[lit-ideas] Re: Must the Word be Literate?

  • From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 09:39:12 +0100 (BST)

--- Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:


> Donal asks whether Wittgenstein's notion of an 'ideal language' was 
> 'rooted in the idea that there must be a logically perfect language...'
> Wittgenstein does not set forth nor does he endorse the idea of a 
> 'logically perfect language.' A fortiori, he does not think that 
> ordinary language should be replaced by such an ideal. In the Tractatus, 
> 'Ordinary language is perfectly in order just as it is,' although the 
> 'tacit conventions for understanding it are enormously complicated.' 
> (Russell does mistakenly say in his Introduction that Wittgenstein was 
> in search of a 'logically perfect language.')

Hold on. This strikes me as disingenuous even if largely true - tendentious,
if you will. Wittgenstein may not have thought a 'logically perfect language'
would ever, or should ever, replace logically imperfect 'ordinary language' -
but this would not show that he did not believe analysis of meaning would
involve analysis according to the highest standards - and these standards
would involve having a conception of a logically 'ideal language' which
exposes the 'tacit conventions' that are cloaked when we use ordinary
language.

Consider: in TLP the putative isomorphism between language and reality is not
said to be 'rough' but is assumed to be exact (even if unsayable because we
cannot 'say' any of the fundamental 'atoms' of language or of reality): and
being _this_ exact it is logically perfect in its exactitude.

> In the Tractatus, he separates what can be said (propositions like those 
> in the natural sciences) from what can't be. His purpose isn't to exalt 
> the former but to show how little has been accomplished when the 
> separation has been made: for the really important stuff, the things 
> that matter can't be talked about. At first, the Logical Positivists 
> (beginning with the members of the Vienna Circle) saw Wittgenstein as an 
> ally in their attempt to show that the only meaningful statements were 
> empirical ones, and that metaphysical statements, ethical statements, 
> statements about art, etc., were either nonsensical or meaningless: 
> 'pseudo propositions,' as Ayer called them.

Again this is tendentious and somewhat disingenuous (no offence). It is true
that Wittgenstein's attitude to what he terms 'nonsense' is rather different
to that of the standard-issue logical positivist: they may be utterly
dismissive of 'ethics', say, as mere balderdash and piffle - whereas for
Wittgenstein 'ethics', though its propositions are 'nonsense' strictly
speaking, is much more important a field than the field of 'natural science'
which is all that does strictly make sense. Yet despite this difference in
attitude to the relative importance of what falls on either side of the
sense/nonsense divide, Wittgenstein and the LPs draw the line between sense
and nonsense in much the same way. [Of course, it was Popper in L.Sc.D. who
exposed that it is the wrong way and embodies a mistaken philosophy of
science].
 
> And for a long time, this was the received view: that Wittgenstein had 
> shown, or had tried to show, that only empirical propositions were 
> useful and important. Only in the past few decades have people realized 
> that Wittgenstein's message was that we cannot talk about the really 
> important things.
 
This is rich. Who are these "people"? For a long time a lot of academic
philosophers may have perpetuated this "received" view - and clearly they
would be mistaken: in TLP Wittgenstein asserts that "only empirical
propositions" make synthetic sense but he does not therefore say that these
sensible propositions are the only "useful and important" propositions,
nevermind say that they are always therefore more "useful and important" than
certain nonsensical propositions. 

Popper was never among this shallow shoal of academic philosophers that
Wittgenstein inspired and the anti-Wittgensteinian bent of his philosophy
does not overlook the fact that "Wittgenstein's message was that we cannot
talk about the really important things." Far from it. 

I don't think my remarks any more misundestand Wittgenstein than Popper does,
bearing in mind that, if Robert Paul is right, "[o]nly in the past few
decades" has Popper's longstanding view of the TLP been vindicated even among
the slow-moving herd of Wittgenstein scholars [this is a pattern in Popper's
thought: some uncelebrated papers of his on evolutionary epistemology in the
1970s, uncelebrated because they went against certain academic 'orthodoxies'
of the time, are now seen as far-sighted and cutting-edge; but then Popper is
an original and profound thinker and not someone else's stooge]. 

Upshot: Whatever the difference in attitude to non-science/metaphysics,
Wittgenstein and the LPs share a mistaken positivistic and instrumentalist
view of science.


Donal 


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