Philosophy and the expressive arts: Frege

One of my goals between now and the end of October is to write an essay on philosophy and the expressive arts. I have about two weeks before my kids get out of school for the summer, and hope to have a (probably very) rough draft by then that I can return to about once a month until it's done or my time is up. What I think I would most like to do is to offer a reading of Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country as philosophy, but I doubt that's really what the organizers of the competition are looking for. Maybe I can incorporate elements of such a reading in the essay, but for the most part I think it ought to be about Frege and Wittgenstein (and possibly Davidson and maybe Rorty) and what we can learn from them. What follows is preliminary notes (really just a series of quotations) on Frege on hinting. Perhaps I should have called this post "Wink, wink, nudge, nudge," but I won't.

Here's the relevant part of the explanation of the competition:

From Plato on, philosophy has had an uneasy relationship with expressive arts such as narrative, poetry, drama, music, painting, and now film. If philosophy today can learn from science, can it learn from the arts as well—or even instead? If so, what can it learn?

Does expressive art access truths, particularly ethical truths, that cannot be expressed any other way? If it does, what can ethicists and other philosophers say about these truths? If it does not, what differentiates expressive from merely decorative art?

Some philosophers insist with Wittgenstein that “whatever can be said at all can be said clearly”. In that case, are artistic uses of language such as metaphor and imagery just "colour", as Frege called it - just ways of dressing up thoughts that philosophers, by contrast, should consider in their plainest possible form?

We welcome submissions of 8,000 words or fewer addressing these or other questions about philosophy and the expressive arts.  

The penultimate paragraph seems like a good starting point. In "On Sinn and Bedeutung," Frege distinguishes between Vorstellung (idea), Sinn (sense), and Bedeutung (reference), all three being kinds or aspects of meaning.

The idea is subjective: one man's idea is not that of another. There result, as a matter of course, a variety of differences in the ideas associated with the same sense. A painter, a horseman, and a zoologist will probably connect different ideas with the name 'Bucephalus'. This constitutes an essential distinction between the idea and the sign's sense, which may be the common property of many people, and so is not a part or a mode of the individual mind. [Beaney, p. 154]

Frege is not very interested in ideas (understood as here), but they surely are important to the expressive arts. He identifies three "levels of difference" that can exist between "words, expressions, or whole sentences" (Beaney, p. 155). These are differences in ideas only, in (ideas and?) sense but not reference, or in reference as well (in which case, presumably, there will be differences in sense and ideas too).

The difference between a translation and the original text should properly not overstep the first level. To the possible differences here belong also the colouring and shading which poetic eloquence seeks to give to the sense. Such colouring and shading are not objective, and must be evoked by each hearer or reader according to the hints of the poet [nach den Winken des Dichters] or the speaker. Without some affinity in human ideas art would certainly be impossible; but it can never be exactly determined how far the intentions of the poet are realized.

In what follows there will be no further discussion of ideas and intuitions... [Beaney, p. 155]

Hints are fundamental in Frege's work, though. In "Function and Concept" he writes that he cannot give a regular definition of what he is calling an object:

I regard a regular definition as impossible, since we have here something too simple to admit of logical analysis. It is only possible to indicate that is meant [gemeint]. [Beaney, p. 140]

Gemeint could also be translated as 'intended', I believe. Reluctantly, Frege is seemingly doing (what he regards as) the work of a poet here, hinting at his intentions in uncertain hope that the reader will share enough affinity with him to receive what he is trying to evoke. He resorts to similar hinting in "On Concept and Object":

Now something logically simple is no more given us at the outset than most of the chemical elements are; it is reached only by means of scientific work. If something has been discovered that is simple, or at least must count as simple for the time being, we shall have to coin a term for it, since language will not originally contain an expression that exactly answers. On the introduction of a name for something logically simple, a definition is not possible. There is nothing for it but to lead the reader or hearer, by means of hints, to understand the words as is intended. [Beaney, p. 182]

He goes on over the page:

...we cannot understand one another without language, and so in the end we must always rely on other people's understanding words, inflexions, and sentence-construction in essentially the same way as ourselves. As I said before, I was not trying to give a definition, but only hints, and to this end I appealed to the general feeling for the German language. [Beaney, p. 184]

The essay concludes:

'Complete' and 'unsaturated' are of course only figures of speech; but all that I wish or am able to do here is to give hints.

It may make it easier to come to an understanding if the reader compares my work 'Function and Concept'. For over the question what it is that is called a function in Analysis, we come up against the same obstacle; and on thorough investigation it will be found that the obstacle is essential, and founded on the nature of our language; that we cannot avoid a certain inappropriateness of linguistic expression; and that there is nothing for it but to realize this and always take it into account. [Beaney, p. 193]

Two more quotations to fill in the picture of Frege on the necessity of 'poetic' hinting:

We come to definitions. Definitions proper must be distinguished from elucidations [Erläuterungen]. In the first stages of any discipline we cannot avoid the use of ordinary words. But these words are, for the most part, not really appropriate for scientific purposes, because they are not precise enough and fluctuate in their use. Science needs technical terms that have precise and fixed Bedeutungen, and in order to come to an understanding about these Bedeutungen and exclude possible misunderstandings, we provide elucidations. Of course in so doing we have again to use ordinary words, and these may display defects similar to those which the elucidations are intended to remove. So it seems that we shall then have to provide further elucidations. Theoretically one will never really achieve one’s goal in this way. In practice, however, we do manage to come to an understanding about the Bedeutungen of words. Of course we have to be able to count on a meeting of minds, on others’ guessing what we have in mind. But all this precedes the construction of a system and does not belong within a system. In constructing a system it must be assumed that the words have precise Bedeutungen and that we know what they are. ["Logic in Mathematics" in Beaney, p. 313, quotation cut and pasted from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy] 

Finally, from a footnote in "Thought":

I am not here in the happy position of a mineralogist who shows his audience a rock-crystal: I cannot put a thought in the hands of my readers with the request that they should examine it from all sides. Something in itself not perceptible by sense, the thought is presented to the reader – and I must be content with that – wrapped up in a perceptible linguistic form. The pictorial aspect of language presents difficulties. The sensible always breaks in and makes expressions pictorial and so improper. So one fights against language, and I am compelled to occupy myself with language although it is not my proper concern here. I hope I have succeeded in making clear to my readers what I want to call ‘thought’. [Beaney, pp. 333-334, quotation cut and pasted from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] 

This last quotation rings a bell, I think because either Kelly Dean Jolley or James Conant quotes it in something I read not too long ago. I'll have to investigate. But throughout there are Wittgensteinian themes here: battling with language, philosophy needing to be written on the model of poetry, and the essentialness to a certain (attempted) task of an obstacle or impossibility, for instance. Not all that glisters is gold, but these apparent foreshadowings are surely worth investigating (which will involve, of course, looking at what others have written about this--I know it's not uncharted territory).

Gibson on poetry

John Gibson has a valuable essay on poetry over at nonsite. I very much like his pointing out the differences between poetry and metaphor, but he says some surprising things along the way. For instance:

Simon Blackburn has said, with admirable understatement, that no one ‘would claim that the study of metaphor has been one of analytic philosophy’s brighter achievements.’

Davidson's work on metaphor strikes me as precisely such an achievement (although I'm willing to be corrected).

It is a sign of poetic success if a poem demands to be studied before it can be understood

Really? This is highly debatable. But the debate will be about taste in poetry, I suspect, rather than about anything very philosophical. Larkin, for instance, would disagree with Gibson here (I'm pretty sure).

If I sent you an email with clear and precise instructions on how to arrive at the funeral of a childhood friend, it would be plain weird to say of it, ‘I see, but what does this email mean?’ But if I sent you a poem with the very same content, it would not only be appropriate but expected.

Maybe. It sounds like a poor poem, so it's hard to know what the appropriate or expected response would be. But in general this seems precisely the kind of response to poems that annoys poets. I don't go to many poetry readings, but I don't remember "What does it mean?" being at all a common question, even if the audience wonders just this. It is a question that seems likely to be greeted with a sigh.

What we have when we first turn to a poem is an uninterpreted mass of images.

Some poems are like this. But all? Two more quotes and then some attempt at a point.

We frequently experience poetic meaning as a far-off destination not because the meaning of a poem is so deeply hidden in its language but because the kind of communicative act in which a poem engages is extraordinarily complex, beginning with language and words but then soon passing from this into a richly, and at times bizarrely, textured imaginative space, the exploration of which is potentially interminable.

I wonder about this. Gibson uses the concept of semantic descent, in which we move below language to the level of things. This is a rich idea, it seems to me, but 'complex' seems precisely the wrong kind of word. The textured imaginative space in question either is, or else is just the same kind of thing as, the world. And to call it complex is to allow the inference that with enough work we might get to the bottom of it all, which is contradicted by the (quite right) bit about its being potentially interminable.

At any rate, it would be silly to claim that the poets I have used to set up my argument are exceptions to the rule of how we experience meaning in poetry. What would the rule be to which these are exceptions? That poems are generally composed of clear, literal language? That the meaning of most poems is transparent and immediately available to anyone who reads them?  It is hard to say this with a straight face.

It's not so much that I disagree with Gibson on this as that I'm not sure how much I agree with him. The problem, it seems to me, here and in much of his essay, is that when he talks about "most poems" he means poems of a certain, distinctly modern, kind. There are many poems that at least try to be transparent, and that, perhaps more to the point, don't have a meaning any more than life does. (And life's not having a meaning is like sunshine and lollipops not having a meaning--it isn't a fault.)

All this reads like a long complaint, but I really mean it as a series of asterisks marking the relatively few points where I am not sure I agree with Gibson. For the most part I think his essay is very good indeed, but that's not a blog-worthy thought.

Novels as metaphors

William Egginton doesn't do his side any favors when he writes that:

The literary historian Luiz Costa Lima has argued that prior to the invention of fiction, narratives were largely measured against one overriding standard: the perceived truthfulness of their relation to the world. That truth was often a moral or theological one, and to the extent that narratives related the deeds of men, proximity to an image of virtue or holiness would be considered worthy of imitation, and distance from it worthy of opprobrium.

Shifting from "perceived truthfulness" to "truth" (when what seems to be meant is "truth", not truth) is shifty, and the kind of either sloppiness or playfulness that encourages others to regard literary theory as providing fun but not knowledge.

This is much better:

For a prose narrative to be fictional it must be written for a reader who knows it is untrue and yet treats it for a time as if it were true. The reader knows, in other words, not to apply the traditional measure of truthfulness for judging a narrative; he or she suspends that judgment for a time, in a move that Samuel Taylor Coleridge popularized as “the willing suspension of disbelief,” or “poetic faith.” Another way of putting this is to say that a reader must be able to occupy two opposed identities simultaneously: a naïve reader who believes what he is being told, and a savvy one who knows it is untrue.

Compare Davidson on metaphor:

The most obvious semantic difference between simile and metaphor is that all similes are true and most metaphors are false.  The earth is like a floor, the Assyrian did come down like a wolf on the fold, because everything is like everything.  But turn these sentences into metaphors, and you turn them false; the earth is like a floor, but it is not a floor; Tolstoy, grown up, was like an infant, but he wasn’t one.

Most fiction is false, but not all of it. There are novels closely based on fact, after all, and at least some sentences in such novels are probably quite true. This might seem to be a difference between metaphors and novels though:

A metaphor makes us attend to some likeness, often a novel or surprising  likeness,  between two or more things

But a) is this claim of Davidson's really true?, and b) don't novels do something like this as well? Metaphors do not usually make us attend to the likeness they imply. "All the world's a stage" might make us stop and think about how life is like a play, but "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life" does not, surely, make us stop and think about how similar something (what?) is to dust. Maybe that's a sign that this isn't a good metaphor, but then most metaphors are not likely to be very good. What I want to say is this: most metaphors do not make us attend to a likeness in the sense of stopping and thinking about it. Shakespeare's do not do that. If they did, we would not be able to follow the plays. Usually we take metaphors in our stride, which is a point I think Davidson himself makes. Metaphors show or present things in a certain way, as like this or that, but we see without having to stop and make out what we are being shown. And novels do something similar. They show us the world as being like this, like themselves.

There is at most one world, as Davidson has said, so fictional claims about what happened (i.e. what we typically get in novels) are not about some other world. They are false claims about this world. (I realize that this is, shall we say, an odd thing to say, but I'm trying to speak Davidsonian here.) But we all know that they are false, so they aren't lies or mistakes. They are like the sentence "Jones is a pig," metaphorical. Being false, I suppose that novels don't provide us with knowledge in any obvious or simple sense. But can't it be true that Jones is a pig? Must we think that such expressions are nothing but fun ways of saying things that ought to be expressed without metaphor? We can think that, I think, but to do so is to insist on using only a very limited range of linguistic possibilities. Why would we do that? It seems very much like the insanity that Chesterton sees in materialism:

As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out... His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cogwheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seem unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the Earth...

I don't know how to argue about such things though. Egginton is responding to Alex Rosenberg's appalling defense of naturalism. (I don't mean that Rosenberg argued appallingly badly but that the view he defends is appalling. Witness the appalled reactions here.) It's like Schopenhauer's contrasting of two nothings:

we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is, for all those who are still full of will, certainly nothing; but conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world which is so real, with all its suns and Milky Ways, is nothing.

What apparently appears as nothing to Rosenberg (nothing but fun, at least) seems like pretty much everything to me. And what seems like everything to him is as nothing to me. But perhaps I'm exaggerating, blinded by the worst things Rosenberg says.

Anscombe and Davidson

I really have nothing to add to the comments thread, but I feel that I ought to link to this discussion over at Leiter Reports. It features good comments by Daniel Lindquist, Dave Maier, and Jimmy Doyle (who was the other Englishman at the University of Virginia Philosophy Department when I was there). If Stoutland really implies that Anscombe believes in Aristotelian physics then that would be unfortunate, but I suspect that he means to imply no such thing. I haven't read any of the book in question, but I think it needs to go on my "to read" list.

This one's from the hip

It's probably not wise to post ideas that are not properly researched or thought out, but then again this is only a blog. I sort of think that half-baked (but not necessarily worthless) ideas are what it's for. So here goes.

I'm sitting in on a seminar with Tal Brewer on the philosophy of action, which is a terrific experience. Consequently I'm reading and trying to think about philosophy of action quite a bit, and am likely to blog about it or else not blog, since I only have so much time. This week I re-read Davidson's "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" (page references below are to this paper as it appears in his Essays on Actions and Events). My impression is that many people object to his claim that reasons are causes because they think of causes in a rather mechanical sense. But I wonder whether this isn't a mis-reading.

Davidson (p. 3) is interested in “the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent’s reason for doing what he did.” On p. 12 he says that “A primary reason for an action is its cause,” where a primary reason consists of a pro-attitude and a belief. On p. 17 he considers the objection to this view that we know causes by observation but our reasons for acting as we do non-observationally. But, he says (p. 18), “the only question is whether these oddities [involving first-person knowledge] prove that reasons do not cause, in any ordinary sense at least, the actions that they rationalize.” The ordinary sense he has in mind seems to relate to the word ‘because’ (see p. 9), which is a pretty broad sense (it might cover all four of Aristotle’s ‘causes’, for instance). So one question I have is whether Davidson is really saying anything precise enough to be helpful (or criticize-able) here. On pp. 9-10 he elaborates on the issue of ‘because’ by saying that, “When we ask why someone acted as he did, we want to be provided with an interpretation.” An interpretation doesn’t sound like an efficient cause, but it might be a cause in the ordinary sense. It certainly answers the question ‘Why?’ I’m not sure how far this takes us beyond common sense and/or Anscombe though.

The last objection Davidson considers to his argument (pp. 18-19) is that there is something wrong with talking about the causes of actions at all. I’m not sure I follow what Davidson says in the final paragraph, but his initial point seems to be that it can’t be true that actions are identical with bodily movements, that these bodily movements have causes, and yet that the actions do not have causes. So far so good, but I wonder whether he has missed the point of the objection (or perhaps Melden, to whom he is responding, made it badly). I would think that an action is a bodily movement under some particular description. So the man playing a tune on a squeaky pump might perform exactly the same bodily movements as a man pumping poison into a house full of Nazis, but their actions are different. Presumably the mere movements have causes in the brain, etc., but in what sense might an action (understood as movements under a particular description) have a cause? Would the agent be caused to conceive of his movements under that description? Or is it not the conceiving or particular understanding that is caused but rather the movements-under-that-description? I think I can make sense of the question “Why do you take yourself to be playing a tune?”, so there might be a ‘because’ here, but it surely won’t be the same as the answer to the question “Why are you playing a tune?” And the answer to the question “What are the causes of the movements we observe in this man’s body?” might be different again. I suspect that the problem is that people are inclined to think of causes as efficient causes within the body. And actions do not appear to have these. But if Davidson means ‘cause’ in a much broader sense then this criticism seems to pass him by because what he is saying has so little substance. Reasons give a because, i.e. they explain why someone did something. But didn’t we know this at the very beginning of the essay (i.e. its first sentence)?