Comments on Methods of Projection: Early Gordon Baker

Dave,A "philosophical system" tends to amount to a...

2008-04-12T10:04:00.000-05:00

Dave,

A "philosophical system" tends to amount to a systematic description of how things are, such that the systematicity applies (via the transparency of the description, when properly carried out) not simply to the presentation (which again, after all, on this picture, simply follows the world's lead), but to the world itself, in the guise of "philosophical truth," ideally detachable from the contributions of its humble discoverer. But this is just the view Wittgenstein rejects.

I don't know any readers of the later Wittgenstein (aside, maybe, from John Cook), who argue for that kind of system. The philosophical system that early Baker was interested in was the system of grammar, i.e., the normative (if conventional) network of rules that govern our language. No appeal to a reality beyond or behind grammar is necessary (or even possible). "The world" is the shadow cast by our grammar. Nevertheless, grammar is normative and additive (to use later Baker's term).

Speaking for myself, I can accept any "systematicity" – or even "theory," for that matter – compatible with seeing "the very nature of [LW's] investigation" as "compel[ling] us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction" [PI Preface] in something like the way PI actually does.

The way I want to read the Preface is that we are compelled to criss-cross the landscape (the landscape) is because there is no view of it from on high. There is no satellite image of grammar. Therefore, the work of conceptual geographers must be analogous the the work of a team of surveyors who, from different vantage points in the city, are able to piece together an accurate map of the whole.

By the way, I read a review by Read recently in which he referred to his reading as 'Jacobin.' I like that.

I was also wondering who Baker was referring to. I havn't read enough Winch to know if he's the target, and Baker makes it sound like he's criticizing a common view.

I don't think "theory" and "system" should be the ...

2008-04-11T19:25:00.000-05:00

I don't think "theory" and "system" should be the same thing for anyone – that is, if the latter means, as at the beginning of this quotation, "a systematic presentation of [someone's] thinking." No one could be opposed to that, except maybe Karl Kraus (with his "bits and pieces"; although of course LW was into Kraus himself). Read that way, I don't have any problem with the last sentence here. (Nice artlcle title, btw.)

On the other hand, for traditional philosophers (and readers of LW who cannot bring themselves to take his criticisms seriously), a "philosophical system" tends to amount to a systematic description of how things are, such that the systematicity applies (via the transparency of the description, when properly carried out) not simply to the presentation (which again, after all, on this picture, simply follows the world's lead), but to the world itself, in the guise of "philosophical truth," ideally detachable from the contributions of its humble discoverer. But this is just the view Wittgenstein rejects.

I agree, though, that it's easy to recoil from traditional realism into a quasi-Krausian (or, looked at another way, as in Read et al, Pyrrhonian) position. (I don't agree, incidentally, that later Baker necessarily did this, although I can see why it might seem that he did.) Speaking for myself, I can accept any "systematicity" – or even "theory," for that matter – compatible with seeing "the very nature of [LW's] investigation" as "compel[ling] us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction" [PI Preface] in something like the way PI actually does. That is, while I agree that PI never met its author's stringent criteria (no pun intended) of success, I take his disclosure, in the Preface, of his "realiz[ation] that [he] should never succeed" (i.e., in producing the sort of work he had intended to write) less as an admission of defeat than as an explanation of (the genesis of) an important advance in matching the book's form to its content. Of course I lean on the entire book in making this judgment, not just the Preface. My point is just that you can't negate the book's anti-theoretical impulse simply by pointing to the confession of dissatisfaction in the first part of the Preface (i.e., up to the double em-dash leading into the part I quoted above). Not that anyone here would do that, of course.

All there is in the task of manifesting Wittgensteinian thoughts "systematically" (or, again, even "theoretically") is a tension, not a contradiction – one which might conceivably be accommodated in a number of different ways. If I thought otherwise, I couldn't see Davidson and McDowell (and McDowell's Hegel!) as key participants in the contemporary working out of Wittgenstein's legacy – the form of their thought would render them ineligible for such duty. But I don't.

I was struck by Baker's statement that that LW's view was "that philosophy consists of a miscellany of conceptual therapies with no internal connections with each other" had been "often claimed" before 1979. Who is he thinking of here, do you think? Winch? (Surely not Cavell!)

To me, this argument of Baker's is indeed "conclus...

2008-04-11T15:39:00.000-05:00

To me, this argument of Baker's is indeed "conclusive." I wonder whether he ever directly addresses it in his later work.

What's interesting is that roughly half of the anti-theoretical remarks in the Investigations date from this period. I'm working on a post on Stephen Mulhall's essay in Wittgenstein at Work. Mulhall explains that §§108(b)-133 were written in 1931 (whereas, §§89-108(a) were written in 1937). That's right in the middle of Wittgenstein's collaboration with Waismann.

If early Baker is right, then 'theory' and 'system' aren't the same thing for Wittgenstein. So he can consistently reject the former while pursuing the latter.

This is all the more striking given that when he c...

2008-04-11T11:16:00.000-05:00

This is all the more striking given that when he changed his mind about W., he came, unfortunately, to think the exact opposite of this.