@fdrake

Here's one more note ― not a direct commentary on this exchange, but another spanner I can't resist throwing in the works.

There's an interview where Orson Welles says this: "You have to distinguish between realism and truth. Look at Cagney: no one actually behaves like that, but every moment he's on screen is TRUE!"

I think we've had this discussion before. — fdrake

That may be, although I like the story you're telling well enough to have told versions of it myself here on the forum, and pretty recently.

I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with this sort of story, but I keep having the feeling that ― and this may not make sense ― it does less than I want because it does more than I want. It treats the universe as sort of flat and so it tells a story that is sort of flat.

things eat in the same sense as they walk, run, dance, skip, speak, interpret — fdrake

I'm not saying that's wrong, so there's no need to get started on a fix. But I don't always want a framework that doesn't distinguish eating from dancing from speaking, or leaves those distinctions optional, or builds up to them in a similarly generic way (apo).

I think there are other stories we can tell that meet different needs.

It's something like a stratum of human behaviour which does the revealing, isn't it? And it's inflected by norms but not totally determined by them. — fdrake

When I was a kid, we used to set the table for dinner, always the same way: on the left, fork, sitting on a paper napkin, on the right, knife and spoon, in that order, dinner plate in between, and all on a placemat. That was our custom. There's logic to it, but it could clearly be done other ways, and was done differently in other homes. There's also a more general norm here, of which we had a specific version, of having silverware for everyone on the table. That too has a logic to it, but needn't be done, much less done this way.

And we could keep going, with more and more general norms that underlie specific ones. But is eating -- rather than eating specific things in specific ways at specific times of day -- is that "just" a norm?

You could say yes if you intend to sweep in everything a human attaches value to; you could make eating a biological norm, so to speak. But we're no longer talking about custom or convention. There is nothing arbitrary about eating. (But it is "optional" if you value something else more highly than your own life, so still arguably a "norm" in some broad sense.)

So I'm just a little leery of a story that's "norms all the way down." The argument that we just happen to say "red" instead of "rouge" for "merely" historical reasons, how well does that extend to eating? If your history takes in the rise of multicellular organisms, which happen to be things that eat, maybe. But to make sense of that, we'd have to look at norms of conversation.

Now what about truth? There are old arguments for and against "truth by convention" that I don't want to rehash. Nor do I want to talk about what people think truth is; for one thing, it's part of the idea of truth that what people think isn't necessarily it. But I do think there's room to talk about the experience of truth, so that's what I've been trying to make a start on here.

Truth as a process. — fdrake

That might be, in a human-finitude sort of way. But I was saying something stronger: we don't so much tell the truth as reveal it, or at least do our part in revealing it. Here's that metaphor taken literally: there is a curtain hiding the facts; I pull it back on my side so that you can begin to see what's behind it, and if you pull the rest on your side, things as they are stand revealed. ― Now, maybe it's best to admit we never quite get the curtain pulled all the way clear, maybe in fact all we get are glimpses now and then when we manage a gap in the curtains, but those glimpses are real and what we see and understand is reality to that degree revealed.

Truth (as a concept) definitely seems to play a privileged coordinating role, even if you grant that it's all coordinating norms. — fdrake

Here too, I want to say something stronger. Or at least I want to make sure the norms in play aren't just matters of what we say and do ― the way these things usually cash out ― but in what we think and believe and know.

Whenever I speak to you, I invite you to see through my eyes, to see things as I see them, and that's so whether how I see things is accurate or not. It's the same when I understand you, which I can do even when I think you're wrong, I can see how you see things. But when I see more of the truth than you and I share that, where we want to end up is that your eyes are just fine, you just have to look where I'm looking and attend to what I'm attending to. ― Maybe that's a matter of deeply shared cognitive norms, at some community or even species level, I don't know.

The thing about truth is that perspective ― "No, stand over here and look. See?" ― may be necessary, in at least some circumstances, to get to it, but truth is never truth only from a particular perspective. Once you've bent down and looked from the right angle to understand how the thing works, you can stand back up. If you would have to be me or think like me to get it, we must be talking about an idea of mine rather than truth. So it is that at most you borrow my eyes, look through them just for a moment, and understand there was nothing special about my eyes anyway. It's not even unusual for you to "what's more ..." me. I was in a better position to see than you and I still missed something.

Alright, I'm beating this to death, which is too bad because I think there are limitations to the seeing business, and very often what we really need and share with each other is narrative.

So roughly, I don't think sentences "bear" truth in the sense required for this debate. It's the norms of use, and we coordinate those by using them in circumstances, and they leave a lot imprecise and unsaid. — fdrake

I want to have my cake and eat it though.

I have considerable sympathy for all of this, but I'm not convinced it's the whole story.

I think we can recognize precision and explicitness as thresholds that are negotiated, without idealizing them into unreachable and thus useless perfection. We say enough to be understood, counting on the audience to fill in as much as they need to to get it, and even that can be negotiated.

But that just kills off an unrealistic picture of how conversation works. Even if your speech doesn't have to carry the burden of truth entirely on its own, it has to do its part.

I keep finding myself thinking that the great value of saying something true to someone else is helping them see it ― like when you point out to someone that a photo of the faculty of your department has no women in it. And it's not just a matter of your words being understood and even credited; if I lie to you convincingly, my words hide the world from you, obstruct and undermine your relationship with it, divert your attention into a shadowy fantasy land. But when I tell you the truth, and you see it, my words fall away.

So I don't think norms and assertibility and all that are the whole story. I think even if sentences don't carry truth like a payload, they still ought to be truth-directed and truth-directing.

I want to take a couple more swipes at treating truth as a predicate.

1. Truth, or some equivalent or substitute, is prior to all the other predicates, underwrites them, and is necessary for doing things like defining their extensions as sets.

You can't define a sentence S as being true if the sentence "S is true" is true without circularity.

2. Intuitively, when you collect things with some property into a set, they're all there because they have something in common.

But if you try to collect true sentences, they each end up in the set for a different reason. "My car is red" goes in because my car is red. "I'm cooking pasta" goes in because I'm cooking pasta.

(I suspect the set of all and only true sentences is incoherent -- Liar? -- but I don't think we have to go there.)

Just as a sentence being true (or false) before it is said makes no sense. — Michael

What are the chances that anyone has ever said that 799168003115 + 193637359638 = 992805362753?

North American ones are ugly — frank

When I was a kid, my family kept some chickens and ducks as pets, I don't know why. Sometimes a fox ― or more often a feral cat ― would get into the pen and cause trouble. I remember running out to the pen one night with a flashlight to see what the ruckus was, and my light landed on a possum sitting there looking right at me with egg yolk dripping out of its little fanged mouth. Most horrifying thing I've ever seen.

In a way, if you put human intellect or human speech on one side and the world on the other, that's an expression of alienation. And there's a long tradition there, this view that because of our intellects and apparently unique cognitive abilities, we stand tragically apart from the world in the way that other animals don't.

And then truth is unattainable because, reach out as we might in language, we can never quite reach the world ― and it is a matter of reaching it, because there is a chasm between us and it. Language is artificial, a kludge. It doesn't belong to the world, anymore than we do.

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

This is tangential, but I sometimes think the most fundamental position a person takes -- the one that most shapes his or her worldview -- is whether the world is to be trusted or not. Is the world a good place?

For the skeptic, truth is defined as what eludes us. Nature seems to exist only to mock man's presumption.

You talked before about truth being a relation between a sentence and something else in the world. — Michael

And I don't think that's a terrible first thing to say, but then you have to think about what that relation is and what grounds it. Wittgenstein shows one way of doing that, but of course it's not the only way.

It's the same with all dualisms: having put language here and the world there, you have to put them back together somehow. The usual word for when they do fit together is "truth", because truth is showing things as they are.

In your telling, truth is external to being, a sort of optional add-on. Things are the way they are, and sometimes people say that they are, and sometimes they don't. There's at least a sense here in which things being as they are is embedded in saying that they are, but it's not clear this is enough to get you truth; if language is just a sort of wrapping paper, or labels we stick on things, what would allow you to distinguish one way of wrapping from another? We would still have things over there, and things we say over here, and truth would just be a preference for one design of paper over another.

I'd say the problem is that you want to put truth on one side and actuality on the other, but they are so closely related that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein treats them as different words for the same thing: the possibility of the book being on the table can be expressed in words, in a picture, in a model, or in the physical fact of the book being on the table.

It is because these are different modalities of expressing the same thing that one can be a picture of another. Going the other way, it's also the reason you can build the building depicted in a drawing.

Truth and being cannot be separated as you want.

Srap Tasmaner's response was both witty and important. — Leontiskos

Although, to be fair, you could say this about most of my posts.

@Leontiskos suggested a spot that already exists, that's all. How people use it ― well, they use it like they use the rest of the forum: being on topic is not a priority, and people never tire of rehashing the same debates.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/categories/16/reading-groups

Then I'll say a sentence is true when it corresponds to the facts. And I don't mean anything special by that.

Would you prefer it if I said “truth bearers are features of language”? — Michael

Do you want to say that? I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, but be my guest.

I didn’t mean anything special by the term “entity”. — Michael

Clearly. It was a kind of placeholder "I don't know what to put here" word. But it is the natural word, in one sense, since you intend to attribute properties to these whatever-they-ares. So why are you backing away from it?

But I don't think this has anything to do with metaphysics at all. Metaphysics concerns the nature of truth makers, not truth bearers. — Michael

"Entities" was *your* word. If you want to pretend that's not a metaphysical word, I don't know what to tell you.

linguistic entities — Michael

Since this thread is, so I understand, in theory about metaphysics, I'm curious whether you have anything to say about these entities. Are you proposing some variety of dualism? What makes an entity linguistic or non-linguistic? (Rain, I take it, is not linguistic.) Are there other kinds of entities or just those two?

what did you mean with the following? — Banno

Consider that question for a moment, and then tell me again how it's the bare sentence and not the use made of it that matters.

Look, you can treat "is true" or "is greater than 3" or "is holding" each as attributing a property to an object, and the surface grammar agrees with you.

I'm just not that impressed by the surface grammar. "4 > 3" says something about 3 and about 4, and about ordering. "The paperclip is holding" says something about the whole Jerry-rigged business. And "What you say is true" is not just a statement about your words.

Or so it seems to me.

The picture theory of meaning? Do you really want to invoke that? — Banno

That would be Michael. Ask him.

the use to which it is put — Banno

This is what I was getting at.

Yes, well, everyone seems to think plain common sense supports their position. What fun.

It's an accurate painting of the front of your house on a rainless day. — Michael

I would say that what you described as a "property" of a painting is more accurately described as a relation between a painting and something else that holds in a certain way and under certain conditions.

being an integer greater than the number 3 makes no sense without reference to the number 3 — Michael

"greater than" is a relation between two integers; it is an arity-2 predicate from which you have produced the arity-1 predicate "greater than 3" by fixing the second value.

(And, not for nothing, but were you tempted to try to formulate this in terms of numerals rather than numbers? Aren't numbers the sorts of abstract objects you wanted nothing to do with?)

To say that a painting is accurate in itself makes no sense without reference to something outside the painting. — Leontiskos

Yes, that was my reservation about saying truth is a property of a sentence.

The case of paintings is curious. If you paint a nice picture of a farm, with a house in the foreground and a barn in the background, your painting may show the barn as being much smaller, even if the actual barn is much larger than the actual house.

Is that accurate? Yes, it is, but accurate as a representation of the world? Or as a representation of a perspective on the world?

(So even the pair <painting, world> looks inadequate.)

Like using a paperclip to replace a cotter pin? — Banno

That was the sense in which I was using "interpretation". Using a paperclip as a cotter pin. More or less.

much like accuracy is a property of paintings — Michael

Hmmmm.

So if you set up your easel in front of my house and make a lovely painting of it, will it seem, even to you, to be accurate if you look at my house from the back? (Or after dark? Or in the rain?)

Truth is a property of sentences. — Michael

Is it? Shouldn't it at the very least be a property of a pair <sentence, interpretation>? (Or a triple that includes as well a world.)

Here's an analogy.

Suppose you have a little wagon, and the wheels are held on by cotter pins but one's broken. You bend a paperclip so that it stays in place as the cotter pin did, and then test it, concluding "It's holding, for now anyway."

Is "holding" a property of the paperclip? If you remove it, would it still be "holding"? Was it "holding" before you bent it into a cotter-pin shape?

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. — Antony Nickles

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

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. — p. 2

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?

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). — Antony Nickles

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

I want you to remember that words have those meanings which we have given them; and we give them meanings by explanations. — p. 27

Whenever we interpret a symbol in one way or another, the interpretation is a new symbol added to the old one. — p. 33

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.

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

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.

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

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

I will give a few such interpretations and use English words with well-established usage. — p. 2

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?

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. — Antony Nickles

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

"This is a pencil",
"This is round",
"This is wood",
"This is one",
"This is hard", etc. etc. — ibid

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.

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. — p. 9f.

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

The grammar of this phrase has yet to be explained to me. — p. 10

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

These are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language. — p. 17

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.

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. — p. 10

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.

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 — Paine

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

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

And on the next page:

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. — p. 5

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.

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. — p. 5, the very next sentence

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.

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'." — Philosophical Grammar, p. 40

"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?" — Philosophical Grammar, p. 41

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:

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. — p. 17

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:

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. — p. 7

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.

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

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. — Ludwig V

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

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".

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.

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

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.)

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

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

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.

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.

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." — Philosophical Grammar, p. 40

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

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. — p. 4

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.

Absolutely. And it can go the other way -- you can guilt-by-association traditional philosophy, art, religion, anything of the past if you think society is so much better now than it was in the bad old days.

I should add, I don't think it's a matter of "reducing" someone's philosophy to their politics, or their aesthetics, or vice versa. But I do believe William James was right to sense that there were different temperaments, I guess we could say, and that attitudes toward various things tend to come in clusters. Or if not temperaments then styles, different ways of approaching things, of defining and trying to solve problems.

the same realm viewed with different eyes — Wayfarer

I like this.

Through the lens of clinging and aversion, the world is fragmented and suffering (dukkha). Through the lens of insight the same world is seen as interdependent, luminous, and spontaneous. — Wayfarer

That certainly has the ring of truth!

It does also sound like the sort of difference that you might attribute to affect or mood.

But that can go either way: you could also say that your mood derives from "which world" you're seeing.

intuitive vision or insight into the real nature of existence — Wayfarer

There's just too much literature on all this for us to do more than scratch the surface.

I'll add something else, which is a little closer to your point about self-realization. There's another sort of insight which maybe concerns something like freedom. I've acquired a sort of homegrown Buddhism: when I'm worried about something (and there is so much to worry about), I tell myself "This is just a thing that is happening" and I can let go of the feelings I attach to those worries. I tell my son, "You gotta be Taoist about this shit." -- Henry Miller used to talk about being a happy rock, that the river flows over but cannot move or change.

Alan Watts — Wayfarer

My oldest son and his friends have read it, along with Nietzsche, Marx, Camus. The hippy reading list is alive and well in some quarters.

the salient idea there is indeed that that of a 'truer realm', which is what 'the sage' has come to realise (in both senses of understanding to be true and bringing to fruition.) — Wayfarer

it's the implicit background for the idea expressed in the 'great chain of being', which is where this started. — Wayfarer

Through the philosophical ascent we 'come to our senses', as it were, and begin to 'see truly'. — Wayfarer

I think you're right to see all these dots as connected, and right to think people reject the whole package because they reject a particular dot, for they see them as connected too.

I think we should have a conversation about the truer realm, because that intuition -- that this world isn't all there is -- is so persistent across cultures and ages. In the modern world, we've mostly corraled it into religion, but the intuition itself is interesting.

So here let me ask you: my hunch is that this intuition, that there's something else, something more, comes first and beliefs about the other realm after. Do you think that's right? Or do you think that people, maybe a smallish number, have experiences that are, well, unusual, that they take as experiences of another realm -- that such experience comes first? I could see either. What do you think?

my difficulty with the OP is that we are trying to get degrees out of the substance/mode binary. — Leontiskos

Which btw I didn't see coming. I think that comes from @Wayfarer's stuff about the 17th century.

What's in it for me? (See what I did there?)

Or, on the other hand, to associate the position you oppose with the past well lost.

That's what I meant when I said he was engaged in a degree of cherry-picking, naming approaches he particularly dislikes and making them exemplary. — J

I think there's a real question whether supposed views of the past are ever really in play in a contemporary debate, or are people staking out contemporary positions in that debate but using the past to give their position the lustre of authority.

terms like "objective" and "subjective" come to take on meanings that are in some ways the opposite of their original meaning and which lead to incoherence because their original framework has been not only abandoned, but forgotten. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is the vision of cultural transmission as a game of "telephone". @Wayfarer frequently makes such suggestions.

Two questions though:

(1) Is the original message necessarily the most important? (Dewey, for a counterpoint, talks about philosophical problems not being solved but abandoned, passed by, because they are no longer "live" to later generations.) The word "necessarily" provides an easy out; make it, why should we think the original is important at all, except as a matter of historical interest?

(2) How much time-place-language-conceptual-scheme-culture relativism are we committed to? Just enough that certain people "no longer understand" the old ways, but not so much that the dedicated scholar can't "recover" or "reconstruct" what has been lost?

(2) is particularly "fraught," as the kids say. When you dip into such a debate, you'll first read someone claiming that the original meaning of such and such was this, because in their conceptual scheme blah blah blah. And you think, wow that's really interesting, and the shift in perspective is exciting. But then you find out that every little detail is subject to endless debate among specialists, and it gets harder to believe anyone really knows the "original". -- And all that comes before considering whether you're even capable of entering into the worldview of a thousand or three thousand years ago, given a mind stuffed with 20th- and 21st-century ideas. How alien are the ideas you're supposed to be able to grasp? How can you know you've done so, that you haven't just played another round of "telephone"?