This is a short preview of the full episode.
Transcript
0:00 Mark: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You can purchase the full episode individually or support the podcast. To get all of our episodes, review your options@partiallyexaminedlife.com support. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 55 is something like what is linguistic meaning? And we read Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Part 1, Sections 1 through 133, and 192 through 360. These were completed around 1946. Published in 1953. For more information on this episode and discussion that you can participate in, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer speaking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.
0:58 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.
1:00 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.
1:02 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.
1:05 Unknown speaker: This is philosophybro.com from an undisclosed location.
1:09 Mark: You're not even saying your name is Philosophy Bro. You're introducing yourself as a URL.
1:14 Dylan: You are a location in the intranets.
1:17 Unknown speaker: Can I not plug the site on the podcast? Is that.
1:20 Wes: No, you can plug all you want.
1:21 Mark: In fact, I think every time before you speak, you should say, Hi, this is philosophybro.com and then talk.
1:28 Unknown speaker: My uncle kim.com ran into a bit of legal trouble, so we're trying to not advertise being the dot coms.
1:36 Mark: So yes, Mr. Bro, Mr. Bro is fine. We had run over across your website at some point you write hilarious descriptions of philosophers, summaries of books, things like that.
1:48 Unknown speaker: Their summaries is probably the best way to put it. They're summaries, slash translations, I guess, since I to used usually write them in the voice of whomever the author is. Or from his perspective, they're probably best characterized as translations.
2:01 Seth: But yeah, all right.
2:03 Mark: And you're actually some kind of academic professional and you do not want to reveal your secret Internet identity, right? Or rather, the Internet identity is the real identity and the real one is the secret one. Which is it?
2:16 Unknown speaker: You know, it depends on the day, I guess. Some days I wake up and I'm like, today is a philosophy bro kind of day. And then other days I wake up and I'm like, no, it's the other one, whoever he is.
2:26 Dylan: So this activity isn't part of your tenure packet?
2:28 Unknown speaker: I can't say that it is, no. Could you imagine if it came down to that? Like, well, it's close, but if only he'd Written more summaries online. Little known fact, that's what pushed Edmund Gettier right over the edge.
2:43 Mark: So having Internet anonymity means you can swear a lot. And is that the chief. What is the chief benefit of this as opposed to just coming clean?
2:52 Unknown speaker: Yeah, I think that's it. But I think the real benefit is that it sort of preserves my. It doesn't let my worldview cloud the summaries. Right. Like, I've got some very strong opinions about controversial questions and I don't care at all about other questions. But I want this science material to stand on its own. I've written about Nietzsche and Thomas Aquinas and David Hume on miracles. And with respect to religion in particular, I'm worried that if my particular views on religion were well known, it would cloud those summaries, all of which have been really well received. So this allows me to, like, let my work stand on its own without having to defend my background floating in there.
3:32 Dylan: So in the future, when your works are collected in a large volume, we can look forward to you being deconstructed based upon your found biography.
3:42 Unknown speaker: Yeah, I would be thrilled to see a deconstruction that takes into account my normal writing and this writing. That would be fascinating. And I think, I hope that, like the Irish, I can't be psychoanalyzed, but that's probably not true.
3:55 Mark: Well, you had harassed us a bit about not having enough analytic philosophy on the podcast. And though we get more requests for Continental folks and the line is ever lengthening, what are you doing to lose?
4:05 Dylan: What are you doing?
4:06 Mark: You know, more literary theory and things like that. But there is a vocal minority that thinks we should do more analytic stuff. So we about a year ago decided to do pretty much our next analytic one with you, as that is your area of specialty, correct?
4:19 Unknown speaker: Yeah, I was taught in the Anglo analytic tradition, and that's where I'm much more comfortable. One of the best things it turns out about doing this philosophy bro project is it's really widened my exposure and given me an excuse to get involved with some really cool stuff. I'm really happy with my Hegel. I did a thing on lordship and bondage and to sort of cast aside the assumption that I think a lot of analytic departments have that Continental is like wordy bullshit and really, like wrestle with that and see something coming out of it has been really cool and it's really opened up my range, I think.
4:51 Mark: Excellent.
4:51 Wes: Yeah.
4:52 Mark: Actually, that's one of the reasons I think that we do so many Continental things ourselves is Because I don't know about the rest of you guys, but that's. Even though I did stuff in that area. Certainly a lot of the contemporary folks are new and adventurous to me as well.
5:04 Unknown speaker: Yeah, it's unfamiliar to a lot of people. And I think there's an argument to be made that critical theory in particular, but a lot of more recent continentalists sort of abandoned the ordinary reader. And. And you need a much deeper background in the literature than you need in analytic. With analytic, you need to be able to think in particular ways, and you need to really be ready to spend a lot of time with the text. But in Continental, there's much more background I think you need to be able to have. You can't just jump into Zizek and expect to pick up Hegel through that text.
5:32 Seth: That's a true statement.
5:34 Mark: Just for the newbie listener who is confused at this point. So there's been a division, at least in the 20th century, between pretty much English and American, which is the analytic tradition, which is all we're going to write very clearly and maybe include logical symbols and sound like we're doing math, as opposed to the continental tradition, which is the continent, because of course, Europe is the only continent that there is. So mostly French and German guys who like to write in one sentence that takes up an entire page. These guys have their roots in. It's really Kant kind of could be considered either one, but definitely set the stylistic precedent for the continental school. Whereas analytic is more like Bertrand Russell and following more closely in the steps of Locke and Hume and folks like that.
6:19 Unknown speaker: Derek Parfit actually has a hilarious thing, hilarious to philosophers, in the introduction of his most recent on what Matters, where he says something like, Kant is the reason it's okay to be a bad writer as a philosopher. Because now you can't say, you have to write clearly if you're going to be a great philosopher, you can point to Kant because he was a bad writer.
6:37 Mark: What you're going to forgive, historically, you know, the fact that Nietzsche is fun to read, even though he was sort of very sloppy scribbling on notebooks. And the one philosophical investigations like it can still be a brilliant book, but it's still not a model for what you in the present day should do.
6:52 Unknown speaker: Yeah, no, I think that's right.
6:54 Mark: Do not try to write like this.
6:56 Dylan: When I was a undergrad, in my class on Nietzsche, I wrote my last paper aphoristically. The first thing that my professor commented on was that Nietzsche gets to write aphoristically.
7:13 Unknown speaker: I remember Being told something similar about starting sentences with conjunctions. Like Emily Dickinson, she gets to start sentence with conjunctions. And Bertrand Russell can have silly footnotes. But for now, focus up.
7:26 Mark: Right. And it's not about having low self esteem. As a modern person, you would like even your geniuses of today to write an accessible way to maximize the utility of what they have to say and avoid a lot of needless squabbling. But at the same time, you could imagine that for every Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or whoever, sloppy or quick or poor writers of the past, there, there are many, many, many other less talented people who wrote in the same way that you will never hear about now.
7:55 Dylan: Well, but there's also a kind of cultishness that arises around people who write very idiosyncratically. And even if, as you pointed out, some of them might be fun to read, there are plenty of cases where people kind of wallow in the difficulty of this other person's writing as a kind of virtue, that it's a sign of their brilliance that they write this terribly. And that's something I find extremely irritating.
8:23 Seth: Well, you know what else people do is that they trumpet their own ignorance and unwillingness to try to interpret something as indicative of the opacity of the writing of the other person. So just where claiming that a lack of clarity is a virtue is bad, so is proudly proclaiming that you're too stupid or lazy to understand something, which is the opposite side of that coin, which is what I see a lot.
8:51 Unknown speaker: Well, you guys really have been doing a lot of continental, huh?
8:54 Seth: No, I just say this because I find it's a rhetorical device that there's a kind of a smug academic attitude where they'll say like, I couldn't understand it. It's just. It's meaningless. Okay, well, how much of an effort did you make? How charitable is that? Because I would certainly take the same effort to try to understand what somebody's saying regardless of what style they were writing in. And by the same token, I could say pull any article on the philosophy of Mind out of the journal of the APA for the last 10 years that was so painstakingly clear that it had nothing to say. And make an opposite claim that clarity is no virtue if you say nothing of meaning. Better a big failure in my book than a small success, I guess.
9:35 Unknown speaker: Certainly Wittgenstein went for the former and not the latter.
9:38 Seth: That is true.
9:39 Mark: Well, let's get going on. Who wants to give the one minute summary of the book? What the hell is going on here?
9:46 Unknown speaker: Yeah, I can try. I guess this is my specialty, probably. So this text has, like, rebuffed me like a dozen times trying to summarize it. But I think, in short, what Wittgenstein is doing in the first part that we read is he's building ever more complex pictures of language and dismissing them. He starts with, like, oh, words attached to things, but that, like, think of all the kinds of things there are. Okay, so words attach to things in different ways, but think of all the different ways that they could attach. So that's not clear enough. And he just dismisses bigger and bigger pictures of language until he gets to the point where he says, and so there is no, like, single essence of language, single view that encompasses all of language.
It's not that simple. And then in the second section, so the private language argument. It's weird because I don't think private language was a big topic until he brought it up. I don't think it was a thing. But he's saying something like, language is a public cultural thing that develops among people who agree to play a game a particular way, and you can't make up your own language. That's not how it works. Words get meaning among cultures of speakers, and not because some individual decides this word is going to mean this thing.
10:52 Mark: And that's it for me, the concern with private language. It's not like people were arguing for there being private languages. It seems like a pretty silly thing to even think about. But he thought that it follows from this traditional account of meaning, which is something that he himself had ascribed to in his earlier book, the Tractatus, or at least something like that which founds meaning on ostension. Right. Which is pointing out something and saying a word. That's that thing. Oh, okay. Well, once you point to enough things, then you've got a language.
And so it would seem then that there are personal experiences that we have that. Can't you then point to that? So if you get hurt and you feel a pain, can't you kind of to yourself point to that pain and say, pain? And in fact, what you mean by pain, since it refers to that private thing of yours, maybe that's different than what I mean by pain and what somebody else means by pain? Because if language is built on ostension, ultimately then you run into these problems about knowing what other people are talking about, at least in outline. I don't know that I have a problem with there being that problem.
That. That's part of the despair of art.
12:02 Unknown speaker: Yeah.
12:02 Mark: Is that we can never. We're all Separated. We're all cold and alone and separated from each other by this existential void. Why wouldn't we think that some of our experience and the things that we talk about should reflect that?
12:16 Dylan: Well, but is that what Wittgenstein is? He's not claiming that there aren't subjective experience. He's claiming there's no such thing as subjective language.
12:26 Mark: Correct.
12:27 Dylan: I think that's an important distinction, that you can have your own pain. But articulating it in terms of language.
12:33 Wes: He seems to talk at some points as if the idea of having one's own pain is nonsensical.
12:39 Dylan: He doesn't seem to go as far as saying that there's no such thing as private sensation. He'd make the distinction between private language as a game that has rules. And all he means by game is that there are rules that are being followed. So there are expectations involved.
12:54 Unknown speaker: Is unique a better word than private with respect to sensation? So he's not saying like, your pain has to be public, but he's saying something?
13:01 Wes: Yeah, I think unique helps.
13:03 Unknown speaker: Your pain isn't special. There's nothing about your pain that only you can access or that sets it apart from all other pain. Pain is pain. And even though you're the only one who feels pain at this moment, like, you're not the only one who feels pain or feels it in the way you feel it.
13:18 Dylan: Would he really deny that the sensation itself is unique and that there's a distinction between communicating what that sensation is to others as opposed to, let's just say something like seeing it? Seems like he wouldn't deny that the photons that reflect off the wall and enter my eye are somehow unique to me in the sense of being a particular event.
13:45 Mark: Right.
13:46 Dylan: What makes them articulable in language is the way that that then gets extrapolated. And he would deny that I would have a unique private language to describe those sensations.
13:58 Wes: But he seems also to be saying that sensations can't be thought of as unique individuals that can be named. Have we explained really what his argument against private language is?
14:09 Mark: No. And it would be good to maybe present it in the context of. Unless you just think it is isolatable. I saw a progression.
14:15 Wes: Should we start from the beginning?
14:17 Unknown speaker: Yeah.
14:17 Dylan: Because we'll get to language games. Then.
14:18 Wes: Should we back up and then come back to private language?
14:21 Mark: I don't think we can do that without Seth telling us to.
14:24 Seth: Can we please get back to the text? I think we should slow down. Back to the beginning. There's a few basic ideas. We need to get on the table before we can jump to that as an account.
14:37 Wes: Thank you.
14:39 Unknown speaker: So when a mom and a dad love each other very much, how far back are we going?
14:46 Wes: Let's start there.
14:47 Mark: Okay, before we start, do you want me to preserve your anonymity, to take your entire vocal track and put it through one of those, like, witness protection adapter so you kind of sound like this?
15:00 Dylan: You have to make him sound like Daffy Duck.
15:02 Unknown speaker: That would be terrible. That would be hilarious. I mean, I. Probably not. I can't imagine the complaints you get as a result of that. I actually had the experience not long ago, maybe three months ago. Someone who doesn't know that I write Philosophy Bro recommended Philosophy Bro to me. And that was like a big moment.
15:23 Mark: Yes.
15:24 Unknown speaker: That felt great. I was like, oh, is he funny? I don't know.
15:27 Wes: Nice.
15:27 Dylan: It's like somebody telling Peter Parker how great Spider man is.
15:31 Unknown speaker: Right?
15:31 Seth: Exactly.
15:33 Mark: Well, I think you would have to then write your own blog, a counter to Philosophy Bro.
15:38 Unknown speaker: Right. Who is this asshole who thinks he knows about philosophy and just run up the drama between us?
15:46 Seth: No, I think what you should is you'd have to constantly be taking yourself to task for not being serious. How can you be so flippant and use such foul language about such important things? I'm sure you get plenty of comments like that.
15:58 Unknown speaker: You know, I get fewer than I thought I would get. Someone who does. Heidegger expressed that my Heidegger post was sort of nonsense and there's no real value in what I do. But that was, like, one negative opinion. And I've heard from a lot more people who really enjoy what I do, even at the, like, super tenure position, like, even though, like, endowed chairs. I've heard from a couple people who have those. They're like, this is super good. So that feels really good.
16:25 Mark: All right, so the beginning of the investigations we have referred to, you know, it's not just this basic meaning on ostension, but also the notion that goes back to Plato of what a definition is supposed to be. Of what? Right? If you understand a specific word, well, you understand the name, right? It's just the name for a thing. That's the ostension. But if you understand a concept, a concept is identifiable on this old Wittgenstein and Russell syntax as a set of objects, right? So if I understand what blue is, that means that I could. Not that I can name all the blue objects right now, but I could identify for any given thing whether it's going to fall into that category or not.
So the way that that was interpreted historically is that you need for any given concept a set of necessary and sufficient conditions to understand it. Right. All the things that meet these conditions will fall into the category. And if it doesn't have these other conditions, it definitely won't fall into the category. And if you've specified that, that's the definition. And so we have Plato having Socrates say, hey, stop just naming examples of justice or whatever, I want you to give me the meat of the matter, give me the actual definition. And this was made very explicit in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions in Aristotle.
Is that right that he actually used that terminology?
17:39 Wes: Or am I imposing that necessary and sufficient?
17:42 Unknown speaker: Yes, that sounds right, but I can't say for sure.
17:44 Mark: That is at least the made up thing that I will assume from my long ago memory.
17:49 Wes: This is an account of meaning though, Right. That's common to Plato and Russell and early Wittgenstein. Yes, although early Wittgenstein is a little more radical about it. And that's the idea that ultimately meaning comes from naming from reference. So to kind of summarize the early Wittgenstein, the Tractatus, you could take any proposition and ultimately decompose it into these ultimate atomic propositions where you have basically just proper names. So they're predicating something. So you will have a basic name standing for an individual, referring to an individual, and then a concept term or a general term which refers to a universal.
And that's the account of meaning which Wittgenstein is now going to reject here. And then ultimately with the Tractatus, with the picture theory, you get this sort of. It's not like a proposition as a whole refers to a fact or a state of affairs in the world, but it does have a reference like relationship. And that's this picturing relationship where it's this isomorphism or structural similarity between the proposition and the relations between its elements, the names. So that structure is similar to the relationship between what's named. And that's how you get a theory of meaning for propositions as a whole.
19:11 Mark: Yeah, folks who found that confusing should just go back and listen to our two Tractatus episodes that we did long ago. However, maybe there is something in our interpretation there or a relevant summarial fact that you want to throw in bro or Dylan, who is not with us.
19:26 Unknown speaker: It's really interesting that Wittgenstein is coming from as radical a reference view as you can get. And there are points in the text where he like. So sometimes he refers to it like, oh yeah, my earlier work The Tractatus. That was stupid. But other times he refers to himself in the third person, like that asshole who wrote the Tractatus. That guy had no idea what he was talking about.
19:46 Mark: Well, and usually when he's objecting of you, he just says something and he puts it in quotes. Right, but isn't language just a picture of the facts and then he goes out of quotes? No, you asshole.
19:58 Unknown speaker: What a ridiculous idea. Guy who is me. Yeah, that sounds right. Have you. I don't know where I read this. It might be an apocryphal story. It might be a super well known story. One of the earliest things that sort of shook Wittgenstein out of that positivist slumber was G.E. moore gave him a really, really obscene gesture. I was like, what's the logical form of this? And I gave him the finger or something equivalent. And Wittgenstein like stormed out of the room angry because he didn't know, and then realized like, oh, that still communicated meaning to me. Like he was clearly telling me to off. Even though that doesn't refer in the way you'd think. How strange. And then that set him on the path to. Since we all know what that gesture means. Had you heard that before?
20:42 Wes: I hadn't heard that. That's great.
20:45 Seth: No. Although I was terrified that you would bring up G.E. moore. I don't know what that would set Mark off.
20:51 Wes: Let's just make sure we don't discuss G.E. Moore in any detail ever, ever again.
20:56 Unknown speaker: Yeah, no, that's completely forgotten. Are we not G.E. Moore fans? My bad.
21:01 Mark: It's fine. Somebody recommended that we read one of his essays on common sense, which I opened before this, but did not look in any detail about. Maybe there's more specific things we can get into that he's reacting to besides his own picture theory.
21:16 Wes: One more thing to say is that the place of rules in the Tractatus, the only rules you're dealing with are the rules of the logical calculus, where you get the ways in which the truths of certain complex propositions are related to the truths of their parts. So of course that's where if someone gives you the finger, the rules at work there, which are semantically important, are not simply logic. And that's really the problem, as brilliant as it is.
21:48 Dylan: There's a way in which I feel like it's just sort of a dumbass idea in the first place. I don't really understand how the Tractatus and that idea of one to one correspondence, you know, atomistic language, survived at all. I don't even get It. This is after we already knew that there were multiple versions of geometry that didn't correspond to one another. This is right around the time of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, even with respect to arithmetic. And the notion that now all of a sudden, there's aspect in the world, even with the weaknesses in philosophical investigations, the notion that it's a reaction to the Tractatus feels like he wrote a straw man in the first place in order to react against it.
I know that's not what happened. Right. And maybe somebody can try to convince me how utterly brilliant it is, even if it's misguided. But it sounds. My reaction to it is this is immediately completely crazy. It misses absolutely prima facie notions about the world that are right in front of you, staring you in the face.
22:51 Mark: To be fair, it's not supposed to be an account of the way language actually is now, so you would not have to account for the obscene gesture, et cetera. It's supposed to that if you're actually trying to get at what the informational content of language is, and that's how really you figure out what is being said and what can legitimately be said. Right. So a lot of philosophy he's going to dismiss as nonsense because it really can't be put in this logically precise form.
23:14 Dylan: Yeah. So ethics means nothing and that kind of thing. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine.
23:18 Mark: Yeah. And it fueled the drive in Carnap and these other guys to try to create a logically correct symbolic language that would be superior to our ordinary, roughshod, silly way, which is exactly the thing that he's now in Investigations. Wittgenstein has completely turned around from. And if there's any sort of big influence from the investigation, it's to. I don't know if he started or maybe he just was concurrent with a trend toward ordinary language analysis.
23:47 Wes: Yeah. I don't think the Tractatus, though, is as weak as it looks on first blush, because it's dealing with some very specific problems, I think, in a way that is kind of genius. I mean, the whole picture theory, you know, some of the problems that we discussed with Frege, trying to figure out how to think about the relationship between these sentences, let's say, and the world. It's a very difficult problem to even begin thinking about. Right. It's sort of crazy in and of itself to try and think about the way language relates to the world. So the idea of that isomorphism, the idea of these internal relations that can be in both language and the World is kind of neat when you get down to it.
24:25 Dylan: I don't mean to indict it as being. I guess what I find surprising is the notion that you would be surprised that the Tractatus is a mere beginning. He surely was aware that Euclidean geometry had ceased to be the only possible geometry. And in fact there are a huge multitude of geometries.
24:46 Wes: How is geometry relevant?
24:47 Mark: You're going to have to sketch that out a little.
24:49 Unknown speaker: I think more than one geometry is fine.
24:51 Dylan: Yeah, I guess I'm maybe picking geometry as opposed to arithmetic or something.
24:55 Mark: In other words, that there's supposed to be a unique set of true propositions that basically describe the world. And that's what the picture theory should entail, that's what you're saying.
25:04 Dylan: I'm not an expert on the Tractatus or anything like that, and I haven't spent hours sweating over that book. My reaction is more to this presentation that Wittgenstein was utterly convinced of the Tractatus. And then he made a turn and has now the philosophical investigations in which it dawned on him that there was aspect in the world. And while granting the utility and the, in fact the difficulty of doing the exercise in the Tractatus, it seems to me that it would be a plain beginning. Now, this might be partly historical issue that, you know, we're in the grip of logical positivism and so forth and so on. And I find logical positivism on prima facie just crazy that you would say that that is the beginning and the end. I find nothing about it convincing and that might be part of my problem.
25:54 Unknown speaker: So I think that's probably the right way to look at it. I think that the Tractatus is like probably the best and a really remarkable expression of a view that we now know is so wrong. Ever since Quine turned the verifiability criterion back on itself. They're like, how do you know that only things you can verify are true? Can you verify that? And everyone's like, oh, right, okay, internally incoherent. Got it. But when logical positivism was big, Wittgenstein was the best at it. And that's probably why that work is so revered. I don't think anyone takes the track that as seriously now as like, probably true. It's more like, look at how well developed this view was before we realized it was wrong. This was really good. They worked really hard to make this work, but couldn't.
26:42 Seth: Dylan, I would say this too. I mean, my kind of aesthetic experience with Wittgenstein is love and hate. He's a tremendously frustrating person to read in both his early and his later forms. And one thing I can say is I do remember that I think all of us, when we did the discussion of the Tractatus, got quite a bit out of the text, even if ultimately it's not this, the answer to whatever question was being posed. It was tremendously thoughtful and sort of thought provoking. If it hadn't been, if we'd spent all that time on it and it just was nonsensical or whatever, then I would have been really frustrated.
And there are times with Wittgenstein that I feel that way. And just like either this guy's saying something immensely profound or he's the most naive idiot who ever got, you know, treated with such praise and honor, that's kind of the tension I feel in what he's saying. And I feel, partially because he's been canonized, that there must be something more. When I hit that point where I'm like, really? Is this like you're just stumbling upon what every child knows? There must be something more to it. And I have a tendency to give him more leeway than I think I would other people.
But there's always that tension present.
27:56 Unknown speaker: It's what Socrates took himself to be doing, too, sort of unlearning all of his mistakes.
28:00 Dylan: Well, one of the things that is refreshing about Wittgenstein is the way in which he's engaging in those childlike questions and trying to sort it out from the beginning. And I really do like that he very rarely refers to anybody else, which I like about it.
28:18 Seth: And yet the book starts off with a nice, juicy quote from Augustine. That's true, by the way. I was talking about this podcast, what we were going to do with my girlfriend, who has no formal philosophical training. And when I asked her to describe how she learned the like words for things and how she learned, she literally, almost like word for word, gave Augustine's account.
28:41 Mark: I'll read it since you're referring to it. Okay, I'm not going to read. I'll just read the.
28:45 Seth: Yeah, please read it just in that,
28:46 Mark: and the listeners will.
28:48 Unknown speaker: I assume that the listener can translate
28:50 Mark: for himself when they, my elders, name some object and accordingly move towards something. I saw this and I grasped the. That the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples. The expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learned to understand what objects they signified. And after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires. So what could be wrong with that?
29:30 Dylan: Maybe we could say, what is the revision of that that Wittgenstein gives?
29:34 Unknown speaker: I think what he says is something like. If we want to say that, like, names attach to things, the variety of things that there is means that attach means something completely different for, like verbs and numbers and apples. To say that the word red attaches itself to a color is something completely different from saying the word apple attaches itself to that thing. So we have to rethink what kinds of words there are and what those words do. We can't just say like, yep, they hook right in.
30:04 Dylan: Even if you kept all the words that Augustine says, it's not that, you know, a kind of Adam out in the world, naming the things of the world, and every child is a child of Adam. Rather, the thing that the child is learning are the rules for that correspondence and not the names.
30:24 Wes: Rules in the sense of the ways in which the words can be used. Right. So if I taught someone what a slab was, if I could do that in the ostensive way, or say, here it is. And the idea there is that the meaning of the word is just this, whether it's an image or something like an image of a slab that I bring up before my mind, that wouldn't really tell me everything I knew about how to use that word. So you can look at the first language game he creates, which is simple.
30:55 Mark: Shall I read it? This is from section 2. Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder, A and an assistant, B. A is building with building stones. There are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose, they use a language consisting of the words block, pillar, slab, beam. A calls them out. B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such and such a call. Conceive this as a complete primitive language.
31:26 Wes: This is a sneaky example that he gives because on the one hand he acts like the description given by Augustine is right. But the description given by Augustine won't be right for this, because what's going on is essentially commands. He calls him out and then someone brings him something. To set up an example where Augustine is right, the game would have to be I call out something and then you imagine that in your head. Or something like that. So it's interesting that he's setting this up as a game in which it's simple enough that Augustine might be right. But of course, Augustine isn't right.
31:58 Mark: Thanks for listening to this episode preview. You can purchase a full episode at our store page. Get it by supporting us through Patreon or become a Partially Examined Life Citizen. We provide supporters with ad free access to our full catalog, including new, exclusive content. Configure our Citizen feed to get it all beamed straight to your Apple or Android device. Learn more at partiallyexaminedlife.com support.
Fantastic, loving this.
The possibly-apocryphal story recounted by Philosophy Bro actually relates to Pierro Sraffa, not GE Moore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piero_Sraffa
Regarding a general understanding of “infidelidad”: Seth understands the concept this word describes and knows how to use this concept from his learning of concepts up to this point in his life. If he had not previously encountered this concept, he would not have been able to retrieve the meaning of the Spanish word.
Regarding meaning as use: The initial use of this concept shaped Seth’s understanding of it through provision of associations, outcomes, causes, etc. that relate to the concept.
Regarding the fuzzyness of foreign language implantation: Quite often, we will implant foreign words or untranslatable words into our native languages and use them in correct and grammatical ways. This is still correct use, even though it abandons all other parts of the foreign language. For example, use the German words zeitgeist or schadenfreude in an English language sentence. As I just have, for another example. Use!
Language is as phenomenologicallly dependant as this implies, in my opinion. Comparing Genghis Khan’s knowledge of concepts used when talking about war to Margaret Thatcher’s knowledge of concepts used when talking about war can prove this theory quite easily. Perhaps two others would provide better examples, but the same proof structure works.
The only question this raises for me is: what is the base concept, or what are the binary base-concepts we learn as infants, upon which we build or grasp of humanity’s known concepts??? My guess is that it’s something to do with the bonding process with the infant’s mother, even if it’s at a prenatal stage of development.
PS: I loved the bit about the slap around the head! Both vital and funny. Mistakes shape our learning by testing parameters. 100%.
I just detected an editing error and am replacing the file, so if your iTunes happened to be downloading it around 8:30pm central and you find that the file you’ve downloaded cuts off, you’ll have to re-download it (which, iTunes being annoying as it is, probably involves downloading it off this site and then using the “add file” to get it in iTunes, or just download it again via your smartphone or something).
The error was kind of amusing though… about 1/2 hr in, Wes starts talking about slabs and beams, and I ask him if I should read the relevant passage. He says “yes, but let me finish my sentence,” and then proceeds to repeat the exact same speech in full, like he was a robot who, when interrupted, had to go back and re-execute the same exact routine.
Aw man! I hate that I missed that.
You should probably splice up a bloopers reel just for fun! 🙂
taking a break @44min. two thought sketches one is the larger question relating here to the shift from his earlier work to this later work and how it is that people get caught up in lines of thought/inquiry and related worlds/intuitions and later people (sometimes the same people) find them nonsensical, hard even to imagine taking them seriously, which relates to Kuhn and Rorty reading Davidson on metaphors/paradigm-shifts.
2nd the big research area that has come out of this insight of Witt’s on the background practices/habits that are at play in human-being is that of enactivism and related developmental neurophenomenology which ties in with pragmatist neo-darwinian thinking on habits and critterly attempts to get a grip (remember M-Ponty) on our environs.
http://herts.academia.edu/DanielDHutto/Papers/185143/Enactivism_Why_be_Radical
http://www.psy.herts.ac.uk/pub/sjcowley/docs/cradle.pdf
“Much is rotten in the ‘sciences’ of language and cognition. To those familiar with
Wittgenstein’s work this is apparent in, for example, the gulf that separates
investigations of mind from those of language. Equally, it appears in how empirical
work tends to skate over conceptual issues while theories of discourse proceed with
disregard for causal processes. Taking another direction, I invoke ‘natural history’ in
asking new questions about the origins of minded and discursive behaviour. In this
context, I use ‘micro-investigations’ to demonstrate how a single interaction can be
used to throw light on human development. Rather than argue for the proposed
ascriptions, my aim is to show the power of the method by exploring a moment when
‘understanding dawns’.”
Dreyfus on nonceptual coping or “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the
Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise”
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/Dreyfus%20APA%20Address%20%2010.22.05%20.pdf
I find it helpful to think of “rules” in terms of expectations, so if you hand me the wrong building material I immediately perceive (in a holistic/gestalt kind of way like how in phenomenology I perceive an apple and not a bunch characteristics that I have to compute to be an apple) that you have missed the point/goal/mark, Rorty understands this in the wider context of all of the ways in which we manipulate our environs (think of babies) and I think is counter to attempts by Brandom to make “It” explicit, or say similar work by folks like Habermas.
here is Alison Gopnik on philosophical babies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cplaWsiu7Yg
will be interested in the next meeting to see if you get into what Wittgenstein considers to be the limits of logic as relates to say ethics, aesthetics, or religion or such, and the ways in which we are “bewitched” by grammar. cheers
I loved Alison Gopnik on philosophical babies. I heard her on philosophy bites and didn’t know about the Ted talk. Nice connection with this topic.
I just wanted to comment on the “meaning is use” vs “meaning is definition” discussion (not that it’s necessarily all one or the other). I see a problem with the “meaning is definition” claim: definitions are themselves made up of words. So where did the words in the definition get their meaning? Other definitions? By introducing the idea of meaning as use, Wittgenstein cuts the circularity or infinite regress present in “meaning is definition”. Now, that’s not to say that meaning can’t be conveyed through definition, it’s just that definition conveys meaning by at least one level of indirection; all roads eventually lead back to use. Just a thought.
Early Wittgenstein seemed to assume that predicate logic could capture all meaningful language. This is strange since it seems pretty clear that, if a person is thinking about natural language, the only kinds of sentences it really captures are statements for which a speaker would intend his sentence to be true, what John Searle and the speech act gang later called assertives. But of course there are other kinds of sentences or expressions, like commands, promises, and excuses, among other categories, which human beings take to be meaningful. I think Dylan in the podcast thought this was strange, too, but this is just to reiterate and flesh out some of the reasons it is strange.
Whereas the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus had a naive view of language qua its different capacities to be expressed meaningfully, the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations seems to adopt an inversely naive view that is not focused on a system of logical relations as could be expressed in some kind of semantics like a predicate logic but rather is focused on the behavior of people using language. The reason this latter view of language is naive is that it does not take seriously the myriad complexities involved in the examples he describes.
I’ll justify this position using two examples, both of which you talked about, and the latter of which Seth had picked up on and found problematic–as did Wes, I think. First, consider ostension. As you discussed in the podcast, and I think this is Wes’s example, you could point to a yellow pencil and try to teach a person the word ‘yellow’ and, to keep that person from misunderstanding you as referencing to the pencil, you could point to a lot of other objects that are also yellow and hope that he infers that he is yellow. But, you know, to take seriously the phenomenology here, this prosaic occurrence is a higly complicated thing. For something to even count as ostension, one already needs to understand the finger directed toward an object as a particular act, namely pointing, which means understanding it as a kind of referring. On top of that, the sound the teacher makes with his mouth means understanding some perhaps hitherto unheard sound as making sense to associate with what is being referred to. Also it must be understand that this person is understood as a teacher who is trying to provide an ostensive definition of something which may or may not be understood at first, either correctly as among the things that are yellow or incorrectly as a pencil. But even this phenomenological description is too informal and what really needs to be explained is what cognitive capacities are necessary to understand/interpret/process this event as ostension. This involves cognitive capacities for phonology, gesture, and articulation, and the only way you could avoid giving a real explanation to these kinds of things is by going ahead and imposing the event as an attempt to provide an ostensive definition. In a way, though, that is kind of circular, because the event is the very thing that needs to be explained.
Another example is the command example. As Wes was saying, calling out ‘Slab!,’ ‘Hammer!,’ etc., and acting in a certain way to provide those things assumes understanding, and ‘understanding’ is just an informal way to take about (perhaps) a series of complex cognitive faculties. Whatever the case, where the real investigation needs to occur to give a sound explanation of what is going on is in the head, not external to the body. Of course the articulation of language is in some sense body-external (but not entirely) but to really ask about the language itself and what it means to know a language or to know some aspects of a language is to ask at least in part about how a person has cognized certain syntactic and morphological structures.
This message is too long, and now this is just a couple of name-drops, but I think there is promise in Donald Davidson’s event semantics, Noam Chomsky’s phrase structure rules, and the line of investigation both Davidson and Chomsky have generated. I would gladly share info about those ideas if you would like in a follow-up response–but of course, if you are not interested in a follow-up, I’ll slink off and just apologize for the long post.
Billie — great points. See Tomasello for related investigations into how language is grounded in mutual intention-reading: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=tomasello
That infidelidad example was way too ivory tower cringeworthy! =P You were all so into explaining the points of the philosophy that the example came up and it was just terribly separate from what my intuition about picking up language in real life. You jumped to the conclusion that you could hear “infidelidad” and pick up on it, just on the use or appearance of the situation, but I disagree. She might be saying infidelity! as an accusation against her husband, yes, but without really knowing what the word actually is yet, that is only one of a myriad of possibilities. She could just be using a shocked expression (i.e., if you were unaware of the meaning of Dios Mio! you might think she was just saying a shocked/anxious cliche like OHMYGOD.) She might be saying “with MY BOSS?” which has implications you’re supposed to take in beyond “wife now has the decision to forgive this or divorce over this” because there’s a job at stake instead of just marital relations. She might be saying “I saw the devil” because she has a mental disorder and the shocking situation this puts the character in is creating an infernal delusion before her. The only thing you pick up on is “a person is responding in a surprised/shocked way to a sexual event,” you can’t really pick up on the million things it could be and as such aren’t coming close to the truth of the word just through observing its use.
Fair enough. I had in mind not one instance, but rather a series of watching Telenovellas to pick it up but your point is well taken. But how is that ivory tower cringe worthy? Name one academic you know that’s every used Univision in an example.
What would have been cringe worthy is if I had referenced Nazis somehow.
SP, I had thought that you were just making the point that you wouldn’t “read” her response as one of joy or otherwise approving, that the context was telling, pardon the pun, but not definitive.
Lacan was right that to some degree all communication is miscommunication.
Actually, social contexts are far more fixed and unambiguous than you’re making out, and words often aren’t even necessary — we can uses mere gazes and gestures to convey very specific meanings because shared context is doing so much (see the Tomasello link above, great readings that provide details). On another note, Seth’s example here (a word — especially a foreign word — for which we have meaning but not use) is a standard criticism of Wittgenstein that you’ll find in introductory secondary readings; I’m not sure how well we explained it.
Around 23 minutes Dylan makes some interesting points about the naivete of the logical positivist program. I’m very much in sympathy with his remarks but I think its important to remember that the incompleteness theorems were still more than a decade away when the tractatus was written and i’m not sure that non-euclidean geometry was then viewed as having the epistemic implications so obvious now with the benefit of hindsight and the developments of 20th century logic. I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s opinion about this second historical point.
Yes, I would have been interested to hear more about Dylan’s objections to the TLP as well (that it’s not merely wrong, but mathematically naive and silly.)
The logical positivists were well aware of non-Euclidean geometry, as was Wittgenstein. I guess the issue is whether one finds TLP-era Wittgenstein committed to language having only one pictorial form, which is clearly untrue after taking non-Euclidean geometries into account. But some have argued that Wittgenstein’s “pictorial form” argument (if modified a bit) can survive other geometries. See, e.g.:
http://amzn.com/3764388390
Dylan seems fundamentally right (if this was his point) that logical positivism was certainly doomed after Gödel, if not before. But I think it would be wrong to align the errors of the Tractatus with the errors of the Vienna Circle, or even to call the Tractatus a necessarily positivist work.
Thanks Daniel. The proper place for this question is probably the discussion for the TLP podcast but maybe its fair game since Dylan brought it up in this one: Why is non-Euclidean geometry in itself so damning for the picture theory? To my mind the only thing that hyperbolic geometry has to say about the picture theory is that Hilbert’s axioms for geometry are insufficient to specify the correct picture if you leave out the parallel postulate. But the fact that sentences can be insufficiently specific is surely obvious. Or is it that these new geometries were so wacky that they couldn’t be pictured?
Hi Nick,
Good question, but I’m uncomfortable imputing any of these objections to Dylan.
Assuming the “method of projection” described in TLP secs. 3.11-3.13 refers to projective geometry, then TLP perhaps already contemplates non-Euclidean geometry? See, e.g.:
http://sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/1561/1/cheung.pdf
After listening to some of your great podcasts, in particular the Wittgenstein ones, since I work on machine learning things and have a physics background, I can’t help but relate to those fields.
Check this out: Stings from Logic!
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0011065
Also, have you guys ever read Vapnik’s on the Nature of Statistical Learning Theory? He digs into some philosophical ideas as related to learning theory, particularly Popper, but touches on a number of others..
Anyway, I love it, keep up the great work!
short but interesting take on Wittgenstein’s pragmatic take on doubt and how this might relate to similar work by Peirce:
http://sammelpunkt.philo.at:8080/1658/1/menary.pdf
I’m curious about this extended discussion of why the target of the statement “block” and “slab” wouldn’t have composed an unsaid verb “go get that”. The way I read that section is that Wittgenstein has set up the problem wrong by coming at it through ostension. These aren’t a series of nouns with an absence of verb, but actually different kinds of words. Assume the objects are sorted, I will take a different route to get the thing. Assume they’re of different weights, I might gird myself differently. Or even just assume that as different as the objects are, there is going to be some variation in my behavior as a result of going to get them, down to, “bend down over this one and not over that one”. When I say “block”, I’m saying all of those things in a single word. If we assume that verbs have to exist, or that some mix of subject verb object exists, then it makes sense that the target of the language would notice the similarities, but that’s a nominal distinction at some level, because the series of behaviors that result from it are going to be distinct. Maybe it’s a digression from Wittgenstein’s point, but if he’s going to make up a weird language, it’s going to have weird kinds of words in it that don’t have the implication, necessarily, of being nouns or verbs or subjects and objects. No?
Do Janus words help Wittgenstein’s point? I wonder.
i am enjoying the W discussion, feel a bit of a connection to this topic…i have taught communication/language to many children using various forms: verbal, gestural, pictorial (PECs), fully kinesthetic/holistic movement, etc., basing my instruction on the child’s developmental and physical ability.
anyway, may i ask: what prompted the slab, block, etc. question originally? did W have a reason for using these 4 objects?
joan
Everyone was trying to address Seth’s question and not hitting on it… You don’t need to know exactly how to use a word to understand it’s meaning, as the meaning of an unfamiliar word can lend itself to you based on its usage in a language game you are familiar with… That is also why Wittgenstein has to go into so many examples; he has to try to demonstrate a variety of different kinds of considerations there can be to discerning meaning when meaning/understanding is based on a complex of “word+usage+context”.
Seth doesn’t need to know how to use the word “infidelidad” to understand what the lady is trying to express when she walks in on the couple and says that. The usage of any exclamation at that particular point is part of a language game that fits with that situation. She could walk in and exclaim “taco!”: It would be bizarre and yet make some sense to him because of her tone, facial expression, and the emotional/societal/cultural aspects of that type of situation. On the other hand, while “taco!” would not be totally out of context, at the same time it wouldn’t tell anyone about the meaning of the word “taco”, even if by exclaiming “taco!” she for some reason meant to express something having to do with the idea of infidelity. If she walked in and said “taco…” in a matter-of-fact way and smiled, this would imply a very unusual, unfamiliar language game because the facial expression, word-use, etc. in the context of the situation would be (in Seth’s view) divorced. In this case there is no context holding the meaning together for people unfamiliar with the usage of matter-of-fact language when an exclamation is called for. However, if throughout our lives we witnessed similar emotional reactions and uses of the word “taco” in the latter way, “taco” would begin to take on a new “definition” and the language game with which it is associated in this sense would become familiar and it would all start to mean something.
So my first point is that Seth’s question shouldn’t be trying to contend with the meaning of the word “infidelidad” in that situation alone, because in that skit there would be so much more to what is being communicated than just the word. It is not the ideal situation (or language game) for learning the meaning of the word for an outsider, because the meaning of the word itself in that language game isn’t the primary factor in its utterance being understood. It is an exclamation or reactionary comment trying to express surprise, anger, or whatever; she is not trying to define or explain the situation in any way. If I stub my toe and say “Shit!”, I am not trying to use the word “shit” to explain what just happened — this could be considered a related language game where the point is not to say something about the situation so much as highlight it or express an emotional reaction to it.
Secondly, another thing about being able to understand but not being able to use the word in question: Consider a situation in which the lady walks in and says “taco” — Seth could think he understands this to mean a Spanish slang word for “infidelity” that he hasn’t yet learned and has never used, and he can assume this only because he is familiar with the language games associated with this type of situation. That’s what I mean when I say you don’t need to know exactly how to use a word to understand it’s meanings, as the pertinent meaning of an unfamiliar word can lend itself to you based on its usage in a language game you are familiar with and can play yourself. For someone totally clueless about Spanish, she could be exclaiming any number of commonly exclaimed things that would fit in the situation; so “infidelidad!” could be assumed to mean “bastards!” or “how could you?!” etc.
The idea of language games is that there is no particular situation in which you can learn the full spectrum of meanings for an utterance. An example is how poetry can effectively misuse words but still communicate a discernible meaning by creating a new context for that word based on the language games associated with that word in combination with the language games associated with the other words in the poem. Poems use language this way most when they talk about mystical, abstract ideas, and Wittgenstein’s main point is kind of that the language of poems (or hand gestures like the middle finger) can do that because the use is the meaning as long as our “vocabulary” of familiar language games can cope.
If the Tractatus tries say how language should be used, Phil. Inv. tries to explain how it really is used, but the common thread is that the language games used for philosophical discussions are always tenuous due to the fact that they don’t rely on tried-and-true (“agreed upon by practice”) words+usage+context complexes, the combination of which gives rise to meaning, and therefore the level of meaning that one can find in philosophical works is always suspect. It’s similar to why Heidegger and the Zen Buddhists don’t feel that any of the philosophizing on being gives a better understanding of being than the experience of being itself.
Just been listening to this episode
Wonder whether you guys and philosophy bro are interested in getting some information on symbolic interactionism by Goffman and Conversation Analysis within Ethnomethodology by Garfinkel.
Goffman and Garfinkel were great sociologists and original theorists. I can see your discussion during that episode about language can almost lead to the development or description of these two theories.
Please do check them out and you can find much more from the sociology literatures and academics, I am not too sure whether Goffman or Garfinkel were inspired by Wittgenstein, but would have been a perfect fit with your conversations and providing the empirical evidence for Wittgenstein’s theories