Private language, moral rules and Nietzsche
The arguments against a private language have a more general form that argues against private rules. A rule that is only understood by one person does not count as a rule.
So can a person have private morals?
Morals are rules to live by; but if rules cannot be private, morality cannot be private.
So could Nietzsche follow a rule that was understood only by himself?
This, by way of attracting attention to a discussion between Reply to Janus and myself.
Now my guess is that this will become a discussion of the merits of the private language argument well before the end of the first page. That's not the point. Rather, if the private language argument is correct, is it compatible with an existential approach to morality?
So can a person have private morals?
Morals are rules to live by; but if rules cannot be private, morality cannot be private.
So could Nietzsche follow a rule that was understood only by himself?
This, by way of attracting attention to a discussion between Reply to Janus and myself.
Now my guess is that this will become a discussion of the merits of the private language argument well before the end of the first page. That's not the point. Rather, if the private language argument is correct, is it compatible with an existential approach to morality?
Comments (153)
If Nietzsche had his own set of rules to live by, and told no one what those rules were. then his set of rules would be understood only by himself. If he told someone what his set of rules were, then they would be understood, or at least known to, someone else.
I haven't been arguing that anyone could create a set of rules that no one else could understand, so unless you want to deny that someone could have their own private set of moral rules, it's not clear to me what we could disagree about in this connection.
Yes - that's the wiggly tooth I want to probe.
How does following one's own private rules differ from mere accident?
I can be diligent or occasionally lapse in my adherence to not stepping on the cracks, or wearing my underpants back to front, or that other thing I don't want to tell you; they are not accidents. I would think a better question would be, what makes them moral?
I tried to ask the hermit at the bottom of the garden, as he is the most moral person I know, but unfortunately, he has taken a vow of silence - either that or he just doesn't like me any more.
That seems false or arbitrary. I don't get why it wouldn't count. Just because you don't want it to?
Quoting Banno
That seems relatively insignificant if it's actually incorrect, though.
I don't not kick the puppy by mere accident. That's pretty darn absurd. I don't kick it because, in your lingo, I have a private rule. Why would you conclude, "It's a mere accident!"? :brow:
(Of course, my rule is not so private now I've told you about it).
Quoting Banno
It seems to me the decision making process is different as a purely psychological fact. Following a personal rule feels different internally.
You can stipulate that you're going to use the word "rule" so that it necessarily isn't something that pertains to just one person, but that doesn't say much except announce to us how you're going to use a term.
Quoting Banno
You can't have anything other than private morals. Just like you can't have anything other than private meaning. Morals and meaning pick out phenomena that only occur in brains functioning in mental ways (there's zero evidence otherwise), and there's no way to make that phenomena be something other than that.
The private language argument is not correct, by the way.
In other words, from an observer's perspective, if we pretend we're behaviorists, and necessarily we're talking about parsing behavior that we can't assume amounts to a rule, because it's apparently arbitrary.
But that's only when we stipulate/assume all of those things (and pretend they're all that matter).
Seems so to me as well.
Quoting Echarmion
I'd make what could potentially be more or less the same point, only worded differently. Perhaps a related point. The one influences what we do or don't do, the other just sort of happens accidentally. With one, I wilfully act in accordance with my rules, whereas with the other, I just act, and stuff happens, and if by mere accident, then I didn't mean it to. I mean not to kick puppies. I purposefully do not kick them. It's certainly no mere accident that I don't generally do this, except when I've lost my football. Let the play continue!
It seems a bunch of us are in agreement that what Banno was saying there seems to amount to a triviality.
If to follow a rule, in the sense of willful human actions, is to hold within one's mind a principle, and adhere to that principle, then all rules are private. If to follow a rule, in the sense of willful human actions, is described as something other than this, then I think it's likely that you have an incoherent description of what it means to follow a rule, in the sense of willful human actions.
My inclination is to say "yes" -- but with a hasty addition that if all we end up doing is the same, but with different words, then it's really hard to tell the difference between existential ethics from traditional ethics. So while I am inclined to say "yes", especially because the burden is just asking about possibility so it seems likely we could come up with some scenario where this all makes sense, it might also be the case that we're missing the point if we're formulating ethics in terms of traditional morality. ((I'm tempted to go on a tangent about Kant here))
But, as I understand it at least, I don't know if it is possible for Nietzsche to understand a rule all on his own -- if it's a rule then he is formulating it in a language. So if he understands it all on his own then it must be some trans-linguistic understanding.
Kinda wondering what the puppy did? :wink: no, your rule was not private when you did not kick the puppy and it became an external behavior. morals and rules are internal in that they are unique to that individual reality but exhibited by behavior externally.
I don't think he ever suggested such a thing. To relate to the private language argument, it would have to be a moral rule that even in principle can't be expressed.
From my viewpoint;
"So can a person have private morals?"
No, although the internal morals may be a way of managing information in response to and for the earlier emotive system, the inevitable result is behaviors exhibited. Often they are displayed through a series social interactions.
"Morals are rules to live by; but if rules cannot be private, morality cannot be private."
Morals and rules are not synonymous, Rules are often a codification of morals.However if any behaviors are the result any of the above then it is not private.
So could Nietzsche follow a rule that was understood only by himself? well perhaps theoretically yes, as a internal management categorization of information in response to the emotive mechanism.. The behaviors exhibited may result in no one else knowing what his morals are.
The following of rules requires a faculty or source of principles such that following rules doesn’t disempower the source of the rules. There can’t be such a thing as morality if rules are constructed without both the means and a reason to follow them. If there is such a source, and it is employed as intended, accident is prevented.
Enter deontology. Like it or not, subscribe to it or not, it does answer the question.
Curiously, he only directly refers to "private language" in three passages:
259. Are the rules of the private language impressions of rules?—
The balance on which impressions are weighed is not the impression
of a balance.
269. Let us remember that there are certain criteria in a man's
behaviour for the fact that he does not understand a word: that it
means nothing to him, that he can do nothing with it. And criteria
for his 'thinking he understands', attaching some meaning to the word,
but not the right one. And, lastly, criteria for his understanding the
word right. In the second case one might speak of a subjective understanding. And sounds which no one else understands but which I 'appear to understand'' might be called a "private language".
275. Look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself "How blue
the sky is!"—When you do it spontaneously—without philosophical
intentions—the idea never crosses your mind that this impression of
colour belongs only to you. And you have no hesitation in exclaiming
that to someone else. And if you point at anything as you say the
words you point at the sky. I am saying: you have not the feeling of
pointing-into-yourself, which often accompanies 'naming the sensation' when one is thinking about 'private language'. Nor do you think
that really you ought not to point to the colour with your hand, but
with your attention. (Consider what it means "to point to something
with the attention".)
259 appears to reject an a priori approach to understanding first-person phenomenology in terms of privately defined linguistic definitions (e.g. as in Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Husserl's Logical Investigations)
275 Nevertheless attributes a meaning of sorts to thinking of first-person experience in terms of a private language, namely "the feeling of pointing into yourself when one is thinking about private language"
269 Attributes sense to the notion of "private language" when referring to third-person behaviour.
Quoting Banno
Only according to Banno and Banno's Wittgenstein :)
Quoting Banno
But Wittgenstein stressed the very importance of ethical and aesthetic judgements and railed against the very understanding of aesthetics and morality in terms of linguistic convention. See Wittgenstein's Poker. He in fact rejected the utility and sensicality of reducing ethics and aesthetics to mere linguistic conventions.
To take a non-moral example, Wittgenstein didn't conclude that a private understanding of redness is impossible because redness is a term belonging to public language whose meaning therefore must refer to public convention. Rather, he concluded that one's private use of the word "red" within a language game cannot be given a meaningful a priori definition in terms of one's immediate sensations, due to such a definition being a circular tautology that is superfluous to, and likely unrepresentative of, one's actual private use of "red", as well as saying nothing informative to oneself or others.
This doesn't rule out a person discovering, a posteriori , an implicit rule that he discovers to be descriptive of his actual private word usage, only that such a rule cannot be the prescriptive force of his use of the word, due to Humean considerations that reject the platonistic conception of logical necessity.
One of the many problems with the private language argument is that it's not at all clear what "in principle understandable" versus "in principle not understandable" would even amount to. (And of course I'd have to pretend that something is going on re understanding that is very different than what I believe is really going on).
This strikes me as nonsensical. One cannot give a "meaningful definition" a priori to an immediate sensation because it would be a tautology (so what?) and unrepresentative (that wouldn't imply that you can't do it) and uninformative (again so what?)
It's important o see that this is not a criticism, since it doesn't point to some contradiction in their ideas.
Quoting Moliere
Go on.
A tedious read.
According to the private language argument following a private rule is incoherent. There could be no criteria for doing so.
SO that's the direction here.
There can't be private criteria for the private rule because?
What exactly do you mean by "private rule" though? A rule that no one else could understand, or merely a rule that no one else does understand because they have not been told about it. I've asked you to answer this question before, and you seem reluctant to do so.
What I'm talking about is a private rule which is obviously understood by the one stipulating it in the terms of some common language; in other words it is private only insofar as others have not been told what it is. I stipulate that because I agree that it would not be possible for anyone to develop an entirely private language, since to understand, and even to develop in the first place, that new language, the inventor of it would need to translate it into some common language that she was already familiar with.
Try to imagine for a moment that for Nietzsche "criteria for correctness" were irrelevant. It's just like aesthetics where there can be no definitive criteria for correctness. It would be a matter of what feels right, and that could be different for each individual. Probably not all that different within the class of individuals who are capable of feeling compassion and empathy, though!
The issue there, though, just becomes whether it would be possible to develop some personal cryptographic code that no one could crack. I don't know how we could know whether it's possible "in principle" or not, which is why I said this earlier: "it's not at all clear what 'in principle understandable' versus 'in principle not understandable' would even amount to." How would we know that some cryptographic code is in principle not crackable versus it simply contingently being the case that no one has been able to crack it yet? (And we can ask the same thing a la "How would we know that some cryptographic code is in principle crackable but just no one has been contingently able to crack it yet?" )
It strikes me as one of those things where people are ("subconsciously") like, "Yeah, understandable versus not understandable 'in principle'--that sounds all nice and fancy and philosophical, like we're saying something rigorous and important," but when you ask anyone what the heck the difference amounts to, how we can discern either, all they can do is more or less go, "Duh . . . I dunno
1) Does it wind up contradicting itself if every moral actor follows it? If no then go to 2 --
2) Are you motivated strictly from a sense of respect for the moral law when you act on such and such a principle? If yes then moral, if no then at least legal but not moral.
which allows for a greater range of actions than a lot of moral systems before Kant.
Now where Nietzsche differs is probably on the emphasis on 1 -- the possibility for universality isn't as important to Nietzsche. But what Kant did is articulate a way of ethical thinking that allowed an individual to act on their own conscience in spite of whatever surroundings they may find themselves in -- so your society may believe that such and such is good, but as long as you believe otherwise and you are acting out of respect for the moral law and everyone could theoretically adopt your rule then your action is moral.
In other words he articulates a way for moral rules to be private in a particular sense -- if not quite in the sense I take the private language argument to mean when it describes a private language.
What's really interesting about Kant's rules is that what makes them moral is not the rule, though the rule must actually pass some formal criteria, but the motivation behind an actor's act. So we can have several persons who are following the same rule, are acting in the same way, but only the person who knows in their heart of hearts that they are doing it out of respect would know that their action is moral (at least if they are Kantian, of course).
Hence why this all opens up thinking, or perhaps serves more as a propaedeutic, to existential ethics -- it's about one's relationship to a rule, and its motivation, and largely excludes our social milieu. Nietzsche just takes this line of thinking further, absent its reliance on theological underpinnings (which are pretty obvious whenever we read Kant, even if his formal theory does not rely upon theology).
So this gets back around to, in my mind, on just what we mean by private or public -- because a private rule by Kant is still, in principle, articulatable (oi, I butcher the language so), even if it is not shared. And though it be articulatable we can have no behavioristic criteria for determining if an act is moral, though we can check if it follows the rule.
(a few edits for clarity)
I think if you already knew a language, say English, then you would simply translate all your terms into English, which would mean that your new language, insofar as it was intelligible to you, would also potentially be intelligible to other English speakers, and hence not truly "private" in the strong sense I am guessing @Banno is concerned with.
On the Nietzsche side of your question, following rules "only understood by oneself" relates to the differing opinions about his notion of the personal as a result of "perspective."
Some have objected to his use of the term perspective because his critique of the objective should not permit him to relate different points of view in a shared space. Others emphasize that the drives competing for dominance exist and Nietzsche was trying to be an accurate reporter of what those things are.
Being a philologist, Nietzsche's use of terms was not personal but fraught with double and triple meanings. He constantly demanded that his readers know as much as he did. His audacity to say what was most important to the philosophers he praised and criticized is a testimony to a non private language.
There are remarks made by Nietzsche that point out that rules are often used to justify decisions after they are made. That is a lot like observations made by La Rochefoucauld regarding a person always needing to appear righteous to oneself and others.
Maybe Nietzsche is not just one thing.
This is not a case of that person following a rule though, it is a case of the person's choices following a rule. So you cannot proceed from this premise, that the person's choices follow a rule, to make any conclusion about whether or not that person is free. That is why it is necessary to determine what it means for a person to follow a rule, before we can make any conclusions about the person's freedom. The person might have freely chosen to follow a rule in making those choices.
A rule that cannot be stated. I really have no idea how such a thing could be made coherent. SO I guess we can leave that aside.
A rule that might be stated, but hasn't been.
Suppose I decide that I will tailgate any car such that the numbers on its plate add to a prime.
TO someone observing, it might seem that I am tailgating vehicles at random; and hence not following any rule.
But if they were to look closer, it might turn out that those drivers I tailgated just happened to have Slavic ancestry.
So was the rule I followed that their number plates added to a prime, or that their ancestry was Slav?
That's not what the private language argument is about though. It's about a language that can't be translated.
So an act's being moral is hidden, private - and hence irrelevant. Between you and your maker, I suppose.
The private rule is that one ought act with moral intent. But could you even know if you had done so? Perhaps your memory is mistaken, and you did not intend to act morally, at the time, even though it now appears to you that your intent was moral.
This happens. We justify our actions post hoc.
And if this were so, we could never know if our actions were moral.
You can only follow a rule that involves criteria of which you were aware at the time of applying the rule I would say. If you knew that the numbers on the plate added to a prime, and you acted accordingly then that was the rule you were following. You didn't formulate a rule with Slav ancestry as criterion, and you didn't know the drivers were of Slav ancestry, so.....it could not have been the rule you were following.
Which rule was I following?
PI p.207e
So how can morality be a private object?
What I was addressing was whether a private language is possible or not (and per the manner in which the "private language argument" is usually construed). The way the argument is usually construed, the claim is that a private language isn't possible. I'm challenging that, under some of the common assumptions (under some uncommon views, such as my views about language, meaning, etc., we might say that all language is private in some regards).
The same goes for assuming it's public. Assume the object constantly changes, but everyone's memory constantly deceives them.
Both criticisms are of course making the additional, curious, assumption that languages can't obtain if what they refer to constantly changes, where the users of the language aren't aware of this.
Are we pretending to be behaviorists for some reason? (So that we're pretending that the person didn't have something in mind?)
I don't think I'd go so far as to say that its being hidden makes intent irrelevant. Though between you and your maker I believe is the inspiration behind such thinking, there is also an aspect to this which makes one question themselves and ask what it is they are really acting from. Did I do this out of love for someone, or did I do it out of respect for some rule, or did I do it because I thought it might benefit me? These aren't all necessarily exclusive of one another, but the intent behind an act is important to deciding if I'm coming from the right place or not -- and thus whether or not I should continue acting in such-and-such a manner (if I happen to believe that such-and-such is subject to moral deliberation, at least)
This line of thinking made me think in three different directions.
In one direction I would say that self-knowledge is in some respect different from knowledge of the world. I am not an object in the world, after all, and though I can certainly be wrong about myself -- and I agree with you that we do come up with post hoc justifications all the time -- the same sort of scenario can be brought up with respect to knowledge of the world. Perhaps we can have self-knowledge, but just as with knowledge of the world, that knowledge lacks certainty or has certainty coming in degrees or in different respects.
In the other direction my thought is that sometimes we do know others very well -- sometimes so well that we know others, at least in certain respects, better than they know themselves. Think of the knowledge a parent has of a child. The relationship is so intimate and long-term that the parent comes to know the child's intents. They can, of course, be wrong about this. And I'd say that the way they come to know these things differs from the way we come to know about ourselves. But the upshot here is that this sort of knowledge is not a knowledge of rules, but of intents and desires.
And, lastly, another line of thought was that perhaps we do not know our actions are moral after all -- at least in a theoretical sense. In a practical sense we can know, and this sort of knowledge is the knowledge of doing. But it's not the same as both being righteous and knowing one is righteous -- so it may actually be appropriate to say we never know that our actions are moral, though we do ponder it, interrogate ourselves, think about our intents, and do the best we can.
I recognize that all three of these thoughts are not necessarily compatible. I just shared them all because I couldn't really decide which course of thought was best.
It is possible for Nietzsche’s public conduct to be guided by private rules, but I think that the error has already been made if one thinks that for Nietzsche what is at issue is rules of conduct. What we should focus on instead is values, and this in terms of self-overcoming, the will to power, and the creation of creators.
The issue is that these "private" rules aren't private in the sense that Wittgenstein meant by the word. A private language for Wittgenstein is a language that nobody else can understand, whereas anyone can learn what it is the Übermensch values and check for consistency in his behaviour.
Nietzsche's view is just that the Übermensch can look at some "herd" morality like Christianity, disagree with their claim that "the meek shall inherit the Earth", and instead decide to value strength.
This "transvaluation of values" just doesn't seem to have anything to do with a private language, and so this discussion seems confused from the start. You might as well try to argue that, according to Wittgenstein, I can't have a private life. I can – and do; it's just that what "private" means in this context isn't what it means in a Wittgensteinian context.
Sure. I think we can all acknowledge that the thinkers are different.
But there is some resonance between these ideas too.
For one, freedom -- under a certain conception of freedom we do not follow rules. So by describing actions as being not-articulatable we could be saying that the ethical is that place in life where language can no longer operate -- that its in the showing, and not the saying, where our actions are free insofar that they do not follow a rule.
For two, one way of reading Wittgenstein is to focus on his interest in ethics -- compare his notion that ethics and aesthetics are one to Nietzsche, or that goodness is not found in the world to Nietzsche. You could almost say that Wittgenstein is struggling with the same problems of value that Nietzsche is, though they do go different ways with it of course.
And then there's rule-following as a traditional way of looking at ethics, of which Wittgenstein certainly has something to say and Nietzsche has something to say about rules.
They aren't talking about the exact same thing. But there's some interesting parallels to be drawn.
EDIT: It just occurred to me to mention this so it's in an edit -- but wasn't Wittgenstein also influenced by his readings of Schopenhauer?
Behaving in a systematic, rule-guided way does not appear to be a characteristic he admired. Being admirable, was. Thanks for your contribution.
Quoting Michael
Just. Doesn't the Übermensch reject any rule-following in order to achieve greatness? And isn't the will to power more than mere strength? If the Übermensch decides that apple trees are important, and spends his life planting apple seeds with no regard to others, he expresses the will to power as well as any monarch.
Isn't it more that is can't be useful?
Quoting Michael
But any behaviour can be made to match any rule. Just play with the constraints.
Further, the Übermensch need not be consistent.
Which has nothing to do with Wittgenstein’s private language argument. Wittgenstein argues that there cannot be a language that only one person can understand and Nietzsche argues that we should decide for ourselves what to value and how to behave. There’s no connection and so no issue of incompatibility.
That's philosophy.
Your world is too neat.
Isn't the reason it would not be useful because it would not convey meaning?
I think Witt's point was that the concept of a private language doesn't make any sense. So it wouldn't be useful because it can't exist.
I don't Nietzsche is your boy. He knew people who live by master morality become assholes who exploit others and fill the world with sorrow. Whatever the ubermensch is, it's not that. I think you probably want Trotsky.
Trotsky (may he rot in hell) was what you think Nietzsche advocated. He had no morality. He believed morality is for the little people. He was a big person who can intentionally start famines and then send the army into the countryside to kill peasants and take the little bit of food they hid away.
Do you think he had a private language?
I agree. I said:
Quoting Fooloso4
Quoting Fooloso4
But I was responding to the question in the OP:
Quoting Banno
Assuming that Nietzsche is following a rule we might not know what that rule is simply by knowing what he values. The fact that no one else can understand it does not prevent him from understanding and following it. I brought up the example of games for this reason. It is a game that no one else can play. Language games, on the other hand, can never be played by private rules, that is, they cannot have a grammar known only to me because no one would not how words were being used and what they meant.
Quoting Michael
Again,I agree. My point about values was:
Quoting Fooloso4
What happens when you encounter a vehicle with numbers that add to a prime, and whose driver is not of Slav descent? What will you do? In other words, the rule you are following is the one you think you are following.
You haven't answered as to how you could overcome the difficulties involved in establishing a private language in the strong sense I outlined in the passage you responded to.
I already covered more or less the same points and asked for a response from Banno; and surprise, surprise!...he didn't respond.
At least you got a response:Quoting Banno
Not a relevant or satisfying one, though...
I didn't get into details because there would be many different ways to do it--it just depends on the person's imagination, ingenuity, etc.
Also, we wouldn't necessarily need thousands of words. It might just be a handful of things.
They could simply come up with novel letters or other symbols or sounds, or even just mentally picture the same--it wouldn't have to be expressed to anyone else, and then think about what they're going to use the letters, sounds, etc. to stand for. They wouldn't have to translate that into some other natural language, though they could if they wanted to, perhaps. And it could be done for any level of abstraction or concrete reference.
I'm not convinced that any of what you suggest would be possible, except maybe for the most rudimentary language. In any case the possibility cannot be tested, so there would be no point arguing about it.
I am not sure about the first part. He celebrated discipline and "orders of rank." His fight against Christianity took the form of denying the "personal" as a refuge from the world of transactions. He insisted that such a withdrawal was also a transaction. The remarks about the nature of a "bad conscience" focus on how it is used to influence outcomes while acting like it is not acting like that.
I propose looking at what he considered to be evidence in a different light from the conclusions he drew from it.
This is a neat rendering. The point of behaving ethically is not to say but to show.
But if that's so, how important are moral rules?
Can we Do without them?
Okay, it's not private if you interpret that in your weird behaviourist way which has the obvious massive failing of not being able to rightly distinguish between someone just [i]acting as though[/I] such-and-such, on the one hand, and genuine cases, on the other.
Quoting Aadee
He was a behaviourist.
False. They could be correct or incorrect by his own standard. You seem to be merely begging the question by assuming the necessity of a different standard, whether that standard is relative to Banno's standard or relative to "an objective standard", which in practice amount to the same thing. It's no coincidence that Banno judges kicking puppies to be wrong, and that he also almost certainly thinks that kicking puppies being wrong is part of an objective moral standard. What would a moral objectivist who judged kicking puppies to be right think in this regard? Hmm, I wonder...
It reminds me of what Xenophanes said:
Obviously, the Ethiopians, the Thracians, the hypothetical oxen, the hypothetical horses, the hypothetical lions, and in fact everyone but Banno, are all simply wrong. Banno has godlike impartiality here.
Speaking of Nietzsche, didn't he say a thing or too about moral prejudice, and the prejudice of philosophers? That's a good quote, too.
But, of course, we know that Banno denies this criticism on a superficial basis because I'm using the word "objective".
Because Banno says so. I think that that's his argument. Perfectly reasonable, no?
Quoting Banno
Wait. Is this a joke? It's the former, obviously. The rest of what you said about Slav ancestry and an observer is irrelevant.
Isn't this just like: suppose there's a cup in the cupboard, but we can't see it. Is there a cup in the cupboard? (Yes).
How about a beetle in a box? A puppy in my torture chamber?
Yes, yes, and yes again. I named the puppy "Little Banno", by the way.
What do you think might make it impossible?
While they weren't languages of just one person, we do have examples of languages that no one has been able to crack yet:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/12884/8-ancient-writing-systems-havent-been-deciphered-yet
What would be the reason that an individual couldn't devise a language in the vein of those?
Will we ever crack them? I don't think there's any way to know the answer to that. Hence my comments about the untenability of the "in principle" criterion above.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Fooloso4
There's a slight ambiguity here. There's a difference between a rule that only Nietzsche understands and a rule that only Nietzsche can understand. The former isn't analogous to a private language as a private language is a language that only one person can understand and the latter isn't anything that Nietzsche claimed to be the case.
So, again, Banno's suggested incompatibility between a private language being impossible and Nietzche's approach to morality comes from nowhere. And even Banno has suggested that Nietzche's approach to morality has nothing to do with rules at all ("private" or not), which makes the OP even more nonsensical.
Perhaps there could be a language that works as a one-time-pad encryption of English (or any other language)? Would require a perfect memory but in principle I think it would count.
Why would memory even be relevant to the issue though?
There's an assumption something like "it's not a language if it can't be used just the same way over time (from an objective perspective)." Where in the world is that assumption coming from?
Let's say I use a one-time pad to encrypt the word "Michael" as "Fpgyamy". If I don't remember this then I won't understand the word "Fpgyamy" when I re-read it.
One possibility is that you do understand it when you read it the later time, but you assign "Joe" to it (or whatever). In other words, just because you assign a different referent to it doesn't imply that you don't understand it.
But that's irrelevant anyway. Why isn't it a language if you don't understand it on the later occasion? Where is the requirement coming from that in order to be a language, you have to understand it in perpetuity?
Imagine that some virus strikes Earth that rapidly spreads and gives everyone a cognitive fog. A symptom of it is that there are many words in all natural languages that no one understands any longer.
Did we not have languages in that case?
These "words" would no longer be words in that language; just random scribbles and sounds.
That's fine, but weren't they words in a language prior?
Yes. They were words when they meant something to the people who used them, but now that they don't mean anything to anyone they're just random scribbles and sounds.
Sure. So that the private language creator doesn't remember, so they can't understand, some word in their private language at a later date doesn't imply that there wasn't (and so can not be) a private language.
Per my analysis of understanding, can there be an expressed private language (where the expression is ever made public) that can't be understood by someone else? No. But understanding on my analysis doesn't imply having the same meanings in mind. (And it's important to remember that on my view, meanings are different than definitions; meaning is a type of mental activity that's not identical to sounds we can make, marks we can make, things we can point to (taking something to be pointing requires mental activity in itself at any rate))
I don't want to speculate why. Why would you say it's a load of rubbish?
Acting as just believing something as compared to genuine cases of believing in something i assume. It is not the weird behaviorist way but the weird "information universe" way of looking a things. Anything that can be observed or in any other way deduced through any information gathering method, means or device is simply information identified.
There is no reason a person might not have an internal language that the individual uses to manage and process information. Of course externalizing would or does require translation to a.language/format that can be understood by the target audience.
When a person adopts any set of internal values what they are actually doing is determining a structure for identifying and using information (especially how to use this information)- and particularly information that fits within the structure and confines of that determining value set. Morals as being referred to in this discussion are no more then a variation on the same basic concept, and can be created or adopted through any number of information gathering means...IE internalizing from information received directly like reading or information received that initiates a response from the earlier emotional information management system, among many others. The universe does not discriminate between "good or bad, right or wrong information" it is just information. Conscious beings however tend to seek out information in a way and that fits in or supports the ways and means of information gathering that has been successful to that point in time. Often expressed as belief systems. Information received or being received by genetic information sources all the way to the confines of a morality structure influence this, as well as continuing feedback from the universe including the feedback of other conscious beings. Even the scientific method is an example of this...
information gathering through the use of the scientific method has been very successful at finding or determining and therefore predicting to a very high degree information relating to our universe. It is still limiting in that it only accepts information that fits within its structure, confines and format. Does the scientist truly believe in the scientific method or does he just portray it?
My point is that it does not matter, and that as we all inhabit our own separate realities, impossible to determine anyway. What does matter is the behaviors, methods, even the info being search/offered are successful and can be provided in a format acceptable to the society the person is a part of.
So the second part as in understand your post is that a person professing an adherence to a set of morals, religion, ect. that internally the person does not accept itself. This presumably then allows the person to access information in a way that otherwise would be confined or not be acceptable or could cause a threat that person. Since i believe a primary function of life is to find and use information, the mere threat of a loss/constriction of information is a powerful inducement to externalize the behaviors most conducive for that to not occur. It is impossible to know what exactly Galileo believed or what his internal information management tools were or what role symbolic interactionism could have played out in his survival. What is clear is that the information he was trying to communicate threatened his existence and threatened his ability to continue to gather/manage information in a way that had been successful for him to that point. Regardless of his internal belief system Galileo spent the rest of his life exhibiting the behaviors and presenting information in a format that fit the expectations and confines of the larger society he was part of. Ultimately to the detriment of the society as its own confines made it unable to readily assimilate and use the info Galileo was providing. In the end though the information Galileo was presenting changed the society.
The weird Information Universe.
Do you believe that one person could create a complex alternate private language without using the public language they already speak? I don't believe such a thing would be possible, but as I said, there would be no point arguing over it, since the possibility or impossibility of such a thing cannot be definitively demonstrated.
The point is that if the familiar public language were employed in the creation of an alternate language, that alternate language would not be "private" in the sense stipulated by the so-called private language argument.
Well, then we would see. But your conclusion does not follow. One can think one is following a rule and yet not be. What is going on in ones head will not suffice to demonstrate rule following.
This is not too far form free will, either. If one follows a rule is one acting freely?
All examples of rule-following will not be subject to exactly the same logic, that is there is no essence of rule-following just as there is no essence of game-playing. So, let's just stick to the example you gave. You have decided to follow the rule that you will tailgate a car if the numbers on the plate sum to a prime. You also knew (leaving aside the question of how this could be possible) that all the cars you tailgated were driven by people of Slavic ancestry, and you ask yourself "which rule was I following?".
Well, the answer is given by your answer to the question "what will I do when I encounter a car that satisfies the number criterion but not the ancestry criterion, or vice versa". What you decide you will do will show which rule you were following, and if you had decided to follow the number rule, then the answer to what you will do (provided you keep following that intention) is obvious. Do you want to say that you cannot decide to follow a rule?
A family resemblance of rule-following?
Cool!
Why can following a rule not be understood only by oneself (as opposed to understandable only to oneself)? Explain your reasons for thinking that (if you do think that) and we might get somewhere.
Yes, why not? If the notion of essences is rejected, then the "family resemblance" idea would seem to be the only contender to take its place everywhere.
And others...
The discussion could involve both cases; after all both are mentioned in the PI; but also we are not here restricted to the PI.
Your interpretation fo the OP was literal - your forte. The questions I wanted to talk about are a bit more general. I'm taking morality to be rule following. I'm thinking of certain types of rules, those with a structure such that if someone finds oneself in a specified situation, one ought act in a specified way. These are rules which have a direction of fit such that the world is made to conform to the words.
And it seems that this approach has hit a chord with some folk, if not with you.
One approach might be to consider an action that results from a certain private sensation. When I feel [i]that sensation, I will do such-and-such.[/i] I think it clear that this wold fall to the incoherence set out by Wittgenstein.
Nor could this count as a moral law; it could have no general application, such that anyone who finds themselves with that sensation must do so-and-so; because the sensation is by definition private.
New keyboard; it's a bit small.
Oppose this to a public sensation... say feeling shame. When one feels shame one ought seek vengeance.
This could count as a moral principle. But in being so, it places a restriction on this who follow it. In Nietzsche's case, I puzzle at whether this restriction would be acceptable. Would he accept submitting to the power of such a rule? I think not.
So Nietzsche can't follow private rules; and he can't follow public rules.
Moreover, we need to be able to evaluate such norms in order to decide which ones to live in accordance with. This requires an ability to treat norms as an object of discourse, a topic of conversation, and not just a fundamental constituent of discourse.
I'm following Wittgenstein. As I said at the beginning of this thread, I'm going to take that for granted. I'm not interested in defending or rearguing the private language argument here; there is plenty of stuff elsewhere for that. That's why I'm ignoring @S and @Terrapin Station and anyone else who wants to go down that path. Getting bit of depth in a discussion means taking some things as moot.
So go look at the Wiki argument on private language. I wrote much of it, anyway.
We'd have to define "complex," but I don't see why someone couldn't do this.
Private language arguments would need to specify and define "complex" languages if what they're saying is limited to that.
Quoting Janus
Yeah, demonstrating it via a specification of a private language that other people are going to understand (at least on the conventional assumptions) isn't going to work, but demonstrating or verifying something is different than whether there can be that thing--unless we've all turned into party-line logical positivists all of a sudden (which would be a bad idea in my opinion).
On my account of language, though, arguably language is private period--or at least important aspects of it are.
The same goes for other existential approaches. I have some sympathy for the view sometimes set as existence precedes essence, although I think that badly phrased. Becoming involves choosing one's own standards, yet for reasons explained, those standards cannot be private, and hence involve accepting public restrictions.
And it's this that I want to fill out in this thread.
Languages are not private; this is true simply on account of the fact that their origins and evolution are public. A completely private language would have a completely private origin and evolution, an origin and evolution that depended not at all on any publicly originating and evolving language.
That just seems impossible to me: and the only way you will convince me otherwise is to give an account of how a language could originate and evolve in the mind of just one individual, and completely independently of any public language the individual already uses.
For your account, start simple. I have already said that the individual that wishes to produce a completely independent private language could draw or even visualize the objects that the common nouns of the new language are to refer to, but how would they specify what pronouns or articles, for instance, are to refer to?
There's no point saying you think something is possible for a human being, if you cannot even begin to give an account of how it could be achieved.
Morality has no bearing on a non-volitional action. If one can make decisions, why couldn't one follow one's own rules? One could keep track of the rule by writing it down and verify conformance by recording some sign. These are things we routinely do anyway.
Going back to this... what Moli said applies further afield than just Kant. Following a moral rule is seen in the doing, not the saying, and yet we cannot infer the rule from the act.
I'm going to adopt, at least as a first position, the view that following the rule as stated is irrelevant to the act being good.
SO I am going to separate out an act's being good from an act's following a rule.
Let's see how that goes.
Why couldn't they simply think about what every symbol of their devising is going to refer to?
All of which makes the rule public.
Context? Becoming (what/in what context?) involves choosing one's own standards?
I had a friend who killed someone in a car accident. It seems they were stung by a wasp and lost control. Nevertheless they were held responsible for the result.
So...
Will that thinking be done in their native language? If not, then how else?
It could simply be relational and not in terms of any other text or phoneme strings.
He's still following his own rule.
I'd have to know more details, but at best it should have been a manslaughter case. The moral issue there is simply that the person should have taken more care than they took.
Of course the family of the victim is going to want the person strung up even if it were completely an accident where manslaughter shouldn't apply.
I don't know. What's your moral outlook? Is moral good just whatever we as a community decide it is?
Perhaps ethics is not about identifying moral rules.
There's a piece of apocryphal about Wittgenstein visiting a Fellow, who's wife asked if he would like tea. The Fellow admonished her, saying not to ask but just to bring the tea; Wittgenstein agreed, "yes - act".
Then there is Tolstoy's Three Questions.
Morality gets in the way of doing the right thing.
If it uses its own text will it use, for example, the English alphabet, or some other set of marks?
The issue is that languages evolve organically via usage over many, many generations, and the idea that an individual could artificially create and evolve their own completely new and independent language from scratch is implausible to say the least.
Moral responsibility could of course be imputed to her by those that feel she is morally responsible. The point is that there can be no unequivocal universal rule that could be used to determine whether or not she is morally responsible, and hence there can be no fact of the matter, analogous to how there can be with empirical propositions.
And that means that moral responsibility is a subjective matter that cannot be strictly codified in a set of rules. There is no essence of moral responsibility, in other words: it, too is subject to "family resemblances". This may not be as tidy as you would like to have it, but nevertheless...
But you're ignoring what I've said about morality, moral rules, correctness, and your own stuff about private rules.
Thanks for ignoring all of that and lumping me in with Terrapin, who clearly at one point was talking exclusively about Wittgenstein's private language argument in a number of comments.
For example, you've said stuff along the lines that private or individualistic morality doesn't count, and that there's no (objective) standard to go by. You've said that morality is about "we", not "I". You've said that stuff here, and you've said it elsewhere. This stuff you say is wrong, or at least unfounded or arbitrary, as I've argued.
Remember that the point at hand was that Morality has no bearing on a non-volitional action. It seems that it does.
I realise that you're under no obligation to reply to every post here. But you shouldn't not reply to my posts for the wrong reason, and you gave the wrong reason in relation to me, so I objected.
I suspect that you only find my views of no help to you because you're stuck in your own ingrained views about morality, and you don't like that I'm challenging them. You don't want help of that kind? It's noticeable that you seem to have found those who agree with you more "helpful" here in this discussion.
I haven't read that. I'll check it out.
I take this to show meaning as use.
I explained this earlier, one may freely choose to follow a rule. The more relevant question would be whether one could act freely without following a rule. Could something which does not follow a rule be an act at all?
Quoting Banno
That's why we're best to avoid getting our information from Wikipedia, it's very unreliable.
It could be a unique alphabet, or non-alphabetic script (a la Chinese) if written. It wouldn't necessarily have to be written.
I had to think about that one for a bit. And I'd say yes and no. Kind of in-between.
I mean, in a lot of ways we already Do without rules. As you noted a lot of ethical talk is post hoc -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if true that demonstrates that we aren't always acting from rules.
I think I'd want to develop the line of Wittgenstein that seems very reminiscent of Nietzsche -- that ethics and aesthetics are one.
Looking at aesthetics in a more literal fashion I think back to one of my art classes and we were taught the elements and principles of art. These are definitions for breaking down works of art into their components, in the case of elements, and then ways of building a work of art of judging a work of art when those components come together, in the case of principles. What's interesting about these rules, in comparison to the ethical rule-following we've been discussing, is that they are not of the form of if/then statements. Rather they are a collection of statements intended to get the student of art to think about art in a different way than "I like this picture" and "I do not like this picture" -- so that it isn't just whether or not you like vanilla ice cream or not, but rather so you can intelligibly say something about why you like or dislike something, or at least be able to begin to interpret a work of art.
Further, when you begin to study some of the masters you see that they actually break rules -- and its in the very breaking of the rules that their work shines. Of course they are masters, and not students, so their artistic intuition and ability is such that they can get away with that and still achieve something interesting. But this goes to show how though there are rules for students, the rules are more pedagogical than they are hard-line rules.
So, flipping back over to ethics and rules following -- it seems to me that we can learn to be good in a similar way that the student of art learns how to do art. Rules are in place as pedagogical tools for those who are unable to make judgments just yet, and need hand-holds pointed out to them. But rules are often meant to be broken, too, when we are masters of an art.
So in a way, if we have developed our ethical capacity we should grow beyond rules. But, at the same time, we could not achieve that ability without them. Further, though we can grow beyond rules aesthetically it's not like we don't think of them or have them in mind when we break them -- so its not a total absence.
Compare Nietzsche's view of the eternal recurrence -- a kind of rule that is not of if/then form, but is one of Nietzsche's responses to the death of God/traditional morality, a way of "saving" values from the death of their metaphysical underpinning.
Bringing this back around to Kant we can see how his articulation began this line of thinking because he did not provide rules. Freedom is the foundation of his ethics, as well as human value -- what he articulated were rules for making judgments about rules from a personal point of view.
EDIT: I think this goes some way to responding to your second post here: -- but let me know if you disagree.
If you consider Wittgenstein's discussion of the meter stick in the PI, when it is used as a standard of measurement it neither (allegedly) makes sense to say 'The meter stick is not one meter long' nor 'The meter stick is one meter long'. If we are analogising the role moral rules or norms play in life, some care would be required to ensure that the formulation of moral rules as propositions renders them true or false.
I don't see why that conclusion doesn't follow, whether "directly " or otherwise, and nor do I see why you think morality has any bearing on non-volitional actions.
I guess you are making reference to so called "moral luck", but in any case that seems to be a separate question and I'm not seeing it's relevance to the question of whether morality can be formulated as a strict set of rules or whether it is more a matter of subjective feeling, moral sense, intuition and conscience.
Could you elaborate and clarify?
You make some interesting points. The analogy of aesthetic principles with moral principles seems apt.
Learning such sets of pedagogical or propadeutic principles enables people to internalize more or less nuanced aesthetic and ethical contexts or paradigms within which subtle aesthetic and moral feelings may be encountered, developed and understood and intuitively principled judgements become more and more possible.
But no precise formulations in terms of sets of rules are possible and individual subjective variations are not only inevitable but desirable.
We would not want to become a society of 'good little robots'.
Indeed. I agree.
Actually that's an excellent post. I'm left nonplussed. You've brought together many of the bits that were floating around in this and other threads. I will think on it some more. Thanks.
Volition has a role in everything we do. Identifying some event that involves a human being as not involving volition... I'm dubious. Should my friend have been driving slower, taking into account the unexpected? Should she have developed the personal strength to deal with the wasp bite with equanimity?
Quoting Janus
And yet she was found negligent. It was found the the fact was she might have avoided the accident.
Perhaps we drop the "universal unequivocal" from what you suggested and move on. We use rules to assess moral situations, Yet the line of thought here is now heading away from rules as being appropriate.
Yes, but that is a legal finding that, firstly, might not have obtained with another judge and jury. And so, secondly, it is not merely a question of moral responsibility, but a is also a sociological question as to whether, taking the whole issue of legal culpability into account with all its ramifications regarding the social effect a determination one way or the other in this particular case would be likely to have and so on, the defendant should be deemed to be guilty. That is to say there is always a pragmatic dimension at work in any determination of legal responsibility, as well as the usual moral and emotional (retributive) dimensions.
I drove home thinking about Tolstoy's story. I pondered the Augustine quote: "Love and do what you please." I thought about thinking. I went around in circles about that for a bit. And then one of my favorite songs came on the radio and I turned up and sang along: the Ronette's Be My Baby. I felt joy.
The right time is now.
The right people are the ones in front of you.
The right thing to do is care about them.
:up:
But of course we need to analyse it. First approximation: the only place one can act is now. One can have acted, in which case all one can do is make excuses; or one can be going to act, in which case one has intentions. But if the core of doing the right thing is doing, than it's now. And if it is now, it is about who we are with. And if it is about doing what is right it is about caring for them.
Now, a critical eye...
I think PWS is a red herring here. The relevant question to me seems to be if we take moral norms as part of the background, how can we ensure that they are necessarily true or false? It may be that we can evaluate using them, but without the necessity of assuming their truth.
How you gonna do necessity without PWS? What is necessity if not being true in all possible worlds? Best semantics around, says I.
So, if we are going to talk about necessary goods, we need first to affirm that goods are true, and then sus out which goods are true in all possible worlds...
Why care about them rather than kick them? We can do that now, with them.
Dunno. If your world is sufficiently messy to have moral norms in the same category as 'paradigms' in Wittgenstein, then we can't ensure that they're truth apt (in all contexts). I'm sure there's a good account linking them, but I don't immediately see it.
Why do I say "There is a hand"?
Comes down to your assessment of people: are they fundamentally good, and evil is defiance of nature (as a Roman stoic would claim), or are we basically evil and must be guided toward good (as Christianity is prone to claim)?
If there's only one possible world . . .
Although we could still say that then we're talking about all possible worlds when we talk about the one.
Determinism amounts to there only being one possible world, by the way.
So, possible world semantics applies to propositions. We evaluate a proposition at a collection of worlds with some relation on them that captures the sense of possibility in question. A requirement of this is that the thing we evaluate must be either true or false in each possible world. It doesn't help analyse whether we can say a moral rule is truth apt while treating a moral rule as a fundamental constituent of language use. So, if we start the inquiry into the truth aptness of a moral rule with respect to a possible world semantics, we will have begged the question about their truth aptness to begin with.
If Witty is suspicious about saying 'The Paris meter stick is 1 meter long' and 'The Paris meter stick is not one meter long', one wonders why something even messier, like 'One ought not introduce security backdoors into communications software', would behave differently. Paradigmatic examples of good conduct may be unable to be said to be good for precisely the same reason as the Paris meter stick cannot be said to be 1 meter long.
Yes. It certainly seems so to me. Why couldn't it?
Quoting Banno
First, can you give an example and demonstrate how it counts? If not, then I rightly dismiss your question.
Quoting Banno
When you catch that wild goose, would you be so kind as to let me know?
“So can a person have private morals?”
There can be no other way. Everything else is making others give you what you want by making them think it’s for their own good.
What you worry about when you’re lying in bed alone at night when everyone else is asleep, are your only real principles. The rest is just politeness, and if done in excess, showiness.