Witters: The Compleat Jokes
-- and Grice's laughter
In Kemmerling's obituary of the Oxford philosopher H. P. Grice, there is an
amusing reference (in German -- the thing appeared in "Erkenntnis") about
Grice's laughter, which I take as metonymy for his (Grice's, not Kemmerling's)
sense of humour, which relates to Witters's jokes.
Marie McGinn, who teaches at York (not New York, but old York, as W. H. Auden
called it -- he lived in both), does not dwell much on Witters's jokes. McEvoy
does.
Some comments:
McEvoy writes:
"Yes, though W[itters] would prefer it if my posts were just showing rather
than arguing."
McEvoy:
"One central argument is that once we accept the Tractatus is permeated by the
say/show distinction it becomes implausible Philosophical Investigations is not
also permeated."
McEvoy gives a reason for this:
"It is very implausible Witters would have rejected the say/show distinction
without saying anything about this, but it plausible (as Monk argues) that
Witters retreated in Philosophical Investigations from even attempting to 'say'
what can only be shown."
Two objections to this:
-- It may be due that Tractatus was published by a strict publisher;
Philosophical Investigations wasn't (Blackwell would publish almost anything!)
-- Were Monk right, Witters would have titled his "Philosopical Investigations"
"Witters's Picture Book" -- but he didn't.
McEvoy goes on to quote from Witters:
"A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of
jokes."
The ambiguity of 'could' is Griceian. Surely, 'could' could be abused. Cfr.. "A
man could walk in Mars without a mask". The proof of the pudding, as the
English say, is in the eating, and Witters should have at least provided a
footnote to a philosophical work who other than Witters would have dared called
'good' and which entirely consists of jokes.
A joke is one of the concepts that H. P. Grice had more problems providing
necessary and sufficient conditions for. He tried with 'jocular', but Strawson
reprimanded him ("That's circular, Grice.").
On the other hand, I strangely agree with Witters that the Alice books are two
books which are good philosophical books that consist entirely of good Oxonian
jokes -- and that had Queen Victoria laughing out loud on the floor.
("Sylvie and Bruno" on the other hand Victoria found to consist of "not to good
jokes, you know.")
McEvoy:
"Though pasted from Wikiquotes, these words from Witters are (I think) serious,
and provide a useful stepping-off point for understanding Philosophical
Investigations: its textures and spirit."
Well, it would seem that Anscombe (who chose 'joke' for Witters's Austrianism)
did NOT share his sense (Witters's that is) of humour. It is said that she
shared NO sense of humour!
But as Sofia Coppola could say, "lost in translation".
McEvoy:
"We have touched on the absurdity of the Witters's apple-table and Witters's
'tools with marks' on them, and to this might be added many other Philosophical
Investigations 'items' like the 'beetle in a box' and also the person trying to
define their sensations 'privately'."
Or, for that matter, we might add Stoppard's play based on Witters which "The
Telegraph" described as "mildly amusing".
McEvoy:
"The whole text is a sequence of serious "jokes"".
The idea of a serious joke is one Marie McGinn might like. Is it analytically
false?
McEvoy:
"beginning with the elaborate opening set-piece based on some writing from St.
Augustine: for the whole 'Augustinian' picture of language acquisition is at
one level entirely and immediately understandable to us yet absurd - and it is
both these things because we can readily understand that words can name objects
yet we cannot properly express in language what constitutes this 'naming' as
opposed to some other linguistic act. Our understanding is so primed that when
presented with Augustine's picture we might think the naming of objects is
constituted by something expressed by the picture, whereas for Witters (when
properly understood) Augustine' picture shows 'naming' but does not express it.
Does Witters say this: no, he presents Augustine's picture to show what Witters
takes to be correct."
Another reason is that Witters lacked a classical education as Grice didn't,
and "Confessions" was in Vienna a bit of a best-seller. The classical
background to Augustine (I won't call him a saint -- in philosophical prose)
has been traced by Umberto Eco and his disciples. It stems from Aristotle's
"Categoriae."
McEvoy:
"Why start with naming? Why not commanding or promising? It is not simply
because 'naming' provides the language-reality nexus in Tractatus but because
it seems the simplest way words can hook on to objects: if this relation has a
sense that can only be shown, then the ground is laid for seeing this is true
for any kind of sense. The opening of Philosophical Investigations makes a
start at laying this ground."
If I understood Marie McGinn alright, her point is that the sense is SHOWN in
use. "Put on show" is one of her favourite examples. She rejects the object-
and meta-language distinction. Because there is a very simplistic explanation
of Augustine's theory in metalinguistic terms.
Indeed, Gilbert Ryle found Augustine so seriously funny that he entitled the
theory behind the saint the "Fido"-Fido theory of meaning.
McEvoy:
"Like Marie McGinn I take Witters to be a kind of Kantian but among my
reservations about McGinn's essay is that I am not sure Witters can have his
views in Philosophical Investigations readily converted into Kantian terms like
'a priori' and 'a posteriori' etc or converted into anything about 'depth
grammar' that sounds programmatic."
Too true. I read McGinn as emphasizing that Witters is into some 'order' of
language but not THE order of language. I.e. McGinn's Witters is rightly a
relativistic. By avoiding the object-language/meta-language distinction, McGinn
ends up abusing terms like "put on show" (why not "put on a Witters show"?) and
such. Her point seems to be that to say:
"A is an object"
is nonsensical. McGinn's point about tautologies is not that clear. A tautology
-- the only one McGinn quotes is
"It is raining or it is not raining"
for which she cares to provide the logical form (or 'pictorial form'):
p v ~p
This 'analytic proposition' does not picture a state of affairs, I take
McGinn's point to be. And while not nonsensical, it is hardly informative (by
Griceian standards). In "Pragmatics," Levinson provides some tautologies that
ARE informative:
A: But will he come?
B: Either he will or he won't (Implicature: Why bother).
Grice indeed deals with PATENT tautologies ("War is war", "Women are women") as
being SO implicature-loaden that they hurt!
McEvoy:
"Also from W's Wikiquote: Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness,
but come down into the green valleys of silliness.""
I like that, but then I like the noun 'silliness'. I said I won't have
Augustine a Saint, but I will call Mary a Saint. In Anglo-Saxon, there was no
word for 'saint', only 'silly'. So I'm not sure Witters (or indeed Anscombe)
was aware of this!
I'm not sure the valleys of sainthood are green!
"Clever" I agree should be avoided. This I learned from G. Mikes, "How to be a
brit". "In England, "clever" is a term of abuse. Only furriners are clever."
McEvoy:
""Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay
attention to your nonsense.""
This has an Alice quality to it:
"Take care of your utterances and the senses will take care of themselves!"
And the Duchess said, `and the moral of that is--"Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love,
that makes the world go round!"'
`Somebody said,' Alice whispered, `that it's done by everybody minding their
own business!'
`Ah, well! It means much the same thing,' said the Duchess, digging her sharp
little chin into Alice's shoulder as she added, `and the moral of that
is--"Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves."'
Anscombe's use of 'heaven's sake' is otiose in that 'sake' is usually otiose
(cfr. "for the sake of truth" vs. "for truth").
McEvoy:
""Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which
teach us at last to understand our own.""
I'm not sure what Anscombe-Witters mean by 'fictional concept'. I would assume
they mean "Rampunzel". But "Rampunzel" is NOT a concept -- it has denotatum,
but not connotatum. I doubt there ARE fictional concepts. Consider Grice's
example in "Vacuous Names"
"Pegasus flies."
"Pegasus" cannot be a fictional concept, because it's not a concept. And "Fly"
is fictional as applied to "Pegasus," but not in itself.
McEvoy:
"There is also the Philosophical Investigations remark: "My aim is: to teach
you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent
nonsense." ( § 464)."
He is having in mind Moore's
"I know this is a hand"
which Moore uttered at Harvard. He also uttered,
"I know there is a window behind those curtains." -- as it happened, there
wasn't -- It was Emerson Hall, where the fashion then was to have curtains
everywhere, for decorative, rather than practical purposes.
Witters is making fun (his 'joke') of something that for Moore is serious and
that Witters irreverently (when it was Moore that turned Witters into a doctor
at Cambridge) takes as DISGUISED nonsense. By this he means that Moore does not
REALISE it is nonsense. Witters self-importantly places himself as the one that
will guide his select students into teaching how to interpret Moore's disguised
nonsense into patent nonsense.
Some respect for one's teacher!
It was good that Grice came to the vengeance ("Some like Witters, but Moore's
MY man"). For Grice shows that what Witters thinks is Moore's disguised (turned
patent by Witters's elucidations) nonsense, is "trivial, true, if slightly
misleading".
Grice's rationale goes as follows. It IS ceteris paribus ridiculous to utter,
"I know this is a hand" when nobody ever DOUBTED it. But this contextual
pragmatic USE does not touch on the SENSE of the proposition, "I know this is a
hand". I means:
a. Moore believes that this is a hand.
b. Moore is justified in believing that this is a hand
c. This is a hand.
Since Witters would rather see himself dead than teaching his select students
the method of necessary and sufficient conditions, it is very understandable
that he prefers to shower them with jokes that HE thinks serious.
A Cambridge don should be more careful here. "Serious" and "Joke" are very
subjective words, and I'm not sure that Rush Rhees (to name a student who
suffered Witters's jokes) found these ('jokes') 'serious' or 'jokes at all'
(Perhaps Rhees did find it amusing that at Oxford the idea of a serious joke
would be considered a Meinongian illustration of a contradictory concept --
cfr. 'square circle').
McEvoy:
"Well "patent nonsense" is likely to be taken for joking but, in reverse, what
might be taken for joking might be a way of revealing disguised nonsense."
Don't know. The point was also made by Ramsey: "Witters should be stop
deceiving himself that he is into IMPORTANT nonsense."
I'm not sure there is much point in distinguishing types of nonsense (alla
Grice with 'senses': "Do not multiply nonsense beyond necessity").
Grice once said that when learning at Oxford (yes, he was poor, :)), he found
an adage by Cook Wilson very illuminating and 'deep' (to use McGinn's favourite
adjective when describing what Witters is against)
"What we know we know."
In later years, Grice came to realize that Wilson was _joking_. But for Grice,
to joke is to m-intend one's addressee to find the original remark amusing. If
Wilson was making a joke for his own amusement, "that was not fair of him."
Especially when laughter at tutorials is a no-no in the Oxford Grice knew.
Grice was the first to allow, in "Prejudices and predilections" that philosophy
should be, 'first and foremost', "fun" -- but "laughing with philosophers ain't
the same thing as laughing AT them -- unless we mean Witters."
McEvoy ends his post by quoting from Malcolm (a favourite author of Grice -- he
dedicates 25% of his WoW -- Way of Words -- to deal with Malcolm's mistreatment
of Moore):
Malcolm writes (I'm paraphrasing slightly)
"Clare gave Witters some Swiss cheese and rye bread for lunch, which he greatly
liked -- at least he ate it whole. Hereafter he more or less insisted on eating
bread and cheese at all meals, largely ignoring the various dishes that Clare
prepared. This Clare found rude. We found Witters declared that it did not
much matter to him what he ate, so long as it always remained the same."
i.e. the Lockean natural kind, 'food' -- as in "Edible arrangements." Witters's
point seems to be addressing what he finds the disguised nonsense of uttering,
uninformatively, "All food is edible."
Malcolm continues:
"When a dish that looked especially appetizing was brought to the table, I
sometimes exclaimed "Hot Ziggety!" — a slang phrase that I learned as a boy in
Kansas."
The slang is strictly, "Ziggety".
"Hot" means "not cold."
"Wittgenstein picked up this expression from me. It was inconceivably droll to
hear him exclaim "Hot Ziggety!" when my wife put the bread and cheese before
him."
Especially because it was cold?
What Grice detested about the otherwise charming Malcolm was his abuse of
hyperbole. How 'inconceivably droll' could something be if Clare found it
amusing enough?!
Cannot be because Clare was from Kansas because she wasn't.
Cheers,
Speranza
