![[dr. bob]](/dr-bob-sm.gif)
Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 7 of 7. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by alexandra_k on January 1, 2005, at 2:33:04
Wittgenstein was always interested in the nature of philosophy, and from the 1930’s on he became clear that philosophy was a THERAPY – a very ancient view of it, for Socrates and many ancient Greek philosophers practiced it that way. The aim of philosophy is [for Socrates] “Thoughts that are at peace”. Wittgenstein thought that our way of life is mirrored in language. “Human beings are profoundly enmeshed in philosophical – i.e. grammatical confusions. They cannot be freed without first being extricated from the extraordinary variety of associations which hold them prisoner. You have as it were to reconstitute their entire language. – But this language grew up as it did because human beings had – and have – the tendency to think in that way”.
The trouble with the Tractatus [his earlier view] was that it had tried to penetrate things. It was as if the essence of things was hidden from us, and we had, by means of analysis, to dig out what lay within it. It then claimed to have found “unassailable and definitive” truths and “the final solution of the problems”. “My new therapy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. – Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us…’ The work of the philosopher consists in assembling REMINDERS for a particular purpose. “The aspect of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity”.
So what is Wittgenstein’s method of therapy? He is not concerned with arguments to establish a position, as in much traditional philosophy. Rather he is teaching a skill that is critical and destabilizing, seeking to fracture the artificial unities we construct with our minds, so that we can see differences. “There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies”. The therapy must be appropriate to the persons involved and the problem. In contrast to psychological therapies, Wittgenstein’s therapy does not depend on any theory of mind. All of these notions tend to make the problem subservient to the theory, as the theorist tends to see the problem through the spectacles of his theory. Language is a poison that can be used to seduce, mislead, and bewitch us, but it can also heal, as when we speak truly. The ambiguous nature of language is central to Wittgenstein’s thought. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”.
A TRIANGLE
Can be seen as a triangular hole, as a solid, as a geometrical drawing, as standing on its base, as hanging from its apex, as a mountain, as a wedge, as an arrow or pointer, as a half parallelogram, etc.
[Is it possible to see without seeing as?]Thinking is at the heart of human life. Logic is sometimes said to be the science of thinking and Wittgenstein was particularly interested in it. So Wittgenstein’s approach to thought is important and illustrates his method well. Thought appears simple until we reflect upon it. “Reflection brings obscurity – which is the result of the shadow cast by the inquirer himself”. “Thinking, a widely ramified concept. A concept that comprises many manifestations of life. The PHENOMENA of thinking are widely scattered”. Now compare these different ways of thinking:
Speak thoughtfully, speak without thought, think before speaking, speak before thinking, think while speaking, speak to yourself in imagination, think of someone, think of a solution to a puzzle, let a thought cross your mind, whistle a tune thoughtfully and then without thought, now just be thoughtful.
The word ‘thought’ is a simple everyday word and appears to correspond to a simple activity, but when we try it out in different situations we see that it is ragged. We had a false picture of it. “Because it is ONE word we think it represents ONE sort of activity”. We forget that a word’s meaning depends on its staging, the scene or circumstances in which it is used. Is thinking an activity? We talk of ‘running hard’ and running is definitely an activity. We were told at school to ‘think harder’. So what did we DO then? If we frown and look solemn, does that mean we are thinking HARDER? What is the difference between trying hard to run faster and trying hard to think? Is thinking a sort of ghostly activity that we cannot see but that occurs in the mind? There is a great temptation to imagine we can actually look into our minds and watch ourselves while we think. What we observe will be what the word means! We imagine that we can inwardly point or look (by introspection), as if we had some sort of ‘inner space’ where inner activities occurred that could be named. “It would be as if without knowing how to play chess, I were to try and make out what the word ‘mate’ meant by close observation of the last move of some game of chess”. In other words, to understand thought we need to understand the rules for the use of the word ‘think’. Instead we are hypnotized by the idea of the mind as working in an invisible space in which we can ‘see’ or ‘infer’ that thinking is going on. Can we use the little word ‘this’ to point to thinking, and so say ‘this is thinking’ as we certainly can do to running?
We can observe activities and say ‘this is running’ or infer processes and say ‘this is particle spin’ but we can’t meaningfully say ‘this is thinking’ in the same sense. Supposing two people are asked to find the square root of a number. One strides up and down, frowns, holds his head in his hands, and comes up with the wrong result. The other pauses a moment and answers correctly. The first has thought hard? We could say so, but we could also say he did not think much at all. Striding up and down is not thinking. Nothing NEED go on when we think – neither bodily gestures nor interior monologue, nor mental images. It is finding it that is the mark of thought. A thought may occur in a flash. But the report of it cannot. The report of the thought is not a slowed down version of it. It is not like taking a video of a train going by in a flash, and then slowing the video down and seeing what the train looked like. You can have half a train, but not half a thought – but you may be half way through expressing a thought or may not have worked out its implications. When thoughts occur in a flash it means we suddenly see what to do or say, rather than something happening suddenly inside of us.
Many people when they ‘think’ get headaches, because they ‘think’ with their heads. “One of the most dangerous ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads. The idea of thinking as a process in the head, in a completely enclosed space, gives him something occult”. Wittgenstein’s therapy seeks to free us from such painful delusions.
Posted by zeugma on January 5, 2005, at 19:36:00
In reply to Wittgenstein on thought, posted by alexandra_k on January 1, 2005, at 2:33:04
Hi Alexandra, I’ll use my preferred method of interpolating comments into your discourse- and besides, I’m on too many ‘dumb-drugs’ to write my own essay :)
Wittgenstein was always interested in the nature of philosophy, and from the 1930’s on he became clear that philosophy was a THERAPY – a very ancient view of it, for Socrates and many ancient Greek philosophers practiced it that way. The aim of philosophy is [for Socrates] “Thoughts that are at peace”. Wittgenstein thought that our way of life is mirrored in language. “Human beings are profoundly enmeshed in philosophical – i.e. grammatical confusions. They cannot be freed without first being extricated from the extraordinary variety of associations which hold them prisoner. You have as it were to reconstitute their entire language. – But this language grew up as it did because human beings had – and have – the tendency to think in that way”.
The trouble with the Tractatus [his earlier view] was that it had tried to penetrate things. It was as if the essence of things was hidden from us, and we had, by means of analysis, to dig out what lay within it. It then claimed to have found “unassailable and definitive” truths and “the final solution of the problems”.Comment:
The Tractatus mentions two philosophers in the Preface- Frege and Russell. Frege was the author of “Begriffschrift” or “Concept-Script,” which is essentially the first work of modern analytical philosophy. He 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.”
End comment“My new therapy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. – Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us…’ The work of the philosopher consists in assembling REMINDERS for a particular purpose. “The aspect of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity”.
So what is Wittgenstein’s method of therapy? He is not concerned with arguments to establish a position, as in much traditional philosophy. Rather he is teaching a skill that is critical and destabilizing, seeking to fracture the artificial unities we construct with our minds, so that we can see differences. “There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies”. The therapy must be appropriate to the persons involved and the problem. In contrast to psychological therapies, Wittgenstein’s therapy does not depend on any theory of mind. All of these notions tend to make the problem subservient to the theory, as the theorist tends to see the problem through the spectacles of his theory. Language is a poison that can be used to seduce, mislead, and bewitch us, but it can also heal, as when we speak truly. The ambiguous nature of language is central to Wittgenstein’s thought. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”.Comment:
But Wittgenstein is paradoxically going to disenchant language- by more language? He is going to make us see- by describing seeing? 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.
End commentA TRIANGLE
Can be seen as a triangular hole, as a solid, as a geometrical drawing, as standing on its base, as hanging from its apex, as a mountain, as a wedge, as an arrow or pointer, as a half parallelogram, etc.
[Is it possible to see without seeing as?]
Thinking is at the heart of human life. Logic is sometimes said to be the science of thinking and Wittgenstein was particularly interested in it. So Wittgenstein’s approach to thought is important and illustrates his method well. Thought appears simple until we reflect upon it. “Reflection brings obscurity – which is the result of the shadow cast by the inquirer himself”. “Thinking, a widely ramified concept. A concept that comprises many manifestations of life. The PHENOMENA of thinking are widely scattered”. Now compare these different ways of thinking:
Speak thoughtfully, speak without thought, think before speaking, speak before thinking, think while speaking, speak to yourself in imagination, think of someone, think of a solution to a puzzle, let a thought cross your mind, whistle a tune thoughtfully and then without thought, now just be thoughtful.
The word ‘thought’ is a simple everyday word and appears to correspond to a simple activity, but when we try it out in different situations we see that it is ragged. We had a false picture of it. “Because it is ONE word we think it represents ONE sort of activity”. We forget that a word’s meaning depends on its staging, the scene or circumstances in which it is used. Is thinking an activity? We talk of ‘running hard’ and running is definitely an activity. We were told at school to ‘think harder’. So what did we DO then? If we frown and look solemn, does that mean we are thinking HARDER? What is the difference between trying hard to run faster and trying hard to think? Is thinking a sort of ghostly activity that we cannot see but that occurs in the mind? There is a great temptation to imagine we can actually look into our minds and watch ourselves while we think. What we observe will be what the word means! We imagine that we can inwardly point or look (by introspection), as if we had some sort of ‘inner space’ where inner activities occurred that could be named. “It would be as if without knowing how to play chess, I were to try and make out what the word ‘mate’ meant by close observation of the last move of some game of chess”. In other words, to understand thought we need to understand the rules for the use of the word ‘think’. Instead we are hypnotized by the idea of the mind as working in an invisible space in which we can ‘see’ or ‘infer’ that thinking is going on.
Comment:
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. ‘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.
End commentCan we use the little word ‘this’ to point to thinking, and so say ‘this is thinking’ as we certainly can do to running?
Comment:
These little words are the ones Russell called ‘logically proper names’, as you know. ‘There’ is another little word, not quite the same- does ‘there’ pick out a property, that of existence, for instance if I say there is a God? Kant believed that existence wasn’t a property, and some papers by a really smart guy named Wiggins give this a thorough analysis. If I could analyze what Wiggins says, in a decent manner, I would have a PhD., but I’ve got a headache right now and besides, Wiggins isn’t all that easy for me to understand. But I digress. Frege, Russell, and Kant are all involved in this debate about existence, which turns on the meanings of little words like ‘there.’ So when Wittgenstein uses a word like ‘this’, it’s already laden with hidden significance. (And there’s a book called “Nothing is Hidden”, about Wittgenstein. 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!)
End commentWe can observe activities and say ‘this is running’ or infer processes and say ‘this is particle spin’ but we can’t meaningfully say ‘this is thinking’ in the same sense. Supposing two people are asked to find the square root of a number. One strides up and down, frowns, holds his head in his hands, and comes up with the wrong result. The other pauses a moment and answers correctly. The first has thought hard? We could say so, but we could also say he did not think much at all. Striding up and down is not thinking. Nothing NEED go on when we think – neither bodily gestures nor interior monologue, nor mental images. It is finding it that is the mark of thought. A thought may occur in a flash. But the report of it cannot. The report of the thought is not a slowed down version of it. It is not like taking a video of a train going by in a flash, and then slowing the video down and seeing what the train looked like. You can have half a train, but not half a thought – but you may be half way through expressing a thought or may not have worked out its implications. When thoughts occur in a flash it means we suddenly see what to do or say, rather than something happening suddenly inside of us.
Many people when they ‘think’ get headaches, because they ‘think’ with their heads. “One of the most dangerous ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads. The idea of thinking as a process in the head, in a completely enclosed space, gives him something occult”. Wittgenstein’s therapy seeks to free us from such painful delusions.Comment:
To quote Hilary Putnam, “meanings ain’t in the head.” Frege, who believed in the primacy of thoughts, did not believe they were in the head either- any more than he thought our heads were filled with pebbles. Meanings were the things our minds grasped, and so they couldn’t be in our heads any more than a rock that we grasp dissolves into our bones. 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.And to close this stream of comments, I get a headache even when I don’t think with my head :)
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 :-)
Posted by zeugma on January 16, 2005, at 11:49:35
In reply to Re: Wittgenstein on thought » zeugma, posted by alexandra_k on January 6, 2005, at 4:45:19
Hi again. This is not the response I wanted to write, but sometimes writing something is better than writing nothing. Gets around writer's block, you know :)
>
> >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?Maybe. I see Wittgenstein (perhaps wrongly) as practicing philosophical hygiene, i.e. by being more careful with his language than his predecessors. The paradox is that Frege saw his relation to Mill in the same light, and Russell saw his relation (in "On Denoting") to Meinong in the same light. Russell makes us see something about certain kinds of expressions, something that is different from the way we saw them before. I actually see Wittgenstein as closer to frege than to Russell in that Frege and W. are extremely hygienic, i.e. careful about getting their meanings right. Russell wants to rush to conclusions about reality, and meaning is in his way, just as Meinong is. Wittgenstein is VERY, VERY careful about meaning. Paradox: this drives us into metaphysics, which is where W. wanted to guide us from.
>
>
>
> 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.
>Skinner practices a method, and as long as the behaviorism is 'methodological', not 'logical', it isn't contradictory. The trouble is that such relentless insistence on pure method is not feasible, because science is not simply a method. It is a way of seeing things. And now we have another paradox, or so I think :) We get away from theory by just looking. And what we see makes us theorize, even if the theory is that the other person's theory is wrong. That's a theory, not an observation. And we can go further. we can say that only observation-statements are valid, because uncontaminated by theory. But that is not itself an observation-statement, and so contradicts itself. Can I avoid the dilemma by saying that I am not going to theorize, not at any costs? Then I have to examine my statements for traces of theory, and we get Quine's 'dogmas of empiricism,' which when rejected bring us back to theory. I need a criterion for isolating the observation-statements from the theoretical (or a priori), but then I need a theory, because the criterion cannot be any type of observation-statement.
>
> > 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'?
>
Yes. Propositions, senses, sets of possible worlds designated by an utterance. Each of these are equivalent in explanatory value and in the number of questions they raise :)
>
> 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.You're placing him correctly. By the way, what do you think of counterpart theory? I like the idea because I try to imagine how well my numerous counterparts are doing at the moment. One of them, who can pass for me, is having a great time now. He'll be my role model :)Actually, I'm doing OK at the moment. What strikes me as remarkable is Lewis' rehabilitation of a despised philospher, Leibniz.
-z
>
>
Posted by alexandra_k on January 17, 2005, at 15:36:12
In reply to Re: Wittgenstein on thought, posted by zeugma on January 16, 2005, at 11:49:35
I guess all philosophers think of themselves as practicing 'philosophical hygene'. Exposing the meaninglessness of others unresolved issues etc.
I am not sure that Wittgenstein's brand forces us into metaphysics (thinking here of "Philosophical Investigations"). That is the stuff about the essence being of no interest to us. I guess Wittgenstein is a bit of a behaviourist. He talks about the USE of language the USE of terms the MARK (ie practice) of thinking, games etc. Then after he has pointed out our usage he says 'explanation has to stop somewhere - we hit bedrock - my spade is turned'. In other words, to say anymore is to talk metaphysics. To try to penetrate the phenomena and dig out the 'illusory' essence. He thinks we shouldn't do that. Once the practice has been described then that is all we can say. What is hidden is of 'no interest to us'.
>Paradox: this drives us into metaphysics, which is where W. wanted to guide us from.
Of course here is the cue to go 'bollocks'. You haven't explained - you have given up on an explanation. You say 'your spade is turned' and all that means is that you have given up. It is like Wittgenstein on thought. He points out the practice and that is all. If we say 'but what is it about the internal state of the person that enables them to go on in the same way' then all he can say is 'explanation has to stop somewhere'. He doesn't explain (but then he doesn't profess to). If we want more then we can talk about grasping a proposition etc. But he wouldn't have liked that. Me: I do, I think there is a whole heap more to be said. Productive theorising too.
Oh. Hey, if possible worlds in which a proposition is true and false delineate the meaning of a proposition then there are problems with tautologies and contradictions. The problem is that they would have to mean the same thing or have the same content becasue tautologies are true in all possible worlds and contradictions are true in no possible world. So 2+2=4 and p=p have the same content or meaning. Some people are ok with that (the best defence I have heard was that tautologies and contradictions are actually contentless). Would be interested to know if you are ok with that.
> Skinner practices a method, and as long as the behaviorism is 'methodological', not 'logical', it isn't contradictory.
True, I guess I was thinking of the contradiction in taking it to be a 'theory of mind'. Maybe 'logical' rather than 'methodological' but yeah, I suppose that to take behaviourism as a 'theory of mind' is pretty straightfowardly contradictory.
You like contradictions / paradoxes eh?
>what do you think of counterpart theory? I like the idea because I try to imagine how well my numerous counterparts are doing at the moment. One of them, who can pass for me, is having a great time now. He'll be my role model :)Actually, I'm doing OK at the moment. What strikes me as remarkable is Lewis' rehabilitation of a despised philospher, Leibniz.
Yeah, though I guess we don't have to go as far as to say that we are located on the best of all possible worlds. I quite like Leibniz parallellism (pre-established harmony). I was quite taken with that in my second year.
I am not sure about this counter-part stuff. I have to admit that I haven't read Lewis, just heard an awful lot about him. Actually I did read something on why he believed possible worlds were real. Best I can figure:
We want to say that 'It is possible that I never came to babble' is true.
But why is it true (in virtue of what is it true)?
There is a possible world in which I never came to babble. That is true and the correspondance between the sentance and the possible world is what makes it true.
But does that really entail that possible worlds are real?
I am not sure about this... It is so simple... I worry that it is too simple...
I worry about my counter-parts. How come I (my conscious experience) got to be associated with the actual world me?
Is there an answer to this?
What sort of answer could we give?Confusing...
Posted by zeugma on January 18, 2005, at 18:01:25
In reply to Re: Wittgenstein on thought, posted by alexandra_k on January 17, 2005, at 15:36:12
Oh. Hey, if possible worlds in which a proposition is true and false delineate the meaning of a proposition then there are problems with tautologies and contradictions. The problem is that they would have to mean the same thing or have the same content becasue tautologies are true in all possible worlds and contradictions are true in no possible world. So 2+2=4 and p=p have the same content or meaning. Some people are ok with that (the best defence I have heard was that tautologies and contradictions are actually contentless). Would be interested to know if you are ok with that.>>
Well, I'd rather say that p=p and 2+2=4 have the same content, than that they have no content. They are both identities, and I am reluctant to say that identity-statements are meaningless (and whether they are meaningful but contentless? well,maybe. But is 2+2=4 really a tautology? I suppose we go back to Kant here, and his demonstration that there is nothing in the concepts of '7' and '5' to show that they add up to '12.' But then we're talking about 'concepts',and we're trying to get past that, right? I think that if we use possible worlds as a model for content, then we have to say that all necessary propositions are one and the same. I don't necessarily have a problem with that. But it is puzzling. And we had better get an account of how it is that p=p is easy but it gets harder from there.)
I think admitting the spade has turned is something a philosopher has to say, at some point. About mental processes: we can say that their 'hiddenness' isn't interesting. (The opposite seems true, but anyway...) Now I have a question for you. behaviorism is a kind of 'anti-realism' about the mind. it says there's nothing there, nothing that can't be captured equally well by the exhaustive physical analysis we can't perform yet and probably never will. Now Wittgenstein denied he was a behaviorist (or am I thinking of someone else here?). It seems that one influence of Wittgenstein is to turn philosphers in an anti-realist direction. I read that Wittgenstein came back to philosophy by hearing about Heyting's lectures elaborating intuitionism in mathematics (a turn away from the realism of the Frege-Russell tradition). Intuitionism is a step is a constructivist direction, a way of giving sense to mathematical discourse by constructing proofs, and I believe they upheld the Law of Excluded Middle, in which a statement could not be simulataneously true AND false, but denied the Principle of Bivalence, according to which all statements must be either true or false (excluding for the moment vague predicates,and which I am in the process of trying to figure out..agg) because unless one could construct a proof, one could not assign a truth-value to it. This seems to be an example of 'hygiene' which keeps our mathematical discourse in order, because we either can construct the proof, in which case we KNOW the discourse has sense because it's true, and also lets us know when we're venturing into regions where our hold on sense becomes perilous. Anyway, that's just my thought. I've heard it said that Wittgenstein was a more radical constructivist than these intuitionist mathematicians, because Heyting had an essentially Kantian idea of 'intuition' (which is a topic of its own to contend with!) whereas Wittgenstein obviously discards the kantian language of 'synthetic' and 'analytic' and so forth.-z
Posted by alexandra_k on January 18, 2005, at 18:47:58
In reply to Re: Wittgenstein on thought, posted by zeugma on January 18, 2005, at 18:01:25
> Well, I'd rather say that p=p and 2+2=4 have the same content, than that they have no content.
Yes I take your point and revise what I said before. Contradictions would have no content (as they are not true in any possible world) whereas tautologies (or whatever is true in all possible worlds) would be content packed (being true in all possible worlds)...
They do seem to have the same content - but surely not the same meaning? So then meaning isn't given by content and we already knew it wasn't given by extension...
>But is 2+2=4 really a tautology?
Oh, I am not sure it is a tautology. Maybe given the concepts of '2' and '4' - along with the operator '+'. It seems to fall out of that analytically. I would want to say that it is true in all possible worlds though.
>I think that if we use possible worlds as a model for content, then we have to say that all necessary propositions are one and the same. I don't necessarily have a problem with that. But it is puzzling. And we had better get an account of how it is that p=p is easy but it gets harder from there.)
Yeah. I quite like the model of possible worlds delineating content / meaning myself :-)
Not that it is without problems...
> I think admitting the spade has turned is something a philosopher has to say, at some point.Yeah. But others should continue digging. It is not that explanation HAS to stop somewhere, it is that any particular individual has to. Either death or they run out of stuff to say. Explanation is neverending!
>About mental processes: we can say that their 'hiddenness' isn't interesting. (The opposite seems true, but anyway...)
I think his point was that we should look at what lies open to view. The stuff that is hidden solely in virtue of its familiarity. If we look at how the word is USED then our desire to dig out the 'illusory' metaphysical essence should vanish. Why? Because we see that words don't have clean edges, we use the same word in different though related ways in different contexts. Because of this we cannot hope to find necessary and sufficient conditions and our desire to do such should disappear.
But of course necessary and sufficient conditions can be as vague as the initial word... And maybe there are just a couple of different senses of the word and we can delineate necessary and sufficient conditions for each sense and so on and so forth. I disagree with him too. But I do agree that we should LOOK first and ANALYSE second. I don't agree with him that after we have looked our desire to analyse vanishes. His may have but mine is still alive and kicking!
>Now I have a question for you. behaviorism is a kind of 'anti-realism' about the mind. it says there's nothing there, nothing that can't be captured equally well by the exhaustive physical analysis we can't perform yet and probably never will.
We can read behaviourism in one of two ways. Behaviourists say that EITHER there aren't any mental states OR mental terms can be analysed into behaviours / dispositions to behave. The first interpretation is what happens if we think that meantal states are inner CAUSES of behaviour. Behaviorists deny that beliefs and desires are inner causal states. The second interpretation is what happens if we ask for an analysis of mental talk, what do we mean when we use terms such as 'belief' and 'desire'. Here they want to say that we are really referring to behaviour, and (more plausibly though also more problematically) dispositions to behave.
>Now Wittgenstein denied he was a behaviorist (or am I thinking of someone else here?).
Yes he did say that. That doesn't mean he was right though! Loads of philosophers hate (or would have hated) their classifications. I think he is 'fairly behaviouristic' though I would go short of calling him a behaviourist outright. The radical behaviourists over here claim him as one of their own. I think he would not have been too opposed to functionalism, but he was a little too early for that one. I would like to hear how computers following a program are not following a 'rule in the head' as it were.
>It seems that one influence of Wittgenstein is to turn philosphers in an anti-realist direction. I read that Wittgenstein came back to philosophy by hearing about Heyting's lectures elaborating intuitionism in mathematics (a turn away from the realism of the Frege-Russell tradition). Intuitionism is a step is a constructivist direction, a way of giving sense to mathematical discourse by constructing proofs, and I believe they upheld the Law of Excluded Middle, in which a statement could not be simulataneously true AND false, but denied the Principle of Bivalence, according to which all statements must be either true or false (excluding for the moment vague predicates,and which I am in the process of trying to figure out..agg) because unless one could construct a proof, one could not assign a truth-value to it. This seems to be an example of 'hygiene' which keeps our mathematical discourse in order, because we either can construct the proof, in which case we KNOW the discourse has sense because it's true, and also lets us know when we're venturing into regions where our hold on sense becomes perilous. Anyway, that's just my thought. I've heard it said that Wittgenstein was a more radical constructivist than these intuitionist mathematicians, because Heyting had an essentially Kantian idea of 'intuition' (which is a topic of its own to contend with!) whereas Wittgenstein obviously discards the kantian language of 'synthetic' and 'analytic' and so forth.
Oh dear, philosophy of maths. I can't do that one sorry :-(
I shall have to leave the philsophy of maths to you...
This is the end of the thread.
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