[lit-ideas] Re: Philosophical Investigations online
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:34:31 -0400 (EDT)
R. Paul wrote:
>More on Grice on Wittgenstein on knives and forks, later.
For the record, from
_//www.freelists.org/post/lit-ideas/In-Philosophical-Investigations,2_
(//www.freelists.org/post/lit-ideas/In-Philosophical-Investigations,2)
by courtesy of R. Paul:
The translation by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte [/Philosophical
Investigations/. Fourth edn. 2009] of the passage(s) in question.
Paul:
"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.
Paul:
"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."
----
Interestingly (or not), when Grice is listing A-philosophers in WoW:I (i.e.
the Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation as he rather pretentiously calls
it in WoW, Way of Words), he has:
Witters
Grice.
From Witters, Grice quotes from that passage referred to by R. Paul.
From Grice, Grice quotes from his own "Causal Theory of Perception".
So Grice is implying, or implicating, that Witters's problem is a different
one from Grice's problem.
This is what he writes about himself:
"Another example which occurred to me
(as to others before me) is that the old
idea that perceiving a material object
involves having (sensing) a sense-datum
(or sense-data) might be made viable by
our REJECTING the supposition
[cfr. G. A. Paul, qua 'follower of Witters',
and Ayer] that sense-datum statements
report the properties of entities of a
special class, whose existence needs to
be demonstrated by some form of the
Argument from Illusion, or the identification
which requires a special set of instructions
to be provided by a philosopher;
and by supposing, instead that 'sense-datum
statement' is a class-name for statements
of some such form as
'x looks (feels, etc) phi to A'
or
'it looks (feels, etc.) to A AS IF" (Grice,
Causal Theory of Perception). I hoped by
this this means to REHABILITATE a form
of the view that the notion of perceiving
an object is to be analysed [rather] in
CAUSAL terms [alla early Russell?]. But I had
to try to meet an objection, which I found to be
frequently raised by those
SYMPATHETIC TO WITTGENSTEIN,
to the effect that for many cases
of perceiving the required sense-datum
statements are NOT available; for when,
for example, I see a plainly red object [pillar box]
in ordinary daylight, to say
'it looks red to me,'
far from being , as my theory required,
the expression of a truth [truism], would
rather be [in some sort of Wittgensteinian
life-form] an incorrect use of words. According
to such an objection, a feature of the
MEANING of
'x looks phi to A'
is that such a form of words is correctly
used ONLY if _either_ it is FALSE that
x is phi, OR there is some doubt (or it
has been thought or it might be thought that
there is some doubt) whether x is phi."
Cfr.
"It looks like a horse to me."
"That horse looks like a horse."
----
etc.
Cfr. "Million Dollar Baby"
--- "This smells like bleach"
--- CLINT EASTWOOD (to boxer): It is bleach. Bleach smells like bleach.
---
Cheers,
Speranza
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