On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 7:06 PM, Donal McEvoy <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Well, 'It is false that...' and 'It is not the case that...' triggerdifferent implicatures. "It is falsified that..." triggers even different
ones. So one has to be careful. In a truth-value gap logic (Strawson, "The
king of France is bald"), one can use "not" but not 'false'.>
Perhaps JLS could expand on this. One might think that for many purposes
"It is not the case that x" is interchangeable with "It is false that x"
e.g. "It is not the case that Donal has two heads" and "It is false that
Donal has two heads". So where does the gap come in?
D
L
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*From:* "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*To:* lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Sent:* Thursday, 16 February 2017, 20:31
*Subject:* [lit-ideas] Witters & Sons
Well, McEvoy entitled his thing, "Wittgenstein sends us shopping" -- so I
thought "Witters & Sons" would be an appropriate one -- shop, I mean.
Meanwhile, let's recall Smullyan,
"Why should I be worried about dying? It ain't gonna happen in my
lifetime."
McEvoy quotes from Witters:
"Think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give
him a slip marked 'five red apples'."
In logical form:
i. 5RA
where "5" stands for the fifth natural number, R for the predicate red (a
favourite of Russell's) and A for apple (cfr. Beyond the Fringe, "Apples in
the Basket").
Witters goes on:
"He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked
'apples', then he looks up the word 'red' in a table and finds a colour
sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers—I assume
that he knows them by heart—up to the word 'five' and for each number he
takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out of the drawer.—It is in
this and similar ways that one operates with words—"But how does he know
where and how he is to look up the word 'red' and what he is to do with the
word 'five'?" Well, I assume that he *acts* as I have described.
Explanations come to an end somewhere.—But what is the meaning of the word
'five'? No such thing was in question here, only how the word 'five' is
used."
On the other hand, we may well imagine this conversation between the
shopkeeper and the customer:
ii. Customer (Griceian): What is the meaning of 'five'?
Shopper: What d'you mean?
Customer: I expect you've read Austin's translation of Frege on the
concept of number.
Shopper: Austen?
Customer: No. Austin. He who used to say, "Some like Witters, but
Moore's MY man."
McEvoy goes on:
"Lawrence may well have finished reading Wittgenstein or not yet begun,
but I think anyone reading Wittgenstein could do with some help. Above is
a passage that in many ways is typical of W's style of presentation in PI."
In Anscombe's translation! In Witters's own prose it's way obscurER!
McEvoy:
"It is liable to throw a casual reader. It does not consist of an explicit
argument or conclusion. It invites the reader to think for themselves. It
also invites misinterpretation."
It also invites the question whether Anscombe had a RIGHT to publish
something that Witters left uncompleted. Hence the lack of conclusions.
Anscombe thought that just because she attended Witters's lecturers, she
could publish the thing with Blackwell. I'm surprised Blackwell accepted it
for publication without Witters's consent. Also, couldn't Anscombe find a
Cambridge-based publisher (just as, say, Heffer & Sons) rather than the
epitome of the Oxford publisher (Oxford where Witters never taught):
Blackwell.
McEvoy:
"I mention all this because both W's TLP and PI are works that anyone with
a serious interest in philosophy should read."
None of them was written in English by Wittesr. The TLP was best known in
Ogden's tr. -- my favourite. At least Witters gave the _okay_. Still, he
only accepted a BILINGUAL edition, Witters did.
McEvoy:
"At one level, they use language that is simple and non-technical and
which gives an appearance of straightforwardness. But when we try to
convert the [essays] into an expressible set of propositions (e.g. to put
its [point of view] in other terms) it becomes clear these works are
bedevilled with problems of interpretation. The TLP begins "The world is
all that is the case" - which seems simple and straighforward at one level,
but what would it mean to deny it?"
Well, I can very well imagine the Oxford philosopher Bradley uttering:
iii. The world is NOT all that is the case.
-- the implicature being that Bradley's world (he was a Hegelian) involved
MORE than all that is the case.
I say 'implicature' because if the world ifs all that is the case, and, as
Bradley implicates, MORE than all that is the case, Witters's
iv. The world is all that is the case.
would still be true. A stricter (logical, as opposed to 'implicatural')
negation would be:
v. It is not the case that the world is all that is the case.
which sounds, admittedly, clumsy, even if uttered by C. K. Ogden --
otherwise a brilliant mind.
McEvoy goes on:
"What picture is given by saying "It is false that the world is all that
is the case"."
Well, 'It is false that...' and 'It is not the case that...' trigger
different implicatures. "It is falsified that..." triggers even different
ones. So one has to be careful. In a truth-value gap logic (Strawson, "The
king of France is bald"), one can use "not" but not 'false'.
McEvoy: "What else could be the case? So what is this "world"? It is
clearly not just the planet Earth. Is it the universe of cosmology? It
seems different than this too - at least different to the universe of
science."
I am reminded of Ackerley,
vi. We think the world of you.
I think 'world' and 'Welt' are turns of phrase, as in the name of the
newspaper Clark Kent worked for.
McEvoy:
"So there is no way into a proper understanding of Wittgenstein without
accepting that his work throws up problems of interpretation - moreover,
these problems are not simply interpretation at the margins but
interpretation going to the core of what W intends to show or say by his
work. So any reader needs to be forewarned."
-- and that he (the reader) is dealing with translators, too! (unless you
are a German).
McEvoy:
"In posts long ago and far away I presented a case as to what constitutes
the core of W's thinking - that it centres on the "limits of language"
(which W takes to be much more imposing than most might assume), and on the
limits of what can be expressed with sense and what cannot. This is
fundamental to both the TLP and, in my present view, the PI - 'a doctrine'
of what can be shown but not said/expressed provides a point of fundmental
continuity between this earlier and later work. My suggestion is that W
provides enough evidence that this the core of his thinking but that it is
easy to lose sight of this core and once lost sight of it is easy to read W
wrongly."
Perhaps Derek Jarman's implicature, in filming a film called "Witters" (or
"Wittgenstein", I forget) was to prove Witters right: sort of -- My film
will show you Witters -- never mind _reading_ him. Sad he found a bad actor
to play Witters. I think Ryan Gosling should have been chosen.
McEvoy:
"Take the above passage. Without any 'core' grounding our interpretation,
we might think W is dismissing the views of the interlocutor or providing
clear answers to them. We might think W is writing as if he is giving an
answer in some ultimate sense, rather than giving an answer 'of sorts' that
simply provides a basis for further thought. For example, we might think
the following shows how the question is answered - '"But how does he know
where and how he is to look up the word 'red' and what he is to do with the
word 'five'?" Well, I assume that he *acts* as I have described.
Explanations come to an end somewhere.'"
Many of those embedded questions were perhaps Anscombe's. Recall these
were Witters's non-public classes at Cambridge. So I can well imagine:
vii. Witters: And that is that.
Anscombe: But how does he know where and how he is to look up the
word 'red'?
Witters: Good question, Lizzie. I assume he ACTS as I have described.
Anscombe: But we need explanations!
Witters: No. Explanations come to an end _somewhere_.
Anscombe: Over the rainbow you mean?
Witters: Your musical humour never ceases to amaze me, Lizzie.
McEvoy:
"On my view this would be a serious mistake, and this becomes clear the
more we understand W[itters]'s point of view"
Well, but it's not an outrageous idea to think that it is Anscombe's input
that SHAPES the "PI". After all, she translated it and she PUBLISHED it!
McEvoy:
"(In my view,) W[itters] thinks the question is a good one, and it brings
out something crucial - that the so-called explanation presupposes or
assumes a whole lot that is not explained. W is actually showing the
untenability of the kind of the explanation being offered - that it's an
unsustainable myth that can only be sustained by a fiction that we can
presuppose or assume many other things as if they do not need explanation.
On the other hand, and as W continually brings out, language has its
specific sense without us having anything like a full or proper explanation
for how it has that sense - we know the sense without fully knowing how the
sense is arrived at."
Recall that Witters was many things other than philosophers: a school
teacher, a gardener, a soldier... Anscombe, on the other hand, is primarily
a philosopher. So I think that Witters's refusal to give philosophical
explanations may be due to his background, which was not strictly
philosophical. Gardeners, for example, do not have to EXPLAIN to their
employers why the roses haven't bloomed that well this season. And school
teachers can avoid explanations by, e.g. sending the student for a walk or
something.
Russell always called Witters, "the Austrian engineer". Engineers, as
Grice notes,
viii. The bridge was made of nylon.
need explain things when things go wrong (cfr. Hart, "Causation and the
law" for a similar argument: we use 'cause' when something unexpected has
happened).
McEvoy:
"This is part of a wider view. We know the sense by participating in
language games but the rules of those games are not expressed but are shown
by the games we play. Fundamentally, the rules of language are
inexpressible and can only be shown - and in this way it is right that
explanation comes to an end somewhere:"
Over the rainbow?
"Somewhere" in logical form presupposes
(Ex) Lx
There is a place or locus where explanation does come to
an end. "Somewhere" usually triggers wrong implicatures. Grice's example
(as he organizes an itinerary from Paris to Portofino):
ix. Grice: And where does Smith live?
Strawson: Somewhere in the South of France.
-- Grice's implicature is "Shall we pay him a visit". Strawson's
implicature, by using "Somewhere" is, 'Depends on how much you want to
detour.' It may also implicate "I don't know exactly where -- but all the
South of France looks the same to me, if you axes me."
McEvoy:
" it actually comes to an end right at the point at which language has
sense in the first place. At that point, language simply has the sense it
has, and has this sense aside further philosophical explanation. If this
were not the case, language could hardly get started. So, in this respect,
the later philosophy makes much of the following insight: language does not
have sense because it is philosophically explained how it has sense. In W's
view it is the philosopher's project of providing a theory or explanation
for the sense of language that needs to be replaced with continual careful
attention to language as it is used and has actual sense - for there is no
getting beyond this (given the "limits of language"). Yet it has to be
admitted that none of this may be obvious from the surface of the text."
Or the letter, rather than the spirit of it, we must speak legalese.
Also, since McEvoy has used 'explanation' a lot, perhaps we should provide
some linguistic botany for "explain". Cfr. the British adage:
x. Never explain, never complain.
The focus should be on the verb, 'to explain'. Suppose we provide an
analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions:
xi. U has explained that q, by providing p.
xii. p explains q.
There are different types of explanation. Byron used to complain that the
explanation of a poem he never quite well understood, 'required in turn its
own explanation'. So there are explanations and meta-explanations.
It should be plain for a linguistic philosopher to provide a good analysis
of 'explain', since, well, 'explain' contains 'plain' -- in fact, 'explain'
bri
