[lit-ideas] Re: Ayer on Wittgenstein II
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2012 15:14:09 +0100 (BST)
That Ayer’s interpretation is defective because Ayer does
not grasp the underlying ‘key tenet’ is shown also by Ayer’s account of the
Tractatus where Ayer also does not grasp
the importance of the ‘key tenet’ to understanding that work. Crucially, Ayer
does not appreciate how the ‘key tenet’ provides an answer to the fundamental
question “how a sentence could at one and the same time express a
pseudo-proposition and an unassailable truth” [p.113]? Ayer writes “I did not
see, and still do not see, how” this could be the case. But, as Ayer fails to
appreciate the ‘key tenet’, Ayer fails to consider W’s putative answer that it
can be the case because a pseudo-proposition may show “an unassailable truth”
though it says nothing with sense. It might be a contradiction of an obviously
untenable sort to claim both that ‘what p says is nonsense’ yet ‘what p says is
the truth’. But it is not the same sort of obviously untenable contradiction
to claim both ‘what p says is
nonsense’ yet ‘what p shows is the truth’.
It is not simply that Ayer does not grasp the ‘key tenet’. There
is more than a grain of truth in the view that W – both early, middle and later
– is a ‘conventionalist’ of sorts in his view of knowledge. But of what sort?
Both
the early and later W, for example, regard the propositions of logic and
mathematics as (roughly) holding in virtue of conventions as to their use and
not because there are external ‘objects’ to which they correspond. And, both
early and later, W’s view of ‘induction’ and of ‘science’ might be (best)
described
as a form of conventionalism. Yet we need not enter into what sort of
‘conventionalism’ might be attributed to W to doubt W is a conventionalist of
the sort described by Ayer. Pace Ayer, W is surely not a conventionalist of the
‘we-make-it-up-at-every-step-of-the-way’
school. Though W does perhaps want to suggest that
‘we-could-make-it-up-differently’ and that there is no independent
backing for these conventions such that they could not be otherwise, and though
the later W may even want to suggest that
‘we-could-make-it-up-differently-at-any-given-point’,
it does not follow that the conventions as they stand have no import but stand
in need of continual ‘ratification’ for their sense. To acknowledge a “rule”
may be changeable at any point is not to say there is no
“rule” at any point: equally, to say that the sense of a ‘what-is-said’ may be
changed at any point is not to say there is
no sense to a ‘what- is-said’ at any
point.
Even in W’s philosophy of mathematics, the kind of
constructivism that suggests that working out an acceptable proof is itself
establishing the conventions that govern the expansion of its terms from
conventions established by prior proofs (as opposed to theview that such
expansions are logically determined
by prior proofs or by independently existing ‘mathematical objects’), only
allows that ‘we-could-make-it-up-differently-at-any-given-point’
in this process: it does not therefore mean
‘we-need-to-make-it-up-at-every-step-of-the-way’.****
Yet perhaps Ayer does not see this last distinction. Ayer
suggests it is W’s view “that we are free not only to choose our rules but also
to decide what counts as following them. What other philosophers represent as
the logical consequences of conventions, thereby seeming to grant some
independent power of constraint to logic, [W] treats as the application of
further of conventions. Such radicalism is heroic, but it is hard not to feel
that it grants us more liberty than we actually possess.” This way of putting
it fails to distinguish the thesis
‘we-could-make-it-up-differently-at-any-given-point’
from the thesis ‘we-must-make-it-up-at-every-step-of-the-way’. If we grant only
the first thesis that ‘we-could-make-it-up-differently-at-any-given-point’,
we may also accept that ‘unless-we-go-differently-at-some-given-point’ then the
direction may be set by the sense of ‘conventions’ as they stand**** – and
admitting this is perfectly
compatible with the ‘key tenet’, which would emphasise that the sense of
conventions as they stand may only be shown and is never said by those
conventions.
In the light of the ‘key tenet’, W is ‘saying’ no such ‘conventionalism’
such as Ayer suggests, but is rather showing that the sense of “the rule” is
not said in its statement – and following out
some of the implications of this, both in PI and in his philosophy of
mathematics. To return to what Ayer says on W’s ‘rule-following
considerations’: pace Ayer, it is not W’s point to claim that the
so-called “eccentric” is not ‘mistaken’ – certainly, for W, the “eccentric”
would be mistaken if he thought the sense he was giving “the rule” was the same
as our sense. W’s point is that
whatever kind of ‘mistake’ it may be to take the sense as the “eccentric” does,
it is not a mistake as to ‘what is said’ [simpliciter] – and (which is W’s
fundamental
point) this shows that the sense of
‘what is said’ is not said in ‘what
is said’. Failure to give this 'key tenet' its role leads to a mistaken view of
W's work.
Donal
Slum landlords sing ‘Stop the ‘key tenet’ we want to get
off…’
* PI-223: “One
does not feel that one has always got to wait upon the nod (the whisper) of the
rule. On the contrary, we are not on tenterhooks about what it will tell us
next, but it always tells us the same, and we do what it tells us.”
** See, for example, PI-172
onwards where W remarks on “the experience of
being guided”: at no point does W suggest there is no such experience or
that “being guided” involves ratification
of the sense of the guidance at every
step. What may sometimes happen is
that there is a point where we do not ‘know how to go on’, at least until
something further is shown that appears to resolve the impasse, after which it
may then be correct to say “Now I know how to go on.”
*** PI-219: “When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.”
[W’s emphasis.] This
clear statement is not offset by any words elsewhere that might suggest that,
for W, when I obey a “rule” I must (consciously) decide (or decide with others)
what is obeying it at every step.
****PI-238: “The
rule can only seem to me to produce all its consequences in advance if I draw
them as a matter of course. As much as it is a matter of course for me
to call this colour "blue". (Criteria for the fact that something is
'a matter of course' for me.)” [W’s emphasis.]
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