[Wittrs] Re: Pictures, methods, Gettier, and other lingering topics
- From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2011 23:44:08 -0700 (PDT)
J:
Can't say I find much of value here. It's a poor assessment of the issues. You
really have difficulty understanding things that I say. And you throw up a lot
of sand about nothing. But here is my sense of it:
1. PICTURES
I've never disagreed with this: "... a picture represent[s] a thinker's
thoughts only if the thinker acknowledge[s] it as the right picture." My point
is that getting thinkers to see that their claims arise from pictures is the
first step to being insightful. Once one is aware (can experience) that this is
how "reasoning" occurs, one can move forward to see how people react to
alternate pictures of account. In fact, if one becomes adept at this, how he or
she regards others who don't "get it" may be quite revealing.
But here's the central problem. What you are doing is defending postmodern
therapy, and wanting Wittgenstein to be the George Washington of that. I really
have no problem with you having these commitments. Indeed, all of your efforts
have been nothing but a clinical-pedagogical (ideological?) reading of various
Wittgensteinian passages. It's the POMO in you, of course, that doesn't like
someone saying that Wittgenstein is an "elitist" project. That perspective
comes from philosophers of meaning, who don't counsel people clinically, but
who deal with claims and propositions and what-not. You won't get much support,
I imagine, from Ray Monk and many, many others on the idea of trying to link
Wittgenstein with, e.g., Derrida.
I know I'm against that for sure:
http://seanwilson.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&thU5&start=0&S>4ab0a1ce18a26680848d2a396bc1e4
.
The fact of the matter is that Wittgenstein's whole life was spent trying to
say which beliefs were better than others. The latter Wittgenstein is no less
arrogant than early Wittgenstein in this respect; he just uses different means.
The Tractatus told people what beliefs were better than others. And PI surely
continues the goal of that story. The big mistake of people who read
Wittgenstein is not to realize that he never actually changed directions. He
didn't do a 180 turn. He simply morphed from one set of tools into a much more
powerful set of tools -- the way, for example, the caterpillar morphs into the
butterfly.
And it's interesting how touchy you are on this. Whenever this turf of yours
feels invaded, you turn into this tornado sort of thing. Out comes the rhetoric
and so forth. I had a private mail from a member of PMTH who said that the host
there reacted the same way as you do to those who refused to see Wittgenstein
in the light of a pomo-therapist.
My sense is that pomos are no different than analytics in one respect: they
each react with venom when the opposite epistemological picture they desire is
presented to them.
2. PICTURING BEING JUST A PICTURE
Here's the point I don't think you are getting: picturing is a BEHAVIOR. But
it's deeper than, say, playing football (its not 'behavior" in that sense).
It's something the form of life does to make sense of things. And so, if one
says, "I realize that I am picturing" -- one treat this as one does an
epiphany. You would tell the person, "excellent!." But if another were to say
of the epiphany, "yes, but that itself just a picture," there would be a
problem. The problem is whether the person who says this is denying that the
phenom is taking place in the first instance. If the person doesn't deny this,
there is nothing to worry about.
Notice the grammar of these words: thought, revelation, epiphany. Or, talking
"off the top of my head." I want to suggest that just as "thought" can
implicate each of these senses, the word "picture" can share aspects of this
grammar. Hence, senses of "pictures" exist. So, the idea of a person
discovering ("seeing") the picturing process might be a kind of
revelation-picture. Saying that a revelation-picture is a "picture" is like
saying an epiphany is just a thought. It's only true in a sense.
BTW, I think you asked for proof of this. You, of course, do realize that
"getting sense" is more in the neighborhood of having an aptitude for language,
right? (All that can be done here is to continue working with you).
3. MEANING AND MIND
When Wittgenstein began emphasizing "pictures," it was an investigation into
how meaning occurs intellectually. This has nothing to do with suggesting
Wittgenstein was involved in empirical psychology. It only suggested that he
was unearthing something deep about the process of meaning. This would cause
him to reflect upon what happens, intellectually, when sentences are asserted.
None of this goes into private languages or talk of folk psychology.
4. THESIS & THEORY
This is a recurring theme for you. I think it is a mistake to take the
bombastic position that Wittgenstein is against all grand insights or
revelations. Or that he would be against the noticing of a general dynamic of
something. It suggests that Wittgenstein had pudding for a brain, which we all
know to be the lie of lies. Meaning-is-use is a grand insight. It's a game
changer. So is family resemblance. So is aspect seeing. So is picturing.
I think where you are confused on this thesis thing is that you have an
ahistoric understanding of the issue. You've got to do two things: place
yourself in the heart of 1930s positivistic intellectual culture and
analyticity in particular. Then, you have to catch Wittgenstein's sense of
"theory" and "thesis." Once this is done, two things happen. You see
Wittgenstein as being against the idea that philosophy should try to
imitate mathematics or science. And that he he rejected the formalism of
analytic philosophy that had been occurring in his age (and making him sick).
As I said before, the best way to read Wittgenstein here is to say he put
forth a kind if END-theory. His sense of the word "thesis" is not against this
idea. And the ultimate point is that what prevails for Wittgenstein is a skill
or craft -- a technique -- rather than a calculation or an exercise in logic.
Nothing I have said about the general dynamic of insight is against this idea.
In fact, it supports it.
Also, you seem to think that the right way to "get Wittgenstein" is to pull out
a quote and read it into your program. Actually, there is another way. What you
would do is catch all the ideas & stuff them into your head, so that they
exist, without conflict or torment. Wittgenstein was very clear throughout all
of his life that people only half understood his ideas. It would bother him
immensely. The way to do this would be never to critique or reject an idea of
his. It would be to understand him as a person, and then try to put all of the
ideas into your head without conflict or torment to each element. If this was
the method, it would come to resemble the way that Psalms might be understood.
Anyway, my point is this: I'm unconvinced with how you go about trying to make
your case. Your objections to "thesis," your failure to catch sense, your
ignorance or rejection of biography, and your POMO-counselling program simply
do the most justice to Wittgenstein's life or ideas. It might fit under the
label of Wittgenstein-inspired POMO-counselors. But it's not working as a
picture of "the truth."
5. EMPIRICAL HYPOTHESIS
You write, "Moreover, even if he had made such a claim as, "Everyone's thought
is based on pictures," (which he did not say, which would have been an
empirical hypothesis and therefore contrary to his professed methods ... )"
You seem to think here that Wittgenstein is against making statements that
could be empirically investigated. What he's against is philosophizing about
them as a set of premises: "look and see!" But that doesn't mean that he
doesn't, himself, form thoughts that have consequences for empiricists. Indeed,
there are many empirical pursuits that can claim Wittgenstein's observations as
an influence. See cognitive linguistics and family resemblance (Steven Pinker).
Imagine: "He couldn't have said language had family resemblance. That would
involve an empirical claim. People actually talking and that happening. Gosh.
That's just a thing for POMO-counselling. He said he didn't do that, here's the
passage I misunderstand."
(Doesn't work, does it?)
6. CULTURE AND VALUE
I don't know what to do on this. You quote something of mine and simply
can't "get it." I assume you just are just being silly on purpose. I never had
any issue with Culture and Value. I love that as much as I would his letters
and other typescripts-manuscripts (Stuart are you even around to catch this
one?).
The only work of Wittgenstein that I came close to "qualifying" was the back
portion of OC which doesn't have the status of being a manuscript or a
typescript -- came straight out of the notebooks. Given what we know, those
remarks would have been revised. That's all I've ever said, skeptical wise.
7. TRANSITIONAL WITTGENSTEIN & FORMALISM
The Monk view would have the "middle period" being the verificationist phase of
29 and in work called Philosophical Remarks. The point of the epiphany is, for
Monk, the birth of the new Wittgenstein. Like I say, I'm on board with that.
That's why he begins tackling problems of formalism with formalistic means.
That's why the book with Waismann eventually gets ditched ("his views have
changed too much."). Nothing wrong with starting the the spring when the
weather breaks.
On this hedge, I really have no problem: " ... does not entail that Monk
advocates reading everything post 1930/1931 as ... there still being many ideas
in transition prior to 1934." Here's the point: a person can transition from
39 to 45. He can certainly transition from 32 to 39. The issue isn't whether he
"transitions." The issue is which of the transitions support prior work and
which break from it -- and to what extent. Monk is right that from 30 onward,
Wittgenstein's thought can be seen as going in a direction that is not
"Tractarian," or at least not conventionally so. Wittgenstein himself would see
the years from 30 onward as chasing down a second sort of project. It is very
consistent with this account, therefore, that he would begin using formality to
show issues with formalism -- and then would eventually dump that (around 39 I
think).
But I'm comfy with treating the epiphany for what it was.
8. HAUGHTINESS
I can't agree with the idea that arrogance is always a vice. There's a whole
set of things here you haven't considered. You are offering, in essence, the
defense of grade-school manners as a universal. Or, you are giving us the
level-shame thing using a cultural construction (Mayberry). You're also jumping
to conclusions about "imitating" -- you don't have the foggiest idea about what
you are talking about. Really, what you are doing is picturing very, very
poorly. This is probably a really good example of where you need intervention
in the picture you have, despite the fact that you don't feel that you do. I
mean, you're out in left field here. You know absolutely nothing about who you
are talking with. You know, there are studies about how email conversations
mislead because you have to provide the voicing, you have to imagine the
person, no visual cues, yada yada. This is about as bar-stool as anything could
be.
9. CLINICS
You write: "Moreover, it is not merely about that, but rather a dilemma: either
one must be willing to use traditional philosophical methods (akin to those
used by the second "voice"), using counterexamples, contrary theses, skeptical
arguments, and so forth, in order first to unsettle a thinker in their
dogmatism, or one must recognize that certain thinkers simply will not be
receptive, because their views don't (at least as yet) cause them any distress."
My sense is that this is clinical ideology. It may not be an "ideology"
about psychotherapy -- it's only a pedagogy then -- but it is once you import
this as a vehicle for understanding what Wittgensteinianism is. This reminds me
of what those behaviorists do. I can think of inordinate times when in the
context of philosophy or academia where people "not in distress," yet need to
be shown something they cannot see.
10. GETTIER, etc.
The point about Gettier had nothing to do with who he studied with or anything
you mentioned. It's another sand storm. The point is that the whole "Gettier
problem" isn't a problem to a Wittgensteinian. The fact that you think he's
nifty because he formally showed that a formal definition of knowledge is a
"problem" isn't the point. This is because his maneuver did nothing but carry
forth and support an irrelevant conversation that went on for years (and is
still going on). In fact, that thing will never end -- it's that much of a fun
toy to analytic philosophy. How to solve the Gettier problem? Goodness. Once
you graduate to Wittgensteinian, you see there is nothing to solve at all.
You write, "... while there were many misunderstandings then as now, there were
also some superb Wittgenstein scholars writing at that time." I don't disagree.
But having access to all of the other writings did cause evolution about the
idea of what Wittgenstein believed.
Also, I can't agree that one who perpetuates an irrelevant conversation with
counter-formality (Gettier) is doing anything like Wittgensein was doing to
"game." Wittgenstein was tearing down the ediface of logic with family
resemblance and meaning is use. Gettier was wholeheartedly supporting it.
Not sure what you are doing with Justified, True Belief. You write, " ... one
risks instead sending them down false paths, clinging even more tenaciously to
traditional approaches, as happened with the subsequent literature surrounding
"justified true belief". Gettier gave birth to a specific kind of problem for
JTB. Epistemology professors who teach JTB pull out Gettier as a problem for
the students to solve. In fact, there is a cottage industry of sorts that makes
up all sorts of "Gettier-type" problems for JTB. As a philosophy student in my
junior year, I had claimed to solve the problem.
(Karate with sticks and pads)
11. THE GROUP.
I don't "ban" people. I put them on moderation. If the problem that gave rise
to moderation disappears in the incoming messages, I forward them.
I'm not "disappointed with group participation" as you might think. I never
wanted a big group with lots of posts. I did want more "horses." The perfect
group would have been about 12 Wittgensteinian scholars and some grad
students.It was never an open "let's debate philosophy" group. It was always
perspectival -- like that PMTH thing.
12. PERSONAL STUFF
You know, I have always found that the dynamic of being anonymous doesn't help
on discussion lists when the person converses with someone who isn't anonymous.
(It actually may be worse when both are anonymous). But I think this
anonymous-tornado-rage thing doesn't really make for a good
intellectual environment. You've shown over and over again -- and on other
lists -- that all you do is "bite" whenever you don't get your way on certain
ideas.
This is a very poor trait, especially for one interested in therapy. I know I'm
not much interested in talking with you anymore, because, frankly, I can see no
benefit from it. You've got such a fortress built, that anyone who goes near it
only gets the POMO-therapy-under-attack treatment.
Since I know who you are now, and your agenda, I think it's best just to have
us avoid conversing any further. At least for a while.
Regards and thanks.
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org
SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/authorY6860
Wittgenstein Discussion: http://seanwilson.org/wiki/doku.php?id=wittrs
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