Donal asks
Does W say this in terms? If so, where?
JLS replies
The reference Grice gives (WoW, p. 5, footnote 4) is "In Philosophical Investigations". He surely needs not to specify where.* The quote is: "Wittgenstein observed that one does notsee a knife and fork as a knife and fork (In Philosophical Investigations).""The idea behind this remark wasnot developed in the passage in which it occurred*, but presumably the thought"**-- if he or she (since Anscombe translated) had any --*** "was that, if a pair of objects plainly AREa knife and a fork, THEN, while it MIGHT be 'correct' to speak of someone as SEEING them as something different (perhaps as a leaf and a flower?), it would be on most occasion (Wittgenstein implies 'always'?), except, perhaps, in very special circumstances which Wittgenstein does not specify, be '[in]correct' (but also 'false', or 'out of order', or 'devoid of sense' --- as the typical Anscombianisms go"to speak of seeing an x as an x."
----------------------------------------------*Why does Grice 'surely' not need to specify where the passage he's commenting on occurs? Was he the incurious dogmatist that this implies? Has he no need to specify it because, being Grice, it's obvious that he could read it correctly without knowing what went before, and what came after it?
**The 'idea,' whatever that means, for I assume it's the passage itself (two paragraphs from Part II, xi) we're talking about, is only clear if one has read the passages that precede it; and since we have JL's testimony that Grice wouldn't need to have done that in order to pronounce upon it, it's no wonder that Grice's offhand conjecture is mistaken (if he really does say what he's reported here to have said).
***I'm sure this helpful comment doesn't occur in Grice's text. It seems to have been inserted by the scholiast.
-------------------------------------------Here is the translation by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte [/Philosophical Investigations/. Fourth edn. 2009] of the passage(s) in question. Hacker and Schulte have reorganized what was formerly simply called Part II of the /Investigations/, and given it the title /Philosophy of Psychology---a Fragment./ They have retained the division into sections indicated by small roman numerals, but added paragraph numbers. The two paragraphs below are from section xi, as they were in the earlier Part II, as translated by Anscombe
122. It would have made as little sense for me to say "Now I see it as..." as to say at the sight of a knife and fork "Now I see this as a knife and fork". This utterance would not be understood. Any more than: "Now it is a fork for me" or "It can be a fork too".
123. One doesn't 'take' [/Man 'hält auch nicht...]/ what one knows to be the cutlery at a meal for cutlery, any more than one ordinarily tries to move one's mouth as one eats, or strives to move it.
Here, 122 is a comment on the earlier discussion, in xi, of 'seeing as,' seeing an aspect of something, interpreting a figure, etc. It's here that the infamous Duck-Rabbit makes its appearance; 123 is just a rhetorical flourish. These paragraphs obviously make no sense on their own---122 clearly refers to something said earlier.
------------------------------------------- Robert Paul
