Ep. 309: Wittgenstein On Certainty (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 309 is what is certainty? We're discussing Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty, a collection of aphorisms composed before his death in 1951, but not published until 1969. For more information, please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin. That's how it is. Rely upon it.

0:34 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas. There is no why. This is just me acting.

0:40 Wes: This is Wes Alwan relying on the testimony of others in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:46 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey not making a mistake. About 12 times 12 is equal to 144 in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:54 Wes: Unless you're demented.

0:55 Mark: It's all built to this, or rather the past two episodes. If you saw, hey, Wittgenstein's a famous philosopher. I always wanted to know about Wittgenstein. And you went right to this, this. But you avoided the two previous episodes on GE Moore. Stop right there. Go back.

1:10 Wes: I guess because this is all about Moorean propositions. I think that phrase is going to come up a lot. So it'd be nice if you know what they are. Maybe we should say what they are.

1:21 Mark: We could sum that up. It's hard to give an intro to say, here's what Wittgenstein is all about here because of. It's maddening. As we've said in our Philosophical Investigations episodes long, long ago, his style, where this is about 90 some pages. And originally we were like, you know, we probably. We should do close reading on this, like, let's do two episodes on it. But he just goes back over the same ground over and over and over and over. It's such that maybe we'll do two episodes. I'm not ruling it out until we get to the end of today, but it would be at least very peculiar if it were to line up that we did the first episode on the first half of the book and the second half.

So on the second half, because they're basically about the same thing. It's just he's growing closer and closer to his impending death and he knows he's going to die, and he just keeps without seemingly even looking back at his previous notes, like, I'm going to take another stab at saying this one sentence, what I think is the right way. So, you know, we had a few extra days to work on this beyond what we thought we all got to the end of the book. But it's a lot of material. Wes, you were trying to summarize it by section, and it was way more than could possibly be what you got 2/3 of the way through the book.

2:32 Wes: I got 2/3 of the way through. And normally I would like. This would get more processing, but you at least got like my italicized little summaries of sections. But I was trying to recreate the, like, what if we were trying to rewrite this as an actual essay and that. Yeah, it's taking forever and it was exhausting, so I fell on the field of battle. But I mean, I like, I enjoy looking at someone's notes, actually. I mean, I enjoy looking at him trying to think this stuff through. But this is something that ultimately would fit into an essay and would benefit from that. And trying to discuss this in the form that it is, I don't know how that's going to go. It's going to be hard. It's all over the place, all these little fragments and like you said, many of them repeating themselves. And so you get different pieces of the same argument in many different places in this book.

3:17 Dylan: I hesitate to say this, but I haven't read the Tractatus. You guys covered it like in the first 20 episodes or something like that.

3:24 Mark: It's not necessary at all.

3:26 Dylan: No, I understand that. My question has to do with his style of writing. So the Tractatus is the only thing that he published in his lifetime. Philosophical Investigations is posthumously published, and this is as well. And what I'm wondering is, is the Tractatus as aphoristically styled? I mean, hyper aphoristically, or is it

3:46 Wes: more essay like it is in the same. It's a bunch of little pieces, right numbered pieces. But it is more structured.

3:52 Mark: It's more like Descartes Rules for the direction of the Mind. Like, it is structured, but it's structured like a geometry proof, not like a diary. Yeah, I mean, it becomes a D. So I wasn't going to take notes in my normal way at all on this because I felt like the fact that he's repeating so much means that I'm already sort of being reminded in the way that I would if I did a second pass to take notes. Instead, I was going to just spend time on secondary literature because people, you know, have written whole books on this book and broken down the themes.

I was looking through one of them and it was pulling a lot of stuff from like 600 some aphorisms. It was pulling stuff from the four hundreds. I'm like, okay, maybe we gotta get at least that far. Like, that seems to be maybe where he. He was being a little more conscientious in his delivery. But toward the end, I just like, no, let me actually just go back and skim this from the beginning and take notes in my normal way. And I got pretty much exactly halfway through, like, the place we were gonna stop according to plan A that had been abandoned some weeks ago.

4:52 Wes: Yeah, once you start taking notes, it becomes a whole new world, different thing. Maybe we should have just not taken notes and just shot from the head.

5:01 Mark: Seth, give us your initial impressions.

5:03 Seth: First off, I don't know why it bothers me, but to see schön spelled S C H O E N or whatever, shun it was shoon to me somehow, just grates against me for reasons I can't explain.

5:18 Dylan: Damn that Germans

5:21 Seth: well, so one of the great anecdotes of my life that I tell myself is trying to read the Blue and Brown books and getting so frustrated that I threw them into the canyon behind the Reed College Student Union in the water. And I claim that if global warming ever dries it up in there, somebody will find my copy of the Blue and Brown books in there. And my initial response was, oh, shit, here we go again. Like, this is what I hate about the later Wittgenstein. And then I thought, if I was dying, is this the thing that I would be obsessing about and spending all my time on?

Probably not. And then I thought, well, okay, let's try to take seriously what he's trying to accomplish here. And, you know, Wes, you had pointed to the Routledge companion. I think it is. It is repetitive and tedious and annoying, but thematically, it's on a point. If you can put up with it. You keep feeling like you're going backwards and you're starting over again. And so if what we can do is just at least piece together a semblance of, like, here's the concern. And there are four or five really good ones, I think. At least four or five really good, interesting points to bring out in relation to the Moorean propositions and then maybe tease out, like, how did this set off the trajectory for Anglophone philosophy afterwards, Make a connection there?

I don't want to spend the next 10 episodes pursuing that line of inquiry.

6:44 Dylan: To me, well, because it's notes and notes in a kind of radical way. It's dying to be put together into a final, coherent, a complete thing. So it's one of the Few cases of stuff that we read where I'm not immediately thinking, well, you should just go read this. You can certainly read it. I do think that something like the Routledge Guidebook brings some of the thematic things together in a very sensible way. You don't feel like he's torturing. This is. Andy Hamilton is the author of that. It feels very true to having read On Certainty. And besides bringing in some nice analysis of More and setting things up so you don't necessarily have to go read the More ahead of time.

It brings together those themes that you're talking about, Seth, and connects them up. And he has a lot of quotes in it. But it's one of the few cases that I would say, well, if you ask me what should I do if I want to read On Certainty, I might tell you to go read the Routledge rather than go read the book.

7:45 Wes: Yeah, the Routledge is good. I didn't expect to get so into more, as I've said, or into this book. That's why I suggested to Mark that we do two Eastern philosophy episodes next because I am hoping that I won't get sucked in as much.

7:59 Mark: I see I didn't get the psychological point.

8:03 Wes: I need a break from this. But you know, the reason why I get so involved in it, it just lines up with things that I've been thinking about for a long time when it comes to discourse and freedom of discussion with respect to Mill, but specifically with the conception of conspiracy theories and what. Yes, it does it is to be a conspiracy theorist. And what conspiracy theorists. What the problem is with them other than the fact that they're paranoid. But what is not working?

8:31 Dylan: And what would it mean to talk about engaging or not engaging or even what it would mean to say, well, you can't even refute them. I mean, that whole conversation is really related to this. I completely agree, but we shouldn't do that as the next episode.

8:48 Wes: We could do conspiracy theories at some point, but not next. So Wittgenstein really speaks to this because he's getting at an aspect of epistemology that historically, I think, up to this point has been ignored, which is that many of the things that we know, it's not because we know them, because they're a priori or logical propositions or clear and distinct. They're right there, immediately available in their minds. Nor do we say that we know them because we have direct empirical evidence and experience of them. Most of it comes from something that's much different.

It involves testimony in the sense. Right. What we learn from others. From teachers, from textbooks. Right. What I know about physics, I assume that it's empirically based, but it's not empirically based immediately for me. I just know that it's part of an empirically based system that many human beings have participated in over many centuries and many years. But I have to be able to. This is what conspiracy theorists lack. I have to be able to trust, if not in human beings, in that system, which is a word that Wittgenstein will use in that whole structured system of knowledge.

And then there are other aspects of this system, too. It's not just all about testimony, but it's about the way all the propositions fit together. It's about coherence. And that's part of what Wittgenstein is really trying to figure out in these reflections. I mean, and these, these ultimately are what we've been calling Moorean propositions. Like, the Earth is very old, it's older than. Than me, and it was around a long time before I was born. It sounds like a very straightforward empirical proposition when you start thinking about it. But Wittgenstein will argue this is a type of proposition that is more, actually more foundational to our knowledge and to quote, unquote, language game that we're in.

It's almost like a logical proposition or a rule of the game, as opposed to some sort of observation within the game that can be validated within the game.

10:37 Dylan: Well, in fact, most of them end up being that way. His criticism of effectively saying, I know these things, he's going to basically refine what it means to say, I know. And that is not a Moorean way of saying that. And I like Wes, that you're pointing to the refinement both of. There's a kind of consensus, a kind of testimony of things, but also reminding that there is sort of these principles of the rules of the game, part of which are going to be these things like consistency and wholeness, but they're going to end up being. I think Wittgenstein opens it up to a way in which there'll be concise spots within language games that will have their consistency, and consistency will be a feature, but you will have effectively different gradations of disagreement and kinds of mistakes that can be made.

There's even a conspiracy theorist, which I think is a great case to think about. They're demanding consistency, but in just a completely different way. In the ways that they're treating certain kinds of facts, they're speaking English, they're putting things together in a consistent way. Of a certain kind of consistency.

11:53 Wes: I brought them up because they are the ultimate skeptics in a way. I think it's a much more pressing skeptical example. And they. Someone might say, well, they just don't believe in science. They reject the science in many cases, actually, they're hyper scientific.

12:05 Dylan: They're hyper scientific, Exactly.

12:07 Wes: Get on a 911 is an inside job website and you just see buckets and buckets of supposed data, right? And you see testimonials from such and such a person with a physics degree about whether jet fuel can burn this or that. And all these speculations. And it looks all very. But what they lack is they don't trust in this larger. That they can't do it all themselves. You look online and see people doing stupid experiments, trying to see if a building will fall if you drop something on it. Their little model of a building, hey, that doesn't collapse that way.

So they think they can do all the experiments for themselves. None of it works that way. We are all beholden to a much larger discursive project, a discursive system. And there's a discursive chain of custody. There's a reason why I believe that Lincoln existed, even though I never met him, and it could all be faked. I trust in that overall system and what Wittgenstein calls historical evidence and in what I would call a discursive chain of custody. And I trust that because, I mean, there are things that Wittgenstein doesn't get to. But a lot of it has to do with, I think I know something about human psychology, what motivates people and that conspiracy theories are implausible.

13:16 Mark: These are really fascinating and I'm excited that you really focused on the testimony piece. I saw this as the connecting text between his talk about language games in the Philosophical Investigations. So we should refresh a little what that is before we get too far into this. And then the philosophy of science stuff, Kuhn's paradigms, Lakatos's research programmes. Because he starts off the essay talking just about these Moorean sentences. This is my hand. Another one he considers that's not one of Moore's, but could have been Moore's is. My name is Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Like, how could I be mistaken about that? These very obvious things, these are the ones he really obsessed about. But then he moves on toward. Because one of Moore's propositions is the Earth has existed for a long time. Or to get more specific. So he sort of plays with variations of this, like this mountain is Very old. In particular, the mountain. It's a gradual line from the things that. It just seems inconceivable that you could be wrong about your hand being there. I mean, maybe you're dreaming. We talked about that last time to things about, do I know for sure that the Earth existed before I was born?

You know, we're getting more and more into actual scientific propositions. And so seeing how something like, you know, even though this is my hand and the Earth existed before I was born, have a very different feeling in terms of how I would verify them right now. Like, it seems like I could verify the hand just by showing it to you, by looking. How do I verify that the Earth existed before I was born? There's nothing I can point to in a similar way, I would have to point to geology. You know, there's a lot of things we can do there, sort of supporting, but it's a foundational underlying thing.

So it sort of gets at the central propositions within what Lakatos called the research program or, you know, central proposition within one of Kuhn's paradigms or something. A worldview that has some solid things at the center or solid guide rails and then things in the outer fringes that could be actually investigated.

15:12 Seth: Let's try to get at what was disquieting about Moore's proof to Wittgenstein, because he obviously was struck by it. Let's keep the earth being old thing away and let's just focus on here's a hand, right? So Moore says, I hold my hand in front of it. Here is a hand. I cannot be mistaken. I know this. And I'm not mistaken about it. I can't be mistaken about it. It sounds like he has an absolutely certain empirical proposition about the external world. And then he says, because I know there's at least one thing. And then I hold my other hand and I say, here's another hand.

That's two things. There's at least two things out there. And Wittgenstein is not disputing the certainty, so to speak, at least the initial prima facie certainty of Moore's assertion. In fact, he says, oh, my God. He's highlighted. He's identified this class of propositions that certainly do seem to be unimpeachable, right? Non controvertible. But he's not convinced that they do the philosophical work that Moore thinks they do. He's just confused and he's concerned. So a couple things that come out of it is he says, they seem like they're empirical Propositions like, there is a cat on the mat that could be verified, but they're not.

They look like propositions like that, but they're not. And then the other piece of it is, it's strange to even say that. You would never, in the course of normal discourse, be like, we're talking right now, and if we weren't talking about philosophy, I would never hold up my hand and say, here's a hand, or this is my hand, or whatever the proposition is. He's like, isn't that.

16:44 Mark: Isn't that why kids raise their hand in school? Because they're just saying, this is a hand, teacher. This is. I'm showing my knowledge that there's a hand here.

16:51 Seth: They're shifting the discourse from whatever they're into philosophy. Yeah. So he's like, okay, there's a couple things wrong here. One is they look empirical, but he doesn't think they are. They are out of place. Like, it just seems strange to even say them in the normal course of a conversation. Like, why would you even bring that up? And then if you do, what you're certainly not doing is philosophy as far as Wittgenstein is concerned. And that's kind of like the starting point of, like, why was this vexing him so much?

17:18 Wes: You're pointing to something important, Seth, which is that in his Common Sense paper, where Moore lays out what we're calling the common sense propositions or the Moorean propositions, this is a hand is not one of those things. Right. What he gives are the long list of propositions that he thinks are quote, unquote, truisms that we know with a certainty. And they involve me being in a present and living human body that was born in the past and has been growing and been near the earth or touching the earth for its entire trajectory. The fact that I've had experiences since I've been born, so there's aspects of it that have to do with me specifically and then aspects that have to do with the world.

That there are all these things in space time, and there are other people and other minds, and they can say many of the same things that I say about myself, about themselves. So all of that stuff, it does feel a lot different than this verification or checking procedure that Moore also talks about when he talks about looking at your hand as a proof that you know something. I think what Wittgenstein thinks is that Moore thinks that there's something incorrigible about knowing in the way. Right. That there's something incorrigible about Believing if I say if I feel that I'm in pain, then I am in pain.

There's no I can't be wrong about that. Those two things just kind of run together. And I think Wittgenstein thinks that Moore was sort of trying to use a strategy of saying that no is in some ways like that if I really do know it, then I can actually infer things from it. Right? If I really know that P is the case, then P. So it's almost something like the certain quality of a mental state that if I'm aware of it as such, I've shown something. But in the end, all these Mark called it verification. Wittgenstein calls it various things at various points, like a settling procedure or settling our doubt about something, or calculating, checking, those sorts of things.

And it's going to turn out that that's not really a check in a way that Moore thinks it is. And these aren't propositions that can be checked in that way. If I wanted to say Venus is in a certain part of the sky tonight. No, it isn't. It's in that part. There's a checking procedure within our language game, and we could talk about what that means in a second that will resolve that dispute. But these more fundamental propositions, they're too foundational. There's no checking procedure within the game.

19:40 Dylan: This is part of the clarification of what knowing means. Wittgenstein is, I think, separating knowing into things that you can be mistaken about or not be mistaken about, and other things that go into that activity of knowing. So those fundamental components of the language game, those aren't a question of knowing. So the example you gave about Venus, right, We can have two different conclusions and then go and adjudicate that, say, well, I know Venus, blah, blah, blah, and you know Venus this, blah, blah, blah. One of us is wrong or both of us are wrong.

And there's a way in which I can know that or I can be mistaken about that. The example that I opened with, that's in mathematics of 12 times 12 is 144. And what kind of mistake you're making when you say, well, 12 by 12 is not 144, 12 times 12 is 163. And we say, well, you're just wrong about that and you've made a mistake. And we can be very articulate about what that mistake is. And cases with Venus is, you can be similarly articulate about that. And the other cases I said, you use the appearance of empirical claims. There are cases where you Making a mistake about it is different.

Wittgenstein is clarifying not knowing as being things you can make a mistake about.

20:56 Wes: We should distinguish the Moorean common sense propositions from what we might think be checks that verify we know them. Right? So that they're physical things is just common sense. And that's what Moore thought he could prove to us. And that other paper. And the proof involves this looking at the hand and seeing that it's something to be met with in space and saying, therefore it must be mind independent. One of the things to come out of this is that, yeah, as Dylan is pointing out, the checking procedures don't work. And then knowledge in the case of these particular Boran propositions, because they turn out to be more logical in nature, and then to say that we know them becomes kind of odd unless we're saying it involves a procedural knowledge or kind of know how.

But to say that we know that, that we know them as propositions becomes sort of an odd thing to say. Because normally knowledge involves giving grounds for propositions to giving reasons and saying why and at that layer, that foundational layer. We can't do that.

21:52 Dylan: In the last episode, one of the things we pointed out is that the way Moore was talking about some of these, his proof of the external world was reminiscent of Aristotle's proof of the principle of non contradiction. That isn't a proposition that you can then derive the solution, oh, non contradiction is not a knowing thing. It's a feature of the way in which you are doing your knowing. You may say, well, the following is false because it contradicts, right? You end up using that, for instance, as a method of underpinning your knowledge. So Moore's proofs about the external world have that similar kind of feel to them. Is it on common sense that he doesn't give up? But he admits, I can't go any further than this in terms of sort of demonstrating or making it plausible that I know these things.

22:44 Mark: I mean, I think that's proof of the external world. Just that you got your conclusion and then you got your premises. And the premises are like, I know that my hands are here. Someone might demand, well, prove your premises. But no, it has to stop somewhere. So what Wittgenstein is giving us in bringing forth his language game talk to. This is, I think, a more sophisticated way or a more suggestive way of talking about when proof has to stop. You could always step outside a language game. I didn't read enough of the secondary literature to get really comfortable with this, but certainly from our discussions before about truth and things, you could talk about the object language, the language you're talking about, and is it the meta language, the one you're using to talk about the object language?

So in other words, you could have a particular language game. His big critique of more in trying to give a proof. I mean, that sounds like a mathematical proof. Like with mathematical truths are supposed to be just true in all situations, they're just truths. And that's not the way things work. When you're talking about people's actual utterances, they have a context. So he keeps using this word language game. Language game really just means the context of utterance. What are you and the person you're talking to trying to accomplish in having this conversation at all?

And so clearly it would be very inappropriate. Let's say you're doing a guessing game. I've got my three card monte or whatever. So I've got a shell game. I've got my shell under one of the three cups or whatever and I move them around and you know, do you know which one it's under? It would be inappropriate when you guessed the center one for me and did not even show you whether you were right or not, but say, well, actually you can't know either way. You can't know the existence of the shell or the cups at all. That's not the game we're playing.

So there's. The philosophy game is sort of the ultimate meta game, the meta language that you're stepping back from any particular situation and that is, you know, would get us eventually to a view from nowhere, to nonsense, to the sorts of predicaments that philosophers get themselves into by taking language out of its original context and asking questions about it. And like, it's fine to do that. But Wittgenstein's form of philosophy is supposed to be a therapy. And actually he reads more as having done that as well. The Connecting Tissue, one of the secondary sources, this Avrum Stroll book.

Moore and Wittgenstein On Certainty and pointed out a specific paper by this guy Norman Malcolm, who Wittgenstein talked to specifically about this, like before writing this. And Malcolm is saying that Moore already had taken a linguistic turn. In fact, one of the things Malcolm was arguing is that a common sense proposition can never be false. Right? Philosophers come around all the time and like, you think that this caused this, but actually causality doesn't exist. I'm Hume. Ah, you know, you think that there are physical objects in the world, but I'm Berkeley and physical object is a Self contradictory concept.

Ha. So Malcolm's interpretation of more is to say that Moore was saying, no, there's a context in which these things are used. And when I talk about physical objects, Moore doesn't use this term language game. But of course there are physical objects. In the context of my identifying my hands, you know, that that is a language game, the everyday context, the common sense context, and that philosophers who try to pull things to a deeper level are missing something.

26:09 Wes: You're making two important points there, and one of them is just about what Wittgenstein means by language game, right? Which is we got at it a little bit in our Philosophical Investigations episodes. We might naively think about it as the game is a very simple game. It's I'm labeling the world, I'm referring to things, and there's my game, and I mean things by words, and that's it. But it's more game like than that in the sense that it is rule governed. Just like games have rules, language has rules. Some of that comes out just in the grammar, right?

What words you're allowed to put after others in general and what words you aren't. But also the game likeness comes out in the fact that when we learn a language, you know, it's like learning tennis or something, the knowledge that's involved is procedural knowledge. There are knowledge of language, how to use language, or knowledge of grammar and logic. And all of that are a matter of know how. They're procedural knowledge and whether or not we can state those rules, right? We're not explicitly guided by the rules, but we're implicitly guided by them.

So whether or not we can state them, those are the rules that we're obeying when we play the game. And so Wittgenstein's famous example of a very simple language game, right? There are different language games that happen within our language based on context, based on what our practical goals are. But, you know, he has the builders who have just four terms, block, pillar, slab and beam. And if I remember correctly, one of them might just say block to another, and that means bring me the block or something like that in that particular context. In another context, the rules might be different.

So we can talk about certain propositions within the language that make sense within that language. And then we can talk about propositions that try to express the rules of the language. And Moorean propositions are more like that, or common sense propositions, you know. So, Mark, you were saying it's just common sense that there's such a thing as physical objects and what Wittgenstein is going to say is that's kind of a rule of the game that we play on a day to day basis. Right? None of us is going to reject the reality of physical objects when it comes to doing most of what we do with language.

Can I have a Coke, please? Wait. Do physical objects exist? I don't know if you can give me a Coke. It's not.

28:20 Mark: Clearly you don't drop acid as much as I do.

28:24 Wes: But one could argue that there's a meta language and there's a metagame and it's philosophical. And in that context, perhaps it does make sense to question whether there's such things as physical objects. But if you are doing that, you're in a difficult spot because you may be poking at rules that are so foundational to any language game that if you reject them, there is no game to be played. Everything just becomes incoherent. Right?

28:47 Dylan: There's no communication at all. I've always found the term language game to be a little bit challenging because it does one piece of work, which I think that Wittgenstein surely intended, which was to lower the status of our truth seeking activities by calling it a game. It also brings of course, the notion of rules that you were just talking about, Wes, that there are sets of rules that govern it, without which you don't have it. Right. A perfect example would be any kind of sports competition or chess or something like that. It literally is the case that those things are defined by, by those rules. If you don't have the rules, you don't have the game, you don't have anything that's happening.

29:24 Wes: But also something more fundamental, practice, but actual practice, like implicit knowledge, which is even more fundamental. So the rules are emergent. On that for us, I agree.

29:35 Dylan: So the case of by calling it a game, he's pointing to the notion that those emergent rules have the same status as the rules of chess in that they are related to one another to form a coherence that allow us to do the figuring out that we do within the game by which you can say that move isn't allowed. You can't do that. Well, why can't you do that? It's because it's against the rules.

29:59 Wes: It doesn't make sense is what we would normally say within language.

30:02 Dylan: Yes, but I also find that calling it a language game, for me at least it makes it sound like it's less about the fact that we're getting to truth about it. It seems to degrade it in a certain way, then maybe it's just because that word game just seems to feel like it trivializes the activity. Well, it's just a game.

30:22 Mark: Yeah, let's get, just get over that. Sorry. I just feel like that's part of the game, that you have to accept that he's not using it in a trivial sense. And if you don't, then you're not playing Wittgenstein's game just to get meta about it.

30:35 Wes: I think Dylan is pointing out that relativism is a problem for him and I think Wittgenstein knows that because he'll try and address that. Not a lot, but at certain points in this he thinks about that. I think that's a legitimate point. Am I characterizing that right, Dylan?

30:49 Dylan: Yes, I agree. And I don't think it's something you just get over. I mean, maybe you just get over it in the sense that you end up just like you do other kinds of beliefs and understanding, figuring things out. But I think it's something that's worth articulating. Why it's not trivial. From the standpoint of Wittgenstein, I don't think it's trivial.

31:08 Wes: The rules of the game are not arbitrary.

31:11 Seth: I thought the reason that he used the word game was just a nod back to his discussion about trying to define a game.

31:19 Mark: So it's analogous to a game. Not that it literally is a game.

31:23 Seth: Yeah, not that it's literally a game.

31:25 Wes: It's a social practice. Right. I think this is the most fundamental part of this, is it's not simply that, hey, there's a world out there and we have minds that make us conscious of that world and all we have to do if we want to, and then this activity arises around that that involves us simply labeling pieces of the world and then handing those labels back and forth between us. It's a much more complicated and rule governed social practice than that in this context.

31:51 Seth: Most importantly, it's a social practice that you can't definitively say these are the rules of the game. You know what they are and everybody else knows what they are. But you couldn't enumerate them and come up with a complete description of what the total rules of the game are. And that's part of the point of this essay, is that he's trying to say we're moving in the realm, we're moving in the area where we're talking about things that make it possible for us to talk about things in this way. And we all understand it, nobody doubts it, we all know it, we all agree to it.

And it's actually that point Dylan, you mentioned a while back. Part of it is about could you doubt this? But also, do you agree to it? The key point is that, like, if somebody literally contravenes one of these quote unquote rules of the game, then they're playing a different game. They're not agreeing to the rules of the game. It's a completely different thing that they're doing. And so to try to have a rational conversation as if you're in the same universe of discourse is just misguided.

32:49 Dylan: Yeah, but what's going to be interesting is that there are going to be overlaps where you get to edges where you end up disagreeing about something, where you get to a part of your conversation where you understand the words but you don't agree with the conclusions because you don't agree with the premises of the specific thing that's going on. And so the way in which they're figuring out something about the world is you're going to disagree with them. And conspiracy theories that we mentioned earlier might be a case of this. But just think about someone who's like a fundamental Christian about the origins of the earth.

The earth is 6,000 years old. If I counted out in the Bible the whole nine yards about creationism, in fact, you will end up having a discussion about that that involves lots of scientific sounding things, but there are fundamental premises that will mean that you don't agree at all. And the same thing will be true for someone who makes conclusions about their life and how they should act in the future, based upon the position of the zodiac compared to what I'm going to do, which is not that.

33:48 Mark: So you're getting into this really tough issue of what exactly is the relationship of a language game to a Kuhnian paradigm? What you're talking about is more in the latter philosophy of science. And like, again, I hope that this text should help us to bridge those things. Would you prefer instead of language game, I just prefer linguistic context. Right. Linguistic context doesn't necessarily mean that there are rules.

34:13 Dylan: But.

34:13 Mark: But I think that if they're not innumerable rules, they're not really rules. Right. We just got into this with our Dworkin stuff like there are rules.

34:23 Dylan: Wait just a sec, Wes. I don't have the benefit of having spent a lot of time on philosophical investigations. So when you just made this, when you clarified my.

34:33 Mark: You were on those episodes with us, just so you know, we've done the same amount as we do, but please,

34:37 Dylan: I was On Philosophical Investigation.

34:39 Mark: Yeah, I was surprised your voice.

34:41 Dylan: I wasn't on Tractatus, but really I was on Philosophical Investigation.

34:44 Mark: Yeah.

34:45 Dylan: I'm just a terrible, terrible person.

34:47 Wes: Our reliance on memory, Dylan, is critical.

34:50 Mark: Yeah, you were raising quite a lot of flack on there. Like, you're not just a passive observer.

34:57 Dylan: Oh, my God, I'm like an illegitimate human being now. Okay, so you're saying that a language game, you're making this distinction by the Kuhnian paradigm or whatever, and you're saying that my examples had to do more with paradigms that were within a language game.

35:14 Mark: I saw paradigms as bigger than language games. But this is why I'm thinking of the paradigm case of a language game would be a particular linguistic context, right? The slab, the chess game. Those are particular sets of practices. Whereas if you're saying the practice that we're doing is investigation, is scientific investigation, and then you fill in what the actual content of the paradigm is. Someone who's a creationist scientist, scientist in quotes, thinks that they're doing science because they have a different set of fundamental background assumptions. And you could criticize whether those are, like, coherent. And the creationist might come back at you and say, well, yours are not coherent either. It's all relative, like Kuhn says.

35:56 Wes: I want to reiterate one point, which is that I think it's helpful to think about it as a game and in terms of rules. Because in the context of a language game, what happens when someone violates the rules is they don't make it sense. What they're saying is not meaningful. So in the same way, if someone were to pick up their king on a chessboard and put it five spaces away instead of moving in one, you'd say, what game are you playing? Because that's not chess. You'd say they made the wrong move or made an illegitimate move. You know, if someone.

Gibberish, you say, either they're not speaking correctly or maybe they're speaking a different language or something like that, they don't make any sense. But what's important is, so for Wittgenstein and the Tractatus, and I think later on as well, when you articulate the rules of the game, which include grammar but also logic, those propositions, they neither obey nor disobey the rules of the game. They don't have sense. In Wittgenstein's sense, they don't. They're senseless, quote unquote. The tautologies of logic. For instance, you're really getting at the rules of the game, and they're not something that, strictly speaking, makes sense within the game.

Right. So defining how the king moves is not part of the game of chess. You don't.

37:08 Mark: It's not part of the object language of chess. It's the meta language of describing the rules of chess.

37:13 Wes: Yeah. So the meta language is always in a predicament of sorts for Wittgenstein. So he'll say this about philosophy as well. Right. But it's a little unclear whether he thinks we should be doing philosophy because of it. Philosophical propositions have no sense. But he says the same thing about logic and math.

37:28 Mark: So let's just take it back to maybe move toward the end of our first part here to the Moorean propositions. So his critique of More is you're saying, I know there's a hand here. I know that this is my hand. Well, unless you have a context in which that was really in doubt, you're sort of describing one of the rules of our game where we assume that the things that are right in front of us really exist. I mean, you could say there is a hand. That's fine to say, I know there is a hand. Well, no. What is that word I know doing there? I don't agree with Vickenside of this. Let me just say this like, I think it's perfectly harmless to say, I know this is a hand.

38:05 Wes: He would agree in some context. It makes sense. Right, right.

38:08 Mark: If you're trying to tell somebody who's not a native English speaker what the word hand means. This is a hand, you know, or

38:15 Wes: if you had a real reason to doubt.

38:17 Seth: Really reason to doubt and an ability to verify.

38:20 Mark: One of his brothers was missing a hand, lost it in the war.

38:24 Wes: Oh, so this is why he's so into this. But yeah, I mean, the normal game involves saying, if you make a knowledge claim, you want to be able to say why. Right. He calls this grounds. If you're saying you know something, you at least have to be able to conceive of how it is. You would justify that knowledge is justified true belief and how it is. If someone doubted you, how they might find out you've made a mistake, what sort of verification procedure they might use in figuring out that you've made a mistake. And if you're involved in an argument about whether physical objects exist and someone says, I know I have a hand. Look, in everyday life, no game works like that.

39:01 Dylan: This amounts to a kind of basic version of straightforward realism is part of the rules of the game.

39:08 Mark: Yeah, the rules of many games.

39:10 Wes: Most.

39:12 Dylan: Most games. But I mean, in the class of things that, for instance, Moore is talking about and that Wittgenstein is referring to, that these are straightforward physical realism games and rules. And my basic rule is that physical realism is just part of the rules. I look at stuff and if I had an account to make, like say, you know, the ways in which I would have to account for things, how do you know it's a hand? And you start talking about the features of a hand and those kinds of things.

39:39 Wes: Mark your intuition that it's harmless is the sense in which it's harmless to articulate the rule of the game. And even the word no, I think makes complete sense. If you think of it as know how or procedural knowledge, it's a totally legitimate way to put it. Obviously, if that's one of the rules of the game, that's part of our practice and we have implicit procedural knowledge of that. It's just that there's this kind of equivocation on that kind of knowledge. And then know that knowing that some proposition is true, that's the part Wittgenstein objects to. Because at point where we articulate it as a proposition and then we look for evidence, we're not going to be able to supply any evidence except to say that's a rule of the game. It's foundational, it's fundamental.

40:22 Mark: And that sounds like a good place to wrap up part one. We'll explore that more in part two. Maybe we'll actually quote the text at some point. I have been very impressed that we've held off. You know, you brought up Know how west, but I already was ready to talk about Heidegger and you didn't. So I'm good job with that. But I think we can let our association flags are name dropping for people that we've covered in detail. My Norman Malcolm name drop is a more unforgivable kind.

40:50 Dylan: But I can't even remember the fact that I read a book. So

40:55 Seth: Plato, Aristotle.

40:57 Wes: It's become implicit for you. Don't. That's. That that's better. That way is better.

41:03 Mark: It's just that the whole of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. You don't remember reading footnotes? Yes. If you're a supporter, it's the next thing your feed. If you're not a supporter, go to parcel examinedlife.com support and become one. And you can hear it right now. Thanks.

41:18 Dylan: Thank you.