[lit-ideas] Re: Philosophical Investigations online - amplification re PI
- From: Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:08:11 -0400
Donal McEvoy wrote:
"... what is in the TLP must, as W says in the Preface to PI, be taken
as essential “background” to understanding PI. So views retained from
TLP need not be the focus of explicit affirmation in PI or otherwise
addressed; whereas what is in TLP but is later rejected, needs to be
addressed (even if the relation between later and earlier, and thus
what has been ‘rejected’, is left for the reader to discern and is not
itself explicitly addressed)."
It seems to me that Wittgenstein means something quite different than
suggested by Donal. In the preface to PI, Wittgenstein writes:
"Four years ago I had occasion to re-read my first book [TLP] and to
explain its ideas to someone. It suddenly seemed to me that I should
publish those old thoughts and the new ones together: that the latter
could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the
background of my old ways of thinking. For since beginning to occupy
myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, I have been forced to
recognize grave mistakes in what I wrote in that first book."
I read this as Wittgenstein acknowledging that putting TLP and PI
together would emphasize the differences and the errors in TLP. The
background provided by TLP is one of contrast rather than support for
PI. I do think that there is continuity between the two texts, but the
differences are considerable and important. Because of these
differences, I would suggest that any claims of continuity need to be
made clear and defended.
Donal continues:
"In short, if W had abandoned anything as fundamental as the
‘saying/showing’ distinction, we might expect him to say so"
Wittgenstein doesn't abandon the saying/showing distinction, but
rather argues that it isn't all there is to language. And he does it
at the very beginning of PI with his discussion of Augustine. In §1,
after quoting Augustine, Wittgenstein writes:
"These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the
essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in
language name objects - sentences are combinations of such names. In
this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea:
Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It
is the object for which the word stands."
This seems to me to reflect much of the picture given to us in TLP, a
picture which supports the saying/showing distinction. Wittgenstein
then carries on in §3:
"Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication;
only not everything that we call language is this system. And one has
to say this in many cases where the question arises 'Is this an
appropriate description or not?' The answer is: 'Yes, it is
appropriate, but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for
the whole of what you were claiming to describe."
I read this as Wittgenstein perhaps acknowledging that what he had
written in TLP was mistaken, not because it was wrong, but rather
because it only accounted for a small part of language. Propositional
language can be understood using the methods of TLP, including the
saying/showing distinction, but it is a mistake to think that these
methods give us an understanding of all language use. Wittgenstein
makes this point in a number of other places in PI as well. In short,
and in my opinion, Wittgenstein is not so much rejecting the
saying/showing distinction as he is saying that there is far more to
sense and meaning in language use.
Donal again:
"If we take the “limits of language” to be set by relevant “rules”
(separating sense and nonsense in relation to some ‘language-game’),
then these “rules” cannot be said but can only be shown. It is a
misreading of Wittgenstein, particularly his ‘rule-following
considerations’, to think that his aim is to state or express what the
“rules” are that govern various 'language-games' – this is no more the
aim than it is his aim to express or draw in language the bounds of
sense (which aim Wittgenstein takes to be aiming at the impossible)"
For Wittgenstein, the so-called 'limits of language' are not set by
rules. Rules are rather, what give sense and meaning to language use
in the same way that rules give sense and meaning to a game.
Furthermore, we can articulate rules of language, such as grammar and
dictionary definitions, in the same way that we can list the rules of
soccer or chess. My wife teaches ESL and it is very important for her
students to know the grammatical rules of English, and that they are
different from the grammatical rules of Arabic or Japanese. We
approach the 'limits of language' when we ask how we learn these rules
and how we follow them. Using Wittgenstein's examples, can someone
learn the game of chess without ever playing it? Or, if the moves of a
chess game can be made mentally, can the moves be translated into
yells and the stamping of feet and still be considered the playing of
chess? The issue is not the rules, which can be clearly articulated,
but rather their use.
Sincerely,
Phil Enns
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