Wittgenstein Fanboys Club

I came across this website for the Wittgenstein Fanboys Club. It's a group of Pitt graduate students who "meet weekly to slowly read Wittgenstein, line by line, and discuss it till we run out of steam." There are podcasts of some of their meetings from 2007, but I can't extract the files (if anyone else is able to do so, please tell me the trick). It's not clear whether they are still meeting (Shawn, do you know these guys?).

Wittgenstein and Davidson on Interpretation

I'm working my way through Jim Hopkins's "Wittgenstein, Davidson, and the Methodology of Interpretion." It's a favorable comparison of Davidson's views on interpretation with Wittgenstein's. For example, Hopkins writes,

Wittgenstein's conception of interpretation also yields a kind of externalism. Indeed, it seems that on a natural extension, Wittgenstein's and Davidson's modes of interpretive triangulation coincide in the case of the mental, and in such a way as to render the analogy with measurement which they both employ intergral to the understanding of consciousness.

Rorty on Davidson

Robert Siegel interviews Rorty on Davidson.

Quine: Savior of Metaphysics

Also from Stanley's sketch of Quine's place in 20th Century philosophy:

Quine's criticism of positivism rescued traditional metaphysics from the positivist critique.

and

Due in no small part to Quine's vigorous defense of the continuity of science and classical ontology, it was soon followed by the full-blown reemergence of traditional metaphysics.

[Update: In response to a commentor, Stanley writes,

Quine thinks that arguments about what there is are perfectly legitimate, as long as they are recognized as part and parcel of the general scientific project, and not standing outside of it and judging which parts are accurate (some of the anti-metaphysical rhetoric is directed against that latter attitude). And Quine himself has influenced the way metaphysics is done (see Van Inwagen's discussion of "Quinean meta-ontology" in his influential essay, "Meta-Ontology"). But of course you are right that Quine would not himself approve of certain parts of metaphysics, particularly modal metaphysics. I was generally making a point about Quine's causal effect, not what he himself would approve of (I myself think Quine's antipathy to modal semantics may not have been necessary to preserve his overall systematic world view - but that's another story). I do think that Quine made possible the reemergence of much traditional philosophy, even parts that Quine himself wouldn't approve of.

So I suppose the title of this post should be "Quine: Unwitting Savior of Metaphysics."]

Wittgenstein: Impediment to Progress

Jason Stanley has written an article titled "Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth Century" for Routledge's Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy. On his website, he describes the article thusly:

I attempt to summarize philosophy of language in the Twentieth Century. It's a completely absurd task, and I fail miserably. The way I managed to complete the paper I wrote was to write a narrative I thought would be at least helpful for any graduate student in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and meta-ethics to read. Certainly, the topics I discuss, and the elementary lessons I draw from them, are ones that I would want my own graduate students to master in their first year of graduate school. So if you feel curious about what I think introductory graduate students in Metaphysics and Epistemology broadly construed should minimally know about the philosophy of language, you would be interested in this paper.

In the article, Stanley devotes three paragraphs to Wittgenstein:

The twenty years of philosophy that followed Frege and Russell's greatest accomplishments were relatively unimportant to subsequent work in the philosophy of language. Russell spent the years between 1910 and 1920 developing an idiosyncratic version of phenomenalism, according to which ordinary objects were "logical fictions", and names for them were to be treated as "incomplete symbols" to be analyzed away, so that we are left just with reference to sense-data and universals (see section 2.5 of "The Birth of Analytic Philosophy"). Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was also devoted to rather large scale metaphysical endeavors, and was not written with the level of clarity that is so characteristic of the writings of Frege and early Russell. However, unlike Frege and Russell, Wittgenstein took seriously the modal notions of possibility and necessity. For Wittgenstein, a meaningful content divided the space of possibilities. For a proposition to be meaningful, both it and its negation had to be possible; otherwise the proposition did not divide the space of possibilities into those in which the proposition is true and those in which it was false.

One way in which the Tractatus impeded progress in philosophy is that it led philosophers (in particular the Logical Positivists) to expend their energies in the pursuit of developing and honing a criterion of meaningfulness, and using the criterion to argue that traditional philosophical theses failed to satisfy it, and were hence meaningless (see "Wittgenstein and After"). This project has been moribund for decades. It is nevertheless the quest of a criterion of meaningfulness that can be put to anti-metaphysical use that the many humanists outside of philosophy unfortunately most clearly associate with analytic philosophy.

However, the influence of the Tractatus has not been uniformly negative. As we shall see, other philosophers took up some of the metaphysical apparatus developed in the Tractatus and applied it to the study of content. As we shall see, this research program has turned out to be extraordinarily fruitful, not just in subsequent investigations in the philosophy of language, but also in metaphysics. So Wittgenstein’s belief that modality and meaningfulness were intimately related has, somewhat ironically, fueled something of a revolution in just the kind of philosophy he wanted to use it to undermine.

What's curious about Stanley's brief account is that the Tractatus is said to be both relatively unimportant to subsequent work in the philosophy of language and responsible for leading philosophers (such as the Logical Positivists) astray.

Stanley does devote a whole section to 'ordinary language' philosophy, but no mention is made of Wittgenstein in this connection. Ryle is not mentioned either. Stanley focuses on Austin and Strawson because their writings "best exemplify" the work of 'ordinary language' philosophy. In the third paragraph, Stanley quotes Strawson's "On Referring":

To give the meaning of an expression (in the sense in which I am using the word) is to give general directions for its use to refer to or mention particular objects or persons; to give the meaning of a sentence is to give general directions for its use in making true or false assertions…. The meaning of an expression cannot be identified with the object it is used, on a particular occasion, to refer to. The meaning of a sentence cannot be identified with the assertion it is used, on a particular occasion, to make. For to talk about the meaning of an expression or sentence is not to talk about its use on a particular occasion, but about the rules, habits, conventions governing its correct use, on all occasions, to refer or to assert.

Meaning is use. I'm sure I've read that somewhere before. Of course, "Strawson does not just state that meaning is use."

He shows by a detailed example that two sentences can be used to express the same truth-conditions, yet differ on their use-conditions, and that this difference is a matter of the conventional meaning of the words used.

Here Stanley criticizes Wittgenstein without even mentioning him or the Philosophical Investigations. Did Wittgenstein "just state" that meaning is use? Or did he arrive at this view through a lengthy discussion of the connection between meaning and explanations of meaning? A closer reading of The Big Typescript, Philosophical Grammar or the Blue Book would show it to be the latter.

[Update: Over at Leiter Reports, Stanley has posted a sketch of Quine's place in 20th Century philosophy. Concerning Carnap, Stanley writes,

While the common sense tradition survived in England in the work of G.E. Moore and later Austin, work on the continent took off in a different direction. The brilliant philosopher Rudolf Carnap, under the influence of Russell's student Wittgenstein, set out to show that the great philosophical questions of metaphysics, indeed the very divisions between idealism and realism that had so exercised Moore and the early Russell, were meaningless. [...] The influence of Carnap's ideas was felt far beyond Austria, as he had followers in both the United States and Britain. For example, A.J. Ayer, later Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University, was an early student of his, and subsequent prominent exponent of logical positivism in Britain.

So Carnap was under the influence of Wittgenstein, and Carnap's own influence was "felt far beyond Austria." Again, curious.]

Quote of the Week

One could ask: "How do I go about always using words meaningfully? Do I consult a grammar each time? No, that I mean something — what I mean — prevents me from talking nonsense." But what do I mean? I say: I talk about dividing an apple but not about dividing the colour red, because in the case of "dividing an apple" I can think of something, can imagine something, can want something; and I can't with the expression "dividing a colour". Or is it just that one hasn't yet observed any effect of the latter phrase on other people?! It would be more correct to say that in the case of "dividing an apple" I think, imagine, want something; in the case of "dividing a colour", I don't.

How do I go about meaning something by a word? Most likely I imagine something when using my words, want something with them, do something with them, in short use them in a language-game. I use the word for a purpose and therefore not without a sense.

What do we do to give a sense to the group of words "I divide red"? Well, we could turn it into completely different things: an arithmetical proposition, an exclamation, an empirical proposition, an unproven mathematical proposition. Thus I have any number of choices. And how is this number limited? That's difficult to say: by various kinds of usefulness and also by the formal similarity of these creations to certain primitive propositional forms; and all of these boundaries are fluid.

But the sentence "I divide red" can have a sense (for example, it can say the same thing as "I divide something that is red"). What if I were to ask: Which word, which mistake, turns this sentence into nonsense? Why should it be the word "red" and no other? Here one sees that even when we encounter this sentence in its nonsensical form we think about a very specific grammatical system. And that's why we say "You can't divide red", i.e. why we give an answer; whereas we would say nothing in response to a combination of words such as "is has good". But if one thinks of a particular existing language-game and its use, then the proposition that says "'I divide red' is nonsensical" says more than anything else that it doesn't belong to the particular game that, judging from its appearance, it seems to belong.

Thus, "one can't divide red" means: Remember that you don't know what to do in the game to which, based on its form, this proposition seems to belong. (The Big Typescript, §19)

Empiricist Interpretations of the Tractatus

The other day someone asked me whether Merrill and Jaakko Hintikka (Investigating Wittgenstein, 1986) are the only post-Anscombe commentators to give an empiricist interpretation of the Tractatus. I answered that there were actually quite a few in addition to the Hintikkas. The earliest that I know of is John Canfield. In a 1976 article titled "Tractatus Objects" he argues that Tractarian objects are sense-data (I don't have it handy, and I can't remember which journal it appeared in). Here are some others:

A. J. Ayer, Wittgenstein (1985), p. 23:

If, as we must, we discard the assumption that only simple objects can be named, we allow room for the suggestion that states of affairs consist of perceptible qualities on the model of Locke's simple ideas, united by a relation of compresence.

Peter Hacker, Insight and Illusion (1986), p. 71:

An (atomic) state of affairs he thought of paradigmatically as the instantiation or coinstantiation of properties and relations at a spatio-temporal point or points in the visual field. Concatenation like links in a chain is coinstantiation or standing in a certain relation. It requires no metaphysical glue in the form of a 'relating relation', since nothing is required to bind a specific shade of red (for example) to a point in the visual field or to 'connect' an object to a relation.

John Cook, Wittgenstein's Metaphysics (1994), p. 31:

He does say that "empirical reality is limited by the totality of objects" (TLP, 5.5561). This and other passages (2.0131, 2.0251, and 4.123) suggest that he thought of objects as being phenomenal entities. That this was his actual view is borne out by much that he says elsewhere. Most significant, perhaps, is his remark in his pre-Tractatus notebooks that "all experience is the world" (NB, p.89). Since objects "make up the substance of the world" (2.021), it follows that objects are elements of experience (visual, tactile, etc.).

Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (1996), p. 104:

since an object's form comprises its possibilities of combining with other objects, Tractatus 2.0251 and Proto-Tractatus 2.0251f. imply that visual objects combine with colours, and hence that colours are objects.

Pasquale Frascolla, "On the Nature of Tractatus Objects," Dialectica (2004), p. 376:

objects do not have any colour, although some of them are colours, do not occupy any visual place, although some of them are visual places, do not have any position in phenomenal time, although some of them are phenomenal times, i.e. in Russell’s jargon, moments of private time.

Peter Hacker, "Scott Soames's Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century," Philosophical Quarterly (2006):

Wittgenstein assumed that minimally discriminable shades of colour are simple objects.

Quote of the Week

Suppose someone asked "Do we all see a printed F the same way?" Well, one might try the following: We shew various people an F and put the question: "Which way does an F look, to the right or to the left?"
Or we ask: "If you were supposed to compare an F with a face in profile, where would be the front and where the back?"
But maybe some would not understand these questions. They are analogous to questions like "What colour is the sound a for you?" or "Does a strike you as yellow or white?" etc.
If someone didn't understand this question, if he called it nonsense,—could we say he didn't understand English, or the meanings of the words "colour", "sound", etc.?
On the contrary: it's when he has learnt to understand these words that he can react to those questions 'with comprehension' or 'uncomprehendingly'. (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, §16)

Semantics & Compositionality

At Language Log (thanks to Daniel for the recommendation) there's a post by David Beaver titled "Donkeys in Cyberspace." The post briefly discusses the problem posed by 'Donkey Anaphora.' Beaver writes,

the trick, of course, is to solve the problem in a natural and general way that respects all the things that semanticists like to respect. And what do semanticists like myself most especially like to respect? Our sacred cow, the thing we like to respect the most, is Compositionality, a principle usually, but controversially, attributed to Gottlob Frege. Compositionality says that the meaning of a sentence is computable from the meaning of its parts and the way they are put together: the principle effectively says you can plug meanings together like lego bricks.

Question: Is this understanding of compositionality required for formal semantics, i.e., does semantics stand or fall with compositionality?

Davidson and Meaning

Davidson's "The Social Aspect of Language" is required reading for anyone trying to get a handle on "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs." After reading the two together, I am fairly convinced that Davidson's central thesis in these papers—that a shared 'language' is neither neccessary nor sufficient for linguistic communication—is correct. (It should be noted that the correctness of this thesis in no way impairs Wittgensteinian/Rylean/Hackerian-style conceptual analysis; it's still possible to make category mistakes, and consequently, to speak nonsense.) However, there are other issues in SAL that give me pause (and I am not sure how these relate to the 'central thesis'). Primarily, I am concerned with Davidson's view of meaning. I'll voice my concerns by considering Davidson's comments (in SAL) about Humpty Dumpty.

Humpty Dumpty says to Alice, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." Apparently, Dummett accused Davidson of having Humpty Dumpty's theory of meaning. Davidson responds,

What should we say of the many cases in which a speaker expects, or hopes, to be understood in a certain way but isn't? I can't see that it matters. If we bear in mind that the notion of meaning is a theoretical concept which can't explain communication but depends on it, we can harmlessly relate it to successful communication in whatever ways we find convenient. So, if a speaker reasonably believes he will be interpreted in a certain way, and speaks with the intention of being so understood, we may choose to say he means what (in the primary sense) he would have meant if he had been understood as he expected and intended. Reasonable belief is itself such a flexible concept that we may want to add that there must be people who would understand the speaker as he intends, and the speaker reasonably believes he is speaking to such a person. Further refinements suggest themselves. But the point remains; the concept of meaning would have no application if there were not endless cases of successful communication, and any further use we give to the notion of meaning depends on the existence of such cases. These remarks should make plain why Dummett's accusation, that I endorse a variety of Humpty Dumpty's thoery that meaning depends only on intention, does not find its target.

(1) The notion of meaning is a theoretical concept which can't explain communication but depends on it.

What is being communicated if not the speaker's meaning? His utterance doesn't wait on successful communication to acquire meaning. It is already meaningful, and communication occurs if the hearer understands its meaning. So it's not clear to me in what sense meaning depends on communication.

(2) If a speaker reasonably believes he will be interpreted in a certain way, and speaks with the intention of being so understood, we may choose to say he means what (in the primary sense) he would have meant if he had been understood as he expected and intended.

If the meaning of an utterance is dependent on successful communication, does failure to communicate deprive the speaker's utterance of meaning? Davidson's remark appears to be an answer to this question. The answer: A speaker's utterance has meaning "in the primary sense" only if communication occurs. If communication does not occur, a speaker's utterance can have meaning only in some other derivative sense. Davidson explains the latter by saying that he 'means' what he would have meant if communication had occurred.

Daniel doesn't think this is the correct reading of Davidson's remark:

I don't think this is quite right. As your scare-quotes indicate, where a speaker isn't understood the "meaning" attributed to his utterance isn't his meaning at all; what is attributed to the utterance is something it doesn't mean. It's not what he meant secondarily; it's a "meaning" that just is not what he was trying to get across at all. [...] Whether or not an utterance is understood doesn't change its meaning, but only changes what its hearers take to be its meaning. But when an utterance is understood, what its hearers take its meaning to be is just the meaning that it has. So where a speaker is not understood, the meaning of his utterance can only be given by an interpreter who understands him, but it's just the meaning that it is whether or not it's understood. So I don't think your gloss on the passage is quite right, and I kinda wish Davidson hadn't added that parenthetical, since I don't think it actually makes his point clearer.

I agree that the hearer's misunderstanding doesn't change the original meaning of the speaker's utterance. But I don't think this is to the point. The question which Davidson is answering is: Does the speaker's utterance have any meaning if communication doesn't occur (i.e., if it's misunderstood or not understood at all). And his answer is: Sort of. It has meaning in a derivative sense. This is puzzling.

(3) Reasonable belief is itself such a flexible concept that we may want to add that there must be people who would understand the speaker as he intends, and the speaker reasonably believes he is speaking to such a person.

Here's where Humpty Dumpty comes in. Humpty Dumpty claimed to have meant "There's a nice knock-down argument for you" by his utterance "There's glory for you." His utterance wasn't understood, but that in itself isn't enough to rule out that he did in fact 'mean' (in the secondary sense) the former by the latter. What rules this out, according to Davidson, is that he did not (or could not) reasonably believe that Alice would interpret him to mean the former by the latter. In other words, if he had reasonably believed that Alice would so interpret his utterance, then even if communication had not occurred, he would still have 'meant' the former by the latter.

After pondering it a bit, I think Davidson's appropriation of Donnellan is correct. So there's no problem with Humpty Dumpty; as Davidson says, he's out. What interests me is Davidson's comments about meaning. I don't really know what to make of them, but my intuition is that something is amiss here.

Harré on Baker

In his review of Wittgenstein and His Interpreters, Rom Harré (Georgetown) writes,

By way of halting the slide among commentators toward the Bakerian position Peter Hacker systematically dismantles the grounds that Baker offered over the years for denying that Wittgenstein had an interest in philosophical arguments that would be of general significance. Some of Hacker's strictures turn on ways that Baker misunderstood and misinterpreted Frederick Waismann. Having known Waismann pretty well and having attended his classes during 1954-56 I can confirm from first hand how far Waismann was from the 'therapy only' position. More directly Hacker demolishes the claim that Wittgenstein was creating a kind of intellectualist parallel to Freudian psychotherapy. There simply is no evidence for it. Another and perhaps more significant point for those of us who teach Wittgenstein's philosophy to psychologists is Baker's extraordinary claim that Wittgenstein was not interested in displaying category mistakes of the kind Ryle identified in such a telling way. Of course Wittgenstein was! There can be no doubt that 'logical geography' was a large part of his technique. Baker came into the Oxford scene after the heyday of 'Oxford Philosophy' and somehow slipped into a familiar misunderstanding — ordinary language was not the touchstone of philosophical clarity — but it was the manifestation of conceptual systems that were actually put to work. Neither Austin nor Ryle, any more than Wittgenstein, had any pretensions to a 'theory of meaning'.

Of course, I couldn't agree more.

Philosophy Video

Our friend over at YouTube has been busy. He's recently added video of

Michael Ayers on Locke and Berkeley
Antony Quinton on Spinoza and Leibniz
John Passmore on Hume
Geoffrey Warnock on Kant
Peter Singer on Hegel and Marx
J. P. Stern on Nietzsche
Hubert Dreyfus on Husserl and Heidegger
and an interview of Jacques Derrida

These join video of

Frederick Copleston on Schopenhauer
Sidney Morgenbesser on the American Pragmatists
A. J. Ayer on Frege and Russell
A. J. Ayer on Logical Positivism
Antony Quinton on Wittgenstein
John Searle on Wittgenstein
Hilary Putnam on the Philosophy of Science
John Searle on the Philosophy of Language
and an interview with W. V. O. Quine

Book Reviews

2008 Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews reviews of books on Wittgenstein:

The Early Wittgenstein on Religion

Paradox and Platitude in Wittgenstein's Philosophy

Thought's Footing: A Theme in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations

Wittgenstein's Apprenticeship with Russell

Wittgenstein and Ethical Inquiry: A Defense of Ethics as Clarification

Wittgenstein and His Interpreters

A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion

Applying Wittgenstein

Another Wittgenstein(ish) Blog

Anderson Brown's Philosophy Blog. Anderson Brown is a philosophy professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez.

Dinner and Davidson

I'm still pondering "The Social Aspect of Language" (There's a lot to ponder. Davidson explicitly responds to Investigations §202. I've been thinking about how he would respond to §508. I'm also puzzled by his distinction between meaning in the primary and secondary senses; he doesn't actually mention meaning in the secondary sense, but it's implied by his mention of meaning in the primary sense. Finally, I'm concerned about his talk of a "mental act or state" in connection with interpretation.) But a question just occurred to me at the dinner table that I wanted to pose: What about my two-year-old?

I have a very precocious two-year-old. He has the language skills of an average three-year-old. He knows his colors, letters, animals, artifacts, a few songs, etc. He speaks (incessantly) in complete sentences: giving descriptions, asking questions, giving orders, etc. Nevertheless, I'm quite certain that, as a speaker, he doesn't have multiple prior theories (that are audience specific). His language skills aren't that sophisticated. He talks the same way for all audiences (whereas, my five-year-old will sometimes talk like a 'baby' to toddlers, for example). Furthermore, I'm pretty convinced that he doesn't have a prior theory at all. That is, he has no beliefs whatsoever about how his utterances will be understood. He simply speaks.

If that's right, what consequences (if any) does this have for Davidson's account? Well, we would have an instance of linguistic communication that, for one of the participants, doesn't involve interpretation (I remember Davidson saying that the speaker is also an interpreter). It also seems to me that, if we can't talk about prior theories, it makes no sense to talk about passing theories.

So what is going on with my two-year-old? I think the only explanation we can give here is in terms of convention. He has mastered a technique for various simple language-games. And his words have meaning because they are regularly used in the context of such practices. Communication only occurs because he shares those linguistic practices with his parents. And here, it seems, convention cannot be removed. A child cannot learn a language ex nihilo. It must be taught, and the language it learns will be the language of its teacher(s). Thus, a speaker necessarily (for humans, anyway) shares a language with its teacher(s). And a young child has nothing to rely on but convention until it has reached a fairly advanced level of linguistic sophistication.

Just throwing this against the wall to see if anything sticks.

[Addendum: We can make the example more pointed by imagining a conversation between two such two-year-olds, twins.]