[C] [Wittrs] Re: Wittgenstein and Theories
- From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:45:36 -0800 (PST)
Hi Rob.
Good to hear from you. I wish you participated more here. Thanks for your
excellent remarks. But let me perhaps clarify where we might not be exactly
"square."
Consider the senses of "theory" today. In ordinary senses, one might offer this
word to mean something as broad as "ideas" or concepts. Let us imagine a
philosopher who came to the earth and said the following: logic is not the
center of language, grammar is. Or who said, language is a behavior. Or who
basically said: the model of language is games. In an ordinary parlance, one
might take all of these to be "theories" about the way something works, where
that word means only "a big account" or "a bird's eye view." It might even
stand for "a picture that works the best."
And so, if one has this sort of idea about "theories," and then reads the idea
that theories are no longer of use to contemplative ventures, the net result is
that thining degenerates into a kind of dinner conversation. The idea is to
bastardize the conceptual. I see this point of view in postmodern thought --
particularly in law and in some circles of social science. One of my professors
in graduate school who had this sort of dinner-conversation approach to his
ideology of philosophy once told me to stop categorizing thought in my papers.
It remains a very peculiar piece of "advice."
Anyway, my point was simply that reading Wittgenstein requires that one come to
learn how he uses certain words. This gets even more hazardous as speaking
conventions change. And that his use of the word "theory" means
"law-candidate," and refers to the ritual that philosophers of his age were
engaged in -- postulating candidates for laws for contemplative phenomenon. The
idea would be that ethics would be subject to the great laws, so too
aesthetics, language, logic, mathematics, etc. And it was the duty of
philosophers to unearth theories ('law-candidates") of these matters that could
be defended in "proofs," an idea that really began in the moral sciences period
of intellectual history in the mid-to-late 1800s and hardened into a
positivistic amalgamation of it in the early 1900s (logical positivism).
I had always called this style of reasoning as "formalism" (after my legal
training). Formalism is not the same as conceptualism. To be formalistic is to
let the forms of reason be more important than the ends. Everything must reduce
to something formulaic.
And so the point is that Wittgenstein isn't against conceptual pontification or
even abstractions, so long as one does not reify those things (become confused
into thinking that they are anything other than their use). Indeed,
Wittgenstein posited theories of an ordinary sort all of the time. What he
never never did after late 1930, however, was postulate a theory in the style
of a formalism. He never announced a "law-candidate" accompanied by
its proof. But his way of speaking might have one think he is saying that he
has no "points" (see Turing paragraph in my last mail); that he has no ideas
(see Rhees paragraph); and that he doesn't want a bird's eye view (see Schlick
and Waismann remarks).
Indeed, one might say it this way: Wittgenstein's bird's eye view is no longer
to climb the ladder, so to speak, but to dig beneath the ground. Meaning is now
more excavational and anthropological. But he is not against the use of ideas
and concepts that that serve this activity. It's the activity that is the focal
point more than the fact that the mind is pontificaticous. The question is not
whether you are pontificating; it is what the objects of thought are directed
toward the right behavior (and never themselves thought to be autonomous).
Regards.
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org
SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/author=596860
Discussion Group: http://seanwilson.org/wittgenstein.discussion.html
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