Great Minds - Part 5 - The Latter Wittgenstein: The Philosophy of Language

[Music] Ludwig Wittgenstein's first published work the Tractatus logico-philosophicus one of the great manifestos of positivism and it's decidedly a young man's work it's elegant clean and very decisive in the sort of skepticism that it advocates and the sort of position that it takes with regard to logic and with regard to thought the King Stein's work his early work the Tractatus was 70 pages of Allah which elaborated essentially seven sentences and these sentences are remarkable for their cogent see for the clarity with which he expresses them and in particular for the ruthless and very determined scepticism which he extrapolates from this conception of language and logic that's in the Tractatus the Tractatus amounts to a theory of the declarative sentence a theory of what can be put in a proposition and what cannot and what Victor Stein says is this that essentially anything that can be said can either be said clearly or not at all so he's a real yes or no kind of a man a very logically clear decisive individual who has a professional competence in mathematics who comes for background in engineering and who has both an extremely practical orientation towards his subject matter but also he has the desire from mathematical rigor and mathematical formality which lends to it a character which is not unlike anything else in the Western philosophical tradition now what he says is essentially this in his early work the Tractatus the first sentence is the world is all that is the case which is perhaps the most one of the most mysterious lines in philosophy it sounds very clear but I'm not entirely sure what that means it certainly means that the set of the state's ever affairs that we find around us the simple facts are what the world is for us it's a word it's a way of saying that there will be no metaphysics in this book that it will be a strictly one world interpretation of what can be thought and what can be said after that first sentence there's another series of sentences and then elaborations on each of these sentences now if you look at the tract at us you'll find that he chooses a particular form he numbers his sentences like a scientific fellow that he is and the first sentence is followed by sentence number two but sentence number two is followed by sentence number two point 12.01 2.0 - in other words he works out all the logical entailment all the logical implications of the views that he holds and then moves on so he intends to be logically exhaustive he intends to tell you what can and cannot be put into the declare into language and since he views the limits of our language as the limits of our at least social thought what he is trying to do is tell us what we can and cannot sensibly talk about the last sentence in the Tractatus is quite remarkable what he says is after finishing the 70 pages of extrapolation and elaboration of this theory of language he says what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence what that means of course is that he is sent is expelled he is a excommunicated many different kinds of discourse into the realm of nonsense Akala T in many respects Vic and Stein is as skeptical as a person can get only that which can be expressed can be Syria can be taken seriously as a set of philosophical propositions and once you get to the limits of our language we have reached the limits of our thought the possibility of going beyond language simply doesn't exist if we were going to eschew language if we were going to get beyond it and eliminate it what would we do when we tried to communicate when we tried to think I mean we'd have to hold hands and have a seance and try and read each other's minds so once we've gotten to the very limits of language we've also gotten to the perimeter of that which can be known so Ludwig Wittgenstein the young man who wrote the Tractatus believed that he had solved all possible philosophical problems not only all philosophical problems that have been developed in the previous twenty five hundred years of philosophy but all philosophical problems that could ever be raised because if you're going to ask a question it's going to be in language and one assumes that the response to your eight interrogatory will be a declarative statement and if it fits into the declaratives into his theory of the declarative statement then it checks out and we're okay but if it doesn't well then it's simply gibberish the popular expression of this is found in AJ Ayers language truth and logic the lecture that Professor Stella just gave gives you a very clear conception of the profound skepticism and the extreme logical tidiness that we find in this tendency in philosophy it's you could call a logical positivism a physics uber alles physics over everything we have logic we have physics that's what real serious scientific philosophers do anything else is essentially poetry or religion or neurosis or something like that it's not to be taken seriously by real tough philosophers now Vidkun Stein's book caused a sensation among the handful of people that initially could make any sense of it because it is an exceedingly difficult book it is surely one of the most difficult works in modern philosophy should any of you be brave enough to undertake a reading of it first take a course in formal logic and then prepare to give up six months or a year of your life that's not a joke perfectly serious now Vidkun Stein's book when published created a tremendous sensation he got a professorship at Cambridge and he was lionized everywhere students and professors of philosophy said finally we've had a real breakthrough finally we've had someone who on his own could create new approaches to philosophical problems that were unprecedented that were easy to understand or not easy but understandable and communicable and it seemed to be definitive as I said before the author of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus thought that he had solved all possible philosophical problems a remarkable attempt if not a remarkable success as his work was absorbed as he got a band of admiring or perhaps not even admiring adoring students and colleagues 15 Stine became rather uneasy now press it's a question of temperament some philosophers liked the idea of being adored if you think of someone like Hegel students would have to adore someone like that would have to look up to him that would make him feel that he was moving in the right path in philosophy it just on the other hand it disturbed Vidkun Stein profoundly Vicky and Stein said well are you sure that I'm completely right are you certain that everything I've said here is absolutely true is there really no way out of this logical corner I've painted myself into as a matter of fact is it possible that this book so rigorous and analytic and formal is wrong now in that respect he was not only lightyears ahead of his contemporaries in putting this book together but he was several more light years ahead of them in calling it into question so at just the time during the 1930s when he is reaching tremendous international renown tremendous international success Vidkun Stein the isolated somewhat odd Socratic had to ask himself am I sure and how do I know and he offered a self-criticism of his own work which was more trenchant and more powerful than any criticism that could be leveled at it from the outside so just as everyone in the world was beginning to worship at this at the ayatul of the young victims time the Vidkun Stein of the Tractatus the toughest logical guy around Vik and Stein began to have misgivings and these misgivings generated a whole series of work that occupied the entirety of his life until he died in the early 50s he refused to publish after the Tractatus he did publish one paper under protest decided that he didn't like it after he had done it and would put nothing else in print he circulated a few manuscripts among his students and among his friends among his colleagues but he didn't like to put anything in print because it seems so final and it seems that philosophy is more a process than a series of absolute certainties and he was moving away from the logic logical hubris that was characteristic of the Tractatus his most important work the latest of his works is called the logical investigations and that too is one of the most profound and interesting works of philosophy in the 20th century it's not so forbidding or so immediate right at us because it lacks a logic a lot of the logical formulae and things like that but in fact it's one of the most difficult and rigorous pieces of work ever produced and it's a sort of exercise in philosophical humility which is not terribly common among philosophers if you've been listening to the other lectures that we've had so far and it shows us not instead of the logical necessity of language it talks about the practical contingency of language he appreciates the ambiguity and the difficulties that attach to our everyday practical use of language rather than a sort of abstract completely logical architectonic formalization of all possible linguistic constructs now the investigations is a series of paragraphs not quite so tidy as the series of sentences that we see in the Tractatus but fit Kim Stein says the book is incomplete I would have written you in the introduction he says I would have written a good book if I could but I was just outside my capacity so this will have to do he says at best it says it's an album a series of therapies to uncloudy understanding of the world which is clouded up by the way we use language philosophy Lichtenstein once said that philosophy is a battle against the be which meant of our intelligence through language oddly enough and it may seem rather strange in a rather logical and physical istic sort of philosopher like Vicki Einstein there are many exceedingly poetic passages in Vidkun Stein it's an odd place to find poetry but in fact the clarity and the rigor of Viktor Stein's writing both in the early period when he was writing the Tractatus and in the later period when he put together the investigations is quite astonishing and simply as a read for the poetry of it getting odd insights into language and thought that itself justifies it so if you're going to read the in China to later date have a look at the investigations it's a most interesting piece of work and you probably find it more rewarding than the track tennis now in the Tractatus Lichtenstein had an idea or made essentially the argument or had the basic conception that language was a picture of the world and that each individual atomic proposition told us something about the world or told us about some logical fact so there are two kinds of meaningful propositions in the tract at us and only two there were deductive facts and there were inductive facts deductive facts are either true or false and he worked out the implications of that it turns out that all true deductive statements or analytic facts are in fact tautologies in other words they only tell you that X is X now it may be a very abstract set of equations on both sides but really what it all reduces to is everything is itself every mathematical equation says that this is this and nothing more it tells us nothing about the world it just tells us about the logical entailment sin our definitions very clean very precise he has a razor blade of a mind and he cuts right through all the nonsense all the complexities to get to one basic core in the in the Tractatus he also says that another kind of proposition expresses the contingent states of affairs in the world the chair is there the audience is here I'm walking up and down all these propositions tell us individual effects about the world and these are not tautologies these are not contradictions they are simple contingencies and the way you find out about them is by looking at the world elegant simple lovely perhaps a little too simple perhaps an oversimplification in his later work when he gets to the investigations Lichtenstein has decided that instead of language being a picture he wants to treat language as a game as a set of social practices which overlap and which don't have one universal skeleton key which allows us to open all linguistic doors instead there are a plurality of overlapping games which have a certain degree of consistency within them but there's no one unifying characteristic that covers all possible linguistic expressions the idea of a great philosopher a philosophy received enormous international notoriety retracting his first and most widely known work is unprecedented in the history of philosophy and one of the great achievements in human self criticism the capacity to be critical towards oneself as well as others the rigorous intellectual honesty is what comes out of the investigations and it is enormous ly impressive in that respect now let's think about the idea of language games Vicky Stein says that there are different kinds of games that we play and that language can be subsumed under that idea and that not all these games are perfectly identical and that there's a certain degree of ambiguity that attaches to some games rather than others and in fact the plurality and diversity of languages of language makes it resist any attempt to find a universal kind of algorithm which allows you to get through all of it remarkable change of intellectual orientation comes here now the question is if we're to take this idea of language games seriously we have to figure out what we would mean by a language game how these games will work and what it is it's different in this second conception this conception of the language game that makes it different from the conception that he had earlier two of the consigns favorite questions come into play here one of his favorite questions is how is a word learned that it's say if you want to define if you want to know about the meaning of a word X then ask yourself how do you find out about X how would you teach X to a six-year-old because as a matter of practical empirical fact all the six-year-olds all the children are in our culture are going to have to be taught the words of English and they get taught them one by one ask yourself how you would teach a word that will tell you a great deal about what the word means and what the word signifies in addition to that he wants to know a second question that Vicki Sean is particularly interested in is how is a word used one of the slogans that was derived from this a little later in his in the Q science development was don't ask for the meaning ask for the use if you want to know what X means ask yourself where people do with it go look at people using the word X and find out what it's good for and when you know how they use it well you know what it means this change from the logical necessity of language to its practical contingency is a fascinating turnabout now let's think about the word game I assume all of us have a sufficient command of English to roughly know what a game is and the problem is one of definition how will how will we define game let's think about our six-year-old let's call him Johnny and let's say we want to teach a game to Johnny now by six most children actually know what a game is already and the question is this how did we teach Johnny the term game and how do we know when Johnny understands the word game and what does it mean for us to define the word game well we'd have to drop back a little bit and see what Vicky Stein is fighting against in the Western philosophical tradition in other words what's the definition of definition in the Western philosophical tradition a kind of meta question kind of bootstraps us up into a new level and the best example the best contrast you can find is in the works of Plato Socrates is constantly asking people what is justice what is goodness what is virtue what is beauty and in what he's asking for is a definition because in each of the Socratic dialogues there is an attempt to define some important abstract concept and in fact in the process of defining it Socrates has very clear criteria for what counts as a definition those of you who are familiar with the Republic know that Socrates wants to define justice those of you who are familiar with the fie drous know that Socrates wants to define love those of you who are familiar with the Meno know that Socrates wants to define virtue when Socrates in the Meno asks me know what is virtue Meno gives him a bunch of examples is the virtue of generals the virtue of soldiers the virtue of men the virtue of women as Socrates says no no no stop stop I don't want examples of virtue I want to know what virtue itself is I want to know some quality that every virtue has an only virtue has in other words Socrates demands that virtue be defined in the way that we define odd numbers or triangles he wants the cannons for definition to be strictly mathematical it goes back to the fact that the Greeks were primarily concerned with the mathematical epistemological questions released plato was as socrates wins many arguments by showing that nobody understands what virtue or justice of beauty is because no one can tell them what the form of it is no one can tell them what every instantiation of beauty has and only instantiations of beauty has no one can tell them what every example of virtue has an only examples of virtue have it's not an example that's it's not an accident Asaka tease whenever he gives an example of what he wants a definition to be always chooses some mathematical entity mathematical things lend themselves to that kind of definition the difficulty that Vicki Stein has stumbled on and it's a fascinating problem is that many things can are not and cannot be defined that way in other words he thinks Socrates is unintentionally playing intellectual sleight of hand by demanding of people something that couldn't possibly be there and then it turns out that when the people try and give him what he wants they end up looking stupid because they piranha there on an expedition to do the impossible a remarkable insight that Kishan offers us a new idea let's go back to Johnny in the game Johnny understands the game and what's remarkable is that none of us sat down and said Johnny every game has the following quality and only games have the following qualities Johnny this is the form of the game as a matter of fact if called upon to tell someone what the form of the game is in other words if called upon to say some quality that every game has and only games have I think you'd run into all kinds of problems ask yourself what the Olympics have in common with tic-tac-toe ask yourself what poker has in common with chess ask yourself what tag has in common with peekaboo ask yourself if any of these things have one universal characteristics one universal characteristic that allows us to say that all these things are games if they don't have one universal characteristic how is it that we can use the word in a sensible way what does it mean to describe all these things as games Vidkun stein has opened up a can of skeptical worms here and he's going to close it too quite remarkable let's go back to Johnny in our game we teach Johnny peek we teach Johnny maybe a card game we teach Johnny how to play checkers we teach Johnny a number of games how do we know when Johnny understands the term game what we do is we look for some behavior some use on the part of Johnny that shows that he knows where it fits in in our language so for example if he starts writing his homework and he says this thing that I'm writing my homework with that's a game we say no Johnny you don't understand that's not a game that's a pencil a game is a thing like tag or checkers or or cards or something like that Johnny but notice we don't say Johnny the following is the form of the game we give Johnny examples so what Vicki Stein is saying here is that as a matter of practical fact all of us not just Johnny but all of us learn the use of words like game everyday simple things like that by being given examples this is called extensive definition in other words in contrast to the Socratic essential definition by specifying one quality that every X has an only X has Vidkun Stein wants to offer us a new paradigm that will cover some kinds of definition as a Kapoor in fact it will cover most kinds of definition this will be definition by giving examples of something so if you want to teach someone that doesn't understand English since it's a speaks of foreign language what a chair is you point out examples of chairs you say sir that's a chair and sir that's a chair and that's a chair and that's a chair and that's a chair and then at some point in time you get tired of saying that's a chair that's a chair that's a chair that you stop and then after that if you want to find out if this person understands the word chair you ask them could you use that in a sentence and point out a few things and if they point to the sky or if they point to a mountain you understand that they don't understand what you meant by chair and you have to give them some more examples if on the other hand he says that's a chair that's a chair that's a chair then you have as good a reason as you are ever going to have to think that he understands the word chair and this is not restricted to the word game it is not restricted to the word chair this accounts for almost all the definitions we have of almost all the words we use every day it's remarkable about Vidkun Stein that unlike Plato and Spinoza who can confuse us and baffle us with the most profound intellectual constructs Vidkun Stein can baffle us with the contents of our closets Vicky Stein can baffle us with the objects on the table Vicky Stein can make it amazing that you should know how to use the word sugar or salt remarkable but not remarkable what Vidkun Stein has done is gone back to the way words actually work in the practical empirical world he started out his career as an engineer and then he moved into mathematics and the desire for mathematical formality sacrificed common sense and now this is a revival of common sense this is common sense in a way with a vengeance think about the paradigm of six-year-olds if they understand what game means don't tell me that us philosophers don't and if we can't specify some quality that every instantiation of the we use of the word game has and only such as Stan she Asians have then why should we believe that there is such a thing now this doesn't sound like all that great a breakthrough perhaps but stop and consider it imagine someone that had spent a scholar spent his entire life trying to figure out what it is that makes beautiful things beautiful and he looked at Beethoven's Ninth Symphony he looked at Rembrandt's portraits he looked at the Sistine Chapel he looked at a number of things and racked his brain for a whole career twenty thirty forty years trying to figure out some quality that all these things have in common and the difficulty may be in the kind of question that we're asking they may not have anything intrinsically in common that unites all of them there may be a series of overlapping commonalities that allow us to refer to all these things in a rough and approximate way it doesn't give us ultimate platonic precision it won't turn us into logic machines but the demand for final logical precision may be the problem here rather than the fuzziness of our language it may be that we're making impossible and unreasonable demands when we ask for the form of the chair for the essential quality of every chair and only chairs perhaps what we need is a series of examples that work in a rough practical way in the Lange Gamze if that we live with in other words the fact that I keep that I can't specify you for you some quality that every games at game has and only games have doesn't mean that you don't know what I'm talking about when I use the word game and doesn't mean I can't teach you to Johnny and what more do you want to do with it aren't we asking the impossible fascinating idea now there's a problem here and Plato would be the first one to come back when that let's be fair to him he'd say look how do we know when we really understand something maybe Johnny is going to go out and misuse the word later on and there's an intrinsic ambiguity to defining things by example that is to say there's always going to be an uncertainty when you get to the peripheral examples of a game or a chair or anything else as to whether this falls under the rubric chair or game or not is a doll's house chair a chair well maybe is a throne a chair well I guess if you sit on a boulder is that a chair well kind of I mean it becomes kind of difficult at the edges and here's what Plato would come back and say look logic or nothing tell me put with perfect certainty or I don't want to hear about it Vikki Stein's answer is elegant and quite poetic he says when you demand absolute logical precision a rigid clear distinction between the tourney between the things that fall under a term and things that do not aren't you demanding the impossible he says something to this effect is a fuzzy photograph of photograph well yeah is it adequate for certain purposes well it depends on what purposes you want to do you want it for in other words is a fuzzy definition of definition well Plato would say no why because he wants absolute certainty that's what the Greek tradition is all about thinking Stein says the problem is not with our language the problem is not without thinking the problem with is with the demand for absolute certainty about the about the nature of chair Ness there is no such thing there's just this chair and that chair and the other chair and there's an intrinsic ambiguity built into our definitions along those lines that's exactly like the ambiguity that we find in a fuzzy photograph think of a satellites photograph of the United States you might object that it's not clear that your backyard is there that Youngstown would say well if we need more resolution we can add that resolution as it's necessary in games in the language games we are engaged in but insofar as we just want to satellites photo of the United States this does just fine if you want your backyard I suppose we could clarify it somewhat and insofar as our language games demand that we bring it down to the level of the backyard that we increase the specificity we can always add that as we need it but we don't need a priori an ultimate essential definition of all the words in our language prior to being able to talk talk comes first action comes first these logical systemization zuv it comes second and insofar as they create an nonsensical ambiguity in our understanding of ourselves and our world the fault lies not with the world the fault not lies not with our language the fault lies with an unreasonable demand for unreasonable degrees of certainty what a remarkable idea it's absolutely brilliant and if you could imagine now our poor scholar looking at the sistine listening to Beethoven's 9th appreciating Rembrandt and then saying I've been asking the wrong question all I have is overlapping elements of beauty that attach to different things in different ways and they may have a rough similarity but that's all we're going to get so instead of a platonic form of beauty or we're going to get is the beauty characteristic of portraits perhaps crafts you could define that with some precision the beauty characteristic of pieces of music perhaps perhaps for some purposes we would want to connect one to the other perhaps you'd want to distinguish them but the problem lies not with the world the problem wit lies with our over demanding of logical rigor now what this means is that we're going to have to find some principle that holds our world together because there's a danger here suppose we were to say that some term X in some language referred to ladies shoes all the numbers over 200 and lobsters well the problem is that there's no connection between these things in other words we don't want to be so completely disparate that we get an totally arbitrary set of utterances referring to the world and Vidkun Stein comes up with another beautiful poetic paradigm for this and this is called family resemblance imagine the Smith family hypothetical group of people they all look roughly alike some are taller some are shorter some way more some way less some have long hair some have short hair but they all look roughly like the Smith family why do we call them Smiths because we see a family resemblance between this and this and this and Vidkun sign says let's extrapolate from that idea let's take the idea that all the chairs have a rough family resemblance they're things built by people so that you can sit on them is a dot and then naturally there'll be some ambiguous cases on the fringe is a doll's house chair a chair is a throne a chair is the front seat of your car or chair well it depends on what you want to do with it but the point is the reason why we might be tempted to call these various things chairs is because they share a certain family resemblance that allows us to clump these common nouns together or the the things that are referred to by these common nouns together and this family resemblance idea is what we are looking for when we try and define a term so when we choose examples of chairs to teach Johnny width we don't choose the odd cases that are unclear we choose things that are very clearly chairs that's a chair and that's a chair and that's a chair when Johnny comes back and wants to know if some questionable case the dolls house chair is a chair we say well it depends on what you want to do it that Johnny if you want to build doll houses maybe we'll call it a chair if you want to talk only about things that people can really sit on well then it's not a chair it depends on what language game you're playing now let's think about game the definition of game it seems like what holds our word game together is the fact that games have a rough family resemblance poker is kind of like bridge in that you playing with cards chess is sort of like checkers in the sense that you play it on a 64 square board and chess is sort of like poker in the sense that both are governed by rules but they'll still be fuzzy questions and fuzzy instead in instances of what counts as a game consider for example peekaboo if we wanted to say that games were behaviors were human behaviors that governed by rules you'd have the difficulty of peekaboo no one explains to an infant these are the ground rules of peekaboo kid before you play it you just play peek-a-boo and it doesn't have any rules or I don't know I mean I'll give you offsides in peekaboo think about it right I mean it's its peekaboo is peekaboo game well if you want to include it for certain purposes I say under the rubric things children do okay it's a game I mean it would be very peculiar to do among adults on the other hand if you want to say that games are rule-oriented behaviors well then it's not what hangs on the question of whether we can absolute ties this or not Vidkun Stein points out nothing what a liberation from physics uber alles what a tribute to common sense and everyday experience what a great intellectual honesty that allows him to break through this into a new domain of rough expressions of everyday language of the way we really live Vikki Stein says in a very memorable passage that some mathematician had tried to demand complete logical rigor his name was Scott Loeb Frager and he said that a term that isn't defined perfectly is like an area in geometry that has an imperfect definition if it's not bounded completely it's not an area which means is not a definition but Vicki's fences no that's not really true he asks is it nonsensical to say stand roughly there do I have to specify with Cartesian coordinates exactly what I want you to stand no stand roughly there I mean anybody that understands English was going to understand this he says there's no mystery here if you're mystifying if you're mystified you are mystifying yourself and philosophy is a battle against the B which meant of our intelligence by language what a remarkable intellect what a remarkable thinker now there's a number of difficulties here difficulty number one actually there are a plethora of difficulties that's not fair but the difficulty that immediately suggests itself how do we know when someone understands a term well we know when they can use the term the way we use the term and if they start using the term in a funny way that is say if Johnny starts pointing at his pencil and saying this is a game we say no John for the hundredth time that's a pencil that's not a game and if Johnny has any brains at all you figure eventually Johnny's gonna come up with idea that look games are things like chess and checkers Johnny learn the language you can do it well here's the idea our standard for knowing where the Johnny understands the word game is his behavior and what this does it comes very very close to abolishing the mind or the psyche or the internal element in understanding in other words this theory of whether you understand the term game or not refers not at all to your mental experiences to your subjective understanding of it it refers to the way you behave and if you don't show me by some kind of behavior whether you understand the word game or not I strictly speaking can't tell whether you can do that so in other words it comes perilously close to turning into a kind of philosophical behaviorism what fit constrain does is drive the world of the psyche of the ego of the subject back not to the point where you abolish as it as many of the more radical logical positives do otto neurath does that a jair I believe does it as well but what he does is drive the ego or the psyche of the subject back to not non-existence but to the point where it's to the level where it is a dimensionless point that takes up no space and that contains nothing within it it is a black box entirely impenetrable to all other people he does not deny that people have a self or an ego but in fact he says that that's inaccessible to us imagine the uncommon loneliness of such a man it means that you can't know other minds or no other people it comes very very close to that so this behaviorism is expressed quite Abele and again quite politically and in a way that's not at all easy to refute and the examples Lichtenstein again can baffle us with the things on our kitchen table he can baffle you with anything with any everyday common object of common activity and in particular he says a makes a number of observations or thought experiments for example he says suppose we taught a child or suppose we met someone who had been taught how to do addition problems many of us can do that it's simple arithmetic and suppose we wanted to know if this if a given person say a person in one of these rows knows how to do addition I might give him some addition problems and ask him to do them and then look and see if in fact he gets the right answer and if he gets the right answer for any length of time I say okay yeah this person knows how to do addition independent of testing them in that way of seeing them perform some kind of action of engaging in some kind of behavior which gives me grounds to say that could I ever possibly have grounds for thinking that a person understands addition imagine the following case and this is the kind of queer brilliance that you get in victims time he says imagine the case of someone that claimed to understand addition but never ever had done an addition problem on paper and had never given anyone any evidence of understanding addition just says I've done a great many sums but I've done them all in my head imagine the strange condition you were in now how can we tell if this person understands addition assuming that they're not willing to do anything out here in the world that we can say take it on faith well imagine where that's going to lead us imagine people claiming that they understood Swedish with the exception that they had never spoken any Swedish and they had never read anything in Swedish but they want you to believe that they know it do you see the problem that is to say what possible criterion could we have for ascribing to a person an understanding of an idea or a concept or process unless it was somewhere in their behavior the only other alternative is to read their mind to hold hands have a seance to see if we can directly get access to it and since that's impossible back to behaviorism back to the standard of external activity as the touchstone for whether Johny understands this and as a matter of practical fact there should come as no surprise that every first-grade teacher when they want to find out if the kids in the class understand addition they give them a test not because they like making the kids nervous but because the only way to find out whether they understand addition or not is to have them do some addition problems you can't take it on faith a remarkable breakthrough the difficulty with it is is that it tends to lock us within our own psyche and that it tends to make it very hard to give behavior which would give a satisfactory reason to believe in certain kinds of experience Lichtenstein says that you're in the investigations what is the aim of your philosophy to allow the fly to get out of the fly bottle in other words we're taken in by the language that we've been brought up on and we tend to get confused because language itself is full of odd quirks and odd facts which only can be determined and conely can be unraveled in the way words get used so back to the theme don't ask for the meaning ask for the use if you're still unclear as to what you're doing then ask how is this word learned so for Vidkun Stein philosophy in the investigations turns out to be a kind of therapy we have conceptual charley horses so we have conceptual diseases and he's going to be a trainer or intellectual doctor who's going to help us improve our thinking and he's going to offer us therapy for the misapprehensions and the confusions introduced into our thinking by our use of language now the problem with the investigations is that it's incomplete one of the difficulties is and here's the real point is that there's an infinite number of overlapping language games and not only is it incomplete but philosophy itself is incomplete the incompleteness of this book gestures at the fact that there is no ultimate finale to the philosophical enterprise which is a total reversal of what he thought he had done in this for error in the early part of his career he thought he had solved all philosophical problems there's nothing left to talk about everything else is just mopping up the confusions that have to be left over from 2,500 years of Platonism now we know not only was philosophy not ending but it's never ending it's never ending because human puzzlement never ends but there and there in fact there is no one universal skeleton key there's no Universal thread which leaves it which leads us out of the labyrinth of language all we can do is learn the local rules used in various communities and in various forms of life with regard to certain linguistic activities and once Johnny learns how to use the word chair and refers to things like that with it well then Johnny understands what a chair is and that is true not just for chairs but it's true for all of language and what he's done is undeceive us and make unambiguous things which we thought were problems but in fact are not problems the problem lies not with the world the problem lies not with language the problem lies with the unreasonable set of demands and expectations that we bring to it the therapy that he is performing in the large-scale sense is to rid us of the Platonic demand for ultimate certainty and go to an essentially pragmatic standard which says if it works it works if it isn't broke don't fix it if Johnny can use the word chair then Johnny understands chair whether you can tell you what the form of the chair is are not as a matter of fact it may be a waste of time because in probability there is no form of the chair there is no one quality which every chair has and only chairs have all we have is the overlapping language games some of them are more precise than others if some are found too ambiguous for our purposes we can increase the precision with which we use language at any time and we can increase it to the point where we find it useful again and then there's no point in taking our precision any further except for the points of pedantry because if it isn't fixed if it isn't broke don't fix it he rescues us from centuries of unnecessary worry he helps us avoid a lifetime of the front of the frustrating pursuit of something that's not there he says or in a way it's a way of going back to the first line of the Tractatus the world is all that is the case and what we must what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence in the Tractatus being a logical scientific kind of a guy he said that there were no way that we could express propositions in ethics or in theology or in aesthetics it's too gooey and ambiguous form later on he comes back with this idea of the fuzzy photo we can talk about ethics we can talk about aesthetics we can talk about theology the difficulty is is that they're very ambiguous very fuzzy words the question is is the fuzziness of our discourse an impediment to understanding each other or not if we get an understanding of what someone is talking about when they talk about beauty or about God or about religion if it communicates with you and you could tell by whether they use it in the proper way well then it's working just fine if it's too ambiguous for our purposes then sharpen it up we are rescued not only from an extreme skepticism we are rescued from chasing our own tails around like puppies in that respect Vick and Stein represents a retreat from philosophical hubris he is a hero in the Socratic sense because he's not only willing to criticize others he's willing to criticize himself and he's unwilling to accept the flattery that comes with philosophical breakthroughs when you yourself have conscientious misgivings about what you've written as an example of intellectual honesty Ludwig Vicki Stein is without peer in the last 500 years of philosophy one of the greatest thinkers and in that respect one of the greatest souls of all and as a matter of just empirical personal fact for him he was one of the loneliest and most I kind of put a distant of men and part of it comes from this extreme logical rigor part of it comes from this willingness to ask new questions willingness to even undermine one's own conclusions but in also it also connects to the fact the victims I himself wanted to bring philosophy down to this world and it amounts to the idea that what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence and the domain of silence it turns out in the investigations is not as great as we had thought

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 10,607

Rating: 4.9337749 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Great Minds, The Latter Wittgenstein, The Philosophy of Language

Id: X7Rb56kZQSk

Length: 44min 22sec (2662 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020