Ep. 310: Wittgenstein On World-Pictures (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 310 is something like, how do our presuppositions affect our

picture of the world?

And we're continuing from episode 309 with our discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty, written in 1951, published in 1969. For more information, please see partial

this

is Mark Linsenmayer doing philosophy like an old person who's always mislaying something and then having to look for it again. Now my glasses, now my keys. In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin,

0:43 Seth: subjectively but not objectively certain that I am sitting in front of my desk staring at a screen with a bunch of white dudes.

0:51 Mark: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan, or so I believe. I'm not sure if I can be in doubt about that. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey,

feeling no scruples whatsoever about ordering my life in line with the principles of physics in Madison, Wisconsin.

And we brought in a ringer for this continued discussion.

1:12 Christopher: I'm Christopher Heath. I'm pretty sure I haven't been to the moon in Los Angeles, California.

1:18 Mark: So Chris was someone who I was emailing with about Philosophy of Science episodes when it came down to do the last bunch of Philosophy of Science episodes.

1:26 Christopher: Yeah, I missed that. I think that was my Something happened.

1:30 Mark: I had just talked to you for other reasons and you had revealed that you were a great fan of this book and were willing to, on a mere week's notice, jump in. And I don't know, did you get caught up?

1:40 Christopher: I did. I listened to. So I read the Moore that you guys read and listened to those episodes, which was interesting because I've always been a little dismissive of Moore. So it was cool to see it taken seriously and sort of tease out the insights in there. And that was cool. And then I also listened to the Wittgenstein, and I had read On Certainty a while back. I remember enjoying it more back then, but I think I was going through kind of a Wittgenstein phase, so I was very excited. Whereas this time it was a little. It was tougher, at least in the beginning. Yeah, I caught up, read all the stuff. I also looked at the Routledge stuff as well, which was like crazy helpful.

2:12 Mark: I don't know how much I will have edited from the previous discussion about how we were not going to have a second discussion because. But Wes, I think Was most insistent that there were many topics in here that we had not covered in the previous discussion. Can we kind of go around the circle a little bit to say based on this additional weeks of prep, what we want to get out of today? Wes, do you want to start us off on at least point some fingers?

So I was able to finish my summary of the book and start on like an index. Now I only got so far as looking at all the places he mentions testimony or learning or teachers or historical knowledge or anatomy. And what I wanted to do is just create. I was sick yesterday, unfortunately because of a bivalent booster. But what I was hoping to do yesterday was create this index of different topics that we could just. Because then we could try to draw together all the different places. For instance, that he mentions memory or testimony. Or whether Moorean propositions can be treated as hinges.

He contradicts himself on that. Or how it is that language games and the possibility of judgment collapses if you allow certain doubts. I wanted to talk about this concept of making connections as a way of assuring oneself as opposed to looking at the contemplating inner states or even direct experience is a sense in which Moorean testimony and the making of connections to a larger system of belief that implicates others is actually superior to this whole let's look at my own hands thing. As I mentioned in the previous episode, the concept of testimony in particular was important to me.

But there's a lot else in here as well. It's just a matter of trying to draw together all the different instances which I did not succeed in doing.

Yeah, I'm sure we'll. We'll vary between doing more actual textual analysis, which we didn't do a lot of last time, and more freeforming, which is great. We wrote some promissory notes last time, including your thing at the beginning about conspiracy theories that we did not pay off. And whether we do that today or in a future episode, that's fine with me. Dylan, what's on your mind today?

So I was spent more time, particularly with the end of it, which as you've noted in earlier in the other episode was a little bit more the philosophy of science kind of thing. So what's on my mind is testing. And I think testimony falls in that category of the way in which we're testing our knowledge. And I think Wes is right that the tying it to the external world with connections or consistency or other principles is probably the biggest criticism that Wittgenstein has of something like Moore's inner sense type of Grounding of I knowing. And to me is the meaty part of Wittgenstein's criticism that he's struggling over and over again with my hand.

I look at my hand and the ways in which I know and don't know that and what the means to doubt that. The part that I'm interested in is the different forms of testing that we do and where that is experience, where that is relying on testimony, and then how we tie into that.

Yes. My hope was to justify this second episode by saying, this is Wittgenstein's philosophy of science. Last time we were focused on Moorean propositions. Now we're going to focus more on, like the one that's mentioned a lot at the end. Water boils at 100 degrees. Like, he brings this up again and again. I don't know if there's enough here to actually justify talking about his philosophy of science. We can try. I was excited by in the Routledge. There was a chapter there that was clarifying the difference between Weltbild, which is a world picture, which is the kind of thing he talks about.

So you might say a Moorean sentence. There are physical objects or something. These fundamental things might be fundamental to a world picture. And we could say how that's different then from a Weltanschauung, a worldview, which is more like when we were talking last time about the Creationist or in the Routledge. That brings up about a Marxist. These seem to be more like Kuhnian paradigms, where the central claims are still empirical propositions. Something about the means of production being a key driver of history or something like that would be empirical proposition.

That could be wrong, but is absolutely central to the Marxist paradigm. So I don't know that there's a sharp distinction between those, but at least a continuum. How the Weltbild is supposed to be something much more basic. Seth, you were good enough to come along here, despite your seeming dismissal at the end of last time of spending any more time with this. Did you sum up the enthusiasm to have an agenda for today yourself?

6:49 Seth: No, I'm here out of a sense of obligation to the rest of you. No, I think I told you at the last episode that there are like four or five really interesting, I think, insights that are brought out here. I guess maybe Mark is trying to figure out the connection between the Weltanschauung or the Weltbild and these language games. There's the part where he says it's not even a philosophical statement, or it's Not a scientific statement. For Moore to say. Here's my hand. That that's part of a language game that, well, it's weird to begin with, but also that he can't deploy that in a philosophical context. And so maybe if we get into that a little bit, it'll be interesting.

7:31 Mark: I don't think it hurts for us to be like Wittgenstein circling back. You know, that's his method in the book. Chris, start us on something.

7:40 Christopher: First, I'd like to say that it's. I gotta remember that I'm in this conversation and not just listening to you

7:44 Mark: guys, because I'm so used to just

7:45 Christopher: listening to you that I have to remember that I'm actually here.

7:47 Mark: But are you here? Show me your hands.

7:50 Christopher: I'd like to think I'm warranted in asserting that I'm here at the very least. But I did take you guys serious at the end of last episode. You guys spoke a little bit about picking out some of your favorite sections or favorite numbered aphorisms and kind of using that as a jump off point or a starting point. So I went through and definitely circled some ones that I thought were most interesting to me. But yeah, I'm generally interested in the philosophy of science and I think in this On Certainty, especially towards the latter half, I was reminded of a kind of like, meaning holism.

I don't know if it's just because I'm a filthy pragmatist myself, but I read a lot of Dewey. In some of the aphorisms I saw a lot of, I was reminded of things like warranted assertability. And what do we mean when we say we're certain? And delineating knowledge and certainty is important. And then again, certainty itself into subjective and objective certainty. And all that stuff is just really interesting to me, especially the way you were talking about Kuhnian paradigms, Mark. Big fan of Kuhn. So I definitely saw how they could be analogous to a world picture.

So it'd be interesting to sort of tease out whether that's an applicable analogy. Sometimes I feel sympathetic to it and other times I feel like it doesn't quite match up. Maybe they're incommensurable, I don't know. But yeah, I can start us off on like a particular. Did you. I don't think you guys went over the riverbed analogy last time, which I really liked that.

9:05 Mark: I think this is a good topic to sort of hit on first. It's like, let's get our ideas about the philosophy of science out. Unless there's Some necessary conceptual groundwork that, Wes, you feel like we just haven't done. And we can't talk about 100 degrees boiling yet.

Talking about world picture and worldview, I think, is the right thing to start with for understanding the philosophy of science. And that leads right into testimony and the reliance on others, because how do we get a worldview? But anyway. But the riverbed thing happens at 97, I think, is the first mention of

9:36 Christopher: that I wrote just yes and true next to all of them, I think, from 95 on to 99. But yes, 97 is when he, I think, specifically talks about it as a riverbed.

9:47 Mark: Well, let's start with 95, then. Okay, I have it in front of me. The propositions describing this world picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a game. And the game can be learned purely, practically without learning any explicit rules. I don't know. Is that this one to start with, or do we need to.

10:04 Christopher: Yeah, yeah, I think that sets it up a little bit. No, 95 is great.

10:07 Mark: Let me just mention one thing. He entertains the idea at the very end that we could belong to the wrong language game. So it may not be that an evil genius is deceiving us about what our perceptions are, but what if we belong to a language game or a conceptual scheme, let's say, or society, in which there are such things as oracles. And oracles are to be relied on. Right. So instead of learning about anatomy in textbooks or through word of mouth or whatever, and being able to rely on that, my worldview includes oracles. And there's no way out of that because that's kind of foundational to the language game.

So he entertains that idea of deception. And then we get into the possibility of conflicts between language games. So I think when he mentions mythology, he's getting at the way in which this stuff is foundational. Part of a world picture, part of a belief system. Even if it's true, it plays that mythological role.

In 94, he says, I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness, nor do I have it because I'm satisfied of its correctness. No, it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

11:14 Seth: The connection here in this 94, 95, 96, and even 97 also ties back to the notion that this worldview is not empirical. It's not like you verified it empirical, which is why it could be a mythology. It's just something you inherit. It's reinforced by experience, but you didn't essentially derive it from experience, so to speak.

11:34 Mark: But that's why I would qualify. It's not empirical with. It's not primarily empirical. Right, because. Because the empirical. This is where the testing part comes in, right? I mean, even with the case of mythology, you're going to be reinforcing it. The fact that you've inherited this background. It's not as if that inherited background doesn't have any connections or evidence for you, even if you're wrong about it in some way. It's that there's going to be these demands of consistency and things fitting together such that you're using that worldview in order to.

In that world picture in order to go about your daily life and figure things out. And the case of the oracle, you're going to be making choices in the world using that world picture in order to do so. And the extent to which that works out for you in terms of use is going to be part of the evidence that you use to support that mythology.

12:33 Christopher: The important thing, though, is to talk about, like, we could even use the oracle example. Let's say you use the oracle and it's wrong. A single instance of the oracle being wrong, a single empirical episode like that is not going to be enough to discard the world picture.

12:46 Mark: Not any more than if I fire a cannonball from a cannon. And the calculation that I made to where it lands is different by 10%.

This is like Lakatos with anomalies, right? So I've learned from textbooks that water boils at 100 degrees. And I go into my high school lab and they're like, okay, let's see where water boils. And I don't get the right result. I assume I messed up bad.

Scientists, yeah, and oracles, people notoriously misinterpret them, right? Every single oracle story, like, oh, we thought it was, you know, predicting my fortune and actually it was predicting my doom or whatever.

But in the case of science, there's more reliability and deferring to this whole system of belief and hundreds, thousands of years of people doing science and then that being reported me and to me in textbooks and teachers that on my own particular experiment, because I can't know that I didn't mess up the experiments. So that's a really important aspect to empiricism. That empiricism doesn't mean, hey, let's always just look at my own direct experience. That's what the conspiracy theorist does, right? They get out their little mini towers and start trying to See if they can make them collapse and say, oh, see, it doesn't work. The towers wouldn't have collapsed that way. And of course, it's just very bad experiments with all the wrong parameters.

Yeah, but in that answer, I mean, the difference with the Oracle and even the presumptive case that I could go out and do that experiment, that inclination, I'm going to go and I'm going to pull out a thermometer and I'm going to go and I'm going to measure the temperature at which water boils, and I'm going to verify that and confirm it for myself. That possibility of doing that confirmation is part of a underlying world picture regarding the way in which science works. Is that the principle that you can go and confirm it for yourself, and so that inclination amongst a conspiracy theorist is exactly in line with science.

It's just that, as you point out, Wes, there's going to be things about the quality of that that are going to be problematic. Right. They're going to be sort of doing a classic case of executing science in a poor way. You know, science just doesn't work on its own. But the Oracle case is different because the Oracle case is testimony on the point of view of the Oracle. And that's where that authority l. That Oracle has a special authority that is not accessible by everyday people. That distinction is really important. Maybe we'll talk about it more.

Wittgenstein doesn't talk about this kind of distinction, but this distinction about where authority comes from and who has access to participating in that judgment and the adjudication of it that is fundamentally important to the way in which science and the scientific worldview operates in the community.

I think in many cases, though, with science, we can't really confirm for ourselves. You have people doing their own global warming climate change research and putting their YouTube videos up, even though they're not experts. And then someone comes along and says, well, we actually have to rely on the experts for that. We have to rely on these nodes of authority, which I think that view can become overemphasized and problematic as well. But see, Latour, the authority lies in the discursive process, in the scientific process, in the chain of what I've called the chain of custody.

It doesn't really belong with particular individuals, even though. And maybe this is just the point you were making, Dylan. Even though we treat certain people as authorities because. And this is something we could talk about too, because Wittgenstein goes on at length about, well, maybe saying I know is just an assurance That I have a certain epistemic privilege that I'm in a position to know. I had lunch with so and so today, so I know they had a haircut, for instance. So it's not that we can't treat people as authorities sometimes, but really that's about the way they are plugged into the true authority, which is the whole discursive process.

And you're making me think now of Minority Report, where you have, instead of one oracle, you have three oracles. And we'll just go with the majority because each of them was plugged into. It was like the third one's predictions are based on our knowing the results of the first one's prediction. You know, there was some sort of systematic. It was not simple disagreement. It was like different data sets that they were collecting from.

How many oracles do you need to invent a light bulb?

You know, I brought up Latour because Latour's criticism was that even though science gets touted as public and like, you could just go do it yourself, as a matter of fact, sort of, the power relations are such that, well, it's the apparatus that are available, you know, only to a cloistered group within a certain places. And so that actually is what sets up what the authority is like, who are the people that actually have the instrumentation and know how to use it to detect things about climate change. Whereas the citizen scientist is probably not in a good position to weigh in.

Chris, did you want to keep going on those propositions?

17:36 Christopher: I think that we didn't quite hit the riverbed.

17:38 Mark: No, we didn't.

17:39 Christopher: Which I think is. Is probably good to go over.

17:41 Mark: I think we're up to 96.

17:43 Christopher: Let's start from 96. I'll read. It might be imagined that some propositions of the form of empirical propositions were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened, but fluid. And that this relation altered with time in that fluid propositions hardened and hard ones became fluid. The mythology may change back into a state of flux. The riverbed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the riverbed and the shift of the bed itself, Though there is not a sharp division of one from the other. Not to name drop. I know we're not supposed to. It made me think of Quine.

18:16 Mark: Yeah, absolutely.

18:17 Christopher: And his holism. And although I thought it was a better description, Quine I think of almost has this kind of static web, although people have tried to update it thinking about it as a network. But like this idea that there's more flux, there's the possibility for even the hardened foundations to almost be eroded away. And we can shift where our foundations are so that the water can flow in a different way. It kind of gives me a better picture of the way that science and our body of knowledge can fluctuate and change given different commitments, whether it be Newton's commitment to absolute time, and then Einstein's got a different commitment, that of it being relative and all this. I just really enjoyed Wittgenstein's description of the way that this constellation of commitments can change, given that it fits in with the rest of our web of belief. Hopefully that makes sense.

19:05 Mark: Yeah. For Quine, right, it's about the distinction between a priori and a posteriori. And he wants to make the claim that the distinction is not as hard and fast as we might think. And it's really what we call a priori beliefs, necessary truths, right? Or if you're Leibniz, eternal verities. These are closer to the center of the web of belief, and it's harder to revise them without revising a lot of other things in that, a lot of other beliefs, a lot of other things in that system, in that web. But they are still in principle revisable. You can't just say that they're necessary truths, true in all possible worlds.

With Wittgenstein, of course, we're getting an expansion of that. This is what he thinks Moore has led us to, which is that it's no longer just about the certainty of a priori of the a priori, but about the certainty of these Moorean propositions which seem to be empirical and yet seem to have something like this a priori status. So in other words, if you're Quine, you might say in the riverbed or at the center of the web of belief, it's not just math and logic and necessary truths. It's also these common sense, seemingly empirical propositions that are puzzling.

Wittgenstein, is there an example?

Because I know that we can come up with, for a supposedly a priori truth, you know, a truth by definition that was considered foundational but became fluid. Like the one that occurs to me is just, you know, if you're an ancient cosmologist, you're like, well, the Earth is by definition the surface on which we walk, and that all the stuff happens while a surface is by definition flat. And so the Earth is flat seems like it would be according to that. Is it a world picture or is it a worldview? One of them An a priori proposition then of course with science that get torn apart, I mean, is that a good example of that? Of the thing that Quine might point to is showing why you might have thought that there were a priori propositions and they were a posterior propositions. But actually the distinction doesn't make any sense.

One of the more propositions that's overturned is the idea that no one has ever been to the moon and we can't imagine how we would ever get there because of strength of gravity and the physics don't support it. Well, eventually the physics did support it and that was apparently a change in.

Well, the engineering supported it. Right. The physics always supports it. Right, right. We just engineered our way over the

physics, the known physics and I think the known physics probably did support it before Moore wrote that.

But we actually think that is a Moorean proposition. This I've never been to the moon. You know, this is something that Wittgenstein considers over and over again as something that seems as immune to doubt as the ones Moore himself considers.

It's not I've never been to the moon. It's no one has ever been to the moon. That's also Moorean proposition.

But is it for Moore? Is it in the same area as this is a hand, as there are people in general on Earth and the Earth has existed before we were born,

it seems just like I and other people have existed close to the surface of the Earth for our entire lives. Right.

Yeah, but Mark is asking. Yeah, you know, once you start looking closely at these propositions, they do in a way fall into different categories. Right.

And Moore was just trying to give like the most obvious ones. But Wittgenstein, by dwelling on this at length, by then going to water boils at 100 degrees and these other specific things about history, not just that the Earth has existed for a long time, but like it has existed for thousands of years. Whatever. Further specificity, like, I think that's absolutely something that makes sense to investigate and not just consider as if there's a sharp line between Moorean propositions and others.

22:43 Christopher: I guess 99 is worth reading. And at the bank of that river consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place, now in another gets washed away or deposited just to like finish up that picture of the flux of our seemingly undoubtable commitments in our world picture and how they can change.

23:05 Mark: And he gives us an example. Right. So the truths which Moore says he knows as such, roughly speaking, all of us know if he knows them, such a proposition might be my body has never disappeared and reappeared again after an interval. This is something else he goes on at length about. There are other aspects here, memory and the regularity of nature. This I think falls into that category of regularity where you don't just have all these random metamorphoses happening. The principle of sufficient reason and mechanism is assumed to be at work.

Part of his river analogy is there's different gradations of flux. So what you just pointed to, Chris, was in line within 97 that there's a different level of flux of the riverbed itself compared to the river. And then the shore of the river has a different level of flux as well. It just seems like the different levels of certainty and different characteristics. Like Wes just pointed to principle of non contradiction. That seems like that's going to be pretty stuck in the riverbed. I mean, the fact that we would talk about a riverbed at all, that's where that's going to be. Right. But there are other things that are going to be a little more influx and then these kinds of paradigm things that we normally think. Because the principle of non contradiction isn't exactly a paradigm, it's a different kind of thing.

24:23 Seth: Yeah.

24:23 Christopher: I think of it as really, really useful for directing the flux of our body of knowledge. Right. It's like just a really important foundation or rock. Again, I don't want to say foundation, I guess, but it feels pretty close to one that's going to direct the flow of the river in a way that to get back to Wittgenstein's use of practice in a way that helps us regulate our experience, essentially it's going to be really important for practice.

24:48 Mark: This is where the notion that you can't even talk if you don't have the principle of non contradiction, you're not going to be able to even talk about the river or think about making any decisions at all.

24:57 Christopher: Exactly.

24:58 Mark: So he's expanding that. He's expanding that Aristotelian idea as we mentioned last time, two other propositions. But I was just thinking of, you know, this idea of things disappearing and appearing and the principle sufficient reason. This is something else other than testimony. In a way, these fallen into the same. It's not the same category, but they live side by side. Right. So I rely a lot on this idea that there are reasons for things, that things are connected by cause and effect on the principle of sufficient reason. And I use that a priori to rule out all kinds of things, including forms of testimony.

And this is in part why I can rely on testimony, because I have so many internal tests. I have a big bullshit detector that involves these ideas about regularity. So if a newspaper reports and a magical genie appeared and did some magic stuff, I don't go, oh, I need to go out and see if this actually, you know, I need to empirically test this. It's not a matter for empirically testing. I have a worldview that says that that type of thing is impossible unless there's some cause I've overlooked. I assume someone maybe even set up a hologram or played a trick or something like that.

So yeah, this belief in regularity of the world and cause and effect and mechanism, it plays such a huge role in the way we evaluate what we're learning and we can do so much of it a priori. There's a million other things you could mention of how it is that without ever looking at experience, without ever looking at my hands or anything else, I can evaluate claims successfully.

You're pointing out something important. So there's cause and effect. And I think that even in the case of the genie that you just gave, what's true about that or is in common is that there is a cause and effect argument going on there. But then there are the conditions of the relation of the cause and effect that are at play. That is part of that web of consistency. It's a particular kind of consistency. There are features of that consistency. And so that for instance, that there are causes that result in effects that have physical characteristics.

You have a chain of custody between them. Right. There isn't a miracle happens in the middle kind of thing. A miracle doesn't count as a cause in this reasoning. Though someone else might say, well of course a miracle's a cause. Right. Because the cause came from God. Da da da da da. There is both the cause and effect thinking, which I think is more fundamental. It's more like a principle of non contradiction kinds of thing. But then there's the character of the cause and the character of the effect and what are considered to be legitimate relations between cause and effect.

Yeah, laws of nature as opposed to one offs.

Exactly. Yes. Repeatability, the notion that we were talking about earlier. Well, of course there's all kinds of things. I take on testimony. I still will stick by the notion that fundamental to it is the possibility that I could go or someone could follow that chain of reasoning and also construct the examination again for themselves.

It's the in principle possibility that not necessarily I. But some person or group of people writes because some experiments are too big. They take the collaboration of hundreds and hundreds of people. And it's the Borg, really. That's the point I want to re emphasize. It's not about my particular experience. It's about the Borg's experience.

I agree. I'm just going to stick by that. That's a huge distinction. That capability is in principle available, and that there are modes and mechanisms by which I could, or me and my other Borg buddies can dispute. So whether it be particle physics experiment or climate change, any of those things, there are ways in which that can be evaluated.

28:49 Christopher: There's also a kind of verification going on, or even experiment, too, in that you've taken serious the testimony of particular groups of inquirers, and it has cashed out that it makes sense to believe them. I mean, whether it's using your cell phone and me going, well, I believe them about satellites here because I've seen the function of that everywhere. You test that every day. When you engage in all sorts of practices, or when someone tells me the temperature at which water boils, I think about all of the other science I've been told seems to cash out. Why would this singular statement not? And so you're constantly bringing your whole experience to each empirical instance.

29:27 Mark: I think a good place for that is 594 to 600. This is the talk of making justifications to other parts of the whole system of belief. Right. Because a lot of what this book is concerned with is this idea that to make knowledge claims requires justification. Knowledge is justified. True belief. But he's expanding the concept of justification as it exists in practice. Right. A justification just might mean. I'm reassuring you that I was in a position to know that I was in a position of epistemic privilege. In this case, justification involves not direct empirical confirmation, but making connections to other parts of the system, which I take to be certain.

30:10 Seth: Right.

30:11 Mark: Making connections to my world picture.

30:13 Seth: Yeah.

30:13 Christopher: Placing it in the logical space of reasons.

30:16 Seth: Yeah.

30:17 Mark: There you go. Quine again.

30:18 Christopher: I think that's Sellars, but yeah.

30:20 Mark: Oh, sorry. So he'll say in 594. Let me just read a little bit of this. So this is about, in particular, whether we can be certain of our own name, which I love. I love that example, but because in a way, I think we're relying on the testimony of others as well. But. So my name is Ludwig Wittgenstein, and if someone were to dispute it, I should straightaway make connections with innumerable things which make it certain so these are. These include connections, right, to other people. The experiences of other people calling me that all my life.

30:53 Seth: Well, ironically, in the text, he doesn't actually say Ludwig Wittgenstein.

30:57 Mark: He's too shy. It's too.

30:58 Seth: He puts lw, which I think just totally undermines this whole point.

31:02 Mark: It's too ambitious a claim. Epistemically, it's just lw.

And in this example of the name and an example of the water boiling, is there a distinction between saying the problem of I know my name is Dylan Casey, or I know that water boils at 100 degrees versus I know I have a name and I know that water boils and the way in which you would be wrong or right about those things. I know that water boils at 100 degrees. It seems like. Well, that's just, like, contingent on your measurement technique. You know, it's 100 degrees centigrade, but it's 212 degrees Fahrenheit. In some ways, it seems like a

31:40 Christopher: trivial fact, a contextual.

31:42 Mark: Well, it's a difference between saying, there's regularity in nature, this mechanism, there's cause and effect, and saying what the particular. Some universe, maybe it's 101. I mean, it varies with elevation and pressure. Right.

So I should interpret when, say, well, I know water boils at 100 degrees, is really him saying, I know that water boils at a fixed temperature.

No, I mean, I think he's saying, we know it boils at 100 degrees because that is an empirical fact. But, Dylan, I think you're pointing to something important, which is that. And he'll say this at the end. So he sort of toys around with Moorean proposition. So, for instance, is I am Ludwig Wittgenstein. Is that part of the logic of the language game, or is a specific Moorean proposition about me never having been to the moon part of the logic of the language game? It seems that way through the whole book until the very end. There's a twist. And he says, actually, it's not. Yeah. Those particular propositions are not part of the logic, the language game. It's the fact that they're propositions of those type. And I think that's what you're getting at, Dylan. I wouldn't want to put in the logic textbook, I am Ludwig.

Yeah, let me read the end of 628 here. The language game that operates with people's names can certainly exist, even if I'm mistaken about my name. But it does presuppose that it's nonsensical to say that the majority of people are mistaken about their names. It's sort of comparable to the methodological skepticism versus global skepticism thing that within this language game, actually, you could be wrong about your being Ludwig Wittgenstein. There are lots of situations, you know, you could be crazy in a very specific way, invent sci fi scenarios or he talks about scenarios about memory that maybe I just ate my lunch, but in fact I ate my lunch, I fell right asleep, I'm narcoleptic and then I woke up and I'm like, oh, I just ate my lunch.

No, you actually, you just took a two hour nap. All this stuff is conceivable and it's not as crazy as, you know, there's an evil demon or we're in the matrix or anything like that. So that just says that, yeah, it actually does make some sense, even if it's not generally warranted to be skeptical about particular claims. But it's the global thing. That is what the Moorean proposition should be. The one that we're in. His Common Sense essay about the in general stuff. Yeah, And I don't know exactly though how to cash that out in terms of like it seems in general general people couldn't be on the moon or whatever.

But that is the kind of thing that then got falsified. Is that a problem here?

34:05 Christopher: Would we say Moore was, I guess, warranted in asserting it then? But that doesn't meet the criteria of a Moorean proposition just because it has to be always the case. Obviously Wittgenstein's against that kind of transcendent certainty, as is put in here and stuff like that.

34:20 Mark: Yeah, I mean, I think relative to his time, it's fine.

34:23 Seth: That's the subjective certainty.

34:25 Christopher: Right. He had the feeling of being certain and that was warranted, I guess you're saying, Seth.

34:29 Mark: So it's not just subjective.

34:30 Seth: Yeah, it's subjective in the sense that the Moorean propositions, even though it's not explicit, take place from a point of view in a certain set of conditions at a time, as opposed to talking about mathematical propositions or something like that.

34:45 Mark: There's a sense in which they're supposed to not to be dependent on context, even though they look like they are. But. But water boiling at 100 degrees is a bit of a different case. And it's even that right could turn out to be wrong just in the way that Maxwell's equations turned out strictly speaking to be wrong. And you say, well, they look right in most cases. But we have to do this. Divide by what, Dylan? One minus square root of one minus C squared. And in most cases it'll come out to basically the same. But, you know, if you approach the speed of light, blah, blah, blah. So you could say that the water boils 100 degrees. We'll have some similar modification based on some future discovery that's more complicated than that. And blah, blah, blah, could be an approximation.

35:23 Seth: No, it is water boils at different temperatures depending on altitude and the composition of the water. Right.

35:29 Mark: That's already accounted for. Right. I'm just. I'm talking about some unknown scientific. Right. So water boils at 100 degrees is shorthand for including all those known variables. Right. What if there's some unknown variable that we haven't incorporated into the theory?

Yeah, but the point is that you would do that, right? I mean, it would be considered of the same kind of thing. Right? So you would have an account that would explain why with your current set of information, you say that's 100 degrees, but now when you look at it more closely or whatever, it turns out to be slightly different than that. I mean, that's exactly in line with the relativity argument. V over C is small, and therefore Maxwell's equations are right. Except in certain circumstances, it becomes super interesting later.

You know, these things can be explained in a theory. That's the idea. Like a true anomaly is desks disappearing randomly or things randomly metamorphizing into others. Right. We can always imagine that there's some explanation for that. So we have to imagine that there really is no explanation. Right? We see these little glitches in the matrix that can't be fitted into any causal explanation, into any world picture, into any system. Lack of coherence. So that's really what we're doing searching for here in a counterexample is lack. A true lack of coherence. Right? And for Moore, it's coherence, which is all we need for mind independence. It implicates mind independence.

Along those lines, I just want to make a slight correction. With relativity, it was Maxwell's equations that were deemed correct by Einstein, and he chose that the speed of light was going to remain constant for all frames of reference. And what gets modified is Newtonian space time. Right? And sort of in order to make Newton consistent with Maxwell, he modifies spacetime, and it's that principle of consistency, as you just referred to, that drives this. Right. To make those two big pieces, electromagnetism and mechanics.

But that's empirically verifiable. Though that the speed of light is the same with regard to all frames of reference. Einstein was reacting to experiments that had confirmed that too. Right.

That amounts to saying he had good reason for wanting to preference that he didn't arbitrarily flip a coin and say, what, am I going to make it consistent with Newtonian mechanics? Or I agree. I wanted to make the factual distinction. It wasn't Maxwell's equations that got changed, it was Newtonian mechanics. Two was that it was driven by this consistency question. And that's just in line with what we've been talking about.

37:55 Christopher: The consistency has to cash out in some way or it does. And that's why it's so efficacious.

38:00 Mark: It's a lever for adjudicating the distinction. And then you do have to make some judgments.

Kuhn would call this a change of paradigm. I think so it looks a little bit more like a world picture change with all kinds of implications. The concept of time has changed. My concept of space has changed. The same object could be the same shorter according to one frame of reference than another depending on my motion relative to that frame.

But those are consequences of the change of world picture that is driven by consistency. That's the way I would put it is that you're demanding that your physical accounts of the world are consistent with one another because they refer to physical objects. That's a principle for your physical theory.

Right. You have these two fixed things, the Galilean relativity and the constancy the speed of light. And how do you reconcile them? You change your views on space time.

Yes.

But it's a good example though of this is the kind of thing a skeptic might appeal to because this looks a little bit more like the riverbed shifting. Right. Because you get changes to a lot of different beliefs that it held fast and.

Sure.

On the other hand, the changes aren't big. And for most practical purposes. So I don't know. It's not like finding out there are no oracles.

Yes. In particular, you can go and spin out that consistency and you can go and look to see if that consistency holds true. And in fact, you know, looking for inconsistencies is like the bread and butter of science. Like the thing that you most want to be true when you're experimental science is find something that's happening in the world that is different than what you think should be happening in the world. That's like the juice. You just love to have that.

39:39 Christopher: Yeah. You're looking for inconsistencies.

39:41 Mark: Yeah. And then we figure out how we messed up that observation.

Exactly. Then you win a Nobel Prize and then you.

I was going to maybe read a little more on the connections thing. Unless we exhausted that.

39:51 Christopher: Let's do it.

39:52 Mark: So he talks about making innumerable connections as a way of verifying. But then he says in 595. But I can still imagine someone making all these connections and none of them corresponding with reality. Why shouldn't I be in a similar case? If I imagine such a person, I also imagine a reality, a world that surrounds him. And I imagine him as thinking and speaking in contradiction to that world. So the chain of reflection is that giving the example of the name. You know, the making of connections is really about making a connection to the fact that everyone has called me this and that.

If I rejected that form of evidence, then the whole language game falls apart. I lose the logic of the game meanings, right? Meaning becomes. I might as well just doubt the meaning of words. Then he gets into the water boiling. And the idea is that skepticism on personal grounds. So, for instance, I do an experiment and the water doesn't boil at 100 degrees. There's more weight to the fact that the entire language game implicates dependence on others and their grounds. So that's 599. Maybe I'll just read that a little quickly. For example, one could describe the certainty of the proposition that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.

That isn't a proposition I have once heard like this, or that which I could mention. I made the experiment myself at school, just to pause there. In various places he reflects on whether my personal verification does much for this piece of knowledge. And I think he's ambivalent about it. But anyway, the proposition is a very elementary one in our textbooks. Which are to be trusted in matters like this. Because now one can offer counterexamples to all this. Which show that human beings have held this and that to be certain, which later, according to our opinion, prove false.

But the argument is worthless to say. In the end, we can only adduce such grounds as we hold to be grounds is to say nothing at all. I believe that at bottom of this is a misunderstanding of the nature of our language games. So we could say implicated here is dependence on others, on testimony, on the language game itself, on the rules of the game. And those play such a strong foundational role that they compete often decisively with my own particular experiences. This should be a reminder of Lakatos and the idea that the theory will not simply just fall apart to some Falsifying experiment.

Something else has to happen.

Well, and I wonder if it also whether the private language argument reflects some skepticism about self certainty. If the whole thing is Moore saying, I'm certain of this. And Wittgenstein stresses over and over again, well, that's just you. That's just subjective certainty. We need objective certainty. We need visible grounds. And so it is the fact that you did this one experiment. Well, that is only legitimate insofar as you were following the directions which were handed down from the scientific tradition of how to do this experiment. It's not that you invented whole cloth, the way of making the observation yourself. If you did that, to then have that ratify, you'd have to sort of share with other people and say, look, I found a new way of determining that water boils or whatever the scientific thing you're trying to establish. And the Borg again would have to ratify it.

Everyone initially will definitely think you're a crank. You're the guy without a physics degree shows up to say, I found cold fusion in my bathtub. And then if it's a Cinderella story, you turn out not to be a crank and you're a great genius and get the Nobel Prize.

Well, this seems like a reasonable place to end part one. We're going to keep going on this in a few minutes. If you are a Partially Examined Life citizen, the part two will be the next thing in your feed. If you are not, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support. You'll see multiple ways of getting access to that.

43:45 Seth: Well, as scintillating as the discussion has been from my perspective, I think you have a more than superior replacement for me in Chris. So I will let him carry it down.

43:57 Mark: Second part for this episode. Not for the podcast episode, just this episode.

44:01 Christopher: Of course. Of course.

44:02 Seth: All right, thanks, everyone.

44:04 Mark: Thanks, everybody.

Thanks.

Thanks.