Ep. 309: Wittgenstein On Certainty (Part Two)

0:07 Wes: Hey.

0:08 Mark: This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 309, part 2. We've been discussing Wittgenstein's On Certainty. I think We've gotten a lot of. I want to say themes, but is it theme? I don't know if there's. There's different facets of the single theme that we've tried to push here. Should we just do some close reading from the beginning of the text and use that to then re explore things? Or were there points that you feel like you were interrupted and you want to say more, Extend more. What we were doing in the first part first.

0:37 Seth: I definitely don't want to do a close reading if we can bring pieces of text in as. As exemplars. But I can't recommend that. We just kind of grind through.

0:48 Wes: We're not going to have time to do that anyway, so we will have to pick out critical points. I have my own synopsis of a lot of this, but there are like some key. What are we calling them, these number aphorisms. Aphorisms.

1:00 Seth: But I mean, they're not really.

1:02 Wes: I think we could read the first one since it gives people the flavor in case they don't want to actually open the book and read the very first thing. It's kind of funny because it almost looks like a joke. It's like, is he making fun of Moore in this? So, number one, if you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest. So he's beginning where Moore ends. His proof of the external world. And it. Does that do justice to what Moore was saying? We kind of gave a pretty elaborate account of what we thought Moore was up to there and having to do with what it meant for somebody to be met with in space and therefore logically independent of any particular perception, and therefore mind independent.

Wittgenstein doesn't go into any of that. He's more interested in this idea that there's a checking procedure that involves this particular claim to knowledge about something that we're experiencing right in front of us.

2:00 Mark: He's critical of Moore throughout. This has a number of sort of snide remarks like, it doesn't matter how much you insist that you know something unless you're ready, as you say, with the verification procedures, the settling procedures, then saying, I know is just expressing a psychological state about yourself. And he does eventually get in the book, like, you know, it's actually okay to say even that I am certain that blah, blah, blah, and still be wrong. Philosophers think you shouldn't be able to say that. You're just lying, you're not actually certain, or you don't have knowledge because knowledge is defined as justified, true belief.

You can't know just by your own psychological sense of yourself and your state, right? Then you can't know whether you know something at all, because you can know whether it's justified. Or at least you could have a feeling, know that it's a belief, but you don't know whether it is true.

2:55 Wes: He breaks down certainty into objective and subjective certainty in a way that looks to me quite different from Moore because we read that paper as well. But where objective certainty involves being able to give grounds, right, to give a justification, and subjective certainty is just a feeling that we might have, and it might be the feeling that, oh, I could give grounds, I could give a justification if I needed to. But that subjective feeling of certainty is a much different thing than quote, unquote, objective certainty, which that's not the way I as I remembered that Moore broke that out.

3:25 Mark: Is objective certainty as giving grounds, is that even enough? Right. If you're pragmatist, then you'd say, oh, well, that means it's true in so far forth established with the verification procedures. So I'm therefore entitled to say I am certain. But the reason nobody likes the pragmatists is because that seems to go against what truth? No, truth is something absolute. If certainty means you've gotten hold of truth or knowledge means you have gotten told the truth, then like you are never in a position to absolutely, 100%. It's just for the context. You could say, I'm certain enough, it is true enough.

4:01 Dylan: That's where pragmatists will just say, when you say truth is 100%, you're just wrong about that. That's just not what truth is. In a similar way that Wittgenstein is recasting what you mean by knowing. And the thing that Wittgenstein is keeping, I think along with Moore is linking knowing with doubting and reminding us that you can't just come at this from a skeptical point of view saying, well, do you really know? Do you really know? But attacking it from the standpoint of what does your doubting mean? What kind of doubt is sensible or legitimate or correspondingly truthful doubt to go along with your knowing claim? And you can't just talk about the knowing piece. You can't doubt absolutely any more than you can know absolutely. And you have to along the way clarify the doubting piece too.

4:59 Mark: So the second aphorism there from it seeming to me or to everyone to be so, it doesn't follow that it is so. So that's actually affirming the distinction between claims to knowledge and actual knowledge. What we can ask is whether it makes sense to doubt it later. I remember he says, it's not that the probability of the truth of something just goes up, up and up and up asymptotically. It's just that when you get to a certain point, it doesn't even make sense to doubt anymore at all. Like we just can't even conceive what it would be for me to not know that. This actually is my hand here.

5:31 Wes: If the doubt is directed at the rules of the game, then you've undermined your very means of doubting. Again, this looks like a variation on the Cartesian or a transcendental argument, right? So for Descartes, it's like, well, if I'm wrong about everything, I can't be wrong about the fact that there's someone being wrong. Therefore I exist. In this case, if I engage in this activity of doubting this sort of language game, there is a structure to that activity and I can simply undermine those important foundational structural features of the activity to the point where the concept of doubting no longer even makes sense.

6:10 Dylan: That's right.

6:11 Wes: You know, at certain points in here, he'll say, when you say something is a physical object, in a way you're doing something closer to semantics and saying, here's what the word physical object means in everyday discourse. It doesn't function so much as a philosophical claim about whether physical objects exist, so much as this is what a physical object is. So physical objects become like logic. He'll say a physical object is like a logical concept. The same way that you can't reject logic or the law of non contradiction without, as Dylan has pointed out according to Aristotle, undermining your ability to communicate in that way. You can't reject the logic of the existence of physical objects or doubt it without undermining the whole linguistic context in which doubt is possible.

7:00 Dylan: It's on this grounds, I think, that when we ask a question about truth, or one of the forms of that is, does it exist? And by that means does it exist as a physical thing in this everyday way that we're talking about? There's a book on my desk to ask if something exists. We're asking if it exists, just like we mean that thing exists. And we do find ways in which we get messed up on that, right? Things that don't have the same kind of physical existence, ideas and concepts in the way in which they exist, but the normal everyday existence meaning of it, right? There's things in the world.

7:39 Wes: Suppose I could be mistaken about whether my hand really exists. I think this is a really good thing about this book is really taking an example like that and working out its implications. Now, I think that there's a sense in which an idealist or a skeptic doesn't really doubt whether your hand exists when they talk about whether or not there are physical objects. Let's just leave that aside to. What Wittgenstein will claim at 54 is that if you could be mistaken about the hand, you might be mistaken about every other statement about physical objects. So the whole structure crumbles. You have nothing against which you can check. This is like what I was talking about in the Moore episodes with global versus local error. If there's global error, then there's no way to know about local error. There's nothing to check it against, and you undermine that very concept.

8:35 Dylan: Yeah, 54 is a good one. For it is not true that a mistake merely gets more and more improbable as we pass from the planet to my own hand. No, at some point it has ceased to be conceivable. This is already suggested by the following. If it were not so, it would also be conceivable that we should be wrong in every statement about physical objects that any we ever make are mistaken. It's more about the doubting thing. What does it mean to doubt a statement and be mistaken about your hand? It's the same way in which you end up being mistaken about everything physical in the world.

9:08 Mark: I was looking to the run up to that to see if we can actually detect. So in 43 he's talking about math number 43. What sort of proposition is this quote we cannot have miscalculated in 12 times 12 equals 144. What kind of proposition is that? It surely must be a proposition of logic. But now is it not the same or doesn't it come to the same as the statement 12 times 12 equals 144? In other words, he's saying, just like I know I am certain about, we cannot have miscalculated. He's deflationary about it. Right? Let's just say the sentence itself, 12 times 12 equals 144. To clarify, he said in 44, if you demand a rule from which it follows that there can't have been a miscalculation here, the answer is that we did not learn this through a rule, but by learning to calculate. We got to know the nature of calculating by learning to calculate.

9:54 Wes: Yeah. This is one of those many places in which we figure out that our ultimate grounds for believing involve the actual rules of the game and practice the

10:04 Mark: doing of the following.

10:05 Wes: But not even. Yeah, but lower down than the rules, right? Yeah. The practice, the use of the rules

10:10 Dylan: of the game and we become convinced by. And trust in it by seeing it work out. In part, we got to know the nature of calculating by learning to calculate.

10:21 Wes: I think he refers to pragmatism once that I in this text, right. This looks like pragmatism, but the whole thing does look a lot. There's a lot of overlap with pragmatism because part of what you want to do as a pragmatist, you want to think about. Maybe I'll get in trouble saying this, but some of it is about the psychology of when we are satisfied with an explanation, right. And even pleasure and pain are implicated, right? What is contradiction bother us? What if we were just the type of creatures that a contradiction between two statements didn't bother?

What if it weren't a pleasure to know things? What if we weren't curious? What if we weren't bothered by not knowing something, how something worked, all that stuff. And then. And then what is the feeling that we get when we feel like something has worked out or been explained? And all of that psychology is implicated in how it is we go about investigating and knowing. And why am I talking about all that? Because practice ultimately has a lot to do with that. We can analyze it after the fact.

11:19 Dylan: Fittingness is a feeling.

11:21 Wes: I like that. That's good.

11:23 Dylan: And it's a feeling that is part of the psychology that you're talking about. When we get that satisfaction that, oh, it fits and it's right. I think you're right. It's a psychological experience that tells us, oh, it's snapped into place. It works.

11:40 Mark: However, I feel like both of you, in talking about this as a bit of psychology, are doing exactly the thing that he. In the passage you just read, said, you don't need to do that. If you add, I know, or it is certain that. Or it is the psychology of humans that you're not actually adding anything. Just say the thing. You know, this is the whole point of Frege's antipsychologistic turn that Moore.

12:00 Wes: And this is why I said, I'm

12:02 Mark: going to get Wittgenstein into trouble.

12:03 Wes: But I don't think that's what I'm doing. But I don't know if we should argue about it.

12:07 Mark: But we can come back to that. The next couple passages, we're trying to get back to 54 here, but 46, 47, 48 are about how we learn to calculate. And is there an explicit rule? 46. But then, can't it be described how we satisfy ourselves of the reliability of a calculation? Oh, yes. Yet no rule emerges when we do so. But the most important thing is the rule is not needed. Nothing is lacking. We do calculate according to a rule, and that is enough. 47. This is how one calculates. Calculating is this. I'm assuming there's some pointing with those italics. What we learn at school, for example, forget this transcendent certainty, which is connected with your concept of spirit, whatever the

12:48 Dylan: hell he's talking about Hegel there for sure, right?

12:51 Wes: Sure, sure.

12:52 Seth: 48.

12:53 Mark: However, out of a host of calculations, certain ones might be designated as reliable once and for all. Others is not fixed. And now is this a logical distinction?

13:03 Wes: What's logical is what's fixed. So once we start getting a distinction between what's fixed and less fixed, right? Logical truths or unalterable and certain other.

13:13 Mark: He's asking the meta question, though, which he does this throughout. Is, is it a bit of logic to say some things are fixed and some things are not fixed? If you say the fixed things themselves are. Are logical?

13:25 Wes: Right, Right, right.

13:25 Mark: Well, that's only. Maybe this is a problem with the use of logic in this kind of ridiculously broad way to talk about just, you know, if it's a matter of everything has to be either empirical or logical, then yes, something's sort of within the game. I don't know if empirical is the right other term to contrast to logical, but whenever you're talking about the rules of the game, you're talking about logic. And when you're talking about talking about the rules, you're also, at least he's asking, is that logic, too?

13:51 Wes: The important thing that comes out here is this idea that when we learn a language, we're not learning the way we learn a second language, and we don't learn our first language. We don't sit down with a grammar book and learn the rules. And that's a really inefficient and hard way to learn a language. We learn within the practice. And then we can analyze all that and say, look, here's the grammar, here are the rules of the language. But we don't need to do that, and we're better off if we don't have to do that as far as learning the language goes.

But there's something epistemologically important there because ultimately everything is grounded in practice. And some of that, you may be able to articulate as rules, but that's the foundational layer of justification for which no other justification can be given. You might say, well, language has developed and is so constituted as to capture something about the world. The rules of the game aren't arbitrary, as I put it earlier. It's a development within the world, just like the mind. And we can say it's importantly linked to the truth and reality.

But for the purposes of our justifications, we can't say why. Well, we could say why 2 plus 2 equals 4 logically to some extent, but we can't say why a logical axiom is true. For instance, in the same way that I think he's going to want to assimilate these Moorean propositions into that situation, right. Moore wants to say, I don't know why this is true, I just know it's true. I think we can. And Wittgenstein does say a lot more about how we know.

15:20 Seth: That came across clearly in Moore where he said, I know this without knowing how I know it. And that's okay that he's kind of giving us license to do that. And I think what Wittgenstein's trying to say is that he's not really using I know in the right way here, because Wittgenstein is still committed to the idea that knowledge is somehow call it justified true belief, or to use the term I know is to play a language game where there is a way in which that can be validated. There can be good reasons given for it. It's not something that emerges from practice in history. And Moore already conceded that point. He just didn't see anything in it. And Wittgenstein is driving the wedge there.

16:00 Dylan: He's also not using no in the same way of someone like Descartes. Like the whole question of the epistemological question. They're both undermining that.

16:11 Wes: Are you saying ordinary cases of knowledge, right? Knowing that Jupiter has such and such a number of moons, or that I think we can legitimately make ordinary knowledge claims and then offer the typical justified true belief type reasons. And then there are these cases where it becomes more odd.

16:32 Dylan: I guess what I'm thinking of is Moore reminds us about doubt and undermines the skeptical argument against certain kinds of knowledge and the idealist account through proof of his external world and on common sense with a variety of different claims about knowing the world, about knowing that undermine them. But he's not using know in the same way and certainty the same way. For instance, someone like Descartes would. Where you're going, it's a chain of one thing and knowing another thing, and then reducing that chain and understanding all those links, used the chain of custody earlier.

Descartes version is very, very different than that. There's a clarity at each point, and that's a kind of mathematical clarity that then you get the chain of knowing out of that. And maybe now that I'm just saying this out loud, maybe it's that Moore would say, I know. The kind of knowing that he has would be each individual link on that chain that Descartes referring to, that they would agree on that.

17:33 Wes: Well, you're making me think there, I don't know if this is directly to the point, but you're making me think about the fact that this idea of the importance of a particular claim's relationship to the overall system, to the overall structure, and he'll even use a building structure analogy at one point. But when you try to alter or doubt one of these Moorean propositions, right, you can't just do that locally and say, okay, maybe this bit's wrong. You guys were talking about paradigms in Kuhn before. You have to do a whole paradigm shift to change one's picture of the world, as Wittgenstein puts it, or one's worldview also, even one's very conception of what it means to have evidence, right?

You might have to like historical evidence. Maybe that's no longer evidence. If you can doubt such and such a thing, you'd have to alter our logic, our grammar, so to speak of the language game, the rules of the game in such a fundamental way that then we can no longer even conceive of what doubting would mean anymore. But yeah, at some point I want to get to this worldview and overall system thing that he talks about.

18:39 Mark: Let's finish the link between 54, 49. But remember, even when calculation is something fixed, for me, this is only decision for a practical purpose. 50. When does one say, I know that this times this equals the other thing, when one has checked the calculation, what sort of proposition is? What could a mistake here be like? So this is another one of those meta questions. It would have to be a logical proposition, but it is a logic that is not used because what it tells us is not learned through propositions. It is a logical proposition, for it does describe the conceptual parentheses, linguistic situation.

19:14 Wes: Yeah. So when he says not learn through propositions, again, procedural knowledge, know how, like how we know how to use.

19:20 Mark: Yep, exactly.

19:21 Wes: And this stuff, like the Moorean stuff About the world has been around for a lot longer than the. It's something we know implicitly and it's a feature of the language. Because if we were to doubt it, we have to doubt a lot of things, right? So there's a lot of reasons why something like that has plausibility for us. Maybe we should just start listing those reasons. It's not just that, hey, I was told that by professor and that professor is really, really trustworthy. So I believe the world has been around for a long time. We get all sorts of bits and pieces of evidence, but some of the evidence is just.

Or maybe let's do the one about parents, right? We all have parents first and foremost. The principle of sufficient reason is in application here, right? We assume that there's some reason we came into the world. If someone tells us a story about biological propagation and we had never seen any other evidence for that story. Suppose I'd never even heard of that. Someone just came to me with that account, you know, a detailed story about biological reproduction. It might seem fantastic at first in some ways, but if I like explanation at all, if explanation is satisfying to me at all, I'm going to have a strong reason to adopted that belief.

Just because I think things have reasons for being the way they are. And if I can be given an account of that, then there's a pull towards that account. And then in the meantime, it's not like someone's offered me a competing account or I went into a different classroom and I got a different story. There's an internal coherence to the account. I know I have parents, I know about sex, this and that. There's a whole bunch of different pieces of information. Some of it is my own direct experience. But a lot of it is just what I've been told or read in textbooks.

And a lot of it is about the appeal of an explanation, the symmetry of it, of that particular picture. All of that comes together to bear on why it is. I might believe a story about how biological reproduction works, even if I've never directly verified it for myself. Something like that. So we rely on this big system of knowledge, a big system of propositions that's much bigger than any different individual person. And we're plugged into it in this important way. But to say that we're plugged into it is not to say that we are all little empiricists running around directly observing things, and that's how we get our knowledge.

21:43 Mark: We were accused of not being clear that Moore is an empiricist it's just that there's a difference between the kind of empiricism that's like Locke and Hume, that is reductive empiricism, that all we ever have are these phenomenal experiences and we figure something, you know, versus a more mature empiricism which like all of phenomenology is paying attention to experience writ large. And so you could be an empiricist and still have this complicated picture like you were describing that like well, it's actually second, third hand experience and you know, pre digested sent to us like maybe at that point the empiricist rationalist distinction, like there's no point in even making that distinction if you're not saying either it's innate knowledge or it's straight from sensation.

If those are the choices. Like no, no mature epistemology is either of those things. Number 52. This situation is thus not the same for a proposition like at this distance from the sun there is a planet and on the other hand here is a hand, namely my own hand. The second can't be called a hypothesis, but there isn't a sharp boundary line between them. So this is why I like this image, you know, like we had in Lakatos or somebody like this, of central propositions and then edge propositions that being corrected about some particular astronomical fact is like not probably earth shaking.

All right, so here we go. 53. So one might grant that Moore was right if he's interpreted like this. A proposition saying that here is a physical object may have the same logical status as one saying that here is a red patch. What did you think about that?

23:20 Seth: It struck me as a non sequitur. I was not able to connect it to the notion about the planet being a certain distance from the sun as a hypothesis. Saying here is a red patch is not a hypothesis. There's no analogy there. I don't understand this.

23:33 Wes: Yeah, he would deny this as a hypothesis that can be tested.

23:36 Mark: But well, here the red patch is not a hypothesis because again, we can't conceive of being wrong. Although how would you check, you know, I have experienced red patch here. Now that seems like you can't check it in some other way, but maybe, you know, your eyes aren't working properly. There's always ways. I wanted to get us from the thing about 12 times 12 equals 144 because you know, we've seen this in later figures like Quine or whatever, but this denying the fundamental difference between you got your empirical propositions on one hand and you Got your central sort of rationalist logical propositions.

On the other hand, this is all about that. So here he's saying that you could have a strictly empirical one. Here's a red patch here. And here's my hand. Those are both. Even though they're different kinds of propositions, those could still be very central to the web of belief in a way that a hypothesis is something on the outside. So, yes, Seth, neither of those is a hypothesis because hypothesis means not central.

24:31 Seth: There's a way to misread this. Where here is a hand and here's a red patch gets you back into the sensation or sense perception versus actual external object distinction there. He says if he is interpreted like this, a proposition saying that here is a physical object may have the same logical status as one saying that here is a red patch. Presumably red in this case is not. We're not talking about a physical object. We're talking about some sense data perception. Sense datum. But that is not a helpful comment to me.

25:07 Wes: I think what he might be on about. I don't think we should spend a lot of time on this because this is. I think it's confusing, but I agree what I think he might be getting at. He's taking a poke at Moore about sense data, which is confusing because Moore thought different things about sense data at different times. And the question is whether a sense datum is an objective, external thing. Right. Do we do naive realism or do we do idealism or do we do something in between? It's too complicated. So what does Wittgenstein mean by saying he'd be right? If he's saying the physical object has the same logical status when the logical status of a sense datum is itself very unclear?

25:44 Seth: I'm sorry, I mean, if it was me, I would just throw this one out.

25:47 Wes: I did. I didn't even include it in my notes. Good.

25:51 Seth: Right. So this is 54. If we're going to be.

25:54 Mark: We're circling back.

25:55 Seth: If we're. If we're circling the drain is what we're doing. 54. For it is not true that a mistake merely gets more and more improbable as we pass from the hypothesis about the planet. The proposition there is a planet at a certain distance from the sun to. This is my hand. Right. No. At some point it has ceased to be conceivable. There are propositions that we cannot conceive of making mistakes about. This is already suggested by the following. If it were not so, it would also be conceivable that we should be Wrong in every statement about physical objects that any we ever make are mistaken.

He says, so is the hypothesis possible that all the things around us don't exist? Would that not be like the hypothesis of having miscalculated all our calculations? He's essentially saying this is more of what the Routledge guy was talking about, being more of a direct attack on skepticism. Like, could you even given, I don't even want to say your experience, because I don't want to use those terms. Given life, given you, is it even conceivable that you could possibly be mistaken about everything that there is? And the answer is no.

27:09 Mark: And by poking at that contrast, like we on the one hand have this empirical thing, and the other hand we have calculations. And he elsewhere explicitly says, like this sort of rationalist, empiricist distinction doesn't work because making a calculation involves experiences, right? It is a human being thinking through something, applying a rule, implicit rule in, you know, implying some know how to come up with an answer. The best you can do if you're not sure is just do it again or have somebody else do it. Double check. There are procedures, but it is not fundamentally different.

You could still be confused. You could still be dreaming. Descartes thought about dreaming, as you know, my reason is intact, I'm in a dream, I'm being deceived, but still I'm thinking clearly. And like, we can just kind of see whether something is clear and distinct. And Wittgenstein is way past that. Like, you know, if you're gonna doubt, am I even thinking coherently? You know, that's not something Descartes even considered doubting. And am I wrong about my hand being here? Which is something Descartes thought you could doubt? Those doubts are really on the same level according to this text.

28:14 Wes: The way I think about this is I think it's perfectly conceivable that we're a brain in the vat, or however you want to put it, but we lose the ability to call that sort of thing an error. Error is something local and internal to the system, and once it becomes global, the word mistake or error just is no longer applicable. This is what I was saying in some of the Moore episodes about. You can call them evil geniuses if you want, but if it's doing its job of creating a consistent, coherent mind, independent reality, that's all we can ask for. So good job, evil genius. So the word error at some point becomes a puzzling way to describe those hypothetical situations which concern the quote, unquote, the logic of Our situation. If error presupposes we're inside the game with a set of rules. Not that the rules have changed.

29:03 Mark: You know, the original draft of the Matrix was, if you take the blue pill, you will remain in the object language. If you take the red pill, you'll ascend to the meta language within the object language. The sorts of doubts you might have about being actually here in this room don't even make sense. You can't even voice them. It's nonsense. Ask ChatGPT to write a description of the Matrix in Wittgenstein's language.

29:28 Wes: How do we know we're not all just inside ChatGPT right now?

29:31 Seth: Because we're not spewing racist stuff.

29:34 Wes: Oh, they fixed them.

29:36 Mark: Speak for yourself.

29:37 Seth: They fixed that.

29:38 Wes: Believe me, I've tried to get at this view. Racist stuff, and it won't.

29:41 Seth: So one of my projects for this year is to create a philosophical chatbot. I've decided I was gonna try to do all philosophy, but now I think I just have to pick one. Gonna start. Maybe it'll be a Wittgenstein bot, or maybe a Kant bot. I kind of like the way that sounds because it sounds kind of dirty. Kant bot.

30:00 Wes: This book is bringing out a different side of you.

30:03 Seth: I told you that later. Wittgenstein made me angry, and that's exactly what's happening right now. It's irritating.

30:10 Wes: Maybe that's. We should end on that note. Like, why?

30:12 Mark: Yeah, I want to pick about this. I understand. Throwing. Throwing one book into the ravine, throwing two books into the ravine. That's premeditated. That's that you're violating the rules of the Passion Game.

30:23 Seth: Blue and brown books are not two books. Oh, it is.

30:25 Mark: Oh, that's my misunderstanding.

30:27 Seth: All right, now we're not playing the same language game, Mark.

30:30 Mark: Why would you call one book two things?

30:33 Dylan: So, look, it's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

30:38 Mark: No, no, I just read the Harry Potter part. I didn't get to the Sorcerer's Stone part.

30:44 Wes: Now I want to get to the bottom of why Seth hates. Well, you got to hate early, too. I mean, I hope you don't just love early and hate late, but no.

30:50 Seth: The Tractatus is like an elegant ice sculpture that purports to be something that it's not. And you walk all around it and you look at all the intricate details and whatever, and you think, I'm sure this is meaningful and significant. It's gorgeous. It's beautiful. But I can't quite figure out. And then you Go. The seasons change and it melts and it disappears later. Wittgenstein. The reason why is when I was in school, when we were in school, there was still a Wittgensteinian legacy that dictated what counted as good philosophy, what kinds of philosophy was. And I read Wittgenstein and I think, is he a genius or is he fucking insane? Is he a crank? And I'm not sure. And I think about sitting in those classes with Ed Allaire, going over proposition by propos, you know, I mean, maybe

31:41 Wes: we were in the same class together. I took a Wittgenstein class. I was in that too.

31:45 Seth: Imagine a three hour graduate seminar where you cover like five propositions, like five sentences. That was the world we were in for a period of time.

31:54 Mark: That's not what we're still in.

31:57 Seth: It feels like it. That's why, that's why I'm getting aggravated, because you're bringing. You're dragging me back to my youth.

32:03 Wes: You're making me relive Allaire's Tractatus Wittgenstein.

32:06 Seth: Allaire did later. Wittgenstein too. Yeah. But anyway, the point is, why are we taking him seriously? Is he really that profound? Is it really that? Or are we just chasing our tails, especially in this work?

32:18 Mark: Well, and Allaire himself criticized Wittgenstein's style in the Tractatus. He compared it to what some monks or something did of like to prove your discipline, you have to tie a string to the tail of a turtle and then tie that to your nose. Or I don't remember the exact what was affixed to what. But you know that we have to just follow this guy around as he just very slowly looks at this thing and looks at this thing and what the hell are we doing here? So this was Allaire talking about his own class.

32:47 Seth: Yeah. And to be fair, the only thing he ever published was the Tractatus. Right. Everything else was notes that he was writing that somebody published on his behalf or posthumously. So there's just something about Wittgenstein as a figure that's very polarizing for me and aggravates me because I am of a certain age and a certain generation. And also, how do you get taken that seriously? How do you do it?

33:13 Wes: Yeah, I frequently have a similar feeling because I get the sense that Wittgenstein doesn't know a lot about philosophy. He doesn't know a lot about the history of philosophy. He knows what he knows from his friends more and Russell. Otherwise he was an engineer. Right. I think. And he is making a lot of, I think Very. I mean, in this book I think the observations are very important. So neither he's a genius. Who else is making these sorts of observations at this point? I think this little stint on Moore and Wittgenstein that we just did is actually quite important and the philosophical investigations were important.

Maybe the frustration is he relies entirely on his genius and it's so disconnected from like a lot of analytic philosophy has been from the history of philosophy that preceded it. That's the way I would articulate my frustration. Other than this being someone's diary and it being very repetitive, don't you think, Seth? This idea about Moorean propositions almost being logical and untouchable at the foundation isn't that profound?

34:20 Seth: Possibly. Like I said, I think there's four or five really interesting insights in On Certainty, ways of thinking about. Let me say I enjoyed the episodes on Moore. I enjoyed trying to get into what Moore was trying to do. And even though he's not the greatest writer and there were some painful parts in it, I felt like it was an interesting strategy and attempt to counter the skeptical claim that, you know, that I don't buy into at all anyway. Right. Because I'm ultimately Heideggerian. The fact that it exercised Wittgenstein and he comes to this thing, but as you said, in complete ignorance of anything else that's going on or has ever gone on in philosophy.

You know, like, oh, it's a worldview, it's a web of beliefs, it's a structure of knowledge and language and, you know, grammar. And to not take into account all the other people have thought seriously about this. Let's take Dewey, for example. Just something as simple as that. Like read a fricking book. I picture this world, it doesn't matter. I don't like the sanctification of historical individuals and I feel like he's Saint Wittgenstein for a variety of people. And when I read him, I want to see the profundity and then I just get aggravated and I apologize for derailing the end of the conversation here, but that's just.

35:44 Wes: It's like watching a five year old brilliantly play some piano concerto. That's impossible even for most adults. But he's still five. That's the way I would describe. It's annoyingly precocious. I don't know, there's an innocence and. But also on my view, it's highly precocious. And it's interesting for that. You know, they're, they're important insights.

36:05 Mark: If we're gonna have another wittgenstein episode. Someone did, for instance, had had recommend his remarks on Frazer's The Golden Bough. A lot of people read mysticism into to Wittgenstein, right? Whatever you can't talk about, you should remain silent. This oh, even though he doesn't let us. We have to be very hard nosed. We're within the language game. But he also the stuff that's outside the language game yet all these, you know, he has lectures on the philosophy of art maybe we could read at some point. He has this stuff on the anthropological religious practices, this Golden Bough stuff.

So there is something to that and that might be the interesting part of Wittgenstein's personality. The fact that this is the book that he was writing while he was waiting to die of prostate cancer astounds me. I don't know what to read into that that he wasn't as all mystical as people think or that I'm not reading this text deeply enough and this really is a profound mystical text.

36:59 Wes: No.

37:00 Seth: Or that he reverted to his juvenile self, that he thought, you know, he wrote the Tractatus and he's like, okay, I'm done with philosophy. I've solved all the problems of philosophy, now I'm going to go do something else.

37:10 Wes: Teaching school children, elementary school, that was the choice.

37:13 Seth: It could be interesting to see what he has to say about art and mythology or it could be horrible. Why don't we all comb through On Certainty and we each bring our top five numbers to the table.

37:25 Mark: Sounds good.

37:26 Seth: And it's a throwdown. It's the gloves off. What are the five most important propositions from On Certainty? That are five most important sections from On Certainty numbered that you think Articulate the

37:38 Mark: full Any other closing thoughts about your I feel like we got our feelings in the front of this episode, so I don't have any more myself.

37:47 Seth: I would read per Wes recommendation, I would read the Routledge Companion by Andy Hamilton instead of On Certainty if you care enough.

37:57 Wes: Well, I had a lot more positive feeling towards and I think there's a lot of important stuff we haven't talked about and I hope we do. We do jump on that and I'll. I'll be prepared to talk about that next. I mean I think we probably could do another whole episode on this.

38:12 Mark: And with that, why don't you let us know what else you want us to cover or make some comments on this. You can comment on the blog post associated with this@prially damaged.com email us pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com or there is a contact form on our site don't give us technical feedback or episode specific feedback by leaving an itunes review that is obnoxious, especially if you didn't like it. However, if you've not yet left an itunes review, an Apple podcast review. For us, half the people that post reviews now are people that are bitching about something or else. So we need people that actually like the show to keep our numbers from steadily going very slightly down one star

38:49 Wes: because I couldn't figure out how to download an episode. Thanks.

38:55 Mark: Exactly. So yes, we would appreciate if you would go and give us the support. In fact, there's a rate this podcast widget in the margin of partiallyxaminedlife. Com. So if you don't even know how to rate something, this can walk you through that. Thanks guys. Thanks listeners. Good night, everybody.

39:14 Wes: Good night.

39:14 Dylan: Good night.

39:15 Seth: Good night.