Re: [Wittrs] just home from the Lakoff lecture...
- From: John Phillip DeMouy <jpdemouy@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Wittgenstein's Aftermath <wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 29 May 2011 21:40:16 -0400
Kirby,
>
> I asked him during the more intimate dinner, to which I had privileged
> access as
> a board member (mom my valued guest), whether he had any sense of a
> countering school of thought. He mentioned Searle and this hazy
> legion of
> analytic philosophers but I think he's got no clue re the
> Wittgensteinians.
> The analytics are clinging to Enlightenment Rationalism in his view.
> He
> senses the demise of positivism, as we all do. That's quite the
> backward-
> looking view though.
>
Unfortunately, people lumping together "Analytic Philosophers" and
dismissing them collectively is all too common. Many would just attach
the label to, e.g. Peter Hacker, one of the foremost Wittgensteinian
critics of "Cognitive Science", and lump him with Searle, notorious for
writing (damning him with faint) "praise" of Wittgenstein and for
rejecting numerous principles of Wittgenstein's philosophical method and
misrepresenting him on various points. This use of labels to obscure
tremendous differences is found in the oddest places. (The same thing
happens with the reception of so-called "Continental Philosophy", of
course, and the labels become an excuse to stereotype and disregard.)
Personally, I regard (and have defended elsewhere this idea)
contemporary Anlophone philosophy as properly "Post-Analytic" and
Wittgensteinians like Hacker are the true Analytic philosophers of
today, (and a minority in the current milieu) because they actually
still regard the proper task of philosophy as conceptual analysis, do
not regard philosophy as either somehow continuous with empirical
science or as able to reveal metaphysical truths. Those ideas are
central to Oxford Linguistic Philosophy and Logical Positivism alike - a
remarkable consensus during the interwar and immediate postwar period
(and a consensus even partially shared by most Phenomenologists, the
"Continental Philosophers" of the era) but are largely abandoned today.
Hacker's taking on nonsense in the fields of Psychology, Linguistics,
Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science while remaining true to those
principles of conceptual analysis making him one of the standard bearers
for what Wittgenstein had to teach us. Of course, Wittgenstein taught
so much and there are others continuing the tradition in quite distinct
ways, ways one might see as quite remote from Hacker's approach, though
they share a common inheritance.
It may be best though that Wittgensteinianism remain a minority view,
never an orthodoxy, and that within that minority, diversity flourishes.
Doctrinaire approaches are inevitable when ideas harden through
consensus into dogmas and doctrinaire approaches, however inspired by
Wittgenstein they might be, are antithetical to the spirit of
Wittgenstein's work.
Take care,
John
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