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
