[Wittrs] Re: [C] Does The Tractatus Invalidate Itself?
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:25:57 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "College Dropout John O'Connor" <wittrsamr@...>
wrote:
> Wittgenstein explicitly states that there are not several kinds of nonsense;
> I think this was in his Lecture on Philosophy of Philosophical Remarks. But
> then, Wittgenstein does not distinguish between logic and logos and other
> words we might think hand on to each other, past each other. Like one is an
> umbrella to the other.
>
Have you a link or direct quotation for this statement? It seems to me pretty
obvious that there ARE and must be several kinds of nonsense, if only because
the term "nonsense", like most of our words, had a range of uses and this is
very much a part of the later Wittgenstein's thinking.
I may say of something I hear, that seems utterly unsupportable to me, that it
is nonsense and mean by this that it is just so obviously wrong no one in his
or her right mind could be expected to accept it. This pejorative sense of
"nonsense" is often confused with, say, a claim that something someone has said
is simply unintelligible, i.e., that it may look superficially as though one
can make head or tail of it but, really, on closer examination one will see
that we cannot. It is simply "non-sense" as in lacking in any genuine meaning.
And this may be intended pejoratively or just as a way of explaining how we can
be fooled by the way someone has put something.
And then there is the nonsense of doggerel and the like. Perhaps Lewis
Carroll's jabberwocky poem would be an ideal case in point. Think of a line
like "T'was brillig in the slithy tove" and so forth. Here there is something
else going on, i.e., the use of words or sounds that recall to mind words with
real meanings for us in a combination that suggests a picture designed to evoke
a particular response in reader or hearer. Here a swampy habitat, vaguely
menacing, comes to mind, especially when heard as part of the larger poem which
proceeds with such "imagery" to build the ominous picture. Certainly and in a
literal sense, such words, too, are nonsense, but they do have some kind of
sense attached to them by dint of their evocative effects and they get these
because they both sound like real words and play the role those real words,
which do have sense, might play. Compare: "T'was brilliant in the slimy grove".
Note how "slithy", perhaps replacing "slimy", evokes something menacing as in
the slithering of a snake.
Moreover, the words in the Lewis Carroll line have the organization, the
seeming grammar, of the real words. A set of words like "brilliant the t'was
grove in slimy" would seem to be more nonsensical than "T'was brillig in the
slithy tove" because the words in the latter group not only evoke real words
with sense in our language but also seem to follow the grammatical form of
those words, while the latter even fail to do that.
So there would also seem to be degrees of nonsense here, as well as the
distinction between what is and what isn't nonsense.
Thus again there are several types of nonsense to be distinguished:
1) The appellation given to describe something that is simply and obviously
false;
2) The name of something that has no recognizable meaning even if it may seem
at first glance to have it, perhaps because of a misuse of the grammar ("Jane
is a good boy");
3) The name for something whose meaning is attained by allusion, evocation,
context, etc., rather than via the usual referential means, i.e., something
that may be intentionally nonsense at one level but meaningful at another, etc.
4) The name for groups of sounds that can achieve no meaning at all because of
the violation of too many of the rules (a jumbled sentence, for instance).
I'm inclined to think there may be other types, too. So I would be surprised if
Wittgenstein (in his later phase at least) would have really thought that there
are no distinctions to be made with regard to assertions of what counts as
"nonsense", i.e., and that all instances of nonsense are just the same. Yes,
all may be dismissed in some fashion or other but perhaps not to the same
degree. Is even poetry that speaks of things that aren't, say 'the soaring
eagle of my heart', be dismissed as merely nonsense because hearts really don't
leave our bodies and soar above us in the heavens as eagles do?
Should assertions of what is good or beautiful be similarly dismissed as
nonsense, as some logical positivists (active during Wittgenstein's earlier
years) wanted to say? And yet the later Wittgenstein was very much concerned, I
think, to show us why such logical positivist notions of nonsense could not be
simply taken as such, even though the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus made a
point of proudly, apparently, calling the work he had done in that book
nonsense at the end -- but wasn't it a good "nonsense" (or else why write and
publish such a book)? And if there is good nonsense is there not also bad
nonsense (that's the point, after all, in calling some things "nonsense") in
which case isn't that, in itself an important distinction between types of
nonsense?
> Descriptively, he might be hitting upon this in the TLP, speaking of how
> propositions hand like a chain.
>
> The nonsense Wittgenstein is speaking of is the utterance of tautologies.
> This is a main point in his Lecture on Ethics, which would make a far better
> introduction to the TLP than Bertrand Russell's spiel.
>
Yes, sometimes a tautology must seem quite pointless and so be nonsense in an
important sense. More to the point, if one wants to say that what has sense has
it because it carries information about the world, then, on at least one level
of consideration, a tautology would not qualify. Yet aren't tautologies, too,
information about the world, i.e., how we or the appropriate language users
deploy a particular term (X is equivalent to Y)? Sometimes don't we need to
know meanings, too? And not just because we may not know quite how to use a
word but, perhaps, because we may not see that some uses are pre-ordained by
the word itself?
Sean is interested in the idea that a bachelor is an unmarried male (or man)
may not be a real tautology and, of course, it is and it isn't. It depends on
when and how we are using the term. I disagree with Sean's assertion that Tiger
Woods, who is currently married with children, could be called a bachelor
though I agree that 1) he might think of himself that way, 2) carry on in that
fashion (maintaining a "bachelor pad", picking up women and sleeping with them,
etc., and 3) that the term "bachelor" could be stretched to apply to a
lifestyle as well as to one's legal status under a certain system of laws and
institutional norms.
Where is the tautology? Well it will depend on what we have in mind, i.e., are
we asking about the meaning of "bachelor" according to legally sanctioned
social norms in this society or are we asking about lifestyle choices? Does the
fact that "bachelor" can be used in different ways detract from its
tautological role in "a bachelor is an unmarried man"? I would say no because
the tautology is specifically geared to a meaning (a set of uses of the word)
and not to the term itself, not to the sounds that, in English are pronounced
"bachelor".
It's easy to confuse the word with its meaning, especially when we agree that
meaning is use in a wide variety of cases, and then speaking of tautologies as
statements like "a bachelor is an unmarried man" looks like it is merely
definitional, what we tell a new English speaker in teaching him or her that
particular word in the language. But giving the meaning is only one thing we
can do here. There is also exploring the claim which rides on the meaning and,
in that case, if asked what form the claim in question has and why that is
significant it is useful to note that it is tautological and that some claims
of knowledge can be shown to have the same form, in which case their truth (or
falsehood) is to be found in the uses in context, not in the record of how
English speakers speak.
> 'The world is everything that is the case' means the world is tautological.
> In regards to skepticism, there is no point in doubting tautologies. There
> is no point in doubting the world.
>
I don't see how you arrive at this. "The world is everything that is the case"
has the look of a stipulation, a statement of meaning, not a tautology in the
sense I have described it above (the form of a claim). That is, sometimes it's
useful to explore a meaning and not a form and, in the above, Wittgenstein
chose to commence the Tractatus with a statement which, on examination, could
withstand challenge because of its stipulative quality, albeit a stipulation
that reflects actual usage (i.e., the language community stipulates it, not
Wittgenstein alone, he is merely making explicit what is already found in the
use).
But is the result the claim that the world is, therefore, not to be doubted?
Whatever is the case will be the case, of course, but what has that to do with
the nature of what is the case? One might still decide that the world is
illusion (because everything that is the case is illusory) and so no gain is
made against a claim of solipsism.
> 'Whereof one cannot speak, Thereof one must be silent' is again tautological.
>
Yes and no. I agree it has a tautological aspect but it also has an important
prescriptive aspect here, i.e., it is a kind of recommendation. And in that it
goes beyond its tautological form. Is it nonsense? Yes in one sense but no in
another which takes us back to the question of whether there are types of
nonsense and whether Wittgenstein, at least in his later phase, would have
agreed that there are.
> Tautologies are senseless, and their negation is a contradiction. This says
> nothing of crawling over the propositions (like a geometric construction?).
>
SWM
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