Photo Credit: Dr Michael Sugrue
Dr. Michael Sugrue's Insightful Lecture on Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language: Enlightening Exploration
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work published during the lifetime of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The project's overarching purpose was to determine the relationship between language and reality and to establish the boundaries of science.
Dr. Michael Sugrue:
Dr. Michael Sugrue received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago and his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from Columbia University.
When confronted with Wittgenstein's Tractatus's tough notions, I discovered a haven via the venerable Dr. Michael Sugrue. His eloquence and mastery are truly astounding, making him a fantastic resource for people seeking clarity in understanding hard philosophical themes, particularly Great Minds - Part 5: The Latter Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language.
I recommend that you subscribe to Dr. Michael Sugrue's YouTube channel and watch his content to obtain a better knowledge of difficult issues. Dr. Michael Sugrue's YouTube Channel is a great place to start if you want to learn more about philosophy.
Analysis: An In-depth Exploration of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Journey
The lecture provides an in-depth examination of Wittgenstein's philosophical progression, beginning with his work in the "Tractatus" and progressing to his later ideas explored in the "Investigations."
Tractatus - The Pinnacle of Precision:
Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" is praised for its remarkable clarity and precision. It encapsulates a thorough, unequivocal cynicism towards logic and thought in only seven sentences. His mathematical expertise shows through in the work's precise nature, emphasizing the need of clear language. Wittgenstein's use of accurate decimal numbering illustrates his desire to define the boundaries between language and thought.
The Ineffability and the Limits of Language:
The lecture dives into Wittgenstein's belief that language defines human understanding, emphasizing his famous closing sentence that everything beyond the expressible must be left unsaid. This concept of the ineffable emphasizes Wittgenstein's view that language represents the limits of our cognition.
Transition and Inner Conflict:
The lecture delves into Wittgenstein's contradictory endeavor in the "Tractatus," in which he attempts to solve philosophical quandaries while tacitly criticizing the fundamental dogmas upon which it is based. His rational and detailed analysis creates a deep inner struggle, leading him to self-criticism and the study of practical contingencies, indicating a move from absolute certainty to a more nuanced grasp of language.
The Pragmatic Turn in "Investigations":
Wittgenstein departs from formal definitions in "Investigations," focusing on the practical and ambiguous nature of everyday language. He emphasizes that language is about more than just architectural perfection; it is also about acknowledging the limitations of linguistic conceptions.
Family Resemblance and Everyday Concepts:
The lecture examines Wittgenstein's concept of "family resemblance" in the context of notions such as games and chairs, highlighting that no one, universal description can encompass these diverse ideas. In the face of various common notions, Wittgenstein's theories challenge the pursuit of rigid, mathematical definitions.
Empirical Understanding and Behavioral Model:
Wittgenstein's work challenges conventional notions of language acquisition, emphasizing a practical and empirical approach to comprehending terms like "game" or "chair." This approach calls into question rigid, basic definitions, arguing that language operates within a flexible framework linked to observable behavior.
Focus on Pragmatism and Functionality:
The emphasis in Wittgenstein's "Investigations" on language's functional usage rather than rigid definitions is the key theme. It aims to free people from frivolous activities and steer them back to realistic, workable understandings of language and concepts.
This multifaceted investigation offers a profound insight of Wittgenstein's philosophical metamorphosis, from the crisp certitude of the "Tractatus" to the pragmatic depth of the "Investigations." It emphasizes Wittgenstein's significant contributions to language and mental philosophy.
Tractatus Overview:
Wittgenstein's concise Tractatus and its distinctive clarity.
The work's emphasis on logical rigor and a mathematical foundation.
Language as Limits of Understanding:
Wittgenstein's belief in language setting the boundaries of thought.
Ineffability and contemplation of the unsayable within language and thought.
Transition and Philosophical Journey:
Wittgenstein's paradoxical Tractatus, questioning the rigidity it's built upon.
The shift from strict logic to a nuanced understanding in "Logical Investigations."
Language Games and Definitions:
Challenge to universal definitions and the introduction of the concept of family resemblance.
Practical, empirical understanding replacing stringent definitions in language acquisition.
Philosophical Behaviorism and Uses of Language:
Transition from seeking meanings to understanding uses in language.
Emphasis on practical, functional understandings over rigid definitions.
Language's Limits and Therapeutic Philosophy:
Focus on the limitations of language and acceptance of the ineffable.
Therapy in philosophy guiding individuals back to pragmatic understandings.
Each idea revolves around Wittgenstein's philosophical journey, emphasizing the transition from precise logic to a more practical, functional understanding of language and concepts.
Professor Dr. Michael Sugrue, PhD: An Exceptional Communicator
Dr. Michael Sugrue has a distinct and interesting style that combines complicated philosophical topics into a logical narrative. His method is based on a clear expression of Wittgenstein's ideas, highlighting Wittgenstein's skepticism regarding logic and cognition. Sugrue's lecture contains short pauses, allowing the audience to fully digest the intricate topics. He meticulously dissects Wittgenstein's works, methodically unfolding and elaborating on each component. Sugrue's emphasis on Wittgenstein's logical clarity is seen in his painstaking analysis and breakdown of the Tractatus which illustrate Wittgenstein's transition from rigorous certainty to a more pragmatic, open-ended perspective of language. The eloquence of the professor and the systematic exposition of Wittgenstein's journey from the Tractatus to the "Investigations" provide for a full grasp of Wittgenstein's shifting philosophical ideas. Sugrue's mastery of complicated philosophical issues, along with his methodical delivery style, makes even the most complex concepts understandable to the audience, making the lecture not only educational but also fascinating.
Link: Michael Sugrue
Great Minds - Part 5 - The Latter Wittgenstein: The Philosophy of Language
Great Minds - Part 5 - The Latter Wittgenstein: The Philosophy of Language
YouTube Video Lecture Transcript:
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s first published work The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one of the great manifestos of positivismand it is decidedly a young man’s work. It is elegant, clean, and very decisivein the sort of scepticism that it advocatesand the sort of position it takes with regard to logic and with regard to thought.Wittgenstein’ work, his early work , the Tractatus (Logico-Philosophicus) was 70 pages which elaborated essentially 7 sentences and these sentences are remarkable for their cogency, for their clarity with which he expresses them and in particular , for the ruthles and very determined scepticism which he extrapolates from this conception of language and logic that is in Tractus. The Tractus amounts to a theory of the declarative sentence, a theory of what can be put in a proposition and what can not. And what Wittgenstein says is this:
‘That essentially anything that can be said can be said clearly or not at all.’
So he is real yes or no kind of a man. A logically clear , decisive individual who has professional confidence in mathematics who comes from a background in engineering and who hasboth an extreremely practical orientation towards his subject matter but also he has the desire for mathcematical rigor and mathematical formality which lend to a character which is unlike anything else in the western philosophical tradition. Nw what he says is this in his early work the Tractus. The first sentence is ‘The world is all that is the cas.’Which is perhaps one of the most mysterious lines in philosophy, sounds very clear but I am not eniirely sure what that means. It certainly means that the set of affairs that we find around us, the simple facts are what the world is around us . It is a way of saying that there would be no metaphysics in this book that would be a strictly one world interpretation of what can be thought ad what can be said. After that first sentence, ther eis another seie of sentences and then elaborations on each of these sentences.Now if you look at the Tractus, you will find that he chooses a particular form. He numbers his sentences, scientific fellow that he is and the first sentence is followed by sentence number 2 but sentence number 2 is followed by sentence number 2.1, 2.01,2.02. In other words he works out all the logical entailments, all the logical implications of the view that he holds and then moves on. So he intends to be logically exhaustive. He intends to tell you what can an what cannot be put into language and since he views the limits of our language are the limits of, at least our social thoughts. What he is trying to do is to tell us what we can and can not sensibly talk about. The last sentence in the Tractus is quite remarkable. What he says is …after finishing 70 pages of extrapolation and elaboration of this theory of language … he says:
‘What we can not speak about must pass over in silence.’
What that means of course is he has expelled, he has excommunicated many different kind sof discourse into the realm of nonsensicality. In many respects, Wittgenstein is as sceptical as a person can get. Only that which can be expressed ca be taken seriously as a set of philosophical propositions and once you get to the limits of our language we have reached the limits of our thought. The possibility of going beyond language simply does not exist. If we eschew language if we were going to get beyond it ( langauge ) and eliminate it what we do when we try to communicate when we tried to think. I mean we’d have to hold hands have a seance and try to read/reach each others minds so once we have gotten to the very limits of language, we have also gotten to the perimeter of that which can be known. So Ludwig Wittgenstein , the young man wo wrote the Tractus believed that he had solve d all possible philosophical problems , not only all phisolophical problems that have been developed in the previous twenty five hundered years of philodophy but all philosiphicl problems that could ever be raised because if yo are going to ask a question it’s going to be in language and one assumes that the respos eto your interrogatort statement will be a declarative statement and if it fits into the declarativesinto his theory of the declarative statement then it checks out and we are okay but if it doesn’t well then it is simply gibberish the popular expression of this is found in AJ Ayer's language truth and logic , the lecture that Professor Stalloff (Dr. Darren Staloff, A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic)
just gave gives you a very clear conception of the profound scepticism and the extreme logical tidiness that we find in his tendency and his philosophy. … it’s ..you could call a logical positivism a physic uber alles physics over everything. That’s what real serious scientific philosophers do. Anything else is essentially poetry, or religion , or neurosis, or something like that . it is not to be taken seriously by real tough philosophers. Now Wittgenstein’ book cause the sensation among the handful of people that initially could make sense of it because it is an exceedingly difficult book . It is surely one tof the most dificult works in moden philosophy should any of you would be brave enough to undertake a reading of it. First to take a course in formal logic and then prepare to give up six months or a year of your life. That is not a joke perfectly serious. Now Wittgenstein ‘s book when published created tremendous sensation . He got a professorship at Cambridge and he was lionizd. Everywhere students nd professors of philosophy said finally we have had a real breakthrough finally we have had someone who on his own could create new approaches to philosophical problems that were unprecedented that were easy to understand or not easy but understandable and communicable and it seemed to be difinitive as I said before the author of the Tractus Logico-Philosophicus thought htat he had solved all possible philosophical problems; a remarkable attempt, if not a remarkable success. Now as hsi work was absorbed as he got a band of admiring or perhaps not even admiring , adoring students and colleagues Wittgenstein became rather uneasy.Now perhaps it is a questio temperament. Some philosophers like the idea of being adored like Hegel students would have to adore someone like that would have to look upto him that that would make him feel that he was moving in the right path in philosophy . It just on the other hand it disturbed Wittgenstein profoundly. Wittgenstein said ‘ well, are you sure that I am completely right . Are you certain tht everything I have said here is absolutely true . Is there really no way out of this logical corner I have painted myself into as a matetr of fact is it possible tat this book so rigorous and analytic and formal is wrong now in that respect he is not only light years ahead of his contemporaries in putting this book together but he was several more light year ahead of them in calling it into question. So at just the time during 1930s when he is reaching tremendous international renown , tremendous international success. Wittgenstein , the isolated, somewhat odd Socratic had to ask himself am I sure and how do I know and he offered a self-criticism of his own work which was more trenchent and more powerful than any criticism that could leveleld at it from the outside so just as everyone in the world was beginning to worship at this at the idol of the young Wttgenstein , the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus , the toughest logical guy around, Wittgenstein began to have misgivings and these misgivings generaqted a whole series of work that occupied the entirety of hsi life untill he died in the early 50s . He refused to publish aftr tthe Tractus. He published one paper under protest decided that he didn’t liek it after he had done it and would put othing else in print. He circulated a few manuscripts among his students and among his friends , among his colleagues but he did not like to put anything in print because it seemd so final and it seemed that philosophy is more a process than a series of absolute certaities. He is moving away from the logical hbris that was the charactwristic of the Tractus . He most important work , the latest of his works is called the Logical Investigations’ and that too is one of the most profound and interesting works of philosophy in the 20th century. It is not so forbidding or so obviously difficult because it lacks logic a lot of logical formulae and things like that but in fact it is one of the most difficult and rigorous pieces of work ever produced ans it is a sort of exercise in philosophical humility which is not terribly common among philosophers if you have been listening to other lectures that we have had so far and it shows us not instead of the logical necessity of language it talks about the practical contingency of langauge . He appreciates the ambiguity and the difficulties that attach to our everyday practical use of language rather than a sort of abstract completely logical architectonic formalization of all possible linguistic constructs. Now the investigations is a series of paragraphs not qute so tidy as the series of sentences thatw e see in the Tractus ut Wittgenstein says the book is incomplete I would have written you in the introduction . He says I would have written good book if I could but it/ I was outside just my capacity so this will have to do.. He says at best it is an album, a series of therapies to uncloud our understanding of the wolrd which is clouded up by the way we use language . Wittgenstein once said that philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence though langauge . Oddly enough and it may seem rather strange in in a rather logical and physicalistic sort of philosopher like Wittgenstein, there are many exceedingly poetic passages in Wittgenstein. It is an odd place to find poetry but in fact the clarity and the rigor of Wittgenstein’s writing both in the early period when he is writing the Tractus and when he put together the investigations is quite astonishing and simply as a read for the poetry of it getting odd insights into language and thought that itself justifies it soif you are going to read Wgenstein to alter date, have a loo at he investigations. It is the most interesting piec eof work and you probably find it more rewarding than the Tractus. Now in the Tractus Wittgenstein had aan idea or made essentially the argument or had the basic conception tht language was a picture of the world and that each individual atomic proposition told ussomething about the world or told us about some logical fact so there are two kinds of meaningful propositions in the Tractus and only two:Ther ewere deductive facts and there were inductive facts . Deductive facts are either true or false. And he worked out the implications of that it turns out all true deductive ststements or analytic facts are in fact tautologies,. In other words, they only tell you that X is X . Now it may be very abstract set of equations on both sides but really what it all reduces to is everything is itself.Every mathcmatical equation says that this is this and nothing and nothing more. IT tells us nothing about the world. It just tells us about the logical entailments in ou definitions. Very clean, Very precise.
He has a razor blade of a mind and he cuts right through all the nonsense all the complexities to get to one basic core. In the Tractus he also says that another kind of proposition expresses the contingent states of affairs in the world. The chair is there. The audienc eis here. I ma walking up and down. All these propostition tell us individual fact s about the world and these are not taughtologies. These are not contradictions. They are simle contigncies. And the way you find out about them is by looking aat the world . Elegant, simple, lovely/ Perhaps a little too simple, an oversimplification in his later work he gets to the investigations, Wittgenstein has decided that instead of language being a picture , he wants to treat language as a game. As a set of social practices which overlap and which don’t have one universal skeleton key which allows us to open all linguisitc doors. Instead there are plurality of overlapping games which have a certai degree of consistency within them but there is no one unifying charactristic that covers all possible lingusiitc expressions. . The idea of a geat philosopher , a philosophy received achieved enormous international notoriety retracting his first and most widely known work is unprecedented in the history of philosophy and one of the great achievements in human self-criticism the capacity to be critical towards oneself as well as others. The rigorous intelelctual honesty is what comes out of the investigations and it is enoromoulsy impressive in that respect.
Now let us think about the idea of language games. Wittgenstein says that ther are different kinds of games that we play and that language can be subsumed under that idea and that not all these games ar eperfectly identical and that there is a certai degree of ambiguity that attaches to some games rather than others and in fact the plurality and diversity of languages of , of language make sit resist any attempt to find a universlaq kind of algorithm which allows you to get through all of it .
Remarkable change of intelelctual orientation comes here!
Now the question is we are to take this idea of language games seriously , we have to figure out what what we would mean by a language game how these games willwork and what it is it’s different in this second conception; this conception of the language game. That makes it different from the conception that he had earlier
Two Wittgenstein’s favorite question come into play here.One of his favorite questions is how is a word learned that it’s say if you want to define, if you wan to now the meaning of the word X then ask yourself how do you find out about X . How would teach X? To a six-year old because as amatetr of practical empirical fact, all the six-year -olds, all the childrena re i our culture are going to be taught the words of English and they get taught them one by one. Ask yourself how you teach a word that will tell you a great deal about what that word mean and what the word signifies. In addition to that he wants you to know.
A second question that Wittgensteing is particularly interested in is how is a word used?One of the slogans that was derived from this, a little later in hisWittgenstein’s development was don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use.. If you want to know what X means?Ask yourself what people do with it. Go look at people using the word X and find out what it is good for? And when you know how to use it wellyou know what it means. This change from the logical necessity of language to its practical contingency is is a fascinating turnabout.
Now let us think abot the word game. I assume all of us have a sufficient command of English to roughly know what a game is and the problem is one of definition how will we define game . Let us think about our six-year-old. Let’s call him Johnny and let us say we want to teach a game to Johnny. Now by six most children actually know what a game is alreadyand the question is this how did we teach Johnny the term game and how when Johnny understands the word game and what does it mean for us to define the word game.
Well, we’d have to drop back alittle bit and see what Wittgenstein is fighting against in the Western philosophical tradition. In other words, what is the definition of definition in in the Western philosophical tradition a kind of meta question of bootstraps us up into a new level and the ebst example the best contrasts you can find i in the works of Plato. Socrates is constantly asking people what i justice. What is goodness. What is virtue. What is beauty and in what he is asking for is a definition because in each of the Socratic dialogues, there is an attempt to define some important abstract concept and infact in the process of defining it. Socrates has a very cler idea of what counts as definition . Those of you who are familiar with the Republic know that Scorates wants to define justice . Those of you who are familair with Phaedrus, know that Socrates wants to define love. Those of you who ar familiar with the Meno know that Socrates wants to define virtue. When Socrates in the Meno asks Meno what is virtue? Meno give s hima bunch of examples . He says the virtue of generals. The virtue of soldiers. The virtue of men. The virtue of women. Socrates says. ‘No. No . stop, stop!. I don’t want examples of virtue. I want to know what virtue itself is. I want to know some quality that every virtue has and only virtue has . In other words. Socrates demands that virtue be defined in the way that we define odd numbers or triangles, . He wants the cannons of definition to be strictly mathematical . It goes back to the fact that the Greeks were primarily concerned with mathematical epistemological questions or (at least!) Plato was. As Socrates wins many arguments by showing that nobody understands what virtue or justice of beauty is because no one can tell them what the form of it is . No one can tell them what every instantiation of beauty has and only instantiations beauty has . No one can tell them what what every example virtue has and only examples of virtue have It is not an accident that Socrates whenveer he gives an example of what he wants a definition to be always chooses some mathematical entity.. Mathematical things lend themselves to that kind of definition.The difficulty that Wittgenstein has stumbled on and it is a fascinating problem is that many things are not and can not be defined that way in other word he thinks Scorates is unintentionally playing intellectual sleight of hand by demanding of people something that couldn’t possibly be there and then it turns out that when the people try and give him what he wants they end up looking stupid because they perhaps on an expedition to do the impossible.
A remarkable insight that Wittgenstein offers us. Wittgesntein offers us a new idea .
Let us go back to Johnny and/in the game. Johnny understand sthe game and hat is remarkable is that none of us sat down and said Johnny every game has the following quality and only games have the following qualities . Johnny. Johnny this is the form of the game. As a matetr of fact if called upon to tell someone what the form of the game is . In other words, if called upon to say some quality that every game has and only game shave I think you’d run into all kinds of problems. Ask yourself what the Olumpics have in common with tic-tac-toe. Ask yourself what poker has in common with chess. Ask what tag has in common with peekaboo. Ask yourslef if any of these things have one universal characterisitc . One universal characterisitc that allows us to say all these things are games. If they don’t have one universal characteristic how is it that we can sue the word ina sensible way. What does it mean to describe all these things as games. Wittgenstein has opened up a can of skeptical worms here and and he is going to close it too.
Quite remarkable!
Let’s go back to Johnny and our game.We teach Johnny peekaboo, we teach Johnny maybe a card game. We teach Johnny how to play checker.We teach Johnny a number of games. How do we know Johnny understands the term game.
What we do is we look for some behaviour . Spme sue on the part of Johnny that shows that he knows where it fits in in our language. So for example, if he starts writing his homework and he say this thing that I am writing my homework with that’s a game we say no Johnny you don’t understand. That’s not a game. That is a pencil. A game is a think like tag or checkers or cards something like that Johnny but notice we don’t say Johny the following is the form of the game . We give Johnny examples. So what Wittgesntein is saying here is that as a matter of practical fact all of us not just Johnny , all of us learn the use of word slike game everyday everyday simple things lie that by being given examples. This si called extensive definition . In contrast to the Socratic essential definition by specifying one quality that every X has and only X has.Wittgenstein want to offers us a new paradigm tht will cover some kind of definition .In fact it will cover msot kinds of definition . This will be definition by giving examples. Of something. So if you wan to teach someone that does not understand English Since he /she speaks a foreign language.What a chair is, you point out example sof chairs. Say sir that is a chair. Sir that is a chair thats a chair tht’s a chair, that's a chair and then at sdome pointyou get tired and you stop and after that if you wna tto find out if this person understands the word chair you ask them could you use that in in a sentence and point out a few things and if they point to the sky or if they point to amountain you understand that they don’t understand what you meant by chair and and yu have to give them some more examples. . If on the other hand he says that’s a char that’s a chair that's a chair.
Then you have as good a reason as you are ever going to have to think that he understands the word chair and this not restricted to the word game it is not restricted to the word chair . This accounts for almost all the definitions we have of almost all the word swe use everyday . It’s remarkable about Wittgenstein that unlike Plato and Spinoza who can confuse us and baffle us with the most profound intellectual constructs Wittgenstein can baffle us with the conents of our closets Wittgenstein can baffle us with the objects of on the table. Wittgenstein can make it amazing that you should know how to use the word sugar or salt .
Remarkable!
But not remarkable!
What Wittgenstein has done has gobe back to the way words actually work in the practical empirical world. He started out his career as an engineer. And then he moved into mathematics and the desire for mathematical formality sacrificed common sense and now this is a revival of common sense . Common sense in a way witha vengeance. Think about the paradigm of six-year-old if they understand what a game mean don’t tell me that us philosophers don’t and if we can’t specify some quality that every instantiation of the use of word game has and only only such instantiations have then why should we believe tht ther eis sucha thing.
Now this does not sound like a greater breakthrough perhaps stop and consider it.
Imagine someone that has present..a scholar .. spent his entire life trying to figure out what it is that makes beautiful things beautiful and he looked at Beethoven’s ninth symphony . He looked at looke dat Rembrandt’s portraits . He looked at the Sistine chapel . He looked at a numbe rof things and and racked his brain a whole career; twenty, trhirt, fourty years trying to to figure out some quality that all these things have in common and the difficulty may be in the kind of question that we are asking. They may not have anything intrinsically in common that unites all of them. There may be a series of overlapping commonalities that allow us to refer to all these things in a rough and approximate way . It does not give us ultimat Platonic precision. . It won’t turn us into logic machines but the demand for final logical precision may be the problem here. Rather than the fuzziness of our language. It may be that we are making impossible and unresanonable demands when we ask for the form of the chair for the seeeential qaiuality of every chair and only chairs. Perhaps what we nee dis a series of examples that work in arough practical way in the language games . If that we live with. In other words , the fact that I keep that I can’t specify for you some quality that that every game has and only games have, doesn’t mean that you don’t kow what I am talking aboutwhen I use th word game. And doesn’t meanI can’t teach you to Johnny and what more do you wan tto do with it . Aren’t we asking the impossible.
Fascinating idea!
Now there is a problem here.
Plato will be te first one to come back when that .
Let’s be fair to him.
He’d say lookhow dow e know when when we really understand something maybe Johnny is going to go out and misuse the word later on and ther eis an instrinsic ambiguity to defining it things by example that . That is to say there is always going to be an uncertanty when you get to the peripheral examples of a game or a chair or anything else as to whether this falls the rubric chair or o game or not . Is a dolls’ house chair a chair .
Well maybe.
Is a throne a chair?
Well, I guess.
If you sit on a boulder is that a chair?
Kind of.
IT becomes kind of difficult at the edges and here is what Plato would come back and say look
Logic or nothing
Tell me
Put with perfect certainty or I don’t want to hear about it . Wittgenstein’s answer is elegant and quitepoetic.
He says,when you demand absolute logical precision.
A rigid , clear distinction between the things that fall unde the term and the things that do not.
Aren’t you demanding the impossible?
He says something to thsi effect.
Is a fuzzy photopgraph a photograph?
Well yeah!
Is it adequate for certai purposes?well it depds on what purposes you wan tto to do you, you want it for
In other words is a fuzzy definition , a definition?
Well Plato would say no
Whybecaue he wants absolute certainty
That’s what the Greek tradition is all about.
Wittgenstein says the problem is not with our language. The problem is not with our thinking.
The problem is with the demand for absolute certainty.
About the nature of chairness
Ther is no such thing
Ther si just this chair and that chair and the othe rchair and ther is an intrinsic ambiguity built into our definition along those lines that’s exactly like tha ambiguity that we find in a fuzzy photograph.
Think of a stellite photograph.
Of the United States
You might object that it is not clear tht your backyard is there . Wittgenstein would say if we need more resolution we can add that resolution as it is necessary in games in the language games we are engaged in but in so far as we just want to satellites photos of the United States this does just fine.if you want your backyard I suppose we cold clarify it somewhat and inso far as our langauge games demand that w bring it down to the level of the backyard tht we increase the specificity we we can always add that wehn we need it but we don’t need a priori.
, an ultimate essential definition
Of all the words in our language prior to being able to talk talk comes first ,these logical sysemizaton comes second and insofar as they create a nonsensical ambiguity in our understanding of ouselves and our world the fault lies not with the world the fault lies not with our languaqge but fault lies with an unreasonable demand for unreasonable degrees of uncertainty.
What a remarkable idea!
It is absolutely brilliant and if you could imagine now our poor scholar looking looking at the Sistine , listening to Beethoven’s 9th , appreciating Rembrandt and then saying I have been asking the wrong questions.
All I have is overlapping elelments.
Of beauty that atatch attach to different things in different ways and they may have a rough similarity but that’s all we are going to get .
So instead of a Platonic form of beauty or we are going to get is the beauty characteristic of portraits perhaps crafts you could define that with some precision, the beauty characteristic of pieces of music perhaps perhaps for some purpose we would want to connect one to the other Perhaps you would want to distinguish them but the problem lies not with the world the problem lies with our over demanding of logical rigor.Now what this means is that we are going to have some principe that hold our worl together.beacuswe there is adanger here.Suppose we were to say that some term X in some language referred to ladies shoes, all the numbers over 200, and lobsters. Well the problem is there is no connection between these things. In other words we don’t want to be so completely disparate that w eget a totally arbitrary set of utternaces referring to the world and Wittgenstein come sup with anothe beautiful poetic paradigm for this and this is called family resemblance.
Imagine the Smith family.
, hypothetical group of people. They all look roughly alike. Some are taller some are shorter. Some weigh more some weigh less. Some have long hair some have short hair but they all look roughly like the Smith family.We dow e call them /smiths because we see family resemblance between this and this and this and this and Wittgenstein says let’s extrapolate from that idea that all the chairs have a rough family resemblance. They are things built by people so you can sit on themis dot and then naturally there will be some ambiguous cases on the fringe is a doll’s house chair a chair is a throne a chair is the front seat of your car a chair well depends on what you wan to do with it.
But the point is the reason why we might be tempted to call thse various things chairs is because they share a certain family resemblance. That allows us to clump these common nouns together. Or the things that are referred to by these common nouns together and this family resemblance idea is what we are looking for when we try and define a term so when we choose examples of chairs to teach Johnny withwe don’t choose the odd cases that are unclear. We choose things that are very clearly chairs. That’s a chair and that’s a chair and that’s a chair…
When Johnny comes back and wants to know if some questionable case the doll\
‘S house chair is a chair we say well it depends what you wan tto do with it Johnny.If you want to build a doll’s house maybe we’llcall it chair. If you only wan tto talk about things people can really sit on well then it is not a chair. . It depends on what language games you are playing.
Now let’s think about game. The definition of game. It seems like what holds our word game together is the fact that games have a rough family resemblance . Poker is kind of lie bridge in in that you are playing with cards. Chess is sort of like checkers in the sens ethat you playit on a 64 square board and chess is sort of like poker in the sens ethat both are governed by rules but they’ll still be fuzzy questions and fuzzy instances of what counts and as a game. Consider for example peekaboo. If we want to say that games were behaviors were human behaviorsthat are governed by rules you’d have the difficulty of peekaboo. No one explains to an infant these are the ground rules for peekaboo kidbefor you play it you just play peekaboo and it doesn’t have any rules or I don’t know I’ll give you offsiedsin peekaboo . Think about it. Right! It is peekaboo.Is peekaboo a game? Well. if you wan tto include it for certain purposes, I say under the rubric things children do okay . It is a game. I mean it would be very peculiar to do among adults.On the other hand, if you want to say that games are rule oriented behaviours wellthen it is not what what hangs on the question of whether we can absolute ties this or not. Wittgenstein points out , nothing.
Whata liberation fro physic uber alles what a tribute to common sense and everyday experience
What a great intelelctual honesty that allows him to break though thisinto annew domainof rough expressions of everyday language of the way we really live.
Wittgenstein says in a very memorable passage that some mathematicians had tried to demand complete logical r. Hi name was Gottlob Frege and he said that a term that isn’t defined perfectly is like an area in geometry tht has an imperfect definitionif it is not bounded completely. It is not an area which mans is not a definition but Wittgenstein says , No that is not really true. He asks, is it nonsensical to say stnd roughly there?
Do /i have specify which cartesian coordonates exactly what I wan to you to stand . Stand roughly there. I mean anybody that understands English was going to understand this . He says, there is no mystery there. If you are mystifying , if you mystify you are mystifying yourslef and philosophy is the bewitchment of our intelligenc ebay langauge .
What a remarkable intellect!
What a remarkable thinker!
Now there is a number of difficulties here.
Difficulty number.1:
There are plethora of difficulties that is not fair
But the difficulty that immediately suggests itself
How we know when someone understand s a term
Well we know when they use they can use the term the way we sue the term and if they start using the term ina funny way that is say if Johnny starts pointing at the pencil and saying this is a game. We say , No Johnny for a hundred time tht’s a pencil that’s not a game and if Johny ha any brains at all you figure eventually Johnyy is going to come up with the idea that look games are things like chess and checkers Johnny. LEarn the language . You can do it. Well. Here is the idea. Our standard for knowing whether the Johnny understands the word game is his his behavior and what his does it comes very very close to abolishing the mind or the psyche or the internal element in our understanding in oher words . This theory of whether you understand the term game or not refers not at all to your mental experiences to your subjective understanding of it. It refers to the way you behave and if you don’t show me by some kind of beahavior. Whether you understand the word game or not I can’t strictly speaking tell whether you can do that so in other words it comes perilously close to turning into a kind of philosophical behaviorism.What Wittgenstein does is drive the world of the psyche of the ego of the subject back not to the poit where you abolish as it as many of the more radical logical positives do Otto Neuraath (!) does that a AJ /air (!) , I believe , does it as well but what he does is: drive the ego or the psyche of the subject back to not non-existence but to the point where it is to the level where it is a dimensionless pointthat takes up no space that contains nothing within it it is a black box entirely impenetral;e to all other people. He does not deny that people have a s elf or ego but infact he says that’s inaccessible to us. Imagine the uncommon loneliness of such a man.IT means that you can’t know other minds or no other people. It comes very very close to that.So this beahviorism is expressed quite ably and again quiote poetically and in a way that is not at all easy to refute and and the examp[les Wittengstein again can baffle us with the things at our kitchen table . He can baffle us with any everyday common object of common activity and in particular he says , makes a numbe rof observations or thought experiments for example suppose we taught a child or we met someonewho had been taught how to do addition problems. Many of us can do that it is simple arithmetic. And suppose we wanted to know if this given person saya person in one of these rows kows I might give him some addition problems and ask him to do that and then look amd see if he gets the right answers and if he gets the right answers for ny length of time I say okay yeah this person knows how to do addition independent of testing them in that way of seeing them perform some kind of action of engaging in some kind of behaviour which gives me ground to say that could I ever possibly have ground for thinking that aperson understands addition . imagine the following case.
This is a kind of queer brilliance!
That you get in Wittgenstein . He says imagine the case of someone that that claimed to understand addition bt never ever had done an addition problem on paper and had never give any evidence of understanding addition . Just says, I have done a great many sums but I have done them all in my head.
Imagine the strange condition you are in now
Hw can we tell thsi peron understands addition
Assuming they are not willing to do anything out here
In the world that we can say take it on faith
Well imagine where that is going to lead us
Imagine people claiming that they understood Swedish with the exceptiot hat they had neer spoken any Swedish and they never read anything in Swedish but they want you to believe that they know it do you see the problem that is to say what possible criterion could we have for ascirbing to a person an understanding of an idea or a concept or a process unless it was somewhere in their behaviour.. The only other altenrative is to rea their mind to hold hands have a seance to see if we can directly get access to itand since that is impossibleback to behavriourism back to the standard of external activity as the touchstone for whether Johnny understands this and as a matter of practical fact there should come as no surprise that every first-grade tacher when they wan tto find out if the kids in the class understand addition they give him a test not because they like making the kids nervous but because the only way to find out whether thay understand addition or not is to have them do some addition problems, You can’t take it on faith .
A remarkable nreakthrough!
The difficulty with it is that it tends to lock us within our own psycheand that it tends to make it very hard to give behaviour which would give a satisfactory reason to believe in certain kinds of experience. Wittgenstein says that you are in , in the investigations , what is the aim of yur philosophy to allow the fly to get out of the fly bottlein other words we’re taken in vby he langauge that we have been nrought up on and we tend to get confused becasue langauge itself is full of odd quirks and odd factswhich only can be determined and only can be unraveled in the way words get used so back to the theme .
Don’t ask for the meaning. Ask for the use. If you are still unclear as to what you are doing then ask how is this word learned . So for Wittgenstein philosophy in the investigations turns out to be a kind of therapy . We have conceptual charley horses , conceptual disease, and he is going to be a trainer or intellectual doctor who is going to help us improve our thinking and he’s going to offer us therapy for the misapparehensions and the confusions introduced into our thinking by our sue of language
Now the problem with the investigations isit is incomplete . One of the difficulties and here is the real point is that there infinite numbe rof overlapping language games and not only it is incomplete but philosophy in itself is incomplete . The incompletenes sof this book gestures at the fact that there is no ultimate finale to the philosophical enterprise .
We see a complete reversal of what we see in his early part of his career.
He said he had solved all philosophical problems.
Nothingleft to tlk about!
Everything was just mopping up. The confusions that could be left over from 2500 years of Platonism.
Now we know not only thi sphilsophy is not ending but it is ever ending . It is never ending because human puzzlement never ends.
There is no one universal skeleton key , there is no one universal thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of language. All w can do is learn the locl rules used in various communities and various forms of life, with regard to certai lingusiitc activity and once Johnny learns how to use the word chair and refers to things like that then Johnny learn what a chair is. And that is true not just for chair but true for ll of language and what he has done is undeceive us and make unambiguous things which w thought were problem but in fact were not problems. The problem lies not with the world the problem lies not with language . The problem lies with unreasonabl set of demand and expectations that w ebring to it . The therapy that he is performing in alarge scale sense is to rid us of the Pfor ultimate certainty and go to an essentially pragmatic standard which says if it works it works if it is not broke don’t fix it If Johnny can use the word chair then Johnny understands chair whether he can tell you what the form of the chair is or not . As amatter of fact ,it may be a waste of time because in probability there is no form of a chair there is no one quality that one chair has and only chairs have . All we have is the overlapping language games . Some of them ar emore precise than others . Some are found too ambiguous.Forour purposes we can increase the precision.between these languages anytime and we can increase it to the point where we find it useful again. An then there is no point in taking up precision any further for points of pedantry for if it isnot broke dont fix it. HE rescues us from centuries of unnecessary worries . He helps us avoid time of frustrated pursuits of something that is not there . He says in a way it a way of going back the first line of the Tractatus .’Th world is all that is the case ,’ and what we can not speak about we must pass over in silence.’I the Tractatus being a logical , scientific kind of a guy , he said that there is no way that we can express prepositions in ethics or in theology or in aesthetics. It is too gooey and ambiguous form. Later on he comes back with thi idea of the fuzzy photo . We ccan talk about ethics we can tlk about aesthetics we can talk about theology. The difficulty is they are very ambiguous very fuzzy words The question is IS the fuzziness of our discourse a impediment to understanding each other or notif we get an understanding of what someone is talking about when they talk about beauty or about God or about religion if it communicates with you and you could tell whether they use it in a proper way ,well, then it is working just fine. . If it is too ambiguous for our purposes then sharpen it upWe are rescued not only from an extreme skepticisim we are rescued fom chasing our own tails around like puppies in that respect Wittgenstein represents a retreat from philosophical hubris . He is a hero in the Socratic sense because he is not only willing to criticise others he is willing to criticise himself and he is unwilling to accept the flattery that comes with philosophical breakthroughs when you yourself have conscientious misgivings about what you have written as an example of intellectual honesty , Ludwig Wittgenstein is without peer in the last 500 years of philosophy one of the greatest thinker in that respect one of the greatest souls of all and as matter of just empirical personal fact for him he was one of the loneliest and msot how can I put it, and most distant of men and part of it comes from this extreme logical rigor part of it comes from this willingness to ask new questions, willingness to undermine even one’ own conclusionsbut it also connects to the fact that Wittgenstein himself wanted to bring philosophy down to thos world and it amounts to the idea that what we can not speak about we must pass over in silence and the domain of silence it turns out in the investigations is not as great as we had thought…
