Wittgenstein II.

this is contemporary philosophy my name is mark Thor's be and in this video series we're taking a look at some contemporary philosophers philosophers from the 20th and 21st centuries and taking a look at how the problem of language has shaped the contemporary world and our last video we took a look we began our study of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations and we talked about the idea that vikins tiny understands language is something very different then it being a systematic structure that's organized according to a specific set of logical rules instead of akin Stein asks us to think of language as a city well we're going to do today is we're gonna continue our discussion of the philosophical investigations we're gonna see that Vika Stein is going to continue to explore this analogy or this idea of language games he's gonna take particularly particular interest to the question of rules and rule following and then in addition we're gonna see Vic and Stein emphasize a sort of dual understanding of philosophy on the one hand he sees philosophy classical philosophy as its type of nonsense and on the other hand he sees philosophy as a type of therapy and of course there's much much more than investigations that we could actually cover in this video so I encourage you to of course read through his text closely and you'll see that there's lots more going on except than these things but I think these represent some of the high points and some of the major elements of the text that I really want to convey so let's get right into it you can see since we're talking bout rule-following here I put a ruler up here just to sort of give you an example let's sort of begin here in where we left off last time around roughly around Section 75 of the investigations I think we actually ended on 70 or 73 or something like that but here in 78 section 75 Vidkun Stein asked the question well what does it mean to know what it came is exactly because if we're gonna understand our language as a series of games that we play and we recognize them in terms of the way in which we use language well this has the question well how does one know what language games they're claiming when they're playing them in other words how we know what the rules are is there some sort of unform elated definition for these rules because consider for instance the way in which you might use I think an example I gave last time was the way which you might use the word soul so if you go to your religious you might use the word soul with your religious friends to refer to the thing that's essential to you your spirit or something like this or the ghost in the shell' you might say but if you're using princess the word soul in the context of music then you mean something very different so how exactly do we know how to use these rules of these various games because there is no clear sort of definition we use yet we do seem to recognize that there is a place in which certain rules apply which in certain games which other rules apply so there's a city and there's an interesting question here 4-bit contain related to knowledge and because one of the things I want you to recognize is the title of this book is the philosophical investigations so one of the ways we can understand says that vikins time is trying to uncover some of the problems or he's trying to tackle some of the problems the Philosopher's are really quite interested in the question of knowledge or epistemology is one of them so what does it mean to have knowledge of these rules for instance he says if I know the game then why can't I express the rules of that game clearly the rules of a language should be something like the expression of my knowledge right so for instance if I for instance imagine if you use a word inappropriately in the in it in one context as opposed to another context how exactly do you express this not these rules is it the same way in which we express our claims about knowledge the claims of knowledge we have about the world yet we seem to know the rules by showing all these sorts of uses not really articulating clear essential rules so there's an interesting question here about whether or not the Vic in Stein's language games analogies breaks down or whether or not we need to just follow it through again he's emphasizing the idea that we seem to know these rules according to the way in which we use them not really by being able to articulate a clear definition now so let's sort of ask ourselves what exactly is a definition now the definition is sort of interesting if you actually break down the etymology of the word definition what you'll see is that definition is de fit it comes from day and finis in Lund fitness literally means the boundary and you can sort of ascertain here that when we ask about the definition of something maybe what we're really asking is what are the boundaries upon which that word can be used for instance imagine two people were asked to define the rules of a particular language game maybe the one I gave an example of it's not it won't take very long before we realized that two different people could easily come up with two different definitions of the rules of a language game and this seems to show that there's a comfort that there can be conflicting pictures between the way in which people recognize these language games Viggen stein gives this analogy right and he sort of gives me now to imagine there's two different pictures these pictures are not of course the ones from victims tiny doesn't actually give pictures but imagine for instance there's two different pictures and we asked people to describe them differently but imagine that one picture is clear where for instance the other picture is completely blurry right you can imagine here is that if one person is to different to describe this picture and they're looking at the picture on the left here or there in other words they're looking at the picture that's clear then they're going to describe it in this particular way with a certain degree of exactitude right but if a person tries to describe that same picture but they're somewhat blurry their picture is blurry they're gonna end up giving a different sort of definition or a different articulation I think the example thinkin Stein gives in the investigation is he imagines imagine if someone's trying to describe sort of red a red box or rectangle but if the box the lines of the block box are blurry it becomes very difficult to articulate those definitions and this is an important analogy if it can stand things for understanding some of the difficulties with which we have in terms of articulating the rules of these language cans he says it's section 77 and this is the position you're in if you look for definitions corresponding to our concepts of aesthetics and ethics or ethics and this is I think actually quite interesting because here vikins town is making one of his first sort of critiques about some of the primary domains and philosophy aesthetics of course studies beauty and and art the way in which we value things and ethics of course studies the way in which we ought to act and how we ought to act according to our values now notice the debate think about the debates you can have with your friends with your family regarding for instance concepts like what is beautiful or what is good these become very difficult to articulate the rules upon which these words might have meaning in a language game he says quote in such a difficulty always ask yourself how do we learn the meaning of a word good for instance what sort of examples what language came then it'd be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings and so what we see here is that instead of asking to articulate the rules of these games and the ruler if you will to logic its embedded within our use of language instead of you can say says don't try to give a positive definition an essence for this instead describe how we actually use them in other words what we're seeing here is Vic in Stein's invocation that we have we should move philosophically from a sort of approach a theoretical approach to a descriptive approach in other words from theory to a description of use which would make sense given we've talked about now Vic consents or gives us this sort of example to sort of drive home the point for instance imagine if someone says Moses did not exist you can ask yourself what does this mean now before I go forward and talk about how we can define Moses notice that when I say Moses did not exist you probably already if you're familiar with who Moses was or is then you will be you probably already have an idea of what that phrase might mean but wait a second what exactly does this mean does Moses refer does this refer to the idea that the Israelites did not have a go leader when they left Egypt does this refer to the idea that their their leader was not called Moses but called something else maybe Joshua or does this mean that there cannot be anyone who did what the Bible says that Moses did right so we have here is that you can see is that this simple phrase Moses did not exist which is very similar to the type of statement you might see a philosopher make maybe they would say something like the soul does not exist you can see pretty clearly that there's actually a variety of ways in which we can begin to interpret this phrase in other words we define what we mean through these various descriptions because each one of these descriptions really calls out a different type of use for this propositional statement the Moses did not exist you can see that Vic enstein is beginning to problematize our assumptions and philosophy that propositions have clear cognitive meanings that are essential to the words what biginsight is really offering the idea is that the meaning resides in the contextual use it have to be a little bit careful there because I don't think that Vidkun Stan's language game theory is simply a contextual theory for language but we'll get into that later here's another example someone says n is dead right so you have to define what exactly does n mean let's say that n is a human being who one saw who saw and as a person that we saw in such and such a place and looks like someone for instance maybe there's a picture we have of who n was B maybe we might say the N is done such and such things we might give a bibliographic sort of picture who n is we might say that an is merely the person who bears the name and right so there's a number of different ways in which we might define n but now ask yourself what if I'm wrong about one of these incidental details does that mean that n is not dead so for instance imagine that I say the end looks like Elvis well what if I'm wrong about that and you disagree with me that n looks like such-and-such well does that mean that the because my definition for n has failed that the statement in is dead no longer has any meaning you can see here is that there seems to be a problem here because it looks like our definitions rely upon really quite incidental characteristics that we call into view when we begin to define the boundary conditions upon which the word might mean this is what biggest sign on 7 section 79 sort of refers to is the bounds of the incidental what we do is we seem to use n actually without a sort of fixed meaning it looks like the N though the words here have a fluidity in terms of the way in which they are defined and they're not defined as clear-cut as we'd like to think that they could be and Invictus time even causing the question the way in which scientific definitions get formed and this is actually quite interesting of course when Viggen Stein wrote the philosophical investigations Pluto was considered a planet but for if you've been following anything in astrophysics for the last I guess ten years or so you'll know that today plot Pluto is not considered a planet it's now classified according to the astronomical experts as a dwarf planet so now so for instance when Vidkun Stein was alive if you read an astronomy book you would say that Pluto was a planet and the third nine planets today if you look in an astronomy book you'll see that Pluto is not listed as a planet and that there's actually eight planets but of course the object in the sky here's a picture of the most recent picture of Pluto which of course big Constanta would have never seen or never did see you can sort of size yourself the actual object in space is still out there so you can see here is notice the way in which our definitions seem to change and in the same way that we talked about there being the bounds of the incidental it appears that not even something as rigorous as science is completely free of these incidental boundaries and this of course is not a critique of science but it's I think rather for bacon Stein it's a critique with the way in which we understand language in the way in which we understand and what the scientific enterprise really is or at least how its logic is formed I once had a professor of science professor physics professor tell me they they at the end of the day the theories of science are essentially determined by vote right is that scientists replicate other's experiments and they and they and they ultimately come to some sort of consensus in terms of how we understand the world but think about it for a moment if science is strictly speaking supposed to uncover the truths of the physical world or the truths of the object of that science then how is it that science is really just left to a sort of vote of experts how is it that science at bottom or in there that's debatable but how is it that science rest upon consensus rather than the objects in the world themselves and you can see here that vacant Stein's discussion of language games begins to give us some sense for why that could be the case now Viggen Stein also talks about a vanishing chair and I call this the vanishing chair problem sort of sort of imagines and hopefully I'm remembering it correctly I can pull it up but is imagine you see a chair and as you walk towards it the chair vanishes right so if you have that experience I guess it's some sort of ghostly experience then how are you going to describe that experience right what you will say is that when you walk over to the chair the chair disappears but of course if I ask you to define what a chair is a chair is not something in an ordinary definition that can disappear it doesn't just vanish which raises the question then if I'm actually having this experience and I'm using the word chair to describe that experience in what sense is that meaningful right in other words do we really have rules for all of these various cases of our language if you go back to the way in which bacon Stein described language as a city you can ask this question are there rules for all the different avenues and ways about in which you can move through that city and it doesn't seem that there are the same that there are rules are at least rules in the same sense that I think the logicians are looking for people like Frey got for instance or Russell here's here's a quotation from section 81 that I think's interesting and what we're seeing is that vacant stands beginning to offer a more full-fledged critique against sort of traditional philosophy he says quote in philosophy we often compare the use of words with games and calculi which have fixed rules but cannot say that someone who is using language must be playing such a game for then it may look as if what we're talking about we're an ideal language as if our logic were so to speak a logic for vacuum I mean here what we can say is that when philosophers seek to articulate a precise rigorous structure of rules for language in a certain sense they begin to leave the world in which language has meaning and they begin to move into an ideal language or they begin to articulate an ideal language that ultimately doesn't have meaning and that's what it means to say it exists in a vacuum there's one passage in the philosophical investigations from the section where if akin Stein says there's no air to breathe when we have these ideal languages and this is something important to look for an ideal language is ultimately to seek after the construction of something and this is problematic because languages are used first and foremost in a particular form of life and it looks like what philosophers are seemed to do is they begin to construct ideal languages that lose their grounding in reality take a look at section 83 from the investigations where vacant science says quote doesn't the analogy between language and games throw a light here we can easily imagine people amusing themselves in a field by playing with the ball so as to start various existing games but playing many without finishing them and in between throwing the ball aimlessly into the air chasing one another with the ball and bombarding one another for a joke and so on and now someone says the whole time they're playing a ball game and following definite rule every throw and is there not also the case where we play and make up the rules as we go along and there is even one where we alter them as we go along now you can see what they can send suggestion here is that is that sort of what the philosopher may be doing and when they're looking for the ideal structure of a language is they're there they're looking at a whole series of uses of of language that go in and out and all a bunch of different varieties of language uses good language games get played and then what the philosopher tends to do is try to construct some sort of rule that would fit all of these cases right and notice how philosophers will always seek the universal not the particular and here Vidkun stein is suggesting that there's a great problem this there's a great problem here and there's a great temptation in a misapplication of language that philosophers are tempted to go to follow through with another another way is think if we reverse the thought experiment and let me give in turn care can we imagine a game in which the rules of a game are so airtight that there can never in principle be any doubt about what the rules are so reverse it and ask yourself okay well imagine we do have a game that's the rules are so absolutely clarified so ideal that there's no way in which you can there's no way in which you wouldn't recognize if a rule was broken but now as yourself well can another rule determine the application of another rule and so on so maybe what the philosopher says well what you have is you have a system of rules which modify other rules and so on and so forth so to trust this big intense okay well let's imagine the builders and and hopefully you'll recall from the first video and from the very beginning of the philosophical investigations the vacant site gives this example of a simple primitive language game and which have two builders and they only have a couple words like slab and block and so on and so forth when one builder calls out blocked the other builder brings the block now if a consensus okay imagine a slightly altered version of the builders scenario he says imagine a language game like we saw in the second section that's played with the help of a table so imagine you've got the builders sitting at a table right now the signs to be the signs given to be by a are now written one so they're handing slips of paper to each other B has a table and in the first column so they have a table they're using to figure out what the rules are right so here you have the word that you have a clear sort of analogy in which there's rules which govern the relationship of the signs between the builders so in the first column of the sign then the first column are the signs that are used in the game and in a second there's pictures of the building stones so there's this sort of key slab and there's a picture of slab so on and so forth so a shows be one of these written signs and B looks it up in the table and then they look at the picture that's opposite and so on and so forth so the table is a rule which he follows in executing the orders okay so the table is one of these rules now one learns to look the picture up in the table by receiving a training and a part of this training consists perhaps and the pupils learning to pass with his finger horizontally from right to left so as it were to draw a series of horizontal lines on the table so imagine that one of the the rules here is where you can move your finger and this helps to direct how exactly where you're placing the stones and so forth now he says suppose they're different ways of reading the table we're now introduced right so one time as above according to this schema so if it says slab you move your hand over and then the picture of a slab and then you do that you you you see there's a picture of a block you move over there's a new the word block you move over you see the picture of block and so forth but imagine then at the end of the sequence there's a rule where you go instead you go diagonally and then you move up right see I suppose there's a different way of reading the table that's introduced you can see the sort of picture of it here right or in some other ways some it's such a schema is supplied with the table as the rule for its use and then here's what big consent asks us to think about he says can we not imagine further rules that would explain this one and so on was the first table incomplete without the schema of the errors arrows and our other tables incomplete without their schemata and you can see here is that what Vic and Stein is drawing for us is he's drawing us a scenario in which the builders are modifying their rules with other rules and now you can ask yourself will more rules for the application of the other rules help give us a definitive sense of what the rules are and the answer is not really because how is the one builders supposed to know when he moves into one application of rules compared to another application of rules so a sort of system of modification isn't sufficient in section 87 Vidkun Stein says it may easily look as if every doubt merely revealed an existing gap in these foundations for our language so that the secure understanding is only possible if we first doubt all that can be doubted and then remove all of these doubts now here there's a clear or indirect reference to none other than the father of modern philosophy part Neve Rene Descartes right and Rene Descartes famous cities begins well I guess his first meditation of philosophy by suggesting that we should doubt all things that can be doubted and then only after we've doubted all of those things then we have to come up with a sure foundation for knowledge and really solve all these problems so you can see here that Vic and Stein is indirectly basically offered a critique of Descartes and really a modern philosophy and in whole because really let's put it back here really after Descartes I think all philosophy essentially follows through in this systematic footsteps of Descartes by beginning really with this question this sort of skeptical epistemology and then moving from there to secure a sure foundation from knowledge if you take an introduction to philosophy class typically what they'll tell you is that in modern philosophy epistemology is first laws that is before we can begin by doing with before we can begin doing any philosophy we have to first recognize what knowledge is and understand what the conditions for knowledge are and how it is we can have clear and distinct ideas and then from there we can get to bigger questions like what reality is or the question of what good and wrong right are and so on and so forth but you can see here is that beacon Stein is calling into question this entire paradigm within the history of philosophy this is a history of philosophy series and so I want you to begin to try to recognize some of the comparative contrasts that thicken Stein's offering for us compared to the sort of new way in which he's trying to tackle these problems with language as opposed to these older views of language he says we understand what it means to set a pocketwatch to the exact time or to regulate it to be exact but wonder for ask is this exactness ideal exactness or how nearly does it approach the ideal and this is sort of an interesting thing you can imagine here that if you say amazing you know at the beginning of a film maybe there's a heist there's you know the main characters are gonna go on a heist or something and so they set their watches together right they make sure they have the same time on their watch you can imagine a scenario where someone says did you set your watch to the exact time and in under normal circumstances that would just mean well that it's basically the exact same time but you can ask your one would it what if someone then followed up by saying oh I see that you've said your watch the exact time but is it the ideal exactness now notice here we've now sort of moved into a sort of philosophical problem in which the language of exactness no longer is coupled to a form of life or a form of use where that makes sense right I know what exactness means and when I'm setting my watch so that way that you and I will arrive at the bank at the same time or something but if I ask the philosophical question of the essence of exactness I suddenly am at a loss for words notice what the consent says here he says inexact is really a reproach inexact as a praise and that is to say that what is inexact attains its goal less perfectly than what is more exact does the point here is what we call the goal am i in exact when I do not give our distance from the Sun to the nearest foot or teller Joyner the width of a table to the nearest thousandth of an inch no single ideal of exactness has been laid down and if you go back to the watch example you could just easily superimpose that same thing is an exact time is the ideal exactness two to the quadrillions of a second right what exactly is ideal and you can see here is that if we look at how the word exact is used within the language game we see that exact is really used as a way of praising something and it exact is way of saying that's not quite correct it's a way of its it has its meaning in terms of a certain use of language not in terms of some sort of logically pure idea and this sort of brings some thicken Stein to the question of logic actually because logic of course is the foundation of the sciences we saw that when we when we looked both the host role and we looked at Fraga and it's clear that if science has meaning its meaning has to at least be logical and which means that science is dependent upon this so logic is the for the logic is a part of the foundation of science but what does that mean exactly well when we look to the sciences what we're looking at are the empirical things we want to understand how things in the world are related and that means that it looks like that if we treat logic as the foundation of Sciences we're looking for something like the essence of the empirical but what they can sensitize is that we what we need to do is we need to seek to understand what is already in plain view rather than looking to how logic functions in some sort of mysterious essential fashion what we need to do is we need to think about how logic works and how sense is how things can make sense in a sense of which is available to all of us we're gonna see Vicens ten hammer on this idea that all of these the the essence of language is completely in plain view because we've used language all the time we are utterly familiar with using language and that he thinks that this temptation by the philosopher to think about the essence of the empiric or the essence of logic ultimately leads us astray because it leads us away from looking at the way the language is used in its ordinary sense and this is this it becomes known as ordinary language philosophy by the way right so take a look here so you have the analysis of logic ultimately for Vidkun stein means that what we're looking at are different types of language games so if we want to understand the logic of a word we have to understand the type of language game out of which that word has its home which means that we're talking about types of statements and here's where they can Stein introduces I think is an important concept for you to recognize with regard to his philosophy and this is the notion of a philosophical grammar or a logical grammar in other words he thinks that the investigation of a language game is a grammatical or a logical investigation now notice how different this is from the type of things that we saw when we looked in frege's sense in reference distinction remember one of the things we saw is that friggin when he talks about the idea of signs he recognizes that not every sign as a referent and so on and so forth any sort of it says well this is because our language is incomplete notice that Freya really is after this ideal essence of language and here vacant Stein says no the analysis of logic is actually a grammatical investigation insofar as language has its certain specific concrete forms of use and when we approach go back to the problem of rules we can say that the clarification of rules works by offering more exact boundary conditions but that makes the analysis look as if there were a final end stage for the language itself in other words this is where the lore of the ideal seems to take place the more exact we look for these the way these rules can be articulated this leads us further and further into this sort of ideal essence of language and this is a mistake actually he says in 92 I'm gonna read this I apologize for reading all these passages but I just couldn't help myself because I just love the way he goes through this and you also notice how big concern is a very different style then really all of these other philosophers so section 92 he says this finds expression in questions as to the essence of language of propositions of thought for if if we - in these investigations are trying to understand the essence of language its function and in structure yet this is not what those questions have in view for they see in the essence not something that already lies open to view and it becomes surveillant but something that lies beneath the surface something that lies within which we see when we look into things and which an analysis is going to dig you out as it were so the essence is something that's hidden from us now this is the form of our problem now assumes we ask what is language what is a proposition and the answers to these questions is given once for all and independently of any future experience now notice that philosophy and there's another great philosopher of language Jacques Derrida who says something very similar here they the classical made you say is sort of a modernist approach to language would say that we asked the question of essence so we said what is language what is a proposition notice that these are no longer the types of questions that Vidkun Stein wants us to ask because these types of questions lead us into looking for the essence of something these are if you will classic platonic types of questions and think of Plato who or Socrates who would ask what is justice and he wanted to get to the essence of justice something that was hidden from view but somehow there and in here Vidkun style it's means suggesting don't ask what is a language rather ask how is how is language used how is proposition used instead of trying to theorize that there's an object that conforms to the meaning of something recognize that it's really a whole variety of uses it's in his ground the way in which we live or what vikins die refers to as the lemons form or our form of life so so you see here there's the cyst there's this this temptation we might call as a sublime essence of a proposition when we ask what how does a proposition have meaning and we're after an essence but here at 96 for instance we consent says these concepts proposition language thought world all of these stand in line one behind each other each is equivalent to each other in their sort of ideal sense but one of these words to be used for now the language in which they are to be applied is missing so for instance if you want go take a survey of really any philosopher and look at the way in which they use these words like propositions thought meaning essence existence and what you're gonna see is that the way in which the if you if L offers give some sort of essentialist definition then what you have there is you have a language game or answer you have a way of using words in which there is no longer a language game that makes sense if there's no language game the inside point here is there is no meaning actually and so what you have here is vacant stands building this critique of philosophy that I think is important for us in terms of just introducing Vidkun Stein philosophy of language here to understand is that the construction of a language without a corresponding language game is actually a mistake and it's actually a type of logical nonsense because without a language game a word doesn't have meaning really if it doesn't have meaning that what exactly are we doing right he says whereas of course if the words language experience were world have it use it must be as humble a one as that of words like table lamp and door so say it so for instance take the word phone there's a way in which we use the word phone I mean it's ordinary use but imagine for instance if you asked Plato to define what phone is well what does Plato do I mean here if you're not familiar with Plato you might want to take a look at my previous videos that a little bit introduce some of plato's concepts but what Plato thinks is that all of our words they the the word table actually refers to some sort of ideal essence they live somewhere else it doesn't live in this world because all of the things we see as tables are not perfect tables and so therefore they're not truly tables but notice how how odd and how alienating that kind of philosophy is vacant signs suggestion to the contrary is that our words like table our words like justice should also have a more humble definition that's rooted in their actual language game or actual form of use and so now another way of looking at the question of logic and the way in which we can think about rules here is to ask well can there be vagueness in logic right it's as if we wanted to say that there has to always be a definite rule right I teach in fact it's funny because I was just teaching logic today with a new logic class face-to-face and we were talking about vagueness and ambiguity in these sorts of things and one of the things I was articulating is that when you're doing formal logic we want to avoid vagueness now in a normal introduction to logic class that makes sense but here vikins tyne is attacking that idea in terms of saying that listen to to avoid all vagueness or ambiguity in logic is ultimately to look for something it's as if we want to look for an absolute definite rule we can know for sure that's how you use the word so I think the example we're looking at my logic class I think the example was a woman saw you know a woman saw another woman giving birth on her television set right I think that was the example and of course it's ambiguous because did a woman see a person giving birth like represented on the TV screen or was there literally a person sitting on the television said wow you know and they actually see a person actually giving birth on a television set sort of a silly example but it's an example of ambiguity because you can you can understand the idea of looking in two different ways and one of the questions that my students always ask and today was no exception is well wait a second what about these other statements like for instance someone says the bus comes at two o'clock isn't there also ambiguity in the way in which you use the words like come and the bus isn't there also ambiguity in that sense and of course our logic book doesn't act like there is but they can sense point here as well yeah actually there is right take a look here at sections 102 and 103 the strict and the clear rules of the logic structure logical structure of propositions appear to us as something in the background hidden in the medium of understanding I already see them even though through a medium for I understand the propositional sign because I use it to say something the ideal as we think of it is unshakable you can never get outside of it you must always turn back there is no outside outside you cannot breathe others do that quote where does this idea come from it's like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at it never occurs to us to take them off this is sort of interesting so it's as if the philosopher is always looking for the essence of things but it's like they're looking through glasses and what beacon sensor says is that we take our glasses off we take off this essentialism in order to begin to actually look at the way language actually is right there before us and that's one thing that victims time will always sort of emphasize is that is that the that these language games are already there laid out right before us there's nothing hidden from view what we have to do is rip to stick to the subjects of our every day of thinking so one of the things I want you to get through with Vidkun Stein is the notion that vacant Stein is is is asking the philosopher to return to their everyday use of language why because ultimately his view at least is my interpretation of his view is that once we get to back to every day thinking we look to the ordinary way as we use language well we'll see is that a lot of our philosophical problems will simply disappear notice he goes on he says it says all reagent he says we must stick to the subjects our everyday thinking and not go straight imagine that we have to describe extreme subtleties which in turn we are after all quite unable to describe what the means that are - so we feel as if we had to repair a torn spider's web with our fingers so there's a certain sense in which the philosopher is almost automatically in of frustrating because frustrated position because as long as they maintain this what he says here 107 this crystalline purity of logic what as long as we maintain that then we're never gonna get a strong grasp of what's going on we're never gonna get complete clarity he says the conflict becomes intolerable the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty we have got we have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense that conditions are ideal but also be just because that we're unable to walk we want to walk so we need friction back to the rough ground and so if it consents constantly inviting the philosopher to get away from the temptation for this crystalline pure perfect idea and give back to the way things actually are actually spoken in our ordinary lives and then to use into and to recognize that the meaning of our words are derived there you know he says that we see that what we what we call sense and language it doesn't have this formal unity we imagined but is really a family of structures that are more or less related to one another in the last video I mentioned that for instance we talked about the idea that if we go along with the consent suggestion of language games then that means that the second idea is that we recognize there's a family resemblance between our words so in some ways the use of the sort of rules that govern our use in one language also govern our uses in others but not always exactly in the same way a sort of interesting example is think of the word of thing about if you're playing a ball a ball game and now think of the different ways in which in basketball you can never you never supposed to hold the ball but for instance in football you're supposed to football meaning American football you're supposed to hold the ball right so the word ball and we think of ball games we think about holding balls but notice that it depends upon this context and it's so if you were to ask what is a ball in its ideal essence right you would say back to the rough ground you've gone astray okay so this now introduces sort of we see here vacant steins offering us a suggestion regarding how we can understand philosophy on the one hand we're gonna see there's good philosophy and bad philosophy or he talks about philosophy in two different ways there's that philosophy if he willed fit were the philosophers looking for these essentialist definitions that lead them to these really bizarre theories that ultimately don't get us any further in terms of really overcoming these philosophical problems but there's another sense of flaws here that big concern suggests and this is the type of philosophy that he's doing which is the notion that philosophy should be understood as a type of therapy in other words that the philosophy of description is a way in which the philosopher can begin to recognize that the philosophical problems that they have or that they can't stop thinking about our really false problems and what the basic method here is that we have to do away with this theoretical explanation in description alone needs to take its place and there's something quite interesting here is that we're gonna see that the closer at well we didn't really talk too much about who strode we talked about who stroll in terms of logic earlier in their videos but who strolls phenomenology also attempts to emphasize description and this seems to be one of the primary features of contemporary philosophy is that is the description becomes the method rather than I guess theoretical explanation in philosophy so philosophies therapy and there's this beautiful and famous quote at thinkin Stein's which I have to draw your attention to which is that philosophy in this therapeutic sense is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language so in other words he thinks that what happens is is that philosophy that the true called philosophy is to help us get clear about how we think about things and that happens through this description and it's quite natural and easy for us to be lost in our words so what's the therapy well what we have to do is we have to bring our words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use if you will we have two deep latin eyes our words language has become deeply tonic not Neoplatonic but unplan ik we have to we have to sort of reverse it so this is actually quite interesting notion because most philosophers or most people studying philosophy tended to use the reverse right they have words and then they try in order to understand those words they look for some sort of metaphysical sense now what does metaphysics refer to here now well we can say that metaphysics refers to something like the necessary transcendental conditions or maybe you might say is the something like the if not the transcendental condition something like the conditions embedded in reality that make our language meaningful and he says no no you're going in the wrong direction here so you can see that he's a very different kind of philosopher and that means that the consignor articulates a sort of special form of nonsense now what is nonsense in the general sense well we can say that nonsense is to have no sense right it's to not make sense of something and in the classic sense if you took a logic class what we would say is that nonsense is always the result of contradiction contradiction is when you say something both is and is not in the same way at the same time and in the same respect so you're watching this video right now and you're not watching this video right now that's contradictory and that's nonsense that's sort of the classic type of nonsense but Vic and Stan is articulating here is that the philosophers are engaged in a different type of nonsense it also is contradictory I suppose but it's a type of nonsense in which the words themselves no longer are tethered to their actual use which means that philosophers make long arguments metaphysical arguments but all it's me at the end of the day what they're saying has no meaning because they don't because there's a misunderstanding of what meaning itself is or in other words they consent says the results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language so the if we think of philosophy as a therapy the therapy is what is the therapy for it's to get us to recognize nonsense and there's this very interesting discussion here about what therapy means and we know that Vidkun Stein at least I know from reading his biography here that he he was very much interested in psychoanalysis and interested in and Freud and interested in these things and so he's interested in the notion of therapy and here you can think of how does Freudian psychoanalysis work right regardless of what you think about Freud it was referred to as the talking cure right you get a person who's neurotic in your office you essentially ask them questions and there's a number of different techniques that therapist will use but the goal isn't for the therapist to just tell the patient what's wrong with them but for the patient to recognize what's wrong with them that is for the patient to recognize the source of their neurosis and then in that recognition they would therefore they would then become free of those neuroses and so you might say is that there's a sort of similar model here that vacant Stein's engaged in is that he thinks that the philosopher has to do this work how do they do it they do it through a description of the use of language so like I mentioned before here when we twinby consent talks about philosophy he's either talking about philosophy in terms of nonsense I think I've misspelled that or he's talking about philosophy as a type of therapy so here's a couple of important quotes he says a philosophical problem has the form I don't know my way about philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language it can in the end only describe it for can I give it and any foundation either it leaves everything as it is so in other words the goal of the philosopher shouldn't be to correct the way in which people use language but rather to glean insight from the way in which people use language so as to recognize the types of nonsense grammatical nonsense that we're prone to do and prone to commit philosophy simply puts everything before us in terms of this descriptive method and it neither explains nor deduces anything since everything lies open to plain view there's nothing to explain for what is hid hidden for example is of no interest to us there's another quote here which I didn't put on your work Vic in Stein says that a philosophical problem has the characteristic of having depth right as if it's something hidden deep in the recesses and if only we could get away from all of this ordinary life stuff and get to the depth to the metaphysical depth of something and here they can stand suggesting no that's not really what philosophy needs to do at least not the philosophical therapy he's advocating right the hidden lies in plain view so we now can ask this question well how does the idea of a language game really help for a philosophy of therapy well it's quite simple a language game operates by allowing us to recognize grammatical comparisons so we can say there's one language game works this way I'll go back to the example I gave earlier of the word soul and when you're praying the word soul means one thing and if you're you know listening to music R&B music the word soul means a different thing and when we begin to compare these things we recognize similarities and dissimilarities and those similarities and dissimilarities and then from there we can begin to unfurl the idea or negate the idea that there's some Universal essence to all of them and that's very difficult because I think vikins ten suggestions we tend to do this now I mentioned Derrida earlier but I forgot to continue that Derrida also says that the primary question of philosophy today isn't the question of what is blank what is the essence of something it's not a question of what at all it's rather well I'm not sure exactly how he phrases it at the top of my head but in the context of this discussion of vikins time it's not a question of what it's a question of how so it is not our aim to consign sense to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our word words in some unheard of ways think of how Plato does this for the clarity we're aiming at is indeed complete clarity but this simply means that the philosophical problem should completely disappear disappear because notice that they what vacant Stein has argued is that the more exact and the more ideal definition we give to our words into our language the more foreign and alien are our analyses become so that means that since the use of language is there before us that the goal of philosophy is simply to for us to completely get rid of these philosophical problems because we recognize that they're predicated on forms of nonsense so if you can sense those through it's not as if there is a philosophical method there though there are indeed methods like there's different therapies now here's an example now this is not an example that victims time gives at least not in these passages but here's an example that I will use for many of you who are studying philosophy which is the famous debate between freedom and determinism are we free or are we determined right there's a famous debate a colleague of mine loves to debate this with me he thinks we're all determined right what does this mean well generally the debate is this they then we seem to have an experience in which we're free but we also know and that's that experience tends to be forward-looking right and so I'm thinking as soon as this video is done I'm gonna do this or I could do this and I recognize well there's different options of things I can do but notice that when I think about determinism I have a sort of backward looking perspective in which I noticed that at least according to the physical laws of the universe one event causes another event which causes another event and that causal structure is necessary right so for instance if I drop something it falls to the ground because gravity let's say the gravitational pull of the earth causes it to fall and there's no choice the problem of freedom determinisms will is couldn't those isn't Clint the laws of physics also be applied to us such that our experience of freedom is an illusion or our or is it they are are our backward looking view that things are determined is illusion right and there's lots of inference last semester I was giving a seminar on identity and what we're reading this essay where they were talking about freedom and determinism and in this philosopher I won't say his name oh because I can't rely on my head but the philosopher was looking at his suggestion was well it's clear that there is a determined structure for the universe but it's also clear that we do have freedom in some sense because we experience it we have an intuition of it and so he suggested well maybe freedom is kind of like the unmoved mover in Aristotle now if you're not familiar with unmoved mover take a look at one of my videos on it but what the unmoved mover is for a thought it's the principle which governs motion but which itself is not in motion and so there's this sort of odd thing where this philosophers seeming to say that we're both determined and we're free now what I think here is that this whole debate and here I have some pictures of some books that philosophers have written about freedom and determinism and here I'm not making a critique against these books but simply saying that this debate in philosophy between freedom versus determinism and of course if you take an intro to philosophy class or you take a class this you'll find out that there's different positions there's compatible lists there's incompatible as there's Universal determinist there's soft determinist and so on and so forth everyone seems to have a metaphysical position but I'll now notice that none of these philosophers have ever really been able to determine with absolute certainty whether or not we're really free to determine to the point that we stop asking the question we're still writing books on freedom versus determinism what would weaken Stein say about this entire problem I think from what we've looked at in philosophical investigations it's pretty clear what you would say he would say well instead of theorizing what freedom is saying that freedom is some sort of metaphysical indeterminacy or instead look to the way in which we actually use these words notice the language gained through the language games in which we might talk about freedom right we might say that the jailer has taken away her freedom well that makes sense within that use right you know for instance if if someone says that or think if we say that he got he got cancer because of his genetics he was determined to get it no matter what notice that the language of determinism also has a language game that it for which it has a home and what it looks like here is the vacant Stein thinks that once we keep our glasses on as it were and we sort of take on this essentialist project we move towards some sort of theory but that theory has no language game it has no home which means that it doesn't really have meaning and so bacon Stein's critique is that problems like freedom versus determinism or other types of problems like what is goodness itself what is intrinsic goodness these types of philosophical topics and debates are all examples of philosophical nonsense and that the way in which we get around them or the way which we broached these problems is ultimately to recognize as the different uses of language and for me this that to me this is sort of solved the problem of freedom and determinism for me which is namely that I think that there is a metaphysical problem here right we simply there's simply a different language game for these different terms and that there's a philosophical mistake in trying to conflate them together now I'm sure some of you were gonna completely disagree with me because the freedom and determinism debate is really big debate and most people who study philosophy eventually have some sort of position on it it's far too funny years ago and I when I first got started teaching full time when I first got a persistent professorship the the chair of the psychology department called me you know say hello and to welcome me to the college but one of the things he said to me is are you are you a freedom person or are you determinist person and you know how do you answer that question from a big continuum perspective I think I say well I guess I decided with freedom he said well I'm for determinism you hung up the phone now we've had lots of debates about it but ultimately my position is that there really is no problem this is a false philosophical problem and I think that's the kind of bra if we were to take it broadly speaking that's the kind of way in which we could begin to apply vegan steins analysis of philosophy as therapy to specific concrete philosophical problems we actually encounter now I've gone on for a long time and there's other things that Vic and Stein discusses in this section including he talks about mental processes and we're going to talk about the next time a little bit more about propositions and signs and even a reference to the picture theory of meaning from the Tractatus but I'm not gonna go into those now because I really just want you I want this lecture to be one in which you begin to recognize the way which begins TYIN is understanding his method of description in terms of its approach to philosophy I hope this has been helpful and hope that's been interesting won't don't worry we're gonna have another video here I'm thinkin Stein coming up soon so stay tuned for that and a lot of these themes will come up again so thank you very much for watching this has been contemporary philosophy on the philosophical investigations thank you very much I'll see you guys online

Channel: Mark Thorsby

Views: 2,985

Rating: 4.951807 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, exactness, philosophy of language, language games, rules, rule following, definitions

Id: Npnf5eX3TjU

Length: 59min 55sec (3595 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2018