Bedrock Rules: The Mathematical and The Ordinary (Cavell-Kripke on Wittgenstein)
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investgations:#217. 'How am I able to obey a rule?'--if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do.
If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.'
Stanley Cavell’s summary (in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome) of Saul Kripke’s reading (in Rules and Private Language) is that we get to a point where we assert our individual instinct/claim (how he sees "my inclination") without reflection (justification), as part of our following or agreeing on (contractual) rules, subject to being judged by society/you.
The passage starts with someone being asked a question, i.e.: "you ask what makes me able to obey a rule (at all)?" "you ask me to explain to you what are my/the reasons and procedures for how I/we follow this rule?"
So the "I" here is instructing someone. But teaching (indoctrinating into society) sometimes runs out of ways to convey, in this example: what constitutes obeying a rule (justifies saying how/that we obey/have obeyed). The teacher (say, I) was digging (with an analogous spade) for our ordinary justifications to provide to the other (you), and we've hit a hard spot (you can’t seem to follow or continue; I’ve run out of means), and we must turn, as there is no ("normative") fact or power to push forward. Kripke's interpretation wants authority for my claim to what's right at the beginning, and then you/society just decide to accept, renegotiate, or reject that claim (here, whether I have obeyed the rule).
But look at it as an expression of exasperation (not rightousness); when my desire to show you has run out (without authority, even without a "right"). Cavell cleverly points out: that what I am inclined to say, I may not go on to say; that an inclination is not an individual assertion, only a desire's possibility, first subject to conscious restraint (I might not say: we just do it!--walk, forgive, threaten, follow, point! #185 "can't you see?").
Yet I don't have to give up on you; my fallback is not a judgment of exclusion, a turning away. Our impotence (that of our ordinary rules) turns us toward each other--rather than necessitating we solve this (always eminent) failure with authority, agreement, knowledge, better rules, more logic, a foundational bedrock--we resist philosophy's anxiety to be better than, a solution for, the ordinary by removing our (uncertain, frightening) part and responsibility.
But humanity aspires to mathematical rules rather than our ordinary "rules" (the criteria of our concepts Witt calls them—Grammar). The structure of the rules of math makes them determined in advance, encompassing all applications, eternal. Our common criteria do not bind all instances (they have history, but no conclusion); we do not know in advance their application, maybe how to continue, where it will end. Our ordinary criteria are nonetheless as precise, accurate, and communicable, but not abstract, universal, and complete, so they are looked upon as only/always lacking. Thus the (skeptical) desire to supplant the ordinary with the certain, pure, normative rule that can remove us, our possibility for failure, the lack of necessity in our interests, the fear that we only happen to live (act, desire, condemn) similar lives (judgments, humor). Kripke's solution attempts to individually/communally avoid reaching a breaking point by addressing it first--side-stepping our fear. But we are responsible at the end for continuing on (toward each other), digging again into the history of a concept, waiting for our time, giving an example of what counts as an instance, perfecting our culture, on and on; perhaps to no avail, but always possible. Our intention has no simple necessity, but neither is our fear our destiny.
Comments (120)
Weren’t you instructing me (or “someone”)? How does your not giving up on me in your instruction (about what constitutes obeying a rule) suddenly become you and I both resisting philosophy’s anxiety? How does that help me?
Isn’t it just the case that we obey the rule because that’s the practice/convention and that’s what people typically do here? Or else we don’t follow the rule for whatever reason, yet the rule still exists because that’s how most people do this particular thing, as a rule. Or we might even try to change the rule and get everyone to follow a different practice/rule.
We can point to rules, we can give examples, we can threaten consequences; at a certain point sometimes they run out, you don't continue as expected--it is meant to be a situation which summons skepticism.
Quoting Luke
Kripke's take on the passage is that this leaves us with only the options of following the rule, change the rule, or be excluded--that it is conformity to a rule. Where Cavell takes Witt as showing that people's judgments are attuned, they share the same interests, etc.--not as an agreement, but because our lives are similar. Because this happens mostly implicitly, he is trying to make explicit a case in which it doesn't happen. And we can do lots of things, but we do not just point to a rule. So the exhaustion of justifications for how you should obey a rule, make a wish, apologize, mean what you say, etc. can be that you refuse to follow the rules, but it can also be that we have not yet imagined all the implications, shown you how our interests are aligned, etc.--that there is not only force and defiance, which says something about knowledge and reason and pre-determined deontological morals (rules).
The fear is of the inability to justify obeying a rule or justify how we obey rules. Both Cavell and Kripke leave that possibility open, but Kripke's picture pits "what we typically do" against your instincts, in judgment of your authority, in a sense, before our discussion even gets started. This is to cave into the anxiety of leaving it up to us, to the vision that there is more to us than rules and conventions, that such discussions can be reasonable, between conformity and exclusion.
Depends on what you refer to as "rules of math". For instance, the Law of the Excluded Middle is useful in traditional or standard math, but not allowed in constructive math. Turmoil in the jungles of the mind.
Is it meant to "summon skepticism", though? Maybe from Kripke's overly philosophical perspective, but I doubt it would summon skepticism from the average person. This is a very alien way of looking at obeying a rule.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm not familiar with Cavell's work, so I'll have to take your word for it. Your interpretations of Wittgenstein sometimes seem foreign to me, which may be due to your reading being coloured by Cavell. Anyway, I don't see that Cavell adds any options to the three that you attribute here to Kripke.
Quoting Antony Nickles
This seems to fit into the three options cited above.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I get that, but you (or Cavell) were instructing someone about what constitutes obeying a rule.
Quoting Antony Nickles
This does not address the main point of my question, which was the main reason for my posting. You say that the teacher is unable to provide sufficient justification to the student about what constitutes obeying a rule. Then you say - crucially - that the teacher does not have to give up on the student because both teacher and student can "resist philosophy's anxiety". I guess I'm asking is: what is it that allows the student to "resist philosophy's anxiety"?
The problem might be better viewed in this way:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Teaching/indoctrination is training someone how to obey a rule or how to "go on" (or behave) in a particular way(s). You cannot first teach/train someone what it means to obey a rule in order for them to then go on and obey a rule; otherwise, you would not be able to teach them what it means to obey a rule in the first place.
I believe that is a rule of logic, but, yes, I'm thinking more of addition.
Yes, of course. But even the notion of addition was expanded in 1801 when Gauss introduced the modern concept of modular arithmetic. As formalized, this was a new idea that could be considered a rule in certain circumstances I suppose. Perhaps only a "rule of thumb." Sorry to interrupt your conversation.
Summon the specter of skepticism for the philosopher (reader), yes; the fear that leads to our need to have a foundational bedrock to justify our acts. An average person might feel an inability to communicate, that words/fact/truth lack power, discouraged at the prospect of (or empowered by) not having anything else to say... but, yes, Witt's example is meant to show us something about philosophy; its powerlessness, and hope.
Quoting Luke
Maybe not my best work trying to show a distinction (part of the problem is Witt is discussing justification for how we follow a rule; and Kripke is reading that as we act from inclination ("inspiration" #232) and then are judged as right or wrong based on if we follow the rule, conform to the rule (before there is any justifying why/how you did or didn't follow the rule)). Cavell takes Witt as leaving open the judgment/exclusion to begin a conversation about what it means to have followed a rule (what counts, what matters, etc.). One view ends the relationship, the other begins a moral discussion.
Quoting Luke
What constitutes justifying that I obeyed a rule. And Kripke wants to resolve the worry that we may not be able to justify how we obey a rule or what constitutes obeying a rule, just between our impulse to act and your judgment and exclusion; Cavell takes Witt as leaving that possibility of failure open, but also continuing a conversation beyond our pre-determined judgment. An ongoing conversation about, say, what constitutes an example (#223)--rationalizing our relationship instead of it relying on, say, violence (understanding rather than just change).
Quoting Luke
To make themselves intelligible. They might claim they did obey the rule; or explain their aversion to conformity--examine their "blind" obedience (#219); as normally we do not "follow" rules (#222). Not to take the position that their actions are unable to be communicated--to feel there is something private, unknowable (not just personal). But really this is an examination of the teacher, and the limitation/impotence of our knowledge (what comes after it).
Quoting Luke
I agree with framing it as training, but I am trying to show two "particular ways" we can be seen as going on--that maybe it isn't (as in teaching math), that we behave (obey) or not, but that we are learning the skill of how to continue, to be able to justify our actions at all--to move forward rather than not be able to "conflict" or "accord" at all (#201) @Banno.
Quoting Luke
Maybe it helps that Witt notices that we learn our whole lives in learning something new (or something like that). That we already: follow, explain ourselves, disobey, judge, defend, etc. So we are not teaching "what it means", as if providing the correct directions, delineating ahead of time what it is to "obey", all other actions being judged as incorrect. I may ask why you didn't obey, say, the golden rule, and you may claim that you did, and then go on to try to justify how what you did was still an instance of obeying the rule. If Kripke's reading is correct, the discussion of what is right happens before my personal action, upon which I am judged. If we take Witt to be reserving judgment, then we begin a dialogue of what it is to, say, treat the other as having a soul (p, 152; 3rd 2001), or convince ourselves we can not know them (p. 192).
Seems as you might set out in some detail what you think is Wittgenstein's orthodoxy, Kripke's variant, and Cavell's reply.
Especially the latter, since there are so few tertiary references to it.
If I were to jump the gun, so to speak, and offer an opinion on what has been said so far, it would be that Cavell's proposing obedience as a replacement for following a rule looks misguided. Hnece certain phrases you have used look ill-formed:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Quoting Antony Nickles
Quoting Antony Nickles
When, for example, @Metaphysician Undercover repeatedly misunderstands certain notions in mathematics, there is a point at which one concludes that he is simply not participating in the game. One might then either turn away or attempt to follow the path of the eccentric. The question becomes one of what is to be gained in going one way or the other.
This actually helps to clarify, so thank you. It is not that math cannot change, or be expanded, but there is a structure/conditions to math (as there is a method for what we consider science, why it produces a certain kind of "fact"). We count (pun intended) something as math because it is predictable, universal, eternal, etc., which is unlike our ordinary criteria for how/when something counts as a justification for obeying a rule.
This is well-taken; the OP does jump past some groundwork. Broadly, I would say there is the traditional skeptic, who sees that our actions are groundless, and thus "aspires to mathematical rules rather than" what Witt would call a concept's grammar; what Cavell refers to as our "ordinary" criteria, framed as the opposite of the skeptic's imposed criteria of ("mathematical"-like) certainty (also referred to as "metaphysical").
Then there is the superficial (the "orthodox" perhaps) reading of Witt as solving (or dissolving) the problem the skeptic is reacting to with our forms of life, which they take as grounding meaning, actions, etc. in the same framework, or by calling skepticism nonsense, or a trick of language.
Cavell and Kripke share the desire not to dismiss or solve the problem the skeptic sees; to acknowledge that there does come a point at which our justifications come to an end. (Here I may get stuck in the same problems I appear to have in the initial reading.) Kripke pictures that we have already (ahead of time) agreed on what the rules are (or practices/criteria/justifications); then I act instinctively yet correctly (without reference to the rules--"as I am inclined to", in his reading), and then I am judged on whether I followed the (circumscribing) rule or not--in or off the island.
Cavell takes the passage not to be the moment of judgment, but the (at least possible) beginning (at the end) of a discussion of our continuing together in the same moral realm, my understanding of your action without society's pre-arranged consent (our immoral act as Nietszche might say), our furthering justification(s) into un-ventured contexts, etc. He sees this as possible because the type of "agreement" we have is not in rules, as to a contract (though we can), but in the way our lives have (so far) been aligned, the possibilities that affords for development.
This would be why Witt words it as training, as we are not teaching (telling) rules, but the practice or skill of, here, how to obey a rule (which Austin would say we could further understand in examining how to disobey, how to be seen as obeying, how it differs from being forced, ordered, etc.--Kripke has this all worked out in advance, Cavell is continuing after Austin). Cavell might add indoctrinating (accepted without justification) because we have yet to imagine all the justifications we might have, and thus where we might go (together, alone) once we feel we are at the end of them.
Quoting Banno
And this is perhaps an example of such a (moral) moment. There are many examples in Philosophical Investigations that verge on insane, alien, strange reactions or responses. If we "conclude that he is simply not participating in the game", we have reached the bedrock--if we follow Kripke, this is the point of judgment, conclusion. But, conclude how? Are we really aware of what matters to considering it part of/not part of, the game? Even granted we have rules for inclusion, do we have answers about their desire to be excluded from those rules? What does it mean for who I am if I measure the other by my gain or loss? These questions can continue or stop. We might then "turn away", but, if we don't, do we only follow another path, having already judged an "eccentric" from without? This is at least possibilities (grounds?) for a discussion, where the skeptic and their nemesis fight over grounds (before) to avoid having the discussion at all (in the future).
So, small steps.
You or Cavell - not sure which - are differentiating between mathematical rules and grammatical rules. How is this distinction to be made?
I gather we are talking in terms of the broad notion of "grammar" Wittgenstein used, roughly the way appropriate to a given language game... but isn't mathematics a language game? If so, there is no prima facie distinction to be made here.
When. after repeated attempts, the rules are apprehended as impossible to understand, due to the appearance of inconsistency and incoherency, the best course for this person is not to participate in that game.
I've bolded the bit the is bothersome. A critical technique I've found most helpful is to remove a word and see what remains:
Are we aware of what matters to considering it part of/not part of, the game?
Well, yes, we are. There is a difference between plus and quus.
This is a good thing to have clarified. You are already aware that Austin provided a lot of examples to show that there are more types of statements than just ones that are true or false (also, this harkens to Kripke's black-or-white treatment of the Other). And that Wittgenstein spent a lot of time showing us that there is not one theory of meaning; that there are many other "games", as you say (he also calls them "concepts"), within which to mean something, then just reference. They showed that we can not think in just one way. They also both showed how each concept--like, pointing, meaning, intending, playing chess, apologizing, marrying, etc--was differentiated from others, what counted for identity, felicity, how we judge, why a distinction here is important, etc. with each concept, and even differences (sense, uses) within one concept in different contexts. Cavell calls these our criteria, Witt calls them the grammar of a thing.
Quoting Banno
What Witt shows is that there is a desire to impose grammar (criteria) on the concepts of which we are skeptical, the criteria/grammar which here Cavell refers to as "mathematical". The term is not meant to imply math is categorically different than a concept (not a "language game"); just that "the way appropriate to" math, its grammar/criteria--certainty, repeatability, universality, predictability, etc.--are similar to the skeptic's requirements for morality, rationality, aesthetics, etc. The "mathematical" is also analogous to the criteria Plato's metaphysical forms have, or Kant's conditions for rationality, or positivism's logic. So in contrast to that are the "ordinary" different, unpredictable, specific grammar of each concept. Now there may not be certainty, or universality, but Cavell's point is that we are left with a rational path when certainty runs out, when we are unsure if our concepts can be, if not universal, at least aligned. Though our actions can not be made predictable, they can be understood as reasonable, taken as good enough (fair, just).
Thanks for your patience. I remain at a loss to understand the difference between - taking from the thread title - a rule's end for mathematics and an ordinary rule's end; that is, while I understand the difference between mathematics and ordinary language, there is something here that I do not understand. You or Cavell seem to want there to be a difference between the spade being turned at the end of an analysis of mathematics, and a spade being turned in ordinary language - or something along those lines. Or is that such a distinction might be made the topic here?
I would have thought hat the spade was turned, in either case, when there was nothing more to be said, and only the "exhibition of what we call obeying the rule" as in §210; the point at which every interpretation is no more than the "substitution of one expression of the rule for another".
This, by way of a sideline, is tantamount to the rejection of coding as meaning (was that @god must be atheist?); coding is just an different expression of the rule, but what we want is to follow the rule.
So, back to my puzzlement: maths is different to ordinary language, sure. but following a rule is following a rule, be it a mathematical rule or a rule of ordinary language. The thread title and the OP seem to think this not to be so, yet I don't see how or why.
We are "left with a rational path when certainty runs out" in both cases.
In my experience, the average person does not typically have "the fear that leads to our need to have a foundational bedrock to justify our acts." That is a "fear" (if you can call it that) which is peculiar only to some philosophers.
Quoting Antony Nickles
And its recurring, thematic, archetypal problems, which he is attempting to resolve.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm not sure whether you would agree that Kripke's is a terrible misreading of Wittgenstein, albeit one which might help to raise some interesting issues. If so, then the question I have is whether you consider Cavell to be in disagreement with Wittgenstein, and whether Cavell is saying anything different to Wittgenstein, or if he says mostly the same thing by interpreting him better than Kripke. That is to say, I agree with Banno's assessment regarding the opacity of your distinction between them here.
I disagree that Wittgenstein is inviting a moral discussion at all, nor any further justification in general terms, although he might consider a place for philosophy or justification to intervene in relation to some specific issue. Generally speaking, the matter is fairly black and white: people do manage to follow rules and are able to be judged as following them or not. As W says: "there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it” (201). See also 240-241. I view 232 as a continuation of the thread that brings into relief the impossibility of privately determining a rule (see 202).
Quoting Antony Nickles
Pointing to the existing practice that constitutes the rule. "You're not allowed to move your knight like that!" (in chess) because that's not the practice or the way it's done.
Quoting Antony Nickles
It's an odd reading to think that Kripke is attempting to resolve this worry, when, by design or by folly, he exacerbates it.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm not sure what you mean here, but I don't see 223 as questioning what constitutes an example.
Quoting Antony Nickles
This is not my reading of 219 or 222.
Quoting Antony Nickles
The issue that Wittgenstein identifies (or forecasts) is that philosophers such as Kripke are sceptical or dissatisfied with any and all justifications of behaving in accordance with, or obeying, a rule. So it is not the person learning a rule that needs to justify their actions (as being in accord with the rule); rather, the philosopher is confused into thinking that no justification is possible or sufficient. This is who Wittgenstein is writing for. A teacher can determine whether or not the student is acting in accordance with the rule. The rule is not (privately) determined by the student. There is no middle ground in obeying the rule for how the knight moves in chess, only conflict or accord.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't think the principle or maxim of the Golden Rule is the same sort of rule Wittgenstein is talking about (it is not mentioned in PI). For the sake of clarity, let's use the example of a very straightforward rule instead, such as a rule of chess or a signpost.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't see Wittgenstein as talking about ethics or about "what is right" in general (in life) in PI. Or at least, not in relation to his discussion on rule following.
Yikes, caught me; red-handed. I'm burning all my Austin--shameful.
Quoting Banno
The word I was looking for (maybe) was: are we always aware? aware of every consideration? (not that we can't be, but that the questions sometimes come after the act; the questions can be without end).
Quoting Banno
Oh, this looks like a rabbit-hole. I'm not entirely versed in this scenario, but Cavell would acknowledge with Kripke that there is no fact to you/me obeying a rule, or meaning a sentence; nothing in me or about our world. But Cavell takes Kripke to read #201 as a paradox that must be solved--that our relationship with rules must/can be fixed. Maybe too simply, Cavell argues that rules have grammar, and they are (and obeying them is) not more fundamental than the grammar for other actions, and that the "fact" is the requirement (creation) of the skeptic.
But we fear that I may become, or be seen as, the deviant--that I might mistake plus-ing for quus-ing. The skeptic sees this as eminent tragedy, and scrambles to ward it off. Cavell "wants to say" there is the fact of "me", here, ready to be responsible for my act, or not; to apologize, rescind it, defy your law (ironically, subversively), explain these differing circumstances; stand as an example, waiting...
They are similar, in admitting of the same crucial change in perspective as urged by Goodman (the "see also" on the Kripkenstein page is no accident) in a rather different context, that of characterising musical and other notations:
Quoting Languages of Art, p134
'True' here means - in effect, in consequence - safely taken as license to make more copies, because the copying relation is maintained in such a way as not to impair the mutual exclusivity of types. No chain of copies will reach from one type (or 'equivalence class') into another. That would indeed be fatal to the system, as all the types would eventually merge, e.g. every tune would be identified as a true copy of every other. A similar (though different) demise is envisaged as the 'principle of explosion'. (Allegedly a false alarm, which is interesting of course.)
The point is that the extension or range of application of any word is a fiction, continually up for negotiation. What distinguishes the 'mathematical' from the 'ordinary' is the reasonable expectation that, however one's own utterances are interpreted (e.g. as plus or as quus), the consequent discourse will be well behaved in maintaining the distinction between distinct extensions, whatever they 'truly' are. This may or may not depend on those extensions being, like tunes, mutually exclusive.
Yeah that was maybe being more poetic than informative. I guess I should have said this is the imposition of the standards for math in place of (sublimizing) those of the rest of language. The desire for our actions to meet the criteria we have for math (or rules) when each action has its own grammar (including that of obeying rules). That math is circumscribed by rules, but that grammar is not.
Quoting Banno
Perhaps; it is two reactions to the ("mathematical") desire in the face of a skepticism--for some rule or other foundation--that divides the readings to the Witt passage; that for Kripke the criteria is decided (learned or not) before I make my final/initial claim (without further justification) that is then correct, or not. For Cavell, Witt leaves our response open, that we do not point to rules (or not always)--creating a space between skepticism and foundationalism.
Quoting Banno
Just that Kripke takes it that an action would be held to judgment of whether the rule was followed, and Cavell reads it that, yes, I can not tell you anything more, that we cannot just explain something (a rule, even its grammar) and you will/must continue. But we can wait; for a response, an inquiry. That we continue to be (exhibit) an example. That to continue a concept into a new context will require more than rules (Cavell refers to this as "the human voice", echoing Niestzche); that in contrast, what it is to be mathematical does not require me (it could be anyone adding).
Both Kripke and Cavell take Witt as pointedly not trying to resolve skepticism (the "orthodox" view I described earlier), but take it seriously, investigate it, see what it shows about us.
Quoting Luke
In the passage starting this OP, Witt acknowledges the possibility of the exhaustion of justifications.
Quoting Luke
And this would be Kripke's stance. But Cavell is attempting to draw out that there is grammar (not just judgment) in obeying a rule; that there are cases that exhibit what these criteria are (#201); that we can go over these examples and see if the context matches ours, whether it is an example, etc. And that grammar, even that of obeying a rule, is different than rules--even leaves us in a different place in the end.
Quoting Luke
It gets even more straightforward, let's use the example of math. The idea is that things are not straightforward like rules (#426), that our criteria (our lives) are open-ended, unpredictable, etc.
Quoting Luke
The further point of the passage of the turned spade is that, though I can wield rules the way you point to (as Kripke grabs onto them as finalizing), we do not have to, there is nothing necessary in treating the other on black and white terms--unless you don't want to address the Other (open the moral realm), that you just want, as it were, to apply the rule. On p. 192, Witt calls this a "conviction". I would say #240 clarifies our need to be able to know how to fight well (keep open the possibility for reasonable moral debate), and that #241 does not solve those issues, by pointing to our way of life in the way Kripe takes it as a contractual (enforceable) agreement.
Quoting Luke
This is to justify the judgment of not obeying a rule by pointing to our practice. We (teacher-student) are at the moment where I claim there is an attempt to convey what it is to obey a rule, how it is that we obey a rule. That this has an ordinary (non-"mathematical") grammar that is not just pointing to a rule (Kripke as it were, generalizes this practice/picture).
Quoting Luke
Cavell is trying to examine how and why Kripke ends up there.
Quoting Luke
And the other might claim his is an example, but responsive to a new context. "This is justice, but here we must do harm in this case."
Quoting Luke
This is in contrast to the "mythological" description (#221) of "all the steps already being taken". But it is not that we cannot choose to obey a rule (its all about rules), only that when (grammatically) I (choose to) obey a rule (am to be said (judged) to have obeyed), I do not (thereafter) make (further) choices. I do not then "follow" the rule, as in watch it go on ahead of me (#232). Kripke takes it that our justifications end (I act blindly) when I obey the rule, and then as if this is how we are said to act at all, with no space for discussing (justifying) that choice afterwards, for rescission if your suggestion to obey the rule was irresponsible, that I would no longer (morally) say I obeyed the rule, but that I obeyed your intimation (#222).
Quoting Luke
It is peppered throughout, in his insistence not to treat our practices mathematically, singularly, but also (albeit cryptically), in Part II, with his discussion of attitudes, seeing aspects.
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So, we're, in our "ordinary" lives, stuck with rules that are neither justified to our satisfaction nor universal in scope. We then look at math and are bowled over as it were by the rules therein that are well-justified and universal to boot. Thus, we come to the realization that we're stuck with flawed rules (ordinary) while also being completely in the know about flawless rules (math) - disappointment is a given (we're missing out on something "better"), fear is unavoidable (our lives are structured around rules that have no underlying truth i.e. we're lost).
What if, in keeping with Wittgenstein's ludological analogy, rules are more about making the "game" more fun, more interesting and less about justification? In other words, rules don't need to be justified in that they have to make sense, instead they have to ensure the "game" is enjoyable, exciting, and pleasurable but also "painful" enough to, ironically, make the "playing" the "game" a serious affair.
Off-topic?!
Maybe consider that those ordinary concepts are not composed of rules at all. It's possible that when we see non-ordinary concepts like mathematics as composed of rules, through a faulty extrapolation we wrongly conclude that ordinary concepts are also composed of rules.
Quoting TheMadFool
Living is like that, enjoyable, exciting, pleasurable, and painful. Living is not a game though, nor is it composed of rules. And I don't think rules are necessarily about making life more fun, they are about obtaining ends, goals. Although this is one way of making life more fun..
I've just finished reading the second chapter of Cavell's Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome; the chapter on Wittgenstein and Kripke. While interesting in places, I find Cavell misreads Wittgenstein and/or is too generous to Kripke, giving his reading more respect than it deserves.
I note that Cavell says PI is not meant to refute scepticism; but that's not the same as saying that Wittgenstein attempts to resolve scepticism.
What I found most interesting in Cavell's paper is the view - which he says he had found elsewhere only in Kripke's reading - of "the possibility of skepticism as internal to Wittgenstein's philosophizing." As he later expands:
It could be tempting to view PI in this way, seeing all the voices in it as Wittgenstein's own, including an expression of Wittgenstein's own geniune scepticism and philosophical doubts via the voice of an interlocutor. But the interlocutor could alternatively be viewed as a mere literary device which allows Wittgenstein to express these typical philosopical concerns only so he can provide his response (or philosophical viewpoint) to them.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Do you view this as Wittgenstein conceding to the sceptic? The quotes from 198-199 in my previous post include his reply to the sceptic (that following a rule is a custom, a practice, a usage, an institution).
Quoting Antony Nickles
Cavell references Wittgenstein's PI 199 regarding the grammar of obeying a rule. I don't know what you mean by the rest, starting from: "see if the context matches ours, whether it is an example, etc."
Quoting Antony Nickles
What has this got to do with rule following?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't see Wittgenstein or Cavell as talking about "the moral realm" with regard to rules, so I don't see that as being "the further point of the passage of the turned spade". But I invite you to make a case for it.
Quoting Antony Nickles
In which edition? The word "conviction" does not appear on p. 192 of my copy.
Quoting Antony Nickles
You might need to expand on why you think that. I don't see that at all. 240 is simply describing the wide (world-wide) consensus that exists among language users and among mathematicians.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I think your assumption that Wittgenstein intends 240 or 241 to be about a "moral debate", or about a solution to it, still requires justification. I don't recall Kripke talking about a moral debate either (although it's been a while and I may not have read it too closely). I take 241 only to be clarifying the type of agreement/consensus Wittgenstein is referring to at 240.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Sorry, I don't understand. How can you convey what it is to obey a rule without pointing to our practice? Are you referring to the student's (and/or teacher's) thought processes or something? And what do you mean by "grammar" here?
Quoting Antony Nickles
That would require that the student/trainee already understands what "justice" means; that they are not being taught the rule for how to use the word.
Right, like when you move the knight in chess; if you know the rule, then you don't think about how the piece can move. But let's go back to what you said and to my original concern:
Quoting Antony Nickles
The student and teacher can "resist philosophy's anxiety" in order to "make themselves intelligible"? I presume you are talking about the student when you say "They might claim they did obey the rule; or explain their aversion to conformity" -- if the student does not know the rule (otherwise why are they being taught the rule?), then they are in no position to claim that they did obey the rule. To "explain their aversion to conformity" implies that they did not obey the rule. Unless they already know the rule, then the student would not have a "blind obedience" to it. And 222 neither states nor implies that "normally we do not follow rules".
Quoting Antony Nickles
Wittgenstein is only talking about the teaching and learning of existing rules. I don't see him as talking about morality, justifying choices or changing rules.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Where does he insist "not to treat our practices mathematically"? Perhaps you could provide an example or two?
Great, I appreciate the effort. I hope it was worth the time. I find the Introduction and defense of Nietszche/Emerson moral perfectionism in the first essay worthwhile. This is Cavell's later work, which assumes a lot of arguments built from his first book and The Claim of Reason, which are more detailed analytical arguments, especially closer readings of Wittgenstein.
Quoting Luke
Well taken, I agree with this clarification. Cavell reads Witt as breaking philosophy's penchant to take its problems as generalized and singular (e.g., a universal theory of meaning), and abstract (without any responsibility on our part). In looking at the criteria for each concept individually--what is meaningful to us in their various ways--and considering the context of the issue, but there is no generalized solution.
So it becomes a philosophical moment: how do we continue, put our concepts and the world back together in this crisis. This cannot be accomplished ahead of time, but, in remembering our ordinary criteria, we have the rational, rough ground to possibly, as you say, resolve this (skeptical) instance, but only in this case/context, our differences there, to continue our relationship, even if we only end in rational disagreement, with the possibility of giving up.
Quoting Luke
Witt's previous attempt to overcome skepticism (in the Tractatus) is his inner skeptic, embodied in the interlocutor in PI--Cavell takes this that we all have two "voices" within us, so that the “style” of PI must be taken seriously (as “confessions” or "compulsions", he says in The Availability of the Later Wittgenstein--a good intro his approach to PI); and that Witt is trying to find a space between those two voices (our human voice and our desire to negate that voice--our "corrective" voice).
Quoting Luke
Yes, our justifications of how we practice a custom may run out; we may concede to our exhaustion. And knowledge (what I can tell you) has a limit, and then I am left with you. How/why I am following a custom/practice/usage/rule the way I am may be, at a certain point, impossible to reconcile with you, so yes, Wittgenstein keeps alive the possibility of groundlessness that the skeptic fears.
Quoting Luke
The grammar of obeying a rule is drawn out through examples (the OLP philosopher, like Witt, makes a "claim" to the grammar in answering: what do we imply when we say X? e.g., "I obeyed the rule". So this is what Witt does in #199--asking us to imagine someone following a rule only once. Now the claim--about what it is about the way rules work that the activity has to recur, have some regularity, etc.--is on you to see for yourself (thus so many unanswered questions in the PI). If we disagree about the implications, we can do so rationally, productively, by, for example, seeing if my understanding of the relevant context is the same as yours, how this example is representative of my claim about the grammar for obeying rules.
Witt's realization is that our grammar/criteria for obeying a rule are not rules, so that the grammar of the custom and technique, our mastery--not knowledge--of the grammar, structurally puts us in a place where our discussion of the justification of the grammar of obeying a rule starts at the end of where Kripke's action is taken and judgment is made of whether you did or did not "obey a rule" (rules playing too large a part, as if in every action). If that is not clear, I would need more than "[ you ] don't know what [ I ] mean"--say, questions, what you take me to say, logical errors, an differing example, etc.
Quoting Luke
Cavell's take is that this is about more than following rules. Witt's example of an action is obeying a rule (looking at its grammar--the custom of it); but the investigation is of how action, meaning, etc. works (in each case): that even in obeying a rule the grammar is not bound by rules. We only want our forms of expression/action to be as "designed for a god"--in the sense of a mathematical rule. (#426)
Quoting Luke
Cavell refers to "the moral realm" as the places in PI where Witt examines how we do not know how to continue with our customs, after the limit of our knowledge of the Other, that our separateness is unbroachable by our desire for mathematical rules, at the end of our justifications for our actions (that they are right). When we are left in further ethical response to the Other: the "conviction" on p. 192, seeing an aspect of the other, what is different than an opinion of the other's soul (our reacting to them as if they have a soul) p. 152; and of course when our spade is turned. Cavell's argument is that Wittgenstein's investigation of the limitations of epistemology (its inability to substitute for us at a point) leads to the realization of our ethical relation to each other (beyond rules or grammar).
Quoting Luke
I was in the 2001 50th Anniversary 3rd edition, which is German on the left and English on the right (actually on 190-192). In the 1953 3rd Ed., it is on 191. This is the page I read in my discussion of the Lion Quote. The "conviction" there is expressed in the desire for the (referential) picture (requiring "mathematical" certainty) to "know" the Other (that their pain is the "same" as mine); that the certainty has shut our eyes (p. 192) to our responsibility to acknowledge the other (or the consequences of dismissing them)--their claim on us (there, the claim of their pain; in our discussion, the possibility of the end of our moral relationship).
Quoting Luke
Sorry, yes, cryptic. I was reacting to the (I would say conscious by Witt) contrast to what is set out by Plato between the mathematical, which Witt is describing here, and everything else.
Quoting Plato - Euthyphro Sec. 7
Cavell's point being that, rather than Kripke's (pre-)judgment and exclusion, Witt is asking us to remember our lives and their ordinary criteria, and, at their end, the beginning of our moral relation to each other, its possibilities (if only for rational disagreement).
Quoting Luke
If we are discussing how to obey a rule (as with: how to apologize, how to judge justice)--if we are discussing the grammar of an act (not "a rule")--and we come to a place where I cannot offer a motivation for you/justification to you, then we can not agree on what is the "right" or "correct" or "felicitous" example of such an act (and/or its justification). The discussion of what is right is a moral discussion. So this is a conversation about politics/justice; the relationship between society and the individual. The breakdown of the discussion of the justification of how to obey a rule--is a moral moment.
That we do not come to "agreement in opinions but in form of life" is a grammatical description of the difference between Kripke's understanding of social agreement (in knowledge, explicitly, beforehand, with certainty, as a written contract--a rule) and our "agreement" in our living (Witt next says" in "judgments" #242). This is not to substitute "forms of life" for our opinions/knowledge--that our lives have all the mathematical criteria Kripke assumes---but that Cavell takes Witt to be saying that, yes, our separate judgments come to the same result (most times), but not because the criteria/justifications are certain (rule-like; followed), but because we have similar lives (as it were, coincidently). So when I act, and there is a question of why my judgment differed, this is where justification begins, or continues, not that we have decided ahead of time, and that all that is left is to act, then be judged (as Kripke pictures it).
Quoting Luke
So this would be easier if we were talking (I tried to highlight above the emphasis to show the difference). I am not saying we are not conveying something about our practices, but that, to start with, you are talking about a different practice (or only one part of it). You are describing a way of judging the student--"You're not allowed"--not our practice of justifying our claim about how we obey rules (not what we do when you haven't); our justification of what we think it looks like to obey a rule, disobey a rule, how we justify (what counts as justifying) our claim to have obeyed a rule, etc. (the grammar of "justifying obeying a rule"). So you are providing an example of how judgment of obeying a rule works, but, your teacher is merely "pointing" and, in sense, saying, "No". Your example is Kripke's casting-out of the other based on the (fixed, predetermined) practice--the "way it's done". So we have not yet even started to discuss what constitutes the grammar of "movement" of a knight.
(Confusingly in this case, the grammar for movement of a knight in chess is based on rules--it falls into the category of mathematical criteria: that all the applications are circumscribed, predetermined, etc. Witt is showing this to take up the exceptions, in investigating what grammar would look like for everything else, not based on rules).
Quoting Luke
Again, your formation takes rules as "encompassing" concepts other than math and chess, like justice (like everything not mathematical). And, although the teacher has authority over the student, that does not mean the teacher knows all there is about justice (which, my point here, is impossible--seeing the whole of each infinite series #426), that the teacher could concede that: not only has the student applied (justified) the concept of justice appropriately (within its grammar--not the "meaning", but what is meaningful to us about it), but that the student has taught the teacher something, in this instance by extending the concept into a new context (my example doesn't really fit), something about justice in a new world (say, what is just in reconciling our past incorporation of our reaction to race into our continuing institutions).
Not to open a new can of worms, but saying that justice "means" something (rather than has grammar/criteria) is going to get in the way, as the question begs Kripke's society to "know" what the thing is that is justice (and to the slippery slope: with certainty, universality, ahead of time, definitively, entirely). Also, the formation of being taught how to use a word, is different than being taught what counts as (the criteria that makes this) a particular use of the word (one of its possible senses--say the four (or more) uses/senses of "I know"), and that the concept maintains unforeseen possibilities/justifications, which is analogous to the ever-possible continuation of, answering for, our moral relationship to each other.
Quoting Luke
The fear of skepticism (groundlessness) is what causes Kripke's society to work out everything head of time, almost as if they(we) don't want to have a conversation later (one that may fall apart), to be then responsible to make themselves intelligible (explicit, understood).
Quoting Luke
I may have mucked this up. What the student is being taught is what counts as--the grammar, or criteria of--"obeying a rule" (later, the grammar of justifying that one obeyed a rule), not learning "the rule"; but the criteria for having been said, or being able to say, that: "I obeyed the rule"--one of which would be it can be used as an excuse: "Hey, I obeyed the rule; it's not my fault it didn't turn out how you expected!" (Our desire for deontological morality--"I'm a good person! I obeyed the rule!".) But also, obeying a rule is different in different contexts--the rules of chess, like those of math, are not like a rule of thumb, the rule of law.
Again, the student is (as, analogously, we are, to society) in exactly the position of making a claim of having "obeyed the rule" without either their or our "knowing" they have (for certain), after the act, before the justifying (even without opening the moral discussion.) It is in a sense a provisional claim ("beyond" knowing, Nietszche will say), but we are not (the human condition is not) in a position to make any other type of claim--without the tyranny of mathematical criteria: its foregone judgment.
Quoting Luke
Cryptic, sorry; I meant in the sense that normally we obey rules, we do not "follow" them, as we do not "doubt" someone else's pain (#303). "Following" is grammatically not a part of obeying rules (with exceptions). I meant to point to the entire section from #218-#232 (after the passage #217 under discussion), which, following the grammatical claim that "When I obey a rule, I do not choose," (#219) in the sense that: part of the criteria for "obeying" a rule is that I do not obey "my inspiration" (#232), as it were, at each moment, like my "eye travel [ ing ] along a line" Id--as if always tracking it/myself--that, if I do that, then I am, categorically, not "obeying" the rule. At #222, Witt sees this fantasy of ours is only a picture of the line intimating to us (absolving us of being "irresponsible"--or the one who taught us being so); that the line does not nod, or whisper, or tell us (#223); that we do not follow along it as a path "on tenterhooks", anxious each second about society's moral judgment (our intention, what we "mean"). And that such a grammatical study can show us the flip side of a concept's logic: say, as grammatically we ignore someone's pain, not doubt it, and when we do not "obey" a rule, we might not necessarily simply "disobey" it.
Quoting Luke
Well again I take #217 as about teaching someone how to be able to obey rules, presenting my justifications (say, even: myself as justification by example) for how it is that obeying rules is justified (in justifying how I have obeyed one). So, again, not teaching the rule itself, but the justification for the grammar of how a/the rule is obeyed--which are not rules (neither the justification nor the grammar (except when they are: in math, chess, or when my justification is simply to enforce a rule (we have set), say, with the threat of judgment).
Quoting Luke
The "tendency to sublime the logic of our language" calling anything else "an inexact, approximate sense." #38; "Here [ in thinking something is queer about propositions ] we have in germ the subliming of our whole account of logic. The tendency to assume a pure intermediary... to try to purify, to sublime, the signs themselves."; being "seduced into using a super-expression" #192; that giving someone a number (in association with a mathematical series) is like telling what a (symbolic) machine will do because all the movements are already there, pre-determined (though even a machine can actually move in other ways) #193; turning around the "preconceived idea of crystalline purity" to still have rigor in our ordinary language without "formal unity" #108; and basically in drawing out our ordinary criteria for any other action except math (or chess).
Do you believe that all moves (or all movements of a knight) in chess are circumscribed and predetermined? Per Banno's earlier comment, I don't see why you view the rules of chess or the rules of mathematics differently to rules of grammar or road rules.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Of course; that is the point of Wittgenstein's remarks at 208-211, for example.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Why is it impossible for the teacher to know "all there is about justice"? Surely they can know enough to teach a student what the word "justice" means (i.e. how to use the word "justice"). After all, didn't someone teach you what "justice" means? And couldn't you teach the meaning of the word to someone else? I don't believe that #426 is typically regarded to be in the rule-following section of PI, but we could look at 218-221 instead.
Quoting Antony Nickles
That's all very possible; it's just not what I see as being the point of Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following, or anything he's actually talking about.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't understand the distinction. I consider "obey" and "follow" to be synonymous here.
Quoting Antony Nickles
This appears to be the source of our disagreement, and where I believe you are misreading Wittgenstein. You seem to think that Wittgenstein genuinely holds that "All the steps are really already taken" (219). I read him, instead, as saying that we should not become captivated by, or fear, this misleading picture. As he says at 221, this is "really a mythological description of the use of a rule."
Furthermore, his comments on "inspiration" are intended to show that one's inspiration is irrelevant to following the rule; and that it is not one's private feeling, but one's public behaviour, that determines whether a rule has been followed (it is not accidental that these remarks lead into the private language "argument" where the rules of language cannot be determined privately, either). So I wouldn't say that "part of the criteria for "obeying" a rule is that I do not obey "my inspiration"; I would say instead that obeying my inspiration is not part of the criteria for obeying a rule or for determining whether I have obeyed a rule.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't understand this. I take the "intimation" in 222 to mean that the line gives one a private impression or intuition about "the way I am to go". That the line gives us this kind of intuition, W says, is "of course, only a picture", and this intuition could be judged "irresponsibly" in which case he would not be following it like a rule. This is, again, arguing against the mistaken picture that a rule can be determined privately.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't know why you bring "society's moral judgment" into it. This is simply another description to reinforce the point that rules are not privately determined.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I see it more in accordance with his remark at #1: "Explanations come to an end somewhere."
The point of all the examples of the different types of practices/concepts is to show that there is a different grammar for each one. There are not "rules of grammar" (that sounds like a sillogism) because each grammar is different, the criteria for their employment are different. Every practice is not bound by "rules" (not all grammar is rule-like) though there is a grammar to rules, and a different kind of grammar for different kinds of rules.
Quoting Luke
Well, I think so... aren't they? I'm mean, strategically unexpected, but the criteria for the rules are complete, exact; this is the category of "mathematical" criteria. There is no creativity in the application of the rules of chess, that's part of the grammar of its rules, as there are extenuating circumstances (not all the possibilities foreseeable ahead of time) in the application of criminal law. (Though predetermined is the wrong word, especially in a philosophy discussion.)
Quoting Luke
Do you mean to imply that grammar pertains to more than just language use; that grammar involves something outside language use? Or what "different types of practices/concepts" are you referring to?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Then how do you account for PI §497 or PI §558?
Wittgenstein's remarks, as well as the following quotes from SEP and Baker and Hacker, indicate that there are rules of grammar:
Quoting SEP
Quoting Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, Volume 1 of An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations: Part I: Essays, Volume 1, pp. 145-146
Quoting Antony Nickles
How do rules differ from "the criteria for their [each grammar's] employment"?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I never said or implied that every practice was bound by rules. (And why the scare quotes?)
Quoting Antony Nickles
Then I'm not sure what you mean by "grammar". I suspect you might be conflating grammar with form of life (which is wider than language).
Quoting Antony Nickles
For example?
Quoting Antony Nickles
They are certainly not complete. There have been numerous changes and additions to the rules (of mathematics and chess and grammar and the road). I'm sure there will be many more to follow. Although you could consider them as complete (or "circumscribed") at any particular time.
Quoting Antony Nickles
So not "predetermined" either...
Quoting Luke
Was this quote without comment meant to signify something?
I can give a definition of justice, which I take as what you are referring to when you say "teach a student what the word 'justice' means", but does a definition contain "all there is"? You've also fallen back on teaching "how to use the word" justice, but do we teach how to use words? I will claim again that this a misunderstanding; that Witt would say there is a use of a concept, as in its sense (one among possible others). "What use of justice are we talking about?" morally right? lawful judgment? fairness? to appreciate properly? And that these are not "teachable" with a definition in the sense Witt is getting at with our aligned lives. We see examples of being fair, we experience injustice, we know the law, we do justice to our father's memory... Again, the "meaning" of a word is taken apart in PI, as a bit of knowledge, and turned about towards the grammar of a concept which shows us what is meaningful about one use compared to another, why we make such a distinction, yada yada.
Quoting Luke
I think maybe I need more than not "typically regarded" or "just not what [you] see" to feel this is a rational critique rather than just feeling you've only gone as far as you want into the text.
Quoting Luke
To say that he should have said it strikes him that the "steps are taken" is not to say it's not true (nor saying that it is "mythological") that they are already taken, but just that they are not "steps", we don't "follow" the line the rule "traces". All of this stepping, following traces, is how things look (from our desire to be caused along the way) against the way we (logically) "blindly" follow a rule; we do not have our eyes open, looking, intending, choosing each step.
Even with all that, I think we agree that it is not an internal determination of the rule, which is all I mean to say: that rules are (logically, i.e., that's what they're for; they function) to be obeyed, but not all grammar functions in that way. Rules take "us" out of the equation (math pun intended), but our ordinary, non-mathematical, grammar for learning, justice, sitting in a chair, are not based on, to be understood as, rules.
Quoting Luke
That's a small take-away; can't we even grant that Witt learns why we want them to be? Much less that if we imagine ourselves, as Kripke does, just confidently acting on rules we've been "taught", the only possibility is for correction because you didn't follow the rule (thus the anxiety).
Quoting Luke
Yes, everything breaks down in the first paragraph, hmm. But maybe this statement is not easily-understood, is unclear, not straightforward, ambiguous; maybe we need the rest of the book to understand why? where do they end? where do they come from? does something else happen that may not end?
"[ No explanation ] stands in need of another — unless we require it to avoid a misunderstanding. One might say: an explanation serves to remove or to prevent a misunderstanding —– one, that is, that would arise if not for the explanation, but not every misunderstanding that I can imagine." #87
Explanations avoid, remove, or prevent a certain type of misunderstanding. But there are other misunderstandings we could imagine, perhaps as examples in a book, that explanations cannot avoid, remove, or prevent. There are some misunderstanding we must face, stay with, allow, encourage, that we must resist our inclination to give up on.
For a particular meaning/use of the word, yes. It is both possible for the teacher to know "all there is about justice" and for the definition that is taught to contain "all there is". See §75, for instance.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes, obviously we teach how to use words. How else do we learn their meanings?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Its sense is its meaning, and "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (§43).
Quoting Antony Nickles
You tell me. It was your claim that the teacher cannot possibly know "all there is about justice". Which use/meaning of justice is it impossible to know?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Then how can we possibly acquire or learn the sense (meaning) of a concept?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Perhaps, but he never says that a teacher (or anybody else) cannot know "all there is about justice" or that we don't teach the meanings of words. It's unclear whether you are trying to say that justice is a family resemblance concept or referring to something outside of concepts/language altogether.
Quoting Antony Nickles
The SEP article gives the following account:
Quoting SEP
If the rule following sections in PI are "directly follow"ed by the private language argument - which the article positions somewhere around §243-261 - then the rule following sections must be just prior to §243, and so not at §426. I could cite more references to support what is "typically regarded" as the rule following section if you like.
Moreover, you have provided zero textual evidence to support your assertion that Wittgenstein says (or implies) anything remotely in the vicinity of "the student has taught the teacher something, in this instance by extending the concept into a new context...something about justice in a new world."
The onus is on you to support your claim that Wittgenstein's remarks on rule following in the PI are about morality or ethics. By your own admission, this is an unorthodox reading. I have already provided several quotes and references to show that you are reading something into the text that is not there.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes, it is "to say it's not true that they are already taken". That is Wittgenstein's entire point here.
"If something of this sort really were the case, how would it help me?"
With this question, Wittgenstein clearly implies that something of this sort (i.e. that all the steps are already taken) really is not the case.
We do follow the rule blindly, in the sense that we follow it with complete confidence and without reflection. It is only in this "symbolic" sense that "I do not choose". This is merely "how it strikes me" when I follow a rule - as if there is no choice. But this should not be mistaken with the mythological idea that I actually have no choice and that all the steps are already taken in advance. I can move my knight from one end of the board to the other if I so choose, but that wouldn't be following the rule. Baker and Hacker provide the following exegesis of these sections:
Quoting Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity: Volume 2 of an Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Essays and Exegesis §§185-242, p. 197
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't understand this. Are you saying we don't follow rules?
On a generous reading, it looks like you might be in agreement with Baker and Hacker's exegesis above, but then why would you also assert (via double negative) that Wittgenstein is saying or agreeing that "All the steps are really already taken"?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I still don't know what you mean by the "grammar" of (or "for") these things. (The grammar for sitting in a chair?) It remains to be shown that there can be grammar without rules.
Quoting Antony Nickles
"Witt learns why we want" what to be what?
In the quote above, you were talking about the anxiety of society's moral judgment. You now seem to be talking about a different anxiety relating to not following the rule? What Witt actually says at §223 is that we do not have to wait upon the nod of the rule and that we are not on tenterhooks about what it will tell us next. So there is no anxiety here. §223 is not about learning the rule, but assumes the rule has already been learnt.
Quoting Antony Nickles
No, he says "but not every misunderstanding that I can imagine."
The concept of justice was picked as an example of when sometimes we don't/won't know how a concept will matter, what criteria will have what importance and to whom--its criteria make its grammar a different type than concepts with mathematical criteria. When the (grammatical) edges are so blurred that "Anything--and nothing--is right. This is the position you are in if you look for a definition corresponding to our concepts in aesthetics and ethics." #77. That this is different then the certainty (lack of disagreement) we have in math. p. 192. And asking if my knowledge is completely expressed by the explanations I could give (#75), describes that my unconscious familiarity can be made exhaustively explicit, but does not say that a concept is finite, complete in advance, learned by saying X (#75 is not about definitions, but explanations); and there is no limit to the explanations that I might have to give (to the student), and it is I who might become exhausted, our relation break down, rather than we have tidy all-encompassing rules justified to begin with, and the student is either right or wrong.
A concept can also be brought into new, unexpected contexts, extended Witt will say at #67, or he uses the analogy of continuing a series. As in "being inclined" in our beginning quote, when making a mistake in continuing a series, we are tempted to say that the student has understood wrong #143, as Kripke's society would judge, as if we have a complete list of how things can go wrong. But we say only that the student has "mastered the system" (#145) "followed the series as I do" But "we cannot state a limit" on when we have a right to say that. "Our pupil's capacity to learn may come to an end." #143. This is my claim that it is "impossible" to nail everything down for all time in any situation. In the extension of non-mathematical concepts we do not have the ability to say " 'and so on', in order to reach infinity." #229 But "we expect this, and are surprised by that. But the chain of reasons has an end." This is where Cavell's student and teacher begin.
[="Luke;576556"]Yes, obviously we teach how to use words. How else do we learn their meanings?
Its sense is its meaning, and "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (§43).[/quote]
Well, I don't want to get lost in the weeds on a sub-topic, but you say we teach how to "use" words, but that seems different than Witt's point that, in teaching meaning, we teach the use of a word in the language (it's sense/place in a concept)--we "teach" how to apologize (mostly indirectly, in living--just through seeing examples and taking correction) and than an expression can be an apology, though it can also be (at the same) in its use as self-aggrandizing, claiming to be a victim. We don't show how to, say, wield the word, but show the word's place(s) in our world, how it is meaningful in our lives. So teaching is not about conveying a fixed "meaning" (which vanishes; Cavell p. 80; PI #118) through definitions and explanations, but connecting our world, in all its distinctions and patterns, with the senses in which a word is used e.g.: knowing as facts, knowing as acknowledging the other, knowing as having a skill--the uses of "I know", which are the possibilities of how concepts (their expressions) can be meaningful.
[="Luke;576556"]We do follow the rule blindly, in the sense that we follow it with complete confidence and without reflection.
‘I am bound in my judgement about what is in accord with the rule and what not’ (RFM 328f.). Hence, if I want to follow the rule, ‘then only doing this will correspond to it’ (RFM 332). So I follow the rule blindly: not like a machine, but with the blindness of complete assurance."
— Baker and Hacker[/quote]
This idea of blindness as being completely "assured" or "confident" of being right harkens back to pp. 69-70 of the Cavell essay, where Kripke says we follow our "confident inclination". I was trying to point out that, if we are to have been said to have obeyed a rule, then not choosing any further and continuing blindly is a logical distinction of how it plays out once we have chosen to submit ourselves to the rule. Cavell, p. 71.
[="Luke;576556"]§223 is not about learning the rule, but assumes the rule has already been learnt.[/quote]
Sure, but learning the rule does not ensure correctness, nor that, even if correct, that there would be the same justification (if any need for one). I am not unreflectively "confident" or "assured" of following the rule correctly (granting myself authority); I give over my responsibility to the rule, no longer needing to make anymore decisions (further steps--a myth is not a lie or wrong; the picture, though not literal, still strikes: see p. 180). In obeying the rule (not myself) I can be "blind" to the consequences, not responsible. I do not "judge" as Hacker claims (#222). The justifications for obeying the rule are different than the explanation (afterwards) for having followed it incorrectly.
[="Luke;576556"]the line does not nod, or whisper, or tell us (#223); that we do not follow along it as a path "on tenterhooks", anxious each second about society's moral judgment (our intention, what we "mean").
— Antony Nickles
I don't know why you bring "society's moral judgment" into it. This is simply another description to reinforce the point that rules are not privately determined.[/quote]
Cavell is claiming Witt goes farther than enforcing the public nature of our lives which inform our grammar, their criteria; to ask why (see below). Additionally, if an actor's "confidence" is part of their act, as Hacker claims, they can be anxious; their "complete assurance" is subject to uncertainty. And if they are acting from an internal/individual assessment (their "judgment") of what is in accord ("right")(even if that was as you claim, only in learning it), they are subject to the correction of society when they are wrong--their fear of exclusion is their desire for criteria (a rule I can know, be assured of) that will ensure that does not happen.
[="Luke;576556"]This is simply another description to reinforce the point that rules are not privately determined.
— Luke
-can't we even grant that Witt learns why we want them to be? - Atony Nickles
"Witt learns why we want" what to be what?[/quote]
He is investigating why we want "obeying rules" (meaning; knowledge of the other) to be "privately determined", reliant on us individually (say, our confidence). Why he keeps trying to make sense of the interlocutor's obsession, fixation. This is not just an argument for a different picture (or a confusion to be alleviated), it is an investigation into the human condition, our desire to not have to rely on the human.
[="Luke;576556"]I still don't know what you mean by the "grammar" of (or "for") these things. (The grammar for sitting in a chair?) It remains to be shown that there can be grammar without rules.[/quote]
Well I got confused saying an example was sitting in a chair (I think I was thinking of Cavell's discussion of sitting at a table, p. 93; part of the criteria of a table is that we sit at it in certain ways). Anyway, the type of grammar of an action/concept will differ depending on the concept. And the way we measure whether a concept's grammar has been met is through criteria for having done them, not rules--though, as I said before, some criteria involve being said to have followed rules; math being one. Sometimes the criteria are categorical, definitive of identity, as to whether you have an opinion #573; some are looser, such as having been said to remember right #56 or having offered an excuse (Austin)--the criteria for a game being all over the place, the criteria for justice being subject to disagreement; these are the ways (the grammar) in which we see what matters to us in each concept. Thus the criteria is the expression of what is important to us (essential) for a concept to be a certain type of thing. #371 #373 Mathematical criteria makes the grammar (rules) of those concepts categorically different than the grammar of concepts with ordinary (non-mathematical) criteria.
You are speaking in the future tense. We can say that the rules are in constant flux, such that there is no ultimate, final, "all-encompassing" rules or criteria. But if that is your requirement for a rule, then there are effectively no rules at any point in time. However, clearly there are rules that we follow; games and sports being an obvious example. If your point is that mathematical rules/criteria are more enduring and perhaps more clearly defined than other rules/criteria, then I take your point.
Quoting Antony Nickles
You're right. I may have confused or conflated definitions with explanations. However, the larger point, of Wittgenstein's, is that concepts are still "usable" (and, therefore, teachable) even if they have "blurred edges" (see §69). W's point at §77 seems to me to be that some concepts are simply resistant to sharper definition.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Does this imply that there is no right or wrong (if there is a "limit to the explanations")? Or what does it mean for rules to be "all-encompassing" and "justified to begin with"?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I take "extend" at §67 in the sense of what is included or what falls under the concept of "number", rather than the concept's use in "new, unexpected contexts". You can possibly read that into it, but Wittgenstein is concerned with description not theory (§109).
Quoting Antony Nickles
Wittgenstein's intent with these remarks is not to demonstrate that it is impossible to "nail everything down for all time", although this kind of "preconception of crystalline purity" is one of his targets in the book. §143 deals with understanding, rule following, being guided by a rule, and normal/abnormal reactions.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm not sure I understand the analogy. Wittgenstein reminds us that, normally, students do learn and are able to go on to use the mathematical and non-mathematical concepts they are taught. Anyway, the real lesson of the student/teacher scenarios is that understanding and rule following are less about the student's inner thoughts/feelings and more about the student's actual behaviour. "Just for once, don’t think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all!" (§154)
Quoting Antony Nickles
But this is where Wittgenstein's student and teacher end. Likewise, Wittgenstein's turned spade is not an invitation for further explanation (see §87 again).
Quoting Antony Nickles
I say that we teach how to use words, but Witt's point is that we teach how to use words in the language? This is a distinction without a difference. At least you are no longer questioning whether we teach how to use words.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I haven't said otherwise. You appear to be projecting views onto me that I do not hold.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't know what you mean by "I give over my responsibility to the rule". What responsibility? Also, I don't believe you when you state that you are never assured or confident of following any rules correctly. "Correctly" should not mean "flawlessly".
Why does learning the rule not ensure correctness? If you are saying that someone who has learnt the rule could still make an error, that's true, but why is your expectation that learning a rule should eliminate all errors? You appear to have a "preconception of crystalline purity" about this.
Talk of "responsibility" here is also misguided, as if you can choose to learn the rule or not. Toddlers do not make the considered decision not to learn their native language - this is the problematic Augustinian view of language acquisition.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Which rules can't you know or be assured of? Should rules be tailored to each individual? The student's motivations for learning to follow the rule are irrelevant. All that is relevant for Wittgenstein's purposes is that children normally do learn to follow the rule. That is our form of life.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I disagree. It has nothing to do with "our desire to not have to rely on the human", as far as I can tell. He is trying to get the obsessed, fixated philosopher to see the matter in a new light. Therefore, it is "an argument for a different picture", e.g.:
Quoting Antony Nickles
When are criteria not rules?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't believe that these are the criteria.
This is the criteria that Cavell is describing as "mathematical", which he believes Kripke is aspiring to impose on the grammar of all concepts, any action. As if rules are all that matter; that every application (of a concept) is already taken into consideration (into infinity--as in math). That we learn rules, instead of having lives, and that right and wrong are simply a matter of obeying the rules or not (what is right is worked out ahead of time; this is similar to Nietszche's critique of Kant's deontological morals).
Quoting Luke
It is this purity (what Cavell is calling "mathematical") that is the pivot-point between the two views of what happens when we get stuck. Cavell takes Kripke's view of rules as "more skeptical than the skeptic", meaning that the desire for purity (certainty, pre-determination, simple enforcement) is satisfied by making rules central to our agreement (then we can teach the rule, rather than the student, rather than agree in our lives). The rule removes us: the partial (our partiality), fallible, limited, separate, finite, impure (of the flesh; feet of clay).
Quoting Luke
I said "we teach the use of a word in the language" (and by "language" here, the difference between our language and our lives only comes up before we reach the point where we are stuck--we ask questions and seek justifications to align our words with our lives). A word (expression) has a use(s). The distinction hinges on the difference between words as used (as if, by rules) and seeing that there are different things an expression, for example, can do: be a threat, an invitation, etc. That it would not be an accusation (except in Kripke's world): "You used that word wrong!" but a question: "What use (variety of sense) of "I know" are you talking about?"
Quoting Luke
Obeying a rule is not a matter of "confidence" or "assurance". It is, categorically, to obey the rule rather than follow your inclination (something internal as you say). So we do not have to be answerable for the action; we can point to the rule as the answer of why we did the action, abdicating our responsibility to be intelligible to the other, respond to their claims on us about what we have done.
Quoting Luke
Maybe it helps to point out the difference here is that Kripke takes rules to be fundamental to the point of PI, and Cavell wants to claim that criteria shape the grammar of every act separately--the grammar of math (which happens to be rules), the grammar of obeying rules (which is not judged by rules), and the grammar of other concepts, such as apologies, justice, knowing, etc.
[quote="Luke;578536"And the way we measure whether a concept's grammar has been met is through criteria for having done them, not rules
— Antony Nickles
When are criteria not rules?[/quote]
Criteria are our means of judgment, not grounds of certainty (as rules are, thus merely judging if you followed the rule). Criteria outline what will count toward a thing's having a particular status or value (along with context, history, etc.) Certain criteria will be already articulated (dog shows) some more organic and loose (what counts as a game), some closed (chess) some open for further specification/rationale--part of the investigation is what will count as evidence, partly we find out what type of thing something is through explicating its criteria, partly what distinguishes this from that. Cavell’s claim is that Witt is comparing rules to ordinary (not instituted) criteria (see the PI index: having a dream, remembering right, mistaking, talking to oneself), so we are not just deciding true or false compared to something we have found certain (or which aspires to a mathematical rule).
Quoting Luke
Well here we are back at the beginning with Cavell's claim that when the teacher is inclined to give up, they do not have to. Our judgment of the other (their act) is not based on a rule they either obeyed or not (except when it is, say, the law), but a matter for us to find out how this type of action (each its own) is justified, how those justifications fail, and how they rmay be brought back to matter for us, where new justifications may come from. All this after mistaken claims, contingencies of circumstances, and all the myriad things that in all instances are not covered by rules. And, yes, justifications run out, come to an end; we no longer can speak for each other, are enigmas to the other (p. 223); we are different, separate. But at least in learning about ourselves in making our criteria explicit, we rationally understand our differences; must account for/to the other before coming to an end with them (or be held responsible for having not). In Wittgenstein's world, the rule is not broken, the community is; we becomes us and them.
Grammar applies only to language use, not to "any action" - unless you have a reason to think otherwise?
Quoting Antony Nickles
We don't either learn rules or have lives. You might as well have said: "That we learn [language/chess], instead of having lives." We learn these as a part of (within) our lives, not instead of us having lives.
Quoting Antony Nickles
But they are. Otherwise, there is no rule.
Quoting Antony Nickles
But it is. Otherwise, there is no rule. (Rules can change, of course.)
Quoting Antony Nickles
What is "we can teach the rule, rather than the student" supposed to mean? The rule is not the student and vice versa. Rules are taught to the student.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Why can't it be both? We are taught the rules for how to use words and how to use those words as threats, invitations, etc. We are taught both how to wield words and how they are meaningful in our lives. (On reflection, this is what I should have said in my previous post.)
Quoting Antony Nickles
Aren't we responsible both for following rules and for not following rules (that is, once we know the rules)? You seem to imply that we are responsible only when we don't follow rules.
In terms of intelligibility, I would say that following the rules (e.g. in chess) is what allows us to make ourselves (our moves) intelligible to our opponent; that following the rules maintains the intelligibility.
Therefore, I do not understand how we "abdicat[e] our responsibility to be intelligible to the other" by following rules.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I think that Wittgenstein attempts to highlight similarities, not differences, between rule-bound activities. Perhaps Cavell distinguishes mathematics from other activities because it might be considered as "more ideal" than others, but Wittgenstein wants to bring all these activities back to the rough ground, including mathematics. As Banno noted early on, mathematics is but another language-game.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Or except when we are teaching them the rule.
Yes, that is literally the kind of claims he is making. That the structure of our language and that of our lives are (usually, for the most part) them same—this is carried from the Tractatus but a different kind of form for each thing, each type of act; and we are looking for its “logic” (on its terms) rather than imposing a fixed criteria. A grammar for excuses (Austin), for apologies, for a threat, for acknowledging pain, for treating someone as if they have a soul, for raising one's arm, for justifying or disagreeing. Grammatical comments highlight the criteria of a thing—what is essential for it to be that thing: learning, mistaking, reading, talking, lying, seeing, etc.
Quoting Luke
Our lives are meaningful, and we learn words (moreover, concepts) in coming into our culture, acting, failing, interacting, becoming part of everything everyone does. Again this picture of "meaning" is getting in the way. Our expressions, as our lives, don't have a "meaning" attached to them; part of the confusion Witt recognizes is that we believe that since we can give a definition ("meaning") for ever word, that this is how all language works (reference/correspondence).
Quoting Luke
To obey a rule is to obey it correctly (do it right) or wrong (fail to obey it). Justifications can differ as to why we obeyed it, and we can argue about what it means to have (rightly) obeyed a particular rule, but what is right and what is wrong are not contained/decided by rules (unless they are set by us--laws, commandments, etc.). To have correctly apologized is not determined by the application of a rule, it is judged by those accepting the apology (at least most importantly), depending on the injustice and other criteria (sometimes or not, depending on the situation; though if it's threshold grammar is broken, I may not accept it as an apology at all).
Quoting Luke
If I am following the rule, I may only have, "I was following the rule." And so cannot explain, detail, qualify, defend, make explicit, distinguish, or justify myself, except as to how I believe following the rule is done and that I did it.
Quoting Luke
You can hold me responsible for the act, and for my choice to follow the rule (though, in following the rule, if I judge the rule as irresponsible, I am not obeying it (#222)). And I can claim I was following the rule as an excuse from the guilt/wrong, but Kripke's society is judging my having followed the rule or not, not whether the rule itself is right/wrong (judged even for following it). But, again, the point is that the desire and temptation (the aspiration Cavell says) for a purity in our language/acts, is just the wish (particularly in philosophy) to remove ourselves (have action based on abstract universal reason or knowledge or rules, not on me).
Quoting Luke
If I am behaving as expected there is no need to make myself intelligible (as we don’t ask after intention unless something phishy happens). If you have broken the rules of chess and I tell you, and you claim you did not, you must explain yourself if we are to go forward, together. For you to explain in what sense you intended, or so that you know what is at stake and have a chance to qualify what seems inexplicable from my position. This may come to our being unable to reconcile, however, as Cavell will say elsewhere about it: though we are endlessly separate, there is no depth to which langauge can not reach, and we are answerable for everything that comes between us.
I'm not sure whether it is Cavell or Kripke making this kind of claim, but, for Wittgenstein, grammar is about the sense of the words "excuse", "apology", "threat", "pain", "learning", "reading", "talking", "lying", "seeing", etc. Our actions are obviously related to the use of these words, but grammar is not about the actions themselves (independently of the words/concepts).
According to Wittgenstein scholar Daniele Moyall-Sharrock:
Quoting Daniele Moyall-Sharrock
Quoting Antony Nickles
I've never claimed that all language works by reference/correspondence only, and "wielding" words need not imply it. I can wield/use the words "Pass the salt" as a command/request, for example. If your earlier distinction between "wielding" words and words being "meaningful in our lives" meant to imply that not all language works by reference/correspondence only, then I misunderstood you. At least, I hope you do not intend to argue against Wittgenstein's position, famously summarised as "meaning is use".
Quoting Antony Nickles
If "what is right and what is wrong are not contained/decided by rules", then why bring Wittgenstein's rule-following into it? If it is to discuss what I take to be Cavell's and/or Kripke's misreading: that Wittgenstein creates an open question with his "turned spade" and invites further justification, then I have nothing further to contribute. If you don't wish to discuss whether or not this is a misreading (or was Wittgenstein's position), then I will leave it for you and others to discuss Cavell's and/or Kripke's take on it.
Quoting Antony Nickles
If that's what you meant by "abdicating [your] responsibility to be intelligble to the other", then fair enough.
Quoting Antony Nickles
§222 is not about judging the rule as being irresponsible. §222 supposes that what determines following the rule is the judgment of one's private "intimation" (i.e. one's intuition, instinct, feeling, hunch). However, one could judge their intimation irresponsibly, and then "I wouldn't say that I was following it like a rule". This brings into question the supposition that our "intimation" is what determines following the rule. This supposition "is, of course, only a picture."
Quoting Antony Nickles
Wittgenstein is not talking about "whether the rule itself is right/wrong". But if you don't want to have that discussion, then I'll leave you to it.
Quoting Antony Nickles
What if someone breaks (or fails to learn) the rules of grammar (i.e. the bounds of sense)? This is a "depth" that language cannot "reach" or reconcile.
Talking about what we imply when we say "I was only following the rule" is to talk about the act of making an excuse, how it works in our lives. To learn about a concept is to learn about the world (and ourselves in it); sometimes they are not aligned, or our words are dead to our culture, or sublimated, but I wouldn't say there is a necessary separation or disconnect, but, if there was one (the spade turned), we could bridge that gap.
Quoting Luke
My phrasing was maybe too poetic. The point being we can not rely on blaming language for the breakdown. Language does not ensure it, but it makes it possible to reconcile (even to a new culture, an expression in a new context, beyond its usual senses) up to the point we give up. Your example does not foreclose that possibility/responsibility, but the picture of rules running language creates the picture of "bounds" because we want everything neatly applicable and predictable and universal, etc.
Quoting Luke
Well if I understand you to say that: an expression is used, as in meant, by me, somehow related to the action or practice, and that the 'sense of the words' above is just another way of saying 'meaning', then I would say this misses Wittgenstein's radical re-conception of the way meaning works, and that the part that "use" plays is twisted because of that picture, but, no, I don't want to argue that with you.
Quoting Luke
Ergh, this seems so close, I can't help it. Yes. Here, the sense/use of what you are saying is closest to "I can [ say ] 'Pass the salt' as a command/request", but then what you call "using the words" is just, "saying". But this can also be seen as a grammatical claim: "The words 'Pass the salt' [ can be used ] as a command/request" You are here (almost**) making a claim about commanding and requesting (a difference or similarity); but the point being that it doesn't have anything to do with "you". (**I'm not sure what the grammatical point could be here with this example; maybe that they both involve influencing, here, the act of another.)
The focus on "is used like" is on whether it is: as an assertion, or, as a hypothesis; not on the person "using" a word, but on the possibilities of the expression (the possible uses); you could call these different senses, but it is not the "sense" (meaning) of the expression. Here, part of the grammar of "belief" is its potential to be an assertion, here compared to the (grammatical) fact--or claim, here, really--that part of its makeup is that it can be a hypothesis. Now you can say: "I used belief as a hypothesis" but the focus is on differentiating between the uses that belief has, not that "your use" gave it, or related it to, the "meaning" that it has--you are merely clarifying among the limited options.
So, can you say "I used the word..."? sssuuuure, but that adds nothing to your merely expressing (saying) them (maybe not even choosing them). The uses, those senses, were already there and their meaningfulness doesn't have anything (much) to do with you (not to say they may not be important to you, you may have reasons, clarifications, etc.). Of course if there is confusion we can ask: "What did you mean?", but the answer to this falls (usually) within a concept's grammar (its possible senses). Now this is different than saying there are rules and I "used the word" in accordance with its rules.
I didn't mean to emphasise the "I", and I don't know why you think I did. Any English speaker could make the same command/request by saying "pass the salt", obviously.
Quoting Antony Nickles
The point of this example was to show you that I know not "all language works by reference/correspondence", since a command or request uses language for a purpose other than mere reference/correspondence. "Slab!"
Quoting Antony Nickles
You are suggesting that the "focus" is only on possible uses, not on actual uses. As though nobody actually uses language...
Quoting Antony Nickles
If the focus is only on the "possibilities" of use, then it's not really about actual use at all. However, Wittgenstein is definitely focused on actual uses of language; that's why he keeps harping on about language-games and language-use as an activity:
Quoting Antony Nickles
How is it different? Language is the game and grammar is its rules. The rules determine which moves are allowable (make sense) in the language-game, and the moves allowable in the language-game are just the "possibilities" (different senses) that you mentioned. So, an expression can be used (e.g.) as an assertion or as a hypothesis, but which of those possibilities is actualised depends on what a speaker/writer actually does with it (how a speaker/writer actually uses it) in a given instance.
I pointed it out for a reason, but not emphasizing "you" as apart from anyone else, but that the way a word has meaning doesn't have anything to do with us, in the way your picture describes.
Quoting Luke underline added
Your picture injects the speaker as "the user"; that the use of language depends on them. But "the" use (not "our" use) is a part of language (our lives), not in the speaker doing something, "using it".
That words are meaningful is not because of how I use a word (or expression), as in the way it is used by me. There is the whole of language, that is to say everything worth expressing or that matters in our lives, and this word has a role, a place. That is its use, not our using; the word's use, as in the word has a use, or uses; Witt will also call them senses (like varieties or options), which depend (mostly) on the context, not upon my intention or my "actualizing" it.
There are two (at least) "understandings", and Wittgenstein is saying "in the sense of" to clarify/differentiate which grammar for this concept we are discussing. As Cavell discusses on p. 80, the classic idea of the "meaning" (what you also call the "sense") of a word, disappears completely, vanishes.
Quoting Luke
This is one main part of this essay in understanding the impact of the desire for "mathematical" rules: that the first picture of how language works, the question is asked after, the second way, with rules, is with all applications thought to be completely known beforehand.
Thus, it is not a matter of simply judging whether a rule (aspiring to be mathematical) was followed (unless it is that kind of concept--math, chess, etc.), but understanding/teaching post-expression justifications; the usual context; the extension of the concept into new contexts; making explicit the grammar of this concept; finding out if we are missing something; adding/changing something because our lives have changed.
I think part of the motivation for misunderstanding here is that if we imagine language works on rules, than at the end of justifications for following them, we imagine there is nothing else to do because the point of the rule was to provide a foundation for a kind of certainty to our language, a bedrock. So, if what happens at the end of justifications turns on us, then it will seem our language is arbitrary, uncertain, individual, because of the ultimate contingency on me and you (not for a prior ground, but an ongoing reconciliation).
So you accept that 'meaning is use', but you reject that meaning has anything to do with "us": the users of words and language?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes, the use of language depends on its users. This is controversial?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Does language use itself? Tell me more about "the" use of language which is not "our" use of language.
Quoting Antony Nickles
So words have possible uses (senses, varieties, options), but we don't actually choose any of the uses/options? Words use themselves?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Why "mostly"?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't find this example relevant. How does it relate to 'meaning is use'?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Sorry, but I still don't get it. Aren't all rules ordinary?
Quoting Antony Nickles
But is that the point of rules?
The concept of "understanding a sentence" is meaningful to us, it matters to us, in (at least) two uses/senses. One is the sense that we can rephrase it to say exactly the same thing. There is another sense--in the concept of "understanding a sentence" (in its grammar)--where we follow something even though there is no other way to express it, as it is said, here, now, to you.
Quoting Luke
Wittgenstein's realization is the first part; the second is a different concept. You seem to see the "possibilities" of a concept, it's uses. And yes we can choose our words ahead of time (as, for a speech, which might help in clarifying the use), and we do say words--express them--(or not say them), but we do not "use" words as in: do not "mean" words. You may understand it as when Wittgenstein realizes that the internal process of "meaning" vanishes, taking with it the picture of us putting "meaning" into what we say, i.e., "using" language. All of this is externalized, so the sense (or use) of an expression is in the expression and context, not coming from us.
(PI 337)
As Austin will say, intention is only something we ask about afterwards if something is out of place (phishy)--"Did you intend to run that stop light?" So the expectation (only apart from which we may be rightfully be asked what we intented) is in the context (embedded in a setting). Now you can choose ahead of time to fly in the face of convention, but that is the extent to which we intend, mean, cause, etc.
We do not always or necessarily even choose our words before we speak, though questions can be answered about what we said afterwards. To have "spoken thoughtlessly" is not to have chosen our words poorly, but not to have taken into consideration the use for which they will be taken. We are still held to the words we say, even if we only register that this is the kind of thing said here, never considering the use (the grammar of an expression, as we don't for walking).
To the extent we "say" something (can be said to have said something) is how much what we say meets all the varied, ordinary criteria for having said (or done) that thing. Not just the words we say, but in a contex as an event--as in there is an after, in which there may (or not) be questions, determinations, pointing out parts that meet our criteria to differentiate one concept from another, one use in that concept ("I know" in the sense of ("yeah, yeah, I got it") from another, excuses, adaptations, even, but not only, justifications, etc.
But our desire for "mathematical" certainty creates a picture of the power of (necessity for) judgments made previously (rules, moral imperatives) which threatens our ability to see we can continue, to wait, to try again, to listen, without which how can we teach anything new to anyone, try to tell someone something hard to hear, have any hope in a moral moment.
We obviously do use words, and we use them to mean this or that. We do not invent their meanings, we learn their meanings. And we learn to use them, and do use them, in accordance with the meanings that they have or can have. It is a mastery of a technique; a practice.
Consider this analogy: in chess, no individual decides or determines the rules (the allowable moves; the grammar) of the game on their own, but individuals can and do decide the moves that they make from among all of the allowable/possible/meaningful moves. This is analogous to choosing/using one's words (to speak meaningfully).
I don't think that we disagree on this, except that you assume my position to be other than it is, and except for your wild claims (or strong implications), such as that language is not used by us, or that we do not teach how to use words.
Quoting Antony Nickles
He does not realise that the internal process "vanishes"; he realises that this is not how meaning works (just as individual chess players do not decide the rules on their own).
Quoting Antony Nickles
Like I said earlier:
Quoting Luke
Quoting Antony Nickles
I think I understand what you are getting at now with your distinction between "mathematical" and "ordinary" rules. Wittgenstein refers to these as "calculi with fixed rules" and "the rules of a game" respectively (see PI 81). A game is "not everywhere bounded by rules" (PI 100), but it is still a game "for all that" (PI 68). Wittgenstein repeatedly compares language to games, and speaks of language as having rules (e.g. PI 84, 100, 125, 133, 549, 558).
However, I still disagree that morality is a significant theme of PI.
We're in the ballpark. Yes, it is the desire for rules like math that Cavell is saying leads to Kripke’s picture of a rule-driven language (a complete system). "The ordinary" would just be all our everyday criteria that matter, say, for an expression to be an excuse, but which are not complete or whose application is not fixed in advance.
Quoting Luke
So I am trying to connect the desire for mathematical rules with picturing acting/speaking as done "in accordance with the meanings that they have" because criteria are not rules; judgment is whether you have met them, not whether you followed them, the application judged as just right or wrong (as the picture of statements as just true/false).
quote="Witt, PI # 81"]All this [ impulse to the ideal ] , however, can only appear in the right light when one has attained greater clarity about the concepts of understanding, meaning, and thinking. For it will then also be clear what can lead us (and did lead me) to think that if anyone utters a sentence and means orunderstands it he is operating a calculus according to definite rules.[/quote]
So the picture that we "mean" sentences (use them) leads us to think language operates on definite rules. And that picture of language comes from an aspiration for langauge to operate like math, sublimely. So we must attain greater clarity about meaning.
Quoting Luke
Well, again, I agree we do choose words (sometimes) and we do say them (in a context), but what else is happening? what else does "us using words" look like? if we are using words to mean something, are we always using them? "mean" them every time? isn't this simply to move the same picture of "meaning" from some internal process to something external (rule, practice)?
Quoting Luke
At least we see that a concept does not operate with a complete set of applications already worked out. The judgment that the game is tennis (in this case) is not made by rules (but by criteria), even though there are rules to tennis (which one has to be broken or removed for it to not be tennis?). And if we do not have a complete system of rules (#133), then how can rules be the (only) way language operates? What happens when our rules would be not so much broken, as, just, run out? What happens beyond the bounds of rules?
Quoting Luke emphasis added
Well, in chess we choose every move, we deliberate over it, we consider the consequences, etc. We do not have this self-consciousness with most things we say or do. And usually only when an expression or action is not straightforward in the context, is there a need (which comes afterwards) to sort out what use of a concept applies--not beforehand by the rules, or in you "meaning" some use. Yes, we do not decide the grammar of a concept, but we also cannot ensure which use our words will have. We may want to make a request for the salt, but our emotions, or ego, or my authority over you (and whatever else comes into play of the context) make my expression a command, despite and apart from my desires and intentions.
Quoting Luke
Making the discussion about rules so important definitely makes any ethical or moral themes seem insignificant. But it is exactly this fight against the desire for certainty, universality, the completely "mathematical" which Wittgenstein is impressing upon us as an epistemological obligation. The pursuit of knowledge of our lives through an investigation of our language, learning about ourselves, the other, can be done in an ethical manner, attending to each grammar for each different thing, or tainted by the desire for an all-inclusive answer. There is also the implications of his discussion of aspect blindness and that knowledge is not our only relation to the world.
We're in the ballpark. "The ordinary" would just be all our everyday criteria that matter, say, for an expression to be an excuse, but which are not complete or whose application is not fixed in advance. There are of course other kinds of rules than “mathematical” ones — But it is the desire for rules like math that Cavell is saying leads to Kripke’s picture of a rule-driven language (a complete system).
Quoting Luke
So I am trying to connect the desire for mathematical rules with the picture of acting/speaking "in accordance with the meanings that they have" which is manifest from that same desire to have the application judged as just right or wrong (as the picture of statements as just true/false).
Wittgenstein is saying that the picture that we "mean" sentences (use them) is what leads us to think language operates on definite rules. That picture of langauge comes from an aspiration for langauge to operate like math, sublimely.
Quoting Luke
Well, again, I agree we do choose words (sometimes) and we do say them (in a context), what else is happening? what else does "us using words" look like? if we are using words to mean something, are we always using them? "mean" them every time? does it really change anything if we simply move the same picture of "meaning" from some internal process to something external (rules)?
Quoting Luke
At least we see that a concept does not operate with a complete set of applications already worked out. The judgment that the game is tennis (in this case) is not made by rules (but by criteria), even though there are rules to tennis (which one has to be broken or removed for it to not be tennis?). And if we do not have a complete system of rules (#133), then how can rules be the (only) way language operates? What happens when our rules would be not so much broken, as, just, run out? What happens beyond the bounds of rules?
Quoting Luke emphasis added
Well, in chess we choose every move, we deliberate over it, we consider the consequences, etc. We do not have this self-consciousness with most things we say or do. Only when an expression or action is not straightforward in the context, is there a need afterwards to sort out what use of a concept applies--not beforehand by the rules, or in you "meaning" some use. Yes, we do not decide the grammar of a concept, but we also can not ensure which use our words will have. We may want to make a request for the salt, but our emotions, or ego, or my authority over you (and whatever else comes into play of the context) make my expression a command, despite and apart from my desires and intentions.
Quoting Luke
Making the discussion about rules so important definitely makes any ethical or moral themes seem insignificant. But it is exactly this fight against the desire for certainty, universality, the completely "mathematical" which Wittgenstein is impressing upon us as a moral obligation. The pursuit of knowledge of our lives through an investigation of our language, learning about ourselves, the other, can be done in an ethical manner, attending to each grammar for each different thing, or tainted by the desire for an all-inclusive answer.
You seem intent on talking about criteria instead of rules. Are you talking about ordinary rules or ordinary criteria?
Rules needn't be "complete or whose application is fixed in advance"; that is Wittgenstein's point. Tennis still has rules and is still a game, even though (e.g.) there is no rule "for how high one may throw the ball in tennis". And Wittgenstein seeks to emphasise the strong similarity between games and language in this regard (see language-games). Language also has rules and remains language, even though it is not "everywhere bounded by rules".
Quoting Antony Nickles
What adds to the confusion here is that, as I understand it from the little I know or have read of his philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein does not even consider there to be these sort of fixed, complete, all-encompassing "mathematical" rules in mathematics (itself).
Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes, I view Kripke as seeking the "ideal" that Wittgenstein considers problematic, as described in the PI 100s.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I think this is confused. Language does have rules (grammar) even though it is not "everywhere bounded by rules"; even though the rules are not "complete".
The rules of language (that we are taught when we learn language-games) include how to use words "in accordance with the meanings that they have". And there are right and wrong ways to use them, otherwise any combination of words would make sense and none could be senseless (i.e. otherwise there is no grammar). PI 500 indicates this is not the case.
Quoting Antony Nickles
No, he does not mention "use" at PI 81. 'Meaning is use' views meaning in the "right light", rather than thinking of meaning as a mental act, which views meaning in the "wrong light". Wittgenstein is referring only to those views of meaning that are in the "wrong light" at PI 81, including his own views of the Tractatus and also (I believe) those of his "middle period".
Baker and Hacker offer this exegesis of PI 81 which may help to clarify matters:
Quoting Antony Nickles
It seems that you desire this "ideal" for a complete system of rules yourself. Ask yourself the same of tennis or chess or any other game. Here's a hint:
Quoting Antony Nickles
If you're talking about beyond the rules of language, then the answer can't be "more language" or "let's talk it out", because there is no sense beyond the rules of language (i.e. grammar). Grammar is the bounds of sense.
Quoting Antony Nickles
This needn't imply that we can't use words to mean one thing rather than another. You are again seeking an ideal (certainty) to make language "everywhere bounded by rules" and to shore up all the gaps (to always "ensure which use our words will have").
Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes, Wittgenstein does make quite a point about rules and rule-following...
Quoting Antony Nickles
Do you have a reference?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm sure it can, but where does Wittgenstein explicitly say any of this in PI? It seems to involve a lot of reading between the lines.
Quoting Antony Nickles
How is aspect blindness related, and do you have a reference for the knowledge part?
I think we're just pulling loose threads now, but I am not saying that the picture of language controlled by rules, is that they are necessarily bounded and complete; that is the "mathematical" desire for rules (the ideal). It is that desire that creates the picture of our "meaning" expressions. There are of course some concepts for which the grammar involves rules, just not all concepts.
Quoting Luke
It is not grammar that makes an expression "senseless", as if our "using" it wrong makes it not an expression at all (without "sense", as in: lacking "a meaning"). It just is an expression (as, an event), it is we that cannot make out where it fits, with which sense of a concept (a different idea of "sense"). But it still has an impact (#498--imagine modern art which is yet to be understand because its context is too new, there is no known form of the art so the grammar of art comes to an end--but is it then "wrong"?). It is us drawing the boundary(#499), perhaps excluding the other or the expression--not automatically for not following a rule, but purposefully--(#500), as we are inclined to (possibly) leave the student with the exasperation of "This is simply what I do." (#217), or not abandon them.
Quoting Luke
How is the picture of us "using language" not a version of a mental act? How does simply externalizing "meaning" make our part in this picture not still causal (#220)? (If you are "using language", where/how is the "using" process happening?) If you can agree this should not be the picture, I'm not sure why we are still struggling to see that Witt's concept of "use" is not determined, as in caused, by us (beforehand), but determined, as in (in the sense of) figured out in making a determination (afterwards, when necessary), by the criteria for its grammar. Other than this sticking point of realizing "the use" is not our "using" (either causing or choosing), the only other thing hanging us up would be, in a sense, the timing (ruling before, or judging after) which affects the process of judgment. (Baker and Hacker do not appear to address the final paragraph of #81 (merely suggesting we compare the regular use of language with the ideal). In that last bit, Witt says that we must get clear about our picture of "meaning" to see why that leads to the idea of operating a calculus.)
Quoting Luke
I will grant that a concept's grammar is where/how we begin our process of judgment, but they are not determinative, pre-determined bounds. It is us that may not know what to do with an expression (what sense it may have), still us that decides if we continue past the logic of grammar. Grammar does not justify or limit our expressions (see above). So our ability to "talk it out" is endless: justifying our acts, making excuses, weighing criteria to be applied in judgment, pointing out relevant context (ad infinitum), settling claims of the grammar of a concept. Those paths may close; the spade may be turned. But that does not end our relationship in continuing to resolve our differences (creating a new world--projecting a concept into a new context; standing in place of our words, whether mad or "before our time" or futily. We may court rejection or irrationality, but we are not doomed to it. This is exactly the point of the essay. If we imagine language as driven by rules, then, having broken one or gone beyond it, there is not a lack of the ability to make sense, but nothing; we have reached our end.
Quoting Luke
When Witt refers to the ordinary he means all the criteria that are not "mathematical" (except for "mathematical" concepts). Mathematical criteria would be complete, universal, certain. etc. Criteria is a part of grammar; they are the measure of our judgments about a certain concept: whether we have made an excuse, the things that count in being said to have an opinion (#573), making a mistake (#51), reading (#159), recognizing you have raised your arm (#625)--roughly, of having satisfied what is essential to us about a concept (its grammar). We may not know this ahead of time (be aware or have it worked out explicitly, as they are imbedded in our lives).
All the talk of the sublime, logic, wanting to know another's pain (with certainty); basically the entire struggle with the Interlocutor and the reason we need to look and see the individual grammar of something rather than give in to our desire to have a generalized understanding.
I'm not sure I would call that "reading between the lines" so much as the big picture. Witt does not say things directly because they won't matter unless you see it, come to it, yourself. There are tons of backwards, hinted statements and questions left to be answered by us. He is also the writer of the Tractatus, so he still will not allow himself to say something he is unsure of, so that leaves a lot of ground covered only about how we go wrong, removing generalized explanations, but where we go from there is wide open, left unconstrained.
Getting into this is for another time, but, if you're interested: If we cannot see something as something (p. 213), then we may want to "know" (be convinced) that someone is in pain (p. 223), rather than react to them as a person in pain (one aspect of the same thing skipped over by another; here, us). We may not treat them (have an attitude towards them) as someone who has a soul, in wanting to have knowledge that they do (proof for our opinion)(p. 179). That our eyes are shut (p. 224) by our conviction for certainty (p. 223).
Which concepts do not involve rules?
Quoting Antony Nickles
To whom is it "senseless" if not we English-speakers?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Having an impact is not synonymous with having sense.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Wittgenstein defines meaning in terms of use as an alternative to the commonplace picture that meaning is a mental act. You are questioning how use is not a mental act? If use is a mental act, and if 'meaning is use' as W says, then meaning must also be a mental act. This would defeat the purpose of Witt's definition of meaning in terms of use. I suppose I could ask you how using a hammer is not a mental act?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Because I can't make words mean whatever I want them to mean. But I can use them with the conventional uses/meanings that they have. And intentionally so.
Also, it's not the same causality at #220, which is talking about rules (not) causing us (to follow them). You are talking about us (not) causing meaning.
Quoting Antony Nickles
The same place I use hammers (the shed).
Quoting Antony Nickles
How can we know the meaning/use afterwards if we don't know the meaning/use beforehand?
Quoting Antony Nickles
You're talking about what can happen in the future, as if a language-game or a game like chess is played according to all the rules over time that a game has had, does have, or will have in the past, present, and future. There might be conventional uses/meanings in the future which are not currently conventional uses/meanings, but that doesn't mean they have any meaning or use to us now. Should we postpone Wimbledon until we know what all the rules of tennis will be? Can we not decide whether or not a move in a game is legal (or makes sense) now?
Quoting Antony Nickles
What's the difference in terms of language?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Right, but the discussion is titled: 'Rules' End', not 'Criteria's End'.
Quoting Antony Nickles
You seem to be talking about the criteria of our concepts, while I am talking about the rules for the use of our words.
Baker and Hacker on 'Criteria':
Baker and Hacker on 'Rules':
Quoting Luke
I think maybe the disagreement here is recapitulating an ongoing one in academic circles between those philosophers who assimilate Witt’s notion of pragmatic use to that of American pragmatists like Peirce and James( Hacker and Baker) and those who argue that his idea of use stands as an implicit critique of their notions of meaning.
In the passage below , P. Hutchinson provides a reading of Witt on the relation between meaning and use that appears to support Antony’s interpretation.
“While many have been tempted to see the phrasing of this remark as a combination of Wittgenstein’s dispensable stylistic ‘tics’ and a definition of meaning, which therefore demands that the reader identify and remove the superfluous clauses and hedging strategies in order to extract the thesis (‘Meaning is use’),
we have argued something like the opposite. Wittgenstein is deliberately cautious in his wording precisely to guard against reading him as advancing the claim or the thesis that meaning is use.
Now, historically, there have been two paths proposed by those who have rightly resisted what we might call the ‘theoretical selective reading’ of this passage—the reading that seeks to overcome the clauses and modal
operators so as to distil out a theory of meaning. The first of these alternatives has it that Wittgenstein identifies or essentially-connects the meaning of a word with its use. He does so so as to draw attention to the ‘grammatical
nexus’ between the use of a word and the meaning of a word, such that if one asks for the meaning of a word one is generally satisfied with an account of the word’s use. This approach, therefore, reads the phrase “the meaning of a word is its use in language” as a ‘grammatical remark’, rather than a hypothetical remark or expression of a philosophical theory. This one might
call for shorthand the Oxford reading, as it emerges in the work of Kenny and Hacker, and is defended today by their students.
Talking of the essence of Wittgenstein’s account of meaning is rendered redundant when one observes that nowhere does Wittgenstein offer an account of meaning. Much less does he “argue” (Mounce again) for something being considered the “essence” (Mounce) of meaning.
How then might one (more successfully) read PI 43? Well, we recommend one reads it as something akin to a prophylactic: it is offered by Wittgenstein as something that might help you when faced with an otherwise
vexing philosophical question. Consider the following:
I have suggested substituting for ‘meaning of a word’ ‘use of a word’, because use of a word comprises a large part of what is meant by ‘the meaning of a word’…
I also suggest examining the correlate expression ‘explanation of meaning’. … it is less difficult to describe what we call ‘explanation of meaning’ than to explain ‘meaning’. The meaning of a word is explained by describing its use.
Witt:
It is a queer thing that, considering language as a game, the use of a word is internal to the game whereas its meaning seems to point to something outside the game. What seems to be indicated is that ‘meaning’ and ‘use’ are not equatable. But this is misleading. (AWL 48 Emboldened emphasis is ours.
In a similar vein, note also:
“An answer to the question: ‘What is the meaning of a word?’ would be: ‘The meaning is simply what is explained in the explanation of the meaning’. This answer makes good sense. For we are less
tempted to consider the words ‘explanation of the meaning’ with a bias than the word ‘meaning’ by itself. Common sense does not run away from us as easily when looking at the words ‘explanation of the
meaning’ as at the sight of the word ‘meaning’. We remember more easily how we actually use it.” (VoW p. 161. Emboldened emphasis ours)
We suggest that it is an error to read Wittgenstein as offering an “argument” for (any kind of theory whatsoever of) meaning, or (further) to be saying anything regarding the putative essence of meaning. In these two passages
we find Wittgenstein writing that he suggests substituting for “meaning of a word” “use of a word”. He repeatedly writes “we” and “for us”: “we ask…”, “what we call…”; thus he indexes these locutions, these questions and
conceptions, to ‘us’ and ‘we’, i.e. those who adhere to his conception of philosophy, ‘our method’ (cf. DS in VoW p.69). He writes of the meaning of a phrase being “characterised by us” (BB p. 65) as the use made of the phrase.
These locutions fall well short of those which one might honestly characterise as indicating identity claims, regarding meaning and use. The emboldened text in the three quotes (immediately above) should indicate that throughout his discussions of meaning Wittgenstein is very specifically talking about, and very specifically suggesting, a way of going on which will help one avoid confusion. There is something distinctly pragmatic about this - but it is not so in the way Mounce wishes to argue regarding Peirce’s theory of the sign. To bring this out, we need to first consider another quote from Wittgenstein:
The meaning of a phrase for us is characterised by the use we make of it. The meaning is not a mental accompaniment to the expression. Therefore, the phrase “I think I mean something by it”, or “I’m sure I mean something by it”, which we so often hear in philosophical discussions to justify the use of an expression is for us no justification at all. We ask: “What do you mean?”, i.e., “How do you use this expression?” If someone taught me the word “bench” and said that he sometimes or always put a stroke over it…and that this meant something to him, I should say: “I don’t know what sort of idea you associate with this stroke, but it doesn’t interest me unless you show me that there is a use for the stroke in the kind of calculus in which you wish to use the word ‘bench’”.—I want to play chess, and a man gives the white king a paper crown, leaving the use of the piece unaltered, but telling me that the crown has a meaning to him in the game, which he can’t express by rules. I say: “as long as it doesn’t alter the use of the piece, it hasn’t what I call meaning”. (BB p. 6)
Why do you think this supports Antony’s reading rather than mine?
I understood you to be agreeing with the Oxford approach and that of Hacker and Baker, which argues that Wittgenstein is offering a definition of meaning as use. By locating a specific grammatical nexus associated with its use, we have defined a meaning.
Hutchinson is instead saying that Witt is. or offering a definition of meaning at all. Instead, he is saying that ‘meaning’ in all its guises ( like definition) is a hopelessly confused idea.
I don’t think that’s right.
Quoting Joshs
This sounds right. As W says: "And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations." (PI 109)
Quoting Joshs
Where did this "talk of essence" come from? Not from the preceding part of your quote. Where is the evidence or argument that the Oxford reading "[talks] of the essence of Wittgenstein's account of meaning"?
Quoting Joshs
Depends what is meant by "an account of meaning". PI 43 might be considered an account of meaning. Also PI 560.
Instead of "definition", a better way of putting it might be that Wittgenstein provides a 'grammatical explanation' or 'grammatical description' of "meaning" at PI 43; i.e. an explanation or description of the way the word "meaning" is used:
Hard to know how to take this. I don't mean to claim there are concepts that do not involve grammar at all (though see below). But the role of grammar as a gauge for identity, for a thing to be that thing, is judged by what is important in our lives and for our judgments, which cannot be entirely codified in advance in a particular structure (a "rule"), then generalized as part of all language. The grammar of concepts is more varied than simply (only) judging right and wrong (in accordance with a rule), such as what counts in the concepts of thinking, being in pain, seeing more than looking, mistaking, dreaming, guessing thoughts, understanding (as like a musical theme #527), not to mention the differences of the role (and limits) of grammar in the concepts of justice, beauty, virtue, progress, knowing the other's pain, illusion, fairy tales, nonsense poems (#282), etc.
However, even beyond a concept's grammatical requirements, a concept can be extended (#67, #209) into new contexts (because they are expressions of our interest #570), as we may claim something else/more to be essentially significant (as when our lives diverge from our concepts). The totality of conditions of a concept's grammar are not worked out ahead of time (#183). And concepts cannot all be taught by explaining rules, but in some cases only by giving/being an example or by practicing (#208).
Quoting Luke
The point is that an expression does not carry "sense" (or meaning) or "senselessness", as if within it, but that we make sense of it, or give up, call it "senseless", as in there is no sense of a concept with which we can associate it to see how it is meaningful, not that it is categorically without sense because it does not follow a rule.
Quoting Luke
Even if we cannot make sense of an expression, place it within a sense of a concept--its grammar and criteria--a "sense" is not the only gauge or limit or result of an expression (you may just stare and gape #498).
Quoting Luke
I'm not sure how this isn't entirely circular, but, yes, I am questioning "explaining" "meaning" (let's say, how it always works) as "using" words, as (the act of?) your "meaning" it, or "intending" a meaning, even if my "meaning" is judged by conformity to a practice or convention.
Not sure we can have a universalized picture of "meaning is use" when we would only define it that way most of the time. If my use of language in accordance with the rules for a practice is not the only definition of "meaning", then what are the other cases and how can these coexist? My claim is that in determining what is meaningful about an expression, it fits into, or we figure out how it fits into, what is important in our lives, which is "its use" within a concept, i.e., "what is the meaning (of this expression)?" is to ask in which way is it to have significance (between two options of a concept), what implications are we to associate (as we are surprised you are willing to adopt those of the concept that appears to fit your expression), etc. If that is the definition in most cases, then other cases would be where there is no importance and no implications, as in the case of simply referring to an object. Here, "meaning which?" is just to connect a demonstrative (this, that) or point out which object. Another case would be the expression of a definition, such as "The meaning of X will be Y", which would be to say, the meaning is all given, set, decided in and by the expression. There are no questions of context in these cases. Another case would be in which we expect the expression to be intended, chosen, purposeful, as in art, or a speech, as we would then claim something about the speaker "They are meaning to say X".
Quoting Luke
If the analogy is that an expression is used as a hammer is used (as a tool), it does not follow that all expressions are "used", even though I grant that we can choose what we say, and even can agree that some concepts are (can be) tools, they can do things (as Austin points out), like promising; and that we can even try to do something with an expression, if a concept allows, not as if intending, but subject to failure, though not based on adherence to a rule, but to the other's acknowledgement of its success, like apologizing; or that saying something correctly is not to necessarily cause anything, as when threatening or persuading or truth-telling. Also, a hammer can be a tool, under the concept of hammering, but then so can a rock, though, even if used to hammer, is not then a hammer; and a hammer can be a weapon, but then would we say we have "used it" wrong? broken the rules of hammering? one could say I adhered to the rules for hammering (though on a person), but that is both true and yet seems to completely miss the point, as if to want to determine the meaning by an intellectual act. Maybe the use of the hammer is a foregone conclusion rather than a discussion, but, even so, the judgment of whether it is hammering or bludgeoning would be clear without involving "your" use at all.
Quoting Luke
I agree that we cannot "make words mean whatever we want them to mean", but we also cannot make words mean something they can mean (our want does not factor in). In this picture you are still "meaning" them--using them to (or making them) "mean" some specific thing (here, a public, conventional use). Again, how is using an expression "intentionally" not causal? To take the "sense" or "meaning" out of your head and put it in the world, still leaves you in control of which use is meant, whether done right or wrong. Whether associated with a private meaning or a public one, to use them or to intend them collapses into your "meaning" them--if this is not by some mental process, how? Again, we sometimes choose what we say, but we do not always do so, nor "intend" a use for what we say, as if our intention was always picking which use we wanted.
Quoting Luke
The use of "knowing", afterwards, is in the sense of figuring out ("Did you intend to shoot that mule?"); and before, that we are not aware ("I didn't know that was offensive!"), that we have not worked out (can not) all the issues that might come up ("It doesn't matter if you believe it's raining, you can't prove it."), we are not aware of all the implications, obligations that are involved. At neither point do we "know" a concept in its entirety, with certainty, in every application (context), even all of its possibilities. Sometimes there will be no issue, sometimes our speech will turn out empty, purposeless, sometimes we do not realize what we have said, sometimes what we say will need to change the world before it can be known, in the sense of taken in.
Quoting Luke
I am not talking about the world (necessarily) changing after we say something, but that the discussion of how an expression is meaningful, if necessary, begins after something is said. The implication you assume is exactly the picture of rules for use that imagines we know all of the applications of a concept ahead of time, as if to resolve every discussion except whether we "used the expression" correctly. And there are games in which we can decide or agree to the legal rules beforehand, they just aren't all our varied life measured differently for each kind of thing (concept). Chess or tennis have rules, but those rules are not the grammar for their identity, but just, rules, for a game, that we agree on so we completely know what to expect with certainty. In this sense, they use (some of) the same criteria as "mathematical" rules. Basically, these example do not generalize to all concepts. Cavell would say this is placing too much importance on rules, not seeing that rule-following is discussed and then moved on from to show how the grammar of other concepts differs. But some people latch on to rules because they satisfy the desire for certainty and evaluation and prediction, etc.
Quoting Luke
Maybe part of the problem here is the conviction that what we say does not create a relationship between the speaker and the listener, and, if so, I agree that it may not necessarily (most days there are no misunderstandings, or no one cares at least if there are). But if the judgment is simply that my use is senseless (wrong), then that does not give us anything to do other than correction (re-conformity) or rejection.
Quoting Luke
I'm arguing those are two competing pictures. Expression is judged on criteria, not rules, and words are (nothing without) concepts.
Quoting Luke
The relegation of criteria to merely a description or synopsis is to overlook that they are the means by which we measure whether a thing is such a thing. They mark what counts, what is considered, what conditions need to be met; they allow for grammar itself. Criteria are not rules; we decide what sense an expression has by holding it up to our criteria for what counts in having said one thing rather than another.
Quoting Luke
Again, hard to say whether B&H need a correlation or something else that "has [to be] found to hold" but, if so, Wittgenstein does not remove the possibility that nothing will hold (us together). And to say, e.g., that "recognizing your fault" is a criteria for an apology does not mean that it is a rule of correctness. The apology may still come off (I may accept it), as you may acknowledge your blame but I may still not consider it an apology. So to say my contrition is an "explanation of the meaning of" an apology is to discount or limit what is meaningful to me, or in this situation, in exchange for a rule that dictates to me, over, say, my authority; skipping over, me.
Quoting Luke
This paints the picture that we can clarify and arrange the rules for what makes sense regarding our questions, then they will be resolved as confusions or dissolve. Again, this puts our agreement about expressions ahead of the occurrence of an expression, now, by me, here, to you. It may be nothing, or it may be a philosophical moment, where we do not know how to understand the other, continue with our conversation; it may be a moral moment, where what I do in response defines who I am. None of these things are possible in a world where everything is agreed to ahead of time and all our questions are already answered, or deemed senseless, or confused.
Quoting Luke
B&H's claim is ambiguous as to who is doing what, when, but let's take it that the foundation on which you or I make a prediction is "mastery of rule-governed techniques". One sense is that how correct I am at predicting you is how well I know the technique--that I am predicting whether you have mastered the technique. But this picture of the certainty of prediction is taken from science's ability to reproduce an outcome based on a fixed method. Wittgenstein has many examples and claims about predictions. At pp. 223-224 he is discussing guessing at thoughts, and claims "the prediction contained in my expression of intention (for example 'When it strikes five I am going home') need not come true, and someone else may know what will really happen.... my prediction (in my expression of intention) has not the same foundation as his prediction of what I shall do, and the conclusions to be drawn from these predictions are quite different." Here there are (at least) two foundations for prediction (even just of intentions). My prediction of what I will do is a hope, a goal, the foundation of which is in a sense a promise to you or myself. This goes wrong not because I don't know what intending or promising is, but that I may break that promise or be kept from it. Your prediction of my action is based on, at least, your familiarity with me ("They always say they'll leave but then they say goodbye to everyone") and/or my knowledge of the context ("They've got too much to do before five"). My "certainty" in this is not my knowledge of the practice of promising (though that may be the threshold, it is not determinate), nor, say, of "meeting a deadline", but that I am certain, as in: resolute, sure of myself, as confident as I am "of any fact", as in: "I would bet money that....", will hold to my conviction, shutting my eyes to anything else (p. 224).
This is to want a rule to ensure the correctness of our acts (if we have prepared with mastery); to know we are doing the "right" thing because a rule is the kind of thing that justifies an act definitively, completely. A rule can be cited as justification for an action if the concept of the act allows ("I have freedom of speech!" (a law) or "Freeing Kuwait was a Just War" (based on Christian morality), but not all actions are associated with rules. Say, running into the street during traffic is an action, let's call it risking your life, but we do not have a rule to justify it, make it "wrong", unless that makes it simply frowned upon. We could say it is justified if we risked our life to save another, but that is not a rule, there is no foundation of a mastered technique.
[/quote]
And this is full circle, which is either that if I have mastered the technique and follow the rule correctly and can ensure that I am right, or it is basic moralism, as, in breaking the rule, I have no other recourse, and so not, possibly misunderstood, but wrong. Nietszche is rolling over in his grave.
You said that "not all concepts" involve rules (or "for which the grammar involves rules"). I asked you to name an example of such a concept. How is that "hard to know how to take"?
Quoting Antony Nickles
If you are talking about "what counts" in the concepts, then you are talking about the criteria of the concepts. However, there can clearly be right and wrong ways of using these words (such as "dreaming" or "justice"), otherwise we would not be able to teach the conventional uses of these words, or to understand them. You still seem to be talking about concepts (and their criteria), while I am talking about the uses of words (and their rules).
Quoting Antony Nickles
But the use of words can. Otherwise, there wouldn't be correct or incorrect ways to use them. Again:
"...there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it”. (PI 201)
Quoting Antony Nickles
What gets practised? The (existing) practice is the conventional use.
Quoting Antony Nickles
The "conditions for" walking - or, the criteria that count as walking - at #183 seem to me quite unlike the rules for the meaning/use of the word "walking" (i.e. for whether or not one is using the word correctly/sensibly).
Quoting Antony Nickles
My point was that using words incorrectly can lead to nonsense.
Quoting Antony Nickles
If the use of "Milk me sugar" has the "impact" of causing people to stare and gape, then why does W say it is not a command to stare and gape? After all, that's how commands are typically used - to have the hearer act in a desired way. It's because it lacks sense (grammar, rules) and is not a conventional use of those words. Merely "having an impact" is insufficient for it to be considered as meaningful language use (or a move in the game). That's how I read #498.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I went on to explain this. Here, I was just criticising your question of why use is not a mental act.
I am not saying that "using words" is the act of "meaning it". I'm saying that we can both use words and mean it (i.e. we can use words with intention). The two different senses of "meaning" may cause confusion here. W's observation that 'meaning is use' is about the meaning (e.g. signification) of a word and how it is used in a sentence, in context. A word might have several different conventional meanings, but typically has only one meaning when used, in context. We learn these conventional uses/meanings of words when we learn the language. This is the sense in which word meaning is not a mental act - because we learn a word's uses, we don't each invent them from our minds.
After becoming fluent in the language and in the conventional uses/meanings of words and phrases, one can also "mean it" when they use words (i.e. speak/write with intention). For example, if I want the salt, I know how to use language to request it. I don't imbue the words "pass the salt" with meaning by some private mental act; the words already have a conventional meaning/use. But I can still use (or even misuse) those words intentionally.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Who said it was "universalized"?
Quoting Antony Nickles
There seem to be few counterexamples. Personally, I think that W simply allows for the possibility that meaning may not always be use. Baker and Hacker suggest that "the phrases 'the meaning of a word' and 'the use of a word' are not everywhere interchangeable". They offer the following example: W "speaks of meaning blindness, but one could not speak of this phenomenon as 'use blindness'."
Anyway, I'm only arguing that Cavell's and your reading is inaccurate, not the merits of W's philosophy.
Quoting Antony Nickles
You appear to be talking about something like subtext. Where do you see Wittgenstein as talking about subtext?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I really don't understand your argument that language (or an expression) is not used. W says:
11. Think of the tools in a toolbox: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws. — The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects. (And in both cases there are similarities.)
Of course, what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them in speech, or see them written or in print. For their use is not that obvious. Especially when we are doing philosophy!
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't read Wittgenstein as saying that we use concepts as tools, but that we use words as tools.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Austin talked about How to Do Things With Words, not with concepts.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Hammers have a conventional use, but they can also be used unconventionally, just as words can also be used unconventionally. The results may not always be ideal, depending on the re-purposing.
The comparison to tools not only reinforces that language use can have various different purposes/functions, but also that the use of language occurs in the world and not (only) in our minds. Hence, language-games, which are like other games that are played in the world, often with other people.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I think you have missed the point, which is that the meaning of a word is not an intellectual or mental act.
Quoting Antony Nickles
A better analogy would be that you don't/didn't invent the conventional use of hammers. You can use a hammer however you want/intend, but I wouldn't try using one to grate cheese.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't make, or intend for, words to have "a public, conventional use". They already have that without me. I only intend how I use them.
Quoting Antony Nickles
It is causal. I cause my use of the expression. The important factor is that I don't cause the conventional meaning/use of the expression, because the expression already has a conventional meaning/use (or several possible meanings/uses). I only cause my use, but I can exploit my knowledge of the different conventional meanings/uses in doing so.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I didn't take the conventional meaning out of my head and put it into the world; it was already in the world to begin with.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Right, sometimes we might be on autopilot; sometimes it might be unclear what to say. As W says at §142:
Quoting Antony Nickles
The use/meaning of the question might be ambiguous and it can be misunderstood or have an unforeseen impact, but presumably no rules of language are being broken; there is no incorrect use of words in the question.
Also, "Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning." (PI 198)
Quoting Antony Nickles
If we can only know afterwards whether an expression is meaningful, then how can we teach (the meaningful uses of) language to anyone? What is it that gets taught in the teaching of a language?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm not talking about "the application of concepts", but the use of words. It's unclear to me how a concept can be applied incorrectly, but it is clear to me how a word can be used incorrectly.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Why do you (or Cavell) think rule-following is discussed at all? Also, can you provide a reference that W shows "how the grammar of other concepts differs"?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Why do you need something more to do? Nobody complains that breaking a rule of badminton "does not give us anything to do other than correction...or rejection".
Quoting Antony Nickles
I think W would say you have it backwards; that concepts are nothing without (the use of) words. Concepts are ideas; mental contents. Wittgenstein spends a good deal of the book making the point that "An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria." (PI 580) See also the private language argument, PI 307, and the majority of the book, including:
Quoting Antony Nickles
B&H say they don't.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Why would you not consider it an apology if you accept it as such? Or is your acceptance or rejection about something other than whether or not it meets the criteria of being an apology (i.e. the grammar of "apology")? (Consider PI 354-355 and PI 496-497)
Quoting Antony Nickles
Whether or not you accept an apology makes no difference to what an apology is, or to what the word "apology" (conventionally) means. The conventions do "skip over you", in this sense. In terms of grammar, your feelings about what is meaningful regarding an apology counts about as much as your vote counts in an election.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Nobody is claiming that grammatical rules are "the foundation on which you or I make a prediction". At pp.223-224, Wittgenstein is providing a grammatical treatment of the expression “What is internal is hidden from us.”
Quoting Antony Nickles
Okay, but PI 217 concerns W's justifications for following the rule in the way he does. One cannot wrongly follow a rule (and still follow it).
Quoting Antony Nickles
Unless you can provide evidence to demonstrate that Wittgenstein is talking about morality in PI, rather than vaguely gesturing at it by saying that he "does not say things directly because they won't matter unless you see it, come to it, yourself" or reference "tons of backwards, hinted statements and questions left to be answered by us", then the evidence explicitly indicates that Wittgenstein's interest is limited only to grammar. He is not concerned with morality in PI.
Is justice something that can be taught.
The teaching of the meaning follows from the feeling.
Quoting Luke
Yes I am, and I agree. Cavell says Kripke just takes Wittgenstein to be giving rules too much importance. The hard part here is that Witt does examine rule-following as an example (as he does with understanding, thinking), and he is not wrong about the concept, which makes it seem central. Also, it is tempting for rules to clear up our uneasiness with the uncertainty and unclarity of what we say.
Quoting Luke
Intend them every time? Not just when we stop and consider how to use our words, but every word is intentional?
Again, how is using an expression "intentionally" not causal?
— Antony Nickles
It is causal. I cause my use of the expression.[/quote]
And this is where I couldn't help but wonder what is happening here. Colloquially perhaps this picture of causing amounts to the same thing when I frame it that we say something, express something, in that there is no evaluating it except against the external practice, in your case, along rules, in mine with criteria in conjunction with, to whom and the place and time in which it is said.
Quoting Luke
A word can be judged right or wrong when they are names or defined. This is also how words together can look like a sentence we understand, as "I am here" (#513), which in that sense cannot be judged as language incorrectly used, though neither can we say we know the importance of the expression from that determination alone. The picture of meaning solely within language does make judgment specific, recursive, and predictable, but an expression is a sentence in an event (in time and place) and criteria are what matters to us in our lives, what is meaningful to each actual thing. The uses of the word justice in its concept are what is just in our lives. Grammar is what is essential about a thing. (#371)
Part of the problem here I think is the method Witt uses. He is looking at or imagining what we say or would say, and he will call that “language” sometimes, so it may seem as if he is only talking about how language works. The method of making claims (they will look like statements) about the implications when we say X, is to, e.g., reveal how we judge that X is the case (grammar/criteria). An example (of an expression in time with a possible context) like when we say "Did you intend to shoot the mule or was it an accident?" (Austin) shows a use of the word "intend", but it also tells us something about (real-life) intention (it only comes up when something goes wrong). A lot of times these claims look like statement about what we can or cannot say: "If anyone says: "For the word 'pain' to have a meaning it is necessary that pain should be recognized as such when it occurs"—-one can reply: "It is not more necessary than that the absence of pain should be recognized." The point is not to explain how language works, but to feel out the limits and logic of the world (our lives in it). (#119)
Quoting Luke
It is only when there is a problem that we worry about where an expression fits into our concepts, how it is meaningful, which we learn as we grow up into our lives of actions and judgments and repercussions, etc. Our concept of a thing is absorbed with coming into our culture, being acculturated. I don't tell you (the grammar or rules or explanation of) how to choose something, it is part of our lives. We can, of course, examine what it means to be said to choose something (its grammar), or work out in a particular instance to what extent we could call something a choice, but neither of this is necessary before or after. Sometimes we just have to be an example, #208. #474.
Quoting Luke
A "way of grasping" that is not "an interpretation" is not meant to make a rule (and thus a word) fundamental, final, but to say that obeying a rule is not to interpret the rule, be an interpreting of it; it is simply the act (event) of applying it in a specific case. Since it is not an interpretation, it does not answer a conflict about a rule, nor eliminate the possibility of interpretation. Though interpretation is not involved at this point in this case, we still express a rule, interpret them by "substitution of one expression of a rule for another". Id. And you still (may) have to justify your action. (In this case, you could point to the rule, but you can have different justifications, as you do when rules are not involved). Of course, justifying how you obeyed the rule as you did may lead to a point where we run out of justifications.
Quoting Luke
I think there is an important difference between a persons's use of words following the rules of our practices or not, and the picture of something said and then resolving any confusion, justification of how it fits into (which use or sense of) a concept by means of its criteria and the situation, and where that leaves us afterwards. Rather than judging whether the use of a word correctly follows the rules for a practice (language), I am judging how an expression, something said, fits into a concept (it's possibilities) based on the concept's criteria, e.g. "How did you mean 'I know'? [what use of "I know" is this?]"
Quoting Luke
Part of the reason to discuss rules would be to draw a limit around how they differ from grammatical/logical rules. Grammar can logically differentiate between the identity of one thing from another, but they also tell us how something matters to us, what our interest in a concept is.
There's also the grammar of understanding a sentence (#527), seeing as opposed to looking; pain (see index); seeing an aspect pp. 166-177.
Quoting Luke
To say expectation is a state, is not a "rule"; nor is this a rule for using the word "expect". We do not follow a rule to expect something, but are said to be expecting (in that state). The judgment of that being the case is made by our criteria for expecting, how it differs from waiting, is similar to hoping, etc., we could say, necessarily, there must be the possibility of something going wrong, but this is a categorical requirement, not a rule.
Quoting Luke
There are some things people disagree about (justice, beauty, the limits of knowledge) where resolving them has to do with more than the application of a rule; though we can even disagree about the application of those, and our justifications possibly come to an end.
Quoting Luke
Okay, you need words, yes. Witt's term "concept" is used in the sense of a classification for what we do: apologizing, understanding, knowing, seeing, etc. These are parts of our lives, so concepts are not abstract from that, nor individual nor arbitrary.
Quoting Luke
You may acknowledge your transgression, but, yes, part of the grammar of an apology is that I can reject it. Now, you may be apologizing correctly, and I may be “wrong” in rejecting it, but that is all within what is acceptable, and I may have my own reasons (outside the criteria that identify an apology), only one of which may be that I do or do not feel you are sincere. In this way, I matter more than the rules.
Quoting Luke
I'm thinking your idea of morality is different. Let's call it the grammar of our ethical situations.
Examples of Witt pointing out that there is a limit to knowledge (as with apologizing). We do not know the other by knowing what is going on with them. The "reasons for the conviction" make up our moral stance toward the other. Our desire for certainty (that "picture") overshadows our grammatical position--of reacting or not--to someone writhing in pain. This is our human condition of having an "attitude" toward the other (not based solely on knowledge). Say, I treat them as if they have a soul.
I have also said he is setting out an ethical epistemology; that it matters the kind of search we do (that we can't start with a desire for mathematical criteria or a need for rules).
Not falling into the desire to penetrate phenomena (to get at a thing in itself with certainty) #90. Not requiring ideal "mathematical" criteria, but sticking to our ordinary criteria that each concept has. #107 And I believe you have minimized his advice not to take the straight road of purity and the ideal (#420) as that he is merely dispelling the idea of something internal. But the whole point of dispelling that picture is to make people aware of our human desire to want to have something fixed to hang our skeptical hat on (whether internal or external); to admonish us (emphatically, morally) to keep our head up and look around to see the perfect ordinary means of being confidently certain, rather than mathematically so (p.191).
Doesn't Cavell also take Kripke to be misreading Wittgenstein, though?
Quoting Antony Nickles
It might help to consider what you go on to say later:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Your question "How did you mean 'I know'?" implies what I am saying here. You are asking what use of 'I know' was intended by the speaker. Why do you think that we use language without intention?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I haven't said that Wittgenstein is only talking about "how language works". He is talking about grammar and the bounds of sense, and this includes how language is interwoven into our daily lives.
Quoting Antony Nickles
It's not an either-or scenario of grammar vs. "real-life"; it's both, and they cannot be separated. You seem to think Wittgenstein is pointing to something outside of language, or talks about "real-life" without talking about language, but he isn't. The "real-life" context of an intention is the reason that we call it an "intention". Language isn't just some scribbles on paper or the thoughts in one's mind.
Quoting Antony Nickles
No, the point is grammar, and what it makes sense to say (e.g. about pain).
Quoting Antony Nickles
You have cited #208 a few times now, but I think you are mistaking what Wittgenstein is saying. He is not talking about something "beyond the rules", as suggested by your OP. Forgive the long quote of part of Baker and Hacker's exegesis of #208, but it may help to address the discussion topic:
Quoting Antony Nickles
What do you make of the last (bracketed) paragraph of PI 217?
"(Remember that we sometimes demand explanations for the sake not
of their content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural
one; the explanation a kind of sham corbel that supports nothing.)"
What do you think is Wittgenstein's purpose with these remarks?
This is what Baker and Hacker say with regards to PI 217:
Hopefully, this shows that PI 217 is not indicating an invitation for further justifications.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Perhaps I am simply confused by your quoting of PI 217 in the OP, which speaks of rules. Or perhaps I am confused by your claims that there are concepts without rules. But I think the larger point to be made is that the "rules for a practice (language)" and the "concept's criteria" both fall under the larger umbrella of grammar (the bounds of sense), and its rules. That is, it's all part of grammar, and you go wrong in trying to draw a distinction here.
Quoting Antony Nickles
How do they differ? There is no difference. There aren't rules on one side and grammatical rules on the other. The rules are techniques that we learn how to apply, as per B&H's exegesis of PI 208.
Quoting Antony Nickles
But neither is "what we do" separate from the words "apologizing", "understanding", "knowing", "seeing". The words encompass "what we do" and our uses/meanings of the concepts.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Let's not. Grammar is of our language.
I have a suggestion to make which may or may not clarify this debate. Rather than giving the impression that what you are attempting to do is locate THE correct reading of Wittgenstein, maybe you could instead accept that there may be more than one ‘correct’ Wittgenstein, and proceed to learn about the alternatives to your own. You will still end up preferring one version over another, but at least you’ll have opened yourself up to other possibilities.
it may be helpful to recognize use that, like with all great philosophers, interpretations of Wittgenstein fall into distinct camps. As I mentioned in an earlier post , I see this debate as pitting a certain Oxford reading ( Hacker and Baker) against what I would call a phenomenological-enactivist reading.
“The Oxford movement that wanted to follow Wittgenstein actually fell back somewhat. It rightly emphasized that a word means its use in situations — the word marks or changes something in the situation in which it can be said. A word's use-contexts have no single picture or pattern in common. As Wittgenstein said, a word's situations are a "family," not a common pattern. But then the Oxford Analysts tried, after all, to define the use of a word, if not by a concept then at least by a rule, to capture what a word marks or does. That effort failed; rules don't limit what a word can mean, either.”( Eugene Gendlin)
I don’t see evidence yet in your posts that you recognize there is such a camp that backs up Antony’s perspective on Witt. Or it may be that you are struggling to understand the coherence of such an account.
Let’s see if it might help to widen the scope of this discussion a bit. The two camps I mention differ not just in their understanding of Wittgenstein, but in the broader psychological articulation of the relation between perception , cognition and language.
Phenomenologically influenced models of cognition and language break away from older theories by abandoning f the notion of internal representations. In you discussion you have focused on such things as concepts, rules, criteria and the influence of social normativity.
These are all factors which shape how we understand and use words, but the question for the enactivist Wittgensteinian camp is what exactly is the functional relationship between these influences and the actual senses of words that arise in contextual situations. Their argument is that none of these shaping factors can be seen as stored internal representations or as having some other sort of temporary identity to them, such that when we understand a word we are consulting some pre-existing scheme(rule. social norm, concept, etc). It is not that these don’t come into play. It is that when they do come into play it is not a matter of simply piecing together or cobbling a pre-existing structure with a new situation.
Such background internal and culture constraints (grammar , rules) only function by being changed in actual use. The actual use co-invents the sense of the rule, grammar, concept that ‘was’ implicated.
“All structures, concepts, representations, schemes and laws are to be viewed as already involving a concretely ongoing activity, and thus they can never explain or picture it.” (Gendlin)
I know much more explanation needs to be given here , but it might help if you familiarized yourself with the enactivist critique of representationalist models.
I've just read through half of the first article you quoted, Practising pragmatist-Wittgensteinianism. It is almost completely unrelated to this discussion. What's worse is that the article is not even critical of the so-called "Oxford reading", which it turns out, relates only very narrowly to the reading of PI 43 (the meaning-as-use passage). The "Oxford reading" is coined in the article and is cited only in order to criticise a reading by H.O. Mounce. It is not, as you presented, a criticism of the "Oxford reading" or of Baker and Hacker's reading. So I'm afraid I'll have to take your advice with a handful of salt.
Quoting Joshs
I don't see evidence yet in your posts that you and Antony are even on the same page.
Quoting Joshs
I quote Baker and Hacker because I view theirs as an orthodox reading. This is supported by the fact that Hacker was one of the two editors of the latest edition of the Philosophical Investigations in 2009. Their reading is also in accord with the current Stanford article on Wittgenstein, which offers insights such as these:
Quoting SEP article on Wittgenstein
It is possible that you and Antony have mistaken me for appealing to "grammar-book rules" as per the final paragraph above, but I have been talking about the ""rules" of grammar" as described in the same paragraph. I have referred to this wider sort of grammar - Wittgenstein's concept of grammar - as a corrective to what is indicated by the discussion title: 'Rules' End', and to Antony's explicit statements that some concepts are without rules; the idea that some meaningful language-use is not rule-governed. That's just not the case. Furthermore, it is a clear misreading by Cavell (followed by Antony) to view PI 217 as pointing to an end to rules or an invitation for further justification. (Cavell reads far too much into the word "inclined".) I also find it odd that the OP is framed in terms of a student-teacher scenario, as the student does not yet know the rules, our technique. Wittgenstein isn't saying let's negotiate with someone who doesn't accept our exhausted justifications, as if their absence of knowledge might somehow be better than our knowledge.
Regarding your claim that grammar and rules "only function by being changed in actual use", you have given no reason as to why these function only "by being changed", or why they do not function without being changed. The actual use can "co-invent the sense of the rule, grammar", but - if I understand you correctly - that is a change in the rules, not an end to the rules.
Quoting Luke
I admit that one would have to read between the lines to extract a clear critique of Hacker and Baker in that article, so I have a couple of large blocks of salt to add to that grain. As far as the Oxford reading of Wittgenstein is concerned, I am not comfortable claiming that no one associated with that group interprets him in the way that I am attributing to both Antony and Hutchinson. I would rather point to specific readings that Hutichinson finds lacking, such as that of Hacker, Malcolm, Ryle and Strawson.
You’ll find an unambiguous critique of Hacker and Baker in another piece by Hutchinson and Read titled ‘Whose Wittgenstein’.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Phil-Hutchinson/publication/279027201_Review_article_Whose_Wittgenstein/links/5878db2508ae9a860fe2a58b/Review-article-Whose-Wittgenstein.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=tH6S94ARp2JGAc2uTUTosTyRrEWJ1o93vrRFYsEAiiZcEdEkSt7lJMKbSzKnXCM_uFDPfG5CyLLc-kImJYNtXw.cIL_CZjrAm2fLfAmjm4Pq7O1YhUB99Gnt7ISbwYveH5sS_YMnVvcmell3-_Ua-HKUvEH80Pfp7cywm2AgcsbUA&_sg%5B1%5D=xUbobHnMyNV6-TK5P0zRpUf5wZKo0Vl3ny9G28AQpeKNNQ0KKhRa1AN4f_m9GmZF5OCmZ9t03V_Kcv_GPUIxZAjNEvumug81yRA4sgbbaUXw.cIL_CZjrAm2fLfAmjm4Pq7O1YhUB99Gnt7ISbwYveH5sS_YMnVvcmell3-_Ua-HKUvEH80Pfp7cywm2AgcsbUA&_iepl=
Here are some snippets:
“While one may be inclined to lean towards Baker & Hacker (if one must lean, on such matters) regarding Wittgenstein’s rule-following remarks when the target of their criticism is Saul Kripke’s exegesis—given that the latter (notoriously) selectively reads Wittgenstein’s remarks in order to generate ‘Wittgenstein-the-rule-following-sceptic’ or ‘Kripkenstein’—this does not blind one to …a recognition that there is in play therein an understanding of Wittgenstein on following a rule which, while avoiding the pit-falls of Kripke’s ‘reading’, saddles Wittgenstein with a substantive philosophy of questionable value.”
“…Hacker’s summatory Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies… tells one in the end rather less about Wittgenstein than about a narrow ‘Oxford philosophy’ which misses the richness and breadth of Wittgenstein’s work and appeal.”
“Gordon Baker, Hacker’s co-author in these papers, had, from 1991 onwards, not only explicitly distanced himself from the Baker & Hacker reading of Philosophical Investigations but also frequently used ‘Baker & Hacker’ readings as a stalking horse for his own new reading…”
Quoting Luke
“We find it odd that in HWCC—and in fact in the entire large volume of literature published by Hacker on these matters— he has never sought to seriously engage with Baker’s post ’90 ‘apostasy’.Particularly so since Baker explicitly identifies continuities between his own (post Baker & Hacker) reading of PI and the readings advanced by Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond and Burton Dreben. What is significant about Baker’s change of mind is not that he did so: a change of mind does not necessitate progress. What is significant is the extent to which Baker’s later work stands as a powerful critique of the reading propounded by he and Hacker in the 1980s, and by Hacker since.”
“In short, Baker’s post-1990 ‘position’—expounded throughout BWM—is that Wittgenstein’s method is radically therapeutic: therapeutic in that the aim is to relieve mental cramps brought about by being faced with a seemingly intractable philosophical problem; radically so in that how this aim is achieved is person relative, occasion sensitive and context dependent.”
Quoting Luke
Perhaps not. But I suggest we first find out if Antony supports Hutchinson’s ( and Baker’s) assertions about what is lacking in Hacker’s reading of Wittgenstein.
Quoting Luke
Quoting Luke
Maybe you could answer Hutchinson’s
question put to Hacker:
“ The thought that mapping our language might serve a purpose (non-person relative, non-occasion sensitive) relies on the assumption that certain relatively static reference points obtain within that language. What vantage point on language would one need to assume so as to be able to discern that which would serve as (non-person-relative, nonoccasion-sensitive) reference points?”
“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker’s thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-V relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words’ belonging to a ‘type of use.’It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture’ which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”
Hutchinson addresses the relation between rule and use in his focus on perspicuous representation.
“A key indication of the difference ( between Hacker and the later Baker) can be gleaned from the understandings of the place of ‘perspicuous (re)presentation’, of which Wittgenstein writes in PI §122, that it ‘is of fundamental importance for us’. For Baker ‘perspicuous presentation’ does not denote a class of representations as it is usually thought to do (in the work of Baker & Hacker for instance, though, to be sure, not only there). It rather denotes what works: what achieves the therapeutic aim. And that this form of representation does so here, now, for this person, etc. does not imply that it will do so again, (or) for someone else. Therapy is achieved by facilitating one’s interlocutor’s ((or) one’s own) arrival at a position where they might freely acknowledge hitherto unnoticed aspects.
Acknowledging new aspects helps free one from the grip of a philosophical picture that initially led to the seeming intractability of the philosophical problem. Any presentation which serves this purpose can therefore be said to have been perspicuous— for that person, at that time, thereabouts. Perspicuity, on this understanding, does not denote a property of a class of representations but is rather an achievement term: perspicuity is accorded to the presentation that achieves the bringing to light of new aspects which are freely accepted by one’s philosophical interlocutor.
One consequence of the later Baker’s rendition of ‘perspicuous presentation’ is that it allows one to reinterpret what ‘our grammar’ might be when we consider ourselves to be perspicuously presenting it . For (later) Baker ‘grammar’ is best read as ‘“our” grammar’; while for Hacker, ‘grammar’ is to be read as ‘the grammar’.”
“… the word ‘grammar’ in Wittgenstein, far from meaning what Hacker (and the early D. Z. Phillips, and possibly, at moments, Dilman) takes it to mean, is intended as our grammar, as indexed to the person or persons employing it, in such a way that an appeal to ‘“the” grammar’ cannot be used to settle philosophical disputes, but only as a way of facilitating a person’s knowing how they are actually using a term and how that relates (or does not) to how they want to use it.”
Quoting Luke
If actual contextual use offers a fresh sense of a rule, and we only know rules in actual use , where is an ‘unchanged’ rule stored? Is there some internal or social non-contextual realm where they are kept protected from alteration?
I’ll give Hutchinson the last word:
“We focus here on the claim that there are two complementary strands, clarificatory and therapeutic, in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. We can find no evidence for these being discrete though complementary strands. Yet Hacker repeatedly asserts them to be so . However,
leaving the question of textual evidence aside, asserting them to be so certainly has unfortunate implications for Hacker’s ‘Wittgenstein’. The unfortunate implications are: if elucidation and therapy (connective analysis, perspicuous presentation) are distinct endeavours,
though both undertaken in PI, then what motivates the elucidations? It is difficult, without relating, i.e. subsuming, the practice of elucidating to the therapeutic thrust of PI, to understand why Wittgenstein would want to engage in such ‘clarifications of our language’. For if the clarification of our grammar is not occasion-sensitive—not carried out on a case-by-case basis with a particular interlocutor—then Wittgenstein, it seems, is embroiled in something of a performative contradiction.
For if clarification per se is a goal then it presupposes a particular view of how language must be (contra, that is, PI §132). In clarifying language in this way Wittgenstein is taken to dissolve philosophical problems by showing us (clarifying, perspicuously representing) the rules of our grammar (linguistic facts). Again this raises the prospect of Wittgenstein, at a really quite basic level, contradicting his own metaphilosophical remarks in the very text in which he makes those remarks; a text, we should recall, that he laboured over for sixteen years.
Indeed, it turns Wittgenstein into a closet metaphysician. This “problem of motivation” then presents further problems for Hacker; if he insists upon ‘connective analysis’ as separate and distinct from therapy, then this must (at the least) imply that Wittgenstein does have a picture (or a theory) of ‘language’; such that it enables us, as it were, to take up a stance external to that ‘language’ and survey it; and that these elucidations serve some nonperson-relative and non-occasion-sensitive elucidatory purpose.
This is important because holding on to the idea that there is more than therapy hereabouts leads Hacker to saddle Wittgenstein with a form of conventionalism. Hacker seems not to realize why others find his form of‘Wittgensteinianism’ easy to dismiss.”
Quoting Joshs
If I may jump in, all that's needed is a relatively stable background of conventions. For instance, I trust that you understand well enough what I'm getting at here, thanks to extremely complex conventions in stringing words together that have become almost automatic for both of us.
Hutchinson’s point is that the background conventions do not do this work of understanding by themselves. They don’t exist independently of person-relative, occasion sensitive use. Understanding happens in the bringing to light new aspects of what is presented.
Quoting Joshs
There's a book I own, which I read several years ago now, called "Wittgenstein and His Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker". In the introduction, under the heading of The 'orthodox' interpretation, it says:
So whose characterisation of Hacker and of the orthodox interpretation should I believe?
I won't pretend to have read all, or even most, of Hacker's work, but I am willing to accept that his reading may be more clarificatory than therapeutic. I am also actually sympathetic to a slightly more therapeutic reading. But what you have raised strikes me as more nuanced and tangential than the substantial disagreement over the broad strokes of Wittgenstein's work that I have been having with Antony.
How do you view the clarificatory/therapeutic dispute as being relevant to the current discussion regarding morality, the putative distinction between mathematical and ordinary rules, the exhaustion of justifications in following the rule "in the way I do", and the other matters raised in the OP? Do you find the OP to be consistent with your own reading of the Philosophical Investigations?
The question only comes after the expression. My claim is that we don't always intend what we express; that that idea creates a necessity which, as Witt would say, forces a picture upon us (of causality). We can intend to say something--we can reflect and try to say something specific, perhaps explicitly trying to influence (ahead of its reception) which way to take what we think might be misunderstood as another sense of the expression. However, most times we don't intend what we say in this sense, as a deliberate choice. As I said, we ask "what did you intend when you said?" when (after) what you say is unexpected in this situation. Witt puts it as "An intention is embedded in its situation" (#337). Sometimes it would be strange to even ask what we intended, as when a question can not exist. The possibility, and possibilities, of us having to clear up the sense of an expression is the grammatical structure for the concept of intention, not casual or determined or a part of what happens during expression.
Quoting Luke
That is one point, but not the one I was trying to draw your attention to there. I was pointing out the framing of the claim, not commenting on the topic of the paragraph. Those are not mutually exclusive.
Quoting Luke
As poorly misleading as the OP is named, I would still say: other than rules, but of course my topic was the influence of the mathematical on the desire for rules to play the part Kripke gives them. The mathematical can be extended repetitively with certainty and completeness for every application, predetermined and predictably (even when--particularly when--"used" incorrectly). It is this desire for certainty which "muddles" our expectation for everything else, generalizing the picture of meaning based on rules to impose as close to those criteria as can be across the board in place of the ordinary, various means of judgment for each different thing. Now granted grammar is sometimes about limits and do/don't-do, but clinging to that alone is to overlook that, as in this passage of Witt, our application of a concept may be in a never-before-mentioned way. That, unlike the mathematical, these concepts are opened-ended, extendable into unforeseen contexts. That we are not at a loss (limited), because complete knowledge is not necessary in advance to "continue a series" (with the ordinary this is metaphorical for extending a concept into a new context). Examples are necessary because we can not explain rules for our concepts that cover every situation--account for every context or predict the way in which they may go wrong. One example may shed light on a grammatical consideration, an implication when we say something in a certain situation; something to keep in mind, to educate us about ourselves, what we are getting ourselves into in saying this, here.
This question is by the Interlocutor, who desires or believes possible a "complete expression" of a concept by explanations and describing examples. I take Witt's answer to the question here as no (or, not outside mathematical concepts, like the height of a mountain). In the paragraphs following he points out that we can draw boundaries around different parts--mine loose and yours definitive--but that ultimately most times we can't completely express a concept by explanation; we can't say what we know (#78) or we can't anticipate the 9 mil ways an expression may be meaningful (#79)(even apart from just "what I intend it to be").
Despite that false start, there is a lot to agree with Hacker about unpredictability and our desire to overcome that. I would say he sees the problem of our desire for predictability, but his remedy is to contain our involvement to salvage some surety. He puts the variability on our unpredictability, when I would say its just that most concepts (non-mathematical) are categorically without the mathematical criteria (certainty) we hope for, even from rules.
And Hacker couches the desire for predictability as our delusion, where I take Witt's Interlocutor to be voicing our real, human fear of the threat of skepticism. Witt is saying that fear is what stokes the desire for certainty, say in our rules, removing the involvement of the fallible, unpredictable human, who is, then, merely subject to judgment based on those rules--the outcome of an expression falling on my precarious shoulders alone.
Quoting Luke
I don't see how it alters Cavell's reading of the paragraph above, only to say that we sometimes judge by the adherence to grammar rather than the truth of a statement; that saying something the right way (in the right form) is more important than saying the right thing (content).
Quoting Luke
The standard reading of Witt here is based on our requirement eventually for some kind of foundational justification, which is most times projected through all his terminology (forms of life, language games); that our shared lives are the final or preexisting justification for our choices. Kripke allows us "inclinations" and Hacker appears to give us "propensities", but the common practice is "what is to be done". This is Cavell's point in saying that Kripke's picture ends the conversation before we even begin about what to do when we are at a loss, what to base our action on in a situation when our justifications to each other run out--that Kripke's picture limits our relationship to judge/defendant. This is not to say there are further justifications, but that we are only "inclined" to end the discussion with a shrug (which you and Hacker have completely ignored). Cavell calls this (p. 95) assertion of judgment ("the repudiation of deviance") a "stance"** to the other (not a ground) without the authority to then claim we are right. (**you will notice the similarity of a "stance" to an "attitude" or a "conviction", as quoted previously about ethics). The desire for normativity creating social repression, suppressing the fallibility of the ordinary with the need to avoid the chaos of the skeptic's conclusions: we may not be justified, we may not (continue to) share a life, we can not be sure, relying on our knowledge and predetermination of practice or rules.
Quoting Luke
There are grammatical limits (of identity) that you could call a rule (demarcating a threat from a warning), but not all grammar nor criteria are rules (and not something we are necessarily taught explicitly). As I've noted, Wittgenstein realizes our grammar shows our interests in our lives (what is important to us about something), and I'll point to this again as well:
Expectation is, grammatically, a state; like: being of an opinion, hoping for something, knowing something, being able to do something. But in order to understand the grammar of these states it is necessary to ask: "What counts as a criterion for anyone's being in such a state?" (States of hardness, of weight, of fitting.)
— Witt, PI #572
To say expectation is a state, is not to say there is a "rule"; nor is pointing out that it is a state necessary for making the word "expect" have the sense of anticipating, much less an obligation, or probability. We do not follow a rule to expect something, but are said to be expecting (in that state). The judgment of that being the case is made by our criteria for expecting, how it differs from waiting, is similar to hoping, etc., we could say, necessarily, there must be the possibility of something going wrong (we are not sure or certain), but this is a categorical requirement, not a rule.
Quoting Luke
One hopes our langauge and the world are always together, connected in a way that is inseparable, but sometimes our language does not keep up with our lives, sometimes our words are dead to degenerate times, sometimes the use of words must fly in the face of practice. So to say we are only talking about language is minimizing, but to assume that in talking about language we are talking about our lives without separation, is to ignore the threats that exist to our communication and understanding, our lives as shared.
Quoting Luke
Okay, sure.
Quoting Luke
It seems to me the introductory summary from Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian, and Oskari Kuusela that you cited is in general agreement with Hacker’s approach and that of Oxford types like Strawson and Ryle.
I’ve picked out passages from it that I think would be considered problematic from the later Baker’s perspective, and are problematic for me as well.
Quoting Luke
The introduction is rejecting metaphysical realism and substituting in its place an empirical , representational realism , also known as neo-Kantianism. But the later Baker would protest that rules and grammar are not ‘essential features’ in the sense of being linguistic facts or classes of representations. Language is not the interpreting of the world via contextually applied rule-based schemes.
Quoting Luke
I think that as long as one continues to hold onto the need for a clarifying role for language, one is still caught up in a representationalist thinking, and from such a vantage it may be difficult to see the coherence of Antony’s position on morality and the other issues you mentioned, since the sense of all of these is inextricably linked to the former.
Not to get in the middle of this, but my pithy yet misleading title is not a narrow claim that we operate at the "end of rules". It would have been better to have said: what happens at the end of justification? What I was shooting for is the end of the idea that Witt is touting rules as a conclusion/solution/judgment rather than an example, among others. The line of discussion of this OP was supposed to be Cavell's reading that takes criteria and our human falibility as more important for Wittgenstein than rules (here championed by Kripke). We strayed into the issue of meaning and use because that picture allows for rules to be structured a certain way, say, to resolve everything other than our following them or not.
Quoting Luke
It is simply not clear how this is a misreading, though I see that is how you adamantly feel. This would be a case where, as Cavell says, we may come to where I say, "This is simply what I do", but that does not confer any authority, as we have not come to any resolution of what is "right". Thus, just an emphatic declaration that he is (I am) wrong carries no weight. We would need questions for clarification, counter-examples, to see the sense of another view, to address a claim seriously, etc., but not a patent rejection. It were as if there was a rule, and I am simply not following it. Here I would think, at the very least, there would need to be an accounting for the evidence of the text. Why, then, are we only inclined to say so? Witt uses the phrase at least 30 other times in the text, say, at #144. He also uses, "we should like to say", "we are tempted to say", "we might say". I would call these the data of investigation. Evidence from which he makes his claims to the grammar of an example, sometimes for correction, sometimes to allow for greater possibilities.
Also, the opportunity left by this only being an inclination is not for further justification (though possibly repeated, or reworded) but to show that we are now two people (or society and me) in a relationship (here, "teacher" and "student" as in #211 to "continue" after "instruction"--call it justifyor and justifyee if you like) that may continue the conversation about the crisis, or rift between us. This does not have to be about what justifying can not seem to accomplish here: to resolve whether the rule was followed correctly. We may have to turn against ourselves in the sense of finding the rule no longer agrees with our lives.[/quote]
Not to quell interest in any topic of discussion, but we are at the moment at which something falls apart: your understanding, our conventions, the "automatic" naturalness of expression and reception, and, in particular--what Witt is discussing here (PI #217, above)--the end of our ability to justify our actions to each other. It is, unfortunately, a tortured thread; I appreciate the interest.
Of course. We navigate, interpret, improvise...always against a background of personal and social habit.
It is a great line to wrestle with.
[quote=PI 217]
If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned.
[/quote]
I've tended to take this in terms of justifying claims that one knows something. A dry example: a king is put in check by a bishop. Someone doubts this or doesn't understand. You explain the rules, perhaps trace the diagonal path of the bishop. If that fails to convince, there's nothing more to do. There's nothing deeper, nothing hidden.
Agreeing with you and this, I suggest that 'rule' and (in another post) 'govern' are useful but imperfect metaphors. There's no top-down authority on what our noises and marks mean. We just live together, experiment, and hopefully get better at talking and writing and gesturing at others. What is 'better' here? Well, the use of 'better' is caught up in this 'game.' Any of us can give examples of when 'better' is used appropriately. Any of us can propose a definition. Personally I don't think any of us possess more than a 'cloud' of its so-called meaning...or the meaning of any other word. 'We don't know what we are talking about.' But we can improvise decade after decade. If they ask us what we mean, we give them still more words.
I'd like your input on the following, inspired by the quote above. Personally it seems impossible for anyone to know all there is to know about (the token) 'justice.' At the same time, most of us could give most of us a rough idea, a start. Then we just keep living, keep interacting, and the way we understand or employ the token shifts, more or less, depending on our trajectories through time. It 'means' (roughly) how it's used. (I think we agree on this.) Its 'meaning' is out there in the hustle and bustle of the crowd, and definitely not in the possession of a clever individual. It has a 'market value.' I care about its so-called meaning only because I interact with others. Its meaning (for instance) is how they'll react to me if I used it like this rather than like that.
You may be interested/challenged by Cavell's reading, which I draw out in the first post, as he compares it with Kripke's, who puts an emphasis on rules, and neither take the claim to be that there is a fundamental justification. As a teaser, Cavell points out that we are only inclined to, as he reads it, throw up our hands.
"If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.'
What's clearly missing from this list is "compelled" and friends. (Wittgenstein exegesis holds little interest for me, so I'm not going to chase up where he says "here we can only say ..." or some variation of that, but I guess you might want to compare the two sets, if you could be certain the variation isn't stylistic.)
I like the "turning toward each other as (moral?) agents" idea you floated. I've had the experience of teaching my own children how to play chess -- their choice, not mine, I'm not a monster -- and as with anything taxing, there will come a point where they are overwhelmed or bored or thinking about something else. One of the things a child will do in such a situation is be silly: I check their king and they move a rook in a great curving arc, flying over various pieces and pawns, and capture my piece. That's not misunderstanding but a signal that they're done for now. The best response always seemed to me to join them in the new silly barely-any-rules game, which will end very quickly and then they can go off and do what they'd rather be doing.
Some parents tend to be a little tone-deaf about this sort of thing and think they have to insist upon every rule all the time -- "Look if you're not going to play right, ..." Treating failure as self-exclusion from the game (as readers of LW sometimes will) strikes me as similarly tone-deaf. "I don't want to play anymore right now -- in fact I just can't play anymore right now because my brain is tired" is not the same as "I don't want to play" or "I don't understand" or "I don't want to learn this" or any of the various other ways the game you're playing might stop, or might just pause for a while. Being alive to those differences matters, I think, and in that moment you need to remember why you are there playing together in the first place. Maybe that purpose can be put on hold for a while, or maybe it can be served by playing something else.
It's a pity there's so little in Wittgenstein about games evolving or morphing into other games, so that his readers, especially the less sympathetic, have always had to deal with the temptation to take "game" as indicating a closed, static rule system. The games my children have played among themselves generally evolved so rapidly they had trouble keeping track.
Anyhow, I like the idea, @Antony Nickles, whether it's yours or Cavell's or Wittgenstein's.
This sounds like Hacker’s reading of Wittgenstein.
This is actually the basis of Wittgenstein's method. He sets out an example of what we might say (maybe setting out part of its context) and then makes a claim about how and why it seems appropriate or not to fit or to reveal something about us, for us to see for ourselves. This would be why he says he is not advancing theories, because for anything to have value as a grammatical claim, we have to come to it on our own, and then he hasn't really told us anything we didn't already know. There is a difference between a grammatical claim and a definition, but I wanted to acknowledge the democratic affinity.
That's how I understand it also. As it take it, grammar (in this context) is just the way we (actually!) use words these days. The reasons that computers can't have toothaches is not metaphysical. It's simply that we usually don't attribute toothaches to machines. This could change. Once upon a time, machines couldn't catch viruses or get worms. 'Incorrect' (metaphorical) usages can obviously catch on until they are 'literally' literally true.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I suppose a definition is or could be seen as a type of grammatical claim. It's of the (implicit) form of: the world works like this, see? I need to know what a 'lawyer' or a 'bear' or 'cyanide pill' is. I need to know what these tokens 'mean' (how and when to use them). Their only meaning is out there in the wild, in the way they are actually being traded. (Contrast this with some 'angelic' language which is static, unambiguous, universal, and complete.)
If I can find the time, I think I'll like Cavell. I have read much of this thread, so I have an idea of what you mean. Instead of fundamental justifications, I think in terms of basic conventions, basic habits. We don't justify driving on the correct side of the road. Either side works. All that matters is that we all drive on the same side. This echoes the arbitrary nature of the sign. Call is 'red' or 'booboo.' To me it seems that justification is a layer on top of an animal-like training. Ultimately I think even this justification layer is still training, so it's more of spectrum. To me there's no crystalline intellect riding on a meat-wagon. We all keep training one another as we interact (with words, smiles, frowns, payments, violence, sex, promotions, etc.).
I think Wittgenstein was almost bound to be misunderstood this way, precisely because philosophers salivate for closed, static rule-systems (the intellectual conquest of the cosmos with magic words.)
I just ordered the first Hacker & Baker volume, so I'll find out soon.
Obligatory plug for David Lewis's Convention: either side of the road is an equilibrium, a stable solution to the coordination problem.
:up:
Quoting Antony Nickles
You seemed earlier to be disputing that we ever use language intentionally, in relation to our discussion about meaning and use. I did acknowledge earlier that we may not always speak intentionally (e.g. on autopilot), but I would say that we speak intentionally at least most of the time.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I think that we generally use words with intention, particularly by intending one meaning of a word or sentence rather than another; intending to express something or other. Whether it is taken in the right way, understood or interpreted correctly by its audience is another matter. However, I confess that I don't think this talk of intention is very relevant to anything Wittgenstein was saying. Again, it only became an issue because you seemed to argue that we do not or cannot use language intentionally.
Quoting Antony Nickles
But that needn't imply that we only speak with intention when a question is raised about what we intended. It might be odd to ask what a speaker intended on a given occasion (e.g.) only because there can be no doubt about what the speaker intended.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Your concluding line: "The point is not to explain how language works, but to feel out the limits and logic of the world (our lives in it)", together with your comments regarding the grammar of ethical situations, the grammar of art, and the grammar of sitting in a chair (that you later retracted), all indicated to me that you were bordering on a misunderstanding whereby grammar is no longer about language, but about the things themselves (about "the world" and "our lives in it"). Hence, my blunt responses to remind you that grammar is about language.
Quoting Antony Nickles
The point of 'rails invisibly laid to infinity' is that this is the wrong picture. I agree with Baker and Hacker's reading of 218-221 that (even in mathematics) we learn a technique of how to apply a rule; we do not learn or get to know every possible application of a rule in advance.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Wittgenstein says at PI 67 that "we extend our concept of number". Are you using "extendable" differently to this? Wittgenstein's use of the word "extend/extension" is clarified at PI 68:
That is, the concepts 'number' and 'game' can be extended to new kinds of 'number' and 'game' that share a family resemblance to what we currently call "numbers" and "games". The concepts 'number' and 'game' themselves get extended or expanded in terms of "what counts" (or what we count) as (falling under) those concepts.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you appear to suggest that it is not the concepts themselves which can be extended (in terms of their family resemblance), but it is the applications/uses of the concepts which can be extended "into unforeseen contexts".
Either way, Wittgenstein indicates that mathematical concepts can be as open-ended as any other (in the sense of "extension" he uses here).
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm not sure why you think anything at PI 75 is said by the interlocutor. Typically - but not always - what the interlocutor says is in quotes. Anyway, I take Witt's answer to the question here to be yes, my concept of a game is completely expressed in the explanations and examples that I could give. As he says at 69:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes, our concepts are not everywhere circumscribed by rules (see PI 84), but they are still usable.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm not sure about ignored; it just seems to miss the mark.
What will you say to the poor sod who continues to demand further justifications for why we write '1002' after '1000' when we are told to add 2? How will you avoid "repressing" them during this "crisis"?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Wittgenstein is pointing here to "extremely general facts of nature" (PI 142) - such as our shared form of life and our natural human reactions - as the "framework for the very possibility" of having shared rules. You and Cavell have it backward in reading Wittgenstein as talking about the end of justification. Witt is not talking about the end of justification, but its beginning; its possibility.
Quoting Antony Nickles
The rule pertains to the use of the word "expect", not to (how to) expect something. The emphasis is on "said to be" (expecting). - "we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history".
Quoting Antony Nickles
Imagine we can take every word and placement seriously, as if it all mattered, that nothing is rhetorical (Cavell basically, from The Availability of the Later Wittgenstein). That every unanswered question was for us, every claim subject to our acceptance. If we take it that there is no depth our reading can't reach, maybe we will learn the responsibility we have for our actions, even if only to ourselves. So I do see a reason for the different phrasing: that we have a desire for certainty that forces us to see things a particular way; we are compelled to see a word I say as something I (and you) can be sure of, e.g., that I am tempted by the picture that I use (intend) words in the way, a practice, in which they are supposed to be, normally, rightly (or wrongly).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
When we are at a loss as to how to respond, as to how to take an expression, there are many actions we can take: judgment, dismissal, projection, moralism, assumption, etc. Socrates recommends in the Theatetus not to trip up your opponent, looking for controversy, but to be fair, in earnest and, with a friendly and congenial spirit, find out what they really mean. And putting himself in the other's shoes is the exact process by which Witt presents his examples. I haven't read through the idea of the continuation of the relationship we have with the opaque and strange people (p. 223), but one idea is that they are hidden from me, by: me, my inability to join them, ignoring their movements as actions, dismissing their institutions as without purpose.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The phrasing of not being able to hear a tone, bounces off Witt's image of understanding an expression as like a theme of music (#528). Cavell, In a Pitch of Philosophy, examines the idea of the human voice in philosophy (through opera), and its repression, turning on its head (side) the emperical idea of seeing reality for a hearing, listening for the right sound of an argument.
"I don't want to play anymore right now"... as "I don't want to play" or "I don't understand" or "I don't want to learn this" or any of the various other ways the game you're playing might stop. Being alive to those differences matters[/quote]
Each of these expression have a sense simply of which the child does not want to continue (as overwhelmed, play with you, put more rules on this game making it boring). Outside of their not wanting to engage anymore with the game, is a context the concept is extended into that doesn't involve interaction with the game, but is connected to the fact that they "just can't play anymore right now because my brain is tired". Can we say the sentences now have a different sense? Perhaps as excuses to save pride or avoid shame?
The essay we are debating is in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. It is a later work that builds on The Claim of Reason, which is a massive undertaking, but also his first book of essays, which are easy enough to get through, Must We Mean What we Say. The Availability of the Later Wittgenstein is a good place to start.
So do I, insofar as I speak English. Proving it about someone else's usage takes a bit of legwork, that's all.
Quoting Antony Nickles
If shame is one of the options when you don't feel like playing chess, I've already fucked up pretty badly as a parent.
Excellent quote.
The 'confused' idea here seems founded on 'mathematical' fantasy of how language works. 'God' knows exactly what 'chair' and 'is' and 'there' mean (semantic Platonism.) So 'there is a chair' always has a proper-official-authentic meaning, which the Philosopher can sort out for us. Meanwhile, in the real world...
Shared propensities, common responses , cultural norms, categorical patterns of word meanings, are only the presuppositions for the possibility of having shared rules if we recognize that what is common to a group, what is shared, what is associated with a rule, a norm, a category is nothing that strictly belongs to , is encompassed by any framework. There is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule. Wittgenstein’s metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories.
Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule.
If the precondition for the sharing, commonality and normativity of language is the very thing that prevents language use from being captured within such frameworks, then one could say that the end of justification brings us back to its beginning.
65. Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations.—For someone might object against me:
"You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language."
And this is true.—Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,— but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all "language".
If the precondition for the sharing , commonality and normativity of language is the very thing that prevents
language usage from ever becoming captured by any framework, then one could say the end of justification brings us back to its beginning.
67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.—
And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way.
Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.
But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words.
One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.”
I tried to find an online copy but found only a review. What do you make of this?
https://www.academia.edu/45638569/Review_of_Stanley_Cavells_Conditions_Handsome_and_Unhandsome
The comments on 'skepticism' (is that really a good word for it?) remind me of old critiques of OLP, that it was stifling and conformist. 'My' practical (semantic) 'skeptic' isn't sure what 'absolute grounds' are even supposed to be, if not something like God's voice and the threat of Hellfire or the brutally simple addition algorithm.
Well if this were any more '90s he would have used the word "agreement", but it doesn't seem helpful in getting an idea of the content or Cavell's method or impact. The writer seems particularly stuck with the idea philosophy is always worried about what foundation it does or does not have.
You draw an interesting connection here between mathematics and Platonism. I wonder if this is what Antony means by “mathematical” in the thread title. As I noted earlier, however, Wittgenstein was not a mathematical Platonist, so this could be the cause of some confusion.
I speculated that Antony meant something like that. In any case, I've sometimes thought of the later W as trying to wake philosophers up from the language-is-math fantasy. If language was like math , then the philosopher could crank out profound theorems (with perfect certainty and clarity) about Reality and the Metaphysical Subject and Genuine Knowledge. Probably the essence at least of the Future could be inferred, and we'd be essentially free from humiliating surprises. I'm not sure that anti-philosophy evades this temptation, and perhaps it simply continues the quest ironically. (I can't help feeling I've learned something from W and others like him about reality, something of durable value.)
Family resemblance may (or may not) be concerned with the concept “rule”, but I don’t believe that family resemblance relates to particular applications of, or the following of, a rule.
I would say that there must be something in common in all particular cases of following a rule correctly, otherwise there could be no such thing as following a rule correctly.
Right. Not a Platonist at all. A critic of Cantor's Paradise.
:up:
Ah but so many do raise the same old issues. How can I be sure? Not sure enough to act with confidence...but even surer than that somehow. Infinitely sure. What do we really know? One of the things I got from W was a suspicion about this kind of talk. There are questions which are earnestly uttered and yet eventually reveal themselves as lyrical cries. One can't even imagine the form of the answer, unless it's a hug from Jesus.
Quoting Luke
This is the crux of the matter. I claim that Wittgenstein is giving us a way to treat a notion like ‘correctness’ that doesn’t depend on the reproductive representation of an alleged ‘essense’( the essense of what cases have in common). Correctness would not be conformity to a categorical essense, but the fresh generating of a resemblance that produces the possibility of agreement, among other things.
Quoting Luke
If one treats a rule as a logical inclusion structure, a category to which particular applications belong, then it seems perfectly reasonable to make a distinction between the idea that different senses of a word relate to each other via family resemblance, and the idea that a categorical, normative concept like rule , being that essense common to a family of resemblances , cannot itself be dissolved into an infinity of related senses.
But I imagine Wittgenstein asking, is not ‘rule’ also a word? And if so, are only some words situational senses tied to other situational senses by resemblance? Are there other , special words, like ‘rule’, that exist in some metaphysical , empirical or theoretical space that resists the situational contingency of sense? Such that while its applications would always differ in sense, it in itself would remain ideally self-identical in its own sense whenever and wherever we speak the phrase ‘this rule’?
I am inclined to construe actual situational sense as the precondition for the understanding of what would
otherwise be considered ideal structure( an essense common to its particulars) , rather than the other way around.
I recognize that the ideality that Hacker imparts to norms, rules and grammars is far removed from approaches to language based on naive realism. Rather than assuming pure relations between sign and referent, Hacker treats rules as contingent , pragmatically based guideposts. He nevertheless retains a restricted notion of ideality.
I’ll repeat my Hutchinson quote because I think it captures so well what I think Hacker is unable to let go of from Kantian idealism.
“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker’s thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-V relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words’ belonging to a ‘type of use.’It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture’ which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”
That's quite appealing, but terribly abstract. There are constraints on or expectations about what sorts of resemblance you generate, and the generating itself, and the agreement. The trick is never landing on a magic formula that someone will take as foundational, right? (I'm thinking of the way people fetishize a phrase like "form of life".)
I suppose what I'm thinking is that LW's approach is well suited to the undoing work, but can it produce a positive account? Is it a mistake to want a positive account? Did he warn us off all sorts of positive account or only off some popular ones he thought mistaken?
It is abstract, and no substitute for great secondary literature from the likes of Cora Diamond , James Conant and Phil Huirchinson fleshing out this position.
There are indeed constraints on our expectations, but I dont think we can assume that such constraints operate behind the scenes. The best way I can put it is that the situation co-produces the constraints along with the new sense. Put differently, the past is changed by what occurs into it.
Oh that's much less abstract!
Anyhow, I'll leave you to it. I like Wittgenstein, but I've never enjoyed Wittgenstein exegesis, so this is not the right party for me.
An important point, easy to miss, is that W's insights double-back to subvert taking his statements about language (or yours or mine) too seriously. There will be no final sentence that gets it right in some context-independent way, not even this one. We are barking and meowing our iterable tokens. Challenged, we can only bark and meow still more tokens.
Quoting Joshs
There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use. Is this not crazy-talk? To those not in our little game here? Maybe it's useful, hard to say. I can't make rules against it. I can only worry about my own animal noises and scratch-marks. Anyway, the gist seems to be that B & H aren't radical enough. Perhaps you're right, but perhaps you and I can't be radical enough either. The trick is to stay intelligible and make case, all the while subverting that case. (To establish 'scientifically' the impossibility of a certain kind of (fantasy) science.) I remember the TLP's talk of its own nonsense. Perhaps we are breaking the first rule of Fight Club.
The picture you have of how language works creates the picture of intention as present during speech. We can intend what we say, as in choose, for speeches etc., but intend as in cause is not a part of speech. Now #648-660 account for the feeling that intention happens before every expression. The actual grammar of intending is a person being determined about an action (#588); grammatically different than a decision (not that sure). There is something about an intention that is open to other possibilities ("I intended to go, why?") There needs to be evidence other than expressing it (something in the context calls for the expression of it)(#641)--as Austin says, something phishy. We can see intention, even a cat's (#647).
Quoting Luke
The reason why it is relevant is this picture: you say something, something specific, specified by your intention, let's say following the rules, communicated correctly. And so "whether it is", say, heard, is now on us. If we take it in the wrong way and misunderstand, you are still assured you said the right words in the right way to intend one thing rather than another. If there is a problem, it is a problem of "interpretation" rather than the responsibility of the parties. This leads to the characterization of language as slippery, which ends up with us wanting to cause words to follow a set of rules.
Quoting Luke
Quoting Luke
If grammar are rules, then in what way is the grammatical rule--that expectation is a state--about the way to use the word expect? And the question is actually how do we judge someone being in
the state of expectation, not just whether we have said expecting correctly.
Imagine it as grammatical claim meant to differentiate "being in a state" from other concepts, say, "being in a position", and to claim we have ways of judging someone else being in a state. This is not explaining a rule we could say they followed rightly. As you say, we are not doing science, but ask yourself what indicators matter to us in saying someone was expecting--are all of them (any of them) rules?
Quoting Luke
None of these quotes help your claim that any of this is just about language, particularly without any explanation of your reading of them, instead somehow imagining that it is clear exactly what they are supposed to point out, without saying anything.
It is not a problem with language that we can't get outside it or that we keep getting the same picture. You are trapped because words are so important, even to you (that you want to fix them), not a trivial annoyance or bewitching filter. It is our desire for certainty that creates the picture. Language is just the means of creating the self-delusion, but it is thus also the method of our self-knowledge.
I don't recommend this. It's like when people teach themselves piano, then, when they try to go back really serious about playing, it is hard to break their old habits, e.g., hold their hands in the formal position, etc. Hacker will just reinforce a reading of Witt that is limited and unconsciously driven by the same forces Witt is trying to investigate. I would suggest Cavell's The Claim of Reason, in which he discusses Hacker, or, easier, the very short essay The Availability of the Later Wittgenstein.
Well, I prefer (so far) to just pick up Wittgenstein. Or actually, once W breaks the ice, to just start paying more attention to the barks and moans and tweets we do. But this thread has largely focused on what X said about W.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I do appreciate your input, but this is more of 'X gets W right, unlike Y.' Ultimately I think we want to talk about reality. But we keep stacking on layers. Like what C said about H said about W said about reality. I'm not against that game in principle (sometimes its great), but in this context we all have access to the data. We all speak English. We can all just look, give examples and counterexamples.
The term "mathematical" is Cavell's, meant to differentiate the type of criteria (how we judge indentity of a thing, the ways it matters, what counts under that concept, etc.) that we attribute to math (chess, etc.), like certainty, predictability, completeness of every application, etc., from the ordinary diverse open-ended criteria for other concepts, like understanding, seeing, apologizing, etc. The starting point is the desire for ordinary criteria to work like mathematical ones and how, here with Kripke, that creates a picture of rules for that kind of backdrop, which limits our options when things go sideways.
Quoting Zugzwang
Behind all the fuss to be certain about what is right, is a desire to predict outcomes, which will avoid our being responsible after our act. That I can say, “Well, I followed the rule correctly!”
Quoting Zugzwang
One new thing I realized in this thread is the difference Witt shows between the sense of certainty as perfection, from certain in the sense of resolute, understanding the terms of our commitment to stand for our actions.
I think you nailed down something interesting here. We often prefer to be 'robots' on script, to escape any possible blame, as you say. When I was younger, I worked lots of jobs that left my mind free. They didn't pay well, but I followed different scripts. Now things are more complicated. How productive I've been is more nebulous, as is exactly what is expected of me.
I commend this. Of course going through the book on your own first is paramount. I also think noting one’s own thoughts in reaction are almost more important, as this is not about being told things as much as coming to see something for yourself.
Quoting Zugzwang
Witt’s method enables anyone to pitch in on what the implications are of an example of an expression. And our examples can follow our personal interests.
I had planned to edit my post to remove the word "correctly", which is extraneous. As I noted earlier, one can either follow a rule or not follow a rule; it makes no sense to speak of following a rule incorrectly. (Maybe that will teach me not to write a quick response on my phone in the car.)
However, you could substitute the word "follow" for "correctly" in your comments on 'essences' above, I suppose. In either case, Wittgenstein explicitly rejects essences in favour of family resemblance, as you have noted. I would only dispute that this also forces him to reject conventional uses/meanings, such that our words must have new or different meanings on every occasion of their use. If that were the case, then I would think it impossible to teach anyone a language. See PI 223-227.
As Baker and Hacker note of PI 223:
Quoting Joshs
This seems to me bordering on idealism, which runs counter to Wittgenstein's repeated reminders that linguistic meaning lies in its use (rather than "in the mind"); e.g. language-games, the incoherence of a private language, etc.
The word "rule" may have a family of related senses but, I would think even according to your own view, Wittgenstein uses it with a particular sense at PI 201.
Quoting Joshs
This seems to me flatly contradicted by Wittgenstein. Hutchinson and Read claim that words do not have (or do not "belong to") a "type of use". At PI 23, Wittgenstein states that there "are countless different kinds of use", goes on to give many examples of the different kinds of use, and then speaks of "the diversity of kinds of words and sentence".
I came across this neuroscience article (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6499020/#sec3title) which I think has a good discussion of Wittgenstein on intention. I note it's quasi-conclusion that Wittgenstein "solves the problem of causation-by-states by positing an equally contested form of causation-by-agents." However, since it still involves causation, I'm not sure you would agree.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't understand how a belief/opinion "could be in the sense of removing me from any need to stand behind what I say (letting the justification absolve my responsibility)". How is that a belief/opinion? By not understanding this, I don't understand the rest of what you say here.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Who is "we" in this situation? If "we" feel it is unjust, then why do "we" say it is just? What role do "our" feelings play here?
Whether or not the killing is just does not affect the two different senses of "justification" (or "just") here.
Quoting Antony Nickles
As Baker and Hacker point out, there is no ideal such that one learns every possible mathematical outcome in advance. Instead, one learns to apply a technique; to follow a rule. It remains to be shown that language is any different to mathematics in this regard.
Quoting Antony Nickles
These rules of the concept of justification are simply the two different uses (senses) of the word "justification" that you have described; the rules for using these words with different senses. There is no need to justify the existence of the different uses/senses of our words.
Quoting Antony Nickles
The sense of the word "just" is already established; you already know what it means. Are you saying that the law could repress or change the sense of the word? Okay, but so what? Maybe it doesn't change the sense of the word, and it only changes our views about what acts or events we would classify as being just or unjust. Anyhow, I'm not sure I see the relevance.
Quoting Antony Nickles
As I said earlier, supported by the SEP article on Wittgenstein, the rules of grammar encompass both how we use words and the criteria of concepts. "Grammar, usually taken to consist of the rules of correct syntactic and semantic usage, becomes, in Wittgenstein’s hands, the wider—and more elusive—network of rules which determine what linguistic move is allowed as making sense, and what isn’t." (SEP) That expectation is a state is part of the criteria of the concept.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Instead of "how do we judge someone being in that state?", I would say the question is more (or equally): what are the grammatical criteria of the concept of "expectation"? That state, and our judgement of someone being in it, are what we call an "expectation".
Wittgenstein gives an insight into his grammatical investigation in the next section. You could easily substitute "expectation" for "opinion" at PI 573:
This is a classic example of how the desire for certainty forces a picture on us that we then try to intellectually solve. It starts out okay by breaking the bad news to "neuroscientists" that intention does not come down to a physical process. Unfortunately, it does not stop there; but why? Why are we driven to continue? The problem is that they want to have our explanation of intention be "normative" or, be subject to "explanation, prediction, evaluation, and regulation". This is their desire. In the essay Must We Mean What We Say, Cavell takes the air out of the desire to find some intellectual normativity by pointing out that something is normative to the extent the practice is normative in our lives. Intention is just not like promising--each concept has its own implications, consequences, or none; you can say whatever you like, but only some things will be considered, say, instructions, or an excuse.
But the author plows forward claiming that "we need to answer the question: what makes the ascription of an intention (by others or by oneself) legitimate?"(emphasis added) But, again, what is this need? He completely misses the point of #641, taking the phrase "the most explicit expression of intention is by itself insufficient evidence of intention”, to signal that: there must be sufficient evidence of intention out there somewhere! Here he tries to latch onto a pattern in our behavior rather than seeing the grammatical distinction that talking about intention only happens in certain situations.
The author quotes the same passages I did (#581-583), but they take the "situation"(#581) or the "surroundings"(#583) to be what is happening with the person, their "pattern" over time. Intention not being mental, they would have it be behavioral--"ascribed" to the person--as if to push causality into them externally. But when Witt says an expectation is "imbedded in a situation" (#581), he is saying the context is what makes expectation here even possible (with a bomb about to go off). Only "in these surroundings"(#583) is there any significance (meaning) to "expecting".
The same applies for intention; it is not a cause, it is an unanticipated part in a situation--"Did you intend to (do something unexpected)?" "I intend to (do something I might not otherwise)." It is the (cultural/personal) expectation that makes the discussion of intention even possible, not the occurrence or lack of someone's "intention". Intention is part of a discussion, not an action, nor a person.
Still the author clings on. "But does not this overlook one of the most important features of the concept of intention, namely that the commitment they express plays a guiding role in human action?" (emphasis added)--important to whom? why? The machinations the author and all those cited are going through are based on the same fears and for the same desires that shape this discussion about rules.
:up: :100:
The book is like a disposable vessel, or rather an incendiary device, since vessel misleads us in to thinking of some stable goo inside the string of tokens.
Asking a philosopher what 'knowledge' means is like asking him the value of a dollar gold and him telling you how fond or not he is of art on it. The values of tokens are out there. If you want to know the value of a currency, look how it's tangled up in buying and selling stuff with intrinsic value. I think it's the same with tokens (words, equivalence classes of grunts and scribbles).
If an even cleverer humanoid visits our planet, perhaps they'll see us as many of us see the other primates (incapable of metaphysics, since not truly liberated from materiality and animality.)
Let me start with the admission that my comments on intention were my own and are possibly not in accordance with Wittgenstein's views on intention. I did not mean for my comments to be taken as an exegesis of Wittgenstein's view on intention. However, I stand by the rest of my comments on Wittgenstein's philosophy and purpose in the PI.
Having said that, I find that I disagree with your reading of the article:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Of course that's their desire; they're scientists. We should not admonish scientists for attempting to explain, predict, etc.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't understand the distinction between normativity and intellectual normativity. I take it to mean it's not the mental (intellectual) which is normative; it's the social practice. Yes, and the social practice includes the use of the word "intention".
Quoting Antony Nickles
Isn't that precisely what Wittgenstein signals here? Otherwise, what does he signal with this statement?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'll just point out that an intention is not an expectation. Also, it's "embedded".
Quoting Antony Nickles
How do you account for PI 647: "What is the natural expression of an intention? — Look at a cat when it stalks a bird; or a beast when it wants to escape." - This is not about "an unanticipated part in a situation."
Quoting Antony Nickles
Are you saying that "the (cultural/personal) expectation" is an intention?
Quoting Antony Nickles
Consider:
Imagination is also part of a discussion and is not an action nor a person. It's not a Nothing, but not a Something either. See also PI 305.
Incidentally, I came across these passages recently, which supports my view that Wittgenstein's focus is on language and its grammar, rather than on the world and morality:
Justification; it's two senses of justification. One is authority, the other sense is a justification that props up my opinion so it doesn't matter that I said it, say, a rule, or scientific methodology.
Quoting Luke
Wittgenstein's method is to make a claim that would apply for everyone, for each of us to see for ourselves, "prove" to ourselves in a sense, to accept. So he speaks using "we" and "our" and "us", giving examples of what "we say", etc. There shouldn't be claim I'm making where "we" can't be me, you, anyone, everyone. The fact they might conflict is the point.
Quoting Luke
It could be justified, in one sense, because the police had authority; at the same time, in another sense, there could be no justification as we are not absolved of our guilt, even if only for conferring our authority. Both things pulling at us at the same time is the anxiety that creates the desire to have a rule (rely on definitions) for the "meaning" of a word.
Quoting Luke
The feeling here was meant as a nagging suspicion, like we're missing something, overlooking a consideration. I'm not sure it plays a role (in the justification?), only that it marks our cultural investment in the conflicting justifications.
Quoting Luke
To say the rules of a concept are simply a description of its use, say, that we are using justification in its sense of authority, does not seem to tell us anything that would make that a "rule". And I did not mean justify the existence of a sense of a concept, I meant justifying how we justify, or justified, as in the kind of justifications that run out, for, in our example, following a rule.
Quoting Luke
Yes, the sense of justification as, say, authority is already established, but it is not unchanging (as our lives change). Also, justification by authority, as much as we are familiar with it, can be different when pushed into a new context, e.g., taken from the church to the state. What is important about it might change, or some criteria for it might matter more, or again (having been ignored previously).
And you keep talking about words. The law (authority) can repress our sense of right, or our ability to redress its failings. To talk as if this "only changes our views", is exactly the suppression that imagining rules of classification imposes with a picture of right/wrong which leaves our expressions merely opinions.
Quoting Luke
This is exactly an example of the death of a moral conversation before it even starts. The desire for our words to bring stability to our lives is why a killing can be justified by a definition. We have no concerns about our concepts? If shame has replaced guilt, what is absolution for us know? how does legislative authority have or not have moral authority? And our culture changes, sometimes because of people dying without justification. What counts and matters to us about authority or having a clean conscious are not fixed timeless equations (which criteria are important, how we are to apply them, what facts count under them). Extending justification in the sense of being wiped clean of guilt from its home in the world of religion into the context of a police shooting affects the grammar and criteria of the concept. In this sense, if we can't find a way to wipe away our guilt for a killing we've authorized, our society is irredeemable.
Neuroscience pictures the concept of intention (and the entirety of humans) as a physical phenomenon, an empirical occurrence, which comes from the belief that science can explain everything, anything. The conceptual misunderstanding forces their hypothesis on them. They're like a politician, looking around for evidence to shore up the conclusion they've already decided upon.
Quoting Luke
Yes, that was insufficiently worded. We are not talking about evidence for a scientific explanation, sufficient to make our knowledge of our intentions certain, for the specific type of conclusion that the scientist wants. As with a lot of what Witt says, this is a grammatical statement: that the context of the expression is necessary. There is no intention of an expression if there is not a context in which there are conditions which would make it possible to ask about or have an intention.
Something happened which was out of the ordinary for this incident, something shameful. Why was it out of the ordinary? In every way and everywhere we look and find something unusual from what we would normally expect. These are the criteria and substance of what matters to us about asking after, or explaining, intention, such as the requirement for a reason--for clarification, as an excuse, as a curiosity, etc.
The author takes up expecting as similar to intention with the idea that both occur over a period of time. They're not wrong, only that it is the "whole history of the incident" (#644 above) and not just the pattern of the person's behavior, say, extrapolated chronologically.
quote="Witt, PI 644"]Also, it's "embedded".[/quote]
You'll have to take that up with Anscombe, or the British in general.
This is the expression of an intention. Neither the look on a cat's face nor the beast's actions would be an intention without the context of the stalked bird or the cage. An intention would never "dawn" on us, like an aspect, unless there was a situation were, say, the bird was out of our frame. "What is that cat (intent on) doing?" or we had not factored in the context that a beast does not normally want to be in a cage (we might think it was just scratching its back or trying to get attention for food; then the context would set the intention in relief).
The expectations (and the confusion about an expression) are the conditions necessary for there to be intention at all.