I quite agree with Horwich and Wittgenstein as they refer to
meta-physics. I think one contribution of meta-physics, as in analyzing
the interpretations of quantum mechanics, is what Wittgenstein called
"therapuetic", i.e. clarifying and identifying real problems versus
psuedo-problems of language. But I think they also serve a purpose in
suggesting how science may advance, what new theories might be developed
or how old ones may be better understood. Although the latter is
generally done by scientists who are specialists in the field, there are
exceptions like Tim Maudlin. And from a meta-physical perspective,
mathematicians are nothing but armchair philosophers.
Horwich doesn't seem to touch at all on moral and ethical philosophy,
how one should live one's life, as exemplified by the epicurieans, the
stoics, the existentialists,... Someday neuroscience, evolution, AI,
and decision theory may make this field more scientific, but in the
meantime there's a place for philosophy.
Brent
On 2/18/2020 11:43 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/was-wittgenstein-right/
*Was Wittgenstein Right?*
BY PAUL HORWICH
MARCH 3, 2013
A reminder of philosophy’s embarrassing failure, after over 2000
years, to settle any of its central issues.
The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature
of Western philosophy — what is special about its problems, where they
come from, how they should and should not be addressed, and what can
and cannot be accomplished by grappling with them. The uniquely
insightful answers provided to these meta-questions are what give his
treatments of specific issues within the subject — concerning
language, experience, knowledge, mathematics, art and religion among
them — a power of illumination that cannot be found in the work of others.
Admittedly, few would agree with this rosy assessment — certainly not
many professional philosophers. Apart from a small and ignored clique
of hard-core supporters the usual view these days is that his writing
is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there
is little of intellectual value. But this dismissal disguises what is
pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within
departments of philosophy: namely, his thoroughgoing rejection of the
subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that
it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its
raison d’être.
Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study
is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she
should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting
arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not
open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair”
through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis.
Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is
based on confusion and wishful thinking.
This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which
continues to prevail. Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its
promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and
the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions
about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that
there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of
consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of
whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just
society, and so on — and that philosophy’s job is to provide such
understanding. Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?
If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says
Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten
products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. So it should be
entirely unsurprising that the “philosophy” aiming to solve them has
been marked by perennial controversy and lack of decisive progress —
by an embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to settle any of
its central issues. Therefore traditional philosophical theorizing
must give way to a painstaking identification of its tempting but
misguided presuppositions and an understanding of how we ever came to
regard them as legitimate. But in that case, he asks, “[w]here does
[our] investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to
destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and
important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of
stone and rubble)” — and answers that “(w)hat we are destroying is
nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of
language on which they stand.”
Given this extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy —
perhaps tantamount to a denial that there is such a subject — it is
hardly surprising that “Wittgenstein” is uttered with a curl of the
lip in most philosophical circles. For who likes to be told that his
or her life’s work is confused and pointless? Thus, even Bertrand
Russell, his early teacher and enthusiastic supporter, was eventually
led to complain peevishly that Wittgenstein seems to have “grown tired
of serious thinking and invented a doctrine which would make such an
activity unnecessary.”
But what is that notorious doctrine, and can it be defended? We might
boil it down to four related claims.
— The first is that traditional philosophy is scientistic: its primary
goals, which are to arrive at simple, general principles, to uncover
profound explanations, and to correct naïve opinions, are taken from
the sciences. And this is undoubtedly the case.
—The second is that the non-empirical (“armchair”) character of
philosophical investigation — its focus on conceptual truth — is in
tension with those goals. That’s because our concepts exhibit a
highly theory-resistant complexity and variability. They evolved, not
for the sake of science and its objectives, but rather in order to
cater to the interacting contingencies of our nature, our culture, our
environment, our communicative needs and our other purposes. As a
consequence the commitments defining individual concepts are rarely
simple or determinate, and differ dramatically from one concept to
another. Moreover, it is not possible (as it is within empirical
domains) to accommodate superficial complexity by means of simple
principles at a more basic (e.g. microscopic) level.
— The third main claim of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy — an immediate
consequence of the first two — is that traditional philosophy is
necessarily pervaded with oversimplification; analogies are
unreasonably inflated; exceptions to simple regularities are wrongly
dismissed.
— Therefore — the fourth claim — a decent approach to the subject must
avoid theory-construction and instead be merely “therapeutic,”
confined to exposing the irrational assumptions on which
theory-oriented investigations are based and the irrational
conclusions to which they lead.
Consider, for instance, the paradigmatically philosophical question:
“What is truth?”. This provokes perplexity because, on the one hand,
it demands an answer of the form, “Truth is such–and-such,” but on the
other hand, despite hundreds of years of looking, no acceptable answer
of that kind has ever been found. We’ve tried truth as “correspondence
with the facts,” as “provability,” as “practical utility,” and as
“stable consensus”; but all turned out to be defective in one way or
another — either circular or subject to counterexamples. Reactions to
this impasse have included a variety of theoretical proposals. Some
philosophers have been led to deny that there is such a thing as
absolute truth. Some have maintained (insisting on one of the above
definitions) that although truth exists, it lacks certain features
that are ordinarily attributed to it — for example, that the truth may
sometimes be impossible to discover. Some have inferred that truth is
intrinsically paradoxical and essentially incomprehensible. And others
persist in the attempt to devise a definition that will fit all the
intuitive data.
But from Wittgenstein’s perspective each of the first three of these
strategies rides roughshod over our fundamental convictions about
truth, and the fourth is highly unlikely to succeed. Instead we should
begin, he thinks, by recognizing (as mentioned above) that our various
concepts play very different roles in our cognitive economy and
(correspondingly) are governed by defining principles of very
different kinds. Therefore, it was always a mistake to extrapolate
from the fact that empirical concepts, such as red or magnetic or
alive stand for properties with specifiable underlying natures to the
presumption that the notion of truth must stand for some such property
as well.
Wittgenstein’s conceptual pluralism positions us to recognize that
notion’s idiosyncratic function, and to infer that truth itself will
not be reducible to anything more basic. More specifically, we can see
that the concept’s function in our cognitive economy is merely to
serve as a device of generalization. It enables us to say such things
as “Einstein’s last words were true,” and not be stuck with “If
Einstein’s last words were that E=mc², then E=mc2; and if his last
words were that nuclear weapons should be banned, then nuclear weapons
should be banned; … and so on,” which has the disadvantage of being
infinitely long! Similarly we can use it to say: “We should want our
beliefs to be true” (instead of struggling with “We should want that
if we believe that E=mc², then E=mc²; and that if we believe … etc.”).
We can see, also, that this sort of utility depends upon nothing more
than the fact that the attribution of truth to a statement is
obviously equivalent to the statement itself — for example, “It’s true
that E=mc²” is equivalent to “E=mc²”. Thus possession of the concept
of truth appears to consist in an appreciation of that triviality,
rather than a mastery of any explicit definition. The traditional
search for such an account (or for some other form of reductive
analysis) was a wild-goose chase, a pseudo-problem. Truth emerges as
exceptionally unprofound and as exceptionally unmysterious.
This example illustrates the key components of Wittgenstein’s
metaphilosophy, and suggests how to flesh them out a little further.
Philosophical problems typically arise from the clash between the
inevitably idiosyncratic features of special-purpose concepts —true,
good, object, person, now, necessary — and the scientistically driven
insistence upon uniformity. Moreover, the various kinds of theoretical
move designed to resolve such conflicts (forms of skepticism,
revisionism, mysterianism and conservative systematization) are not
only irrational, but unmotivated.The paradoxes to which they respond
should instead be resolved merely by coming to appreciate the mistakes
of perverse overgeneralization from which they arose. And the
fundamental source of this irrationality is scientism.
As Wittgenstein put it in the “The Blue Book”:
Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation
with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the
explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of
primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment
of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly
see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly
tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is
the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into
complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to
reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really
is “purely descriptive.
These radical ideas are not obviously correct, and may on close
scrutiny turn out to be wrong. But they deserve to receive that
scrutiny — to be taken much more seriously than they are. Yes, most of
us have been interested in philosophy only because of its promise to
deliver precisely the sort of theoretical insights that Wittgenstein
argues are illusory. But such hopes are no defense against his
critique. Besides, if he turns out to be right, satisfaction enough
may surely be found in what we still can get — clarity,
demystification and truth.
NOTE: A response to this post by Michael P. Lynch will be published in
The Stone later this week.
[
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/of-flies-and-philosophers-wittgenstein-and-philosophy/
]
Paul Horwich is a professor of philosophy at New York University. He
is the author of several books, including “Reflections on Meaning,”
“Truth-Meaning-Reality,” and most recently, “Wittgenstein’s
Metaphilosophy.”
[ https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/paul-g-horwich.html ]
cf.
*Language Games, Writing Games - Wittgenstein and Derrida: A
Comparative Study*
Jolán Orbán
https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Lang/LangOrba.htm
@philipthrift
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