We spent the bulk of class going over a new handout that should, I hope, help us as we move into the final weeks of the class (we have three and a half weeks of class left, or seven more meetings). The primary aim of the handout was/is threefold: it will help us keep track of (and helped us to review) important concepts, terms, moves, and structures within the text as we move forward; it will help to introduce us to the tricky features of the actual arguments that Wittgenstein is making; and it will provide us with a more systematic method for reading the text. The opening sections of the handout served largely as a review, but we eventually moved into new material. Or rather, it was material I had introduced during the three class periods that served as an introduction to the PI, but we were not then ready to make much sense of some of that material until we’d become familiar with the text.
The crucial new material centers in the handout centers on the structure of the arguments that Wittgenstein is making in four areas of philosophical concern. Each area of concern deals with a norm of some kind – semantic, practical, epistemic, and ontological – and each norm is ultimately (Wittgenstein argues) a linguistic one. As always, Wittgenstein does not argue in a traditional or academic manner; instead, he makes claims and offers descriptions and thought experiments and imagined dialogue. However, we will try to translate, as it were, what he is doing into more accessible terms. Thus, we can see him as engaging in the following complex argumentative structure with respect to problems that arise with each kind of norm. First, he argues that the problem stems from a conflation, the end result of which is that some part of something is taken as the essence of that something. Thus, for instance, we take some part of language (such a true/false assertions) and then universalize that one feature of language, meaning that we treat it as the essential feature of language, i.e., as that which makes any use of language “language.” This conflation is grounded in – or becomes – a preconception that bewitches it, and because of our belief in it, we tolerate contradiction and paradox. The assumption (never fully spelled out or justified by Wittgenstein) is that it is in some sense bad and irrational to tolerate contradiction and paradox. However, Wittgenstein must then argue directly against the paradox, too, since the argument against the conflation did not do the trick. The result is that he engages in a form of cognitive therapy: assuming that the conflating picture is a deep-seated part of our thought (a habit) that creeps up everywhere and whether we want it to or not, we then have to repeatedly present ourselves with new questions from different angles so that we can see how and where it pops up – and then refute the conflated idea in the light of day (so to speak). Since the habit is ingrained, one instance of this is not sufficient; it must be done repeatedly, and trying to do so repeatedly can show how easily the ingrained habit of thought can persist and how readily it can derail clear thinking.
(We’ve have yet to look at how this toleration of paradox takes place, but for those who wish to start thinking about it, you can look at §§352-56, in which he blames a misapplication of the law of the excluded middle. Basically, the conflating assumption sets up an either/or dilemma (such as ‘either any given piece of language use must refer or it does not refer (and so is nonsense)’). A paradox arises when it seems that, for instance, a piece of language does not refer and yet clearly is meaningful (So we have: ‘It is true that meaningful language must refer. This piece of language does not refer. Yet this piece of language must refer. And yet it doesn’t. Argh – we’re caught in a dilemma!’). Take the command “Stop!”: the perplexed philosopher will oscillate back and forth, unable to find a way to account for the meaningfulness of this bit of language while the conflating idea is in place. S/he sees no third option (namely, the possibility that this bit of language is meaningful but does not refer).)
At the end of class, we looked at the first conflation, which is semantic in nature and which is laid out (according to Meredith Williams) most fully in §22. We read through this section and I translated the English into (hopefully) more accessible English (meaning more Tractarian-like English) as we went along. In what follows, I have written the entire section out, with my comments placed in brackets (which are the common means of marking off outside insertions within a quote). The conflation is two-fold: the philosopher conflates one part of language for all of language (which is the first fold); however, this happens because of a conflation of the means of representation with what is represented (which is the second fold). In other words, the particular surface features of the language we tend to use (including not just grammar (in the ordinary sense of syntax – Wittgenstein at §664 calls syntactic grammar “surface grammar,” which misleads us with respect to the “deep grammar” that governs the use of a word) but also the particular ways of speaking toward which we tend even when other syntactically legitimate ways of speaking are available) mislead us into making the conflation, because we take some aspect of the means by which speak to say something essential about what we are speaking about. However, what we are speaking about is often very different (contrary to the Tractarian assumption of logical isomorphism) from the means by which we talk about it.
"22. Frege’s opinion that every assertion [read: proposition] contains an assumption [read: sense], which is the thing asserted [read: projected], really rests on the possibility, found in our language, of writing every assertoric sentence [read: every sentence that expresses a thought, i.e., every proposition with sense] in the form “It is asserted that such-and-such is the case” [which is, in Tractarian terms, is “I think that such-and-such is the case,” and “such-and-such is the case” is the General Form of Proposition]. – But “that such-and-such is the case” is not a sentence in our language – it is not yet a move in the language game. [In other words, if all I say is “Such and such is the case,” then I have not really said anything – unless context makes it clear what this “move” means, but it would then be a “move” (a use of language that is meaningful and that accomplishes something) only because of the context in which it is said, such that its meaning would depend on other sentences and on a non-linguistic background.] And if I write, not “It is asserted that …”, but “It is asserted: such-and-such is the case,” the words “It is asserted” simply become superfluous. [In other words, I can write this sentence in two ways, linking “It is asserted” and “such-and-such is the case” with either a colon or the word “that.” The difference might seem trivial, but Wittgenstein is suggesting that it is not only not trivial but is in fact a central cause of the conflation error that we make: we tend to think of the “It is asserted” – or the “I think,” in Tractarian terms – as an essential part of the sentence, but it only looks that way because of the convention of writing or saying “I think/believe that ….” However, our grammar in fact allows (via the colon) for us to write this assertoric sentence in a different way – a way that makes the superfluity of part of the sentence clearer – but we tend not to write it that way. At the same time, we taken the way that we do normally write it as reflective of some deeper truth about language, which is what he is trying to show in the rest of this section and the PI as a whole. Note also that the “It is asserted” drops out in the same way that the “I think” drops out in the TLP, but it does so for very different reasons and with very different consequences.]
"We might very well also write every assertion in the form of a question followed by an affirmative expression: for instance, “Is it raining? Yes!” Would this show that every assertion contained a question? [Note here the similarity to the issues raised and method used in §134, which is the first section after the metaphilosophical remarks and is the section in which he finally begins to move away from rebuttal of the Tractatus in order to focus more fully on the new problems with which he is concerned. Those problems were, as you can hopefully see just in this section, already rehearsed in §§1-108, but the primary focus in these first 108 sections is the rebuttal of the TLP. The conflation and paradox arguments for the violation of semantic norms are in the first 108 sections mainly because these are the only sorts of norms with which the TLP dealt. Because of the way that the Tractarian theory drew a limit to what can be said (and so to what the self can be), he largely ignored the other areas of concern, although the Tractarian theory, if followed out more fully, clearly seems to have implications that lead to violations in the other three areas of normative concern (practice, epistemology, and what we might call ‘internal ontology,’ or the ontology of those states, process, feelings, and thoughts that we ‘find’ when we look ‘inside’ ourselves). As for this second paragraph of §22, Wittgenstein is primarily trying to show that it is possible that some other convention for making assertions could have arisen. He is also showing that one could assume that every assertion contains a question and then ‘analyze’ every assertion down into a question and an affirmation. However, to do that would be silly: it would be to make an unwarranted assumption and to then, on the basis of that assumption, not analyze the sentence but instead create two somewhat different sentences. This is what the PI Wittgenstein believes the TLP Wittgenstein did.]
"Of course, one has the right to use an assertion sign [a symbol that basically shows that I judge the content of the assertion to be true] in contrast with a question-mark, [there should not be a colon here, and so I’ve removed it] for example, or if one wants to distinguish an assertion from a fiction or an assumption. [This is a rare use in the PI of an essentially moral term: “right.” Wittgenstein here seems to mean that there is nothing stopping one from doing these things in order to accomplish some purpose: there is no law against it (in nature of society or grammar). However, the implication is that one is free to do many other things, to, such that it is a problem if one exerts one’s ‘grammatical rights’ and uses an assertion sign but then tries to impose this use on all other possible uses of language. The attempt to impose it – to claim that one has gotten at the essence of language with the use of the assertion sign – rests on a mistake, which helps to explain why it is illegitimate.] It is a mistake only if one thinks that the assertion consists of two acts, entertaining and asserting (assigning a truth-value, or something of the kind) [or, in Tractarian terms, thinking and then projecting via a propositional sign: to entertain is to think (one can think something without thinking that it is true) and to assert is to say something that one actually believes] and that in performing these acts we follow the sentence sign by sign roughly as we sing from sheet music [which is what the early Wittgenstein suggests that we do – and can do because of the underlying shared logical form of thoughts and their various sensible expressions; cf. 4.01s for the music references]. Reading the written sentence loudly or softly is indeed comparable to singing from sheet music, but ‘meaning [Meinen]’ (thinking) the sentence that is read is not. [This anticipates the account of reading in §§156-78 and in particular the definition of reading as converting signs into sounds. It also anticipates one of the things that we noted as we worked through those sections: there seems to be something different going one when one thinks what one reads as opposed to merely converting the signs into sounds. Furthermore (and we did not get into this yet, since we have not yet worked our way to the sections on ‘being guided by’), when we read, the thought does not ‘come to us’ sign by sign but rather more holistically, implying that there is not a shared logical form between what we read and what we think (let alone the world that we then think about).]
"The Fregean assertion sign marks the beginning of a sentence. [In other words, it shows the reader that what follows is a whole sentence and not just a part of it; thus, it really would serve only as a convention for marking boundaries between distinct sentences so that they are easier to read. In doing this, it would be like a period (which comes at the end of a sentence but which serves the same function.] So its function is like that of the full stop. It distinguishes the whole period from a clause within the period. If I hear someone say “it’s raining”, but do not know whether I have heard the beginning and end of the period, then so far this sentence fails to convey anything to me [or more literally (with respect to the German) ‘then so far this sentence is not for me a means of understanding [Verständigung, which can also mean ‘agreement’ or ‘communication]’]."
To sum up: Frege – and the early Wittgenstein – thought that they had discovered something essential about language, but really they had mistaken a particular conventional way of speaking for the essence of language. The later Wittgenstein argues that this is the case (that a conflation had occurred in the thinking of Frege and his earlier self, who was heavily influence by Frege), but he knows that someone in the grip of an idea will not be refuted simply by having their conflation – and the true nature of what they are conflating – pointed out to them. Such a person will persist in holding onto this conflation, even when it leads to vexing paradoxes.
Another way of putting the conflation is as follows: Logical notation gives us a means of representing (some of) the things that we say; we then conflate that means of representing what we say (exemplified in what the early W called a “proposition”) with the reality of what we say, i.e., of how language works. The notation is, in a sense, an attempt to make clear the norms that govern our linguistic practice, but the problem is that these norms are conflated with moves within that practice (Williams 7): we think that this talk of norms actually says something meaningful, when in fact talk norms are a precondition of playing a language game but not themselves moves within a language game. I might even reflect on the norms that govern language, but that does not (so Wittgenstein seems to claim) accomplish any purpose within any ‘game’ in which language is used in life. (Note here that one might argue that the PI is in fact very purpose-driven, such that talk of norms could, in a different sense, be a move in a language game).
We reinforce a conflated idea whenever it guides our use of and approach to language. Thus, whenever a Tractarian goes to analyze something, he is further reinforcing his conviction that an ideal exactness must be out there in reality; without that conviction, he would never be motivated to logically analyze a sentence; the analysis must then either build the ideal exactness out of limited material or it will seem as if there is nothing there.
So that’s the conflation. We then get to the paradox at §95: “‘Thinking must be something unique.’ When we say, mean [meinen], that such-and-such is the case, then, with what we mean, we do not stop anywhere short of the fact, but mean: such-and-such – is – thus-and-so. – But this paradox (which indeed has the form of a truism) can also be expressed in this way: one can think what is not the case.”
I’ll leave off at this point, but note two things. First, note that we have the idea of a unique mental process, which is what we get again with reading (in §§165-167). Second, as §§94 and 96 (the sections surrounding §95) make clear, the Picture Theory of Meaning is invoked to get around this paradox, but it only in fact digs us deeper into the problem (and so we try to get out of the snare of the paradox only to find it tighten).
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