https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/was-wittgenstein-right/
<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/
<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
<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
<https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Lang/LangOrba.htm>
@philipthrift
