For Grice, metaphorically, it all boils down to implicature. Implicature is
like utterer's meaning, and he (Grice) always complained that the distinction
between expression meaning and utterer meaning was seldom ignored by his friend
J. L. Austin, and BLATANTLY IGNORED by Witters!
McEvoy was showing or attempting to show that the say/show distinction
permeates ALL of Witters's work.
A dictum in Tractatus runs:
i. Was gezeigt warden KANN, KANN nicht gesagt warden.
(I'm not sure Witters uses the italics which the capital letters are supposed
to represent there. But a more or less faithful translation of that (given the
odd way Germans have of displaying the 'passive voice') is:
ii. What can be shown cannot be said.
I wonder if McEvoy thinks it's something like (i) that permeates all of Witters
work. When I use the passive voice, indeed, as when H. P. Grice did, we need to
EXPLICATE what is implicated: the agent: shown by what or who? said by what or
who? So, (ii) may be expanded into their corresponding implicatures:
iii. What can be shown by me cannot be said by me.
where 'me' is of course Witters. I don't think Grice would subscribe!
What is the justification of (ii)? One Griceian answer would be that
iv. Given that you have SHOWN that p, why bother SAYING it?
But I don't think that is Witters's point. Since Witters denies Russell's
suggestion that the application of a meta-language is useful here (so what
cannot be said in L1 may be said in L2), we are left in the dark.
In fact, it all seems to have started with G. E. M. Anscombe in her
"Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus".
According to Anscombe, we must understand the apparent self-immolation of the
Tractatus in the light of a fundamental distinction between that which can be
said in language L1 and that which can only be shown.
Wittgenstein teaches, in typical jargon, that propositions express their sense
through sharing with reality a logical form.
Propositions, alas, cannot describe, for Witters, this logical form, however.
We cannot use propositions to say what this logical form is.
To do so, we would need to, as it were, step outside logical form.
But this would be to step beyond the bounds within which meaningful discourse
can occur.
(talk of Strawson, "Bounds of Sense!" -- and I see McEvoy disagrees with Marie
McGinn's view of Witters as a post-Kantian).
Nonetheless, this logical form exists.
Only propositions “show” this logical form, they make it manifest—and “what can
be shown, cannot be said.”
Allegedly, once we have appreciated this saying/showing distinction, we can
understand the peculiar character of Witters’s writing, according to Anscombe.
Witters wants to convey to us insight into the things that can only be shown
and not said.
These are, she says,
“things that would be true if they could be said”
but that are nonetheless unsayable.
They are unsayable because, very simply put, their opposites are unthinkable.
Their opposites are “incoherent and confused” and it would not be right to say
that they would be false if they could be said.
The nonsense propositions of the Tractatus arise from Witters's silly attempt
to say what can only be shown (sadly by his own standards!)
Yet they can help us to see that which is shown by ordinary propositions that
do make sense -- such as:
"Hello! Are you having a good day, dear?"
They have in them less “darkness” and “error” than sentences that try to deny
the things that would be true if only they could be said.
Anscombe’s explanation of Tractarian nonsense strongly suggests that there is a
realm of many items — logical relationships among propositions, distinctions of
logical type, and so on, but also ethical principles, the truth of solipsism,
the existence of the world — which can be SHOWN and not said, and that some of
these items are something like propositions, such that they “would be true if
they could be said” — quasi-truths like that one proposition implies another,
that concepts and objects differ in type, that some actions are intrinsically
valuable, that I am my world, that the world exists.
Anscombe's account also suggests that the point of the Tractatus is to get us
to know these quasi-truths -- although the mode of knowledge here is not that
of ordinary propositional thought, but rather some kind of “seeing” or insight.
Thus Witters seems to be telling us that those who understand him will “see the
world rightly.”
P. M. S. Hacker indeed gives a reading of the Tractatus that develops these
aspects of Anscombe’s account.
Hacker distinguishes between misleading nonsense, which characterizes
pre-Tractarian philosophy, and illuminating nonsense, which characterizes the
Tractatus.
Misleading nonsense is generated by the failure to grasp the principles of
logical syntax, which “engenders the illusion that one can say things which can
only be shown.”
Witters's own remarks similarly violate the rules of logical syntax, but do so
self-consciously, to direct our attention both to those rules and to the
ineffable truths which logical syntax shows — “what Witters means by these
remarks...is, in his view, quite correct, only it cannot be said.”
Again we encounter quasi-truths, items that would be true if they could be
said, that can be “meant” if not “said” and can be “quite correct” if not
“true.”
Such readings of the Tractatus attribute a view to it that is, at bottom,
incoherent.
For, as Russell pointed out in his Introduction to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein
“manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said.”
Famously, Ramsey quipped that what can’t be said can’t be said, and can’t be
whistled either.
Nonetheless, Hacker, in his “Was He Trying to Whistle It?” has defended the
answer “yes.”
Still, Ramsey and Russell are surely right in pointing out that there is an
incoherence in Witters's very attempt.
As Warren Goldfarb has pointed out, this incoherence is not hidden or deeply
buried, but easy to see.
The idea that there are “things that would be true if they could be said” only
gets its content from examples -- but to provide examples is precisely to say
the things we are not supposed to be able to say.
Thus Hacker is led to say things like this:
“What Wittgenstein is saying to Russell when he denies that one can say that
there are aleph-sub-zero objects is precisely...: if there are, all right, only
that there are has to be expressed—has to be shown—in another way, namely by
features of our symbolism.”
Yet what Hacker here has Witters saying is obviously incoherent: if we can say
“if p, q”
we can say “p.”
It is self-refuting to say
“if p, p can’t be said”
and to take yourself to have said something.
It is no help to say that this too can’t be said, but can only be shown.
The same problem simply arises again.
Thus, readings of the Tractatus like that of Hacker and Anscombe, “dissolve
into incoherence if pushed slightly,” as Diamond argues.
Moreover, they make it look as if the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus either was
singularly dense or suffered from a remarkable philosophical blind spot.
This is not a promising interpretive starting point, perhaps.
Authors like Hacker and Anscombe characteristically try to finesse this issue
by using language like the following:
“Apparently what someone means or intends by a remark can be grasped even
though the sentence uttered is strictly speaking nonsense" (Hacker).
Thus they stick to the letter of the doctrine that Witters's teaching cannot be
said, and his pronouncements are nonsense, but hold onto the opposite thought
as well, disguising this by saying that while his pronouncements do not say
anything, do not express any thought, and are not true, they convey what he
means or intends, and this meaning or intention is quite correct.
Here there is a less than full-hearted recognition of Witters propositions as
nonsense.
Cora Diamond calls this “chickening out,” and approves of the label
“irresolute” for such readings of the Tractatus.
Irresolute readings disguise the incoherence they attribute to Witters through
“chicken” terminology like (Griceian) “means,” “intends,” “quite correct”; the
resolute reading sees this maneuver for what it is and refuses to go along with
it.
This is the chief prima facie advantage of the resolute reading -- although
some believe that Diamond and Conant have developed this reading in sufficient
detail to show that it has advantages beyond the simple point that it seems
required if we are not to treat Wittgenstein as a bumbling fool.
Unless he was?
Cheers,
Speranza
FURTHER REFERENCES:
Anscombe, G.E.M. An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
Augustine, A.. City of God.
Baillie, J.. Contemporary Analytic Philosophy.
Barker, K.. The NIV Study Bible.
Brenner, W. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
Canfield, J. “My World and Its Value”
Carruthers, P. The Metaphysics of the Tractatus.
Conant, J. “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?”
-- “Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder."
-- "The Method of the Tractatus."
Diamond, Cora. “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus."
-- The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense.
-- The Realistic Spirit.
-- "Throwing Away the Ladder."
-- "Wittgenstein and Metaphysics".
-- Realism and Resolution" Journal of Philosophical Research 22.
-- Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein."
Engelmann, P. Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein. With a Memoir.
Frege, G., Grundgesetze der Arithmetik.
-- Begriffsschrift und Andere Aufsätze.
-- Kleine Schriften.
-- Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel.
Friedlander, E.. “Heidegger, Carnap, Wittgenstein: Much Ado About Nothing."
-- Signs of Sense.
Goldfarb, W. "Metaphysics and Nonsense: On Cora Diamond’s The Realistic
Spirit,” Journal of Philosophical Research 22
Grice, H. P. "Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man".
-- Discussion of "Philosophical Investigations" in "Logic and Conversation:
Prolegomena".
-- "Witters as a minor figure", in "Prejudices and predilections, which become
the life and opinions of myself."
Hacker, P.M.S. Insight and Illusion.
-- "Was He Trying to Whistle It?”.
Kremer, M. "Contextualism and Holism in the Early Wittgenstein: from
Prototractatus to Tractatus,” Philosophical Topics.
Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters.
McGuinness, B.F. “The Mysticism of the Tractatus."
McGuinness, B.F. and von Wright, G.H. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters.
Monk, Ray. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of a Genius.
Pears, David. The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s
Philosophy.
Ramsey, Frank P. "General Propositions and Causality."
Reid, Lynette. “Wittgenstein’s Ladder: the Tractatus and Nonsense,”
Philosophical Investigations 21.
Ricketts, Thomas. "Pictures, Logic and the Limits of Sense in Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus."
Tolstoy, Leo. The Gospel in Brief.
von Wright, G.H. A Portrait of Wittgenstein.
Whitehead, Alfred North, and Russell, Bertrand. Principia Mathematica.
Winch, Peter. "Wittgenstein’s Treatment of the Will."
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
-- Philosophical Investigations.
-- “Letters to Ludwig Ficker."
-- "Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932–1935."
-- Culture and Value.
-- Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1930–1932."
-- Notebooks 1914–1916.
