[lit-ideas] Re: Must the Word be Literate?
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2007 13:33:49 +0100 (BST)
--- Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>'Analysis' begins with the statements of
> ordinary language. Even the reformist Logical Positivists began there.
Let us grant this.
> Yet Donal, I believe, misunderstands the difference between
> Wittgenstein's project and theirs. Wittgenstein does not think [3] that
> the tacit conventions needed to understand ordinary language disguise
> anything; he simply remarks that we employ 'enormously complicated'
> conventions in understanding ordinary language (but we should not
> mistake this for a defect that has to be remedied).
Did I suggest otherwise (the practical point being that it would be unduly
cumbersome to express ourselves using explicitly the 'enormously complicated'
conventions that underpin ordinary language)? Did I deny that there might be
differences between Wittgenstein and the LPs (did I say Wittgenstein was an
LP)? This leaves the question of the similarities and differences and their
relative importance in 'placing' certain ideas (the LPs had their differences
too, ah but those sweet, sweet similarities..).
Donal
Must dash
This cautionary
> remark is not the preface to '...and so, we should examine what language
> REALLY is.' Wittgenstein believed that he could show the logical
> structure of language, the structure that it had to have in order to
> mirror the world. This isn't though a reformist project: it is
> descriptive, througha and through.
>
> That is the essential difference between Wittgenstein and the
> Positivists. Wittgenstein thought that he was revealing the relations
> between thought: language: logic: and the world (and ultimately) the
> logical structure of world itself, which is mirrored in and is mirrored
> by logic. (Well, this is all very sketchy.) The Positivists on the other
> hand, believed that there was something fundamentally misleading about
> ordinary language (outside the natural sciences) and began a
> prescriptive project aimed at showing not what language?au fond?rests on
> but what it should be. That generations of commentators have slurred
> over this fundamental difference between Wittgenstein's and the
> Positivists' enterprises has led to much unnecesary suffering.
>
> Robert Paul
> The Reed Institutea
>
>
> [3] is
>
>
> > Consider: in TLP the putative isomorphism between language and reality is
> not
> > said to be 'rough' but is assumed to be exact (even if unsayable because
> we
> > cannot 'say' any of the fundamental 'atoms' of language or of reality):
> and
> > being _this_ exact it is logically perfect in its exactitude.
> >
> >> In the Tractatus, he separates what can be said (propositions like those
>
> >> in the natural sciences) from what can't be. His purpose isn't to exalt
> >> the former but to show how little has been accomplished when the
> >> separation has been made: for the really important stuff, the things
> >> that matter can't be talked about. At first, the Logical Positivists
> >> (beginning with the members of the Vienna Circle) saw Wittgenstein as an
>
> >> ally in their attempt to show that the only meaningful statements were
> >> empirical ones, and that metaphysical statements, ethical statements,
> >> statements about art, etc., were either nonsensical or meaningless:
> >> 'pseudo propositions,' as Ayer called them.
> >
> > Again this is tendentious and somewhat disingenuous (no offence). It is
> true
> > that Wittgenstein's attitude to what he terms 'nonsense' is rather
> different
> > to that of the standard-issue logical positivist: they may be utterly
> > dismissive of 'ethics', say, as mere balderdash and piffle - whereas for
> > Wittgenstein 'ethics', though its propositions are 'nonsense' strictly
> > speaking, is much more important a field than the field of 'natural
> science'
> > which is all that does strictly make sense. Yet despite this difference
> in
> > attitude to the relative importance of what falls on either side of the
> > sense/nonsense divide, Wittgenstein and the LPs draw the line between
> sense
> > and nonsense in much the same way. [Of course, it was Popper in L.Sc.D.
> who
> > exposed that it is the wrong way and embodies a mistaken philosophy of
> > science].
> >
> >> And for a long time, this was the received view: that Wittgenstein had
> >> shown, or had tried to show, that only empirical propositions were
> >> useful and important. Only in the past few decades have people realized
> >> that Wittgenstein's message was that we cannot talk about the really
> >> important things.
> >
> > This is rich. Who are these "people"? For a long time a lot of academic
> > philosophers may have perpetuated this "received" view - and clearly they
> > would be mistaken: in TLP Wittgenstein asserts that "only empirical
> > propositions" make synthetic sense but he does not therefore say that
> these
> > sensible propositions are the only "useful and important" propositions,
> > nevermind say that they are always therefore more "useful and important"
> than
> > certain nonsensical propositions.
> >
> > Popper was never among this shallow shoal of academic philosophers that
> > Wittgenstein inspired and the anti-Wittgensteinian bent of his philosophy
> > does not overlook the fact that "Wittgenstein's message was that we
> cannot
> > talk about the really important things." Far from it.
> >
> > I don't think my remarks any more misundestand Wittgenstein than Popper
> does,
> > bearing in mind that, if Robert Paul is right, "[o]nly in the past few
> > decades" has Popper's longstanding view of the TLP been vindicated even
> among
> > the slow-moving herd of Wittgenstein scholars [this is a pattern in
> Popper's
> > thought: some uncelebrated papers of his on evolutionary epistemology in
> the
> > 1970s, uncelebrated because they went against certain academic
> 'orthodoxies'
> > of the time, are now seen as far-sighted and cutting-edge; but then
> Popper is
> > an original and profound thinker and not someone else's stooge].
> >
> > Upshot: Whatever the difference in attitude to non-science/metaphysics,
> > Wittgenstein and the LPs share a mistaken positivistic and
> instrumentalist
> > view of science.
> >
> >
> > Donal
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________________________________
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