My post on Baker is about done. I'm just waiting for interlibrary loan to deliver Hacker's "Gordon Baker's Late Interpretation of Wittgenstein" (in Wittgenstein and his Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker) so I can get a look at Hacker's most recent take on things (he does address Baker's interpretation of PI §122 in the revised Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (2005), though he doesn't mention Baker by name). In the meantime, I'll add one more quotation to frame the discussion.
I forgot that Hacker also accuses the other side of making Wittgenstein's philosophy irrelevant:
The issues [raised by the New Wittgensteinians] are not without interest. But the narrowness of the concerns is unfortunate. All the great debates about Wittgenstein’s philosophy over the last fifty years, e.g., on family resemblance concepts, the nature of philosophy, criteria, private language, following rules, had multiple ramifications. One need not have been a follower of Wittgenstein to have been justified in attending to these debates, and to have hoped to learn from them. The New American Wittgenstein offers no such rewards. It will not alter the way non-Wittgensteinian philosophers pursue their work – nor need it do so. They will, I fancy, pass by with the ironic observation that all that followers of Wittgenstein can now do is quarrel over what sort of nonsense Wittgenstein’s early work was. It is sad to see matters come to such a pass. ("Wittgenstein, Carnap and the New American Wittgensteinians," p. 2)
As with Read and Hutchinson, I'd rather see separate issues handled separately. And regardless of who is right about Wittgenstein, both positions are, in my opinion, philosophically interesting.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Trading Shots
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About Me
- N. N.
- I am a doctoral student in philosophy writing a dissertation on Wittgenstein.
10 comments:
What a strange comment (i.e. of Hacker's).
The NW's think that 1) you can't understand the later W. if you misread the TLP; and that 2) most people, including Hacker, misread the TLP; and that 3) we can explain the different readings of TLP in terms of types of "nonsense". So we can hardly infer from their talk of types of nonsense in (of) TLP to the supposed "narrowness of their concerns." Given that that's what they believe, what did Hacker think they were going to say?
And it's entirely bizarre to read this about Conant, who manifests a reasonably consistent attitude (whatever one may think of it) in his writings not only about Wittgenstein (early and late), but also about Kierkegaard, Rorty, Putnam, Cavell, Kant, etc. Same with Finkelstein, Martin Stone, Crary, and most of the rest of them as well. If "non-Wittgensteinian philosophers" don't learn anything from what these people say, it's hardly because they only care about nonsense in the Tractatus.
On the other hand, I do wish the NW's (narrowly construed) would give it a rest. I hardly need to look at the Tractatus to have reason to pass Hackenstein over in silence. It's what he says about (the topics of) the later philosophy which is of no use to me, or to the "non-Wittgensteinian philosophers" whom I am trying to enlighten. (Feel free to disregard this contentless abuse as well; that guy just bugs me.)
As with Read and Hutchinson, I'd rather see separate issues handled separately.
Ye-es, but as I've mentioned, I think (for Davidsonian reasons) they're not so easily separated as we tend to think.
Do you think that the NW reading of Wittgenstein's later philosophy stands or falls with their reading of the Tractatus?
An excellent question. I think it pretty much depends on them. In order to be a NW, as I understand it, you have to say 1) W. had a "therapeutic" conception of philosophy, which 2) he had throughout his career, and 3) shows up in TLP in such and such a way (so that we are to "throw away the ladder," recognize its propositions as nonsensical, etc., etc.). I'm not sure about the details of the party line w/r/t (1). So our question is: do we have to be able to see (one's reading of) the PI strategy as an extension/modification of the specifically NWian TLP strategy in order for it to count as "therapeutic"? That's a pretty vague term. W uses it himself, so pretty much everyone gets to say that his W. is "therapeutic" in some sense. I think Read makes a "therapeutic"/"elucidatory" distinction, but then he identifies the former with Pyrrhonism, which wasn't really how I was thinking of it.
So again, it seems to depend on how big the NW tent is. We do need some consistent conventions here to avoid confusion. I tend to use the term narrowly, to refer to that particular reading of TLP: Diamond, Conant, Floyd, Crary and Read, and their allies in this sense, not all of whom I've read (Kremer, Ricketts, etc.). They refer to allies in a broader sense as well, who may or may not have particular views about TLP, but who read PI in a "therapeutic" way: Baker, Cavell, McDowell. I would put myself in this somewhat loose group, as these are my main guys; but then I also reserve the right, depending on what "therapeutic" ends up meaning, to distance myself (or us, if I may speak for my betters as well) from (say) Read's attempt at alliance. I hope that attackers of one or the other group will use terminology which will allow us to keep this straight, even if they attack both groups at once.
As I said, I wish the NWs would lay off the TLP long enough to say more about PI on its own terms. What I've read so far sounds like the Pyrrhonism I've already rejected. I look forward to Conant's collection on Baker. Anything good in the other Baker book?
I did find Conant's "W. on Meaning and Use," which I started. So far I agree with him, but so far the target is Marie McGinn's reading of On Certainty (and of Cavell on same). But he's just introduced a distinction (on her behalf) between two kinds of nonsense, which is suggestive of the line he's going to take. So it seems the door is open for him to say: yes, our (NW) reading of the later work stands or falls with that of TLP (and nonsense, etc.). But the reading of PI better work on its own terms too. In any case, unless we can get past the stale Pyrrhonism, I remain unsold (in either sense: that it's Wittgenstein, or that it's right).
I think restricting the 'NW' tag to those who adopt a 'resolute' (as opposed to 'metaphysical' and 'anti-metaphysical,' the latter being a term that McGinn reserves for the likes of Ishiguro and Rhees) reading of TLP and the corresponding reading of the PI is a good idea. I suppose we could then refer to similar minded interpreters of just the PI -- Baker, Cavell, McDowell, et al. -- as 'therapeutic' (as opposed to 'constructivist'). On this arrangement, it would be possible to be a 'metaphysical' reader of the TLP and a 'therapeutic' reader of the PI.
I havn't yet got my hands on Wittgenstein and his Interpreters. They must be sending it by covered wagon. I thought about posting without it (the post is already quite long), but I've decided to be patient. Just glancing at the table of contents, I'm interested to read most of the articles.
What exactly is the new reading of PI? It seems quite straightforward in the case of the Tractatus, but after having read Crary's introduction to the NW I'm still not sure how the new understanding of the Investigations is supposed to be "ground-breaking".
Akos,
Their reading of the Investigations is not as revolutionary as their reading of the Tractatus (Cavell, for instance, was pretty 'new' long before 'new' was fashionable).
The principal difference between the NW reading of the Investigations (and similar 'therapeutic' readings, e.g., Baker, McDowell), on the one hand, and 'standard' readings (e.g., Kenny, Hacker), on the other, is the latter hold that, in addition to the negative work of 'therapy,' the later Wittgenstein outlines a constructive role for philosophy which consists in mapping the grammar of our language (this will be addressed in detail in my next post). According to the NWs, Wittgenstein's philosophy, early and late, is only destructive, i.e., it shows certain sentences to be mere nonsense. For an excellent, brief account of the 'standard' reading, see Anthony Kenny's "Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy" in The Legacy of Wittgenstein.
Hi,
I was wondering if you have already read David Stern precisely on this question.
In "How many Wittgensteins?" (in: Pichler, Alois & Säätelä, Simo (eds.) Wittgenstein: The philosopher and his Works. Bergen: Wittgenstein Archives, 2005, pp. 164-188; same arguments found in Stern, David. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. An Introduction. CUP, 2004, chapter 2, pp. 29-55.)
His solution is quite different. For him such a division between pyrrhonian and not-pyrrhonians (as he classifies) is a predictable effect coming from misinterpretations of the style of composition of PI texts. They can't be viewed in the same way as its MS's and TS's sources in the Nachlass. The album form and the dialogue among different voices (not just two voices, and anyone of them is precisely the narrator) demands a therapeutic interpretation but deprived from skepticism (or from the proposition of theses, obviously).
Not quite the same but similar approach can also be found in Pichler, Alois. Wittgensteins Philosophische Untersuchungen. Vom Buch zum Album. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.
Any comment?
JJ.
JJ,
Welcome. I have listened to that paper here). It's been a while, though, and I don't recall the details.
"...the dialogue among different voices ... demands a therapeutic interpretation but deprived from skepticism...." So none of the voices is Wittgenstein's, i.e., none of the voices shows the correct path?
First of all, congratulations for your very, very good post "Gordon Baker and Wittgenstein's Method". Although I can't follow you in your conclusion.
The voices in PI.
I don't think there is a voice who shows "the correct path" - the narrator voice, so to speak, performing this task.
One of the reasons is that in the architecture of PI sometimes the narrator voice becomes the interlocutor voice. Sometimes also there is a third, sometimes a fourth voice appearing. In such a way that it would be better to understand dialogues in PI as "Bakhtinian dialogues" or "polyphonies".
This sort of rethorical method is perfectly harmonious with persuading rather than convincing anyone. And more appropriate for an album (like PI) than for a book (like The Big Typescript).
I have some two or three points regarding your last posting which will complete my considerations here.
See you soon.
JJ.
"Do you think that the NW reading of Wittgenstein's later philosophy stands or falls with their reading of the Tractatus?"
Conant seems to think so. Take a look at "Why Worry about the Tractatus?" in the Post-Analytic Tractatus collection. He attempts to show how the ineffability reading of the TLP "infects" one's reading not only of the PI (in terms of the so-called Private Language 'Argument') but also On Certainty (specifically in regard to "hinge propositions"). If he's right, then the same conception of nonsense at work in the TLP leads one to a wrong view of each phase of Wittgenstein's corpus.
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