The Philosophy of Language and It's Importance
Before I write some of my thoughts, I would like to get feedback from those of you who have a solid philosophical background, or who have a solid science background. The reason I ask this, is that I would like to keep the discussion on a higher level of discourse. This is not to say that others shouldn't or can't respond, but to recognize that those who have been studying philosophy for many years, generally have a greater understanding of some of the ideas that follow.
As many of you know I've spent a lot of time studying philosophy of language, in particular, Wittgenstein's writings. One of the reasons I've spent so much time studying philosophy of language, is, obviously, that language is the medium in which philosophical discourse takes place. It seems to follow, that having a good understanding of the way language works, in terms of concepts and meaning, is crucial to having a clear understanding of not only philosophy, but other subjects as well. It also seems self-evident that clarity, and the ability to get a consensus about what we write, stems from how well we understand language in terms of the concepts we use, how meaning is derived from the concepts, and our ability to express our thoughts in writing.
This subject is very complicated, but I'm interested in a wide array of thinking across this domain of thought. It's not so much about debating the topic, although that always happens, but how philosophy of language has influenced the way you think about philosophy, if at all.
I guess much of this thread will about what you've learned about the topic over the years, and has it helped your thinking.
As many of you know I've spent a lot of time studying philosophy of language, in particular, Wittgenstein's writings. One of the reasons I've spent so much time studying philosophy of language, is, obviously, that language is the medium in which philosophical discourse takes place. It seems to follow, that having a good understanding of the way language works, in terms of concepts and meaning, is crucial to having a clear understanding of not only philosophy, but other subjects as well. It also seems self-evident that clarity, and the ability to get a consensus about what we write, stems from how well we understand language in terms of the concepts we use, how meaning is derived from the concepts, and our ability to express our thoughts in writing.
This subject is very complicated, but I'm interested in a wide array of thinking across this domain of thought. It's not so much about debating the topic, although that always happens, but how philosophy of language has influenced the way you think about philosophy, if at all.
I guess much of this thread will about what you've learned about the topic over the years, and has it helped your thinking.
Comments (243)
Sure, but I'm skeptical that analyzing language is some sort of cure for philosophical problems in general. That may be the case in some instances, but I'm of the opinion that the majority of philosophical problems are not primarily linguistic in nature.
By example, consider health problems. We use language to discuss health, but health issues are biological and social, and not primarily a matter of language usage (although it can be sometimes in certain situations).
You won't get much disagreement from me on this, but I do believe many problems are clarified or dissolved, many more than people realize. The question is, which or what philosophical problems are we talking about.
Would be interesting to try and divide them up:
1. Philosophical problems dissolved.
2. Clarified.
3. Potential to be clarified or dissolved.
4. Resistant.
Or what have you. Of course the problem here is people won't necessarily agree on what constitutes dissolving or clarifying a problem, and which ones are resistant. Even coming up with a framework for classification will be controversial.
That reminds me of David Chalmers book on scrutability where he attempts to give a framework for metaphysics given whatever basic premises one wants to start off with.
Perhaps the fixation on language is an outcome of the 14th c turn away from moderate realism to nominalism.
If you can describe a philosophical problem and then define each word you just used in a way that will gain even a substantial minority of agreement then I'd be prepared to concede this. Thus far, I've not found such a thing to be possible. In health problems one can resort to pointing at the condition (or a photograph of it) and observing the remedy. There's no such resort with philosophy, hence it is entirely wrapped up in the understanding of language.
Just hoping I haven’t joined in without proper qualification. Presuming you yourself intend to take part in this 'higher level of discourse' perhaps you could let us know what level of qualification you are so that we know the target we're aiming for?
OK, let's take an old saw as an example: Free Will. Of course compatibilists will say that we simply do not understand what it is to be free, but really, that's not the issue. To see this we can avoid the word "free" altogether. The position I take is that at a decision point many, mutually incompatible, lines of action are equally possible. A determinist will say that only one line of action is actually possible. We each understand our terms in the same way. So, language is not the issue.
OK, so if you actually want to do this. Define 'decision' without begging the question. Define a 'line of action' without assuming cause and effect. Define what it means for something to be 'possible' without presuming either determinism, or some arbitrary constraints.
Quoting Dfpolis
I don't think they do. I don't think we even agree what it is to 'understand' a thing.
That sounds like no amount of linguistic analysis will fix the problem since people won't agree on what the terms mean.
But I don't think this is actually the case for every problem in professional philosophy, just discussion forums where the rules of engagement are a lot more lax, and people can play loose and fast with terms to try and win the argument.
If you look at the debate over qualia, the different sides mostly agree on terms, they just don't agree on the issue as to whether qualia present a hard problem. And thus it's not a linguistic issue.
The dispute between Dennett and Chalmers, for example, is not a matter of language, since they both understand each other and use the same terms. They're not having a semantic dispute over how to use the word consciousness or qualia, rather they're having a substantive dispute.
Such as culture, sociology, cognition, politics, even biology, depending on the nature of the problem.
I can think of a few problem sets which don't seem to be fundamentally reliant on the analysis of language to be addressed:
Philosophy of time: presentism, block universes etc.
Metaphysics of science: emergence, character of natural law
Political philosophy: the vast majority of issues in it. 'Are Marx's classes of proletariat and bourgeoise still present in capital? Have they changed over time?'
Logic: foundations of mathematics (eg, we used to think set theory was the only way to axiomatise things, now we have topos theory!), properties of formal systems.
Meta-ethics: cognitivism, non-cognitivism (Frege-Geach for a specific debate)
Ethics: real world ethical issues - environmental conservation, overpopulation, morality of torture, relationship of ethics and legal systems.
Philosophy of language/linguistics: performativity and speech act theory, pragmatics vs formalism.
Epistemology: epistemic dependence
It seems to me that the analysis of most problems doesn't turn on the analysis of language. To be sure, being a careful reader and writer is useful for understanding and contributing.
Is that just wishful thinking, or do you have some reason to think this? If you could provide an example of some philosophical terms whose meaning you think is widely agreed on (with a rough idea of what that agreed meaning is), that might help.
I updated my post to include qualia, with the ongoing dispute between Chalmers and Dennett as a specific example.
Qualia is understood to be the essence of subjective experience. This isn't a matter of dispute. It's what the term means. Whether qualia exist, and if so, how they can be accounted for, is open for dispute. The term itself isn't in dispute.
A decision is a commitment to a course of action based on a consideration of alternate courses of action. A determinist would say that before this process begins, the commitment is predetermined. I would deny that. There is no question begging on either side.
Quoting Pseudonym
There is no need for me to avoid assuming that effects follow from adequate causes to maintain my position, nor is the determinist required to do so. However, I am happy to comply with your request: A "line of action" is a continuous sequence of events.
Quoting Pseudonym
To be possible means that the contrary is not necessary.
Quoting Pseudonym
I will be happy to consider your definition and tell you whether I find it acceptable or not.
This is precisely the point I am disputing with Pseudonym
Agreed, and this could be resolved by physics at some point.
Quoting fdrake
Right, and this is regarding the nature of the world, not language.
Quoting fdrake
Yep, obviously political differences can't simply be resolved by analyzing political language. There are issues people disagree on, and some of them are ideological in nature. Some of them relate to a kind of philosophical outlook on how society should function.
Quoting fdrake
Certainly outside ordinary language analysis.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, ethics relates to how we should live. That's not a matter for linguistics.
Agreed.
If we have the addendum that philosophy mostly consists in the creation/discovery and analysis of concepts, then I think we see eye to eye.
You think about stuff, then you make stuff to help you think about stuff, or you discover some structure in stuff. Sometimes you make stuff to help you think about stuff and then that helps you discover a structure in stuff. Philosophy is the study of how stuff hangs together.
Edit: this contains the silly idea that philosophy is done by individuals rather than being a product of a relation between individuals and history mediated by individuals and history mediated by...
This is not a central issue. Of course, equivocation has been a recognized problem since the ancient Greeks. However, most open minded people are not wed to specific definitions and are willing to use those of a dialog partner to facilitate communication. The real problem is that even when we agree to use terms in the same way, we may still have very different visions of the nature of reality. Thus, linguistic differences are a side issue, like clearing weeds before starting a building project.
Well, that is close to what I said about building a consistent framework for understanding our experience of reality -- however, I see "our experience of reality" as an essential note.
Talking about that goes even further away from poor @Sam26's thread topic. Which, I imagine, is supposed to be a series of vaguely Wittgenstein influenced confessions of how the analysis of language has changed how we think about philosophical issues. Emphasis on the specifics, like 'How reading Wittgenstein made me an anti-theist' or 'How reading Austin turned me off Chomsky's approach to language'.
And you're sure what an 'essence' is? Have you read no debates on the meaning of 'subjective?
Essence was just my word for the nature of subjectivity. It's not a word typically used in the debate.
So tell me how linguistic analysis can help if nobody agrees on the meaning of the terms?
Would also be interesting to see what sort of agreement/disagreement we got on the classification of different problems.
I'm looking for people who have given significant thought to the issues, but I don't want to keep people out of the discussion. I say this to give some guidelines for what I'm looking for. There is something to be said for studying these ideas at length and coming to a conclusion, but sometimes even then one wonders about the quality of the thoughts or conclusions.
You've just replaced 'decision' with 'commitment', how do the two terms differ in this context? Quoting Dfpolis
I'm really not going to carry on like this, but can you define an event? Where does one event end and the next one start. This is important because if you can define a single event then you can't say that existence is not one single event which undermines the argument against determinism somewhat.
Quoting Dfpolis
More definition by symonym (or antonym in this case). What is it for a thing to be necessary? Necessary for what?
By shaking the certainty that there is a 'problem' out there which requires anyone's help in that sense.
I suppose it may.
I understand, but surely you're not so hubristic to think that your version of 'significant thought' is going to be universally understood? That's why I was wondering if you were hinting at something more objective (like academic qualifications), but that's cleared the question up, thanks.
For me, most, if not many of these problems are about the concepts used. However, that's not to say that there aren't problems that are not part of what we normally think of as language problems. Let's take for example, the concept time, it seems to me that many of the philosophical problems, and even possibly scientific problems, arise because of the misunderstanding the many uses of the word, and the confusions that arise as a result.
Don't you think that depending on how you define the word creates many philosophical and maybe even scientific confusion?
Yes, this is definitely what I'm looking for, but I'm also interested in how you think about philosophy of language, viz., its shortcomings and its benefits.
I was very hesitant to put down very specific qualifications because I didn't want push people away from the discussion.
Quoting Sam26
There's a debate, now mostly settled as far as I know, in feminist theory. It began as an internal tension in feminism; why was it that feminist activity mostly excluded women of colour? This gave rise to theoretical and practical emphasis on 'intersectionality', a view that paying attention to how different marginalised groups interact on a personal (like black transgender) and interpersonal (corporate hierarchies like black women are cleaners, white women are secretarial, white dudes are managerial) level is important in addressing political marginalisation as a whole.
The idea that any of this could have been resolved through supplying an appropriate definition, or impeded forever by supplying inappropriate definitions, is really far off the mark. It was mostly worked through by people hashing it out, and was enabled by the civil rights movements for people of colour and women. Political problems don't arise or go away through the analysis of language, they arise and go away through targeted change of social systems and behavioural change on a large scale. The analysis of these problems and the activity of addressing them concern real social systems, not words.
The story's a bit less clear cut for time, I imagine.
The question, lest we lose track of it, is how linguistic analysis will resolve my difference with a determinist? It is not whether linguistic definitions are ultimately circular. I can easily prove that in any finite language, definitions must be ultimately circular. The point of definitions is not to provide replacement words, but to cause the reader to recreate in his or her own mind the concept the word expresses.
Quoting Pseudonym
I don't agree. The fact that I can define a point without reference to a line does not mean that a line is not a continuous sequence of points. The concept of
As I said, in any closed language, any series of definitions will ultimately close on itself. So, I make no apology for defining "possible" in terns of "necessary." In fact, it is precisely because language in isolation is closed that we must transcend language and turn our intellectual gaze to being. It is only in relation to being that language has any ultimate meaning.
You have yet to indicate how linguistic analysis will resolve the issue between me and a determinist. The determinist thinks there is one possibility. I think there is more than one. That is a difference as to the nature of reality, not a verbal misunderstanding.
I've written heavily on this subject in many of threads (e.g. A Wittgenstein Commentary), but yes, I can see how someone might not understand what in particular I'm talking about.
Wittgenstein was looking at the problems between thought or language, and the world. Questions like: "What is the function of language? What is the structure of language? How is language related to the world? How is it that we can say anything about the world and mean something? What is meaning? These are some of the questions, and there are many more related questions. But not just these questions, but how not understanding how language works causes philosophical (I'm using philosophical in a broad sense to cover all philosophical thought - which is wide and diverse) confusion.
No. I think failing to adequately reflect on its meaning (the reality it indicates, which I take to be a measure of change), is the source of problems involving time. Once you have a clear meaning, applying it consistently resolves any confusion. Then all that is left is different beliefs about the facts.
These kinds of problems sometimes get solved in other ways besides the ones that I might suggest.
I hope that you don't think that I would suggest that a definition correctly understood would somehow solve the problems that Wittgenstein is referring to. I would suggest that some philosophical problems do go away once one understand some of Wittgenstein's points. And even in the example above one could apply Wittgensteinian methods to help clarify concepts.
I agree with much of what you're saying, but they're are many definitions (I would say uses) of the word time, that cause confusion. And the way I define it is similar to your definition, it's simply a measurement of change. However, sometimes we look at time like it's a stream, i.e., something we can get in and out of, and it's these kinds of time that can cause confusion.
I like this Tim, maybe you can explain further.
Isn't the emphasis on language pretty much the entire analytical enterprise of the past century? The idea that if we can get clear on language, then many philosophical problems can be adequately addressed, and philosophy can be turned into a respectable pursuit, similar to science.
If so, a question arises as to how successful that emphasis has been.
No, I don't think you take such a reductive view of philosophy. What issues do you think are dissolved, or nearly dissolved, by looking at them through your preferred lens? I don't have a view of philosophy of language in general, but I am rather prejudiced against ordinary language philosophy because at its worst it thinks there are no substantive philosophical issues and because it espouses a kind of 'first philosophy' which is to be done through the analysis of word use.
With reference to the other desired kind of response you wanted, I can think of a few things which reading Wittgenstein left me with.
(1) Pay a lot of attention to how the thing you're looking at works.
(2) Using language with a purpose always has some background upon which it makes sense.
(1) and (2) together form a maxim: once you have a description you have a model.
(3) Rule following is a non-deliberative** component of language use; the 'way of following a rule which is not an interpretation'. As @StreetlightX put it, language is extra-linguistic.
(4) Highlighting the importance of aspect shifting (seeing as).
The interaction of (3) and (4) has been influencing my thoughts and philosophical studies for some time. It's difficult for me to articulate without jargon, but the rough idea is that nature is suggestive. (3) highlights that we're always in the world with the stuff at our fingertips and (4) highlights that the world springs out into structures when we have both language and the stuff at our fingertips.*
As somewhat of a consequence of (1),(2),(3),(4), though the theme is also present in the contrast of early vs late Wittgenstein in terms of the realism of the language he studies.
(5) Good presuppositions facilitate insight, bad ones impede it.
[hide=*] I also read Wittgenstein as a semantic externalist, which is another of the ideas that has shaped how I think about everything in general. It invites a view of language as a historical, collaborative endeavour. Roughly; it's 'out there' in the actions of everybody rather than 'in here' with my thoughts. Augmenting this externalism with the claim that, say, there really is a rabbit in the duckrabbit is a neat way of sidestepping skeptical inquiry.[/hide]
[hide=**]I trying to decide whether non-cognizant or non-deliberative was better here for some time. Still not sure which is better.[/hide]
I agree with this, but I think many people don't understand the "get clear on language" part, what does that mean via Wittgenstein and Austin for example.
To answer your first question, the issue I've been working on, viz., parts of the epistemological issues get solved. However, solving the issue doesn't mean that people will agree with it, that's another problem. It also doesn't mean that other problems won't arise within that answer. We see this in science all the time.
The problem with ordinary language philosophy is the way people think of it, viz., that how the ordinary man talks, is the talk that we should strive for, but that's a misunderstanding (not that that is your view). The way I think of ordinary language is how a word, for example, is developed over time in ordinary language. It's home, so to speak, and the use of the word/concept in that setting. For example, some philosophers have come up with a sense/meaning of knowledge that doesn't fit within the ordinary use of the word. Thus, they use the word completely out of it's home. It's akin to calling a car a pencil, as if that use explains cars in a way we haven't previously understood; and that understanding the car now as a pencil gives us new insights.
I guess in some sense it is a "first philosophy" as you say, but that would have to be unpacked a bit.
The rule-following as I interpret Wittgenstein isn't extra-linguistic, i.e., he's saying that rule-following is a necessary feature of language. And it's this feature that tells us much about how language develops in a social setting and not privately. Our private uses of words are meaningless, which further illustrates that language is necessarily social, as seen especially from the rule-following ideas Wittgenstein put forth.
There is a component of Wittgenstein that goes into this idea of "seeing as," i.e., the duck rabbit picture, but I'm not sure of the connection between rule-following and that idea. I would need to hear more.
Quoting fdrake
This last paragraph interests me because I think maybe I've recently being having similar thoughts. Maybe we're coming at it from different angles. Part of this, if I'm not mistaken, is related to to the problem of consciousness.
Does this apply to ancient or medieval philosophical problems in addition to more modern ones? Because various philosophical problems have been expressed in Greek, Latin, Hindi, Chinese, English, French, German, Arabic, etc.
On an abuse-of-language view, different languages would probably present different forms of abuse. Or so we might expect.
We might also wonder if there's something about ancient Greek that gave rise to ancient metaphysics and epistemology.
I'm a fan of JTB, and we can trace it back to ancient philosophy, but yes, it does apply to philosophical problems across the board, and throughout history.
Yes, different languages would present different abuses. However, I think for the most part many of the problems are very similar.
Yes, but is it really necessary to study Wittgenstein to spot an equivocal use of terms? Clearly not, for Aristotle discusses different types of equivocation (multiple uses = pollakhos legetai or dikhos legetai). (See, e.g. G. E. L. Owen, "Aristotle on the Snares of Ontology" in R. Bambrough, New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (London, 1965), pp. 69-95; Jaakko Hintikka, ""Aristotle and the Ambiguity of Ambiguity," Inquiry 2 (1959). pp 137-151 and "Different Kinds of Equivocation in Aristotle.," J. Hist. Phil. 9:3, (July 1971) pp. 368-372.)
I don't follow this, specifically, "it belongs to a wider set of practices and capacities which must also be grasped in their specificity."
Obviously not, but Wittgenstein goes much much further than this, and it's this wide view that Wittgenstein deals with over the course of his life. I think most philosophers would agree that Wittgenstein's thinking was genius, but most present Wittgenstein in very basic ways. When I hear some of the interpretations of Wittgenstein, they seem to be of those who have only read some of Wittgenstein, but have not really studied Wittgenstein in depth. The comparison would be like me talking biology with an expert in biology. It seems naive.
The reason I say some of this is that Wittgenstein is very difficult, and yet people will give his philosophy a cursory reading and think they understand. But now I'm way off topic.
I've come to the conclusion, as did Wittgenstein, that the problems of philosophy are psychological or have their root in the psychology of the speaker. Hence, I've adopted a psychologist attitude towards the therapeutic use of philosophy in elucidating psycholog(ies) of people, and their interactions. One important concept that I stumbled on is the issue of personal identity in regards to life events and other unforeseen consequences of action (think the Butterfly effect).
My stance towards science, religion, and other matters hasn't changed considerably. But, the way I view the use of language-game and analyzing their settings has.
I am one of those who have read some Wittgenstein and was not unduly impressed. I take responsibility for that. As a student of Aristotle, who is also a genius and often difficult to grasp, I appreciate the need to study a philosopher in depth to fully appreciate his/her genius. So, as I see it, it is a matter of resource allocation. We have limited time, and so we have to judge, after minimal exposure, where to spend it.
One way to overcome this barrier is to have someone show you an instance of the philosopher's genius.
:up:
Let me know if you care to criticise it or what have you.
Depression, anxiety, OCD, self-identity, death.
All of these influence what conclusions we arrive at. Reason itself is limited by what the emotive aspect of our beings tells us about a situation or issue. That's not to say that self-realization is impossible; but, it's hard. I still think we can change our minds about things; but, that's limited by the ability to satisfy our needs from wants.
While I agree that our emotional state can affect what we look at our admit is real, I don't see that this has much to do with the philosophy of language.
And yes -- self realization is hard.
Well, if you adopt a therapeutic stance towards speech and philosophical problems, then yes it is pertinent to the philosophy of language.
I did not mean to challenge your insight, I just do not appreciate the connection.
Surely, we use language to direct attention in ways that will result in desirable emotional states. But does one have to be steeped in the philosophy of language to do that?
Your right, it's very difficult to make time to study some of this material, especially since there is just so much to study. All I have time for is a very limited area of philosophy, there is just too much.
His genius is seen in the Tractatus, even if you disagree with it. It's seen in his transition from his early to his later philosophy. I see his genius in his final notes (On Certainty). I've also seen his genius in what he did outside of philosophy. One example was his work during WW2 at Guys Hospital in England...
“Wittgenstein’s job as a porter was to deliver medicines from the dispensary to the wards, where, according to John Ryle’s wife, Miriam, he advised the patients not to take them. His boss at the pharmacy was Mr. S F. Izzard. When asked later if he remembered Wittgenstein as a porter, Izzard replied, ‘Yes, very well. He came and worked here and after working here three weeks he came and explained how we should be running the place. You see, he was a man who was used to thinking.’ After a short while, he was switched to the job of pharmacy technician in the manufacturing laboratory, where one of his duties was to prepare Lassar’s ointment for the dermatological department. When Drury visited Wittgenstein at Guy’s, he was told by a member of the staff that no one before had produced Lassar’s ointment of such high quality. “
Was taken from the following link: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/wittrs-blog/2009/12/12/wittgenstein-labors-at-guys-during-wwii.html
What do you mean?
Quoting Dfpolis
Yes; but, it can lead us down the wrong path of neuroticism, self-reinforcing concepts of depression, anxiety, or what have you. So, those have to addressed first.
Quoting Dfpolis
Quite the contrary, Wittgenstein valued ordinary life above that which philosophy ever hopes to describe. This is the self-defeating aspect of philosophy, which Wittgenstein instilled in many generations to come. Hence, the need to apply philosophy as therapy, in his mind, I think.
If you want to know what I would disagree with, it would be the above statement. There are many psychological ramifications of what Wittgenstein said, there is no doubt about that, but he would not say that the problems of philosophy have their root in the psychology of the speaker. However, to be fair, Posty you may have something in mind that I'm missing.
:up:
See here. What do you think?
For a while, I was involved in the philosophical counseling movement, and have an article published in a collection on the subject. I was able to help a few people with severe problems by directing their attention to things that gave them self worth. Without going into detail, the result was transformative. Clearly, this did not depend on my knowledge of Wittgenstein, which is minimal at best.
I think this is the point that Wittgenstein was trying to get across. That of ethics to be found in the ordinary deed done out of kindness or charity in everyday life.
This sounds like something Wittgenstein would say, viz., that ethics is to be found in the deed.
It was a comment posted by an unnamed author of this forum. I find it hard to disagree with either way, but, it's important to realize that it doesn't all come down to a brute realization of wants and needs. Wittgenstein "spoke" staunchly about the mystical (ethics) in the Tractatus. E.g the seventh proposition of the Tractatus.
I simply mean that language is a practice like any other: playing football, walking a dog, brushing teeth; to use language is to do something. And 'doings' are not specifically linguistic. Moreover they can only be made sense of in wider contexts that might involve everything from economics to power relations to biology and so on. Language is embedded in a world, and to understand language we must understand the world. Witty would capture this in his recourse to his reference to the form-of-life in which language-games operate.
A sociological and historical understanding needs to be brought to bear, that doesn't take for granted philosophy's own (IMO delusional) assumptions about itself, but addresses the rise of philosophy, and the reason for its defectiveness, non-philosophically. In the Western tradition specifically, this must be done with an understanding of how philosophy and sophistry are historically linked, and how Socratic philosophy began over puzzlement in strange ways of employing language, especially in response to the sophists' deliberately using language to conjure fallacies.
I don't know if you intended to address this point to me or Sam, but, given your range of "philosophical" problems not tied up with language problems, I'm guessing this is supposed to serve as an example?
The problem for me is that you seem to a) have a very wide definition of Philosophy, and b) have mostly picked examples from the very fuzzy edge of that definition.
From a sociological perspective, all that happened with the sub-groups of feminism achieving some of their goals was that they found a means of presenting their issues in a form which made those currently in power positions consider it expedient to their own agenda to resolve them (or stand aside and allow them to be resolved). It's a political game. Psychology, maybe; Game Theory, almost certainly (although probably not consciously so), but Philosophy? I don't see the function it served other than post-hoc rationalisation of that which was going to happen anyway as a result of the shifting power balance within the groups.
It won't. What it might do is get you to see that there is nothing further to be resolved. It's like one person describing the field as 'emerald green' and another describing is as 'like a sea of grass' and then you arguing with them assuming they therefore think the grass is blue. Both of you are describing grass, you're just picking out different aspects of it in your language.
You and the determinist are both describing the same experience of life. The determinist is not suggesting that it 'feels like' they are being controlled by the pre-determined forces of nature, neither is the non-determinist (of whatever persuasion) claiming that one's environment or history has no influence.
The point they disagree on is exactly the point at which actual experience ceases to provide any further data. It 'feels like' we have choices, but that's as far as we can examine it by self-reflection. The rest is just a more or less complex story of how we think that feeling might be generated by 'the way the world really is'. Like any story, different people will pick out different aspects, and like any description it is contained entirely in language, and is entirely a social act to communicate to another.
The point in highlighting the circularity of definition was not to undermine the concept of defining a word at all, but to emphasise how blunt a tool it is. The more synonyms you add to your definition, the more focus you bring to the concept, but you very quickly run out of words, the most you can do is take a vague concept and make it slightly less vague. The insight from Wittgenstein, for me, is to recognise the bluntness of language. It's not to throw out the whole project of trying to understand one another, it's to know when to stop.
As ever with these threads the debate gets quickly moved to people's pet issues and I realise I haven’t actually answered your question.
I was involved for a while in social psychology, mostly environmental ethics and child development, and it was at that time that I read PI. What I took from it was what I later found out to be the 'therapeutic' interpretation (I know, a psychologist reading a book and presuming therapy, who'd have thought it?). The way it influenced my thinking was to see a whole different way of looking at discussions between opposing views. Instead of seeing them as processes designed to reach some idealistic end goal, I started to think of them as stone masons trying to carve likenesses of their ideas but all they have is sledgehammers. You can definatly rough out something usefully resembling a concept, but you have to know when to stop otherwise all you end up with is a pile of rubble.
Its particularly true of child development issues. You have to know when to stop asking the child to further define their issues, and simply accept the rough sketch. In my experience, it usually much earlier than many psychologists seem to think.
My introduction to Philosophy of Language was Austin and Searle, followed by Davidson. My knowledge of Wittgenstein at that stage was tertiary. Years later I had the time to read Wittgenstein in detail, mostly with an eye on the tension between his language as use and Davidson's language as interpretation; and between natural language and formal language.
The great joy I had from PI was due to reading it as a set of tools more than for the content. Consider, for instance, "Don't think, but look" from ?66. It's just brilliant - as in, it illuminates what goes wrong in so much philosophical thinking.
The vast majority of philosophical problems derive from grammatical muddles; here I am using "grammar" in the broad sense of the structure of language and language games. Indeed I am tempted to say if it's not a grammatical problem, it's not a philosophical problem - it belongs to some other field.; That is, it is tempting to posit that philosophy is exactly the study of confusions of language.
What is philosophical in each of these issues is cleaning up and setting out what is being asked or claimed in each case. After that they reduce to physics, politics, economics or some other area of study; or to differences of opinion.
But I might be wrong about this; hence Quoting Banno
Well-said, but I'd put it slightly differently: philosophy isn't the study of such confusions, but the participation in / performance of such confusions.
I say this to emphasize that to get away from these issues, we must genuinely apostatize from philosophy. Wittgenstein, whatever his merits, was still a philosopher, and as a personality extremely ill-suited to the abandonment of the field. He is, if you like, a struggling Christian in various stages of retreat and denial. What is needed is a new generation to think about philosophy without being philosophers, in the way that we have scholars of religious texts who are themselves in no way religious. Philosophy is a field of linguistic error not to be engaged with on its own terms, but externally, from an understanding of language that itself owes nothing to the games that philosophers attempt, and fail, to play with language.
In this way, in the vein of David Stoves's 'neo-positivism,' philosophy itself offers us not a field to engage with, but an empirical laboratory for such confusions and errors – we see them forming, as case studies and as a broader social phenomenon, in real time.
Yes, I would definitely agree with this.
But often the fly enjoys being in the bottle.
Can you give an example of what you mean.
This seems, although I'm not sure, to go along with Wittgenstein's foundational ideas, or what appear to be foundational ideas.
Your post is the kind of post I'm looking for, i.e., the ideas that you gleaned from Wittgenstein. Some of you may have a different perspective, so it doesn't have to relate to Wittgenstein.
I'm not necessarily looking for debate, but having a debate about what's said is part of the process. I'm looking for your perspective in relation to philosophy of language, and it doesn't need to be from Wittgenstein's perspective.
Getting Banno to write more than a sentence or two is an achievement in itself. Maybe I should close the thread.
Yes, this is why I think philosophy of language is so important, and this seems to me to be a very important discovery about the philosophy of language. Maybe one can debate the idea that every philosophical problem is a language problem. I know I did leave open the idea that not every philosophical problem is a language problem, but in a sense it is.
Indeed; your work here is done.
This doesn't seem to fit the Wittgenstein I know, although I can see how you might think this from some of what he said. Wittgenstein definitely believed in the mystical, and he admired the writings of some Christians, like Kierkegaard.
No, just no. That's wrong.
Profesional philosophers have moved on, it seems; but then, they have to do something in order to convince others to pay them.
How to proceed?
I guess leave it up to Sam.
You, and those who agree with you, would explain and attempt to show how the philosophy of language encompasses all of philosophy.
Those of us who disagree would attempt to show that it doesn't. Assuming "philosophy of language" is defined in a definitive matter that means something more than just philosophy. IOW, that philosophy is actually the philosophy of language for any domain being discussed that falls under philosophy.
Preliminary: what is meant by "philosophy of language" and how would it be understood to cover all of philosophy?
Language seems foundational in some sense to philosophy, as per StreetlightX's comment, but then moves on as we learn to use it in these other subject areas.
Ya, this is a rather broad topic, but don't hold back.
My knee jerk reaction against Banno's claim is that it sounds like getting clear on how language is misused to create philosophical problems will either dissolve all those problems, or clear them up in preparation for some other domain like science to take over.
Which would mean that philosophy is a mistake.
added:
You realize that's a really, really strong claim, right? It's certainly worth discussing.
When I talk about philosophy of language I'm referring to a Wittgensteinian process, for the most part. Although I sometimes use linguistics to refer to some of the same things, strictly speaking linguistic philosophy is much different.
From the SEP...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/
"Philosophy of linguistics is the philosophy of science as applied to linguistics. This differentiates it sharply from the philosophy of language, traditionally concerned with matters of meaning and reference.
"As with the philosophy of other special sciences, there are general topics relating to matters like methodology and explanation (e.g., the status of statistical explanations in psychology and sociology, or the physics-chemistry relation in philosophy of chemistry), and more specific philosophical issues that come up in the special science at issue (simultaneity for philosophy of physics; individuation of species and ecosystems for the philosophy of biology). General topics of the first type in the philosophy of linguistics include:
"What the subject matter is,
What the theoretical goals are,
What form theories should take, and
What counts as data.
Specific topics include issues in language learnability, language change, the competence-performance distinction, and the expressive power of linguistic theories.
"There are also topics that fall on the borderline between philosophy of language and philosophy of linguistics: of “linguistic relativity” (see the supplement on the linguistic relativity hypothesis in the Summer 2015 archived version of the entry on relativism), language vs. idiolect, speech acts (including the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts), the language of thought, implicature, and the semantics of mental states (see the entries on analysis, semantic compositionality, mental representation, pragmatics, and defaults in semantics and pragmatics). In these cases it is often the kind of answer given and not the inherent nature of the topic itself that determines the classification. Topics that we consider to be more in the philosophy of language than the philosophy of linguistics include intensional contexts, direct reference, and empty names (see the entries on propositional attitude reports, intensional logic, rigid designators, reference, and descriptions)."
Maybe you could expand a bit on this, and on any of the comments made in that post.
It may now be an archaic term; if so, I suggest that is because it has been so widely accepted that by now doing philosophy by linguistic analysis is pretty much ubiquitous.
I can't help myself...
It seems like you haven't quite cured the itch yet. Maybe rub some more analysis on it.
But I suppose on your view philosophy could be seen as a necessary endeavor to clarify and dissolve or handoff certain kinds of questions humans have been tempted to ask the past 2500 years, at least.
Once the conceptual topology is set aright, what we are doing ceases to be philosophy.
So if we us fdrake's list, the question is whether all of those topics will cease to be philosophical once the right conceptual topology has been grammatically sorted out.
1. Philosophy of time: presentism, block universes etc.
So, our concept of time developed out of noticing that things change, and some of those changes are periodic, such that we can measure the change by days, seasons, etc. And then we can say that yesterday I went to the market, today I'm plowing the field, and tomorrow I will be marrying my cousin.
Now at some point (in time), somebody must have first wondered about yesterday and tomorrow. Do they exist? What is meant by that? It's easiest to understand by borrowing from science fiction, where a time machine enables travel to the past or future. In earlier times, magic or the gods may have been invoked to explicate the notion.
At some point (again in time), a debate would have developed where one side said yesterday and tomorrow exist in that you could visit them if you had some means to do so. But then the other side said that no, they don't exist. All that exists is the ever changing now. And from this you also get a debate as to whether the "flow of time" we experience is real or an illusion.
Fast forward to modern physics, and we have the implications of General Relativity with time dilation. Which leads some to suggest the 4D block notion of the universe, in which all points in time exist eternally, and the flow of time we experience is an illusion constructed by the mind.
Thats my attempt at explaining the issue. Someone else can give a more precise explanation with the actual philosophers who put the issue on the table. We know that as far back as Heraclitus and Parmenides, there were related disputes as to whether time was an illusion or everything was change.
For this discussion, can we dissolve the issue, or leave it up to physics by engaging in linguistic analysis?
But what would this mean? Presumably it doesn't mean seeing the world the way pre-philosophical people saw it, or the average person ignorant of philosophy who takes things as they appear. Although that's a bit harder today with the prevalence of science and various fictional concepts. Everyone knows about the Matrix and time travel, for example, and anyone a little drunk or high can tell you how time doesn't exist or the cells in our bodies could be entire universes, or whatever passes for profundity.
Well, here's how it might be done. The details are, of course, debatable.
SO let's go back to a word game from Austin, Quine and others. To say that something exists is no more than to give it a role in our language. So although "does time exist?" looks like a profound bit of metaphysics, it is also (only?) a question of language use.
Presentism says that we should adopt a grammar such that we don't give a role to future or past, but only to now (or something like that...). The block universe says we should adopt a grammar such that events occur in a block of space-time with Lorentz transformations to decide on their order from any given position.
Now, which of these is right? I'm not sure that question makes sense. Perhaps block universes are most appropriate for physics, and presentism for psychology. IF it's a choice of grammar, then it's like choosing to speak Italian in Rome and English in London.
This is a gross oversimplification, but there's my mooted PhD in a nutshell.
I'm going to disagree strongly with that. For starters, we say unicorns don't exist, but they do have a role in our language. But we do say horses exist, and they aren't simply a role in language, but are animals who don't need us to talk about them to be.
Quoting Banno
We do have a perception of change. That's not linguistic. It's why time plays a role in our language. We could invoke Kant here, or a physicist.
Well, a fish can dry out on land, so I guess you mean does a fish feel wet? Because certainly fish are wet in water.
As for what fish feel, notice that we do feel the air around us. I don't know that we have a word for it. Do we feel "aired"? We would certainly feel the lack of it in a vacuum. So I'm sure fish feel the water around them. Would not be very adaptable if they didn't. It's just that being wet is normal for them, like having air around us is normal for land animals.
Something like what it means to feel air around your skin, I suppose.
But this is already a grammatical error because horses and (the proposed) unicorns are both things, objects in spacetime which can either be there or not. To presume the same of 'time' is either to beg the question, or, as I say, make a grammatical error. The investigations of language can uncover that error.
I assume you know? Maybe we only notice it with a temperature change or air movement. But sure, a fish doesn't feel wet in the way we feel wet, I would assume. I'm not a fish, though.
Unicorns are not things in spacetime. They're fictional.
Sure. Note that the argument here is not about the details, but the philosophical method being used.
So when you say "But Unicorns do not exist", You are telling us about unicorns... or are you telling us about how we use the word "exists"? Why not both?
We do say things like "Only virgins can attract unicorns", and hence posit unicorns within some of the things we do with words - writing myths, perhaps, or children's stories.
So mapping out the topology of the word "exists" would be one way to sort through the conceptual issues around time. That's linguistic philosophy.
The concept is of a thing in spacetime such that we can look and see it isn't there.
Right, but change is in the horse category of being there, not the unicorn one of not being. Notice that you even use spacetime as the backdrop for seeing what's there.
Okay, so I think there is no disagreement that we do perceive change, events taking place, that sort of thing. And form this we have a notion of time which we can measure.
So it appears to us that things change, and we can talk of the before, during and after.
Is measurement special in some way?
No, change is not in the horse category, because we cannot simply look at it to see it exists, we cannot point to change, we experience it, which leaves open the possibility that we simply think we experience it. We must therefore describe the experience, and there, language becomes the framework which determines that definition. As such, an analysis of language gets at how we have constructed the experience of 'time' in a more complete sense than it gets at the experience of 'horse'. After we remove all the subjectivity about 'horse' something (probably) still remains. Once we've removed all the linguistic construction of the concept of 'time' nothing is left behind.
*Must. Resist. Mentioning. QM.*
Measurement probably means something exists to be measured.
That remains to be seen. But surely change is still left behind? Or are you in agreement with Parmenides that change doesn't exist?
SO perhaps unicorns exist, in that we can talk about them, but are not real; while horses also exist in the same sense, and in addition they are real. Arguing in this way is setting up a grammar about "existence" that distinguishes it from "real" in order to sort out the conceptual issues.
Sure, but are you only attempting to show how a linguistic analysis would proceed? I'm not doubting that you can analyze language for any philosophical position. They are stated using language.
What I'm skeptical of is that linguistic analysis will dissolve all the philosophical problems. Has the philosophy of time been successfully dissolved to your knowledge?
Sorry, my wording was ambiguous. I'm not making a claim about the existence of time, I'm saying that the entire experience of it is constructed in our minds, we cannot point to it, or bump into it. As such any attempt at inter-subjective analysis relies entirely on language (ie there is nothing left to analyse after language has been taken away). With the horse, after we take away the language describing our experience of the horse, there's still the actual horse.
Which is right?
The one that works.
Some issues have been, to my satisfaction.
And that's what counts.
Sure, and yesterday/tomorrow works well in language, but if I'm asking you as a philosopher as to whether to finish building the time machine in my garage, what would be your advice?
I'm sure some issues are amenable to this. Truth might be one of them. But all of philosophy? It only takes one exception.
Of course experience is in one's mind.
That's another example of sorting out a conceptual knot.
But not having found the solution does not mean that there is none.
Right, well we would need some metric for deciding which issues have been dissolved, which ones look dissolvable, which ones we're not sure about, and which ones remain resistant.
And also whether it can be shown that some problems can't be resolved this way.
Every now and then a neophyte comes along asking if time really exists. My Wittgenstein style joke is, ask me tomorrow.
After all, it doesn't exist unless it is measured...
Like claiming that mountains do not have a height until they are measured.
At he very least, i propose as a philosophical method, look at your words first and check what you re doing with them.
I recall that 100+ page long thread.
There is plenty for philosophers to do, in the details.
Yeah, if you're not going to actually follow the line of argument but just critique half-sentences to sound superior then there's not a lot of point in arguing. The sentence here specifies the entire experience of time, not experiences in general, and it is in the context of explaining how the term 'exists' can be used of unicorns differently to the way it can be used of 'time'. The experience we would expect of unicorns is one which interacts with our physical world, the world we sense. When no such interaction takes place, a term "doesn't exist" seems appropriate. Time is not a thing in the sense that we would expect some empirical interactions with it, as such "doesn't exist" is a grammatical error. It's simply not the sort of thing which is described by the term "exists" because it is entirely constructed in our minds rather than directly observable with our senses.
I've forgotten the context of this side debate.
Quoting ?????????????
That doesn't sound promising for resolving philosophical debates. Reminds me of mereology and sorites. Which along with identity I'm somewhat amenable to dissolving with language. Those seem more like what sort of concepts we want to use in various situations where the world doesn't care whether objects can have parts or how much they vary over time.
Cool. I have no access to the entire experience of time, and so I will have to take your word for it.
It's interesting to note though that science does provide new material for philosophy from time to time.
Well, if we're just focusing on the philosophy of time, it seems natural to me that humans would eventually start asking these sorts of questions.
But you have access to your entire experience of time, no? Is any of it available to other people via their senses? Or does the entirety of it have to be constructed in language in order to be inter-subjectivly analysed?
After having bumped into a horse, I can place it in someone else's path and watch them bump into it. My physical response matches theirs and so I have understood something about horses (you can't walk through them) without the need for language. I can establish horses "exist" in such a way. I cannot do the same with time.
The biggest challenge I see to your position is the ethics and how to live branches of philosophy. To borrow from Simon Blackburn, if I think fox hunting is wrong, and you think it's okay, how is analyzing language going to settle the dispute?
No, but my wondering about the nature of time has little to do with whether it's useful for getting to work. Not everything is of pragmatic concern. Sometimes we're just curious, or are feeling existential, mystical, high, whatever.
Yeah, but what is the argument here? At the very least, we want a scientific explanation of time. That still seems to leave some questions.
A horse was useful for travel. That didn't stop people from wondering how horses came to be. A linguistic analysis of how we used horses didn't help with that question.
Just so.
Quoting Banno
I set in bold the relevant piece.
Why think that the answer to our differences of opinion can be found by doing ethics? That there is an answer to "what should we do?"
But on the other hand, consider the way in which an analysis of "sentience" impacts on one's decision to eat meat. Or Martha Nassbaum's analysis of justice and disability. Clarifying our ideas might not lead directly to solutions, but it will lead towards greater coherence. See the thread I started on transgender issues, where I asked for help in sorting out 'male', 'female', 'woman', and 'man'.
SO to answer your question, it might not give us the answer we want, but it's not going to hurt.
No. The bits from before my third birthday remain sketchy.
You are in the way of a conversation I am having with March.
Fine. I wasn't aware that this had become a private forum.
Bedtime, anyway.
Whether a linguistic analysis of the philosophy of time can dissolve it, or leave it with the physicists.
Which would mean it's a mistake to ask philosophical questions about time. Either it's a scientific matter, or it's an everyday, practical matter.
http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html
Nah, I'm a scientific realist. Thus even though the sun is said to rise and set, the reality is that the Earth turns, and ordinary language is wrong, being based on a misleading appearance.
Science has the trump card over ordinary use. If science were to definitely say that time doesn't flow, then our experience and talk of it "flowing" is wrong. It would still be useful in everyday life, though.
Come on, we all know the origin of those words were based on how people thought the sun moved.
Quoting ?????????????
Sure it can mean that also, but that isn't the concern when asking questions about the nature of time or sunrises.
The point here being that showing how the words sunset or time is used in an ordinary setting doesn't help with ontological or epistemological questions regarding the movement of the sun or the nature of time.
I appreciate the respect in your apology, but I also respect the honesty in your original remark, so will back out. Thanks.
Presentism and the problem of future contingents:
But what if dog didn't do way instain mother? Dog is would be, maybe. But definitely dog wasn't. Would be isn't is and wasn't isn't is, can talk that. But only is is is! Therefore wasn't isn't is and isn't isn't was, and would be isn't is and isn't isn't would be. But isn't is maybe would be some of the time. Would be and wasn't isn't is.
(1) the problem that the present isn't temporally extended.
(2) Whether presentism requires there to exist a unique ordering of all events.
(3) The equivalence of the ordering in (2) with time.
Admittedly there's a lot of baggage which can be brought to the table. 'Temporal extension' reads a lot like the Cartesian sense of extension, which applies to substance, and time alone doesn't seem to be substantial. Regardless, intervals of time are well understood, the present understood as a duration 0 event makes it pretty hard to defend. This alongside whether presentism requires a single unique now or a plethora of unique nows depending on the spacetime geometry of the universe.
I think the interaction of the debate around presentism with the problem of future contingents is suspiciously 'language addled' so to speak. If I say 'it will rain tomorrow' now, and it does rain on the next day, 'it will rain tomorrow' is true. If presentism is true tomorrow doesn't exist, which (arguably) doesn't allow the lining up with the state of affairs which happens tomorrow with my statement. Then it can be analysed as 'It will rain tomorrow' will be phrased as 'It will rain (for some subinterval of time within the next 24 hours)'. I think once we start doing the conceptual analysis of phrases to dodge objections using our folk understanding of terms it should raise suspicions that what we're doing is moving language around rather than anything substantive.
I would also like to highlight that it's probably the case that it's easier to take a bad approach to a complicated problem, making 'language run idle', than it is for the problem itself to have 'must be treated with language on idle' as a property.
As do I! The only thing I'd add is that a coherent problem is a grammatically well-formed one. This does not mean the problem of time is 'merely' linguistic: it simply means that it meets the minimal criteria of being a problem that can be addressed at all. It's like saying: "all problems of vision are problems of light": in some sense, this is true and undeniable - but it is also misleading. The disjunction between "all philosophical problems are linguistic" and "philosophical problems are real" is a fake one: philosophical problems are real - are only real - when they have a well-formulated grammar that makes sense of them.
Sure, but that's a lot different than the claim that linguistic analysis can potentially dissolve philosophy problems across the board. That philosophical inquiry is itself an abuse of language. That philosophers for two and half thousand years have been misunderstanding language.
Regarding time, the question was whether a well-formulated grammar would show us that no such philosophical issues actually exist.
I don't know whether Wittgenstein though this was the case for all of philosophy, but some of his proponents have talked as if it were.
I agree. That's a bunch of wank.
Obligatory: In Soviet Russia, dog explains you!
It would take another thread to discuss it.
Does anybody understand Wittgenstein? :wink: :razz:
This is the most absurd claim I've read from someone serious in a long while. You're saying that a count of one (actual possibility) and a count of more than one (actual possibility) are simply different ways talking about the same cardinality? Your proposal rejects the Principle of Contradiction as well as basic arithmetic.
Quoting Pseudonym
No, this is not the case. The determinist is claiming, against Hume's analysis of necessity in time-sequenced causality, that the temporal sequence of my acts is necessary. I am pointing out that this claim is unjustified by experience, and so we have no reason to believe that my decision is necessitated.
This is neither a linguistic problem, nor one for which there is inadequate experiential data.
Quoting Pseudonym
No, again. "Feels" do not enter into consideration. Experience tells me that it is in my power to go to the store and it is equally in my power to stay home. So, based on experience, two (actually many more) possibilities are equally in my power -- which is my claim.
Quoting Pseudonym
No, it is not like a story. Stories are fictions, which means that they are not tied to our actual experience as philosophical analysis is. Yes, people project different aspects of reality into their conceptual space, but those aspects cannot contradict each other 9they cannot tell us that one is more than one).
How we communicate is indeed a social act. What we communicate need not be culturally or socially determined. The problem of free will, like most philosophical problems, is not about how we communicate, but about the adequacy of the thoughts we communicate to our experience of reality.
Quoting Pseudonym
Definition is only blunt if one is unwilling to look beyond the words to the reality they point to. If, instead of standing beside me, looking in the same direction as me, and trying to see what I see -- if, instead of that, one remains fixated on the words, seeing language not as a means of indicating intelligibility, but as a closed system, then yes, definitions are a very blunt tool indeed. When to stop is when the dialog partner is unwilling to try to see what one sees.
Wittgenstein is one of those philosophers who is fascinating because the very act of reading him seems to have something of a transformative effect on the way I thought after reading him -- even without fully understanding it. And the act of coming to understand him changed the way I thought about some problems. I'm aware of hermeneutic disputes with respect to Wittgenstein, so I am hesitant to say that I am one who understands him still -- because I couldn't confidently take a position with respect to these disputes -- but I have a big picture idea of his thinking, at least.
I'm also naturally resistant to his position, or at least what I take to be a general consensus about his position with respect to philosophy -- that the problems of philosophy dissolve with an analysis of language. In a way I see his philosophy as an examplar case of a lot of 20th century philosophy -- where philosophy comes under philosophical scrutiny -- and his challenge to philosophy is very strong evaluated by those same philosophical values. But even so I've found in my own thinking taking on his criticisms of philosophy as a practice in my own thinking.
So I suppose I see the philosophy of language ala Wittgenstein sort of in the vein that Kant saw his critical philosophy -- as a propaedeutic which outlines common pitfalls in thinking, but which doesn't quite live up to the claim that all the problems of philosophy are resolved through therapy. I'd say that that is more the result of another bad habit of philosophers -- overgeneralization.
Yes, because it's 'one' decision. If I talked about multiple piles of sand, and you spoke of just one big pile, would that be absurd? Is it absurd to say that rather than several oceans, there's only one big sea? There's dozens of situations where cardinality is not clear due to fuzzy definitions. Is a 'decision' to have vanilla ice cream rather than chocolate, or is the decision to eat the flavour you prefer, or is the decision whether to be the sort of person who eats their preferred flavour all the time? Unless you have a complete map of every firing neuron, you have no way of determining what 'decision' is being made. In addition, we don't even know clearly what making a decision is. If I consider all the options and then act in accordance with that balance, have I made a decision, or a calculation?
The way we define 'decision' dictates how we go on to talk about determinism.
Quoting Dfpolis
But don't you see how your 'experience' is not the same as others? Are you really so hubristic as to think that the way you experience the world is exactly as it is and not filtered by your own framework (most of which is built by language).
Quoting Dfpolis
No, it can't possibly tell you that because you only did one or the other. Experience tells you it was within your power to do whichever option you actually did. You can't possibly say whether it was in your power to take the other choice because you didn't try it. But this is not a discussion about free will. Sam has quite carefully asked to keep it on topic so I don't we should discuss this further (apologies if I've already taken it to far).
Quoting Dfpolis
Quoting Dfpolis
Do you realise how arrogant this sounds? Like anyone who doesn't agree with you just isn't trying hard enough. No amount of words can define a thing so accurately as to be assured that what is in your mind is faithfully transferred to mine, so if there's remaining uncertainty, why is it my fault for not trying hard enough. What else am I supposed to try, mind-reading?
I'm not talking about the count of decisions, but of possible actions.
Quoting Pseudonym
Of course I see that every individual has different life-experiences. That is not the issue. The issue is that no one has an experience base that can justify the determinist's view of causal necessity against the critique of Hume. Just as we can abstract away the details of what we are counting to come to an understanding of numbers, so we can abstract away the details of individual experiences of event succession to see the soundness of Hume's critique.
Quoting Pseudonym
I am talking about what we know before the decision, not what we know after (as you are here). We know what is in our power by seeing (1) what were were able to do in the past and (2) knowing that we have suffered no debilitation or other impediment since then.
Quoting Pseudonym
This is a nonsensical claim. It misunderstands the nature of potential. Many contradictory outcomes may be possible, not withstanding the fact that only once can be actual.
Quoting Pseudonym
It is not in the least arrogant. It is how I approach texts. I stand beside the author, trying to see what he or she saw and wants me to see. If you can't bring yourself to do the same, you're not entering into the spirit of dialog, only looking for sniping opportunities.
But how are they being used now?
That sounds interesting. What is it to have the property of being treated with language on idle? Not to be said, but to be shown?
How the words were used then or now doesn't help us when we want to know whether it's the sun moving or the Earth turning, or something else that accounts for the appearance.
With time, we want to know what accounts for the appearance of regular change, such that we can have yesterdays and tomorrows.
Cheers.
Methodologically, cleaning up language remains a good thing to do.
SUre. But asking to meet at sunrise is not about the sun moving; it's about when we meet. Talk of when to meet and talk of planetary dynamics are different.
Don't look to meaning - look to use.
You are right that there is an important issue here, one that stands open after Wittgenstein. It appears on the face of it that Wittgenstein thought language games to be incommensurate; I would argue, following Davidson, that we can't make sense of such incommensurability, and that what we ought do id be aware of which language game we are playing and look to the rules for translating form on to the other.
In the case at hand, it is a simple issue to move from talk of sunrise to planetary dynamics by employing that - admittedly not so simple - descriptions of physics.
from man and his symbols by CG Jung
This makes no difference. Exactly the same could be said of actions. What constitutes a single action determines entirely the count of 'actions' in any scenario. Is 'going to the store' a single action (count of one), or is it composed of several actions (get up, walk to the door, find keys...). How we define 'action' determines entirely how many such entities we count in any situation.
Quoting Dfpolis
Again, related to the topic, this depends entirely on what you define as an 'impediment' is not wanting to go to the store and impediment? If so, then we have in fact suffered an impediment since last time, we no longer want to go to the store. We have suffered the loss of our desire to go to the store. What if, in the meantime, I had suffered a debilitating phobia of stores? Would you say I was equally able to go to the store as I was before the phobia set in? No. So how much negative feeling about going to the store counts as an impediment? Slight fear? Minor displeasure?. It all comes back down to definitions.
Quoting Dfpolis
This is just a bare assertion.
Quoting Dfpolis
No-one's talking about my trying to see what you see though are they? How on earth do you know what I'm trying to do. We're talking about your prejudicial presumption that I'm not trying to see what you see simply on the basis that I haven't agreed with you. That I'm not 'entering into the spirit of dialogue' simply because I disagree with your points. That's the arrogance that I'm referring to. The presumption that I couldn't possible 'see what you see' and yet still think you're wrong.
Later: Oh, now I remember. DUH
I definitely will suspend belief when it comes to these statements. :gasp:
I'm wondering what philosophers have thought this? I know that in Wittgenstein's early writings (The Tractatus) he believed that the major problems of philosophy were a result of not understanding the logic of language (mainly an a priori endeavor). Moreover, in thinking he solved this problem, he thought that he had solved the major problems of philosophy, so this may be true of the early Wittgenstein. Are there others that you're thinking of?
Well said, I concur wholeheartedly.
You do, don't you!? :wink:
The logical positivists*? Carnap, Quine, Stove?
But I had fans of Wittgenstein in mind, not necessarily professional philosophers.
edit: *positivists not empiricists
This is not a sensible response. So, it is time to end this conversation.
I don't believe so.
It sounds to me like some people's interpretation, even in this very thread, of the later Wittgenstein is that he was trying to cure the philosopher in us from the need to do philosophy.
Well, Wittgenstein did believe that much of what passes as philosophy is just misunderstandings of the logic of language. This is seen from the Tractatus to On Certainty. There's disagreement over this, but I think Wittgenstein would say that if you can clear up the linguistic confusions, it will help clear up the philosophical muddle, and that will enable you to stop. I don't think he meant that all philosophizing would stop, I don't see how that would or could be the case.
I find more depth in Wittgenstein the more I read him. (We shouldn't sanctify him of course, he was in some ways a pretty unpleasant person) I've become interested in 'language games' and in particular how much talk about language assumes that monologue-style statements, as if spoken to oneself or written in papers, are the meaningful stuff of our language where we really really mean things.
There's a movement in sociolinguistics to consider dialogism as more important than we have previously considered - which potentially takes us back to Plato, but also feels present to me in much of Witt's later chunterings to himself, his uses of remarks in quotes by speakers whose identity we don't know.
An odd starting point for me is the sometimes rudeness or abrutpness of Siri and other a.i. assistants. And indeed of humans in call centres trained on systematic scripts. They don't understand 'dialogue' or 'conversation'. To me this means they don't understand 'language games'. They are underpinned by a philosophy that talk is 'speech acts': monologues delivered to audiences. - Whereas actual talk is exchange, conversation, a relation between humans that also involves gesture, mood, scent.
I think there are ways back here into some analytic approaches, e.g. Davidsonian interpretation, but I am trying to get my head round what the routes are.
I've wandered off into vagueness, just explaining where I've got to.
Good luck Mcdoodle on your masters. How old are you, if you don't mind me asking? I'm 68, in just a few days. Keep thinking it's good for the brain.
My own thinking is that Wittgenstein's methods can be used across a wide array of philosophical thinking. For example, in answering questions such as - what is reality, what is knowing, what are beliefs, objective and subjective ideas, and the very expansive topic of how meaning is derived, which goes to the logic behind the use of words/concepts.
However, to make the point some have already made, just because you get clear on the use of these words, that doesn't mean the problem vanishes. It does help clarify the problems. Many of the problems that disappear, aren't really problems in the first place. Some or many are just linguistic illusions.
I think the question of the importance of the understanding of language (over and above the mere ability to use it, obviously) to philosophy hinges on the question of intellectual intuition. When philosophers claim that abstruse metaphysics is 'language on holiday' this is grounded on the empiricist assumption that concepts such as, for example, 'infinity' and 'eternity' are not somehow directly intuitive 'graspings' of something 'beyond', but are simply arrived at by negating ordinary empirically derived concepts such as 'space' and 'time', and that they are subsequently reified as transcendent actualities.
So, in this sense philosophy of language, so-called analytic philosophy is firmly underpinned by empiricist assumptions which are themselves based on science and it's exclusion of the non-empirical, of any notion of the transcendent.
The problem for any transcendence talk would seem to be that its very indeterminacy renders intersubjective corroboration impossible; which makes it unsuitable for science and even for philosophy conceived as a search for determinate truth. If philosophy is conceived as being more akin to poetry than to science, then this problem of indeterminacy need not be so fatal to philosophical dialogue.
It all depends on what you think philosophy is, or on what you want it to be.
I’m not entirely sure this is true for science. Consider some of the speculative theories in physics, debates involving thought experiments, different interpretations of QM that physicists have come up with, the question of biological determinism vs contingency in evolution, and so on. Also, the widespread use of mathematics.
If science was exclusively empirical, we wouldn’t have theories. Unobservable entities like quarks wouldn’t be posited. There would be no laws or constants.
I don't exclude mathematics from the domain of the empirical. It is something we practice in order to discover determinate results.
The process of doing math is one of working with symbols in accordance with strict logical rules, in order to discover previously unknown results, so I count it as an experimental, and thus empirical, practice. I think the distinction you seem to want to make between conceptual and empirical is itself not free of certain assumptions.
I can see how applied maths is empirical, but not pure maths.
I thought empirical was perceptual. What you're talking about sounds deductive. Doesn't logic work the same way?
Which means, they don't understand context, and context is derived from culture, and so on. This is a fatal flaw in so-called AI. Which allows me to quote one of my favourite passages:
Logic, DNA and Poetry, Steve Talbott.
ThIs is spot on.
One of the tantalising characteristics of PI is the use of multiple voices; Wittgenstein writing down the dialogue he is having with himself. It's an unpolished book, and because of that it allows us a peek into the process of philosophising.
Much of the difference between the Tractatus and PI is summed up in saying Wittgenstein realised that there was more to language than monologue.
Not just context; we do things with words, and they do things to us; and it's a "we" not an "I".
It might better be captured by saying we are embedded in language.
Landru, is that you?
He actively encouraged his students to go and do something else - something useful.
But philosophy is a hard addiction to kick.
The plethora of angst-ridden self-doubt threads warn us of the expense of excess philosophy.
Who was David Stove?
Stove's Discovery of the Worst Argument in the World
A good read.
I hope that it's not impertinent of one of Stove's ex-students to say that I think he utterly failed to comprehend Kant (and Plato). I mean, very sharp guy in many respects, unfailingly courteous and encouraging to me - but he just didn't get it. (Actually I also knew Jim Franklin, who penned that article, whom I used to serve as a customer when I worked in the Campus Computer Store, and who published a very good article, in Aeon, on Aristotelian Realism.)
//ps//Incidentally the Who Was David Stove article says that ‘it will hardly do to dismiss Plato (“that scourge of the human mind”) and Kant (for example) as overrated poseurs’.//
Thanks Janus for your thoughts, your post is in keeping with the spirit of this thread. I was looking for both thoughts I agreed with and disagreed with.
Much of my thinking these days is focused on two subjects, epistemology (as it connects with Wittgenstein) and near death experiences. I've been reading a book called Longing to Know by Esther Meek, and her epistemology is very different from my own. The disagreements between Esther Meek's philosophy and my own are profound, as I believe our disagreements are. However, I think there are interesting points of overlap with her epistemology, and some of what you said. In some ways they're similar.
As someone who believes that we do survive death, and (by survive I mean that we survive as who we are, not just as energy, but as the person we are) that there is some connection between the two realities. Moreover, since it's my contention that consciousness is the unifying principle of the universe, and that we're all connected to this consciousness or mind, then there is a connection in some profound way between that mind and ours.
Just to be clear I don't believe in God in the traditional sense, nor are my beliefs connected with a particular religion, but I do believe there are mystical facts of reality (based on my studies of NDEs). Also, I don't believe language goes on a holiday when talking about some of these ideas, although, it probably does in some or many contexts.
As I said above, I think there is a connection between the two realities, viz., a mind-to-mind connection. How this takes place is a mystery, although I do have some speculative ideas. What I mean is that there are nonlinguistic beliefs or ideas that seem to be generated from a place of transcendence (to use your wording); and that these beliefs, ideas, intuitions, whatever you want to call them, are not language based. They seem to be thoughts generated from some kind of mind-to-mind interaction, and I believe there is evidence for this. And although they're not language based, they can be put into language, i.e., the thoughts can be transformed into language. So we're going from a place of metacognition, or as you say, the intersubjective, to a language based epistemological belief system. And I connect the two based on the idea of prelinguistic beliefs, of which many are empirical, but some are not. Some are abstract, and they get translated or transformed into our language-games. Thus, they become public.
The problem I had with Esther Meek's position is that she wants to claim that the metacognitive or intersubjective is a kind of knowledge, and here's where I disagree. I do think there are beliefs that are prelinguistic, but I don't think there is prelinguistic knowledge. I'm not sure we even have words that fit that transcendent reality in some instances. So although there is overlap, it's very difficult to describe because of the nature of language, and the nature of the reality in which we now reside. The tendency is to bring language into the transcendent, which I think can be done, but it doesn't always work. In cases where it doesn't work, I think we can say that language has gone on a holiday. What I mean is that certain words/concepts only make sense within the language-game of their residence, so we have to choose are words carefully. How we describe the transcendent is very difficult, but I do believe there is a flow from the transcendent to our linguistic world.
This is what I meant when I said there is overlap in some of our position, at least it appears so.
I don't see a genuine divide between the deductive and the empirical. How do we deduce, how do we know that a premise entails other things which may not be immediately obvious? I would say that deduction involves observation; it is thus a process of discovery. It involves observation in two senses: first the rules of deduction are observed, and second premises are examined in order to discover what is entailed by them. I think this is how mathematics evolves; it is thus a process of observation and empirical discovery.
I don't actually disagree with anything you say here: I reserve judgement about both an afterlife and about whether there is intellectual intuition. I also believe that there might be "a flow from the transcendent to our linguistic world", and that this may be shown in scriptures, poetry and the writings of mystics; my main point is that it cannot be counted as definitively corroborable knowledge, a point which, unless I have misread you, you also seem to be making.
We don't learn about logic or math from observing the world. They developed out of our conceptual reasoning. As such, they are a priori. Empirical knowledge is a posteriori. This has been recognized since at least Plato, even if it was put in different terms.
The distinction has not been universally recognized since at least the advent of pragmatism. It's by no means as uncontroversial as you are painting it. Are you aware that most of the pragmatists would disagree with you; along with C I Lewis, Quine (see The two Dogmas of Empricism), Davidson, Putnam, McDowell, Brandom and others?
We learn about maths from observing mathematical operations, which are part of the world. The separation between the mental and the sensual is useful at times, to be sure, but it is not absolute. For instance, how could we know (as opposed to merely accepting that it's true by definition) that
2+2 =4 if not by observing groups of objects? How would you discover whether 1,236,794,380,857 is prime or not without investigations that obviously involve the senses; seeing the symbols that you are writing on the page or typing on the screen, and so on?
We don't get numbers, operations or equations from observing nature. Two, plus and equals don't exist as objects anymore than a perfect circle or PI does.
We create symbols to express the ideas they represent. And we write these down or use tools like calculators because it's difficult for us to do complicated math and logic in our heads.
We also developed concepts like infinity, hyperspace, or counterfactuals. These don't come from sense data.
Mostly we wouldn't, but that's alright.
The cause of what we know, the states which cause a particular experience, are just distinct from the presentation of the experience of knowledge itself. Let's take 2+2=4.
In logical terms, we know that by experiencing the a priori mathematical concepts. If we were without these concepts, we would not have knowledge 2+2=4.
Yet, it is also the case this understanding was generated out of states of the body in an environment. In terms of causality observation might have been involved. My body might have generated my idea of 2+2=4 in response to me seeing a group of objects.
Even Kant acknowledged that although what is known a priori, say for example that visually detected objects will always have size and shape, does not depend on verification by subsequent experience, our knowing of it certainly depends on having previously experienced all such objects as being extended and shaped. In that sense it is a kind of a posteriori knowledge, just of the most universal kind.
Quoting Marchesk
So, I would say we do ultimately get all those things from observing 'external' nature; and this of course in conjunction with observing the nature of our mental processes; which are also surely part of nature, properly conceived.
It's undoubtedly true that there is, as you say, a "conceptual apparatus", but what is in question is the nature and origin of that conceptual apparatus. Must it have supernatural origins?
Sure, mental process are part of nature. The problem here is that mental processes can be about things that are not part of nature. Our understanding of the world can have mistaken notions. Our experience of the world can be mistaken. It's clear that problems arise between language and the world. Simon Blackburn called it a "loose fit" between mind and world. What constitutes identity? When is something a pile? Can you have non-simple objects? Are forms required for knowledge? Does time flow? Do we look out on the world perceiving things as they are? And so on.
Language does seem to bestow the ability to reify what are merely concepts, leading us to imagine that they are concrete entities.