[Wittrs] Meaning, Nonsense and Verifiability (for Walter)
- From: "SWM" <swmirsky@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:28:26 -0000
Okay, since my last response did come through, I am concluding that my earlier
efforts were obstructed because of some block placed on the thread to which I
was responding. Given that, I'll place my response to that earlier thread here,
while changing the header above!
Meaning, Nonsense and Verifiability
Just to put my two sense in here: To hold a view that something is nonsense a
la Wittgenstein is not to share a commitment to the same implications of that
claim as the logical postivists (including Carnap) held. That's a mistake many
critics of Wittgentein make and it requires a response (whatever else is going
on in this debate).
As is well known, Wittgenstein did not subscribe to, or endorse, the logical
positivist position, including their claim for the verifiability principle as
THE criterion of meaningfulness (for a statement), i.e., that it is not,
therefore, nonsense. While the early (Tractarian) Wittgenstein often seems in
sympathy with that view, his own statements in the shadow of his work at the
time (the Tractatus) suggests he did not embrace it and that it is therefore a
misreading of the Tractatus to take it as a logical positivist manifesto (as
Carnap and others in the Vienna Circle apparently did at one time).
But the early Wittgenstein had made some (later) admitted errors in his
formulations in the Tractatus and his later work reflects his efforts to
clarify, understand and refine those original insights (as he, himself, stated
in the preface to his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations). In
that work, and in his later teaching (as seen in the extensive notes we have
from that period), Wittgenstein laid out a way of understanding the distinction
between a term's being meaningful or meaningless which clearly moves away from
the bifuctated logical positivist view that saw the verification principle as
the one and only standard for what may have meaning.
THAT principle, of course, was the source of logical positivism's own demise as
Walter rightly noted.
Wittgenstein's earlier view seemed to hold that what was "nonsense" (in the
sense of being without sense) included under its conceptual umbrella many
things that had a kind of significance (and therefore a more rarified sense?)
in some larger, deeper way than could simply be demonstrated by suceptibility
to verification. Thus: his notion that what the Tractatus was really about were
all the things he hadn't explicitly stated! Thus, too, his notion of "showing,"
i.e., the claim that some things could be shown but not said!
This aspect of the Tractatus has a very mystical feel to it and so attracts
many who are drawn to mystery. Mystics and religious ecstatics have long been
attracted to the idea of a truth beyond the ordinary truths of our existence,
of a greater, deeper truth, an unsayable truth that must simply be known or
felt and cannot be expressed (and so conveyed to others in mere words). The
Tractarian Wittgenstein, in writing of the distinction between what has meaning
and what does not, touched this nerve in many -- and, perhaps, in himself as
well.
In spelling out the way it seemed to him language worked (his picture theory of
language), he was attempting to delineate boundaries between sense and
non-sense and using this exercise as a "showing", that is, as a way of finally
delineating the borders and, by so doing, to show or point us to what was
necessarily left out: What could be pointed at but not said. I think the later
Wittgenstein was increasingly unhappy with his effort though and realized he
was missing something, that a mystical explanation was no explanation at all.
And so, on returning to philosophy, he pursued in fits and starts, a way of
explaining his earlier insight more satisfactorily. What he arrived at, as seen
in the Investigations, was the notion of language as behavior rather than as an
agglomeration of pictures and, in that context, he developed his notion of
language games (the many interlocking activities we perform with language) and
of meaning as use (the way in which a word is deployed in any given language
game). Thus what had seemed to the logical positivists to be either sense or
nonsense, corresponding to whether a term or claim was verifable or not,
became, in Wittgenstein's mature philosophy, a function of whether a given term
or claim fulfilled the role assigned it in the particular language game in
which it was employed.
This does not deny that there is a language game (or games) engaged in
verification activity, too (or falsification if we want to adopt the Popperian
approach). It only points out that that is not the ONLY language game that
constitutes language. Thus, what had been for the early Wittgenstein purely a
matter of showing, became for the later thinker, a matter of doing. Of course,
there is still a role for showing because rules (a fundamental aspect of games,
language or otherwise) are revealed by observing their application. Many of the
things we do with language thus involve showing.
But the idea that the truth behind the superficial truths of empirical
experience or logic is shown by some kind of direct experience of it, either
through following along with Wittgenstein's carefully constructed edifice in
the Tractatus, in order to finally cast it aside, or in some more mystical
fashion (meditation, mystic practice, sudden experience qua enlightenment,
etc.) which resonates sympathetically for many with the work of the early
Wittgenstein, is no longer seen to be necessary.
The later Wittgenstein came to an understanding that it is language, itself,
that lies at the core of much of the confusion we have, including the
philosophical kind. Not understanding the role or particular workings of
different aspects of our language, in which we are embedded, we often miss the
forest for the linguistic trees (words and phrases) that surround us.
So Sean's claim that it is "not Carnapian" to hold that many traditional
philosophical claims (such as whether we have or don't have "free-will") are
nonsense, that they are neither true nor false because of their failure to fit
the demands of the verifiability principle, is correct. Wittgenstein did not,
in his later years, adhere to one language paradigm only, as exemplified by the
verifiability principle. His point was that there are many standards of meaning
for words, depending on the uses to which they are being put (how they are used
in any given language game).
Sean's point, as I understand it at least, appears to be that the term
"free-will" has no real application in any of our ordinary language games and
so finds its sole meaning, such as it is, in the rarified atmosphere of
traditional philosophy. But that kind of "meaning," divorced from any of our
actual usages (again an important Wittgensteinian insight) is adrift from its
appropriate moorings. One of Wittgenstein's important points was that we had to
be alert to confusions that arise when we permit language to go "on holiday",
i.e., when we lose sight of the real meanings of our terms in favor of various
imagined meanings in philosophy which may have no real affect or application in
the world.
I think that is the meaninglessness Sean is pointing out, not the failure to be
verifiable. (See my comments nearby about how "free" is used in many ways
although none equate to what is meant when it is included in the term
"free-will", a use that seems to be without real application because it is so
far divorced from any real world implications.)
As to Walter's likening of Wittgenstein's insight about meaning to the logical
positivists' reliance on the verifiability principle, I would point out that
claims about language being gamelike, or meaning being a function of use, play
the same role in the later Wittgenstein's thinking that the verifiability
principle played for Carnap and his fellow logical positivists. And yet there
remains a critical difference.
Logical positivism as a philosophical system or school was seen to collapse
when people realized that the principle which was its cornerstone did not,
itself, meet the criterion it had established for meaningfulness. Thus, logical
positivism was itself seen to be without meaning based on its own standard, a
logically untenable position.
But Wittgenstein, who early on saw this (if he did not quite articulate it) in
his rejection of logical positivism, came to see that a different explanation
for being meaningful was available, one that did not oblige us to cast science
aside but which still allowed into the tent all sorts of other ways of
thinking, i.e., he came to see that words took their meanings in different ways
in different contexts. This does not reject the scientific standard of
verifiability. It merely allows us to see, and grant, meaning in a myriad of
other ways.
And unlike the verifiability principle, whose meaningfulness (and therefore its
capacity to serve as a standard of meaning for other propositions), the notions
of language games and of meaning as use do not depend on meeting their own
criterion or standard because they are not, themselves, criteria of meaning but
only explanations for how criteria of meaning occur. What determines their
truth or falsity is the degree to which they work as explanations of how
language (and meaning within language) work.
The verifiability principle failed its own test because it posited itself as
the sole criterion and then could not itself pass. On the other hand, as
explanations, the notions of language games and meaning as use only have to be
shown to be good explanations of how standards of meaningfulness occur. That
is, they have to provide sufficient explanatory power to adequately account for
other aspects of the phenomenon they are directed at, language.
There is nothing Carnapian (in the sense of logical positivism) to be seen in
any of this.
SWM
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "walto" <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
<snip>
>
> I stand by everything I've said. To wit:
>
> Your remark that discourses on freedom of the will is nonsense is indeed
> Carnapian . . .
<snip>
> W
>
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