Quine, Dennett and Wittgenstein

Here's a very interesting link to a panel discussion on Quine's views about language, science and philosophy. This particular segment (its broken into nine and they are all worth watching, preferably in sequence) involves Dennett (one of the panelists) asking Quine to clarify his position vis a vis behaviorism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WumCK5cxrFQ

Dennett poses the question to Quine as a matter of Quine's distinguishing the relationship of his views on language and meaning, which Quine acknowledges as consistent with behaviorism, as to whether they are more compatible with a Skinnerian approach to behaviorism or the kind of behaviorism Wittgenstein is often seen as representing. (In the literature Wittgenstein's later position on meaning is sometimes thought of as "logical behaviorism" as opposed to a methodological and/or metaphysical sort which, latter, presumably denies the existence of mental objects in any sense whatsoever.) This is an interesting exchange in light of the frequent debates and disagreements here over whether Wittgenstein was a behaviorist and, if so, which type, and whether Dennett effectively is, and so can be construed as denying the existence or reality of what we call our "experiences" in his attempts to "explain" consciousness.

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Minds, Brains, Souls/Anscombe on Wittgenstein and the Mental

I've recently picked up Human Life, Action And Ethics by G. E. M. Anscombe, a student of Wittgenstein and later editor of some of his work. I was not familiar with her as a philosopher in her own right, though I knew she had that standing. The book, a compilation of a great many of her most important essays, dealing mainly with matters of ethics and morals, was edited by Mary Geach, her daughter and also a philosopher in her own right, and Luke Gormally with whom I am not familiar. The very first essay (which is as far as I have so far got), is entitled Analytical Philosophy and the Spirituality of Man. Although I have not yet gotten far in it the following passage, near the very beginning, struck me as relevant to the battles so often played out in this discussion group (can we call it that?) and on earlier lists where many of us also participated. She writes . . .

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Language Idling

In a comment following an earlier blog post, one of Sean's about "Club meanings,' I suggested "investigative philosophy" as a way of signifying Wittgenstein's way of branching off from what we might agree to call "analytic philosophy," a branch that originally welcomed him as one of its own.

Wittgenstein himself encourages an investigative mindset, drawing from anthropology but also detective work. One must look for clues hiding in plain sight as it were. We are only blind to the workings of language because we are so untrained to really look at it, versus idly fantasizing about hidden mechanisms, fantasies taken up by neuroscience in our own day (2013).

Where there's police work, there must be crime, or in the medical paradigm, a condition in need of healing, and in Wittgenstein's later philosophy that sin is "language idling" or "doing no work". Cambridge is an "influenza zone", presumably infectious as he can only withstand abbreviated visits before he's running off to Norway or Russia or the wars to get cured.

"Language idling" is not the same thing as idle play or nonsense poetry or Alice in Wonderland. Rather, it has the appearance of working, perhaps of doing something profound. It's aspect is of something broken, but not obviously so, something hollowed out and rotten, but appearing to bear a load. As such, it might be dangerous, as "the next thing to really fail" (overtly, not just by failing to pass some subtle smell test). Wittgenstein had a background in engineering, aeronautical in particular, and was no doubt sensitive to the kind of catastrophic failure a more serious investigation might have prevented.

Another way of describing Wittgenstein's approach then, is one of relieving broken language games of load-bearing responsibilities, which in this metaphor would be any responsibilities whatsoever. A language so released from duty might feel newly light and a legitimate target for jibes, whereas earlier its exalted "seriousness" made it untouchable by the mere layman.  A sign of healing is when an older, less admirable form of life becomes risable.  We're out from under its death grip.  We need no longer suspend our disbelief.

In this sense then, Wittgenstein's branching away from the analytic approach, is also his way of starting to lay it to rest as a serious workingman's tool. You may need to learn computer languages but you won't need to obsesses about who cuts the barber's hair. Logicism, positivism, and scientism were all close affiliates of 1900s analyticism. In helping to usher in their demise as serious languages, Wittgenstein is injecting an air of levity, telling jokes, busting myths.

We don't have to let "philosophy" itself go down with that ship. He keeps a firm grip on the word itself, using it for what he's doing (a serious business, this undertaking). We just look over the side and wave, as the good ship Analytic sinks to the bottom. Good riddance.

Wittgenstein's On Certainty Reconsidered

An overview and analysis of the insights and implicit arguments in Wittgenstein's On Certainty with attention to the philosophical background which rendered radical skepticism such a compelling challenge to generations of western philosophers

G. E. Moore once claimed that he knew there was an external world (beyond his own mind, i.e., his perceptions, conceptions, etc.) because he could raise a hand and show it when asked (the physical body being part of the external world, the thoughts and our awareness of it being the "internal"). 'I know I have a hand,' he said (I'm paraphrasing), 'because here is one hand and here is another' at which point he held up his second. Moore's was an argument from common sense. Wittgenstein, as he lay dying, was asked to say something about that . . . The text was eventually published as On Certainty [and] takes off from Moore's "argument" to explore what it means to say we are certain of anything. . . .

To be certain is a state of mind, a condition of unwillingness to doubt, whatever the basis for that unwillingness. In that book he shows that there are different reasons not to doubt different things and that, just because we cannot be certain of something for one kind of reason, it doesn't follow that we cannot be certain for another, often quite different, sort of reason.

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