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Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations, A Collection of Critical Essays
Collection of 19 papers concerning issues from Wittgenstein's book The Investigations, Preface and Bibliography.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
510 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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October 1, 2010
This book of critical essays has far too much variety of viewpoint for me to discuss or summarize in any helpful way. So I tend to look for the meaningful snippet which may prove of interest to the widest variety of my philosophical friends. The following quote is from Anthony Kenny’s essay, “Cartesian Privacy.”
“If Descartes’ innovation was to identify the mental with the private, Wittgenstein’s contribution was to separate the two. Since Wittgenstein, we tend to equate the mental with what is peculiar to language-users; and if Wittgenstein’s arguments are valid, languages cannot be private. The cogito and the private language argument each lie at the heart of the epistemology and philosophy of mind of their inventors. The cogito led to the conclusion that mind is better known than body. The private language argument leads, we might say, to the conclusion that body is better known than mind.”
Keep in mind that by “private” Descartes means that which can only be experienced firsthand by oneself, such as one’s sensations, one’s thoughts, one’s feelings, and one’s intentions. By “public” Wittgenstein means what must be shareable to make sense, such as that which can be taught and confirmed by others.
This is a beautiful capsule summation of two great philosophers’ relation to each other. At least some of my friends will balk at the idea that the mental is what is peculiar to language-users. They may think that there is plenty mental going on that is pre-linguistic and that Wittgenstein is hopelessly cerebral. It may come as a surprise to them that Wittgenstein concludes that body is better known than mind, perhaps because they think of body as visceral feelings rather than as an object in the world.
Wittgenstein’s view lends itself to a naturalistic view of human nature. I appreciate that and yet I find Wittgenstein to be overly behavioristic (and Wittgenstein has his own kind of behaviorism, sometimes called “logical behaviorism”). I find Wittgenstein not to do justice to the Cartesian insight of the cogito. Even accepting Wittgenstein’s argument that language cannot be private, he does not allow for the pre-linguistic formative powers of private experience. Every piece of language originates from a point of view, and before the language can be made stable by becoming public, it must be shaped and conceptualized by a self. To deny legitimacy to this process until it meets the threshold of public language is to rule out an area of useful exploration.
“If Descartes’ innovation was to identify the mental with the private, Wittgenstein’s contribution was to separate the two. Since Wittgenstein, we tend to equate the mental with what is peculiar to language-users; and if Wittgenstein’s arguments are valid, languages cannot be private. The cogito and the private language argument each lie at the heart of the epistemology and philosophy of mind of their inventors. The cogito led to the conclusion that mind is better known than body. The private language argument leads, we might say, to the conclusion that body is better known than mind.”
Keep in mind that by “private” Descartes means that which can only be experienced firsthand by oneself, such as one’s sensations, one’s thoughts, one’s feelings, and one’s intentions. By “public” Wittgenstein means what must be shareable to make sense, such as that which can be taught and confirmed by others.
This is a beautiful capsule summation of two great philosophers’ relation to each other. At least some of my friends will balk at the idea that the mental is what is peculiar to language-users. They may think that there is plenty mental going on that is pre-linguistic and that Wittgenstein is hopelessly cerebral. It may come as a surprise to them that Wittgenstein concludes that body is better known than mind, perhaps because they think of body as visceral feelings rather than as an object in the world.
Wittgenstein’s view lends itself to a naturalistic view of human nature. I appreciate that and yet I find Wittgenstein to be overly behavioristic (and Wittgenstein has his own kind of behaviorism, sometimes called “logical behaviorism”). I find Wittgenstein not to do justice to the Cartesian insight of the cogito. Even accepting Wittgenstein’s argument that language cannot be private, he does not allow for the pre-linguistic formative powers of private experience. Every piece of language originates from a point of view, and before the language can be made stable by becoming public, it must be shaped and conceptualized by a self. To deny legitimacy to this process until it meets the threshold of public language is to rule out an area of useful exploration.
January 8, 2016
Includes essays by several famous people, including P. F. Strawson, Paul Feyerabend, Norman Malcolm, A. J. Ayer, and Michael Dummett.
From A. M. Quinton:
"Objects are incomplete in the sense that they only exist in the relation to other objects that constitutes facts."
"Elementary propositions . . . owe their meaning and truth not to their relation to other propositions but to their relation to the world. That there must be such simple, unanalyzable propositions if any propositions are to have a definite sense and not merely stand in internal logical relations to one another, is the cardinal axiom of Wittgenstein's philosophy. It may be seen as a highly generalized analogue of the traditional empiricist principle that if any concepts or propositions are to make sense some must be derived from experience of the world. What makes it possible for a sentence to express an elementary proposition is its being a picture of a possible state of affairs, a possible arrangement of objects which, if it obtains, constitutes a fact. The proposition, as an arrangement of names, pictures the state of affairs, as an arrangement of objects. If the objects it names are so arranged, then the proposition is true. . . . If we are to think or speak at all, then, there must be fundamental propositions owing their meaning and truth to their pictorial correspondence to states of affairs and facts respectively. From this first principle Wittgenstein derived both his ontology of facts and objects, in one direction, and his theory of the non-elementary parts of language in the other."
"Within the domain of compound propositions, there are two noteworthy limiting cases in which the truth-value of the compound remains the same whatever the truth-value of the elementary components. These are tautologies, such as 'p or not-p,' which are always true, and contradictions, such as 'p and not-p,' which are always false. The truth or falsity of these limiting cases is determined simply by their truth-functional structure; we do not need to know how things are in the world to tell whether they are true or false and, in consequence, they tell us nothing about the world. Their truth or falsity is thus of a degenerate kind which leads Wittgenstein to call them senseless, though this is not to say that they are nonsensical."
From Strawson:
"For sometimes a person applies a word or phrase not on the strength of shareable experiences but on the strength of non-shareable experiences, and is publicly reporting or describing those experiences; and this he is enabled to do either by the existence of shared experiences which count as signs (criteria in the weaker sense) of the occurrence of the unshared experiences (the case of 'I am in pain'), or by the adoption or invention of analogical modes of description, where the analogy is with shareable experiences (e.g. reporting the words that pass through my mind)."
From Norman Malcolm:
Wittgenstein meant by a "private language . . . one that not merely is not but cannot be understood by anyone other than the speaker." The words of the language "refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations" (243). What is supposed is that I "associate words with sensations and use these names in descriptions" (256). I fix my attention on a sensation and establish a connection between a word and the sensation (258).
"It is worth mentioning that the conception that it is possible and even necessary for one to have a private language is not eccentric. Rather it is the view that comes most naturally to anyone who philosophizes on the subject of the relation of words to experiences. The idea of a private language is presupposed by every program of inferring or constructing the 'external world' and 'other minds.' . . . At bottom it is the idea that there is only a contingent and not an essential connection between a sensation and its outward expression--an idea that appeals to us all."
"But now the notion of 'correct' use that will exist within the private language will be such that if I believe that my use is correct then it is correct; the rules will be only impressions of rules; my 'language' will not be a language, but merely the impression of a language. The most that can be said for it is that I think I understand it (cf. 269).
"Doubting has an end" (p. 180). Perhaps we can imagine a doubt; but we do not take it seriously (cf. 84).
Another major theme of Wittgenstein's thought--that "Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything" (126). "It leaves everything as it is" (124).
"Strawson appears to believe (I may misunderstand him) that each of us not only can have but does have a private language of sensations, that if we are to understand one another when we speak of our sensations there must be criteria for the use of our sensation-words, . . . "
From Stanley Cavell:
"David Pole has said, ' . . . Wittgenstein's central ideas . . . are essentially simple.' I was, although skeptical, impressed: that would be a large claim to enter and support in discussing any difficult thinker, but it could be very worth trying to do. About Wittgenstein the claim is doubled up."
"How can we come to such an acknowledgment of limitation? Wittgenstein's answer is: 'What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use' (116). I have, in effect, asked: why does that help? And my suggestion, essentially, was: it shows us that we did not know what we were saying, what we were doing to ourselves. But now I want to ask: how do we accomplish the task of bringing words back home? How do we know when we have done it?"
From Renford Bambrough:
"I believe Wittgenstein solved what is known as 'the problem of universals,' and I would say of his solution, as Hume said of Berkeley's treatment of the same topic, that it is 'one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters.'"
One of Wittgenstein's key points is the idea of a family of qualities that may fit under the word 'game' for example. In the Brown Book page 131, he asks, "Could you tell me what is in common between a light red and a dark red?" and in PI Section 73 he asks, "Which shade is the 'sample in my mind' of the colour green--the sample of what is common to all shades of green?" What do all chairs have in common? All books? All games?
Bambrough asks, If I choose to give the name Alpha to all sorts of random objects, have I prevented them from having anything in common? What comes into my head then when I give the name Chair to all sorts of different chairs?
Could Islanders classify trees according to boat-building trees, house-building trees?
Both the realist and the nominalist are right because resemblances and properties are both significant.
From Haig Khatchadourin:
He discusses common names and "family resemblances." Try it yourself. What does a word like "chair" or "table" or "knife" or "game" have in common with others of that class. A lot of Wittgenstein focused on just that question.
A. J. Ayer and R. Rhees discuss private language:
Both mentioned the inability of animals other than humans to speak. I have watched a video of monkeys in a large tree using the word for snake. There were several species of monkeys in the tree. Each monkey had to know the word for his own species and that of all the others, about a dozen total words for snake. Pretty cool: animals can speak to each other.
From John W. Cook:
Can we feel, experience, be acquainted with another person's sensations? The question of pain is in Wittgenstein. For me, the answer is in science. We can understand and explain how pain works. We can even cut it off.
Wittgenstein in PI 116 expressed an intention to "bring words back from their metaphysical to their every-day use."
From Alan Donagan:
The question about "pain" is can you feeling pain and me feeling pain be asserting the same sensation. The "Cartesian" position is that each man has, in the Rylean phrase, "privileged access" to his own sensations. Not only does he have them; but he, and only he, directly knows that he has them. Others may infer that he has a given sensation; but he, and only he, knows whether he has it or not. The behaviourist position is the opposite: we do know about sensations from experience and observation.
Wittgenstein said in PI 246: "I cannot be said to learn of [my sensations]. I have them." But he also claims that these sensations often cannot be independently verified.
Are there ways to show pain behavior without having the behavior? Acting, for example?
From Charles S. Chihara:
The last essays deal with Wittgenstein's thoughts on the fundamentals of mathematics. I thought this idea from Chihara was the most interesting:
What if I write down the sequence 3, 6, 9, and say to a person: 'Now continue the sequence doing the same thing as I did in obtaining each term from its preceding term.' Imagine however that the person puts down 13, 17, 21, 25. You say: 'That's not right--you are not doing the same thing as I did.' But the person now says: 'But what is doing the same thing?' It is possible that the person interpreted doing the same thing in this way: He could say: 'I added the number 3 three times, then I added the number 4 four times. Is not that the same way?'
From A. M. Quinton:
"Objects are incomplete in the sense that they only exist in the relation to other objects that constitutes facts."
"Elementary propositions . . . owe their meaning and truth not to their relation to other propositions but to their relation to the world. That there must be such simple, unanalyzable propositions if any propositions are to have a definite sense and not merely stand in internal logical relations to one another, is the cardinal axiom of Wittgenstein's philosophy. It may be seen as a highly generalized analogue of the traditional empiricist principle that if any concepts or propositions are to make sense some must be derived from experience of the world. What makes it possible for a sentence to express an elementary proposition is its being a picture of a possible state of affairs, a possible arrangement of objects which, if it obtains, constitutes a fact. The proposition, as an arrangement of names, pictures the state of affairs, as an arrangement of objects. If the objects it names are so arranged, then the proposition is true. . . . If we are to think or speak at all, then, there must be fundamental propositions owing their meaning and truth to their pictorial correspondence to states of affairs and facts respectively. From this first principle Wittgenstein derived both his ontology of facts and objects, in one direction, and his theory of the non-elementary parts of language in the other."
"Within the domain of compound propositions, there are two noteworthy limiting cases in which the truth-value of the compound remains the same whatever the truth-value of the elementary components. These are tautologies, such as 'p or not-p,' which are always true, and contradictions, such as 'p and not-p,' which are always false. The truth or falsity of these limiting cases is determined simply by their truth-functional structure; we do not need to know how things are in the world to tell whether they are true or false and, in consequence, they tell us nothing about the world. Their truth or falsity is thus of a degenerate kind which leads Wittgenstein to call them senseless, though this is not to say that they are nonsensical."
From Strawson:
"For sometimes a person applies a word or phrase not on the strength of shareable experiences but on the strength of non-shareable experiences, and is publicly reporting or describing those experiences; and this he is enabled to do either by the existence of shared experiences which count as signs (criteria in the weaker sense) of the occurrence of the unshared experiences (the case of 'I am in pain'), or by the adoption or invention of analogical modes of description, where the analogy is with shareable experiences (e.g. reporting the words that pass through my mind)."
From Norman Malcolm:
Wittgenstein meant by a "private language . . . one that not merely is not but cannot be understood by anyone other than the speaker." The words of the language "refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations" (243). What is supposed is that I "associate words with sensations and use these names in descriptions" (256). I fix my attention on a sensation and establish a connection between a word and the sensation (258).
"It is worth mentioning that the conception that it is possible and even necessary for one to have a private language is not eccentric. Rather it is the view that comes most naturally to anyone who philosophizes on the subject of the relation of words to experiences. The idea of a private language is presupposed by every program of inferring or constructing the 'external world' and 'other minds.' . . . At bottom it is the idea that there is only a contingent and not an essential connection between a sensation and its outward expression--an idea that appeals to us all."
"But now the notion of 'correct' use that will exist within the private language will be such that if I believe that my use is correct then it is correct; the rules will be only impressions of rules; my 'language' will not be a language, but merely the impression of a language. The most that can be said for it is that I think I understand it (cf. 269).
"Doubting has an end" (p. 180). Perhaps we can imagine a doubt; but we do not take it seriously (cf. 84).
Another major theme of Wittgenstein's thought--that "Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything" (126). "It leaves everything as it is" (124).
"Strawson appears to believe (I may misunderstand him) that each of us not only can have but does have a private language of sensations, that if we are to understand one another when we speak of our sensations there must be criteria for the use of our sensation-words, . . . "
From Stanley Cavell:
"David Pole has said, ' . . . Wittgenstein's central ideas . . . are essentially simple.' I was, although skeptical, impressed: that would be a large claim to enter and support in discussing any difficult thinker, but it could be very worth trying to do. About Wittgenstein the claim is doubled up."
"How can we come to such an acknowledgment of limitation? Wittgenstein's answer is: 'What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use' (116). I have, in effect, asked: why does that help? And my suggestion, essentially, was: it shows us that we did not know what we were saying, what we were doing to ourselves. But now I want to ask: how do we accomplish the task of bringing words back home? How do we know when we have done it?"
From Renford Bambrough:
"I believe Wittgenstein solved what is known as 'the problem of universals,' and I would say of his solution, as Hume said of Berkeley's treatment of the same topic, that it is 'one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters.'"
One of Wittgenstein's key points is the idea of a family of qualities that may fit under the word 'game' for example. In the Brown Book page 131, he asks, "Could you tell me what is in common between a light red and a dark red?" and in PI Section 73 he asks, "Which shade is the 'sample in my mind' of the colour green--the sample of what is common to all shades of green?" What do all chairs have in common? All books? All games?
Bambrough asks, If I choose to give the name Alpha to all sorts of random objects, have I prevented them from having anything in common? What comes into my head then when I give the name Chair to all sorts of different chairs?
Could Islanders classify trees according to boat-building trees, house-building trees?
Both the realist and the nominalist are right because resemblances and properties are both significant.
From Haig Khatchadourin:
He discusses common names and "family resemblances." Try it yourself. What does a word like "chair" or "table" or "knife" or "game" have in common with others of that class. A lot of Wittgenstein focused on just that question.
A. J. Ayer and R. Rhees discuss private language:
Both mentioned the inability of animals other than humans to speak. I have watched a video of monkeys in a large tree using the word for snake. There were several species of monkeys in the tree. Each monkey had to know the word for his own species and that of all the others, about a dozen total words for snake. Pretty cool: animals can speak to each other.
From John W. Cook:
Can we feel, experience, be acquainted with another person's sensations? The question of pain is in Wittgenstein. For me, the answer is in science. We can understand and explain how pain works. We can even cut it off.
Wittgenstein in PI 116 expressed an intention to "bring words back from their metaphysical to their every-day use."
From Alan Donagan:
The question about "pain" is can you feeling pain and me feeling pain be asserting the same sensation. The "Cartesian" position is that each man has, in the Rylean phrase, "privileged access" to his own sensations. Not only does he have them; but he, and only he, directly knows that he has them. Others may infer that he has a given sensation; but he, and only he, knows whether he has it or not. The behaviourist position is the opposite: we do know about sensations from experience and observation.
Wittgenstein said in PI 246: "I cannot be said to learn of [my sensations]. I have them." But he also claims that these sensations often cannot be independently verified.
Are there ways to show pain behavior without having the behavior? Acting, for example?
From Charles S. Chihara:
The last essays deal with Wittgenstein's thoughts on the fundamentals of mathematics. I thought this idea from Chihara was the most interesting:
What if I write down the sequence 3, 6, 9, and say to a person: 'Now continue the sequence doing the same thing as I did in obtaining each term from its preceding term.' Imagine however that the person puts down 13, 17, 21, 25. You say: 'That's not right--you are not doing the same thing as I did.' But the person now says: 'But what is doing the same thing?' It is possible that the person interpreted doing the same thing in this way: He could say: 'I added the number 3 three times, then I added the number 4 four times. Is not that the same way?'
January 26, 2017
One of the many benefits of carousing annual booksales in small towns is that in arriving threw hours after mob opening the gems are left and tumbleweed is blowing by the towering walls of ROMANCE!! I'd never heard of Pitcher nor several names in this anthology, but an indispensable book of essays on desert island book(s) for .50 is good news.
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March 31, 2018good
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