that his career would be doomed if he kept writing about those sorts of issues. Adam Becker's "What is Real?" has stories of some serious harassment on the grounds that papers were "incoherent metaphysics," and not "science," (interestingly, papers that have since become very influential).

But more to your point, when Hegel was more dominant, this was a common charge against Hegelians. They would say "your critique against Hegel is not truly presuppositionless! Hegel's philosophy has no presuppositions and so is immune to all these critiques."

I have to imagine people really did go on like this, because it's a common complaint. Houlgate talks about this at length in his commentary on the Logic, and there actually is a valid form of this sort of defense of Hegel that is a good response to some of the critiques that have misunderstood Hegel's project, but it was deployed in a sort of blanket way.

Edit: Scholasticism might also show how movements can change. Neoscholastics do not strike me as very dogmatic. The Catholic philosophy space makes very active use of both continental and analytic philosophy. Just off the top of my head, someone like Sokolowski will engage very seriously with Husserl and analytic philosophy of language, while working in Aquinas and Aristotle. Ulrich makes considerable use of Heidegger and Hegel next to Aquinas. Did they learn from their mistakes? Is it just such a small school that it cannot afford to be dogmatic? It is decidedly NOT that they made peace with modernity though lol.

Partly, what made scholasticism calcify into dogmatism is that it felt it needed to guide how the world worked. The Church was the most important institution in its society and scholasticism was essential to the Church (or liked to think itself so). It got itself into trouble precisely because of the role it saw for itself in guiding and defending that institution.

Well, today arguably science is the most influential institution and scientism the leading "religion-like" world view (in terms of broadly telling people "the way the world is"). The anti-metaphysical movement likewise saw itself as in charge of defending their society's most important institution, and so maybe this is where the similarity lies.

That is an interesting observation.

Will think about.

I think it might be fair to say of the "anti-metaphysical movement," more broadly that it was the most dogmatic since late scholasticism, or at least that it had the greatest combined ability and desire to enforce its dogma. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

If you can't be useful to technology and science, best be dogmatic about philosophies that only focus on the bits and pieces, and not the whole I guess... As I indicated in another post, it's easier to be taken seriously when you say something anyone can get on board with... "What I can verify is what is all that can be discussed", "The economy is paramount in policy".. You say something quite commonsensical, then philosophy starts becoming the handmaiden of common sense rather than a way anything else. That isn't necessarily appropriate or good, just convenient to be relevant or pragmatic-sounding, and thus gain a sort of cache.. "I'm not a scientist or engineer, but I play one in philosophy" :cool:.

But it seems just as plausible that language evolved in such a way as to be vague and confusing precisely because it's being generated by people facing a world full of vague and confusing metaphysical and epistemological conundrums. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Language evolved to be efficient for the purpose of mundane communication, that's why it's vague and ambiguous. We learn the minimum number of words required to make ourselves understood in a maximum number of different circumstances. Accordingly, it's not well suited for metaphysical and epistemological problems, and it's confusing when applied in this way.

I’m unclear on what you mean. What other interpretations of Wittgenstein’s philosophy are there apart from language, linguistics and language games? I think that’s the sum of his contribution to philosophy.

Are you proposing that is a self evident component of the text?

In most cases, yes where whatever is being formulated is done in a concise and meaningful way. Otherwise it would need clarification.

- Yes - gave the classic quote from Aristotle earlier today.

Well, I was being cheeky there.. I was not in favor of the bits and pieces, science thing :smile:.

What do you make of the following?

6.4 All propositions are of equal value.
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value.
If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental — ibid.

That view is distant from visions of discourse defined solely by use or general purpose.

Language evolved to be efficient for the purpose of mundane communication, that's why it's vague and ambiguous. We learn the minimum number of words required to make ourselves understood in a maximum number of different circumstances. Accordingly, it's not well suited for metaphysical and epistemological problems, and it's confusing when applied in this way.

Do you mean "evolved" in terms of man's ability to use language overall, or in terms of how individual languages evolve?

I agree with what you're saying to some degree, but it's also the case that various metaphysical traditions: Platonism, atomism, Aristotleanism, etc. are all significantly older than any of the languages people on this forum are likely to speak as their native language. So there has been plenty of time to "work out the kinks," if it was easy to do so.

Probably more relevant to the linguistic turn's hopes is that, for over a millennia, philosophers and theologians actually did use a dead language whose function was primarily to discuss these sorts of issues (outside of the liturgy obviously). You have a thousand year stretch of philosophers using a language that had been denuded of its "everyday" implications, supported by vast and elaborate lexicon of technical terminology worked out within that time period. Yet this clearly didn't resolve all the issues vis-á-vis metaphysical questions—questions that appear to be at least as old as the written word itself, and which will seemingly always fascinate us.

The Latin era sort of seems like a gigantic natural experiment to see if the problems of philosophy can be fixed by moving away from everyday language. There is an irony in the fact that the medieval period is often singled as an exemplar period "bad philosophy" vis-á-vis the linguistic turn given the language philosophy was done in at the time.

6.4 All propositions are of equal value.
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists — ibid.

I think it wrong on the face of it, as the world can't exist without a knower/known (pace Schopenhauer).

If value is imputed by the knower, the knower is always in the equation.. as per Schopenhauerian metaphysics.

He’s talking about certain things being transcendal, namely value.

I can’t make much of it but it appears to be an exception to his obsession with language and appears mystical in his formulation.