[Wittrs] Re: [C] Does The Tractatus Invalidate Itself?
- From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 10:51:57 -0800 (PST)
John:
1. Regarding the best way to understand Wittgenstein, I would recommend
biography. The three books that I think are the most important to understanding
him would be: Ray Monk's, Duty of Genius; Norman Malcolm's, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, A Memoir; and Ray Monk's, How To Read Wittgenstein. Actually that
last one has a lot of Tractarian ideas in it.
2. I don't see 1 or 2 Wittgenstein's; I see only what happened in history and
what his views were at given times. Once his life is meticulously understood,
all the arguments seem to vanish. As I said to you before, the meaning-is-use
Wittgenstein would not take the position that something must be either said or
shown (in the senses he meant), because the former idea was what replaced the
latter. The Ambrose lectures are all about the showing of the new ideas.
3. I wasn't clear on the passage you cited about nonsense. The point that you
are having issues with is an extremely sophisticated point. In Tractarian
Wittgenstein, nonsense is delineated by a formula. One can see two or three
categorical forms emerge. (J and I had previously discussed this). In Ambrose's
Wittgenstein, "nonsense" is now an idea that has sense-and-family, and is
governed by meaning-is-use, rather than something relegated to by the logical
form of the proposition. What he is saying there (assuming the actual words are
correct -- big if) is the following:
(a). All the things called "nonsense" are of the same type of thing if one
takes what we might call a "bird's eye view." One might say, they have family
resemblance. What is common among them is a language maneuver that excludes
something from being viable. This is the thing the expression does. It excludes
from viability. In this sense AND ONLY THIS SENSE, all forms of nonsense are
the same.
(b) Within the family resemblance, there are different kinds of nonsense
(different family members). There are those things that become "nonsense"
because they fall over their own feet, so to speak (violate their own
conditions of assertability); and there are those that amount to
gibberish. Skepticism is of the former type (see Tractatus).
(c) Nonsense is a construction. This is clearly anti-Tractarian. Please read
this from the same page you cite:
"We exclude such sentences as 'it is both green and yellow' because we do not
want to use them. Of course we could give these sentences sense. I said earlier
that what is possible or impossible is an arbitrary matter. We could make it a
rule, for example, that 'green and yellow can be in the same place at the same
time' is to make sense." (Ambrose, 64)
Care must be taken not to understand this. All that it says is that the ends of
language are arbitrary. If people in the language game began speaking of
something being both green and yellow -- and if this took on a certain kind of
meaning -- then the expression would have life. Point: meaning is use.
4. Please take care in reading Ambrose. If I recall, she reconstructed the
content years later. Don't get me wrong: I'm a fan of the work. I love the
book. But I would just make sure that it is read in light of the other things
out there. She says in the preface it is only Wittgenstein as she understood it
(and as she reconstructed it).
5. Would you care to tell the group why you don't view the Tractatus as
positivist? I'd like to hear the views. Why not share it with us under a
separate thread? (I'm not saying it is, of course. I just think it would be a
good exercise).
Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
Personal Website: http://seanwilson.org
SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/author=596860
Discussion Group: http://seanwilson.org/wittgenstein.discussion.html
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