[Wittrs] Wittgenstein, Language, Thought and Mind

  • From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:59:24 -0700 (PDT)

(Reply to Nasha):

Regarding the issue of "thoughts," I think the following discussion 
was helpful:  
http://seanwilson.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=348&start=0&S=ea23ad7d48ebff75fa851131c581a764

The thing to remember is that Wittgenstein is really against a contrived 
inner/outer distinction. He doesn't want you to talk with too much inner as 
much as he does not want too much outer. Nothing is hidden from you. But this 
does not mean that thoughts are "words" any more than it means words are 
"thoughts." Really, it means that both are sentential -- that we think by 
the same process that we language. That these are the same sort of thing. In 
fact, when Wittgenstein says that we could not understand anything without 
"language," he does not mean to say that an infant who cannot speak an 
English-language-word, but whose eyes become huge at the sight of a 
bright-colored object, is not "languaging" yet. Indeed, that would be a 
function of what cognitive processes are going on, and whether they are 
language-like. All that Wittgenstein was every doing was trying to destroy folk 
psychology (a little man in the head) without also becoming a brute
 behaviorist. 

Some may say he's walking a tightrope; I would say he has shown us another 
false problem (albeit a difficult one for some to grasp).  

This is the same debate that people have over how much Kant is in Wittgenstein. 
Although Wittgenstein did go through an explicitly Kantian period in between 
the Tractatus and right before the arrival of his new philosophy, the question 
of how much remained in true latter-day philosophy is always debated. The 
answer, of course, is "enough." I have posted these quotes before, but I'll 
throw them in again. They support this basic proposition:

We imagine one falsehood (a little man in the head, an ethereal substance, an 
occultish sort of thing) in order to avoid another falsehood (that there is 
nothing but a mechanical lifelessness to the form of life). That is the point 
of all of these passages:    

---------------------------
"It seems that there are CERTAIN DEFINITE mental processes bound up with the 
working of language, processes through which alone language can function. I 
mean that processes of understanding and meaning. The signs of our language 
seem dead without these mental processes: and it might seem that the only 
function of the signs is to induce such processes, and that these are the 
things we ought really to be interested in. [BB, p. 3] (See also, PI, sect. 
358). [note: allcaps used in place of italics –sw]"
... 
"Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the 
formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the 
meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not treat of dashes on a 
bit of paper. Frege's idea could be expressed thus: the propositions of 
mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly 
uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life. And the same, of 
course, could be said of any proposition: Without a sense, or without the 
thought, a proposition would be an utterly dead and trivial thing. And further 
it seems clear that no addition of inorganic signs can make the proposition 
live. And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added 
to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, 
with properties different from all mere signs."[BB, p. 4].
... 
 "And this too could be said: Someone who THINKS as he works will intersperse 
his work with AUXILIARY ACTIVITIES.  The word ‘thinking’ does not now mean 
these auxiliary activities, just as thinking is not talking either. Although 
the concept ‘thinking’ is formed on the model of a kind of imaginary auxiliary 
activity.  ... 
 
These auxiliary activities are not the thinking; but one imagines thinking as 
the stream which must be flowing under the surface of these expedients, if they 
are not after all to be mere mechanical procedures. Zettel (100-30), from 
Kenny’s W-reader, 131 [allcaps used for italics -- sw].
 
Regards and thanks.
 
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
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