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

0:07 Mark: Hey. This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 310, part 2. We are concluding our treatment of Wittgenstein's On Certainty still with our guest. Hey, Chris. And no Seth anymore. He'd had enough. He had other things to do, which is reasonable. Of course.

0:24 Wes: He threw his computer into the ditch with the, with the Wittgenstein book.

0:29 Dylan: It disappeared into the riverbed.

0:30 Christopher: The blue and brown books.

0:32 Mark: One of the things I wanted to get out of today, this distinction between the Weltbild, the world picture and the Weltanschauung worldview, I feel like we have not made that clear whatsoever. And maybe it's because this is a distinction from the Routledge that is maybe made A little bit in the actual Wittgenstein text. And he does not make a big deal about. I know just in introducing that I said that what it's supposed to be is that the world picture is mostly unarticulated. Right? This is the thing that he's concerned with. With Moorean propositions, I believe.

So maybe induction itself, the fact that nature will follow a regularity, these are so unquestioned that it's hard to. Well, I don't know. Is this even a good example? Because I can picture perfectly well what a denial, what skepticism about the regularity of nature is. Even if it's something that is an unarticulated basis for our scientific investigation. If you believe in miracles, if you think that actually sometimes there are great leaps and it's not an entirely organized picture. So is that part of the Weltbild? As opposed to Weltanschauung, this worldview, which is supposed to be made up of empirical propositions that are just very general, I guess just a pejorative term the way Wittgenstein used it.

And maybe that's the only difference is that the Weltanschauungs are the ones that he doesn't like or like Marxism or you know, the ones that Popper is going to point to and say, oh that's not falsifiable, you're Marxist, you know, that's pseudoscience. Whereas the Weltbild is at least at the very bottom level, the very center of probably any scientific program. Even if you're going to deny major things about Newtonian mechanics, you're not going to deny that there's regularity in nature.

2:17 Wes: Or one might make the kind of Kantian claim that certain things are necessary grounds for the possibility of experience. So that for the most part, and Wittgenstein would say as a matter of practice for the people behave as if things are regular and there is cause and effect, there's mechanism and make a lot of other categorical assumptions. And one might argue that if we didn't have them, there would be no experience, there would be no world of any kind. Some things are so fundamental that you can't build a language game or world picture. Which one?

2:51 Mark: I think it's got to be a world picture. Yes, that's what we're focusing on here.

2:56 Christopher: The world picture is going to be something like Wes was talking about the conditions for the possibility of experience at all. So like three dimensional space and discerning particular things. And a worldview is going to be something like. Want to say ideology, but something Like a Republican's point of view or a Democrat's point of view. They both obviously accept that we're in a kind of space situation with objects and all that, but we're not going to agree on the best solution for poverty or something like that. Is that a way to talk about both of them or is that too reductionist?

3:28 Mark: You know, like a Kuhnian paradigm would have a Weltbild at the bottom of it, but then it would also have a full blown Weltanschauung. It doesn't necessarily have to go into. I mean there are going to be some normative elements in terms of this is how you should do experiments, this is how should make observations, some shoulds, but I don't know that it has to go into that. If ethics is the cutoff point though, certainly a lot of paradigms involve some sort of ethical implications built in.

3:53 Christopher: So something more like both scientists from these different world pictures, they both agree that there's regularities, but one of them thinks that brute matter is strewn throughout the arena of space and time is absolute. And then another scientist, an Einsteinian scientist, might say no, there's this thing called space time and it's actually the picture you're using to make experiments is actually not the case. So they have different sort of, I don't want to say ontological commitments, but sort of. But is that a way to articulate, like keeping it within science? Like you have a Newtonian scientist and an Einsteinian scientist and they have different ways in which they bring a different worldview to the same world picture.

4:31 Dylan: Those feel like different worldviews, but they seem like they're like in the same family of worldviews. And in that way they seem to me like as hard of a case as we'd want to consider. Going from an understanding of caloric as being the source of heat to understanding thermodynamics or the example you gave of Newtonian versus Einsteinian relativity. Like all those things involve something, let's call it more or less characteristic of a scientific worldview. And those are just different flavors of a scientific worldview. I want to take into consideration other kinds of epistemic frames, I guess, and what it would mean to adjudicate between them and whether or not there becomes a kind of just a failure of communication.

I suspect that there does, that you disagree fundamentally about the way in which the cause and effect is ordered and the consequences of those causes and effects and what kind of decisions you should be making with respect to them. And then the result is if you're coming up against other people for which the resources at play are in contest because of this, that you end up having a war, you know, or fighting about it.

5:46 Mark: One little wrinkle to add here is that, at least according to the way the Routledge interprets Wittgenstein, is that the world pictures are still relative. There are multiple possible ones. And so it's not just that, like, it's a Kantian move that we just can't help. You know, human nature or rational nature as such, is built that we have to interpret things causally and we have to interpret things in terms of space time or as Kant thought, Newtonian space time, I believe. And so maybe the, you know, the fact that these things that were considered so certain that they must be part of rational nature, part of any perceptual apparatus, or at least human perceptual apparatus, turned out to be actually false according to the most serious science points us to that there are different, not just worldviews, but world pictures available to us.

It's not that because we're part of one world picture, we can't understand another one. So Davidson, we did in another episode, followed up on Wittgenstein by talking about that you couldn't have different conceptual schemes that are untranslatable. In other words, people often say that Kuhnian paradigms, what distinguishes them is that if you're in one paradigm, you can't even understand what the other one is talking about. There's none of that here. But still, even if you can understand another paradigm, you know, so he gives that example of the Moorean sentence of the Earth has existed before I was born.

Maybe you have a king who is raised, you know, to think I'm the center, I'm the king, I'm the center of the universe and the Earth wasn't existed before. And then maybe more could go and convince this person, but that would be, as Wittgenstein says, a conversion. So that that sort of flip in world picture is not just on rational grounds. Rationality needs to refer to some underlying stream bed. But it's like jumping to a different stream bed that there's going to be something that you can say, well, that was motivated the jump. It was reasonable in a broad sense, but not based on some sort of criteria because there's, you know, we're shifting criteria.

7:45 Dylan: It doesn't seem to be quite like that exactly that, that there's the jump from one criteria to another. It may be there's some reordering. I mean, these fundamental Riverbed things. The fact that you have criteria at all and that you're going to be judging between them, there's going to be connections that allow you to even do that. Right. If I think about glaciation theory for a second, which is where we get a lot of our notion of how old the earth is. A lot of that stuff is new. Mean new in the sense of in the past couple hundred years and before modern geology and glaciation theory was accounting for things, these were at least, especially in Europe, the basic shows that the world is, you know, something like 600 years old.

There was a great flood, you know, it was very Christian oriented point of view and there were a lot of theories the Diluvian theory was trying to account for. Using that worldview, I guess to understand. Well, I have all of this geological evidence, I have these things that I agree about. These rocks that I found in the middle of South England don't have any geological commonality with the rocks around them, but they actually are just like these rocks that are in North England. That kind of thing was going on, right? So what happened? So there's this idea, well, there was a great flood and these glaciers, they floated on the water in the great flood.

And then when the glaciers melted, they floated around the earth and they dropped these rocks in different places. That was the account. Now what's common about that is it's accounting for the evidence that you see before you, right? And it's saying, okay, here's my list of cause and effect that gives me a causal chain of how this happened. And I mean I have this thing called a flood that was apparently caused by God. But the evidence that I have before me is trying to make that consistent. And the way that God sorted out is that eventually there were other principles that came into play about how long things have to be consistent.

Like so again, these become kind of fundamental scientific principles. What's true about things on the Earth has to be true about things in the rest of the universe. Our world is not special with respect to it. It's the same rules on the moon. The rules on the moon are the same as the rules down here. The rules on the stars are the same as the rules down here. Those are principles that then govern conclusions. But the operation of that kind of thinking seems to me to be like this riverbed stuff, right? I'm making claims of consistency and claims of evidence and I grab ahold of this other evidence, I say it's like this evidence and that's what becomes convincing criteria of simplicity.

10:21 Mark: And stuff like that.

10:22 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

10:22 Dylan: Yes.

10:23 Christopher: And parsimony and all that consistency, all that stuff, we all bring that to the table regardless of the way in which we employ it. But I see what you're saying, Dylan, that. Is there a world picture where that's not the case, that. That these kinds of conspiracy theorists are like this? Sure.

10:39 Dylan: I would say that they ultimately reject simplicity of parsimony. Right. They are.

10:43 Mark: You gotta ask. Cui bono? That's the simplicity.

10:47 Wes: Yeah, they reject simplicity and lots of other sorts of internal, what I call internal criteria for evaluating theories. But they also reject what most of us take for granted or think we know about human nature or human psychology. The way things are motivated people's capacity for cooperation in large projects, their level of diabolicalness collectively, their capacity for large numbers of people to keep such things a secret over a long period of time. And this is something Wittgenstein doesn't really get into. And what I think is really the crux of the issue.

A lot of our level of certainty about knowing things that we don't know directly, but that we take on testimony has to do with thinking that we know other people's psychology because we project our own. We know our own motivations very well. So this is sort of a Cartesian moment where I retrieve the external world. It's not I think, therefore I am. It's I understand my own psychology, therefore I understand that of others. And I know that there are no evil geniuses in terms of collective conspiracies of people. And so I can retrieve the external world through testimony.

That I find really fascinating, the degree to which we know things because we know psychology.

12:05 Mark: Right. So I guess an us and them. This seems like a primary political divide, is that I don't ultimately believe in us and thems. You know, that as you're saying, everybody's psychology is potentially accessible. You know, it's ironic then, that if this is a way of characterizing the left versus right, then identity politics, left is affirming them. Every group has its own unreachable psychology. And you can never understand, you know, what it's like for an oppressed person or whatever, if you've not been in that particular circumstance. But putting that aside, it still seems like there's something of the conservative mindset that, well, your phenomenology about your own motivations only goes insofar as it extends to other sort of honorable people. But yet, if you let vice take a hold of you, then there are all these others that, like, who knows what the Hell, they're going to do.

12:51 Wes: Well, the conspiracy theorists can say, look, people are dishonest, they're evil, they're greedy, they're self interested, self motivated. And so there's a parallel move right here in the way the skeptic operates, going from the possibility of local error to the possibility of global error. The conspiracy theorist wants to go beyond that because we know that about individual human beings. It's not that we put our faith in humankind in any given particular person. That's not why we trust testimony and the discursive chain of custody. It's just that we are confident of our ability to evaluate that chain and to evaluate testimony.

And so, for instance, when someone is being evil, we feel like we can evaluate how that motivation works. So, for instance, large numbers of people are not going to cooperate to do an inside job on the World Trade center to accomplish some absurd political goal that could be easily accomplished otherwise, and then cooperate to keep all of that a secret. Right? And so the conspiracy theorists will say, oh, you're just being naive and this is the way the world works. No, they're naive. It's not that we're being too trusting. It's that we think we understand the ways in which others are untrustworthy, the particular structure and configuration of that, that they don't understand.

14:10 Christopher: That belief of theirs is closer to the center of their sort of structure of beliefs than something like Dylan's criteria for simplicity or parsimony. Or if I can read a quick 142, Wittgenstein says it is not single axioms that strike me as obvious. It is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support. And so the idea sort of surrounding this distrust of institutions and stuff, it all sort of supports that. And I think that, like I said, is closer to the center of the web. And so they find it easier to discard other criteria because those connect so well. And, you know, it's sort of a supportive foundation for what follows from all of that. You know, like you said, that people are distrustful. And that can come from all sorts of things, like you said, Wes, their own psychology, they might know themselves as

14:56 Wes: rather, they're basically paranoid. And I've had a lot of experience with this in my profession. And people who believe, for instance, a schizophrenic might believe that their entire environment is filled with actors playing these games in order to torture and deceive them, and that this in fact is plausible. And if you make the big mistake, a rookie mistake, of trying to argue with them, they can make these very extensive arguments about why this is entirely plausible and they can make quite sophisticated and reasonable arguments about why this is a logical possibility.

Right. So they can do the skeptic thing and move to that position. But basically they're paranoid in such a way that they lose sight of the realities of human motivation and the realities and the psychological capacities of others. They develop a kind of, you know, what psychoanalysts would call this very split view of human beings. You can have These very diabolical Dr. Evil type characters out there who are motivated by nothing but putting a big thing over on, on, on the world,

16:02 Christopher: you know, kind of othering.

Right.

16:03 Wes: So yeah, it is a kind of. Yeah, and it's the basis for political paranoia. In fact, paranoia is quite, at a political level, is quite common and we're all susceptible to it seems that way. Yeah. And that's what's really interesting. This is one of the reasons I think skepticism is far more motivated than a lot of, say, analytic philosophers would think. We routinely think that large parts of the population are just fucking delusional. It doesn't even have to be QAnon. It's just they're in the other party and they believe a lot of bullshit. So the skeptical problem is very pressing in that circumstance. How do I know I'm not in the deluded camp? What are my criteria? What if I have the wrong criteria?

16:43 Dylan: That last question is typically not the question that we ask. I mean, part of our psychology is valuing our being right. We have come to the right conclusions. And so I think there's, in fact, there's something about our psychology where when we know we understand things better than other people do, we find that gratifying and we grab ahold of it. And we want to preserve that, that we are in the know more than other people. And that to me feeds directly into this skeptical argument, which is not just about doing nanny nanny boo boo on an argument. It comes along with I know better than you, I know more than you.

17:26 Wes: Yeah. And I think we reassure ourselves, right, by becoming good reasoners. If we're interested in philosophy and we think we're less deluded than the average person. Although we might read a New York Times op ed by a philosopher and think, wow, so much for philosophical rationality, that person is an idiot. But what Wittgenstein always returns to in this is the idea that but we really in principle could always wake up and find out that we're deluded. So all of our metrics, internal consistency and knowledge of human psychology. You could make a film where everything looks very reasonable from the standpoint of the protagonist and they seem to be doing according to their own criteria, all the right things for making evaluations of claims and assertions. And it all seems very certain. And then it turns out that you pan out and they're wearing the straitjacket.

18:18 Mark: It.

18:19 Wes: And the world is completely different than the way that they thought it was. Because even things about, okay, well, it's math. And we do the checks over and over again. There's some alternate explanation for how that type of thing could go wrong. Now we have to be a very clever filmmaker to explain that.

18:38 Mark: I think every TV series should by necessity end with something like that.

18:43 Wes: Yeah.

18:43 Christopher: An unreliable narrator where you zoom out

18:46 Mark: on Tony Soprano on the Night Court gang or whatever, and you see they're in straitjackets. It's all a dream.

18:54 Wes: Or is all who say it? Viewers love that when it all turns out to be a dream.

18:59 Christopher: But it would be consistent throughout beforehand, before the reveal.

19:02 Mark: Right?

19:02 Christopher: There would be a consistency before the reveal.

19:05 Mark: Right. It's not like 1899, a show that nobody should bother to watch. Where I got to the end of it and like, oh, this is all nonsense.

19:12 Christopher: Because.

19:12 Mark: Because it was about the fact that it's gonna turn out to be all nonsense.

19:15 Wes: Wait, 1899 is all what, a delusion or a dream or.

19:19 Christopher: Spoiler alert.

19:20 Wes: Sorry, Mark.

19:22 Mark: The one about the boat. This is not one of those cowboy ones, all right?

19:26 Wes: Because it's like Dynasty where he turns. Like they had to explain something. So they just had all previous seasons be a dream. They wanted to bring character back to life.

19:35 Mark: Everything is non canonical after. Yeah, a certain point.

19:38 Dylan: Yes.

19:38 Mark: One of the ways I'm making sense of this world picture versus worldview thing is web of belief seems to be the thing that's making the most sense here, which doesn't distinguish between exactly what are parts of the world picture. I mean, maybe those have to do more with the unarticulated things and the worldview, the more ideological part. But a web of belief is an individual's belief. And it seems like an individual could partake of. Well, maybe not multiple world pictures, but multiple worldviews could be involved. There could be some not really being sure of which worldview that you.

We can talk about different ways of being in bad faith like that. Just reading the Brothers Karamazov now. And the ways that the psychological pictures of the. I'm an atheist. Am I a believer? Like you could sort of jump back and forth and various Research programs. Right. Research program in Lakatos's sense doesn't just mean a worldview, it's like a particular program, a thing, you know, a set of assumptions, methodological assumptions you're using to achieve a certain goal. And it seems like, like you could be involved in multiple things of that and you don't think they overlap.

You know, this sort of non overlapping magisteria between the religious and the scientific or even just floating this like between different sorts of scientific enterprises that, you know, as a physicist and as a thinker about human nature or something, you might have fundamentally different methodological assumptions. So I don't know if that really helps. It's not a good taxonomy, but at least can help understand why when we're talking about a world picture or we're talking about a Kuhnian paradigm or something, we're sort of focusing on a particular set of phenomena within an individual's experience.

These are social things, right? We can all sign on to the same paradigm. But of course when you get to the individual level, it's going to be much more complicated.

21:21 Wes: Right? Individual level, meaning individual claims, the individual believer.

21:26 Mark: Yes, yeah, yeah. What is your web of belief? Do you even understand the paradigm or the research program enough? I'm acting in it, but that doesn't mean that I've read all the books. It's a thing that's larger than any individual. So talking about a web of belief, a system that's interesting of me because are you talking about I fit things in with other things that I believe, other things that I can personally verify that I'm actually hooked into, or are we participating? This would be a very Wittgensteinian thing to say, is that most of our mental life is sort of engagement with a social structure that we mostly don't even understand.

22:04 Dylan: Right.

22:04 Mark: We just are like acting. So if we want to refer to how something gets justified, then we don't go to the individual and like how do I figure out whether I'm really sure or something? We go to the publicly available criteria for settling a dispute, which again I as an individual might not even know how to do competently. Right.

22:25 Christopher: This reminds me of 159. Wittgenstein says as children we learn facts that every human being has a brain. We take them on trust. I believe there's an island, Australia, such and such shape, so on and so on. I believe I have great grandparents that people who gave themselves out as my parents, for they were my parents, etc. Importantly, he says this belief may never have been Expressed or even thought that it was so, never thought. So there are parts of our whole web of belief or constellation of commitments that are never articulated by ourselves. Or it's not like we see the whole web and make decisions. Like you said, it's part of our practice. It's what has been, I guess, useful as of yet. Which language games are the most effective in, I guess, being persuasive.

23:05 Dylan: And the next one there, where it says doubt comes after belief ties directly into that, right, that we don't doubt anything until after we've believed something. And the way in which that doubt can arise. I guess there might be multiple forms of doubt, like the sort of the generic form. I'm just going to doubt doubt for the sake of doubting. And you have to be doubting something. But then you might also have a kind of doubting that comes from there being something that runs afoul of your current belief.

23:36 Wes: He'll say, in many places, certainty about some things is a ground for the possibility of doubt, because doubt is a form of judgment. Uncertainty is part of the language game. So you don't have meaning. You don't even have a language game without some certainties. So this is another Cartesian moment. I try to doubt everything. I can't because I lose not the self, but I lose meaning per se. I lose the language game. Yep, I learned an enormous amount and accepted it on human authority. And then I found some things confirmed or disconfirmed by my own experience.

In general, I take as true what is found in textbooks of geography. For example, why I say all these facts have been confirmed a hundred times over. But how do I know that? What is my evidence for it? I have a world picture. Is it true or false? Above all, it is the substratum of all my inquiring and asserting. This is one of the most sustained sections on testimony. And as you can see, it fits together with the idea of a world picture very closely.

24:36 Dylan: I kind of wish he had brought up growing up here and the kinds of ways in which our world picture changes as we get older. The thing that immediately came to mind when in this section was I believe everything my parents say about the world. And then eventually you stop believing. In fact, you go through a phase where you doubt everything that they say in some important ways, like you rebel against it. So even in our own growth of our own psychology, we go through this from being children and the way in which our parents or the adults in our lives are forming that world picture for us. And we just believe that. And it can cause us all kinds of problems if they are deeply inconsistent, for instance, in the way in which they interact with us.

25:20 Mark: You're talking about a world picture as something that an individual has. This individual is making sense out of the world. I believe, you know, all good comes from Mommy and Daddy. All truth comes from Mommy and Daddy. But if I'm right, then Wittgenstein's idea of a world picture is a language game, is a social thing. So it's not like there's a social thing that the child is signing onto. He's trying to sign on to whatever it is that Mommy and Daddy play, their view of the world. And it's just that his grasp is so secondhand and rudimentary that he's not even, like, playing the game correctly.

It's like the difference between Mommy and Daddy are playing chess. I can play chess too. I look, I'm moving the pieces around on the board, but, like, doesn't understand what winning and losing is, doesn't actually understand any of the rules. So you could talk about that as the world picture changing, but I think for Wittgenstein, that would have to be like a mode of going from one language game to another, whereas I'm interpreting that as I don't understand any of the language games involved. Oh, now I get the point. On that account of the world world picture, the child actually doesn't have a world picture at all.

26:22 Christopher: Are you saying, similar to your reference to private language, that a world picture is going to have to be social and a single individual cannot have a world picture?

26:30 Mark: That seems like a Wittgensteinian kind of way to think about it. I'm not sure I like Dylan's explanation, but I don't know if it's a Wittgensteinian one.

26:38 Dylan: I guess I thought it would have been social, a small social circle.

26:41 Mark: Right, right.

26:42 Christopher: You and your parents, you were saying?

26:44 Wes: I think it's both. Obviously, an individual has their own world picture, regardless of what Wittgenstein wants to say about accessing mental contents and things like that.

26:53 Christopher: But it is the case that that world picture developed socially, right? It had to have. Yeah, of course, its origins are. Do you think that world pictures are truth valuable, or do you think that they're on a whole, just not within the game?

27:07 Mark: I mean, if they're a language game.

27:08 Christopher: Right, but not outside. So we don't have a way to compare world pictures. Right?

27:12 Mark: Sure, sure you can.

27:13 Wes: Well, he gets into that a few times. He entertains this idea of conflicting world pictures. Do we want to look at that.

27:21 Christopher: Right. When Moore gets kidnapped is that one

27:23 Wes: where he's puzzled by the possibility of that. So what happens when we get these competing world pictures or language games? How do we persuade someone? So for instance this is at 2:57. He's contemplating the idea of persuading someone with a different world picture of one's own. So it starts out with language games. So this is the other thing. Language games changing over time. So the world picture can change. 257 if someone said to me that he doubted whether he had a body I should take him to be a half wit. But I shouldn't know what it would mean to try to convince him that he had one. And if I had said something and that had removed his doubt I should not know how or why because he

28:05 Christopher: doesn't have the same world picture. And so he doesn't know what would end up being persuasive.

28:10 Mark: Yeah. He doesn't know what the criteria. You know this person obviously is thinking so differently than me. Then what I would give as reasons are not going to, as far as I understand have any footing in his world picture. Being a half wit might mean you actually don't have a coherent world picture at all. It's not that you just have a different one.

28:29 Dylan: Well I mean that's the question.

28:30 Christopher: Right.

28:31 Dylan: So you would have the case where I'm going to say that they're just deranged. And that would be the category of effectively not having a world picture that had a characteristic of consistency. Right. There's something deranged about them. The other possibility is right. They're right. Right. In fact in some ways you're the deranged one. If you're both sort of right in some way then there's going to be these stepping stones that are going to get between you two.

28:57 Wes: Here's another one. 262 I can imagine a man who had grown up in quite special circumstances. Special and been taught that the earth came into being 50 years ago and therefore believe this. We might instruct him the earth has long etc. We should be trying to give him our picture of the world. This would happen through a kind of persuasion. So he's thinking about the difference between operating within the language game within the worldview and convincing someone of local error. Put it that way. Right. Versus convincing someone that their entire paradigm is messed up. That would be a whole different process to persuade them of that than what we normally do within Inside the language game.

29:42 Christopher: I circled 262 the one you just read Wes, and not to poke you at all, but I wrote Rorty at the bottom, as once we understand the social justification for truth, we understand all there is to know about truth. It just made me think of that.

29:56 Wes: Say more about social justification.

29:58 Christopher: Specifically, when he talks about. He says this would happen through a kind of persuasion. And I guess the way in which we would alter someone's worldview or bring evidence to bear to try to persuade them otherwise, that's going to be the arbiter for what you fit in your web of belief and what criteria you have for justifying those claims. And that's going to end up being a social phenomenon, I guess, the way testimony is.

30:24 Mark: Right.

30:25 Dylan: I mean, persuasion becomes the mechanism by which you bring the kinds of evidence and authority that you are taking to be persuasive and getting them to agree to it when you get persuaded of something. Right. Just like everything we said about I can't perform every experiment for myself. I don't know all the facts on my own. I haven't verified everything. But I rely on testimony. I rely on this level of belief. Persuasion means if I get persuaded, I have a path where I've been carried along so that my set of connections get harmonized with another set of connections.

That harmonization may mean I recast some of the connections I had before and understand them differently than they were before so that they make this new whole. That recasting may be that I don't believe them anymore, but I believe these other ones. It could be that extreme. It could be just that I just fold them into one another and that when I persuade someone else, I make that kind of connection for them.

31:22 Wes: Yeah. I mean, the question is how we persuade someone who doesn't. Because they don't share a world picture. They don't have the same things that they're connecting to. It's like unplugging them from their picture and plugging them into our picture, which can't happen. It might not be able to happen by way of reasonable argument. Right. It might be a matter of therapeutics. So. So I'm thinking here of Wittgenstein. How does he persuade philosophers that they're engaged? Maybe I think he's trying to say they have the wrong world picture and that it's based entirely on a confusion regarding the language game, let's say.

But you could think about this too, in terms of trying to persuade someone who's religious, who believes in God, that there is no God. You can't just go to them and say, within my world picture, you got to be able to verify, there's got to be empirical evidence or however you want to put it. That's not going to connect for them. But we know that religious people do, through a series of experiences, they do gradually have that picture sometimes overturned. And then the question is, well, how did that happen? What changed? It wasn't just an argument, but how did they get plugged into the new world picture?

32:36 Dylan: What's their crisis of faith?

32:38 Mark: Right. I would love to do a future episode on persuasion and conversion. You know, find a really good source to read about that, because Wittgenstein, just saying this would happen through a kind of persuasion that is so ambiguous. Like, we're just filling in the gaps here to figure out what that would mean. I like Dylan's. I'm marshaling the forces of what persuades me. But then Wes is correct that like. But then I have to connect it to the person I'm persuading. And if the person is making statements that are incomprehensible is a half wit, as Wittgenstein says, there might be no way to plug into that.

Like there might be with the schizophrenic patient or whatever, that there's not any places where reason could insert itself. But there might be other ways of persuading that are not strictly speaking about reason, but that are most. I will marshal your fellow feeling, you know, all the kind of stuff that Aristotle refers to in the rhetoric.

33:28 Wes: And I think Lakatos is relevant here. Right, right. It's not about falsifying. And that's what Wittgenstein will say here. You can't just go to the person of faith and say, oh, look at this piece of evidence to the contrary. Or what about all the suffering in the world thinking of Dostoevsky. But you can show them that a new theory has more explanatory value. At least if Lakatos is right, it explains more. There are things not explained by the old theory that are explained by the new theory, et cetera, et cetera, or

33:55 Mark: that it just even has more other pragmatic benefits. Like, I don't rule out Pascal's Wager kind of argument or just any kind of pragmatic Kierkegaardian, I will choose faith or whatever, you know, because of all the psychological benefits it brings. You know that these are not about appeals to rationality except in sort of its instrumental rationality. Right. You want to be a happy person.

34:16 Christopher: If we go to 204, I wrote at the bottom, just take the pragmatism pill. But it's.

34:22 Wes: What color is that pill, by the way? I want to know.

34:25 Christopher: Ooh, interesting. A green, I guess. I don't know why I think that maybe money, I don't know. Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence comes to an end. But the end is not certain propositions striking us as immediately true. That is, it is not a kind of seeing on our part. It is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language game. And it makes me think of being persuasive to someone who's religious. You might have all the propositions explanatory and you might have all the scientific evidence to bring, but it might be that what's more persuasive is. Is them no longer being a part of their church community because they moved.

34:57 Wes: Yeah.

34:57 Christopher: And these kinds of things are going to have a larger effect on their, I guess, world picture.

35:02 Wes: Different rituals, different ceremonies. Thinking of Confucius now, having done philosophy

35:08 Mark: versus improv for a year and a half now. There are a couple points in here. We're like, maybe we should do a scene. You know, how does. If the king believes the world started at my birth, now you guys all try to convince me. Or when Wes brought up the. You can't talk to the paranoid schizophrenic about, you know, why they're incorrect. Well, let's run through that. Like, I want to actually see a literary defense of this. Like, it would have been very. Not in character for Wittgenstein, but like, in his sort of throwing out these questions, like, give us more dialogue, put more things in quotes. Like, fill out a scene of, like, how this would really. The convincing would work.

35:44 Christopher: He should have written a book.

35:46 Wes: Have you guys read anything about childhood theories of sexuality or reproduction? And do you remember that from your own childhood? Like, where you thought babies came from and when that view changed and was it a emotionally disturbing experience to find out the truth? Because I remember at one point as a child thinking, even though I knew about sex, thinking that babies actually came from love. And I was very attached to that idea. And I was able to argue for it ferociously. I imagine you wouldn't care children in ways that were baffling to them. I don't know why I'm bringing up

36:21 Mark: Sounds like a good South Park.

36:23 Christopher: I had a particular experience like that I was told by my friend Nakai in, like, fourth grade what was really going on. And I remember trying to pretend like I knew, but it was pretty like, oh, you know, shit, I don't even think I understood it really.

36:34 Wes: Or as a kid, you know, I went around. I never believed in Santa Claus.

36:38 Dylan: What?

36:38 Wes: I still loved Christmas. I was still very excited about Christmas, but never believed in Santa Claus and would always be like, to other kids, like, what are you talking about? Are you an idiot?

36:46 Christopher: I was devastated when I found out.

36:48 Wes: Yeah. And then I went through a little phase as a new atheist. When I got to the United states, I was 9 years old and running around trying to browbeat people into admitting that belief in God made absolutely no sense.

37:04 Mark: This is a good product to journal because, like, I don't remember how I learned that there was no Santa Claus or how I learned where babies come from. And if only I'd been encouraged to record my. Put your phone in voice recorder mode in front of your kids and ask them questions about, like, how do you think this works? You know, not only will it. The questioning process itself might advance them forward, but it'll be just an awesome keepsake.

37:30 Wes: How terrifying would it be to have a transcript of every thought we've ever had childhood to adult and be able to review that?

37:39 Mark: Yeah, it's funny how some of these things stick with you and some don't. Like I recall, you know, I was old enough at my freshman orientation in college and they were giving us the speech, maybe I've told this story before. They were giving us a speech of like, why you shouldn't be homophobic. Because it was 1989 and that was a way we were raised. And I raised the teleological question of like, but how do you explain homosexuality given that the whole point of sex is, you know, for procreation and that the person running the orientation here is like. Well, psychologists, they just. It's just a factor. Right? It's just some people are gay and some people are not gay. In other words, put your smarty pants teleological reasoning that makes you think you know more than you do. Just fuck off. Fuck off with that.

38:21 Christopher: Yeah.

Hopefully they gave you a textbook on evolution, essentially.

38:25 Mark: So I remember that sort of bit of shameful ignorance and hubris on my part, but that's because I was at 5.

38:31 Wes: You are a homophobic adult.

38:37 Mark: I remember getting over that in the course of college.

38:40 Christopher: Yes, that's good.

38:41 Wes: I think that's an example of a change in world picture. But we're on normative territory here. And it would be interesting to know what Wittgenstein thought about that. Right. Because do we get any of that in the book? It's all about facts, like epistemic normativity. No, I mean, just about norms in general, truth claims about norms and how that works with the language game and certainty and all that.

39:08 Dylan: The riverbed stuff is aligned with that. But he doesn't frame it in terms of norms as much as in terms of the way we were talking about it earlier as being sort of grounds for the conditions of experience, that kind of thing. I think that in the book, he's considering that way as opposed to being normative of our experiences.

39:27 Mark: I feel like I have an ongoing. The same way that I will doubt myself in ways that Wittgenstein thinks it's ridiculous to, like, did you do that thing? Like, well, I'm not really sure. You know, this sort of comes up with things around the house, like, are you sure you fed the dog? Like, well, I'm not really sure of much of anything. You know, I feel like as a philosopher, I'm much more modest, but then as a practical matter, I'm much more likely to want to follow my own judgment. And this is definitely something carrying over from my childhood where it was much worse. You know, how likely are you to think that the GPS must be wrong? Or. My son got me a LEGO kit for Christmas, and I'm going through this, and, like, they left out this piece. This piece is missing. I should complain. Oh, of course. The piece is right there. Like, I just assume they just think

40:14 Christopher: you have an epistemically privileged position always.

40:16 Mark: Yes.

40:16 Christopher: Yeah.

40:16 Mark: And you do not. So it's just interesting that that goes with the hyper modesty about, like, do I really know? I. I'm not sure that. It seems to me that I know about doubt, almost everything. Those two sides of the same coin somehow. I don't know. So is this a philosopher issue or is this a personal problem? Is what I'm asking you guys not to.

40:34 Christopher: Not to psychoanalyze, but do you think that your willingness to doubt yourself is kind of a way for you to forgive yourself for making these mistakes, like forgetting to feed the dog to make you feel better about, like, oh, you know, it's not my fault. I. You know, who knows?

40:47 Wes: No, it's bad faith.

40:51 Mark: Maybe in both circumstances. Yes, that it is a, you know, attempt to exert my power over the world. The GPS must be wrong. I didn't take a wrong turn. There's something in the system. And, yes, we're just all feeble creatures with frail memories. How could we be expected to keep promises and show up to appointments on time and be at the meeting, et cetera? Any other sharing before we go? Thanks, Chris.

41:17 Dylan: For coming.

41:18 Mark: Yeah. Share some with us about your the phenomenology of being on a pel. Episode here.

41:22 Christopher: It's wonderful as it's ongoing, I guess. I do want to thank you guys a lot for letting me participate. I have. Being someone who has no background in philosophy, I have like a theater degree. So you guys kind of allow for me to dive into some of these papers and books and like, hearing you guys genuinely try to work through it is something that I don't often find other podcasts are, you know, relatively informative, but you guys really engaging with it is something that has helped me really engage with the whole intellectual history. And I love, you know, I love, I love the whole thing.

I mean, ethics are kind of cringe, but I. Even then, if you read some Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir is incredible, for example. And that's. I got that from you guys. But anyway, I do a lot of philosophy now online in like a Discord, and that has also been because other guys on my Discord have philosophy backgrounds. And so being able to participate with them has been. Has been really enriching as well. And I really just have to thank you guys for that. But yeah, being on the podcast is incredible. You guys are all really great. Obviously, I'm sympathetic to Dylan's point of view.

I don't know if you're still a pragmatist, Dylan, but.

42:27 Dylan: Oh, oh, yeah.

42:28 Christopher: But I take serious when you. I mean, I remember the Rorty episode and Wes's objections are great to sort of try to sort through. Either way, I'm random.

42:36 Dylan: He's still wrong.

42:37 Christopher: But.

42:38 Wes: Well, when it comes to, you know, altering my paradigm, flattery is a good means of persuasion.

42:45 Dylan: True, true, true.

42:47 Christopher: Thank you guys for doing this and for letting me participate as well. Shout out to my Discord, the Citadel.

42:52 Wes: Thanks for coming on.

42:53 Dylan: Thanks for coming on, Chris.

42:54 Christopher: Of course, man.

42:55 Mark: All right, next time we're shifting gears and going to do the Dao De Jing, Lao Tzu, a text. We did some Daoism very early on. It was our first non western philosophy episode. But we didn't do this text because I thought got it's too religious. But we got a one that's called a philosophical translation. So we're going to use that to voyage in. If you have ideas of what you'd like to cover or any other comments about the show, maybe you'd like to be a guest. Chris reached out to us in this way and bugged us for a long time and. And what, seven years later or something?

Voila. He's on the show. It can happen to you, too. Pl partialexaminelife.com is the email. There's a contact form on our website, partiallyexaminedlight.com or through Twitter, through Facebook, Instagram. Many ways of reaching us and making your will known. Maybe don't use the itunes rating system as a way to post your petty grievances, but we do. Welcome. If you just want to give us a five star and tell us that you've been listening for however many years or episodes that would be.

44:02 Christopher: Welcome.

44:02 Wes: Welcome.

44:03 Mark: Thanks, everybody and good night.

44:04 Wes: Good night.