[lit-ideas] - serious jokes
- From: Adriano Palma <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2017 09:19:07 +0000
Che scherzi da prete
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
[mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Donal McEvoy
Sent: Friday, March 3, 2017 9:25 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Witters & Sons - serious jokes
McEvoy was arguing that the say/show distinction permeates (if that's the
word) ALL of Witters's philosophy.>
Yes, though W would prefer it if my posts were just showing rather than
arguing. One central argument is that once we accept TLP is permeated by the
showing/saying distinction it becomes implausible PI is not also permeated - it
is very implausible W would have rejected saying/showing without saying
anything about this, but it plausible (as Monk argues) that W retreated in PI
from even attempting to 'say' what can only be shown.
"A serious and good<
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Good>
philosophical<
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Philosophical>
work<
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Work> could be written consisting entirely
of jokes<
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jokes>."
Though pasted from Wikiquotes, these words from W are (I think) serious, and
provide a useful stepping-off point for understanding PI: its textures and
spirit.
We have touched on the absurdity of the W's apple-table and W's 'tools with
marks' on them, and to this might be added many other PI 'items' like the
'beetle in a box' and also the person trying to define their sensations
'privately'. The whole text is a sequence of serious "jokes", 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 W (when properly understood) Augustine' picture shows
'naming' but does not express it. Does W say this: no, he presents Augustine's
picture to show what W takes to be correct.
Why start with naming? Why not commanding or promising? It is not simply
because 'naming' provides the language-reality nexus in TLP 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 PI makes a start at laying this ground.
Like MM I take W to be a kind of Kantian but among my reservations about her
paper is that I am not sure W can have his views in PI readily converted into
Kantian terms like 'a priori' and 'a posteriori' etc or converted into anything
about 'depth grammar' that sounds programmatic .
D
L
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Sent: Friday, 3 March 2017, 0:50
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Witters & Sons
-- and daughters, shall we say (cfr. "The daughters of the revolution").
McEvoy has provided some brilliant exegesis of his way of taking McGinn's
(that's Marie) exegesis of the alleged continuity of Witters.
We were wondering if a philosopher's philosophy needs to show continuity.
Grice did! I mean, his philosophy does. He says he owes this to his father, a
nonconformist. And it's easy to be born a non-conformist and die one. ("Once a
non-conformist always a non-conformist").
With Witters, a philosopher senior to Grice, the case may be more complicated.
McEvoy was arguing that the say/show distinction permeates (if that's the word)
ALL of Witters's philosophy.
Marie McGinn (a 'daughter' of Witters, as we may call her) deals not to much
with the "Tractatus" and the "Philosophical Investigations," as McEvoy does,
but with the "Tractatus" and "On Certainty". She spends some time with things
like G. E. Moore's
i. This is a hand.
ii. I know this is a hand.
and so forth. McGinn, as opposed to McEvoy, also makes a correspondence between
-- what is say
and
-- what is show
(if I understood McGinn alright) in terms of 'knowledge'. "What is said" (the
dictum, to use Hare's phrase) would be part of one's theoretical knowledge.
What is shown -- (I wish I had a Latinism alla "dictum" here) is more part of
some 'practical knowledge', as displayed in how we use lingo.
McGinn spends some time on the nature of analytic propositions. Consider:
iii. Either I know this is a hand or I don't.
As McGinn notes, the logical form of this is
iv. p v ~p
i.e. an analytic proposition which comes out as tautologous in Witters's tables
--. This a-priority can for McGinn only be shown (or as I would prefer,
expressed in a lingo OTHER than the object-language), not SAID in the
object-language.
Unfortunately, McGinn does not use the object-language/meta-language
distinction that Russell focuses on in his "Intro" to Witters's tractatus. But
perhaps then Russell would agree with J. L. Austin:
"Some like Witters, but Moore's MY man."
McGinn's main references are Conant and Diamond -- and I believe in the essay
in question there is only ONE quotation from the "Philosophical
Investigations." McGinn does not provide (or does not seem to provide) textual
evidence for Witters's use of 'show' in his later philosophy.
But what McGinn doesn't show she does seem to tell!
Cheers,
Speranza
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