Ordinary Lang. Phil.: Wittgenstein's "Use" of the Lion-Quote re: Ethics
"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations pg 223 (3rd Ed., 1968) “PI”
Attempting to show Wittgenstein ("Witt") is making an ethical argument (through unearthing the desires of positivism) in the Philosophical Investigations, I will argue that it is essential to put the above sentence in the textual context in which it was written to see its USE here--the sense ("Grammatically") in which it is said (“meaning” not existing independently, beforehand, immediately, certainly, etc.)--in its sense as an uncontested FACT (not to be refuted or interpreted, nor an open question, nor a thesis, etc.). This is a close reading and, with hope, a demonstration of Ordinary Language Philosophy (people may call this "Philosophy of Language", but that term is misleading as it takes a position on morals/ethics, epistemology, logic, science, the mind, metaphysics, etc.)
Note: The page (223) of the PI is transcribed at the end of this post, and I encourage you to read it thoroughly before reflexively posting an opinion on just this one sentence as if it were an solitary tclaim of Witt's which is open to question. So, you may have another interest in this sentence--and in philosophy--(which is fine), but, if you take the trouble to respond, I ask please that you here indulge me and start by trying to see the angle to the text which I am proposing; otherwise, I welcome any additional thoughts on the rest of the text as well. (Also, all phrases below in “quotes” are from page 223 unless otherwise noted; all emphasis in italics are in the original work; all my emphasis on terms is done in ‘ single-quotes ’ or all CAPS.)
Another reader offered this:
“My guess is that what is meant here is that we have no basis for understanding because our context of 'understanding' is so radically different than that of a different species.”
Setting aside for now (see *** below) the imagining of the difference in the internal (external) world of a lion (I’m going to jump around in the text a bit), the comment assumes there is a “context of understanding” which is the "basis" of " ‘understanding’ ". But what is Witt actually getting at? If we are to begin with “contexts of 'understanding' ”, it sounds very similar to the people with “strange traditions” mentioned at the top of the page.
Here, in this situation, we can communicate. But we do not understand the 'people', say, as our people; we do not understand their judgments, criteria, manners, expectations, consequences, etc. They are an "enigma" to us; not so much hidden, as a mystery. We “cannot find our feet” with them; we would have to learn their judgments, criteria, manners, expectations, consequences, and align/differentiate the differences from ours.
Now a lot of people stop with Wittgenstein at this point, and take him as just having the opinion that his term 'Forms of Life' (these traditions) gives meaning to words allowing for communication and thus knowledge of traditions are all we need for understanding--they (similar reactions, communal agreement, etc.) are the "basis".
The motivation for this misappropriation is much the same for what Witt addresses next: which is when people think internal ideas or other thought processes ('meanings') are connected to the world/words, which allows for (are the "basis" for") communication. This is the misconception Witt starts with at the top of the page, which begins:
[ read this as if it were stated TO Witt (not by him) by someone else, commonly referred to as, the “Interlocutor” ]
[ Here, this is Witt’s voice ]
If their feelings are apparent ("evident"), “I do not think: [that they] are hidden”. This begs the question then, what do I think? Is this then a person whom we would say is “transparent to us”? When we know their Forms of Life, is everyone? Maybe this isn't just a philosophical disagreement about whether "meaning" is internal or external. Then, why do we desire to put up a barrier to the ("hidden") other?
This is where I think it is very important—essential—to see that the lion-quote puts a perspective on the quote just above it, which is:
I strongly impress upon you to find a way to see that the "cannot" in the first sentence, is in contrast to the "could not" in the lion sentence.
As in (placing the phrasing in parallel structure): 'Now HERE [with the lion] we COULD NOT understand him'--as in, it is impossible, a fact (said as uncontested--see ** below)--but, with the person saying they 'CANNOT know' another person, it is a conviction--a decision or firm belief. [The ’quotes’ are only a re-phrasing of Witt.]
This use of the lion-quote is comparison; not as a hypothesis, not an opinion or belief, not to be considered, but as an uncontested fact**--'grammatically' as one, Witt would say, and also: Look at the use!! (#66) This use is not to inspire debate (even though it could--that is one of its possibilities; but not here, in this context). Wittgenstein is not making a 'claim' to “very general facts of nature (Such facts as mostly do not strike us because of their generality)” p. 56, #143. The use of these facts is as contrast “to explain the significance, I mean the importance, of a concept,” (ibid.) like, here, with 'understanding' (see also the dog, p. 229, or the parrot, #346).
Clarification: Witt's focus on "use" has been a stumbling block in the responses, so I wanted to point out that it is not the idea that use (some internal force/decision) determines or is the basis for "meaning". There are multiple versions ("senses") of a concept; one determines the use from the context (afterwards). "Every word has a different character in a different context." PI, p. 181. Not to say a we do not sometimes chose what we say, but senses exist outside and prior to us; the same confusion is that every word/action is 'intended'. The idea of a sentence or a word in isolation is only a thing in some philosophy--stemming from the desire to tether it to something determinate, certain, universal. Nietzsche also is taken to be claiming statements about society--say, in Human, All to Human’s chapter “Man in Society” rather than just using them as examples/contrasts to shed light on our moral process.
And so (as opposed to with the lion) we CAN know what is “going on in him” (though see *** below), and saying we cannot is a conviction, a belief (in this example, in a particular theoretical framework/"picture"; roughly, that meaning is tied to an idea). Apart from just the conviction in the picture though, Witt is making a point that we are responsible in how we treat the other. It is an ethical argument, not (merely) an epistemological one. The conviction is a person's choice not to ACCEPT what is going on with/in the other, as opposed to how it would be with the lion, where we simply CANNOT understand there (again, look at it as a fact--in its fact-ness--compared to the choice we are making with the other).
The example is similar to the student in #144; "I wanted to put that picture before him, and his 'acceptance' of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently"--we are in a position to reject or accept. This is a decision, a choice. With the person in pain we are in a position (“being inclined” #144) to regard (accept) something as such; "My attitude towards [them] is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the 'opinion' that [they have] a soul." p. 178. We don't have knowledge that they have a soul, we treat them as if they do.
We do not “think” in this sense, because our understanding of the other is not a matter of knowledge. If someone is expressing pain, you acknowledge (react to) the person or you deny them (from Cavell). It is not our intellect that is limited--that we lack some knowledge (of a form of life) or access (to the other's private thoughts). Replying to the sceptic that says, "I cannot know what is going on in [them]", that they are mistaken—you CAN know!—is simply to miss the point.
If someone is writhing in pain, we do not think: 'the picture is wrong' (does not reflect reality) or that 'sensations ARE evident' (just, to science). The (positivist) picture is an expression of a conviction to ignore the moral claim the other's pain makes on me—their humanity—to disavow our responsibility for the other, the meaningfulness of their expressions (to look past the other for something certain, infallible). If I am convinced (by positivism's picture, or by a choice about the other), in this sense I "am certain" and "[my eyes] are shut” [to their pain] (just after on p. 224). We have stopped being understanding. There is nothing else to SEE (no form of life to learn or share), no knowledge to gain that will necessarily change my conviction about/relationship to, the other.
The reasons for the conviction (to deny the other) are "not readily accessible", because it is not the picture that gives them (not science nor positivism nor behavioralism); it is the person (justifying, apologizing, standing on principal, or without reason, etc.). The reasons for refusing to see the other's pain are accessible, but we must ASK the person rather than just have knowledge of their Form of Life, or the contents of their brain. To mean (or not) what you say and do is not a thing, it is a position (Witt calls it an attitude); reason is not an ability--people have reasons (or don’t) for speaking or acting. What they meant (their rationale) does not (usually) come up unless someone asks (‘Why did you… ?’ ). Their reasons are not private nor public so much as personal, say, a secret (Cavell, again). This creates the possibility of a lie, and the fear of it; and this doubt is the desire to “guess thoughts”. Witt isn’t stating facts or arguing theories about lions or our brains or our lives; he is investigating (not solving) that fear.
***Now to get back to the lion (and its insides) that everyone is dying to conjecture and hypothesize about; some will balk at limiting it to a logically-contrasted fact, or maybe even more at Witt's point: that neither science, nor its philosophically-clothed cousins--positivism, emotivism, behavioralism, etc.--are able to access or address the basis of understanding (with A.I., our individual internal experience, ‘qualia’, Forms of Life, agreement, etc.). Science can describe forms of life, explain pain, but a conceptual investigation (the criteria for the Grammar (workings) of pain, knowledge, etc.) tells us about our convictions (“Concepts lead us to make investigations; are the expression of our interest, and direct our interest.” #570). How the concept of pain works (our judgments surrounding it, the consequences from it, the structure of our relationship to it, etc.) is the expression of our interest in pain--why we care about it, how it matters to us; e.g., how we are defined by our reaction to it. Those mixing science and philosophy read the lion-quote (and philosophy generally) to use for their interests; unrelated, motivated by a particular outcome, etc.
QUOTED FROM: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations uninterrupted excerpt from p. 223 (3rd Ed., '68)
* * *
There is a game of 'guessing thoughts'. A variant of it would be this: I tell A something in a language that B does not understand. B is supposed to guess the meaning of what I say.-Another variant: I write down a sentence which the other person cannot see. He has to guess the words or their sense.--Yet another: I am putting a jig-saw puzzle together; the other person cannot see me but from time to time guesses my thoughts and utters them. He says, for instance, "Now where is this bit?"--"Now I know how it fits 1"--"I have no idea what goes in here,"--"The sky is always the hardest part" and so on--but I need not be talking to myself either out loud or silently at the time.
All this would be guessing at thoughts; and the fact that it does not actually happen does not make thought any more hidden than the unperceived physical proceedings.
"What is internal is hidden from us."--The future is hidden from us. But does the astronomer think like this when he calculates an eclipse of the sun?
If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.
We also say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country's language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet with them.
"I cannot know what is going on in him" is above all a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not readily accessible.
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
It is possible to imagine a guessing of intentions like the guessing of thoughts, but also a guessing of what someone is actually going to do.
To say "He alone can know what he intends" is nonsense: to say "He alone can know what he will do", wrong. * * *
[Antony Nickles: and to provide the full quote from p. 56 (right after #143): "What we have to mention in order to explain the significance, I mean the importance, of a concept, are often extremely general facts of nature: as are hardly ever mentioned because of their great generality."]
Attempting to show Wittgenstein ("Witt") is making an ethical argument (through unearthing the desires of positivism) in the Philosophical Investigations, I will argue that it is essential to put the above sentence in the textual context in which it was written to see its USE here--the sense ("Grammatically") in which it is said (“meaning” not existing independently, beforehand, immediately, certainly, etc.)--in its sense as an uncontested FACT (not to be refuted or interpreted, nor an open question, nor a thesis, etc.). This is a close reading and, with hope, a demonstration of Ordinary Language Philosophy (people may call this "Philosophy of Language", but that term is misleading as it takes a position on morals/ethics, epistemology, logic, science, the mind, metaphysics, etc.)
Note: The page (223) of the PI is transcribed at the end of this post, and I encourage you to read it thoroughly before reflexively posting an opinion on just this one sentence as if it were an solitary tclaim of Witt's which is open to question. So, you may have another interest in this sentence--and in philosophy--(which is fine), but, if you take the trouble to respond, I ask please that you here indulge me and start by trying to see the angle to the text which I am proposing; otherwise, I welcome any additional thoughts on the rest of the text as well. (Also, all phrases below in “quotes” are from page 223 unless otherwise noted; all emphasis in italics are in the original work; all my emphasis on terms is done in ‘ single-quotes ’ or all CAPS.)
Another reader offered this:
“My guess is that what is meant here is that we have no basis for understanding because our context of 'understanding' is so radically different than that of a different species.”
Setting aside for now (see *** below) the imagining of the difference in the internal (external) world of a lion (I’m going to jump around in the text a bit), the comment assumes there is a “context of understanding” which is the "basis" of " ‘understanding’ ". But what is Witt actually getting at? If we are to begin with “contexts of 'understanding' ”, it sounds very similar to the people with “strange traditions” mentioned at the top of the page.
Witt, PI p. 223:We also say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country's language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet with them.
Here, in this situation, we can communicate. But we do not understand the 'people', say, as our people; we do not understand their judgments, criteria, manners, expectations, consequences, etc. They are an "enigma" to us; not so much hidden, as a mystery. We “cannot find our feet” with them; we would have to learn their judgments, criteria, manners, expectations, consequences, and align/differentiate the differences from ours.
Now a lot of people stop with Wittgenstein at this point, and take him as just having the opinion that his term 'Forms of Life' (these traditions) gives meaning to words allowing for communication and thus knowledge of traditions are all we need for understanding--they (similar reactions, communal agreement, etc.) are the "basis".
The motivation for this misappropriation is much the same for what Witt addresses next: which is when people think internal ideas or other thought processes ('meanings') are connected to the world/words, which allows for (are the "basis" for") communication. This is the misconception Witt starts with at the top of the page, which begins:
Witt, PI p. 223:'What is internal is hidden from us'.
[ read this as if it were stated TO Witt (not by him) by someone else, commonly referred to as, the “Interlocutor” ]
Witt, PI p. 223:If I see someone is writhing in pain with evident cause, I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.
[ Here, this is Witt’s voice ]
If their feelings are apparent ("evident"), “I do not think: [that they] are hidden”. This begs the question then, what do I think? Is this then a person whom we would say is “transparent to us”? When we know their Forms of Life, is everyone? Maybe this isn't just a philosophical disagreement about whether "meaning" is internal or external. Then, why do we desire to put up a barrier to the ("hidden") other?
This is where I think it is very important—essential—to see that the lion-quote puts a perspective on the quote just above it, which is:
Witt, PI p. 223:'I cannot know what is going on in him' is above all a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not readily accessible.
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
I strongly impress upon you to find a way to see that the "cannot" in the first sentence, is in contrast to the "could not" in the lion sentence.
As in (placing the phrasing in parallel structure): 'Now HERE [with the lion] we COULD NOT understand him'--as in, it is impossible, a fact (said as uncontested--see ** below)--but, with the person saying they 'CANNOT know' another person, it is a conviction--a decision or firm belief. [The ’quotes’ are only a re-phrasing of Witt.]
This use of the lion-quote is comparison; not as a hypothesis, not an opinion or belief, not to be considered, but as an uncontested fact**--'grammatically' as one, Witt would say, and also: Look at the use!! (#66) This use is not to inspire debate (even though it could--that is one of its possibilities; but not here, in this context). Wittgenstein is not making a 'claim' to “very general facts of nature (Such facts as mostly do not strike us because of their generality)” p. 56, #143. The use of these facts is as contrast “to explain the significance, I mean the importance, of a concept,” (ibid.) like, here, with 'understanding' (see also the dog, p. 229, or the parrot, #346).
Clarification: Witt's focus on "use" has been a stumbling block in the responses, so I wanted to point out that it is not the idea that use (some internal force/decision) determines or is the basis for "meaning". There are multiple versions ("senses") of a concept; one determines the use from the context (afterwards). "Every word has a different character in a different context." PI, p. 181. Not to say a we do not sometimes chose what we say, but senses exist outside and prior to us; the same confusion is that every word/action is 'intended'. The idea of a sentence or a word in isolation is only a thing in some philosophy--stemming from the desire to tether it to something determinate, certain, universal. Nietzsche also is taken to be claiming statements about society--say, in Human, All to Human’s chapter “Man in Society” rather than just using them as examples/contrasts to shed light on our moral process.
And so (as opposed to with the lion) we CAN know what is “going on in him” (though see *** below), and saying we cannot is a conviction, a belief (in this example, in a particular theoretical framework/"picture"; roughly, that meaning is tied to an idea). Apart from just the conviction in the picture though, Witt is making a point that we are responsible in how we treat the other. It is an ethical argument, not (merely) an epistemological one. The conviction is a person's choice not to ACCEPT what is going on with/in the other, as opposed to how it would be with the lion, where we simply CANNOT understand there (again, look at it as a fact--in its fact-ness--compared to the choice we are making with the other).
The example is similar to the student in #144; "I wanted to put that picture before him, and his 'acceptance' of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently"--we are in a position to reject or accept. This is a decision, a choice. With the person in pain we are in a position (“being inclined” #144) to regard (accept) something as such; "My attitude towards [them] is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the 'opinion' that [they have] a soul." p. 178. We don't have knowledge that they have a soul, we treat them as if they do.
Witt, PI p. 223:If I see someone is writhing in pain with evident cause, I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.
We do not “think” in this sense, because our understanding of the other is not a matter of knowledge. If someone is expressing pain, you acknowledge (react to) the person or you deny them (from Cavell). It is not our intellect that is limited--that we lack some knowledge (of a form of life) or access (to the other's private thoughts). Replying to the sceptic that says, "I cannot know what is going on in [them]", that they are mistaken—you CAN know!—is simply to miss the point.
If someone is writhing in pain, we do not think: 'the picture is wrong' (does not reflect reality) or that 'sensations ARE evident' (just, to science). The (positivist) picture is an expression of a conviction to ignore the moral claim the other's pain makes on me—their humanity—to disavow our responsibility for the other, the meaningfulness of their expressions (to look past the other for something certain, infallible). If I am convinced (by positivism's picture, or by a choice about the other), in this sense I "am certain" and "[my eyes] are shut” [to their pain] (just after on p. 224). We have stopped being understanding. There is nothing else to SEE (no form of life to learn or share), no knowledge to gain that will necessarily change my conviction about/relationship to, the other.
The reasons for the conviction (to deny the other) are "not readily accessible", because it is not the picture that gives them (not science nor positivism nor behavioralism); it is the person (justifying, apologizing, standing on principal, or without reason, etc.). The reasons for refusing to see the other's pain are accessible, but we must ASK the person rather than just have knowledge of their Form of Life, or the contents of their brain. To mean (or not) what you say and do is not a thing, it is a position (Witt calls it an attitude); reason is not an ability--people have reasons (or don’t) for speaking or acting. What they meant (their rationale) does not (usually) come up unless someone asks (‘Why did you… ?’ ). Their reasons are not private nor public so much as personal, say, a secret (Cavell, again). This creates the possibility of a lie, and the fear of it; and this doubt is the desire to “guess thoughts”. Witt isn’t stating facts or arguing theories about lions or our brains or our lives; he is investigating (not solving) that fear.
***Now to get back to the lion (and its insides) that everyone is dying to conjecture and hypothesize about; some will balk at limiting it to a logically-contrasted fact, or maybe even more at Witt's point: that neither science, nor its philosophically-clothed cousins--positivism, emotivism, behavioralism, etc.--are able to access or address the basis of understanding (with A.I., our individual internal experience, ‘qualia’, Forms of Life, agreement, etc.). Science can describe forms of life, explain pain, but a conceptual investigation (the criteria for the Grammar (workings) of pain, knowledge, etc.) tells us about our convictions (“Concepts lead us to make investigations; are the expression of our interest, and direct our interest.” #570). How the concept of pain works (our judgments surrounding it, the consequences from it, the structure of our relationship to it, etc.) is the expression of our interest in pain--why we care about it, how it matters to us; e.g., how we are defined by our reaction to it. Those mixing science and philosophy read the lion-quote (and philosophy generally) to use for their interests; unrelated, motivated by a particular outcome, etc.
QUOTED FROM: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations uninterrupted excerpt from p. 223 (3rd Ed., '68)
* * *
There is a game of 'guessing thoughts'. A variant of it would be this: I tell A something in a language that B does not understand. B is supposed to guess the meaning of what I say.-Another variant: I write down a sentence which the other person cannot see. He has to guess the words or their sense.--Yet another: I am putting a jig-saw puzzle together; the other person cannot see me but from time to time guesses my thoughts and utters them. He says, for instance, "Now where is this bit?"--"Now I know how it fits 1"--"I have no idea what goes in here,"--"The sky is always the hardest part" and so on--but I need not be talking to myself either out loud or silently at the time.
All this would be guessing at thoughts; and the fact that it does not actually happen does not make thought any more hidden than the unperceived physical proceedings.
"What is internal is hidden from us."--The future is hidden from us. But does the astronomer think like this when he calculates an eclipse of the sun?
If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.
We also say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country's language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet with them.
"I cannot know what is going on in him" is above all a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not readily accessible.
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
It is possible to imagine a guessing of intentions like the guessing of thoughts, but also a guessing of what someone is actually going to do.
To say "He alone can know what he intends" is nonsense: to say "He alone can know what he will do", wrong. * * *
[Antony Nickles: and to provide the full quote from p. 56 (right after #143): "What we have to mention in order to explain the significance, I mean the importance, of a concept, are often extremely general facts of nature: as are hardly ever mentioned because of their great generality."]
Comments (71)
I'm willing to try to understand your point. Is the above your point?
By context, I mean the textual context--its use in relation to the rest of the language around it.
Thesis:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Antithesis:
What does not actually happen? I ask a guy to assign meaning to a language he doesn’t understand mandates a mutually perceived physical proceeding.....I’m talking to him, after all, and I know he hears me. So this cannot be the thing that does not actually happen. The only thing left that does not actually happen, and is therefore the unperceived physical proceeding, is the objective exemplification by which meaning is assigned by the dude to whom I’m asking. All that reduces to a categorical error of modality, the schema of which is existence, to posit that which doesn’t happen is equal to being hidden. There is nothing to hide so it being hidden is superfluous.
Still, it must be the case that he thinks something, even if it’s only to think it impossible to give any meaning because he lacks the judgements necessary to connect what he perceives to what he understands. The unperceived physical proceeding, in this case speech reflecting the assignment of meaning, according to W, is hidden from both of us because it never happened, but the thought demonstrating that the meaning is impossible to present as a physical proceeding, must have happened, and is only hidden from me, to whom it did not happen, but cannot be hidden from the guy from whom I’m asking a meaning be given. This is the categorical error of relation, the schema of which is community, in that it is supposed one thought is denied to, or hidden from, both parties when it is only hidden from one.
—————-
Thesis:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Antithesis:
No, I do not, but I do not, because I think nothing immediately with respect to his feelings, as a predicate of my observation of him writhing. Given the evident cause, I immediately grant him the objective reality of being hurt, the writhing I see immediately grants merely one of a plethora of immediate corresponding physical representations of being physically hurt, both of which are a posteriori judgements.
I can and I do think, mediately, all the same, his feelings are necessarily hidden from me, in that the causality of his representations are not contained in the physical representations of them. And I am justified in that thinking, for the simple reason I am not the one writhing with evident cause. If I already understand feelings as pure a priori representations, and I know no a priori cognition is transferable, it follows as a matter of course, his pain is inaccessible to me, hence I am permitted to say they are hidden. This, incidentally, relieves the categorical error of modality.
—————
Thesis:
Quoting Antony Nickles
Antithesis:
If I know, or if I do not know, something, I must have reasons. And they must be accessible to me, otherwise the knowledge is quite empty.
Knowledge can be defined as a judgement valid because its ground is objectively necessary. That which goes on in him is subjective in him, hence inaccessible objectively in me, therefore I am justified in claiming I cannot know of it. These are my readily accessible reasons derivable from a definition.
A conviction can be defined as a judgement valid because its ground is objectively sufficient. I am certainly authorized to say what goes on in him is objectively sufficient, under the condition that he and I are both the same kind of rational intelligence, in that I allow him the same ground for his as I require for mine.
It follows that what I know is not the same as that of which I am merely convinced. I am always authorized to claim my convictions are given from the same reasons as my knowledge, but I am not authorized to claim my knowledge is given from the same reasons as my convictions.
A picture, considered as some mental image, can be a convincing expression of a conviction, but not in the case where I have certain knowledge antecedent to the image. While it is true images are not the source of reasons in any case, where some proposition is predicated on a knowledge, those reasons are not needed, so their inaccessibility is moot. I need reasons for my convictions iff I cannot arrive at knowledge from conviction alone.
The lion will have to wait for Page 2, assuming there is one.
Thanks for the interesting thread, and the chance to ramble on over it. Hope I followed your wishes, but if I didn’t.....ehhhh.....no page 2.
Note: In responding, I want to point out that all the quotes being responded to are Wittgenstein’s (not mine)—I'll underline those; and use quotes from Mmw’s response. Also, labeling Witt’s sentences as “Thesis” is not exactly accurate. These are not claims to true statements (similar to the point I’m making about the lion-quote). He is not advancing a theory. He is trying to get us to change our perspective on an historical philosophical picture, imagine a different view of our terms and beliefs and framework (paradigm Kuhn might say).
"Thesis:"
All this would be guessing at thoughts; and the fact that it does not actually happen does not make thought any more hidden than the unperceived physical proceedings.
Quoting Mww
As a Ordinary Language Philosopher, Witt creates imagined scenarios to flesh out the consequences of people’s beliefs (here, roughly, the belief in something internal connected to words as meaning). In this case, the examples above this quote, of guessing at thoughts, are the situations or circumstances that may not actually happen in ordinary life.
Quoting Mww
The “unperceived physical proceedings” are the writing and the jig-saw puzzles, etc.—which are hidden in the sense of, away from view. The point is those are analogous to the confused picture of something hidden, internally, “Qualia”, meaning, some mental occurrence. This is not to say people are see-through (it can be hidden privately, as I’ve said). I think maybe having decided a picture/theory/belief already, may be getting in the way of understanding the terms (words) and how Witt is relating them to each other in the different paragraphs, which do not stand alone.
Quoting Mww
No; it’s not the case (do you always think? do you always think before you speak?). Witt’s point is ‘thinking’ in the sense I believe you are using it (that it is (always) connected to speaking; as ’meaning’ is believed to be connected to words, like a definition) is a picture created from a desire to force the issue, as I discussed in the post. One confusion is maybe the belief that ’thinking’ can only be meant one way; consider: deliberating, reflecting, imagining, formulating, etc. And how words work is not for us to “assign” (usually), say internally. Try to compare pre-determined ‘meaning’ to asking someone after they have said something, “What did you mean?” or someone saying, “I didn’t mean that I was thinking about it in that I hadn’t made a decision, I was just considering your feelings first”. Examine in the text how he points out that I could tell what you intended (‘mean’) before you do (see below)—and this is not to read your mind or guess some ever-present thoughts (or physical situation) connected to your actions and speech.
Quoting Mww
Again, the idea is not an internal occurrence. If you change the picture of thinking, we can know what someone is thinking, for example, as intending: (“she’s going to eat that donut”), even when the person is blind to it themselves (“she says she’s not an alcoholic, but she’s going to drink again”). Ordinary Language Philosophy, like Witt, is about unpacking these words philosophers use (‘knowledge’ ‘thinking’ ‘meaning’) to see them in an ordinary context, and the variety in sense they have, in order to examine the motivations for pushing them into the boxes philosophy has historically.
—————-
"Thesis:"
If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.
Quoting Mww
I think you’re on the right track with the rest of what you wrote; Witt’s immediate point is: why would we start with doubt backed up by a picture of some hidden occurrence? but the further point, I discuss in the post, is that we do not have to grant the other their pain—we can ignore the person on the street; treat a slave as less than human, etc. The “a posteriori judgement” is not immediate or given, say, apart from us (maybe let go of “objective” and “real”).
Quoting Mww
The idea of causality is part of the picture of meaning being taken apart here. Is it continual? ever-present? always accessible? There could be no ‘cause’ nor any ‘pain’; he could be faking, acting, etc. And, oppositely, why can’t the “cause of his representations” be contained in the physical? “He is in pain—it looks like a heart attack.” “He’s not in pain—that scream is too forced to be real.” And if I understand what you mean by “error of modality”, things like intention, attitude, etc. are ordinarily discussed after the fact, rather than always determined prior to an act; and, as the general theme of the PI, the modalities (“grammar” he says) are different for every type of action. Maybe I have those terms wrong of course; not my specialty.
—————
"Thesis:"
"I cannot know what is going on in him" is above all a picture. It is the convincing expression of a conviction. It does not give the reasons for the conviction. They are not readily accessible.
Quoting Mww
Again, take a look at re-thinking ‘know’ and ‘reason’. If you know something it might make sense to ask HOW you know, or maybe in what way you know something, but would it (always?) make sense to ask what my ‘reason’ is for knowing something? maybe “I know what year I was married because it’s my password.” but ,e.g., “No reason; I must have heard it somewhere.” But is that knowledge “empty”? To me it is nothing, but maybe to the other person it is the answer to the crossword they were killing themselves for.
Quoting Mww
Knowledge could be defined like that, but it is not its only sense; “I’m in pain!” “Okay, okay! I know you’re in pain. Just wait, I have to get the top off this Tylenol.” This is an acknowledgment that the other person is in pain (“I [am acknowledging] you’re in pain”). Scientific knowledge can be facts (grounded in method); knowledge can be skill (“I know how to take apart a Chevy engine.”), etc. And it is the reasons for the decision not to know their pain that are not accessible, but, importantly, “readily”, say, without asking. We may be a psychopath, we may have seen them suffer so much we are numb, etc. The reason for the “picture” is that positivism wants to secure knowledge of the other, or deny its possibility, in order to avoid our responsibility for them, answer to/for them.
Quoting Mww
My understanding is a conviction is just another word for belief, although “strongly held”; one way to see it might be that we have to stand for our beliefs, where knowledge can be said to be apart from our relationship to it. “I hold the belief you’re not in pain strongly, against any attempt to plead with me to see it.” or “I didn’t know he was in pain, there was no evidence.” And if you don’t have an ‘objectively sufficient judgment’, can you not know their pain? (Sympathize with it, recognize it, etc.) Witt might say the belief (conviction) in your criteria of reason shuts your eyes to seeing a wider world. That belief is a “convincing picture” because it preys on our doubt and our desire to avoid the other (and ourselves), say, behind objective rationality.
And, yes, I would suggest reading the text as one piece rather than singular statements (to be refuted), and I hope that my post is worth more than just anti-thesis.
Quoting Daemon
Well, I'm sorry to hear that you don't feel you can contribute, and for my flippancy. I'm not sure the "particular kind of discussion" I'm suggesting should preclude much, but, if you want to talk about something entirely different, than, yes, another thread would be appropriate (I hope you will tag me with it, or however that works). Of course, if you simply disagree, I'm willing to hear why; or if it's just confusion, I'll take any questions you have. Thank you in any event for reading it, twice.
Quoting Daemon
Maybe try not to think of it so much as an argument with a thesis as a reading to put you in a certain perspective to a certain history of philosophy (particularly positivism). Maybe start with trying to see the purpose of the lion-quote on this page: as a fact to contrast against the rest of the paragraphs (within all the possibilities it could be taken or used--within its 'grammar' Witt would say, or the 'sense' of it used here), and then work backwards, as the ripple-effects begin with that sentence and go deeper, contrasted to other mis-readings.
Are you saying that it is a person's (ethical?) choice not to understand a lion? Or are you saying that it is impossible to understand a lion (as "a fact, not a choice")? It seems to be the latter. Couldn't we make a choice to try and understand a lion?
Also, do you think Wittgenstein uses the terms "know" and "understand" synonymously?
First, it is not made as a claim nor said as a statement to be considered (which are obviously within its possibilities of sense). This is a lesson in how words (sentences) can be used in specific ways. The use of this statement is as a fact, to be contrasted with the conviction, or the strangeness of traditions. Let me put it another way: if a lion talked, we would no longer understand it to be a lion. We can of course understand lions, say, study them. But, yes, this is simply meant to be an uncontested fact, used for comparison. The choice (conviction) regards the other (person).
I think you need to provide more support for this reading. Why couldn't it be another example of "the convincing expression of a conviction"? Or something else? Wittgenstein isn't the easiest philosopher to get a handle on and "if a lion could talk" is one of his more enigmatic statements. Your reading may be correct but I don't yet follow why it is, or what you're trying to say exactly. I'm also curious about the other parts of your discussion title re: qualia and forms of life which you said little about in your OP.
Quoting Luke
There are other ways this sentence could be used, yes, but that doesn't mean I have to refute all of them (that it is any of those). The reading is internally coherent and based on the textual evidence. I realize it might be hard to see/accept, but I have pointed out the comparative examples, his actual statements about how he uses facts, his use of them elsewhere, the impact to the rest of the text, and the parallel structure to the previous sentence (if you switch the clause) that highlights the comparison:
"I cannot know what is going on in him"
"We could not understand a lion if it talked."
The first is a refusal, the second is an impossibility.
Is there (do you have) another way (attempt) to account for all of this evidence? The statement is not enigmatic if you accept and focus on its use. It is a "very general fact[ ] of nature (Such facts as mostly do not strike us because of their generality)” #143. Could he have used a simpler fact? Yes. Could it maybe not have been from an imagined world? Maybe. Is he goading the positivist? Maybe he feels this stark contrast, however fantastical, would be shocking enough for people to reassess the need to have a fixed referent.
Quoting Luke
I would say that the point of putting this fact here is enigmatic, but that's my whole discussion (start with letting go of the assumption that this is used as the kind of "statement" philosophy historically defines--say, a claim based on a theory). I will also say that it is illustrative of Witt's method of looking at the use of language, which is indicative of Ordinary Language Philosophy--is this a threat? an apology? a refusal? a plea?
Quoting Luke
I do mention those in the post, but they come from a viewpoint based on a desire for certainty basically. If you want to be able to fix words or speech to something inside the brain (ideas, thoughts, mental occurrences; what has been termed 'qualia') then hanging onto that makes it hard to shift to seeing the motivation for that, which Witt is pointing out. So some, out of the same desire, have latched onto his term of Forms of Life, as a communal agreement, or a type of rule, that ensures the meaning of words. I would need maybe a little more to understand where you're getting hung up, or what you are interested in discussing, but I appreciate the consideration.
I meant it as indicating the opening statement as affirmation, in accordance with continental dialectical reasoning, re: German idealists in general. The antithesis, then, follows as subjecting the opening to negation, or just some sort of modification. I didn’t label W’s statements themselves in any way at all; I just copied them verbatim. Still, I could have used point/counterpoint, so......
—————
Quoting Antony Nickles
Hidden from the guy, yes. I just went off on a rant over the gross dissimilarities between empirical invisibility and rational invisibility, and how silly it is to juxtaposition one against the other.
Anyway.....good talk, and, carry on.
Quoting Luke
After looking around in the book, I would say, sometimes its close, but not here. As with most words, the 'grammar' of the word allows for many senses (and for new ones). Knows, as: has knowledge; as: acknowledges; as: familiar with; as: know how to continue, etc. Understands, as: understands how to (do a procedure); as: commiserates with (a person); as: can follow (what someone is saying, their point), etc.
They are not fluid as much as multifaceted. At one point Witt says: "The grammar of the words "knows" is evidently closely related to that of "can", "is able to". But also closely related to that of "understands". ('Mastery of a technique.) #150. And also at one point talks about how understanding a sentence is being able to paraphrase it, but understanding a poem can only be said one way. After his interlocutor says: "Then has 'understanding' two different meanings here?--I [Witt now] would rather say that these kind of use of 'understanding'' make up its meaning, make up my concept of understanding."#531-532. Concept not being an idea but a term to encompass all the different senses, uses, possibilities, etc. of a word (its "grammar" he calls it).
But on page 223, knowledge (saying, I know) is most often used by him to mean the certainty people want for their words or other people--the positivist version of knowledge--either as a fixed internal or external thing ('thought' or 'tradition'). Understanding here is I would say more tied to: can follow what they are saying (the point; why; where they are coming from, etc.) We might not be able to say what a clarinet sounds like (#78), what a game is (#75), but we can demonstrate that we understand those things (are familiar with, can be said to; e.g., give examples, compare to a flute, etc.) He is not using a definition of understanding nor does understanding consist of one thing.
Not to belabor this, but I would suggest Witt ( and OLP) does not play by those rules: affirmation, negation, points to counter, etc.--again, these (mostly) are not meant as statements, say: to be taken as true/false distinctions, or as claims. He's trying to get the reader to see from a different viewpoint. I only worry about trying to force this text to meet a pre-determined criteria (idea of reason), as one of the main points of Ordinary Language Philosophy would be there are different kinds of reasoning ("grammar") for each concept, each word in a sense: "knowing" "understanding" "acknowledging" "reason" and even for just a kind of situation, and even without being closed, fixed, or certain. And I wouldn't call Witt a German Idealist, but even Hegel's method was to unpack simple juxtapositions, and Kant had roughly the same idea as grammar with his categories (though singular criteria and limited application).
Again, I hate to be a stickler, but the juxtaposition is the whole point. The comparison with "emperical invisibility" (out of sight) starts down the road to figure out why philosophers might make up the idea of "rational invisibility" (as a hidden 'thing', not just unexpressed) and all of its offspring.
Understood. I suppose that might work for one who hasn’t an entrenched viewpoint already. It may also work, even for him, if OLP made enough sense to displace it. Personally, I’m happy with what I got.....I better be, considering the time and effort I’ve invested in it.
No, I most certainly wouldn’t label W as a German idealist either; yes, Hegel unpacks juxtapositions....in his own profoundly roundabout way...., and I’d be interested in what you have to say about Kantian “grammar” with his categories. I’d be pleased to see how you correlate reasoning to grammar, from your “...one of the main points of Ordinary Language Philosophy would be there are different kinds of reasoning ("grammar")....”
I don’t wish to detract from your thread, so if your attention is warranted elsewhere, I can wait.
Ouch. ; ) It is tough because OLP is more of a method and viewpoint than a theory; it doesn't have any force or particular logic to itself other than: "Hey, do you see this too?"". The place where I thought it made the most sense (other than J.L Austin's response to A.J. Ayer, though he doesn't bother to explain himself) was in Stanley Cavell's essays in Must We Mean What We Say, particularly the title essay--basically about intention--and "Knowing and "Acknowledging" which steps through the problem of other minds (like Witt here) but methodically and more straightforward.
Quoting Mww
These may be another post(s), but, well briefly (Cavell addresses this in that title essay too), the OLP (Witt) idea of grammar is that each concept, say, knowing, or, an apology, has its own (or multiple) say, ways it can make sense, how it works (or fails): e.g., understanding--when can you say someone else understands something? how do you explain it? what is proof for understanding, say, math, a poem, a person? etc., each concept having its own (subject to change and adaptation as we change our judgments, standards, lives, etc: what is justice, these days?).
Quoting Mww
My Kant is questionable, but "grammar" would classify an action being a certain action--being identified as such. You can try to make an apology, but if it is said sarcastically it may not be understood/accepted as an apology (its a further rebuke, etc.); there are reasons essential to it being an apology; criteria it must meet. We could look at each concept as a category. To be in its category, a concept has its limits (when does a game break down into only playing?) This is a far cry from Kant's desire for his categories, but the structure of grammar is analogous--the sense of inclusion and exclusion, the rationality of criteria--though not the "imperative" of his logic/reason. There is not the same force (should) and inclusion is not determined deontologically (beforehand, for certain), but only usually after an act. "Did you mean to apologize? that just sounded like complaining. There wasn't any acceptance of wrong; no request for forgiveness!"
Oh, yeah, we scared him away. Damn.
That's different - an Hegelian critique of Wittgenstein... Curious.
I'm not sure what you mean by an impossibility. Is it impossible that lions can talk? Yes, but Wittgenstein is getting us to imagine that a lion could talk, and given that case we could still not understand it. Is it impossible that we could not understand a lion if it talked? It's a conditional statement and hardly a self-evident fact. Why do you consider it such a straightforward fact that it would be impossible to understand a lion if it talked? Would it speak English or Lion?
Quoting Antony Nickles
I'm reluctant to get into it because I find it so enigmatic, but I might side with the quote from your OP: "because our context of 'understanding' is so radically different than that of a different species".
Quoting Antony Nickles
I agree that W is attempting to "turn our whole inquiry around" (PI108).
Quoting Antony Nickles
Where does he talk about "fixing words or speech to something inside the brain"? I don't find the relationship between mind and body to be an immediately apparent goal of his investigations.
Quoting Antony Nickles
It sounds as though you take this to be a misunderstanding of Forms of Life. If so, what do you understand "Forms of Life" to mean or to be about?
Quoting Antony Nickles
If these terms are not synonymous, then doesn't this create a problem for your reading of:
"I cannot know what is going on in him"; and
"We could not understand a lion if it talked"?
Doesn't it loosen the connection you are wanting to draw between these?
What I should have said is Witt is using the statement in its sense of impossibility; as I did say, using the sentence as a given fact (it could be other things--in other texts, in other uses). The use (its fact-ness?) is more important than it being an isolated statement (an opinion or claim to be answered by an opinion or refuted). The problem is, isolated/taken as just the words, you are not wrong in everything you are saying. This is why Witt falls back on "use"--how it is meant (in what sense).
Quoting Luke
My argument is that this is not being used (I'm not sure it helps to underline it anymore) as a conditional statement (though it can be seen that way--it is one of the possibilities of its grammar--but you would have to ignore the context) In this case (in this text, in relation to everything around it), he is not asking us to imagine a talking lion--it is being said as an accepted fact ("if", "then", no buts). If he is asking us to imagine something, what sense do the sentences around it make?
On your reading, he's using the impossibility as a fact. Okay.
Quoting Antony Nickles
How can it be otherwise? Lions can't talk.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I don't think it's clear, but I'm not sold on your reading. At least, not yet.
Well this isn't the stretch where that is looked into in detail, that's on me. But the interlocutor's desire to have, his worry about, something "hidden", is evident here. If something isn't hidden in the other, it could be there is nothing I can hide, or nothing special about me--which leads to the thought: I can't know his pain, but he MUST be able to know it (and I, me)(see @Mmw here)--which is the desire not to have to understand the other, be responsible (and for what I say). "Thought is connected to words, and I know those words, so I know him"--without me having anything to do with it. I'm just working from the very end of that journey, where he is exploring the ethical situation we are left with when that desire is abandoned.
This is also outside of this text, but Witt points out the variety of our forms of life to get us to see the variety of how the world makes sense (has reason)--not just word=object, or true/false statements. I only point out the analogous use some people make of it as with hidden internal somethings--the desire to secure language from skepticism (ground it from confusion, misunderstanding), to remove the human from the activity of communicating.
Well, you got me there, though I believe the point still stands. He is going back and forth between the two, and the difference between wanting certain knowledge, and being able to understand the other, intersect here in Witt's use in their mutual sense of: trying to figure out what to do with the other, how to address them. Object of knowledge? or understanding how to go on with them? (both maybe?)
Quoting Luke
I got my "it"s confused; not using the impossibility as a fact, using the statement as a fact.
Quoting Luke
Yes, it is a statement, among other things. It is not being used for its possibility to state something--to claim itself as a fact; to stand to be refuted; it is being used in its uncontested fact-ness, for comparison to a choice. As you say, Lions can't talk. If someone says they cannot know another, that is a belief. "A dog cannot be a hypocrite, but neither can he be sincere" p. 229 This fact is being used in comparison to a baby who will be able to pretend, but not without learning many things beforehand.
And to provide the full quote from p. 56 (right after#143): What we have to mention in order to explain the significance, I mean the importance, of a concept, are often extremely general facts of nature: as are hardly ever mentioned because of their great generailty."
« If Wittgenstein could roar, nobody could understand him. »
— A lion
If the Kardashian's could talk, I wouldn't understand them. Because they do and I don't.
@StreetlightX made a thread on this topic a few years back.
Lions and Grammar
I think Wittgenstein was making a joke. Either that, or he was wrong.
Technically, Hegelian would be triadic, but my dyadic thesis/antithesis is just me philosophizing in Kantianese.
So grammar is the science of application of concepts? Can we say that? If concepts have a plurality of meanings, grammar is the method for picking the better of them? Ok....to what end?
When I pick use a word representing a concept, and indicate some meaning by it, is that word intended to demonstrate my reasoning, or is it chosen to align with your understanding of my reasoning?
“...To say "He alone can know what he intends" is nonsense: to say "He alone can know what he will do", wrong....”
(From your Witt, P.I., p. 223)
Am I suppose to gather from all that, that I can know what he intends, if only I choose the right word for the concepts? So I say...did you intend ____?; he says, nope, not that. So I say, well, did you mean ____?; nope, not that either. I see a serious problem here, don’t you?
On the other hand, I say, did you mean ____, and he says, no, I meant _____, to which I say, oh, cool, I get it now, or I could just as well say, ohfercrissakes, that just doesn’t make any sense at all.
In the immortal words of Strother Martin, what we have heah.....is a failyah......to cuh-MUNicate.
And here’s the kicker. All I wrote just now? All I’ve ever written, actually? I submit, My Good Sir, that it is impossible for you to tell, if I got it right, whether I used my grammar (reasoning) correctly with respect to your understanding, or merely from my own, and they happen to coincide from sheer accident. And, if I got it wrong, it is impossible for you to tell whether I chose my meanings with the intent to make you think I got it wrong, when I understood you perfectly from the get-go. Both of which catastrophically falsify Witt’s prophecy given above.
BOOM!!!!! Mic drop, exit, stage right......
(Kidding. I’m just thinking out loud. No offense. You may rebut as you see fit)
Obviously this needs to be an entirely different thread. Science doesn't come into it. 'Meaning' is like the imagined 'hidden' inner process. A concept's Grammar is not the reasoning we go through, but the (external) possibilities of sense--not a fixed 'meaning' like a definition either. Part of it is the way we judge in reacting (the lines along which it could make sense): "It's a blue day." "Do you mean, we should go surfing? or that the sky is a magnificent color?" "Well, I meant both", or "No, I'm just sad." A little harder to understand as fitting in the field of acceptable Grammar: "Today's the day I wear blue!" But also the limits of sense, as with the failure to apologize by offending instead. These are not determined (fixed by us or decided) beforehand. We don't always 'mean', or 'intend', what we say (say resolutely or casually) because most times those things do not come up until we say something strange. This is all very quickly said and better addressed with Witt's text on Grammar, or OLP in general, which I may get to eventually.[/quote]
This has two things going on. Acting and intending, and the knowledge of those. To intend (to do) something, and, to mean (something) have two different ways they work (or don't)--different Grammars. Witt is explaining the Grammar of knowledge in these instances (Grammar, as: let's say, everyday logic, roughly; or: the way in which knowing intentions makes sense or doesn't). Yes, I can know what you are going to do; "look he is going to ask her out!" With intention it is harder, but imagine them both as not a hidden internal causal process--that intention is like an excuse; it only comes up after something gets screwed up; "Did you intend to bring a gun fishing instead of a pole?" "Did you intend to slap her instead of apologize?" Something unexpected happened or outside (the Grammar of) our expectations. What Witt is trying to get at is that, if you want to say there is a hidden internal 'intention' or 'meaning' that you (alone) KNOW (say, beforehand, certainly, specifically), that is not the way knowledge and intending work--if you insist on that (and mean it, say, as a philosopher), you are denying the other; if you say that in normal conversation, it's going to sound like nonsense too (though we could probably imagine a scenario). Now I can intend to do something: "I intended to roll for Sixes, but I'll have to take Chance."(in Yatchze), and we too can know your intention (you only had those two spots left, course you're gonna roll for sixes. If you intended to roll for chance, then there would be questions.).
Quoting Mww
Witt does say its amazing that we can communicate at all. But trust me I can tell when you're reasoning is wrong. : ) Grammar sits apart from us, prior to us--in the language/world. But if we understood each other by coincidence or accident, would it make a difference? But you have hit on the crux of the matter for me, which is that trickery, pretending, lying, charade, joking, trolling (@Banno), etc. look exactly like the real thing (maybe), so: how do we KNOW! And this is when we have to see that 'hidden processes' and 'having a secret', are two different ways of thinking of (viewpoints on) the uncertainty of the other (The "Problem" of Other Minds).
The cartoon is all most people take from Witt, which is sad (and wrong) as I think he's one of our most important modern thinkers. Also, again (previously addressed to others here), the idea here is to see that the sentence is not an opinion or a claim of some kind (to be answered with an opinion or alternative claim). If there is some confusion, I hope I can help.
This is philosophy? Troll much?
Often as I can.
Sure, the context is important. If that is the whole of your thesis, then we have no disagreement.
If I see a lion writhing in pain with evident cause, do I think: all the same, the lion's feelings are hidden from me? We are embedded in a shared world. We share long grass and antelopes and water holes with the lion. These are the things about which we might talk.
After Davidson, if we are able to recognise that the lion is indeed speaking, then by that very fact we must be able to recognise some of what it is saying. Otherwise we would have no reason to think it was not humming to itself, or the equivalent.
The quote in that thread is taken (mis-taken) as an open-ended call for speculation too. Instead of inner processes, he's fixed 'Grammar' in the place of those, in the same way Forms of Life is used as well, just grabbing the quote for its own reasons. As a discussion of Witt's term Grammar, it misses the mark for that reason and others, but that is a different discussion.
Have a look at the sections around about ?500.
Okay...done. ; )
The textual context: the role the sentence plays on this page. Based on Witt's discussion (and my other evidence), the sentence is used as a fact, not as an open question. (I wouldn't put it as a 'disagreement' so much as an inability, or lack of interest, to see, so far.)
507. " 'I [the interlocutor] am not merely saying this, I mean something by it.' -- When we consider what is going on in us when we MEAN (and don't merely say) words, it seems to us as if there were something coupled to those words, which otherwise would run idle. --As if they, so to speak, connected with something in us." [With the talics in original, in all CAPS.]
The 'meaning' being the something, connected to words, or connected to some inner process (set apart from our responsibility). But we don't 'mean' what we say, usually--'casually' at all--and we don't have to, in the senses: be careful with it, say it emphatically, for reasons, etc. Yet we can still answer the question (afterwards): What did you mean? (or, "Did you mean to say that?") But that is not usually asked unless we say something strange, etc. These are some of the Grammar of 'meaning' (something).
The context is guessing thoughts, and the talk of pictures relating this to his picture theory of meaning; it's the whole picture that we do not understand, as opposed to when some specific utterances are seen as lacking sense (this is dealt with around ?500). "If a lion could speak we could no understand him" is the expression of a conviction, not a piece of reasoning.
A lion might speak in such a way that we simply do not recognise his behaviour as language. There doesn't seem to be much of worth in considering this possibility.
Or a lion might speak in such a way that we recognise his behaviour as language, but cannot make sense of it. But consider, how could we recognise his behaviour as language, unless there were some aspect of it that we understood as language? SO if we recognise some behaviour as language, by that very fact we have in some way understood it.
Suppose a language that is private to lions. We would either not recognise it as a language; or if we do recognise it as a language, we would at least partially understand it, and hence it would not be private to the lions.
Well, this is very-much appreciated (someone's been reading--maaaaybe not my post, but it's something). I agree with you that he begins with guessing thoughts and that "it's the whole picture that we do not understand." I would point out the picture is not Witt's, so much as positivism's, but, whatever. But, yes, Witt is trying to investigate: why do philosophers (anyone) hold onto, need, create, this picture (of meaning being internal thought)?
I ask that you look again at my argument that the quote is being USED as a fact (though it is, makes sense as, and can be addressed as--independently--a hypothetical opinion, or questionable claim, whatever--fine; that is not what's happening here/what Witt is doing with it--I'm not sure how to write that any better (it's starting to make me self-conscious); I mean looking at USE is a major point of the PI); He is using it, here, as a fact, for comparison with a conviction (above)--a belief chosen and held onto strongly (and maybe the above back-and-forth with Luke might help). Not (used as) an expression of belief (nor a piece of reasoning). The PICTURE is, in those terms, an (expression of our) denial of the other. I am adding to "the picture"'s motivations, our own (it's our picture anyway), in that it is a human doubt and fear that creates (is expressed into) the picture, but also that its solution--for certainty, rationality, predictability, universality, predetermination--is the same solution that wishes to deny the human in the other (and ourselves); the failing, the responsibility, the unpredictability, irrationality, etc.
I'm not sure how Witt is not seen as looking at "specific utterances" (say every utterance of the Interlocutor?) and sometimes pointing out how they don't "make sense"--yes he can be less than forgiving with this, but it is not a dismissal (insensible idiot!) so much as to bring to light the distinctions between having said one thing as opposed to another, for being judged as falling outside that category, subject to the consequences for that concept, etc. (the Grammar of the concept). He is rather curt and unforgiving though.
But, for the other,
Quoting SEP Wittgenstein article
I think the picture theory ran deep enough to carry well into PI, and that this is what he has in mind when he talks about the lion; we have no picture of what would be going on.
And I think that we do have at least something of a picture of what is going on.
The SEP article you quote is Wittgenstein as a positivist. In the PI, the positivist is the Interlocutor--he is wondering how he got himself into the gordian knot of the Tractatus. He is diagnosing the creation of the picture theory.
Quoting Banno
If you want to take a position on the content of that sentence, go ahead. I don't have an argument against this; I am not arguing with that. However, I am arguing that Witt had something else in mind (he is using the sentence in another SENSE): here (with the lion) there is not a choice (it is in its sense as a FACT that he is USING it), but with us (with the conviction; in wanting a picture theory) we have a choice, and, in doing so, we shut our eyes to the other.
Quoting Banno
Yes, this is ships in the night (the arguments are categorically incompatible--back to the "rough ground" as Witt would say; which I would argue is the text--maybe seeing it a new way). I can understand if you don't care to follow it, but I don't think I'm speaking German ;) Always willing to help, of course. And I do edit some of my responses, like my last one, to try to make them more clear and responsive to where I feel the misunderstanding is.
Weeeeeeell, I'll grant you that. But (though this is said provisionally, i.e., I don't want to argue it here) he did skirt it and was left with nothing to say, and spent the PI filing in that blank (everything other than word--world, true/false statements). More to what I AM arguing here, in the PI he is wondering what the positivist's desire (need) was, which I will argue he did share (as does his other/former self--the Interlocutor).
They skirted him.
So, are we going somewhere here?
I'd rather not here (see the edit above)--maybe another post; his path from TLP to the PI and the "rationality" (rigorousness? ability to be subject to study/criticism?) of everyday life, "ordinary language", I may take up in another post about Ordinary Language Philosophy generally. Here I wanted to focus on the ethical argument Witt is making (and the subtlety of 'use' I guess because everyone can't seem to wrap their head around that).
Quoting Antony Nickles
In a sense it was the positivists (and in this case their odd bedfellowing with monotheists) and similar thinkers who made it take so long to acknowledge within science that animals had intentions, goals, emotions, desires and the like. That they were experiencers like us and active ones cognitively. Placing a lion in the above quote, one writhin in pain, say with a spear in its gut to me offers no contrast. If we want to make an ethical appeal or an argument with an ethical goal, I think it is problematic to not realize that the animal us is what is being denied when we assume our way away from empathy with other humans and animals. IOW you may be right about his intent and what that sentence about lions is 'doing', but it's still a problem for me.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Yours is a thoughtful response, taking into consideration my effort here; I appreciate it. I will say a bit of clarification for me in another reply, and I understand and share your disappointment with his (repeated) distinguishing our biological differences--which I would only say he is (insensitively) using to contrast our 'humanity' positivism would like to ignore--but I am heartened by your association of seeing (desiring to see) a person in a way (for me, past them to something else more certain, less 'human'--per Witt) with the idea of seeing an animal in a way--say, as meat--without noticing the sympathetic. I would say the "seeing as" or "aspect-seeing" that Witt gets into later (pp. 193-208), ties animals and humans together in our ability for denial of the other, say, their pain. There is a great book of back-and-forth essays (four) called "Philosophy & Animal Life" in which, in response to an essay by Cora Diamond (in response to another), Cavell argues a rational argument for the ethical treatment of animals is impotent because it does not address the human desire to see the other (animal) as, in a sense, "inhuman"--not seeing the (moral) aspect of our similarity as animals: that we are responsible in the face of our separateness and the failing of knowledge to bridge that apart from our response.
This makes W’s grammar/reasoning synonymy more apparent, in that my philosophical perspective attributes to acting pure practical reasoning, and attributes to meaning pure theoretical reason. And now I see why, in the second paragraph of your first response to me, ethics/morals were its concern, which has to do with acting. I certainly agree that the acting I do and the meaning I impart have different ways they work, for they are each derived from their own ground of reasoning. If I already grant acting and meaning are different in a certain way, I don’t profit significantly in seeing that they are different in some other way as well. That is to say, why acting and meaning are said to have different grammars, when I acknowledge them cum hoc as having different reasoning, still escapes me, but that’s ok.
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Quoting Antony Nickles
I disagree. “Going to ask” is not asking, so stands as merely a possibility, and any possibility has its immediate negation just as possible. You may know he intends to ask, or that he means to ask, but you can’t know he asks until he actually does. He could be hit by a wayward cyclist (beer bottle, panic attack, ad infinitum) a split second before he gets the words out. Asking is acting, intending to ask is meaning, and because they are different grammars, given the above, the reasoning is different, again, from the above. Therefore, what it is permissible for you to know must be different, if such knowledge comes from the reasoning. Which of course, it must, because it couldn’t come from anywhere else.
Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes, just like that. Outside the grammar, being the same as other than the reasoning, of our expectations. Obviously the second contradicts the first, so what should I make of that?
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Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes, I see that. As a matter of philosophical fact, it is because concepts do have specific meanings, that it is possible to tacitly understand days are not blue, and nonetheless allowance is granted to mischaracterize the meanings of concepts within certain limits given sufficient experience. I suppose the “imagined ‘hidden’ inner process” to indicate the rational arrangement of all the myriad associations contained in the concepts, that is, their schemata, into an order which obtains a meaningful statement coincidental to speaker and listener. As such, your “it’s a blue day” transfers to my “he is exhibiting pathological despondence” if I’m a clinical psychologist, or “sucks to be you” if I’m just a rabid Nietzsche-an cynical nihilist. “Here...have another hit on this” if I’m an old hippie. (Grin)
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Quoting Antony Nickles
Sure, under certain conditions. That which is tautologically true cannot be reasoned wrong, and if I do, you can certainly tell. Logical fallacies and categorical errors are entirely sufficient for distinguishing wrong reasoning. Other than instances of analytically certain statements, you can only tell what I mean for you to know on the one hand, and I can present any reasoning I want but if you have no experience whatsoever with what I’m talking about, you can tell nothing at all about my reasoning. You may have your conclusions with respect to it, in that you might say I’m so full of crap my eyes are brown, but that is grounded in your reasoning, not mine.
Quoting Antony Nickles
No, but that’s taken out of context. I said....coincidence from accident, you say coincidence or accident. My philosophy denies anything is ever understood by accident, because understanding is a logical procedure in which the objects must align with the subject necessarily in order for there to be understanding in the first place. This is the only way misunderstanding is possible. The difference between yours and mine, is mine has the accident in coincidence, yours has the accident in the understanding.
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Quoting Antony Nickles
Depends on the degree of “(maybe)”, doesn’t it? An obvious lie is easy to know qua falsehood, a well-disguised lie is not. On the other hand, if reasoning to a lie, or the grammar of the conceptions if you insist, looks EXACTLY like the real thing, which I suppose to be reasoning to a truth.....you can’t know. The real thing can only be as you know that thing, so if what he is saying looks exactly like what you know, nothing new is given to you by which you can make a distinction between them, leaving you with no more than what you already knew.
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Quoting Antony Nickles
Doesn’t that depend on the domain of discourse? In the overall history of mankind in general, isn’t misunderstanding the exception to the rule? It follows that if the misunderstanding is the exception, then the ability to communicate, which is the facilitator of mutual understanding, is not so amazing. I can see, however, that Witt’s detractors might say exactly that, considering they might think Witt made common language use FUBAR because of his very own philosophical investigations. By the way.....did Witt have any peers playing the role of serious detractor?
I’m open to being convinced Witt’s proclamation, “He alone can know what he intends" is nonsense: to say "He alone can know what he will do", wrong....” is possible. Gonna take a powerful argument in its favor, I must say, and while I admire your attempts, illuminating by glimmer as they do, I’m requiring a epiphanic spotlight. An Archimedes lever to move my Enlightenment predispositions, doncha know.
I can grant the sentence is being used as an uncontested fact, but if it is not be contested, refuted or interpreted asks the question....why did he say it? Apparently Witt is allowing himself to do something with it, even if only to demonstrate something else, which seems to require some sort of correspondence with an uncontested fact. Doesn’t the fact need to be interpreted in order to determine its correspondence?
Is it the various grammars of the concept “talk” that is under examination? Is this the juxtaposition that is the whole point? Lion-talk/human-talk? Perhaps it is the grammar of the concept “talk” vs the grammar of the concept “understand”. If so, the sentence is either true or false. But it is already very well established that every sentence is either true or false. Which reduces to the grammar of the concepts that makes them one or the other, or, enables us to see they can be one or the other. If grammar of concepts is Witt’s sense of reasoning with concepts, and it is also already well established that reasoning is the condition that makes sentences true or false, what is the sentence, and by association Witt himself, really saying? He isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know.
Ok....so a different viewpoint. Sorta like, if I’m in the habit of putting on my left shoe before my right, and I for whatever reason decide to put on my right shoe first, I certainly would have a different viewpoint of shoe priority, but in the end, I got shoes on both feet. Gross oversimplification, of course, but isn’t it the same principle?
Would you accept the sentence, “asking forgiveness is easier than asking permission” to be a suitable substitute for the lion sentence?
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Quoting Antony Nickles
Can you help me out with picture? Picture of what, picture of what kind, how do I know it as such, what am I enabled to do with it, what am I enabled to do because of it......and whatever else may apply as far as this topic is concerned.
Thanks.
We do have this problem with dolphins. They are clearly communicating, but are they using language? Might we figure it out and be able to say something to them?
Lions just roar and growl, so for one to speak it would actually have to be using human language. But some animals like certain birds and cetaceans have make sophisticated enough sounds to one another that it may be a form of language, or on the border. I saw a video about a year ago where one researcher was convinced dolphins have names (special sound an individual dolphin will recognize itself by).
I hate to police, but you might notice (I try to point out many times) that this thread is about the difference between: taking something (a statement) as something (a claim) for yourself, and putting yourself in the position of the other (Witt) to see how it is USED (not its other implications) given a certain context; the above--opinions about understanding lions/dolphins--is to ignore my effort here entirely. So, you're not wrong or have a trivial interest, only maybe, imagining this thread as a different topic--and, maybe, hurting my feelings? ; ) Maybe the other responses might help with the difference between 'meaning' and 'use'?
Quoting Coben
This extrapolates from the consequences of what I am proposing Witt is uncovering in a way that shows you understand where I was coming from, so, again, thank you. You are headed in a different direction (a different interest), which is fine, so I would only say that I (and I believe Witt here) am not so much making a case in place of empathy, so much as diagnosing the desire, as philosophers--to side-step the fallibility of others, their separateness, with, say, knowledge--that starts with the human (common) desire for certainty, and the need to respond to, fill in, that gap (to the other). I would say, before that view of ourselves, there is not even the possibility of empathy, that the denial of our 'human condition'--here I mean our relationship to (the limits of) knowledge--is a desire to avoid any other relationship to the other (animal, as you rightly point out we should add; which also brings up our instinct to see the other (their pain) as the same (as ours)--also avoiding any difference in people (and the people of difference), even further negating them--as we do not want to see our separateness because then I must respond to the other, bridge that gap with, in a sense, me--take their expressions as a claim upon me (e.g., my empathy).
Not that a call for empathy is not needed (even, philosophically), but just that I think there is merit in achieving the ethical perspective that Witt is attempting to get us to see--to see our human reaction (denial) to our condition with the lack of knowledge of the other; especially given the still prevalent influence of positivism (although cloaked now), which is a product of the common (cultural/human) desire for fact and evidence to take the place of individual judgment and putting ourselves in a position to (for) the other--letting ourselves (bravely) be called out, without certainty, for the other, rather than shirking that; e.g., to only rely on DNA evidence rather than seeing that circumstantial evidence, judging an unreliable witness, etc., is sufficient to convict (however fallible); also, e.g., we rely only on science to understand other animals, rather than realizing we are in the same position to them as to another human; as I say it in my other response to you: that we are responsible for our response to their expressions (in the face of our separateness and the inability of knowledge to bridge that gap).
Again, this should (will I am thinking more and more) be a separate thread about Grammar, and intention, action, etc., but I do see some profit here (with this thread) in pointing some things out.
Quoting Mww
Just to point out, this isn't predicting the future (especially not ensuring it). It is "going to do", not, know that he actually does it. And, of course, importantly, we can be wrong (or, as you say, something can intervene), but that only proves the possibility that we can. Witt is pointing out that possibility, in comparison to the Interlocutor's refusal to admit that we can "know" the other (even knowing their secrets) without "knowing" what is internal in the other. Importantly, these are two senses of knowledge within its Grammar (possibilities): to know (to guess with evidence, experience of the person, etc.) as opposed to knowledge as certain, prediction, infallibility, etc.
Quoting Mww
We're almost there, but I put 'meaning' in quotes as connected to the hidden, inner process, because it is the (confused) picture Witt is trying to figure out why we want to insist on. Part of that picture is the idea that "concepts do have specific meanings." The PI starts with the idea that there is more (in his term, ordinary) rationality in the world/our language, than fixed, certain, specific; ALL the different ways each concept makes sense (the possible, available--even the unforeseeable): see two types of 'know' above (also, we can 'know' our phone #, which is the sense of knowledge (in its Grammar) that "we can remember it"). Meaning is not a noun, in this sense, not an adjective (meaningful statement), because meaning usually comes up afterwards (though we occasionally are trying to mean a specific sense, e.g., writing a speech; taking into consideration in advance an obvious possibility of it being taken in a different sense in a given context, etc.) We usually just say things and it works out fine (as you say). The point is nothing is fixed at all ahead of time (the 'object' and 'subject' do not align--the people do); we are endlessly responsible to each other to clarify, re-phrase, apologize, etc. (although we can give up). This frailty is not determined or resolvable by philosophy, logic, Forms of Life, our thought, 'meaning, intention, rules, science, etc. It is the open-ended process of communication.
Quoting Mww
All the positivists turned against him; Russell, Godel, the "Vienna Circle"; I would put A.J. Ayer in that boat (who J.L. Austin eviscerates: He and Witt share in responding to the 'descriptive fallacy'--the idea that everything said is a (true/false) statement; that everything is word--world, meaning--understanding; Austin showing there are other "truth-values", e.g., felicity to the Grammar of a concept, in Witt terms. But Austin is just a destroyer (thinking that refuting the skeptic is all we need); Witt is looking for why we want that in the first place (leaving the door open for the skeptic, putting us at the end of the failure of knowledge).)
As I said in my first post: he is using it as a fact in comparison to the choice (the conviction) in the sentence before, to show that we are in a position to the other (beyond knowledge) in response to their pain. It is not that we CAN NOT know/understand the other ( as with the lion, see ** below) we decide (cave to our desire) that without knowledge (in its sense of certainty, independent from us, etc.) we can not know the other--we have no (further) obligation to respond to their pain.
**Though, as I have said, you can certainly debate the fact if you want, or discuss it in its other possibilities; just trying to get people to see that its use here by Witt is as an uncontested fact, again, for comparison. Maybe it helps to say that: it can be both of these things, along with others. Just because it can be used in various ways, or that it "makes sense"--as in: you know the words and how they go together, say, independent of any context--doesn't mean that it can't be/isn't used in a particular sense--here, as an uncontested fact; it is the context (here, textually) in which its sense is seen.
Sounds reasonable. Maybe the fact that we haven't succeeded in translating dolphin-talk is reason to be skeptical that they are using language.
Humans have been able to successfully learn languages upon encountering new language communities. Maybe our common biology makes that easier than with other animals.
When a philosopher makes such a claim, I would think bringing up anthropology, linguistics and zoology would be appropriate. Reading over your OP, I see you were making a connection to ethics vis Witt's language use and pain. And that he wasn't really talking about lions, but was exploring what we understand of the other? I don't entirely follow.
I confess to sometimes glancing at a thread I haven't read from the beginning and wanting to respond to a particular post someone makes.
I'll leave you to it; only to say: my whole point is that Witt is not here "making a claim". That is not why this sentence is here. It is used in a different sense in the context of this text. Of course you can take it that way (it is a possibility of those words alone) as it is possible to drop in on one comment of a post.
The more times I read all this stuff, the closer I get to what you’re trying to say. So, yeah, the juxtaposition isn’t of the concepts in each sentence, it is the juxtaposition of the sentences to each other. My fault, for getting stuck in the minutia, in that I reject the arguments of both sentences outright, which makes it very hard to reconcile them into any sort of comparative relatedness.
You say the lion sentence is to be taken as a fact demonstrating an impossibility. It is only to be taken as a fact because its author so stipulates, but the sentence does not demonstrate an impossibility. It can’t, because the whole thing is predicated on contingencies. Thus, in order to understand the author’s overall intent, I am forced to disregard that the entire thesis begins with a logical error.
Fine, he wants me to accept the sentence as fact, ok, I do that. Then comes the other half of the dichotomy, concerning a moral circumstance. The conviction that the feelings some dude in pain are inaccessible to us when in truth “we CAN know”, but choose to be convinced we can’t, which casts us in a moral dilemma. Here is where requiring the lion sentence to be taken as fact is related, for we relieved of moral responsibility insofar as it doesn’t matter if lions could talk, we wouldn’t understand them anyway, so whatever their feelings, however they arrive at them, we couldn’t tell what they were anyway, so can’t be held liable for denying the accessibility of them. But on the other hand, because some dude and I are of similar enough “forms of life”, we should be non-transparent to each other (only he knows what he will do (is) wrong”), which in turn suggests stuff about him, including his feelings, shouldn’t be hidden from me (“only he knows what he intends is nonsense”).
And all that needs doing, in order for those two parenthetical assertions, and indeed how the two antecedent propositions, the one on fact and the other on conviction, can actually be the case......is to grant that concepts have different meanings. Or, the grammar of concepts are not etched in stone, so the reasoning using concepts is adaptable to circumstance.
I talk with you only to understand Witt, but even if or when I do, I’m not going to accept that OLP philosophy
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Quoting Antony Nickles
This is yet another manifestation of the classical Platonic rendering of knowledge of, as opposed to knowledge that. Saying to know is to guess, is a flagrant disregard of logic, and has been since forever.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I might grant this is what Witt is telling us, then immediately reject it as not the case at all. It is never our knowledge of others that predicates our moral obligations. Even if I know everything there is to know about about you, I am not obligated to respond to your feelings because of it. I am obligated by HOW I feel about myself, not WHAT I feel about you, and certainly not either how or what you yourself feel. My knowledge, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t even enter into it, except it avails my immoral actions.
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Quoting Antony Nickles
Yes. Tethering to the irreducible, the apodeitically certain, is the whole modus operandi of human reason, and consequently, for possible mutual understanding because of it. Witt credits language use for understanding, or lack of it, but proper philosophy reduces language to its components, and those are the actual ground for understanding, and by association, the prevention of misunderstanding. Rather than worry about what a word means in a language, it is a better effort to realize how words originate of themselves, for then we find the meaning of a word is given BY its origin, and understanding henceforth becomes a matter of its relation, and its meaning becomes merely a matter of convention.
This relates directly to why I asked you about what Witt intends us to understand by the “picture”.
Anyway....5 minutes to football, so.....I’m outta here.
Quoting Mww
This is a legit question for this post, as I skip over the picture to just make a case that the same desire (for the picture) comes from the entire human condition (our separateness). Maybe the best sense of the picture is: a model of sorts; the positivist model of meaning that Witt toyed with in the Tractates (that he is now diagnosing in the PI--"why did I/we want to think about it that way?"). The picture is: meaning, thought, any inner processes (how some use Forms of Life), corresponds to the world. We know one (world) through the other (word/meaning)--correlation.
" [From the Interlocutor:] 'A name signifies only what is an element of reality. What can not be destroyed; what remains the same in all moments.'... This was the very expression of a quite particular image: of a particular picture we[**] want to use." #59 **"We" being what philosophy has wanted in the past--certainty (not"destroy[-able]"), fixed ("the same"), universality ("in all moments")]
If we can't know one (the Other's mind) we can't know the Other (this is the denial). It is the view of (a picture for) meaning as statements that refer to objects; that true/false is the measure of meaning.
" 'The mind seems able to give a word a meaning'... But this is not something that seems to be so; it is a picture." p. 184
It is here important to point out that this is what Witt is trying to show as the shortcomings of philosophical 'knowledge'--its attempt to solve the skeptical doubt of other minds ("I can't know--be certain--what is going on in them"; "I can't but know what is going on in me"--or "I absolutely can not know what is going on with them"---because it doesn't meet the standard of the positivist's "knowledge".
" 'Either he has this experience, or not' --what primarily occurs to us is a picture which by itself seems to make the sense of the expressions unmistakable..." #352
Witt points to the lion; as if, in THIS case, yes, we CAN NOT--but, with the Other, we are ABLE TO, however, we would rather rely on the Picture: where knowledge (of the inner, of agreed meaning, etc.) stands in our place, excusing us from any relation to the Other--to their expressions which ask to be answered, perhaps; "mistake"-nly (see quote above); unjustly, selfishly, by closing our eyes shut, etc.
Quoting Mww
No, he/the sentence does not demonstrate it, but, Yes!! Witt is asking you to take/accept/imagine it as a fact. Whew.
Quoting Mww
Again, got it. You go on to assume Witt is using the comparison as a moral equivalency (between our position to the lion and the Other), but that is going one step too far--what you say above is the stopping point with the lion. Also, we are not "choosing" to be "convinced". Picturing knowledge this way expresses our conviction with regard to the Other: I want to know him only by knowing his inner (thought processes, meaning, intention, etc.) or outer (traditions, form of life, etc.), and, since those are not accessible/sufficient, we conclude we cannot "know" the Other (as the Interlocutor says), when we can. But we do have a relationship to the Other; it's just that it's more than knowledge ("know" in a different sense--aaaand I just lost @Mmw because this is Witt as Ordinary Language Philosopher.) Our relationship to the Other (and meaning, Form of Life, etc.) is not predetermined, certain, universal, predictable, not partial, unconditional, free from doubt, etc. There is a gap between us and Them that only we can fill (if necessary)--we know the Other in the sense we acknowledge them, their expressions as meaningful, or reject them.
Quoting Mww
This (which is taken out of the context of @Mmw's discussion, but it) is, in a nutshell, what we want as humans, and which creates the Picture of philosophical (positivist) knowledge. We no longer have to be responsive to the accessible expressions of the Other; no longer have to span the distance of our separateness.
Quoting Mww
And here all we need to tweak is that "reasoning" (or, us), do not "use" concepts. Concepts have different "uses" as in different ways in which they make sense, say: "to know", as I have discussed elsewhere, a phone number, the theme of a poem, a person's intent, when a star will appear on the other side of the moon, etc. But these senses are not adaptable "to" a circumstance, nor, again, adaptable by reason (or by a person); the "use"--the sense(s) a concept has--is part of the context at the time (as it were, to be determined, if necessary). Just because they are not fixed (do not ensure anything), does not make them adaptable, nor irrational--just that what counts as reasonable for each concept, in context, may be different.
Quoting Mww
The issue is the problem the Other creates in being unknown (unknowable (with certainty) the interlocutor will claim, since we cannot know what is going on with their experience--internally; or by some shared external something)). Now this response in a sense moves past the other--the claim on us of them, not others generally, but this person, in front of us, in a present moral situation, say, writhing in pain--past that to find our obligations spelled out in morality, our moral knowledge. As if Kant were not just trying to remove our feelings or instinct from our moral action, but remove what we can't be certain of (beforehand) entirely--including the Other.
Quoting Mww
Here I should say that there is nothing wrong (false) with the Picture of knowledge that the Interlocutor wants, and there is nothing impossible about it--we can, of course, 'know' the Other, say, scientifically (for what good it does). And the mode of (philosophical, rational, logical) "human reason" is not nonsense, or incorrect. However, the desire to "tether to the irreducible" is the same desire for certainty of the Other that Witt is pointing out comes to an end (categorically) in the human condition. We are separate; there is no understanding that is ensured to us mutually. If there is a miscommunication, or a disagreement, or a refusal to recognize the Other--their cares, their sensibilities, their history--there is nothing that "knowledge" or "reason" will do apart from our willingness to refuse to give up on the process of understanding. The "possibility" for that understanding has a breaking point, an ending moment. But, again, most of the time misunderstanding does not happen--there is no need for concern over the Other; no need to ask about intention or what they mean, but that is not the situation philosophers care about. The desire is to never come to that moment by treating every communication and the process of understanding as the same; setting the bar for certainty and predictability, and solving for that problem. It is to put the cart before the horse, and the philosophical criteria from that desire for certainty leave us blind to the Other, unable to capture all the various ways we save understanding--excuses, apologies, clarifications, acknowledgements, concessions; i.e., reasons, to allow for the possibility for understanding.
Quoting Mww
And now we've come full circle to the "ground for understanding" again; the search for how meaning is given to a word--here maybe by its origin, relation, convention; "language as components"--this is the search Witt is showing forces a picture on us, a certain pre-determined theoretical framework based on our fears and desires. Saying Witt "credits language use for understanding" is to impose that picture onto Witt--attribute to him the desire which he is attempting to reveal. It is important to note that when Witt is saying, paraphrased: "Look at the Use!" (#340), that is not to say that "use is meaning" (use as opposed to... ) but: Look! See how language functions many ways beyond this prejudice for certainty, universality (beyond the person); to see that language is not just word-object or true/false statements; to recognize that there are myriad uses ("senses" he will say, grammars) of a concept--they have numerous possibilities in which they can be meaningful (even projections for new importance, into new contexts), and have different criteria, judged different ways, in each sense, in each categorical context--knowledge as fact, knowledge as skill/familiarity, knowledge as acknowledgement--its many ordinary formations (imagine, even "certainty" in different ways in different places). As if Plato pushed past Socrates' accomplishment in his (Plato's) desire for a standard of knowledge which led to the picture of the forms. Socrates was an ordinary language philosopher first in asking "what do when say: when...", say, we ask about justice. One ordinary answer is: might makes right--that is actually a part of the world of justice; it's a legitimate, rational answer. Maybe not the best justice, but how can we say that the idea that "what is good for the stronger is good for the country" is not part of the concept/possibility/conversation of justice? It's the basis for trickle-down economics. Socrates (and definitely Plato) do aspire to a (more just) answer, but along the way we are investigating our (normally unnoticed, unexamined) concepts--this is the benefit of ordinary philosophy. Plato went too far in imagining a hidden world to fit his desired conditions rather than see the criteria existing in the world. Why ask the question if you know the answer?
But Witt's point is that the grounding we want is a wish; a decision before we look (start our investigation)--starting with a demand for a certain standard. We understand each other most of the time because of the ordinary everything; all the training, all the watching, all the mistakes, etc. Our language is weaved into our lives and world, not in any specific way, but in all the complex, subtle, crass, general, lazy, vague, precise, poetic ways in which we live and judge and how we disagree and know and forget and apologize. Witt is trying to expand our vision to see all the different ways language works in various activities; even just at a particular time/place (the context of the event, the people there, the expectations, the accompanying histories, the feelings). All language can not be reduced to one explanation, a theory.
The point he is making at this moment in the PI is that, despite our wish to interact with the Other based on knowledge that is certain, and with understanding grounded in something that would prevent misunderstanding, our knowledge of the Other comes to an end, and we are left with: not an empirical problem to solve, but a moral situation in which we are responsible for our effort (or lack of) to understand the Other--together, through questions, rebuke, ultimatums, education, exasperation, breakthrough, learning what matters to each other, clearing up hyperbole, generalized terms, different senses, etc. You might say words have meaning; I would say that more important than ensuring that process is to see that words are meant.
Agreed, in principle. The picture....the mental image as I use “picture”......corresponds to the world, such image I would call intuition, but the remainder of the inner process must ensue before there is knowledge. Different metaphysics, similar principles.
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Quoting Antony Nickles
Kindasorta lost me, I guess, insofar as I attribute no philosophical authority to ordinary language. But I’m still interested in this “know” in a different sense, from its point of view.
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Quoting Antony Nickles
And that too?
A concept is, after all, nothing but a representation of something. A representation, in and of itself, has no meaning. It only attains to a meaning upon being conjoined with something else, and the only way to conjoin, is to reason. To think. It is here that it becomes more rational to insist concepts are fixed, concepts do ensure something, otherwise we couldn’t ever claim any knowledge whatsoever. If we are not certain of a specific representation of a specific quantity, conceived, say, as the number 1, we wouldn’t have any ground at all for what stands as the absolute truth of mathematical expressions. But the number 1 is completely meaningless by itself, and actually wouldn’t even have been conceived at all, if it weren’t for a need only it could satisfy.
And as an added bonus, we see what counts as reasonable for each concept may indeed be different, insofar as “green” will never be a reasonable substitute for the number 1.
Also continued......
This is a description of "the picture", not as a theory proposed by Witt (or me). It is also not referring to 'pictures' as, say, mental images; it is the theoretical framework forced on us by the desire for certainty (predictability, universality, etc.). The metaphysics (or Forms of Life, or Use, or any other postulation to solve the problem (separation) of the Other) is created by the need for something other than the stopping point at which we become responsible to each other. This is to veer into territory better suited for another post, but one of Witt's points is there is no space between our pain and its expression to allow our own "knowledge" of it. We express our pain (or hide it); we don't "know" it. Similarly, usually there is no space between the world and our language; no (metaphysical) "reality" to which our words correspond. I say usually because our doubt--our confusion, our fear, our lack of control of the Other--along with other (moral, aesthetic, etc.) problems, create the feeling of space--and thus the need for some connection--between the word and the world. But the Other is separate; we can't agree or convince each other; things fall apart, irreparably sometimes; our standards run afoul. The picture allows a vision of the world where these things are manageable, avoidable, or solved--by knowledge, logic, argument, etc.
Quoting Mww
I'll take the second part first. I have discussed elsewhere that Witt is pointing out that knowledge in this sense (our ability to be certain, say, about the Other), comes to an end sometimes. We are separate, and that comes out in ways that cannot be resolved by "knowledge"--either of the Other, or of our world or our language, say, to convince/logically force the Other. As I added just above recently, language is not just word-object or true/false statements; there are myriad uses ("senses" Witt will say, grammars) of a concept--they have numerous possibilities in which they can be meaningful (even projections for new meaning into new contexts), and have different criteria, judged different ways, in each sense, in each categorical context--knowledge as fact, knowledge as skill/familiarity, knowledge as acknowledgement--its many ordinary formations.
Now when you say you attribute no philosophical authority to ordinary language, that is understandable. That is a view of Witt and other ordinary language philosophers shared by much of philosophy. This definitely would be another post, but the observations of OLP are not made to be assessed as statements (about the world, etc.). OLP makes no claim to defend ordinary usage ("common sense") either (say, against "philosophy"). The descriptions also have no authority other than the extent to which someone else sees what I see--the statements about: what we say when, e.g., when we say we "know something", etc.--are philosophical evidence--but they are not facts. Though neither are they merely beliefs. There may be disputes, e.g., over whether it is really the case/sense, whether it applies in this particular context, and whether, even if we accept it, there is any philosophical implication to the issues that concern us, say: does the sense of knowledge as acknowledgement really impact the Problem of Other Minds? OLP is not to compete with traditional analytical philosophy (say, on its terms), but to revolutionize it (from within) entirely.
Quoting Mww
In the paragraph above in which this is included is the implication that there is a competition here between knowledge and belief--a way for certainty (stone), and a failing of "difference"/"adaptability". Witt is trying to see past those all-or-nothing pictures by showing that our concepts have varying senses (say, than this dichotomy). But the criteria for you "knowing" your brother's character compared to you "knowing" Newton's laws are not different "meanings". We don't (reason doesn't) "use" or "adapt" concepts. Just because they are not certain, universal, predictable, etc., or that because they are varied, sometimes generalizable, projectable, subject to circumstance, etc., does not make the different senses (and each of their criteria) of our concepts, flimsy, personal, or without implications. You'd have to explain why you'd say you "know" the sun will come up (not that there are no reasons, I guess), not because it's common sense, but because that does not fit the criteria for the concept of "knowledge"--(there'd have to be a reason to doubt it would come up)--My examples of apologies, etc. are better. You CAN say whatever you want ("adapt concepts to circumstances"), but at a certain point you will be said not to be making an apology, no longer playing a "game"; you will be outside any category of a concept, or lying, evading, joking, insincere, avant garde, or maybe called insane (the goal here is not claiming normative force).
Quoting Mww
Witt's view of concepts (the same term used by others but with a different framework around it), is that they are categorical (as I said, in sort of a Kantian sense), not representational. It is not "idea" and "reality" (or whatever). A concept is a class held in place (loosely) with criteria (say, for judgment, standards, identity, etc.). The "conjoining" of meaning with anything, by reason or agreement, etc., to "ensure" or "fix", say, our thoughts--the "insistence", the need of it--is the pull that forces a certain view of how meaning must work; the picture, the theoretical threshold. The fear of the fallibility of us, of our concepts, leads to calamatizing "we couldn’t ever claim any knowledge whatsoever."
Quoting Mww
Here try to see that "the absolute truth of mathematical expressions" being "grounded" in "certainty" is the grammar of mathematical expressions; it is the way they work, the criteria for being what they are. Is it not easier now to see that there are other expressions that have other criteria? different ways in which they work? Maybe they do not rely on certainty; there may even be no "ground". Our moral realm still has rationale, though it might fail; our aesthetic world still has knowledge, only perhaps not always agreement. Can we never make any claim whatsoever? i.e., is discussion impossible outside the conditions of grounded certainty?
Quoting Mww
Seeing the variety of conceptual rationale is one of the main points of the PI. "Seeing what counts" for a concept--even for the different senses of a concept--is to see two things (at least) about the grammar of a concept: the criteria ("what counts") are the structure and limits of that concept. If you stray from the grammar of a concept, the criteria resolve the identity of an action under that concept--e.g., what it can not be (or must fulfill) if it is to be "knowledge". But the criteria also elucidate what "counts"--as in, what 'matters'--under a concept; the human cares and needs reflected in our criteria. "Reasoning" is not internal; grammar is also the ways I which a concept can be meaningful, or at least usually (as humans can do whatever they want for whatever reasons they want), say, "What's your reasoning for doing it that way?"--"for more aerodynamics" or "less weight"; but maybe not: "I felt a moral obligation".
Quoting Mww
And here we can see a need giving a concept the criteria for its grammar (one of which is the satisfaction of the need). Should we call this the concept of singularity/uniqueness? or of numerical primacy? or a series? All? Are there contexts where there could be confusion between which sense applies? (not here but maybe under the different senses of knowledge, good, should, etc.) We have different criteria for how these senses are used, e.g., different conditions, and different consequences for using them outside that criteria, say, the rigidity for inclusion under one sense or the other. These distinctions go on as far as the need to clarify, even beyond their limits (e.g., the "bad" as the "moral" as Nietschze might say).