PREVIEW-Episode 56: More Wittgenstein on Language

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast. This is episode 56, continuing our discussion from episode 55 of what is Linguistic Meaning? Where we read Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations, part one, sections one through 133 and 192 through 360 completed around 1946. Go get the text and other info@partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:31 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:33 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:36 Philosophy: And this is Philosophybro, author of Philosophybro.com from the Bro there, wherever that is.

0:43 Mark: Maybe before we get back into it, let's do our ground rules we did not do last time so the relatively new people can know what we are trying to do here. Do you want to take a stab at one, Mr. Bro?

0:54 Philosophy: Oh, did we just make them up as we go?

0:56 Mark: I'm saying, have you listened to the show enough that you can name one of the damn rules?

0:59 Philosophy: No, I haven't. And I'm not gonna be able to bluff my way to that one.

1:02 Mark: Number one, try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy. Number two, do not name drop. Just make your point. Don't say you would understand me if only you'd read Philosophy Bro's existentialist tract Broin in the Wind. We will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, unless doing otherwise would be more entertaining. For instance, in the last episode when we meant ostension, sometimes we said ostentation because that would be awesome. Because it's like the difference between pointing at something and saying chair and like flinging your hips around and saying chair with sparkles. That would be ostentation.

1:42 Wes: Who said no Ostentation.

1:44 Mark: I noticed Dylan saying it once.

1:46 Dylan: I said ostentation.

1:47 Wes: Yes.

1:48 Dylan: Awesome.

1:48 Wes: Thank God it wasn't me.

1:50 Mark: Maybe it happened other times. I don't know.

1:52 Wes: Sounds like something I would say.

1:54 Mark: And we have some big news. Today is the three year anniversary of our recording of episode one.

2:01 Dylan: Really?

2:02 Philosophy: Wow.

2:02 Dylan: Actually, the day.

2:04 Mark: Yes.

2:05 Dylan: Wow.

2:06 Philosophy: Congratulations, you guys.

2:07 Mark: April 19th. And by the time this posts, we will have 1 million downloads.

2:13 Unknown speaker: Woo.

2:14 Philosophy: That's great.

2:14 Wes: And Lucy Lawless is a fan.

2:17 Mark: That's right.

2:18 Wes: She at least tweeted that she wanted to marry one of the Partially Examined Life guys when she grew up.

2:23 Philosophy: Did she say which one or she just said one of them.

2:25 Wes: She said, and I'm not gonna say who.

2:27 Philosophy: Oh, it would be even funnier if she was like, I just want to marry one of them. I don't care which one it is.

2:33 Mark: Actually, I think that was the implication because then somebody was questioning her and she said, this is still another tweet. I just have a hard on for the dux.

2:41 Dylan: Yeah.

2:41 Wes: Now, that was in response to me. That was. We were having an exchange.

2:45 Mark: I looked that up, and that was

2:46 Wes: like head of the class in New Zealand slang. Yeah, I had to look that up, too.

2:51 Mark: Actually, the first definition for it was leader, so I assume that must refer to me.

2:55 Wes: I had the same thing happen. I was thinking, well, it sounds like Latin for leader, so she must mean Mark. And then I was really relieved when I looked up New Zealand slang. And there it was. The best. It's nice of her to leave it vague.

3:09 Philosophy: You know, I'm sure that's what. Mark went straight to the Latin, too.

3:14 Wes: Could be the end of the show if she had, you know, singled out one. One guy that could have just the riff that might have developed irreparable over jealousies.

3:24 Mark: Well, I think it really means the last one left alive is the one that she likes. Let the combat begin.

3:31 Wes: The Hunger Games.

3:32 Philosophy: You know that you're not gonna be able to impress her with, like, physical combat, right? Given her background. That's not really right. She's fought ogres, so you guys are probably not gonna be the ones like, oh, look, I killed two other philosophers. Oh, yeah.

3:46 Mark: But physical violence is the only way I know how to express myself. I'm not.

3:49 Philosophy: Oh, but your thesis was great.

3:52 Wes: But I have to say of the compliments we've gotten, and we get quite a bit of fan mail, and we've gotten some.

3:58 Mark: And we value all of you equally.

4:00 Wes: Yes, we do.

4:01 Mark: We do.

4:02 Wes: We value you all equally. Except for Lucy Lawless, who's in her own plane.

4:10 Philosophy: All of your fans are equal. Just some of them are more equal than others.

4:13 Wes: I was so ecstatic over that. I just. I think it's just, you know, being starstruck.

4:17 Mark: And so now that's Our target audience is just celebrities. It's just her. And so we can just kind of refer to her by name, just at random points in the episode.

4:26 Wes: She's our only celebrities in general.

4:29 Philosophy: In a year, you're going to have this conversation. How do you think we're doing? I think we were doing really great until we started pandering directly to Lucy Lawless every episode. And then things.

4:39 Wes: The podcast developed into an obsession with Lucy Lawless, who basically stalking her.

4:44 Mark: I did get out of her that she liked the political episodes, that that was her primary interest. In getting into it is to figure out why society is so screwed up and how it works. And so named the Machiavelli and the Hobbes in particular. So that is proof that there was actual listening going on.

4:59 Wes: Very cool.

5:00 Mark: Not like some people that are like, I've enjoyed working my way through your back episodes. I just discovered them a couple days ago. Like, well, how have you decided in a couple days that you actually like what we're doing? That you've worked your way through the back? I'm.

5:15 Dylan: Maybe they just listen to them back to back to back for 12 hours at a time.

5:18 Mark: It does happen.

5:19 Wes: Shows like Crack Mark, you can underestimate its power.

5:23 Philosophy: And that's the great part. When there's a back catalog, you got a 10 hour drive, just queue up like four pels. And then when you run out, you're like, oh great, now I have to wait two months for each new one.

5:34 Mark: I picture when I was a youngin during a summer and I was painting houses and we'd have the radio on playing our 80s crap of just people that have to work outside all day. This is for you in the coal mine in Chile, Wherever that guy is. There was one guy that was a coal miner in Chile.

5:51 Philosophy: Too soon?

5:52 Mark: No, I'm serious. There was a guy that wrote us

5:54 Wes: a. Yeah, we did get a great. We did get a great email from.

5:57 Mark: Or people on guard duty in Afghanistan. Actually he didn't say he listened to it. On guard duty. I don't know if that's allowed people overseas. Anyway, I picture people that have to do manual labor in the hot sun all day. Just rolling through episode after episode. Probably in a group, a whole group of.

6:13 Philosophy: And then they pause and fight.

6:15 Dylan: And then now we have to do our Marx episode.

6:17 Philosophy: Right?

6:18 Dylan: Because then maybe all the laborers will revolt.

6:20 Wes: That's right. We could start a revolution.

6:22 Mark: All the guards in Afghanistan will throw down their weapons and say we're done.

6:27 Wes: Then philosophy will have some practical value.

6:30 Mark: Then we'll be outlawed by the armed forces Radio or whatever.

6:34 Wes: Oh yeah, I don't think that would take much.

6:36 Philosophy: Yeah, right. Subversive.

6:38 Mark: Confiscate your personal listening devices. Wittgenstein.

6:45 Philosophy: Yeah, that got dark fast.

6:46 Mark: So, Wittgenstein, last time we covered a lot of the overall themes. So maybe this time I had suggested that we just pick out passages that we know we especially wanted to talk about and then read them and then talk about them. And then that way we'll maybe get through more than five pages. Does that sound reasonable?

7:06 Philosophy: I think so. Yeah, sure.

7:08 Mark: Well, the first one I had on my little list was number 22. 22, I think might be the only spot where he name drops Gottlob Frege, who we had an episode on a while ago. And it says, Frege's idea that every assertion contains an assumption which is the thing that is asserted really rests on the possibility found in our language of writing every statement in the form. It is asserted that such and such is the case. But that such and such is the case is not a sentence in our language so far. It is not a move in the language game. And if I write not, it is asserted that, but it is asserted colon, such and such is the case.

The words it is asserted simply become superfluous. We might write every statement in the form of a question followed by a yes, is it raining? Yes. Would this show that every statement contained a question, et cetera? So this is referring not only to Frege, but also to Wittgenstein's earlier idea that language is fundamentally about making assertions and that if you have something else, well, maybe you could come up with like an assertion. You know, if you say, I doubt that you speak English, you have to analyze that in terms of what would be the primary.

Okay, there's a proposition in there, you speaking English. But he says, well, that's actually here. He says, that is not itself an assertion. As soon as you look at anything the least bit difficult, he thinks that this idea that everything can be reduced to assertion falls apart.

8:24 Wes: Just for background, Frege, as part of his logical calculus that he developed, right. Which led to our mathematical logic, he had a sign, a symbol for assertion. I don't remember what it looked like exactly. I think it preceded the sentence, right? To say, this is being asserted.

8:39 Mark: Right. And so you could have different modalities of the same proposition. Is it being asserted? Is it being questioned? Is it being doubted? Whatever. Frege and those folks want to say that the assertion is the basic one. But Wittgenstein says, well, you know, why would you necessarily assume that? And 23 says, but how many kinds of sentences are there? Say assertion, question, command. There are countless kinds, countless different kinds of use of what we call symbols, words, sentences. And this multiple simplicity 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.

This is kind of the. Oh, yeah, I found the coolest part of the book, just that this giant list that he gives of different. You know, if you think asserting is the basic one, he Says review the multiplicity of language games in the following examples and in others, giving orders and obeying them, Describing the appearance of an object or giving its measurement. Constructing an object from a description, a drawing, reporting an event, speculating about an event, forming and testing a hypothesis, Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams, Making up a story and reading it, play acting, singing catches, guessing riddles, making a joke, telling it, solving a problem in practical arithmetic, translating from one language to another, asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying, etc.

And it ends. It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways in which they are used, the multiplicities of kinds of words and sentences, with what logicians have said about the structure of language, including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

10:02 Philosophy: That guy was a dick.

10:03 Wes: Namely moi.

10:08 Mark: So that was thought provoking to me, that, yeah, okay, unless you were of the mind like you were expressing last time, Dylan, that, like, well, why would you think assertion is basic? Why would you think you can reduce everything to, you know, logical symbology? Because it was that simple.

10:21 Dylan: I think it's worth articulating why you might not think it at least. Or what is the contrast that he's unearthing here? The note that I had about this section was that he was saying that assertions involve expectations. So assertions are not expectations, but language involves expectations. That's one of the ways I understood him to be claiming that what language is doing in a sentence is not an assertion. Saying that it's an assertion is not enough. That's a short version of his criticism, is that you do have assertions, but assertions don't characterize language completely and sufficiently.

And this goes right to his notion that he wants to keep calling it a game in that the rules are different and in fact, innumerable for the different kinds of games. And this is what I meant while I was thinking about it in terms of expectations. Because a lot of a game involves what you expect to be happening either next or the implication of what has happened now for what you should expect in the future. That is, you're following rules, so you know, your expectations imply rules, and rules allow you to structure expectations. So I guess that's why, to me, the distinction he was making was that language is about expectations and not about assertions.

11:36 Philosophy: That might be part of his point. I don't know if that's his point here, though. I think that, like, that's all right. And he's certainly saying assertion is not at the bottom of how language works. Nor can you say that here are the four things at the bottom of every language. Assertion, doubt, question, command. And that's everything. I mean, Frege's work in the philosophy of language is really sort of ancillary to his logical work. He's trying to find ways to connect his logic work to Lang so that he can do his project more easily. And Wittgenstein is saying, you can't cross that gap. You can't just come up with a sign and say like, oh, here's an assertion. Beautiful. And then that's all that indicates. And there you are, like, there's no reason to think that at the bottom of even that particular kind of sentence is one form of assertion.

12:20 Dylan: Say more about that. I mean, or explain it more.

12:22 Philosophy: Right.

12:22 Dylan: It's. I mean, right now what you're saying is a kind of ostension. You're invoking Wittgenstein pointing. And maybe that's all he's doing in section 23 is he's just pointing at, look at all examples of language games that aren't characterizable by assertions. And if he fully spelled it out, he would give the same exact sentence and say that I could have them manifest each one of those ways of having a language game with exactly the same sentence. And maybe that's all that he's going to do, is as an act of ostension, point to the fact that language acts as a language game. It seems to be unpackable more than that, that you can point to the failure of assertion as being the end all of language without just pointing at.

13:04 Wes: Right.

13:05 Philosophy: He's not just pointing and saying, look at all these other things. He's making the point. And these other things also will characterize a language. I'm not saying like, no, Frege had it wrong having four things. Really, there are 20 things. You can't just say these are the number of things there are because new things are constantly emerging. So I just don't think he's talking about rules here, rules and expectation. He's just saying new things are constantly emerging.

13:25 Dylan: What is it about language that's doing that?

13:27 Philosophy: Probably that there are multiple players doing this thing.

13:30 Wes: Well, there are multiple human activities and intentions and human beings want to accomplish. Right.

13:35 Dylan: Well, but multiple isn't the same thing as enumerable. Right. He's saying that he's not numerable. Right. So for this to really work for him, and I'm on board with it, but I'm just trying to see where it is that you're going to say it's innumerable. What's the argument for that?

13:50 Mark: It has to be that. I mean, even you can see from some of these examples. I don't know if we're actually going to find an argument in here, because that's not the way he works. But from some of these examples that, you know, a number of them seem to be different kinds of assertions, right? It's not like assertions and questions and commands are fundamentally different. I guess what I'm trying to get at is trying to figure out what it is to do an examination of language. Like, we think that traditionally maybe you have the syntax so you can talk about what is grammatical, and did you use the plural verb with the plural noun and did you have a noun in the sentence at all?

That kind of stuff just will a sentence makes sense. And then you have the semantics, which to me has always meant what do the words mean? And the easiest way to think about that is just, you know, what do they refer to? Just in this sort of ostensive way. And you understand, well, okay, maybe the word and isn't ostensive. You just figure that out by context. When you have enough other things, enough nouns that are ostensive, enough verbs that you can, you know, see someone running and say run, et cetera. And so you build up something and then that's it for a theory of language.

You've got the syntax, you've got the semantics. And a part of that, complete semantics then would be to, if you're getting to the sentence level, to distinguish between commands and questions and statements. But it wouldn't really go beyond that socially, right? You'd say, I'm done with my theory of language now. But I think what Wittgenstein is saying is that you just can't make this distinction between semantics and the social uses of words, right? As long as there could be other things people could be doing socially. And we can make up a game right now that every time I say the forbidden word, that is philosophy bro's real name, everybody's gonna go, ah.

At me. So there we just made up a new language game. So now the forbidden word sort of doesn't just refer to him anymore, it refers, it is meant to elicit this response and have me correct myself and say, oh, I'll edit that out, whatever.

15:35 Dylan: So it's the lack of a lookup table. When we say multiplicity, we're meaning multiplicity of meaning. There isn't a one to one correspondence. A joke is a perfect example here. The fact that you can have irony, things like that, right?

15:47 Philosophy: So I think what drives the multiplicity and the innumerability is the innumerability of ways there are to live right where he thinks, like language games are forms of life. The reason we can't just strictly enumerate the number of ways to use language is because we can't strictly enumerate the ways people can be or do and languages as far out as that. So he's saying something like, for Frege's project to work, it needs to be the case that, like, oh, people only do five things. They assert, they doubt, they question, they command, they joke, and that's all. Everything people do can be reduced to those five things. And since we can't reduce it to those five or to 20, we can't reduce language to that either. And there isn't like a separate kind of language that does access those five things in general. That's just not how language works.

16:31 Wes: And I think the implication here is that this throws a wrench in the idea that you're going to develop this logical calculus that in any way does justice to. To the way language is really used. I mean, I think when Frege and Wittgenstein developed this calculus, I think they thought that everything important could be reduced to it. Right? Even if language has complexity, ultimately all that complexity can be reduced to these very simple atomic statements which are essentially descriptive. They're essentially trying to link language to these facts or states of affairs in the world. Point here is that much of what goes on in language is not descriptive in that way.

17:11 Dylan: Well, so I think it's important that the multiplicity has to do with the ways. Right? So for instance, in these cases of different language games that he gives lists of in the individual terms, we would say, well, I sort of know what those individual terms mean, but when I use these different language games, I realize that in fact they mean different things than even what I might have thought they meant. And that's where this multiplicity is coming in. It's both the multiplicity of the ways I can use the language in terms of the rules, the individual games, like praying or reporting an event or constructing, but also the way that folds in on the meaning of the individual words.

So it's not even as if individual words are atomic. And then you have following the calculus notion that each of these games amount to just different sorts of rules or functions. He has to have it be the case that the atoms themselves are multiple in their meanings.

18:09 Philosophy: There are no atoms.

18:10 Dylan: There are no atoms. Yes, because if There were atoms and you just had a multiplicity of functions. You would still have something just more complicated than Frege's description. Right, right. It has to be that the meaning of the words gets affected by the games themselves. It would be like having the X and Y values in a function get affected by the function itself.

18:31 Philosophy: Right.

18:32 Mark: I think what makes this hard to understand, then, the way you're describing it, which is apartment that is, maybe we don't mean by these words what we think we mean. Well, that seems ridiculous, because isn't meaning something we're aware of? I know what I mean. And so he spends half the book arguing against that notion of meaning.

18:47 Wes: Yeah. Very counterintuitive.

18:49 Philosophy: Yeah, that seems right. So just to clarify, when I say there are no atoms, I don't mean, like, it's impossible for a word to be atomic. He thinks there are very clear contexts in which words serve in that sort of atomic role, where, like, that dog lives there. And that's pretty simple. But I can say that same sentence and actually be saying, my best friend constantly pisses off his girlfriend, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that dog lives there. Same atoms. And I'm doing air quotes for the listener at home. I'm doing air quotes, same atoms, but completely different meanings. So there are atoms, except when there aren't, and it turns out they're usually not.

19:23 Wes: Yeah. He argues at certain places in this against the old idea that you could just decompose every complex description into atoms. Right. Into atomic sentences. Because for the early Wittgenstein, the idea was that, well, there's some dispute, but at least for Russell, it's pretty clear that a statement like the dog is there, could be further deconstruct, decomposed into. You get these logically simple atomic statements, which I don't even know what they would be. Right. But you would be reducing everything as much as possible into its parts and then making statements about those parts. Right.

19:54 Mark: For Russell, they were phenomenal. You know, there's a red patch in this corner of my field of vision. And for Wittgenstein, we could not figure out what the hell he meant.

20:03 Wes: Yeah. It's almost like, you know, you're creating a computer program and you're building the dog pixel by pixel, and the atomic statements describe the location and color of every pixel, let's say. And then any statement about the dog is a compound statement, descriptive statement, which is logically related and can be broken down into all the atomic sentences.

20:22 Mark: Right. So if you knew all the atomic facts, all the state of all the atomic sentences, then you could derive every other truth that could be.

20:29 Dylan: Yeah. And that turns on the fact that you have to have both the atomic sentences and that there is only one set of ways of relating them, or a numerable, explicit, determined set of ways of relating them.

20:43 Mark: Right. They're either true or false, the atomic

20:45 Philosophy: ones, and you need to be able to verify things. Right?

20:47 Dylan: Yeah. But saying that they're either true or false has to do with the relations, because it's more than just the atoms themselves. It also has to do with the way they're related to one another. And this game business has to do with there being a multiplicity of relations and that reflects back on the putative atoms themselves.

21:04 Philosophy: I think that the notion of game is more his way of pointing out that in any particular language, a language game is an interaction among persons according to rules that they all sort of agree on. And the fact that we have lots of language games going on at any given time is just the indicator that we are, at any given time interacting according to lots of different sets of rules that with different people we will agree on in different ways. But the notion of a game is, I think, just his way of isolating this is just some very small set of rules that you're interacting according to in this interaction that you all agree on.

21:34 Wes: We're making moves, and those moves can be right or wrong according to the way the game is played, according to the practice of the community.

21:42 Philosophy: Right.

21:43 Dylan: But you don't have to even be playing the same game.

21:45 Philosophy: Right.

21:46 Dylan: That comes along with this as what

21:48 Philosophy: someone to whom you're talking, you do

21:50 Wes: for it to make sense to someone, you do have to be able to. No, they at least have to be able to figure out your game, otherwise what you're doing is not meaningful to them, it's nonsense to them.

22:00 Dylan: So it could be nonsense. That's one possibility. Right. A good example would be where I simply don't understand the other person's language. I'm just listening to them speak. I don't have the benefit of any other kind of information, and it's just nonsense. But of course, there are plenty of other cases where I understand, or I think I understand what they're saying, but I am operating and understanding it under a different set of rules, a different language game. And so therefore, from the standpoint of the other person, I'm confused, but I understand exactly what they're saying in terms of my language game. And so you end up getting in a discussion about sorting out exactly what you mean by something.

22:36 Wes: I think the problem here is that we don't issue the rules. We don't make the practice that's a community level authority. Right. So it's not like each of us has our own set of rules that's issued by the community. And it's that practice that we are born into without any choice, really. I mean, it sort of reminds me of the Saussure podcast.

22:55 Mark: So you didn't like the example I just gave? I just invented a game of we can't say philosophy Bros, Real names and that counts as I thought you could have it either way.

23:02 Philosophy: You can explicitly issue rules, and as long as we all agree to play with that, that's fine. But let's say so you explicitly issue this.

23:08 Dylan: Wait, wait, I don't understand this whole business of agreeing. It's not like everybody sits down and has a constitution regarding their languages.

23:15 Philosophy: No, but when we learn language, we are learning to participate according to the more or less standard rules. Good God. More or less standard.

23:23 Mark: The customs we are learning to.

23:25 Philosophy: Jesus. Participate in a language form.

23:28 Wes: Yeah, in a practice.

23:29 Philosophy: And how. Right, so this is why meaning is used. So like when you were in middle school and you discovered sarcasm, that was like a miraculous thing. When a kid first discovers sarcasm at such a big moment in his life, and then he alienates all of his friends by being constantly sarcastic and maybe I'm getting too autobiographical here. Not important. The point is that, like, learning to do sarcasm is learning a new language. And no one like, sits down and says, okay, here are the rules of sarcasm. What happens is a parent says something like, yeah, you can stay up as late as you want.

And you're like, awesome. And they're like, no, I was being sarcastic. And then you get better at sarcasm as you lose friends and start to realize you have to temper yourself. And that's how people get better at particular language games. You can sit down and issue explicit rules. Like, every time you guys say my name, we make a funny sound. But that's not typically how language learning proceeds.

24:19 Wes: But also, even when you do that, it's still established at the community level. The idea is that we can't each issue our. You know, this sort of gets us at the private language argument. We can't just each individually have our own set of rules and imagine we're interpreting things according to our own idiosyncratic set of rules. The game and meaning occur between at least two people.

24:40 Mark: I like thinking about this whole. What if two people are using different language games?

24:43 Wes: Yeah, it's a good thought. Experiment.

24:45 Mark: Yeah, I was using sarcasm and you didn't realize I was. But what if, you know, it seems like you could have double meanings. So let's say I just come up to you and engage you in conversation and you think we're playing the engaging in light conversation language game. But what I'm really doing is feeling you out to see if you're going to be a good mark for my robbing you later for my con. So in a sense, it seems like the conning language game is something I'm trying to do with language. I didn't make up what conning is. I didn't make up the fact that there is property and there is robbery, you know, and all this kind of stuff. But I'm still doing something that you're not in on, even though I'm communing with you and you think I'm making sense.

25:21 Wes: That's just deception, though. I mean, the con artist still understands what the meaning ostensibly is, right? They know what the mark is going to believe that they're saying ostensibly.

25:30 Philosophy: Normally a great word, maybe.

25:32 Wes: Maybe go with supposedly in this context ostentatiously. I said ostensibly because it was just too irresistible in the context of ostensibly. So anyway.

25:43 Philosophy: But yeah, so that's really good. You were actually making a pun. I thought you were just playing the normal, same thing language game. And I was like, whoa, you gotta be careful.

25:51 Wes: And there I really was just making the pun for myself. I didn't expect it to actually.

25:56 Mark: I thought you said ostensibly. And that was. I did say that word than ostensibly, right?

26:02 Philosophy: No, it's a different word. I was just saying, like, we're all gonna get confused.

26:05 Dylan: Let's look at an example, like Andy Kaufman and his humor. Andy Kaufman would go to a club and he'd put a plant in there and he would engage in a comedy routine that then would involve a member of the audience who he knew, but then ended up being a kind of joke on the other audience. So he would play this kind of. It doesn't ris quite to the level of a genuinely private language because it involves himself and some other people. But it involves more than a ruse or a deception, like in a con, because it involves a manipulation. So he is self consciously using a language game that he expects a reaction from his general audience in such a way and is sort of even playing with what their reaction is going to be without them understanding the game he's playing.

26:53 Philosophy: So that's fine. What he's doing is he is manipulating the rules that they're playing. By. But he needs to know what. He needs to understand those rules in order to fuck with them. And it's not private because you can describe what he's doing.

27:06 Dylan: Yeah, I'm not making a strong argument for private language right here, but I guess what I would say is that the part that makes me think that there's a flavor or a rings of relative intimacy of language, maybe not genuinely private, has to do with both that example that I gave with Kaufman, but also the whole notion that we can figure something out so that we can figure out a language game that we have never played before by either example or watching it. As long as it's close enough, as long as it has some fingers or some resonances with it, but we can figure it out. And so that tells us something about the way we process language games or the way language works for us and gets to the root of sort of why this would be true. Wittgenstein's claims would be true. Is that the example that we can just figure them out, that we can figure anything out at the end of the day.

27:58 Philosophy: Right. If Wittgenstein were wrong about private language or personal rules, you would have to say something about Andy Kaufman. Like, right, so Andy Kaufman, he's fucking with the audience and he gets this internal feeling that he calls braglia. And no one really knew what Bralia was. It was an emotion that only he could have. No one can refer to it. In fact, the only reason I know that he felt that is he said, once I feel the feeling, braglia. But no one has any idea what Brawley is. If that doesn't make sense, what he was really feeling is like amusement and maybe smug self satisfaction is bralia. And he doesn't really have that private feeling because we can talk about what he was doing. Even an individual who takes himself to be doing language in a new way or a different way has to be doing it in a way that it can be figured out. And I think that's right.

28:40 Wes: Yeah. The private language is. The meanings can't possibly be known by anyone but the speaker. Right. So it's not just that it happens to be private, it's if you created a private language for your diary and you were speaking about everyday sorts of things, in principle, we can translate that. So it's not really a private language in the strong sense that Wittgenstein means. He means that it's untranslatable. And the reason why Wittgenstein even brings that up is that seems to be arguing against a Cartesian Notion of mental states that are completely inaccessible to others. So Mark has pains. And these specific states, I can't possibly know them. Not just that I don't happen to know them, but in principle I can possibly know those mental states.

29:23 Mark: So should we read some text of the private language argument since we're talking about it?

29:27 Philosophy: 199 is the first place. I have a note that is something like where he starts to build towards the private language argument. This is probably before we explicitly mentions it.

29:38 Mark: Sure. It is relevant here because it's about obeying a rule. And maybe I should read a connecting thing that's actually in the section that we are reading to see how tightly this whole thing fits together. I was looking at 31 and he's talking about chess. And this is the third paragraph of 31. I'm explaining chess to someone and I begin by pointing to a chessman and saying, this is the king, it can move like this, and so on. In this case we shall say the words this is the king or this is called the king are a definition only if the learner already knows what a piece in a game is.

That is, if he has already played other games or has watched other people playing and understood and similar things. Further, only under these conditions will it be able to ask relevantly, in the course of learning the game, what do you call this? That is this piece in a game, we may say only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask for a name. So that sort of starts off and then a whole lot of what comes after that is, well, what is this rule following? I mean, he's already said it's not a matter of explicitly having a formula in your head that you consult, because just in our talking about how we figure out a new language game based on knowing other language games, it can't be something as instructive as that.

And one of the things we were saying last time is that if you think that this rule following is a matter of sort of having an explicit rule in your head that you look at, well then you would need instructions on how to interpret that rule, which would lead to an infinite regress. Right? You can't have a rule about how to use a rule about how to use a rule, etc. So then looking at ahead to what did you say? 1.

31:06 Philosophy: 199.

31:06 Mark: 199, yeah. Is what we call obeying a rule something that it would be possible for only one man to do and to do only once in his life? This is of Course, a note on the grammar of the expression to obey a rule. And he says, so it's not. It's not possible that there should have been only one occasion which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible. There should have been only one occasion in which. On which a report was made, or an order given or understood, etc. To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess are customs.

31:35 Wes: That's sort of a preliminary to the body of the argument. Right, right.

31:39 Mark: But you can see how it flows very naturally from what was going on earlier.

31:43 Wes: Yeah.

31:44 Mark: 204. As things are. I can, for example, invent a game that is never played by anyone. But would the following be possible too? Mankind has never played any games. Once, however, someone invented a game which no one ever played.

31:57 Wes: He's still on about the rules. Yeah, I mean, it's all related.

31:59 Philosophy: Of course.

32:00 Mark: That was 204. He gives a response to that. But that's just the queer thing about intention. This is in quotes. So it's his opponent. It is just the queer thing about intention, about the mental process, that the existence of a custom, of a technique is not necessary to it. That, for example, it is imaginable that two people should play chess in a world in which otherwise no games existed, and that even that they should begin a game of chess and then be interrupted. And he answers, but isn't chess defined by its rules? And how are these rules present in the mind of the person who's intending to play chess?

And then he goes more and more on. This is related to that, the comments about meaning, like, well, if you think meaning is something in the head, that's not going to capture it. Just like obeying a rule is not something in the head because it's just not an explicit thing you could express in one sentence that you're reading off of some inner space in yourself. It is a complex and kind of of flexible thing that enables you to act in a human way.

32:52 Philosophy: I have this great image of someone like, who's never ever played games or known they exist. And you sit down with a chessboard, you're like, so here are the pieces and they're like the what? And like the things that we move. And then I'm going to move one and then you move one, like so in what order do you move them? Oh, I don't know. However, it's going to get to take my king. But why? Why would you want to? I think what he's getting at is you would have to Explain. Before you could invent a game where there were no games before, you have to invent, like playing and then playing a game. And then you have to suddenly build this entire notion just to give chess

33:28 Wes: any sense whatsoever.243 that's exactly what I was saying.

33:33 Mark: Yeah, go ahead and read it.

33:35 Wes: A human being can encourage himself, give himself orders, obey blame and punish himself. He can ask himself a question and answer it. We could even imagine human beings who spoke only in monologue, who accompanied their activities by talking to themselves. An explorer who watched them and listened to their talk might succeed in translating their language into ours. This would enable him to predict the people's actions correctly, for he also hears them making resolutions and decisions. But could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expressions to his inner experiences, his feelings, moods, and the rest for his private use?

Well, can't we do so in our ordinary language? But that is not what I mean. The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language. And then he goes on with the private language argument.

34:29 Mark: Well, yeah, we might as well read the next one. 244. How do words refer to sensations? There doesn't seem to be any problem here. Don't we talk about sensations every day and give them names? But how is the connection between name and a thing named set up? This question is the same as how does a human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations of the word pain? For example, here's one possibility. Words are connected with the primitive, the natural expressions of the sensation, and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries.

Then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations. In later sentences they teach the child new pain behavior. All right, so he's already giving his what sounds very behaviorist alternative to the idea that again, language based on ostension. So then language about inner states would have to be based on ostension is that I examine pain in myself and I say, ah, there's pain. Then there's a problem there. How do I know that what I mean by pain when I refer to myself is the same as what you mean by pain when you refer to yourself? And don't we all have unique psyches?

And couldn't we come up with these words that refer to these. These strange feelings that only we have, or we just can't know whether anyone has them? Doesn't that make sense? And he just thinks that that's just based on, again, a whole ridiculous conception of what linguistic meaning amounts to. Linguistic meaning is not a matter of having an image in your head when you say a word.

35:47 Dylan: Yeah, so 246 just two later says, in what sense are my sensations private? Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain. Another person can only surmise it it. In one way this is wrong, and in another, nonsense. If we are using the word to know as it is normally used, and how else are we to use it, then other people very often know when I am in pain. Yes, but all the same, not with the certainty with which I know it myself. It can't be said of me at all, except perhaps as a joke, that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean, except perhaps that I am in pain? Other people cannot be said to learn of my sensations only from my behavior, for I cannot be said to learn of them. I have them. The truth is, it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain, but not to say it about myself.

36:44 Mark: I think that's really hard for people to understand because he was sort of going back and forth between interlocutor and response.

36:50 Dylan: Well, well, okay, so maybe they need to have the text in front of them.

36:54 Wes: But the basic idea is that he doesn't think it makes sense to say we know our own private sensations, we

37:00 Dylan: have them and it's a result of a misunderstanding of what it means to know something that we would ascribe a claim like having a private language because we never own our sensations in a way of knowing them.

37:15 Wes: This one I think doesn't work very well because I think he's ascribing to the concept of knowing something, which really belongs to the concept of assertion in general. The reason why we don't say I know I'm in pain to someone generally in language is not because it doesn't make sense from the standpoint of the concept. No, it's just because we don't make that kind of assertion to people unless they have reason to doubt it. So the reason to doubt thing comes up with respect to the concept of assertion, not with respect to the concept of. No, I think jumping on its weakness right there because I think it's part of the private language argument, but it's not all of it. That's one of the threads he's using to argue against private language, but I don't think it's the strongest one.

37:58 Dylan: What are the other prongs of the private language argument besides A kind of epistemological claim.

38:04 Wes: In order for a word to have meaning, it must be able to be right or wrong. There must be some correct description of meaning or incorrect description of meaning according to the language game. But that language game always occurs at the level of community. So you can't get meaning at the individual private level. So even if you're making these individual descriptions, later on he's going to talk about naming a sensation as S or something like that. That activity isn't doing what on first blush it looks to us like it's doing because we're already presupposing the language game. But a truly private language couldn't rest on that community language game in general. And so you couldn't really get meaning at that level. I don't think I've done a very good job of describing that, but I think that's the other major prong of the argument.

38:55 Mark: Formally, the private language argument is thought to start at 256. This is on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. So some of the things we read are sort of the precursors to it. Which actually I want to read 255 because it's one of his pithy things. It's just the philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.

39:12 Dylan: What does that mean? I wrote a question mark by that.

39:14 Mark: It means that questions only arise because. And he has other earlier pithy sayings in the work to support this because we've taken some word out of its customary context and we don't know what to do with it. So in this case, what we understand in situations where we call something knowledge is, I'm looking for my shoe and oh, there is my shoe. Now I know where my shoe is. But looking at our own inner states is not. We might want to attach the word knowledge to that, but it's really not appropriate yet.

39:44 Wes: So the philosophical problems arise from misuse of language. Right?

39:48 Mark: Yep.

39:48 Wes: The true approach here is to relieve ourselves of those problems not by developing the right theory, but by therapeutically getting rid of our misuse of language.

39:59 Philosophy: Right. One really, I think good way to say this. And this was a comment that someone made on Reddit in response to something I said once that just kind of blew me away. Someone said that what we normally think of as philosophy is an emergent property of discussion, not a thing to do separately as its own thing. And in these discussions, problems arise. Philosophy allows us to, like, figure out what the answer to that problem is. Therapeutically is a good word. Right. So we Treat a question by. We examine it, we lay it out. But it's not something that we have to make.

I guess the important thing there is philosophy is an emergent property of discussions. So on Wittgenstein's view of what philosophy should be doing, we can never really get rid of philosophy in the sense of answer all the philosophical questions that there are. We can only treat the questions that arise, that will arise, emerging from discussions.

40:51 Dylan: And the reason why questions arise is it's just a characteristic of language or a characteristic of us or yeah, it's

40:58 Philosophy: just a characteristic of discussions.

41:00 Mark: I think it's a clash between different language games, taking something out of one context and putting it into another. Like I was just thinking about sarcasm in this context. That sarcasm sort of relies on everybody normally telling the truth. Sarcasm is a parasitic phenomena. So sort of imagine a society of, you know, a junior high with no teachers, where everyone is sarcastic. Then like, well, what does that even mean? How would you understand anyone? Or does every. Is it just opposite day? Or is there. There's something that would be taking the concept of sarcasm out of its usual environment, which is a rebellion against the straight laced or something like that.

And so you could. Then it could become like a Zen koan, the one hand clapping, or does the tree fall in a forest? What is a sarcastic person in a room of all sarcastic people or something? And he would want to say no, that's obviously a bullshit philosophical question. Just understand what sarcasm is and it'll go away. So that's an easy one, right? But virtue or something.

41:59 Philosophy: So questions about like, what really is a sentient being? Can artificial intelligence ever become sentient? That's a philosophical question that emerges out of discussions about what sentience is and what artificial intelligence, what direction it's going in. And we can treat that question by, oh, so what do we normally mean by sentience? This is really important. It will never be the case that like, oh good, science has answered all the questions. There's nothing for philosophy to do. Science has told us that AI is sentience. How did it do that? It's parasitic on a particular use of sentient. But we can't ever like get rid of philosophical questions. We can only treat them as they arise, lay them out.

42:40 Dylan: But the reason, like for that particular case, this seems to me the reason why that question arises is because you would make a claim that there's a similarity between a computer or some kind of program, that you see a likeness with a human being. Or even before you have computers, just a mechanical system that operates without you touching it. That seems to have its own activity. And then you make the leap. Well, it seems to be alive because it has its own activity. And the root of all that is making the leap, that one thing is like another. And this goes to what Mark was saying, that you are applying one language game to another language game.

So there's this kind of likeness, this pattern matching or whatever you want to call it, that we have, that we do, that tries to overlap one thing into another. And maybe in sort of the friction of that, you get both something like philosophy or that activity in trying to sort that out. But it's born out of this activity of finding things to be like one another and trying to see if they really are or not. And. And part of that ends in trying to become atomistic about it. And part of it comes in giving up the notion of being atomistic about it because you can't reduce it.

43:59 Philosophy: Right. So one way to clarify that sort of confusion of possible likeness. I think probably the right way to Wittgenstein here is to examine what do we mean when we say this thing. Let's try and make that clearer so we understand how this word is typically being used the wrong way to go about it. And what earlier Wittgenstein tried to do is by stipulation, the wrong way to go about figuring out if robots are humans, if they're sentient, is to stipulate robots are not sentient. Boom. That's not what philosophy should do. And when it does that, that's when problems arise.

44:33 Wes: And here's another criticism of this sort. Just to give another example from our Philosophy of Mind episode, we read some Gilbert Ryle and he talked of the Cartesian dualism as a category mistake, where basically Descartes theory that there's a substance, soul is a product of thinking, of reifying something that's really an abstract term that doesn't have a fixed object that it's referring to. So other terms of the sort like university. University is more of an abstraction. And you're not going to say, okay, here's this ball of substance in my hand.

University must stand for something like this same thing for soul. And the idea is that that kind of mistake is a product of the way language works of grammar. We expect any noun to sort of have this nice solid, tangible referent to it. And so we slip up on that. And so that's where some philosophical problems come from. Ultimately, I don't find that very convincing. I argued in that episode that in fact, it's not a category mistake. And that even if you reject Cartesian dualism, it's actually a legitimate attempt to come up with a theory to solve a legitimate problem.

But that's another think here. This idea that philosophical problems arise out of problems of misuse of language, let's say, or bad habits instilled in us by language or trying to take it out of context, I don't find that convincing. I think philosophical problems have their own legitimacy. Even after you've done all this language stuff.

46:03 Mark: I generally think of Wittgenstein as providing the groundwork for folks like Ryle. Like you were just discussing, but it sounded like, bro, you were just saying that the upshot of Wittgenstein here is that we need. Were you contradicting that or were you just saying, oh, there is a role for philosophy, but the role of philosophy is dissolving these problems. But it sounds like you were saying by philosophy should not stipulate. You were saying something different than that, that you were saying something more like what Wes is arguing for, which is that these perennial philosophical problems will stay alive regardless of the outcome of science.

46:32 Philosophy: I was also saying that philosophical problems will exist regardless of the progress of science. I do also agree that the role of philosophy is to dissolve these. These problems. Some people have taken a really hard line stance out of Wittgenstein that, like, philosophy is. I'm not saying there's not a lot of bullshit done in philosophy, but I'm not saying something like there is no role for philosophy. What I mean by philosophy shouldn't stipulate is Wittgenstein seems to be saying the wrong way to go about dissolving these problems is to just declare an answer.

So let's say something like, you declare sentience is anything that is like humans but isn't a robot. Well, then someone might say, what if a virus got out, like a nanoparticle virus got out, and that eventually evolved techno organically into a robot, but it's made of the things that this robot we built is made of. So then you have to go back and stipulate something like, okay, nothing built is sentient but evolution, that's fine. And so you have to make these stipulations. When you freeze one variable, all of a sudden everything else goes haywire, so you have to start freezing new things.

And that's how you get philosophical problems of the sort that Wittgenstein is dismissing.

47:40 Wes: The idea is that you look at use in order to figure these things out and not simply stipulate, how are These words actually used. And so for some background, Gilbert Ryle was considered one of these ordinary language philosophers who variously were thought to sort of be working in the tradition of later Wittgenstein. But then they denied that they were doing exactly the same thing, or they denied his influence. And. And I think Wittgenstein didn't want to be associated with them either. I think he is still living when some of that stuff was going on. But the ordinary language philosophers as well, like Ryle, were focused on looking at how words were being used. G.E. moore was another notorious one for that. Right.

48:18 Dylan: I hear two things going on in this discussion about whether you can be doing philosophy. One would be that, well, at the end, all philosophy is, is a kind of therapy. It's therapeutic. What do we mean when we say that term, that it's therapeutic?

48:34 Wes: We had this in the Buddhism episode as well. The idea there was that Buddhist ethics was more therapeutic than Aristotelian ethics. And the idea was that. So, for instance, in Aristotelian ethics, you had to have the right sort of upbringing. And then developing these virtues was a matter of, I think, to some extent, habituation and learning, let's say. And the therapeutic idea is that you actually have to get rid of certain bad proclivities. So in Buddhist ethics, you have lust and these other poisons in your desire that you have to work to get rid of, and they're universal to all human beings.

So no matter how good your upbringing is, you have these things that need to be therapeutically gotten rid of. And I think that's the idea here with Wittgenstein, that once we start reflecting on things, once we start using language to talk about language, let's say, which is inevitably what we're doing when we're reflecting, we naturally develop these sorts of confusions that can therapeutically be removed when we learn not to play the wrong sort of game, when we learn not to involve ourselves in these confusions. And I think, again, looking at the way language is used is one way to get out of that.

So one of the confusions, for instance, is the way he starts logging whole work, which is the idea that ostension is a model for language in general, or the idea that these descriptive atomic sentences are a model for the way language works in general. That sort of approach, instead of looking at the way language is actually used, it's motivated by the attempt to theorize, by the attempt to create a model where we can make these very firm links between, let's say, atomic sentences and facts in the world. And then build up the rest of the. The world out of that.

That attempt to theorize and build a nice model to explain everything, I think goes out the window here. Those theories become misguided, and our propensity even to engage in that theorizing, that kind of theorizing behavior, I think he seems to think needs to be therapeutically removed.

50:34 Dylan: But this goes exactly to the other prong, which seems to me that you were speaking of, which was criticizing Ryle for dismissing the Cartesian argument, saying that even if there are problems with the Cartesian argument, things like that are still philosophically live and breathing. They're not laid to rest because they are useful.

50:57 Wes: No, actually, what I was saying was. So Ryle was arguing that. So I think most of us agree that Cartesian substance dualism doesn't work as a theory. But Ryle was saying it's not just that, it's a bad theory. It's not meaningful. It's not even a meaningful theory. It's a category mistake. And so I'm arguing that, no, it's actually it's a meaningful theory that meaningfully attempts to solve a problem. It happens to be a bad theory. But Ryle is saying something much stronger, and that's what I reject, the idea that it's simply meaningless.

51:27 Mark: I still think you could be. Without taking the hard line of Ryle. His conclusion, taking Wittgenstein's approach here, is useful for that problem. So you say, why do we think we have minds? Well, because we talk to each other and we use these terms like belief or desire, and we can sort of think about in what context we actually use them. But it would be.

51:50 Wes: That's just a post. You already have to believe that the theory is wrong. That's just a post hoc rationalization of why it's wrong. You're giving a genetic account of how did we come into this confusion. You're not really giving an argument of.

52:03 Mark: No, I'm not. I'm not saying in advance. That is a. Confusion. Confusion. I'm saying if you're going to make a claim that the soul is not a substance, the soul is not an object, then you have to come up with some. All right, well, maybe I am.

52:17 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

52:17 Wes: Because it could be the case that we have all kinds of motivations and even illegitimate motivations pushing us in the direction of saying the soul is an object. But that doesn't say anything about whether the soul is actually an object. So that's the genetic fallacy. Right. So whatever our motivations are, that's fine. It's great to give an account of human motivations. Once you believe it's false, once you believe we've made this mistake, then, yeah, we need to figure out, well, what motivated us? How did we fall into that trap? But unless we know already that it's a mistake, simply describing those motivations won't tell us that it's a mistake.

52:50 Mark: Well, I think that your point about the genetic fallacy gets exactly to the point of your problems with pragmatism before and the problems you're expressing with Wittgenstein here. All these folks say, for instance, going back to the thing we hashed to death in the pragmatism episodes about truth, and you said folks like Russell and even later pragmatists like Rorty wanted to distinguish between what truth actually is and how we figure out that something is true, which is exactly what a pragmatist like William James is going to deny. And I think Wittgenstein would also be denying that. That I thought in my Tractatus days, the truth following Russell, following Frege, the truth was this primary indefinable thing, that it's like a binary. Every atomic sentence either is true or is not true.

53:34 Unknown speaker: But.

53:35 Mark: But if you're going to take Wittgenstein's approach in this book, then you would have to say, in what context do we use the word truth? How do we learn about to act appropriately in these contexts? And it might just be the case that there are plenty of things that just aren't true or aren't false. Like, it's just. It's an inappropriate concept to apply. And I think maybe some of these. Is the mind the same as the body or something. Wittgenstein is going to say those two concepts come from different language games. And so there really isn't a yes or no answer. Just the concept of truth does not apply to that at all. Is that just nonsense?

54:12 Philosophy: The concept of truth doesn't apply to what?

54:14 Mark: To the claim the mind is the body or the mind is a separate substance from the body. Both of these involve some sort of grammatical mistake.

54:23 Wes: Those are meaningless for Wittgenstein. So, yeah, you can't.

54:26 Philosophy: Those are meaningless.

54:27 Wes: Well, I think for both isn't. Am I wrong about that?

54:29 Philosophy: Yeah, I don't think he wants to say that it's meaningless to say that the thing we are referring to with the mind. I don't know if he wants to say those are meaningless. He probably wants to say something like that philosophical problem isn't interesting or productive. Trying to decide is the mind the same as the body. What are you gonna do about that?

54:47 Mark: Well, it involves a mistake of language games. It involves a confusion of language games. And when you try to describe what the two language games are, you're doing exactly what I was trying to do that Wes was objecting to. You're giving a genetic account of how we found out about in know what is our interaction with body. Well, a body gets sick. If I punch you in the body, then, you know, there's all these things that we can say about how we know about bodies. And there are different things that we would say about how we know about minds or pains or something.

And so you could say that whatever the relationship is between these, at least this distinction of language is informative, that we don't have to be forced into this. What fallacy of misplaced concreteness, of putting them all in the same ontological category. It doesn't mean you have to take Ryle's hard line and say, day, it's actually meaningless to even ask the question. But there's something a little screwed up in asking the question, because these concepts don't come from quite the same place. So maybe the solution then is to elaborate a very complex story, you know, about emergence or something like this, about how these things relate.

55:47 Philosophy: Right.

55:48 Wes: And by the way, we do need to return a private language after we're done with all this, right?

55:52 Mark: Yes.

55:52 Wes: Okay.

55:53 Mark: But this is interesting. This is very on point.

55:55 Dylan: Part of this is that the claim about the relative truth value and that while we're doing lots of language games and stuff like that, that is in one way very second order, because you still have to use those games, right? So on the one hand, you can be conscious of the fact that you are participating in these games. And in fact, I suspect what Wittgenstein would say, that you are in fact conscious of this all the time, because you apply different kinds of language games in different sorts of situations and ways of life all the time. But you still have to also participate in a game.

56:31 Philosophy: No, no. Wittgenstein explicitly rejects second order philosophy.

56:35 Dylan: Well, okay, so this is where I want to understand it a little bit better, because it seems to me that in the way that you can talk about how all your practices are therapeutic, yada yada yada, the fact is you're going to have to have some practices and you will have some practices, even if they are somehow de facto or unchosen, and they will involve following some rules in a game. And you can be then conscious of that fact and maybe refine your games and maybe self consciously participate in a kind of therapy for them, but you're still going to be participating in a game. And so the discussion gets to be very second order about what you're doing rather than just doing something. Right. While all the while recognizing that there might be limits to what you're doing, but not harping on the fact that there are always limits to what you're doing.

57:27 Philosophy: So you're saying that what Wittgenstein is doing is second order in that he's talking about how language games work and then he says, and we use language games this way, but he doesn't ever do that. Right. So he's saying philosophy should be therapeutic. Let's not get wrapped up in arbitrary metaphysical questions. But he never shows you what we should be doing instead. Is that what you're.

57:45 Dylan: Well, I'm not saying that he would even want to say what we're supposed to be doing instead. Right. Recognizing that there are limits and that there's games involved and so forth would go a long way, say in a political realm to subverting dogmatism and that sort of thing. It seems to me that there would be an activity of more productively than others engaging in thinking about something. And one of the reasons I was thinking about this had to do with what Wes was saying earlier about Descartes and the usefulness of Descartes, mind, body dualism and stuff like that.

That I was not focusing on what his criticism of Ryle was. And to me it was interesting that it was worth understanding and thinking through Descartes claims and not because they were simply wrong, but because it is a structure. I don't know if it rises exactly to a language game, but a structured claim about the world and that that is a different kind of thing than what Wittgenstein is doing. Wittgenstein is saying something about the way we make claims about the world. That's what I mean by it being second order.

58:56 Philosophy: He's making claims about the way we make claims about the world.

58:59 Mark: Right. But I could see where you're. You could be critical of how he's not being positive enough. Because, for instance, that exchange that I just had with Wes about Ryle, I don't think Wittgenstein gives very good guidance on how do you tell a good account of what language games are going on from a bad way? Wes was saying that if I'm trying to give this genetic account of. Well, we come up with mind from certain interactions with each other and we come up with body from different interactions with each other. And Wes was saying, no, that's just all because you've already decided the issue in your head and you're making up these accounts after the fact. And I don't think Wittgenstein has a good way of telling us when we're just bullshitting about what is a language game and what is not. In situations like that, it seems to

59:42 Dylan: me that that's the kind of thing that Wittgenstein is going to fail to do. And in some ways this is the kind of problem that you have in pragmatism, which I'm also very sympathetic with, which is that you talk about the activity itself as activities without giving necessarily a lot of guidance about how you judge between individual activities, because you're going to maintain along the way that certain ways of doing things are better than others. You don't want to be fundamentally relativist in this respect. Maybe Wittgenstein will end up being extraordinarily relativist. I guess it doesn't seem to me that he is. That he seems to me to be pointing out a multiplicity and aspectualness to language that is intrinsic and fundamental, but trying to sidestep, at least, if not deny, utter relativity, which would sort of lead to a kind of meaninglessness.

1:00:36 Philosophy: It seems like he would just say that the best language games or the best way to play language games are just the ways that are most successful. So in that sense, I don't know if it's relative so much as relativized. Right. Like whichever language game is best going to accomplish. Conveying your meaning or conveying meaning. I don't want to privilege your meaning there.

1:00:56 Mark: Well, the problem move, which sounds circular the way you just.

1:00:59 Philosophy: Yeah.

1:01:00 Wes: The problem of relativism arises because the criterion of correctness is community use. And we can't really ask whether the whole community could be wrong about anything.

1:01:11 Mark: Right.

1:01:11 Wes: Right and wrong doesn't make sense at that level. Right and wrong only makes sense. Comparing the individual to community use, that's another long argument.

1:01:20 Mark: What immediately comes to mind there is ethics. And a couple episodes from now, we will have an episode specifically on Alasdair MacIntyre on virtue ethics, who is following up on Wittgenstein. In this way we can save the particular analysis of that very obvious but huge topic for then.

1:01:37 Philosophy: So it's relative, but in this really, really super loose way that, like, it doesn't matter what words you pick to refer to things as long as everyone agrees to that word. Right. So the color that we know is red it's relative in that other languages, words for red are perfectly good words, but it's not relative in the sense that, like, is red closer to orange than it is to blue and corresponding words?

1:02:01 Wes: Our semantic theory, though, right, has to give us grounds for true and false. And so if meaning is use, then we're not going to get a true and false. We're not going to get a correspondence theory, any kind of theory that is grounded in, say, comparison of language to the world. And so naturally, those relativistic problems arise, which is not to say it's necessarily relativist, but there's an argument to be had there.

1:02:26 Philosophy: I see what you're saying. I don't know how far I want to pursue this just offhand.

1:02:29 Mark: Yeah, let's punt that to a Rorty episode.

1:02:32 Wes: Yeah, that's in the future. And that gets boring very quickly.

1:02:36 Philosophy: Boy, does it.

1:02:37 Mark: One of the really positive things that I get out of this around 65 to 67 here is this notion of family resemblances, which we haven't brought up explicitly, but that's super important. It's exactly where we've been going with a lot of this. He uses the idea of a game partly to say, he says in 66, you know, consider all the things that we call games, board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games and so on. What is common to them all? Don't say there must be something common or they would not be called games, but look and see whether there's anything common to them all.

Well, if you look at them, you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. And then by 67, he says, I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than family resemblances. For the various resemblances between members of a family, build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. And I shall say, games form a family. And so this is actually going to be his overall toppling of what a definition is. Going back to Aristotle, where. And going back to Plato, where Plato says, you haven't said what justice is.

You've just given me some examples of justice. And you should be able to look at what all those have in common. And that's what justice is. And Wittgenstein is just flatly denying that. That's just not how language works. There might be a lot of things we call games or justice or virtue or truth, and they're just not going to be comparable. You can't just find something that's common among them or pick you know this is the right one or something. It's more a case. Normally when I would introduce this in a class or something, talk about you've got a paradigm case and then you have borderline cases.

So if you ask what is a bird? In essence, there really is no answer to that. But there is psychologically things that we typically think of when we call birds. And then things are like penguins or emus. They're, you know, things that we might not be sure whether it's a bird or not that are the borderline cases. Reading this this time, I discovered actually he wouldn't use that term borderline because he has a quote in here somewhere that says, what is a fuzzy border? Like there's nothing. There's a fuzzy border. Either there's a border there or there's not a border.

So if really concepts kind of melt into each other because we're getting out of the normal uses of the words, then you can't say there are borderline cases. You just say there are are cases that are part of a different language game or are not specified in the standard language game.

1:04:48 Dylan: But it seems to me that he's wrong about that. Right? There are all kinds of fuzzy borders. I don't really get that. Why would he deny that there are fuzzy borders?

1:04:55 Philosophy: It seems like what he's saying is

1:04:58 Wes: that there's ultra fuzzy borders.

1:05:00 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:05:00 Philosophy: You can't say like, oh, there's a border there, but it's kind of fuzzy. Let's clarify.

1:05:06 Wes: The borders are so fuzzy, they break down altogether.

1:05:09 Philosophy: Right. So the thing about borderline cases isn't that they fall one way or the other on the border and we just can't decide where. The thing about borderline cases is who the fuck knows? That's what makes it like, I don't know. Good question is the right answer to a borderline case.

1:05:23 Dylan: But what's interesting about that is let's say I have a border stripe. So what you're saying is that there are cases that are clearly away from the border on either side.

1:05:33 Philosophy: Right.

1:05:34 Dylan: Rather than being a line, there's a sort of no man's land.

1:05:37 Philosophy: Yeah.

1:05:37 Dylan: And that in fact there is a kind of gradation along that no man's land from one side to the other, and in this in between time, it's who the fuck knows?

1:05:48 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:05:48 Dylan: But in addition, there are cases where it's utterly clear one side or the other.

1:05:53 Philosophy: Yeah.

1:05:53 Wes: It's not clear that he's saying that all concepts work this way. In the same way that the concept of game does right. Not all concepts work by the overlapping family resemblances principle? Or am I wrong about that?

1:06:06 Mark: Could it be maybe the natural concepts that sort of arise organically, that those are all fuzzy? Whereas, yeah, you could invent a game where we just define something very specifically and then if that catches on, but

1:06:17 Wes: also like mathematical concepts, or there are lots of examples that are. You get nice strict delimitations of your concepts. Right.

1:06:26 Philosophy: So here's a really good example of what he's talking about. I think you're right that, like the natural concepts is a good sort of way to gesture at the concepts that have this property. But any attempt to figure out, okay, so find which words work this way and which ones don't, you're gonna end up not being able to draw a line between the kind of concepts that are fuzzy and the kind that are clear. Except bare. I think that one really helpful way to think about what Wittgenstein is saying is anywhere he makes an assertion, it's implicitly followed by except when it's not.

Which concepts are like this, the natural ones. Oh, except when it's not a natural one. Dylan, I think you're right. There are always. Not always. There are often clear cases and not clear cases. And then the border, no man's land is a good way to think about it. Here's an example that I never get tired of because I spend some time in the South. Baseball. Clearly a sport. Bananas. Clearly not a sport. Nascar. How do we feel about nascar? Sport, not a sport. Who knows in the south, they're going to insist, absolutely, it's a sport. Sport. Anywhere else, they're going to say they're just kind of driving cars real fast like that's not a sport any more than chess is a sport.

Some people are going to want to say no, but according to this criterion, chess is a sport, and that's just not how we use those words. There's not a right or wrong answer as to whether NASCAR is a sport. Yeah, spoiler alert. There is. It's not a sport. That's the right answer. But that's just me and the way that I typically tend to play the language game. But there's not like an absolute right or wrong way to answer that. Some people use that word in a very slightly different way than I do, and that's just all there is to it.

1:08:01 Dylan: But going to the community use case, if I then say, as long as I agree on my language game, I'm going to constrain the cases that are fuzzy to be many Fewer. So in the case with your example with nascar, it seems pretty much that it comes down to an argument about what you mean by sport and what language game you're engaging in. When you use that word and speak, speak of that universe of things and what the criteria are for calling something a sport. And then it becomes a discussion about that. It becomes a kind of semantic argument. It's the same thing with marriage. The whole marriage argument going on has to do with what you want to have that word mean. But you can also agree on the rules for what you mean by that word. And then it becomes much easier to speak about whether it falls in this category or that category because you've established the rules for. For it.

1:08:50 Philosophy: Well, you've established rules for. In a particular language game. Say, the legal language game. Yeah, right. So one really weird thing that Rick Santorum does is he gives this stupid fucking speech where he says that gay marriage can't be a thing because marriage just is by definition between a man and a woman. There's no such thing as gay marriage. And we would say, like, really? Because there's a law that says gay people can get married. And that's how that law uses that word. So the problem there is that Rick Santorum is trying to take a word out of context and freeze it when we can just agree to use it in this particular way.

But that doesn't become the meaning of marriage is this legal contract that just means in this particular language game, the legal language game, that word takes on this meaning. But that doesn't define once and for all, like all the ways people in America can use the word marriage. So he might say something like, well, but marriage in God's eyes exists between a man and a woman. And your response there wouldn't be, yes, it does. The law defines it that way. Your response would be, that's not the language game we're playing, asshole. We're talking about legally.

And those are different things.

1:10:03 Mark: Besides which, God's eye is infinitely large, so a gay couple could fit in there, no problem.

1:10:08 Philosophy: Yeah, right.

1:10:10 Wes: By the way, looking at 66, where he tries to debunk the notion that there's any common than property to games, I'm still sympathetic to the. The idea that games all have rules.

1:10:21 Philosophy: What about Calvin Ball?

1:10:23 Wes: Say it again.

1:10:23 Philosophy: Calvin Ball.

1:10:24 Dylan: Calvinball in Calvin and Hobbes.

1:10:27 Wes: Go ahead and describe it.

1:10:28 Philosophy: Calvin Ball is a game where you just make up the rules as you go. Someone can just declare a rule.

1:10:32 Wes: There's still rules, just making them up as you go.

1:10:35 Philosophy: But you can undo those rules whenever

1:10:36 Wes: you want, but then that's just another meta rule.

1:10:39 Dylan: Well, but I think this is a good example because it illustrates what happens when you end up making up the rules literally as you go along. Because what happens is that it always ends. In this case, it ends in violence or in an utter end of the game, because no one knows what to do. When I would go to the bus stop where I used to live and wait with the kids till the bus came, they're all like 8 years old and they would be throwing the football around or playing a game, 500 or something. And the way these kids would work is that the ones who were had, you know, essentially bullying kind of tendencies. They would all change the rules as they went along to their own advantage all the time.

1:11:23 Philosophy: Yep.

1:11:24 Dylan: And the frustration was palpable because they were not playing by the rules. And then after a while, they would assert a certain set of rules, and then they would tweak them again to their own advantage. Literally playing Calvin Ball, changing the rules all the time as you go along. And what ends up happening is that it becomes about a unspoken set of rules which has to do with the rules of the bully and the rules of power and stuff like that.

1:11:51 Wes: Yeah, that's no longer Calvin Ball, at least as I'm interpreting Calvin Ball, because I'm getting the sense of Calvin Ball, you're making up the rules as you go along, but it's a form of play. Right. The agreement is that you're making up the rules as you go along, and there's still this meta rule about what you're doing and how that constitutes play. Or take a simpler case with, say, something that doesn't look like we would call it a game, like two kittens playing, for instance, because we know animals play, and we know that's very important to development.

What are the rules there? Well, the idea is that, for instance, one kitten is biting another, but they're not biting to do harm. There's a certain amount of restraint involved. There's a certain amount of aggression, but there's a certain amount of restraint. And so there are these implicit circumscribing boundaries to what goes on, even to something that looks fairly amorphous, like cats or kids tussling around on the ground.

1:12:45 Dylan: Even in the case of the kittens or in the case of the kids, there are boundaries constraining their activity. So, for instance, it's not going to be the case that the kids are going to go over and grab a rock and start bludgeoning the other one

1:12:59 Philosophy: in general, you need opposable thumbs for that.

1:13:02 Dylan: So that's out as a new change in their game. Right. So there are boundaries to it, but the rules for how the game is played are literally changing all the time. So those two are different things. Having a boundary set is not the same thing as defining what the rules are.

1:13:20 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:13:20 Philosophy: I think, Wes, in order to make the point that, like, games are things with rules in this particular way, you're going to have to weaken the notion of rules so far that it's just what Wittgenstein is talking about with any general custom. That's like saying to do anything is to follow rules. To write a paper is to follow rules in a particular way.

1:13:38 Wes: Right. You'd need something else. You're right. And I'm thinking about this concept of play now, what makes play play.

1:13:44 Philosophy: Right.

1:13:44 Wes: But I think it's doable. I wish I had thought about it more before the podcast so I could make an argument. But I don't buy that it can't be done, that you can't give a theory of play, for instance, because that's really the implication is that if you can't give a common property, you can give a theory.

1:13:58 Mark: We're going to see this actually next episode. We're going to talk about this with regard to humor. So maybe we can put off some of this discussion and actually see if we can do it in practice. It's a. I find it perfectly sufficient to get from this that what defines a concept like this, like game, is that there are a set of. Like, you're saying that there are things that are clearly outside the role of games when you start killing each other. Other, unless they're the Hunger Games, I don't know. But for a given purpose, you have some paradigm examples.

And then again, to relate this to his point about meaning, the fact that you might have a specific image in mind that comes to mind of a game is not at all sufficient to get at what the meaning of that term is, even to you. That when I consider bird, what might jump into my head is a kind of neutral cardinal blackbird, something like that, and not an emu or whatever. But then actually, when I sit back and think about it, it, well, okay, what I mean by birds, since I understand more about birds, is something even if I can't really give a strict definition of necessary and sufficient conditions, I still mean something more than this particular image that came into my head.

And so that's really, you know, meaning is not about images in Your head.

1:15:08 Philosophy: And I think giving it.

1:15:09 Wes: Yeah, that's his claim. I don't think we should grant him that.

1:15:11 Philosophy: But giving a theory of play, I think that's different from giving a definition of play. And I think what's driving your intuition is that you know how to use the word play. When someone says, I'm playing a game to you, or I'm just playing, calm down, or whatever, you know what they mean, you know how to use that word. And you, like Russell and a bunch of other people think, like, I know how this word works, so I should be able to give a theory of it. I think that any theory of play you give, I think you have a pretty comprehensive theory of play that covers, like, almost all use cases.

And then I think some. Some clever bastards going to come along and invent a kind of play that your theory doesn't cover, and you're going to be like, fuck. That doesn't mean you don't know what play is or that you don't know how to use that word. Wittgenstein says it's totally okay that you can't give a definition. That's my point. That doesn't mean play is meaningless and we'd fall into chaos. Once again, he's just saying, that's fine. We can still use that.

1:16:09 Wes: Yeah, I understand the appeal of the argument. I just. I'm not fully convinced. And I think, yes, you develop these counter examples and then you refine your theory, and there's still some unity to the theory.

1:16:20 Mark: But, bro, I think you've given us an excellent segue of playing with yourself to get back to private languages.

1:16:27 Philosophy: Wow. I see what you did there. That was good.

1:16:31 Wes: Thanks, Mark. All right, so let's go back to 258. So let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end, I associate it with the sign S and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation. I will remark first of all that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated. But still, I can give myself a kind of ostensive definition. How can I point to this sensation? Not in the ordinary sense, but I speak or write the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation, and so, as it were, point to it inwardly.

But what is this ceremony for? For that is all it seems to be. A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign. Well, that is done precisely by the concentrating of my attention. For in this way, I Impress on myself the connection between the sign and the sensation. But I impress it on myself can only mean this process brings it about, that I remember the connection right in the future, but in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about right.

This is what I saw as the, you know, we talked about his argument surrounding the use of the word no. And this is what I took to be his argument having to do with the lack of a criterion of correctness, making this inner ostension meaningless. So this goes back to the failure of ostension at the very beginning of the work. And now, now someone's come along with a case where it seems like inner ostension might work and he's going to reject that. And this is also related. We talked in the last episode about the rejection of this idea of a mental rule, mental understanding of a rule as grounding meaning.

And here he's sort of filling out that argument. We're no longer dealing with a rule, but it looks like his interlocutor has come along and said, well, well, maybe rules aren't in the head, but sensations are. And Wittgenstein is going to say, nope, even with sensations, you're not going to get mental contents grounding meaning. Because the idea of meaning rests on the idea, this criterion of correctness, which you can only get through the public use of the sign.

1:18:52 Dylan: Let's say I'm brought back to this question of. Of how you made this recognition at all. Between this and that, seems to me this whole argument in 258 requires underneath it a kind of pattern recognition that you could have the ability to refer. Or the notion of recognition or remembering requires a kind of patterning that human intellect does. In fact, it would even be just human. So right down to the way we pick out things and this and that, it requires all that to happen happen in order for you to be doing this, just like the notion of ostension does.

1:19:28 Philosophy: Well, I think what he's saying is you need somewhere to store the pattern of the rule, and you can't store it in your own brain.

1:19:34 Wes: That's a good way to put it. Yeah.

1:19:35 Dylan: It just seems wrong. It might not be sufficient to undermine his claim that there's no such thing as private language, even if you don't have it as language. The recognition.

1:19:46 Wes: Yeah, exactly. I think, Dylan, you know, there may be the community practice grounding our use, but certainly we internalized these rules in Some ways, which is not to say we can accept that there's not this conscious mental content to which we have access and that allows us to interpret a rule. Our internalization happens at a much different level. You could say, well, it's completely unconscious, let's say. But obviously that internalization must occur. In other words, for us to be engaged in these games to get biological neural pathways must have been laid down. We have to have certain dispositions and propensities which are grounded in some sort of internalization.

1:20:25 Dylan: I guess. I suppose the reaction he would have would be to go back to this discussion about pain and the distinction between knowing you have pain and having pain. So he seems like he wouldn't deny that a person has sensations that are their own private sensations, but the way in which they know that they have them is going to be different. And I think is somehow the cusp of understanding the way language is working for him. It seems to me that what he's doing in 258 requires more than just sensation. It does require an act of mind in which we delineate things and group things and say this is an object. And it seems to me that happens even without language.

1:21:08 Wes: One clarification here is that when he talks about naming this sensation s I couldn't use the types of public language. I mean the types of words with which we're all familiar, like this throbbing pain in my big toe. Even if I use my own particular word for that, because in principle that could be translated it would have to be some sort of sensation which is so specific that in principle no one else could have access to it. So let's say I called it Wes's throbbing sensation in his big toe. On the other hand, I'm not naming specific instances.

It's not like I stubbed my toe yesterday and I named that Mary and I stubbed my toe today and I named that Paul. I'm not naming tokens of pain. I am talking about these general property descriptors. But again, they have to be so specific as to rule out the possibility of translation in someone else's language. Which seems to me saying Wes's throbbing toe pain may do that. I'm not sure.

1:22:05 Mark: Yeah, they're supposed to be type descriptions. Yep.

1:22:07 Wes: This argument is often taken as a sort of rebuttal to the idea of Cartesian private mental states. I'm not sure it's related because for Descartes to say I have this privileged access to my own sensations and no one else has access to them, I'm Talking about tokens, I'm talking about particular instances of my sensations. So when I say I just stubbed my toe and this pain mark, you don't have access to this pain. I'm not talking about type there, I'm just talking about this particular token, this particular instance. You don't have access to that. That of course you have access to the type. Of course you could know what it's like to have the same sort of throbbing toe pain in general. You just don't have access to this particular instance of my pain. I got the sense that maybe he was trying to refute that idea at some point, but I didn't see that.

1:22:59 Dylan: Why can you say, well, of course you could have some knowledge of the general case and simultaneously deny that you have access to my specific case. It seems that to really make the argument, you have to really assert individual identity strongly.

1:23:15 Wes: Suppose I walk into a room and you've just had your leg sawn off. There's two things going on there. I don't. Unless I've had my leg sawed off in the past, I don't know what it's like to have that kind of pain. And I also don't have direct access to what you're feeling at that moment. I may cringe, I may have a lot of empathetic access to what's going on with you, but there really is is an experience that you're having to which I don't have access. But of course, in principle I could have access if the same thing were about to happen to me in the future. So I'm not barred from type, but I am barred from token.

1:23:53 Dylan: Yeah, but having a baby, it doesn't seem like it's very hard to come up with cases that make it fundamentally individual identity.

1:24:00 Philosophy: Right, But a private language would mean you can't even talk about that. Just the fact that if he says it hurts like my leg is getting sawed off, you wouldn't say something like, no, it's not. No, that can't be how much it hurts. And it wouldn't be the case that you'd be like, I have no idea. Would that even so what, it hurts a lot or not that much? I don't. Help me out here. What does having your legs sawed off feel like? The fact that you can even talk about that level of pain indicates that there's not a sort of private thing going on. Even that sensation, which you've never experienced, even a token of you still have access to in the sense that you still understand the language being used to describe it.

1:24:39 Wes: Yeah, but I don't know what it feels like.

1:24:41 Dylan: Why isn't it just merely speaking by analogy? But it's still private. Why does the fact that I could speak by analogy mean that it is not possibly private?

1:24:52 Philosophy: Because I don't think that's what he means by private language. The fact that you're speaking by analogy means that you are using these public tools in order to name this.

1:25:03 Wes: Yeah, I thought we set that up from the beginning. Right, right. The examples I've given where you talk about the throbbing pain in your toe or I've just had my legs off, those are type descriptions, but they're not strong enough to count as a private language. I would have to. You had a made up word for sensation, right?

1:25:20 Philosophy: It was just some syllables. So pick your favorite syllables.

1:25:23 Wes: And then so of course you could use some made up word to refer to throbbing pain in the toe and that would be translatable. So that's not properly privateized either. But if you're referring to some specific sensation in which in principle no one else has access to, no one else has access to that type of sensation. So it's a very specific throbbing which happens to Wes, and it only happens in this way. And so therefore no one else can have access to it in principle, there's no translating. Ever. Now, my problem with that is that the private language argument is fine.

Private languages are impossible in the sense that Wittgenstein says they are. I just don't think they bear on Cartesian mental states. Because when someone argues for Cartesian private mental states, they're not arguing for types that are in principle unavailable to others. They're arguing for tokens that are in principle unavailable to others. I looked for this argument in secondary literature and I couldn't find it. Which makes me think that I'm probably just confused about something. Maybe this type token thing, this distinction that I'm making, falls apart at some point when you think about it first.

Further, but this is one of my obstacles to at least understanding this as bearing on Cartesian mental states. I don't get that. And then I wonder what the point of the private language argument is then, if it's not trying to rid us of this notion of private mental states.

1:26:43 Mark: I think it's trying to say something about language. I don't think it's trying to say something about this ontology of the mental like in the Tractatus, where there's things you can talk about and things you can't talk talk about. You could Gesture at them maybe. And some people then read the Tractatus and oh look, he's a mystic and there are biographical things and other comments he'd made and other things that point out that interpretation is legitimate. Actually I have a passage here about whether he's a behaviorist or not. But before reading that, I mean, I don't think he's trying to address the behaviorism issue.

He's just trying to address this linguistic issue. Right. You can't have ineffable private things. Okay, but you just can't have effable private things. And so if you're going to ask does that contradict Descartes? Well then you have to get into Descartes and try to figure out the specific things that he's saying about the mental. You know, does that violate what he's talking about or not? I'm not sure.

1:27:28 Dylan: What about just the notion of unspeakable things? Wes was going at this from the Cartesian token type kind of thing. But what about there being experiences or sensations which are unspeakable? Is that claim just denied?

1:27:43 Mark: I think not. I think he's not addressing that.

1:27:45 Philosophy: Yeah, so the only thing I can think of is to say, like, say more about what you mean by the thing that you can't say anything about. Could you have an experience that you couldn't possibly convey? Yeah, I don't think he could address that because what would that look like?

1:27:59 Dylan: I'm with Mark, the person who said this. And you tried to really pull it out of them, they deigned to give you an account in some way. Seems to me they could try to do that.

1:28:10 Philosophy: Right.

1:28:10 Dylan: And still say that, look, this is at best a bad analogy for me to try to translate for you that unspeakable sensation, experience, so forth and so on.

1:28:23 Philosophy: Yeah, I mean, that's why Thomas Aquinas stopped writing. The reason Thomas Aquinas didn't finish the Summa Theologica is he had a vision. And compared to what he saw, everything he wrote is like straw. That's all we know he respected. Look, look, I saw something. I can't describe to you what it is, but imagine that that two volume work that you think is a huge deal, it's just like straw. Yeah, that seems like he could be right, that that experience is ineffable.

1:28:52 Mark: To put this in Dylan's speak, I feel like the question here is can there be a separation of this from that without language? The way to figure that out in Wittgenstein, I would think is to look at the Many occasions sprinkled in here where he talks about answers, but I really did not know how he ultimately came down on it. I have one here, number 25, which is as clear as he gets, even though this is the first time I think he brings it up. It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity and this means they do not think and that is why they do not talk.

But this is him responding. But they simply do not talk. Or to put it better, they do not use language. If we accept the most primitive forms of language, commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history history as walking, eating, drinking, playing. So he's not denying the mentality and consequently I would think he's not denying the existence of these unspeakable experiences. I just, I don't think he thinks there's anything more to say about that

1:29:47 Philosophy: in virtue of there not being anything to say about them.

1:29:52 Dylan: Yes, well, but in denying that they're private languages, he would say that there isn't a self communication that a being has that relates those experiences one to another in a form that being understands but is unspeakable.

1:30:08 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:30:09 Dylan: He would lump them all together as mere experiences and sensations that are utterly unrelated to one another in the form of something like a private game. Because to have a private language, in his terms, would be to have a private game that had its own rules that were unique to it. And he would deny that that's possible while maintaining that you could have sensations but they wouldn't be related to one another.

1:30:31 Philosophy: So I think you would just say that it's not language what you're doing when you think of that experience, that's just not language.

1:30:37 Mark: And consequently in focusing on language in this way, like just the same thing when we were talking about meaning, does meaning mean something in the head? He wants to say no. Well, if you ask the question, like fine animals can't talk, can they think? He's going to think there's something fishy about that question, that that breaks the rules of language games. Because what we understand by thinking is something that you have to have language to be thinking as we understand it.

1:31:00 Unknown speaker: It.

1:31:00 Dylan: This is really good here. So what it would mean to say that would be that there's no way I can privately relate one sensation to another that doesn't amount to public language.

1:31:14 Mark: Yeah, I think that's right. Because you're picking out an objective this and an objective that and you're relating them to each other. Can you do it? But it'll just be screwed up because you think you do it one time. But then you know, since there's no place public third party to check, then the next time you look back and think you're making the same relation, then maybe you're making a totally different relation. You just don't know.

1:31:33 Dylan: That very example is making me think, well, this private language argument is not very strong at all.

1:31:38 Philosophy: Yeah, you're saying to make that relation is just language. So let's say that Aquinas had had two such visions and he could relate them. Let's say he saw Hume blue, like he really grasped that blue that no one has ever seen before. And someone said, what happened? You went into a trance again, he would say it was another vision like last time. Oh, what'd you see? I can't explain it, I can't describe it. There's nothing. But it was a vision like last time. And in that sense that relating one thing to another is done by way of language. So I don't know what you mean when you say relating this to that.

1:32:19 Dylan: Well, but I disagree that language is the facilitator of that relation. I would say that language is reflecting that relation that's being made, that pattern recognition is being reflected in your language. But it's not that language is facilitating or necessary for that relation.

1:32:38 Wes: Right.

1:32:38 Mark: Like a dog can't, you know, identify its bowl and then it's bowl later and you get the connection between the food and the bowl. And I buy Wittgenstein's response to that, that maybe. Well, you don't want to call that thought because when I'm using the word thought, it has something specific in mind that that is not. But there's still clearly something going on there. We could just call it dog thought. Fine. Maybe the move here is just the one that psychologists made, which is you could talk about cognition without talking about conscious thought.

There's clearly some identification that the dog is making or that we without language might, might make. But that in our case, if we reflect on our own experience, that reflection is completely riddled with language. So I don't think we as adults can make these sort of non lingual comparisons of things within our own mind or something like that. But that doesn't mean that there aren't things that we might say are unconscious that are going on in us and that are going on in the animals that we might as well, for other purposes call cognition or thinking.

1:33:39 Philosophy: So one question Wittgenstein might have, Dylan, is like, what would it look like if you're wrong. How would you be wrong in this sense of this is like that. Where's that internal criterion of correctness?

1:33:51 Dylan: I would not deny that it is in the sense of rules. But if you were to claim that there was a private language, it would be that you would agree that there were rules involved with it. That's what makes it a language. That's what makes it having expectations and making predictions and having patterns and stuff like that. But the fact that it's necessarily public, the way Mark was talking about it, made me think that language is a capability of thought. But thought does not require language.

1:34:22 Philosophy: So let's say second vision coming on to Aquinas, and he has a thought, oh, this again. And this doesn't really have a reference. It's just, you know, this that he's having right now. In that way, it's outside of language.

1:34:34 Dylan: Oh, it does have a reference, though. Right. It has a reference to the pattern that he had established from the thing that he identified before. It's in his memory.

1:34:41 Philosophy: Right, right. So what would it look like if he were wrong? How could he even be wrong when he thinks, oh, this again?

1:34:47 Dylan: Well, in the case that you've given, it would rely solely on the way he judged his memory. But I think you could use the same example with the experiences that, whether it be an animal or a human being, would have with any kind of physical thing. Again, the way you would interpret your relationship to the physical world could have the repeatability that you're wanting to get. That is how you would judge it to be wrong. And the simple way you would do it is that you would repeatedly do the activity and find out which ones were consistent and which ones were inconsistent.

And on that basis you decide whether you were right or wrong in your way of understanding it. But all those cases seem to me not necessarily required interaction with a community. It seems to me that the cultural and community aspect would facilitate it and maybe strengthen it and make it pass along more quickly, and that we get education and stuff like that. But to say that it's impossible. In fact, it seems to me that I might make a very strong argument that I must have the capability of having private language in order to have culture at all.

In order to have cultural, cultural language, period, I have to have the capability of having a private language. And it might be that in the end my cultural language becomes more powerful and in fact becomes in some important ways, the way I even think. I begin to think in words and sentences that come to me through culture. But that is not That I am incapable of having a private language. Nay, it's that I can have that that makes it even possible for me to have a cultural language.

1:36:22 Mark: There's one more part of the text I wanted to look at which I think might help to address this. It's 304 through 309. He starts with the objector to him. But surely you will admit that there's a difference between pain behavior accompanied by pain and pain behavior without any pain. So in other words, it sounds like he's been denying mental states in some ways. Well, his response, that is, admit it. What greater difference could there be? The interlocutor says, and yet you again and again reach a conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing. He responds, not at all. It is not a something, but it is not a nothing either. The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us.

1:37:05 Unknown speaker: Here.

1:37:05 Mark: The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose to convey things, thoughts which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything else you please.

1:37:17 Wes: What number is this?

1:37:18 Mark: This is 304.

1:37:20 Wes: It's a good one.

1:37:21 Mark: So it's really just a matter that, you know, you have these private sensations, fine. But when you're using the word pain, you're not actually just referring to the private sensation. How the word pain works is somehow more complex than that. And I think that this Aquinas example kind of gets at that. But interestingly, right, if you think Wittgenstein was a mystic, as he definitely seemed to want to be during some parts of his career, then if you can't talk about the contents of the mystical experience, there are still ways you could use language around it.

And maybe one of the ways is to say, oh, this mystical experience was like that last one. But when you're doing that, you're not exactly pointing out some inner quality of the thing and saying, this equals that you're doing something else with the word same. In both cases, you were meditating, you were having, you know, it's you sitting in the same position, and that's what's the same about it. It might be something less literal. I think Wittgenstein is going to have to say that if the word same is going to mean anything at all there.

1:38:20 Philosophy: Yeah, I think that's helpful.

1:38:22 Mark: Moving down to 307, the interlocutor is again saying, are you not really A behaviorist in disguise. Aren't you at bottom really saying that everything except human behavior is a fiction? He responds, if I do speak of a fiction, then it is a grammatical fiction. How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and state about behaviorism arise? The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them, we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter.

For we have a definite concept of what it means to know a process better. The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one which we thought quite innocent. And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we have denied mental processes and naturally we don't want to deny them. Can we dissect that a little bit? I'm sure that's not going to have been clear to the listeners just going through it.

1:39:20 Philosophy: I think what he's saying here is I'm trying to talk about processes and states without making any decision about the them. And I'm talking about them in a particular way, which seems to work in general, but sometimes we talk about them in different ways. We can't quite pin them down. And so now our inability to pin down processes makes it look like we're saying, oh, there are no processes. We have no idea what that looks like. But that's not what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to say like, what the fuck is a mental process? And the fact that I don't have an answer for that question might look like me being skeptical about their existence, but it's not. It's just me saying like, yeah, fuck if I know.

1:40:00 Mark: Well, I'm not sure if that gets up. What he thinks is the bad first step here. The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. And here's the first step. We talk of processes in states and leave their nature undecided so that the mistake is made, right, in forming the question, what is a mental state? And that means that either you have to say, oh, it's this thing, it is like Descartes, or it is equivalent to the brain, or you have to say, there are no mental states at all. I'm a behaviorist. And he thinks that that's a false dichotomy, that you don't either have to give it an ontological status or not give it an ontological status.

You can just say, well, I'm not making an ontological claim at all when I'm talking about mind. It's not that mind exists or doesn't exist. It's that the word mind is used in certain contexts. And what is the nature of this thing should not be one of those contexts.

1:40:48 Wes: I think Ryle is a behaviorist. Right, Right. Or did he deny that?

1:40:51 Mark: Right. I'm just using an analogy here. I don't know.

1:40:54 Wes: Regardless of the. He's not claiming that mental states don't exist, but he's saying that they can't ground meaning.

1:41:00 Mark: Yes. Which we've said in several different ways.

1:41:02 Wes: Right.

1:41:03 Mark: Already. Right.

1:41:04 Wes: But that's the important thing here. He's saying they can't ground meaning. And that may look like behaviorism, but he's still making that assertion that they can't ground meaning, which is still unclear to me that that's true.

1:41:15 Mark: And 309, which is a one sentence one right after what we just read. I've been waiting to read this the entire podcast since episode one. What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fl. The fly the way out of the fly bottle.

1:41:28 Philosophy: You fucked it up, God damn it. You've been waiting all this time and you said flay instead of fly. Mark.

1:41:35 Mark: I also said to show instead of. To shoo the way out of the fly. To shoo the fly the way out of the fly bottle. I almost called this podcast something like out of the fly bottle instead of the Partially Examined Life. That was one of my first. Because that was the idea that I really thought. And this is before talking to Wes, and Wes has kind of, over the years here, convinced me that these perennial questions really are perennial in an important way. But I think I started this podcast with the idea that, like, I can approach all this philosophy with a kind of flippancy because I agree with.

With folks like Wittgenstein that these are all just kind of bullshit illusions of language. So I've comfortably escaped the fly bottle. Ha ha. I no longer worry myself about these philosophical matters, and I really didn't for years before this podcast came along and got me reading these things again.

1:42:29 Wes: Wow.

1:42:29 Mark: Yeah, I'm not saying that I still don't think a lot of the problems are bullshit linguistics, but some of them at least are not or are interesting enough that, you know, it's like I was saying that maybe the solution to, say, the mind body problem is not like Ryle says, you know, it's a category mistake, just write it off as a grammatical problem. But it's also not to force an ontological solution on it. You know, in a simple way, say either there is mind body identity or there is mind body duality. But that, no, we have to really look at again the genetic accounts of where these words came from.

But also more than just the genesis. We have to use whatever means we have at our disposal to investigate the natures of the things, scientific, neurological studies, whatever, and try to make some sense of it all. And I would think in the case of the mind body problem, that what you would come up with is some convoluted count of emergence, which we'll have to talk about in a future episode.

1:43:24 Wes: And for background listeners should know that it's not even in analytic philosophy and philosophers may be wrong about it, but it's not the prevailing view that philosophical problems are just problems of problems grammar.

1:43:35 Philosophy: No, it's really not.

1:43:36 Mark: No.

1:43:36 Wes: Maybe just because they've been more corrupted by Russell and Frege than they should have been.

1:43:41 Philosophy: Well, I think this is a really good. It's good that you guys are doing MacIntyre eventually because MacIntyre takes himself to be recovering a proper way to do philosophy. MacIntyre doesn't think that all philosophy is language and we just need to get to the grammar of goodness. But we don't just analyze these concepts and come with up, up with questions that are binary, like is this thing good, yes or no? As a virtue ethicist, he thinks it's more fuzzy than that. But not that there aren't philosophical problems, just that philosophical problems look very different than analytic philosophers tend to treat them.

1:44:17 Mark: Any other closings? Anybody just want to bitch about how frustrating it is to read Wittgenstein, who does not proceed in any kind of logical order. He talks kind of circles back on ideas and says these things about the therapeutic nature of philosophy in like five different places in the book. It's like he reaches this climax where he gets his method very early on, like around line 80 or 90 and then yet he has 500 more verses after that.

1:44:46 Wes: It's enjoyable. It's just also very confusing.

1:44:49 Mark: I found it enjoyable when I started. I was just reading the most of the stuff that we talked about in the first time, like, wow, this is great. But then as I was try to slog through to get to the private language argument and I actually read the sections in between the two assigned sections which were just fucking all about rule following for 30 pages and oh, so

1:45:08 Wes: there's where you went Wrong.

1:45:10 Mark: And then. Yeah, and then I tried also. I actually, I did get to the end of book one, you know, after the part we read, there's still another 30 pages or something of just more about pain and can share. Think if a chair could they wear. Would the thought be in the chair?

1:45:26 Wes: Mark, you should. You should know by now that it's quality of Wittgenstein accounts, not quantity.

1:45:33 Mark: Yes, yes.

1:45:34 Philosophy: I feel vindicated in my refusal to summarize the Philosophical Investigations after arguing with you guys about it for six hours and covering something like 20 of the several hundred propositions that we.

1:45:50 Mark: Yes, but we got most of the ideas, not the examples. There are a lot of interesting other things that he has to say. You know, about names and why isn't the word this a name? Like there's a whole section on that.

1:46:01 Wes: We at least said all the right keywords, rules, family resemblances, private language.

1:46:05 Philosophy: We definitely covered a lot of ideas. Of course, one central battle of the Wittgenstein wars is what the fuck are actually the ideas here that he's saying? And every time I read this, I get completely new things. There's just so much in this text, or nothing, depending on.

1:46:24 Wes: It's a lot of nothing.

1:46:26 Philosophy: But it's something, but it's also nothing. But really not either.

1:46:30 Mark: He's playing games with it. He just grows it very gradually. What about this example? What about this one? Maybe I won't actually give an answer to any of them. I'll just keep asking more and more questions so that one of the analyses, I think in Stanford or something of the whole book was, you know, he's trying to establish what's a legitimate question. He's not even trying to answer anything.

1:46:50 Philosophy: For me, the most important takeaway of this book is when someone says something and you're like, oh, well. And you correct them and they say, you knew what I mean, you're the asshole there, not that person, because you did know what they meant. And Wittgenstein is. I think he is really trying to humanize Florida philosophy.

1:47:08 Mark: It's the fly that just keeps getting sucked back into the fucking bottle. Getting sucked back?

1:47:14 Wes: Yes. Philosophers went about their business. Unfortunately, after this, this book didn't put it to an end. So put an end to it.

1:47:22 Philosophy: And we didn't put it to an end either. I'm really disappointed that we couldn't figure out all of the investigations in these six hours together.

1:47:29 Mark: We tried all of philosophy.

1:47:30 Philosophy: Another hour, maybe we could have done it. But alas,

1:47:35 Mark: next time we will be reading Henri Bergson's. Laughter. An essay on the meaning of the comic from 1900. And we'll have a real comedian on the air with us. Make sure to check out partiallyexaminedlife.com for a discussion about this and many other things. Donate some money to us. Gee, thanks.

1:48:01 Philosophy: Hey, I actually am. I'm drinking it every time you do it. That was the game I was playing the whole time.

1:48:05 Mark: Thank you, bro.

1:48:06 Philosophy: It was my pleasure, guys.

1:48:07 Mark: Thank you for joining us, bro.

1:48:09 Wes: Yeah, thank you.

1:48:10 Philosophy: Thanks for having me on, dude.

1:48:12 Mark: Good night.

1:48:13 Philosophy: Good night, guys.

1:48:14 Wes: Good night.

1:48:14 Dylan: Good night,

1:48:28 Philosophy: Sam.

1:48:52 Unknown speaker: I can really touch to the you because you're not a woman rather I can't talk at you out loud to myself as I do but standing at this distance I'd like to understand I didn't know it meant that much to you. Yes I know I am arrogant as hell at some points but it's empty just a way of dealing with myself and things and you know how easy it is to be kind of a bastard you obviously need the defense you ripped me for doing what sustained you you ripped my sentimentality and I find this bloody mess you don't care what we're doing here but you don't lord like hell I'm what you've done if it's just because you feel in it I can't but think that you have caused but I did know admit that much to you closed at the end up on your palms cuz I was done using it and I was done

1:50:00 Mark: using you

1:50:04 Unknown speaker: may you let me I take that back too. Am I trying to apologize or rip back neither seems necessary and I don't know which I want standing at this distance I hardly give a damn but I didn't know it meant that much to you you ripped me for doing what sustained you you ripped my sentimentality and I find this bloody mess you don't care what we're doing here which I don't like hell and what we've done if it's just because you feel in it I can't but think that you have cause but I didn't knowing that that much to you didn't get you much applause and now it's done

1:51:06 Mark: using you

1:51:09 Unknown speaker: now I'm done using you you're with me. You with me.