[lit-ideas] Re: The Order of Aurality ratification of fiction

  • From: "Walter C. Okshevsky" <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2012 04:54:14 -0230

As we're beginning week 9 of a 12 week term, I don't have the luxury of
following this interesting thread very carefully. But I'm wondering whether the
following idea may be helpful: For Witters, all creatures capable of symbolic
language (not simply a language of signs) share a common "form of life."
"Symbolic language" here refers to such things as Hungarian, chess, Romantic
poetry, curling and table tennis, sexual politics and classical music. All
symbolic languages are translatable into each other in that their respective
semantic and syntactic features are in principle universally intelligible. This
excludes the lion. Were he to speak, we would not understand him because we
would fail to see how his speech coheres with chess, curling, etc.. My 2 kopeks
worth.

Walter O
MUN


Quoting Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>:

> Donal wrote
> 
> > We might perhaps admit that "For Wittgenstein, any language is, in 
> > principle, open to understanding by any language user who shares a 
> > sufficiently similar 'form of life'" but not that, without that 'form 
> > of life' qualification, "For Wittgenstein, any language is, in 
> > principle, open to understanding by any language user (irrespective of 
> > whether their kind of language and 'form of life' bear any similarity 
> > to the language in question)".
> 
> I wrote, with a certain referential opacity,
> 
> > I don't understand the sentence in quotes. It seems just mistaken. The 
> > reason it's mistaken is epitomized at 327 in 'Philosophy of 
> > Psychology?A Fragment,' [Hacker and Schulte's revised translation of 
> > the /Investigations/]: 'If a lion could talk, we wouldn't be able to 
> > understand it.'>
> 
> I meant to refer only to the last sentence in quotes, which ends with an 
> italicized clause, that begins '/irrespective of whether/...' My 
> objection to this is that Wittgenstein nowhere says this, nor does 
> anything else he says imply it. I read the last quote-enclosed sentence 
> as saying that one can understand any 'language' whatsoever, independently
> of whether or not the 'language' in question is used by persons, 
> non-human animals, or intelligent mushrooms whose forms of life are 
> /completely/ different from our own. What's meant by 'completely 
> different' may border on circularity, but Wittgenstein apparently 
> thought that there were some more or less clear cases, e.g., that of the 
> talking lion.
> 
> > I don't quite understand what Robert does not understand here. There 
> > aretwo sentences in quotes, and they represent two incompatible 
> > claims. They are attempts to reframe Phil's unqualified claim that 
> > "For Wittgenstein, any language is, in principle, open to 
> > understanding by any language user" in terms of whether or not this 
> > claim must be qualified by the additional words "who shares a 
> > sufficiently similar 'form of life".
> 
> The first sentence might be close to what Wittgenstein's views would 
> look like after having been run through a Cuisinart, but the second, 
> which appears to detach languages
> from forms of life would not come close to anything Wittgenstein says, 
> even if it were engraved in platinum. At §19, he says 'It is easy to 
> imagine a language consisting
> only of orders and reports in battle?Or a language consisting only of 
> questions and expressions for answering Yes or No?and countless other 
> things.?And to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.'
> 
> What troubles me is the generality of the two sentences in quotes. It's 
> as if 'scholars,' or 'philosophers' had pretty much agreed that there 
> are some main theses or doctrines in
> the /Investigations/, but were quarreling over just what they were and 
> what form they should take. Let me suggest that this is not a fruitful 
> way to approach the /Investigations/.
> The book is neither a collection of aphorisms, nor an extended 
> philosophical argument concerning one or two clearly defined positions; 
> such arguments having pretty much the
> the form of philosophical treatises which are full of therefors and 
> hences and thus-we-may-concludes. Wittgenstein sketches out what a 
> reader should expect to find in the /PI/, in his /Preface/. What she 
> should not expect to find is anything resembling Hume's first Treatise, e.g.
> 
> A warning of where philosophers go wrong can be found in the /Blue 
> Book/, where he calls attention to their 'craving for generality,' and 
> their 'contempt for the particular
> case' (something he accuses Socrates of). He resists that craving, and 
> scorns such contempt, in his later writings. 'Don't think, but look,' he 
> says, admonishing Socrates'
> ghost. Enough. I am not made for a discussion of Wittgenstein's theses 
> or principles, so I will withdraw, and leave the subject matter to those 
> who are.
> 
> > Also I don't understand how "If a lion etc." at all shows how the 
> > first of these sentences in quotes is mistaken; nor is it, of course, 
> > an argument that the second of the sentences in quotes is mistaken, so 
> > much as a way of 'epitomizing' that it is mistaken [because 'Aslan' 
> > would not share our 'form of life'].
> 
> I think Aslan was a follower of Grice.
> 
> Robert Paul,
> sometime student of Mordant College, Oxon.
> 


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