Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Class 17: From Critique to Investigation

Setting up the Philosophical Investigations is proving to be a much bigger pedagogical challenge than I had anticipated. I believe that the reasons are threefold. First, having become immersed in the TLP, it is hard to then suddenly shift gears. In particular, it is perhaps too easy to pick up the PI critique of the TLP in the wrong way: after reading the TLP, one should be able to see why he raises some of the questions and concerns that he does (we encountered some of them ourselves), but it can be easy to interpret these questions in ways that fail to do full justice to the exact flaws that Wittgenstein is targeting and that, more importantly, leave one with a limited sense of what is being turned from (as opposed to full sense) and no sense of what we are being turned toward (and why). (At the same time, it is hard to imagine teaching the PI without having first worked through the TLP.) However, I felt that today, by the end of class, we were starting to get a sense of what exactly Wittgenstein was targeting and why, and, as a result, of what exactly he is turning us toward now. Indeed, I felt that we made some real progress today after having spent the previous three classes engaged in what were largely preliminaries for today’s progress.

The second problem is that Schroeder’s commentary does not pair up as well with the structure of the PI as it did with the structure of the TLP (which structure is also more accessible than the structure of the PI). The fault is not entirely Schroeder’s, since it is something that nearly every commentator does, but the fault is this: the PI is presented as a set of problems (with accompanying critique and dissolution), and these problems are seen as scattered throughout the text (which, to some extent, they are); the commentator then gathers up the problems and presents them in an order that has only a rough correspondence to the actual text, and for each problem s/he gathers up the scattered sections that apply. Thus, for instance, the section on “meaning as meaning” (section 4.2.f) in Schroeder cites or references the following sections in the following order: 1, 28, 276, 507, 334, 187, 188, 665, 205, 33, 674, 667, 139, 140, 663, 675, 36, 665. Reference to other texts of Wittgenstein’s are scattered throughout. There is no way for a beginner at this point (just a little ways into a first reading of the PI) to really assess the PI (or Schroeder’s account of it) through all of this – not, at least, until one has read through the entire PI; however, that is a huge task, and one must first have some sense of how to read the PI if that first reading is to go in a positive manner. Thus, one might be able to understand the critique of the TLP as Schroeder has gathered it up here, but one will get no sense of how the PI itself operates. This is a problem, because the purpose of the PI is not simply to critique the TLP. Yes, that is a primary objective of the first 105 sections or so, after which he turns to his new conception of philosophy (and it will continue to be an objective – although not a primary one – after the metaphilosophical sections). However, that new conception of philosophy, including the deeper targets at which Wittenstein is aiming and the new conception of language and self that emerges as a result of his critical investigation, are already emerging within these first 105 sections. Insofar as the emergence – this criss-cross movement of his thought – has a purpose that goes beyond a critique of the TLP, the danger is that we are missing this movement.

This is not to say that the critique is not tremendously important or that Schroeder fails to do a good job of presenting it (he does an exemplary job); it’s just that our discussion of this critique, if we are to do it full justice, does an injustice to the subtle movement of the text. I’d been trying to juggle both and felt that I was in turn doing justice to neither. However, I may be doing an injustice to us, since part of the problem is that the pivoting (to use Wittgenstein’s analogy in §108) takes time.

And this leads me to the third reason that the move to the PI has been challenging: it is simply more difficult to set up the PI, as it is a bigger, more complex, and more subtle work. I had always (rather facilely) thought of the PI as ultimately being simpler and more accessible than the TLP, but my thinking on this issue has actually changed in the past ten months, and our past four courses have confirmed this. It is perhaps especially difficult to do this pivoting right around midterm, as everyone is writing on the TLP while juggling midterm exams and papers for other classes.

Nonetheless, I felt that things really started to come together today, and I hope that that is in fact what you experienced. I believe that the structure of class helped: we first walked through the PI critique of the TLP as it is presented by Schroeder, but we talked ourselves through it instead of getting caught up with either the details into which Schroeder delves or the relevant sections of the PI. (Your fifth blog post, by the way, should in essence try to recreate some of this critique and should provide some sections in support of it.) It seemed to me that you all grasped this critique – and did so in a way that did justice to it.

In particular, we saw two things that I had not anticipated. First, the critique, as structured by Schroeder, starts with the essential assumption of the Tractarain – the idea that reference is the essence of language – and then moves through topics as the Tractarian is forced into them in response to failures with the previous topics/pseudo-insights. Thus, whereas these topics were presented in Chapter 2 as insights that led to and built on each other, they are now presented as evasions of the problems with the preceding insight. So we see that the idea of determinacy of sense is not so much built on the idea of reference as it is something into which the Tractarian is forced to retreat because of problems with reference. Indeed, names refer, but propositions do not, and so we have to speak of propositions having sense, not reference. But, we might say, these senses are, at the least, determinate. However, we then see that that is not so, and so we are forced into the idea of logical analysis, which reveals the hidden determinacy of simple ordinary language sentences. We are then pushed into the idea that this analysis is necessary because every proposition is either true or false, and so it must be possible to determine what makes a proposition true (or false), and looking toward that picture, which will be either true or false, is what guides our analysis (and without that picture our analysis would be lost … even though the analysis is supposed to clarify the picture). We are then pushed into the idea that this is in fact the essence of language. Finally, when asked how such language gets ‘hooked up’ with reality, we are told that a mental act of ‘meaning’ or ‘intending’ is responsible, and it even seems as if it’s the mental state – the thought – that gets analyzed and not the propositional sign that is the vehicle through which the thought is expressed. And this – this strange idea that a mental act of projection is necessary to ensure that language hooks up with reality – will be one of the primary targets with which the PI is concerned, insofar as a great deal of the PI targets the ideas that words can refer to mental states and that mental states or processes are what give life and so meaning to words.

We then turned to a close reading of the ‘metaphilosophical sections,’ which are those sections in which he reflects on the nature of philosophy and the philosophical method that he is ostensibly using in the PI. I’ll write up this portion of class in a separate post, but I’ll end this post by noting this: I felt that, after working through the first half of these metaphilosophical sections (from §106 to §119) and after working through the critique of the TLP, we are now ready to begin looking more closely at the structure of Wittgenstein’s thought in the PI and at the way that it is used to reveal – and dissolve – philosophical problems as needed.

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