[lit-ideas] Re: Sounds right to me
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:22:09 -0800
Walter modestly attributes to 'beginner's luck,' the following thiughts.
Consider the claim:
"I can refer to a sensation by the use of 'S' only if I can check my use of
'S'."
Is there a claim here as to a necessary condition for the possibility of
something? Or is this simply an empirical, and hence, contingent, matter?
There is a familiar argument in the Investigations, designed to show
that one cannot learn 'sensation words' from 'one's own case,' i.e.,
that one cannot learn them 'privately,' so that one can learn privately,
without recourse to the natural language one is immersed in (and without
recourse to what one's fellow speakers may use as criteria for using (in
this case sensation) words.
This is a weak version of the 'conceptual' problem of other minds; the
'epistemological' problem is simply that of trying to find grounds for
saying that others have (starting from one's own case) sensations and
mental states similar to mine, given that I have no 'direct access' to
these states, and only the 'outward behaviour' of those (apparently)
sentient beings around us. It's usually thought that if the conceptual
problem were solved the epistemological problem could not arise.
Wittgenstein's destruction of the claim that one knows that a certain
experience is pain, e.g., entirely from one's own case, and that one
therefore learns to 'name' sensations that way, takes the form of
blocking every attempt to offer a coherent view of how this might be
done. This is the famous 'Private Language Argument,' whose conclusion
is that if one could learn to use sensation words 'on one's own,'
meaning from introspecting one's 'private' sensations, one would be
committed to the absurdity of a private language, a language that only
one person could speak and understand, the the 'privacy' is a conceptual
privacy, not the privacy of codes and secret diaries. 'An inner state
stands in need of outward criteria.' Is this a 'necessary' claim? Well,
it's not a logical truth (nor is it the result of repeated failutes in
trying to devise such a language—it is, remember, impossible to get from
it to any natural language, or from any natural language to it.
If every time one tries to advance an argument one is shown how its
steps lead to absurdities, does this represent a 'necessary condition'
for its failure? If so, so be it; but this seems like a quick and dirty
summary of complex matters.
"Philosophical problems cannot be solved via appeal to experience."
True. If you can get an answer by performing an experiment; measuring,
weighing; testing; or by performing a calculation, you're not dealing
with a philosophical problem. Of course, philosophical claims, since
Queen Metaphysics died, seldom stand in opposition to the empirical
sciences.
"Odd coincidence: every time we've tried to solve a philosophical problem via
appeal to experience, we've failed. We must re-double our efforts here."
Whoever says this owes his audience at least one example of a problem in
philosophy that could be, or could only be, solved in the ways I've
mentioned above. "Appeal to experience' is too broad a term to provide
much help here.
One last one:
"If one tried to advance *theses* in philosophy, it would never be possible to
debate them, because everyone would agree to them."
What kind of a claim is one that denies the very possibility of debate regarding
a philosophical thesis? Could it be one that W is presupposing a necessary
condition of debate that is not met by philosophical "theses."?
In a way, perhaps. These words are from Investigations §128.
'Philosophy simply puts everything before us and neither explains nor
deduces anything.—since everything is open to view, there is nothing to
explain.
'For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us.
'One might give the name "philosophy" to what is possible _before_ all
new discoveries and inventions.' [§126]
''The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a
particular purpose.' [§127]
The word 'debate' in Walter's version, is in the original 'Diskussion.'
Anscombe has 'to question them.' I appeal to Richard Henninge to
straighten this out.
It would seem that he thought that anything in plain view needed no
discussion, once that was realized.
I'm disappointed that Walter didn't respond to my earlier post, which
was, apparently, his stimulus for writing this one. There is still more
to say about language games.
Robert Paul,
in frozen Lake Oswego OR
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