[lit-ideas] Factivity of "See" (Was: Frege)
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 15:00:42 EDT
R. Henninge quotes from Frege:
>>Having visual impressions is ... necessary for *seeing* things,
>>but it is not sufficient. What must be added is not anything sensible.
>>And it is precisely this that unlocks the outer world for us; for
>>without this non-sensible something, each of us would remain locked
>>up in his inner world.
R. Paul comments:
>A sentence from some work or letter in which Frege is intent on denying
>the
>truth of 'psychologism,' i.e. he is intent on denying that human psychology
>plays any role in logic or mathematics).
R. Henninge replies:
>I don't think that's the point at all in this quote. The point goes much
>further toward the private language arguments in the later Wittgenstein. Can
>you feel my pain? Can you know my tree? Can we communicate about anything?
>Remaining "locked up" in one's "inner world" is no joke for Frege, but he
>felt, with Wittgenstein, that the way out of the solipsistic dilemma was to
>establish the dimensions, the boundaries, the field made up of these
>"non-sensible something"s that *is* the outer world for us. Robert knows my
>problem with Strawson. Maybe it's my grand problem with Anglo-Saxon or
>UK-based philosophy, Kantianism, etc. Even Hawking. The "outer world" is too
>much taken for granted, unquestioned, unchallenged--even by as much a
>Kantian as Strawson. The extent to which the so-called outer world is forced
>to sing to the tune of these Fregean-Wittgensteinian non-sensible
>form-objects, that this "mathematical" agreement among language users
>essentially provides to grounds for objectivity itself, has not yet been
>*kapiert*. And that's why...
I took Frege's quote to be about the alleged 'factivity' of "see" (sehen, in
German)
Note that he speaks of 'visual', and 'see' -- which are cognates in the
Romance languages. Only the Germanic languages make a distinction between
'visual' and 'see', and wonder what word Frege used for 'visual'.
>>Having visual impressions is ... necessary for *seeing* things,
>>but it is not sufficient. What must be added is not anything sensible.
>>And it is precisely this that unlocks the outer world for us; for
>>without this non-sensible something, each of us would remain locked
>>up in his inner world.
The problem is tricky and was discussed in Oxford by Grice and Warnock.
Notably in Studies in the Way of Words, Grice brings the attention to the use
of
'see' in
Macbeth saw Banquo.
If 'see' is factive, then Macbeth could _not_ have seen Banquo since Banquo
was not there to be seen. This would be a case for Frege where "each of us [or
Macbeth, to be more specific] remains locked up in his inner world [of
Scottish tragedy]."
The problem is that sometimes we _do_ use "see" non-factively (as in
"Macbeth saw Banquo") -- However, rather than deny that 'see' _is_ factive,
it's
best to analyse that use of 'see' (as in 'Macbeth saw Banquo') as a _loose_ use
of the verb.
Grice writes:
"If we all know that Macbeth hallucinated, we can quite safely say that
Macbeth saw Banquo, even though Banquo was not there to be seen, and we should
NOT conclude from this that an IMPLICATION [entailment, not implicature] of the
_existence_ of the object said to be seen [in the seer's outer world, to use
Frege's phrase] is NOT part of the 'conventional meaning' of the word 'see',
nor even (as some have done) that there is one _sense_ of the word 'see'
which _lacks_ this implication." (WOW, p. 44).
Grice was very concerned with this, as it's clear from his "Causal Theory of
Perception" -- only if there is an existent _cause_ to the sense-datum, can
we say that we actually _sense_ or perceive things. We don't want to remain
locked up in an inner world, which is Fregean for 'solipsism', methodological
or otherwise.
Cheers,
JL
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