Update on Conference in Honor of Ishiguro

The provisional program with dates, times and places is posted at the conference website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctyjlz/IshiguroConference.htm

Here are the presenters and their papers:

Marie McGinn, University of York
"Wittgenstein and Analysis"

Wolfgang Kienzler, University of Jena
"Reading the Tractatus from the Beginning: Saying Everything Clearly in Three Words"

Hidé Ishiguro, University of Tokyo
TBA

Jacques Bouveresse, Collège de France
"Wittgenstein, Gottfried Keller, Self-Knowledge and the 'Difficulies of Faith'"

José Zalabardo, University College London
"The Tractatus on Logical Consequence"

Michael Kremer, University of Chicago
"What Did Wittgenstein Learn from 'On Denoting'?"

Warren Goldfarb, Harvard University
"Logic and Showing in the Tractatus"

Brian McGuinness, University of Siena
"In Praise of Nonsense"

A Proposition Divided Against Itself

There's something wrong with the standard liar sentence p: 'p is false' (obviously). For if we replace the name of the proposition, p, with the proposition itself, we get "'p is false' is false." Isn't this logically equivalent to 'p is true'? If so, then p asserts its own truth and falsity. I'm no logician, but isn't that a problem?

Update on the UCSC Conference

I've been informed by a commentor that the UCSC Conference on Wittgenstein may be by invitation only. Since there's only a handful of people that actually read this blog, the danger of anyone crashing the party is probably quite small. Nevertheless, to be safe I am posting this notice.

More Wittgenstein Conferences

Since I found about the UCSC conference only this morning, and I probably would have gone had I known earlier, I decided to search for any other upcoming Wittgenstein conferences. In addition to the annual International Wittgenstein Symposium put on by the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society (this years conference is August 5-11: http://www.sbg.ac.at/phs/alws/wittgenstein07.htm), there are two conferences in the UK.

Wittgenstein, Literature and Other Minds Conference, July 16-18 at the University of East Anglia: http://www1.uea.ac.uk/cm/home/schools/hum/philosophy/Events+and+News/WittgensteinConference

Wittgenstein: A One–Day Conference in Honour of Oswald Hanfling, July 20 at the Open University: http://www.nwdegree4me.com/Arts/philos/hanfling-conf.htm

Conference on Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Mind

The conference is at the University of California, Santa Cruz, June 21-28. According to the webpage, "More than 40 scholars from across the country and abroad will gather ... for a conference on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his significance for contemporary philosophy of mind." Here's the link: http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/text.asp?pid=1396

Hat tip to Simon over at The Wittgenstein Forum.

Another New Wittgenstein Blog

The blog is Langauge Games: http://dprice218.wordpress.com/. It's proprietor, who chooses to remain anonymous, is a soon-to-be graduate student in philosophy at Boston University who just completed a senior thesis on "Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and 20th century analytic and post-analytic theories of mental content" at Goucher College.

Google Reader

I watch a show on G4 called Attack of the Show (http://www.g4tv.com/attackoftheshow/index.html). One of the things they do on the show is tell the viewer about new web-tools (they also review movies, music, games, gadgets, and have a lot of tech related content). A couple of nights ago, they introduced me to Google Reader, a blog-reader's best friend.

Google Reader brings the content from any number of blogs to a single website. I used to surf 20 different blogs a day by tediously clicking through my bookmarks. Now I go to Google Reader, and it tells me whether there's anything new at the blogs I read, and it displays the new posts (as well as all of the old) on the Reader's main page (which looks a lot like an e-mail inbox). I can still surf to individual blogs from the Reader's main page. But why would I? The blogs now come to me!

Check it out: http://www.google.com/reader

New Wittgenstein Blog

There is a new Wittgenstein blog (not to be confused with a "New Wittgenstein" blog) called The Wittgenstein Forum (http://wittgensteinforum.wordpress.com/). It's run by Simon van Rysewyk, a soon-to-be graduate student in philosophy at Australian National University.

Another Criticism of the New Wittgensteinians

Since my last criticism fell apart in the discussion, I thought I'd explore another. On Conant's view, we do not build up the sense of the propositional sign from the meanings of its components. Rather, the components have meaning only because the propositional sign as a whole has a significant use: "It is a condition of being able to recognize the symbol in the sign that the string in which the sign occurs be sinvoll." (194)

This seems to be inconsistent with the 4.02s:

4.02 We can see this from the fact that we understand the sense of a propositional sign without its having been explained to us.
4.021 A proposition is a picture of reality: for if I understand a proposition, I know the situation that it represents. And I understand the proposition without having had its sense explained to me.
4.024 To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true. (One can understand it, therefore, without knowing whether it is true.) It is understood by anyone who understands its constituents.
4.025 When translating one language into another, we do not proceed by translating each proposition of the one into a proposition of the other, but merely by translating the constituents of propositions. (And the dictionary translates not only substantives, but also verbs, adjectives, and conjunctions, etc.; and it treats them all in the same way.)
4.026 The meanings of simple signs (words) must be explained to us if we are to understand them. With propositions, however, we make ourselves understood.
4.027 It belongs to the essence of a proposition that it should be able to communicate a new sense to us.

When we encounter a new proposition, we do not have to have its sense explained to us because we already understand the meanings of its words. If we cannot understand the meanings of the components unless we already understand the sense of the proposition (as Conant claims), then we would have to have the sense of a new proposition explained to us. This is explicitly denied by 4.02, and therefore, Conant's view contradicts Wittgenstein's.

This is just a sketch, but I think it is sufficient to get a discussion started.

Philosophers in the "Top 50" Who Work on Wittgenstein

I wanted to know how many philosophers at the departments in the Philosophical Gourmet rankings work on Wittgenstein. So, at the steady pace of one department a day, I decided to take a look. I have included philosophers if they (1) say that Wittgenstein is an AOS, AOC, or area of research, or (2) have published on Wittgenstein. Obviously, these are broad criteria, and not everyone on the list is a Wittgenstein "scholar" (whatever that may be). Some have published only a single article on Wittgenstein, and others mention Wittgenstein in a litany of research interests. This does not make them Wittgensteinians, but it does make them "philosophers who work on Wittgenstein." If you notice any errors or omissions, please let me know.

(I'll probably use this list as the basis for a more comprehensive list of "philosophers who work on Wittgenstein.")

NYU — Paul Horwich, Crispin Wright (visiting)
Rutgers — None
Princeton — George Pitcher (emeritus)
Michigan — Ian Proops
Pittsburgh —Thomas Ricketts, John McDowell
Stanford — David Hills
Harvard — Richard Moran, Warren Goldfarb, Hilary Putnam
MIT — Richard Cartwright (emeritus)
California, LA — None
Columbia — Haim Gaifman
UNC — None
California, Berkley — Hans Sluga, Barry Stroud, Alva Noë
Arizona — None
Notre Dame — None
Texas — Herbert Hochberg, Edwin Allaire (emeritus)
Brown — Felicia Nimue Ackerman, Justin Broackes
Cornell — None
USC — Edwin McCann
Yale — None
California, Irvine — Penelope Maddy, Kai Wehmeier
California, San Diego — Avrum Stroll (emeritus)
Chicago — James Conant, Michael Kremer, Michael Forster
CUNY — Saul Kripke, Richard Mendelsohn, Rohit Parikh, Iakovos Vasiliou
Massachusettes — None
Wisconsin — None
Ohio State — Allan Silverman, William Taschek
Duke — Susan Sterrett
Indiana — Gary Ebbs
Maryland — Jack Odell
Pennsylvania — None
California, Riverside — Erich Reck, Larry Wright
Syracuse — None
Colorado — None
Miami — Colin McGinn
Johns Hopkins — Meredith Williams
California, Davis — None
Illinois, Chicago — None
Washington — None
Carnegie-Mellon — None
Georgetown — None
California, Santa Barbara — J. William Forgie
Virginia — Cora Diamond (emeritus)
Washington, St. Louis — None
Arizona State — Margaret Walker
Florida State — None
Minnesota — Brian Bix, Peter Hanks, H. E. Mason (emeritus)
Rochester — None
Connecticut — John Troyer
Florida — None
Boston — Jaakko Hintikka, Juliet Floyd
Rice — None
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign — Timothy McCarthy
Northwestern — None
Missouri — Donald Sievert
Emory — None
Purdue — None
St. Louis — Garth Hallett
Temple — Thomas Meyer, Gerald Vision
Iowa — David Stern
South Carolina — Alfred Nordmann (visiting)
South Florida — Stephen Turner

The New Wittgensteinians: A Simple Criticism

I reread Conant's "Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein" yesterday. A simple criticism occured to me. Conant distinguishes between substantial nonsense and austere nonsense:

The substantial conception distinguishes between two different kinds of nonsense: mere nonsense and substantial nonsense. Mere nonsense is simply unintelligible – it expresses no thought. ... The austere conception, on the other hand, holds that mere nonsense is, from a logical point of view, all there is. (176-7)

...according the austere reading, the aim of Tractarian elucidation is to reveal (through the employement of mere nonsense) that what appears to be substantial nonsense is mere nonsense. (196)

If mere nonsense is unintelligible (Conant calls it "gibberish"), how can it appear to be substantial? Suppose that instead of the string of letters that make up the Tractatus, we had a different string of letters:

1 adfkdkj foosjjyksjad dkkpsd.
1.1 ldka kfjlsa fffffggggrrrrr.
Etc.

No doubt, if this were the Tractatus, no one would have heard of Wittgenstein. In particular, Conant would not believe that Wittgenstein provides "insight into the sources of metaphysics." (196) Clearly, the Tractatus as we actually have it conveys something that the imaginary Tractatus does not. It seems to me, however, that Conant cannot account for the difference between them without conceding some sort of substantial nonsense.