Further thoughts and notes (more notes, really) on
what I said before about the Tractatus. Wittgenstein's fundamental thought is given in 4.0312:
My fundamental thought is that the “logical constants”
represent nothing. That the logic of facts does not allow of
representation.
Propositions represent objects (and their relations), i.e. facts. What must or should be done in any non-factual sense cannot be represented. "If...then" statements can all be replaced by propositions connected with the Sheffer stroke or by truth-tables, and truth-tables are like rules for a game. Nothing tells you that you have to play that game. The only necessity is logical necessity, which is the necessity of a game. Compare
Anscombe:
in a divine law theory of ethics [...] what obliges is the divine law‑as rules oblige in a game.
Here is more Wittgenstein on philosophy and the limits of the ethical/sayable (not the same thing, but they share a border):
4.113
Philosophy limits the disputable territory of natural science.
4.114 It should delimit the thinkable
and therewith the unthinkable.
It should limit the unthinkable from
inside, by way of the thinkable.
4.115
It will refer to the unsayable in that it presents clearly the sayable.
4.116
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.
I think this backs up what I was saying about the limit in question being a kind of border between scientific facts (which Wittgenstein understands in a very broad sense--scientific facts are basically just facts, and maybe even all possible facts) and the unsayable. The unsayable is also unthinkable, so I don't think this should be regarded as any kind of mysticism. The unthinkable cannot be thought
at all. There is no room here for 'grasping' or 'intuiting' the ineffable.
cmon, not at all, what if i just, you know, kind of, like… really try and get at it
ReplyDeletesomehow
I remember reading a nice paper in Religious Studies (I think) by Tim Knepper on LW and ineffability. Having looked over some old writing of my own, I remembered this paper, and a suggestion he makes that we should doubt that there is anything like "absolute ineffability"--anything that is absolutely ineffable isn't anything at all. (I think was the point--I can't remember if he's actually drawing that out from LW.)
ReplyDeleteBut isn't all of this thinking about what's going on in the Tractarian remarks about what can and cannot be said beholden to the idea that language can only express facts? Aren't we supposed to give that up when we come, in PI 23, to be reminded of the various expressive uses of language, beyond stating facts? (Or would the idea remain that, whatever we are doing when we use ethical language, we aren't stating propositions? That is, is ethical language still on the other side of a border, with fact-stating propositions squarely on the other side of that border?)
Thanks, I'll have to look that paper up. It sounds right to me that anything absolutely ineffable isn't anything at all. At least that sounds right as a reading of the Tractatus, which is what I'm involved in here.
ReplyDeleteLanguage surely can do more than just express facts. But I'm not sure when Wittgenstein recognized this, or expected his reader to do so. TLP 6.54? PI 23? Somewhere in between? I don't know. I think he always recognized a difference between the kind of fact-stating that scientists do and ethical uses of language, but how to describe that difference is something he surely changed his mind about. (And I'm not sure it's really one difference, or an absolute difference: stating a scientific fact might be an ethical act in some circumstances.)
You talk about “border between scientific facts […] and the unsayable. Is this meant to be resolute? Here is something Cora says about limits in a discussion of solipsism in the Tractatus:
ReplyDelete“Wittgenstein’s remarks about the limits of language and the world [...] are concerned with the difference between a Russellian two-limits view [...] and a one-limit view. [...] The world is my world in the sense that there is nothing [...] which is in the world and which I cannot name. The idea that the use of quantifiers enables me to reach beyond the limits of my experience to objects ‘outside’ experience is incoherent. The rejection of the two-limit view does not, though, leave us with one of a sort of thing, namely a limit, of which the Russell view had had two. It is the mistake of solipsism to treat its rejection of a two-limit view as leaving us confined within the limit which Russellian realism had sought to get us beyond. That is, solipsism rejects the Russellian idea that we can get beyond the ‘limits of private experience’ but keeps its conception of that limit: it does precisely give us one of what Russell had given us two of. The solipsist does not rigorously follow out his solipsism; if he did, it would lead to a non-Russellian realism. A one-limit view self-destructs; we are not left, at the end of the Tractatus, with a philosophical view about a ‘far side’ of the ‘limit’, but merely with there being the sentences of our language. [...] The Russell notion of the ‘limit’ of experience is meant to be the notion of something about which we can ask: ‘Can we get beyond it, and if so how?’ The Tractatus technique first makes available a criticism of the Russellian answer to that question; we are then meant to see that the Russell question has been shown not to be a question at all.” (“Does Bismarck Have a Beetle in his Box?” section 9, p. 282-3.)
When Wittgenstein talk about ‘limits,’ is it borders that he has in mind?
When Wittgenstein talk about ‘limits,’ is it borders that he has in mind?
ReplyDeleteApparently not. The "border" between facts (or anything else) and the utterly unthinkable is not really a conceivable border. I need to return to Cora's work. Thanks for the pointer.
glad to jettison the imagined mystic aspects but what do you make of those things that we can do but cannot explain (even to ourselves) how we do them?
ReplyDelete-dmf
I'm not sure, but perhaps Wittgenstein would say that whatever can be pictured can be thought. And we can picture how we do things. That is, if I want to teach someone how to play a musical instrument or make a cappuccino, say, then I might find a demonstration better than any number of sentences I could speak or write. And this demonstration could be in the form of a video or series of cartoons. It can be represented, that is to say.
ReplyDeleteEthics is not like this. I can represent murder's making people unhappy, but not its being wrong. (Is that right? Doesn't "Murder is wrong" represent it?)
Where does this leave the saying/showing distinction? I don't know.
In short: good question!
is there an actual "wrong" separate from aspects like suffering/loss? and not so sure about the illustrated point as this sounds much like the various rule-following/cookbook dilemmas, if one counts something like an apprenticeship as "demonstration" than maybe but that's a wide net to cast when one considers the role of socialization in our lives.
Delete-dmf
is there an actual "wrong" separate from aspects like suffering/loss?
DeleteI think so, at least conceivably. That is, I think one can have bad thoughts, e.g. sadistic or racist ones, and that attempted murder is bad even if no suffering at all results from it. Someone might disagree, but then they wouldn't be describing how we use words like 'wrong' and 'bad' but making a recommendation about how we ought to use such words.
I think I share your worry about the demonstration case. Someone (Jason Stanley?) recently argued against the knowing how/knowing that distinction by saying that it is all knowing that, because know-how is all knowing that it is done like this:... That struck me as cheating, and I don't want to commit a similar foul here. But I'm trying to understand what Wittgenstein wrote more than I'm trying to decide what I believe about it. That comes after I know what he says.
but even in the thinking there is something ugly/undesirable about the thoughts/images and not something separable/extra (not counting the context of our lives) that is wrongness itself (so to speak) is there (maybe like cold can be a quality?)?
DeleteAgreed (I think). I don't think there's any such thing as wrongness itself that could ever be separable, even in thought. The only reason I hesitate at all is that you say "so to speak," so I might not be understanding you as well as I think I am. But I think I am.
DeleteWittgenstein in 1949 (Culture and Value, p. 94):
ReplyDelete"God's essence is said to guarantee his existence – what this really means is that here what is at issue is not the existence of something.
For could one not equally say that the essence of colour guarantees its existence? As opposed, say, to the white elephant. For it really only means: I cannot explain what 'colour' is, what the word "colour" means, without the help of a colour sample. So in this case there is no such thing as explaining 'what it would be like if colours were to exist'.
And now we might say: There can be a description of what it would be like if there were gods on Olympus – but not: 'what it would be like if there were God'."
Similarly, there cannot be a description of "what it would be like if murder were not wrong", and this is why "Murder is wrong" cannot represent murder's being wrong. "Our words will only express facts, as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water even if I were to pour out a gallon over it."
And oh, this "Cora" business. I envy you for it. I have met Ms. Diamond, run with her frantically to catch a parting train, and even been told a dirty joke by her, but she'll never, ever be "Cora" to me. I don't call Schopenhauer "Art" or Hume "Dave" either.
ReplyDeleteI do call Jim Conant "Jim" though, and this strikes me as the only proper thing to call him although I've only met him four or five times. This must be a symptom of something significant.
I feel a little weird calling her Cora, but I'd feel weirder calling her anything else. (This also relates to an odd feature of blogs, which are public but not really addressed to the public in the way that a book is. First names seem too pally, last names too formal. But I've decided to use first names when I know the person in question, even if I don't know them very well. I just hope this isn't too sickening (i.e. envy-inducing or seemingly-trying-to-be-envy-inducing) for anybody.)
DeleteWell, there isn't anything sickening about it. (In any case I can deal you a Georg Henrik for your Cora.) It's just somehow... unreal. Belief-beggaring. That someone, anyone, can know such major figures in the history of philosophy... just like that, at the flick of a wrist.
DeleteNothing compared to how some people called Rush Rhees "Bob", though. I trembled in disbelief when I heard, via Georg Henrik.
Bob?! I don't think I ever heard that. As I recall everyone always called him Rush Rhees. But that was a long time ago.
DeleteThanks, Tommi! I should perhaps add that when I expressed uncertainty about the answer above I meant only that I (right now) am not sure what to say. I didn't mean that I understand the matter fully and know that no one can answer the question at all well.
ReplyDeleteThe passage from Culture and Value is interesting because, as you suggest, it seems perfectly in line with Wittgenstein's earlier thinking. I can imagine someone insisting, though, that "Murder is wrong" does represent murder's being wrong, and I'm not sure how Wittgenstein would respond, what the next step in a constructive dialogue would be. It seems to depend on what you mean by 'represent,' for one thing. But it certainly matters that we cannot describe or imagine what it would be like (or mean) if murder were not wrong. This makes murder's being wrong a very different kind of fact, if it is a fact at all, from other facts.
Not to change the subject, but I wonder now whether "Murder is wrong" might be thought of as a "hinge proposition." This seems like the kind of move someone might want to make, anyway. But it seems very different from "My name is DR" or "The Earth is very old." We could, after all, make a movie about the Earth's not being very old after all. It's an imaginable situation. You would be crazy to believe it, but it's an idea we can entertain. Murder's not being wrong doesn't seem like that. I could write a story about a world in which people don't consider murder to be wrong, but that's not the same thing. And I can entertain the thought of murdering this or that person. I can even wonder whether it would really be so wrong in these cases, even if I accept that it would be murder. But murder's not being wrong generally is not something I think I can make any sense of. (And then I start to wonder exactly what "Murder is wrong" means, but I don't want to try to get into that here.)
It always saves a lot of time and energy when you start to object to your own train of thought already yourself, as happens in your last paragraph. I agree with the objection completely.
DeleteAdditionally, there's also the fact that you can hope to have (and often do have) a free ride on alleged moral "facts", while you cannot have one on any empirical facts. Recall that Wittgenstein compares the account of a murder with the account of the falling of a stone. Well, you can get away with acting in defiance of the "fact" that murder is wrong, but you cannot get away with acting in defiance of the empirical fact that a large stone is about to fall on your head.
In the case of the stone, it's almost as if the "punishment [...] lie[s] in the action itself", as Wittgenstein says at Tractatus §6.422 – only not in the secondary sense reminiscent of Plato's Gorgias, which is Wittgenstein's sense, but completely literally.
Yes, I agree with the objection too. A blind alley seemed to appear and I wanted to note it while still pointing out that it was a dead-end.
DeleteAnd I agree, there is no escaping empirical reality.
I think two issues here needs to be separated: (a) The question about grammatical propositions like red is a color, two is a number, Duncan is a proper name… and (b) the whole business with moral language.
ReplyDelete‘Murder is wrong,’ I think, is a grammatical proposition, whatever else it might be. And so it is not immediate to me that when Wittgenstein talks about God’s essence, in Mr. Uschanov’s quotation, he means this to be a grammatical remark about moral or religious language. The fact that he puts the example of color alongside it might indicate that his point here is not about ethics. (Even though in the next paragraph he does seem to distinguish between the grammar of pagan and monotheistic languages.)
Or again, there might be two, not one, issue here of inexpressibility: one related to logic and the other to ethics. – Or at least, if the issues are related, that has to be clarified.
(By the way, with regard to that issue regarding hinge propositions, Jim’s “Why Worry about the Tractatus” can shed some light on that. Basically, he surveys kinds of propositions or pseudo-propositions, in which Wittgenstein was interested in the Tractatus, in the Investigations and in Culture and Value, as well as the kind of misunderstandings of their function. He emphasizes the similarities, but there are also differences.)
Thanks, Reshef. "Murder is wrong" does seem to be analytic, although I have a feeling that this has been denied by someone worth taking seriously. (I should look into that.) And this is different from a sentence such as "Abortion is wrong," which is not analytic (or grammatical--I hope we're using these terms interchangeably). So there are two questions or issues (at least) here, one about grammatical propositions and another about moral language generally.
DeleteWittgenstein's remark about God's essence does not seem to be about moral language, or even religious language in general. But his point about the possibility of a description of what it would be like if x strikes me as relevant to the question of what kind of meaning moral language has.
Thanks, too, for the reference to Conant's paper. I will have to look it up.
Saying that ‘murder is wrong’ is not analytic is a strange claim. I mean, to be analytic is a matter of use; it’s not somehow magically contained in the words that when thus combined they will be analytic or not. Perhaps the claim is that the proposition could have uses that are not analytic, or is often used not-analytically. Or perhaps the claim is that the proposition could not have an analytic use. (That would be interesting, but a bit incredible.) Or perhaps--and this might be the most interesting claim--the claim is that the proposition (and perhaps other moral propositions) is analytic in a special way. - Who knows.
DeleteAnyway, you talk of separating two issues. But I’m not completely sure which two issues you wanted to separate. The two issues I had in mind are both about problems regarding meaningfulness. Of moral propositions--whatever these are supposed to be (and that’s, I think an important question)--Wittgenstein says that they don’t exist. Apart from that, he also had Fregean suspicions about the meaningfulness of grammatical propositions, like ‘horse is a concept.’
Crudely, for both grammatical propositions and moral propositions there are suspicions about their ability to mean something: suspicions about us really wanting to be doing something with them. But somehow it seems to me that the issues should be separated. Even more crudely, I sense that we should separate claims that a proposition is meaningless because grammatical from claims that a proposition is meaningless because moral. It seemed to me that when we take a proposition like “murder is wrong” as our example, we are bound to run the two issues together.
Were these the two issues you wanted to separate?
I should probably not have mentioned the idea that "murder is wrong" might arguably not be analytic. As I say, it seems analytic to me.
DeleteWhat I had in mind about separation was the fact that "Murder is wrong" is (let's say) analytic, but also includes the word 'wrong,' and its meaning might be questioned for this reason (i.e. there is a question about the meaning of the word 'wrong,' at least in some cases, as there is of other related words, such as 'ought' and 'obligation'). So, as I think we agree, one could question the meaning of "murder is wrong" because of its analyticity or because of its moral component (assuming it's the moral sense of 'wrong' we're talking about here).
http://www.radiolab.org/2010/dec/14/i-need-a-hero/
ReplyDeleteThanks.
DeleteI like this comment there: "Actually, in spite of the bafflement expressed by Jad and Robert at the lack of any clues to the origin of the heroic deeds of the Carnegie award recipients, Bill Pennell -- the second Carnegie hero interviewed in the segment -- did make a very important comment, which Jad and Robert seem to have missed or ignored. Bill said, something like, "I was thinking 'These are somebody's kids in there.' I had a daughter at the time who was 16." Clearly, he experienced empathy toward the parents of the kids and almost paternal feelings toward the kids in the car. He understood and identified with the suffering that would have been experienced by others if the children in the car perished."
Deletethat was interesting but I would bet that in fact this was an after the fact un-conscious embellishment and that in the moment he didn't go thru such a thought-review process.
DeleteOn a wider scope of behaviors/choices people (especially analytic philosophers) often confuse after the fact justifications with before the act reasons/processes but they are reactions to quite different events.
as to above I just said "so to speak" as we (well I was) were doubting the possibility of a distinct quality like "wrongness" apart from a distinct event/action (even if just a thought of) of wrong-doing.
-dmf
I agree. I've never done anything heroic, but I doubt those who do motivate their actions with any kind of argument. Still, it doesn't follow (it seems to me) that they have no reasons for what they do, that there are no reasons one can (accurately) identify.
DeleteAnd on "so to speak" I was just being (overly) cautious. I agree with you.
see I think that having reasons (as in ones I can give/say) is a different kind of doing/activity than what I might do in terms of leaping down onto a train track, so as to what/who does (might?) unify these doings than we are in the murky realm of persons and identities. On a perhaps less murky front I don't think that such reasons function like machine-programs in that I would always do such and or that they are routine/predictable, I think there is some degree of improv related to the specifics of any happening, which means maybe not so accurate in our hindsight? by the way thanks for engaging me on these topics I'm sure that there are many technical aspects(and terms) that are available to those of you in the field that I don't have handy and so I'm probably less than clear/precise in my own lay language.
DeleteWell, this is tricky stuff, but let me see... Having reasons is a different kind of thing than leaping down onto a train track: yes, but in leaping you act purposively, i.e. with some intention, don't you? I agree that this is not machine-like, but the reason for the action is, as it were, there in the action. Leaping isn't falling, for instance, and leaping to help isn't the same as leaping to escape something else. Action isn't just movement but intentional movement, so the intention is a different kind of thing than the movement, but the two belong together in action.
DeleteThere is a real possibility of improv or acting out of character, I think, and room for doubts about what one's real motivation was after the fact. But there isn't much room for doubt about what a person is doing (she's saving that man), even if we can doubt why she's doing it. The little picture is easier to describe, less controversial, than the big picture. So if I rescue kids from a burning car there might be no doubt that I'm smashing the window in order to get them out, but there could be plenty of doubt about why I'm doing that. But the fact that there could be lots of doubt doesn't mean there always will be. There might, in a given case, be no (sane or reasonable) doubt at all that I was acting purely altruistically.