Friday, December 21, 2007
Michael Kremer, "The Cardinal Problem of Philosophy"
A while back I posted a link to Conant's "Mild Mono-Wittgensteinianism," which is his contribution to Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond (NDPR review here). Michael Kremer has posted his contribution, "The Cardinal Problem of Philosophy," here. I'm in the process of reading it, and should have something to say about it next week.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
UEA Philosophy Blog
I've just discovered that the University of East Anglia's Philosophy Department, well-known for it's Wittgenstein research, has a blog (here). I havn't read them yet, but (as could be expected) there are several Wittgenstein-related posts.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Concepts & Science
Over at DuckRabbit, Dave has responded (here) to a post of Anton’s (here) over at Brain Scam. Presumably, Dave didn’t leave his response on Anton’s blog because it was to lengthy for a comment box. I commented on Dave’s post, and he responded, and now my response to his response has become too lengthy for a comment box. Therefore, I am posting my response here. No doubt this could lead to a cascade of responses moving from blog to blog, the effects of which could cripple the blogosphere. But’s it’s a danger I’m willing to face.
In response to me Dave wrote,
So while in some sense it's true that "what is going on in the brain or eye at the time I am so struck is simply irrelevant" … in another sense it isn't. Empirical results can and do affect our philosophical understanding of them. How could they not? They provide the content for our map [of logical geography]. If they were different then so would the map be. Often – even most of the time – this is trivial, allowing us to ignore the particular details of the empirical results (as here). But sometimes it isn't – and we can't know ahead of time when that will be, but instead deal with the results (and, most likely, the resulting conceptual confusion) when they come in.
Simply put, the question is this: Do scientific inquiries inform our concepts? The answer seems to be obvious. Of course they do. My concepts Sun or lightning, for example, are somewhat different from an ancient Roman’s concepts Sun or lightning. And that’s because my concepts have been partially shaped by scientifc discoveries concerning those phenomena.
This obvious answer undercuts my claim that "what is going on in the brain or eye at the time I am so struck is simply irrelevant." Surely, just as astronomy can inform my concept Sun, so neuroscience can inform my concept being struck. I’m reminded of Marie McGinn’s criticism of Hacker’s Appearance and Reality on the concept color:
First of all, the framework for the objectivist conception of colour that Hacker develops in opposition to the primary/secondary quality distinction is provided by the claim that it is grammar, not science, that tells us what anything is. Yet, despite the prima facie implausibility of the claim, it is given virtually no defence. Hacker seems simply to assert that although science may discover all sorts of interesting facts about the distinctive properties of objects of a given colour, it cannot tell us more about what colour is, for that is purely a conceptual matter, a question about the linguistic rules that govern our ascription of colour to objects. Thus, Hacker insists that anyone who asks the question 'What is red?' must, if he is to make any sense at all, be asking for an indication of how the word 'red' is used; any attempt to ask the question in a way that would require a scientific theory to answer it is, we are told, simply confused:
If someone were to ask 'What is red?' we should rightly point to a sample and say 'That colour is red'. If he were to insist impatiently that of course he knows what 'red' means, but that he wants to know what red is (or, really is), we should judge him confused.' [Appearance and Reality, 185-6]
This is not, it seems to me, immediately persuasive. If the questioner goes on to explain that he is asking about what it is that makes a surface look red, or about what it is that, as it were, makes it red, then we not only seem to understand the question, but also to have a fairly clear sense of what would count as an adequate answer to it. The questioner wants a scientific unpacking of the property that confronts him, in scientifically more basic terms, e.g. in terms that relate perceived colour to the light reflecting (or absorbing) properties of the surface. If someone were to respond to such a questioner by saying 'I've already told vou what red is. It's that colour', then I think we might well be inclined to judge him confused: He hasn't understood that the request is for a scientific account of colour, not for an indication of how we use the word 'red'.
The problem is that simply confronting someone with the fact that in ordinary life the question 'What is red?' is answered by pointing to a sample cannot be enough to show that it is conceptually incoherent to expect science to provide an informative unpacking of what colour is, or of what makes something the colour it is. It seems useless to insist that 'there is no explanation of the "essential nature of red" that goes deeper than that', for it does nothing to undermine our strong (though not necessarily unprejudiced) intuition that the phenomenon of colour cries out for informative explication in terms of what science regards as ontologically more basic. To a modern ear it is simply bizarre to insist that we must take the world at face value and treat all phenomena as on an equal footing. The whole success of science surely resides in its ability to explain the less basic in terms of the more basic. Why should science's ability to penetrate phenomena come to a halt just because the phenomenon happens to be something we describe or refer to in ordinary language? ["Wittgenstein's 'Remarks on Colour,' 436-8]
Obviously, the position I’m trying to stake out is the one Hacker articulates. And while the issues seem clear cut with concepts like Sun and lightning, I’m not persuaded by McGinn’s take on color. There is a significant difference between the questions ‘What is red’ (which Hacker maintains is answered by philosophical analysis) and ‘What makes something (e.g., a surface) red.’ The first is the request for a definition. The second is not. It could be rephrased as ‘How did this surface come to be red.’ An answer to this question might be, ‘I painted it.’ It could also be rephrased as ‘What are the physical causes of this surface coming to be red.’ An answer to this question would involve talk of light waves, visual cortexes, etc.
The word ‘makes’ in the question ‘What makes something red’ is ambiguous. I can use it to ask for a definition. If I ask, ‘What makes someone just,’ I could be asking for a definition of justice. But I could also be asking about a person’s upbringing or education. In the latter case I am not asking for a definition, but for a causal story. It seems to me that McGinn muddies the water by conflating these different uses. Hacker would surely respond to her complaint by saying that an investigation into the physical conditions of color can’t even get off the ground until we know what color is. Otherwise we wouldn’t know where to begin. So obviously, that investigation can’t tell us what color is.
But can it revise and extend our prior concept of color. This, I think, is where things gets tricky. Certainly the physics of light and the neuroscience of vision lead to new conceptual content which is related, in some way, to our prior concept of color. But is it an expansion of the latter concept, or is it a complex relation between different (how different?) concepts, or even different language-games. The notion of family-resemblance makes it difficult to demarcate concepts, but it doesn’t make equivocation impossible. And that’s the concern. Is the bridge between these language-games that employ some of the same words mere equivocation?
[I have run out of time to finish/edit this post, but since I don’t know when I’ll have more time, I think I’ll publish it as is.]
In response to me Dave wrote,
So while in some sense it's true that "what is going on in the brain or eye at the time I am so struck is simply irrelevant" … in another sense it isn't. Empirical results can and do affect our philosophical understanding of them. How could they not? They provide the content for our map [of logical geography]. If they were different then so would the map be. Often – even most of the time – this is trivial, allowing us to ignore the particular details of the empirical results (as here). But sometimes it isn't – and we can't know ahead of time when that will be, but instead deal with the results (and, most likely, the resulting conceptual confusion) when they come in.
Simply put, the question is this: Do scientific inquiries inform our concepts? The answer seems to be obvious. Of course they do. My concepts Sun or lightning, for example, are somewhat different from an ancient Roman’s concepts Sun or lightning. And that’s because my concepts have been partially shaped by scientifc discoveries concerning those phenomena.
This obvious answer undercuts my claim that "what is going on in the brain or eye at the time I am so struck is simply irrelevant." Surely, just as astronomy can inform my concept Sun, so neuroscience can inform my concept being struck. I’m reminded of Marie McGinn’s criticism of Hacker’s Appearance and Reality on the concept color:
First of all, the framework for the objectivist conception of colour that Hacker develops in opposition to the primary/secondary quality distinction is provided by the claim that it is grammar, not science, that tells us what anything is. Yet, despite the prima facie implausibility of the claim, it is given virtually no defence. Hacker seems simply to assert that although science may discover all sorts of interesting facts about the distinctive properties of objects of a given colour, it cannot tell us more about what colour is, for that is purely a conceptual matter, a question about the linguistic rules that govern our ascription of colour to objects. Thus, Hacker insists that anyone who asks the question 'What is red?' must, if he is to make any sense at all, be asking for an indication of how the word 'red' is used; any attempt to ask the question in a way that would require a scientific theory to answer it is, we are told, simply confused:
If someone were to ask 'What is red?' we should rightly point to a sample and say 'That colour is red'. If he were to insist impatiently that of course he knows what 'red' means, but that he wants to know what red is (or, really is), we should judge him confused.' [Appearance and Reality, 185-6]
This is not, it seems to me, immediately persuasive. If the questioner goes on to explain that he is asking about what it is that makes a surface look red, or about what it is that, as it were, makes it red, then we not only seem to understand the question, but also to have a fairly clear sense of what would count as an adequate answer to it. The questioner wants a scientific unpacking of the property that confronts him, in scientifically more basic terms, e.g. in terms that relate perceived colour to the light reflecting (or absorbing) properties of the surface. If someone were to respond to such a questioner by saying 'I've already told vou what red is. It's that colour', then I think we might well be inclined to judge him confused: He hasn't understood that the request is for a scientific account of colour, not for an indication of how we use the word 'red'.
The problem is that simply confronting someone with the fact that in ordinary life the question 'What is red?' is answered by pointing to a sample cannot be enough to show that it is conceptually incoherent to expect science to provide an informative unpacking of what colour is, or of what makes something the colour it is. It seems useless to insist that 'there is no explanation of the "essential nature of red" that goes deeper than that', for it does nothing to undermine our strong (though not necessarily unprejudiced) intuition that the phenomenon of colour cries out for informative explication in terms of what science regards as ontologically more basic. To a modern ear it is simply bizarre to insist that we must take the world at face value and treat all phenomena as on an equal footing. The whole success of science surely resides in its ability to explain the less basic in terms of the more basic. Why should science's ability to penetrate phenomena come to a halt just because the phenomenon happens to be something we describe or refer to in ordinary language? ["Wittgenstein's 'Remarks on Colour,' 436-8]
Obviously, the position I’m trying to stake out is the one Hacker articulates. And while the issues seem clear cut with concepts like Sun and lightning, I’m not persuaded by McGinn’s take on color. There is a significant difference between the questions ‘What is red’ (which Hacker maintains is answered by philosophical analysis) and ‘What makes something (e.g., a surface) red.’ The first is the request for a definition. The second is not. It could be rephrased as ‘How did this surface come to be red.’ An answer to this question might be, ‘I painted it.’ It could also be rephrased as ‘What are the physical causes of this surface coming to be red.’ An answer to this question would involve talk of light waves, visual cortexes, etc.
The word ‘makes’ in the question ‘What makes something red’ is ambiguous. I can use it to ask for a definition. If I ask, ‘What makes someone just,’ I could be asking for a definition of justice. But I could also be asking about a person’s upbringing or education. In the latter case I am not asking for a definition, but for a causal story. It seems to me that McGinn muddies the water by conflating these different uses. Hacker would surely respond to her complaint by saying that an investigation into the physical conditions of color can’t even get off the ground until we know what color is. Otherwise we wouldn’t know where to begin. So obviously, that investigation can’t tell us what color is.
But can it revise and extend our prior concept of color. This, I think, is where things gets tricky. Certainly the physics of light and the neuroscience of vision lead to new conceptual content which is related, in some way, to our prior concept of color. But is it an expansion of the latter concept, or is it a complex relation between different (how different?) concepts, or even different language-games. The notion of family-resemblance makes it difficult to demarcate concepts, but it doesn’t make equivocation impossible. And that’s the concern. Is the bridge between these language-games that employ some of the same words mere equivocation?
[I have run out of time to finish/edit this post, but since I don’t know when I’ll have more time, I think I’ll publish it as is.]
Sunday, December 2, 2007
New Audio
Four new audio recordings of lectures have been posted at the Wittgenstein Archives (University of Bergen) website. Three are by Jaakko Hintikka, and the last is by Ray Monk. They are available here.
Back to Blogging
It's been a busy Fall for me. I've been writing like mad, teaching, and watching my beloved Cowboys destroy the rest of the NFC. But I'm back to blogging... at least, occasionally. I've been hired for a position that starts in the Fall (hurray), so I'm rushing to complete my degree this Spring (hopefully my readers won't suggest any major revisions). Anyway, I'll be trying to post a couple times a month, and keep an eye on the various blogs I enjoy reading.
I'm reading an article by Tyler Burge, "Philosophy of Language and Mind: 1950-1990" (Philosophical Review, 1992). It's an introductory overview of some deveopments in these fields in the last half-century. It's written for non-specialists, but it provides a good view of the forest (an übersichtliche Darstellung of recent philosophy is often hard to come by).
However, I have a minor complaint about the following comment on the Vienna Circle:
The theory of meaning was the most original proposal of the movement. It consisted of two main principles. One was that the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification or confirmation (the verificationist principle). The other was that statements of logic and mathematics, together with statements that spell out meaning relations, are analytic in the specific sense that they are true purely in virtue of their meaning and provide no information about the world: they are vacuosly or degenerately true.
Burge does not mention that both of these "original" principles were taken from Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein explicitly formulated what came to be known as the "verificationist principle" in the early 1930s (and it is implicit in Tractatus 4.024), and his view was directly transmitted to the Vienna Circle through conversations with Schlick, Waismann and Carnap. Indeed, Carnap refers to it as "Wittgenstein's principle of verifiability" (see Carnap's "Autobiography" in the Schilpp volume, p. 45; there is also this great article on Wittgenstein's relationship with Carnap by David Stern in which he summarizes Wittgenstein's associations with the Vienna Circle). And the view that logic is "analytic," i.e., tautological, is taken directly from the Tractatus (though in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein does not treat mathematical "equations" as tautologies; see this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In fairness, Burge does state in an introductory footnote that he is not concerned with recounting, among other things, "the legacy of Wittgenstein." But that doesn't explain his use of "original." Some reference to Wittgenstein is called for.
I'm reading an article by Tyler Burge, "Philosophy of Language and Mind: 1950-1990" (Philosophical Review, 1992). It's an introductory overview of some deveopments in these fields in the last half-century. It's written for non-specialists, but it provides a good view of the forest (an übersichtliche Darstellung of recent philosophy is often hard to come by).
However, I have a minor complaint about the following comment on the Vienna Circle:
The theory of meaning was the most original proposal of the movement. It consisted of two main principles. One was that the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification or confirmation (the verificationist principle). The other was that statements of logic and mathematics, together with statements that spell out meaning relations, are analytic in the specific sense that they are true purely in virtue of their meaning and provide no information about the world: they are vacuosly or degenerately true.
Burge does not mention that both of these "original" principles were taken from Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein explicitly formulated what came to be known as the "verificationist principle" in the early 1930s (and it is implicit in Tractatus 4.024), and his view was directly transmitted to the Vienna Circle through conversations with Schlick, Waismann and Carnap. Indeed, Carnap refers to it as "Wittgenstein's principle of verifiability" (see Carnap's "Autobiography" in the Schilpp volume, p. 45; there is also this great article on Wittgenstein's relationship with Carnap by David Stern in which he summarizes Wittgenstein's associations with the Vienna Circle). And the view that logic is "analytic," i.e., tautological, is taken directly from the Tractatus (though in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein does not treat mathematical "equations" as tautologies; see this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). In fairness, Burge does state in an introductory footnote that he is not concerned with recounting, among other things, "the legacy of Wittgenstein." But that doesn't explain his use of "original." Some reference to Wittgenstein is called for.
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About Me
- N. N.
- I am a doctoral student in philosophy writing a dissertation on Wittgenstein.
