[Wittrs] Re: Where to from here?
- From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2011 10:15:31 -0700 (PDT)
(re: Stuart)
... yes, Stuart. Thanks for the confirmation on CV.
Of course, on the rest, I can't agree with your caricature. The only point I
have ever made that is close to your gross misunderstanding is completely
uncontroversial: how one comes to understand what another person asserts can be
a function of how adept they are at that sort of brain trait. (It is the same
with mathematics or music or reading comprehension or whatever). And "getting
Wittgenstein" is something that will test how a person handles that. It's very
hard to "get Wittgenstein." Cf., for example, Karl Marx. It's not hard to "get
Marx," though he was a terrible writer. For Wittgenstein, your orientation
needs reworked.
My point is always about whether the ball is going into the net. It's never
been my position with Walter or anyone that "they had no intellectual standing"
and that I "stood on superior insight alone." That's a caricature that one
would make only when they were threatened by the view and/or misunderstood it.
Indeed, that would be about as poor of a catch of my position as I can
imagine. Rather, what I said to Walter was that he had participated poorly in
an exchange that had several misunderstood points. It has never been my
position that people on the Analytic list are "dolts" or that they aren't
intelligent people. Goodness. Mathematicians, artists, musicians,
auto-mechanics, craftsmen, administrators, etc., can all be "intelligent
people." Any issue with Analytic that I have ever had, aside from the poor
discussion environment they had fostered in the past, is that the framework
they work within is frequently impoverished, and that the fault lies
in not seeing certain Wittgensteinian insights very well. All of this is true,
no matter whether saying it is efficacious.
Take a discussion about these topics into Analytic and see what you get:
meaning is use, family resemblance, conditions of assertability, grammar,
pictures, imponderable evidence, connoisseur judgment, and false problems. What
you'll get is the idea that "sociology isn't meat" (see Walter), and a
reporting of what other analytic philosophers have said about the issue
(journalism). You'll also get a lot of "I really don't understand W, but if you
can point to something maybe we can talk about it." "We can't say because W
isn't clear." Or (my favorite): "This is where Wittgenstein's argument is
refuted ...." (as if the matter were really like that at all).
Look, here is where I am. I've never held Wittgensteinism to be a "philosophy."
Rather, I hold it to be a graduation of sorts. There are a certain set of
skills that I have learned through accessing Wittgenstein. A certain way to see
the life of an idea. You cannot hold this perspective and not be changed by it.
You cannot hold it without certain walls falling. And for those who remain with
the walls they do, one has two simple choices: to let them remain where they
are, or to try to show them. Being within the walls does not make one "not
intelligent." It doesn't even make them less worthy than those without the
walls. It means only that one sees what he or she does.
Wittgensteinians are discriminated against everywhere. And the reason why is
that they are not allowed to talk about things they see after they have been
transformed. They get level-shamed. They get told, in essence, to put their
walls back up.
I simply cannot agree with your caricature.
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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