[lit-ideas] Re: Tittles--a change of title
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:24:06 -0230
Please see specific replies below --------->
Quoting Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>:
> I confess that I have a somewhat dim conception of what makes something
> (outside of religious and perhaps mystical experience) transcendental,
> so what I say here may be based on a misunderstanding. As far as I've
> been able to determine a philosophical practice is transcendental if it
> doesn't depend on the outcomes of experiments and calculation, and this
> seems true of Wittgenstein's best-known works.
-----------> Although thought experiments have been used to make transcendental
claims. Aristotle wondering whether one can deliberate about the "necessary and
unchanging;" W. reflecting on whether the expression "This is my hand", uttered
in normal circumstances, could be an epistemic claim having truth conditions;
Kant contemplating the possibility of moral judgement independent of agents'
capacities for freedom, etc.. (I'm not sure what "calculation" refers to.)
> Although I wouldn't have
> spoken of them that way, it struck me some time ago that the Tractatus
> was very Kantian; but Kant's sort of transcendentalism doesn't seem to
> be the right sort.
-------> Any account making claims about universal and necessary features of a
discourse, competence or practice I understand to be a "transcendental"
account. Thus, any claims W makes regarding what must be the case in order for
meaning, understanding, knowledge, a world to be possible - where "what must be
the case" simultaneously identifies limits beyond which such things are not
possible - constitutes a transcendental claim. He isn't providing us with
simple empirical reports.
> As for its being his 'fundamental and abiding claim' that 'meaning and
> understanding are conditioned for their possibility by language-games,'
> it seems to me that this is not so. (I don't understand what
> 'conditioned for their possibility' amounts to.) He is at pains in the
> Investigations to debunk the notion that meaning is something that
> 'stands behind' a word, or 'accompanies it,' and that meanings exist in
> some 'occult sphere,' and are drawn upon when needed to give sense to
> certain concatenations of marks (and sounds). To ask for the meaning of
> a word is to ask for its use in a language;
----------> Agreed. The last staement above is a typical transcendental (T)
claim: i.e., "meaning" is only possible as .....
> many people have heard that
> this is the very the epitome of what Wittgenstein has to say about
> meaning. And it often is; so that if some words have wandered off ('gone
> on holiday') and we try to make sense of them outside the language game
> that is their home; this is one way that philosophical problems arise,
> and it's true that most philosophical problems and puzzles do rise, for
> Wittgenstein post-Tractatus from 'misunderstandings of the workings of
> our language.' Still, this isn't the only way they do.
------> As such, we're not dealing with a T claim.
> ?But if I suppose that someone has a pain, then I am simply supposing
> that he has just the same as I have so often had.? That gets us no
> further. It is as if I were to say: ?You surely know what ?It is 5
> o?clock here? means; so you know what ?It?s five o?clock on the sun?
> means. It simply means that it is just the same time there as it is
> here when it is five o?clock.? The explanation by means of identity does
> not work here. For I know well enough that one can call five o?clock
> here and 5 o?clock there ?the same time?, but what I do not know is in
> what cases one is able to speak of its being the same time here and
> there. [Investigations §350]
>
> Wittgenstein has proposed a simple analogy to call into question what
> appeared to be a straightforward enough assumption: that when I say that
> someone else has a pain I mean just that he has ?the same?? as I have
> when I have a pain.
>
> Would one call this a case in which language had somehow broken down;
> that certain expressions had escaped their familiar and appropriate
> surroundings? I?m not sure, but it seems to me that §350 doesn?t present
> a case like that: in it, Wittgenstein believes that a particular
> explanation by means of identity fails, and tries to show this by giving
> an analogy that?s on all fours with it (and doesn?t work either).
>
> At other times, when he?s arguing against Frege?s contention that
> concepts are like areas and that an area without a boundary isn?t an
> area at all (and hence useless), he doesn?t so much suggest that Frege
> had been misled by certain forms of language that deceived him into
> thinking that. He accepts what Frege says (it makes sense) and then
> offers some modest suggestions about why we can nevertheless get along
> perfectly well much of the time without paying attention to it (Frege
> was, after all, writing about the foundations of arithmetic). What he
> says doesn?t appear to be unintelligible or meaningless.
>
> Wittgenstein?s first response [§71] is to ask ??is it senseless to say:
> Stand roughly there?? (to a companion). Suppose that I were standing
> with someone in a city square and said that. As I say it I do not draw
> any kind of boundary?but perhaps point with my hand?as if I were
> indicating a particular spot.
>
> It looks too easy. Philosophy is meant to be profound; it has earned its
> impenetrability over many centuries. If it were easy, they?d teach it to
> school children, so that they?d know how to decide between saying that
> we see material objects directly and saying that we see only sense-data.
>
> Of course this is a pathetic attempt to show something of Wittgenstein's
> 'method,' All I meant to do here was to suggest that there's more to it
> than language-games (and more to language-games than might first
> appear). Anyone could find dozens more example of his various ways of
> trying to remedy philosophical mistakes, and to treat those who make
> them so that they see clearly again. He real purpose isn't to solve
> philosophical problems and puzzles but to make them disappear entirely:
> so that he can stop doing philosophy.
-----------> My claim is not that W always did philosophy when he wrote or
thought. Nor that he and I agree on what constitutes "philosophical" analysis.
I claim only that the distinctive and unique feature of the discipline of
philosophy is that it is a transcendental form of inquiry. Philosophers do a
whole lot of stuff other than philosophy and not all of what they say is
"philosophical." To be a philosopher is not to always speak or think
philosophically. "Being" here is a matter of .... dare I utter the word .... a
"disposition."
Walter O.
MUN
>
> Robert Paul
>
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