[Wittrs] Re: Stuart Mirsky's Review of McGuinness' Young Ludwig
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:36:19 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, brendan downs <wittrs@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> >
> > Per McGuinness, what can be said are things that may be true or false,
> > which include all the propositions of natural science. What can be shown
> > are the relations of logic. What must be passed over in silence is all the
> > rest which, since we can't speak about them, well we can't explicate any
> > further than this. More mysticism it seems to me!
>
>
> I'm not sure if this is the correct reading, but I try an understand it with
> Witt responses to the Posivists.
>
> 6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say
> nothing except what can be
> said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing
> to do with philosophy -- and
> then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to
> demonstrate to him that he had
> failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it
> would not be satisfying to the
> other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him
> philosophy--this method would be
> the only strictly correct one.
>
>
>
> Say "that is a tree" is a scientific statement. "is a scientific statement"
> is not a scientific statement. if this makes sense? I'm not sure If Witt was
> meaning this but this is how I interpret it.
>
>
>
> Brendan
>
Elsewhere Wittgenstein speaks of psychological facts as being facts, too, so
speaking of what is a scientific statement could itself be factual on such a
view, i.e., it's a fact about how certain things we say work in the world. But
then there is the issue of whether this makes it, in fact, a meta-fact in a
logical sense, in which case is THAT a fact in the ordinary way we speak of
facts or something else?
I read the above quote you offered as saying that philosophy has nothing to
say, only to show, as in showing the correct logical relations between
statements and denotations of fact. In so doing, philosophy reveals when
something has strayed beyond the boundaries of sense, putting things, as it
were, in their place but adds no new knowledge. Here is a constant of sorts
with his later thinking.
On this view, only scientific statements (what can be true or false with
relation to what's found in the world) can have sense while logical statements
say nothing (which is why THEY lack sense) but do reveal something that cannot
be explicitly stated.
Where Wittgenstein differed, apparently, from the logical positivists'
classical position in this period seems to have been in this: What has no
sense, as defined above (neither factual nore logical), may still, on his view,
be expressed as long as we don't confuse it with what has sense (with true and
false statements or the logical showings needed to produce the statements that
have sense). Thus the Tractarian "argument" is metaphysical and, as he says at
the end, without sense but presumably useful to see things clearly. (In such a
case then, doesn't it have a kind of sense, too, though?)
The logical positivists, contrary to the Wittgensteinian view on the other
hand, seem to have held that what is non-sense in this way (neither a factual
nor a logical question) is just nonsense and therefore pointless to invoke,
thus carving away ethical and aesthetic statements as merely emotive and
therefore without meaning.
(As most of us will know, of course, when the logical positivists' own
underpinning, the verification principle, was shown to be as nonsensical in
this way, because it was fundamentally metaphysical, as what they wanted to
discard, their whole thesis collapsed. Wittgenstein never had this problem
because he embraced nonsense of this sort in his basic approach as shown in how
he resolves the points made in the Tractatus.)
In fact, Wittgenstein in this period seems to have wanted to carve out the
empirical and logical statements from the rest, leaving what is unsaid (because
it is unsayable) as significant but in a different, unexplicated sense
(presumably because it requires a different mindset to make use of these
statements).
What he had not done in this period, though, was to think through the
implications of this, or consider why such obviously nonsensical ideas as one
needed to even construct the kind of picture provided in the Tractatus would
have their own kind of sense and what this said about language itself.
His later work, which reassessed the role of language in our ideas and claims
of knowledge, addressed just this problem. Language, in the later view, is like
games we play by following rules and consists of many different sub-games,
devised and used for a wide range of purposes, with logic fitting in as just
one more of the sub-games.
Thus logic is no longer the be-all and end-all of sense as it was in his
Tractarian period and the notion of sense becomes a much larger and more
inclusive concept. What makes sense is what has a use in language so look to
the use, etc.
The young logician who wrote the Tractatus was trapped in a worldview that held
logic to be the primary paradigm of sense-making with language being ultimately
reducible to logical relations which could then be explored and studied for the
purpose of learning something (i.e., how the world, in the aggregate, is).
But the later, older Wittgenstein came to see that this was a mistake because
language was bigger than logic, and more multiplicitous. It was language itself
that governed how we understand things (by determining prescriptively and/or
reflecting the parameters in which we operate, i.e., language as a "form of
life"). The way to do philosophy, thus, was no longer to study and explore
logic but to examine and consider language itself in all its ramifications.
Once Wittgenstein realized that his accepting the nonsense, which the logical
positivists wanted to shear away, as being meaningful, albeit in a different
way, made it untenable to say things like "those things whereof we cannot know,
thereof we must be silent". This because such statements could no longer
suffice to resolve the question. We cannot just retreat into silence because,
in fact, we are not silent in the real world about such things (art, morals,
even religion) -- nor could he be!
In his own life he was constantly making aesthetic and ethical judgments and
even pursuing religious practices (albeit in a somewhat idiosyncratic way).
Indeed, these kinds of things seem to require certain verbalizations! If, to do
them, we need to speak, then such speech cannot JUST be nonsense even if it was
that in the logical sense expounded in the Tractatus.
So it was probably inevitable that he would have had to rethink and reevaluate
his earlier work if he really wanted it to relate to his actual experience in
the world. Nevertheless it took a profound and courageous thinker, I believe,
to have been willing to toss away what for most philosopher's would have
counted as a lifetime's worth of work and, more or less, start again.
SWM
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