Category: Wittgenstein

On the Expressibility of ‘Something Exists’

Surely this is a valid and sound argument:

1. Stromboli exists.
Ergo
2. Something exists.

Both sentences are true; both are meaningful; and the second follows from the first.  How do we translate the argument into the notation of standard first-order predicate logic with identity? Taking a cue from Quine we may formulate (1) as

1*.  For some x, x = Stromboli. In English:

1**. Stromboli is identical with something.

But how do we render (2)?  Surely not as 'For some x, x exists' since there is no first-level predicate of existence in standard logic.  And surely no ordinary predicate will do.  Not horse, mammal, animal, living thing, material thing, or any other predicate reachable by climbing the tree of Porphyry.  Existence is not a summum genus.  (Aristotle, Met. 998b22, AnPr. 92b14) What is left but self-identity?  Cf. Frege's dialog with Puenjer.

So we try,

2*. For some x, x = x.  In plain English:

2**. Something is self-identical.

So our original argument becomes:

1**. Stromboli is identical with something.
Ergo
2**. Something is self-identical.

But what (2**) says is not what (2) says.   The result is a murky travesty of the original luminous argument.

What I am getting at is that standard logic cannot state its own presuppositions.  It presupposes that everything exists (that there are no nonexistent objects) and that something exists.  But it lacks the expressive resources to state these presuppositions.  The attempt to state them results either in  nonsense — e.g. 'for some x, x' — or a proposition other than the one that needs expressing. 

It is true that something exists, and I am certain that it is true: it follows immediately from the fact that I exist.  But it cannot be said in standard predicate logic.

What should we conclude?  That standard logic is defective in its treatment of existence or that there are things that can be SHOWN but not SAID?  In April 1914. G.E. Moore travelled to Norway and paid a visit to Wittgenstein where the  latter dictated some notes to him.  Here is one:

In order that you should have a language which can express or say everything that can be said, this language must have certain properties; and when this is the case, that it has them can no longer be said in that language or any language. (Notebooks 1914-1916, p. 107)

Applied to the present example:  A language that can SAY that e.g. island volcanos exist by saying that some islands are volcanos or that Stromboli exists by saying that Stromboli is identical to something must have certain properties.  One of these is that the domain of quantification contains only existents and no Meinongian nonexistents.  But THAT the language has this property cannot be said in it or in any language.  Hence it cannot be said in the language of standard logic that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents or that something exists or that everything exists or that it is not the case that something does not exist.

Well then, so much the worse for the language of standard logic!  That's one response.  But can some other logic do better?  Or should we say, with the early Wittgenstein, that there is indeed the Inexpressible, the Unsayable, the Unspeakable, the Mystical?  And that it shows itself?

Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches.  Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische. (Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus 6.522)

What I Like About Wittgenstein

He was one serious man.  I have always had contempt for unserious people, unserious people in philosophy being the very worst. You know the type: the bland and blasé  whose civility is not born of wisdom and detachment but is a mere urbanity sired by a jocose superficiality.  I have always had the sense that something is stake in life, that it matters what we believe and how we live. What exactly is at stake, why our lives matter, and how best to respond to nihilists and Nietzsche's Last Men are profoundly baffling problems.  But that life is serious is a given.

Perhaps unfortunately, Wittgenstein seemed unable to 'punch the clock' and play the regular guy among regular guys for even a short time.  Wittgenstein died in the house of Dr and Mrs Bevan, a house that bore the auspicious name, 'Storeys End.'  Ray Monk relates the following anecdote:

Before Wittgenstein moved into their house, Dr Bevan had invited him for supper to introduce him to his wife.  She had been warned that Wittgenstein was not one for small talk and that she should be careful not to say anything thoughtless.  Playing it safe, she remained silent throughout the evening.  But when Wittgenstein mentioned his visit to Ithaca, she chipped in cheerfully,  'How lucky for you to go to America!' She realized at once that she had said the the wrong thing.  Wittgenstein fixed her with an intent stare: 'What do you mean, lucky?'  (Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 576.)

Poor Mrs Bevan!  The first shot depicts LW in 1925, the second on his death bed in 1951.

Ludwig08

Ludwig19

Wittgenstein on Religious Faith and Superstition

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), P. 72:

Religious faith and superstition are quite different.  One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.

Although Winch's translation is correct, I would translate ganz verschieden as 'entirely different.'  For in American English at least, 'quite' can mean either 'very' or 'entirely.'  Glaube (faith) and Aberglaube (superstition) are, says Wittgenstein, entirely different.  I agree.  It follows that religion cannot be a species of superstition.  It is not as if the genus superstition divides into religious and nonreligious species.  And as Aberglaube suggests, superstition is a degenerate form of faith, which is what I have been maintaining.

But is it true that superstition arises from fear while religious faith does not arise from fear but is a kind of trust?  I don't think so.  "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10)  A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith.  So arising out of fear cannot be what distinguishes religious faith from superstition.  It is worth noting that Wittgenstein himself believed and feared that he would be judged by God.  He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs.  In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,

God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth.  Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (CV, p. 87)

Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.

Perhaps we could say that superstition arises from mundane fear, fear concerning the body and the things of the body, while religious faith does not arise from such fear, but from fear concerning the soul and its welfare.  But this is not what Wittgenstein says.  Religious faith is a trusting.

A trusting in God, but to do what?  Presumably not to supply us with the material necessities of life or to save us physically from life's trials and tribulations.  Perhaps one can makes sense of Wittgenstein's notion of trust in terms of his early experience of  "feeling absolutely safe" recounted in a lecture on ethics from 1929.  "I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say, 'I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens.'" (LE 8)

The feeling of being absolutely safe is the mystical sense that deep down, and despite appearances, everything is perfect and that one is ultimately safe and secure.  But surely as indigent bodies in a world of bodies we are not safe and secure. So who is the ME that nothing can injure no matter what happens?  Me as individual soul?  Me as eternal Atman?   If I am at bottom an individual soul confronting God my Judge, then the mystical feeling of being absolutely  safe is illusory, is it not?  How can I be absolutely safe as individual soul if I am to be judged and perhaps found unworthy of entering the divine presence and then either annihilated or sent to hell?  If I am at ontological bottom the eternal Atman, then I am absolutely safe and nothing can touch me — but this does not comport well with the notion of God as Judge.

Wittgenstein says that superstition is a sort of false science.  That is essentially what I said when I said that a necessary condition of a superstitious  belief is that it be or entail erroneous beliefs  about the  causal structure of the natural order.  But I think we are both wrong.

Suppose a soldier is pinned down behind some rocks under withering fire.  There is nothing he can do.  So he prays.  Supposes he prays that his  life be spared by divine intervention.  There needn't be any "false science" involved here in the way false science is involved in the childish belief that stepping on a sidewalk crack will break your mother's back.  And yet the soldier's prayer is superstitious in the way that the prayer, "Thy will be done,"  is not.

Wittgenstein and Dreaming: *On Certainty* #383

On Certainty #383: The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well  and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

What is senseless (sinnlos) here is not the dream argument, but what Wittgenstein says about it. It is a plain fact that people have dreams in which they know that they are dreaming, and in which they think to themselves, 'I am dreaming.' In those dreams they are not dreaming that they are dreaming, if dreaming that p entails that one does not know that p.

I once had an extremely vivid dream about my dead cat, Maya. There she was: as (apparently) real as can be. I saw her, I touched and petted her, I heard her. It was all astonishingly vivid and coherent. There was an ongoing perceiving in which visual, tactile, and auditory data were well-integrated. And yet I knew within the dream that she was dead, and I knew that I had buried her in April 2001 in the desert behind the house.

And so I began to philosophize within the dream: I know that Maya is dead and that I am dreaming, and so these perceptions, as vivid and coherent as they are, cannot be veridical. Coherence is no guarantee of veridicality. I did not dream that I was dreaming, I knew that I was dreaming; and I did not dream the reasoning in the second-to-last sentence, I validly executed that reasoning. And the meanings of the terms in the reasoning was in no way affected by their being grasped within a dream.

Wittgenstein seems to be assuming that, for any proposition p, if one becomes aware that p while dreaming, then one has dreamt that p in a sense that entails that one does not know that p. But this assumption is false, as Descartes appreciated. Becoming aware that 2 + 3 = 5 while dreaming is consistent with knowing its truth in the way that dreaming that one is sitting before a fire is not consistent with knowing its truth. So there is no reason to deny that one can become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming. To become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming is not to dream that one is dreaming in a sense that implies that one is not in reality dreaming. And to use words within a dream is not to dream the meanings of those words in a sense that implies that they do not in reality have those meanings.

Cottingham, Wittgenstein, and the Religious Impulse

John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (Routledge 2003), p. 52:

     . . . the whole of the religious impulse arises from the profound
     sense we have of a gap between how we are and how we would wish to
     be . . . .

This is not quite right, as it seems to me, even if '"would wish to be" is read as "ought to be."   The sense of the gap  between 'is' and 'ought' is undoubtedly part of the religious impulse,  but there is more to it than this. It must be accompanied by the sense that the gaping chasm between the miserable wretches we are and what  we know we ought to be cannot be bridged by human effort, whether  individual or collective, but requires help from beyond the human-all-too-human.   Otherwise, the religious sensibility would  collapse into the ethical sensibility. There is more to religion than ethics. The irreligious can be aware of the discrepancy between what  we are and what we should be. The religious are convinced of the need for moral improvement together with a realization of their impotence in bringing it about by their own efforts.

I had an undergraduate professor whose symbol for religion was:

 Rx_symbol

I like that because it conveys that religion is for the sick.  And sick we are.  An awareness of our root sickness is an element in the religious sensibility.  Dubious as Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion is, he is absolutely on target in the following observation:

People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect (unvollkommen), as ill (krank).  Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched (elend). (Culture and Value, U. of Chicago Press, 1980, tr. Winch, p. 45e, emphasis in original)

A Kierkegaardian Passage in Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen), ed  von Wright, tr. Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 53e:

     I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound
     doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or
     the direction of your life.)

     It says that all wisdom is cold; and that you can no more use it
     for setting your life to rights that you can forge iron when it is
     cold.

     The point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you; you
     can follow it as you would a doctor's prescription. — But here you
     need something to move you and turn you in a new direction. —
     (I.e. this is how I understand it.) Once you have been turned
     around, you must stay turned around.

     Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard
     calls a passion.

Sound doctrines are useless? It would be truer to say that faith as a mere subjective passion is useless. The fideisms of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein fall far below the balanced positions of Augustine and Aquinas. The latter thinkers understood that sound doctrine, though insufficient, was an indispensable guide. They neither denigrated reason nor overestimated its reach. Reason without faith may be existentially empty and passionless, but faith without reason is blind and runs the risk of fanaticism.

The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell

Ludwig Wittgenstein sometimes shot his mouth off in summary judgment of men of very high caliber. He once remarked to M. O'C. Drury, "Russell's books should be bound in two colours: those dealing with mathematical logic in red — and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue — and no one should be allowed to read them." (Recollections of Wittgenstein,* ed. R. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 112.)

Here is a passage from Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (Liveright 1930, p. 24) whose urbanity, wit, and superficiality might well have irritated the self-tormenting Wittgenstein:

I do not myself think that there is any superior rationality in being unhappy. The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead.

This observation ties in nicely with my remarks on short views and long views.  If middle-sized happiness is your object, then short views are probably best.  But some of us want more.

 __________

*This title is delightfully ambiguous. Read as an objective genitive, it refers to recollections about Wittgenstein, while read as a subjective genitive, it denotes Wittgenstein's recollections. The book, consisting as it does of both, is well-titled.

Ernest Gellner on Ordinary Language Philosophy: Moore as Wittgensteinian Man

The following quotations from Ernest Gellner's Words and Things  are borrowed from Kieran Setiya's site.

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of people who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer.

It is not clear whether Moore should be called a philosopher or a pedant of such outstanding ability as to push pedantry and literal-mindedness to a point where it became a philosophy. [. . .] One might say that Moore is the one and only known example of Wittgensteinian man: unpuzzled by the world or science, puzzled only by the oddity of the sayings of philosophers, and sensibly reacting to that alleged oddity by very carefully, painstakingly and interminably examining their use of words. . . .

Absolutely brilliant!  When I first read Moore and his remark to the effect that he would never have done philosophy if it hadn't been for the puzzling things he found in books by men like Bradley, I took that as almost the definition of an inauthentic philosopher: one who gets his problems, not from life, but from books.  I should say, though, that over the years I have come to appreciate Moore as a master of analysis.  But I can't shake the thought that there is something deeply perverse about finding the impetus to philosophizing in philosophical claims and theories rather than in the realities attendance to which gave rise to the claims and theories in the first place.  Imagine a scientist or an historian or even a theologian  who proceeded in that way.

In this passage Gellner explains the appeal of the later Wittgenstein:

The linguistic naturalism, the reduction of the basis of our  thought to linguistic etiquette, ensures that there is no appeal  whatever to Extraneous Authority for the manner in which we speak and think. Naturalism, this-worldliness, is thus pushed to its final limit. But at the very same time, and for that very reason (language and custom being their own masters, beholden and accountable to no Outside norm), the diversified content of language and custom is indiscriminately endorsed. Thus the     transcendent, if and when required, slips back ambiguously, in virtue of being the object of natural practices, customs, modes of speech.

I take the Gellnerian ball and run with it in What is the Appeal of Ordinary Language Philosophy?  and How Ordinary Language Philosophy Rests on Logical Positivism.
  

Dale Tuggy Avoids D. Z. Phillips

In the fourth of a series posts on the evolution of his views on the Trinity, Dale Tuggy reports on his time at the Claremont Graduate School.  About D. Z. Phillips, he says the following:

D.Z. Phillips I avoided. I’d read real epistemology (Chisholm, Plantinga, etc.) and was always unimpressed with the later-Wittgenstein approach, especially to the epistemology of religion. Anyway, I heard it all repeatedly from some of my fellow students, who also said that every Phillips class was basically the same line over and over. I never could identify with the quasi-conversion stories some of them related about reading Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.

It looks as if Dale and I are in agreement when it comes to the philosophy of religion of the late Wittgenstein. See my The Question of the Reality of God:  Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer.

I hope Dale comes to Tucson again this summer to visit his in-laws.  Peter, Mike and I met him in Florence where we visited a Greek orthodox monastery.  An excellent discussion ensued.  We hope to see him again. 

The Fly and the Fly Bottle

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . .  He should have just walked away from it.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It can be done.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.)  For any justification proffered, perforce & willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy.  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

(Exercise for the reader: Cite chapter and verse of the Epictetus and Wittgenstein passages to which I allude above.)

Wittgenstein on Time and Flux

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trs. Hargreaves and White, Chicago 1975, p. 83:

52. It's strange that in ordinary life we are not troubled by the feeling that the phenomenon is slipping away from us, the constant flux of appearance, but only when we philosophize. This indicates that what is in question here is an idea suggested by a misapplication of our language. 

This indicates to me that Wittgenstein lacked a metaphysical sensibility. It is precisely in ordinary life, and prior to his occupation with technical metaphysics, that the metaphysician feels and is saddened by the transitoriness of things, the flux of phenomena, the passage of time. That feeling is part of what sets him on the path of technical metaphysics in the first place. It is the fundamental sense of the transience and unreality of this world that disposes him to take seriously metaphysical writings when he first encounters them. And it is the lack of this sense in G. E. Moore and in Wittgenstein which disposes them to be puzzled by the writings of metaphysicians like Bradley and McTaggart and to set out to debunk them either by defending common sense (as if the metaphysician were simply denying it) or by bringing us back to ordinary language used in ordinary ways.

Wittgenstein says that "only when we philosophize" are we troubled by the flux of phenomena. Not only is this plainly false, it suggests that there is something aberrant rather than natural about philosophizing, as if philosophy were a disease of cognition needing treatment rather than refutation. I simply deny this.  If there is a cognitive defect, it is in those who fail to perceive the relative unreality of the transient.

Philosophy arises quite naturally in people of a reflective disposition who have a sense of the relative unreality, the ontological non-ultimacy, of the world of time and change. Philosophy is not a disease, but a response to the inherent questionableness of the world and our lives in it.   In the Theaetetus, Plato speaks of wonder as the "feeling of the philosopher." This wonder is not mere puzzlement induced by linguistic confusion but a questioning elicited by the nature of things, a questioning that is a transcending of this world, a transcending that issues in attempts to put into language the essence of the world.

It is the possibility of this transcending that Wittgenstein questions. He questions it by questioning the meaningfulness of the sorts of extended uses of ordinary words that the metaphysician employs. The metaphysician takes a word like 'present' from ordinary usage and then says something extraordinary like, 'The present alone is real,' or 'Only the present experience has reality.' Wittgenstein objects to this with a sort of Contrast Argument:

We are tempted to say: only the experience of the present moment has reality. And then the first reply must be: As opposed to what? Does it imply that I didn't get up this morning? (For if so, it would be dubious.) But this is not what we mean. Does it mean that an event that I'm not remembering at this instant didn't occur? Not that either. (85)

Wittgenstein's point is that when one says that the present alone is real, one is using 'present' in an extended sense, one in which it no longer contrasts with 'past' and 'future.' He seems to think that the presentist metaphysician is saying something that conflicts with such obvious facts as that one got up in the morning. But here is where Wittgenstein's Contrast Argument becomes hard to credit. Wittgenstein's mistake is to think that when the presentist, saying that the present alone is real, implies that the past is unreal, he is implying that the past is nothing at all in a way that would render it false that we got up this morning. But of course the presentist does not deny the gross facts; what he does is reinterpret them. His point is something like this: the reality of the past is relative to, or derivative from, the (absolute) reality of the present.

The Question of the Reality of God: Wittgensteinian Fideism No Answer

Taking a Wittgensteinian line, D. Z. Phillips construes the question of the reality of God as like the question of the reality of physical objects in general, and unlike the question of the reality of any particular physical object such as a unicorn.   Phillips would therefore have a bone to pick with Edward 'Cactus Ed' Abbey who writes,

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

Abbey's meaning is clear: It is as idle to suppose that there is a God as to suppose that there is an irate unicorn on the far side of the moon. Of course, there could be such a unicorn. It is logically possible in that there is no contradiction in the idea. It is also epistemically possible in that the supposition is consistent with what we know. (Perhaps a clever extraterrestrial scientist synthesized a unicorn, put him in a space suit, and deposited the unfortunate critter on the moon.) But there is no positive reason to believe in something so outlandish. The same goes for God according to Abbey, Russell, and plenty of others.  Such theists think of God as just one more being among beings, as something in addition to all the other things that exist.

Another Example of a Vicious Infinite Regress: Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 239

I am collecting examples of infinite regress arguments in philosophy. See the category Infinite Regress Arguments.  Here is one that is suggested by section 239 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. When I hear the word 'red,' how do I know which color is being referred to?  The following answer might be given:  'Red' refers to the color of the mental image that hearing the word elicits.  But then the question arises once again:  How do I know that the color of the mental image is the color to which 'red' refers?  Do I need a criterion for that as well?  If I do, then I am embarked upon an infinite regress, one that is vicious.

Why is it vicious?  Most of us know which color 'red' refers to.  But how do we know it?  To ask how we know this is to request an epistemological (and therefore a philosophical) explanation.  But if the explanation is that 'red' refers to the color of the mental image that hearing the word elicits, then, although we have answered the initial question, we have  answered it in a way that allows the posing of a second question of the same form as the first.  And so on.