Quote of the Week
Dialogs July 31st, 2007“My German engineer, I think is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable – I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn’t.”
Bertrand Russell, on Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a letter, 1911
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:49 pm
This reminds me of Moore’s argument “here is a hand” (as I mentioned in a recent email). If Wittgenstein says:
1) Russell does not know if there is not an objective reality.
2) If follows the Russell does not know there is an rhinoceros in the room.
Moore would turn this around and said:
1) We know there is not a rhinoceros in the room.
2) Therefore we know objective reality exists.
I would perhaps qualify this argument by saying:
1) We provisionally know that there is not a rhinoceros in the room.
2) Therefore (provisionally) objective reality exists.
Of course, in science, there is no way to “prove” any hypothesis.
This has reminded me of a thought I had a few days ago… Wittgenstein’s thoughts on language are valuable – especially in terms of avoiding confusion and analyzing seemingly unanswerable questions (which turn out to be something else). But-
Wittgenstein based his (early and possibly later?) writing on observations on how language actually works.
(You can probably now guess where I am going with this)
For example, he notes from observation there are multiple “forms of life” (or “language games”) not a singular “form of life”.
But this is an empirical observation.
Therefore his theory on language is only provisionally true, as much as any empirical hypothesis.
In fact, I think he is aware of this but chooses to leap over this obstacle (or obfuscate it entirely) with the metaphor of his “ladder”. He said after understanding his theory, it must be discarded like a ladder, because it is nonsensical (Tractatus 6.54). I don’t buy this. (This point smacks of a self refutation – saying his argument is “nonsensical”!) But I do agree with it as an observation of real language (without throwing the ladder away essentially).
Not sure if that makes sense. Ask me for clarification if its a bit patchy
AC1
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Oh yeah I nearly forgot:
“Researchers from St Andrews University have shown that the animals intentionally modify or repeat their signals to get their messages across.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6926703.stm
(language related?)
AC1
August 3rd, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Nice comment, it ties in well with a lot of philosophy I have been doing recently, and covers Wittgenstein, Feyerabend and the Cartesian dilemma that philosophy has never resolved.
You really bring up two issues (though they are related) and I shall try to deal with them seperately and succinctly.
I think you’re qualified argument:
1) We provisionally know that there is not a rhinoceros in the room.
2) Therefore (provisionally) objective reality exists.
Gets to the crux of the matter. Wittgenstein, Feyerabend and for that matter me, refuse to deny the possibility of there not being a rhinoceros in the room. But equally when presented with the ‘provisional’ sense-datum, not to mention common-sense, we are unwilling to categorically state that there is a rhinoceros in the room.
This is the classic anti-realist, anti-rationalist, irrealist position, but contrary to accusation it is not necessarily anti-science (although at times it may appear to be).
This is a philosophical position that concerns Descartes. Those who follow the above irrealist position look upon Descartes with two views.
a) In meditation 1 He presents us with the ultimate philosophical challenge… how can we be sure we are not being decieved?
but then
b) in meditations 2-6 In order to solve his challenge descends into a variety of metaphysical propositions. i.e. God wouldnt decieve us, or we must trust that we are not being deceieved all the time… The idea that God could decieve us repulses him so much that he begins to talk about a deceptive demon instead.
The problem for the irrealists is that his attempts to resolve the challenge are either inadequate or desperate. It seems as though Descartes having made one of the most radical philosophical pronouncements ever (in meditation 1) then chose the easy way out, perhaps because he couldnt handle the anti-realist position he posited. One extreme of the anti-realist position and one that Descartes could never accept is solipsism, that there is no reality outside of our mind.
Lets briefly look at meditation 1.
Descartes says that in order to achieve “certain knowledge” he had to destroy all that stood before and rebuild his philosophy from the foundations upwards.
He concludes the best method is doubt. Scepticism thus becomes the method through which “certain knowledge” can be reached.
BUT, scepticism is a means to an end, not the end in itself. Descartes does not want us to become more doubtful, but through doubt find more certainty.
Descartes chooses to consider his senses, as he thought that at the root of his beliefs were sensate experiences. Sight, sound, taste, smell and touch were the origins of ideas that eventually become beliefs or “views” about the world around us.
But his senses, he tells us sometimes decieve, whether we are dreaming or hallucinating, or are blind, partially deaf and so on.
In summary he reaches the following conclusion:
1- “From time to time I have found that the senses decieve.”
2- “It is prudent never to trust completely those who have decieved us even once.”
3- “Therefore, it is prudent not to trust our senses completely.”
He says of course only a madman would completely distrust his senses, but even if we are not mad alas we should not completely trust them either.
Therefore Descartes dilemma is: once the seed of doubt is sewn, all beliefs become uncertain.
He goes on to argue for certainty in things like maths, geometry, logic, and even God’s non-deceptive nature.
He also proposes that there is one thing that absolutely cannot be doubted, I am, I exist. Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am.
So what is the problem with Descartes.
Well the irrationalists argue that Descartes ends his first meditation without any firm knowledge at all. Once he allows that anything he can doubt must be rejected as uncertain and therefore not known, it seems nothing can be known at all. Other than I am.
So the moral of the story is if we are saying that immunity from doubt is required for something to be true or to be known, then nothing can be true or known.
So as the irrationalists like Wittgenstein and Feyerabend and me would argue maybe we simply have the wrong idea about what it means to “know” something.
Immunity from doubt is too strict a requirement for knowledge.
So why stop at irrationalism and anti-realist scepticism? Why not try and rebuild from the mistakes Descartes makes over meditations 2-6?
The answer is because irrationalists are not sure they would not make the same mistakes again and again.
Descartes hopes to build foundations which are true, uopn which he can build up truth to an all-encompassing system. But how will he know when he had discovered foundations which are true? He will know (he says) because these foundatoins will be indubitable – above all doubt.
Descartes seems to believe that if something is beyond doubt, it must be true!! And similarly that if there is doubt then it must be false.
But can we accept this? Has Descartes made a mistake. It would (for many philosophers and not just the irrationalists) appear so.
To say that “X” is beyond doubt is to state a psychological fact. Because certainty and doubt are states of mind in the person who is certain or doubting. To paraphrase the philosopher Henri Bergson, reality is what the mind is telling the eyes it is seeing.
On the contrary to say “X” is true, or that one knows “X” is to state an epistemological truth, something about what is actually known or is true.
Descartes commits his fundamental error then in believing that one can jump from psychological facts (states of mind) to epistemological facts (states of actual knowledge).
It seems then that nothing is so absurd or irrational that someone either asleep or mad could not believe it to be certain and indubitable.
Thus Wittgenstein, and me, can happily (and tongue in cheek) proclaim that there may or may not be a rhinoceros in the room, irrespective of what our senses tell us, or what other people say to be the case.
Now then to your second part the language games.
In order to avoid the extreme of solipsism Wittgenstein wanted to look at language and logic, and see if there were truths within it, about which we could have no doubt.
The early Wittgenstein (of the Tractatus) studied language using his picture theory. He thought all language was propositional statement. All words were names that correlated to picture ideas that when structured in a particular way we could understand.
Thus from an assertoric proposition “the door is shut” one can derive “is the door shut?” and “Shut the door!”
But the later Wittgenstein rejected his picture theory for falling into the same sort of traps Descartes did. In particular Wittgenstein criticised our craving for generality.
There were four cravings to generality.
1) The tendency to look for something common under which we can ascribe a general or generic term. (Take as an example the taxanomic categorisation and division of the species, creating boundaries where perhaps there are instead overlapping resemblances).
2) There is a tendency to understand a general term, as though it were a general idea. For example this includes the mistake of looking at words as though they were all proper names, and then confusing the bearer of the name with the meaning of the name. Two further examples:
a) When Bertrand Russell died, the meaning of the name Bertrand Russell did not die with it. The two are distinct.
b) the tendency to generalisation would lead us to picture a ‘leaf’ when using the term leaf, so the term has come to possess a general picture of a leaf as opposed to pictures of particular leaves. We are inclined to think that the general idea of a leaf is something like a visual image, but one which contains what is common to all leaves.
3) We have a tendency to mistake hypothetical mental mechanisms (i.e. the general idea of a leaf) with a state of consciousness (i.e. toothache).
4) This tendency to generalisation occurs in the philosopher because of the method of science. Where science is about reducing natural phenomena to smaller constituent explanatory laws and observations, when a philosopher attempts to do the same (as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus) he is prone to fall into metaphysics.
So Wittgenstein rejects the picture theory of language for language games.
Now firstly a clarification, a common misunderstanding of Wittgenstein, that even his ardent supporters do little to clearly correct, is that the idea of language games is about different or seperate ‘islands of discourse’ leading us to talk of the language game of science, or the language game of religion.
He did not view language games in this way. The idea of the language games is to analyse the way we use language and to see and understand the connections between them.
It is a model by which it is easier to understand how science and religion get all confrontational when talking about concepts that are overlapping, i.e. creation and the natural world. Both attempting to explain the same phenomena but in different ways.
For this we need to re-evaluate the concept that all words are names. Or rather, that when used as names, all names operate in the same way.
This is the breakthrough in language games, its how we use language that is of the utmost importance in understanding it. Not which words are used.
Thus “Five Red Apples” is a statement that uses three different names, yet all three names are being used in different ways. The name of a number, the name of a colour, the name of an object.
You can keep an apple in a drawer, but you cannot keep a five in a drawer. You can count to five but you cannot count to red.
The number five is important only in relation to an understanding of the full set of cardinal numbers. An innumerate community can have no meaning for the word or number five.
This I think is what he is getting at by the ladder. Something of meaning can be nonsensical, which returns us to Descartes something which is beyond doubt is not necessarily something which is true.
Thus the rationalist language game of science may fulfill all its own criteria and validate itself as a rational pursuit. But exactly the same self-validation can occur in other language games which have less emphasis on rational laws.
He wants us to discard the ladder, and to refute our own empirical observations, even where the observations are true, in order to avoid being held captive by the picture (and the picture idea). As he once said, to let the fly out of the fly bottle.
The term language game means to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life…
“But how many kinds of sentence are there? Sat assertion, question, and command? -There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’, ‘sentences’. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once and for all; but new types of language, new language games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.)”
I fear I may have confused the matter greatly, for there is more to language games than the little (?!) that I have posted here. I think my conclusion has to come from your comment that his theory of language is provisionally true.
He wants us to throw away the ladder, because the theory is just a language game in itself, albeit one that seems to work. So it is both self-refuting and self-proving (hopefully). But he also wants us to reject the picture idea, reject the idea that this is a theory. The more we get stuck with theories the more obsessed we become with generalisations. And when this occurs in philosophy, the more likely it is you will descend into nonsense and metaphysics. Note he is not concerning himself too much with science here, as he is content that it validates itself. Feyerabend takes it the next step by suggesting that a self-validating method is a doubtful one. (but thats for a different topic).
Wittgenstein best sums up his irrationalist philosophy and the ‘essence’ of ideal of language games with this comment.
“People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them;… peots, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them – that does not occur to them.”
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:15 pm
I don’t want to overcook the above. So this really will be brief.
Paul Feyerabend says this in his intro to Against Method, and it perhaps neatly surmises the implications found in Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations, and particularly in his concept of Language Games.
“My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits. The best way to show this is to demonstrate the limits and even the irrationality of some rules which she, or he, is likely to regard as basic. (1975, 32)”
August 4th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Yes I read the Orangutans playing Charades in the New Scientist. Interesting research. What wasn’t clear from the BBC article is whether this behaviour is exhibited in the wild, or has it only been observed in a captive situation?
August 5th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Another nice quote from Wittgenstein, from the Tractatus on solipsism and the limitations of language.
5.6
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
——————————————————————————–
5.61
Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.
We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, that there is not.
For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also.
What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.
5.62
This remark provides a key to the question, to what extent solipsism is a truth.
In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself.
That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.
5.63
I am the world. (The microcosm.)
5.64
Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
August 6th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
This quote is very appropriate to your comment #3 and our private email discussion of “On Certainty”:
(As I said in an email,) if we reject “here is a hand” (the “seeming world”), how can we say “I am the world”? Surely “I” and “am” could be imaginary too?
AC1
August 6th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
The seeming world can be rejected on the grounds of doubt or uncertainty with regards the trustworthiness of the senses.
To doubt that you ‘are’ is contradictory. For if you are engaging in doubt then you must have grounds to believe that you do not exist, how do you know you that you do not exist? Wittgenstein deals with this matter on death. Death is not existential, we do not live it.
Even the brain in the vat that is being fed illusions about external reality is aware of its own mental independence. That is the only certainty of which we can know.