Wittgenstein

My claims about language, consciousness, explanation and other matters owe a big debt to the philosphy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I have not acknowledged this in detail in what I have written elsewhere, in part because the claims rely on an interpretation of him which, like most or all such interpretations, is itself tendentious. But I do not want to appear to be claiming Wittgenstein's ideas (nor anyone's) as my own. So here is what I think I have taken on, and where I go my separate way. At least from a high level, the story is pretty simple.

We must begin by noticing that Wittgenstein's philosophy is usually divided into the earlier, more metaphysically oriented thinking of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the later work which is centred on his Philosophical Investigations. I am interested only in the later work.

The second main point is that the later philosophy is often acknowledged to have (at least) two separate moments or dimensions. On the one hand is a sceptical or destructive dimension whose goal is to unseat a prevailing understanding of what meaning is and how language and our minds work. On the other is a positive, constructive dimension, the point of which is to say what meaning really is and how language and our minds in fact work * . Simply: I agree with and make use of Wittgenstein's sceptical moment; I disagree with and reject a lot of his constructive moment. The substance of what I am offering, such as it is, is an alternative to his positive proposal. There are, however, lines of convergence between the position here and Wittgenstein's. I consider it instructive that if you begin with just a couple of basic assumptions and build out in a systematic, logical way, many coincident themes independently arise - themes such as the mistakenness of our urge to explain (albeit in a quite different aspect), the way to understand private experience, and the concept Wittgenstein calls 'form of life'.

So, what is Wittgenstein's scepticism about meaning? *  Generally speaking, the essence of being rational, of having a plausible hope of reasoning systematically to true conclusions, lies in believing only what is justified, of what it's right to think in the circumstances. Accordingly, a main through-line of philosophy since Plato has been the matter of which, among the things we're inclined to say, we are justified in saying, and where we are, what it is that justifies us. Wittgenstein's revelation was that none of the things we usually offer-up as candidates for this job, works. Again: if you attend carefully to what it takes for one thing to count as justifying another, then, it turns out, none of the things normally considered by philosophers as justifiers is up to the task.

Now, what we're focused on here is statements expressing potential beliefs or judgements - things which you might state with an assertion sentence, which may be true or false. So, for example, it could be the statement that the apple is red, or that the next number in the series 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, ... is 12. Concerning the question which one might ask, about whether the colour you see when you look at the apple is rightly called 'red', Wittgenstein points out that nothing you can offer yourself -a mental colour sample, for example- can do anything more than alter your inclination to assert or deny. Crucially, there's nothing about it which makes right the assertion or denial. *

The same kind of point goes equally for our judgements of reason, such as in the counting-by-twos example. You can give yourself a rule ("at every stage, add 2 to the last number to get the next"), but that at best simply transfers the problem to this new statement. What does "add 2" call for at any step? On its face, the rule-statement is just more words. If it in some sense guides you at any point in producing the series "+2", that is in virtue of the understanding you have of it, and it is far from clear what such an ineffable thing as an understanding might be and how it might in the needed way constrain you. The rule needs to make right the judgement "12 is next", but there's just nothing about the statement itself which imbues it with the specialness needed to pull this off.

The initial, sceptical implication of Wittgenstein's argument is that the distinction between being right (being justified) in making an assertion and simply being inclined or disposed to make the assertion, collapses. The very concept of being justified, of being rational, has no substance. At bottom we are left only with our inclination to assert some things but not others:

That's pretty dire. If your goal was to give yourself comfort that the world really is the way you're inclined to say it is, it's not a great outcome. The problem Wittgenstein leaves us with, then, is to build out to rationality given in the first instance only our inclination to find congenial some sentences, and distasteful, others.

The general upshot of philosophical thought over the centuries on this central topic has been that it is not at all trivial to understand how we as individuals, afforded only what our senses deliver to us and our mental faculties, can manage to come to a reliable understanding of the world. Wittgenstein's argument can be seen as yet another blow to this already teetering undertaking. To get his rebuilding efforts underway, he realizes that he must turn to the big apparent resource still mostly untapped in this thinking, namely, other people. Putting the point another way, the problem needs to be re-conceived - for the purposes of this undertaking we don't confront the world as isolated individuals, but as speakers of a language, engaged from the outset with others.

It's hard to overstate how radically different the problem looks from this perspective. For starters, in addition to our brute inclination to assent to some sentences and to dissent from others, two basic things must simply be given as unquestioned/unquestionable, ground-level resources. The first is the set of others who count as fellow speakers of the language, able to agree and disagree with the things we're apt to say, and whose sayings we mostly immediately either agree or disagree with, without the need of any interpretation. These others Wittgenstein calls our 'form of life'. The other thing which has to be given is the fact of these others' substantial agreement with us. As he says,

I take all of the foregoing from Wittgenstein. It's a lot, I acknowledge. This, though, is where he and I part ways, I think. Wittgenstein's positive program is famously encapsulated in the slogan, "meaning is use". Alongside this, however, is his famous reluctance to theorize, which leads him to demur from formulating in a systematic way how this is meant to solve the problem. Like many, I am left wondering, what exactly is use, and how exactly does it do what the other things don't?

I have set out my own thoughts in detail elsewhere. Briefly, though, my project in the first instance is just to understand the relation between the two basic elements of semantics, namely

• the meanings of words, and
• the truth/falsity of sentences.

To this end, I look to create as simple a model as I can of speakers producing sounds, and to add incrementally to it until those sounds have properties credibly interpretable as truth and meaning. Other people have tried this sort of thing, of course, but not, in the main, respecting Wittgenstein's sceptical result, as far as I can see.

The initial goal is to get from that brute yea/nay reaction we have to sentences, with which Wittgenstein left us, to truth. This requires inverting the usual assumption that word-meaning is, from a knowledge standpoint, more basic than sentence-truth. There's a pile of reasons why this is usually assumed to be the case - seeing that it need not be involves rethinking our explanatory obligations, and is immensely clarifying. The core thought is that our individual maximization of the everyday goods we naturally seek is facilitated by our each having as large as possible a personal inventory of those sentences-felt-to-be-congenial (beliefs), and that the ideal of the verbal commerce we engage in to this end is truth. With a few plausible assumptions, our all having this goal leads to our being best off if we mostly cooperate with one-another, but also occasionally compete. This competition/cooperation dynamic gives rise to properties of agents and their activities naturally understood as rationality and justification. Wittgenstein, I think many would agree, did not imply any of this, and would largely have rejected it as inappropriately theoretical, to say the least. Still, following it through lands us in a place very close to his position (on some interpretations of his position).