Wittgenstein III

hello and welcome this is contemporary philosophy and my name's mark Thor SP in this video we're going to be taking a look at our third installment of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations so let's go ahead and get started let me begin by reviewing some of the key ideas that we've learned about last week and in the previous videos one here is in vacant Stein's later philosophy he wants us to think of language in terms of language games and there the idea is that there is no essence to what a game is because there are so many different types of games rather one learns what a game is by playing the game and he thinks that our language operates in a similar manner whereas the philosopher has the temptation to think of language and ultimately the auspices of meaning as hierarchically or horizontally structured and in terms of some sort of systematic system I guess that's a tautology but in terms of some sort of systemization they can Stein suggests that no we should think of language as it as a sort of city of a whole different plethora of uses now our words have we used the same word in multiple contexts and within each of those contexts there are different meanings as it were and so big'uns time instead of he wants to encourage us to think of language and the words of our language is having family resemblances within the various games and so here the key is to recognize that meaning is inherent in terms of its in terms of the use of language the meaning of a language isn't derived through some sort of transcendent metaphysical schema or other or other sort of thing language is inherently derives its meaning from its use and this led that concern to a discussion of definitions and what definitions of words are and this route moved they can study into a discussion of rules and rule following we're gonna see tonight and the Dickens has going to carry on that same discussion and thinking about rules and rule following two other key concepts I want to emphasize to you is that thinkin's time talks about the idea of philosophy as a type of nonsense and there victus Tynes notion is that philosophers have a tendency to take our words and then pull them out of their language games and then create you know vast systems and theories and this sort of thing and he thinks that this holds really renders our language meaningless and philosophy because we have words without a proper use now we haven't gotten to it and unfortunately we're not going to see big instead really emphasize this in tonight's discussion but that ultimately the meaning of language is derived and it's used in terms of the Leben's form or the form of life we employ and then finally bacon Stein suggests and we're going to see this at the end of our discussion today is that we can think of philosophy in a positive sense as a type of therapy a therapy which helps us unfurl the nonsense were so typically led to believe when doing philosophy so Dickens has this very interesting philosopher who suggests a really radical theory of language and meaning but on the other hand a radical articulation and critique of the philosophical project itself so I want you to we're gonna see Viggen Stein develop a lot of these themes tonight or today it depends I guess when you're watching this we're gonna seem develop those discussions and even in more depth okay so what are some of the today's key concepts that we're gonna look at the key one is we're going to talk about what's known by scholars as the private language argument this is a sort of central set of passages and bacon Stein's work where he takes a look at whether or not you could have something like a private language and we're gonna talk a little bit about why it matters it has important implications for the problem of solipsism for instance solipsism is the idea that there's only you in the world and how could you know that there's someone or something else outside of yourself we're gonna see that that is an important way in which bacon sounds good there's an important way in which his critique of the idea of a private language has important implications for the problem solipsism but also as a implications for the philosophy of mind in general and there's many other implications and of course I can't go over everything that in vacant stands work tonight so there's lots of nuance and lots of detail that we can get into that I'm just not going to have time to do tonight so put it this way is that our video here is not going to be a substitute for actually reading vacant stands where I'm going through it now many many people have written on this material many people who know this material better than myself and so I encourage you to take a look at some of the other work of others scholarship and secondary literature on big concerns work here and I should say there's sort of two major camps and vacance Tinian literature that interpretive they can star in a different way so I'm not gonna go through that because here I just want to focus on some familiarize you with some of the core concepts and Pitkin stands work so let's sort of start off we're sort of roughly speaking where we left off in our last video and that is we've been talking here about language and rules and rule-following and whether or not these language games have specific rules and what those rules might be exactly and this sort of leads bacon Stein into a critique of the idea that languages a sort of machine and so here we see vikins time addressing what I would call the mechanistic analogy which is namely does live language function like a machine with with definite rules and or does language function in a more amorphous manner where the rules that we employ are not definite per se but derived and made known to us in some other way right he says we might say that a machine or the picture of it is the first of a series of pictures which we've learned learn to derive from this one and in many ways I think that you could this is sort of taking Vic it's done a little bit beyond what he's talking about specifically in these passages but in many ways you can see this as a critique of the modern way of looking at problems of language and when I say modern I'm thinking of modern philosophy which I think in many ways functions or recognizes the problems that they get dealt with in philosophy as being mechanistic in a certain way we're going to see that Vic and Stein doesn't think this he doesn't think that our language functions like a machine with definite rules although we can talk about root the rules of our language games but they here what we have is a picture that seems to hold us captive so let's see if we can explore the analogy a little bit right we can think of the machines as moving only in a rigid way right so think of machine for instance I can I can look at a frigerator which is a machine and you can imagine all of the various little parts and components that go into a refrigerator perhaps there's different levers there's certainly valves and compressors and all this sort of things and the machine moves in a very rigid mechanistic way well obviously mechanistic moves in a rigid way but it doesn't necessarily have to be this way this isn't the only way we can imagine machines for instance people often so sometimes you'll hear biologists refer to the body as a type of machine but clearly the type of machine that the body is is something far more dynamic than simply this sort of rigid mecan't with the rigid way in which the machine over a frigerator for instance might function so what we see here is that we can talk about machine movements and the possibility of machine movements in a whole variety of ways so here we see big consents and a wee mind about the kind of expressions we use concerning these things we do not understand them however but misinterpret them when we do philosophy we are like savages primitive people who hear the expressions of civilized men put a false interpretation on them and then draw the queerest conclusions from it so here a vegan Stein wants to suggest that we're now thinking when we talk about rules and rules following we fall into a temptation of of oversimplifying our understanding of things based upon pictures that we call to mind that are given by our words really so you even SCO's as far as to suggest that quote in our failure to understand the use of a word we take it as the expression of a queer process as we think of time as a queer medium of the mind as a queer kind of being right so here you can see the Dickens time is recognizing that there's specific problems in the philosophy of mind but other problems that are indicative of philosophy in which we are led to misunderstand our language in the operation of its meaning and that this seems to funnel us into very queer and odd ways of thinking about things that really take us far beyond our Leben's form or the form of life in which our language has its natural home and think here about the way a philosopher by for instance if you took an introduction to philosophy class or something and the professor said you know what is what does it mean to have a thought right if you open your your brain if you you know if you're doing brain surgery and you look inside someone's brain and you ask them to say something you won't see a thought so what exactly is a thought that sort of weight line of thinking often leads us to think that thinking in the word thought must refer to something very very different something almost alien to our natural form of experience in other words we see here that the failure to recognize how our language is meaningful leads us really into a whole series of metaphysical quandary so for instance bacon sign says let's imagine that someone says let's play a game of chess now most of us hopefully know how to play a game of chess and we know the rules of chess but now ask yourself if someone asks to play a game of chess can is that the same as simply saying do you know the rules of chess so in other words how what's the connection between playing a game of chess and the rules of chess specific now biginsight says the rules of chess by themselves don't really determine actually what it means to play a game of chess obviously to play a game of chess means that you in some way understand the rules but simply knowing the rules themself doesn't mean necessarily that you know what it means to play it's here we have an interesting emphasis on the notion of play or if we will the use of language bigan Stein suggested section 198 of the text that interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning so here it's it's not something idea that I know what the rules of chess are the net interpret them in some way and that I can play the game interpretations don't do enough because what's missing ultimately is the form of life out of which play itself is grounded so we can ask you another question that takes us back to an earlier video our earlier discussion we had between Fraga we asked well what is the connection between a sign and its referent we can think that we can see a similar amount analogous scenario between the playing chess scenario here and the more logical question whether question that's more indicative of logic which is what is the relationship between a son and its referent he says I I have pulled a quote here for you he says I have further indicated that a person goes by signpost only insofar as there exists a regular use to signpost a custom so in here the idea is that in order to really understand how to use the rules of game of chess you have to already be grounded in a regular use or a custom for the way in which those sorts of phrases would actually come about so the answer is what is the relationship between the Sun and it's referent it's not an extensive definition it's not about pointing to something and saying the word rather it's grounded in a regular use now this is a claim that we saw vacant stein already addressed and you can see he's further developing this this idea and he's further intensifying it for us by repeating which is very important because bacon stein if we take his notion that philosophy can be a sort of therapy then you have to recognize that a philosophical problem would be akin to a person who's sick a person who's trying to recover from an illness now how does Vidkun Steen address this sort of illness of philosophy again he encourages us to look at to describe the use of our language rather than to theorize about the meaning of our words in our language so first it's could you imagine the reverse could you have a sign or a rule that's absent of any regularity right so imagine you had a sign where there is no regularity to the referent there's no regular use of that word could you learn a game where the rules are constantly changing well no right could you have a rule that could only be followed once in a lifetime for instance the answer is clearly no because to obey a rule to make a report to give an order to play a game of chess these are all customs there uses their institutions so to understand a sentence means to understand a language and to understand a language means to be a master of a specific or certain type of technique so this means that one doesn't learn a language by learning the names of things one learns a language by it being inculcated into a form of life in which the use in which there's a use of language that grounds the meaning of the terms that are said so let's get back to the chess analogy here right let's imagine that there's two people who are unfamiliar with chests who are going through the steps of the game by you know made perhaps there's reading the rules right and of course we've all been there perhaps maybe over a holiday or a birthday party or something you've been with your family or other people that you know and love and you've sat down to play a new game you've never learned you've never played before and you pull out the rules and you start reading the rules notice that it's it's often very difficult for us to actually learn the rules of the game simply by reading them but it's much much easier learn the rules of something by seeing how people use them for instance I teach logic quite frequently and when I teach logic I find that it's very difficult for students to understand for instance how to do a a proof and predicate logic for instance or a truth table or something like this simply by me explaining the concepts to them are explaining what the rules and the steps are ultimately how do people learn they learn by doing they learn in other words by using those rules that is they have to learn to do something with those rules they have to inculcate themselves into the customer or the institution of their language or of the rules now for instance here the consensus okay you can imagine people trying to learn chess by going through the rules but can you imagine people understand the rules of the game in a different way imagine for instance people understand the rules of the game by yelling and stomping their feet in specific ways would this make sense right and you can see here this seems a very bizarre suggestion to us but it raises some important considerations for us which is namely well on the one hand maybe you could actually imagine that but the only way you could imagine it is Baxley by the inculcated into its use and that's the important criteria again we see another important theme in vacant stein unfurling which is the idea that in order to understand the meaning of our language we have to look to a description of the use of that language it's section 202 I'm sorry it's section 202 of it instead ads and hence also obeying a rule is a practice and to think one is obeying a rule is not to abandon rule right so just think it you have to actually do it right so hence it is not possible to a bear rule privately otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it right so it's not simply about having a mental thought that enables us to have the practice of a bigger rule we actually have to get involved in doing it I think now now here there's so a couple beautiful passages that I had to throw in here right is that what we can see here is the language is a labyrinth of paths you approach from one side and you know your way about but you approach the same place from another side and you no longer know your way about this really has the the this is really a really nice way of articulating the problems the philosophers engender themselves to write we understand what our words mean in their everyday use but as soon as we're we approach them from a different angle we suddenly find that we're lost and again vacant Stein's always his in his approach here is to get us to think about the description for the use of these terms and to get us out of this unfamiliar sort of alienating thing that we do in philosophy here's another way of thinking about rules right a clear following a rule really be analogous to following an order right for instance imagine you travel to a faraway land how would you know the difference between a rule and following an order so imagine you you see different people and they act in certain ways how are you supposed to know the rules is there a really difference between people obeying rules and following orders right the common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language let me repeat that again the common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language notice here they you can't actually really learn a language by simply buying the dictionary for that language so maybe you don't know how to speak well Greeks may be a difficult example because people don't usually know how to read creep but let's imagine you pick up a book you don't know Latin but you pick up a book of Latin the letters look similar but everything's different and you're not sure how to interpret it could you know that language simply by memorizing that dictionary and the answer is not really and if any whatever you did learn from it it would come from the behavior that you know is grounded in the translation of the terms right the the system of reference the system of signs by which our language has its logical meaning is ultimately derived and the behavior that we have now we have to be careful here because we're gonna see you that vikins 10 is not a behaviorist right a behaviorist is a person who would say that everything just can be reduced to the mere behavior right there I guess a linguistic behaviorist would say that the meaning of language is just simply reducible to the behavior the people enact while they're speaking language this isn't going to be big consigns point because ultimately vegans type things so far as I understand him that behaviorism Falls trap to that nonsense that philosophy is nonsense problem because behaviorism tries to take behavior as the primary explanation of everything but that means that the behaviors actually uses the language of behavior itself in a way that's alien to the use of the language itself here's a great passage let's imagine that the people in the country carried on the unusual human act of carrying on the usual human activities in the course of them employed apparently in articulate language now if we watch their behavior we find it intelligible right it seems logical but when we try to learn their language we find it impossible to do so for there is no regular connection between what they say the sounds they make in their actions but still these sounds are not superfluous for if we gag one of these people it has the same consequence as with us without the sounds their actions fall into a confusion as I feel like putting it are we to say that these people have a language that orders reports and the rest there's enough there's not enough regularity for us to call it a language you can see a critical feature here is the regularity of our use of language and here think of the way which we can see I was emphasizing the notion of a custom you know it to be careful here I don't think of under interpretation that big concern is merely giving us an anthropology of languages use some people accuse Vidkun Stein of really art articulated an anthropological theory of language I don't think that's quite right myself for the same reasons that bacon Stein would be suspicious of behaviorism and we all see victims type directly address the problem with behaviorism here and above it so is a rule of language the same thing as the regularity of its use right so this is you can see we're still following up on this problem of rule and rule following does route through following the rules of a language means simply adopting this sort of regularity this pattern of activity but you can ask yourself well how would one teach the meaning of this word the word regularity well they we teach the meaning of the word regularity ultimately by practice that is by doing something again and again so the the language of regularity has itself that is itself derive from a practice and this doesn't involve us in a logical circle or it doesn't involve us in the fallacy of begging the question because the practice is something that is ultimately concrete and derivative now you can see here is that let me go back here to the slide I think many philosophers in their high points of philosophical speculation would find this problematic right the idea that ultimately the meaning of our they were just just derived from a type of practice seems to be a little too amorphous a little too willy-nilly but Vic ensign doesn't think so because he actually thinks that there's actually real depth there right but you can ask the question well is this theory of meaning deep enough in view of a consensus well at some point our reasons will give out and what our reasons give out then we just act without reasons think of here if you've ever had a child or perhaps you were a child who asked the question why for instance my daughter has done this to me you know we have to go store why do we have to go to store well we have to get food why do we have to get food so we can live why do we have to why do I have to live and so on and so forth at some point our reasons give out and then we just act we don't need reasons to act this description of the way in which we actually employ our language demonstrates for us that you know okay although the philosopher the speculative philosopher may not be satisfied the the problem of their satisfaction isn't based in the emphasis on the use of our language it must be derived their lack of satisfaction from something else and we're gonna see one simile for vacant Stein it's to arrive from their their desire to take language out of its ordinary use and to essentially transpose it into some sort of transcendental function and here we can think about in logic the sort of Neoplatonism that frege's seems to employ for instance he says if I've exhausted the justifications I've reached bedrock and my Spade is turned then I'm inclined to say this is simply what I do so does this mean that okay does that mean that language is really just a form of agreement that we have with other people such that the rules of our language if they're derived from use in the use has a sort of regularity that that regularity is a regularity that we have with others is it a sort of social contractual thing and it sort of sort of be interesting here because we see vikins tine raising this suggestion and then almost instantly pivoting to what will become known as the private language argument now this is the the key passage that's typically pointed out by scholars in terms of where the content begins this notion of the private language argument usually it runs for usually these scholars place it from somewhere between section 243 and around section 313 of his book so if you end up being interested in writing a paper on the private language argument that's really the sections you'll want to focus on and again there's a lot more depth to what Vic and Stein argues that I think I'm able to actually express me so I apologize for the poverty of my own explanations but let's take a look here and see what Vika Stein says here at 2:43 so a human being can encourage himself give himself orders obey blame and punish himself he can ask himself a question and can answer it we could even imagine human beings who spoke only in monologue who accompanied their activities by talking to themselves an explorer who watched them and listen to their talk might succeed for instance in translating their language into ours this would enable him to predict these people's actions correctly for he also hears them making resolutions and decisions so you can see your vision Stein is sort of giving us an interesting comparative thought experiment imagine we're in a different country where people are speaking so much so that they can't they talk to themselves right could we translate that language into our own he goes even further he says but could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences his feelings his moods and the rest for his private use well can't we do so in our ordinary language but this isn't what thinking Stein means the individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking to his immediate private sensations so another person cannot understand the language so here the consent is asking well is a language that exists in principle as something which is private even comprehensible right we can imagine where people have a sort of use of language where they talk to themselves that you can maybe translate it out right we do in fact know people who talk to themselves and we sort of understand what that's all about but could you imagine a person who has a language that could only ever be understood by them now at this point you can see the consent is raising a problem that for many of us we normally would consider a problem we will never consider this problem because we're already accustomed to using language with others but this has very very important implications for modern in philosophy in general and for instance I say modern philosophy this is this course is on contemporary philosophy and you can compare it with our earlier course or the earlier series on the history of modern philosophy in which we saw that the one of the primary movers and shakers in modern philosophy is Rene Descartes in his argument that I think therefore I am and remember if you go back to date cards card T or you go back to the Cartesian meditations take card suggests if we doubt all things that could weed out all things that could in principle be doubted the question is what at bottom could we know to be true and with Descartes you see the rise of epistemology is the preeminent concern but when Descartes says I think therefore I am right he's suggesting that if we doubt all things the one thing we can't doubt is our own inner experience of thinking itself right that must exist right and you can see here it looks like Descartes is really engaging and something like a private language argument and there's other important implications too because Vick enstein is going to think that that this problem of the private language is actually a sort of central problem in philosophy that percolates in a whole range of different problems in a whole range of different philosophical scenarios so it's gonna be quite essential now how would the words of this private language really refer to anything well again let's imagine that you have sensations we all have sensations so let's imagine you have sensations and let's imagine for instance you have pain it lets us think about pain behavior right and here for instance a common way of addressing the problem is to imagine if you see someone else in pain how do you know that they really are in pain so I have a picture here of a person whose eye apparently has a back injury their back hurts they're experiencing that we'll think about it how do you know that a person who says their back hurts how do you know that their back really does hurt in other words how does what does it mean to say that you have your own subjective sensations and can other people actually understand or read what those are apart from simply recognizing that you're acting or you're behaving like you're in pain is there a difference between the experience the sensation of pain and the pain behavior that we can recognize well yeah and obviously there is right because we can ask him well what sense our sensations private at all well in what sense can I say that I know I am in pain right but the consensus is just sort of a nonsensical question to ask if I can know whether or not I'm in pain is really bizarre because it begs the question of what we mean by knowledge because it really means nothing other than I am in pain right so the truth is it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I'm in pain but it doesn't make sense to say that I doubt whether or not I am myself in pain because I am the subject of the pain itself right so you can see your this is a little bit of that philosophical nonsense we see they can start talking about where what I say when I ask the question how do I know if I'm a pin I'm now using the language of knowledge the word know in a way that's very odd in a way that's unfamiliar to our normal context or scenario situations for understanding the term knowledge right the temptation here in the private language pain scenario is to think that only you can know that you're a pain right the temptation is to say that I can be subjectively certain than my back hurts but you cannot so therefore I the that since I'm the one who's experiencing the pain I have some sort of special knowledge that can't be transmitted to you you can't experience my pan so you can't know that I've been paid notice here that we've now established a way of talking about the knowledge here that's very very different from when we talk about say for instance did you know that I have a cat knowledge there it means something very different than here and you can see this is seems to be sort of the the see the lead us into a whole range of subjectiveness fallacies really right now also I should say I mentioned this temptation to saying that only you can know that your pain I think ultimately for Viggen Stein this misuse of language ultimately is at the very core of the problem of solipsism that philosophers frequently raise how do you know that there's actually a world outside of your own head well notice there that it's the same temptation or it's something very close and analogous to the scenario of pain behavior that bacon Stein's raising now compare the different uses of language pick consensus for instance when I see that my sensations are private that's analogous bacon Stein says to saying that I only complacent err by myself and if you read Vicarstown he actually says I only play patients by myself by oneself I think it's the same game so when I say sensations are private that can be a meaningful phrase but it's only meaningful in the use of language if we mean it in the way in which you might say you can only play solitaire by yourself you can't play solitaire with another person notice again biggest head is using al in a game in order to help illuminate the notion of a language game so there it's not completely nonsense to say that my sensations are my own right and then in some sense they're they're private because they're my own but you can see that that only has its meaningfulness and then in a case that's analogous like this right for instance ask yourself or vacant Stein house why can't a dog simulate pain for instance we know that human beings can pretend like they're in pain but can a dog right in Vegas has the answer really is that well no they can't because the surroundings which are necessary for this behavior to be real simulation or missing thinking that even says at one point in order to know how to tell a lie is to know a specific type of language came and the thing is is that because dogs don't use language they don't they lack a certain type of use out of which of things like pretending could be derived right so the surroundings the context the life form that's necessary to make sense of simulating pain are absent for dogs right or absent for animals right so maybe someone says only I can know that I'm in pain well again ask well what use of language does the word know have here right and victims that says that when we make a stamen like I know that I've been paid only I can know that I'm in pain rather this looks like an empirical proposition it looks like something that you know through the sensations you have but they can sense point here is to four is that we need to recognize that that's not an empirical proposition but it's really a grammatical proposition it's a proposition that's derived out of way of thinking about language not out of a way of experiencing our own sensations as it were I'm not into another scenario maybe someone says another person can't have my pink it's right I've I've italicized my there right here you can ask the question or Vic instead ask what counts as the criterion for identity here when I say that another person can have my pains well my refers to a certain type of identity that's I guess my own right but what is the criteria what feature or characteristic can I use in order to understand what counts as my identity exactly and here this raises some interesting questions about identity in general and victims time again instead of theorizing he asked us to do a comparison he asked us to take a look at the ways in which we actually use our language he says compare that imagine if someone says these two objects are exactly the same so for instance if you've been reading the philosophical investigations like I have then we both have the same book we're reading the same book but in what sense does the word same have any meaning in other words what's the criterion for my identification of what counts as quote unquote the same Vic instead says insofar as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his or hers it's also possible for us to both have the same pain and it would also be imaginable for two people to feel pain in the same not just in the corresponding place right in other words there is a sense for the proposition of things being the same I gave the example of someone's back hurting for instance a couple pardon me a couple I guess there's a couple of months ago I had a really bad back problem myself it wasn't a lot of pain and so I was talking to a friend of mine and I was explaining what it felt like and they were saying oh I have the same back pain problem myself now you can ask yourself what does that mean exactly how can my friend know that I have the same pain that they have obviously they're not having the pain they don't they're not experiencing the pain in the the way that I'm experiencing because they're not me per se but there is a way in which they can in fact recognize that we both have the same pain and the difference here is because in one sense the proposition makes sense because the sense right and I want you to think you're the logical sense is derive from a specific type of use I mean it's good we're gonna relate this back to behavior here in just a moment right but maybe so says no no mark you can't have this pain right this pain is mine in mine only and vacant Stein says here that the word this what it seems to do is it reminds us of a specific criterion for identity within our language game and that this is pointing to the idea that the pain is a pain that I'm experiencing it doesn't mean that this is a subjective experience that is in principle only mine but rather that this refers to Elaine a criterion that we can share that this really just refers to the fact that I'm the one who's experienced in pain rather than you for instance compare the words identical and the same there's a variety of shades of meaning which are possible right identical in some context identical means exactly the same all the way down to the to the I guess to the atom or something but there's other context in which they're not necessarily the same imagine for instance if I got in a car accident or let's say imagine I'm driving my car I come to a stoplight and then someone hits my car and I'm telling my friend and they say the identical thing happened to me last week identical there has a sense but that sense was ultimately given in a certain use of language out of which were both familiar so there's a whole variety of shades of meaning or if you will language games out of which identical and the same can can be used and they get closer and further away in terms of their meaning the problem here is that the philosopher has a temptation to reduce all of these shades of meaning into a monochromatic if you will explanation that is a single explanation or a single theory which explains all of them and here if it's interesting to compare the way in which what beacons town is talking about you're really challenges the entire notion of platonic philosophy where Plato is constantly seeming to do this constantly looking for the singular form out of which the plurality of forms might be my occur now here we have one of these beautiful I already mentioned it and I sort of highlighted this but here we have one of these beautiful phrases famous quotes that Dickens stands where he says the Philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness and so we have to think of the task of philosophy as a therapy to help us get away from this temptation towards reduction now how them do we use words to stand for these either sensations that we do have right in here actually I think we need to be careful with the language of inner versus outer an important of critique of Descartes and subjectivity and the mind-body dualism of the cartesian metaphysics comes from Gilbert Ryle and I encourage you to take a look at Gilbert Rao's essay because in many ways Gilbert Ryle does what thickened Stein suggests and part of it is to attack the very notion of what we mean by inner now we know what inner means in an ordinary sense but the problem here is that when we ask a question like what is up what is it what about by inner sensations I there seem to be making a philosophical nonsensical statement from this vegans Tinian perspective so what if they can Stein say at section 257 well he begins by asking a question what would it be like if human beings showed no outward signs of pains they didn't grow that increments or anything like that then it would be impossible to teach a child the use of the word toothache well let's assume the child is a genius in itself invents a name for the sensation it has for the thing that we normally call a toothache but because time returns but then of course he couldn't make himself understand understood when he used the word so he ducked so does he understand the name without being able to explain its meaning to anyone you can see your vacant Stein is giving us a sort of scenario that would fit this model of a private language he's thinking sang goes on but what does it mean to say that he has named his pain how has he done this naming of pain exactly and whatever he did what was its purpose when one says he has given a name to a sensation one forgets that a great deal of stage setting a language his presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense and when we speak of someone having given a name to pain what is presuppose is the existence of the grammar of the word pain it shows the post where the new word is stationed so you have this very sort of interesting discussion that it's worth thinking about for a while which I'm not going to belabor here in the video but I encourage you to really sit down and reflect on this right imagine for instance that you go to the dentist and you say I've been having this oddest sensation but it's a sensation that I only have because it's something that's inner to my experience and you see and you tell I've given a name to this and the name is googly goo right of course how are you supposed to explain to the dentist what googly goo means exactly the answer is you can't just say what name the pain what you have to do is you have to somehow explain to the dentist how googly goo is something that's regular within the use of living life and feeling things that there would be the same for the dentist right so you can see here is that simply giving names to sensations is not sufficient in order to ground the meaning of a name the meaning of a name has to be derived from its use as we've seen before so let's imagine for this we create our own private language in this private language free consent says imagine you have a sensation who knows what the sensation is and in order let's say every time you have the sensation you have a Dyer and you write the word yes in that diary no s is just a sort of symbol for that sensation so as here is the name of your special personal private experience now how do you know when you write s you're actually using the word s correctly maybe you might say well I impress it upon myself well what does that mean right the problem there is that if you were to record your own private sensations in this way how would you ever know that you're doing it correctly you see what's missing here is there is no criterion for correctness and that's what's essential and this is because the criterion for the correctness of our language is ultimately crowned in a common form of life we have with others right he says at the bottom here or let me just read you the the parts I've highlighted he says I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation to this end I associate with the side s and I write this sign in a calendar for every day in which I have the sensation right and then at the very end he says but in the present case I have no criterion of corrects of correctness how do I know I'm using the word s the right way for the future cases I really don't have any way of knowing that I'm using it correctly all in one could do was just accept what I said but that the problem is it's not just that other people just have to accept what I say it counts as s I myself could even know whether or not I was correct in using that word s one would like to say going back to the text whatever is going to seem right to me is right and that only means that here we can't talk about right because in order for things to be right you need some sort of independent criteria now how is this the S scenario the big concern gives us here different from the sort of regular diary entry that we have so imagine my imagine I have some sort of sickness or disease and my physician asks me to write it down in a diary every time you you feel this pain write it down so that way we can track it how is that different from this s scenario the different is that the difference is that when I write a regular entry my regular entry has a function and to say that has a function is to say that it can play a role within a larger language game the problem is is that s by itself has no language game it doesn't have a language game for me or for you so it doesn't have any meaning he said he asked well what reason have we for calling ask the sign for a sensation for sensation is a word of our commonly a language not of one intelligible to me alone you can see that vikins tag goes even further because the notion of sense in itself if it's taken merely as something which is purely private in principle to my own experience that it really is actually just meaningless right he goes on so the use of this word stands in need of justification which everybody understands and it wouldn't help either to say that it does it need not be a sensation there when he writes as he has something and that is all that can be said has in something also belonged to our common language so in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like to just emit inarticulate sounds but such a sound is an expression only as it occurs in a particular language game which should not be described no let me say something this is gonna be important for some of the neck the next Clause we're going to look at is Heidegger is there is this temptation in philosophy to invent your own language and this is something that I jokingly talk about with my students which is that philosophers love to create their own words and and make up their own terms for things why is that exactly the consigns pointing out here is that it comes out of a very very deeply rooted temptation and this is a temptation in which we seem to let our language take flight from its own conditions of meaning that is language takes flight from its use so can a person have a personal subjective justification for a word no they can't because a justification always implies an independent criteria but if a criteria is independent it can't be subjective so that wouldn't actually make any sense so that means a subjective meaning has no justification insofar as it's taken as being something merely private the essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar but that nobody knows whether other people have this or that or something else the assumption would thus be possible though verifiable that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another and in fact you've probably thought about this I when I was a kid I remember in like second or third grade thinking about this how do I know that for instance your experience of red is different from my experience of red right in the answers that is a bad question that's a meaningless question because you can never under any conditions know that what counts as red is subjectively the same as what your subjective experience is because ultimately red is a linguistic artifact and in fact anthropologists have actually seen this for instance there have been isolated cultures and tribes for instance then when anthropologists went to those tribes they found the people living there only have three colors they only had white black and red so for instance the these natives when they would point to something let's say the blue sky they would say oh it's red that's the color it's red and but they go in the anthropologists tried to figure out their words for other colors colors like green and purple and brown there was no language there and because there was no language there was effectively no experience of those things so you can see here is that the notion of red even though we have an experience of something being red that the word red is actually something that's derived that comes from the language game that we have with others and there's an independent criteria for using that term but the independent criteria is not something that is derived from my own subjective sensation it's rather something that I might say is communal or custom as victims time suggested earlier so okay here's the example of the blue sky vegan science says look at the blue sky and say yourself how blue the sky is when you do it spontaneously without philosophical intentions the idea never crosses your mind that this impression of color belongs only to you and you have no hesitation it explains claiming that to some what else and if you point at anything as you say the words you point to the sky I am saying you you have not the feeling of pointing into yourself which often accompanies naming the sensation so you can see well as finish the sentence when what is thinking about private language nor do you think that really you ought not to point to the color with your hand but with your attention consider what it means to point to something with the tension right so for instance when you point to and you say that the sky is blue what you don't actually do is think about the way in which you're having an inner experience rather you're pointing to the sky right you're not pointing to your attention of a specific sensation right and why is that because the language game of talking about the colour of things is not about calling attention to your own sensations as it were right in 278 a little bit later section 278 consent says I know how the color green looks to me surely this makes sense certainly big ensign says but the question is what use is the proposition are you thinking of so if I say I know how the color green looks to me right that might be a meaningful statement but it's only meaningful so long as it's grounded in a specific use of the language a specific language game okay so wait a second does that mean that ultimate language is really just about the type of behavior we have with each other in other words is the meaningfulness of language ultimately rooted in behaviorism so as behaviorism ultimately the primary answer here to the problems of language and derivatively the problems of philosophy or you might ask instead of pain is there only pain behavior right and Vick instead sort of asked a couple of interesting things he says look on stone and imagine it having sensation one says demise one says to oneself how could one so much as get the idea of ascribing sensation to a thing well one might as well ascribe it to a number and now look at the Ringling fly and and once these difficulties vanish and pain seems to get a foothold here where before ever everything was so to speak too smooth for it and so to a corpse seems to us quite inaccessible to pay our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead is not the same all our reactions are different if someone says that cannot simply come from the fact that a living thing moves about in such and such a way and a dead thing does not then I want to intimate to him that this is not the case of the transition from quantity to quality which this distinction between quantity and quality report distinction in philosophy and many philosophers make it and here Vicki sign is suggesting again that in order to understand how these sorts of descriptions and recognitions of painter possible it's not simply derived by making these characteristic distinctions Rather's derived in the form of life and the language games out of which these things follow now here we have I have a little beetle in a box and this has a famous thought experiment one of my favorite in all of the philosophical investigations called the beetle in the Box scenario and I'm not going to quote they can standard read what he says I'll just explain it right instead says imagine do a little thought experiment imagine there's a world in which everyone who's born into the world is given a box so as soon as you're in this culture of this world you're given a box and within that box is something you don't know what's in your box I'm sorry you can know it you can look in your own box I'm sorry but you can never ever look in anyone else's box right now we decide to call whatever's in our box with the word and we call that word beetle so maybe you look in your box and and you see a little figure 8 loop sorry about that a little Facebook message you look in your box and you see a little figurine maybe another person looks in their box and they see a little a little crown maybe another person looser box they see a key another person has a picture in their box but no one can ever look into anyone else's picture and everyone uses the same word to refer to what's in the box they call it a beetle and this would even apply if someone look to their box and there was nothing in their box they would just say they have a beetle in their box now ask yourself what is the meaning of the word beetle where does the the meaning of that word to ride from does it derive from the object that's in the box no it doesn't it the meaning of the word beetle isn't something that's isn't an object in the box the meaning of the word beetle is to rye or is a reflection of the way in which we use language with each other now ask the question if someone says I have the soul right I have a soul and that soul is accessible to me because I have an inner experience of it you have a soul you have an inner experience notice that we want to take the word soul and say that soul must refer to the object of that inner experience in the same way that you might say that the object is the beetle but the beetle in the Box scenario shows that the meaning of the word is derived and it's used and the same thing goes for terms like soul now if we take this to the private language argument the private experiences we have are not actually private per se not insofar as they be is their expressed in language because the language of use I'm sorry the the use of language is something that's available to all in our last video for instance we saw bacon Stein emphasizing the idea that all of these philosophical problems are open to plain view they're open to plain view because they're to the meaningfulness of them are derived from the way in which we actually use our language which is quite clear to all of us the temptation of the philosopher is to point to the object of this inner experience that is different potentially for every person and to think that the meaning of our language comes from that thing comes from the beetle so the beetle the Box scenario is a nice little thought experiment that to see the overall point that biggest eye is making in the philosophical investigations regarding the structure of how our propositions are made meaningful in language a couple last quotes here write vegan says says when we look into ourselves as we do philosophy we often get to see such a picture a full blown pictorial representation of our grammar not facts but as it were illustrated terms of speech so this is quite interesting it means that when philosophers do their introspective discussions and analyses in many ways what they interpret to be facts that are derived from their eminent experience are really just pictures or representations of the grammar of our language and remember that term grammar is ultimately crowded in the use the the logical grammar is grounded in the use of that language and the sort of rules that go along with the variety of language games now the paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way always serves the same purpose and here you can see that this is quite as soon as we give up on the idea that language has this unitary systematic structure and we take on the idea that language does a whole bunch of different things and it's quite varied and it's likely constant suggested an ancient city suddenly this paradox of language disappears for us and the paradox of the private language begins to be dissolved now here's the question though if it's time recognizes is he's going to be accused of behaviorism in disguise right are you a bottom really saying yeah that everything except human behavior is a fiction and because their response is to say if I do speak of a fiction then it is of a grammatical fiction that is it is of a fiction in which we think that the logic of our language is derived from something else and behaviorism itself is a type of fiction now this is a very very famous phrase and this is a fly bottle so this is where a fly I can fly in the bottle then it can't get out and then it dies right and here's an important passage of thinking stones what exactly is vacant Stein's aim and philosophy is the answer to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle so vacant Stein thinks that when we engage in philosophy these classic philosophical problems we're like a fly that gets trapped in our own language constantly bumping up against the limits of our own language so if that's the goal if the goal of his philosophy is to get us to stop doing philosophy then is there a positive story that we can take away from your and I think the emphasis here has to be on the way in which bacon Stein talks about grammar what is grammar well essence is expressed in grammar remember we're talking about grammar in terms of language use of a language came right grammar tells what kind of an object of anything is so if we want to understand what what something is we look to the grammar out of which it is grounded in in terms of its meaningfulness and here he says this interesting suggestion think of theology as a site as a grammar and here's a sort of final rejoinder to the problem of pain and pain behavior and he that is the consensus you learn the concept pain when you learned language now notice you did learn the concept pain when someone poked you you learn the concept of once you began to use language within an embedded form of life a situatedness out of which down language had its meaningfulness and this sort of brings us to vacant science I think primary point here's a picture of bacon Stein very famous picture in which vikins time wants us to essentially dissolve our philosophical problems by by constantly through a sort of repent therapy of looking at how our words are actually described and in many ways you might say that this reveals to us a sort of new form of philosophy a new method for doing philosophy okay now there's much much more we could talk about I think it's time and I think there's a there's even a deeper analysis and a way of tracking the private language argument as well as these other arguments of Bacon's time but I hope this video is giving you a sense of what some of the basic themes of the constants philosophy are and more importantly I hope that vikins tions philosophy will help give you a little bit of therapy in order to maybe address some of the philosophical problems that are bugging you as it were okay thank you very much for watching the video I look forward to seeing you guys online later bye

Channel: Mark Thorsby

Views: 2,481

Rating: 4.9298244 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Wittgenstein, Language, private language argument

Id: ilmSRRYgfXY

Length: 64min 54sec (3894 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 07 2018