[lit-ideas] Wittgensteiniana
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 22:23:47 EST
R. Paul admires Witters.
----- "Speak for yourself," I hear him say. But what's the good of having a
mailing list, if we are not going to interact.
Anyway, we are discussing Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein wrote:
Russels Verdienst ist es gezeigt zu haben, dass die schein-bare logische
Form des Satzes nicht seine wirkliche sein muss. 4.0031.
-- which McEvoy reminds us, Ogden translates as
"Russell’s merit is to have shown that the apparent
logical form of the proposition need not be its real form."
Oxonians are well aware of the
real-apparent distinction. I think after Bradley,
"Reality and Appearance", a best-seller of its day. (Grice quotes from
Bradley in WoW:I).
----
what is real is NOT apparent?
What is apparent is not real.
Etc.
Note that Wittgenstein's words are
'schein-bare' and 'wirklich'
---- The first is cognate with English 'show' as in 'show and tell'. Also
'shine' (as in bootshine). 'Bare' I wouldn't know.
Oddly, for the Greeks, 'to show' (as in 'shine') was possibly a factive.
"phainomenon" is 'what shines'. The verb is deponent in Greek.
The Latinate would be 'apparientia', I would think.
----
Wirklich I'm not sure if it has a cognate. The Latinate, 'real', is after
'res', which is 'thing' really.
I'm not sure if it's German or English which are more confusing when it
comes to this rather clear distinctions in Greek.
"phainomenon" is, clear enough, what 'appears'.
For the 'real', the Greeks would just use the 'copula' ("S is P" -- versus
"S seems P").
----
"Appareances are misleading", or "can deceive". It was possibly a Greek who
first said that. Descartes has shown that given the irrefutability of the
malignant-demon hypothesis, to say that 'appearances are misleading' _IS_
misleading.
McEvoy focuses on the 'need not' (which is "muss nicht" in the German, due
to German grammar, rather than German logic):
"To say apparent logical form is NOT ALWAYS actual [i.e. real] logical form
(appearances sometimes being deceptive) is surely more tenable than
claiming it never is."
"The latter claim would seem to imply a necessary disconnection between
apparent and actual logical form - a bold thesis, and perhaps LOL, but not
what W said or sought to show."
I see. I mean, I see what you mean. Will elaborate on that. I just think
'real' (or 'actual') is most of the times 'otiose'. Austin calls 'real' a
'trouser-word' ("The word that wears the trousers") which we have discussed
with Ritchie. (This Austin does in "Sense and Sensibilia").
When it comes to things like flowers, I can see Wittgenstein's point. To
quote Grice:
"The knife appeared as a leaf"
"The fork appeared as a flower"
--- Wittgenstein's examples as I recall. Discussed in this forum by R.
Paul, etc. Paul quotes from the latest translation on this.
When it comes to _logical form_ -- an abstract thing already -- I wonder if
we have to distinguish
apparent-real
----- I don't think Wittgenstein gives examples.
"Logical form" is odd, though
- - p
is supposed to be equivalent to
p
(double negation cancels out).
Yet, the logical form of "- - p" is different from the logical form of "p".
Russell perhaps ignored "grammatical form". And I grant that to say that
"Russell's merit is to have noted that grammatical form is misleading
regarding logical form" is hardly a dictum of _depth_.
McEvoy:
"For Popper, the TLP is replete with many bigger jokes, including "the
deepest problems are really no problems"".
-----
As opposed to:
"The deepest problems are really not deep"
which is even _stupider_.
McEvoy:
"The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound,
all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds
between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is
common"
-----
I think he forgets the 'ear'. Without the ear -- where are all the waves of
sound to deposit?
Cfr. Grice, "A causal theory of perception".
It would be odd to say,
"I heard a noise", if there's no noise to be heard. In this case, the
sensation of the ear is a hallucination. So, the logical structure is NOT
isomorophic to reality because in reality there was no sound.
---- "Musical thought" may not be propositional, or digital, but
analogical. "Thought" there may be metaphorical.
Witters (his brother) played the piano, and indeed, I would here add the
'musical thought' of the composer, rather than the interpreter.
McEvoy:
"The Darwinian theory has no more to do with philosophy than has any other
hypothesis of natural science"
-----
The use of 'no' there in 'no more' "implicates" as per Grice (cfr. "I'm not
dating Scarlet Johansen") that someone (or other) did suggest that:
The Darwininan theory has to do with philosophy MORE than other hypotheses
of natural science.
----
McEvoy:
"The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what
can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science,
i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy", and "My
propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands
me finally recognizes them as senseless". FOTFL. Though very serious too."
-----
"My propositions are elucidatory" is different from "I am being
elucidatory".
By distinguishing there, he can get away with the apparent paradox here:
It's NOT: "I am being elucidatory and you understand me because I'm
senseless"
Rather, Wittgenstein seems to dissociate what he says ('my propositions',
which are senseless) from his act of saying it, which can thus be
'understood'. Note that he applies 'understanding' directly to himself (or his
self,
if you must) ('he who understands me') rather than to his 'senseless,
elucidatory propositions'.
McEvoy:
"There are also some contentions that are on the right lines from Popper's
(and no doubt others') POV:-
(1) "If a proposition follows from another, then the latter says more
than the former, the former less than the latter."
This above I think linguists abbreviate as "DE" downright entailments, but
I would need to doublecheck that. Grice considers DE vis a vis 'strength'
of what you say.
"My wife is in the garden"
is 'stronger' than
"My wife is in the garden or in the kitchen' ("Causal theory of
perception").
However, this does not hold for
"The pillar box is red"
"The pillar box seems red"
The former sounds and looks 'stronger' than the latter, but in terms of
'entailments', neither is necessary nor sufficient for the other.
---
McEvoy:
"As 'p' follows from 'p', and as both 'p' and 'p' are identical, this
should be reformulated - what follows logically from a set of propositions
never
has greater propositional content than the set of propositions from which
it may be inferred."
Yes, it makes sense.
--- Again, conversational maxims disallow the utterance of
"p v q"
on the mere strength of "p" (or "q")
I.e. the use of 'or' is pragmatically motivated by other than its logical
introduction,
p
----
p v q
--- I think Witters, as Grice notes, disregarded these aspects of the
implicatures of what we say.
"A distinction never made by Witters, and all to frequently ignored by
Austin", Grice has it.
----
McEvoy:
(2) "The freedom of the will consists in the fact that future actions
cannot be known now".
This might be reformulated as:- "There would not be genuine human freedom
if there were no limit in principle to predicting the future by scientific
means, including by "the future" the future growth of our knowledge and our
future actions"
In Popper's view, the limit in principle on such scientific prediction is
a logical kind of limit - as per the logical character of Popper's 'Tell
Told' argument, which is presented in "The Open Universe - An Argument For
Indeterminism".
That "future actions cannot be known now" is, in Popper's view, not
sufficient to create or constitute "freedom of the will" (and so it is wrong
to
say "freedom of the will" consists in it) but it is a necessary condition of
there being "freedom of the will" (although Popper would tend to avoid
this term "will" and reformulate the problem of freedom in terms, say, of the
interaction of the human mind (World 2) with World 1 and World 3."
Yes. Dummett once approached J. L. Austin with retro-causal and inverse
causation, as per time travel. Austin did grant that it is not inconceivable
to think of 'time travel'. "Go back to the past and let us know", I think he
advised him.
I think Flew, who studied with Grice, also considered that.
----- Of course, the type of argument Grice enjoyed IN THAT AREA is by
analysing the use of 'regret' (as per Strawson, "Resentment" essay) -- cited by
Grice, in "The conception of Value".
You can only regret what is or was within your orbit of control to allow
you to have a say on the issue.
Strawson's essay is _Freedom and resentment_.
"regret" is not "resent".
"I resent" implicates that there was free-will involved. Animals don't
resent. (But then they don't speak).
The "Lionspeak" argument by Witters has been also analysed alla Grice by
Bar-On and Mitchell, online. Worth having a look. (Google "Lionspeak" if you
have the time).
McEvoy:
(3) "If there were a law of causality, it might run: “There are natural
laws”."
This might be reformulated:- to assert "There are natural laws" may be to
assert only that "There exists at least one natural law", and this is not a
"law of causality" (such that "all events have causes", for example) so
much as a metaphysical claim which falls to be evaluated as against its
negation, which is "There are no natural laws". That there are any natural
laws
is not shown by science, because it could only be so shown if a scientific
theory of a law-like character could be conclusively demonstrated or
verified, and this cannot be done. Whether there are any laws of nature is a
question that is not testable, but comes down to a metaphysical 'faith' in the
existence of a cosmos of some sort rather than an utter chaos. The arguments
favour this 'faith'. But even without this 'faith', the search for
invariants through testing would still be rational even if there were none."
Oddly, not everybody believes there are natural laws. Nancy Cartwright, who
studied with Grice at UC/Berkeley ("Hands across the waves", she was at
Stanford) now thinks of 'laws' as 'as-if' counterfactuals. ("How the laws of
nature lie"). D. Frederick has discussed this recently.
----
McEvoy:
(4) "The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest
law that can be made to harmonize with our experience."
This might be reworked:- There is no "induction"; but we can make
conjectures that are falsifiable and our preference for the simplest theory is
tied
to the fact that a simpler theory will be more falsifiable than one hedged
about with complex qualifications. Whether the simpler theory survives
attempts to falsify it is to be decided in the light of the attempt.
Metaphysical intuitions as to the degree of "simplicity" of the cosmos cannot
ever
proved by science; although scientific progress, by way of falsifying some
theories, may show that certain kinds of simple explanation are false - and
indicate the truth is rather more complex."
Yes. This parallels Strawson in "Intro to log. theory". Oddly, Strawson
reviewed much of Wittgenstein ("Philosophical Investigations"), but Oxonians
are proud enough to disallow too strong of a Wittgensteinian influence.
Cheers.
Speranza
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