Well, a point could be made that no conditional statement is verifiable or
falsifiable as long as the condition is not satisfied. Nothing could be
said with certainty about the truth value of "If you hire me, I will do a
great job at your company" unless I am actually hired.
I took W. to be suggesting not that we would have contextual difficulty to
interpret a lion talking about photography, but rather than a lion's mental
life is so different from ours that it would not be conveyable to us even
if he had language. (I.e. I took him to be talking about conceptual rather
than contextual difficulty.) This is not a falsifiable claim to be sure,
but neither is it extremely convincing.
O.K.
On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 6:40 PM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
They certainly give the appearance of speaking to one another. Therevocabulary might be a bit limited, but they seem to get their ideas across.
If speak is taken to mean "communicate" through sound, then lions certainly
speak. They don't speak English so far as I know, but they communicate
ideas, notions, displeasures, desires etc, to one another through the
making of sounds.>
My post in another thread points out that "If the lion etc." is a kind of
aphorism: it is not to be taken as an empirical claim that there are no
'animal languages' and no 'lion language'. But feel free to treat it as an
empirical claim anyway, especially as this makes Wittgenstein sound silly
for ever saying such a thing. ["I wandered lonely as a cloud" might equally
be taken as an empirical claim: and plainly false, for which of us
resembles a cloud? What a silly poet.]
I also pointed out that the fact we would understand the words "Take a
photo" if they were uttered by a lion does not refute the aphorism, for it
does not mean we would understand "the lion" saying those words (JLS thinks
I overlooked this point because I never mentioned Strawson, but this point
is made very clearly in that post, and it is clearly acknowledged that this
is part of Wittgenstein's point). Finally, I pointed out that an aphorism
does not offer truth of an empirical/falsifiable sort in any
straightforward way and that we do not treat aphorisms like they are
refuted by counter-examples: and Wittgenstein is deliberately using
aphoristic language because he is not intending to say something
empirical/falsifiable. Feel free to pass that over in silence too.
Dnl
Ldn
On Tuesday, 9 June 2015, 16:01, Mike Geary <
jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"there vocabulary" should, of course, be "their vocabulary" One should
always proof read BEFORE sending.
On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 9:58 AM, Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I concur with Omar's questioning of the determinacy of q in 'if p, the
q'. In fact I would question (and infact, I do question) the belief that
lions don't speak. They certainly give the appearance of speaking to one
another. There vocabulary might be a bit limited, but they seem to get
their ideas across. If speak is taken to mean "communicate" through sound,
then lions certainly speak. They don't speak English so far as I know, but
they communicate ideas, notions, displeasures, desires etc, to one another
through the making of sounds. I dare say -- just watch me -- that lions
even speak to us humans, or at least attempt to. Only those familiar with
the language of lions understand when the lion is saying "I'm bored, I'm
hungry, I'm bored. But apparently they do use sound to communicate their
desires but not many are willing to learn Lion language.
On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 4:49 PM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"If the lion could talk we could not understand"
Seems to be a subjunctive. In the traditional treatment of material
implication, it would seem that 'if p,then q' is considered true whenever p
is false. (Lions don't appear to speak.) However, I am rather inclined to
think that the truth value of 'if p, then q' is indeterminate when p is
false.
Bestest,
O.K.
On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 11:40 PM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Donal chides me for posting things, *Principia* *Mathematica*, *Paradise*
*Lost*, e.g., without providing a gloss of them. I 'd be grateful for
some examples. I try not to post unfamiliar quotations or citations without
explaining them (unlike some), unless if someone, in asking for the quote,
has also asked for an explanation of it.
The only time I can recall posting a quote from either the
*Investigations*, or *The House at Pooh Corner,* is when someone has
asked for such a thing to illuminate something that isn't clear to him.
I've never posted any of Wittgenstein's texts, English or German, just for
the hell of it.
This is what Donal wrote, not long ago. I think he was responding to
something Chris said.
'This same tendency, to adduce Wittgenstein as if he is the key expert
witness waiting in the wings to be consulted - but without adducing the
character of his actual evidence, has been seen from others on the list:
notably Robert Paul (who has, additionally, quoted actual words from W like
"If the lion could talk we could not understand" but, crucially, without
spelling out what this claim amounts to). It is (dare I suggest) a bad
tendency.'
If this is how I appear to Donal, this is the way I appear to Donal. It is
a distortion of anything I've done: I've quoted actual words (!) from
Wittgenstein, without stopping to explain what they meant. Why would I want
to do that? Perhaps someone's asked what Wittgenstein said, in a certain
place, or where 'what LW said,' means 'what did he mean in saying it?' or,
more snappily, 'What does this mean?' Or perhaps someone who's misplaced
his copy of something Wittgenstein wrote, is trying to reconstruct it and
asks...
'If a lion could speak we could not understand it,' or 'If a lion could
talk, we wouldn't be able to understand it,' (Hacker and Schulte). Have I
ever used this expression to whack somebody over the head? No. Have I used
it to illustrate something? I doubt it. Do I want to talk any more about
any of this? No.
Thanks to Donal, and love to all the magicians.
Robert Paul
