[lit-ideas] Re: Wittgenstein's Big Joke as Devealed by Grice
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 03:12:44 +0000 (GMT)
--- On Wed, 23/2/11, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Russels Verdienst ist es gezeigt zu haben, dass die
> schein-bare logische
> Form des Satzes nicht seine wirkliche sein muss.
>
> 4.0031.
>
> Geary's German is perhaps better than mine, and he
> proposes:
>
> "The merit of Russell is to have shown that the
> apparent logical form of a
> proposition must not be its real form."
Surely Ogden's translation is preferable:
"Russell’s merit is to have shown that the apparent
logical form of the proposition need not be its real form."
To say apparent logical form is not always actual 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.
For Popper, the TLP is replete with many bigger jokes, including "the deepest
problems are really no problems", "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", "The Darwinian theory has no more to do with
philosophy than has any other hypothesis of natural science", "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.
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."
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.
(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.
(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.
(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.
There's more, but I want to stop before Geary brings his mother-in-law into it.
D
> Geary comments:
>
> "Similarly, the shadow of my mother-in-law is not my
> real mother-in-law"
Phew
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