Posted by alexandra_k on January 6, 2005, at 4:45:19
In reply to Re: Wittgenstein on thought » alexandra_k, posted by zeugma on January 5, 2005, at 19:36:00
Hi there, thanks for your response :-) Firstly I should say that it is not my essay, it is a pieced together version of "Introducing Wittgenstein" which is a beginners guide comic book type thing. I apologise for not referencing it - typically I do, but I must have forgotten.
> Frege... developed his views not because of an overwhelming interest in concepts- he was a mathematician by trade, and became a philosopher in order to combat what he saw as the simplistic views of J.S. Mill and others that mathematics was simply a matter of putting pebbles in a row. He became a logician in order to justify a more exalted view of mathematics, and then became a philosopher of language to justify his logic. Frege would penetrate beyond appearances to show that arithmetic is more than lining up pebbles and logic is more than a set of syllogisms. This finally led, in 1919, to the publication of a fascinating article, “The Thought.”
I did not know any of that. Thank you.
>Wittgenstein is paradoxically going to disenchant language- by more language? He is going to make us see- by describing seeing?We could describe it as a paradox... But then again we could describe it like this:
-He is going to show us how language functions by describing the ways in which we use it.
-He is going to tell us where to look so that we may see for ourselves.
Have I dissolved the paradox?>The Tractatus tried to discard itself by claiming that its own claims were nonsense. I would claim that while it claims to discard itself, it does no such thing.
The Tractatus was about the limits of sense (and a lot else besides). To delineate the limits of sensible and senseless discourse. According to the theory expounded in the Tractatus sense was limited to assertorial (verifyible) claims about the world. If we accept this definition of what something has to be to count as having sense then the Tractatus fails by its own lights.
Bit like how Skinner's 'theory' of behaviourism was sorta senseless in theorising that we should refrain from theorising :-) Contradictory in the sense of being a theory aimed at justifying why it is that we should abandon theory. Yet prima facie the theory seems to make sense.
I agree that the claims made in the Tractatus are not nonsense. I think Wittgenstein would have changed his mind on that anyways in light of the Philosophical Investigations and what he has to say later about the function of language and their being different language games or uses to which language may be put.
> Well, there’s ‘thought’, noun, and ‘think’, verb. If we follow Frege and say that nouns name objects, then we can use ‘thought’ (n.) to name the class of all ‘thoughts’ (n. pl.). This is an object.
What sort of things are thoughts? Propositions? Not 'in the head', but 'grasped by the head'?
>‘Thinking’, on the other hand, is a verb, which makes it a concept, because it has a ‘gap’- someone has to do the thinking, it can’t just stand there by itself, the way that a set of objects can. For instance, Mill’s pebbles do just fine all by themselves on the beach, but thinking doesn’t just happen. Someone has to do it, although the thoughts, themselves, do just fine by themselves- they’re things, and things are just ‘there’, so to speak.
So are you saying that thoughts are mind independent? They are something that the mind can grasp and when the mind is actively grasping them then that is what it means to be thinking?
I have indeed heard of Wiggens. Didn't he do some personal identity stuff, or maybe I am just placing him incorrectly... I have the same battle with Lewis' modal realism and the notion of counterparts.
>That is one thing that cannot be true, if W.s philosophy is to be consistent. The Tractatus aspired to a transparent language, and both the Tractatus and later work repudiate this aspiration. But then, if there is not transparency, there’s opacity, hence hiddenness!)
'But what is hidden is of no interest to us'.
'What is of real interest to us is hidden because of its familiarity'. Thats why he tries to SHOW us phenomena (of different people thinking in different ways) to show us how language is actually used. Rather than giving an idealised characterisation of thinking along the lines of Frege's grasping of propositions.>To quote Hilary Putnam, “meanings ain’t in the head.”
Indeed. (Though where the fr*g are they then?) Reference may be found in the world to be sure, but meaning (in terms of concepts) don't seem to be located anywhere at all. Where do propositions reside? Are they in the head or in the world? Are they perhaps the sort of thing that don't have a location like the number 6?
>The mind reaches out somehow, or does something to get ahold of meaning. While this is less painful than to think of my skull rattling with foreign objects, it seems even more occult.
Thats why he looks at how the words are used in practice. To try to provide an alternative account of our usage of terms such as 'think'. Rather than a mysterious theory we are left with a mysterious practice. But the practice never professed to explain the practice, it is the theory that proclaims to explain the practice. That is why the mystery is unacceptable at the level of theory.
> And to close this stream of comments, I get a headache even when I don’t think with my head :)Don't get tense and furrow that brow - you need not do that when you think. I take that to be the moral there :-)
poster:alexandra_k
thread:436252
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20041210/msgs/438419.html