[Wittrs] Wittgenstein Before and After
- From: "SWM" <swmaerske@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 18:09:30 -0000
As you know, Sean, I have lost the ability to initiate posts here since you've
shut off the Yahoo membership mechanism. As a result, I typically respond to
posts but do not initiate them here. However, I ran across two very amusing
on-line animated videos today which place some of Wittgenstein's actual words
into the mechanized mouths of robotic animations. The result is hilarious and I
decided to send it on to some family and friends via e-mail.
However, it occurred to me that they might not appreciate it, lacking a
background in Wittgenstein and philosophy. So I set about explaining it to
them. Before I'd finished I had a virtual mini-treatise on the differences
between the early and later Wittgenstein. After paring it back somewhat, I sent
it on. But it occurs to me that it might be worth posting here to see what some
Wittgensteinophiles on this list have to say about it. Perhaps I got some
things wrong or perhaps others here will have other useful notions to add by
way of additional commentary. So without further ado, here it is (I hope the
links to the videos prove useable).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Addressees Deleted)
What the guy who made the first video here has done is put Wittgenstein's
foreword to his Tractatus in the mouth of a stuffy animated character.
Listening to the words (instead of reading them as they were meant to be
approached) actually turns out to be hysterical. I couldn't stop laughing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uljz2PeqWwc&feature=related
Of course, we know that Wittgenstein, years after he wrote it, actually
rejected his Tractatus, announcing in his foreword to his later book, the
Philosophical Investigations, that the author of the Tractatus had made some
grave mistakes. Maybe he'd have come to that conclusion sooner if he'd had a
chance to see this YouTube animation of what he was trying to say first!
The animation that follows is of one small section from that later work,
Philosophical Investigations. Of course, it sounds just as absurd -- but in
this one it's because the video maker gives us only a fragment, taken
completely out of its context. Still, it's pretty funny, too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCh8fhG94O4&feature=related
Here, though, is the context which, when seen, I think will show why
Wittgenstein is an important thinker:
He was discussing why it makes no sense to suppose that solipsism -- the idea
that the only thing that's real is ourselves -- is true.
The Problem
For centuries philosophers have agonized and argued over how we can know what
we know. How can we be sure we are not just the victim of some giant delusion?
This is the knowledge or epistemological problem.
Whole theories and arguments have been developed and elaborated in Western
philosophy to justify our knowledge, to demonstrate that we really do and can
know things. Of course you can argue that common sense already tells us this.
But the problem is that common sense, being just another claim of knowledge,
could itself be part of the delusion. Philosophers have thus struggled to
provide a solid basis for knowledge claims in light of the fact that everything
we know seems to be supported by such basic beliefs about the world as
solipsism seems to throw into question.
Wittgenstein's "Solution"
His point in the larger text from which the second video clip is extracted
boils down to the claim that to express ideas we must do so in language and
language is ultimately a public, not a private, matter, i.e., it is shared with
other language speakers.
Language he proposes, is a matter of learning the rules for how to use words
and then following those rules correctly. But, he points out, there can't be
any rules unless there is a standard outside of ourselves against which to
measure the rightness or the wrongness of our uses.
Therefore, as soon as we try to claim that solipsism is true we are also, in
effect, denying that truth because, to say it's true is to use language which
assumes that others are already present (because language cannot be private,
i.e., you need a community of language speakers to have and follow rules). If
others ARE present, then, of course, solipsism can't be true (because solipsism
implies that there is no one else but ourselves to be present).
This was actually an ingenious (if still somewhat controversial) solution to
the age old philosophical problem of how we can be sure we know anything about
an external world. Solipsism and similar forms of radical skepticism are not,
on this view, false anymore than they are true! They are simply unintelligible
claims that cannot even be stated coherently let alone questioned.
Wittgenstein's Broad View
This ties into his larger point that "problems" like this (the meat and
potatoes of classical philosophy) are not substantive problems at all but only
the result of our getting confused in how we use language.
We think that asking questions like "How do I know there is an external world?"
or "How do I know there are others in the world besides me?" can be answered
intelligibly with some kind of "because" reply, by giving some reasons we take
to be inarguable (and which we hope to prove are inarguable). All sorts of
theories of knowledge and the world are thus devised by philosophers in order
to provide a basis for our common sense beliefs.
But in fact, as the later Wittgenstein showed, the very question that underlies
this challenge is unintelligible. And, if it is, it cannot even be asked and,
if it can't, then it also cannot be answered.
So it's not a question of whether it's true or false after all. Non-solipsism
and related forms of radical skepticism are simply excluded from consideration
because they don't depend on reasoning but are already built into what we are,
what he called our "form of life".
The Difference Between the Early and Later Wittgenstein
Initially he was in the thrall of these very kinds of problems and struggled to
find an acceptable answer, as other philosophers did. The Tractatus, his first
book, attempts to do this by describing how language relates to the world, how
language consists of certain pictorial and logical relations and that, once you
understand these, you know what you can say and what you can't (what can be
pictured via these logical relations and what can't). Then questions like
whether solipsism is true, say, are seen to be beyond clear statement within
language (because solipsistic statements and the like lack adequate referents
in the world -- they don't point to or name anything we can discover in our
experience). He therefore placed such questions outside the zone of rational
discourse. But he still allowed their significance, albeit, he thought, in some
deeper, non-linguistic way. Such statements were nonsense in the sense of being
inexpressible in any but some poetic way, but they were still important --
perhaps more so than the statements we could make about the world which had
sense (i.e., genuine referential relations).
But the later Wittgenstein concluded that this was a mistake. It wasn't that
such statements involved some great mystery beyond the realm of rational
thought, accessible only in some mystical way (i.e., what we can "show" but
cannot "say"). Rather it was that language, itself, confuses us at times
(especially when it comes to philosophizing). Once we realize that this
confusion stems from a failure to recognize that we're using language
incorrectly (in the present case of solipsism, for instance, we had been
thinking that there was a legitimate question to raise when there wasn't), the
problem that had troubled us seems to simply dissolve away. In other words,
such issues are more like puzzles than real problems and their solutions
involve unpacking them so that they cease to puzzle us, rather than looking for
an answer in terms of a logical proof or some kind of convincing evidence in
favor of our claim.
At the heart of the change lies Wittgenstein's changed view of language
although in both the Tractatus and the later book, language is what he homes in
on.
I wanted to explain this because I know most of you have a hard time figuring
out what Wittgenstein is about when I mention him, why I find his work
interesting and why any of it matters to anyone but me!
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